God is unchanging. The calendar changes, but Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. We have trouble thinking about the same thing for ten minutes, but “the Glory of Israel . . . is not a man that He should change His mind.” Our plans shift rapidly from one thing to another, but “The counsel of the LORD stands forever, the plans of His heart from generation to generation.” Human beings, unlike God, are utterly dependent creatures, created... Read more
The style industry exists to keep producing new styles, to keep everyone thinking that they have to buy a new wardrobe each year to keep up, to bring shame to everyone uncool enough to wear last season’s colors . A celebrity, someone once said, is a person well known for being well known. But the half-life of fame is extremely short, and to keep yourself in the public eye you have to be willing to make yourself over again and... Read more
Ecclesiastes 2:24-25: There is nothing better for a man than to eat and drink and tell himself that his labor is good. This also I have seen that it is from the hand of God. For who can eat and who can have enjoyment without Him? Many Christians have concluded that Ecclesiastes is an odd book that teaches a form of cynicism that contradicts most of the Bible. As we saw in the sermon this morning, this partly arises from... Read more
Iain Provan doubts that Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes . One of the “striking” bits of evidence is “that many of the later passages in Ecclesiastes appear to be written from a non-Solomonic point of view (i.e., from the perspective of the subject rather than the ruler, e.g., 5:8-9; 8:1-9).” It’s a good observation about those texts, but as an argument concerning authorship absolutely vaporous. Could Solomon not have spent a bit of time wondering what the simple folk do? (Lerner and... Read more
Iain Provan doubts that Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes . One of the “striking” bits of evidence is “that many of the later passages in Ecclesiastes appear to be written from a non-Solomonic point of view (i.e., from the perspective of the subject rather than the ruler, e.g., 5:8-9; 8:1-9).” It’s a good observation about those texts, but as an argument concerning authorship absolutely vaporous. Could Solomon not have spent a bit of time wondering what the simple folk do? (Lerner and... Read more
More thoughts on Ecclesiastes, stealing, as always, from James Jordan . The image of “shepherding wind” has a particular application to the king, who is the shepherd of flock of Israel. Solomon recognizes that ruling a kingdom is like trying to shepherd wind, which is of course impossible for human beings. Solomon shepherded a whole nation, and specifically shepherded the workmen on the temple, and came to the insight that this is beyond him. (more…) Read more
Some additional thoughts about the role of the “remnant” in Israel’s history, which supercede earlier posts on the subject. 1) The word “remnant” in the OT normally refers to the whole of Israel that survives a judgment, rather than to some sub-division of Israel that remains faithful during a period of apostasy. (See the discussion of remnant under LEIMMA in volume 4 of TDNT for an extensive defense of this point). The remnant is the Israel miraculously preserved through judgment,... Read more
Christopher Dawson, who died in 1970, was one of the leading historians of the twentieth century. A devout Roman Catholic, hededicated his career, and some 25 books, to understanding andexplaining history, particularly Western history, from aChristian perspective. One little book, Christianity and the New Age, provides a glimpse of thewisdom of this remarkable writer. Originally published in 1931, “Christianity and the New Age” does not deal directly with the popular neo-paganism that has recently been going under the label of... Read more
As if anyone cares, here are some unfinished and amateurish comments on “what I think of postmodernism.” 1) First, it is helpful to distinguish, as many writers do, between postmodernism and postmodernity. The latter is a cultural/political mood or condition, referring to movements in architecture, film, and other arts that have moved away from the priorities and agendas of modernism; a dissolvingly ironic stance toward life; high-tech combined with bohemian aspirations – the bobo phenomenon. Postmodernism is a complex and... Read more
Somewhere in his blog discussion of Brian McLaren’s Generous Orthodoxy , Doug Wilson indicated that McLaren considers inerrancy a sell-out to modernist foundationalism. To support this, Doug pointed me to this quotation from John Franke’s foreword to McLaren’s book: “In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the foundationalist impulse produced a theological division between the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ among Anglo-Americans – liberals constructed theology upon the foundation of an unassailable religious experience while conservatives looked to an error-free Bible as... Read more
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