Once there was a little bumblebee who was very clumsy. When he flew, he didn’t say “Buzz,” like most bees. He said “Zubb.” When he aimed for a flower, he often missed and found himself trying to suck nectar from a lamppost or a fireplug. And he was always tripping over his wings and hurtling down like a falling star. When he was first hatched, his father called him Tim and his mother called him Tom, and after a horrible... Read more
Churches have a life-cycle just as individuals do. Both individuals and churches begin life in helpless dependence, slowly learn to do things for ourselves, and eventually take responsibility not only for ourselves but for others. Trinity Reformed church was born in August 2003 as a church plant from Christ Church. We had no members of our own, no elders of our own, no budget of our own. Now, a little over two years later, we have nearly 190 members in... Read more
Not long ago, Frank Schaeffer frothed out a piece of mind-boggling stupidity in the San Francisco Chronicle attacking Pope Benedict XVI as a fundamentalist. It says something about Ratzinger’s learning that he is the author of 86 books, 470 articles, and has been a member of the Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques at the Institut de France since 1992 because of his contributions to ethical and political thought. Let’s see, let me try to count up the fundamentalists so... Read more
Not long ago, Frank Schaeffer frothed out a piece of mind-boggling stupidity in the San Francisco Chronicle attacking Pope Benedict XVI as a fundamentalist. It says something about Ratzinger’s learning that he is the author of 86 books, 470 articles, and has been a member of the Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques at the Institut de France since 1992 because of his contributions to ethical and political thought. Let’s see, let me try to count up the fundamentalists so... Read more
David Klinghoffer argues in his Why the Jews Rejeced Jesus that pagan Europeans would not have embraced Jesus if the Jews had not rejected Him: “If you value the great achievements of Western civilization and of American society, thank the Jews for their decision to cleave to their ancestral religion instead of embracing the rival teachings of Jesus and his followers.” As a result, as Jacob Neusner recognizes, the world came to know the Torah: “Christianity really did bring the... Read more
A few quotations from Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s Nation of Rebels , which are all the more revealing because they come from men decidedly on the left of the spectrum (though, in their terminology, they belong not to the “ameliorative” rather than the utopian “transformative” left). “Consumerism always seems to be a critique of what other people buy . . . so-called critique of consumerism is just thinly veiled snobbery, or, rose, Puritanism.” On the message of the film... Read more
Marcus Rench of Cary, North Carolina, sent along the following quotations from H. E. Jacob’s Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity . Note that all these quotations are about coffee , not today’s expensive imitations – which will remain unmentioned – that allow people who dislike coffee to hang out at coffee houses, thinking they are part of the grand tradition. Coffee has changed the surface of the globe! The muscular and cerebral stimulation and transformation produced in mankind by... Read more
Jules Michelet said: “Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain, which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illuminates the reality of things suddenly with the flash of truth.” Read more
Some notes for a disputatio talk on church unity. Thanks to Rusty Reno for clarification at several points. It is evident in the text, and it is evident in church history, that there is good and bad union and good and bad division. 1-2 Kings explores the first of these in particular, showing us good ecumenism and wicked ecumenism. By my reading, the Omride dynasty, particularly under Ahab, attempted to reunite Israel and Judah as a Baalist people ruled by... Read more
By my count, there are twelve disfigurements listed in Leviticus 21:18-20 that disqualify a priest from serving at the altar and in the tabernacle: blind, lame, slit, deformed, broken foot, broken hand, hunchback, dwarf, defect of eye, eczema, scabs, crushed testicles. The listed disfigurements point to a disfigured Israel, twelve disfigurements for twelve tribes. And this adds some depth to the fact that Jesus heals many of these disfigurements as He creates a new Israel. Read more
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