The fatuous foolishness of the Manhattan Declaration

December 1, 2009 By Fred Clark

I had meant to conclude with a final post on this subject reserved simply for laughing at the Manhattan Declaration and the comical preening of its pompous prose. It provides a hilarious, real-world example of the kind of wince-inducing misplaced self-importance and lack of perspective that I’ve always enjoyed when it’s performed by people like Ricky Gervais or Rowan Atkinson or Steve Coogan. The document begins with the authors comparing themselves to those who defended Christendom against the onslaught of... Read more

Pulling a Lieberman

November 29, 2009 By Fred Clark

First let me say a word in praise and defense of my former boss, my professor, mentor and friend Ron Sider. I need to start off with this affirming word because by the end of this post — and in the one to follow — I’m afraid I’m going to have to be rather harshly critical of my old friend. Sider’s book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger is an unflinching, uncompromising assessment of the Christian obligation to share... Read more

Toxic smugness

November 24, 2009 By Fred Clark

Hey kids! It's time to play "Stupid? Or Evil?" Today's contestant is Chuck Colson: "If someone walks in our church and says, 'You preach a sermon on [homosexuality], we're going to arrest you as a violation of the hate crimes,' then they'll have to arrest us." I'm going to have to go with "Evil" here. Colson knows this is utter nonsense. He's enjoying the posture of self-aggrandizing bravado, but he knows full well that hate crimes has nothing to do... Read more

Bruce Barnes must die

November 23, 2009 By Fred Clark

I apologize for the recent lack of regularly scheduled Left Behind Fridays here lately. (And, for that matter, the lack of much of anything else.) We'll never get through the seven-year Great Tribulation at this rate, and the stalled progress on our weekly Bruce Barnes Death Countdown is getting frustrating. But let me beg your indulgence for one more week and let's set our calendars for December 4 to resume our journey through the World's Worst Books. This Friday is... Read more

Fresh thread

November 19, 2009 By Fred Clark

From Mark Noll's The Civil War as Theological Crisis: American national culture had been built in substantial part by voluntary and democratic appropriation of Scripture. Yet if by following such an approach to the Bible there resulted an unbridgeable chasm of opinion about what Scripture actually taught, there were no resources within democratic or voluntary procedures to resolve the public division of opinion that was created by voluntary and democratic interpretation of the Bible. The Book that made the nation... Read more

Evangelicals and immigration

November 11, 2009 By Fred Clark

On the one hand, you've got your religious evangelicals. They're born-again Christians who go to church twice every Sunday, read their daily devotions, try not to say "geez" because that's almost just as bad as swearing, feel guilty that they haven't done more to witness to you because they genuinely don't want you to go to Hell, and they just really Lord they just really just pray, Lord, all the time that, Lord, Jesus would just really just guide their... Read more

TF: Showdown let-down

November 8, 2009 By Fred Clark

Tribulation Force, pp. 108-113 Buck Williams is hogging the spotlight. So far in Tribulation Force, the Buck pages are outnumbering the Rayford pages by more than 2-to-1. And even when we do check in briefly with Buck's co-star here it's mainly in order to eavesdrop on Chloe's side of Buck's romantic subplot, in which Rayford plays the role of the nurse in Romeo and Juliet. This imbalance isn't surprising, given the way our dual protagonists function as fantasy stand-ins for... Read more

Sinister suffrage

November 5, 2009 By Fred Clark

The Associated Press reports: SAN FRANCISCO — Stunned and angry, national left-handed leaders Wednesday blamed scare-mongering ads — and President Barack Obama's lack of engagement — for a bitter election setback in Maine that could alter the dynamics for both sides in the southpaw-franchise debate. Conservatives, in contrast, celebrated Maine voters' rejection of a law that would have allowed left-handed people to vote, depicting it as a warning shot that should deter politicians in other states from pushing for sinister... Read more

Innocence and experience

November 4, 2009 By Fred Clark

I made this recently, but I'm still not quite sure what to make of it. Playing off of Jesus' charge to his disciples to "be wise as serpents and innocent as doves" we can construct the following grid of wisdom and innocence, charting four possible outcomes when you encounter someone purporting to be in need of your help: As you can see, one of these outcomes is a Very Good Thing, one is a Very Bad Thing, and the other... Read more

TF: Saving Hattie Durham

November 2, 2009 By Fred Clark

Tribulation Force, pp. 108-109 Buck Williams is sitting just outside of the Antichrist's office. He imagines he can feel the supernatural evil emanating from the next room. He desperately prays for divine protection, for deliverance, because he knows he's in extreme danger. Nicolae Carpathia has power over the minds of men and unless Buck is somehow able to convince him that he, too, is under his spell, that office may be the last room that Buck ever sees. Buck has... Read more