Ancient History

Historian Philip Jenkins on events in Iraq:

"We often read of the birth and growth of churches, very rarely of their deaths. In Mosul, however, we may be seeing the end of an astounding example of Christian continuity that lasted nearly two millennia."

Full article...

And yet so far away...

A few quotes from recent reading on the subject of falling short:

"There will always be a gap between who we are and who we want to be." — Todd Pickett

"We have met the enemy, and they are partly right." — Tony Campolo

"That we act different in private than in public is everyone's most conspicuous experience, it is the very ground of the life of the individual. Yet curiously this obvious fact remains unconscious, unacknowledged [...]" — Milan Kundera

"Sin is not the worse thing in the world. The worse thing in the world is the denial of sin." — Fulton Sheen

Quote Grab Bag

"When people lose sight of the proper objects of religious passion, they do not necessarily lose their religious instincts. Many will fill that hole in their soul with things of this world."

— Jonah Goldberg

[On Postmodernism:] "We should not be surprised at your inability to stand if your argument is that you have no legs."

— Douglas Wilson

"In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience."

— Oscar Wilde

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

— George Orwell

Democratic Gospel Theory

"Woodberry's results essentially suggested that 50 years' worth of research on the rise of democracy had overlooked the most important factor."

Read more at CT...

(ht: Douglas Wilson)

Calvin on Monday-morning QBs

"[M]any complain when God executes his judgments: they would measure all punishments by their own ideas, and subject God to their own will."

— John Calvin

Letting it go

"The thing that prevents us from taking risks is the fear that if we don't succeed, we'll lose out on something we need in order to be happy.  [...]  But because everything we need, in Christ, we already possess, we can take great risks."

and

"Every attempt on our part to fix someone else [...] is actually a subtle attempt to fix ourselves."

 — Tullian Tchividjian

Full audio (mp3) of his talk "The End of To-Do List Christianity" here...

Fear Not

"It is an act of homophobia to believe that people in the LGBT community are either too sinful to respond to God’s call on their life, or to believe that people in the LGBT community have a fixed nature that will never, by the blustering, unfounded, and uncharitable declarations of secular psychology, change by the power of the gospel."

— Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

Full article...

Doctrinal Jenga

From Steven Wedgeworth's essay "What Depends upon an Historical Adam?":

"Death is, according to the Bible, a judgment based upon Adam’s sin. If that original sin was not itself real, an event occurring in this world, then the judgment is arbitrary and unjust. We should also say that if death is simply a natural part of the created order, the normal process of decay inherent in the evolutionary model, then it is not actually a "problem" at all. It is just a feature of the universe. This then must attribute death to God’s original design, a species of Gnosticism.  [...]   If Adam was not historical, then Christ need not be either."

Read the full essay here...

Q182: Whose Authority?

"First, the Christian is the man who no longer seeks his own salvation, his deliverance, his justification in himself, but in Jesus Christ alone. He knows that God's Word in Christ pronounces him guilty even when he does not feel his guilt, and God's Word pronounces him righteous, even when he does not feel he is righteous at all. The Christian no longer lives of himself by his own claims and of his own justification, but by God's claim and justification."

—  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"Let My Tebow Go"

You won't read a better (or deeper) analysis of the whole Tim Tebow phenomenon than this article.   Stephen Marche for NYT:

"[...] Tebow has to play again, if not in New York, then somewhere. Not because it would be good for the Jets or good for the fans or good for football, but because of what he has come to represent (to me at least): the necessity, and the beauty, of absurdity.  [...] This is an atheist's plea: Let Tim Tebow play."

Full article...

Q172: All Fall Down

"Where your safety net is, there is your god."

  — Michael Horton

Q171: Try Harder

"[...] so many pulpits are filled with preachers who are telling one-legged people to run faster and jump higher." 

— Aaron Zimmerman

Q167: Watchman Nee

From Watchman Nee's Back to the Cross:

"Death is the door to life."

Happy Easter

" [...] we rejoice in the fact that it was in the beginning that our Lord cried out it is finished."

— Douglas Wilson

Q158

"'He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?'  [...] You measure your adherence to the first greatest commandment by your adherence to the second.   You can see whether or not you're serious about loving God by whether or not you're serious about giving to your neighbor."

— Douglas Wilson

"I fought the Law, and..."

Paul Walker delivers an excellent talk on Law and Grace:

"The theological name for scorekeeping is justification by works.  It's the way of life governed by the Law.  It's the way of living life as if life were a contest to be won.  It's the way of living life as if life were a battle out of which one must emerge the victor.  It is a way of life which sees life as an accusation against which one must justify oneself.  [...]  Frankly, it is the way of death:  we always lose when we keep score."

Audio from mbird.com:

Download MP3 from mbird.com...

Watch This

Toby Sumpter on men, women, and God's purpose in marriage:

Unity does not rest on uniformity. Unity does not rest on being identical. Rather, unity and life in the world God created actually rests on the goodness of difference: the goodness of the difference between Creator and creation, the difference between heaven and earth, the difference between land and seas, between man and animals, between man and woman. God created the world this way and said it was very good. God created the world and people to share in His glory which did not require a loss of identity on His part, and no true loss of glory at all. Difference is where glory shines. Contrasts light up the world.

Full text...

"The Sacred Script in the Theater of God"

From the archives:  Douglas Wilson addresses the Desiring God 2009 National Conference.   The subject (at an event commemorating the 500th anniversary of John Calvin's birth) is the authority of Scripture.    I thought upon first hearing it (and still think today) that it is probably the most important theological speech given in its decade.   I'd probably still endorse that statement without the "theological" in there.   Have a listen.    

Link to audio (and video, if you swing that way)...

Siloam

Captain of this site's blogroll, Douglas Wilson preached in Tuscaloosa recently, and spoke about seeing the meaning in the recent tornadoes.   Bear with him a while while he sets things up, and he'll then get right to the point.    Well worth a listen.

Page with download / stream links...

"The History of Redemption"

Kristopher Koelle's collection of artwork titled "The History of Redemption".