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American Politics

Voting, Praying, and Purity: Two Different Versions of Civil Religion

Pastor John Piper has written on why he (probably) won’t be voting in this month’s presidential election. Reading his argument, I couldn’t help wondering if voting has a cultic significance to Piper. As much as self-admitted Christian Trump-voters are characterized as cult followers, Never Trump Christians often strike me as…

by Mark HorneOctober 30, 2020
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Literature

Pastor Frankenstein

Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself… –– Victor Frankenstein In Mary Shelley’s classic novel, Victor Frankenstein is a young intellectual with an excessive thirst for glory and worldwide acclaim. Having lost his beloved mother, Frankenstein works to…

by Drew KnowlesOctober 27, 2020
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How to Worship

Against Practical Preaching

“Our daughter is just like a baby hippo,” my wife says to me as I hang my coat up. “After we watched a video of hippos munching whole watermelons, she sat down to her own watermelon lunch. She gobbled them up with those same puffy cheeks and big eyes.” My…

by John HigginsOctober 22, 2020
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Abortion

Evangelicals for Adolf: Christians in Hitler’s Germany

Christian compromise with Nazi Germany’s political leadership is well documented in painful detail. There was resistance, but it was the exception rather than the rule. German Christianity was terribly timid. Leadership lacked spiritual strength because of serious Biblical ignorance and unbelief. But it was not just the leaders. Christians in…

by Ralph Allan SmithOctober 20, 2020
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Abortion

For Whom Should a Christian Vote: Moral Reasoning and the 2020 Election

Can a Christian vote for Donald Trump? That might seem like a surprising question given the widespread evangelical support for the President. Yet for a growing number of evangelicals, to vote for Trump is to endorse his moral repugnancy and further discredit gospel-believing Christians who have sold their birthright for…

by Blake JohnsonOctober 13, 2020
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Hermeneutics

Two Yeshuas and a Fish

Thirty-eight years is a long time to take getting somewhere (Deut. 2:14). You could just ask anyone in the unfaithful generation of people whom God brought to the edge of the Promised Land the first time under Moses—if they were still alive, that is (Num. 14:22-23, 32-35). But there are…

by Eric RobinsonOctober 6, 2020

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Our Religious War

M ary Eberstadt doesn't believe we're in a war of the religious v. the secular. In an adapted excerpt from her newly-released It's Dangerous To Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies , she argues that the battle is between “competing faiths: one in the Good Book, and the other in…

June 27, 2016

What Brexit Can't Fix

I an Morris puts the discontent with Western elites, reflected most dramatically in Britain's departure from the E.U., in a larger historical perspective. “Throughout history, when things have gone wrong, people have blamed their leaders,” Morris writes. “In the West, things are now going wrong more than they used to,…

June 27, 2016

Beloved Son and Vineyard

I n his long-anticipated and dramatically-completed (read the Preface) Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels , Richard B. Hays devotes a few pages to the parable of the vineyard as recounted in Mark 12. He observes, as every commentator does, that Jesus is the son who is finally sent to…

June 27, 2016

He Is Not Here

P lace, writes Robert Pogue Harrison ( The Dominion of the Dead ), is established by a hic jacet : “here lies” the body of my ancestors. To this the gospel poses a direction challenge: When the women show up at the tomb of Jesus, angels tell them hic non…

June 24, 2016

Darkness Rebuked

D on't participate in ( sugkoinoneo ) darkness, Paul says (Ephesians 5:11). Communion with darkness is fruitless, sterile ( akarpos ). Instead of communing with the works of darkness, instead of joining them in one dead flesh, we are to “expose” the works of darkness. Elegcho , “expose,” can also…

June 24, 2016

Tomb Culture

I n an essay on “The Evangelical Subversion of Myth,” René Girard examines Matthew 23:27, Jesus's comparison of the Pharisees to whited sepulchers, and Jesus's condemnation of the Pharisees who are sons of those who kill the prophets. On the last passage, Girard cleverly observes that the Pharisees' effort to…

June 23, 2016

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