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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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Biblical Studies

Beastheology

God created two different kinds of land creatures, which are identified with two different sorts of names in the Old Testament. Wild animals are classified as “living things” ( chayyah ), while domesticated animals are classified as “cattle” ( behemah ). This is a division built into the original creation,…

October 24, 2014

From the Sea

At the beginning of Revelation 13, the dragon - Satan - goes to the seashore. He places himself in the same position as the Spirit at the beginning of creation, who hovered over the water and called up the land from the sea and the many other things from the…

October 24, 2014
Music

Musical Eschatology

In a 2009 First Things piece reprinted in It’s Not the End of the World: It’s Just the End of You , David P. Goldman explores how Western tonal music is able to capture higher orders of time and that evoke eternity. Drawing on Augustine’s account of time in terms…

October 24, 2014

Reconciling with Plato

One of the interesting findings of Patrick Fletcher’s Resurrection Realism , a study of Ratzinger’s Augustinian views on the resurrection, has to do with Ratzinger’s changing views of Platonism. Early on, Ratzinger saw Platonism as an enemy of Christian faith. He attempted to construct a “de-Platonized” eschatology that did not…

October 23, 2014
Communism

Communism, Lies and Illusion

Francois Furet’s Lies, Passions & Illusions is a best-seller in France. The little book is Furet’s portion of a conversation-debate with Paul Ricouer. Ricouer put aside his edited version of the conversation when Furet died in 1997, but Furet’s portion was completed and is not published. Furet’s analysis of twentieth…

October 23, 2014

Points of the Compass

In his Prison Notebooks , the Marxist writer Antonio Gramsci rebuts the abstracted philosophizing of Bertrand Russell: “Russell says approximately this: ‘We cannot, without the existence of man on the earth, think of the existence of London or Edinburgh, but we can think of the existence of two points in…

October 23, 2014

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