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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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Exhortation, Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

Each week, we kneel to confess our own sins and then go on to pray for the universal church, the nations, and the world. It’s obvious why we confess our sins. We are seeking forgiveness and cleansing. We are praying for one another as we pray together. The prayer for…

February 11, 2007

Cooled prayer

Prayer, Rosenstock-Huessy says, is “doubtful, agitated, despairing, searching.” Prayer desperately seeks answers. When prayer cools into a “residue,” it’s called “research”: “If research is real, it still has the dignity of prayer, although it is the last and most cooled-off phase of genuine prayer.” This cooling process is evident in…

February 11, 2007

Silencing women

Rosenstock-Huessy notes that the ancient world observed a division of labor with regard to speech: “Women are expected to contribute wild, passionate, inarticulate shouts of blind feeling. Men are expected to build on this natural stratum the structure of high and articulate speech . . . . Women and children…

February 11, 2007

Historical Jesus

Historical Jesus studies, Rosenstock-Huessy claims, attempt to reduce the four gospels to a single unified story, turning the gospels into “material for our reconstruction of the life of Jesus from all the material.” Or, historical Jesus studies attempt to place Jesus among the ancients: “He belonged with antiquity. He was…

February 9, 2007

Gospel biography?

It has become popular to describe the gospels as biographies, but Rosenstock-Huessy pre-challenged this trend (no doubt reacting to the lives-of-Jesus movement of the 18th and 19th centuries). Ancient biographies, he claims were actually “thanatographies,” while “the story of Jesus makes sense only when his death begins and antecedes our…

February 9, 2007
Literature

Spiritual colors

Christopher Smart wrote Jubilate Agno while confined in a madhouse. He would have said, no doubt, he found his sanity there. Newtonians, they are the madmen: For Newton’s notion of colours is ALOGOS unphilosophical. For the colours are spiritual . . . . NOW that colour is spiritual appears inasmuch…

February 9, 2007

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