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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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Paul the Hellenizer?

Schweitzer didn’t think so, but he did think that Paul prepared the ground for Hellenization. According to the summary found in Stephen Neill and N. T. Wright’s history of New Testament interpretation, Schweitzer identified the primary historical problem of Paul studies, namely to explain the transition from Jesus to Paul…

January 20, 2009

Covenant

Irenaeus interpreted Jesus’ parable of the laborers in the vineyard as a parable about Jews and Gentiles (Matthew 20:1-16). The first-hour men are Jews, and the eleventh-hour men, who slip into the vineyard at the last minute, are Gentiles converted by the apostles. Over the surly objections of the Jews,…

January 19, 2009

Joshua’s Jubilee

Luke 3-4 follows, like Matthew 3-4, the history of Israel. Jesus is the true Israel, recapitulating Israel’s failed story. But the sequence is somewhat different in the two passages. In Matthew, Jesus receives baptism from John, enters the wilderness to be tempted, begins His ministry in Galilee, before ascending to…

January 19, 2009

Sermon notes

INTRODUCTION Jesus continues on the way toward Jerusalem , predicting His own future and teaching the Twelve about discipleship. They don’t understand, but fortunately Jesus is the compassionate Son of David, who opens blind eyes ( 20:29 -34). THE TEXT “Now Jesus, going up to Jerusalem, took the twelve disciples…

January 19, 2009

David covenant

Psalm 89 explicitly tells us that Yahweh entered into a covenant with David (v. 28), which makes David the firstborn over the kings of the earth (v. 27) and promises a perpetual seed and sonship (vv. 26, 29). The Psalm as a whole, however, is about an apparently broken covenant.…

January 18, 2009
Philosophy

Aquinas at Oxford

In the first volume of his history of ethics, Terence Irwin gievs a chapter to Plato, four to Aristotle, but nine to Aquinas. Reviewing the book in the TLS , Anthony Kenny says that Aquinas “emerges as the hero of the entire volume,” and, after noting that Irwin holds a…

January 17, 2009

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