my burg

While working on a sermon this week I remembered the "serious presents" that Father Christmas gave to the Pevensie children when the winter  spell over Narnia was finally broken.  “These are your presents and they are tools, not toys," he said.  "The time to use them is perhaps near at hand.  Bear them well.”   (From The Lion,  The Witch, and The Wardrobe , by C. S. Lewis)  In the message I wanted to emphasize the importance of the spiritual gifts for the encouragement and  upbuilding of God's people.  He gives serious gifts.  This flashback to the world of Narnia rekindled many happy memories of reading the Chronicles of Narnia as a college student and new-born Christian.  I was enthralled with Aslan -- both the literary and the real version -- which was a wonderful introduction to the "real" world for me.  C. S. Lewis was among the first Christian authors I read after becoming a believer, and the Chronicles were my f...

"To think independently of other human beings is impossible, and if it were possible it would be undesirable. Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said. And when people commend someone for 'thinking for herself' they usually mean 'ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound more like people I approve of.' ... People in my line of work [ academia ] always say that we want to promote 'critical thinking'—but really we want our students to think critically only about what they’ve learned at home and in church, not about what they learn from us." ~ Alan Jacobs, How To Think (Currency / Random House, 2017), page 37.   “'Critical thinking' is a form of intentional deracination and displacement. Its basic assumption is that students enter college or university with a set of under-explored moral commitments that they have inherite...

"Anybody who lives beneath the Cross and who has discerned in the Cross of Jesus the utter wickedness of all men and of his own heart will find there is no sin that can ever be alien to him.  Anybody who has once been horrified by the dreadfulness of his own sin that nailed Jesus to the Cross will no longer be horrified by even the rankest sins of a brother.  Looking at the Cross of Jesus, he knows the human heart.  He knows how utterly lost it is in sin and weakness, how it goes astray in the ways of sin, and he also knows that it is accepted in grace and mercy... "In daily, earnest living with the Cross of Christ the Christian loses the spirit of human censoriousness on the one hand and weak indulgence on the other, and he receives the spirit of divine severity and divine love.  The death of the sinner before God and life that comes out of that death through grace become for him a daily reality." ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (Harper & Row...

“You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” (19:4-6) “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.” (20:2-3) Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck reflects on the totality of God’s claim upon us: Religion is not limited to one single human faculty but embraces the human being as a whole. The relation to God is total and central.  We must love God with all our mind, all our soul, and all our strength. Precisely because God is God he claims us totally, in soul and body, with all our capacities and in all our relations… There can be no true service of God without true knowledge… But that knowledge of God ...

The following words are taken from "Surmounting the Clash of Worlds," a lecture delivered by Carl Henry on July 7, 1989, at the dedication of the new campus of Tokyo Christian Institute (which later became Tokyo Christian University).  This call to wholistic Christian thinking sets naturalism and biblical theism in the sharpest of contrasts...    "We are self-deceived if we allow naturalistic speculation to parade as something modern, when in fact it was repudiated almost twenty-five  hundred years ago by the great philosophers of Greece.  Pagan though they were, the classic Greek sages recognized that naturalism cannot bring  into being or sustain a stable society and, in fact, robs human life of distinctive value and meaning.  The Greeks insisted that if time and change  control all reality, and if truth and right are subject to ongoing revision, then human civilization becomes impossible; moreover human life loses  fixed meaning and spec...

The following words are taken from "Surmounting the Clash of Worlds," a lecture delivered by Carl Henry on July 7, 1989, at the dedication of the new campus of Tokyo Christian Institute (which later became Tokyo Christian University).  In many ways this is a mandate for Christian education -- that we should not teach Christianity in bits and pieces but toward a comprehensive way of thinking about all of reality.  Henry explains clearly the conflict of Christian theism and atheistic naturalism...  "The Christian outlook cannot be effectively maintained by piece-meal retention of a few selected and respected tenets and the surrender of other  important elements.  The fact is, the naturalism that now pervades many influential universities of the modern world is far less vacillating in what  it believes or disbelieves than are some so-called religious institutions.  Naturalism does not selectively dispute only the doctrine of creation, or  the h...