my burg

"This is what it means to be a Christian -- to embrace the whole Christ: the suffering Christ, the risen Christ, the reigning Christ, the coming Christ."   (John Piper)

"He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.  For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to  dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross."  (Colossians  1:18-20 ESV)  Christianity is often seen and portrayed as being exclusive rather than inclusive, and culturally narrow rather than ethnically broad.  And yet, it  is precisely because Christianity is universal that it is therefore exclusive.  It is because Christ's work is so complete that all other ways are only  partial at best.  Herman Bavinck explains,    "Christianity is therefore the absolute religion, the only essential, true religion.  It does not grant that other religions are of almost equal worth  alongside of it.  It is, according to its nature, intolerant, even as the truth at all times is and must be oppos...

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, "Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!"   (Revelation 7:9-10 ESV) Christianity is a global movement.  It is not confined to one language, one culture, or one ethnic group.  The Syrian Christians who are suffering are my family.  The North Korean Christians in prison are my brothers and sisters.  Many Iranians are even today coming to faith in Christ.  Men and women, boys and girls, from many nations are entering the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus!   I frequently have fellowship with Christians from Turkey, Kenya, and Brazil.  The Apostle Paul wrote of the church, "Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbar...

I've always enjoyed these helpful drawings from Credo House.  So true.

"...concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord... (Romans 1:3-4 ESV) "The first point which we have to make is that the gospel is concerning God's Son.  That is the nerve, the heart and the very centre of the gospel.  There is no such thing as the Christian gospel, and there is no such thing as Christianity, apart from Him.  Christianity, by definition, is Christ Himself.  Now this is something, it seems to me, as one sees so clearly in the New Testament, about which there can be no discussion or argument whatsoever.  There is no such thing as Christianity apart from the Person of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.  That does not mean that the Lord Jesus Christ is a 'bearer' of good news from God.  No!  It means that He Himself is the good news.  It is the Person and what...

"By the very nature of the Christian faith... the Christian mind has an attitude to authority which modern secularism cannot even understand, let alone tolerate.  It follows from all that has been said about the God-given nature of the Christian revelation and the Christian Church that they must command a whole-hearted allegiance from Christians; for Christians are, by definition, men who accept the revelation and the Church for what they are, the visible vehicles of God's action in the world.  That which is divinely established and divinely guaranteed calls forth from men, not an egalitarian attachment, but a bending submission.  One cannot seriously contemplate the first elementary truths of Christianity -- the doctrine of the divine creation of man and his world, the doctrine of the Redemption, and the doctrine of the Church, without realizing that here is something which is either authoritative and binding, or false; deserving of submission or of total neglect....

What do Christians -- or the church as a collective -- have in common with secularists working on the problems of the world today?  How is our agenda different, or the same?  What common ground does a secular social justice have with a biblical social justice?  Is better technology or political / social structures (what Eliot calls "machinery") the answer to "setting the world right"?  What solutions should the Church be expected to bring to societal problems? Following are some excerpts from a radio broadcast talk by T. S. Eliot, given in February, 1937, which forms an Appendix to "The Idea of a Christian Society" in Christianity and Culture .  He writes,   "I want to suggest that a task for the Church in our age is a more profound scrutiny of our society, which shall start from the question: to what depth is the foundation of our society not merely neutral but positively anti-Christian?  "It ought not to be necessary for me to insist t...

“The marks of truth, as Christianly conceived, are that it is supernaturally grounded not developed within nature; that it is objective and not subjective; that it is a revelation and not a construction; that it is discovered by inquiry and not elected by a majority vote; that it is authoritative and not a matter of personal choice.”   ~ Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think? (SPCK, 1963; Regent College Publishing, 2005)

Continuing with the list of twelve best books I read this past year...   The Everlasting Man , G. K. Chesterton (1925).   I studied this work with a reading group I attend.  In his unique way of thinking and writing,  Chesterton deals with how Christianity, and Jesus in particular, is the fulfillment of the religious hopes of philosophers and pagans down through  history.  It's a very winsome presentation of historic Christianity.  This book was instrumental in moving C. S. Lewis from atheism to faith.  Lewis  wrote, "I read Chesterton's Everlasting Man and for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to  make sense..."   Enough said.  The Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-42 , by Ian Toll (W. W. Norton & Co., 2012).  And I'll add to this the second of his trilogy,  The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942-44 ...

"In pointing out these things to the brethren, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, constantly nourished on the words of the faith and of the  sound doctrine which you have been following."  (1 Timothy 4:6 NASV) There is an ongoing concern in many evangelical churches that we need to move on from Christian doctrine to the more practical aspects of the  Christian life.  After all, Christianity is more relational and practical.  It's more about life and relationships than it is about the content of the teachings of the church.  This is a fair enough concern, since all biblical doctrine needs to be worked out in real life.   But the danger here is that we separate doctrine from faith and life, and so remove the very foundation (and motivation) for living faithfully to God in this world.  Those of us who are studying Romans together are seeing that the Apostle Paul lays out eleven chapters of doctrinal groundwork before he comes to th...

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...

The following paragraphs are taken from the conclusion of an article by J. Gresham Machen, originally published in 1933 in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science .  Machen is addressing the relevance of the Christian message to American education early in the 20th century.  He answers the question of what responsibility the church has in working for the betterment of society...  "The message will not be enforced by human authority or the pomp of numbers.  Yet some of you may hear it.  If you do hear it and heed it, you will possess riches greater than the riches of all the world. "Do you think that if you heed the message you will be less successful students of political and social science; do you think that by becoming citizens of another world you will be come less fitted to solve this world's problems; do you think that acceptance of the Christian message will hinder political or social advance?  No, my friends, I will pre...

Over twenty-five years ago, Carl Henry gave a lecture, first to the Baptist Union of Romania (September, 1990), and later to the Tyndale Seminary faculty (the Netherlands) and at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, entitled "Christianity and Resurgent Paganism".  As with all of his writings I am continually amazed at Henry's prescient insight into Western culture and its trajectory.  In this post and the next I will highlight some quotes from this talk. "The unraveling strands of Western civilization are everywhere.  Not  simply at the future end of history, nor even only at the looming end of  this second Christian millennium, but already in the immediate present,  modernity is being weighed in the balances.  Dismay and distress follow  in the wake of the rebellious despiritualization of our once vibrant  civilization.  Secular hedonism has nurtured the disintegration of the  family and the desanctification of human existence. ...

From my bookshelf I picked up again the classic little work, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think (SPCK, 1963; Servant Books, 1978), by Harry Blamires.  This author was encouraged to write by none other than C. S. Lewis, his tutor at Oxford.  Writing from mid-twentieth century Britain, Blamires examines our wholesale surrender to secularism and how to recover a uniquely Christian approach to thinking and dialogue.   "We twentieth-century Christians have chosen the way of compromise. We withdraw our Christian consciousness from the fields of public, commercial, and social life.  When we enter these fields we are compelled to accept for purposes of discussion the secular frame of reference established there.  We have no alternative -- except that of silence.  We have to use the only language spoken in these areas." (p. 27) "We have stepped mentally into secularism.  We have trained, even disciplined ourselves, to think secularly about s...

In J. R. R. Tolkien's biography by Humphrey Carter, the author records for us this conversation between Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.  Lewis at this point is still a skeptic, believing Christianity to be only a myth...  “But,” said Lewis, “myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver.”   “No,” said Tolkien, “they are not.  ...just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.  We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbor, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.”   “You mean,” ...

"All Christian learning must be for the sake of worship and service of God in the world, and we are deceived if we think that our own schematic skills or speculative theories or politico-economic proposals make the Bible meaningful or credible to the contemporary world. The case for Christianity does not rest on our ingenuity; it rests upon the incarnate and risen Lord.  The Bible is meaningful and credible as it stands; it is we, not the Scriptures, that need to be salvaged.  Unless evangelical education understands Christianity's salvific witness in terms of the whole self -- intellect, volition, emotion, conscience, imagination -- and of the world in its total need -- justice, peace, stewardship and much else -- it cannot adequately confront a planet that has sagged out of moral and spiritual orbit." ~ Carl F. H. Henry, Confessions Of A Theologian (Word Books, 1986), p. 76. 

Kenneth Scott LaTourette, church historian, writes about the success of Christians in the early centuries... Inevitably the question arises: Why, from being the faith of a small, persecuted minority in competition with other religions which appeared to have better prospects of success, did Christianity eventually enroll the large majority of the population of the Roman Empire? To that outcome several factors contributed. In the disintegration of the existing order which by the end of the second century was becoming obvious many individuals were seeking spiritual and material security and believed that they could find it in the Christian faith.  By the end of the third century, while enlisting only a minority, the Church was Empire-wide, was more comprehensive than any institution except the state, and gave to its members a sense of brotherhood and solidarity. Christianity assured its adherents what many in the ancient world were craving -- high ethical standards, a spiritual dy...

Niebuhr's definition of liberal Protestantism may be applied to today's revisionist Christianity : “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”   (Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America , 1937) The "love of God" can be used in the Bible in different ways : "God loves with a love of benevolence (John 3:16) and with a love of delight (Zeph 3:17)." (Thomas Manton) C. S. Lewis on applied science, which we could call "technology" : "There is something which unites magic and applied science [ =technology ] while separating both from the 'wisdom' of earlier ages.  For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.  For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men; the solution is a techni...

Listening to a John Stott message on "Jesus Is Lord", I heard this poem that he used to describe the morality of our relativistic world" It all depends on where you are; It all depends on who you are; It all depends on how you feel; It all depends on what you feel; It all depends on how you're raised; It all depends on what is praised; What's right today is wrong tomorrow; Joy in France, in England sorrow; It all depends on points of view; Australia, or Timbuctoo; In Rome do as the Romans do; If tastes just happen to agree, Then you have morality; But where there are conflicting trends, It all depends, it all depends. Here's a good intro to a Christian view of morality .