Funny yet sad

Very insightful blogger Onesimus Online has recently put up what he calls The Evangelical [...] shorter Catechtism - if there is any hint of fundie theology in your bones, this is a must read not just for the humour factor, but that we may repent and believe!

Saintly sage

I love C. S. Lewis' response to someone who is struggling with the thought that her husband (now dead) may be destined for eternal torment. The questioner thinks that if this is the case, wouldn't it be better if God erases the memory of her husband? Lewis, rather than respond in theological fantasy and semantical ambiguity (that sometimes clouds my answers) offers what in my mind is saintly (godly) and sagely advice

"When I have learned to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. In so far as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest at all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased."

Reminds me of the greatest Saintly Sage: Matthew 6:33

Quote of the week

Sexual knowledge is the model of knowledge, the eschatological knowledge, because at the end the world will be bride. To know the world now, we love it, caress it, embrace it. We don’t uncover the secrets of the world by raping, but by wooing her.

Via SONG OF WISDOM

Video of the week

We all do it... So get it right

DugDownDeep_Carnahan.mov from Covenant Life Church on Vimeo.

one small step for woman, many sad steps for man

Isn't it painful when someone just says it as it is? I'd never seriously thought about how the ordination of women inadvertently leads to other theological errors (although I remember a fellow ordinand once saying in a lecture - to consternation/squirming from the rest of us - that the ordination of women and the "gay issue" were all part of a package). Anyway there was that issue just lounging in the deep recesses of my brain when I read this

"Looking for flourishing chastity in such settings is a sexual snipe hunt. Just ask the question directly. Those denominations that worked through the controversy of women's ordination a generation ago have certainly moved on. Their controversies now concern whether sodomites should be wearing sodomitres in solemn procession up the central aisle"

from Doug Wilson's Why Ministers Must Be Men, 23

Briefly looking at what has happened at my denomination, the mind goes huh!

Echo of the future

Soon after moving to London, I remember being urged to re-think my views on Church. The key issue was to avoid calling Church "worship" and to see all of life as a worship event. Amongst many of my friends, I remember a key book being Vaughan Roberts, True Worship which helpfully pointed out that all of life is to be lived God-ward. I embraced this ideology and became an advocate of the "all of life is worship" mantra and eschewed the notion of calling church services "a time of public worship". Over the last few years though, this ideology has been challenged somewhat. Reading through the book of Hebrews or 1 Corinthians for example it is hard to miss the NT's portrayal of our gathering on the Lord's day as a particular time of worship when we focus on the Lord in a way we haven't done all week. This is not to deny that everything we do is an act of worship but rather to recognise as Mike Cosper says, that "worship has TWO contexts—the broad context of all of life (unceasing, living-sacrifice worship) and the narrow context of the gathered church, who gathers to encourage and build one another up, offering a foretaste of what is to come when Christ returns an heaven and earth are joined together. (Jeremy Begbie calls this an "echo of the future," which is one of the coolest phrases in all of Christendom.)" So there, I'm looking forward to our time of worship this Sunday. Hope you are too.

Ouote of the week

Ministers of the gospel should expect their teaching to have transformative power over the course of years and decades. Gospel proclamation is not like the coach's half time talk in the locker room, where the exhortation is all about now, and the application, all the application, immediately follows... You might see a man do the right thing today, and not know that it could all be traced back to a sermon heard by his great grandmother on his mother's side in 1932.

via Doctrinal Leaven