Why Religion Gets to the Heart of Things

Ken Myers has a good quote on why theology is still the queen of the sciences. Whether it is acknowledged or not, it is the science behind all the sciences:

"Virtually all the major disagreements between rival theories in the sciences and in philosophy can ultimately be traced back to the differences between the religious beliefs that guide them" (Roy Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories, Revised edition, University of Notre Dame Press, 2005.

The Western Classics Are Still Doing Their Job

I recently watched an interview with David Denby, author of The Great Books. Denby is a journalist and film critic and not conservative or religious. He talks about the multiculturalist and feminist attack on the Western classics as "a white oppressive Euro-centric tradition." He said that when you got to the reasons behind their attack, it all has to do with failure to do failures to do justice as with racism and slavery.

Thus it was a failure of equal rights. Denby points out however, that these notions of equal rights come from the West. They are grounded in the belief that each of us has a soul worth developing and saving and representational government for all. He says, "They criticized the courses [in classical literature] in terms they got from the courses or from the culture itself." He adds, ironically, that this shows the books have done their job.

What's Wrong with Only Doing Evangelism and not Politics?

In his Politics According to the Bible: A Comprehensive Resource for Understanding Modern Political Issues in Light of Scripture, Wayne Grudem has a nice summary of Alvin Schmidt's work on Christian influence on the state. He also does a nice job critiquing the "do evangelism not politics" view represented by John MacArthur:

Historian Alvin Schmidt points out how the spread of Christianity and Christian influence on government was primarily responsible for outlawing infanticide, child abandonment, and abortion in the Roman Empire (in AD 374); outlawing the brutal battles-to-the-death in which thousands of gladiators had died (in 404); outlawing the cruel punishment of branding the faces of criminals (in 315); instituting prison reforms such as the segregating of male and female prisoners (by 361); stopping the practice of human sacrifice among the Irish, the Prussians, and the Lithuanians as well as among other nations; outlawing pedophilia; granting of property rights and other protection to women; banning polygamy (which is still practiced in some Muslim nations today); prohibiting the burning alive of widows in India (in 1829); outlawing the painful and crippling practice of binding young women's feet in China (in 1912); persuading government officials to begin a system of public [Christian] schools in Germany (in the sixteenth century); and advancing the idea of compulsory education of all children in a number of European countries.

During the history of the church, Christians have had a decisive influence in opposing and often abolishing slavery in the Roman Empire, in Ireland, and in most of Europe (though Schmidt frankly notes that a minority of "erring" Christian teachers have supported slavery in various centuries). In England, William Wilberforce, a devout Christian, led the successful effort to abolish the slave trade and then slavery itself throughout the British Empire by 1840.

In the United States, though there were vocal defenders of slavery among Christians in the South, they were vastly outnumbered by the many Christians who were ardent abolitionists, speaking, writing, and agitating constantly for the abolition of slavery in the United States. Schmidt notes note that two-thirds of the American abolitionists in the mid-1830s were Christian clergymen, and he gives numerous examples of the strong Christian commitment of several of the most influential of the antislavery crusaders .... The American civil rights movement that resulted in the outlawing of the racial segregation and discrimination was led by Martin Luther King Jr., a Christian pastor, and supported by many Christian churches and groups.

There was also strong influence from Christian ideas and influential Christians in the formulation of the Magna Carta in England (1215) and the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Constitution (1787) in the United States. These are three of the most significant documents in the history of governments on the earth, and all three show the marks of significant Christian influence in the foundational ideas of how governments should function. These foundations for British and American government did not come about as a result of the "do evangelism, not politics" view.

Schmidt also argues that several specific components of modern views of government also had strong Christian influence in their origin and influence, such as individual human rights, individual freedom the equality of individuals before the law, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state....

Therefore I cannot agree with John MacArthur when he says, "God does not call the church to influence the culture by promoting legislation and court rulings that advance a scriptural point of view." When I look over that list of changes in governments and laws that Christians incited, I think God did call the church and thousands of Christians within the church to work to bring about these momentous improvements in human society throughout the world. Or should we say that Christians who brought about these changes were not doing so out of obedience to God? That these changes made no difference to God? This cannot be true.

MacArthur says, "Using temporal methods to promote legislative and judicial change ... is not our calling--and has no eternal value." I disagree. I believe those changes listed above were important to the God who declares, "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream" (amos 5:24). God cares how people treat one another here on earth, and these changes in government listed above do have eternal value in God's sight.

If the Christian church had adopted the "do evangelism, not politics" view throughout its history, it would never have brought about these immeasurably valuable changes among the nations of the world. But these changes did happen, because Christians realized that if they could influence laws and governments for good, they would be obeying the command of their Lord, "Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them" (Eph. 2:10) (Politics - According to the Bible: A Comprehensive Resource for Understanding Modern Political Issues in Light of Scripture, Zondervan, 2010, 39-51).

Leithart's Defending Constantine points out that Constantine was the first Greco-Roman ruler to recognize the church as its own distinct polis, as Augustine would later distinguish the city of God and the city of Man. This distinction was completely lost on pagans who had worshipped their emperor as a god and assumed that Rome was sacked in 410 because the gods were angry that they weren't getting their sacrifices.

Prior to the Christianization of the empire, there was no distinction much less separation of state and religion. Leithart shows that the pagan Roman Empire was drenched in sacrifice to the Roman gods from top to bottom. Today, modern pagans want to use this Christian distinction between church and state to silence the church in the world at large. Shouldn't this get us talking politics again?

Chesterton on Beckett

Priceless Chesterton:

WHEN four knights scattered the blood and brains of St. Thomas of Canterbury it was not only a sign of anger but a sort of black admiration. They wished for his blood, but they wished even more for his brains. Such a blow will remain for ever unintelligible unless we realize what the brains of St. Thomas were thinking about just before they were distributed over the floor. They were thinking about the great medieval conception that the Church is the judge of the world. Becket objected to a priest being tried even by the Lord Chief Justice. And his reason was simple: because the Lord Chief Justice was being tried by the priest. The judiciary was itself 'sub judice'. The kings were themselves in the dock. The idea was to create an invisible kingdom without armies or prisons, but with complete freedom to condemn publicly all the kingdoms of the earth. ~GKC: What's Wrong with the World.

Stark Reality

The Rise of Christianity:  How the Obscure, Marginal, Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force .... by Rodney Stark
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Stark brings the eye of a sociologist to the secondary literature on early Christianity. His chapter on life in ancient Antioch is eye opening in terms of realism and Christian transformation of the Greco-Roman world.

Stark was confessedly a cultural Christian at the time, and is now calling himself an independent Christian. As such, he gets some things wrong but is on the right track. The work is invaluable, if for no other reason than it infuriates secularists, who think that human rights came from evolution and are sustainable apart from their real basis.


View all my reviews

A Tribute to C. S. Lewis or Jack's Hagiography

Jack's Life: The Life Story of C.S. Lewis by Douglas H. Gresham
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not as good as Gresham's autobiography Lenten Lands, which has much more about Gresham's relationship with C. S. Lewis, his stepfather. In this work, Jack is the hero and Mrs. Moore the villain, but Gresham tries to be understanding of the villain. Mrs. Moore is Jack's adopted mother who he cares for because of a promise he made to her son Paddy during WWI. Warnie, Jack's brother, plays the main supporting role and Gresham and his mother Joy Davidman are a part of the latter years of joy, pain, and struggle, but also victory in Christ.

The biography is a tribute to Jack, who, Gresham says, lived out his Christianity better than anyone he's ever known. The one inconsistency with this is that Jack seems almost incapable of tough love. I got the overwhelming impression that the demanding, self-pitying Mrs. Moore needed some gentle rebuking and firm resistance. But the only person who ever properly stood up to her, in Gresham's pages, was her daughter Maureen. After Maureen married and left the Kilns, she reappears once to tell her mom to back off and give Jack a rest, as he was convalescing in the hospital from exhaustion. Warnie and Jack's friends couldn't understand why Jack always gave in to her incessant pettiness. Whenever pressed, Jack told Warnie to "mind his own business." This also sounds like a failure to make oneself accountable. Warnie was a struggling alcoholic and, rather than intervene, Jack seems to have minded his own business.

That said, Jack does press on patiently and admirably. His sense of duty inspires. One also gets the sense that if it weren't for the inklings and his students Jack would've crumbled. Friendship is a powerful means of grace in Jack's Life, but there is little here about those relationships. This is not as surprising however, as how little there is about Jack's relationship with Gresham's mother and with Gresham himself. Mrs. Moore and Warnie have the most ink next to Lewis himself. I couldn't help feeling cheated.

I've read numerous biographies of Lewis and the Inklings, and this is perhaps the best on Jack's life in the trenches of WWI and his trials with Mrs. Moore. It is wonderfully accessible as it is written on about a fifth grade level and is usually brief, plain, and to the point. Gresham has many wonderful insights into things like Jack's nightmares and Lewis's love and care for his property-the kilns. This is a good place to start with understanding Lewis, but I recommend moving on to Gresham's Lenten Lands, George Sayer's Jack, Humphrey Carpenter's The Inklings, and Diana Pavlac Glyer's The Company They Keep.


View all my reviews

The Problem with the Sovereign Self

Sometimes post modernity is an amplification of modernity. For instance, both take for granted the sovereignty of the self. In modernity the self could know all. In post modernity, the self has to be more modest. Reality is too slippery, so let it go slip-slidin'-away. It's a beautiful destination right?

Right, except there are no standards for beauty except what the individual likes. So this leads me to the sovereign self of post modernity. The self is sovereign not because it can fit the universe into its brain but because it can remake the universe in its own image. That is as long as it doesn't run roughshod over someone else's sovereign self. So we live for pleasure in splendid isolation. Not too comforting is it?

Christianity has a unique opportunity to say to the modernist that we can reliably but not exhaustively know the world, and, to the post-modernist, that skepticism is not the final answer. This is because we are created by the Logos, in the image of the Logos, and thus our reason and senses were made to know the world. So we can say yes to certainty AND humility. Reason is made to know the world of God's natural and special revelation through the senses. Thus, the self is not sovereign but is its true self under God in Christ.

Lust for Power Becomes a Powerful Lust

When the self and the state supplant Christ as moral authority, the law becomes "do whatever you like as long as you don't put your neighbor in physical danger." As Anothony Esolen says, this means we will be ruled by our appetites (Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civ.).

Why the Modern State is Jealous of the Ancient Church

Charles Matthews, on the latest Mars Hill Audio Journal, points out that the modern nation state has made the church an offer. It offers the church "freedom" if it would understand itself as a denomination within the overarching category of the nation state. Christians needs to politely say, "No deal!" And consequences be damned. This is because the Bible calls the church "a holy nation" and anything less is bowing to Nebuchadnezzar and no true freedom (2 Peter 2:9).

The state makes this offer because it feels threatened by the absolute loyalty Christians are called to give to Christ. It is also jealous of the church's God-given role in the world. In other words, the state wants absolute loyalty and to do everything Christ has called the church to do, like mercy ministry, which it calls welfare. The modern nation state wants us to believe that there's a political remedy to our every ill and has gotten the church to abdicate its vocation to heal these diseases.

Douglas Wilson has pointed out that, in a sense, every state is a theocracy. The state either points the way to the true God, false gods, or puts itself forward as god. I would argue that the modern nation state of America has done the latter. The neutral secular state is a myth. Cavanaugh in his Migrations of the Holy has pointed out that the we have assembled the largest military in the history of the world in order to propagate our homemade religion here and abroad.

We must love our nation enough to want it to be just.

Writing for the Word

Wordsmithy | Why Christians must write, and what they must write about | Doug Wilson from Daniel Foucachon on Vimeo.

Christian Comedy

The ancient pagan worldview said, "Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die." Jesus said, "Be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world." Anthony Esolen points out that the pagan worldview is tragic, but the Christian worldview is a comic (Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization, 95-96).

Not Caring What Anybody Thinks

I preached on Reformation Sunday in Muncie, IN and in chapel at Heritage Classical on Reformation Day. I came to the conclusion, based on Romans 1:16-17, that once you know you have God's righteousness you don't care what anybody thinks. That's what gave Luther courage to defy the two super powers of his day:

[Since you desire a plain answer I will give it] Unless I can be instructed and convinced with evidence from the Holy Scriptures or by evident reason, I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. Here I stand, I can do no other God  help me. Amen.

Then I ran across this on Blog and Mablog:

Courage . . . is the indispensable requisite of any true ministry . . . If you are afraid of men and a slave to their opinions, go and do something else. Go and make shoes to fit them" (Phillips Brooks, as quoted in Stott, Between Two Worlds, p. 300).

Annus Significans

1831: Year of Eclipse by Louis P. Masur
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Start with a solar eclipse, add Nat Turner's slave Rebellion, Charles Finney's revivals, de Tocqueville's travels, the Trail of Tears, nullification debates with John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, and the octogenarian John Madison, Audobon's birds, a cholera epidemic, a pinch of Transcendentalism, then shake violently and you have the most important year in ante-bellum America.


Masur brings in Frances Trollop, Beaumont, Tocqueville, the British Hamilton, and a host of others to show us as a nation living numerous contradictions, such as liberty and slavery, law and Indian removal, the rise of the Democratic Party led by King Andrew I, and the celebration of nature and industrial revolution. Tocqueville shows us to be a nation of conquerers who thrive on instability and are driven by the profit motive. Individualism, rugged and revivalistic, was running rampant and would eventually redefine democracy as the pursuit of personal preference.


View all my reviews

Constantine vs. Constantinianism

Constantine is usually accused of mixing church and state, as if the Roman world prior to him were a secular state. But Roman emperors before to Constantine claimed to be part of the Pantheon of gods to whom the Romans were to sacrifice.

When Constantine broke with the Roman sacrificial system, he sided with Christianity, but far from mixing church and state, he distinguished them for the first time. He did this by recognizing the church as a distinct polis with its own authority structure and by tolerating paganism. Constantine was only an interested observer at the council of Nicea and not the final judge, and he allowed pagans to continue to serve as government officials.

What Constantine actually did was allow the church to reform the state without making the church an arm of the state. The church introduced equal rights for all and charity toward the poor, but wasn't yet used to oppress pagans. Constantine recognized the need for church unity within the empire and called the council of Nicea, but his Christian successors thought the empire needed to be uniformly Christian and called for the removal of paganism. As a result, some began to condone force and the empire became less and less Christian.

Debating Instead of Demonizing

Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis is lively, well-written book, which argues that the founders succeeded not because they liked each other or got along, most of the time they didn't, but because they resolved their differences by doing politics face to face.

Ellis writes in vivid images and analogies but is sometimes too wordy for his own good. For instance, Ellis demonstrates that Adams wanted, in modern terms, to "deconstruct" all romanticized accounts of the founding. But this is because Adams thought the historians of his day didn't do justice to the greatness of his own contribution. Ellis writes: "At its nub, his [Adam's] critique of the historical fictions circulating as seductive truths was much like a campaign to smash all the statures, because the sculptor had failed to render a satisfactory likeness of yours truly" (217). What a vivid and memorable sentence, but could've been more effective if shortened into a  punch.

Ellis goes on to show just how much the ambitious Adams wanted to be the central figure of the American pantheon of heroes. When Adams was hidden between the lines given to Washington and Jefferson, he wanted to grab the pages of history and start shredding. Privately he mocked Washington for his lack of classical education and once referred to him (though not cited in Ellis) as "old mutton head." Ellis says Washington read mostly newspapers.

Adams was almost post modern in wanting to show that reality defies neat dissection into good guys sporting white hats and bad guys in black hats. He especially wanted to expose Jefferson's betrayals of the Adam's administration. He also wanted to vindicate himself to his critics showing, among other things, that he was responsible for averting war with France in 1800 and not interested in creating an Adam's dynasty by passing on the presidency to John Quincy.

Ellis shows that Adams was jealous of Jefferson because the July 4th Declaration of Independence came to be seen as the defining moment of the new nation. Instead, Adams pointed to the debates in Congress that made that declaration possible. It turns out that Jefferson hadn't participate in those debates, shy as he was, but Adams held forth there and won the day when, on MAY 15, 1776, "Congress passed a resolution calling for new constitutions in each of the states" (242-43).

This was definitive, Adams thought, because the states were creating "separate and independent American governments" and thus breaking with their British Charters. This was the true and original declaration of independence. He looked back on Jefferson's writing of the Declaration as a historical accident that occurred because Adams himself deferred to his junior partner in order to give him something to do. Why couldn't people like his historian friend Mercy Otis Watson see John Adams as the ultimate American hero that he was?  

Ellis also argues that historians do their best work when they realize that history doesn't look inevitable at the moment when it was happening. Historians must give uncertainty back to the actors in the historical moment, while also considering the outcomes from the modern vantage point. He writes: "We need a historical perspective that frames the issues with one eye on the precarious contingencies felt at the time, while the other eye looks forward to the more expansive consequences perceived dimly, if at all, by those trapped in the moment. We need, in effect, to be nearsighted and farsighted at the same time" (6-7). Ellis is the master of using alliteration like "contingencies" and "consequences," which stick in the mind. He is the truly rare combination of a competent historian and clear writer. He proves his thesis in spades showing how the founding fathers were indeed brothers who succeeded not because they didn't clash, but because they looked at each other across the table of creative compromise.

Unfortunately, many of the compromises, like the three-fifths compromise, just prolonged the debate until the slave question erupted into civil war. The founding fathers also feuded over whether federal or state power had ultimate sovereignty. This too was finally settled by civil war, and yet the debate goes on in the fallout over how much federal power should be wielded over states, private individuals, and corporations.

In terms of feuding fathers, one squabble went out with a bang, but Ellis argues that the Burr-Hamilton duel was an anomaly. Most quarrels were settled like the Hamilton-Madison argument over whether the federal government should shoulder the burden of state debts after the Revolution. Hamilton, the federalist of federalists, wanted the government to assume this responsibility for the states it was going to rule. Madison feared this would make the states dependent upon and thus subservient to federal power. Jefferson invited the two disputants to dinner, where Madison promised not to make it a hill to die on as long as the future capitol would reside in Virginia. Jefferson and Adams feuded over Jefferson's role in paying a newspaper to print libels against Adams when they were serving together as President and Vice President. Adams had some newspaper men thrown in prison under his controversial "Alien and Sedition Acts" and probably wished he could do the same to his VP. But even this row resolved itself as the two "explained" themselves to each other through statesman like correspondence in their twilight years.

It was the Founders way to feud, and then work it out after "looking each other in the eye." The founders successfully created a new nation because they talked, broke bread together, and lived cooperatively. They would probably be amazed that their union is still together and using their legacy to debate the same issues. But today's political wars tend to be fought on the impersonal battle fields of cyber space and the air waves. Could we accomplish more by settling our differences in community, instead of demonizing each other to our constituents in the partisan media outlets or over twitter or facebook? I think Ellis's Founding Brothers suggests we could.


View all my reviews

Did Everything Good in the State Come From the Church?

Defending Constantine by Peter J. Leithart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Americans tend to assume that we cannot have religious freedom without a separation of church and state. But Leithart shows that Constantine created true religious freedom almost a millennium and a half before the US Constitution and within a Christian empire. How did he do this?

First of all he didn't try to turn the church into an arm of the state. Constantine tried to reform his empire with the gospel of Christ, but he did not try to control the church. He respected the church as a distinct polis with its own sphere of authority. For instance, he called the council of Nicea but didn't attempt to determine its outcome. He tolerated paganism in the civil realm, but let the church carry on its own culture war with the empire's pagan past. Compare this to conservatives turning the Christian Coalition of the 1990s into a religious arm for the Republican party (See Stephan Carter's God's Name in Vain).

Now we might consider Constantine's Christian reforms of the Roman state dangerous, but without them, Leithart points out, the state would have continued to allow men to abandon their wives through divorce, treat their unwanted infants as disposable property, sell their children into slavery, and enjoy murder in the gladiatorial arenas as entertainment. Before Constantine, equality could not be assumed. That came from the Christian doctrine of creation, which taught that all people are made in the image of God.

Leithart shows that sacrifice to the Roman gods and the deified emperor was the central religious act in a very religious empire. Constantine broke with the pagan Roman past by not offering the customary sacrifices after his triumph at the Milvian Bridge in 312. He turned the back the demise of the empire by looking out for the disadvantaged. He gave tax breaks to poor parents who couldn't afford to raise their children. Constantine reformed the corrupt judicial system of Rome by turning justice for the those who couldn't afford representation over to ecclesiastical courts.

Constantine had his faults but he knew that the state needed the moral authority of the church in order to defend women, children, and the poor. We are now losing the ground he gained by promoting a secular understanding of the separation of church from the state. Without a transcendent basis for our laws everyone does what is right in their own eyes. There are no absolutes in Israel, and we are re-paganizing at an alarming rate with abortion, no-fault divorce, and commercial combinations that widen the gap between rich and poor.

Would to God that more Christians would, like Leithart, defend Constantine instead of Congress.


View all my reviews

Loving God in Each Other

Loving the Unseen God


Text: 1 John 4: 7-21

I. Intro.
A. (Att. Getter) It’s easy to love a god you cannot see. This is because we can imagine an unseen God to be however we like.
B. (Textual) John says that we must love God not according to our own imagination. We must love God according to who he really is. And how do we know who he really is? John says that we know who he is because he has revealed himself in Christ’s love and he has revealed himself in each other.
C. (Transition) Let’s take a look at how God has revealed himself so that we can truly love him for who he is.
II. The first way God has revealed himself is in sending his Son to die for our sins.
A. It’s easy to love a God we cannot see, but can we love a God who “sent his son to be a propitiation for our sins?”
B. To love God we must accept the fact that we are in such a bad condition that it required God to become a man and die in order to save us. Steve Brown has said God’s grace is a radical grace, but to receive it we must accept that we are radical sinners.
C. We are sinners who cannot save ourselves. We deserved God’s wrath and couldn’t do anything to satisfy his wrath.
D. (Ill) Sometimes we say to our spouse in exasperation, “What do you want from me.” In other words, “What can I do to make you happy.” What if our spouse said, “Nothing.” That would be a terrible, helpless feeling. But what if our spouse said, “The only way that I can love you is by giving my life for yours. Then and only then can you become a person I can love.” That is actually true. We could never love each other unless we sacrificed ourselves to our spouse. When we make sacrifices for our spouse it makes the other person lovable. “If we don’t sacrifice ourselves we end up sacrificing each other” (Glenn Kaiser). God paid the ultimate sacrifice for us so that he could make us the object of his love and save us. Therein we see his love.
E. This means that we should love each other by laying down our lives for each other. Love begets love. If you want something to be lovable start loving it. Love makes things lovely. Love has a redeeming power that transforms whatever it loves.
F. This is why Paul says, “Without love, I am a resounding gong or clanging symbol.”
G. C. S. Lewis wrote, “The husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church. He is to love her as Christ loved the church – read on – and gave his life for her (Eph. V, 25). This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion; whose wife receives most and gives least, is most unworthy of him, is – in her own mere nature – least lovable. For the church has no beauty but what the Bride-groom gives her; he does not find, but makes her, lovely. (the Four Loves 105-06).
H. We must make each other lovely to ourselves.
I. Someone once told me that they found it very hard to love someone. I said, “Love him and you will find him lovable.” This is divine, agape love. There is nothing lovely about us to the holy God, but he lays down his life in an act of love to make us lovely.
J. In this way, as Lewis points out, husbands are responsible for the loveliness of their wives.
K. John says in v. 17, “we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world.” If we want assurance of salvation we must love others as Christ loved us with sacrificial love.
L. This is not impossible. Jesus is our source, “We love because he first loved us” (v. 17).

III. The second way God has revealed himself is in each other.
A. v. 12, “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” What is John talking about?
B. God is invisible but he is made visible in each other. When we love one another sacrificially his sacrificial love is perfected in us.
C. When we go beyond just saying we love one another and actually start loving each other then we find his love in us.
D. v. 20, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.”
E. The invisible God is made visible in each other. If we cannot love God as he is seen in each other, we cannot claim to love him as he is unseen.
F. It’s easy to love a God we cannot see. It’s another thing to love the God we see in Christ and the cross and each other.
G. But this is who God truly is. We see his sacrificial love in Christ and we see his diversity in each other.
H. Why can’t we love one another when God is in each other? We come to think that God is like us and those who are different are ungodly or unchristian.
I. But God says we cannot claim to love him as he is invisible if we don’t love him where he is visible.
J. (Ill) Gr. Charlie, the church split, and the man he wouldn’t let hate him.
K. This is why marriage is so important. It teaches us to love someone quite different from ourselves.
L. (Ill) there are two kinds of marriages: birds of a feather flock together and opposites attract. The research says that the more successful marriages are birds of a feather flock together. But I know of more marriages where opposites attract. God loves bringing people together who are quite different from each other. Their marriages might not be as successful but maybe they can be better and broader people. I wonder if birds of a feather might not get along better but become more lopsided as people. We are exposed to more through people who are different in temperament, personality, and taste.
IV. Conclusion:
A. God reveals himself in two ways: in his son’s sacrificial love on the cross and in each other.
B. The first transforms us and we see the evidence of that transformation in how we love or do not love people different from us.
C. It’s easy to love a God we cannot see, but loving the God we see in Christ and in each other is more rewarding.

Quicksand for a Foundation

One of the most prevalent myths of modern times is that the Enlightenment produced science and technology. It was in fact the Christian West that produced the scientific method and modern science.

Other civilizations had no rationale for pursuing science. Platonism did not teach, as Christianity does, that the universe was created ex nihilo (out of nothing) and thus good and knowable by mind. It was the Christian doctrine of creation that gave medieval philosophers a basis for pursuing science. The fact that God created the material world good and us in his image provided a basis for doing science. It meant that our senses were reliable, our reason could be trusted for processing our observations, and systematic knowledge could be built and passed on to other minds.

Simply put, God made our senses to know the world and our mind to develop its potential. This is gave us our "proper confidence." The Enlightenment borrowed that confidence in sense perception and reason but removed their basis in God. As a result, we are now smacked down by the post-modern backlash against Enlightenment confidence in reason, sense impressions, and thus science. See Thomas Kuhn's 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions if you doubt. The growing consensus is that we are trapped in our own subjectivity.

As Christians we should be poised and ready to restore our "proper confidence" in our ability to observe, report, test, and draw conclusions. There is a basis for science that is rooted in the Christian doctrine of creation. Otherwise we're left with Einstein's conclusion that "What can't be proven scientifically is the scientific nature of science itself." To build science on science is to use quicksand for a foundation. Science must be based on faith in the God of creation and redemption.

Colson on Classical

Will Anyone Go To Hell?

Robert Peterson was my mentor at Covenant Theological Seminary,  and he has ably responded to Rob Bell's book Love Wins. Dr. Peterson has published several excellent books on eternal destinies and the Bible's teaching on salvation.

Like Dr. Peterson, we need to let God speak for himself through Scripture in dealing with questions of heaven and hell, especially at a time when our culture has no stomach for hard truth and real grace.