Catholicity, Orthodoxy, and Lordship
Charles Hodge writes:
They are not intended exclusively or mainly for the recipients’ benefit, much less for their gratification; but for the good of the church, just as the power of vision is not for the benefit of the eye, but for the whole person. (Charles Hodge, I Corinthians The Crossway Classic Commentaries, , 219)
The agenda of the FV school of thought is to talk about the things God talks about in the way God talks about them. —Bill DeJong
See: DeJong’s reply to Clark’s questions
Steven Wedgeworth’s introduction to Klaas Schilder
Cheaters, and Tigers, and Idiots, Oh My! by David Bahnsen
This Will Not End Well by George Will
George Will writes:
The president’s party will not support his new policy, his budget will not accommodate it, our overstretched and worn down military will be hard-pressed to execute it, and Americans’ patience will not be commensurate with Afghanistan’s limitless demands for it. This will not end well.
A case can be made for a serious, meaning larger and more protracted, surge. A better case can be made for a radically reduced investment of resources and prestige in that forlorn country. Obama has not made a convincing case for his tentative surgelet. Continue reading “On-Line Article (s) I Read Today, XII”
God intends to put the world to rights; he has dramatically launched this project through Jesus. Those who belong to Jesus are called, here and now, in the power of the Spirit, to be agents of that putting-to-rights purpose. N.T. Wright
But the Kingdom of Heaven is for little children. It’s for little children and their messes. God likes spilled milk and crumbs on the floor. He’s ok with markers on the carpet and running in the hallway. God isn’t a perfectionist, and He proves it by calling children into His Kingdom.–Toby Sumpter
Betsy Hart writes:
[T]he belief seems to be that it’s more likely kids will stick with church over their lifetime if it’s more geared to them when they are young. But the evidence is that this isn’t what happens.
Two decades ago, Christian education expert James W. Write showed in his book, Intergenerational Religious Education (Religious Education Press), that studies reveal that children who worship regularly with their parents are more likely to consistently worship as adults than children who grow up primarily attending “children’s church.”
…that the faithful nave no reason to be afraid, since God is always ready to deliver them, nay, is also armed with invincible power. He shows in this that the true and proper proof of our hope consists in this, that, when things are so confused, that the heavens seem as it were to fall with great violence, the earth to remove out of its place, and the mountains to be torn up from their very foundations, we nevertheless continue to preserve and maintain calmness and tranquillity of heart.–Calvin, commentary on Psalm 46
True preaching cannot leave men unconcerned: it will either arouse them to repentance and to godly action, or it will arouse them to ungodly hostility as they see themselves in the light of God’s Word.–R.J. Rushdoony
The motivation for God’s people to live by God’s law is ultimately to bless the nations. After all, what would the nations actually see? The nearness of God is by definition invisible. What, then, would be visible? Only the practical evidence of the kind of society that was built on God’s righteous laws. There is a vital link between the invisible religious claims of the people of God (that God is near them when they pray) and their very visible practical social ethic. The world will be interested in the first only when it sees the second. Or conversely the world will see no reason to pay any attention to our claims about our invisible God, however much we boast of His alleged nearness to us in prayer, if it sees no difference between the lives of those who make such claims and those who don’t.
Christopher J. H. Wright
The Mission Of God – pg. 380
Wrote H. L. Mencken:
The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues, and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else…Their purpose, in brief, is to make docile and patriotic citizens, to pile up majorities, and to make John Doe and Richard Doe as nearly alike, in their everyday reactions and ways of thinking, as possible.