Early in my Christian life I was struck by a fascinating quote in C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letter #21. On the sin of peevishness, he wrote, Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And […]
Christianity
What Christian Reconstruction Gave Me
As everyone who investigates me online knows, in my 30s I was a Christian Reconstructionist. Part of the appeal of that to younger people in that era was the specific blueprints for society and personal action that seemed to fill […]
More on Manners and Customs
Some more issues on the issue of Manners and Customs. The issue of enforcement. Disobedience to Manners is enforced, let it be said, by discrimination and exclusion. Sometimes the person is explicitly told why he is excluded; sometimes he is […]
The Politics, or a-Politics, of the Evangelical Church in the 1970s
I came to Christ in 1973, at the high tide of the Jesus movement. No, we weren’t all hippies; the movement swept through secular colleges [even fraternities!] and youth groups as well. It is worth pointing out that my [deservedly […]
Manners, Customs, and Languages: The Spontaneous, A-Rational Kingdom
This particular kingdom is also not one of the three that evangelicals regularly talk about, but in the training of missionaries and evangelists, we pay a lot of attention to it! ‘Missiology’ includes endless classes on culture, and how we […]
The Theonomization of Anabaptism
At the time of the Reformation, certain groups emerged which said that one ought to be baptized again [despite one’s infant baptism] when one came to conscious faith in Christ. Therefore, they were called Anabaptists, which means ‘again-baptizers’. But they […]
A Letter about ‘Freedom’ and Christianity
I have wrestled with the tensions between Christianity and ‘freedom’; and they have been a major part of my thinking, at times even an obsession. So I think it’s time that I told my whole story and thinking about this […]
Time to Stop Using Political Terminology for Theological and Moral Views
Some portions of the American church, it is asserted, have gotten much more politicized in recent years. It is at the point where many want to ditch the word ‘evangelical’, because ‘evangelical’ is seen by the public as a political […]
Drawing Lines: The Fences of the Church
The modern Church tries to be open to as many as possible, in order that as many as possible might hear the Gospel. Jim Belcher has written about a model of the Church not as a fenced enclosure but as a […]
Did Jesus Give Us Our Individualism?
Patrick Deneen has warned that modern ‘liberalism’, which includes American style conservatism, has stressed the individual and dominion over nature so much as to weaken community. In trying to liberate the individual, the state, and for conservatives the market, expand to protect […]