Doug Wilson & Christian Nationalism make the news in Australia
‘The presenting story that led to the AP piece is a view promoted by Wilson’s church, whereby women should lose the right to vote. I wasn’t shocked to read this, as it fits into their view of men and family life. In the last week, I have also heard the scenario where some (a tiny, tiny number) of Christians now advocate that women should not have voting privileges in a church! The idea is preposterous as it conflicts with one of the Bible’s wonderful teachings: the priesthood of all believers, and therefore the value of all members of the church and their contributions. And what of single women? In the world of Moscow, single women are frowned upon and offered and often derided. More of this in a moment.’
What I Use (and Don’t Use) To Make this Site
I appreciate this one from Tim Challies. Like him, I do not use AI at all. Everything written on this blog is hand-typed by me. Every article linked to has been read by me and manually shared. Unlike Tim, I do not use nearly half the tools he outlines. I think we share the same mouse (I also use an Mx Vertical at home) but otherwise, it is basically me and my laptop (and a laptop riser) at home and a fairly standard bluetooth keyboard. Otherwise, I write on my One Plus Tab. But like Tim, I want to stress everything I write is (except for guest posts) written and hand-typed manually by me.
Put up walls so you can welcome
‘Sounds paradoxical, doesn’t it? We think we know that to welcome is the very opposite of having a wall up. We’re wrong. Ivan Illich taught that the welcome of hospitality requires a threshold. By definition, we need to move over a threshold in order to be welcomed. If there is no threshold to move over, I can’t welcome you. To put it another way, if someone isn’t in some sense an outsider, I can’t welcome them into my space. Why not? Because if they’re already an insider there’s nothing to welcome them into.’
Reformed and Amillennial: Five Reasons to Embrace Amillennialism
‘Why should Christians—especially those in the Reformed camp—embrace amillennialism over premillennialism or dispensationalism? In this post, I’ll share five compelling reasons that won me over, and I believe they can convince you too.’
Did the Disciples Embellish Jesus’ Identity over Time?
‘Bible critics like Bart Ehrman, Alex O’Connor, and a multitude of Muslims and other skeptics allege that the disciples’ view of Jesus evolved over time. They claim that the earlier Gospel accounts—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—have a low Christology. According to the skeptics, Mark is the earliest Gospel, written in the AD 50s or 60s, and it depicts Jesus in a way that doesn’t explicitly ascribe divinity to him; rather, he is portrayed as more human, which they claim aligns more closely with the historical (i.e., true) Jesus. By the time John was penned decades later, Jesus’ followers had adopted a higher Christology. Legend crept into the narratives, which is why John depicts Jesus as a divine figure, reflecting theological embellishment. Is this true, or is there another way to understand the differences between the Gospels?’
When Kierkegaard Goes to an Oasis Concert
‘British music has become differently and aggressively political. It’s a stark contrast between Oasis headlining Glastonbury—the United Kingdom’s largest music festival—in 2004, and Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg’s appearance on the same stage in 2022. At some point between those years, mainstream British culture swapped hedonism for moralism. We gave up on being mad for it and instead became mad about it all. For that reason, some have received Oasis’s return as the chance to recapture an apparently simpler time. “When I go to a gig,” one new (and young) Oasis fan wrote online, “I don’t want to feel bad about myself, I don’t want to see Palestine flags or get preached at about the climate. I just want music and a good time.” Oasis can scratch that itch like no other.’
From the archive: It’s OK to disagree sometimes
‘The fact is, it is OK to disagree. It’s OK for elders to disagree with each other and it’s also OK for members to disagree too. That doesn’t make everybody equally right, but nor does it mean every disagreement is a matter of dissent and disloyalty. The fact is, disagreement (as one of my elders said recently) is inevitable. The question is not whether we agree, it is how we deal with it.’
On the Stand to Reason article about Mark’s Christology compared with the other gospels, I’ll start from the basis that Mark’s Gospel is about what Jesus did, Matthew & Luke wrote about what Jesus taught, and John wrote about who Jesus was. So in Matthew, Luke, and John the divinity of Jesus comes across in the words, which themselves communcate this significance.
In Mark, it’s the actions of Jesus which show his divine nature, and the author of the article gives examples of these. However, understanding the significance of these actions as indicating the divinity of Jesus frequently requires information from outside Mark’s text – it’s not always obvious from his account. It is in the Old Testament that these actions are described as being performed uniquely by God, and this knowledge is necessary to understand the significance of these actions in Mark’s high Christology – one where Jesus’s divinity is ascribed implicitly by his actions, rather than explicitly by his words. Until, of course, we get to chapter 14 verses 62-63, which should come as no surprise to any reader who has been picking up the clues in the preceding 13 chapters.
The Bible critics referred to (Ehrman et al.) are simply revealing their ignorance of the OT – or disdaining its relevance – an ignorance that one has to suspect as being deliberate blindness. Incidentally, this factor makes me doubt the assertion in the article that Mark wrote primarily to gentile believers, because such believers might not have the OT background that would have provided the information to understand the significance of Jesus’s actions. Mark is unlikely to have written to gentiles while assuming a knowledge of the Jewish Scriptures necessary for this understanding.
Angus J