Can God make a rock so big that he can't lift it? Is there anything that God cannot do? According to Scripture, God cannot violate his own character. He cannot sin or tempt people to sin. And, Scripture declares, he cannot acquit the guilty. That is, he cannot just forgive-he cannot just let bygones be […]
In history, only twenty or so people in succession separate us from the eyewitnesses to Jesus' Resurrection. Wendell Berry, in his novel Jayber Crow, has Jayber, an aging village barber, reminisce: History grows shorter. I remember old men who remembered the Civil War. I have in my mind word-of-mouth memories more than a hundred years […]
If you were to ask evangelicals, "Why should God forgive your sins?," you would probably receive several answers. Most would probably say, "God forgives me because he loves me." But others might reply, "God forgives me because I repented of all known sins." And still others might answer, "God forgives me because I prayed the […]
"Forgiveness." "Redemption." "Freedom from the soul-destroying, peace-robbing guilt of sin." "Peace with God." Only someone who has been truly convinced of sin can even start to understand the excitement of these words. But who receives divine forgiveness? Human religions put a price on forgiveness, a very high price. Holding it out like the proverbial carrot […]
Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice. April is the cruellest month, breedingLilacs out of the dead land, mixingMemory and desire, stirringDull roots with spring rain.Winter kept us warm, coveringEarth in forgetful snow, feedingA little life with dried tubers. Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, […]
Calvin surely got this much right: "But if there is anything in the whole of religion that we should most certainly know, we ought most closely to grasp by what reason, with what law, under what condition, with what ease or difficulty, forgiveness of sins may be obtained!" (Institutes III.IV.2) Happily, Jesus taught his disciples […]
Precious few seem alarmed by the amount of pain and anger that has emerged over the last thirty years in the hearts of adult children of divorce. In the United States alone, one out of every four adults under the age of forty comes from a broken family. No matter what was said by our […]
What Does It Mean to Be Saved? consists of a scholarly collection of seven essays and two responses occasioned by a 2001 Regent College conference that asked select academics to "open up new vistas" for North American evangelicals who "need their [soteriological] horizons expanded" (p. 9). The book's stated goals are to serve as a […]
Last spring, Hugh Hewitt, the host of the appropriately named radio talk broadcast, The Hugh Hewitt Show, speculated on the air that because The New York Times had not reviewed Rick Warren's best seller, The Purpose-Driven Life, the newspaper's editors were guilty of bias against evangelicals. How else to explain the paper of record's neglect […]
Chapter four of Mark R. Gornik's To Live in Peace: Biblical Faith and the Changing Inner City exemplifies both its greatest weakness and, more importantly, its enduring value. Gornik offers a "reading" of Nehemiah (pp. 127ff), which applies it to the modern task of urban revitalization. Here, as elsewhere, Gornik too blithely interprets Scriptures about […]
