The evil in such an arrangement, mind you, isn't that somebody has to make those choices. That is life. The evil is in relegating responsibility for those choices to the federal government.

To extend the words of the sage in Ecclesiastes 3, I believe there is a time to reveal knowledge and a time to keep knowledge hidden. Why does God keep some information hidden? There must be a number of reasons, but allow me to share at least one.

Contrary to the Telegraph account – and good grief, this is a conservative paper – the reason early church leaders privileged those particular four gospels was that they were so evidently the earliest and most authoritative texts, without serious competition

Perhaps the supposed separation between sleeping and waking hours is somewhat false. After all, both are critical parts of a whole life. Would we offer God the work we do when we’re awake and wall off our time in sleep as unworthy of his notice? Perhaps sleep is not simply a necessary activity that fuels the work God put us on earth to do. Perhaps it is part of the work God put us here to do.

In other words, and (finally) more simply, the transcendental method, i.e., the impossibility of the contrary, holds that Christianity is true and anything opposing it is false and, in and of itself, self-destructive. This should be obvious to any Christian. Christianity is true. We believe that it is true, but it is true whether we believe it or not. This means also that Christianity is true, even for those who are not Christians.

“The government has now re-written the ‘safe harbor’ guidelines three times in seven months, and is evidently in no hurry to defend the HHS mandate in open court…By moving the goalposts yet again, the government managed to get Wheaton’s lawsuit dismissed on purely technical grounds. This leaves unresolved the question of religious liberty at the heart of the lawsuit.”

None of these hopes are unique to the FOP and ECO. All of these hopes exist in the current PCUSA and are openly expressed at other events like NEXT church, a similar in-gathering of Presbyterians who are theologically progressive. What radically differentiates the FOP and ECO from other efforts is the culture they are seeking... Continue Reading

Preparing a manuscript lets me retool and fortify sentences for their maximum human delivery. Manuscripting lets me work with fresh and new ways to say the same thing; as opposed to saying the same thing in the same way — over and over and over.

It is interesting that so many of the men who promote the Federal Vision do so with the express intent of addressing the problem of assurance. The contention of these Federal Vision writers is that many Reformed and Presbyterian church members suffer from a lack of assurance that stems from morbidly introspective self-examination. The reason, say the Federal Vision men, that some Christians engage routinely in such unproductive self-examination is that their view of the faith is overly subjective.

When I was in college I struggled a lot with being holy and being funny. Now, those who know me best may wonder if I’m particularly adroit with either virtue. But stick with me for a minute.