The term hyper-Calvinist is often used as a pejorative. Almost any Calvinist who adheres to the doctrines of grace is likely to be considered a hyper-Calvinist by at least someone. Frankly speaking, a hyper-Calvinist can be any Calvinist to a person who doesn’t understand Calvinism. So today, just briefly, and because the term has come…
This isn’t a book review. Though I often refer to a particular book, I mean this more as a series of statements on intelligent design. The concept of intelligent design has undeniable appeal. Forming a kind of middle ground between creationism and evolution, it claims to reconcile the claims of modern science with what seems…
As mentioned in an earlier post, I read through Lou Priolo’s book Pleasing People last week. This was a book that just showed up in my mailbox. It is not one I would have chosen and even after I pulled it out of the box and set it in my “to read” bookcase I didn’t…
Yesterday the Resurgence blog posted an article by Greg Wright, a writer and film critic. The article was titled “Movies, Morality, and Ratings: A Hard Look at Our Opinion of Films.” He begins like this: Consider this graphic Hollywood plotline: A man travels to Las Vegas to retrieve his cheating wife. On the way back…
I’ve been working my way through Lou Priolo’s new book Pleasing People and it has given me a lot to think about. I don’t know that any of us are readily willing to admit that we are eager to be people pleasers but Priolo shows in this book just how prone we are all to…
Every year, when summer approaches, we begin to hear about summer reading lists. I am uncertain if this is a throwback to days gone by or if people really do try to set aside a few books to read over the course of a summer. Or perhaps it is only students who do this as…
Over the weekend a member of a mailing list I subscribe to asked an interesting question. Reflecting both on some of the highly-publicized “defections” of former Protestants to Roman Catholicism and some he has witnessed personally he asked “What is the appeal of Roman Catholicism?” I have sometimes wondered the same. Why is it that…
A week from today, the movie Evan Almighty will hit theaters across the continent. A projected summer blockbuster, it is the sequel to 2003’s hit comedy Bruce Almighty which starred Jim Carrey and pulled in over $200,000,000 at the box office. Evan Almighty is, I believe, the most expensive comedy ever made with a budget…
By all accounts it would seem that evangelicalism is currently in the midst of a resurgence of interest in Reformed theology. At conferences and in publications all sorts of people are noting the growing interest in Calvinistic theology, especially (though certainly not exclusively) among younger people. Collin Hansen captured some of this interest in an…
A couple of weeks ago I preached for the first time after the elders at my church were kind enough to ask me if I’d like to contribute to a series called “God’s Sovereign Saving Grace.” This was a series on the Doctrines of Grace that has spanned a few month’s worth of Sunday nights.…
I mentioned last week that I had received the first endorsement for The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment, or TDoSD if you were trying to decipher the headline, (which, to remind you, should be available on January 7 of next year). A few weeks ago the manuscript was sent to a handful of authors, teachers and…
Road hockey is a long-standing Canadian tradition–so much so that we invented the word “shinny” to describe the informal games that are played on driveways, roads and parking lots across the nation. It seems that today’s youth generally prefers to play hockey on the Playstation and it is becoming more and more rare to see…
I have done a lot of reading lately and am preparing a bunch of book reviews for the next couple of weeks. I thought it might prove an amusing distraction to select a brief quote from each, provide you the titles to the book, and see if you can match them up. Or even just…
At this rate no one is ever going to take the blogosphere seriously. And it’s all Justin Taylor and Abraham Piper’s fault.* Well, I guess it’s not really their fault, but I think they’ve got some things wrong. Yesterday Abraham, guest-posting on Justin’s site, wrote an article entitled “Tips for Better Blog Writing.” Earlier this…
King for a Week is an honor I bestow on blogs that I feel are making a valuable contribution to my faith and the faith of other believers…or sometimes just because I really like them. It is a way of introducing my readers to blogs that they may also find interesting and edifying. Every two…
In four previous articles, I have discussed the tendency of Christians to put God in a box of our own imaginations. Since it has been a few days since the last article, let me just review each of them really briefly before moving forward in this discussion (and before concluding this discussion). In the introduction…
This is the fourth installment in a series of articles discussing the Christian tendency to put God in a box. In the first article we saw that we tend to feel insecure about God unless we have contained Him within a box in our minds and then saw that God has revealed Himself to us…
This is the third article in a series that discusses that tendency Christians have to put God in a box. In the first article (link) we saw that we tend to feel insecure about God unless we have contained Him within a box in our minds and then saw that God has revealed Himself to…
This is the second article in a short series dealing with the tendency Christians have to put God in a box (click here for the first article). Several people, commenting on this first article, remarked that this is a topic usually reserved for people attacked Reformed theology rather than defending it. Bear with me and…
A couple of years ago I got thinking about the idea of putting God in a box. This is a charge people often level at conservative Christians and Reformed folk in particular. It is not unusual for us to hear that we seem to feel that we have got God figured out, stuffed and mounted…