logos redux

The conference begins this evening at 7 at Memorial Presbyterian here in St Louis. There are still spots open. If you are a young person in the PCA training for ministry you really ought to go to this if you have any interest in the direction of the denomination.  Speakers include:

• Bill Boyd
• Matt Brown
• Jeremy Jones
• Greg Thompson
• and Jeffrey White

And the topics of discussion will be:

• The ethos of our church
• The theological practices of our church
• The worship of our church
• The ecclesiology of our church, especially as it relates to other ecclesial bodies
• The mission of our church to the world

The cost is $125 unless your a student in which case it’s only $25. 

Check out this hilarious video over at APPKA. The story of John the baptist through the eyes of a little Irish girl. Brilliant.

Related to the theme of grasping and receiving discussed in the last post is the theme of maturity. James Jordan has discussed this idea at length in a number of his works, but I think it is worth dwelling on. It seems to me that one of the central themes of the Bible with regards to man is maturity. God’s intention is to grow us up into maturity. Without going through a full catalogue of why I think this is so, I think a few things are worth mentioning.

First, the Bible as a unified story presents man as moving, through a long and circuitous route due to sin, from a garden-sanctuary to a garden-city-sanctuary. In Genesis we have a garden that needs to be worked by the man and brought, under his sinless dominion with a view to spreading this cultivation and glorification downstream, to the rest of the world. No doubt this plan is complicated by sin, but even in Abraham we see the plan going forward in Genesis 12 with God’s promise to bless the nations through Abraham’s seed.

Skipping forward then, we have in Revelation the picture of fulfillment and it is a great Garden that, through cultivation and sinless dominion, has been transformed into a Garden-City. Like the original garden it remains a sanctuary where God dwells with man, but it has been matured.

I believe that this perspective is immensely helpful in the practical, day to day, out-workings of our faith. Continue Reading…

One of the things that I have noticed over the past few years of studying the Bible, reading, particularly about the Pentateuch, and listening to sermons is that there is a clear theme in Scripture of contrasting grasping with receiving. This theme starts in Genesis 3 and continues through to the New Testament. Throughout the Bible we see the pattern of God leading his people in the path, the often painful path, of maturation so that they might grow up to be the kind of people who are prepared to receive what he has for them. However, we also see a pattern of those same people rejecting the path of maturation and attempting to grasp at those things that can only be properly had by bestowal, or more accurately, divine investiture.

To illustrate, let us take a brief survey of some of the major events in which God’s people have failed to rightly obtain what God had for them. We start in the Garden. God placed Adam and Eve in a glorious garden-sanctuary where they enjoyed blessing and unobstructed communion with Him. God also gave them a task that would mature them. (The need for maturation does not imply sin, hence Jesus.) Had they done as they were told and matured in the process it seems likely that God would have eventually granted them access to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. That’s why it was there. When they were mature they would have been made like God and invested with the knowledge necessary to be wise Kings and Queens. (The knowledge of good and evil is associated in the Bible with ruling. That is why it was what Solomon asked for.) But instead they opted for the option that promised instant gratification. At the serpent’s suggestion they grasped at the fruit rather than waiting for God to give it to them. Continue Reading…

Unfortunately I missed most of it. I had the time wrong. This is supposed to be the last one until 2010; hope you enjoyed it.

I fear that this may well sum up the contribution of my generation to the collective wisdom of the ages - crass cynicism and a pretension to wit that, faced with unencumbered self-indulgence and no meta-narrative, knows nothing other than to smirk irreverently at the horror of it all.

Or, to put it bluntly, isn’t that clever.

Sartre determined that suicide was the answer to the nihilism he had embraced. Camus used heroic language to call men to rage against the meaninglessness of life. But my generation, the post-everythings, merely sigh condescendingly and slap a banally witty sticker on their car just before going to the mall to buy their Che Guevara t-shirt.

Good thoughts from Nancy Wilson on the failure of feminism here. Thanks to my sister Tara.