Our likeness to God. Those who regard a human being as nothing but a programmed machine (behaviourists) or an absurdity (existentialists) or a naked ape (humanistic evolutionists) are all denigrating our creation in God's image. True, we are also rebels against God and deserve nothing at his hand except judgment, but our fallenness has not entirely destroyed our God-likeness.
Read moreSubmission to Christ. Our primary authority is Jesus Christ our Teacher and our Lord, and our submission to Scripture is only the logical outcome and necessary expression of our submission to him. It is to Christ that we come; but Christ sends us to a book. Not that the book to which he sends us is a dead and wooden letter, or an authoritarian ogre. He bids us listen rather to his own voice as he speaks to our particular situation by his Spirit and through his written Word.
Read moreThe false analogy of race (immutable) to sexual behavior (changeable and variable) has once again reared its ugly head in the California Supreme Court majority opinion. The foundation was laid at the federal level in the Texas sodomy case which invoked the extra-constitutional and specious 'right of privacy' vis-a-vis homosexual behavior. The slippery slope of legalizing consensual adult sex and all its permutations has brought us to this critical juncture.
Read moreMainline Protestant boards and agencies, describe what is at stake: "These church bureaucracies have offered the mainline churches an unsupervised playground for experimentation in political messianism, utopianism, sexual liberation, and anti-market economics." ---Methodist theologian Thomas Oden
Read moreFalse teachers. In telling people to "*beware of false prophets"* (Mt. 7:15), Jesus obviously assumed that there were such. There is no sense in putting on your garden gate the notice 'Beware of the dog' if all you have at home is a couple of cats and a budgerigar! No. Jesus warned his followers of false prophets because they already existed. We come across them on numerous occasions in the Old Testament, and Jesus seems to have regarded the Pharisees and the Sadducees in the same light.
Read moreThe Study of Theology. Intellectual exploration. The fact that God has revealed himself in Christ and in Scripture does not rule out intellectual exploration. The theologian is no more inhibited from theological research because God has revealed himself in Scripture than the scientist is inhibited from scientific research because God has revealed himself in nature.
Read moreReputation and revelation. We need the humility of Mary. She accepted God's purpose, saying, 'May it be to me as you have said' . . . We also need Mary's courage. She was so completely willing for God to fulfill his purpose, that she was ready to risk the stigma of being an unmarried mother, of being thought an adulteress herself and of bearing an illegitimate child. She surrendered her reputation to God's will.
Read moreThe fount of reformation. The English Reformation may be said to have begun in the White Horse Inn in Cambridge, where from 1519 a group met in secret to study the Greek Testament which Erasmus had published three years previously. It was this that Tyndale translated into English, determined (as he put it) that the ploughboy should know the Scriptures better than the Pope.
Read moreResisting false teaching. "The apostolic traditions are the foundation of Christian faith and life, while subsequent ecclesiastical traditions are the superstructure which the church has erected on it. The primary traditions, to which we should hold fast, are those which the apostles received from Christ (either the historic Christ or the living Spirit of Christ), which they taught the early church by word or letter, and which are now preserved in the New Testament.
Read moreAgainst the same thought (lust), another old man said, "Be like him who passes through the marketplace in front of an inn and breathes the smell of cooking and roasting. If he enjoys it, he goes inside to eat some of it; if not, he only inhales the smell in passing and goes on his way. It is the same for you: avoid the bad smell. Wake up and pray, saying, "Son of God, help me." Do this for other temptations also.
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