Christianity will indeed accomplish many useful things in this world, but if it is accepted in order to accomplish those useful things it is not Christianity. Christianity will combat Bolshevism; but if it is accepted in order to combat Bolshevism, it is not Christianity. . . Christianity will produce a healthy community; but if it […]
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Author: Rick Shrader
Facing Legalism and License With Truth
Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it; ignorance may deride it; malice may distort it; but there it is. Winston Churchill The German Anabaptist Hans Denck said, “Therefore, as God wills, and so much as in me is, I will not have my brother as an opponent and my Father as a judge.”1 In […]
Telling The Old, Old Story
Christian literature, to be accepted and approved by the evangelical leaders of our times, must follow very closely . . . a kind of ‘party line’ from which it is scarcely safe to depart. A half-century of this in America has made us smug and content. We imitate each other with slavish devotion and our […]
The Election In The Mirror
Christianity could be transformed into a cultural religion. Instead of attending to otherworldly concepts such as individual salvation and everlasting life, the church would focus upon this world. Moral pronouncements, social involvement, and political activism would become the work of the church. Such ‘cultural Protestantism,’ to use H. Richard Niebuhr’s term, came to dominate 19th-century Protestantism […]
Repeat His Mercies In Your Song
Give to our God immortal praise; Mercy and Truth are all His ways; Wonders of Grace to God belong, Repeat His mercies in your song. Isaac Watts I have never been a musician in any technical sense of the word. I can play C, G & F on a guitar and sometimes D, A & […]
Are We Hurting Or Helping?
For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and have tasted of the word of God, and the powers of the world to come, if they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify […]
The Trojan Horse In Atlanta
Nobody has written a real moral history of the Greeks. . . The wisest men in the world set out to be natural; and the most unnatural thing in the world was the very first thing they did. The immediate effect of saluting the sun and the sunny sanity of nature was a perversion spreading […]
Trusting In Trust
In exalting faith, we are not immediately putting ourselves in contradiction to modern thought. Indeed faith is being exalted very high by men of the most modern type. But what kind of faith? There emerges the difference of opinion. Faith is being exalted so high today that men are being satisfied with any kind of […]
When Truth Doesn’t Matter
We live in an era that boasts of its vehement resistance to propositional truth. Truth is said to be a “relationship” or a “personal encounter.” Existential philosophy has placed so much stress on the personal and relational character of faith that an allergy has developed against propositional or objective truth. R.C. Sproul1 Richard Rorty said, […]
Does Mind Matter?
Does Mind Matter? Who would not think, to see us compounding everything of mind and matter, that such a mixture is perfectly intelligible to us? Yet this is the thing we understand least; man is to himself the greatest prodigy in nature, for he cannot conceive what body is, and still less what mind […]