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 […]
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Author: Rick Shrader
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 […]
More Than The Common Faith
Some Christians who once championed sound doctrine beat a retreat once in a while and from stratospheric heights announce that they do not stoop to controversy. When a man contends for the faith in New Testament style he does not stoop! Some assert that they have become mellow in later years, but one must remember […]
A Good Conscience
This charge I commit unto thee, son Timothy, according to the prophecies which went before on thee, that thou by them mightest war a good warfare; holding faith, and a good conscience; which some having put away concerning the faith have made shipwreck. 1 Timothy 1:18-19 It is an interesting time to be a pastor […]
What About Lewis and Chesterton?
This means open war between men, in which everyone is obliged to take sides, either with the dogmatists or with the skeptics, because anyone who imagines he can stay neutral is a skeptic par excellence. This neutrality is the essence of their clique. Anyone who is not against them is their staunch supporter, and that […]