Bully's Blog

We think that it is good simply for a man to love, for example, forgetting that it depends entirely upon what he loves. After all, John told us to love not the world, or the things in it. We believe it is a sin to hate, forgetting that this depends upon whatwe hate. But is the hatred according to the Word or not? We think that it is a virtue to tolerate, forgetting that the Lord Jesus rebuked a church for tolerating that woman Jezebel. Everything hinges on what we are tolerating, and our global love for smooth words indicates that what we are mostly tolerating is our own hardness of heart.

Douglas Wilson www.dougwils.com

“Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh” (Luke 6:21b).

The truth of the gospel leads inexorably to laughter. Those who want to glower as they cling to truth want something that can never be. Whatever it is they have in their hands, it must not be the truth, unless it is just a fragment of it. The dour Calvinist, the cranky sabbatarian, and the pious self-loather are all textbook head cases. We see them in Scripture, we see them in our literature, and sometimes we see them out on their front porch on sabbath afternoons, glaring at the bicyclists. Are they speaking the truth? Well … are they laughing for joy?

Whenever the truth is presented to us, we have to recognise the various devices we have for avoiding it. The libertine is not hard to understsand. Any given truth may be overtly rejected in the flesh. But we too often forget that it may also be accepted and praised in the flesh. Thus the pharisaical mind is innoculated to truth — he has received just enough of the truth to keep him from getting a case of the real thing.

- Douglas Jones, Douglas Wilson, Angels In The Architecture, p. 72-73.

“The world (which God created from nothing) contains moral and natural evils. God either knew these evils would happen if He created or He did not. To say that He did not is to depart from Christian orthodoxy, being a functional denial of omniscience. But if God knew what would follow, and He decided to create anyway, this amounts to an ordaining of what would therefore happen. It is that simple.

The openness guys try to get around this by departing from Christian orthodoxy, and they deny God’s knowledge of the future. But this just makes Him guilty of reckless endangerment instead of premeditated carnage. But as Paul would say, I am out of my mind to talk like this…”

Doug Wilson, Narratival Calvinism and Storyless Readers (Comments) www.dougwils.com

“We so often lead lives forgetful of the fact that our God is very shocking. Amidst all our fragile piety and devouring busyness, we have a Lord who steps in and commands us such things as, “Thou shalt bestow that money for whatsoever thy soul lusteth after, for oxen, or for sheep, or for wine, or for strong drink, or for whatsoever they soul desireth: and thou shalt eat there before the Lord thy God, and thou shalt rejoice, thou and thine household” (Deut. 14:26). Such unthriftiness. Such waste. Such gluttony. Such winebibbing. Such is a command of our holy God.

For some reason foreign to our modern ears, God tells us that celebration is central to pleasing Him; it is central to leading a good life. Modern American life has no time for serious celebrations as did life in centuries past. We’ve got work to do; projects and deadlines press us. And yet for all our industrial-strength pragmatism, few if any truly important things get accomplished. We have forgotten that celebration isn’t just an option; it’s a call to full Christian living.

Celebration is worshipping God with our bodies, with the material creation He has set up around us. Celebrating–whether in feasts, ceremonies, holidays, formal worship, or lovemaking–are all part of obeying God’s command to “love the Lord thy God with all thine heart”… God’s redemption and creation ought to keep us in a perpetual state of thanks which bursts out in celebration at every opportunity.”

- Douglas Jones, Douglas Wilson, Angels In The Architecture, p. 80.

Before Jesus ascended into heaven, He assigned an apparently overwhelming task to His disciples (Matt. 28:18-20). Like many familiar words, these often just float by us. We think we understand them simply because we are accustomed to them.

But an understanding of this passage must always be at the centre of any thought of a distinctively Christian culture — not because our Lord’s words are primarily concerned with politics, but because they are not.Following the Lord’s authority, one of the distinctives of Christian cultural understanding is that it is also minimally concerned with politics. The restoration of the nations is not, in any important sense, a political process. Rather, the process is one of baptism and catechism. The means given for the conversion of the heathen were the waters of baptism and the words of instruction. When the lessons have been learned, there will of course be some political consequences. But they will be minimal for the simple reason that the state itself, in a nation that has come to repentance, will also be minimal. For the Christian, the political realm is a creature to be redeemed, sinful like the rest of us and with a long way to go before it retires to more biblical proportions.

- Douglas Jones, Douglas Wilson, Angels In The Architecture, p. 201-202

If someone is reading God-honouring Christian books (as opposed to the theological Christian treacle which most Christian bookstores specialise in today), those books will admonish, advise, teach, and instruct. But above all, they will do what all godly teaching does — drive their readers back to the Scriptures. And that will result in more books.

- Doug Wilson, Mother Kirk, p.209.

“This last Lord’s Day, something occurred to me in the course of the sermon, something which I mentioned in passing. But then as I was reading the Scriptures this last week, the same point jumped off the page at me, and in a far more explicit way than what I had seen before…

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I get through more Bible in one scripture lesson with non-Christian high school kids than many church congregations get in 6 months. Why have we dumbed church down so much?

“A young man, who never really wanted to graduate from high school himself, gets hired as a youth minister. His task is to put together a wild and crazy time down at the church, with perhaps a little inspirational message attached. The driving assumption is that young people today will not tolerate serious instruction and discipleship, and so we must give them large amounts of what they do want, which is “fun, fun, fun, till her daddy takes the T-bird away.” The problem here is not that the kids in the high school group get together, but rather that we have assumed that their time together should consist largely of froth and vanity. As these children grow up, we find that they are unaccustomed to any kind of serious, sustained worship, and so the pressure mounts to make the worship service more and more like the youth group used to be. Because we have tolerated and encouraged the dumbing down of the faith amoung young people, we discover over time, as they grow up, that it stays dumbed down.”

Doug Wilson, Mother Kirk, p. 220. Available from www.canonpress.org

Live More Than the Length of It

The life that Christ has called us into is a life that is not just everlasting in duration. The eternal life that He welcomes us into is qualitative. Jesus says that He is the resurrection and the life, and that life is one that the Holy Spirit weaves us into. This affects the texture and the breadth of our lives — or it is intended to. Our natural resistance to this is one the things that God deals with in us.

We want to walk with our heads down, as though we were walking along a railroad track, keeping our balance there, we don’t want to live expansively, the way a Christian ought to live. We forget that God is sovereign over all things, and we forget that He is the God of dangers, the God of adventures, the God of the unexpected. The wrong kind of concern for safety, for security, for a life of predictable and cozy conservatism is, at the end of the day, a form of idolatry.

Think of it this way. Remember this exhortation as you understand the tasks before you — your vocation, your family life, your worship of God. Everyone here will live the entire length of their lives. Everyone lives until their dying day. All of us go the appointed distance. But not all of us live the width of our lives.

Doug Wilson, www.dougwils.com

If you only see one movie this year…

“The only panelist who really scored big points, in my opinion, was Doug Wilson. Rather than echoing the evidential arguments that his colleagues set forth, he argued at the presuppositional level. Hitchens never really answered him. In fact, I don’t think he knew quite what to do with his arguments.”

Previews at www.collisionmovie.com