Bully's Blog

or The Church with the Big Head

Human talent amazes me. Totally aside from the child prodigies, we are an extremely gifted bunch. After only a couple of decades on the planet, from those who have the opportunity to apply themselves with enthusiasm to their particular area of interest, we see some incredible achievements. For the godless, this should certainly seem miraculous. But for our dark hearts it just proves how smart and wonderful we already are in ourselves. This is the ingratitude Paul speaks of.

For Christians, talent (or beauty or wealth) is just another dead giveaway of God’s existence. And God Himself almost seems to despise this early glory as a short-lived covering of wildflowers that appears suddenly after some long-awaited rain. This is the glory of youth and it is insufferably vain. It exalts itself by calling its competition dumb and ugly.

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Band of Brothers – 2

Part 1 here.

One thing the Bible Matrix demonstrates is the nature of history. Sure, it repeats itself. Everyone knows that. But our personal histories are microcosms of the lives and deaths of families, churches, nations and empires. Reading the Bible is like looking through a glass onion.

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“To be postmillennial is to be committed to the claim that the state of creation, over time and in time, will be recognizably as the prophets predict…”

Peter Leithart gets down to the nuts and bolts of postmillennialism:

I am postmillennial, and postmils like to speculate about the long view. We like to ask questions like: What is the church and world going to be like after another several millennia of evangelism, baptism, teaching, discipline, Eucharistic merriment? What kind of political system will exist?  How will the church worship? What will the economy look like? What kinds of technological advances will be retained and which will be dispensed with as incompatible with God’s commandments?

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or Wax Moon Faces and Books with Pores

“It often seems to me that the night is much more
alive and richly colored than the day.”
—Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother Theo in 1888

Last week I had the privilege of viewing seven Van Goghs, all in one room, including Starry Night Over the Rhone, the depth and texture of which has to be seen to be believed.

The impressionists went out of their way not to paint what they saw. They stretched and strained the norms to communicate how it made them feel. They were expounding—explaining—reality. As Jordan writes, made in the image of God, man is the only symbol which is also a symbol-maker. [1]

This post has been slain and resurrected for inclusion in my 2015 book of essays, Inquietude.

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Tim Nichols recently posted concerning whether Christians should participate in martial arts that have a pagan background.[1] I suggested that postmillennialism naturally sees what can be salvaged from pagan cultures and “redeemed”, rather than writing it all off as corrupt, as many Christians do. His response was worth repeating:

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or James Jordan’s Big Hammer

“My God, it’s full of stars!” 

One of the reasons I appreciate James Jordan is his ability to identify the “universals” in Scripture. Understanding these recurring themes answers many questions and solves many mysteries. These universal “roles” and events all point forward to the events of the first century. For instance, we cannot understand what the apostles meant by the phrase “the sons of God” without checking its history in the Old Testament. [1]

The danger with dealing in all the “big picture” stuff is that it can become self-serving. The heart is deceitfully wicked, and theology can become a kind of escapism, an ideology. Like the worst of the 20th century’s political ideologies, it can be divorced from reality so that in practice it rides roughshod over people to achieve its goals. Any big theology must maintain a big pastoral heart.

[This post has been refined and included in Sweet Counsel: Essays to Brighten the Eyes.]
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or Calvinists are Never Surprised

“A Puritan confronted by failure and ambivalence could find his faith justified by the experience, could feel that the world had answered his expectations.”

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“If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you had asked almost any of the great Christians of old, he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is more than a philological importance.

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Here’s a charming quote discovered and posted by Doug Wilson over a year ago. Being exactly the opposite of the so-called “party” image portrayed on TV and in glossy mags, it kind of stuck with me. It is not sinful like they are, yet it is so “incorrect” that it must be true.

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After a friend pointed out that New Orleans and Haiti are big on voodoo, I read this insightful piece from Rich Bledsoe. It is reproduced here with his permission:

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