Tried With Fire

When we attended the 2012 Ligonier Conference, Dr. Robert Godfrey spoke on the damage anti-intellectualism has done to the Christian mind and traced its rise in American history. After the Revolution, the glory of individualism took hold in such a way that "Power went from the snobs to the mobs" in three specific areas - medicine, law, and religion. In The Search for Christian America , the authors also discuss the Revolution's affect on theology, but they get specific with the school that was affected. It was Calvinism. "The kind of democratic individualism unleashed by the American Revolution altered no dimension of the church more than its theology. Most obvious in the fifty years after the Revolution was the revolt against Calvinism. But most notable was the revolt against the accepted ground rules of theology itself. This second revolt attacked especially the long-standing Christian conviction that it was valuable for an educated segment of the church to re...

I didn't grow up reformed.  Until three years ago, I had no idea what the word even meant, but when reformed theology found me, it opened a whole new world.  There are no words to describe the relief and freedom that comes when you realize your salvation in its totality depends on God and not you.  The Gospel isn't the recitation of the sinners prayer but a life changing truth that takes us from new birth until the very end.  Doctrine suddenly became a wonderful thing to learn.  I had never seen before how my view of God shapes my view of man and vice-versa  My concept of sin directly affects my understanding of grace. Same with wrath and love. These words have meaning, and rightly defining them makes all the difference in the world. A biblically robust, cohesive framework of truth is a beautiful thing. But sometimes I react against what I used to believe.  I'm a little too quick on the trigger when certain phrases or topics strike a raw theolog...

My daughter said that Calvinists should have "Knox, Knox" jokes instead of knock, knock jokes. Consequently she came up with the following: Knox, Knox. Who's there? Dude. Dude who? Dude you want to read some Spurgeon? p.s. Dude is also our nickname for John Owen courtesy of Shai Linne's Spurgeon rap: "The amount that he read was truly mind blowing, steeped in the writings of dudes like John Owen..."

Can you guess these phrases? While unpacking, we found an old hangman game that I had played with my daughter when she was 5 or so.  This inspired her to come up with some new words to guess.  Methinks this apple is not falling far from the tree. 

My daughter was watching a chemistry lecture on molarity. She said that every time the instructor used the word "molar", she thought of this:

If you ever wondered what the Super Bowl would be like played out as a debate between Arminians and Calvinists, look no further thanks to Tom In The Box . 1st Half Half-time show and second half

ht: The Lighthearted Calvinist

There is a very interesting article on the Young, Restless, Reformed (YRR) movement by Carl Trueman at Reformation 21 . (ht: Challies ) From the article: Finally, I worry that a movement built on megachurches, megaconferences, and megaleaders, does the church a disservice in one very important way that is often missed amid all the pizzazz and excitement: it creates the idea that church life is always going to be big, loud, and exhilarating and thus gives church members and ministerial candidates unrealistic expectations of the normal Christian life. In the real world, many, perhaps most, of us worship and work in churches of 100 people or less; life is not loud and exciting; big things do not happen every Sunday; budgets are incredibly tight and barely provide enough for a pastor's modest salary; each Lord's Day we go through the same routines of worship services, of hearing the gospel proclaimed, of taking the Lord's Supper, of teaching Sunday School; perhaps several ti...

During dinner, my daughter said that when she looked at pictures of me in the past, I looked like an Arminian. I asked her why? She said, "You never looked like you were at peace. You always looked like you were unsettled about something. But now, you look like a Calvinist. You don't have that discontented look anymore. " Another interesting thing she said was " Now you smile like a Calvinist, not just because someone told you to say cheese ." I definitely was an Arminian prior to 2008. A change took place where now I love the doctrines of grace and find such peace and joy in God's sovereignty. The change is so great it is almost akin to being born again, again. The means of that change was the break up of my marriage. This is actually the first time I am even writing about this rather than just alluding to some nameless trial. But then again, our trials are not nameless, amorphous things but very acute and specific griefs. Why the Lord would do such a thing...