Month: October 2007
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John Perkins: 5 Things to do if the Foundations Be Destroyed
Last Saturday, John M. Perkins spoke at the annual harvest banquet of the Los Angeles Bible Training School. Perkins is a living legend, and LABTS is a great old school “dedicated to the task of instructing Christian workers in the Word of God.” It seems that lots of churches are starting Bible Institutes and Ministry…
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Witnessing as a Spiritual Discipline
A Review of the Nature of Spiritual Disciplines In previous articles here on Scriptorium I have clarified the nature of a spiritual discipline and explained how spiritual disciplines, construed as training exercises analogous to those employed in getting good at golf, help to facilitate growth in the good life. I defined a Christian spiritual discipline…
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Why Heart Huckabee?
Mike Huckabee hit a home-run at his recent appearance before his Focus on the Family friendly audience. Huckabee is appealing to many in socially conservatives circles, but does he have what it takes to unite the party and lead the Republicans to a victory against Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton? As the race to the Republican…
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How He Worked for Christ: R.A. Torrey
Like all reasonable people everywhere, I always expected to be a super-hero when I grew up. I figured it was just a matter of time before my latent superpowers manifested themselves. But my sixteenth birthday came and went, no superpowers. My eighteenth birthday came and went, no superpowers. By that time, I would have settled…
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Flower Flower Flower Flower
It’s not exactly 36 Views of Mount Fuji, but this set of drawings by Phoebe Age Five does keep the viewer on the move. There is a dance between the human figure and the flowerpot that draws the viewer in. You realize that you are not just watching a person dance around a flower (which…
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Faith is Nothing
Faith is nothing. Really, it is. In fact, one way to ensure missing the gospel is to think faith is something. But it’s not. It’s really nothing at all. Faith is a negative concept that opens up space to speak about something else. It has what John Webster calls a ‘rhetoric of indication’, one which…
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Why Ephesians is the Greatest (Thomas Goodwin)
The puritan Thomas Goodwin (1600-1679) wrote a breathtaking commentary on Ephesians: about a thousand dense pages that only cover up through chapter two, verse 11. Before launching into his exposition, Goodwin offers a few remarks about just how great the epistle to the Ephesians is. He quotes Jerome’s comment that Ephesians is “like the heart…
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Passing the Time
Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-1886) wrote a wise book on The Study of Words in 1851. Trench is excited about words, and keen to spread that excitement to his readers. “Words are living powers, are the vesture, yea, even the body, which thoughts weave for themselves,” he says on the first page of this long love-letter…
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Happy Vikings Go Exploring
Vikings: “They’re cool,” says Freddy Age Seven warily, “but they’re not good.” These Vikings, though, are happy enough adventurers. Their tiny boat has a grin of its own as it rocks through the spiky waves. Rows of oars dip down into the sea and a strange, boxy, union-jacky flag structure surmounts the truncated mast. Loot,…
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Worst Coleridge Poem Ever!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the greatest minds ever to write in English. But aside from the justly famous Rime of the Ancient Mariner, he didn’t manage to finish very many extended poems. That mind should have produced an English epic, but instead he produced Wordsworth –no small contribution to English letters. And aside…
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Cowboy Psalm: Turn ’em ta Tumbleweeds
Psalm 83 depicts a dreadful scene: the enemies of God’s people devising schemes to wipe them out of existence. Against this background, the Psalmist prays for deliverance, asking God to do to these enemies the kind of things he did through champions in the book of Judges. One line is especially striking. I grew up…