***Several years ago William Willimon spoke in chapel here at Midwestern Seminary. Willimon was then Dean of the Chapel at Duke University and was already the most brilliant popularizer of Narrative Preaching. I find Willimon’s preaching style and particular brand of sarcasm-laced humor seducing, probably because it seems to derive organically from the Piedmont of […]

***When Richard Land (Southern Baptist), Jim Wallis (Sojourners), and Dwight Hopkins (University of Chicago) speak with a single voice, it’s news. All three gave a big thumbs down to the health and wealth positive thinking message of Joel Osteen over the holidays on CNN. Osteen’s messages would leave me buoyant and energized if he would […]

***Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth’s biographer and live-in secretary recorded his last memory of the great theologian, just two nights before his death. It was Advent, 1968:
In his last year he was not so busy and I think very ill. There were some times in the spring and summer when it seemed he would die. But […]

*** “I felt sure that the creature was what we call ‘good,’ but I wasn’t sure whether I liked ‘goodness’ so much as I had supposed. This is a very terrible experience. As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. […]

*** Barth on Schleiermacher:
“We have to do with a hero, the like of which is but seldom bestowed upon theology. Anyone who has never noticed anything of the splendor this figure radiated and still does―I am almost tempted to say, who has never succumbed to it―may honorably pass on to other and possibly better ways, […]

***“Calvin is a cataract, a primeval forest, a demonic power, something directly down from Himalaya, absolutely Chinese, strange, mythological; I lack completely the means, the suction cups, even to assimilate this phenomenon, not to speak of presenting it adequately. What I receive is only a thin little stream and what I can then give out […]

***I suppose I first learned of the inevitable idolatrous tendency of protestant liberalism (and apologetic approaches to theology generally) from Karl Barth. He convinced me that unless we allow the God-borne witness to in Holy Scripture to speak for Himself, we find ourselves speaking in His place, and so, wittingly or not, we make a […]

***Check out the article in the November 27 Wall Street Journal by Arthur C. Brooks, “A Charitable Explanation.” Everybody knows that France cares more and does more for the poor than other nations. And everybody knows that liberals in America care more and do more for the poor than conservatives. NOT! on both counts.
Americans give, […]

***Must evangelicalism and emerging churches be enemies?
Thomas Oden views modernity as the dying intellectual and cultural framework beyond which postmodern believers may move for the recovery of ancient, orthodox and yes, evangelical Christianity. He defines modernity according to the following four substantive or ideological commitments: (1) autonomous individualism (Sartre, Nietzsche, Hemingway) or in the East, […]

***Lewis modeled the retention of myth and story as fit instruments for Christian expression, entertainment, inquiry, and instruction. He did so against the backdrop of the deadening, spirit-evacuating tendencies of the higher critical approaches to history and the Bible so dominant at the time. Lewis did so earlier, more impressively, and with more faithfulness to […]