Before the Fall, we were all artists and poets
“Can our churches be beautiful again, and not just promote goodness and truth?... It’s one thing to make our work, our business, our arts and our political endeavors good and even ‘successful.’ It’s another to aspire to make them beautiful. It’s one thing to try educate and raise our children to be good and ‘successful,’ but it’s another to try to raise them to be beautiful.”
Listen in as we sit down with Makoto Fujimura, author of, “Art + Faith: A Theology of Making” and discuss the living and beautiful reality of God and His image bearers. Makoto gives no quarter mere Theology-as-a-hobby or for a truncated Gospel (or “plumbing theology”). In sitting down with Makoto we don’t get novel and new, rather, we get the original telos and tangibles that concern the implications of creation and new creation. This interview is for humans seeking full humanity.
By Steve Bishop
There is a wide range of varieties of what has loosely been termed Calvinistic philosophy. This family tree is an attempt to identify some of these strands and their relationships. Inevitably, it is an oversimplification...
He Named things We Pastors, Creatives and Rank-and-Files Couldn’t Name
“The Bible became alive to Him, it was not as some Elizabethan artifact but as a living book, appropriate for the gritty lives of butchers, cement layers, radio-preaching mothers, and the drunks who lounged in the alley behind his father’s Butcher shop. People around the world were picking up books with his name on it--picking them up and sensing they’d found a voice that spoke their language. Vast numbers of readers recognized in Eugene’s words a hunger they’d forgotten, a craving for an authentic encounter with God. They were hungry for a vision calling them into the wondrous expanse of a life that honored what it meant to be a beloved (yet finite) human living under the mercy of God. They found all this in the words of Eugene Peterson.”
The Heart of Dogmatics: Christology and Christocentrism in Herman Bavinck
Listen in as we sit down with Dr. Bruce Pass and discuss his book “The Heart of Dogmatics: Christology and Christocentrism in Herman Bavinck”. Here we are guided by the hand of Bavinck and Dr. Pass into a Theology that is no mere academic hobby but where Theology is a living-being animated by true religion. Like a heart this living-being pumps blood and life to the needed areas in the body. Dr. Pass shows us how Bavinck’s though that, much like the Universe is the center of the solar “system”, Christ is the center of the Christian theological system.
By Steve Bishop
Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck were the main instigators of the movement that became known as neo-Calvinism, however, they stood on the shoulders of others. One of these was Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (1801–1876). Harry van Dyke describes him as a “godfather” to both Kuyper and Bavinck; and Bratt describes him as “something of a surrogate father to Kuyper”. He was visited by several abolitionists from Britain. They had heard of his ideas for social reform, they hoped he would become “Holland’s Wilberforce”. Many of Groen’s embryonic ideas were taken up and developed by Kuyper...
The Consummate Orthodox Outsider
O’Connor’s intense religious devotion, along with her father’s death when she was only a teenager, and then her own long struggle with lupus, are some of the crucial elements of her life that formed and informed her writing and gave her the uncommon voice she is rightly celebrated for (and...
Interview with Danny Olinger
Vos would emphasize the Old Testament is a book of redemption that bears an organic connection to the salvation that has come in Jesus Christ. There is no separation between the Old Testament work of God and the work of Jesus. The two constitute a single body of supernatural revelation...
Dear Troubled Believer, I see you.I know it feels like you’re army-crawling through morning and afternoon. I know how your soul slinks on the ground, breathing in the dust, while everyone around you seems free as birds in the breeze. They don’t understand the willpower it takes to do the...
Interview with Rowland Ward
What would have happened if Adam and Eve never ate from The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden? It’s a hypothetical question since they did eat, but the parallel with the last Adam, Jesus Christ, shows that obedience would ultimately have led to...
by Pierce Taylor Hibbs
My friends, God has marked the entire world, the entire cosmos, with his personal presence, and it can’t help but “speak” of him. God, in other words, is a writer. He was the first writer. We write reality as we know it, and we write in his image. Apply this...
by Joe Humphries
This article presents a Christian view of sales as a profession and will look to the scriptures to help formulate a basis for this view. Salespeople are often viewed as untrustworthy, greedy, and contemptible.
Dear Unmarried Christian, In autumn 2005 I entered graduate school (the first time around) to study philosophy in Amsterdam. While visiting churches, I met a woman in her mid-40s from Indonesia, studying theology. Most of her home village and her entire family had been slaughtered by Muslim militants some years...
Interview with Hans Boersma
I want to focus on your recent book “Seeing God”, which is a study of the so-called “beatific vision” in Christian theology. Could you just start by giving a brief explanation of the concept of the beatific vision for a layperson unfamiliar with the term? The beatific vision is the...
Interview with Rick Schaeffer
The power that spoke light into darkness and water to wine also breaks the hardest hearts and progressively turns people into the image of Christ as the same God speaks through the gospel.
