Uncategorized

The Ten Commandments are ten doors to the heart of God. They have a sequence, a grammar, as a matter of fact. They are not laid out arbitrarily from one to ten. But each of them in its own right is a door, and although each door leads to the same place, to the heart of God's love, it matters which door you use. How you see the whole depends on where you enter. The First Commandment Most enter through…

Thank you very much, brothers and sisters, for the privilege of speaking in your chapel today. I am not a preacher but I want to reflect a bit on a sermon I heard last summer. My wife and I and some friends of ours were visiting fellow Christians in Sierra Leone, West Africa. We made a few visits in the capital, Freetown, then headed to Kabala, an up-country town far to the north, to visit people in our Reformed sister…

OCTOBER 2007: INTERVIEW (Editors' Note: Few people have left as many fingerprints on the Reformed Church in America in recent decades as I. John Hesselink--seminary president and professor, foreign missionary and General Synod president. In addition, Hesselink has been a leading figure in Calvin and Barth studies worldwide. Perhaps most fascinating are Hesselink's "famous friends"--Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, the prominent Swiss neo-orthodox theologians, and more recently writer Marilynne Robinson (Gilead, The Death of Adam). The following interview was conducted…

OCTOBER 2007: Tree Rings The once animals from before before, stepping in wet tar. Their eyes rolled back in the museums of clay and black bones. We become them as we sail the studio back lots late at night. Our mothers tucking us in. Or our wives. Our daughters. Did you ever see something so beautiful? The setting sun through her hair, the vague coalescing days in something like amber or deep cave crystal. Cast I can see the harbor…

A nameless man and his son traverse a ruined country that was once the United States, looking for food and shelter and trying to avoid the few other humans left in the wasteland of North America. By day they follow roads south, heading, they hope, for warmer weather, heading for the Atlantic coast through eastern Tennessee. By night they take refuge well off the road, risking the use of small, careful campfires to cook their meager rations and to protect…

Stephen's speech in Acts 7 gives the impression that the temple was not a very good idea. On trial before the Jewish leaders, Stephen accuses them of being no better then their ancestors who in the desert abandoned Moses and offered sacrifices "in honor of what their hands had made." His criticism implies a connection between the golden calf and the temple as he argues the Most High does not live in "houses made by men." What are we to…

What shall we say about the recent books by Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens? Their attack is sharper than we usually see. They go beyond saying we can't know if there's a god; they say we need to know there's not. They don't just say religion is backward, they say it's bad. Should we answer them? Somebody should, at least for the record. There are innocent people who find their arguments compelling and who would be well served by decent rejoinders.…