Is Schleiermacher Sharing Your Pulpit?
Some say it doesn’t matter the path you take so long as you arrive at the proper destination. According to this advice, the final destination is assumed to be more important than the path taken. But the path and destination are not so easily separated. Whether discussing travel or life, we’re all aware that paths shape us, for good or ill. What’s more, they always determine our condition when we arrive at our destination—and often...
No More Authentic Than Your Ancestors
We are a people consumed with the idea that we have courageously exceeded our ancestors’ meager attempts at freedom, honesty, and authenticity. Richard Weaver critiques such notions in Ideas Have Consequences (1948): Every group regarding itself as emancipated is convinced that its predecessors were fearful of reality. It looks upon euphemisms and all the veils of decency with which things were previously draped as obstructions which...
Revelation Does What Philosophy Cannot
Thomas Paine, who famously wrote Common Sense and The Rights of Man, also wrote The Age of Reason. It was in The Age of Reason that Thomas Paine sought to undermine historic Christianity in favor of Deism, or, as he saw it, “pure religion”. Calvinist Baptist pastor Andrew Fuller responded to Paine’s work. In this quote, Fuller says that philosophy (or reason) can only take one so far. [I]t might be proved that every...
J. Gresham Machen: Christianity & Liberalism
“Christianity is a way of life—not a religion.” This is the mantra of many Christians today. Some prefer a tame, non-doctrinaire Jesus—one who is more akin to a teenage boyfriend than a suffering servant or a conquering king. Maybe this is overstated, but it certainly rings true that there is a modern tendency to sentimentalize Christianity by acting as if it has been resurrected from an ancient time capsule and is of no import to...
Andrew Fuller Ridiculed for His Baptism
Eighteenth Century Baptist Andrew Fuller movingly recounts being ridiculed for his baptism: “Within a day or two after I had been baptized, as I was riding through the fields, I met a company of young men. One of them, especially on my having passed them, called after me, in very abusive language, and cursed me for having been ‘dipped.’ My heart instantly rose in a way of resentment: but, though the fire burned, I held my peace; for,...
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