The Grace College Blog Has Moved
I moved the Grace College Blog over to blogspot: http://graceslocollege.blogspot.com/
Please follow it over there from now on.
November 29, 2010
November 23, 2010
John Owen on the Mortification of Sin
In 1656, a Puritan theologian named John Owen wrote a book called The Mortification of Sin. On Sunday, we talked about the extent and seriousness of sin, and how to fight it as a believer. These are Owen’s 9 summary prescriptions for mortifying (killing) sin in your life:
1. Consider the symptoms that accompany a lust.
2. Get a clear and abiding sense upon your mind and conscience of the guilt, danger, and evil of the sin with which you are troubled.
3. Charge your conscience with the guilt of indwelling sin.
4. Seek a constant longing and thirsting to be delivered from the power of sin.
5. Consider whether the trouble that you are perplexed with is related to your particular make-up and nature.
6. Consider what occasions your sin has taken advantage of to exert itself in the past, and watch carefully at such times.
7. Rise mightily against the first sign of sin!
8. We need to be exercised with such meditations as will fill us at
all times with self-abasement and thoughts of our own vileness.
9. When God stirs your heart about the guilt of your sin, concerning either its root and indwelling, or its breaking out, be careful you do not speak peace to yourself before God speaks it. Listen carefully to what he says to your soul.
November 18, 2010
What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of what I call ‘Christianity And.’ You know–Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform…Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring. Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing. The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart–an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, an inconstancy in friendship.
The devil’s advice to his apprentice in C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape LettersNovember 8, 2010
But you are a Christian. This means you cannot go to college just to get a better job. These days, people talk about college as an investment because they think of education as a bank account: You deposit the knowledge and expertise you’ve earned, and when it comes time to get a job, you make a withdrawal, putting all that stuff on a résumé and making money off the investment of your four years. Christians need jobs just like anybody else, but the years you spend as an undergraduate are like everything else in your life. They’re not yours to do with as you please. They’re Christ’s.
Stanley Hauerwas, “Go With God: An Open Letter to Young Christians on Their Way to College”October 20, 2010
Peter Hitchens on the University
Peter Hitchens on the modern university (He is an English Christian, and the brother of the atheist Christopher Hitchens):
“For many people, college is a corrupting, demoralising experience. They imagine they are independent when they are in fact parasites, living off their parents or off others and these days often doomed to return home with a sense of grievance and no job. They also become used to being in debt – a state that previous generations rightly regarded with horror and fear.
And they pass through the nasty, sordid rite of passage known as ‘Freshers’ Week’, in which they are encouraged to drink dangerous amounts of alcohol and to lose what’s left of their sexual inhibitions after the creepy sex educators have got at them at school. If they have learned self-disciplined habits of work and life, they are under pressure to forget all about them, suddenly left alone in a world almost completely stripped of authority. And if they are being taught an arts subject, they will find that their courses are crammed with anti-Christian, anti-Western, anti-traditional material. Proper literature is despised and ‘deconstructed’. Our enviable national history is likewise questioned, though nothing good is put in its place.”
October 14, 2010
JP Moreland on Intellectually Unsophisticated Scientists
From Justin Taylor’s blog:
After refuting the claim by Hawking and Mlodinow (The Grand Design) that natural laws are consistent with creation appearing from nothing, J.P. Moreland explains why the influence of Hawking and Mlodinow’s claims are troubling: In previous times when average people knew more philosophy, these claims would simply be laughable because they are philosophical assertions being made by scientists who have little or no philosophical training. Thus, however brilliant they are in their own field, Hawking and Mlodinow are laypersons when it comes to the relevant issue at hand. But we live in a scientistic culture. When a scientist speaks, he is taken to be an authority irrespective of what the topic is. And that attitude reflects poorly on the educational level of the public. Thus, the deeper issue for me in all this is not whether or not the universe could come into existence from nothing without a cause. It is, rather, the scientism that lies at the heart of Western culture. I have long believed that philosophical naturalism, with its unjustified scientism, has helped to create an intellectually unsophisticated culture, and this is one reason why I think this way.
A Realistic View of Life without God
Bertrand Russel on the ultimate meaning of life apart from God:
Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home.
That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving;
that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms;
that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave;
that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system,
and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—
all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.
Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.
—Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship” (1903); emphasis added.
October 5, 2010
[Christ] did not cultivate self, even His divine self: He took no account of self. He was not led by His divine impulse out of the world, driven back into the recesses of His own soul to brood morbidly over His own needs, until to gain His own seemed worth all sacrifice to Him. He was led by His love for others into the world, to forget Himself in the needs of others, to sacrifice self once for all upon the altar of sympathy. Self-sacrifice brought Christ into the world.
BB Warfield, Imitating the IncarnationSeptember 28, 2010
Doctrine can never take the place of Jesus himself, but we can’t know him and relate to him in the right way without doctrine. This is because doctrine tells us not only what God has done but also what his actions mean to us.
Joshua Harris, Dug Down Deep, p. 31September 27, 2010
What About Bob? and the Transcendence of God
Yesterday at the college group I taught on the character of God. One thing we talked about is that God is transcendent, meaning that he is far above and other than us. Last night, we were watching the movie What About Bob?, in which Bill Murray plays Bob, an obsessive-compulsive who follows his beloved psychologist on vacation. At one point, Bob made a comment about his doctor that made me laugh out loud while also reminding me of God’s transcendence:
We can’t even try to understand him. He’s so much higher up than us. We’re like ropes on a Goodyear blimp!
