June 07, 2020
Other Viable OptionsKedric Webster
As Paul in Colossians 2 discusses human relationships to the principalities and powers, he emphasizes that Christ is the Creator and Lord of even these realities. The Colossians, however, have shown a propensity for regarding these structures and regulations as ends in themselves, idols as it were, rather than as means to facilitate their relationship with Christ.
This is the whole point of Paul's discussion of practices regarding food and drink, festivals and worship, (vv. 16-19). They may be the expression of a moral code, a political or ...
December 24, 2018
Generous Giving And How It Often Goes WrongKedric Webster
Giving. One thing Americans do very well, especially this time of year. Things kick off with the fairly new concept of Giving Tuesday and continue on and through Christmas. It is fair to say that most of the money that comes into charities comes in the roughly 5-6 weeks from Thanksgiving to New Year’s.
It’s not just money that people donate. People donate stuff, lots of stuff. What kind of stuff? Useful stuff like cleaning products or food or kitchen supplies, for example. Sometimes, however, it is not useful stuff. Charities, such as ones ...
April 19, 2017
The Prophetic AppealKedric Webster
In The Structure of Biblical Authority, the late Meredith Kline (d. 2007) offers in this treatise a
"reinterpretation of the nature of the canonicity of Scripture, based on a re-examination of the history of the formation of the canonical Scriptures from Moses on. The formal model for the biblical canon concept that Kline articulates is found in the ancient Near Eastern treaties; the Bible, the author asserts, is in its literary-legal form a covenantal document, and the biblical canon must be understood as a treaty-canon." (back co ...
September 08, 2016
Bavinck on a Philosophy of RevelationKedric Webster
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"Philosophy of revelation seeks to correlate the wisdom which it finds in revelation with that which is furnished by the world at large. In former times Christian theology drew the distinction between special and general revelation. But it never wholly thought through this distinction, nor fully made clear its rich significance for the whole of human life.
Such a retreat, however, betrays a weakness and is in direct opposition to the idea of special revelation. Revelation, while having its centre in the Person of Christ, in its ...
March 01, 2016
Economic Systems in ContextKedric Webster
Despite the problems with [Max] Weber’s thesis [in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism], it has proved somewhat attractive to American Christians keen to see a close relationship between their theology and a central tenet of the American way—the capitalist free market. The connection is useful: if there is a link between Christian truth and capitalist prosperity, then capitalism itself becomes the God-given way in which society should be organized; and it presumably accounts for the fact that, in the USA, a term such as ...
October 29, 2015
Deconstructing Evangelical ResearchKedric Webster
"As much as Americans may participate in a variety of parachurch activities and support them with their hard-earned dollars, statisticians of United State religious life continue to make claims about American religiosity on the basis of church attendance. America is, according to pollsters, the most religious of Western democracies because roughly 40 percent of its citizens are in church every Sunday. If this is true, and if it is truly as significant as many interpreters suggest, then finding out what these Americans do every Sunday and what ...
May 23, 2015
Marriage, Celibacy, and LanguageKedric Webster
I’ve been thinking about the issue of singleness in the American church here and there over the years and even more so recently. Normally I would never express such things in a public forum, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I should voice them to clear the air.
There is much confusion about the issue of why there are so many single people in the church (an issue that has been pressing for a couple of decades now). Many of the answers indicate a serious divide in philosophies of Christian living, how modern technology has changed the way ...
March 30, 2015
Repentance and the Whole ManKedric Webster
"Repentance is not limited to any single faculty of the mind: it engages the entire man, intellect, will, and affections. Nor is it confined to the moral sphere of life in the narrower sense: it covers man's entire religious as well as his moral relation to God."
"True repentance strips sin of all that is accidental. It resembles an inner chamber where no one and nothing else is admitted except God and the sinner and his sin."
"The new direction of life which the repentance brings about finds its explanation in the absolute and exclusive ...
December 17, 2014
To concede or not to concedeKedric Webster
The world is very confident of its own conclusions, and it is very sure of the infallibility of its own methods of research. It does not call its tenets “opinions,” “views,” “conjectures.” It dignifies them in the mass by the abstract names of “philosophy,” “science,” “learning,” “scholarship.”
It does not offer them to the Christian for testing and trial; it thrusts them upon him as the perfect expression of final knowledge. He is not requested to subject them to his touchstone, the Word of God, or sift from them the good and reject the ...
November 19, 2014
Marsden on opposing polesKedric Webster
Although there may be signs of change, American society is still caught in the polarized pattern that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. At one pole is the liberal culture that includes most of mainstream academia and entertainment and that is self-consciously pluralistic in the inclusivist sense, but is also overwhelmingly secular, so that it does not have much of a way to deal with religious diversity in public life.
At the other pole is a predominantly religious, conservative, popular political culture that does not often have a ...
November 11, 2014
Marsden on the Religious Right and Enlightenment IdealsKedric Webster
The complex heritage of the evangelical religious right, as shaped, among other things, both by biblicist born-again revivalism and broader principles developed during the eighteenth-century American enlightenment, helps to explain some of its paradoxes, apparent contradictions, and blind spots.
The biblicist side is often absolutist and militant, invoking stark choices between serving the Lord of Hosts or the Baal of secular humanism. The enlightenment heritage allows militantly conservative fundamentalist to in fact affiliate with the ...
October 30, 2014
A Royal RunKedric Webster
This was an amazing World Series, an amazing playoff run.
To the San Francisco Giants: if there is a team that is like looking in the mirror, it is this one. Pitching, defense, putting the ball in play, small ball. All of that was on display today. Aoki’s shot didn’t fall to tie the game because of the perfect position of the right fielder.
Two runs were scored on sacrifice flies. A starter who KC couldn’t hit managed to shut the Royals down again out of the bullpen. That’s hard to do. Gordon’s single/error gave us hope and the man I ...
September 17, 2014
Objective truth, Subjective truthKedric Webster
[Archibald] Alexander's reflection on the themes [of divine truth and the believer's experience] represents his attempt to formulate a theology of religious experience to reconcile two previously separated traditions. On the one hand he attempts to do justice to his Scotch-Irish Presbyterianism by stressing the importance of doctrinal belief. He spoke approvingly of catechetical instruction of children and of the importance of formal education for ministers. On the other hand Alexander acknowledged the validity of religious experience, ...
September 03, 2014
Nothing New Under the SonKedric Webster
Hazel Motes: “Well, I preach the Church without Christ. I’m a member and preacher to that church where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way. Ask me about that church and I’ll tell you it’s the church that the blood of Jesus don’t foul with redemption.”
“He’s a preacher,” one of the women said. “Let’s go.”
“Listen, you people, I’m going to take the truth with me where I go,” Haze called. “I’m going to preach it to whoever’ll listen at whatever place. I’m going to preach there was no Fall because ...
August 07, 2014
Blessed are the CynicalKedric Webster
Cynicism rears its head at times in my thinking. Most of the time I want to dialogue about serious issues in order to bring about understanding so that at the end of the day, even if there are disagreements, everyone walks away having learned something. Then there are other times when it's almost better to just answer with the buzzer.
I have developed a skill at finding clips on Youtube that relate to conversations on social media (read: Facebook). The work has already been done for me as some wise soul has created a short (under 20 ...
July 15, 2014
Science as Religious TheaterKedric Webster
I recently finished a book that was not published recently. Not only was it published in 1988, it has no endorsements, despite being published by the well-known InterVarsity Press. This might have been the time when endorsements on the back cover and inside pages of books was not a wide concept or it could be no one wanted to endorse the book because it ticked off too many people.
The book is Science Held Hostage: What's Wrong with Creation Science AND Evolutionsism. Yes, AND is capitalized in the title. At the time of the publishing the ...
June 27, 2014
Being and Becoming by BavinckKedric Webster
"Natural mechanism cannot be the final cause and explanation of everything, since it asks for an explanation itself: natural mechanism is not lord of the world, but servant of the spirit. The forms in which it operates--time and space, measure and numeral, order and law--are basic categories of the spirit. Just as a machine serves man, natural mechanism must be subservient to the governing and leading of a divine mind that rules over all.
This does provide room for development in the true sense of the word. If the whole world is nothing but ...
June 24, 2014
Alexander on religious melancholyKedric Webster
"When...people of nervous temperment are relieved from a fit of depression, their sky is uncommonly free from clouds; their hopes are lively, their spirits buoyant, and nothing can trouble them. These alternations of day and night, of sunshine and darkness, must of necessity affect the feelings in regard to all matters, temporal and spiritual; for as in a dark night every object appears black, so when the mind is overcast with gloomy clouds every view must partake of the same aspect.
To many persons this description will be unintelligible; ...
May 30, 2014
The A-B-C's of NewspeakKedric Webster
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought--that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc--should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.
Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every ...
May 12, 2014
TV and ReligionKedric Webster
"There are several characteristics of television and its surround that converge to make authentic religious experience impossible. The first has to do with the fact that there is no way to consecrate the space in which a television show is experienced. It is an essential condition of any traditional religious service that the space in which it is conducted must be invested with some measure of sacrality.
Of course, a church or synagogue is designed as a place of ritual enactment so that almost anything that occurs there, even a bingo game, ...
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