Always Reforming

There are a few topics in Christianity that engender more debate than others.  These topics flare up tempers and inspire seemingly-endless ingenuity as we seek to understand them better and clarify our positions more precisely.  One such topic is the law of God.  Some go so far as to say that the Old Testament law holds absolutely no value for the New Testament Christian, while others go to the opposite extreme in believing that the entirety of the law is still binding.  In between these two extremes exist a thousand shades of antinomianism and theonomy.  It seems that every denomination has a slightly different view of the law of God. I don't want to discuss that today.  In fact, I don't know that I could really commit to an exact description of my own view.  I think the two extremes are, well, extreme, and many of the views in the middle have good points.  It's a complex issue. One thing I do know, however, is that the Law of God, the Old Te...

Race has been a big issue lately.  By "lately" I could mean the last few years, the last few decades, or even the last few centuries.  Let's be honest--it's been a big deal for most of the history of mankind.  Sinful men love to hate and kill each other, and race is low-hanging fruit, that is, it's an easy excuse to hate your fellow man. More specifically, race has been in the news and on social media for the past few days because of the macabre anniversary that fell on April 4th of this year--the 50-year anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.  People have chosen to commemorate it in many ways, celebrating his life and using it as a time of reflection.  See my thoughts on that here .  As I said there, racism is an issue and we need to work on that. However, the remedies being offered for this racial unrest are often insufficient, or, even worse, self-defeating.  Some people, mostly trendy white folk, think that sharing a hot po...

There.  I said it.  Someone had to.  Martin Luther King, Jr. was a bad person. April 4th marked the 50-year anniversary of the assassination of MLK, in memorial of which many individuals and groups took the opportunity to reflect on the status of race relations in the United States.  Even Evangelical Christian organizations held conferences in his memory.  This is a natural reaction, and one that is not unnecessary.  We must not be above reflecting on our faults, both our own personal sins and those of our forefathers.  However, and here comes the rant, we need to be honest here, MLK was not a good guy.  MLK did some "good" things, and he remains an important historical figure, but he was a bad person.  He was not a morally righteous individual.  He was not an orthodox Christian, and he was certainly not a "Reverend." Before I proceed any further, let me clarify three things.  Firstly, as I have already stated, MLK did some go...

Multiculturalism .  It is the great human experiment, but has that experiment proven to be a failure?  There are many who argue that it has (simply search "the failure of multiculturalism" and you'll see what I mean), and their reasons range from realistic to cynical to plain old racist.  While there have been many attempts at multiculturalism in the history of the world, I believe that the United States of America is the most genuine and pure attempt at it.  Empires like Greece and Rome (which, by the way, failed) were diverse, but they were predicated on conquest and the distance between the slaves and the ruling elites makes those examples less applicable.  The US, however, has incorporated into her culture essentially every possible nationality and ethnicity, along with their customs, religions, etc., over the past 400 years, giving (eventually) all of those people groups equal opportunity to voice their opinions and beliefs, both informally and in the gover...

Technology, particularly the Internet, is truly a wonderful thing.  It enables simple folk like myself to encounter things of which we could never have been aware just decades ago.  We have the world at our fingertips!  This is a good thing, but it can have unfortunate side-effects, one of which is discontent.  It's easy to see the things that other people are doing and feel like we're missing out on those things.  It's not unusual to find ourselves wishing we could experience more, buy more, and do more than our place in this world affords us. This discontent is exacerbated when we have families.  Have you ever had second thoughts about getting married young, having children, or buying that house?   If only I were single , you might think, then I would be truly happy.   There's no two ways about it: when you have a family, you give up many things.  If you don't, you're probably very selfish.  Marriage and parenting, properly done...