A Living Text.

A lot of work is being done on what the Qur’an refers to [it is largely incomprehensible without exegesis]. Gabriel Said Reynolds has helpfully summarized some of these developments in this article. Another helpful source is this Wikipedia entry on the Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran. I came across another example of this dependence on…

In Wright’s commentary on Romans, he says: He affirms predestination, but seeks to guard from an overly-deterministic mindset – something where I believe the Reformers agree with him, despite perceptions to the contrary. In a footnote of his Romans commentary, Wright comments on Douglas Moo’s recent commentary which adopts the standard view of predestination in…

At the time of the Reformation the Ottoman Empire was the leading Islamic power in the world. The Caliph or leader of Islam was the Turkish Emperor and to refer to the “Turks” was to refer to Muslims in general. It is interesting to read the opinions of Luther and Calvin on the Turks and…

Since moving to Virginia we have unfortunately visited a great deal of churches. With a few exceptions, these churches are all unfriendly. They are polite, very polite, but not friendly. Well, in some cases they are polite, not all. And most of these churches are not large churches where you get lost in a crowd,…

The current issue of First Things, which I subscribe to, contains an article with a topic very familiar to those of us who interact with the LDS Church: Is Mormonism Christian ? The authors are Bruce D. Porter from the First Quorum of the Seventy on the LDS side, and Gerald McDermott a Professor from Roanoke College…

Most of us have been in churches that equate being active in the church with being a true Christian. Contrary to this is the view that our duties of love to neighbor imply first and foremost those whom God has put in our path in the ordinary, every day life. For most this is their…

Writing in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik says of G.K. Chesterton: In these books, Chesterton becomes a Pangloss of the parish; anything Roman is right. It is hard to credit that even a convinced Catholic can feel equally strongly about St. Francis’s intuitive mysticism and St. Thomas’s pedantic religiosity, as Chesterton seems to. His writing…

Ex-Nazi Hermann Rauschning reports on a conversation between Hitler and Bernhard Forster, Nietzsche’s brother- in-law: Hitler would be the first to achieve what Christianity was meant to have been, a joyous message that liberated men from the things that burdened their life. We should no longer have any fear of death, and should lose the…

Probably not much. He attacks the idea of factions in the church being called by a leader’s name when he writes about monasticism: And that there might be no doubt as to their separation, they have given themselves the various names of factions. They have not been ashamed to glory in that which Paul so…

This probably puts me firmly into the fundamentalist camp, but I don’t mind. An article says that yoga can lead to demonic possession, and I tend to agree. All kinds of non-Christian practices that were anathema when I was a kid (not that long ago) are now widely embraced, including horoscope reading, acupuncture, and yoga.…