A Living Text.
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The Sermon on the Mount
I was struck this morning while reading the Sermon on the Mount, how Jesus’ first teaching as recorded by St. Matthew is an ethics-laden sermon. Jesus called Israel to repent, and then went up on the mountain and issued all kinds of teaching on care for the poor, sexual ethics, the way marriage should work,…
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What Happened to the Gold Plates?
I knew that Mormon accounts of the plates used to translate the Book of Mormon say that the angel Moroni took the plates back at some point, but I had a hard time finding the source texts for how or when this might have happened. So far, I have three sources: [1] Biographical Sketches of Joseph…
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Misreading the Qur’an
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…
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N.T. Wright on Predestination
In Wright’s commentary on Romans, he says: Foreknowledge is a form of love or grace; to speak thus is to speak of God’s reaching out, in advance of anything the person may do or think, to reveal love and to solicit an answering love, to reveal a particular purpose and to call forth obedience to…
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The Reformers on Islam
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…
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Unfriendly Churches
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,…
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“Is Mormonism Christian?”
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…
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You Aren’t Called to Church Activities
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…
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The Convert’s Blindness
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…
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Hitler’s new religion
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…