Last week Mumford & Sons released their new album, Babel. It’s a great album. Not as great as Sigh no More, but I like it holistically. In many ways, this new album follows the strengths of the previous album, especially in utilizing the crescendo effect (though it is a bit predictable). The most intriguing aspect of the album is — once again — the odd association of biblical imagery alongside swear words. I’d like to start my review with...
Every fan of Harry Potter has envisioned themselves as belonging to one of the four houses of Hogwarts. Ask any fan and they’ll tell you. For myself, I know I am not courageous enough to be Gryffindor and so I’ve always identified with Ravenclaw; not because I am particularly drawn to characters from Ravenclaw — such as Luna Lovegood, Cho Chang, or Prof. Flitwick — but because of their emphasis on academics. For a guy...
“Therefore go and make disciples of all the nations.” I think anyone who has spent time in the church has had a life filled with experiences where the execution of both new disciple making and disciple deepening have been found dreadfully wanting. So, how do we move forward from here? In the last few decades, many oft-labeled “emerging” church leaders have sought to champion new approaches to engaging a post-modern generation with the Gospel. One...
You can’t love God and hate homosexuals. On the contrary, loving God means loving gays. Really, truly, honestly loving them. (Are you listening, Westboro Baptist cult?) That doesn’t mean voting “no” on Proposition 8 or waving rainbow flags in the nearest pride parade. No, biblical love for gays is far more extraordinary. It’s a Christ-centered love that meets them in their brokenness and offers the same grace that God extended to us, even when we...
A friend of mine, whom I love for his warm but temperate heart, expresses the concern that the Christian faith, once normalized in the prevailing culture, will suffer a weakened witness. In many places a normalized church has been a worldly church, and one does not wish to see (for instance) the Church in China suffer the degradations of the Church of England. We agree that the word of God is infallibly applicable to all,...
Incapable of fully communicating the nuances of a fine wine with mere words, connoisseurs have at times resorted to using analogous terms like “tastes like a meadow” or even “tastes like a damp sock” (uh?) to describe its elusive and difficult-to-pinpoint qualities. Along similar lines, if someone were to ask me to describe Lecrae’s latest album Gravity, I would have to liken it to a slab of jet black asphalt that’s just been doused by a...
Most of the readers of this blog will be familiar with the Law/Gospel distinction that is present in the New Testament. While this distinction grew out of a particular set of controversies involving a particular law code and its relevance to a particular cultural situation (something that we Protestants often forget to our own exegetical detriment), the New Testament also occasionally abstracts what we might call the principles of Law and Gospel as two ways of...
In David Bartholmae’s article “Inventing the University”, he states that in order for the student to succeed in the university as it was currently (1985) constituted, the student must, “invent the university by assembling and mimicking its language, while finding some compromise between idiosyncrasy, a personal history, on the one hand and the requirements of convention, the history of discipline, on the other.”[1] The “mimicry” of language and terms in the academy is one that...
Biola’s President, Dr. Barry Corey, on the university’s decision. Last week, two new Christian Universities, Grace College and Seminary (Indiana) and Biola University (the first California school to join the discussion) joined an existing lawsuit against the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, and the controversial requirements for employers of 15 or more employees to include contraceptive (including abortion inducing) tools and medication in its employee insurance coverage, free of charge to the employee.[1] These two...
It should go without saying that art is a powerful thing. When it is done well it can easily change the way we see the world, subverting our perspective in a way where other forms of communication would struggle or fail. We are surrounded by well executed art, yet it is an exhilarating rarity to find a piece art that is not only aesthetically exquisite, but also serves as an incarnation of the gospel for...
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