Amazing Grace Reflections

(Rest assured, this is not a repeat post. This post will contain my review of the quality and themes of the movie, now that I’ve actually seen it)
Amazing Grace was far and away one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. All throughout it was reminiscent of one of the [...]

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The Theology of Tomato Chopping

From The College Kid: ‘Intrinsic in glorifying God is “loving God and loving others,” which includes serving others to the best of your ability. Therefore, if your main purpose in chopping tomatoes is to glorify God, you would be the best possible tomato [chopper] that you could possibly be.’ Keep this in mind, and realize [...]

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Amazing Grace

William Wilberforce was a political activist. He was an idealist. He fought a twenty-year fight to end the slave trade and emancipate the slaves of England. You might even say his passion was social justice. With a profile like this, he should be the hero of every modern liberal. Ah, [...]

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A Renewed Sense of Christian Charity

This Sunday, I was once again blessed to sit under Rev. Roets of Sanborn URC as he stopped to meditate on the positive command generated by the eighth commandment, namely that rather than stealing, we give generously to those in need. I swear that this blog entry is not simply a plagiarization of his sermon, although it is heavily indebted to it.

Christian churches have always struggled with the apparent discrepancy between how much wealth a congregation has and how much of that shows up in the collection plate. The Roman Catholic church once offered the fateful solution of allowing its congregants to buy grace, and a few years and the most significant schism since the break with the Eastern Orthodox church later, the Reformation created a movement which would eventually fracture into hundreds of small denominations.

Today, prominent Pentecostals and Fundamentalists preach a gospel of wealth. Books like the Prayer of Jabez say that if we just bank up enough tithing with God, He’ll write us off a Divine IOU eligible for redemption as the blessing of earthly prosperity. I’m not accusing these people of trying to line the church’s coffers out of some evil motivation, because charitable donations are much lower these days than they should be. This just represents yet another tactical switch, since the age-old strategy of guilting people into it sure doesn’t seem to be working.

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Two Heads…

Donald Roth, a colleague of mine and a distinguished scholar of History, Law, Politics and Theology has joined Coram Deo! Since everyone tells me that group blogging is the way of the future (and Mr. Roth is way smarter than I am and far more adept and beating back the silly arguments of the [...]

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Loving the Edwards, Hating the Calvinism

Since the beginning of the semester, I’ve been getting up every Tuesday and Thursday to trudge over to the classroom building and (after checking for signs of frostbite) sit through another mind-numbingly boring exciting day of my 9:25 class, History of American Evangelicalism.
But, through all the blank stares, I’ve started to pick up on a [...]

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The Orthodox Century?

Last semester I had my first real exposure to Greek Orthodoxy. It was, interesting, to say the least. I had always thought of the Greek Orthodox as being Catholics without a Pope and, well, I was mostly right. There are distinctions, to be sure, but even after more direct study it’s easy [...]

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