The Wolf in White-Man's Burden

It's common knowledge that Bob Dylan never desired to write politically charged protest songs: I never set out to write politics. I didn't want to be a political moralist. There were people who just did that. Phil Ochs focused on political things, but there are many sides to us, and I wanted to follow them all. We can feel very generous one day and very selfish the next hour.I'm equally ambivalent about political folk songs. Even more so with respect to poetry. Poetry, it seems to me, can be didactic, but not heavy handed, or it ceases to be poetry, strictly speaking. The same could be said about a song, too. This is hard to avoid when writing about politics—as with any moralizing. But I'm not ambivalent at all about sermonizing politics from...

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Reading with Whom?

A long-dead guy named Robert Murray M'Cheyne, that's who. I've never read him, and I've barely heard of him, but apparently he wrote a popular "Daily Bread," a "calendar for reading through the Word of God in a year." The following comes from Jeremy Smith, executive minister at First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Mississippi, and managing editor of reformation21: M’Cheyne's reading plan averages about four chapters a day, but it rewards the follower with reading through the Old Testament once and the New Testament and the Psalms twice in one calendar year. M’Cheyne envisioned two chapters to be read as part of a daily family time of devotion and two chapters were designated for private reading.This year we have enlisted the help of several...

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You Will Read This (barring any intervening historical contingencies)

To gain a clearer perspective on the idea that the fulfillment of at least some unqualified predictions were subject to the contingency of human response (i.e., conditions did not have to be stated explicitly to be operative), let's look more closely at a few canonical predictions or prophecies. According to Pratt (see the first post about that), they generally fall into three categories:1. Predictions qualified by conditions: while the qualification was communicated in many different ways, I will simply list the passages with the surface grammar of conditional sentences (note that in the Hebrew language, conditional sentences are not marked as they are in English).Isa 1:19–20; Jer 22:4–5. It is important to see at this point that prophets...

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You Will Read This (part 1)

Millennial madness isn't anything new. Folks have been arguing since the apostolic era about what the prophetic literature of the Scriptures means and how it's to be applied—if at all—to various events of the past through to the present and into the future. Seldom, however, is the first hermeneutical step ever discussed (on the street, at least). How is this stuff supposed to be read? I sat under Professor Richard Pratt as a seminarian, and he had some suggestions worth entertaining. I had a few "aha" moments in his Prophets class, but the principles of reading he lays out are not without their potentially unintended negative consequences. You can read his address, where a lot of the following material was taken, over here. First, Pratt argued,...

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Reformed Anglicanism

  On the second Sunday in Lent, during the Dean's Hour at St. Luke's Cathedral, Richard Turnbull (author of Anglican and Evangelical? and Shaftesbury: the Great Reformer) delivered a lecture on the reformation of the English church. He did so by focusing on two major players in its reformation: John Wycliffe and Nicholas Ridley. But this was no detached presentation of a few tidbits of history; ulterior motives lay just beneath the surface. Turnbull clued us in on them during his very first sentence of the lecture: "I commend St. Luke's Cathedral as living examples of Reformed Anglicanism." Indeed, he went on, it couples the best of historic, orthodox worship with "Reformed theology." Now, it may be wrong of me to read too much into...

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