Keep Yourselves in the Love of God

It’s easy to miss the fact that Isaac strove with God for twenty years over his wife’s infertility before seeing a positive answer. His son, Jacob, showed similar persistence when he wrestled with the angel at Peniel. This is not to be confused with stubbornness; rather, Jacob's striving is synonymous with brokenness. His long night of wrestling is described by the prophet Hosea as follows: “He strove with the angel and prevailed; he wept and sought his favor” (12:4). In other words, he threw himself upon the mercy and grace of the one, true God upon whom the blessing to Abraham rested in its entirety. It would have been the same for Isaac, which leads us to see his twenty-year prayer as an extraordinary act of faith during a time that is...

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Where is the "Fun" in Fundamentalism?

"Grace" Christian School I'm one of those who fall in the "[Christian] fundamentalism breeds atheism" camp. True, it may be better, at least it's more honest, to be an atheist than a functional one (i.e., a person who explicitly denies the existence of deities vs. a confessing Christian living as if God doesn't exist). But, still, my childhood experiences with fundamentalists, while standing in contrast to a few of my adult experiences with them, push me in the direction of using the moniker pejoratively. Put differently, Warfield's fundamentalism (with which I've come into contact in the past decade—the good kind) is not the kind of fundamentalism that arose during/after the modernist controversy of the early twentieth century. I generally...

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