Month: December 2017

What Christmas Is All About

  

There’s one passage of Scripture not in the Gospels themselves that is a crystal-clear Christmas message. It doesn’t mention a manger, shepherds, or a sign in the heavens, yet it communicates what Christmas is all about regardless. It’s found in Philippians 2: 5-11: Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form… Read more »

Lewis’s “Poison of Subjectivism” in Our Day

  

Subjectivism: the belief that moral judgments are statements concerning the emotional or mental reactions of the individual or the community. In other words, we make up our own morality without any reference to an outside, objective authority, i.e., God. Subjectivism has become rampant in most of what used to be called Christian civilization. Moreover, those who, as a recent president infamously remarked, “cling to their religion,” are pressured, by law, to violate their consciences and accept the new ideas of… Read more »

Here’s What Concerns Me

  

It’s a very easy thing to loathe politics; it can be a very loathsome thing, exposing as it does the basest of human interactions: petty jealousies, outsized egos; personal insults; the precedence of expediency over principle. I do understand why people want to avoid it. All along the political spectrum there are people who operate at the lowest level of morality and who seem to delight in tearing down those with whom they disagree. Some of those people do so… Read more »

No Winner in Alabama

  

The Alabama Senate race is finally over, and the result was a foregone conclusion: there is no winner. No matter who was going to come out on top, it would be a loss for America. The ostensible winner, Democrat Doug Jones, is a far-left radical who doesn’t believe there is any right to life until a baby comes out of the womb. He is an Alabama anomaly who never had a hope of winning this Senate seat until Republicans chose… Read more »

Lewis: Promiscuity’s Women Victims

  

Sometimes when I’m wondering what C. S. Lewis post to write on Saturdays, I turn to an excellent compilation of his works, The Quotable Lewis, edited by Wayne Martindale and Jerry Root. Often it sparks further thoughts on one of Lewis’s insights. This morning, I happened upon a relevant Lewis quote from his essay “We Have No Right to Happiness,” which he wrote near the end of his life. While 1963 may seem to be a long time ago to… Read more »

When We Subordinate Righteousness to Political Expediency

  

For twenty-eight years I’ve taught history at the university level, with some of those years being in a master’s program of public policy/government. Consistently, I’ve tried to communicate the message that Christians ought to be involved in the political sphere. One of the first books I wrote, If the Foundations Are Destroyed: Biblical Principles and Civil Government, was an attempt to lay out basic Biblical concepts that should undergird all of life, including government. In that book, I pointed out… Read more »

Man-Made Utopias: A Lewisian Assessment

  

The Almighty Mind of Man can do anything, we’re often promised. Every age has its share of utopians who believe that societal perfection lies at the other end of that proverbial rainbow (if only we could ever find the location of the “end”). Karl Marx was positive that his scheme would usher in the perfect society where there would be no more government, no more religion, no more philosophy, and no more family. The Age of Aquarius, that illusion of… Read more »