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Get a Room! On Our Detrimental Reading of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity
A recent Gallup poll indicating that church attendance in the United States has fallen below 50% for the first time shocked many American Christians. Conversely, a random internet search of “most popular Christian books of all time” yielded exactly what I expected to find: C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity was on nearly every list, often…
LATE LIGHT IN CHATTANOOGA
I was born in a shadow country Of roofless temples smudged with smoke, Where even the roadside shrines Sat jilted, their chintzy dioramas Strung with strands of christmas lights That lit the paths of small tin soldiers Shouldering their guns into darkness To hollow drums and distant music. O sing, cicada, sing… I grew up…
Divine Pedagogy in the Midst of a Pandemic: Hoping in God and the Gospel
I felt sick to my stomach. It was the middle of April 2020, and we had been shut down for a few weeks. In the chaos and isolation, I foolheartedly took to read the classic novel Kristen Lavransdatter. It is a sweeping story of faith, sin, redemption, and to my utter shock, the bubonic plague….
J. C. Ryle on What Evangelical Religion Is (Part 2)
Yesterday we noted that Bishop Ryle had listed five points on what evangelical religion is. Here is the second point he makes on that subject. ( b ) The second leading feature in Evangelical Religion is the depth and prominence it assigns to the doctrine of human sinfulness and corruption. Its theory is that in consequence of Adam’s…
Milton
He moved the candle closer to the paper Whose clouded words escaped his failing sight. Blind anger rose again. He dropped the taper, Thought flickered low, and rage put out the light. Despair stood near at hand to shake its head, And bitterness reminded him that slaves Stood as unworthy masters in the stead Of…
J. C. Ryle on What Evangelical Religion Is (Part 1)
For the next few days I am going to post some more thoughts from J.C. Ryle’s Knots Untied – these being from the very first chapter of the book, on “What Evangelical Religion is.” Bishop Ryle starts out by defining what “evangelical religion” is, what it is not, and what makes much religion not evangelical….
Anglicanism: Reformed Catholicism, Protestant and Catholic
The question that continues to vex Anglicanism (perhaps since the time of the Reformation but even more so over the last 200 years) is whether she is “properly Catholic” or “properly Protestant”? Some will answer that she must simply be Protestant, because she is separated from Rome, and only those in union with Rome can…
J. C. Ryle on ‘Watchfulness Over One’s Soul’ as a Mark of Righteousness
Continuing further in Ryle’s Knots Untied, this is what the good Bishop had to say about the next mark of regeneration, which I am calling “watchfulness over one’s own soul”: Sixthly, John says, “He that is begotten of God keeps himself”-I John 5:18. A man born again, or regenerate, is very careful of his own…
More Laud than Baxter: the Protestantism of 1662
“And the Church of England is Protestant too” – William Laud, then Bishop of St. David’s, later Archbishop of Canterbury.[1] Before the mid-19th century, to regard the Book of Common Prayer as part of an explicitly “Protestant” narrative would have been accepted as self-evident by Episcopalians and Anglicans.[2] A future Archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Bancroft’s…
J. C. Ryle on ‘Overcoming the World’ as a Mark of Righteousness
Continuing further in Ryle’s Knots Untied, this is what the good Bishop had to say about the next mark of regeneration, “overcoming the world”: Fifthly, John says, “Whatever is born of God overcomes the world”-I John 5:4. A man born again, or regenerate, does not make the world’s opinion his rule of right and wrong….
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