Pastor's Blog

In his national bestseller,  From Dawn to Decadence:  500 Years of Western Cultural Life , Jacques Barzun describes the impact of the reformers' efforts in translating the Bible into the common tongues:  The results for Protestants were remarkable. To start with, it gave whole populations a common background of knowledge, a common culture in the high sense of the term... The Bible was a whole literature, a library. It was an anthology of poetry and short stories. It taught history, biography, philosophy, political science, psychology, hygiene, and sociology (statistical at that), in addition to cosmogony, ethics, and theology. What gives the Bible so strong a hold on the minds that once grow familiar with  its contents is its dramatic reporting of human affairs. For all its piety, it presents a worldly panorama, and with particulars so varied that it is hard to think of a domestic or social situation without a biblical example to match and turn to moral ends...

Recently a friend alerted me to a KU News Release, " Distractions, quick thinking lead to conservative thoughts, research finds ." It begins, Could knocking back a few beers influence a person's views on property rights or the role of government in production and trade? By asking bargoers to take a political survey and blow into a Breathalyzer, a scholarly investigator at the University of Kansas has found that as blood alcohol levels rise, people become increasingly intoxicated with conservative policies, too. Sounds interesting, methinks. So I pours meself a cold one and reads on. The press release refers to a study, Low-Effort Thought Promotes PoliticalConservatism , by two researchers from the University of Arkansas and one each from universities of Kansas and Wisconsin. They introduce their study thus,   Conservative political ideology in Western democracies may be identified by several components, including an emphasis on personal responsibility, ac...

Good interview with Thomas Woods, author of "Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century," with the standard leftist group-think zombie-like responses.

I have just started reading Mark Levin's new book, Ameritopia . His thesis is that a desire to build a utopian society is the justification for totalitarian government. In his own words, "Utopianism is the ideological and doctrinal foundation for statism." "Utopianism substitutes glorius predictions and unachievable promises for knowledge, science, and reason, while laying claim to them all. Yet there is nothing new in deception disguised as hope and nothing original in abstraction framed as progress. A heavenly society is said to be within reach if only the individual surrenders more of his liberty and being for the general good, meaning the good as prescribed by the state. If he refuses, he will be tormented and ultimately coerced into compliance, for conformity is essential. Indeed, nothing good can come of self-interest, which is condemned as morally indefensible and empty. Through persuasion, deceit, and coercion, the individual must be stripped of his identi...

The Bible doesn't expressly forbid the practice of cremation, but the examples we have in Scripture of the people of God caring for the remains of the dead are decidedly in favor of burial. And of course the burial of our Lord Jesus Christ serves as an example which Christians have generally wished to follow. Normally in Scripture, burning the dead was a sign of a person’s having died under God’s curse. It was a punishment inflicted upon the corpse of a particularly egregious offender. We see this punishment commanded, for instance, in the case of Achan. By the command of God, Achan was stoned for his offense of stealing from God, and his body was burned (Josh. 7:15 , 25; see also Lev. 20:14 ; 21:9). A number of cultures, both ancient and modern, have at different times practiced cremation for various reasons—some for practical and others for religious reasons. Burial seems at first to have been the usual custom among the ancient Greeks; but later cremation became ...

When I first began to post on Paul Johnson’s excellent book on secular intellectuals, I thought I would post a little here and a little there on each of the figures he chronicles. But what I discovered was that to do so would be to sound like a broken record. The personal circumstances and the extent of the influence of each person he describes vary, but the ideals to which they were committed being the same, their character and behavior were for the most part identical. So rather than making as many posts as a full review would require, let me simply quote Johnson’s own summary. We are now at the end of our enquiry. It is just about two hundred years since the secular intellectuals began to replace the old clerisy as the guides and mentors of mankind. We have looked at a number of individual cases of those who sought to counsel humanity. We have examined their moral and judgmental qualifications for this task. In particular, we have examined their attitude to truth, the way in w...

A quick follow up to my last post. A small church in eastern Kentucky found itself at the center of controversy last week when it was reported that the church had voted to ban interracial couples from membership. Thankfully, they have since reversed course . When I saw the headline I was hopeful that the church had recognized its sinful error. I was dismayed, however, to read the real reason behind the reversal. Stacy Stepp, pastor of the Gulnare Free Will Baptist Church in Pike County, told The Associated Press that the vote by nine people last week was declared null and void after it was determined that new bylaws can't run contrary to local, state or national laws. He said the proposal was discriminatory, therefore it couldn't be adopted. It was the right decision to reverse an unbiblica l standard for church membership. The problem is that the right decision was made for the wrong reason. The mere fact that the church's position was "contrary to local,...

I happened across this headline:  Kentucky Church Bans Interracial Couples From Joining Congregation , and decided to post a link to a previous Ask the Pastor question:  What About Interracial Marriage?

One of the most important things that distinguishes conservatives from liberals is that the latter tend to believe more government is the answer to everything. Rousseau was one of the first (at least in modern times) to champion this delusional notion. He wrote ‘those who control a people’s opinions control its actions.’ Such control is established by treating citizens, from infancy, as children of the State, trained to ‘consider themselves only in their relationship to the Body of the State’.   ‘For being nothing except by it, they will be nothing except for it. It will have all they have and will be all they are.’   Again, this anticipates Mussolini’s central Fascist doctrine: ‘Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.’ The educational process was thus the key to the success of the cultural engineering needed to make the State acceptable and successful; the axis of Rousseau’s ideals was the citizen as child and the State ...

Is it best to understand creation as six literal days? Yes it is, and I think it’s apparent to anyone reading the text without any preconceived notions to defend, that the author intends his account to be taken as a literal historical narrative, and not merely in a figurative sense. Many try to combine the biblical account of creation with the theory of evolution and of course to do that you need to greatly extend the length of time that appears in the Bible. Taking the chronology of the Bible at face value only gives us about 6,000 years, not nearly enough time for evolution to take place. So where do we find the necessary time? We insert it into the account of creation, by taking the days of the creation week not as literal 24 hour days, but as symbolic of very long periods of time. But Dr. Ken Gentry, who has written extensively on this subject, gives several reasons to take each of the days of the creation week as a literal 24-hour period. First, he mentions what he calls ...