Afterwords -- week 16
"...his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers." (Psalm 1:2-3 ESV)
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April 9, 2022
Dear friends,
It has begun! Yesterday, our lawn received its first haircut for the season. At the moment it is all green and level. Spring and its growing things have arrived. This morning a robin took a bath in our newly filled bird bath. (Some mornings we still have to break a little ice on the surface.) Daffodils are on their way out and the redbuds are in bloom (above). Then there are the allergies, which are no fun. But all in all, we love the four seasons we experience here in the New River valley. This morning Jan Lu and I read Psalm 1, the great gateway to the Psalms. Life, growth, and fruitfulness come from the Lord as we meditate day and night on his word. In a world filled with gigabytes of chaff, God gives us the good wheat of his truth. Let's fill our minds and hearts with it.
IS THEOLOGY IMPRACTICAL? “The purpose of theology is not to tickle our intellects but to instruct us in the ways of God, so that we can grow up into maturity and fullness of obedience to Him. That is why we engage in theology.” (R. C. Sproul, Everyone's a Theologian) In two blog posts I have written why I don't believe Christian theology (or doctrine) is a dry and impractical discipline. Read more here, part one and part two.
ON EXPLAINING THE TRINITY. "When you are explaining what Christianity is all about to your interested friends, you needn't mention the word 'Trinity' at all. You speak to them about God, and about the way in which God has revealed himself to us and reconciled us to himself through Jesus Christ. But if you were to sit down and start thinking about the question 'What must God be like if he is able to act in this way?' you will end up with the doctrine of the Trinity. In other words, the doctrine of the Trinity is the end result of a long process of thinking about the way in which God is present and active in his world. It is the result, not the starting-point, of a long process of thinking which can be seen going on in the first four centuries of the Christian era, as Christian theologians wrestled with God's self-revelation in Scripture and tried to understand it. The proclamation is that God redeems us in Jesus Christ—the doctrine is that God must therefore be a Trinity. It doesn't explain why God is like this, and neither does it pretend to—it simply states that God must be like this if he acts in the way in which Christians know that he does." -- Alister McGrath, Understanding the Trinity (Zondervan, 1988).
RECENT ARTICLES.
-- "While I do not wish to add my voice to the alarmists who think the West is certain to collapse under a weight of bureaucratic bloat and cultural decadence, I do believe that most of us have lost sight of the blessings we uniquely enjoy." Kevin DeYoung on the uniqueness of western civilization.
-- Here's an introduction to a Puritan poetess you may never have heard of.
SOMETHING POETIC TO PONDER...
"Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present."
-- T S Eliot, "Four Quartets: Burnt Norton"
AND FINALLY, THIS...
Well, that's it for week 16!
Sandy