All in Art

Till We Have Faces

The beauty of the gospel is that it is the ultimate unveiling. The reality of Jesus pulls back the veil that has hidden the ugliness of humanity's heart. When we are presented with the god-man Jesus Christ we have but two options: 1) the pridefully hang on to the veils that cover our ugliness or 2) allow the spirit of grace to remove the veil, expose our shame, yet cover us and transform us into the beauty of Christ.

Book Review: And So To Bed… A Biblical View of Sleep

Until infants entered the picture, my experience of sleep was one of quickly falling into it, staying there soundly, and waking each morning refreshed.  Nursing an infant every two hours will create new sleep and prayer patterns. As Adrian Reynolds discusses in his book, And So To Bed…A Biblical View of Sleep (henceforth “To Bed”), not only is sleep spiritual, it speaks of spiritual realities and can be both hindered/enhanced by spiritual conditions.

Book Review: The Home Team by Clint Archer

The Home Team closes strongly, reminding families that the goal of parenting is “to raise children who are independently dependent on Christ” (133). Although covenant orientated families, and churches, will be appreciative of Archer’s insight, they will ultimately be unsatisfied.

Only the Trinity Will Work

"Deep Comedy," according to Leithart, is something that can only be achieved in and through the Christian worldview. What is "deep comedy?" it is the world that the Bible says that we inhabit. The Bible, through the communication of the Trinitarian God, teaches that creation (the world we inhabit) need not be a perpetually decaying world.

Far from disparaging the commands of God by ignoring them (like many reformed/pietists) or calling people to earn their salvation through adherence to a moral code (like Moral Therapeutic Deists), Smith shows that the purpose of the law is to subvert any claim on autonomy and direct the community of the church into a lifestyle that is aimed at the way the world is truly suppose to be; aimed at the Kingdom.

When you think about the fact that bats are blind and use sonar to navigate the night skies looking for bugs; or the fact that caterpillars hang from tomato plants in your back yard for a few weeks in order to turn in to butterflies; or the fact that the ring I gave my wife when I asked her to marry me was at one point a lump of black coal; these all seem like stories you could tell a kid before they go to sleep at night. Wilson gets at the fact that they are all stories; God's stories for us.

In our Adamic nature we are prone to chafe under our limits (for this was how Satan tempted our parents in the garden: "You will be like God"), however, when we rest in the sovereignty of God we find that we can not only accept our role as limited creatures but actually rejoice therein!

Book Review: NIV First-Century Study Bible

I am not a fan of study bibles, preferring full commentaries, but the FCSB is now on my short list of recommended resources. In a day and age where every theological tradition has a study Bibles, the FCSB brings back to life the original views of the early church and Jewish Rabbis in a resounding and edifying way.

While truth in the form of theology & philosophy is very helpful it is stories that ultimately grab us! In fact it is stories that grab us first as children before we even have the capacity to understand theological treatises. Christians should not shy away from stories but instead embrace them and learn to tell them better!

The Reformers did not exhaust the fullness of justification. There is indeed a robustly corporate view of justification that the Reformers–rightly preoccupied with Romish theological abuse–simply did not address explicitly in the 16th century. In this sense, Wright needs to be read and listened to attentively.