bible
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Treasures in the Darkness
The Bruised Reed in the Dark, Part 4: What Remains When Strength Fails I ended the last part by saying that depression, like any severe trial, is often God’s holy ground. Not because depression itself is holy. There is nothing sacred about a mind becoming ill or a human being suffering beneath a weight he… Continue reading
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The Morality of Our Founding Fathers
Would your church receive George Washington or Thomas Jefferson into membership? The Fourth of July is here, and it is not a bad thing for a nation to remember its beginning. Nations, like men, forget easily. We forget the cost of things. We forget the blood beneath our comforts. We forget the contradictions buried under… Continue reading
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When Contempt Replaces Christian Witness
Fox News Christianity, MAGA zeal, and the neighbors left as collateral damage Mike McCready recently wrote a sharp reflection on the MAGA mindset — not merely as a set of political opinions, but as a story people have been taught to inhabit. His point, in essence, is that many die-hard MAGA supporters are not unreachable because they… Continue reading
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How Theology, Nation, and Identity Became Entwined in the American Imagination
I discussed Dispensationalism and its theology in the previous posts. But here is an important part of the story. There is also a reason why this framework has found particularly fertile ground in the American context. This instinct has deeper roots than we might first assume. From its earliest days, many of the first English… Continue reading
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Dividing the Mind, Distorting the World: The Fruits of Dispensationalism
As noted in the previous piece, dispensationalism is not merely a different way of arranging timelines—it is a different way of reading Scripture itself. And that matters. Because theology never stays on paper. It works its way outward—into how we see the world, how we understand nations, power, conflict… and ultimately, how we act. Here… Continue reading
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One Covenant, One Christ: A Word on Dispensationalism
Dispensationalism did not fall from the pages of Scripture—it arose in the 19th century, most clearly through John Nelson Darby, and was later popularized in America by the Scofield Reference Bible. What made it so compelling was its apparent clarity: neat divisions of history, a sharp distinction between Israel and the Church, and a detailed… Continue reading
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Israeli or Jewish lobbying has nothing to do with it
Appealing to it as the primary explanation is an intellectually shallow reflex—one that reveals more about the speaker than it does about the situation itself. The real driver is something far less discussed and far more consequential: a modern strain of evangelical theology—simplistic, unbiblical, unhistorical, and utterly earthly—profoundly misapplied. What we are witnessing is not… Continue reading
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Scripture and the Microphone
On Confidence, Authority, and Speaking of God’s Word There are few things more dangerous in public life than a man who mistakes his platform for wisdom. History is full of them. The Pharisees had it. The medieval scholastics who weaponized Scripture for politics had it. The 20th-century ideologues who wrapped their propaganda in moral language… Continue reading
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The (Biblical) Shame of American Slavery
To outsiders, the claim of some evangelicals that the U.S. Constitution is a Christian document raises immediate—and understandable—concerns. A brief examination shows that such a notion overlooks glaring historical realities, none more striking than the Constitution’s explicit provisions for slavery (the Three-Fifths Clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause). These provisions stand in direct contradiction to the biblical… Continue reading
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What About Patriotism?
Yes, what about that. The notion of patriotism is connected with many strands to the topic of my previous post. My original intent was to address them together. However, it became obvious that the post was getting lengthier than expected, and so ‘extricating’ patriotism to its own heading seemed like the most sensible route. I… Continue reading
