This Mindless Age -- Part Three

By James Boice

This Mindless Age
Romans 12:1-2
Theme: Christ’s call to think.
This week’s lessons teach us our responsibility to be thinking Christians.
 
Lesson

A great deal of what Postman develops in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death is reinforcement for what I have been describing as mindlessness. And "the pattern of this age" today is certainly mindless. So let me review two specific areas of bad influence, as he sees it. There is a chapter in the book that deals with news on television, and it is entitled "Now... This." That is because these are the words most used on television to link one brief televised news segment - the average news segment on network news programs is only 45 seconds long - to the next news segment or commercial. What the phrase means is that what one has just seen has no relevance to what one is about to see or, for that matter, to anything.

The Goodness of Man

Posted 4/18/14 by Donald Barnhouse

When delivering the graduate lecture to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich many years ago, an English writer of some distinction talked to the young officers on the honor and high integrity of human nature. He gave as two examples a captain who had gone bravely down with his ship and a mother who had suffocated her own child under a mattress. The first, he claimed, was human nature, and the second was not. He called upon his audience to choose their creed in life as illustrated by these two incidents.

The Goodness of Man

It is strange that thinking men so often fail to see beyond the glittering generalities to the solid foundation of truth that lies beneath. Almost every error has a basis of truth, but men see the scaffolding rather than the building because their eyes are blinded, either by self or by a more sinister power.

A Faith That Fights

Posted on Friday, April 18, 2014 by Aimee Byrd on Housewife Theologian

Why Study Shadows When We Have the Son?

by Dr. David Murray • April 17, 2014

Why study shadows when we have the Son? That’s a question I’m often asked when I’m trying to promote more reading of the Old Testament. The question is usually focused specifically upon typology. Why study the types when we have the anti-type? It’s a valid question and if there is no satisfactory answer then the Old Testament, or large parts of it, are going to continue to gather dust. But I believe there is a satisfactory answer, six answers in fact.

Why study shadows when we have the Son? That’s a question I’m often asked when I’m trying to promote more reading of the Old Testament. The question is usually focused specifically upon typology. Why study the types when we have the anti-type? It’s a valid question and if there is no satisfactory answer then the Old Testament, or large parts of it, are going to continue to gather dust. But I believe there is a satisfactory answer, six answers in fact.

More Than We Realize

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This Mindless Age -- Part Two

By James Boice

This Mindless Age
Romans 12:1-2
Theme: Christ’s call to think.
This week’s lessons teach us our responsibility to be thinking Christians.
 
Lesson

Amusing Ourselves to Death was published in 1985, one year after 1984, the year popularized as the title of George Orwell’s futuristic novel with its dark vision of a society controlled by fear. In Orwell's novel Big Brother rules everything with a ruthless iron fist. But Postman reminds us that there was another novel written slightly earlier with an equally chilling but quite different vision of the future: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. In Huxley’s novel there is no need for Big Brother, because in this ominous vision of the future, people have come to love their oppression as well as the technologies that strip away their capacities to think.

The Total Depravity of Man

Posted 4/17/14 by Donald Barnhouse

The great theological doctrine of total depravity has had many enemies. Yet we find it hard to understand how anyone can take cognizance of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews and fail to see what roots of sin are in the human heart. To call the instigators and perpetrators of these crimes "bestial" is to insult every animal that ever walked the face of the earth. If we should see a lion bound upon his prey and tear it to bits, it would be only proper to say, "He eats almost in a human fashion."

The Total Depravity of Man

This Mindless Age -- Part One

By James Boice

This Mindless Age
Romans 12:1-2
Theme: Christ’s call to think.
This week’s lessons teach us our responsibility to be thinking Christians.
 
Lesson

In our time there is no longer a distinctly Christian way of thinking. There is to some extent a Christian ethic and even a somewhat Christian way of life and piety. But there is no uniquely Christian worldview to guide our thinking, in distinction from the thought of the secular world around us.

Christians and Depression

Posted on Wednesday, April 16, 2014 by Todd Pruitt on 1517

Recently David Murray's HeadHeartHand Media produced 5 videos each telling the story of a Christian who knows what it is to struggle with depression. Murray is the author of Christians Get Depressed Too which I highly recommend.

The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals is member supported and operates only by your faithful support. Thank you.

1517
1517

Har Far Did Man Fall?

Posted 4/16/14 by Donald Barnhouse

Some time ago, while teaching a Bible class on the Book of Genesis, I came to the third chapter and the account of the fall of man. In the course of the study I said that many of the great differences in theology which divide men and churches arose out of the question as to how far man fell in the sin of Adam. To my astonishment, the crowd laughed. I was not expecting it at all, and had a flash of stunned silence, but then I immediately saw that the laughter came from a shock of something so unexpected. The audience had never heard the matter expressed in that way, and their minds were totally unprepared for the statement, and did not comprehend it. The combination had touched off laughter.

How Far Did Man Fall?

Reviewing Beauty

Posted on Wednesday, April 16, 2014 by Aimee Byrd on Housewife Theologian

Let's face it, all women get tangled up in the whole beauty issue. Carolyn Mahaney and Nicole Whitaker tackle it head on in their new book True Beauty. If you want to know a little more about the book, I have reviewed it over at Books at a Glance:

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