Love, not law, is the motive
The last few days have seen a discussion at First Things’ Evangel blog on the respective roles of the law and the gospel in the Christian life, in particular in this post by Joe Carter. Quite separately from this I found myself looking through Henric Schartau’s classic sermon “Jesus Only” (the linchpin of the chapter “Transfiguration Day” in Bo Giertz’s The Hammer of God, on which I have blogged

Lutheranism in a nutshell
E and I were talking about the difficulties of explaining to non-Lutheran friends (whether Christians or otherwise) why we’re Lutherans and what is different about Lutheranism – while avoiding the opposite extremes of (a) plunging into a half-hour theological discourse or (b) mumbling something defensive about “not being a sect”. It struck me that the distinctive flavour of Lutheranism (as contrasted with evangelicalism in particular) lies in its approach to worship, as summarised in Norman Nagel’s introduction to Lutheran Worship: Our Lord speaks and we listen. His Word bestows what it says. Faith that is

The heart and head of Scripture
Flicking through John Stott’s The Contemporary Christian – one of the first books I bought following my return to faith in 1994 – I noticed I’d underlined the following quotation from J.J. von Allmen (ellipses in original): The heart of the Scripture (what sums it up and makes it live) or the head of Scripture (…what explains it and justifies it) … is Jesus Christ. To read the Bible without meeting Jesus is to read it badly, and to preach the Bible without proclaiming him is to preach it falsely. Yes. That was it…

Wandering Hedgehog: Slavoj Žižek on ideology
A post I almost put here rather than on my politics blog, as it relates to broader political/cultural issues rather than just UK party politics: the “eminent thinker”/”Marxist holy fool”/”dancing bear” (delete as applicable) Slavoj Žižek on how ideologies only win when they lose. I’ll be interested to know what people think. (Note: this isn’t an endorsement of Žižek; this is my usual blogging approach of seizing on particular ideas I find interesting or suggestive, re

Inerrancy as a “category error”
From a post by Blue Raja on the Boar’s Head Tavern. This is great stuff: I’m sort of a Vanhoozer-ian sort of guy when it comes to the nature of language (i.e. his theological version of speech-act theory) and I think the most basic observation it contributes to an understanding of inerrancy is that stating the truth/falsity of some proposition is only ONE speech-act in the Bible. The Bible has many more sorts of speech-acts for which “error” is simply a category mistake (i.e. promises can be faithful or faithless, but not “in error”; poetr