Disciplesplanet

When they came for the Alt-right mouth breather I did nothing but smile gleefully as such sub-humans do not deserve to even breath the same air as the rest of us. 

When they came for the Fundamentalist naïve realist Christ followers, I did nothing, as they really are socially unpalatable and culturally inept to a cringe-worthy degree. 

When they came for the Conservatives, I did nothing, because they are irrelevant and in the way of progress. 

When they came for the Pentecostals, I did nothing, as their…

In his small, but potent book, The Problem of Pain, Clive Lewis looks at the visceral notion of revenge, the following is one excerpt, 

“Revenge loses sight of the end in the means, but it's end is not wholly bad - it wants the evil of the bad man to be to him what it is to everyone else. This is proved by the fact that the avenger wants the guilty party not merely to suffer, but to suffer at his hands, and to know it, and to know why. Hence the impulse to taunt the guilty man with his crime at the moment…

“Stigma and Shame are bad – toxic man! We must erase them from our culture, right?  Like, you know, no one should be made to feel bad about themselves or their choices, it’s bad for your mental health!” 

Author? Pretty much any millennial raised by the pop-culture. 

What is becoming more disturbing is that this previous statement is no longer simply an innocuous…

Let us be perfectly clear from the very outset of this post – God is love, not ‘love is god’!   

Before the universe existed, before time itself, God is. 

The Triune community of Three Persons – One Deity, existed in perfect union, harmony, and communion. Only the Judeo-Christian world view and theological framework has both love and family existing and in play before the universe was created – and from that source, that community – was spawned not merely the material, but Divinely infused humanity. 

…

In the now more vulgarly apparent ‘cultural dichotomy’ that has aggressively burgeoned in the past 5 years (and accelerated in past 5 months) over the so called ‘Progressive’ and so called ‘Conservative’ positions, I found myself pondering where I may fit? 

The divide has seemingly abandoned any continuum mode, and for ‘cancel culture’ to work, it must create silos with gapping chasms between. 

Because of my Evangelical Christianity (so labelled by non-Christians and those who want to claim the title, but…

I understand that the idea of the ‘image’, as in Genesis 1:26-28, to mean that humans are designed to function like angled mirrors. We are created in order to reflect the worship of all creation back to the Creator and by that same means to reflect the wise sovereignty of the Creator into the world. Human beings, worshipping their Creator, were thus the intended key to the proper flourishing of the world. “Worship” was and is a matter of gazing with delight, gratitude, and love at the Creator God and…

Jesus Christ   

Power, Profile, Position and Posture 

The history of the church is peppered with theological conflagrations, but none more so than those around the identity of Christ, particularly in the Trinitarian context. 

For…

It is always fascinating to watch claims, and counter claims to ‘righteousness and justice’ in the marketplace. If the ‘divine’ is invoked, it invariably is about affirming the ‘god’ of our choosing throwing ‘its’ lot in with our clearly worthy cause. Of course, in the atheistic narrative such invocations are not possible, although the cult-like fervour that such ‘rightness of cause’ is claimed by these groups can make many religious zealots blush. Of course, without the claim of a transcendent narrative…

The iron hand it ain't no match for the iron rod 
The strongest wall will crumble and fall to a mighty God 
For all those who have eyes and all those who have ears 
It is only He who can reduce me to tears 
Don't you cry and don't you die and don't you burn 
Like a thief in the night, he'll replace wrong with right 
When he returns. 

Truth is an arrow and the gate is narrow that is passes through 
He unreleased His power at an unknown hour that no one knew 
How long can I listen to the lies of prejudice ? 
How long…

The following are selected excerpts from Tolstoy’s little-known work, Confession, as translated by David Patterson. 

However, before launching into the text and enjoying some of the wrestle and journey this remarkable culture shaping artist went on, I wanted to share some reflections on not only the musings outlined in this important work, but also on some of the posture that emerged from this robust theosophical struggle. 

There are often many unstated, yet tacit attitudes that so often emit from those…