discussion on Human Judgment

What is the matter with us is a question as old as time. Many philosophers and prophets believe they have an answer, but so too does holy scripture. According to the Dutch-Canadian philosopher Al Wolt...

The famous poem The Charge of the Light Brigade includes these haunting lines: Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred… Someone had blundered. Theirs not to reason why, ...

In those same weeks, Harper’s Magazine featured an evening-long conversation between two professors, Neil Postman and Camille Paglia, about the meaning of television for persons and for polities...

The bottom line is this: never grow complacent. Never grow tired of learning. As soon as we stop learning we lose the capacity to grow and mature in our work and our relationships. This continual lear...

At the last Judgment Christ will say to us, "Come, you also! Come, drunkards! Come, weaklings! Come, children of shame!" And He will say to us: "Vile beings, you who are in the image of...

Learned Helplessness can be easily seen in a research study when participants are given a math test. In this study, some participants are told, “men don’t tend to do well on this test,” or “Millennia...

Some skeptics today speak about “evolving” from a primitive condition, but the Bible (Romans 1:18-32) sadly portrays a  descent  rather than an ascent. The result has been given the theological term “...

The unjust steward who, hearing he is going to be fired, doctors his master’s accounts to secure another job, is commended precisely because he acted. The point does not concern morality but apathy. H...

What we need to realize, however, is that there is no such thing as autonomous or “self-grounding” knowledge. All systems of interpretation and all claims to true knowledge are ultimately grounded out...

The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than the alien intrusion of sin, as the villain. Such an error conceives of the good-evil dichotomy ...

To see with God’s eyes, suppose we were to compare one person’s morals to being in Death Valley, 280 feet below sea level; another person’s morals to being in Denver, the mile-high city; and another p...

After the fall of our first parents, boundaries were something to push past, to transgress. It’s worth pausing to note how we use the word transgression for “sin.”  With its Latin roots, “across” and ...

What is our responsibility to our neighbor? This is a question many have asked, including the Medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas. Meditating on the topic he observed, “To patiently endure wrongs done ...

God formed us in his image — a glorious thought! — but we all participate in the abandonment of that original identity…Does that mean that your precious little child is a dirty rotten sinner, as some ...

Is God stingy? Mark D. Roberts observes that many writers and preachers focus on the prohibition of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil instead of Genesis 2:16: "You may freely eat of each...

In his introduction to John Mark Comer’s book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry , pastor John Ortberg shares some thoughts from his mentor Dallas Willard on the subject of hurry: The smartest an...

Not long ago, I had a young couple come to me and say, “Pastor, we’re looking at buying a house. We’ve looked at this one house, and we really like it, but we want to make sure it’s God’s will. Would ...

When every option is available to us, we don’t actually have freedom; we tend to shut down. I experienced what sociologists call choice overload (or paralysis) and decision fatigue. If you’ve ever tri...

One simple sentence, from my first pastoral supervisor, has significantly shaped how I seek to discern God’s personal will. Each Wednesday during my first year of congregational ministry, we met to re...

In contemporary society our Adversary majors in three things: noise, hurry, and crowds. … Psychiatrist Carl Jung once remarked, “Hurry is not of the Devil; it is the Devil.”

Too often we are given a choice—emotions or faith and belief. Yet as Dan Allender and Tremper Longman observe,  Emotion links our internal and external worlds. To be aware of what we feel can open ...

Writing about ministering to postmodern skeptics, Don Everts and Doug Schaupp share a helpful insight into the mystery of God's movement: The first lesson they have taught us about the path to f...

The second lesson this group of new believers has shown us is that the postmodern path to faith is organic. Lostness, of course, looks different depending upon your perspective and personality. It is ...

Our 24/7 culture conveniently provides every good and service we want, when we want, how we want. Our time – saving devices, technological conveniences, and cheap mobility have seemingly made life muc...

James Elkins talks about how even the sense of sight is more complicated than we might believe: “Our eyes are not ours to command; they roam where they will and then tell us they have only been where ...

At the core of every project of self-salvation is the staunch unwillingness to believe that God’s love and forgiveness can be unmerited. Those who would try and save themselves prefer work to rest, ef...

A group of researchers sought to study the nuances of self-control. They conducted a study with a few dozen kindergarten students and gave them a painfully boring, repetitive task designed to test how...

The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy describes a view (not his own view, because Tolstoy was a Christian) of the human person, based on a theory of reality he saw emerging in his day. It is a narrative that...

We sometimes imagine surrender to God as emotional starvation. Every pleasure feels suspicious, and every passion feels in competition with our love of God. We think that the more miserable we are in ...

The atheist author Richard Dawkins, who wrote, “The universe, at the bottom, has no design, no purpose, no evil, and no other good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor care...