worldview and perspective on Order

The absence of boundaries creates nonorder, and nonorder is not the end of exclusion but the end of life.

If you go against the grain of the universe, you get splinters.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence.

Gracious God, we don’t live as Christ did. Although You give us specific instructions for an ordered way of life that stands out from the rest of the world, we settle for lukewarm Christianity. Our li...

The cosmology of the ancient world was dramatically different from the way that we think of ours. Scholar John Walton writes in The Lost World of Genesis One , “Old world cosmic geography is based on...

In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way.

Ancients married in order to have children, to cement alliances, and to gain strategic relationships.

In order to speak of the crucified God we need a theology of abandonment, of dereliction, of an alienation so profound that it can only be expressed in language marked by paradox and by great daring a...

To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.

People take it for granted that the physical world is both ordered and intelligible. The underlying order in nature-the laws of physics-are simply accepted as given, as brute facts. Nobody asks where ...

If we’re unable or unwilling to discern a norm to judge what is good and evil, the whole moral order will tumble into confusion. If we don’t get the moral facts straight, a variety of “crises” will co...

Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question — you have t...

According to Bill Tripp, a member of the Karuk tribe in Northern California and a forest manager, Fire is that which renews life. A lot of people have been conditioned to look at it as a threat and...

How many modern Christians consider dying to be the worst thing that can happen to them? We pray for safety, healing, and protection, and rightly so. However, do we live in the truth that death has tr...

Any experienced gardener has heard of a botanical term called Apical (ah-pick-ul) dominance. In most plants that grow from a central stem, from maple trees to bush peas, whatever branch is at the top ...

Kate's Crisis: Values vs. Church One damp afternoon during the fall of 2016 I was sharing a pastoral conversation with Kate, a professional artist in her late 20s. Over years of meals and convers...

Interpretive strategies have gone through cycles of strict-constructionist (or Originalism) and broad-constructionist (or Living Constitution) perspectives. Originally the procedure of interpreting th...

James Nelson describes sexuality as the central clue to what God is up to in the world. While this might seem a little over the top, when you think about it, sexuality factors integrally in our relati...

Epiphaneia in New Testament Greek means manifestation. An effective method of teaching the content of the faith, not often enough used, is to instruct congregations in the texts of the seasonal hym...

There Are No Ordinary Things J. R. R. Tolkien tells a short story about an ordinary fellow who just wants to finish a painting. Over time, he is constantly distracted by the requests of his neighbors...

It would be an understatement to say the term gospel is an important term in the Scriptures. Not only is it central in Scripture, but churches have adopted the term as their most beloved adjective. Yo...

Introduction During my time in seminary (and the year after I graduated) I spent a lot of time at a church in southern New Jersey. It’s actually how I met Scott Bullock, TPW board member and creator...

Lord God, we know that you are life, the life which is the light of the world But sometimes we allow the darkness to close in We find ourselves driven apart from you We confess that we do not ...

Pastor: "For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." (Jn 3:17) All: His love endures forever Pastor: "...

Prayer of Adoration Good Morning, God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Before the world was – you were. Before we were – you knew us. Before we awoke today – you were alert, active ready to meet us her...

Almighty and everlasting God, you made the universe with all its marvelous order, its atoms, worlds, and galaxies, and the infinite complexity of living creatures: Grant that, as we probe the mysterie...

Shame is an unhappy emotion invented by pietists in order to exploit the human race.

It is possible also to come at Christianity from a rather different point of view as well, seeing it as something not too difficult but too simple for us, too basic, something to be apprehended theref...

This capriciousness of the gods is diametrically opposed to the biblical view. The God of Creation is not at all morally indifferent. On the contrary, morality and ethics constitute the very essence o...

A contemplative politics entails a two-part movement, one that parallels Thoreau’s injunction to be wary of trivia and devoted to eternal truths. The first involves an askesis, a kind of self-discipli...