ethics on Freedom

Context of Galatians I still remember my intro to New Testament class in college and the professor discussing Paul’s letter to the Galatians. All of Paul’s other letters begin with words of adoration...

Preaching Commentary Context of Galatians I still remember my intro to New Testament class in college and the professor discussing Paul’s letter to the Galatians. All of Paul’s other letters begin ...

It takes a great deal of freedom and love to be therapeutic with a group. Many years ago when Emil Brunner, the great Swiss theologian, was lecturing in this country, it was reported that when he prea...

Preaching Commentary The teachings contained in this passage are, for my money, as difficult to preach as any lectionary text. Not only is each teaching difficult in its own right, but each has also...

So how can we form deep Christian convictions without dividing the church? Let’s take a deeper look at convictions themselves. Convictions are like light: they come in many colors and form across a sp...

For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while ano...

They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words—“free-love”—as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and...

A close friend who started a financial loan business took thirty of his executives to the poverty- and violence-filled section of Montreal where he grew up in order to introduce them to the section of...

Preaching Commentary Confrontation Most pastors don’t care for confrontation. Maybe, that could be said for most people. There are the rare few of us who thrive on the tension and drama that comes ...

The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has to-day all the exhilaration of a vice.

If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other--the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the co...

Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue reconnected thinking about ethics back to virtue by connecting virtue to the story a life is a part of. In order to know how we ought to live, we first need to answ...

Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end... but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature ... And to...

The success of every culture hinges not on big points of morality—there will always be issues like abortion or school prayer over which people differ—but on smaller values, like being considerate of o...

Confrontation Most pastors don’t care for confrontation. Maybe, that could be said for most people. There are the rare few of us who thrive on the tension and drama that comes with a direct standoff,...

A source of the intensest pleasure earthlings can experience, sex has also been a source of vexatious trouble for the human family since the beginning of history.

What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.

The only reason for doing the right thing is that it is the right thing to do; all other reasons are reasons for doing something else.

In the Christian faith, we frequently take for granted how radically Jesus evens the playing field. No matter your wealth, your position, let alone your race or gender, all of us are equal in God’s ey...

The British poet Thomas Campbell, attending a horse race with some friends, bet one of them (Thomas Wilson) £50 that the horse Yellow Cap, would come in first place. After the race ended, Campbell, th...

God has chosen to save the world through the cross, through the shameful and powerless death of the crucified Messiah. If that shocking event is the revelation of the deepest truth about the character...

Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.

[M]ost Christians attach their convictions to Christ personally. In other words, we form our convictions in order to please Jesus, not ourselves. Convictions do not express what we think or feel or li...

Many Christians know John Newton as the author of the hymn Amazing Grace and other beloved hymns. Fewer know that Newton’s own life matches the beauty of transformation written in Amazing Gra...

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as 'moral indignation,' which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue."

In these acts of love Jesus created a scandal for devout, religious Palestinian Jews. The absolutely unpardonable thing was not his concern for the sick, the cripples, the lepers, the possessed . . . ...

There is a Moral sense, and there is an Immoral Sense. History shows us that the Moral Sense enables us to perceive morality and how to avoid it, and that the Immoral Sense enables us to perceive immo...

Human will-power alone is not enough. Will-power is excellent and we should always be using it; but it is not enough. A desire to live a good life is not enough. Obviously we should all have that desi...