Category: Blog
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Definition Part 3: Disjectamembra
See the other posts in this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. George Muller (1805-1898) was a 19th-century pastor famous for trusting God to meet his daily needs, even when his daily needs grew to include caring for thousand of orphans. His life story has been told many times, but the classic version, approved…
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Definition Part 2: Disjectamembra
See the other posts in this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. For penetrating insight into the character of Old Testament revelation, there are few scholars of the caliber of Alfred Edersheim (1825-1889). Edersheim was a Viennese-born Jew who converted to Christianity under the ministry of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries, and he turned that unique…
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Definition: Disjectamembra
See the other posts in this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. The Roman poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 BC) once said that a true poem would still be poetical even if you rearranged all the words in it. Or perhaps what he said was that a good poet would still be poetical…
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Anybody out there interested?
John Mark Reynolds, 2005. Does any publisher out there want a book? Does anyone want to read the rest of this story? Chapter One: Messages Wind. Blowing, tearing wind was the main memory he had of the Dream. He called it the Dream, because it came so often and was almost always the same. It…
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Education and the Problem of Our Times
John Mark Reynolds, 2005. What is love? What is true education? One of the great masters of both, Socrates, gave us a lesson in the dialogue Symposium that is powerful. Socrates ends his discussion of Love on a high note. He says of Diotima’s speech, This . . . was what Diotima told me. I…
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He is Risen!
John Mark Reynolds, 2005. Every day the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. For those of Western European ancestry, like myself, it is to the East that we owe the coming of the True Light: Jesus Christ. From the East came Peter, prince of the Apostles. From the East came the…
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Stripping the Altar
John Mark Reynolds, 2005. For Eastern Christians today is Good Friday. Last night we recollected Christ’s gift of Holy Communion to the Church. At the end of that most beautiful of services in the light of candles the altar was stripped. Every decoration was removed. Every sign of honor was taken from it.It is a…
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Nearer My God to Thee
John Mark Reynolds, 2005. Tonight almost a century ago the RMS Titanic sank. Thousands of people lost their lives in a disaster that came to symbolize the death of the false optimism that had marked the start of the century. Liberalism in 1900 felt it had at last escaped the chains of fundamentalism. Christianity would…
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Getting Free
John Mark Reynolds, 2005. Last summer our dog, Aristotle, died. It had been my fourteen year old son’s boyhood companion. I can close my eyes and see L.D. being dragged around the block by a young Aristotle. The dog was bigger than the boy! One day, and it happened all at once, he was much…
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The Life in the Blood
John Mark Reynolds, 2005. When I was a boy one of my favorite songs was Power in the Blood: There is pow’r, pow’r, wonder working pow’r In the blood of the Lamb; There is pow’r, pow’r, wonder working pow’r In the precious blood of the Lamb. How true this is! Every Sunday, Holy Communion brings…
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Help me Lord! Help me find Holiness!
John Mark Reynolds, 2005. One of the glories of Christianity is the way the Holy Spirit has provided for the integration of practical piety, the life of the church, and theology. No place is this more evident than in the issue of repentance. According to Williston Walker, the early Church faced a difficult issue with…
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The New Monasticism?
John Mark Reynolds, 2005. Monastaries often get an undeserved bad reputation. Chaucer may have something to do with it or the fact that our culture cannot imagine real community and giving things up. If you believe, as I do, that the culture is in real trouble, then monasticism looks more appealing. There are forms of…