Category: Blog
-
Dante Continued (Paradise)
John Mark Reynolds, 2004. Tonight I struggled with love again. What is it? How do I know when the divine love is present? The love that is divine is fruitful. It bears children. Too much of modern love practices birth control. It aborts the natural fruit of love in order to stay in the sterile…
-
Book Review: “Joan of Arc” by Mark Twain
John Mark Reynolds, 2004. Phil Johnson is the source of some of the best reading recommendations I have ever received. He taught me Trollope. And now he has had me read Mark Twain’s masterpiece, Joan of Arc. I am fairly immune to Twain’s normal charms. He is fun in small doses, but his best notes,…
-
Reflections on Easter, 2004
John Mark Reynolds, 2004. Christ has conquered! The voyage to the undiscovered country has been made and one man has returned, Jesus of Nazareth. He is now plainly revealed to be God’s only Son. Trapped in the cave, bound in the chains of our sin, we could not see the light of life. Christ came…
-
Reflections on Holy Saturday, 2004
John Mark Reynolds, 2004. This is the day between. Good Friday with its horror is past, but the joy of Easter is still ahead. Holy Saturday is the time we live in now. Christ has come and Christ will come again. Now we are in Holy Saturday. When I was a child, I thought the…
-
Reflections on Maundy Tuesday, 2004
John Mark Reynolds, 2004. Tonight I stood before God in a service I did not create. I didn’t sit with my other friends and make up the work of the Church as I went. The Church was not emerging tonight, it was standing on a firm foundation. They did not have to hear my words,…
-
On Dorothy Sayers’ “Mind of the Maker”
John Mark Reynolds, 2004. Still thinking about Dorothy Sayers Mind of the Maker. Why do so few people know about this brilliant book?An artist creates. This act, according to Sayers, reflects the triune nature of God: Idea, Energy/Action, and Power. The author writes her book based on an Idea. This idea, like the Father is…
-
Revelation and Reason
John Mark Reynolds, 2004. Today’s class was on Dorothy Sayers. Ably led by Miss Silvers, we delved into the relationship between Revelation and reason. Some of my thoughts from this class. I think the world to be a reasonable place, but it may not all be open to our reason. Some problems are just too…
-
Reflections on the Annunciation
John Mark Reynolds, 2004. Today we reflect on the Annunciation. Mary becomes the Mother of God. Gabriel, the Strength of God, comes to make this world morphing announcement to Mary. Why does God send an angel? Couldn’t the Divine have done the job better himself? Of course. God excels at everything. He is like that…
-
Blindness and Sight
John Mark Reynolds, 2004. John 9- Jesus heals a “man born blind.The Greeks wrote that the blind could see better in the spiritual world, because they were not distracted by the physical. They made their great sages and prophets blind (Homer, Tiresias). To see the world where the gods lived, one had to ignore the…
-
Thoughts on Satan
John Mark Reynolds, 2004. Satan begins by saying he would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. Soon he realizes his error, but by then it is too late. He reaches for heaven, falls to hell, and ends up serving the divine purpose in any case. Most of us would not make that choice…
-
The “Language of Appearance” in Genesis
John Mark Reynolds, 2004. Biblical scholars sometimes resort to the argument that a “language of appearance” can allow for the cosmology and history of the Bible to be false while still not destroying inerrancy. The Bible can assert in Genesis that the flood came from an ocean above the earth through windows, because the human…
-
Thoughts on Milton
John Mark Reynolds, 2004. Today I got to do a concluding class on Milton’s Paradise Lost. While trying to understand the work, we began to discuss Milton’s view of men and women. Milton says that women are inferior to men in intellect and morals. It reminded me of why so many people become feminists. Misogyny…