What did you say?!

Almost every time Jonathan gets hurt, he comes up to me and says, "Daddy, kiss [insert hurt body part here] please," as he points to where he got hurt.

Yesterday, he tripped over something while walking backwards. After a short cry, he walked up to me, and with his sad little face said, "Daddy, kiss my booty please."

Proof that language is more about meaning than it is about the actual words.

Martin Luther and Literature

Just when I thought Martin Luther couldn't get any cooler (ok, I never really thought that), I find this quotation from a letter he wrote to a friend in 1523:

"I am persuaded that without knowledge of literature pure theology cannot at all endure, just as heretofore, when letters [literature] have declined and lain prostrate, theology too, has wretchedly fallen and lain prostrate; nay, I see that there has never been a great revelation of the Word of God unless he has first prepared the way by the rise and prosperity of languages and letters, as though they were John the Baptists. . . . Certainly it is my desire that there shall be as many poets and rhetoricians as possible, because I see that by these studies, as by no other means, people are wonderfully fitted for the grasping of sacred truth and for handling it skillfully and happily."


Did you get that? Theology won't endure without literature, because it is through things like fiction that people begin to grasp deep truths which they otherwise might not pick up in systematic theology books.

If I knew how to insert a little heart, I would write I [heart] Martin Luther. But I can't, so I won't.

An Irony of the "Christian Nation" claim

I like this post I found. Sums up a good irony that I completely agree with:


James F. McGrath, Associate Professor of Religion at Butler University, Indianapolis, nails the problem with the "Christian Nation" thesis as articulated by David Barton and many others who like to proclaim that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and has, only of late, become secularist and against Christianity:


"It seems unlikely that at any point in the past the vast majority of inhabitants of the United States were devout Christians with a personal faith, as opposed to nominal Christians for whom their Christianity consisted largely of a "tribal identity" including churchgoing and assenting to some doctrinal beliefs and moral precepts.

Does it not seem ironic, then, that the notion of American having once been a "Christian nation", and nostalgia for that bygone golden age, is found largely among Evangelicals, those very Christians who emphasize the need for a personal faith, and the inadequacy of a Christianity that consists merely of church attendance, denominational affiliation, or even moral living?

Am I missing something? Why would the very Christians who deny the adequacy of such nominal Christianity today, depict its heyday as a sort of golden age for American Christianity?"


There never was a "golden age" in American History when the nation was somehow truly Christian. Maybe there was a lot more church attendance, and there was certainly a time in the not-too-distant past when more people lived more outwardly moral lives. But that doesn't mean the nation was more Christian. It just means that they went to church more, behaved better in the civic squre, and kept more of their personal sins in private for fear of public shame.

This nation has probably not ever been much more, or much less, genuinely Christian than it is now.

Birthday Coming Up!

Get the John Calvin birthday clock at Calvin 500