You might be a Christian nationalist if… by Kenneth Tanner
You might be a Christian nationalist if you believe that one nation on earth has a special vocation to be a Christian nation as an example or sign for all other nations.
You might be a Christian nationalist if you believe that God founded your nation as a superior nation among the nations to uniquely enact his will in the earth.
You might be a Christian nationalist if you believe the founding documents of your nation reflect the teachings of Scripture accurately, that God was involved in their creation as in the creation of Scripture, that the writers of those documents were primarily interested in expressing Christian principles, and that, like Scripture, they are timeless. [With my regards to Jim Eisenbraun]
You might be a Christian nationalist if your church removes the national flag of the nation in which it is located, and that removal makes you anxious or angry, or if its services fail to offer a venue for displays of national patriotism, and that absence disturbs or alarms you.
You might be a Christian nationalist if you have a low tolerance for an honest assessment of your country’s national sins, or when pastors do the difficult, necessary work of identifying those sins (for sin is personal, familial, and tribal) you refuse their humble discernments.
You might be a Christian nationalist if you’ve never questioned your nation’s offensive or defensive military operations or if you are tempted to trust in your nation’s temporal powers rather than God for salvation from enemies.
You might be a Christian nationalist if you believe that God cares about the survival of your nation’s particular political order or “way of life” or economic status rather than the persons and living things within its borders, its language and culture, its natural treasures.
You might be a Christian nationalist if the prospect of your nation’s end unmoors your trust in providence.
You might be a Christian nationalist if the orienting realities of your life or your family’s life are not the apostles’ teaching, a table of bread and wine, fellowship with the poor, and the prayers but your partisan loyalties, and the so-called thought leaders of that loyalty.
You might be a Christian nationalist if you do not recognize that the gospel is pan-national, encompassing all peoples everywhere, all cultures, all languages, where all armaments become gardening tools, where the peace won by the weakness of the human God on the cross reigns.
West-East Divan / Goethe – review by Ron Dart
West-East Divan -- The Poems, with “Notes and Essays”: Goethe’s Intercultural Dialogues (2010), with commentary by Martin Bidney. Goethe’s book is a pathbreaker, a boundary-crossing intercultural poetic dialogue—one of the most notable and far reaching...
Arab Spring, Christian Winter – Willam Dalrymple
Fatal lot of Christianity's homelands BY WILLIAM DALRYMPLE WHEREVER you go in the Middle East today, you see the Arab Spring rapidly turning into the Christian winter. The past few years have been catastrophic for the region's beleaguered 14-million strong...
The limits of the language of wrath – Brad Jersak
For the past week I’ve been marinating in Kevin Miller’s Huffington Post article, “Why We Need the Language of Hell.” That bit of commentary, penned by the director of the, Hellbound? Documentary, may be the most poignant summary of humanity’s perennial need for wrath...
Why we need the language of hell – Kevin Miller
James Eagan Holmes allegedly slaughters 12 people at a movie theater in Colorado. Survivor Stephanie Davies describes the event: "We were laying there, literally in the mouth of hell." Anders Behring Breivik kills 69 people at a summer camp in Norway. Prime...
Is Universalism the New Annihilationism? by Kevin Miller
Thanks to a prod from Graham Ware, I’m currently reading Clark. H. Pinnock’s excellent essay The Destruction of the Finally Impenitent. Published in 1990, Pinnock’s essay critiques the “traditional” doctrine of hell as eternal torment for the wicked and argues for the...
The Journey to the East by Herman Hesse (1956) – Ron Dart
Herman Hesse (1877-1962) was one of the most conscious spiritual seekers in his time and one of the finest and most consistent European doves in an age of two world wars and an ethos of overt hawkishness and militarism. Hesse fled Germany to Switzerland because of his...
Wrath and Love as Divine Consent by Brad Jersak
“God does no violence to secondary causes in the accomplishment of his ends.”[1] In this article, I will attempt to creatively apply a theology of the Cross or ‘divine consent’ towards a metaphorical reading of wrath back into those Scriptures that so repulse those...
Review of Brad Jersak’s ‘George P. Grant: Minerva’s Snowy Owl,’ by Ron Dart
Review of Brad Jersak, George P. Grant: Minerva’s Snowy Owl: Essays in Political Theology (FWP, 2012). Only when the dusk starts to fall does the owl of Minerva spread its wings and fly Hegel George Grant is, without much doubt, one of Canada’s...
September 1, 1939 by W. H. Auden
September 1, 1939 by W. H. Auden I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our...
Some personal Meditations on Aboriginal Day (June), and July first, 2012. Henk Smidstra
Two hundred years ago, on June 1, 1812, United States President, James Madison, declared war on England and its North American Colonies .Now from a 200 year old perspective, 2012 is going to be a reflective and patriotic year in Canada as it goes down memory lane to...
