tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153126792011-07-20T03:48:35.946-07:00Reactions to reading the book of RomansRobert McAnally Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05941503105740045194noreply@blogger.comBlogger261100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15312679.post-1147202088983353572006-05-09T12:14:00.000-07:002006-09-14T13:56:20.273-07:00

Some people, because of their commitment to a naturalist point of view or other forms of unbelief, are not able to entertain the Gospel. For the Gospel to reach them, the other ideas must first be smashed out of their heads. (By the way, God has raised up some “smashers” here and there. John Ankerberg is one who debates the world’s views with care and integrity. The late C. S. Lewis was also an

Robert McAnally Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05941503105740045194noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15312679.post-1129398250960759522005-10-15T10:43:00.000-07:002005-11-27T22:59:18.523-08:00

It is a commonplace that one man’s education is another man’s indoctrination. So, let us concede the point from the outset: education has always consisted partly in indoctrination. Without doctrines, that is, without beliefs about the value of reason, language, and culture, there can be no education. A child does not begin learning sums on the basis of his reasoned analysis of its future utility.

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If the rejection of God, as a force to reckon with intellectually and morally in the education of children, were all that is being forced on us in the City, it might be possible to live with. But the prince of the City has seen the expulsion of God from the schools as an opportunity to expel some of God’s friends and to invite in some new gods. Non-pagan classics have been discarded. Christian

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Even more deadly, though it takes longer to mature, is the bland assumption that responsibility is something that one takes up or leaves behind. The fact that in life in the West we have great latitude in selecting occupation, lifestyle, location, friends, even family, is impressed on us early. Freedom, that almost holy word for the right to be whatever kind of person one wants to be, is a curse

Robert McAnally Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05941503105740045194noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15312679.post-1129218834815153122005-10-13T08:53:00.000-07:002006-09-14T14:04:44.766-07:00

A few years ago, a poet named Robert Bly came into a brief vogue, touting a new or reconstituted vision of male virtue. He proclaimed that a major defect of modern culture was the failure of men to assert manhood and to pass this on to their sons. He decried the “feminization” of men, and he held seminars for men in which they celebrated a kind of modern stoicism mixed with ritual for nourishing

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I do not want to make a big mystery of this. It is simply a matter of logic. By their very nature, moral codes are not subject to choice. The notion that I should follow or adopt the moral code that I like best, or that fits my circumstances best, or that best appeals to my training, intellect, aims, or appetites, or that I should do “what is right for me,” cannot be supported logically. If my

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The marketing people have many names for it: the Global Village, the Shrinking Universe, the Small World, the Electronic Marketplace, etc. They all amount to the same thing: technology and the appetites of society have linked the world together in ways unimagined a few decades ago. It is the gift, not of visionaries or master architects, but of engineers and businessmen, working for a living,

Robert McAnally Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05941503105740045194noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15312679.post-1125294363273508652005-08-28T22:45:00.000-07:002005-10-13T09:47:54.353-07:00

One might argue that the City’s principle is omniscience, that it is pan-human and does not discriminate. Nothing within our experience is to be excluded from the comprehensive, biggest-available, online knowledgebase. Everything will be classified, organized, fetched on demand, each thing an object to be culled and placed beside other objects of the same class, a thing among other things——like

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Aldous Huxley’s masterpiece, Brave New World, depicted a culture created to satisfy certain ends, using means that were deplorable by early 20th century standards, but deliberately designed to achieve those ends, safely and with high confidence. The irony was that the ends were mostly conceptions that would have met with considerable approval during that era, like social stability, planning,

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Reared as I was on the thinking of C. S. Lewis, I can reflect and reiterate his concern for the reduction of man to mere material (The Abolition of Man), with this provision: I have experienced a lot more of it than he did. As a programmer of computers for thirty-two years, I have lived the dream; I have tasted it. The reduction of thought, of ideas, of life and culture, and most of all, of

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From inside the machine, each person’s point of view tells him that he has, or does not yet have, the things that define him as an individual, his tastes, his comforts, his morals, his goals. From outside the machine, each one is simply another instance of the same entity, distinguished only by his metrics (technical jargon for the results of the measurements that presumably characterize and

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The mechanism that the machine hides is the systematic quenching of the Spirit. It makes no difference to the proprietor of a shop whether the customer is a saint or the most wicked villain imaginable. That is what money does to us. A popular quiz show (in 2001) is entitled, “Who wants to be a millionaire?” Not, “Who wants to give lavishly to the charity of his choice?” nor, “Who wants to provide

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It is far easier, not to mention, more effective, to appeal to one’s greed than to one’s honor. This is why a cash bond is universally preferred over a man’s given word. Richard Whately once said, “Honesty is the best policy; but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man.” So, all of us can be, in some respect or other, coaxed into virtue (as well as something considerably less than

Robert McAnally Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05941503105740045194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15312679.post-1125293928781599612005-08-28T22:34:00.001-07:002005-10-13T09:41:58.120-07:00

Many years ago, I read the response to someone who had complained of impersonal treatment by some system that had adopted computers in its processing (probably an insurance or credit card company or a government institution—I have no memory of it). Instead of being a name, each person in the system was a number. The response argued that computer systems, with their capacity and detail, were

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The City has plunged the mind of man into darkness in this age primarily through the promulgation of the philosophy of optimism, which together with its closest rival, existentialism and the absurd, occupies every portal of mass communication known to man, twenty-four hours per day, every day of the year. See if you do not recognize some of the philosophy of optimism, as expressed here by

Robert McAnally Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05941503105740045194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15312679.post-1125293633597859562005-08-28T22:32:00.000-07:002005-10-13T09:41:07.673-07:00

The mindset of optimism is scarcely confined to America. One reason for this is the use of American television productions in other countries. When my wife and I were in Sweden recently, I was surprised at how many Swedish people spoke good and even excellent English. Their speech was well inflected, idiomatic, perfectly understandable, and in one memorable case, accent perfect (I thought she was

Robert McAnally Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05941503105740045194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15312679.post-1125293521318698712005-08-28T22:31:00.000-07:002005-10-13T09:40:15.756-07:00

There is nothing inherently wrong with watching television. Many millions of dollars are collected and expended each year by organizations that oppose the violence, sex, language, and criminality of television programs, and I should add that I also oppose those things and therefore have a certain sympathy with their efforts. But, in the long run, those things are not corrupting.Jesus said, “There

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American commercial television is a vehicle for the expression of very great evil and temptation, more so perhaps than any other popular medium. Those who agitate against the contents of the newspapers do so in vain, I think. A newspaper is composed, consistent with the economics of its production, to appeal to readers. It sells readers what they already want to read, on a daily basis. Morally,

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So what are the messages of television? First, the message is, seek me again. Second is, obey me. Third is, what I speak is true. Martin Luther wrote, “Reason is a whore,” presumably because it serves the wicked as well and as easily as the Godly, just as He “sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” (Matt. 5:45) It is probably not appropriate to characterize reason in such strong language,

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The eye of the television camera sees all, but what it transmits is blindness. During the blitz in London during World War II, the blackout jokes and gags abounded, despite (and no doubt, because of) the desperate circumstances. One cartoon in a popular magazine featured the invention of a handheld flashlight that cast a cone of darkness instead of light. Television has had a similar effect. It

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The City does not advance blindly, despite the blindness of the builders and workers. The City has a ruler, a director who rules with an iron hand. He daily increases his hold over the hearts and spirits of the condemned in the City. Attraction, seduction, addiction, and slavery are the pattern of his rule, and his system creates slaves by the billions. To recognize that men are in slavery to the

Robert McAnally Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05941503105740045194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15312679.post-1124138753429954162005-08-15T13:44:00.000-07:002005-08-15T19:00:54.770-07:00

The beloved pastor of our church is of German extraction, as are many Lutherans in the US. For the second time this year, he has felt it necessary to mention in passing, during his sermon, that he holds his head in shame for the Nazi Reich that ended sixty years ago. It has occurred to me, as an Irishman by extraction, to wonder what stuff I should be hanging my head in shame about. Plenty, no

Robert McAnally Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05941503105740045194noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15312679.post-1123904417942616572005-08-12T20:39:00.000-07:002005-10-13T09:34:44.946-07:00

Unbelief is not passive. It is not the agnostic suspension of judgment in the face of insufficient facts that we all like to imagine it is. Unbelief is active. It takes a definite position, whether we like it or not.For many years, I formally took an agnostic position, primarily because it seemed to me to be the easiest to defend. The defensibility of agnosticism was important to me first of all

Robert McAnally Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05941503105740045194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15312679.post-1123904381762198252005-08-12T20:37:00.000-07:002005-08-15T13:50:33.880-07:00

The presuppositions of unbelief did not gain such ascendancy by themselves. They were the results of furious advocacy in the generations preceding us. We will examine some of these seats of advocacy in later posts.It is impossible to say how early I picked up the presuppositions of unbelief. It has occurred to me to ask, is this the very heart of original sin, that we are equipped with the power

Robert McAnally Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05941503105740045194noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15312679.post-1123904219113405502005-08-12T20:36:00.000-07:002005-10-13T09:52:52.016-07:00

One of the most revealing things about skepticism is the way it can lay down roadblocks to belief, hurdles across which we must pass before belief can even be entertained. One of those, for me, involved the sequence of events in the first century. Somewhere I had read that the 53rd chapter of Isaiah (the Suffering Servant passage, Isaiah 52:13-53:11) was written and added to the Old Testament by

Robert McAnally Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05941503105740045194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15312679.post-1123823897313441862005-08-11T22:13:00.000-07:002005-08-11T22:19:54.676-07:00

As believers, we are understandably timid about expressing doubts, perhaps because of the story of Thomas the Apostle, doubting Thomas (John 20:26-29). In the account, Jesus states that belief without having seen Him is “happier” than belief based on sight. This is, perhaps, the origin of the notion of “blind faith.” But note that Jesus does not condemn Thomas; in fact He satisfies Thomas’

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