Eulogy of Hank Williams

"What was the secret of his greatness?... He had a message. It was swelling in him like a great body of water behind a massive dam. It was a message of the heart."
- Dr. Henry L. Lyon, pastor of Highland Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, giving the eulogy at the funeral of Hank Williams

Ecumenism

"Denominationalism, which was actually the ecumenical idea that brought religious warring to an end, is now blamed for being the source of our troubles. Actually, of course, it is always the claim by one church to be the one visible church on earth that causes all the trouble to begin with. It could well be argued that the idea of 'visible unity' is the most unecumenical idea the world has ever seen!"
- Gerhard O. Forde, A More Radical Gospel

Ecumenism gives rise to what I call "Hippopotamus Theology." It is said that a hippopotamus is what is produced when a committee designs a race horse. It is also true for theology. When all the wildly different traditions try to agree on the Gospel, it is watered down and tamed. This isn't the jist of the Forde quote but, hell, it's my blog, right? - DOB :-)

Thank You, God, for Martin Luther

“A good tree needs no instruction or law to bear good fruit; its nature causes it to bear according to its kind without any law or instruction. I would take to be quite a fool any man who would make a book full of laws and statutes for an apple tree telling it how to bear apples and not thorns, when the tree is able by its own nature to do this better than the man with all his books can describe and demand. Just so, by the Spirit and by faith all Christians are so thoroughly disposed and conditioned in their very nature that they do right and keep the law better than one can teach them with all manner of statutes; so far as they themselves are concerned, no statutes or laws are needed.”
- Martin Luther

I just love Martin Luther. He really did rescue Christianity. Christians just need to preach the law and the gospel and leave people alone. Quit moralizing to people for the sake of all that is holy. - DOB

Who would have ever thought of squirrels with light sabers? :-) - DOB