Sorry I’m late with this! Busy times with the Faith at Work Summit (which you really should join us for).

TGR carries the first of my new series on Babel:

The potentially unlimited height of the tower is emphasized to invoke the futile hope that without God to get in our way, we can grow without limit. There is a note of absurdity in the cry of v. 4: “Let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens!” The darkened mind flees from God because it flees from limits, above all from limits to its own power.

Let me know what you think!

Register for the awesome Faith at Work Summit 2018; price break goes away Sept 15 and discounted hotel rooms are almost gone! You won’t want to miss this.

Oh, and TGC runs the third of my series of three articles plugging the summit:

Continuity and discontinuity are both needed for a sound eschatology, and hence for a sound approach to our daily work. Continuity alone brings us vocational captivity to worldly standards and moralistic legalism. Discontinuity alone brings us vocational detachment and even resentful isolation.

Come for the dialogue between Mr. Savage and Mr. Virtue from C.S. Lewis’ The Pilgrim’s Regress, stay for the eschatological schema!

I said “Okay, Enough Bickering for Now,” but I needed just a little more. TGR runs a coda to my series on eschatology and work, connecting tension over eschatology to tension over soteriology:

Even if we as individuals, and as a church, are not yet perfected and glorified in the present, we are made holy in the present. To borrow David Wells’ helpful – because rhyming! – language, being made holy is not just a matter of condition (progressive sanctification) but also a matter of position. We are set apart to the Lord, not progressively but all at once, when we repent and believe. That is what repenting and believing means.

The world in which we do our daily work has not yet been made holy, has not yet been set apart to the Lord. And we do not work in isolation from our neighbors. Our work is not only shaped but actually constituted by the social situation in which we do it. You can’t work in the world as if the world were the church.

Let me know what you think!

TGR just carried the last post in my series, “Let’s Keep Bickering about Eschatology”:

When we remember that Jesus’ return will renew the earth and consummate God’s good work that has been ongoing in creation since the beginning, we will seek to build moral consensus with our neighbors in order to carry on the good work now.

But when we remember that Jesus’ return will bring a catastrophic confrontation and judgment upon a fallen and sinful world – and that this traumatic revolution of affairs is not supposed to begin until Jesus returns – we will accept differences with grace and strive to cope with pluralism through compromise, without demanding a social unity only Jesus’ return can bring.

See also the penultimate post, which I neglected to link here at the time:

Eschatological continuity emphasizes fighting for justice, bearing prophetic witness against the darkness of the world, and exercising kingly and queenly authority in rooting it out from our own domains of responsibility. Eschatological discontinuity emphasizes moderating our ambitions to see justice and mercy vindicated, and waiting patiently for the Lord’s judgment upon the overwhelming majority of evil that we are either not authorized or not able to remove ourselves.

I suppose in a series about eschatology, the last post is pretty significant. Let me know what you think!

Law & Liberty recently ran a piece I wrote on how Wittaker Chambers can shed light on the collapse of conservatism:

As I closed my copy of Odyssey of a Friend, just after reading those striking letters of resignation from National Review near the end of his life, two things struck me. One was that it is a testimony to divine inscrutability that great thinkers are so often taken from us just as they are making new discoveries whose implications they will never have the chance to explore. The other was that, for all its devotion to a few specific moral causes and its championing of the social utility of religion and religious institutions, the underlying failure of the conservative movement was that a serious return to moral responsibility – which ultimately means people becoming humble and obedient before the face of the cosmic power that transcends them – was not central enough to the conservative project, and could not have been made so without fundamentally altering the nature of the project.

Chambers continues to unlock new doors for me – he will for you, too. Check out Witness.