Mark Horne

He preached it in the garden
Excellent thoughts from Pastor Ramsey!
They inspired me to add some stuff to Theologia.

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I remember hearing that a church changed its name from Westminster Prebyterian Church to Greenmeadow Presbyterian Church (or something like that) and thought this was some sort of evidence of some sort of “departure” from the Reformed faith.
Looking back on that, all I can do is plead that I was young and stupid. There [...]

Mark and John comment on weekly communion.
As far as boasting in particularities, that is rife in a hundred different ways in the PCA. Cool Kellerites, EmerGentlemen, WCFans, Reformed Catholics, etc. Remember, in Corinth, even saying “I am of Christ” was schizmatic. How we pull all this in is worth talking about. [...]

…I bow my knees before the Father…
So writes Paul in Ephesians 3.14. Are we Protestants known for doing this?
Kind of odd: If a zealous Protestant talks about other traditions (Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglo-Catholic) and their practice of kneeling toward images or objects, he will (accurately) see the danger in it. The Bible [...]

Here’s the final paragraph of three:
Whether or not one agrees with Kuklick’s assessment of Hodge, his idea on what makes a Christian thinker long dead worth reading has some merit. Christians today don’t read every Christian writer from the past. Many are forgotten and that is probably a good thing. Not everything written is worth [...]

Hebrews says that the blood of Christ speaks better than the blood of Abel. This is a contrast, but it is also a comparison. Abel’s blood also speaks, or at least has spoken. And this is precisely what Genesis 4 tells us. The blood of Abel liberated God’s people from the [...]

Cool! I wonder what J. C. Ryle would have thought about this.

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Many thanks go to Rev. Phil Ryken for pointing us to a British Evangelical symposium defending the penal view of the atonement. Of special interest I thought, was I. Howard Marshall’s “The Theology of the Atonement” which makes good use of N. T. Wright’s excellent commentary on Romans. But even more interesting was [...]

So, A great post from David Wayne (who really is a jolly blogger, by the way) starts up a bunch of stuff on the web. (Before I go further I should mention I really liked the Dane’s comment, though I have a lot of sympathy/agreement with David’s concern.) Common Grounds picks up on [...]

As far as I can tell, this has been my most talked about blog entry ever:
The Big Lie
Every time we Christians talk about our need to reach contemporary culture we are telling a lie to ourselves and others–a lie that worsens the problem we’re trying to address.
We are contemporary culture just like everyone else who [...]

If you’re not reading the Bible for fun you need to consider if maybe you’re doing it wrong.

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Lecturing at the Dabney Center on Ephesians and Paul’s perspective therein, I had to deal especially with Ephesians 3.6: “This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.” My message, following Ridderbos was that the “mystery” was the Gospel. [...]

Richard Baxter:
Whom must I judge a visible member of the church, with whom I am thus bound to hold communion?

If you are the pastor of the church who are made the judge, at his admission by baptism, or afterwards, you must so judge of every one who maketh a credible profession of true Christianity, that [...]

I forgot one detai:
After the crack about buttons and hooks, Peter bar Jona answered rather stiffly as he sat up from the couch, “Well, I am speaking Latin more often.”

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Thomas Reid, the father of Scottish Common Sense Realism, pointed out that the Empiricists had been misled by a trick of grammar. One can say, “I see a tree,” and “I feel a pain.” Thus, the idea is derived that we need some sort of intermediary between us and the “external world.” [...]

In Gene Wolfe’s excellent tetrology, The Book of the Long Sun, Patera Silk receives a vision from the Outsider that his predecessor’s prayers for help have been answered. He is the help. But this means he must not expect help. The help is him.
This seems symmetrical with what we need to realize [...]

John Nevin:
But to be thus living and vigorous, our theology must be more than traditional. It must keep pace with the onward course of human thought, subduing it always with renewed victory to its own power. Not by ignoring the power of error, or fulminating upon it blind ecclesiastical anathemas, can theology be saved from [...]

I never finished the dream.
Suddenly the sea serpent was gone and the belly of the beast became a psychologist’s office. Jonah lay on the couch and someone who looked Freudian stood near him smoking a long cigar.
“Why do you think you imagine you’re trapped in a whale?”
“Fish, you mean.”
The doctor shrugged. Outside the [...]

Today we officially shifted shape. Jennifer is working and our school-aged children are in school. Quite a change for what has been a home-schooling single-income family! I could post pictures of them in school, of course, but instead here they are at Grant’s Farm during our last visit of the Summer holiday.

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The other night I had a dream that I was in the belly of a big sea monster. There was a man there. I was worried that we didn’t have anything to talk about, but it turned out that he was a Christian. God had called him to be a missionary to [...]