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‘True Grit’ Has It!
By
Ben Witherington
I grew up in the age of Westerns and Frontier shows. My Mom would drop me at the Paramount or Center theaters in downtown High Point on a Saturday morning in the 50s and early 60s and I would watch the silver screen images of Gene Autry, the Lone Ranger, Red Raider, Tom Mix, Zorro,…
A Normal Christian Life—- Part Eight
By
Ben Witherington
One of the more crucial of John Wesley’s early sermons, preached at Oxford at the beginning of the Methodist Revival was entitled ‘the almost and the altogether Christian’. John Wesley was apt to say that you can be as orthodox as the devil, for the devil knows the truth about Jesus and God, but that…
A Musing
By
Ben Witherington
MUSINGS I’m afraid my muse is too musical And has a propensity for rhyme It prefers lyrical to metrical… Until it runs out of time. It’s apt to use a wordplay And a pun is within its scope But don’t ask for iambic pentameter It really cannot cope. Its quite well-versed…
A Normal Christian Life—- Part Seven
By
Ben Witherington
I used to have a colleague at Asbury who said that when he was a teenager he came to the altar in repentance so many times, and was born again so many times, he had stretch marks on his soul! Whatever else you say about the new birth, if it is genuinely the new birth,…
Tron’s Legacy—Perfection is Unknowable
By
Ben Witherington
Jeff Bridges stars in two movies this Christmas, and they could not be more different. One is the Coen Brothers remake of John Wayne’s film ‘True Grit’, the other is the long awaited sequel to Tron, a truly groundbreaking film. We will deal with ‘True Grit’ later. One needs to keep in mind this is…
A Normal Christian Life—- Part Six
By
Ben Witherington
As if Wesley were speaking directly to our Biblically illiterate culture, and sadly our almost as Biblically illiterate church, he stresses that pure ignorance is a major cause of spiritual degeneration and apostasy. Here is how he puts it…. Another general cause of this darkness is ignorance; which is likewise of various kinds. If men…
A Normal Christian Life—- Part Five
By
Ben Witherington
JOHN WESLEY ON A KEMPIS’ ‘IMITATION OF CHRIST’ Perhaps more than any other devotional book of its time, John Wesley pointed his Methodists to a book he came to call ‘The Pattern of Christ’ by Thomas a Kempis. A book originally written in Latin for the Brethren of the Common Life in about 1411,…
A Normal Christian Life—- Part Four
By
Ben Witherington
Sometimes spiritual formation literature can get pretty weird and demanding, especially if you are an ordinary Christian just trying to improve your Christian life. Sometimes it sounds like you are being called to be some sort of individualistic spiritual superman or superwoman. John Wesley had a good deal to say about the wrong sort of…
A Normal Christian Life—- Part Three
By
Ben Witherington
John Wesley was getting aggravated with his Moravian friends because of their quietistic tendencies. They were having some heated discussions in London about the means of grace, and there were some Moravians even arguing that ‘grace happens’ according to God’s preordained plan, and that there was nothing we humans could do to prod God into…
Wright and Witherington and Friends do the Elf Dance
By
Ben Witherington
http://elfyourself.jibjab.com/view/eCvJM7GiMy7dNGKgjOzV
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