The Tulip Driven Life

The Reformed church is deeply divided over many issues, not the least of which is gender roles, or even more fundamentally perhaps (depending on how we are defining things), gender itself, what it means to be a man, and what does it mean to be a woman. What is masculinity and femininity? What does the Bible have to say about this, if anything at all? It should be pointed out that this crisis mirrors the very real issues in our nations today, especially here in the United States, concerning gender/sexuality, etc. It is quite likely that the  # metoo  movement has been able to take root in the church as well because there are real issues of abuse, and because there are real instances of primarily women lying about being abused, stretching the truth, etc. Both men and women are sexual sinners, and I have seen and/or heard of both of these situations, men abusing and women lying about abuse. This of course means that the church is very worldly, rather than the world being ver...

By: Thomas F. Booher I had a wonderful discussion with a Christian who I would best describe (based just on one extended conversation) as an Anglo-Catholic in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), and a big fan of C.S. Lewis. He is a philosophy professor, and with him I probably had the most stimulating conversation about God and Christianity that I've ever had with a non-Calvinist.  In fact, he said the one thing he was pretty sure that he wasn't, was a Calvinist. A lot of other things were still on the table for him, but Calvinism probably wasn't (but we'll see). Yet in a real sense, this didn't bother me too much. It is akin to our admiration as Reformed believers for C.S. Lewis (who was also very much like an Anglo-Catholic) or G.K. Chesterton, both of whom explicitly rejected Calvinism as making God into something evil, not unlike my philosophy friend.  I'd like in a separate post to talk about justification by faith alo...

Today in Omnibus class we discussed whether angels can have physical/human bodies. Now before you think, "Oh dear, what useless speculation" let me argue in defense of these kinds of questions.  To arrive at an answer to a question like this (if you take the question seriously), you have to summon up all your theology that is relevant to the question. What this does is reveal what you think about God, and what you are willing to say about God to argue for your position. So, what I learned from this question from one of my students is that he does believe angels have physical, human bodies, and to get there he argued that God Himself must have a human body, face, back, etc., because God said as much when He revealed His back to Moses in the cleft of the rock. He further claimed that, since we are made in the image of God and have physical bodies, so must God, otherwise it is basically dishonest to say that we are made in the image of God. I tried to explain anthropomorphi...