Kevin Stilley

Archives for May 2008

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Slowing Down Your Church

Slow Down

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Planning another big event at your church will probably make your people more active and bring in more people, but is it really what is best for your church? Consider the following paragraph from W. R. Greg’s Life at High Pressure.

Beyond doubt, the most salient characteristic of life in this latter portion of the 19th century is its SPEED, — what we may call its hurry, the rate at which we move, the high-pressure at which we work;– and the question to be considered is, first, whether this rapid rate is in itself a good; and, next, whether it is worth the price we pay for it–a price rarely reckoned up, and not very easy thoroughly to ascertain. Unquestionably, life seems fuller and longer for this speed–is it truly ricer and more effective? No doubt we can do more in our seventy years for the pace at which we travel; but are the extra things we can do always worth doing? No doubt, we can do more; but is “doing” everything, and “being” nothing.

That was written in the 19th century. How much more might it apply in the 21st century?

[Read more…]

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The Eschatology of Jonathan Edwards

Here is is another article that I contributed to the Dictionary of Premillennial Theology .  As with the previous articles, I would change some things in this material if contributing to this or a similar compilation.  Nevertheless, I believe the following to be both accurate and helpful.

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Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) is generally recognized as America’s greatest theologian and philosopher. At the time of Edwards’ ministry most of Protestant theology, being heir to the amillennialism of Augustine and Calvin, spiritualized the Scripture’s teaching concerning the millennium. Edwards, on the other hand, was innovative in the development of a postmillennial eschatological vision. Edwards saw the millennium as a literal historical reality which was the telos toward which history had been progressing since the fall of Adam. He thought it probable that this latter-day glory would begin in America. His millennial expectation is often considered to have been a major factor in the social movement resulting in the American Revolution.

Edwards interpreted tribulational passages as predictions of the apostasy of the Roman Catholic Church and the suppression of true religion. He believed that the Reformation marked the shortening of days (Matt. 24:22), which is to be identified with the restricting of the powers of spiritual Rome and the papal Antichrist. Applying the year-day theory of interpretation to the twelfth chapter of Revelation, Edwards proposed that the millennium would arrive approximately 1260 years after 606 A.D., when the Bishop of Rome was recognized as having universal authority. Thus, the millennium was imminent and the revival fires of the Great Awakening could very well be harbingers of the coming age when great progress in technology would free mankind from material concerns to engage more fully in the noble exercises of mind and vital religion. At this time the kingdom of Antichrist will be utterly overthrown and there will be a national conversion of the Jews. Following the millennium will come a period of great apostasy and tribulation, which will be superseded by the personal Second Coming of Jesus Christ in infinite majesty. The saints will be gathered unto their Head, forever to be in his presence, and the wicked will be summoned before the judgement-seat of Christ. (Kevin Stilley )

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, general editors Perry Miller and John E. Smith, 10 volumes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957-1993); ______, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, reprint 1992, 2 volumes (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Press, 1834).

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Jonathan Edwards recommended titles

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Reading and Writing – Book Quotes

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.
~ John Locke

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks
All the sweet serenity of books.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Books are more than books. They are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.
~ Amy Lowell

The world exists to be put in a book.
~ Stephane Mallarme

Readers, on the other hand, have at least 7.5 books going all the time. Actually, the number of books a reader takes on is usually directly related to the number of bathrooms he has in his home and office. I am working on a survey that will show that, over a lifetime, readers are in bathrooms seven years and three months longer than nonreaders.
~ Calvin Miller, “Confessions of a Librophliac” in Christianity Today, January 18, 1985, page 32.

A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.
~ John Milton

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.
~ John Milton

What enriches language is its being handled and exploited by beautiful minds–not so much by making innovations as by expanding it through more vigorous and varied applications, by extending it and deploying it. It is not words that they contribute: what they do is enrich their words, deepen their meanings and tie down their usage; they teach it unaccustomed rhythms, prudently though and with ingenuity.
~ Michel de Montaigne, “On Some Lines of Virgil”

There is hardly any grief that an hour’s reading will not dissipate.
~ Montesquieu

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear that it will go off in you face. . . . It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy.
~ Edward P. Morgan

Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing.
~ Christopher Morley in The Haunted Bookshop

Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.
~ Kathleen Norris

Read properly, fewer books than a hundred would suffice for a liberal education. Read superficially, the British Museum Library might still leave the student a barbarian.
~ A. R. Orage)

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
~ P.J. O’Rourke

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.
~ George Orwell

A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.
~ Katherine Patterson

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.
~ Anna Quindlen, in How Reading Changed My Life, page 6.

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. they are the destination, and the journey. They are home.
~ Anna Quindlen, in How Reading Changed My Life, page 70.

Tough choices face the biblioholic at every step of the way–like choosing between reading and eating, between buying new clothes and buying books, between a reasonable lifestyle and one of penurious but masochistic happiness lived out in the wallow of excess.
~ Tom Raabe, Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.
~ Hazel Rochman

People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory.
~ Franklin Roosevelt

The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.
~ Andrew Ross

The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.
~ Muriel Rukeyser, “The Speed of Darkness”

If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.
~ John Ruskin, in Sesame and Lilies

You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable–nay, letter by letter… you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly “illiterate,” undeducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, — that is to say, with real accuracy– you are for evermore in some measure an educated person.
~ John Ruskin

The Bible is the one book to which any thoughtful man may go with any honest question of life or destiny and find the answer of God by honest searching.
~ John Ruskin

There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
~ Bertrand Russell

All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write.
~ Carl Sandburg

The difference between the effect produced on the mind by thinking for yourself and that produced by reading is incredibly great…For reading forcibly imposes on the mind thoughts that are as foreign to its mood as the signet is to the wax upon which it impresses its seal. The mind is totally subjected to an external compulsion to think this or that for which it has no inclination and is not in the mood…The result is that much reading robs the mind of all elasticity, as the continual pressure of a weight does a spring, and that the surest way of never having any thoughts of your own is to pick up a book every time you have a free moment.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), page 89.

Desultory reading is delightful, but to be beneficial, our reading must be carefully directed.
~ Seneca

It does not matter how many, but how good, books you have.
~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Learning to read . . . we slowly learn to read ourselves. Once we learn how to read, even if then we do not live more wisely, we can at least begin to be aware of why we have not.
~ Mark Shorer

No furniture is so charming as books.
~ Sydney Smith

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
~ Richard Steele

And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.
~ Robert Lewis Stevenson, in An Apology For Idlers

As if a man’s soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed an narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train.
~ Robert Lewis Stevenson, in An Apology For Idlers

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
~ Robert Lewis Stevenson, in An Apology For Idlers

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.
~ William Styron

My home is where my books are.
~ Ellen Thompson

Books are the treasured wealth of the world, to fit the inheritance of generations.
~ Henry David Thoreau

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
~ Henry David Thoreau

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!
~ Henry David Thoreau

Books must be read as deliberately and as reservedly as they were written.
~ Henry David Thoreau

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read towards the right and I recommend this method.
~ James Thurber

Book love, my friends, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.
~ Anthony Trollope

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world, “lighthouses” (as a poet said) “erected in the sea of time.” They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
~ Barbara Tuchman.

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Nationalizing The Oil Industry

My grandfather was a Socialist back in 1920s and 1930s. He believed that the government could do a better job of running important industries than the private sector. In recent years there have been growing numbers of Americans who are calling for not just government intrusion into the private sector but for “taking it over.” Until recently socialized medicine was at the forefront of what appears to be a growing national zeitgeist. However, it is now most visible in the calls for the nationalizing of the oil industry. First, it was Hillary Clinton saying that she would “take the profits” of the oil companies, and now Maxine Waters wants to “take over” the oil companies.

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Baby News

Our baby is due in September so “baby news” catches our attention these days. I simply can’t understand the kind of thinking that would result in the scenario below. This is excerpted from The Sun Online:


A British couple abandoned their newborn twin girls, conceived by in vitro fertilization, at a hospital — because they wanted boys.

The 59-year-old mother and 72-year-old father conceived in India with fertility treatment and returned to England for the birth.

They told horrified hospital workers they did not want the “wrong sex” babies immediately after the Caesarean section at New Cross Hospital in Wolverhampton, England.

The husband then asked how soon it would be before his wife could try IVF again in the hope of getting a boy to continue the family name.

Female babies are often abandoned in India for being the wrong sex.

I think that we were all kind of hoping that Child #5 (we still don’t have a name picked out) would be a girl, so that Tessa would have a little sister rather than four brothers. However, when this baby gets here we will love it just as much regardless of whether it is a girl or boy, healthy or not.

If you have not yet seen the baby news regarding Sarah Palin, CLICK HERE to read Susan’s thoughts about it. That is a baby news story that is inspiring rather than heartbreaking.

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Using A First Name

We want our children to show proper respect for the adults in their lives. Therefore, we do our best to instill in them proper manners such as looking an adult in the eye when spoken to, not correcting their elders, answering with “Yes, Sir,” and “No, Maam,” and using adults’ last names, eg. Mr. Jones, Mrs. Smith.

In The Penguin Classic Baby Name Book, Grace Hamlin writes of the changes in social customer regarding the use of first names.

One of the more puzzling aspects of Victorian manners to modern readers is the importance placed on the use of the first name. Anthony Trollope managed to write an entire novel (He Knew He Was Right) about a man who nearly loses his sanity because an old family friend calls his wife “Emily” after her marriage.

The use of a first name among adults was a badge of intimacy. Male characters, even fast friends, tend to call each other by their last names. Women are more free with first names, but reaching that stage of closeness in a friendship is a distinct event, never something to take for granted. And when a single man calls a single woman by a first name, it is usually a sign that he intends something warmer still. Trollope’s novels are full of moments when intimacy is established or refused or even unexpectedly maintained. Lily Dale, for instance, continues to call John Eames “John” long after she refuses to marry him, in both The Small House at Allington and The Last Chronicle of Barset. By doing so, she is paying him a significant compliment.

So, pay me a significant compliment, just call me Kevin.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

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Are Professors Being Expelled

Expelled Dembski“Professors aren’t being fired because they support intelligent design, they are being fired for lots of other reasons and then they have to justify their firing to other people and say it was because they advocated ID, rather than admit they were in some other way inadequate.”

That is what I was recently told by a cheeky fellow who was trying to cast an aura of confidence and disdain.

[Read more…]

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Girls Shouldn’t Just Wanna Have Fun

Parker & KevinGirls shouldn’t just wanna have fun, and neither should anyone else. Consider this story told by J.P. Moreland in The Lost Virtue Of Happiness which he co-authored with Klaus Issler;

When my daughter’s eight-grade team was being creamed in a soccer game, the coach said at halftime, “Girls, don’t worry about the score. The reason we play soccer is to have fun; so let’s try to have a blast during the second half and go home happy whatever the final result.” That coach reminds me of Cyndi Lauper’s song “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” He was mindlessly parroting the cultural mantra that pleasurable satisfaction is the goal of life. The reasons my wife and I wanted our daughter to play soccer where to learn how to win and to lose, to cooperate with others, to sacrifice for a long-term goal, which requires delaying instant gratification, and — well, you get the picture. What was really sad was not simply the coach’s speech, but the fact than none of the parents so much as batted an eye at his counsel.

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The Eschatology of Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I wrote the following article on the eschatology of Charles Haddon Spurgeon for the Dictionary of Premillennial Theology . There are things I would add and/or say differently if writing it today, but I believe it still to be accurate and helpful.

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Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Eschatology of :

C. H. Spurgeon (1834-1892), famous London pastor known as the “Prince of Preachers,” believed that the personal return of Christ should be proclaimed dogmatically, from the pulpit of the preacher and the lectern of the teacher. He was convinced that failure to preach the Second Advent would inevitably result in preaching and teaching which he described as “lame.” His own sermons abound with the theme of hope, and central to this hope is the Great Hope of His soon coming. A confession statement signed by Spurgeon and published in the Sword and Trowel explicitly states; “Our hope is the Personal Pre-Millennial Return of the Lord Jesus in Glory.”

When preaching upon eschatological matters, Spurgeon thought it proper to deal primarily with those things he perceived to be “clearly revealed.” Thus, his eschatological preaching tended to focus upon imminency and the believer’s response to the Great Hope. Some have taken Spurgeon’s declination to meticulously systematize his eschatology as an opportunity to impose their own eschatological grid upon his teachings. Recently, there have been attempts to redefine Spurgeon as a midtribulationist. However, Spurgeon’s sermons, as well as his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, clearly demonstrate a posttribulational premillennial eschatology that is generally referred to as historic premillennialism. (Kevin Stilley)

BIBLIOGRAPHY: C. H. Spurgeon, “The Ascension and the Second Advent Practically Considered,” Spurgeon’s Expository Encyclopedia, vol. 4, (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1951), pp. 437-448; ______. The Gospel of Matthew, (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987). ______. “He Cometh With Clouds,” The Treasury of the New Testament, vol. 4, (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, n.d.), pp. 663-669; “Mr. Spurgeon’s Confession of Faith,” The Sword & The Trowel, August 1891, pp. 446-448;

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Argumentum ad misericordiam

Tomorrow I must turn in grades for the classes I taught at the college this Spring. Over the last few weeks I have fielded no less than nine appeals for mercy.

“If I don’t make a good grade I will lose my scholarship.”

“If I don’t make a good grade it will look bad on my pageant documentation.”

“I would have done better but ….

Well you get the idea.

These appeals to mercy are know as the argumentum ad misericordiam fallacy. In the Fall I plan on starting the semester with a discussion of it. Rather than present a reasoned argument with supporting information the appellant makes an attempt to evoke sympathy. Even if logically irrelevant such an argument can be successful if the one to whom the plea is made is a compassionate bloke. Personally, I would prefer that they bring me a shiny red apple — or a cup of Starbucks coffee.

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