The “celebrations of life” people hold now pretend that what has happened isn’t real. The funeral homes with flowers everywhere—flowers that themselves will be dead in mere days—cover with their sickening sweetness the stench of death in a corpse we’ve filled with formaldehyde to pretend none of this is really happening….
Read More“An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream.” It’s not an example. Many of our dreams are the fruits of anxiety or indigestion. I once had a dream that Fritz Pauling and I were in Italy stealing a pipe organ. I don’t plan to do what I dreamed. (Although it might make a pretty good buddy caper movie.) The kind of dream Joseph has is extremely rare. But it should remind us of another Joseph: the son of Jacob who had that amazing technicolor dreamcoat. His dreams got him thrown into a pit, then sold into slavery. To where? Egypt. See the similarities? With this new Joseph, and the Mother and Child, God is going to redo the Exodus.
So the “Angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying.…” Angel means messenger. An angel speaks; that is his purpose: he brings God’s Word to particular people. What’s the message?
Read MoreIf you want to understand how medieval Roman theology became so corrupted, look at how it became captive to philosophy. Luther was a law student who became a monk, then a doctoral student, and finally a university professor. He knew the system inherited from Aristotle and Aquinas inside and out. And here was his conclusion: “He who without danger wants to be a philosopher in Aristotle ought to have become first a good fool in Christ.”
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