God, because he is infinite, can create out of nothing by his spoken word. We, because we are finite, must create from something else that has already been created.
Is the creative part of our life committed to Christ? Christ is the Lord of our whole life and the Christian life should produce not only truth – flaming truth – but also beauty.
Lex Rex has become Rex Lex. Arbitrary judgment concerning current sociological good is king.
And beauty has a place in the worship of God. Young people often point out the ugliness of many evangelical church buildings. Unfortunately, they are often right. Fixed down in our hearts is a failure to understand that beauty should be to the praise of God. But here in the temple which Solomon built under the leadership of God himself beauty was given an important place.
We are to have a forgiving spirit even before the other person expresses regret for his wrong.
The Christian should be the man with the flaming imagination and the beauty of creation.
Religious subjects are no guarantee that a work of art is Christian.
But our world at the end of the twentieth century has so much destruction without Christian artists so emphasizing the minor theme in the total body of their work that they add to the poorness and destruction of our generation.
Having turned from the One who can fulfill, the One who can give comfort, having turned away from His love, His propositional revelation, there will be death in your city, in your culture!” Modern man stands in that place.
There is no real preaching of the Christian gospel except in light of the fact that man is under the wrath of God – the moral wrath of God. So Paul has a reply to the man who shrugs his shoulders and says, “Why do I need salvation?” His response is this: “You need salvation because you are under the wrath of God. You have broken God’s law.
The temple was covered with precious stones for beauty. There was no pragmatic reason for the precious stones. They had no utilitarian purpose. God simply wanted beauty in the temple. God is interested in beauty.
In this setting modern modern science tends increasingly to become one of two things: either a high form of technology, often with a goal of increasing affluence, or what I would call sociological science. By the latter I mean that, with a weakened certainty about objectivity, people find it easier to come to whatever conclusions they desire for the sociological ends they wish to see attained.
The Christian, therefore, has a sociological base which is extremely strong. As humanists are fighting today against prejudice, they have little philosophical base for their battle. But as a Christian I do: No matter who I look at, no matter where he is, every man is created in the image of God as much as I am. So the Bible.
If they had worshiped Jesus and Caesar, they would have gone unharmed, but they rejected all forms of syncretism.
The Christian’s life is to be a thing of truth and also a thing of beauty in the midst of a lost and despairing world.
In John 13 the point was that, if an individual Christian does not show love toward other true Christians, the world has a right to judge that he is not a Christian. Here Jesus is stating something else which is much more cutting, much more profound: We cannot expect the world to believe that the Father sent the Son, that Jesus’ claims are true, and that Christianity is true, unless the world sees some reality of the oneness of true Christians.
Sweeping out of the inward positive reality, there is to be a positive manifestation externally. It is not just that we are dead to certain things, but we are to love God, we are to be alive to Him, we are to be in communion with Him, in this present moment in history. And we are to love men, to be alive to men as men, and to be in communication on a true personal level with men, in this present moment in history.
Man beginning with his proud humanism, tried to make himself autonomous, but rather than becoming great, he had found himself ending up as only a collection of molecules-and nothing more.
No man has stood in a great place who has not, by the grace of God, stood in lesser ones before. If a person cannot stand faithful in a lesser place, how will he be able to stand in the center of his own culture in front of the twentieth century’s own kind of fiery furnace? To be a man or woman of faith requires training.
In contrast to this, humanism has no final way of saying certain things are right and other things are wrong. For a humanist, the final thing which exists – that is, the impersonal universe – is neutral and silent about right and wrong, cruelty and non-cruelty. Humanism has no way to provide absolutes. Thus, as a consistent result of humanism’s position, humanism in private morals and political life is left with that which is arbitrary.