New Book!
Now available from CreateSpace, Stars Through The Clouds: The Collected Poetry of Donald T. Williams
Stars Through the Clouds is a revival of the lost art of traditional poetry--glimpses of beauty, goodness, and even truth, couched in what today will seem the radical innovations of meter and rhyme!
Stars Through the Clouds is available through CreateSpace for $15
Current Sermon
God's Provision
We have a very important question to ask of every teacher and every teaching. This question does more than simply help us to discern sound doctrine and false teaching. Even more gloriously, it focuses our reading and our understanding of Scripture on the one thing necessary, the one thing altogether lovely, the one Person worthy of all our worship and praise and devotion and of all glory, our all-sufficient Savior and Lord, Jesus Christ. All teaching is to further God’s provision; therefore, all teaching is to center on God’s provision, which is our Lord Jesus Christ. Well did the great Reformer Martin Luther stress that the whole Bible is about Christ only everywhere. The Old Testament prepares for His coming, the Gospels narrate it, the Epistles explain it and apply it. And therefore all our teaching and all our living should bring Him glory and exalt his holy name.
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Reviews
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
I enjoyed the film and would not mind seeing it again. It is not the betrayal of Lewis that Prince Caspian was. It does capture his vision even though it has moments when it is working against itself in doing so. But it could so easily have been so much better, more inspiring verbally and more powerful spiritually, in ways that would not have made it either less cinematic or more sectarian. Lewis fans would have loved it even more, and those who do not know Lewis would have been even more powerfully attracted--or repelled. We know the books have that effect on some. It would have been a risk worth taking, in my opinion.
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Essays
Humanity And Faerie: J. R. R. Tolkien And The Place Of Narrative In Conceptualizing The Christian Life
Few matters have a greater influence on how we understand ourselves and deal with life's problems than how we tell our own life story, how we see and interpret our own personal narrative. Therefore one of the most helpful things a biblical counselor can do to understand clients is to hear and understand the way they tell their own stories. And one of the most helpful things he can do to serve them is to help them see their own personal story in the light of, and as part of, the grand Story that Scripture presents as the key to the meaning of human existence. Without this kind of vision, our clients can never develop a truly and deeply biblical self concept. Our very understanding of what human nature is will depend on our ability to see that larger Story as meaningful and as true. No one has done more to help us pursue that kind of understanding than G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien.
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"The Mind Is Its Own Place": Satan's Philosophy And The Modern Dilemma
Satan began his career by rebelling against his Maker and proceeded by trying to enlist others in his rebellion. Many readers have thought that Milton's Satan began by rebelling against his author and has proceeded by trying to enlist others in that rebellion. A sufficient number of critics seem to have joined up in any case. Whatever we make of his cause or his case, Satan continues to demand our attention, and Milton's characterization of his arch villain remains one of the most fascinating aspects of his great spiritual epic. To the extent that Milton's portrait of the real Enemy of our souls is accurate, it gives us insight not only into Milton's poetry but also into the spiritual battles in which we are still engaged.
Discussion of whether Satan is-intentionally or not-Milton's "real hero" in Paradise Lost has tended to center on Satan's personality. After the defiant freedom fighter of Books I and II-Satan as Che Guevara-the slightly pompous and definitely defensive Theology Professor which is Milton's portrayal of God in Book III can seem a bit of a let down, even to those who have not missed the fact that this picture of Satan is created by accepting at face value his own view of himself. Did Milton fail to anticipate how much less obvious the contrast between the self-serving image created by Satan's propaganda machine and the plain unvarnished truth of Heaven (well analyzed by Stein and others) would be to a generation jaded by constant exposure to spin doctors? No doubt. In this paper we will examine another set of clues Milton gave us as to how we should take his great Antagonist, a set that has perhaps not received the attention it deserves
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Comment
As I look at the current scene, I see a church in desperate need of three great movements of God:
Renaissance:
A recovery of the life of the mind. An increasingly illiterate generation is harder to reach with a faith founded on the message of a Book; an increasingly illiterate church is incapable of experiencing full-orbed Christianity based on the whole counsel of God;
Reformation:
A recovery of sound doctrine. Otherwise, we gorge ourselves on spiritual junk food while the great truths of the faith slip through our fingers;
Revival:
A recovery of vital spirituality. The great error of our generation is to believe that this recovery is possible apart from the first two. Biblically and historically it is not. Without Renaissance and Reformation, all our zeal for Revival is vanity and striving after wind.
On February 2, 2002, I delivered 5 Theses on Ministry at University Church in Athens, GA. This sermon is a revision of my "Final Tirade and Last Diatribe at Trinity Fellowship of Toccoa." It is available here as a Microsoft Word document: 5 Theses on Ministry.