This post continues the thoughts from last week, and is based on insights from Ken Blanchard.

(c) McDonald's

Most of these “Leadership Proverbs” I’ve just picked up, absorbed and imbibed by some process of osmosis along the way and don’t know exactly whom they originated from. But when I know I’ll make reference, and when I don’t it’s not that I’m ungrateful or that I want to appear like a genius. It’s genuinely that I can’t remember. So if I’ve flogged something from you let me know and I’ll happily acknowledge it.

Change your leadership style

There are numerous leadership styles: delegating, visionary, directional, authoritarian, strategic, managing, motivational, coaching, cheerleading, entrepreneurial, reengineering, and more. Many of these styles overlap and some people possess one style and some possess multiple. Everyone has a natural or default leadership style, a style that is most organic and feels most comfortable, a groove they will slot into most easily and unconsciously when they’re not concentrating but just “leading from the hip”. One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is just running with their default style and not modifying their leadership style to suit the particular situation or person at hand. The more flexible you can be the more effective and helpful to your team you will be. The more you tailor your leadership style to the situation you find yourself in the better leader you will be.

Individuals go through a similar life-cycle in the roles they take on to the life-cycle of a team that we saw ast time. Briefly here are the individual development stages, then we’ll talk about the appropriate leadership styles for each situation. Each stage is a combination of high and low competence and high and low enthusiasm.

Stage 1: Enthusiastic beginner. These people are pumped up and excited, but they don’t really know what they’re supposed to do or how to do it. But they’re keen. Low competence, high enthusiasm.

Stage 2: Disillusioned learner. These people are still learning how to do stuff, and the task is harder than they thought and the learning curve is getting steep and hard to navigate. They know enough to know they aren’t doing very well and they have a fair way to go and they’re a bit over the whole thing. Low competence, low enthusiasm.

Stage 3: Capable but cautious. These people have the basic skills and know-how to get the job done, but have to be very conscious of each step they take. They are competent but aren’t sure if they are competent enough to handle the task on their own. High competence, low enthusiasm.

Stage 4: Self-starting flourisher. These people can perform the task from start to finish. A lot of the skill-set is second-nature. They can be told the task and the due date and can then be left to achieve it and trouble-shoot throughout autonomously. High competence, high enthusiasm.

You can see how this cycle corresponds to the team life-cycle. And each stage, both with individuals and with teams, requires a certain leadership style that fits best.

Stage 1 Leadership: Directing. At this stage of development you need to provide clear instructions on exactly what is expected, exactly what you want done, specific instruction on how to do it and when to do it by.

Stage 2 Leadership: Coaching. At this stage you need to provide a fair amount of direction on what needs to be accomplished plus a lot of encouragement and positive feedback to keep motivation high. Keep looking for small wins or where they get it basically right and tell them what it was and that they did it well.

Stage 3 Leadership: Supporting. At this stage people don’t need much instruction or direction, but they need a lot of time to talk and be listened to and encouraged.

Stage 4 Leadership: Delegating. At this stage you just need to give them the task and when it’s due. And although their motivation is already high and they will probably continue to feel good about themselves because they’re doing a good job you still need to be their cheerleader and encourager.

(c) zerobriant

C.S. Lewis married late in life, when he was in his mid-fifties. He married his wife, Joy Gresham, in 1956. She died of cancer on July 13 1960. In 1961 C.S. Lewis published a book called A Grief Observed. The book was a collection of his notebooks reflecting on his own grief.

I love this book.

Not because Lewis always says things I think are correct, often he doesn’t. But I love this book because it’s very honest and very real. This is Lewis turning his command of the English language, his razor sharp intellect and his gift for profound analogy to the task of chronicling and reflecting on his own grief as it happens. Which makes it quite raw and visceral.

He offers us an inside look into one man’s descent into despair, piercing anger towards God, the crumbling of his faith, and then the journey towards a deeper understanding of himself, and both his love for his wife and his God.

Here is a quote where Lewis is contemplating his own plummet into doubt:

“Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead. From the rational point of view, what new factor has H’s death introduced into the problem of the universe? What grounds has it given me for doubting all that I believe? I knew already that all these things, and worse, happened daily. I would have said that I had taken them into account. I had been warned – I had warned myself – not to reckon on worldly happiness. We were even promised sufferings. They were part of the programme. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn’ and I accepted it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not in imagination. Yes; but should it, for a sane man, make quite such a difference as this? No. And it wouldn’t for a man whose faith had been real faith and whose concern for other people’s sorrows had been real concern. The case is too plain. If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which ‘took these things into account’ was not faith but imagination. The taking them into account was not real sympathy. If I had really cared, as I thought I did, about the sorrows of the world, I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came [...] I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me. Now it matters, and I find I didn’t.

“Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game ‘or else people won’t take it seriously’. Apparently it’s like that. Your bid – for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or noneternity – will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high; until you find that you are not playing for counters or sixpences but for every penny you have in the world. Nothing less will shake a man – or at any rate a man like me – out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses.

“[...] And I must surely admit – H. would have forced me to admit in a few passes – that, if my house was a house of cards, the sooner it was knocked down the better. And only suffering could do it.”

                                C.S. Lewis A Grief Observed (pp. 32-33)

I appreciate both the clarity and the honesty.

(c) Jon Worth (http://www.atheistbus.org.uk/bus-photos/)

The evangelistic neo-atheists are all the rage at the moment. From Dawkins to Hitchens to Penn and Teller’s Penn, everyone’s stepping it up. And I’m totally fine with the atheists getting out there, just like I’m fine with any other tiny religious minority group putting forward their faith claims for evaluation and discussion. So I’m not outraged at them or anything like that.

You may have seen these bus ads over in the UK.

Now I’ve read a lot of people take issue with the word “probably”, and while I agree that it’s a bit silly and really does work against what they’re trying to achieve, that’s not what struck me most about the ad when I first saw it.

But before I say anything more let me just point out that I’m not trying to disprove atheism or show why belief in the Christian God is rational or basic or probable. Rather this is simply a reflection on their ad campaign from my position, assuming belief in the Christian God and that this belief is defensible within reason.

Two things about the ad struck me: 1) was how naive it was about what life in the world is really like; and 2) was how desperate the whole argument was.

So let’s briefly consider these two thoughts in reverse order.

1)      I guess it’s only early in the new-atheist’s evangelistic push, and so I suppose I shouldn’t expect too much, but I’ve found the arguments I’ve read to be very lacklustre and intellectually shallow. Although, to be fair, I’ve only read The God Delusion from Dawkins and am only part way through Hitchen’s God is Not Great. Now I’m sure they can do better. And I’m not saying that atheists are stupid because they are most certainly not and I’m sure there are some very good arguments for atheism. I’m just saying that the figureheads of this new militant atheism are less than impressive.

But the reason I find this argument here so vacuous, the “so stop worrying and enjoy your life” part, is that it’s one of two key pieces of atheist rhetoric that contradict. One of the favourite arguments against belief in God – any God, not just the Christian God – is that this belief is supposedly simply a crutch for people too weak to cope with life. People who need a sense of purpose or who weren’t told they were loved enough as a child or something like that. So they need to imagine or find an already existing imaginary friend who can be that crutch for them. So belief in God is simply a way for people too weak and stupid to be able to enjoy life to some degree.

Hopefully the contradiction with the bus ads is becoming clear. The bus ad is another favourite argument against belief in God. It’s the argument that belief in God is an oppressive straitjacket that makes people live in a constant state of fear and guilt. It squashes personal freedom and creativity and restricts people’s lives with arbitrary and repressive rules. And it makes people constantly anxious about a coming judgment and wrath from an arbitrary and petulant God who flies off the handle at minor misdemeanours. Or at least that’s how the caricature goes. But, they say, this God doesn’t exist so stop worrying and enjoy yourself. Belief in God hinders you from enjoying life.

So which is it? Either belief in God helps or it hinders. Does it help you enjoy life more or does it hinder you from enjoying life like you should? It can’t be both.

Of course this doesn’t “prove” or “disprove” belief in God or atheism. It’s just a silly way to argue.

2)      But the main thing that struck me was how naive the ad was. Now maybe I’m putting too much freight on a simple ad slogan that’s designed to be provocative and somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But even still, the worldview it’s portraying is very narrow and parochial. And of course embarrassingly naive.

It is the view of what could only be a very small segment of the population. Here I’m not referring to the atheist minority. I’m referring to the affluent Westerner-ness of it. Sure, if you’ve lived in unbridled peace and prosperity, like I have, your entire remembered experience then there could be some truth to the “if God doesn’t exist I can enjoy life more with no thought of consequences” thought.

But as I understand it, that’s a very small percentage of the world’s current, and perhaps previous, population. The majority of the world live under extreme hardship, poverty and injustice. And the injustice they live through is of the kind where they will never experience true justice and recompense in this life before they die or are exterminated. But only in looking forward to a true and just judge who will put everything right one day is there even the glimmer of hope. Only in looking to a God who will one day completely heal and compensate and also bring true retribution is there any hope for enjoyment.

Now again, this isn’t an argument for the existence of a God. I’m just assuming that’s true and looking at these ads from that vantage point. And they are hopelessly naive.

What would it be like, to look a woman from the Sudan in the eyes who had just been gang raped by 10 men and then seen her sons, daughters, husband and extended family brutally tortured and murdered and piled up in their own excrement right before her eyes, a woman who had been kept alive by her attackers so that she could “live with death constantly close to her”. And similar situations would be multiplied probably millions of times across continents and throughout history. What would it be like to look her in the eyes and say, “Don’t worry, God doesn’t exist. This will never be put right and there is no justice for you. So stop worrying and enjoy your life.”?

Hopelessly naive would probably be an understatement.

Tycho-Coastal Brake Album Cover

Most of these “Leadership Proverbs” I’ve just picked up, absorbed and imbibed by some process of osmosis along the way and don’t know exactly whom they originated from. But when I know I’ll make reference, and when I don’t it’s not that I’m ungrateful or that I want to appear like a genius. It’s genuinely that I can’t remember. But this leadership insight came to me by way of Ken Blanchard.

 

Understand the life-cycle of a team

 Teams have a clear and predictable life cycle. This life cycle corresponds with a life cycle which happens to those individuals within the team – which we’ll look at next week. These cycles have been noted by various observers and everyone gives them their own titles. Here is how I explain them. The titles don’t mean much, it’s what is actually happening and what the titles refer to that is most important. A team has 4 distinct stages. Every team will go through these four stages. None will be short-cut or overcome, but some teams will pass through certain stages faster than others.

Stage 1: Formation. Teams come together as a collection of individuals who have some specific task they are trying to achieve. There’s a fair degree of excitement and enthusiasm. Roles are either assigned or simply taken on unofficially. Rules are set up regarding how the team will work and what is expected. These aren’t so much verbal and stated but rather how things are actually done.

Stage 2: Fighting. The team begins to lose motivation and enthusiasm and can become disillusioned and jaded. Don’t panic or get angry, this is normal and simply needs to be managed and the individuals need to be appropriately cared for. More conflict than normal is to be expected along with team members being confused or unsure of roles and purpose.

Stage 3: Figuring. The team begins to gel and get into a groove where roles are beginning to be owned and understood. Teamwork becomes more natural and trust begins to be created.

Stage 4: Flourishing. The team really catches and owns the vision, individuals understand their place and role within the team, deep trust has formed between team members, more is achieved with less effort, confidence is high as people perform roles “naturally”, motivation and enthusiasm is high.

Each stage of a team’s life has a leadership style that fits best. What makes it complicated is that individuals go through a similar cycle which, though corresponding, doesn’t exactly overlap with this team process. This means that sometimes teams as a whole need a different leadership style than do individuals within that team. But we’ll look at the corresponding leadership styles next week.

Not sure who to credit this to, but I'd like to find out. If you know who did this please tell me.

Karl Barth is easily one of the most important theologians of the past 100 years. He’s interesting, brilliant, poetic, unique, innovative, helpful, stretching, provocative and frustrating. He’s a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Here’s a quote where Barth explains how he views the importance of both preaching and sacraments and also how he thinks preaching and sacraments should be related to each other:

“[The Reformers] regarded the representative event at the centre of the Church’s life as proclamation, as an act concerned with speaking and hearing, indicative of the fact that what is at issue in the thing proclaimed too is not a material connexion but a personal encounter. In this light they had to regulate the mutual relations of preaching and sacrament in a very definite way. To be sure, they could not and would not assign to the sacrament the place which falls to preaching according to Roman Catholic dogmatics. Proclamation of the basis of the promise which has been laid once for all, and therefore proclamation in the form of symbolic action, had to be and to remain essential for them. But this proclamation presupposes that the other, namely, repetition of the biblical promises, is taking place. The former must exist for the sake of the latter, and therefore the sacrament for the sake of the preaching, not vice versa. Hence not the sacrament alone nor preaching alone, nor yet, to speak meticulously, preaching and the sacrament in double track, but preaching with the sacrament, with the visible act that confirms human speech as God’s act, is the constitutive element, the perspicuous centre of the Church’s life [...] Evangelical Churches can and must be termed the churches of preaching.”

                                     Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I.1.70

 Barth’s point is that both preaching and sacraments are vitally important to the life of the church. But it is always sacrament tied to the preaching of God’s Word. Sacrament alongside preaching. Not preaching alongside sacrament. Not preaching and sacrament on equal level. But preaching with sacrament.

 But this isn’t to say sacraments aren’t important, or that they’re optional. Far from it.

Preaching is to be preeminent. And both preaching and sacrament – verbal and visual proclamation – are essential.

(c) Inebriantia aka Jose Ramos

In a recent post I quoted and wrote about the view put forward by Miroslav Volf that in the new creation we will no longer remember wrongs done, either by ourselves or others, due to our perfect enjoyment of God and each other in God.

To view the post click here.

Now, while I am sympathetic to this point of view and am of the opinion that it makes good sense of scriptural evidence and itself has explanatory power, I still don’t find Volf’s entire thesis convincing. And there are two key points where Volf and I part ways. The first is the question of assigning meaning to the events of the past, and the second is the memory of the cross in the new creation. And I view both of these as significant points of departure.

At one point Volf ponders what salvation would look like if we did perfectly remember wrongs suffered for eternity? “… it seems that it would need to entail rendering remembered wrongs in some way meaningful … they would have to be integrated into a narrative.” (p. 183) Volf comes at this from the human-level view and asks whether our whole past needs to be rendered meaningful to be redeemed?  And in the end Volf rejects the ideas that all events must in some way be rendered meaningful and that all events will in fact be rendered meaningful. And thus it coheres with his thesis that past wrongs will not be displayed as meaningful but will eternally resist being integrated into a meaningful whole and will instead slip from our memory.

Whether the redemption of people can be true without the redemption of all their past experiences is an interesting question, though not the heart of the issue. (Though I tend to think the answer is: yes it can). To my mind the heart of the problem isn’t so much anthropological but rather God-shaped. The issue isn’t so much tied to whether personal history must be shown to be meaningful within a wider narrative for true redemption of a person to occur, but instead is God the type of God who overrules a world which is meaningful? Does God see all the events of the past with meaning within a wider narrative? Does God design and execute all the events of my past with a meaning and within a wider narrative?

I am convinced that this type of high view of God’s sovereignty and providence is the picture the Bible describes. The issue here isn’t so much will past events be rendered and/or revealed as meaningful but are past events actually in fact meaningful, regardless of how hidden that meaning is to us?

So for me the question isn’t, “Do the events of my past have meaning?” – I think they do – so much as, “Will their God-designed meaning within His narrative be revealed to me in the new creation?”

In sum, the core issue isn’t about the nature of humanity or the nature of redemption but rather the nature of God and his rule over his creation.

I’m not convinced, however, that the fact that all my past events do have meaning – a meaning which is at present largely hidden but will one day be revealed – necessarily means that non-remembrance will not and must not occur.

Secondly, Volf asks, “If wrongs suffered will not come to mind in the world of perfect love, does it mean that the death of Christ will not come to mind either?” (p. 190) to which he answers, “True, our being new creatures in eternity will have been achieved in part through Christ’s death. But it does not necessarily follow that life as a new creature is predicated on the eternal display of the means by which such life was achieved … The cross of Christ is, rather, a stage on the road to resurrection and exaltation … a stage that can be left in the past even if its effects last for eternity.” (p. 191)

This is a change of mind for Volf from the position he posed in Exclusion and Embrace, where he believed the cross would be eternally remembered. And it’s not a change I’m particularly excited about.

I should be clear that I’m not of the opinion that the cross is an eternal event in God. When the New Testament refers to Christ as “the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world” (Rev. 13:8) I think it means that from eternity Christ had been destined for the cross within the realm of time. But I do believe that the cross is so central to the New Testament, so central to the character of God, so central in regards the revelation of God, so central to what love is, so central to the display of God’s glory and victory that I find the proposal that it will not be remembered in eternity not particularly plausible.

But does that mean that the Cross will be the one act of past wrong that will be remembered into eternity? The greatest act of evil in all of history will be the only one remembered while all others will fade into non-remembrance?

I’m not sure.

Is it the uniqueness of the cross that will set it apart? Is it the triumph of God over evil in and through this specific evil that will separate it?

I’m not sure.

But on at least these two issues I’m not keen to follow Volf. I think at these two places he has memory problems.

I don't know who to credit for this photo.

Most of these “Leadership Proverbs” I’ve just picked up, absorbed and imbibed by some process of osmosis along the way and don’t know exactly whom they originated from. But when I know I’ll make reference, and when I don’t it’s not that I’m ungrateful or that I want to appear like a genius. It’s genuinely that I can’t remember. So if I’ve flogged something from you let me know and I’ll happily acknowledge it.

 

Give Credit and Take Blame

 When you work in a team every member plays a role and the achievement belongs to the whole team. For example, even if person B’s idea is used and person A’s is discarded person A was still a vital part of the process because her idea is quite possibly what sparked person B to think her idea, which would not have occurred without person A. You get what I mean?

So when the team achieves something make sure you give the team the credit, both privately and publically. When a part of the team runs something or organises something or goes beyond the job description to get something done give them the credit. People will assume you were involved as the leader, and even if they don’t who cares? Humility is a virtue and a struggle for most everyone, and here is a great way to cultivate it. Give the credit away to your team members.

And when things fall in a heap and crash and burn you take the blame. As team leader the responsibility falls on you to make something happen. And so when it doesn’t happen the responsibility sits on your shoulders.

Now this is different from it being directly your fault. Someone else might have been at fault, in that direct sense. But you were responsible. You were responsible for the activity, you were responsible for the person, you were responsible for the oversight. Even if it wasn’t directly your fault it was directly your responsibility. It happened on your watch.So you take the blame.

This doesn’t mean that the person at fault takes no responsibility or perhaps shouldn’t  expect any consequences or reprimands. All that is still important and we’ll talk about that later, accountability has to happen and responsibility honours people. It’s okay to point out, “Person A, we really needed you to come through on that.” But, even with all that, as the team leader you also need to be quick to show that, in the end, you are responsible and so you accept the blame.

Give credit and take blame. Don’t do it the other way around. It destroys teams and undermines people’s confidence in you as the leader and so erodes their trust in you. “He just takes all the credit. He’s only in this for the ego boost. She always dishes out the blame. She’s the one in charge. Am I going to be the next scapegoat she unloads failures on?”

Give credit and take blame. Your team will feel appreciated and supported and they will have increased respect and trust in you as a leader.

Unknown artist. If anyone knows who did this let me know.

One of the most prolific and influential theological writers right now is a guy called N. T. Wright, Bishop of Durham in England.

 What makes Wright so interesting is that he’s not obviously a “hero” or a “villain”, sometimes he’s more like one, sometimes he’s more like the other. He has some really helpful things to say about Jesus, some helpful correctives on Paul, some very unhelpful views – in my opinion – on justification and imputation and some extraordinarily good stuff on the resurrection.

 Here is a quote from the Times of London Easter Sunday opinion piece that Wright wrote (yes, that just happened) earlier this year. The whole article is worth checking out:

 

“But ‘resurrection’ to 1st-century Jews wasn’t about ‘going to Heaven’: it was about the physically dead being physically alive again. Some Jews (not all) believed that God would do this for all people in the end. Nobody, including Jesus’s followers, was expecting one person to be bodily raised from the dead in the middle of history. The stories of the Resurrection are certainly not ‘wish-fulfilments’ or the result of what dodgy social science calls ‘cognitive dissonance’. First-century Jews who followed would-be messiahs knew that if your leader got killed by the authorities, it meant you had backed the wrong man. You then had a choice: give up the revolution or get yourself a new leader. Going around saying that he’d been raised from the dead wasn’t an option.

 Unless he had been.”

 -          NT Wright

Photographer Unknown. But I'd like to know.

This year marks the 500^th Anniversary of the birth of John Calvin.

 Calvin was a part of the Reformation in the 1500s and played an instrumental role in the church rediscovering its gospel roots. Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany, in 1517. Much to Luther’s surprise this launched what we now call the Protestant Reformation.

 Calvin himself was not converted until somewhere around 1533 or 1534. (Calvin is quite muted in any autobiographical comments and so the exact date here is hard to pin down). So the Reformation had been in full swing for something like 15 years before Calvin even came on the scene. But it would be fair to say that it was Calvin who took the thought and principles of the Reformation and really organised and clarified them.

 Most people who know the phrase Calvinism or Calvinist would probably link it mainly to an over-emphasis on predestination and election. But Calvin and Calvinism (which can sometimes be quite different) are about much more than that, and those issues are in fact quite secondary to Calvin’s main priorities and emphases.

 Or people know Calvinism as TULIP . But TULIP only talks about Calvinism in opposition to Arminianism .

 Here’s Charles Spurgeon’s definition of Calvinism. I can’t say it any better, and this is my kind of Calvinism:

 ”To me, Calvinism means the placing of the eternal God at the head of all things. I look at everything through its relation to God’s glory. I see God first, and man far down in the list … Brethren, if we live in sympathy with God, we delight to hear Him say, ‘I am God, and there is none else’”

 It’s important to say at this point that Calvin was by no means perfect or even close to it. He made some major mistakes and no one thinks he’s perfect. But here is a list of some of the things I find so appealing about Calvin:

 1)      His top concern was that the glory of God was upheld. Here’s a quote from Calvin’s work The Institutes of the Christian Religion: “For until men recognise that they owe everything to God, that they are nourished by his Fatherly care, that he is the Author of their every good, that they should seek nothing beyond him – they will never yield him willing service. Nay, unless they establish their complete happiness in him, they will never give themselves truly and sincerely to him.” (p. 41) What a great quote. Not only does he get in a great use of the word “nay”, but he holds up honouring God and being totally happy in him as the main game.

2)      Calvin’s always sought to put Jesus front and centre in all his preaching and thinking and theologizing. Here’s a quote from Calvin’s Commentary on Colossians: “For how comes it that we are “carried about with so many strange doctrines” (Hebrews 13:9), but because the excellence of Christ is not perceived by us? . . . This, therefore, is  the only means of  retaining, as well as restoring, pure doctrine:  to  place Christ  before  the  view  such  as He  is with  all His  blessings,  that His  excellence may  be  truly perceived.”

3)      Linked with this, Calvin hated speculation. He was always concerned to start with what God has actually done, not on what might have happened or what God could possibly do. He always wanted to follow God in history and think God’s thoughts after Him.

4)      Scripture was his number one authority and the place where God spoke most clearly. Everything was assessed in the light of, and subordinated to, God’s word revealed in scripture.

5)      Calvin was an industrious preacher. He preached through books in what is called an expositional style, which means he started at verse 1 and went through the book from start to finish. But get this, he started preaching through Acts in 1549 and preached every week through that book and finished in 1554! He would preach two different sermons on Sunday, and then also preach every day every second week. Between 1550 and 1559 he took 270 weddings!

 So we remember and read and celebrate Calvin not because we want to make Calvin great, but because the more we look at Calvin the more we are pointed back again and again to the Scriptures and because through Calvin we see Christ better and more clearly.

 Thank you God for Calvin.

 Here are some links to stuff on Calvin, some of them are free and some of them cost $$$:

John Calvin and His Passion For the Majesty of God - Free

Portrait of Calvin by THL Parker - Free

An article on Calvin and Preaching - Free

 

A biographical sermon on Calvin by John Piper - Free

 Calvin’s Institutes

A Reader’s Guide to Calvin’s Institutes

Theological Guide to Calvin’s Institutes

(c) Mon0Lith

“Since we are responsible for the far-reaching destruction to creation it is argued that it is now our responsibility to preserve creation from destruction … However, with this line of reasoning a number of important theological distinctions are in danger of being blurred. Inflicting destructive effects upon creation falls indeed within the realm of human responsibility and has therefore from the earliest times onward been interpreted as sin … Yet, the preservation or restoration of creation cannot be a human task if this creation is continuously created and preserved by God who brought it into being in the first place. Theologically, creation, including the sustaining and preserving of creation, is a divine and not a human work. Therefore, creation is not in the same sense a field of human action as, for instance, politics, science or business. The term ethics of creation contains a dangerous ambiguity. It seems that the same absolutism of human action which has characterized the human exploitation of creation is now returning in the guise of rescuing it … What seems to be needed is not an ethics of creation, but an ethic of createdness which is informed by a theology of creation.” 

                                                 Colin Gunton, The Triune Creator