Bnonn Tennant
@BnonnTennant
Symbolic theology guy. Shepherd at http://www.redwoodchurch.nz. Producer http://www.truemagic.nz podcast. Author The Spine of Scripture. Co-author IGTBAM with @thisisfoster
Social media, and particularly X, seems to have a significant place in Reformation 2.0. Yet there is a pastoral and moral question that sits at the heart of how we use X — making it a pastoral and moral question at the heart of how, and whether, reformation will succeed here… 🧵
Tools have teloi. Social media, for instance, wants to forms the soul into a sower of discord in exchange for glory. It wants to make us hasty accusers, or deliberate slanderers. It won’t *inevitably* succeed — but we have to be deliberate about using it, or it will be using us.
Natural law is just a term for describing the covenantal regularites that God has imposed on created things in view of their teloi. If you think natural laws (or physical laws) are like forces with power in themselves, you are not far from worshiping creation.
Learning to write well will automatically eliminate 99% of your "AI vibe." LLMs are just averaging the prose of millions of mediocre writers aping patterns they (almost always wrongly) associate with intelligent, sophisticated communication. It's really not hard to outdo...
We need the gospel of the kingdom, not gospel centeredness. The gospel of the kingdom > gospel centeredness The “gospel centered” movement ended up giving preachers a pass to not preach on culturally controversial topics because those topics are not “the gospel.” The “gospel…
I think it was @Cernovich who said something like "you are who you argue with." That's been helpful to me over the last few years.
In Judges 3:5–11, we have a king of double wickedness, associated with double rivers, defeated by Othniel, the man of double springs (Jdg 1:15), representing the double goodness of God.
Meet Mitsuo Fuchida: an Imperial Japanese Captain (the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack), who came to Christ because of the deeply Christian doctrine of forgiveness exhibited by Christians
I think 1,000 years from now Postmil will be the orthodox outlook in the reformed church. Covenant theology (itself rather new in the grand scheme of things) leads inexorably toward it. Those who say that it doesn’t matter are mistaken. The doctrines of scripture fortify one…
"We have not yet arrived at the goal. There are still treasures in the Scriptures, the knowledge of which have remained hidden to us. All the misery of the Presbyterian churches is owing to their striving to consider the Reformation as completed, and to allow no further…
Widespread use of WhatsApp and Telegram are strong indicators of a second world society.
Everybody in Windmillland is on WhatsApp and nobody is on air conditioning. They can’t convince me it’s first-world here. I love it. But it ain’t first-world.
The kids in a big family don’t all grow up with the same parents. Even when they share the same mom and dad. Time has a way of working on people. Parents aren’t exempt. By the time the youngest arrives, Mom and Dad are changed. Sometimes softer. Sometimes harder. Sometimes both.…
Christian Nationalists believe they can change the country to be more Christlike, when they seem to be incapable of changing themselves to be more Christlike.
I’ve never thought of teaching as just passing along data or information. Sure, it involves facts, logic, and clarity. But if that’s all it is, you’re not really teaching. You’re just transferring files. Teaching, especially in the pastoral sense, runs deeper than that. At its…
I don't agree with Moats on everything, but...
You're not required to clear your throat every time you share an article, video, podcast, or quote you find helpful. You're free to just like and share stuff. Example: "I don't agree with Jordan Leithart Wilson Foster Rigney Sumpter Roberts on everything, but..."
The gospel is inherently political. Jesus announced the good news of the kingdom, and the apostles proclaimed the resurrection from Pss 2 and 110, both of which are about an enthroned Christ who rules the nations.
The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. Don't let the Bohemians ruin that. Free love is a perversion of the gospel of grace; romance images the love between Christ & church as an outworking of the eternal perichoretic onetogetherness of God.
I suspect that the degree to which you are still a modern feminist can be measured by your response to this CS Lewis quote: "An angel is, of course, always He... because whether or not the male is, or is not, the superior sex, the masculine is certainly the superior gender." 👀
The fact that identity is constituted in covenant bodies requires that we baptize our babies. Infant baptism is not explicitly taught in Scripture because it is such a natural and inevitable consequence of the fundamental pattern of covenantal integration. HT: @BnonnTennant