East of Everest

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Latest Posts & Commentary

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Smashing the Kingdom of Jove

Charles Norris Cochrane’s summary of Augustine’s critique: In misapprehending God’s kingdom, man misappropriates power

"[T]he error of Classicism may be summarily described as a failure to identify the true source of power and, therewith, its true character and conditions."

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Commentary & Exposition

- Colossians
- Colossians 1:1-29

The Time & Space Between Faith & Love

Acknowledging the rule & power of God in the church by its expressions of love

This is how redemption mimics the original creation: What begins in the act of God as an instance of creation—a man’s new birth, much as a germinated seed—also blooms and then blossoms again among the other flowers in a field of perennials.

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Commentary & Exposition

- Colossians
- Colossians 1:1-29

Awareness & our Earliest and Natural Obligations of Love

The obligations in family predict their display in the church

Awareness, then, eventually and increasingly admits to the world as it is, that we might act within it as we are required. From its vantage point is a near horizon, from which rises the light of our obligations and the evening of their refusals.

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Photograph: A Tea Garden in Ilam, Nepal

The photograph of a tea garden in east Nepal, seen above, is part of a small collection of photographs that I have added to the website.

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Ascribed & Prescribed (Notes on Ideas)

The Dharmaśāstras: The Reordering of the World, One More Time

The emergence of the Hindu Dharmaśāstra texts in India as polemical rhetoric

To say, as the Dharmaśāstras do, that some people know dharma is to also say that others do not. There is, then, not only a stated purpose to the Dharmaśāstras, but one that is set in a telling awareness of disagreement and debate.

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Notes on Scripture

Redemption: The Purchase of a Postscript

Noting the persistence of God’s will in the nature of redemption

Our ways, which are reflective and cursory, contrast to the way that God declares his purposes in promises, and then binds himself to their fulfillment in action. Both their initiation and their performance proceed upon the unchanging character of God.

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Edits & Rewrites

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Reflections (& Refractions)

Refitting an Analogy

Jesus Christ makes the mercy of God apprehensible

In other words, justice and mercy may exist together, and we are not left to the precarious balance in which government bureaucrats must balance the two principles. They each and simultaneously find their source and definition in the very character of God.

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Select Quotations

A Good World for Fallen Man

God makes the strained relation between man & earth to serve man's desire for heaven

"The present world is neither the best nor the worst possible, but it is a good world for fallen man."

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“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

C.S. Lewis
The Four Loves

“See the heinousness of sin by this, that Christ was made a curse…

…if thou wouldst know what sin is, go to mount Calvary.”

Thomas Goodwin
Christ our Mediator

“Holiness does not consist in mystical speculations, enthusiastic fervors, or uncommanded austerities; it consists in thinking as God thinks, and willing as God wills.”

John Brown
Expository Discourses on 1 Peter

“Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.”

Robert Louis Stevenson

“Grace knows no jealousies except for the honor of God.”

Geerhardus Vos
Seeking and Saving the Lost

Scripture Notes & Commentary

- Commentary & Exposition

- Exodus
- Exodus 1:1-14

Redemption: Renegotiating the Value of Creation

What Israel’s Exodus tells us about redemption

If Israel would be delivered from Egypt at all, it would be at God’s initiative. Israel’s new life, then, must wholly subsist in the kind and quality of life that God gave Israel through his intervention on Israel’s behalf and, after the fact, no other definition of life could exist for her.

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- Commentary & Exposition

- Exodus
- Exodus 1:1-14

How Christ’s Toil Made Light Work

The condition of Israel's affliction & redemption from Egypt

- Commentary & Exposition

- Acts of the Apostles
- Acts 2:1-13

Reading the Old Testament by the New (& the New by the Old)

The Christian reads as did the prophets, by the Spirt and in search of Jesus Christ

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Assorted Articles

- Reflections (& Refractions)

Life’s Rhythms & the Telling of Time

Contemplating affection for eternity in the passing of days

Time, then, becomes something more to us than the measured span of what we do. There is also the frightening contemplation of what is not done: tasks uncompleted, people unvisited, God’s grace unacknowledged.

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- Ascribed & Prescribed (Notes on Ideas)

The Stump Speech Becomes Secularism’s Sermon

Flattery, politics, & the search for power

- Essays & Assorted Articles

Syrian Religion in Ancient China

Syncretism & religious aspiration

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Read & Overheard

- Select Quotations

An Ironic, Apprehensible Summary of a Problem

A brief and well-known excerpt taken from C.S. Lewis’ 1941 sermon, "The Weight of Glory"

“We are far too easily pleased.”

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- Select Quotations

Moral Awareness: Caught up in the Middle of Things

Moral obligations are discovered in moral experience

"It would be nice to test the ground of morality before we step on it. But to all such proposals there is one inevitable reply: they come too late."

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- Select Quotations

Religion is Contemplated in God’s Gift of Redemption

A Selection taken from Herman Bavinck’s The Wonderful Works of God

"Without special revelation the religion of men and the philosophy of thinkers do not have a right knowledge of God, and hence no right knowledge of man and the world, and of sin and redemption."

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The Christian Can Hope Perfectly

Geerhardus Vos on the Christian’s hope

"But the Christian’s hope is positive. His youth is like that of the heir who knows precisely what awaits him. No, more than this, the Christian has the assurance which no heir in temporal things can ever have. He knows with absolute certainty that the inheritance will not merely be kept for him, but that he will be kept for it."

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