Faith Without Rocks is Dead.

"Faith is the substance of fossils hoped for, the evidence of links unseen" (Lunn, The Flight from Reason).

Worthy of the Table.

Is a man worthy of the bread and the wine?

Well, we know that the autonomous man—the man who remains in his sins, living according to his own laws—is not worthy of the body and blood of Christ. No, he is only worthy of death, judgement, and the eternal wrath of God.

But what of us? Are we worthy of the table? In and of ourselves, we are not still; you know we are not. Rather, in partaking, we are being made worthy. And this is the point of Christ's invitation: we need to be worthy. The table is for us and we must partake; we are commanded to partake (Luk 22:19). We did not deserve or merit our place at the table, but the Father, through Christ, in the Holy Spirit, has invited us anyway. 

This means that we are either completely and in every sense unworthy of the bread and wine, or we are being made worthy of the bread and wine in the partaking of it.

Grace is for you; the table is for you. So with thankfulness in your hearts, together with the Body, come and welcome to Jesus.

The Evil Stratagems of Problem Passages.

“Illegitimate systematics is done by the kind of people who put together jigsaw puzzles with a pair of scissors and mallet handy. The solution is not to abandon systematics, which is not possible anyway. Everybody in this discussion has a system because everybody wants to understand what the Bible as a whole teaches. Our task is nevertheless to guard ourselves against Procrustean interpretations, and we do this best by acknowledging frankly that every school of thought will have such temptations. This happens when we get certain passages ‘down’ and then feel impelled to protect that understanding against the evil stratagems of problem passages” (Wilson, Against the Church, p. 54).