Bøger af Hal Brunson

In sharp distinction to the colorfully clad false prophets of Elijah's day, like John the Baptist after him, Elijah stood out singularly and strangely-a different kind of messenger with a different kind of message, wearing a different kind of mantle. Elijah's mantle was not the colorfully embroidered garments of the wealthy, much less the elegant robe of royalty, nor even the typical garment of the average man; neither was Elijah's mantle the soft clothing of false prophets, those reeds forever shaking in the capricious winds of popular doctrine. No, Elijah's mantle was the rough and rare garment of the Divinely-called prophet. Let the true sons of Elijah take heart with Elisha, for God has sovereignly chosen to leave the mantle of Elijah upon the earth, even upon the shoulders of men with like passions as Elijah, men of frailties and fear, failures and foibles, but also men of power through the amplitude of Elijah's mantle. If we would rightly claim the mantle of Elijah, we must wear it as he wore it, our ministries attesting to the same Divine power that the mantle invested upon Elijah our forerunner. So let us ask ourselves: If Elijah's mantle signifies his singular, unique, and divine authority as a God-called preacher, what is the fabric of such a mantle and of such a preacher, and, most importantly, has the mantle of Elijah fallen upon us, and are its threads woven into our ministries? If we would bear Elijah's name and wear Elijah's mantle, we must serve Elijah's God; like the rugged prophet, we must be "very jealous for Jehovah, the God of Israel"; otherwise, no matter how we may array ourselves, we cannot claim Elijah's mantle if we do not proclaim this one truth, the very essence of Elijah's name and the very fabric of his mantle-Jehovah is God. Let us not claim Elijah's mantle if we deny Elijah's God.

The book begins with a parabolic account of a "serendipitous" encounter between J. N. Darby and B. B. Warfield on an Oxford-bound train where the two theologians discover, much to their chagrin, how much they have in common. From thence, the author creates a second parable that takes the reader into a mysterious room where a twice-broken mirror reveals the distorted reflections between infant "baptism" and circumcision. This book is a thoroughly researched, devastating polemic against the errant presuppositions and hermeneutics that underlie paedobaptist covenantalism.

This book is an anthology of essays that tackle some of the most complex and controversial topics of Christian theology, including the origin of evil in the Satanic and Edenic falls; competing views of lapsarianism; the relevance of evangelism to election and reprobation; and the marks of a legitimate prophetic ministry. Although the primary focus of the book is theological, the author also explores various philosophical and cultural dynamics inherently hostile to Christian truth that dangerously influence and adversely impact Christendom.

Using William Wordsworth's "spots of time" as a descriptor of his style and subject matter, the author shares with his audience how God can transfigure simple "spots of time" into moments of eternal value. Each chapter in the book is a small vignette of the author's own experience of time and thoughts transfigured by God's grace. The book divides into six categories of experience: Love, Aesthetics, Words, Society, Sickness, and Devotion. The author varies his style throughout to fit his wide range of subject matter, from the philosophic and formal to the rustic and home-spun, all written from a distinctively biblical perspective.

Black and White Version - In the last three decades, a renewed interest in aesthetics has arisen among some Christians. The Christian-classical school movement, with its emphasis upon classical languages, literature, music, and art has contributed to this resurgence of aesthetic sensibility, reinvigorating aesthetical discernment among its proponents regarding Goodness, Beauty, and Truth, an encouraging development that signals the partial recovery of a renewed aesthetical awareness that characterized the church at more thoughtful moments in her history; however, we say only a "partial recovery" of aesthetical awareness because, in terms of how the Bible characterizes sublime experience, the current emphasis upon Goodness, Beauty, and Truth is more Platonic than it is biblical, and therefore represents a deficient philosophy of aesthetics that leads to a misinterpretation of aesthetics biblically understood; a misrepresentation of The Sublime; and, most seriously, a mischaracterization of God. Those errors result from an oversight of an equally important fourth dimension of The Sublime - the fear of God - to which I refer in this book as Terror, also called Dread, or in Kierkegaardian and Nitzschean terms - Angst. As this book asserts, any biblically-based understanding of aesthetics must include not only Beauty, Goodness, and Truth but also Terror as an essential component of The Sublime, especially when sublime experience involves a direct encounter with Almighty God.