The Four Discoursemen

A Farewell to The Four Discoursemen

The Third Discourseman

Who were ‘The Four Discoursemen’?

To begin with, we were just four young men in our early 20s, on the verge of exiting undergraduate days and entering the real world (which in reality meant two unpaid Christian training schemes and one PhD in intellectual history, but still, it felt pretty real at the time!). We had a dream – nay, a vision – of working together on something big. A vision mostly of spouting off and proclaiming to the world, or perhaps just to each other, our amazing insights and opinions. A mingling of bright and fertile minds, youthful over-ambition, a misplaced sense of our own importance, and a hope of making something that mattered. A feeling of discontent at the world around us, the pitfalls of modernity, the blind spots of Western progressivism, the shortcomings of low-church evangelicalism and anti-intellectual Christianity. A sense that we alone were sane in a world gone mad. All this may well have been amplified by pandemics and lockdowns, and the frustrations of being shut up indoors for months on end. There were murmurings of blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels. And during lockdown, over one fateful Zoom call, a plan was hatched. And the first thing that plan needed was a name.

Our Questing Hearts

Happy New Year! Did you know 2025 is the square of the sum of the numbers 1 to 9? (This also implies that it is the sum of the first nine cubes – the proof is left as an exercise for the reader.) I’ve been entertaining my classes with this fact, and they have wept tears of excitement at the thought of living through such a milestone. Being a maths teacher is pretty good, and life in general – if I am permitted to say so – is pretty good. I love my church, I enjoy my work, I’ve got my own house. And yet, assuming you’re not a large language model and you have some understanding of the workings of the human heart, you’ll know this doesn’t mean everything is tickety-boo. That lush, lush grass on the other side of the fence always looks ever so nice.

The King and His Gift

Photo: Vladyslav Melnyk (a human), from https://unsplash.com

The King looked out into the white-specked night and groaned. “So no more flesh and wine, no burning pine logs in the hearth, no merriment?”

Unbiblical Words to Worry About

Christians love unbiblical words and phrases. Christian rhetoric, in books and sermons, prayers and pulpits, is full of language that cannot be found anywhere in the Bible. Words like ‘Trinity’, ‘Aseity’, ‘Omnipotent’, are nowhere in scripture, but all over Christian discourse.

Note that unbiblical doesn’t necessarily mean anti-biblical. No doubt the ideas are there, just not the terminology.

So is this terminology useful? Is it good for us to use it? Have the countless multitude of theologians who have crafted a bespoke theological vocabulary over decades, centuries and millennia, carefully weighted and thought-through, often forged in response to serious contemporary debates and combatting heresies, given us something useful and valuable to work with? Do these words, that have withstood the test of time and proven vital to Christian thought throughout church history, still have a place in our vernacular?

Absolutely not.

Notes from Scatterland #1

Reading back over various articles published here, in our own glorious echo chamber, I am struck by the intellectual fertility of those early, lockdown-gripped years of the project. Perhaps it was because, at some mass societal level, the West itself was undergoing a shift – what later historians will identify as an inflection point – intensified by the madness of the Covid-19 pandemic and the curious shrillness of its political responses. Such times are always pregnant with intellectual and literary possibility: I’m sure the vibrant lyrics of Ovid took on an extra charm when Visigoth spears were sharpened in sight of Rome’s walls, and in our own Rome-will-burn moment there does seem to have been a particular flourishing of, inter alia, meaningful reflection on the great and the good in our cultural heritage that was lacking in the heady utopianism and globalised liberalism of the 1990s and early 2000s. More probably, though – if I may apply a dose of self-realism to my escaping thoughts – we were final-year students on the cusp of stepping out into the world, jaded by the status quo but giddy with the lockdown-fuelled discovery of completely different ways of seeing the world and our place in it.

Corporate BS

I received an email today which began as follows:

‘Dear X,

Adaptability and stability are essential in aviation, ensuring systems evolve seamlessly while maintaining operational excellence in a dynamic environment.’

Britain votes for death

Why is idolatry bad for us? Because every idol demands blood. Only if we worship the true and living God does the self-sacrifice required of all true worship – which no human being can escape – make sense, and result not in something rent asunder, but newly made whole: because only in Christ can the death we die to ourselves, in the purest act of worship that he demands of us, be sanctified by the life that God gives to all who truly trust in him. But our idols can only destroy; they can only bring chaos, death, bloodshed, disarray. And that is what we have seen today.

Produce something average

They once got two groups of people to make some pots out of clay. One group was given an hour to make as many pots as possible, while the other group used the hour to refine their one pot to near-perfection. The group who churned out pot after pot, by the end of the hour, consistently made better pots than those who laboured for an hour on their one creation.

Are Evangelicals Obsessed with Sex?

The Third Discourseman

It is often claimed that evangelicals are obsessed with sex. And not in the good way. I don’t think those who make such comments are complimenting us on our high libido, sex drive, or how good we are in bed. Rather, they’re mocking us for our out-of-date, Victorian fear of sex and sexuality. For our constant attempts to place boundaries around acceptable sexual practice. For the fact that our churches preach against homosexuality and sex outside of marriage. ‘Why do evangelicals concern themselves so much with what’s going on in people’s bedrooms?’, they ask. ‘Don’t they know there are bigger issues at hand? Wars in the Middle-East? Homelessness on our door? Our greedy, materialistic, worldly western culture?’. We’re seen as those who have lost all sense of perspective, banging on about an issue that, even if it does matter, is surely not as important as those issues that are actually causing death, destruction, pain and poverty.

Labour’s Brave Stand

It is heartening to see that Labour are at last standing up for the ancient right of the inheritance of wealth. After a century of enduring suspicious glances from the sons of the rich, the party of the many has understood the plight of the few.