“If when we die we just go back to the dirt, well, then nothing matters. But if the Christian story is true — that Jesus died and rose again — then everything matters,” says the Newsboys’ lead singer Peter Furler.

If Jesus died and rose again it means every one of us is heading for one of two destinations, according to C. S. Lewis: being “immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”

My friend Greg Davis lost his battle with esophageal cancer this week. But he won a more significant campaign. Greg loved Jesus. And Greg lived as though he weren’t just returning to dirt. He lived as though he were destined to become an everlasting splendour.

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In my “defenestration” posting I made comments about R.C. Sproul’s remarks on the FV/NPP paper that were wrong and sinful. I know I can’t take them back, but I am deleting them, and I have written him to apologize.

I don’t know why I couldn’t have either just attributed to him better motives and intellectual integrity in the first place, or at least gone to him personally in the second. But I had to go and put my unworthy thoughts out for everybody to see. It took seeing Lane Keister’s rebuke on his website for me to see what I had done.

There may be “fluff” in the church, but it does not come from R. C. Sproul. Nobody’s worked harder in his generation to give a coherent account of the faith. I know that. I’ve benefited from it. When I was in college and seminary, his was one of the voices that helped me start thinking in Reformed categories. It was a delight to teach with him in the early days at RTS/O. No praise ever meant more to me than his approbation of my contribution to the New Geneva Study Bible. I was never more proud of a theologian than when he called Max King’s radical preterism the Gnosticism that it is.

I don’t know where I get off calling R. C. Sproul smug — I twisted his passion for the truth and his confidence in Christ into their opposite, and was wrong to do so. I had no business doing a mind and heart read on his “righteous applause” remark either.

Finally, whatever inclination PCA General Assembly members might have to assent to something that R. C. Sproul says just because R. C. Sproul says it does not deserve to be called sycophantic. Whatever moral capital he has with the Assembly, he has because he has earned it.

I’m so sorry. My heart is broken for the lack of peace in the Reformed world, and I’ve contributed to its fracturing.

I beg the Lord’s mercy and everybody else’s forbearance with my sin.

The Athenians waived their claim in the interest of national survival, knowing that a quarrel about the command would certainly mean the destruction of Greece. They were, indeed, perfectly right; for the evil of internal strife is worse than united war in the same proportion as war itself is worse than peace. It was their realization of the danger attendant upon lack of unity which made them waive their claim, and they continued to do so as long as Greece desperately needed their help. (Herodotus, Histories 8.2)

Following the deaths of the Spartan King Leonidas and “his brave three hundred” at Thermopylae in 480 B.C., the various Greek city-states decided they needed to pull together. Xerxes’ gargantuan army and navy were poised to overwhelm Greece, indeed the whole of Europe. At the eleventh hour the Greeks realized they needed each other.

Traditionally, Greece looked to Sparta for leadership on land and to Athens for leadership on the sea. But in this case there were misgivings about giving Athens command of the city-states’ combined fleets (despite Athens’ contributing the largest number of ships). Herodotus isn’t clear whether the reluctance was due to lack of confidence in or envy against Athens, or due simply to a recognition of Sparta’s moral capital.

The point is: Athens “got it,” to quip Herodotus: civil war in the face of an external threat is suicide.

Or, in Facebook-speak: mutual defenestration means self annihilation. When the enemy is at the gate, that’s not the time to be throwing each other out the window.

Rather than lobby for their traditional right to command, Athens accepted Spartan command of the navy as well as of the army. The result: two brilliant victories — one by Greece’s combined navies (at Salamis) and one by Greece’s combined armies (at Plataea) — and one huge and final retreat by Xerxes. The result: daughters of neither Athens nor Sparta were exported to harems in Persepolis.

There are times that call for a sense of measure and proportion — times when you need not to be doing a smack down on each other. Fifth century B.C. Greece it figured out. Will we?

On one front, we face militant Islamists who have declared a reverse Crusade on us, demanding we either grovel before a disincarnate cosmic monad, or die.

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