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Wings of the Wind
Est. September, 2009 – ReEst. April, 2010
Recent Comments
Wings of the Wind 
Thanks for sharing this video Chris.
You’re welcome, Elizabeth. I hope you have a great day! God’s blessings…
Thanks for sharing this video, Chris. Overall, I was blessed by listening to it this morning. R.C. Sproul was such an excellent speaker and his love for God was palpable.
What remains a mystery to me was how Sproul loved the Gospel of grace, but was dichotomously a devotee of Thomas Aquinas who he mentions very prominently and favorably in this video. Sproul personally identified as a “Thomist” and I have read or heard examples of his devotion previously. Aquinas is revered by the RCC as its greatest theologian and played a major role in defining its false gospel of salvation by sacramentalism and merit. I understand that Sproul was influenced by his college professor, John Gerstner, an outspoken Thomist, but with all of his knowledge of the Gospel, comparative theology, and church history, the mature Sproul “should have” known better.
In his 2012 book “Are We Together?: A Protestant Analyzes Roman Catholicism” Sproul rebuts the RCC’s main doctrines, but they are all doctrines that Aquinas helped to define. It’s such a bizarre incongruency.
Hearing Sproul extol Aquinas to his evangelical Protestant audience is like nails on a chalkboard. I am at a loss at how intelligent evangelical Protestant pastors can have such blind spots when it comes to the RCC.
Thanks for the good comment, Tom, and I’m glad you were blessed by this except for the sections that were hard for you to listen to. I can see how that would be like nails on a chalkboard to you. I don’t know a great deal about R.C. but I did listen to a different sermon of his just this morning and I think it would have been better received by you. I have differences with R.C. on baptism but, in general, I can see how so much of his ministry was beneficial to many. At the end of this talk he focuses on the word “alone.” He certainly believed the Gospel message was the one we find in scripture; it is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone that we are saved. I know that you know this about R.C. but others may not. Thank you for the feedback and I hope you have a great day!
Thanks, Chris. I definitely don’t think we should “cancel” Sproul because of his Presbyterian belief in paedobaptism and this bizarre and contradictory infatuation with Thomas Aquinas. We need to chew the meat and spit out the bones. I was blessed by many of Sproul’s videos and articles when I returned to the Lord in 2014. His emphasis on God’s grace was a welcome relief after my nine years in fundamentalist legalism. I’m grateful that Sproul was one of the few “big name” evangelical pastors (along with John MacArthur and D. James Kennedy) to take a very public stand against Evangelicals and Catholics Together in 1994. But again, that was incongruous with his Thomism. I don’t know how he juggled the contradiction in his head. A worldly and inexact analogy that comes to mind is that of a person being a very successful entrepreneur and yet being an admirer of Karl Marx at the same time. Well, I actually just published a post about such a person on my other blog.
I’m with you, Tom. I can’t cancel Sproul in spite of his stand on infant baptism and the incongruous Thomism position. It does seem odd that he had such a stance. At the same time his good way outweighed anything I’m aware of that might be off. Some of his “Holiness of God” sermons are very good and I know that many, like you, have appreciated that he has helped them grow in the faith. I posted this particular message because I liked how he put mankind in his place in relation to God. More and more people are choosing to believe that there is no God, particularly in the West.
I’m glad you mentioned D.J. Kennedy. I remember him becoming angry at a Presbyterian Church Annual Denomination meeting when (I can’t remember the subject) he was opposed to some strange thing they were considering. I had never seen him that angry as I usually only saw him in the pulpit when he was pretty soft spoken. If I remember correctly, he was in the minority and his anger seemed perfectly understandable to me at the time.
Thanks for the comment, Tom, and I’ll be by in a bit to check on your latest post.
Thanks for the additional comments, Chris. I wasn’t that familiar with Kennedy, but I was very grateful for his uncompromising stand on ECT. Same with Sproul and MacArthur.
The post I was referring to (which included comments about film director Elia Kazan incongruently being a rich Marxist) was published on my other blog, Tom’s Other Topics, which deals with more “frivolous” subject material.
The link to the post is below, but please don’t feel obligated to read.
Okay, thanks for the link, Tom. I’ve been to your other blog once before and I’ll have to check it out again.
I was interested to read that Tom referred to Elia Kazan – he was a surprising character in this context, perhaps, but I understand the relevance of the idea that he was both a Maxist and a rich man.
But actually he wasn’t, not at the same time. As young in the 1930s, he was a Marxist, belonged to a very radical group of people working in the theatre as actors, directors, stage managers etc. (Hollywood came later.) But he changed his views alogether, so there is no contradiction. He actually gave evidence about the group when he was called before HUAC (House Committee on Un-American Activities). Because he testified, not only about himself but about the whole group, he was both boycotted and seriously condemned by very many colleagues and other people, but he was tough and stood against the pressure, he maintained he had been right: The communist party and their fellow travellers really HAD planned to take over all media by violent means, as part of a revolution where they would use the media to spread their propaganda and prevent realistic news. And they had some plans and had people placed in strategic jobs. Although it is unclear how realistic they were, they certainly intended to destroy the existing, ‘capitalist’ society by violence, and he thought the whole group of them ought to have testified honestly about themselves. They had of course the well-known ideas of the Soviet Union being a peaceful, classless garden of plenty for everyone, with freedom and progress for all, and of war as something that only arose out of ‘capitalism’. (Compare the millions who in reality were murdered or starved to death both in the Soviet Union and in communist China. No other creed comes close to its atrocities.)
All this has nothing much to do with Christianity, but since his name has been brought up: I have read Kazan’s autobiography “A Life” from 1988. You won’t find anything relating much to the themes of Chris’s “Wings” in it, but is really a good book indeed, very realistic, giving insight into intellectual and political life in the USA over a 30 year period.
Tom refers to the film “Splendor in the Grass”, written by Bill Inge. Inge also wrote other plays, some of which Elia Kazan directed as stage plays. About Inge he says: “… I was to learn a lesson as I went on with the play [The Dark at the Top of the Stairs], which is that all Bill’s work – his other plays and the film I would do with him a couple of years later – seemed on first view to be conventional mid-America stuff, with nothing that hadn’t been seen and said before. But all of it suddenly, to the audience’s surprice as well as my own, would produce scenes of exceptional poignancy – not thunder and lightning, but insight and tenderness, Inge’s own gifts.”
Hi Marianne.
I hadn’t read the post that Tom linked to about this. Now, I’ve read your comments here and there, along with the post that Tom wrote. Like you, Tom is always a pleasure to communicate with. I’m glad you felt comfortable commenting on his blog along with this comment on mine.
I appreciate you sharing your knowledge on this subject. I’ve know of Elia Kazan but I’ve never had any reason to look at his history. Any book that gives “insight into intellectual and political life in the USA over a 30 year period” is very worth reading.
I read his “Wiki” entry and it states: “ his testimony as a “friendly witness” before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1952 at the height of the Hollywood blacklist. It states that “His harshly anti-communist testimony ‘damaged if not shattered the careers of his former colleagues.’”
The entry includes a comment by Stanley Kubrick who called Kazan “without question, the best director we have in America.”
Looking at the list of the films he directed (I have seen several), I can see why Kubrick had this opinion. He directed some of the most popular films of his time, films that continue to spark interest.
Thank you again for your comments, Marianne. You know I always appreciate them.
God’s blessings…