sparkhouse: fail

Before you hit play, he says a naughty word in the middle -- the bad word for "backside". It makes him far more transparent, I am sure.



This, btw, is why "emerg*" is a failure: this may be the dumbest 55 seconds of video ever produced (including all the rest of YouTube) regarding the state and future of human history, and yet it's been published as a way to spark new life into the "church".

Blah blah blah indeed. Honestly: how do you parody this?

Needs to be said

Piper says it.

Imonk may not enjoy the echo chamber, but I do.

Open Mike: Shane Claiborne

At TeamPyro, Phil linked to this story about Cedarville University, and also to this story from Christianity Today about Shane Claiborne getting called off because of "some bloggers" objecting to Claiborne's lecturing (or whatever it is that Emergents do, since I am sure they wouldn't commit that level of rhetorical violence against their fellow humans).

I'm interested in this quote from Claiborne about the goings-on:

aiborne said he was "disappointed that the institution itself at Cedarville was not secure enough to stand up to these vigilante voices."

He also said he wanted to talk to his critics. "Unfortunately, it's difficult to communicate with folks who will not talk to you, who only talk around you, as in this case," he said. "There's too much constructive work to do for the kingdom for us to spend our energies constantly reacting to every destructive voice, especially those who do not honor Jesus' admonition to speak directly to one another in love (Matthew 18)."

And before we unleash the hounds here, let me say a few things.

First of all, I admit that I do not know or understand what is going on at Cedarville, and in some ways I don't really care. I'm not an alum, I'm not a donor, and those who are ought to take an active (not passive) role in being part of the trajectory of that university and its objectives as an educational institution. The rest of us don't have a stake in it.

I mean: they're not a church, right? They're a private university with a Christian heritage -- a hertitage, btw, which is not very well-defined by their website. Their site paints them broadly as a place where Christian social action takes place or is advocated, but for example I couldn't find a direct link to the history of the university which would spell out its ties to a specific church or denomination or confessional statement. So in not being a church, we don't have a stake in its goings-on.


Now, what do I mean by that? Should we not comment at all? No -- I'm blogging about it, folks: I think thinking about it and commenting on it are totally-valid ways to spend a few hours. What I think is a little randy is for people who never attended the University, and don't have any direct ties to the University, to start campaigning for or against some perceived threat to the University.

You know: they have a board of trustees; they are over seen by multiple academic certification organizations. If they are doing wrong, the truth will out.

Which brings us back to Shane Claiborne. His complaint, as I read it, is that "vigilantes" stopped him from speaking at CU and that the worst reason for this is that "it's difficult to communicate with folks who will not talk to you, who only talk around you, as in this case." And the most-keen of you will, of course, recognize his "Like Ministry" plea against making his own case with them or against them.

My opinion is that it's wrong to call these folks "vigilantes". "Busy-bodies"? Yes -- that seems good. "Babblers whose talk will spread like gangrene"? I've heard that one before someplace, and it seems a little, um, dramatic, but OK -- that one might cut both ways here. But factually I can tell you that if Ingrid is one of the culprits who drove off Claiborne, I am certain she is willing to openly discuss any issue she is complaining about.

And that said, I'm opening the meta here for a discussion of what just happened at CU and what the problem is with "watch-bloggers".

Go get it.

The Shack

Challies reviews the Shack.

Open thread here for people who think Challies is wrong. Just so you can count the cost, I think Challies' last sentence is exactly right, and good on him for telling the truth about this book. I would have made that final point more clear in the rest of the review, but I'm not a famous author with a contract with Crossway.

Yes, I am green with envy.

Conflicted

I heard the Mars Hill in Seattle had a New Years Eve party this year complete with (gasp) champagne, so I'm conflicted. I'm looking for more than a report that there was likker and dansen.

Was anybody there? Who was there? What happened?

You call it

I don't know if anyone was following it, but a fellow named "Drew" who makes comments at TeamPyro conceded this exchange at D-Blog after 4 questions and only 3 answers from me.

You have post your commentary on this exchange in the meta of this post. I'm not sure what to say about it, either.

gingerbread man

This weekend as we were building up to the big thing tomorrow, my wife pulled out a bag of gingerbread mix (listen: if you add the eggs and milk and whatever, it's home made) and my kids started cheering. They love the gingerbread stuff -- the house, the people, the tree.

"So you're going to make the gingerbread this year?" I asked her, trying not to imply anything.

"Nobody'll care after we frost it," she said, trying not to concede anything, and I realized I had the headline for my Darrin Patrick post.

Now, don't get me wrong, OK? I liked all of his 3 talks at Covenant Seminary, and especially liked his talk which he called "the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" of the emergent church. But after listening to part 3 there, I sorta felt like he thought that if he layered on enough rhetorical frosting, nobody would care that he was really telling the radical edges of the ECM that they were preaching a different gospel, and that they needed to get over others pointing that out because that's the only way to resolve the differences.

I mean: that's how he pretty much ended that talk, and I was sort of blown away by how frank he was about it. And if you listened to only, say, the last 10 minutes of the talk (prior to the Q&A portion), you probably will get a very different impression of what he intimates about that movement than if you sit through all the "good" part, and even through the "bad" part. His description of the "ugly" is spot-on, even if it's covered in all kinds of other things to sweeten it up.

There where were moments in part 3 where I had to pull out a pen and scribble down a note or two. For example, it was a little sheepish (trying to avoid saying "coy") to use Justin Taylor as a cover for the "bad" segment of the talk. Sure: JT was plainly the source of that segment, and good on Pastor Darrin for citing his source. But it seemed to me that he was trying to avoid being the bad guy by pretty much reading what JT wrote on the subject of the ECM word for word.

Another moment was when Pastor Patrick followed a rabbit about what it means to preach to the culture -- you'll find it in the section where he says he wants to be preaching to "dudes", among other "cultures".

Here's what I don't disagree with: I think we have to context our churches in a way that the people to whom we are reaching out will give us a listen. You know: I'm the guy with the comic book blog, right? I don't think Fuller-brush door-to-door evangelism is useful today, and I think it is more useful to find social forms which people today can relate to in order to present the Gospel to them there.

But here's my problem with where I think Darrin's talk leads to: I think it leads to a place where we forget that the Gospel is (sing it with me) the solution to culture. That is: it's fine to get to the "dudes" and the "DINCs" and the farmers and so on by having some kind of way of talking with them and to them. It's another altogether when we avoid, because it is hard, the fact that the Gospel is supposed to reconcile races and cultures and all kinds of men not just to Christ but to each other -- that is, that all kinds of men are (not will be) reconciled to each other because they are reconciled to Christ.

I think that's the fundamental challenge to the current iteration of "missional" thinking -- failing to make reconciliation a real issue for people. It seems to me -- and people are welcome to knock this one down if they can -- that making "dude" churches (as one example) overlooks the fact in Scripture that "dudes" need older people to have a complete body of Christ, and vice versa. It's not enough just to say that your church is part of the greater, invisible church.

So that said, I enjoyed Darrin Patrick's impression of the gingerbread man. You may have a different opinion, and you now have the full-fledged version of haloscan into which to express it.

And have a napkin -- you have some frosting on your lip.

Darrin Patrick is the shark

You've been waiting for Part 3 of Darrin Patrick's covenant seminary talk on the Emerging Church, and now you can find it here.

Listen. Enjoy. Talk amongst yourselves. Comments from me later, as I have a minute.

Because you can't like without them, dude.

Weightier Matters

Finished the "weighier matters" post on Rob Bell. For those who lost track.

More Important Matters

Look - I'll just start the post with the fireworks, and then let the chips fall where they may.

Rob Bell.

Everybody over it already? I said "Rob Bell", and now you can all just settle down and listen to me for a minute. We have a new reader, or a lurker who came out of lurking to comment on a post last week, and I popped over to his blog to see what sort of blogospheric fauna he represented, and all in all I liked his blog. It's a little, um, dark in template for me as I am old and getting more and more squinty-eyed, but at least he doesn't play his music too loud.

Of particular interest today would be Tyler's review of Velvet Elvis to point out that he's no raving sycophant for Bell and his teaching.

This is important to point out because of this post by Tyler which leads us to this sermon by the afore-mentioned Rob Bell. The version I have linked to is at archive.org for the sake of having a static link which is unlikely to be banished or shuffled by the needs of someone else's server.

Tyler says this, among other things about Bell's sermon on a section of Mt 23:

It was awesome. It was fantastic. It was balanced, clear, biblical, exegetical, and utterly entirely convincing. In his opening prayer he even mentioned that the words of Jesus contain edges, which was nice to hear. I honestly cannot think of any one point where I would disagree or ask for clarification. Listen to it yourself, because it was awesome.

Which, of course, causes one to want to listen for one's self because who wants to miss "awesome" and "fantastic" "balanced" preaching? It caused me to listen, anyway.

Now, here are some highlights from the mp3 I listened to:

[*] A really, really good cross-reference to the OT laws on tithing and dietary law; very useful in exposing the problem Christ was condemning the Pharisees and Teachers for, especially in the context that they were Jews who were in Moses' seat and were teachers of the Law.

[*] A really, really good exposition of the counterpoint between the keeping of the Law and the "weightier matters" of the Law ("justice and mercy and faithfulness" in the ESV; "judgment, mercy, and faith" in the KJV).

[*] And all things considered, a really good view into the faulty heart behind legalism which seeks, as Jesus says elsewhere, to get the outside of the cup clean but forgets that it's the inside of the cup that needs to be cleaned up - which is an important contexter here, which we will also come back to.

So yeah - on the on hand, there's something worth listening to in Bell's presentation which, I think, any decent Bible expositor would be excited to hear in and of itself.

That, however, is not all. And I think it's somewhat interesting that this sermon turns out the way it does in the context of some of the larger conversations and meta-threads in the blogosphere these days - because it winds up pointing directly at the question of what it means to have a "kingdom on earth" in some relationship with "salvation in heaven".

Here's what he says:

All of this wasn't because you don't want a gnat - because a gnat had religious significance. For a Pharisee, their understanding of why things had fallen apart for them - remember, you're a good Jew, you live in Israel, you believe you're God's chosen people, you believe that God called your father Abraham and you are one of Abraham's sons and Abraham's daughters and your job is to show the world what God is like. SO your whole worldview is built on, "you are chosen, special and predestined". But something unfortunate has happened: world history hasn't really worked that way. You've been conquered by the Assyrians, the Babylonians, you ancestors were slaves in Egypt, you have now been conquered by the Romans. And this giant global military super power, the Romans, has just crushed you. And so you've got Roman soldiers in all of your streets, and these Roman soldiers don't even believe in your God. Your God is like, what, the God of the Jews? I mean, you don't even have statues, c'mon.

So as a good Jew, you live with this aching {sigh} ... we were supposed to be the ones who, like, showed the world what God is like, and instead we just get beat - who-whoever seems to be in charge of the world, we just get beaten up, just consistently, and now with these Romans have taken over [sic].

And so for the Pharisees, central to their worldview is, "I'll tell you why this has happened to us. I'll tell you why our country is under oppression and occupation. I'll tell you why this has happened: because of sinners. God is judging us because we haven't been pure and upright." So the problem is all of these, ah, prostitutes and sinners and unclean people. And so for a Pharisee, their, uh, drive to be what's called 'ritually clean' - we want to show God that there are some of us who aren't like "them". And so for a Pharisee, your spirituality was tied up in how well you could distance yourself from anybody unclean or any sinners. They're the reason why we're in this political mess.

Now, listen closely here because this is sort of tricky. Ultimately, Bell is right about this. To a large part, there was an apparently-good motive behind what the Pharisees did. It wasn't the only motive, but it was one of them. There are other motives which the Pharisees are given woe over by Jesus - in the rest of Mt 23. Woe for taking the best seats; woe for being greedy; you read Mt 23 and decide for yourself how much woe Jesus calls down on these guys - because there's a lot of reason for Jesus to call woe to them, not just a mistaken sense of how kosher works.

But let's first be completely fair about this one section: it does, in fact, point out that one of the problems that the Pharisees had is that they thought that if they kept all the rules, God would like them better - God would be faithful to them if they were faithful. Any reader of this blog ought to recognize that as rank legalism, and in that we can applaud Bell for recognizing rank legalism.

Now before we go on, it would be useful to keep in mind the rest of Mt 23, which goes something like this:

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, "The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, so practice and observe whatever they tell you— but not what they do. For they preach, but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger. They do all their deeds to be seen by others. For they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long, and they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi by others. But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers. And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. Neither be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Christ. The greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

"But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.

"Woe to you, blind guides, who say, 'If anyone swears by the temple, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath.' You blind fools! For which is greater, the gold or the temple that has made the gold sacred? And you say, 'If anyone swears by the altar, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the gift that is on the altar, he is bound by his oath.' You blind men! For which is greater, the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred? So whoever swears by the altar swears by it and by everything on it. And whoever swears by the temple swears by it and by him who dwells in it. And whoever swears by heaven swears by the throne of God and by him who sits upon it.

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean.

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying, 'If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.' Thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers. You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell? Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of innocent Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Truly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not! See, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again, until you say, 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.'"

See: Jesus isn't just concerned with so-called "legalism" here, right? Jesus is concerned about something which He labels "hypocrisy", which looks like "cleaning the outside of the cup and the plate, but [leaving the] inside they full of greed and self-indulgence". In that, what Bell misses pretty boldly is that Christ is not merely saying, "legalism is bad": He's also say that legalism for the sake of oppressing others and lifting one's self up is bad.

The "woe" of the Pharisees is not merely personal holiness: it is also leveraging holiness for the sake of trodding others down.

That's why we should have some kind of qualm with Rob Bell saying this:

So the reason you don't want a gnat in your wine is because you are a Pharisee and you want to be ritually clean as a way of saying, "we understand how we got in this mess, and if people would just be righteous and pure and holy like us, then God could show up and do what God's supposed to do." So for them, the gnat was about their standing with God, their holiness, righteousness, uh goodness, and at the same time simply them being, uh, holier, better, more righteous than the sinners around them.

So Jesus says, "you strain out a gnat, you are so devoted to personal holiness and cleanliness - your own definitions - before God, but the problem is in straining out a gnat you swallow a camel." ... (riff on Lev 11)

... It's a crushing blow to the Pharisees because for them, everything was about being right with God, being clean, being holy, being pure, being in right standing with God. It's the driving thing for a Pharisee is I wanna be right before God [sic]. And Jesus says, "you are so consumed with being in right relationship with God and your own personal holiness and purity and cleanliness, you are spending so much time making sure that you don't get gnats in your wine that in the process you have neglected the bigger issues of the suffering of the world.

The context of Mt 23:23 is far broader than Rob Bell wants it to be – because Bell is frankly trying to imply something here that impugns traditional, conservative Christian churches. And that is: somehow, churches don’t do enough for the world.

Here's how he phrased it:

And because God's heart beats for the suffering of the world, and because you have missed the more important matters (Jesus' words) all of your efforts at cleanliness have actually lead you to be unclean before God. You strain out a gnat, yeah, but in the process you're swallowing a camel.

Well, uh, what do you do with that? What do you do with that? Perhaps, by way of reflection, just a couple thoughts. Sometimes you will hear somebody talk about "It's all about me and God".

Sometimes you will hear among Christians spirituality as defined the kind that pleases God, when it all comes down to it, it's all about me and God. And that sounds great, but the problem is that it's not what Jesus teaches. The obsession of the Pharisees, which started as a very righteous, good, beautiful impulse, which is we want to be standing right with God, we want personal cleanliness, had become so far out of wack - and once again, it's not to neglect this, isn't not like, "hey just live however you want, but what matters ... " no no no: cause Jesus says you gotta do both. It led them to miss the larger issues of justice, mercy and faithfulness which God never stops talking about. Which Jesus never stops talking about. Which the first Christians never stop talking about.

Be very, very careful. When somebody takes their relationship with God and says, "all that matters is me and God". Because Jesus didn't teach that. God isn't just interested in saving you. God isn't just interested in redeeming me. God isn't just interested in help you work through your stuff. God isn't just interested in your own morality purity and devotion to the way of Jesus. God wants to use us to do something about the greatest suffering in the world.

What he does is make that same phony distinction which some of you have seen Doug Pagitt make recently over at the TeamPyro blog – that is, that somehow there's no "already"/"not yet" tension in the message of the Gospel and Jesus' message of the Kingdom – and he translates that into something wholly-bizarre.

In Bell's view, personal holiness tracks parallel to the Pharisees' obsession with the keeping of the whole law – but somehow, the social gospel, and doing acts to relieve "the suffering of the world" is not a dangerous and legalistic way of interpreting Christ's message.

Listen: the works-righteousness of "I don’t drink or smoke or cuss or go with girls who do" is not any more or less legalistic than the works-righteousness of "I don't waste paper or water or gasoline or go with humans who do, without regard to their sex or gender". If it's the works which make us closer to God, we are only trading one menu of laws we can't keep for another menu of laws we can't keep – in spite of our very humble smugness as we shop at the mall or drink coffee which costs $5 a cup.

What bothers me about this talk is not the mulling-over of what kind of works-righteousness the Pharisees had: it's the failure to mull over the works righteousness someone is trying to put in its place.

Darrin Patrick thinks I'm cute

Part 2 of Darrin Patrick's talk at Covenant Seminary is allegedly up @ journeyon.net, but I couldn't get the link there to download the file. I had to monkey with the URLs and it's just to darn complicated to explain -- so I archived the file I finally got at Archive.org so you could enjoy it, too.

He makes a minor mistake by calling TeamPyro "John MacArthur's boys", but he makes up for it when he says we're "cute when we're angry". If you're reading this, Darrin, you must be doing something right -- my brother-in-law lives in St. Louis and you make him crazy every time you're quoted in the paper. I love that.

12 items - some mistakes

Alert reader Joel Griffith sent me this link, which gives this list:

12 Mistakes Western Mission Agencies Make:

1. The Mistake of Starting Bible Schools, Not Universities
2. The Mistake of Only “Salvation in Heaven,” not “Kingdom on Earth”
3. The Mistake of Congregations Sending Missionaries, Not Using Mission Agencies
4. The Mistake of Whole Congregations in Direct Involvement, Not Professional Missions.
5. The Mistake of Insisting that Devout Followers of Jesus Call Themselves “Christians” and Identify with the Western Church
6. The Mistake of Sending Only Money, Not Missionaries
7. The Mistake of Sending Short-Termers, Not Long-Termers
8. The Mistake of Not Understanding Business in Mission and Mission in Business
9. The Mistake of Healing the Sick, Not Eradicating Disease Germs
10. The Mistake of Thinking “Peace” Not “War”
11. The Mistake of Assuming Science Is a Foe Not a Friend
12. The Mistake of An Evangelism That is Not Validated and Empowered by Social Transformation

Here are the questions for you other alert readers:

1. Are all of these items mistakes?
2. Which one would you change in your church today, if any?

Truth War Skirmish!

Well, welcome to the blog this week. Had a few throw-away posts this weekend, but I got redirected a few times to a post by a guy named Bob Robinson at Vangard Church regarding his review/evaluation of the Truth War by John MacArthur. I read it, read a review of the review, and after making a brief post on one of the referring blogs I chose to spend my morning today sorting out the original post for the sake of posting something substantive for the first time since my blog allegedly came back from "hiatus".

Here's the headline of the original blog post:

MacArthur Fits His Own Criteria for an Apostate

Now, before you fly off the handle, let's read the thesis statement of the post:

I’d like to juxtapose three statements by John MacArthur in order to show that, while MacArthur is quick to label other Christians “false teachers” and “apostate,” these labels can just as easily be leveled unfairly at MacArthur.

And to Robinson's credit, he does go through 3 quotes from Dr. MacArthur in an attempt to do what he says he's going to do. But let's make sure we understand what he's trying to do here to determine whether or not it deserves any redress: he's trying to prove that Dr. MacArthur's use of "apostate" is so ill-defined that it can be applied to Dr. MacArthur himself because it is such a broad category.

Here's the first quote Robinson gives, with exposition:

Statement #1:
“What we are called to defend is no less than ‘the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.’ Jude is speaking of apostolic doctrine (Acts 2:42) – objective Christian truth – the faith, as delivered from Jesus through the agency of the Holy Spirit by the apostles to the church … Jude speaks of ‘the faith’ as a complete body of truth already delivered – so there is no need to seek additional revelation or to embellish the substance of ‘the faith’ in any way. Our task is simply to interpret, understand, publish, and defend the truth God has once and for all delivered to the church. That is what the Truth War is ultimately all about.” (p. 75)

Let's make sure we have a handle on what Dr. MacArthur has said here before we read what Robinson interprets. Dr. MacArthur makes it clear that, on the one hand, new revelation and embellishments on the substance of faith are out of bounds, but interpretation, understanding, publishing, and defense of truth are all in-bounds. I have added emphasis in that text, above, to make that clear.

So what Dr. MacArthur has put in his scope are things which add to revelation (by which he means "Scripture" and the fullness of revelation in Christ), and things which embellish or exaggerate "the faith". What he has –not- decried are writings or teachings which interpret (that is: writings which make what is in the text more clear), understand (that is: teachings which draw in the larger picture of Scripture), publish (that is: the simple act of disseminating such teachings through print media), and defend (that is: teachings which draw out the contrasts between the faith and other ideas or philosophies in order to show why the faith is itself better).

Let's see where Robinson takes this:

So, MacArthur is saying that Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, Stan Grenz, John Franke, John Armstrong, Donald Miller, and Chris Seay are all guilty of embellishing the substance of the faith in some way. They are not being loyal to the faith “once for all delivered to the saints.”

Yes, I think this is exactly what he's saying, and the word Robinson uses here is exactly right: "embellishing". That is: they have gone beyond the bounds of the texts involved, and therefore have engaged in exaggeration thereby creating a caricature of the faith which is false. And like all caricatures, it might be funny of they weren't serious about making that creation into the faith itself.

Now watch what Robinson does here:

Let’s take this criterion and apply it to John MacArthur. MacArthur is a Dispensationalist, a form of theology that originated in the late 1800s with John Nelson Darby in England and in moved to the United States in the early 1900s when C. I. Scofield began teaching it. Don't miss this: Dispensationalism’s interpretation of the Bible is very novel, less than 150 years old. Dispensationalism insists that God deals with Israel and the Church differently through a dispensational grid and that this grid determines how we must interpret every passage of the Bible so that we can determine whether the passage is referring to Israel or the Church. It insists that the Church must be raptured away from the earth into its heavenly existence so that God can finish His plan for Israel in its earthly existence.

I repeat: This theology is new. It is not the same theological understanding that “was once for all delivered to the saints.” It grew out of a admittedly individualistic interpretation of the Bible (the Dispensationalists insisted that they were reading the Bible literally and letting the Bible alone determine their theology, with little regard for the history of interpretation).

I have two disclosures that I have to make before I go on. The first is that I'm not a fan of dispensationalism – it's a somewhat broad category of eschatology and hermeneutics that includes all kinds of people from John Macarthur to Tim LaHaye to Clarence Larkin, and you simply can't know what kind of thinker you're dealing with by the label "dispensationalist". I don't find it helpful, personally, to know if someone is a "dispensationalist" because it's a category which doesn't mean anything.

And let's be honest: people like Clarence Larkin are kooks. They might actually be "apostate" as Dr. MacArthur defines the term, but that's not the point of this post. I also think that bad forms of dispensationalism and premillenial enthusiasm have caused the American church in particular to exaggerate the priority of the individual in matters of faith -- but that's for another day. The point of this post is to take a look at what Robinson says about Dr. MacArthur's argument and see if it holds water. So no: I'm not a dispensationalist.

The second disclosure is that I'm not interested in reductionistic historical arguments. It's one thing to say that the systematic formulas of Ryrie and Scofield are "new", and it's another to overstate their newness for the sake of trying to make them fit inside an ideological box in order to call some book or some author's reasoning into question. You know: there's something "new" about translating the Bible using "dynamic" translation philosophy, and I doubt that Robinson would try to wedge that into the box of "apostate" – and I doubt that Dr. MacArthur would go there, either. The question is not how "new" something is, but whether or not its "newness" causes the truth to be somehow voided.

Let's be honest: one of the greatest systematic conundrums of the NT is whether or not God will ultimately deal with racial, hereditary Israel in a different way than He will with the rest of the world. To say the sorting out of this matter was somehow "done" by the end of the apostolic age is a little ambitious, and ignores a lot of things – like the anti-Semitism of the 4th and 5th centuries. And in that light, to call Ryrie's attempt to reconcile this issue in the 19th century "new" is, um, demonstrating a lot of gusto.

Here's the rub, however: we have to ask ourselves what's "new" about dispensationalism. Is it trying to renovate the cross to make it palatable for a culture, a worldview, a people, or a philosophy? Or is it "new" in the sense that the cross remains in tact and one view of the end times as a consequence of the way God reveals himself in history is being explored?

I think it's a big jump to say that interpreting the prophecy that God will save all Jews at some point in history as "all the Jews" is in the same league as interpreting the cross as a form of "cosmic child-abuse". That's the problem we face here – the scope of the claims, and the objective of the "newness".

Thus when we read what's next, we should have a pretty big problem:

So, using MacArthur’s criterion of whether someone is "seeking additional revelation or embellishing the substance of the faith in any way," Dispensationalists could be included. Now, I’m not saying that Dispensationalists should be included, just that MacArthur fits his own criterion for an apostate. Before he labels others as “false teachers” he had better know that, in doing so, he opens himself up to that same label.

If we apply definitions the way Robinson does here, the Trinity has to be called an innovative doctrine because the category "trinity" doesn’t occur by name in Scripture – yet I am sure that Robinson doesn’t have that kind of chutzpah. Just because one formulation of one doctrine is not given some name or specific systematic outline in the first generation of Christian writing, this doesn’t force the doctrine into the category Dr. MacArthur outlines – and Dr. MacArthur's paragraph here specifically defines why. A document teaching or explaining what Scripture says is not inherently apostate – even if the presentation is innovative.

What is at stake with the men specifically listed in this post by Robinson as identified by Dr. MacArthur as "apostate" is that they veer off the page of Scripture and into imaginative, speculative, and theological ditches which give us central themes of Scripture for some other ideological objective.

At this point, Robinson goes on to a second statement by Dr. MacArthur:

Statement #2:
“Every form of gnosticism starts with the notion that truth is a secret known only by a select few elevated, enlightened minds. (Hence the name, from gnosis, the Greek word for knowledge.) … Another dominant variety of gnosticism (know as Docetism) taught that all manifestations of Jesus’ human nature – including His physical body (and hence His crucifixion and resurrection) – were only illusions. God could not really have come to earth in the true material form of authentic human flesh, the Docetists said, because matter itself is evil.” (pp. 89, 92)

Who can argue with this, really? It's a historical set of definitions. I agree that this is what docetism and Gnosticism are.

Again, if we take this criterion and apply it to MacArthur’s theology, we see that he opens himself up to the same criticism. He talks about Gnostics in general and Docetists in particular, as if those in the Emerging Church are guilty of these heresies. However, it has been largely acknowledged that it is Dispensational theology that is the main culprit of gnosticism in the United States.

Wow. I mean – that's not a logical leap: that's a logical fall off the cliff – and the list of so-called evidences simply makes the case worse and not better.

* Dispensationalism stresses the hope of heaven over the hope of the redeemed earth.

That's not just "dispensationalism" which does this, btw – even post-millenial guys are in for the New Heavens and New Earth which are -far- -better- than what we have today. The question is not whether they will be better, but –how- they will be better. And in that paradigm, even the Dispensationalist says that the Earth is "redeemed" by Christ.

* Dispensationalism stresses the hope of a “rapture” over the hope of a resurrected physical life.

It's sort of breath-taking that someone is willing to say this out loud – because even the sort of weak-tea dispensationalism of a Tim LaHaye doesn't say that the rapture is the be-all and end-all of Christian life. The Resurrection is –still- the ultimate end of redemption, and it is a –physical- resurrection, not merely souls without bodies.

* Dispensationalism stresses the importance of saving people from the earthly existence and inviting them into a spiritual, heavenly existence.

That's almost laughable – especially in the context that Robinson is talking about MacArthur who wrote The Gospel According to Jesus and has opposed the ridiculous easy-believism of "Free Grace" guys like Zane Hodges. MacArthur is about an exclusively-eternal salvation? Document that in some way – especially in the context of his Dispensational leanings.

* MacArthur’s own books on Heaven are filled with hints toward gnostic ideas that matter itself is evil; that true “glory” is when we move out of the fleshly existence and into the spiritual existence.

This last one is interesting because it names "hints" rather than open statements and affirmations. Let me suggest something: frame MacArthur's work as a body of writings that hang together in some way and are related to each other, and these so-called hints will –all- evaporate. That can't be said about the guys Dr. MacArthur is criticizing in The Truth War.

So, before MacArthur accuses others of being “false teachers” and “apostates,” he had better know that he opens himself up to the same accusations.

See above. This is at best a strident accusation and at worst a completely-unsupported fiction which Robinson hasn’t substantiated at all.

Now, for critics who want to peck at this dismissal of Robinson's claims, let me offer you this: when it can be said that Dr. MacArthur advances a secret truth which is not available to all men that makes matter evil and the immaterial the only possible good, and that he preaches a Christ who was not a real man whose death was only a symbol or a metaphysical representation, then you can start barking up the tree of Gnosticism and/or Docetism.

Statement #3:
“Truth (the simple truth of the gospel, to be specific) is necessary for salvation … (Romans 10:13-14). Scripture is clear about this: there is no hope of salvation apart from hearing and believing the truth about Christ (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:21). That is why nothing is more destructive than false religion. Mere ignorance is devastating enough: ‘My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge’ (Hosea 4:6). But gospel-corrupting apostasy is the most sinister of all evils.” (pp. 119-120)

In light of MacArthur’s earlier warning against gnosticism, he had better be careful here. Remember that on page 89 of his book, MacArthur wrote, “Every form of gnosticism starts with the notion that truth is a secret known only by a select few elevated, enlightened minds. (Hence the name, from gnosis, the Greek word for knowledge.)”

What Robinson had better be wary of is a misrepresentation of Dr. MacArthur and the Gospel which he proclaims – because that's what's at issue here: whether the Gospel is proclaimed or if it is hidden. The Gospel is a public event, something (as it is said in the book of Acts) not done in a corner. And it is because of this aspect of the Gospel – the lifting up of Christ that all men may be drawn to Him – that there is –nothing- Gnostic about the Gospel MacArthur preaches.

But now watch what Robinson does in this next section:

One signature motif throughout MacArthur’s book is that he continually insists that what saves you is the knowledge of the truth. This, again, is a form of gnosticism: it teaches that Christians have a secret knowledge (gnosis) and that people are saved from this earthly existence by believing the knowledge that we can explain to them.
* For MacArthur, evangelism is explaining what he knows is the truth to others.
* For MacArthur, salvation is when someone accepts and knows this truth.
* Therefore, according to MacArthur, the key to Christian ministry is the proclamation of specific truths, so that people will hear these truths, accept these truths, in order that they too will be “in the know.”

This is a classic error on the part of novice critics of Christianity in general and critics of Baptists in particular. On the one hand, they confuse the categories of "proclamation" or "evangelism" with "apologetics" or "defense". On the other, they are seeking to press the philosophy of "gnosis" into service just because of the Biblical statement that we should "know" Christ.

"gnosis" is a secret knowledge which one gains by private means, sometimes referred to as an interior light or spark from God. What Dr. MacArthur advances, in the most obvious terms possible, is a knowledge of God obtained by public and special revelation on the part of God through Scripture and ultimately through Christ.

Only someone with no real understanding of either the Bible or Gnosticism could come to the conclusion that evangelical faith is appealing to a private center – but it would serve one well to compare that to some of the statements coming from guys like McLaren and Bell.

MacArthur is quick to point out that Jesus is truth incarnate, and that we need a personal relationship with Christ in order to be saved. THIS is the gospel. I wish he said this more often in the book.

How often does he have to say it in a lifetime of writing and preaching? Another pretty amateurish mistake on Robinson's part is trying to isolate MacArthur's criticism in this book for the fairly-encyclopedic body of writing he has turned out in 40 years of ministry.

If this were Dr. MacArthur's first book, or if he didn’t have a print and audio archive of what amounts to gigabytes of text and sermon audio, all of which in one way or another points to the fact of the incarnation of Christ as the fulfillment of Moses and the Prophets, Robinson's criticism would have some legs to stand on. Instead, it has to sit down and catch its breath.

However, the way he elevates “knowledge” as the key to salvation over and over again in this book opens him up to the accusation that he is the one that is hedging toward the apostasy of gnosticism, for it is not a secret knowledge of the truth that saves, it is a relationship with Christ that saves.

If MacArthur wants to point fingers at other teachers and accuse them of apostasy, MacArthur had better be ready for some of the same treatment in turn.

This is the basic problem with this book. MacArthur is seeking to label people "apostates" when they do not, in fact, fit the description. The proof is in that MacArthur himself fits his own description!

See above. I can frankly honor Robinson's good form as he structured his criticism here well – it's got good expositional form. It just doesn’t have any substantive expositional content, and falls down for lack of real substance.

UPDATED: For the record, I fixed some typos and clarified one statement, so your RSS feeders may have gotten a double copy of this post. Thanks to all alert readers who helped comb this out.

Meet Slicey

There's a fellow calling himself (or maybe it's a woman calling herself) "Slicey" in the meta, and yesterday I clowned Slicey for saying this:

Your Cartesian understanding of knowledge, and lack of recognizing your own pre-understanding was my point.

Which, I think, long-time readers of this blog will find especially amusing. However, Slicey isn't happy about being clowned:

Tell me what it means before you "clown me." Because you don't understand something don't resort to a graphic.

Let's hang on a minute here -- because the irony is pretty delicious. Slicey -- who has called the poster video "cartesian" in presupposition -- wants me to explain the category "clown" to him/her before I apply it. I should be more rational, apparently, rather than intuitive.

I'll wait for you to stop laughing before we go on.

You OK now? good.

See -- Slicey doesn't think I know what he/she means when he/she calls me "Cartesian", and ... well, he/she tells it so well:

Typical evangelical.

Which, of course, is not a label, right? Just an obvious fact based on evidence. Nothing "cartesian" about that -- that's not a wholly-westernized criticism based on Enlightenment-style classifications. That's just the truth in love, I am sure. We'll get back to that in a minute.

Call someone a "liberal" or the like then you don't have to listen to ANYTHING they have to say.

Now, here's what's interesting: I didn't call Slicey a "liberal": I called Slicey a "clown" -- in fact, I used the "angry clown" gravatar, not the "happy clown" avatar to make my point more pointy. So if Slicey wants to kvetch about "cartesian understanding of knowledge", maybe he/she should check his/her own epistemological Brita filter before coming here and getting all allegedly-informed on me.

It's like there is a chess game and by labeling you wipe their pieces off the board before the game begins.

Which, if we review the meta, the first person to start assigning labels was ... Slicey. To make full disclosure here, this is what the exhange looked like:

These posters were difficult to read spread out over time on Pyro. To see them so quickly together...the narrow world-view, the arrogance, it is difficult for those that recognize (sort-of with some help!) their own pre-understandings and biases that they come to the text with.

Descartes would be so proud of your grasp at knowledge. YHWH on the other hand...
Slicey | Homepage | 09.28.07 - 4:15 am | #

---

Slicey:

BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh brother -- that's the best joke of all, dude! It's an offense to God to say that the Emergent guys are unorthodox in their theology and adolescent in their ability to interact with those they disagree with!

Oh man -- whooh! That's better than coffee at 6:30 AM ...

... oh wait -- I just read your blog, dude. That's a shame. It's too bad you're serious.
centuri0n | Homepage | 09.28.07 - 6:35 am | #

---

I never said it was an affront to God to say stuff about Emergents. Stuff needs to be said about Emergents.

Your Cartesian understanding of knowledge, and lack of recognizing your own pre-understanding was my point.
Slicey | 09.28.07 - 3:45 pm | #

At which point I clowned Slicey and said, "'cartesian understanding of knowledge'? That is the dumbest thing I ever read, dude. Take your clowning like a man."

So as we consider who broke out the Enlightenment Dymo labeler and started tagging things with categories in order to dismiss them, poor Slicey was the one who thought labels would clear things up for the rest of us. Especially in God's eyes.

For the record, Slicey, you got clowned for being self-controdictory and more smug than informed. One of the reasons for that would be a conversation I had with Tim Enloe about two years ago in which he accused me of the same thing, and I told him that, in the first place, I wasn't a dualist; in the second place, Descartes' "cogito ergo sum", in spite of his good intentions, was and is a form of idolatry which places experience before divine revelation. It's humanism, as you would agree, I am sure -- but in that, it violates the precepts of Romans 1:18-end, replacing God as the cornerstone of how we know anything.

But let's be clear about something -- it's your position, Slicey, that labeling things is an enlightenment task betraying Enlightenment epistemological presuppositions. The problem is that God is a covenant God, and He sets aside Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob -- He in fact gave a name to Abraham and Israel to set them apart for all time. It's funny how God makes such a big deal about setting apart Israel but that act somehow gets lost in the eyes of people who want to be more Eastern or more into context. It is in that way, by that method of separating our work from His, which God tells us what is true about Himself.

That's not an Enlightenment view of things: that's the Old Testament view of things, which predates Descartes by two millennia.

So you get clowned for buying into a Chomskyite reduction of western civilization, and not being half as concerned with a God-centered view of the mind and reason as you like to think you have.

If you need more detail there, we can probably cover another 1,000 words on the subject before its get mind-numbingly boring and all my readers have slid off to cut grass or whatever.

It's your site, do what you want, "clown me" if you must. I'm still fairly certain though that if there might be people reading this that understand the term Cartesian, they will see you don't even begin to understand what I meant, because I used a term you didn't recognize, and inadvertently clowned yourself by trying to cut me off with something so shallow.

Aha. I didn't clown you: I clowned me. I didn't realize that you're rubber and I'm glue -- because if I did recognize those categories, I would have ended my comments with "double jinx infinity -- no takebacks!"

You got clowned for doing the thing you say is bad, Slicey. You got clowned for trying to fish the mote in my eye out with your half-informed, self-congratulatory stage-prop-sized powder puff rather than something which will actually accomplish the job -- and you hit yourself in the face with it, and got mad at me for laughing.

Stop hitting yourself, dude. You don't want me to laugh? Stop hitting yourself.

Pomotivators -- the Video

This'll go up on the TeamPyro site later this week, but here's the music video for the Pomotovator posters.

Apologies to Elvis Costello, Declan McManus, and all other aliases bound to be frownie-faced over this.

Blog This

In 4 parts, no less:









Worth talking about. I'm interested in seeing what you-all will say about this ...

Fries with that

[disclaimer: this is not a paid advertisement]

So there were a lot of e-mails flying around yesterday, and without violating any agreed confidences, I had this thought while trading bandwidth with a couple of people.

It starts, as is common in my world, with a cartoon:

The comment was made that this is the conservative view of orthodoxy -- it's a prison or a fortress meant to keep all kinds of people out. And, I guess, there's something to that -- but it gives the impression that the objective of the Gospel is to make the church into a bunker, and that somehow the church's primary task is to keep itself clearly separated from the world and that's it.

Listen: there's no question that James 1:27 says that Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to keep oneself unstained from the world. But it doesn't only say that. It says, "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world." That is, we have to be in the world but not of the world -- we have to be doing things which present the Gospel to the world. We are suppose to be a Light to the world (Mt 5:12; Phil 2:15).

So whatever orthodoxy is -- and it is something specific -- it cannot be something which causes us to be a bunker. And if I may propose this without being seen as condescending or disrespectful, I think this is what orthodoxy ought to turn us into:

Now, before you go insane and fill the meta with denunciations, hear me out. In the first place, Sonic is pretty limited, right? You can't get a steak at Sonic, and you can't get a pizza, and you can't get lobster tail or any of that stuff -- so someone who is looking for that can't pull up to the talking sign and demand a seafood platter and then be in a huff when the voice tells them, "I'm sorry, you can't get that here -- how about a Slush?" In fact, we would think that someone who did that to the talking sign would be somewhat of an egomaniac -- because everyone knows what Sonic is about.

In that, Sonic doesn't care what seafood lovers want. Sonic knows what's good for Sonic, and doesn't much listen to critics who think Sonic should also be Red Lobster or the Outback Steak House. Sonic's not going to add all kinds of bad ideas to its inventory because someone thinks their menu is too limited.

But on the other hand, Sonic is able to leverage its menu to be somewhat wildly popular -- and that, maybe based on one item: the Slush. Just a few flavors, but the slush is by a long shot Sonic's claim to fame -- especially since they did away with the Frito Chili Pie (a violation of orthodoxy which they will pay the price for in the long run, I am certain).

But my point is this: Sonic maintains a kind of regimented plan and creates itself not to be a defender of its plan so much as a promoter of its plan. That is, the plan is what it is, and people should know that this plan is full of good things. They don't have to change the plan. The Slush will always be Sonic's foundational matter -- because the Slush is good.

Think about it: Lemon Berry Slush. Just the words make you want to go get one. It makes the back of my throat dry to think about it. What Sonic has -- I want that. And it's not because Sonic has pandered to me: it is because I have tasted of what Sonic has, and it is good. And remember: Sonic doesn’t have any shame in asking you, once you’re hooked on the Slush, "You want fries with that?" They don't have any shame in asking you every time you come for the sweet, savory stuff if you will also take the up sell -- if you would be willing to go in for more while you are here.

I'd be willing to take for granted today that your church has an orthodox statement of faith -- that it has the Christian menu someplace in there. Here's my question: does your church treat the menu like it's something to be protected and defended, or does it treat the menu as the only reasonable thing which we must share? Is it serving up the Gospel, or is it hiding the Gospel? Is it a result of the Gospel, and an outlet for the Gospel or is it trying to hide the Gospel from harm and keep it safe from anyone who might touch it?

I realize this analogy has some pretty serious limits, but look: Christ wants to be lifted up. You can't lift Christ up very far if you live in a bunker -- the ceiling is too low.

Let's think about how we can leverage orthodoxy as something which is spiritually delicious today, something that if people taste and see, they will want it more and more.

Come and get it.

Catez hot tin roof

Catez emailed me to make sure I didn’t miss his her (sheesh!) reply at Dan Kimball’s blog – because, you know, Dan Kimball’s not going to respond to those kinds of questions – and I wanted to make sure I responded to him her in full.

UPDATED: Ahem.

I got this e-mail from Dan Kimball? And in it, Pastor Kimball pointed out my statement about "those kinds of questions", and my interpretation of his comment is that my statement comes across as a bit uncharitable toward him.

He's right. I apologize.

Frank,

Wow - you really managed to mischaracterise me in your comment:

"What strikes me as interesting in the responses from catez (who is a reader of my blogging elsewhere) and Eric is that they don't see blogging as a valid form of dialog. It can only be a fight, or it can only be impersonal, or it can only be not enough. Geez, guys: why blog?"

I don't see what my reading of your blog has to do with this for starters.

For starters, Catez, it has to do with context. Pastor Kimball and his readers may have an excuse for thinking that I’m just a blogger itchin’ for a fight, but you should know better. In that, when your original reply to me was Do you think so Frank? That he should suddenly engage in public "rounds" with some-one to satisfy your curiosity? Would that be the best reason? I mean, having said what you've said, how could anyone not think an approach to dialogue was just contrived after that?, you should have some small insight into what exactly I’m asking for when Chamblee shows up looking for friends among anyone who will say I’m a bad guy.

I do think that engaging Chamblee would be an excellent place for Dan Kimball to test his “They Like Jesus” methodology out. Does it put Chamblee on the defensive? I’d be a liar if I said, “no,” but seriously: what statement of affirmation about evangelism would not put Chamblee on the defensive?

I wasn't commenting on your blog at all. Neither did I specify what I thought "rounds" meant - so you've read your own definition into that.

I like that – “I’ll put ‘rounds’ in quotes to make a point of repeating what seems to be a perspective in Frank’s comment, underscoring my perspective that Frank has some kind of excessive curiosity and is therefore making a spectacle of the event, but when Frank calls me on it, I’ll just say I was too vague for him to comment that way.”

If your point was not that blogging an interaction with a rank unbeliever like Chamblee is profitless and contrived, and should not be done for the sake of a spectacle, please tell me what it was. Tell me how you expressed that point of view in your comment.

My comment was asking - since you missed it - if the best reason for engaging in dialogue with some-one who is not a believer simply the satisfaction of your curiosity? - and given what you had already said wouldn't a sudden dialogue seem contrived? i.e. who is more important in the dialogue - you or the person being dialogued with?

It seems that I have not misread you at all, catez: you just don’t like hearing what you are saying come out of someone else’s keyboard.But since you asked, the best reason for engaging Chamblee with the “They Like Jesus” method is that he’s right there, and he’s an unbeliever. That is, we are allegedly talking about effective evangelism strategies, right? And Pastor Kimball is making a video series about how good this works, yes? And Zondervan is banking on this strategy to sell some books, right?

Well, golly: Chamblee says he likes Jesus but he can’t stand the people who worship Him. There ya go: that’s outside the bubble. Let’s get a dialog and an intelligent conversation and a non-polemic interaction which doesn’t just quote Bible verses at somebody going with Chamblee.

Why? Because that’s what Pastor Kimball says we ought to be doing.

I’d love that. I wouldn’t even comment on it – because it is possible that one of my greatest problems is that I am too polemical, and I am too loveless and that I do beat people over the head with the Bible.

Show me the better way. Teach me. Provide an example for me in this fellow who thinks he can garner your partnership against the fundies and Jesus-worshippers because he thinks they have done something wrong by you-all.

That’s all: teach me. What I got you don’t want, but if what you got does what I am actually trying to do, I’ll change. I’ll come across. The Gospel is not about one script for reaching the lost, and I want to win the lost. You know: because you have read my blog and know that’s my #1 concern.

It is a complete lie to say that I don't see blogging as a form of dialogue. Nothing in my comment here or anywhere else indicates that I believe that. I've been blogging for 3 1/2 years and have never said blogging cannot lead to dialogue. I've had many dialogues - some public and some private. I think you owe me an apology actually.

An apology for what exactly? I’m pretty ready to apologize to anybody when I shatter glass or even drop the ball. But in this case, between you and this fellow Eric, I’m fairly confident that what has happened is that I have asked some pointed questions to and about someone you value which he is not prepared to answer. In that, I have also responded to what I would call “knee-jerk objections” against fair questions. You and Eric both simply reacted against what you see as hostility toward Pastor Kimball – when in fact, in the thread he opened to field questions, he hasn’t answered one.

It is your view that, having pointed out that Chamblee is an unbeliever with whom this method could be tested out, the dialog would not be useless. Why? Because it is a blog format – one where (as Eric said) there is post/counterpost, or as you said, one which is “contrived”.

I do believe that my conversations and dialogues with those who are not Christians occurs as a set of responses between two people who want to engage in discussion - not as some sort of "proof" of method to some-one else bystanding.

Problematically, the video series Dan Kimball is producing with Zondervan says something else by the very nature of its production: that is, we teach this method by example.

In that, think through your complaint here, catez. I think you have over-reacted because I have asked Dan Kimball the same kinds of questions I have asked iMonk, and Steve Camp, and the atheist guys who have passed through, and whoever else we don’t mention out of a loathing to summon them. That is, I have been the same kind of guy to someone who some think is above being subjected to direct questions.

Dude: he opened up the comments and asked for questions. Mine were honest and made with the proper level of respect for a pastor. And Chamblee is still lost. I wonder why only people like me will bother to interact with him?

Other Loudness

Joe Thorn gave us a link yesterday (it's about time, Joe), and I thought I'd clean up some loose ends regarding what I said there. Because the problem, really, is what we think we ought to be doing about culture. On the one hand, we have all kinds of people who want to view the internal church culture with an open hand, making the culture of the church somehow "like" the culture at large in order to get some people off their duff, so to speak, to come in and maybe hear about Jesus even though they really came for the coffee or the band.

And that sounds like a criticism of the "emergent" folks (and it is), but think about this: there are plenty of nondescript, nondenominational megachurches out there which fit this mold, so let's not pretend that the biggest problem here is the "innovators": the biggest problem is that our idea of innovation (if such a thing is rightly said about the preaching of the Gospel) is to get a new logo for "new Coke" in the hope that it's the logo people hate and not the crappy, too-sweet taste.

But on the other hand, we also have the view that somehow it's the culture we have to save. You know: this gets underscored in this week's Rolling Stone magazine as they do a little 3-pager on Ron Luce's Acquire the Fire empire. I always turn on a second light and get out my reading glasses whenever I see someone who graduated from Oral Roberts University, and I always break out the air fresheners whenever I see someone who is endorsed by Jerry Falwell, but look at what Rolling Stone reports about Luce's view of things -- which is reiterated, btw, at the Acquire the Fire website:

"This is a real war," Luce preaches. When he talks like that, he growls. "This is not a metaphor!" In Cleveland, he intercuts his sermons with videos of suicide bombers and marching Christian teens. One of the most popular, "Casualties of War," features an elegiac beat by a Christian rapper named KJ-52 laid over flickering pictures of kids holding signs declaring the collapse of Christendom: 1/2 OF US ARE NO LONGER VIRGINS, reads a poster board displayed by a pigtailed girl. 40% OF US HAVE INFLICTED SELF-INJURY, says a sign propped up over a sink in which we see the hands of a girl about to cut herself. 53% OF US BELIEVE JESUS SINNED, declares the placard of a young black man standing in a graffiti-filled alley.

Yes: all of the things listed here are bad -- some morally, some theologically. But the question is this: is it the secular culture we have to win? See: I thought that Jesus came to establish a new Heavens and a new Earth, not to try to make the one we have wrecked into one in which Victoria's Secret only sells stuff to married women, but doesn't target unmarried women because that would be profitable.

Jesus didn't come here, giving up His rightful place on the throne of Heaven and the active praise of creatures which will make you cry out in fear because they are flames of fire, and die on a cross so we can have a global America. Middle Class American culture is not the reason the Son of God spilled His own blood. He did not walk out of the tomb to hand you the keys to a new SUV or a house with a nice, flat sod yard.

Jesus came to die for sinners, and it wasn't because He was angry but because of Love. It is because God loved the world that He gave His only son -- you know: "for God so loved the world ...". "For" here means "because" or "on accout of". So the smack-talk about war and opposing cultural terrorists is just as stupid as capitulating to a passive-aggressive culture which will just not talk to you if you disagree with them. Because you're mean.

This Jesus is a crazy person by any normal standard. He thinks that if He dies, many will be saved -- He doesn't think that if he calls down 10,000 legions of angels and frees Himself anyone will be saved. He doesn't demand His rights -- which would be the rights of the King and Ruler of everything -- but gives them up to accomplish something else. And He calls us to be like Him.

He thinks that if we are obedient, the world will hate us, but those who are called will come. Think about that: Jesus doesn't want us to win an argument but to tell the truth and then accept the disdain of those who reject the truth. He doesn't want us to kill our enemies but to love them, and he doesn't want us to attack them but to die to sin daily. If we have seen the enemy, we know that he is Us -- and in that, the wrong thing to do is to call those like whom we once were the real enemies of the Gospel.

If there are enemies of the Gospel, they belong to a group who has access to and in some way posseses the Gospel. The single-mom stripper doesn't possess the Gospel. The Victoria's Secret district manager doesn't possess the Gospel. MTV not only does not possess the Gospel, but it couldn't trip over it if they were standing in the middle of it blindfolded and the Gospel was wrapped in concentric circles around them.

And if I can get this off my chest, there's something wrong with a guy who runs stadium events and lives like Tony Robbins in very nice hotels and has a staff of hundreds who tells kids that they are the ones who need to give up the materialistic luxuries of this world. Heh bub: when you fire your personal hair stylist, stop buying relevant updates to your wardrobe, establish a local church and some personal accountability for yourself among the people of God rather than appealing to phony authorities like James Dobson and Pat Robertson, then you can credibly start the organ music against secularism, materialism, idolatry and immorality and set the monkey to dancing.

So listen to me: this statement -- this thesis which my pastor has proposed and is working out in his own life and the life of our local church -- that "The Gospel is the solution to culture" is not just a slogan which you have to contemplate with some kind of zen-like objective of becoming nothing. This is the serious business of first being utterly humbled by the hands that were pierced through by the nails which we deserved, and the head which was mocked and slapped and crowned with thorns instead of the perfect diadem it deserved, and the side from which blood and water flowed to prove He had died from the punishment; then it is a matter of being that humble before people who aren't that humble, and who think you are stupid and weak for being humble -- until they either kill you for being like the firstborn of many brothers, or they finally see His loving face and feel His loving hands and hear His loving voice in your declaration that they know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus who was crucified.

That doesn't get us a republican majority in the House or the Senate, and it won't get us a pro-life President who will actually seek to protect the innocent and the oppressed: it gets us killed for the sake of our fellow men -- economically, socially, emotionally, professionally, in all the ways our heart and minds and souls can manifest this truth. It doesn't earn us the respect of those who say they like our Jesus but can't understand us: it makes us witnesses -- martyrs -- to truth.

Don't buy the t-shirt. Don't get the plastic symbol for your car. Don't pretend that you can join the club and once you have a membership card it's all good. Get real. Get serious about whether the death of Christ means something more than entertainment and personal gratification.

Thinking Out Loud

I've been thinking about some of the things people on the emergent side of the blogosphere have been saying lately about why people like Jesus but hate the church. Many of them sound suspiciously familiar, but let's admit a few things about the sociological group in the U.S. known and recognized as "Christian":

There is no effort to think about substantive differences inside the sociological loaf of bread. That is: when Pat Robertson says something stupid, everyone from Marginal Mike and Lukewarm Lisa to John MacArthur, John Piper and J. Ligon Duncan takes a credibility hit, and nobody comes out to say, "Pat, please shut up." The leadership of the church has to be more open and public about its repudiation of kooks -- whoever they are. In the American Christian loaf, there is a lot of bread, a lot of vacuous pockets, and enough whole-grain nuts to make the whole loaf full of, um, high fiber, if you see what I'm saying.

There is no effort to systematically and publicly underscore meaningful theological differences. You can prove this yourself by asking any nominal Christian or any non-believer this question: "Is there a substantive difference between what the Bible teaches and what the Koran teaches?" There's no way to approach even the Protestant/Catholic divide -- let alone the Presbyterian/Baptist divide -- when most people can't even identify the uniqueness and superiority of Christ.

There is no effort on the part of denominational leaders across the board to repudiate men who reject denominationalism for the sake of building private empires. The slogan, "I follow Jesus" (and its ugly brother, "I follow the Holy Spirit") ought to be treated in exactly the same way Paul told the Corinthians to treat that slogan -- which is, to reject it from people who use it to garner favor and position inside the church. The exact same thing ought to be true when men embrace denominationalism to raise their own personal capital.

There is also no attempt to distinguish between the actual stumbling block of the Gospel and phony stumbling blocks which people erect to protect themselves from evangelism. For example, it's a phony stumbling block -- a ruse, a red herring -- when someone says they think the church is "too judgmental". Too judgmental about what? When was the last time there was a book burning at a local church that you didn't have to hunt up via Google? How about a live protest against -- let alone public evangelism toward -- homosexuals which was meaningful? The church is not one-tenth as judgmental as the radical political left in this country, and that is to its shame.

And let me be clear about something, before I get misquoted: book burning and public picketing of objectionable events is judgmental. Yelling at homosexuals who are walking around at their version of public worship is judgmental and antithetical to the Gospel. Tearing up books and throwing them into a fire in front of TV cameras is ignorant and mean-spirited. But when does this happen, really? Who has personally witnessed such a thing? Nobody I know -- and I have lived both in large, metropolitan cities and now in the Bible belt.

[UPDATED: To be fair, James White experienced some really amazing stumbling blocks this weekend, so I do actually know somebody who has been a victim of "too judgmental". My suggestion, James, is to post old women in electric wheelchairs outside the church next week and let Lonnie see what kind of stuff he's made of.]

However, at the exact same time, the church is also not 10% as involved in influencing the culture as the radical political left. We live in a bunker, and we behave in public like people who live in a bunker -- which is to say, we have no idea how to act. We look away when people look us in the eye; we stammer, and don't understand the cadences of normal human speech. We act like we have never seen a person outside of our own family before. So on the one hand, we have no idea how to object to things we know are wrong, and on the other hand we don't even know how to treat other people like human beings because we live in the 21st century versions of caves.

I think these are true things -- this is how it really is in the world. And this is not to the church's credit by any leap of the imagination. But what concerns me about these things is that somehow they are used to leverage the good conscience of the church (irony: you'd think that a church like the one above doesn't have a good conscience) to listen to people who are not in or of the church to motivate some kind of change.

Listen: the reason to change is that we are being disobedient to God. There is a great side effect of doing that -- we will decimate the criticisms of those outside the church, and win people by our love rather than by our slogans or arguments. But the method for change is Gospel-centered reformation, and the motive for change which sticks is God-ward love and obedience. So if you have the complaints, above, you're right: those things are true. The question is whether becoming what the culture wants us to be is the answer, or will we be the solution to culture.