Joe Thorn is a good guy

See – I put that headline up there to make sure that anyone reading this will not miss the fact that I said, “Joe Thorn is a good guy”. Because this post isn’t about whether or not Joe Thorn is a good guy or a bad guy. This post is about his new blogging endeavor.

See: Joe is a good guy. If you meet him, I promise you will probably like him. And if you ask me, that’s probably a good attribute for any Christian: as Paul would say in proper King James, lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty. I think that’s Joe.

And he has opened up a new blog with fellow reformissionary Steve McCoy [note: AFAIK, STeve McCoy is a good guy, so no sleight-by-omission intended] called “sub•text”, about establishing the church in a suburban (American) context – which, you know, the suburbs are full of lost people. Everyone from Steve Camp to Steve Sjogren would agree with that. The suburbs need the Gospel.

I agree that the suburbs need the Gospel.

But then Joe and Steve affirm this:

For many Christians the mission of God is seen as the salvation of individual sinners from hell, sin and self. While this is an important part of God’s mission, it is only part of it.

The whole picture is that God is redeeming a people for himself made up of every tribe, tongue and nation. And his mission does not stop there, but includes the salvation of creation itself. His goal is the establishment of a new creation that will never fall into corruption; one that will reveal and revel in his glory for eternity. In fact, at every point along the way of the history of redemption God’s promise to redeem through the Messiah is never pointed merely at individual salvation. The reformed tradition has made this clear in its dealing with the covenants of God.

I added the underlines, btw. Before we go any farther, I don't know anyone who would deny the first underlined part except for a few hard-core anti-reformational types. People would fall on a spectrum of whether God's glory is in the foreground, the middle-ground, the background, or perhaps God's glory is the overarching metaphysical ground -- but the idea that "God's mission" is to glorify Himself is, frankly, baseline Christian metaphysics.

The second underlined part there, though, is where the dust cloud sorta kicks up. And the problem is not the reformed stress in what it means that God calls a people out to himself: it is what Joe and Steve meanby applying that tradition.

The next part is pretty neutral:

In God’s first promise of redemption after the fall (Gen 3:15), hope is given to the human race. Somehow, through the woman’s offspring, Satan would be defeated and sin would be conquered (See Geerhadus Vos, pg 43). God later promised that through Abraham’s seed all the peoples of the earth would be blessed. This covenant would be made with all of Abraham’s spiritual offspring (Gen. 12, 15, 17; Gal. 3). Ultimately God’s promises of redemption always reveal a communal salvation and a creation-restoration.

Now, again -- that's a pretty reformed idea that Jesus didn't die just to save me (even if I do get saved overall). It's also a pretty reformed idea that God will restore creation. The problem, of course, is that these two things are not completed as parallel work. That is: God calls out the church through the proclamation of the Gospel in the course of time, but the renewal of "the heavens and the earth" isn't a like that.

Joe and Steve, I think, would disagree with that:

Concerning the restoration of the earth George Eldon Ladd said it this way,

The biblical idea of redemption always includes the earth. Hebrew thought saw an essential unity between man and nature. The prophets do not of the earth as merely the indifferent theater on which man carries out his normal task but as the expression of divine glory. The Old Testament nowhere holds forth the hope of a bodiless, nonmaterial, purely “spiritual” redemption as did Greek thought. The earth is the divinely ordained scene of human existence. Furthermore, the earth has been involved in the evils which sin has incurred. There is an interrelation of nature with the moral life of man; therefore the earth must also share in God’s final redemption.

George Ladd, The Presence of the Future

For some of you, a bell just rang, and for others of you, well, you need a tour guides here. George Eldon Ladd was a dispensationalist and a baptist who wrote some interesting -- and, I think, when you read it as he intended it -- useful theology on the meaning of the term "Kingdom of God" and how we are to think about that in this church age. The problem is that Ladd's work has been somewhat co-opted by the "Kingdom Now" guys for the sake of setting up the groundwork of dominion theology and/or theonomistic approaches to the church in the world.

Here is what I am NOT saying: I am NOT saying that Steve and Joe have drunk the dominion theology Kool-Aid. I am sure they are not throwing themselves into the Pat Robertson/Gary North right-wing of dispensational reconstructionism.

Here's what I am saying: they are making the same mistake to the left.

These are two obviously-bright guys who have and obviously-right heart about people and God. They want the Gospel to go out, and for it not to come back void, amen? So Joe and Steve are not bad guys. But in wanting to be faithful, and in not wanting to do what their forefathers in the faith have done, I think they are reacting against superficial problems rather than the root cause of their beef with SBC suit-and-tie types.

The problem is not that the SBC doesn't understand the command in James to not be hearers only of the Law but doers also: the problem is that the SBC has made the Law the Gospel in many ways, and has therefore transformed the communio sanctorum from God's work using God's means into men's work using men's means.

And as a word of advice to Joe and Steve, neither of whom are bad guys, let me suggest that changing the works from Gospel sings and passing laws against Gay marriage to, well, raves and passing laws against unkempt yards ... might as well just pass the resolution against alcohol, too, then. Meet the new boss: same as the old boss.

WORD OF CAUTION: I think it is conceivable that the rebuttal from Joe and Steve looks like this -- "dude, that is our point. The SBC is afraid to make superficial changes which will reach people, and that's wrong."

The problem is that this is not my point. My point is that there are fundamental problems in over-realized eschatology, both on the right and the left. I think we should stop quibbling about things like whether or not Lenexa, KS, has the same cultural environment as Miami, FL, and start worrying about whether or not anyone in either city has even encountered the Gospel. Hearing the Gospel proclaimed is not about putting it in the right fashion catalog. It is about whether or not the church itself has as its main focus a savior who transcends culture whose work is greater than aid.

More advice for iMonk

Sorry for the interruption. Don't take a job situated on the edge of a political knife; own the part of the displacement you have made for yourself. Right? I said that already.

Advice #3 is this: make sure you understand why you are working in the first place. You know something? I work for the paycheck. No offense to anybody, but if this was the 23rd century and we lived in the United Federation of Planets were replicators made everything we needed, I promise you I wouldn't be working in manufacturing. Not because Manufacturing is bad in some way, but because I'd rather read and blog. Sadly, blogging isn't the cash cow some people make it out to be, but in my non-blogging time I'm a pretty good leader and job coach -- and there's decent money in that.

I work for the money, and I hope for heaven's sake you do, too. If you work for the status, the "satisfaction", the "challenge", or any other non-money reason, I think the odds of you sleeping well at night are pretty low -- because those things are fleeting.

"Cent," you might say, "money is fleeting, too, don't you think?" Indeed, moth and rust and thieves and all that -- but the common experience is that money spends to a budget and you can know when the money is going to run out. You just have to have a paycheck come in before the money runs out. You can't possibly gage when status, "satisfaction", or any other apparently-lofty aspiration will run out.

The exception to this, such as it is, would be full-time ministry, and again: you should ask your questions clearly about that exception rather than expect me to run up 3 pages on the subject and bore the other readers with your inquisitiveness.

Work for the money. That means you should find a job that requires as much of you as you are willing to trade for the money. Realize that money can't buy back years of your marriage, or your kids' childhood, or your health. Work for the money, and keep money in its rightful place.

But if you find working for the money somehow base or uncouth, then if you choose to work for the status or the power or the admiration of others, work as if those things matter to you. For example, if you're a teacher, you prolly won't get rich. But you will get 35 years to influence the minds of young people. That's what you're working for: don't waste it.

Last one: Don't attach your personal worth to employment. Not to get too God-centered here, but if you're an adopted son of the God of the universe, and the One and Only Son of God has shed his blood for you, none of that happened in order that you can be president of the convention or CEO of the company: it happened for a purpose God has already established, so whether you get to be famous or homeless your worth is not a function of your performance. If you get walked out, rejoice. Hope in God.

I am sure the readers have other good advice, and I leave it to them to go ahead and give it. Cruel and stupid remarks will not be tolerated.

Advice for iMonk

The blogger formerly known as iMonk has asked the following:

One new development in my life, post sabbatical, is an increased possibility that I’ll lose my job.

This could happen in several ways. Even though I am respected, liked and have a great ministry here, political and administrative realities are there. A couple of scenarios are possible.

I could get fired for things I’ve written. Even though I’ve taken extraordinary steps to make my blogging a non-issue at my job, it is still controversial with some people, and some of the people who have been unhappy with it could decide I need to go.

Another is this: A major leadership change will happen in the next year and a half, and I am a likely person to be moved out under new leadership. (Fairly normal in SBC life.) I’m an old geezer in a job that increasingly belongs to 20-somethings.

Here’s today’s question: Have you ever been fired/pushed out from a real job? What did you do to regroup and move on? How did this event work into your personal journey?

As a person who has left several jobs under his own power and has also been relieved of duty, the first thing I can say about this situation is that whoever you are, that hasn't changed just because your job is at stake. Sometimes "they" are going to fire you because "they" are jerks; most often "they" are going to fire you because you were a jerk. I know this factually because most of the people I have seen relieved of duty have been walked out because they didn't do the things their job required.

My first piece of advice is this: "don't take a job which is situated on the edge of a political knife." You are far better served to be in a job where they will fire you if you can't or won't do the work than you would be in a job where they can fire you because you don't look good in the new t-shirt. I would say this especially in the case of ministry work -- and I know that seems to many people to be an impossible requirement. We could talk about that specifically if somebody had a question about that.

That's advice about regrouping, btw -- because it brings into focus what you're going to do for a living after they give you the empty box and the handshake.

My second piece of advice is this: "Own the part of the displacement you made for yourself." I have been fired by neglegent posterior-shielding people (who, themselves, also got fired), and in spite of their shortcomings there was a kernel of truth under the reasons they proffered for separating me from their payroll. So whatever I did that contributed objectively to their extremely-subjective judgment, I need to own that so I don't do that again for someone who, frankly, deserves better. It is possible that you didn't do anything -- that the company went belly up, or they really do make it cheaper someplace else. If that's the case, there's nothing to own except the reality that you need to choose an employer who really does make it cheaper, better, faster -- and they still exist in the US.

I have two more pieces of advice, but I have actual work to do today. Maybe I'll drop the balance after lunch.

For whatever it's worth

I feel like I'm about to return to blogging as an actual hobby again any time now, or else just keep slogging along as you 250-or-so die-hards keep stopping by and checking to see if I have any new graphics.

But seriously: if you want to read 4 books that are essentially blog that have been bound (and I mean that in a good way), you should pick up Mark Driscoll's new releases in the series "A book you'll actually read". Use the search bar on the left and type in "Mark Driscoll", and the titles are "on the Old Testament", "On the New Testament", "On Church Leadership", and "On Who is God?"

I promised Michelle at Crossway that I'd do reviews on these books, and I will later this week. But for now, suffice it to be a recommendation. The short form on these books is that if you have read any other Driscoll material, you have probably read all of these books someplace else; but the truth is that these books are better than tracts, and require you, the Christian, to engage the person you are handing pieces of paper to. They also look like you care more than handing someone a two-color glossy napkin does.

The rest you get when I write the reviews. In the meantime, go buy some.

Oh wait -- I also read the Keller book on God, I have the new edition of William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith, I am trying to finish Kauflin's book on Worship, and I covet your prayers about my professional situation.

So yeah: I'm prolly going to blog a little. Soon.

WALL-E

Great movie. Best line, from the Captain of the Axiom: "I don't want to survive: I want to live."

Irony: every kid who went to see WALL-E opening weekend got a free disposable watch.

You won't get that one until about 3 minutes into the movie. Apparently not all plactis junk is created equally.

is this thing on?

OK. It's not hardly perfect, but it's what I've been doing for my sunday school class for the last 6 weeks and they have been kind and appreciative -- so the rest of you can find out what I sound like every morning.

The Generic Sunday School podcast is now on-line, and it picks up where we are reading through the Old Testament, my warts and all. It is not hardly perfect, and all errors are plainly my errors. However, rather than leave the podcast icon in the top of the blog perpetually dark, I thus link you.

The link works best when you have iTunes in the background and then click to find the subscription. The audio quality was best last week, and as long as you don;t mind a 15 MB download for 30 minutes of audio, it's OK. I was trying to keep the file size down around 3 MB each week, but the quality was like AM radio.

Anyway, there ya go. It's not hardly John MacArthur.

UPDATED: First of all, I thought everyone knew what a podcast icon looks like. Look under the comics code approval stamp to see the icon.

Second (and last), I got this e-mail today from iTunes which pointed me at iTunes University, and one of the links was Concordia Seminary's intro to Greek. I think your iPod just paid for itself.

ANOTHER UPDATE: the blog which feeds the podcast is found here for the luddites who still use dial-up but not iTunes.

Vote or Die

Y'know, I post the "best of" posts to try to keep the blog from going belly-up and to keep my time commitment to blogging minimized in the system tray, if you get what I'm saying: open, running, but not really doing anything.

Last night, my family went camping without me because, well, I'm the Dad, and I work for a living and the rest of them have a lovely summer vacation to take. And I hate sleeping on the ground. But in that, I got to eat pizza (the kind I like), play TeamFortress 2 until I unlocked the second level achievements for the Pyro, and in an act of utter irresponsibility, I slept in and didn't go work out this morning.

But that lead to reading blogs. Particularly, this one which I hate to link to because it's the yellow journalism of alleged "God Blogging", worse by far than any so-called watch-blog.

So I was reading Malkin, and she had the above-linked link to a photoshopped P.Diddy wearing a t-shirt that says "OBAMA OR DIE". Now, he didn't actually wear that shirt -- it's a prank, see? Very clever. The problem is that he did actually start a chant to that effect at the BET awards, so wear the t-shirt or not, he's in.

Now, before you go checking the Pawn Shop, let me suggest something to you: what kind of message is "Obama or Die"? Is that a political message? Should we be running people for office in whom we want to invest the power of life or death -- particularly our life or our death, pesonally?

That sounds like something othe than a political message to me, along the lines of "Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!" And you have to ask yourself: is that how much confidence I have in our political system, or does my confidence really lie someplace else and I have been somehow misled into saying things about a man that I would (or at least "should") only say about God?

Re-nutter

Now, in the end, you’re either saved or your not, right? So I'm not falling off the apple cart here. The question is if everyone in the church is saved, and if every church is itself standing inside the Gospel which saves. It would be a much less complicated world in which to deliver the Gospel if there were only "Gospel churches" and "unsaved people" and nary the twain shall meet but on the mission field.

What we actually have is a diverse spectrum of entities manifest in this world that stand in some relationship to Christ – with varying degrees of flaws among them. From inside the scope of the Gospel, we ought to see that many people affected by the Gospel are more affected by the culture than by the Gospel – and they gravitate away from the Gospel and toward the culture.

But what that looks like from outside the Gospel is that there are some people who say they have the Gospel who are willing to be cooperative about the matter and "tolerant" or "civil" about it, and some who are inflexible and intolerant and show no good will. To those outside the Gospel, not only does the Gospel look like a bad idea, but it seems to them that many who bear the Gospel are not very good at sharing it because if they were, they'd be more like these ones over here that work hard to make peace with the culture.

That's where the question, "How do you create good will for Jesus?" comes from. It comes from the perception that Jesus ought to offer some kind of concession to people in order to get a fair hearing. If He were reasonable, and if His servants were people who really cared, they'd be finding ways to be more like me – more like I want them to be – rather than whatever it is that they are.

Listen: before I crescendo here, it is important to "get" something. One of the clear admonitions that Jesus gave to the Disciples was that they should love one another. We were not saved in order to create a pro wrestling circuit of drama and violence. There is no doubt that, on balance, Christians could be more Christ-like to one another.

What that does not mean, however, is that "Christ-like" equals "your clubbing buddy Jesus". It also does not mean "your very sensitive creative buddy Jesus". It also does not mean "your ethereal pseudo-buddhist goth buddy Jesus". "Christ-like" means something other than "like me and my friends": in fact, it means the opposite of "the kind of person I would hang out with".

The matter of Christ-likeness is fairly shattering because we can only understand Christ in the context of the Gospel. The Christ like whom we ought to be is the Christ who died for sins, and had the authority to take up his life again. He is not someone who imitated anyone but was in fact the standard which we ought to imitate. And in that, Christ's death teaches us that opposition to sin for the sake of righteousness is worth dying for. There is a sacrificial aspect to that statement, but there is also a love of justice in that statement which is completely lost on the contemporary observer.

And the worst case is when that observer is someone in that gray area in my diagram who thinks they are in the church, but the Christ they advocate is a Christ who doesn't oppose sin but simply overlooks it – in order to make people feel OK.

My wife indulged me

Except for the gratuitous implied sex scene in the first 20 minutes, I loved Iron Man. Not for kids, for sure: I'd say rated "T" for Teen at least (very intense scenes and war violence [no splatter]).

However, it was pitch-perfect, and Downey was classic as Tony Stark. The big surprise for me was Jeff bridges as Obediah Stane.

Anyway, two thumbs up, not a big disappointment like the last Superman movie, and it leaves the door open for a lot of other cool stuff from marvel in the "Ultimate" universe category.

There are no spoilers. Go see it.

UPDATED: I'm looking for the person who can get me a high-res image of Stark's workshop in the scene where he's taking off the armor after he saves the Afgani village. When he looks over his shoulder at Pepper Potts, there's a workbench behind him, and I think Captian America's shield is on that bench.

Go find me the HI RES version of that scene. This is the low-res version:

Mixed Emotions

On the one hand, my kids are ridiculously happy and they love this little beast.

On the other hand, um, I feel like I got a hand-knitted pair of gloves and a muffler when I asked for a ball cap and a big-kid leather glove.

{sigh}

At least she barks at cats and squirrels. She sounds like a squeaky toy, but her heart is in the right place.