coming clean

Failing to Come to Grips With Bad Religion

Fri, 04 May 2012 10:37:00 -0400

Ross Douthat, in Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, p. 4:

[A] growing number of [Americans] are inventing their own versions of what Christianity means, abandoning the nuances of traditional theology in favor of religions that stroke their egos and inulgle or even celebrate their worst impulses. These faiths speak from many pulpits—conservative and liberal, political and pop-cultural, traditionally religious and favorably “spiritual”—and many of their preachers call themselves Christian or claim a Christian warrant. But they are increasingly offering distortions of traditional Christianity, not the real thing.

Locked in conflict, neither religious conservatives nor their secular antagonists have come to grips with this transformation. The secular mistake has been to assume that every theology tends inevitably toward the same follies and fanaticisms, and imagine a truly postreligious culture is even possible, let alone desirable. The religious mistake has been to fret over the threat posed by explicitly anti-Christian forces, while ignoring or minimizing the influence that the apostles of pseudo-Christianity exercise over the American soul. Along the way, both sides have embraced a wildly simplified vision of our culture, in which the children of light content with the children of darkness, and every inch of ground is claimed by absolute truth or deplorable error.

Quote of the Day

Thu, 03 May 2012 15:40:24 -0400

“Fiction can sometimes, like Nathan the prophet’s story of the ewe lamb, awaken parts of us that we have calloused over, due to ignorance or laziness or inattention or sin. This very night, on my way home, I was talking by telephone to my eighty-six year-old grandmother. She was telling me a story about the last time she saw my grandfather alive. She told me about feeling the coldness of his feet as she changed his socks in his hospital bed, about how his eyes were focused on her, though he couldn’t speak. She talked about how, when the nurses told her she had to leave, she kissed him, told him she loved him, and that she could feel him watching her as she left the room, for the last time. I knew she had lost my grandfather. I know that people die. I know “Husbands love your wives” (Ephesians 5). But that story awakened something in me. It prompted me to hold my wife with a special tenderness when I walked in the door. I had imagined what it would be like to say goodbye to her in that way, and, suddenly, all the daily pressures of kids and bills and house repairs and travel just seemed to fit in a bigger context. Fiction often does the same thing.”

Quote of the Day

Tue, 01 May 2012 15:02:43 -0400

“[T]he claustral feel of Osteen’s success gospel paradoxically works exactly the same effect that he warns believers to resist: It imposes limits on God, by largely confining his workings to the dominant American culture of success. If the Osteen-coached believer does not reap abundant and large reward in career, family life or creative pursuits, they are not necessarily going to curse their God, as Job’s comforters had counseled him to do amid his notorious personal setbacks. But neither are they going to make the key connections that earlier Protestant divines have preached, going back to Jonathan Edwards and John Calvin: that the divinity does not, in fact, have your own personal happiness occupying pride of place on his exhaustive to-do list. The universe is ultimately about a larger set of concerns, and faith concerns a much vaster striving toward justice than believers are wont to see in their personal affairs, their social conquests or their annual paychecks. This is why Edwards, for all of his better-known hell-and-brimstone sermons, urged onto believers a stoic ‘consent to being in general’— not a plan for individual life advancement.

“This disjuncture between Protestantism’s more humbling counsel and the feel-good Word Faith gospel became most painfully evident during one of Osteen’s closing perorations. In chilling detail, he recounted the story of a young Tutsi Christian woman who’d hid out in the bathroom of her church pastor’s office at the height of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The machete-wielding Hutu killers who pursued her returned to the pastor’s office every day for 91 days, usually calling out for her by name. At one point, Osteen said, a Hutu militia man was poised to turn the knob on the door to the tiny bathroom where the woman was quartered alongside six other Tutsi believers — but at the last moment, he became distracted and walked away. Finally, when the genocide had been contained, the woman was free, and has been traveling with ministers ever since to testify to the amazing story of her survival. ‘Nearly 1 million Rwandans were killed in this genocide,’ Osteen said as he wound up to the story’s larger moral. ‘It was very sad.’

“Well, no. The Rwandan genocide was something far more than sad — it was a colossal failure of moral and political agency, going back to the German and Belgian colonial partition of the country that set up artificial power conflicts between the nation’s two main tribes. This horror also most certainly came about thanks to the wretched failures of the Clinton administration and other Western powers to arrest a well-documented string of massacres, even as senior U.N. officials such as Lt. Gen Romeo Dallaire, the leader of the agency’s Rwandan peacekeeping mission, implored them to.

“For Osteen, of course, the story of this woman’s survival was a divine miracle. But if this one survivor was enjoying the loving favor of an omnipotent God, what are we to conclude that this same God thought of the more than 800,000 Rwandans murdered in the genocide? Was their faith wanting? Was God planning unparalleled new successes and joys for their surviving family members? Are these the people Osteen has in mind when he exhorts his listeners not to be victims, but victors?”

Far From Being Indifferent to Morality

Tue, 01 May 2012 09:21:50 -0400

Leon Morris, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, p. 62:

Holders of substitutionary ideas [of Christ’s atonement] have sometimes been criticized as being indifferent to moral values, but this criticism cannot be urged against the biblical writers. In the Scripture we see the price paid, the curse borne, in order that those redeemed should be brought into the liberty which may paradoxically be called slavery to God. The whole point of this is that sin no longer has dominion; the redeemed are saved to do the will of their Master.

The Benefit of Grace is Doubly Infinite

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:50:00 -0400

I preached about 4,800 words on the grace of God on Sunday. These 225 words from Jonathan Edwards are are more comprehensive and immeasurably better (from The Essential Edwards Connection, Book One, p. 61-62):

The redeemed have all from the grace of God. It was of mere grace that God gave us his only begotten son. The grace is great in proportion to the excellency of what is given The gift was infinitely precious, because it was of a person infinitely worthy, a person of infinite glory; and also because it was of a person infinitely near and dear to God. The grace is great in proportion to the benefit he have given us in him. The benefit is doubly infinite, in that in him we have deliverance from an infinite, because an eternal, misery, and also do receive eternal joy and glory. The grace in bestowing this gift is great in proportion to our unworthiness to whom it is given; instead of deserving such a gift, we merited infinitely ill of God’s hands. The grace is great according to the manner of giving, or in proportion to the humiliation and expense of the method and means by which a way is made for our having the gift. He gave him to dwell amongst us; he gave him to us incarnate, or in our naturel and in the like through sinless infirmities. He gave him to us in a low and afflicted state; and not only so, but as slain, that he might be a feast for our souls.

Quote of the Day

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 11:44:10 -0400

“Is Christ dead? and did he die the violent, painful, shameful, cursed, slow, and lonely death of the cross? Then surely there is forgiveness with God, plenteous redemption for the greatest of sinners, who by faith apply the blood of the cross to their poor guilty souls.

“There is sufficient power in the blood of the cross to wash away the greatest sins. Before the efficacy of this blood, guilt vanishes and shrinks away as the shadow before the glorious sun. Every drop of it has a voice, and speaks to the soul that sits trembling under its guilt better things than the blood of Abel (Heb. 10:24). For having enough in it to satisfy God, it must needs have enough in it to satisfy conscience. Can God exact satisfaction from the blood and death of his own Son, the surety of believers, and yet still demand it from believers? It cannot be.”

Quote of the Day

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 13:30:33 -0400

“I think we’ve gotten to the point in our culture where we’re all sex addicts, literally. We have equated happiness in life with as many orgasms as you can possibly pack in, regardless of where it is that you deposit your love interest…

“It’s just dehumanizing. And I have to honestly say, I think this era of porn is at least partially responsible for it. Where is the anticipation and the personalization? It’s all pre-fab now. You have these images coming at you unannounced and unsolicited. It just gets to be so plastic and phony to me. Maybe men respond to that. But is it really better than an experience with a real life girl that he cares about? It’s an exploitation of the poor male’s libidos. Poor babies, they can’t control themselves…

“I just imagine them sitting in front of their computers, completely annihilated. They haven’t done anything, they don’t have a job, they barely have ambition anymore. And it makes for laziness and a not very good sex partner. Do they know how to negotiate something that isn’t pre-fab and injected directly into their brain?”

The Worship Service is Like a Banquet Hall

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:22:00 -0500

The Gospel Coalition recently aired three discussions on culture, worship and the church with Kevin Twit, Isaac Wardell, and Mike Cosper. Really wonderful, hearty stuff, and you get the sense from them not that they aren’t vying for better culture or style in worship, but a bigger God. There’d be no way to agree with everything they say (there is some inherent elitism in their analysis), but they surely move the ball down the field in getting us to think more thoroughly and deeply about worship, and in spurring us to put on a feast, not a show. Enjoy!

A Thousand Worlds Were All Too Poor

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:01:54 -0500

Anne Steele:

Enslaved by sin and bound in chains,
Beneath its dreadful tyrant sway,
And doomed to everlasting pains,
We wretched, guilty captives lay.

Nor gold nor gems could buy our peace,
Nor all the world’s collected store
Suffice to purchase our release;
A thousand worlds were all too poor.

Jesus, the Lord, the mighty God,
An all sufficient ransom paid.
O matchless price! His precious blood
For vile, rebellious traitors shed.

Quote of the Day

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:43:21 -0500

“This week my son turned blue, and for 30 terrifying seconds, stopped breathing. Called an “apnea seizure,” this is one stage in the progression of Tay-Sachs, the genetic disease Ronan was born with and will die of, but not before he suffers from these and other kinds of seizures and is finally plunged into a completely vegetative state. Nearly two years old, he is already blind, paralyzed, and increasingly nonresponsive. I expect his death to happen this year, and this week’s seizure only highlighted the fact that it could happen at any moment—while I’m at work, at the hair salon, at the grocery store. I love my son more than any person in the world and his life is of utmost value to me. I don’t regret a single minute of this parenting journey, even though I wake up every morning with my heart breaking, feeling the impending dread of his imminent death. This is one set of absolute truths.”

“Here’s another: If I had known Ronan had Tay-Sachs (I met with two genetic counselors and had every standard prenatal test available to me, including the one for Tay-Sachs, which did not detect my rare mutation, and therefore I waived the test at my CVS procedure), I would have found out what the disease meant for my then unborn child; I would have talked to parents who are raising (and burying) children with this disease, and then I would have had an abortion.”

FF on ACL.

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:58:22 -0500

FF on ACL.

Next One! Next One! Next One!

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:04:54 -0500

Next One! Next One! Next One!

Quote of the Day

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 09:50:39 -0500

“Pornography is a universal temptation precisely because it does exactly what the satanic powers wish to do. It lashes out at the Trinitarian nature of reality, a loving communion of persons, replacing it with a masturbatory Unitarianism.”

Religion Hata Gettin' Hated On! (Appropriately)

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:11:51 -0500

Religion Hata Gettin' Hated On! (Appropriately)

Cuddle Your Kids

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:58:14 -0500

Cuddle Your Kids

Quote of the Day

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 09:50:17 -0500

“He decided he wanted to meet Stott, and a friend helped connect them. Simon called the theologian and offered to take him out for dinner. He said Stott told him he didn’t go out much anymore and instead invited the musician to his flat for tea and biscuits.

“‘I’d say we spent two or three hours there,’ Simon recalled. ‘I talked about everything that was on my mind about things that seemed illogical, and he talked about why he had come to his conclusions.’

“Simon was very impressed by Stott. ‘I liked him immensely,’ he told me. ‘I left there feeling that I had a greater understanding of where belief comes from when it doesn’t have an agenda.’

“‘It didn’t change my way of thinking,’ he added, ‘but what I liked about it was that we were able to talk and have a dialogue.’”

I Need a Gun

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 12:23:39 -0500

I Need a Gun

Moms (and Dads) Your Kids are Not an Inconvenience

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 15:48:59 -0500

Moms (and Dads) Your Kids are Not an Inconvenience:

“I am SO thankful that God does not see me, His child, as an inconvenience. Instead, while I was still a sinner He sent His Son, Jesus, to die for me (Romans 5:8). When I have come to Him in need, I have never felt Him roll His eyes at me or turn away because I called at an inconvenient time. He delights in my need of Him, and He encourages me to come to Him … with anything and at ANY time. He does not demand that I wait until morning, or that I grow up first, or that I get a grip. He offers Himself, and delights as we come to Him. What an amazing Heavenly Father we have who has given us the example of how to love, nurture and give, even when it is difficult. My prayer is that my little girl will always know and feel that her parents prayed for her and find her valuable — even when she is 3 years old.”

Dude?

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 20:54:43 -0500

Dude?

Quote of the Day

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:43:12 -0500

“Today, polls show Americans are much more inclined to put up a Christmas tree and decorations or go to a party than to attend religious services, even though they tend to see Christmas as a religious holiday.

“Perhaps it’s a bit puritanical to insist that believers dump their cherished family traditions to march off to church on Christmas morning. But it’s also self-defeating to complain about keeping Christmas holy when churches close on Dec. 25.

When he preached at Christmas, Saint Augustine acknowledged the associations between the still-dominant pagan rites and Christianity’s Feast of the Nativity. But the bishop of Hippo said that such associations should spur the faithful to deeper observance, not to downplaying the holiday altogether or tailoring it to the prevailing culture: ‘So, brothers and sisters, let us keep this day as a festival—not, like the unbelievers, because of the sun up there in the sky, but because of the One who made that sun.’”