CRN.Info and Analysis

Ingrid’s got the book of life. And while she doesn’t reveal who’s in it, she does reveal who’s out:

The term evangelical now can mean anything from a homosexual and his lover at an Evangelicals Concerned support group in New York City, Jim Wallis waving around Karl Marx’s Das Kapital , Shirley Dobson and her Reform Jewish universalist Rabbi, Greg Boyd and his hand-wringing semi-God, Brian McLaren and his hell-free, atonement-free, New Age Shift crusade, Rick Warren and his Purpose Driven madness, Rob Bell and his “human-product” Bible, Mark Driscoll and his toilet mouth pastorate, Doug Pagitt and his Desperate Housewives theology, and so forth and so on.

So to recap the following groups are just plain Jesus hatin’, hell bound miscreants:
Democratic/politically liberal Christians in the vein of Jim Wallis
Traditional, baby boomer Christians in the vein of Focus on the Family (Sorry dad)
Younger evangelicals in the vein of Greg Boyd.
Emerging/Emergents in the vein of Brian McLaren and Doug Pagitt.
Younger Reformed Christians in the vein of Mark Driscoll
1st Century wannabe Christians in the vein of Rob Bell.

Which pretty much just leaves Ingrid and her blogroll. Well maybe, after all she finished the sentence of condemnation with “and so on and so forth”. It kind of reminds me of the old joke:

A man arrives at the gates of heaven. St. Peter asks, “Denomination?” The man says, “emerging.” St. Peter looks down his list, and says, “Go to room 24, but be very quiet as you pass room 8.”

Another man arrives at the gates of heaven. “Denomination?” “Non-denominational.” “Go to room 18, but be very quiet as you pass room 8.”The man says, “I can understand there being different rooms for different religions, but why must I be quiet when I pass room 8?” St. Peter tells him, “Well, the ODMs are in room 8, and they think they’re the only ones here.”

Sometimes I wonder if Jesus could get into heaven if Ingrid was the gatekeeper.

Israel has begun celebrating her 60th anniversary, which of course, is great cause for celebration for Israelis and Jews around the world. This also extends to many American Evangelicals - particularly those of the dispensational camp.

Although not all in Israel are celebrating. Pictured here is Palestinian Ahmed Elaian, 86 at the time, showing the keys of his home in Israel, on the 57th anniversary of Al Naqba, or day of catastrophe, in the Kalandia refugee camp near the West Bank town of Ramallah, Saturday May 14, 2005. (AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen)

With the recent movie “Expelled” getting some press I assumed that it wouldn’t be long before the Ben Stein “Christmas Tree” email started floating around again. Well I was right!

As of this morning I had 3 messages in my email about Ben Stein and his declaration on “Christmas Trees”. Only problem is the email isn’t true. Of course it has some truth but much of the “commentary” has been fabricated. And some of the items in the letter are outright lies attributed to Ben Stein. You can read the whole situation at Snopes.com

In this age of information you would think that Christians, of all people, would do due diligence if/when launching an email, blogging, or internet slander campaign.

According to the logic and theology of MacArthur & Friends we must banish another Christian author/preacher/teacher to the realm of the apostate.

Warren W. Wiersbe in his book Real Worship -

“Once we understand the subjective and objective aspects of worship, we are better prepared to deal with some of the problems that worship seems to create. For one thing, we can better understand why different Christian communions express their worship in different ways. After all, if there is one God and one Bible, why should we not all worship in the same way? The answer is simply that we are all different and live in different cultural contexts.” (p. 25)

I watched a Christian comedy show the other night. It was a bunch of different African-American comedians telling mostly clean jokes, often about church. I didn’t get a lot of the jokes. Sure, I got some of them, but most of the jokes required me to have some kind of prior experience with a particular type of church in a particular tradition. I turned it off before it was over and I’m pretty sure I tuned out long before that. Grrrr… context strikes again.

As has been pointed out before, the problem with contextualization is not when you contextualize something, but when you contextualize it and think that everybody should do it your way.