CRN.Info and Analysis

A friend of mine gave me a book the other day…quite by chance; or not. I was given a copy of the book The Language Police. I have only had the chance to peruse it, but I have come across a couple of interesting paragraphs, one of which I’d like to share with you.

The goal of the language police is not just to stop us from using objectionable words but to stop us from having objectionable thoughts. The language police believe that reality follows language usage. If they can stop people from ever seeing offensive words and ideas, they can prevent them from having the thought or committing the act that the words signify. If they never read a story about suicide or divorce, then they will never even think about killing themselves or ending their marriage. If they abolish words that have man as a prefix or suffix, then women will achieve equality. If children read and hear only language that has been cleansed of any mean or hurtful words, they will never have a mean or hurtful thought. With enough censorship, the language police might create a perfect world.

Let us, at last, fire the language police. We don’t need them. Let them return to the precincts where speech is rationed, thought is imprisoned, and humor is punished” (The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, Diane Ravitch, 158-159, 170)

I agree.

“No-one can live on the spiritual capital of his ancestors. As R.B.Y. Scott puts it, ‘The religious group which only carries on the momentum in belief and practice of an age which has passed away, and has not made its own the covenant of the fathers, will find that the covenant is no longer valid, and the living God has passed on to seek a new people for Himself.”

–Leon Morris, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, 74

I agree.

First off we are not journalists so ‘journalistic integrity’ is not really a charge that we need to hold to. Christian integrity, however, is.

Recently I’ve begun to notice a trend with ODM’s, they don’t actually do ‘research’. They claim to do research, some even have it in their URL’s. Actually I’ve known this for a while but lately it appears that the ‘chicken littles’ of the Christian family are more apt to take so and so’s word for it. They link to themselves, they link to each other, they proof text, and they rip quotes out of context. Sometimes, dare I say, they make stuff up.

For instance:

“The more I follow grace, the more I’m drawn to him [God], the more I’m willing to stand up for people being persecuted,” says Jay today. “This sounds so churchy, but I felt like God spoke to my heart and said ‘[homosexuality] is not a sin.’ ”

This quote comes from Jay Bakker (allegedly) via Apprising.org but it’s not the exact quote and I couldn’t find the direct link to this quote, nor could I find any reputable website who has the quote. What I did find was a lot of heresy hunters self linking and cross linking each other. I’m not saying that Jay didn’t say it I would just like an accurate, in context, direct link to prove he said it. But all I have is this link from Ken at Apprising.org. So much for research and integrity*.

If you have a few minutes to waste, google the quote, and visit some of the sites that purport it. I found (1) Link to Radar Online but no article, anywhere on their site about the quote, (1) Link to a portion of the full article with the incorrect quote, and (9) Links to Kens articles about Jay Bakker. I did find the cached article but it’s not exactly how Ken reports it. According to the date stamps on the comments and photos it appears the article was first published in 2006. The cached article is cobbled together with what appears to be several articles and the word ‘Homosexuality’ was inserted into a seemingly non-sequiter paragraph about growing up PTL.

I do have an email into the writer, Martin Edlund, about the interview and also an email into Radar Online. Hopefully I can find the full transcript of the article.

Don’t take my word for it though. Go and do the research.

*Yet another case of those so offended by the worldliness of the church getting their info from the world to build a case of hypocrisy against those who they claim are in the world. Integrity?????

This is from Eugene Peterson’s book Tell It Slant. Here he is commenting on the prayer of Jesus in John 17.

“A major difficulty in taking this prayer to heart is that it doesn’t seem to have made much difference for twenty centuries now, and certainly doesn’t seem to be having much of an impact on Christians at the present. The Christian Church is famous worldwide for being contentious and mean-spirited, for using the words of Moses and Jesus as weapons to exclude and condemn. One of the identifying marks that Jesus gave his disciples is that ‘you have love for one another’ (John 13:35). But not many centuries had passed before outsiders were saying, ‘Look how they vilify one another!’ We kill with verbs and nouns, swords and guns, ‘Christians’ marching under the banner of the cross of Christ.” (Tell it Slant, 223)

Be blessed today. Find a way, as far as it depends upon you, to live at peace with your neighbor. Love the fellowship of Saints.

I believe this to be one of the most beautiful paragraph of words I have ever read in my life. It is profound; mind-boggling. Grace and Peace.

“If we fix our eyes upon the place where the course of the world reaches its lowest point, where its vanity is unmistakable, where its groanings are most bitter and the divine incognito most impenetrable, we shall encounter there—Jesus Christ. On the frontier of what is observable He stands delivered up and not spared. In place of us all He stands there, delivered up for us all, patently submerged in the flood. And if He was delivered up, how much more are we all submerged with Him in the flood, dragged down into the depth, and included in the ‘No’ which God utters over the men of this world and from which there is no escape! How much more are we led to the place where we stand under the universal judgment of God, where, embarrassed by the conflict between righteousness and sin, life and death, eternity and time, there remains naught but the existentiality of God. But the transformation of all things occurs where the riddle of human life reaches its culminating point. The hope of His glory emerges for us when nothing but the existentiality of God remains, and he becomes to us the veritable and living God. He, whom we can apprehend as only against us, stands there—for us. That Christ, who deprives us of everything but the existentiality of God, has been delivered up, means—we must dare to say it, dare to storm the fortress which is impregnable—and already capture!—that God is for us, and we are by His side. Christ who has been delivered up is the Spirit, the Truth, the restless arm of God. If so be that we suffer with Him, how can it be that we should not also be glorified with him? If we die with Him, how can it be that we shall not also live with Him? If God has delivered us up with Him to the judgment which threatens us all, how should He not also with Him give us all things, and thus secure that all things should work together for our good? All things—freely! Concerning the dawn upon which we have gazed, we are able neither to speak nor to be silent.” (Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 327)

Friends,

In my preparations for Sunday’s Lectionary readings, I came across this in David Jackman’s The Message of John’s Letters in the IVP The Bible Speaks Today series. The author is commenting on 1 John 4:20-21. I thought you might appreciate it:

“This final ground of assurance brings us full circle back to 4:7, where this major section began. When God’s love begins to fill our lives, he not only gives us a model of how we should live in our human relationships, but he gives us both the desire and the ability to begin to do it; to reflect his love others. Once again John reminds us of this most practical of all his tests of Christian reality. It is the easiest thing in the world to make a verbal profession of Christian commitment, or to say I love God. But if we do not at the same time love our brother and sister, it is a lie. Love for the unseen Lord is best expressed not just in words, but in deeds of love towards the Lord’s people whom we do see.

“Is this not one of our greatest sins as Christians today? We may talk a lot about loving God, we may express it in our worship with great emotion, but what does it mean when we are so critical of other Christians, so ready to jump to negative conclusions about people, so slow to bear their burdens, so unwilling to step into their shoes? Such lovelessness totally contradicts what we profess and flagrantly disobeys God’s commands. It becomes a major stumbling-block to those who are seeking Christ and renders any attempts at evangelism useless. In many churches and fellowships we need a fresh repentance on this matter, a new humbling before God, an honest confession of our need and a cry to God for mercy and grace to change us.

“Let us not avoid the plain teaching of Scripture. If we do not love those fellow Christians whom we know well and see regularly within our fellowship circles, we cannot be loving God. We may have occasional warm feelings, but these can be merely sentimental and unrelated to other people in their real-life situations. The proof of true love is not emotion or words, but deeds, which read out to help others in need. But the other side of the coin is that such practical caring love can be a wonderful ground of assurance. There is a divine obligation laid upon us all in verse 21. The whole law is summed up in the royal law of love and we cannot love God without keeping his commandments. His will is that we should reflect the image of our Creator, who is love, by our love for one another. Plummer quotes the words of Pascal: ‘We must know men in order to love them, but we must love God in order to know him.’ That is true, but John would insist that we add, Whoever loves God must also love his brother.” (131-132)

I really needed to be reminded of this today.

I’ve told you before that I am a loyal reader of Modern Reformation magazine which is edited by the estimable Michael Horton–no shallow Calvinist I assure you. Besides my hero DA Carson (and maybe John Calvin) I’m not sure there is a more deeply devoted-to-Reformation-theology Christian on the planet than Horton. (Maybe Brendt.)

Well, in the most recent issue, March-April 2009, Michael Horton wrote: “As Richard Foster observes, Protestant Movements such John Wesley’s ‘holy clubs’ and the ‘inner mission of the Norwegian Pietists have their roots in the heritage of Catholic spirituality, identified with medieval writers such as Thomas a Kempis (1380-1471)” (page 48, my emphasis).

It may be nothing, but I could have sworn Richard Foster was on the list of confirmed heretics. And now the bastion of conservative Reformed theology, host of the White Horse Inn, author of many books, editor of Modern Reformation, professor at Westminster Theological Seminary, is quoting him? I know this is an innocuous quote, but it is a quote. Maybe there’s another Richard Foster that I’m unaware of and in that case, this post can be safely ignored. But if he is quoting the Richard Foster (the one constantly dragged through ADM mud, author of many dangerous books on spiritual disciplines, and perpetual Guilt By Associator) then this is a whole new ball game.*

*

One of the reasons I am convinced that the ADM’s of the blogosphere are not, have not, and cannot be ministers in any useful sense (such as located, local church ministry) is because of the very nature of the ‘work’ they do. So at the Boar’s Head Tavern, Paul McCain wrote:

But it got me to thinking. Where is the line between pathological negativity and the necessary identification of error? And it got me to thinking, when am I so caught up in finding wrong that I miss what is right [my emphasis]

People who are ‘in’ ministry simply cannot engage in the nefarious ‘work’ of unbridled criticism. Why? Because those who are ‘in’ ministry know all too well the rigors of the ministry. Why? Because those ‘in’ ministry understand all too well how much the criticism hurts and, to be sure, how much of it is nonsense and simply untrue. Why? Because those called to ministry had better have a profound working theology of grace.

I think it is tremendously important to keep ministry in perspective because ministry done by ‘ministers.’ Ministers, those who are of that un-hallowed club of so-called professional clergy, are necessarily weak, fragile, broken, and nervous people. Did you catch that? People. I think it is this ‘person’ aspect that is altogether forgotten when it comes to preachers of the Gospel. Preachers, or ‘ministers’, are simply forbidden, however subtly, to be human.

Ministers are not allowed to make mistakes, lose their temper, have bad days, or sin. Ministers are called upon by congregations to be the most legalistic bunch of Christians there is. Preachers are expected to live by the rules and die by the rules; preach the rules; expound the rules. (Sadly, most preachers are not allowed to actually enforce the rules and when they do, well…use your imagination.) When preachers start talking about grace, asking for grace, or offering grace that’s when congregations, and ADM’s, start getting really antsy.

Ministers are the leaders, so we’re told, and if they fail somehow, preach a bad sermon, be at all emotional, or discouraged…well, we can’t have that because ‘we’ might lose those folks who visited the church on Sunday. It’s much better for the preacher to be fake and have those visitors think everything is alright than for the preacher to be real and risk that they might go to the church down the road. Personally speaking, the dehumanizing of humans who preach is one of the most insidious of all the services provided by the ADM’s of the church, both those in the blogosphere and those in the pew.

A blog friend of mine, Jason Goroncy, posted an absolutely brilliant post at his blog the other day titled: The Scandal of Weak Leadership: A Sermon on 2 Corinthians 11:16-12:10. I think you should read it and be encouraged, especially if you stand week after week in any kind of pulpit. In the post, Jason wrote:

This is the sort of ad that I can imagine the church in Corinth writing. How disappointed they must have been when they got Paul! He was not the eloquent speaker for which they had hoped. Instead of providing the ’strong’ leadership they wanted, he treated them with gentleness. And while he was prepared to teach about spiritual gifts, he hardly ever talked about his own ’spiritual’ experiences, even less gloat about them. And rather than mixing with the influential, he insulted them. Even worse - he would not take their money!

Instead of getting Arnold Schwarzenegger or Napoleon or Takaroa, in Paul the Corinthians were given a weak, sick, persecuted, afflicted and bruised human being. And then to add insult to injury, Paul had the audacity to tell them that his weakness was actually proof that he was genuine!  [Are you kidding me?--jerry]

[...]

And as for that mysterious ‘thorn in the flesh’, who knows? The commentators have a field day here: Paul had a theological opponent; Paul had an unbelieving wife; Paul had poor eyesight; Paul had homosexual urges; Paul had malaria - all of which are possibilities, but must remain speculations. Whatever it was, and however much Paul at times wished it removed, it served as a constant reminder to him that the integrity and effectiveness of his ministry would rest not on his worthiness or credentials but on God’s grace.

There’s that word again: Grace! Jason’s paragraph that follows the above quote is simply beyond words in its brilliance. Here’s a snippet: “Here is grace’s way - that God has a deliberate policy of positive discrimination towards nobodies, that the kingdom of God belongs to the poor and that the earth will be inherited by the meek.”  Yet the ADM’s of the blogosphere and pew continue to believe that weakness is just that: weakness. They refuse to see weakness for what it is: God’s grace.

I love God’s grace. It is no mystery to me any longer why last year I was able to take one seminary class and it was Doctrine of Grace. It is one thing to know grace. It is something else entirely to experience it, believe it, and conduct oneself in accordance with what one has believed and experienced. In my estimation, there are some people in the world of blogs who simply have not experienced or believed God’s grace. I’m convinced of it. Furthermore, they simply do not understand that in their fervor to protect God’s orthodoxy, they are destroying the ones called to proclaim it.

I wonder who is really held captive?

The coup de grace, where power-criticism is finally silenced, comes at the end when Jason quotes from Henri Nouwen, (*sarcasm* alert) which I know automatically disqualifies the sermon as orthodox and legitimate. Still, it is worth repeating and perhaps committing to memory:

The way of the Christian leader is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross … Here we touch the most important quality of Christian leadership in the future. It is not a leadership of power and control, but a leadership of powerlessness and humility in which the suffering servant of God, Jesus Christ, is made manifest … To come to Christ is to come to the crucified and risen One. The life-giving apostle embodies in himself the crucifixion of Jesus in the sufferings and struggles he endures as he is faithful and obedient to his Lord. So Paul preaches the crucified and risen Jesus, and he embodies the dying of Jesus in his struggles to further point to the Savior. His message is about the cross and his life is cruciform, shaped to look like the cross … I leave you with the image of the leader with outstretched hands, who chooses a life of downward mobility. It is the image of the praying leader, the vulnerable leader, and the trusting leader. May that image fill your hearts with hope, courage, and confidence. [Henri J.M. Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 62-3, 70, 73.]

So be encouraged you who preach or you who find yourself at the barrel end of an ADM AK-47. You are in good company. I send this blog post out to all those who have found themselves the subject of negative or critical or downright hateful blog posts this week. I send it out to all those who have no voice of their own or who cannot defend themselves or choose not to. I also thank Jason for writing this sermon and preaching it.

And finally, a word to the ADM’s of the church, both in blogs and pews, learn about God’s grace. I promise it will free you from that nagging, persistent feeling you have that your ‘ministry’ is to stand guard at the door of God’s throne room in order to prevent any weak, sinful, decrepit loser from finding God’s grace time and time again. It will free you to be so caught up beholding what is right that you won’t even have time to look for what is wrong.

Soli Deo Gloria!!

I came across this quote in a small magazine that was published in December 1957. It’s an old Restoration church mouthpiece called The Plea. The quote goes like this:

There is a principle which is a bar to all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep man in everlasting ignorance. This principle is ‘contempt prior to investigation.’ –Herbert Spencer as quoted in The Plea, December 1957, Volume 13, no. 10, p 2.

Amen.

And at times, our problem too:

Dogmatism As Christian theologians we are likewise faced with the temptation toward dogmatism.  We run the risk of confusing one specific model of reality with reality itself or one theological system with truth itself, thereby ‘canonizing’ a particular theological construct or a specific theologian.  Because all systems are models of reality, we must maintain a stance of openness to other models, aware of the tentativeness and incompleteness of all systems.  In the final analysis, theology is a human enterprise, helpful for the task of the church, to be sure, but a human construct nevertheless.

- Theology for the Community of God by Stanley J. Grenz, 13.