CRN.Info and Analysis

Over at Apprising Ministries, Ken Silva responds to a letter from a reader. Here are a few excerpts that are quite telling of his attitude when it comes to his status

The following is based on an unsolicited email I received here at Apprising Ministries. Please understand that I do not think any pastor-teacher is above reproach [insert typical Emerging Church whining here], etc. [emphasis mine]
What I wish to bring out is how easy, and I’ll argue arrogant as well, it is for people to simply disregard the teaching of someone like myself who has been studying the fields of apologetics, Comparative Religion and evangelizing non-Christian cults for 21 years….

You said: “I was very surprised to see your negative views on Christian meditation in the article CHRISTIAN MEDITATION WITH MANTRA: DOM JOHN MAIN.” So let me put it another way: I am very surprised to see you so quick in attempting to instruct someone like me whom Jesus has called as one of His pastor-teachers. [emphasis mine]

My dad always told me that you could tell alot about someone based on how they respond to correction or constructive criticism. This correspondence to Apprising was in no way instructional or a harsh rebuke. It sounded like an honest reader that was trying to understand where Silva was coming from. Most of the email was actually the reader asking him questions. But, Ken strikes back with his lofty credentials and how a man of his status should not be quickly instructed. How did Silva know that this reader had not spend some time looking at the Apprising articles and made an educated and simply inquisitive inquiry. On top of that, he sends such mixed statements: no pastor is above reproach, but people should not instruct someone who is a pastor-teacher in this manner.

Anyhow, this all too telling of the attitude of both Apprising and CRN:
We are educated, anointed and experienced, therefore we get to criticize whoever we want, whenever we want. And, you better not say anything about it.

In the controversial post below, Chris Lyons pointed out how Ingrid was so encouraged by a listener who wraps and sells flowers for a cult in the evening. We get the full story in this article later, that this man was unable to find work and was forced to do this job at night for the Moonies.

My first thought was “I wonder if she would extend the same grace to a purpose driven pastor that was unable to pay the bills and took this job.” I could see the headlines now… “purpose driven pastor supports cult practices.” I really think this is a matter of showing grace where you want to, and upholding the law where you want to. It is acceptable for a believer to work for a cult until they can get a full time job, but Rick Warren can’t partner with secular organizations to help eradicate human poverty. No one is saying that it is wrong for this guy to enjoy VYC America’s programming –not any more wrong than a Buddhist monk enjoying the teachings of Rob Bell.

A year ago, Brian Gordon, the well-known new age energy coach, cited some writings of Erwin McManus on his blog. He definitely tweaked McManus’ words to fit his own ideas and philosophies in the process. Well, the ODMs went nuts over this! They went on and on about how this new-aged energy coach has similar theologies as McManus, and how he was really teaching unbiblical energy philosophies. All of it could not be further from the truth. In fact, when Gordon read what the ODMs were writing, he immediately contacted McManus, ashamed of the negative publicity he had brought him.

It’s amazing how certain groups are unable to see past their own logical processes. For example, if you follow the link in the original article to the VYC America webpage, you will find a video that says

Music Till Dawn will provide a relaxing contemplative atmosphere, where the Holy Spirit can speak to quieted hearts

relaxing contemplative atmosphere? If that was on Doug Pagitt’s website, he would be speared to death by the ODMs for it. There would be all types of arguments as to why we shouldn’t have contemplative prayer where God speaks to us individually. Sola Scriptura! But, somehow contemplative spirituality is ok for VYC America. I am just wondering when the double standard is going to be recognized.

Ingrid engages in guilt by association tactics again by trying to link Jeff Foxworthy’s belief’s with Ravi Zacharias because they appeared at the same event together.

The event in question occurred on September 13th, 2007 and was entitled, “Is America Really Christian?” After looking around the blogosphere for a bit I found two blog entries that contain first hand accounts of the event in question. The first has disappeared from the web, but Technorati saved a snapshot of it for us to enjoy:

Challenge to the soul September 14th, 2007 Yesterday we trekked through rain, wind, and traffic while heading to Atlanta to hear Ravi Zacharias and Michael Ramsden speak on the topic of “Is America Really Christian?” Such a strong, powerful, and passionate message of Jesus Christ who crosses all cultural boundaries

The other comes from a myspace blog:

they covered everything from various world-view philosophies - and the flaws in them to explaining in the most beautiful of terms Salvation — and what comes next!

Her account of the message delivered by Ravi and others continues:

in order for America to be “Christian”, the people that belong to America must be Christians.. not just in name, or because their grandmother and granddaddy were.. but because they were called, and they consciously made the decision to cast aside who they were — and become born again in Christ. <---- that really shot me straight in the heart, i mean -- how many people have i made the mistake of asking if they were Christians -- when i really should have been asking if they were a follower of Christ? do they know Him? have they known Him, but He's become one of those friends that they put away when they "grew up" and became a mature adult?
and, for us Christians -- have we become so "mature" in our lives that we no longer feel the "need" for God, unless something breaks down, or the money is getting tight..or a loved one is sick? in our minds, does God become a vending machine that we drop in a few good deeds for someone we may not like, or pray an eloquent prayer at Bible study, or even put a little extra in the offering basket -- and we expect to have our wants answered in a timely manner..and wonder why if the answer was "no"?

Doesn’t sound like Jesus is disappearing to me.

Well, well, well, it seems as if the anonymous editor over at CRN.com has a problem with an emergent/emerging church’s gathering due to the adult beverages they served.

Oddly enough, the anonymous editor had nothing to say about the issue of women in leadership, which as you can see was clearly laid out as egalitarian:

Rob and I had talked about the conversation we would have about women in leadership. I was excited for this conversation because I knew how Rob had courageously led his own church through the change of an all male leadership structure to include women on every level of leadership.

Now, for those not paying attention, ODMs have taken a hard line stance against women in church leadership. So why the sudden bout of silence on such a nice big juicy target? It probably has something to do with the fact that Ingrid is busily setting herself up not just as an authority within a church, but as an authority over many churches.

So there it is. If you’re an ODM its ok to take a completely anti-scriptural view of alcohol, yet ignore what is a much stronger case against female leadership, all because you happen to have a big female voice on your team.

Turns out sola scriptura is an ODM punchline.

Posts like this make me profoundly sad. In fact, it makes me wonder if this author really can know the peace and grace of Christ (I’m not suggestion this person is outside of Christ, only that they’ve not realized the work that Jesus accomplished between us and God). 

This post is not meant to be a criticism of the opinions expressed about Driscoll (we’ve rehashed that conversation dozens of times, though it does seem odd the author would criticize Driscoll without actually reading the book itself).  Rather, I want to address the assumptions made by the author about the relationship between us and God, and I want to do so because it seems lately that I’ve been seeing these assumptions made by Christians in many different streams of theological thought. 

Consider the following statements, which are representative of the piece:

Scripture says we are to fear HIM:

He destroys the HOLINESS and FEAR for Christ Jesus. There is nothing worth taking from Driscoll’s pig stye to sift through and find truth. Go to Scripture and find the pristine reverence for Christ, held up above all people and all of Creation, set apart as Master, Righteous One, and without spot or blemish, never acting like the pigs, dogs, and vipers of His day.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing in this piece that speak of the intimacy we have with Jesus.  Nothing in it speaks of the great love that God has for us. 

Consider, for example, the consistent and overwhelming use of the metaphor of God as father.  It is so overwhelming that when Jesus is asked by his disciples how to pray he begins with "Our father in heaven".  Or consider that Christ is consistently pictured as the bridegroom of the church, which is the exact comparison Jesus uses for himself when his disciples’ actions are being compared to that of the Pharisees.  We also have the description of Jesus as older brother, and we are called adopted sons into the family of God. 

The descriptions of God I get from many Christians, and this article in particular is far from the familiarity and intimacy of a brother, father, or husband, instead God is pictured as this unapproachable, unreasonable, petty tyrant who is looking to punish anyone who forgot to dot an I or cross a T.

Its almost like verses such as:

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!
Luke 13.34

Have been forgotten.

Ultimately, theology such as the one represented in this article is a Christless theology because Christ is our mediator.  His work is the work that created the easy familiarity of brother, husband and father with God.  The only way that God is an ineffable, unapproachable deity is if Christ’s work didn’t work. 

And if you think this Christless theology is confined to an obscure blog dedicated to re-publishing, and re-hashing the same old critiques against Driscoll, I invite you to read this group of comments.  Here’s some highlights:

Ultimately we (all people) live under the threat of eternal death if we worship improperly, do we not?

The Bible does not say God is “love, love, love.” It does say, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.”

Great reminder that we are not approaching "the man upstairs" but the King of glory!

Continue Reading »

every article at CRN right now is written by the editor, except for three.

For people that are so concerned about fighting for the truth, they sure have a strange way of being truthful about who is writing these very controversial articles.  Just a thought.

(Note: I’m not a fan of either of these presidential candidates — nor any of them, for that matter. So I’m not interested in a political discussion. The political realm just happens to be where this example lies.)

In Monday night’s Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama got testy with each other. There was one exchange though, that gave me a serious case of déjà vu:

Obama: I was helping unemployed workers on the streets of Chicago when you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board at Wal-Mart.

Clinton: I was fighting against misguided Republican policies when you were practicing law and representing your contributor … in his slum landlord business in inner city Chicago.

See the difference? Obama claimed to be working with actual people. Conversely, for Clinton, the important thing was to be anti-Republican, (apparently, the highest calling that any human being can aspire to).

Then I got a flashback.

A bit over a year ago, I wrote an email to one of the group-written incarnations of Slice asking why my comments kept getting un-approved, despite the fact that they were civil and not particularly strident. I contrasted my comments to stuff like:

RICK WARREN IS NOT A CHRISTIAN!

– and –

Houston will be a desert before I accept a liar, a slanderer, a self-promoting name-dropper, and a blasphemer of the Holy Spirit as a brother in Christ. (regarding Warren)

I marveled that such anti-Biblical skubala was permitted on a site on which comments were carefully screened.

Put down your coffee before you read the next sentence. I don’t want to be responsible for the spit-take all over your computer screen.

The response that I received was that comments at Slice were not carefully screened. Rather, the only comments that were disallowed were apologists for the emerging church and Rick Warren, and comments that were truly malicious.

Since my actual point was totally ignored (the anti-Biblical nature of some comments), I re-iterated it again. The response that I got this time stated that even guessing who is saved is unbiblical.

I responded that I was glad that this was her stance, pointed out that this was not the stance of all the writers at Slice, and then asked the following:

Does this mean that you place a higher priority on being anti-emergent and anti-Warren than on being pro-Biblical?

“Surprisingly”, I didn’t receive a response to that note.

Sure, being pro-Biblical will inherently mean that we’ll be “anti” some stuff. But the latter follows the former. Talk about getting the cart before the dead horse that you’ve been beating.

From Tim Challies via his interview by iMonk:

Discernment cannot be understood as a practice that stands on its own. Neither is it something we do for its own sake—we are not discerning for the sake of discernment but rather for the sake of purity in doctrine and in practice. A person who wishes to be discerning must also be willing to take into account the Bible’s other teachings about loving one another, about speaking the truth in love, and so on. Many of these “discernment ministries” and “discernment blogs” seem to understand the importance of separating truth from error, even while falling into error in their responses. The Bible does not account for a lone wolf Christian making it his business to critique every author or teacher or ministry who happens to stumble into his crosshairs. In the book I suggest that the local church is the best and most natural context for the practice of discernment and I’ll stand by that!

(For you non-geeks out there, “!=” means “does not equal”. We now return you to normalcy.)

Please hang on with me on this. This may, at first, come across as simply an apologetic for Mark Driscoll. But I’m merely using him as an example — that we recently cited, no less — for a much broader point that I’ll get to.

In Tim’s recent plug for Mark’s message on the first part of Philippians 3, one commenter jokingly said:

That’s the first Driscoll sermon I have heard, and there was a disappointing lack of potty language and emerging concepts. Not like what I was told by ODM’s. I liked it.

A couple follow-up comments were made stating (accurately) that Driscoll has distanced himself from the EC, but doesn’t toss the whole thing out the window.

If I may paraphrase Barbara Mandrell and George Jones, Mark was emergent when emergent wasn’t cool.

He was in the movement back before chunks of it developed some of the beliefs with which he is in disagreement. Because of this, he had the advantage of seeing that there are aspects of the movement with which he does still agree. And so his later distancing himself was not a wholesale “baby with the bathwater” thing. He hung on to the parts that he still agreed with, and maintains friendships with those with whom he theologically disagrees.

Many today don’t have that advantage. And, to be honest, it’s human nature that if the first thing you hear from an ECer is something with which you strongly disagree, you may ignore him completely thereafter.

Note that I said it’s “human nature” — I didn’t say it was “right”.

This is, unfortunately, how many Christians operate. They equate being in non-agreement with something to being its enemy; sometimes, even when the stuff that they don’t agree with is non-essential. (And, no, I’m not getting sucked into an argument over the definition of “essential”.)

I have to count myself among the “many Christians”, as I know that I am sometimes guilty of the same thing. Whether it’s Steve Camp telling us that Driscoll is lying when he says that he wants to pursue humility or John MacArthur unequivocally telling us that Doug Pagitt is going to hell, my tendency is to ignore (or severely discount) anything else that comes from the mouth, pen, or keyboard of these men.

And even from a pragmatic standpoint, that’s wrong. Steve was a great songwriter (I’m not familiar with his current work, or I might say “is”). And when he’s concentrating on exposition, there are very few that hold a candle to the vast majority of MacArthur’s teachings.

But let’s delve even deeper. Scripture is loaded with examples of God using the most unlikely of vessels. And lest we think that we are reading too much into that, Paul tells us explicitly:

But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, that no flesh should glory in His presence.

We see, then, that it’s not just the great songwriter or the solid teacher through which God speaks. So, I would caution us not to shut out someone with whom we disagree, because what we are doing when we do that is bordering on blasphemous — as we tell God that He is incapable of speaking truth to us through anyone that He pleases.

God is not simply truthful — He is Truth. So when truth is spoken, He is in the midst of it. Now this is not an argument for a “divine spark in everyone” or pantheism. There is (obviously) a great distance — in logic, if not solely by definition — between omnipresence and pantheism. So if we shut out someone who is speaking the truth, we are really shutting out God.

That’s not something that I think we really want to do.

Ken couldn’t let his recent defeat on the internet at wikipedia.com go down without some article on CRN.  I mean, I know he is God’s appointed ruler over all that is orthodox, so he wouldn’t want the world to see that he is immortal and flawed (”pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” comes to mind).  He didn’t bother to bring up the fact that opinion blogs, such as apprising, are not allowed to be cited on wiki pages, or that most of his “proof” is himself citing himself.   Gotta love his closing remarks though

thus the lead Watchdog Watcher Chris Lyons may finally rest easy…

Well, at least for now anyway…

He might as well have said “I’ll get you my pretty, and your little dog too!”