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I’ve told this story before, but it perfectly illustrates the mentality addressed in today’s quote.
In the mid-eighties, I was introduced to a fellow college student who claimed to be very interested in Jesus Christ, but had a “few” questions about the Bible first. I naturally offered to help in any way that I could. He handed me a list of familiar posers along the lines of “Where did Cain get his wife?”
Okay, the issues seemed important to him, so fair enough.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
David de Bruyn’s series of Letters to Stagnant Christians at Churches Without Chests hit what both Immanuel Can and I considered its peak this week. It’s an insightful post entitled “Confirmation Bias” in which David makes the case that it is possible for Christians to fail to grow in Christ as they should, not because they agree too little with what they hear, but because they agree too much.
Tom: Now, that sounds a bit counterintuitive, doesn’t it, IC?
Immanuel Can: Well, yes. We might wonder how it’s possible to agree too much with anything God says. That seems highly implausible at first. You’re going to have to unpack that a bit, I’m thinking.
David de Bruyn’s blog series giving pastoral advice to various types of stagnant Christians continues this week with a post on the importance of church attendance. I have not agreed with every position he takes throughout these letters, but major kudos to David for bringing these issues to our attention and provoking thought and conversation with his posts.
Of course attending church is very important indeed. No difficulties with that.
Churches Without Chests is the personal blog of David de Bruyn, as the author indicates on his “About” page. De Bruyn is a South African Bible teacher who has hosted a weekly radio program called Bible Perspective for more than twenty years while pastoring New Covenant Baptist Church in Johannesburg, though he is not its only Bible teacher, as the “Sermons” section of the church’s website attests. I read de Bruyn regularly, and have even combed through his blog archives, which are extensive. It’s solid ministry, and I appreciate his thoughtfulness and passion for the Word.
Lately, he’s been writing about spiritual stagnation.
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Wouldn’t it be nice if every interaction between Christians and unbelievers was sufficiently mesmerizing to generate eleven letters from each side?
Yeah, I know, not your experience. Not mine either. The closest I ever got was a college acquaintance who claimed to be looking into Christianity. I wrote him a series of carefully researched, thoughtful responses to his (apparently endless) questions, until one day he as much as admitted he was shining me on, having no real interest in pursuing a relationship with Christ. His religious questions were merely academic.
Okay. Next time maybe.
A Belgian man obsessed with climate change reportedly took his own life recently after a series of exchanges with a so-called artificial intelligence (AI) on his smartphone. His widow says “Eliza” (the app’s default chatbot) had become his “confidante” and encouraged him to consider suicide as a contribution to saving the planet when his worries about the effects of global warming on earth’s environment became the primary topic of their “conversations”.
I read the article the morning of April 1 and immediately started thinking the writer was pulling my leg.
We all know Christians who get offended at just about anything: observing Christmas, reading Harry Potter, owning a deck of cards, instrumental music in church, the “wrong” hymnbooks … you name it, some believer will invariably have something bad to say about it, especially if you are the one doing it.
A pseudonymous writer on Christianity.StackExchange.com asks how to handle such situations in a post called “The Tyranny of the Weaker Brother”. To be fair, he had just given up a much-loved pastime out of respect for a self-professed “weaker brother”, and was probably in a bit of a snit.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
It’s been years since I paid a great deal of
attention to the charismatic movement, but David de Bruyn’s
post on The
Pentecostalization of Christian Worship at ReligiousAffections.org is a
real
Tom: Mr. de Bruyn’s thesis is fairly simple: the current patterns of worship in the charismatic movement are not leading Christians within it anywhere good. Worse, these practices are catching on throughout the evangelical world. I’ve experienced them myself in my early twenties, but never really stopped to analyze the significant differences between the way charismatics engage in “worship”, and the historic patterns of worship across many other Christian traditions. Far more importantly, the charismatic approach differs radically from the patterns of worship we observe in the scriptures.
What did you think of the post, IC?
Immanuel Can: So many things … where shall we start?