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Immanuel Can: This is super interesting.
Tom: Do tell …
IC: It’s a chart measuring what proportion of two-sided debate and its opposite, so‑called “social justice” indoctrination, is being practiced at the various university campuses in Ontario, Canada.
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Tom: I read Terry Mortenson’s article on compromise this morning. It seems as good a starting point as any. He names a number of well-reputed conservative stalwarts whose own statements suggest they have gone (or went) a little soft on the issue — James Orr, Dyson Hague, George Frederick Wright, R.A. Torrey — to one degree or another, some as far back as the early 1900s. Other less conservative believers like Andrew Klavan accept evolution outright, convinced it’s so obvious that believing it is simply common sense.
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In Matthew 16, upon Peter’s confession, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” Jesus responds with two promises, which we may briefly restate as: (i) “On this rock I will build my church”, and (ii) “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven …”
Tom: There’s more to these promises, obviously, but I wanted to consider a couple of issues. First, whether these are two separate promises, or if the second is merely some kind of amplification of the first, and second, when can we anticipate the realization of these promises.
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Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, who believes sex-associated personality differences are at least partly genetic, is deeply unhappy anyone would dare to challenge his worldview, set limits on his contribution to the public discourse, and disrupt his ongoing pursuit of intellectual fulfillment.
Who is doing such a thing, you ask? Why, it’s not the “moral majority” or the Christian Right; Wright dismisses Creationists as irrelevant. No, it’s the social justice Left.
Tom: It turns out the current state of evolutionary psychology has finally collided with the “blank slate” ideology of progressives, IC, and the sparks are making both sides unhappy. How unfortunate for “science”!
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Young pastors in American churches are a dying breed. So says Eric Conn, and he’s got a major 2017 study in hand from the Barna Group to prove it. The number of U.S. pastors under forty is currently half what it was in 1992, while the number over sixty-five has tripled. The Barna report concludes, “It is urgent that denominations, networks and independent churches determine how to best motivate, mobilize, resource and deploy more younger pastors.”
Tom: That’s a highly debatable conclusion, but not a surprising one. What’s interesting to me, IC, is not so much Barna’s “Aging of America’s Pastors” article, but Conn’s analysis of it. As someone who’s been there, he described vocational ministry as “a hot mess”.
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I’m going to quote a full minute of a recent sermon on the subject of the New Testament teaching about baptism here because I want to fairly represent what this particular pastor was trying to communicate. A punchy line or two out of a message is fun, but may distort the speaker’s intent. In this case, providing the entire context makes that intent quite clear.
“I believe that the commission to baptize all nations was given to the church.
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Tom: Let’s do something a little different today, Immanuel Can. I was thinking about the social implications of that clip you sent me this morning from the action-adventure video game Red Dead Redemption 2. It seems like that might be worth talking about from a Christian perspective.
Do you want to take a crack at describing it?
Immanuel Can: It’s hard to imagine if a person has not seen modern video games. (Of course, for those who have children, avoiding video games is all-but-impossible nowadays.) A lot are now story-based, but a lot are also what’s called “first-person-shooters”, designed to let players kill a lot of characters as they move through a maze or follow some kind of prepared story line.
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David B. was kind enough to forward us this link to a recent survey by Ligonier Ministries and LifeWay Research about what Americans believe about God, Jesus Christ, sin and eternity.
Tom: Apparently they are doing this every couple of years now. Having regular new data sets to browse can be useful in noting trends of one sort or another. We discussed the LifeWay 2016 survey in this space, if I recall correctly … yes, I do. That was the one where, based on the frequency of their heretical answers, my fellow writer Immanuel Can was inspired to refer to some of the respondents as not so much Christian as “ ‘Christian-flavored’, like a really, really bad kind of tofu.”
How’s the tofu this year, IC?
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Modern attention spans are what they are. We try to keep these posts to roughly 2,000 words; conventional internet wisdom has it the average person begins to tune out around then. But there were at least three points we didn’t get around to last week in our discussion of the accusation raised by Tim Keller that the traditional evangelical fundraising model is systemically racist.
Tom: IC, I wanted to start out with this thought: Tim Keller is using woke language and making typical social justice assumptions about his fellow believers, but I don’t want to leave the subject without pointing out the there is nothing wrong with self-examination on the part of Christians, churches, and parachurch organizations.
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Tim Keller has been under fire around here lately. In mid-February we fisked a Daily Wire column by Megan Basham that listed Keller among thought leaders credibly accused of enabling Francis Collins to flog COVID propaganda to evangelicals by introducing him as a “friend” during a joint interview for BioLogos.
Collins is a man of the Left, a self-described ally and advocate of the gay and trans lobbies, has facilitated and funded experimental transgender research on minors, and has publicly defended experimentation on fetuses obtained from abortion. It’s one thing to engage personally and privately with such an individual in the name of Christ. It’s quite another to represent him to believers as fellow member of the flock and a trustworthy expert on science.
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Tom: We’re in the middle of batting around commonly misunderstood Bible verses. Here’s another frequently-quoted line for you, IC, this one from Proverbs:
“As he thinks within himself, so he is.”
I mentioned in another post a few weeks ago that I’ve often found other people understand individual proverbs very differently from the way I understand them. This one is no exception.
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Tom: We haven’t done a post on commonly misunderstood Bible verses in a while, IC, so I thought that might be fun subject to get back to for a week or two. This one is a favorite, particularly south of the border:
“If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
To be fair, I’ve heard it prayed by Christians here too, beseeching the Lord that Canadians would suddenly and inexplicably vote to abolish abortion on demand, or oust Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal Ontario government, or whatever.
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We had a good time with this last week, so Immanuel Can and I have agreed to revisit our growing list of commonly misinterpreted Bible verses and discuss three more examples.
Tom: How about this one?
“For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.”
How do you read that, IC?
Immanuel Can: I think the first question has to be “two or three whats”, or “two or three of whom”?
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We’ve done maybe seventy of these exchanges now on various subjects, Immanuel Can. But what we’ve never done is a post on commonly misunderstood scriptures. Everybody does those. I’m feeling left out.
So why don’t we just do it like the Lord Jesus did with the lawyer and ask the questions, “What is written? How do you read it?” That’s a pretty solid precedent to work from.
Tom: I’ll start. Let me lob you a softball here, IC.
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David Rönnegard is 37. He has a PhD in philosophy from the London School of Economics, and is a researcher and teacher in corporate social responsibility in Stockholm. But far too soon David’s friends and family will be using “had” and “was” rather than “has” and “is” to describe him.
Dr. Rönnegard has stage four lung cancer.
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Immanuel Can: Hey, Tom, what’s all this I’m suddenly hearing about “NPC”?
Tom: Oh my, you sure know how to pick ’em. As you have surely noticed, there’s a big media brouhaha around that term, and Twitter has banned it outright as “hateful”. I’ll let writer Brandon Morse explain it:
“If you’ve ever picked up a video game that features other characters that are controlled by the computer, then you’ve run into non-player characters or NPC’s.”
When you call someone an “NPC”, what you are saying is that they are programmed with preset behavioral patterns decided for them by somebody else, be they professors, activist groups or the media. You are telling them they are unable to think for themselves.
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I’m not even sure how to describe this, but I’m going to give it a go.
Publishers Weekly’s ShelfTalker, “In which children’s booksellers ponder all things literary, artistic, and mercantile,” has a piece on a hot new trend sweeping the nation’s libraries: story time with a drag queen.
Mixed groups of three- to eight-year-olds are invited to come and enjoy a spoken word performance from men like “Harmonica Sunbeam” dressed as women (there is a picture with the article but — fair warning — it can’t be un-seen).
Tom: IC, is it possible to normalize something so bizarre and decadent, even with the power and budget of big corporations and the education system fully committed to it?
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Tom: Here’s a hot topic we’ve yet to discuss, IC — at least, it’s generated some serious heat for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, sufficient to rate an article in The New York Times.
At issue is the government’s determination to tie federal funding for youth job programs to the expression of politically correct opinion. It’s about $113 million annually, give or take, and approximately 70,000 jobs are at stake.
The Prime Minister dismisses the very predictable negative reaction from Canadian conservatives as a “kerfuffle”.
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The Pew Research Center — a moderately reputable outfit as these things go — just released study data that indicates three quarters of Americans are incapable of distinguishing fact from opinion. When given a series of statements like “Spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid make up the largest portion of the U.S. federal budget” (fact, supposedly), and “Democracy is the greatest form of government” (opinion, surely), most participants were unable to determine which were which.
Tom: Somebody’s responsible for that, IC. Want to hazard a guess who it might be?
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[Editor’s note: When we were young we used to play road hockey. Now we do this. I missed out on this particular email discussion, but I thought the rest of you might enjoy it as much as I did when I woke up to find it in my inbox. And yes, I got called out for not participating, but these days I will take sleep whenever I can get it.]
Bernie: Okay, bear with me ...
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I was just poking through the archives and realized that last year we did a post together called “Bad Reasons to be Non-Denominational”. It was all about the recent trend toward non-denominational Christian gathering that doesn’t always have a whole lot in the way of specifics and convictions.
Tom: We agreed that wasn’t our preferred way to go, IC. But now I’m wondering if you can think of any good reasons to meet together with Christians without a lot of the historical baggage that goes with a well-established, well-known bloc of believers — like, say, the Southern Baptists.
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Christianity Today’s Caleb Lindgren interviews author Brian J. Wright about his new book, Communal Reading in the Time of Jesus.
Tom: We bounced this article around by email last week, IC, and it was fodder for a few interesting observations. I thought we might revisit it here. One major weakness of Lindgren’s interview is that he never quite gets Brian Wright to define “communal reading” for us, and the term then ends up being used to describe a whole bunch of different things in the course of the interview.
Care to take a shot at defining it?
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more holiday-oriented than usual.
Tom: I was out for my early morning walk in a little bit of a mood, and I decided the thing to do was to spend my prayer time thanking the Lord for the good things he has brought into my life and the great things he is doing in this world.
I’m sure you can imagine exactly what happened, IC: my mood changed drastically.
Immanuel Can: Gratitude will do that, won’t it? One of the great sins of mankind is lack of it.
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Kevin Miller is an Executive VP at Christianity Today International. In this article he lays out a number of ways that one can go about developing a vision.
Tom: Immanuel Can, Miller is ignoring the elephant in the room: he starts with the unstudied assertion that good leaders must always be men of vision and charges right into how we can all acquire it without addressing why this quality is allegedly a critical component of leadership.
And he’s not alone.
Immanuel Can: You’re right, Tom, there are a lot of people talking about our lack of vision as Christians today. What do you think accounts for this widespread concern, and how legit do you think it is?
The most recent version of this post is available here.
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The current state of our evangelical Christian churches is not the easiest thing to encapsulate in a few sentences. While each of today’s Protestant denominations originally sprang from a set of shared doctrinal convictions and associated practices, few could ever have been called monolithic, and evangelicals are even less so. Some groups bear the same name but believe and do things very differently indeed.
Tom: My experience with folks from the denominations is primarily online, but our own Immanuel Can has been out church-shopping of late, and may have a better view from the trenches ... er, pews. Does the average modern evangelical church building still have pews, IC?
The most recent version of this post is available here.
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| God, cash & prizes: a winning combo! Or not. |
How Do You Read It? is kind of a series within a series, in which Immanuel Can and I discuss common misinterpretations of some very familiar verses. The first two instalments can be found here and here.
Tom: IC, it’s been a year since we did one of these. Have you got one for me?
Immanuel Can: What about “Whatever you ask in my name …”?
The most recent version of this post is available here.
The most recent version of this post is available here.
The most recent version of this post is available here.
The most recent version of this post is available here.
The most recent version of this post is available here.
The most recent version of this post is available here.
The most recent version of this post is available here.
The most recent version of this post is available here.
The most recent version of this post is available here.
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Christianity Today notes a new trend in “worship”: electronic dance music. As writer Jeff Neely puts it, “layers of computer-programmed electronic backing tracks, quarter-note bass thumps, and cycles of musical ‘builds’ and ‘drops’, much of it set to a tempo around 130 beats per minute.”
*headdesk*
Tom: That’s my sister’s response, Immanuel Can, and I think it’s entirely apropos. Some things are beyond the pale. But perhaps we can use it as a jumping-on point to discuss the role of enthusiasm in worship, what sort of place the arts might have or not have in the context of local church gatherings, and so on.
That work for you?
Immanuel Can: Certainly.
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Immanuel Can: Tom, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but a division seems to be forming within the Christian community generally, and within some local churches as well, over the issue of what we all should have done about the government’s lockdowns. In some cases, the debate is becoming quite heated. One side says “the powers that be are ordained of God”, and that as a duty to love our neighbor, all Christians should be very thorough in obeying the government’s dictates. The other side points out that love of neighbor is the second commandment, not the first, the first being to love God above all, and that all Christians have a duty to “obey God rather than men”.
Tom: Actually, I’ve written extensively about that very subject here and here, and I’ve recently been enjoying a few of the more radical “first commandment” folks online. As you point out, both sides have their scriptures.
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If you’ve been watching the numbers over the last few months, it should be evident to even the most Negative Nancy that the COVID-19 rates of infection and death are finally decreasing steadily. We may reasonably discount the weekly cries of the media alarmists about the latest terrifying variant; that’s just what they do when they’re all out of stories about dying polar bears.
Tom: And so we are beginning to hear tentative musings about reopening businesses and getting back to something approaching our pre-March 2020 way of living. As someone who worked in the office throughout the entire song and dance, I was more than a little surprised to read that I am not necessarily in the majority in my desire to see society normalize. Tim Kreider of The Atlantic has decided he’d rather stay in bed, along with untold numbers of others who would rather work from home forever ... or preferably not work at all.
IC, didn’t one of the ‘seven deadlies’ use to be the sin of sloth?