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“Every act of faithful leadership will be met with an equal and opposite act of sabotage.” — Joe Rigney
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Saturday, August 01, 2015
Friday, July 31, 2015
Too Hot to Handle: My Favourite Atheist
In which two or more of our regular writers toss around
subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Pat Condell* |
Here’s a sample of what he thinks about Jesus, for instance:
“I don’t reject Jesus, I reject religion … the early church capitalized on [supernatural nonsense about Jesus] and exploited it enthusiastically because they needed Jesus to be a god so that they could use him to generate fear — which, of course, is the only level they know how to operate on — and also so that they could claim supernatural authority through him, which is the best kind of authority to have when you’re bluffing. As a mere man, Jesus was almost useless to them. All he could offer were words of compassion and wisdom, and what earthly good would they be to the men who run the church?”
Labels:
Atheism
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Authority
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Church
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Pat Condell
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Recycling
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Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, July 30, 2015
Faith, Identity and Growing Up Christian
If that sounds a little cranky, be advised there are
Christians reviewing Barnabas Piper’s book “The Pastor’s Kid: Finding Your Own Faith and Identity” on Amazon who agree with me. Because that’s got to carry some weight, right?
My disdain for the “PK” (pastor’s kid, preacher’s kid) and “MK”
(missionary’s kid) abbreviations goes way, way back to the days in which I was
two of the three. I’m not sure I could tell you why I disliked them so much; to the best of my
recollection nobody ever used either designation to describe me. I don’t recall
hearing them from my Christian friends. In fact I suspect I only ever encountered
PKs and MKs in the magazine rack next to our couch in publications like Christianity Today or in those hokey
teen novels in Christian bookstores.
Labels:
Christian Homes
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Growing Up
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Living Under the Blade
The most current version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Forgiveness
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Guilt
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Sin
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
Christian Escapism and a Time of Trouble Such As Never Has Been
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Amillennialism
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Daniel
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Prophecy
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Rapture
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Supersessionism
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Tribulation
Monday, July 27, 2015
Leadership: It’s a Dog’s Life
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Elders
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Leadership
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Shepherds
Sunday, July 26, 2015
Help! They Changed My Bible!
Bible translations have a way of changing over time, and it can make some Christians quite frantic.
Textual criticism is a discipline about which many believers know very little. The average regular churchgoer can probably tell you that the Bible was written primarily in Greek and Hebrew, not English (and the average reasonably intelligent person might simply assume it), but beyond that basic piece of information, how our Bibles came to us is not all that widely understood.
Given the quality of history courses in the average high school since 1970, fewer still know that when we speak of “the originals”, they are not sitting in some airless, climate-controlled museum display case. Would they be shocked to discover such manuscripts no longer exist and have not existed for centuries? Probably not, with a few seconds consideration.
Textual criticism is a discipline about which many believers know very little. The average regular churchgoer can probably tell you that the Bible was written primarily in Greek and Hebrew, not English (and the average reasonably intelligent person might simply assume it), but beyond that basic piece of information, how our Bibles came to us is not all that widely understood.
Given the quality of history courses in the average high school since 1970, fewer still know that when we speak of “the originals”, they are not sitting in some airless, climate-controlled museum display case. Would they be shocked to discover such manuscripts no longer exist and have not existed for centuries? Probably not, with a few seconds consideration.
But no, they don’t exist so far as we know. Some people are fine with that idea.
Labels:
Bible Translations
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Daniel Wallace
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Manuscripts
Saturday, July 25, 2015
Crazy Uncle
Normally, I’d leave
something like this alone. It is, after all, the Huffington
Post, and anything they have to say on the subject of Christianity is almost
guaranteed to be dismissive, frivolous and poorly informed.
But hey, it provides a
useful lead-in to something I’ve been thinking about for a while.
In an article entitled “3 Reasons Why
Apostle Paul Is the Crazy Uncle No One Wants to Talk About”, Pete Enns argues that “Paul’s handling of his Bible makes him look like the crazy uncle
you make excuses for or avoid entirely”.
Labels:
Apostle Paul
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Inspiration
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Interpretation
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Scripture
Friday, July 24, 2015
Too Hot to Handle: Let’s Make Sure They Hate Us Enough
A more current version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Government
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Islam
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Leftism
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Persecution
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Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, July 23, 2015
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
Too Much for Sunday School
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Daniel
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Heaven
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New Jerusalem
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Symbolism
Tuesday, July 21, 2015
“My Church Believes …”
“Oh, you mean like a creed,
or a statement of faith?”
Not really. I’m thinking more generally. A
statement of faith usually attempts to be concise, whether it’s eleven paragraphs or seven pages. It may cover only basic theology or it may go into detail about home life and
personal conduct. But it cannot possibly include everything the New Testament
teaches. It cannot tell you all that a church really believes, though it may set
off spiritual alarm bells by what it does or does not contain.
Labels:
Belief
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Church
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Creeds
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Practice
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Statements of Faith
Monday, July 20, 2015
Doing It the Hard Way
The Wailing Wall: Last vestige of Herod’s temple |
How much does the church matter to the
Lord?
When we look at the condition of most local
churches today and compare them to Christ’s original intention as laid out in
the epistles and patterned for us by believers in the first century, we might
well wonder why the Lord continues to bother with the church at all.
Most of us do not really understand why we’re
here and what we’re supposed to be doing. Great numbers of professing
Christians atrophy in the pews, putting in an hour or two a week listening to a
lecture and going home to a largely secular existence into which God is only allowed
to intrude when things have gone disastrously wrong.
Sunday, July 19, 2015
Failure to Choose is a Choice Too
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Interpretation
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Luke
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Scripture
Saturday, July 18, 2015
Fulfilling or Destroying
A couple of days ago I posted some thoughts on the place of the Law of Moses in the life of the
Christian.
Most Christians who
have read Romans or Galatians understand that we are not under law but under grace.
However, because the teaching of the Lord Jesus is traditionally bundled with our
New Testament, some believers have difficulty recognizing that things like the
Sermon on the Mount are really addressed to people living under and seeking to
obey the rules of the Old Covenant.
Confusion on this
subject leads to inconsistent interpretation and maybe even inconsistent
living. It’s worth a careful and prayerful look.
Labels:
Grace
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Law
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Moses
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Sermon on the Mount
Friday, July 17, 2015
Too Hot to Handle: Diluting the Faith
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Church
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Modern Christianity
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Too Hot to Handle
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William Booth
Thursday, July 16, 2015
Progressive Revelation and Paradigm Shifts
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Paradigm Shifts
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Progressive Revelation
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Progressivism
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
Authentic Me
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Authenticity
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Christianity
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
Forgive or Die
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Dispensationalism
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Forgiveness
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Matthew
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Sermon on the Mount
Monday, July 13, 2015
Dispensing With Dispensations
If you are the
average, practical Christian just looking to apply practical Christian
principles practically to your life, feel free to tune out here.
This post will not
help you much.
If, on the other hand,
you are keen on understanding the whys and wherefores in scripture, being able
to make distinctions in the way God has behaved towards mankind throughout
history has helped me tremendously, and has made a lot of things clear that
would otherwise be terribly foggy. I’ll give you a very real-life example of
that tomorrow.
Labels:
Church
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Dispensationalism
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Israel
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