Who’s Minding the Store?

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Taught to Die

Isaiah the prophet speaks the thoughts of the promised Messiah:

“The Lord God has given me the tongue of those who are taught, that I may know how to sustain with a word him who is weary. Morning by morning he awakens; he awakens my ear to hear as those who are taught.”

Taught, but not exactly.

Anarchy and Violence

I used to like democracy. As forms of government go, I liked it a lot.

Not to say I’m all that emotionally invested in any particular way of running the show. As an adult Christian, I now recognize the built-in limitations of all human institutions. But for most people, unless the system in which we grew up was transparently horrendous, it tended to define our political horizons. I was no exception.

Mind you, as a lifetime reader of the Old Testament, a monarchy sounded like it might be cool — always assuming you had exactly the right sort of monarch. But the books of Kings suggest such a hope is a bit of a long shot: Israel’s 19 kings were a total moral washout, while Judah went a mere 8.5 for 20 in the “good king” department.

Not a great track record.

“I Love You,” She Said Determinedly

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Too Hot to Handle: Church Is Too Easy

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Contributory Negligence

Reality is what it is, as one of my relatives is fond of endlessly repeating.

He’s right. Truth remains true no matter whether anyone believes it. God found fault with the people. Let God be true though everyone were a liar. Etc., etc.

Truth also remains truth no matter who says it. God has communicated truth through donkeys, little foreign slave girls, and even corrupt, pseudo-religious political animals like Caiaphas.

Everyone has an obligation before God to identify truth and respond to it regardless of how that truth may be packaged. The personal failings of the messenger do not excuse us from this obligation.

Living Large

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So Dumb We Need a Pastor

How smart are you, and how much does being intelligent matter to your Christian life?

The other day, a discussion of IQ and what it means for human capabilities in various areas of life took a turn for the bizarre in the comment section of one of my favourite blogs. One of the wordier and more inscrutable readers said something that boiled down to this (I’m translating from intellectual-ese here):

“To be usefully involved in the Church requires a certain minimal level of reading comprehension. Important parts of the Bible are not instantly obvious to everyone. How smart do you have to be to understand it?”

I think Protestants find this an uncomfortable question because it undermines sola scriptura. They shouldn’t: pastors exist for a reason.”

It was, as you might well imagine, the last line that caught my attention.

The Gifts Yesterday and Today

Why are the spiritual gifts we observe in the book of Acts so much more impressive and obviously supernatural than the gifts we observe today? Why do some of the gifts on Paul’s ‘gift lists’ in Corinthians and Romans appear to be missing or underutilized in our churches?

If you’ve been reading the last two days (here and here), I’ve done my best to rule out A.W. Tozer’s chief culprits: unspirituality and bad teaching. These are certainly problems we may observe in many gatherings of Christians and of which we always need to be careful. I do not believe, however, that they are primarily responsible for the apparent dearth of gift in modern Christendom.

Where Did Those Gifts Go?

Yesterday I tried to establish that of the eighteen spiritual gifts listed in Romans and 1 Corinthians, at least half seem to have gone missing in our churches somewhere in the last two millennia.

Most Christian commentators agree this is at least partially true. We may argue about how to recognize the various supernatural abilities on the Holy Spirit’s gift list and about the nuances of a few of the Greek terms Paul uses. But in the end, most Christians acknowledge that unless we describe the gifts of tongues or prophecy very differently from the way we see them occurring in the book of Acts, or wildly dilute the concepts of miracles and healings, some of the Holy Spirit’s gifts are unaccountably absent today.

Very well then, let’s do some accounting.

Assumptions and Loaded Conversations

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Missing in Action

How many gifts of the Holy Spirit are listed in the New Testament? I suppose it depends on the criteria you use.

Whatever your standards for inclusion on the gift list, and whatever your final gift count, you will surely notice that several factors complicate our application of these familiar passages of scripture to the church today:

1. In many instances the exact nature of the gift and how we might expect it to show itself are not precisely spelled out for us;
2. We no longer have apostles in the sense the word is used of the Twelve;

Too Hot to Handle: Which Beer Do Christians Drink?

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Quote of the Day (24)

If you’re looking for a scapegoat in the ongoing war of the sexes, don’t look here:

“Weak men drive women insane, and insane women make men weak.”

— John C. Wright

Not wrong, but we’re no closer to a solution.

Feminism has already made tremendous inroads into today’s church. The war of the sexes is not yet waged in every Christian home and place of worship, but if you haven’t experienced it, trust me, it’s coming.

Inbox: The Finishing Stroke

Ever ask a simple question and get one of those answers that just won’t quit?

Having opened that can of worms before, I know the feeling of looking at your watch and realizing that you’ve inadvertently set yourself up for a reply on the scale of a Homeric recitation of ancient Greek epic poetry in dactylic hexameter.

Then again, sometimes it turns out the question wasn’t so simple after all. Or, in this case, that it provided the occasion to do an in-depth study that I trust may have had a few unexpected benefits.

In Exodus 32 God told Moses, “Whoever has sinned against me, I will blot out of my book”. The simple question originally asked was, “What about those who repented (if any did)?”

Inbox: The Book of Life in the Book of Revelation

The book of Revelation contains the majority of the Bible’s references to the moderately mysterious and much-discussed “book of life”. No study of the subject (such as the one beginning here and concluding here) that failed to address these verses would be particularly useful.

This one may not be either, but let’s at least take a crack at it.

Inbox: Booking It

In connection with the episode in Exodus 32 where God says, “Whoever has sinned against me, I will blot out of my book,” WD wonders, “What about those who repented (if any did)?”

Good question. I think this might be the first mention of such a heavenly “book” in scripture (assuming we take the reference literally), but similar language comes up in other places more than once. The Hebrew in Exodus is çêpher, an umbrella term for all kinds of written decrees, long and short, variously translated “book”, “letter”, “scroll” or “evidence”. The sense of the word is not merely a communication but a communication that has legal force.

That part we can all agree on. Don’t worry, it won’t last ...

Retro Christianity

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The Distance Between

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Too Hot to Handle: Coalition of the Unwilling

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