Lingo or Perfection

How to put it? It’s always the great dilemma.

For instance, I can tell you — my new, unsaved friend — that I enjoy the fellowship of the saints in the assembly at 14th and Dutton. After shaking your head, you might eventually figure out what I’m blathering on about. Or not.

Alternatively, I can simply say, “I go to church at the corner of Dutton and 14th”, something you will almost certainly grasp immediately.

Cause to Celebrate

I’ve always been pretty laid back. There are generations of finely-tuned English restraint in my end of the gene pool, the most obvious result of which is that I tend to be more comfortable with fairly austere, reserved modes of praise.

But people were made to celebrate. Including me.

We’ve done it all through history, in good ways and bad. Celebration seems to be hardwired into the human race, Brits notwithstanding. Whatever doesn’t come out in church comes out anywhere near a football pitch. All cultures celebrate, though it may look vastly different from one cultural setting to another.

Voodoo Therapy

I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

Through its Transformative Global Health office, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto, Canada is partnering with voodoo “healers” to address depression and anxiety in Haiti, which it says have become major problems in the aftermath of Haiti’s 2010 earthquake.

The 27 qualified psychiatrists currently plying their trade in Haiti will now be aided and abetted in their efforts by some of its 60,000 voodoo priests, who treat illnesses of all sorts primarily with storytelling and dance.

No, I promise, this is real. You didn’t accidentally surf your way to The Babylon Bee.

Too Hot to Handle: The Peasants Are Revolting

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The Fourth Option

People talk about God, and about what God wants from us. What they say may come from several places.

Sure, what we say can (1) originate with God. We hope it does. Peter says, “Whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God”. Amen, so be it.

But we know this is not always the case.

The Virtue of Pious Disobedience

I think most Christians would agree that, for believers, starting an insurrection would be morally wrong.

After all, the New Testament teaches that we are to obey the governing authorities. Our job in the present age is to live quietly and mind our own affairs as part of our testimony to our Saviour, something some of us do better than others.

But this is not a universal rule.

Tefillin and Wonderbra

Sam the Eagle weighs in ...

God gave his word to man with the intention that it be used to address every moment of human existence in its every aspect.

To those who have never lived this exercise (and it is very much an exercise), that may sound a little tedious and even holier-than-thou. We’ve all met people who are “Jesus this, Jesus that” 24/7 and wondered what exactly they were trying to prove.

God meant, I believe, that we should come to think and live in fellowship with him at all times.

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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