Vote Utopian!: The Christian in a Quandry

Imagine Jesus lived in a republic, and could vote.

There are several candidates running for Governor of Galilee. The two candidates with the most support are Publius, who wants slavery to continue and expand, and Adrian, who wants many forms of slavery to be done away with, though not all. There are other candidates, like Phillip, who wants slavery totally and immediately abolished. But most Galileans don’t want to abolish slavery, though they are ready to make it less common and more humane. Realistically, Phillip couldn’t be elected for many years to come, but voting for him now would be a show of support for the ideal. It could increase his influence, and hasten the day he could be elected.

Of course, if Publius wins, slavery will continue and worsen. In fact, more persons will be slaves. If Adrian wins, there will be less slavery, and the movement to abolish slavery may also grow as a result of people coming to see slavery as an evil worth abolishing.

How would Jesus vote? Would he vote for the elimination of slavery, but because of political realities, actually spend his vote in the election of someone who would expand slavery? Or would he vote for the reduction of slavery, so that fewer persons are enslaved this year and next year?
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I wish I’d said that

This Real Live Preacher piece on the Bible is really wonderful, and I don’t have to agree with every word to say that. I’m sure there are recovering fundamentalists all over the place who could benefit from those thoughts. I can imagine the incident that must have prompted this sad and gentle rant, and the result is a beautiful description of a much larger idea of the Bible than the rationalists and the scholastics and the creationists and the fundamentalists and the nouthetic types. So large, in fact, that it goes well outside the boundaries of anyone’s ability to creedalize it.

I appreciate it when we can say, in short order, “This is what the Bible is all about, and this is what it’s NOT.” That’s the best kind of confessional language. I appreciate the fact that someone who doesn’t believe in a “magic book” idea of hocus pocus inspiration could express some of what we struggle to say. It’s hard to say more about the Bible than the literalist, because he is so determined to insist that you are saying less. Inspiration is about Christ, not about all the literary attachments and accumulations in the book that brings him to us. The wonder of the Bible is that such HUGE things are in such SMALL words, and that at the end of the day, the things in the Bible are larger than anything we can say or think. So why are we fighting about those words?

None dare Call It Marketing: Lifeway, Beth Moore and the conspiracy to take over your church

Let’s get one thing straight at the outset: I don’t have a problem with Beth Moore, so don’t write me and give me grief like I do. Everything I’ve read, everything I’ve heard seems excellent, Christ-centered, full of the Gospel and Biblical. Compared to any other celebrity Bible teacher I might see or hear, Beth Moore is the top of the chart. I wish, hope and pray for the very best for her.

OK. Everyone relaxed?

But I’ve got some questions. Questions about how Christian publishers, and Lifeway in particular, promotes someone like Beth Moore as a teacher and leader for the whole church, and for my church. Questions about why we ought to accept Lifeway’s selection and promotion of Moore and other celebrity Bible teachers. Questions about the real agenda of Lifeway, and whether we’ve taken stock of that agenda- and its effects- in our churches.

If you don’t want to think, or ask questions, just pass on this post. But if you are getting tired of being told by the money changers in the temple who the spiritual leaders of the church ought to be, read on.
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CT and me on Eldredge

CT has a large article on John Eldredge. I understand where the guys who give me “I hate theology” syndrome get annoyed at Eldredge, but I have to admit a lack of excitement myself, even though much of what he says has a Piperesque quality to it.

Dan Allender, one of Eldredge’s mentors during his graduate education, has delighted in his former student’s emerging ministry. Allender believes Eldredge stands in a literary stream along with Kierkegaard, Lewis, and G. K. Chesterton that appreciates Christianity as passion. “In many ways, I see John as the answer to Nietzsche’s statement that Christians are both idiots and weak,” he said. “John’s voice really is a call to the yes of the gospel.”

My problem is that I think Eldredge is running the risk of stereotyping male behavior into something fairly shallow, and leaving me (and other fat, bald, bookish guys), way out.

The video series features Eldredge and his colleagues Craig McConnell, Gary Barkalow, Bart Hansen, and Morgan Snyder doing manly things together: riding horses, rappelling down a cliff, rafting in white water, shooting skeet, and stacking hay in a barn.

But other parts of me resonate very much with what he says. If I ever read pop theology again, I’ll really give him a serious hearing. (I think his view of maleness has a lot to say for it in terms of sexual sin, pornography addiction and so forth.) I appreciate knowing about his connections to Crabb and Allender, two guys who have meant a lot to Denise and I in our marriage journey.

I am most impressed with his change of heart about the place of the small church. Count me as “small is real, small is beautiful, small puts the focus where it needs to be” kind of Christian, and one who supports Eldredge’s move out of , and back into, the church. We need a LOT more of this:

One of Eldredge’s most striking and controversial comments concerns the demands of attending church. “When the deepest treasure becomes our most dutiful burden, it really kills our hearts,” he writes in The Journey of Desire. “You might even need to give up going to church for a while or reading your Bible. I stopped going to church for a year; it was one of the most refreshing years of my life. I hadn’t abandoned God, and I very much sought out the company of my spiritual companions. What I gave up was the performance of having to show up every Sunday morning with my happy face on.”

What prompted Eldredge to take such a radical step? “The biggest clue was that I found myself sitting in the parking lot reading Scripture because I couldn’t find God inside. For me there was absolutely no life in it. It was routine,” he says. He spent the year reading the book of Psalms. “What is described in the Psalms is so much more passionate, so much more honest, and so much more true to human experience.”

Eldredge is quite possibly on to the legacy of Lewis and the recovery of a Christianity of joyful affections- male affections. He surely is on the track of the kind of healing a lot of men need. I wish him the best, and hope to read and understand him more in the future, even though I don’t ride horses or repel.

(P.S. Here’s the balancing, critical article in CT.)

Is Your Church One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic?

If you really do attend Oakmont Worship Center, this post isn’t necessarily about you. If you attend the majority of America’s megachurches and megachurch-wannabes, it is about you.

In a recent issue of Tabletalk magazine, R.C. Sproul Jr. addressed the issue of whether the modern evangelical church has the classic and confessional marks of the true church: One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic. I was impressed with his answer, but couldn’t find it on the net. I’ve remedied that, and I hope R.C. won’t mind.

(Thanks to Denise for typing this for us.)
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Out of the Mouths of 16-year Old Babes: The Terrible Truth About Kids and Parents

The youth ministry professional has something to say, and parents need to read it. First, let’s hear about a new book you need to add to the Amazon wish list.

This book has a lot to teach us. But not just about our kids.

Seems that Doris Fuller, a journalist, her 19 year old college son and her 16 year old, wild-child high school junior daughter have penned this little book giving the terrible truth of what is going on in the youth culture of contemporary suburban yuppiedom. Hence the title, “Promise You Won’t Freak Out.”

The protagonist of this little tell-all is 16-year old Natalie. Oh what a child is she!

So take a deep breath and get ready for 15-year-olds who drink liquor shots holding their noses in their parents’ kitchen and “touchy-feely,” a football-team party game where guests drink, strip naked and race through the house groping body parts.

Natalie, who by 16 confesses to lying, shoplifting, sneaking out of the house, drinking, driving to visit a boyfriend out of state and getting her belly button pierced, notes that during her sophomore year “I must have lied to my parents about my plans 90 percent of the time.

“I would tell them I was going to someone’s house to sleep over, and then I’d go someplace I wasn’t supposed to be. It was like a game … Every time I returned home, adrenaline pumped through my veins in anticipation of finding out if I had successfully pulled off my latest getaway. I knew that as long as I got away with things and was having too much fun, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself.

Out of this adventure in honesty comes a lot of parenting advice from the point of view of the wayward child who says she really needed her parents to show up and do their job. It’s all well worth hearing.
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The SBC and the BWA: A case of abandoning ship too soon?

To hear the Southern Baptist Convention leadership tell it, the Baptist World Alliance had become intolerable. Taking nearly a million dollars a year from those dear Baptists who really wanted to support Lottie Moon and spending it on an America bashing, liberal seminary supporting, money wasting public relations outfit that no self-respecting SBC fundamentalist would identify with for money or biscuits. So in the 2004 SBC annual meeting, the SBC took its money and went home, leaving the Baptist World Alliance without a third of its budget and the largest chunk of its member churches.

Not everyone was pleased. Check out the Baptist General Convention of Texas’s BWA page. Seems that some feel the BWA is doing a lot of good for the church around the world and anyone interested in missions could find a way around any tight spots and stay supportive of an organization that gives Baptists a voice in places where those south Alabama accents aren’t recognized.

In fact, according to the theologian cited by the SBC in their objections against liberal theology in the BWA, the SBC gang is just plain lying….and he wrote and told them so, asking them to repent and come back into the worldwide fellowship of Baptists. (I have to say that reading this is distressing. It appears the SBC was looking for a fight and picked one.)

Plenty has been written about this decision, and given the mood and behavior of the SBC these days, is anyone really surprised? Still, I wonder if the SBC move makes as much sense as it seems to at first.
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Do Evangelicals believe in hell? Should they?

Dave at the really excellent blog Grace Pages, asks a question that makes the iMonk’s honesty meter go into the red zone: “Do evangelicals believe in Hell?”

I must confess that the day I stopped believing in hell — or at least the idea of hell as the eternal, conscious punishment of unbelievers my fundamentalist heritage had instilled in me — I did not do so on the basis of a study of Scripture. In fact, it was more a matter of intellectual integrity: I had already stopped believing in hell; I merely had to have the courage to admit it to myself. And the reason I had stopped believing was simply because it was a monstrous idea to me, a horrific notion unworthy of a religion that claims to talk about a loving, merciful God…

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Is Reich Right?

In the interesting and significant file is the rhetoric of Robert Reich on the “Coming War Between Conservative Christians and Freedom Loving Liberals.” NRO summarizes the Reich article in The American Prospect:

The great conflict of the 21st century will not be between the West and terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic, not a belief. The true battle will be between modern civilization and anti-modernists; between those who believe in the primacy of the individual and those who believe that human beings owe their allegiance and identity to a higher authority; between those who give priority to life in this world and those who believe that human life is mere preparation for an existence beyond life; between those who believe in science, reason, and logic and those who believe that truth is revealed through Scripture and religious dogma. Terrorism will disrupt and destroy lives. But terrorism itself is not the greatest danger we face.

At least some of Reich’s rhetoric appears to be grounded in personal atheism, but I don’t know that for a fact. I think Reich is brilliant, and passionate. He frequently is ahead of the curve of caution that rules most political discourse. (That’s why he became an out-man in the Clinton White House.) That he’s picked this issue is significant, because it signals that liberals feel Christians have extended themselves too far in this “culture war,” and it is now safe to hit back hard in the most incindiary terms.

Is Reich correct that Religious conservatives have betrayed conservatism itself by denouncing the TRADITION of religious tolerance and advocating a theocracy? Well, I think what we have here, like it or not, is the arrival of the fact that evangelicalism is now broadcasting its voice on a LOT of channels (so to speak) and many of those channels sound like “cultural conquest,” “Christian domination of society” and even some kind of theocratic ideal. You and I as moderate to liberal evangelicals may avoid these voices, but they are there, from Dobson to Gary North, from The Kansas City Prophets to Jerry Falwell, from TBN to CCM, from Ken Ham to Kent Hovind. They are out there, they get a lot of applause, and they are intemperate in their endorsement of what sounds like Christians running America AT THE EXPENSE of the freedoms of non-believers or other-than-Bible-thumping believers.

Reich is right (and pragmatically wise) to sound the alarm at this point, even though he doesn’t understand the theological/social context of a lot of evangelical yammering, a context that keeps most observers from jumping up and screaming. Still, we have a situation where a significant number of conservative evangelicals sound like they are advocating Christians taking over society, ruling over the secular realm, etc. How does this sound to people like Reich? Call it political rhetoric if you want, I think Jim Dobson and Jerry Falwell and the generals of the SBC sound darned scary to a lot of very reasonable people.

I think things have gotten bad enough that lines like this- which sounded absurd a few years ago- will now resonate with a lot of people. A LOT.

In the months leading up to Election Day, when Republicans are screaming about God and accusing the Democrats of siding with sexual deviants and baby killers, Democrats should remind Americans that however important religion is to our spiritual lives, there is no room for liberty in a theocracy.

NRO responded. Maybe you’ll send along some other links to this discussion.

My conclusion: Reich has sensed the wind, and conservative evangelicals are ripe for a frontal attack on this issue. And deservedly so. This kind of atmosphere will make the lies of a movie like Farenheit 911 seem “fair” because the threat needs to be defeated. In that sense, can you see how the reaction to “The Passion” is related to the endorsement of F911?

Worldview worries: Justification by Homeschooling?

The whole homeschooling debate at Internet Monk and the BHT started with a post over here, so I guess I can revisit that topic. (I’ve learned that this is serious business with a lot of people, so I hope we can all act like civilized people. Pistols at dawn sounds good to me.)

Guy at the IM forum thread on PS/HS writes this:

I’ve seen my own children through public school while holding to the view that they were in the world but not of it. Our faith or testimony didn’t fade when we stopped saying the Lord’s Prayer in school. I don’t want the school teachers to be my children’s spiritual leaders. I, as a parent will always have that reserved for myself and my children realize that nothing can change that.

Along comes a “guest” who responds with this:

OK, so you raised them up in two faiths. One for their private devotional lives, where Jesus is guru. Another for the “real” world, where Caesar is Lord. As long as they keep the two worlds carefully barricaded against each other, you’ll need never worry about them doing anything embarassing and public for Jesus in the “real” world.

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