The heir to a hero of Chinese mission says the Christian press’ obsession with persecution in China is “misdirecting the mission world” away from effective gospel ministry in that nation.
China bashing distorts mission by Jeremy Halcrow
I think this was a line from the movie Bug’s Life, when a moth responds to calls from other bugs to stay away from the flame (or lightbulb).
A friend recently told me that moths use the moon to navigate. They continue in a straight line by keeping it on one side, which is why smaller lights get them flying in circles.
I thought this was a great analogy for the way idolatry gets us spinning our wheels.
Centered on recent events, preaching inevitably loses most of its transformative power. From apostolic times, the task of preaching has never been a matter of providing a “religious insight” into what’s going on, a new slant on what everyone already knows. The purpose of apostolic preaching was to announce an event that, according to Paul, no one could know without a preacher. The point of preaching is not to answer questions that are already circulating. The point is to challenge the entire worldview that gives rise to those questions, and to announce the reality of a new world in which all the old questions have to be reformulated or discarded altogether.
Peter J. Leithart, Of Preaching and Newspapers.
“For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” Hebrews 4:12
NOTE: THIS POST HAS BEEN REMIXED AND INCLUDED IN GOD’S KITCHEN.
I thought for many years that the phrase “joints and marrow” in this verse was very strange. I guess this is a testimony to the artificial division of the Old Testament from the New by Bible teachers. It refers to the sword of the priest cutting up the sacrifice.
“Prayer is not a retreat from the history of redemption into private ecstasies of communion. Prayer is a chief instrument by which the Father renews the world through His sons who are in the Son and who have received the Spirit.”
Peter Leithart, Romans 8, continued, www.leithart.com
Just watched The Painted Veil. Must be Edward Norton week. A movie based on a 1925 novel by Somerset Maugham, with strong messages of the benefit of forgiveness after betrayal, and of how suffering strips away our delusions and brings maturity and freedom to love.
The main thing that struck me was how the superstitions of the locals obstructed those who risked their lives to help them. We lose sight of just how much the gospel has changed the world, and take the foundation of our culture, the Bible, for granted.
Over and over again when I read essays decrying “violence” I see no definition of the term. What it seems to mean is doing things another person does not like. So, spanking your child is violent because he does not like it. It is violent because it violates his person.
From a Christian standpoint this is idiocy. From a Christian standpoint sinful violence violates God’s integrity and the integrity of the innocent. Sinners deserve and need to be violated. God is all in favour of violating sinners, and will do so to some people in hell forever. God delights to punish the wicked (Deuteronomy 28:63) and though Jesus wept over Jerusalem in AD30, He was delighting to destroy her in AD70 (Psalm 69:21-28), because she had violated His Bride.
The exercise of violence is not a failure of the community, as some have asserted, because the Trinity does not fail and the Trinity will send some people to hell. Get used to it. It is blasphemy to suggest otherwise. Punishing criminals and spanking children does not reveal a mournful failure of community but is in fact the joyous privilege of maintaining community.
Violence is not wrong. Violence can be good, depending on who’s doing it and what the situation is. The psalms, which we are commanded to sing before God in worship, are full of violence. The only question in violence is who is being violated and why.
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James B. Jordan, Evil Empire?, Biblical Horizons Newsletter No. 199, September 2008. Subscribe at www.biblicalhorizons.com
In C. S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, we are given a good example of a boy who was brought up poorly. Eustace Scrubb had stumbled into a dragon’s lair, but he did not know what kind of place it was. “Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon’s lair, but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.”
It is a standing rebuke for us that there are many Christians who have an open sympathy for the “true” books which Eustace read — full of true facts about governments and drains and exports — and who are suspicious of great works of imagination, like the Narnia stories, or The Lord of the Rings, or Treasure Island, because they are “fictional” and therefore suspected of lying. The Bible tells us to be truthful above all things, they tell us, and so we should not tell our sons about dragon-fighting. Our sons need to be strong on drains and weak on dragons. The irony here is that the Bible, the source of all truth, says a lot about dragons and giants, and very little about drains and exports.
–Doug Wilson, Future Men, p. 101.
The InternetMonk, Michael Spencer, has predicted The coming evangelical collapse.
Is it a bad thing?
“The sooner God destroys the world of evangelical gnosticism, the sooner authentic Christian churches can begin to do what we are called upon to do.”
James Jordan makes some good observations about evangelicalism in Obama as Fool.
And Doug Wilson has comments here:
“There are (at least) two kinds of disasters. One is when an asteroid lands on the most beautiful albaster-gleamy city we have. This is disaster straight up. Then there is the disaster revelatory — it was a disaster all along, and now we know about it… The coming evangelical collapse will be the disaster revelatory.”
God periodically shakes the Land so that the trash falls away. We need to read our Old Testaments.
Frank Turk comments:
Stop Asking Me
I gave kudos to iMonk for getting pretty much global recognition for his “death of Evangelicalism” piece, right? So credit where credit’s due and all that.
Many of you have e-mailed me to ask, “yeah, but what do you think about the essay?” Look: I’m not going to take the bait. The truth is that Michael and I get along pretty good as long as we don’t talk about things we blog about, and I’m really intent on keeping it that way as I have no free time to speak of.
That said, here’s what Doug Wilson thinks about that essay, and I would endorse without comment Doug’s affirmations and denials.
The problem is not that there’s too much conservatism: it’s that there’s a lot of unfounded, flabby conservatism running around with plastic fishes attached to it rather than a robust, young, and dangerous conservatism riding around on the fat, noisy Harley which is the Gospel.1
Now there’s an image.
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1 http://centuri0n.blogspot.com/2009/03/stop-asking-me.html
Bible Matrix blog
