Schaeffer: not on our own - the Holy Spirit

...how: it is not to be done simply in our own strength.  Neither is it only acting in practice upon the reality in God's sight [of rejected-slain-risen etc] ... But it is more than acting on this fact, even though it is so wonderful and should fill us with adoration.  It is much more.  The how is that the glorified Christ will do it through us.  There is an active ingredient:  He will be the doer.

...there is the agency of the Holy Spirit: "And hope maketh not ashamed;  because the love of God has been shed abroad in our hearts by the  Holy Ghost [Spirit] which is given unto us" (Romans 5:5)  What he is saying here is that you will not be ashamed experientially when you begin to act upon the reality, upon the teaching, as it has been presented.  Why?  "because the love of God has been shed abroad in our hearts by the  Holy Spirit which is given to us."

...What makes the difference?  This is the Holy Spirit, not just a 'new idea'.   It is not to be in our own strength.  There is a Holy Spirit  who has been given to us to make this service possible.

TS pp50 & 51

Schaeffer: reality of indwelling of the Spirit

...the doctrine of the mystical union of the church (those living now and those who have died) but I am not here thinking of it as a doctrine.  I am thinking of the reality:  that God ties us in the present time to the reality of those who are already in the other situation.  They are there, they see Christ face-to-face, they are dead, and we have the earnest of the Holy Spirit...

[Galatians 2:20 -]

Here we are told that Christ really lives in me if I have accepted Christ as my Savior.  In other words we have the words of Jesus to the thief on the cross, "Today shalt thou be with me in paradise." (Luke 23:43)...and mean it.  To die is to be with the Lord.  It is not just an idea;  it is a reality.  But at the same time Christ, the same Christ, gives the promise just as definitely that when I have accepted Christ as my Saviour, He lives in me.  They are equal reality.  They are two streams of present reality, both equally promised.  The Christian dead are really with Christ now, and Christ really lives in the Christian.  Christ lives in me.  The Christ who was crucified - the Christ whose work is finished, the Christ who is glorified now - has promised (John 15) to bring forth fruit in the Christian, just as the sap of the vine brings forth fruit in the branch.

True Spirituality, p48 & 49

Schaeffer: choosing to be a creature

When God tells us to live as though we had died, gone to heaven, seen the truth there, and come back to this world, He is not asking us merely to act on some psychological motivation, but on what really is...Thus I am to live now by faith, rooted in the things which have been, such as Christ's death and resurrection;  what is, such as second stream of reality in the unseen now;  and what will be, such as my bodily resurrection and return with Christ...It is not just a case of accepting, there is to be an activeness  in our passivity.  We are to be creatures because that is what we are - creatures.  But in Christ we are presented with  an opportunity, a calling, to be a creature by choice, to be creatures glorified.

True Spirituality, p47

Keller: irony of objective rights in an accidental world

To use a simple example, it is often argues that corporal punishment violates the rights and human dignity of a child, and therefore should be illegal.  Smith [The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse] that there is no secular, scientific basis for the idea of human dignity, or that human beings are valuable and inviolable. Historian Carl L. Becker famously said that, from a strictly scientific viewpoint, human beings must be viewed as "little more than a chance deposit on the surface of the world, carelessly thrown up between two ice ages by the same forces that rust iron and ripen corn."  Scientist Stephen Hawking agrees that " the human race is just chemical scum on a moderate size planet" and most recently Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker wrote an essay entitled "The Stupidity of Dignity". The prominent philosopher John Gray, who teaches at the London School of Economics, writes in his book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and other Animals of the self-deception of those who embrace science and still hold to the tenets of liberal humanism, such as belief in human dignity and rights.

So, concluded Smith, to say that corporal punishment violates a child's dignity and rights seems more objective than to say "I think corporal punishment of children is morally offensive", but the latter statement is a more frank expression of how you reached your conclusion.

Generous Justice, p155-156 (emphasis mine)

Keller: three kinds of (secular) justice

Sandel [in Three Kinds of Justice] lays out three current views of justice, which he calls "maximising welfare", "respecting freedom", and "promoting virtue".  According to one framework, the most just action is that which brings the greatest good to the greatest number of people.  According to the second, the most just action is that which respects the freedom and rights of each individual to live as he or she chooses.  According to the last view, justice is served when people are acting as they ought to, in accord with morality and virtue.  These views lead to sharply different conclusions about what is just in particular cases.

Why do we have such gridlock in our society over justice?  Underneath all the notions of justice is a set of faith assumptions that are essentially religious and these are often not acknowledged...

Generous Justice, p155

Schaeffer: alive to God

[2Corinthians 12:2-4:]

Can't you imagine this man as he came back from heaven?  He had seen it as a propositional truth, as a brute fact.  He had been there, and looked at it, and then had come back.  Would anything have ever looked the same to him again?  It is as though he had died.  It is as though he had been raised from the dead...the constant pressure to conform to the world about us, the social pressure and every other kind of pressure of our day - surely it would have been broken...All things would look different.

But Romans 6 does not leave us here, as though we were merely projecting our imaginations.  There is more to it than this.  "For in that He died, He died unto sin once for all;  but in that He liveth, He liveth unto God" (Romans 6:10).  Jesus Christ lives indeed in the presence of the Father.  This is where we are called to live.  We are to be dead in this present life!  Dead both to good and bad, in order to be alive to the presence of God...

This is what it means now, as I wrote earlier, to love God enough to be contented, to love Him enough in the present world to say thank you in all the ebb and flow of life.  When I am dead both to good and bad, I have my face turned towards God. And this is the place in which, by faith at the present moment of history, I am to be.  When I am there, what am I?  I am then the creature in the presence of the Creator, acknowledging that He is my Creator, and I am only a creature and nothing more.  It is as though I am already in the grave and already before the face of God.

True Spirituality, pp37&38

Schaeffer: died, heaven, risen

The Bible says that in the present life we are, in practice, to live by faith as though we are dead now.

 For in that He died, He died unto sin once for all: but in that He liveth He liveth unto God.  Likewise reckon (this is an act of faith) ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin (Romans 6:10-11)

As Jesus died in history, and once for all was dead to sin, so now we are called in faith to count ourselves dead, in practice, at this present moment of history;  not in some far-off world of religious ideas, but at this moment on the clock.  By faith we are to live now as though we have already died...

...So the sixth point is that we are to live by faith now, in the present history, as though we had already been raised from death...

Now what does this mean in practice, so that it will not just be words going over our heads?  First of all, it certainly means this: that in our thoughts and lives now we are to live as though we had already died, been to heaven and come back again as risen.

True Spirituality, pp36&37

The unfairness of infinite justice...or...

Mark Galli (CT):

There is a lot of talk about how unjust or unfair this is—that finite decisions can have eternal consequences. To me, some of that talk sounds like a teenager rebelling against having to do homework or chores. Philosophical rebellion is respectable in our culture, but when we rebel against the very conditions of our existence, I'm not sure what to say: That God should have created a different world with different conditions? 

Our objection to the inevitability of eternity, of course, is one sided. We like the idea that good finite decisions might have happy eternal consequences. But of course, this is just as unfair as its opposite. Why should a finite decision be rewarded with infinite rewards? Maybe the universalist gets this when he postulates that what eternity is about is learning to make an infinite number of right decisions that will be awarded a life of infinitude.

I for one find this a dreary and hopeless scenario. What I know about myself is this: I am unable to make right decisions and to perform right actions, certainly not to the degree that they merit an infinity of reward. What I know about myself is this:

For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. (Rom. 7:18-20, ESV)

Elshof: dying to self

[without planning I turned to Elshof's book to blog whatever the next quote happened to be, immediately after my last post....]

If I'm going to be a disciple of Jesus then I'm going to be dying...if I'm not dying that will be clear over time.  But if I'm not dying and I'm going to continue to think of myself as a disciple, I'll need to be self-deceived either about the call of a disciple to die or about the fact that I'm not dying...

If on the other hand we are dying to self, we will find that the need for self-deception dissipates over time.  We'll not need to deceive ourselves about the call of the disciple to die to self, since we'll have heeded that call.  We'll not need to deceive ourselves to the degree to which we are not yet dead, since we'll also be aware of the degree to which we have in fact died.

So let's not merely use the spiritual language of the cross and self-mortification.  Let's adopt proven and effective plans for putting to death the various addictions that prevent us from moving more fully into the life of Jesus.  Let us move out of the darkness and into the light with respect to our sin.  The less we have to hide from ourselves and others, the less we'll be moved into the direction of self-deception.

I Told Me So, p.114-115

Schaeffer: dying to self

[Apology:  I messed up the paragraph formatting on this one and can't see how to put it right!]

Schaeffer makes the point, from Luke 9:22ff, that the pattern of Jesus' life was:  rejected-slain-raised;  but not just for Him:

The order - rejected, slain, raised -is also the order of the Christian life of true spirituality;  there is no other...

...if we forget the relationship of this order to us as Christians, then we will have a sterile orthodoxy, and we have no true Christian life.  Christian life will wither and die;  spirituality in any true Biblical sense, will come to an end...

...so I must ask, very gently:  how much thought does the necessity of death by choice provoke...how much prayer do we make for our children and those we love that they may indeed be willing to walk, by the grace of God, through the steps of rejection and being slain? ...  We must not think that we can rush on to the last step without the reality of being rejected and slain, not just at that point in our lives when we become Christians but as a continuing situation in our lives.

[Badger:  I wonder how much truth to this is indicated by my own instinctive hope that we can get through this bit and onto the the more positive, really spiritual stuff? And by how I was struck at his list of verses concerning our need to die to self? He clearly states there are huge positives next to such verses, but:]

We must walk through the first half ("knowing this, that our old man is crucified with Him") before we can get on to the second half (" that the body of sin might be destroyed that henceforth we should not serve sin"). I think I perceive that most Christians even read the first half of those verses faster, in order to get to the second, "happy" part of the verses, but this is a mistake. We love to skip along, but one does not get on the other side of the door without going through it, and we do not get to the second joyous part of these verses without passing through the first part.

I am to face the cross of Christ in every part of my life and with the whole man. The cross of Christ is to be a reality to me not only once for all at my conversion, but all through my life as a Christian. True spirituality does not stop at the negative, but without the negative - in comprehension and practice - we are not ready to go.

True Spirituality, pp 22, 23, 25, 26.

Elshof: Why we believe we're not well off (great quote!)

In explaining self-deception in regard to how well off we are by global standards, Elshof suggests we keep within a sphere similar to our own where have agreed to not ask awkward questions:

This is why the lifestyle in the next stratum up from wherever you are situated will look to you as though it teeters on the edge of exorbitance and gross materialism - but it won't look so to those situated there.  For them it will be the strata above them that satisfies that description.  We surround ourselves with those willing to ignore the questions with respect to our particular standard of living.  In so doing, we make possible a blindness not otherwise possible to the grip of materialism.  The last thing a rich man wants to do is accuse his rich neighbour of being too rich.

I Told Me So, p82

Elshof: concern and anger

Concern is a convenient disguise for anger, since 'concern' for someone is a perfectly legitimate sentiment, and it seems to justify many of the behaviours  one would expect from someone who's just plain hurt and mad.

I Told Me So, p72

Schaeffer: contentment as an index to spirituality

...I am to love God enough to be contented...

If the contentment goes and the giving of thanks goes, we are not loving God as we should, and proper desire has become coveting against God.  This inward area is the first place of loss of true spirituality.  The outward is always just a result of it.

True Spirituality, pp 9 & 11.

Schaeffer: taboos and underneath

Often, after a person is born again and asks "What shall I do next?" he is given a list of things, usually of a limited nature and primarily negative...

...there almost always comes into being another group of Christians that rises up and begins to work against such a list of taboos;  thus there is a tendency toward a struggle in Christian circles between those who set up a certain list of taboos and those who, feeling there is something wrong with this, say "Away with all taboos, away with all lists."  Both of these groups can be right and both can be wrong, depending on how they approach the matter....

...when I take hold of [a list of negatives] and say "This is too superficial", and I push it aside, I must see what I am doing.  I am not confronted with a libertine concept, but I am confronted with the whole Ten Commandments and with the law of Love.  So even if we are dealing only with  outward commands, we have not moved into a looser life; we have moved into something much more profound and  heart-searching.  As a matter of fact, when we have done with our honest wrestling before God, we will find we will be observing at least some of the taboos on these lists.  But having gone deeper, we find that we will be observing them for a completely different reason.  Curiously enough we often come around in a circle through our liberty, through the study of the deeper teaching, and we find we do want to keep these things.  But now not for the same reason - that of social pressure.  It is no longer merely a matter of holding to an accepted list in order that Christians think well of us.

True Spirituality,  pp 4, 5, 6

for Mintie

Elshof: Kierkegaard on procrastination

...if a person does not do what is right the very second he knows it is the right thing to do - then for a start the knowledge comes off the boil.  Next comes the question of what the will thinks of the knowledge.  The will is dialectical and has underneath it the whole of man's lower nature.  If it doesn't like the knowledge, it doesn't immediately follow that the will goes and does the opposite of what was grasped in knowing...but then the will lets some time pass;  there is an interim called "We will look into it tomorrow".  During all this the knowing becomes more and more obscured, and the lower nature more and more victorious...and then when the knowing has become duly obscured, the will and the knowing can better understand one another.  Eventually they are in entire agreement, since knowing has now deserted to the side of the will and lets it be known that what the will wants is quite right. (Kierkegaard, 'Sickness Unto Death')

Beliefs are sometimes demanding.  Often they break in on us unexpectedly and take to ordering us around like uninvited tyrants.  One minute we're sailing happily through life.  The next we find ourselves with an uncomfortably demanding belief.  This tyrant takes office and issues an imperative with such compelling force that we're unable to look him in the eye and say "no"....While the tyrant will have nothing of direct defiance, though, he can often be appeased by  the promise of deferred obedience.  If we promise him obedience later, he'll often take the bait.  And if we put him off long enough he might just go away.

I Told Me So, p40-41

Image/Word

"A video-streamed sermon on the Incarnation would be ironic at best and offensive at worst." And when most people are consuming electronic media ad nauseum, then the primary medium for a countercultural church must be an unplugged one.

Adopting and baptizing the new visual technologies is a losing strategy as well. The church will never do it as well as the culture. If James Cameron can spend $500 million, invent a new camera and new 3D techniques in order to produce the most visually stunning film ever recorded, and you can't remember a single character's name, do you really think your church budget is going to somehow do a better job of telling the Jesus story with PowerPoint, YouTube clips, or an internally-generated video? Even if you have the budget and artistic talent within your church to make quality films, because it is an image-based medium, it cannot penetrate the surface the way word-based communication can.

The new media techniques being employed in our churches may distract us from being bored in church for a little while, but beyond that they have no staying power because they have little authority. And they have little authority because they reflect the seen reality rather than the spoken truth. Take a great sermon from a hundred or a thousand years ago. When we read it, the message is still authoritative, and often still applicable. But watch a video of your favorite preacher from five or ten years ago and I guarantee it will be somewhat embarrassing. The visuals will take away from the message. Wow, just look at those clothes! The sincerity and theology is obliterated by the dated look of the fashion of the time. The authority of the word is eroded by the overwhelming power of the visual.

Leadership

Tiger Dad

I saw someone at the airport the other day who really caught my eye.

Her beautiful, long blond hair was braided back a la Bo Derek in the movie "10" (or for the younger set, Christina Aguilera during her "Xtina" phase). Her lips were pink and shiny from the gloss, and her earrings dangled playfully from her lobes.

Granderson went on to note that the girl was eight years old and to denounce the corporate executives who planned such a product: "[H]ow do people initiate a conversation in the office about the undeveloped chest of elementary school girls without someone nearby thinking they're pedophiles?" he wondered. The concerned writer and parent reserved his sharpest words for parents, however. "It's easy to blast companies for introducing the sexy wear, but our ire really should be directed at the parents who think low rise jeans for a second grader is cute." Parents, after all, "are the ones who are suppose to decide what's appropriate for their young children to wear, not executives looking to brew up controversy or turn a profit." In the most memorable line of the article, Granderson concluded his denunciation by referencing Amy Chua's recent book:  "Maybe I'm a Tiger Dad," he said.  

CT 

Elshof: attention management

William James said that "my experience is what I agree to attend to.  Only those items I notice shape my mind."  The most common strategies for long-haul self-deception involve the management of attention.  Through habitual and systematic management of my cognitive gaze, I can come to believe things that I wouldn't believe were I to attend indiscriminately to my surroundings.  Through attention management I exercise a degree of control over what comes into my mind.  And this, in turn, affects what I believe.

I Told Me So, p32

600!

It's a tradition now - every centenary I say

THANKS!

 to Dickie Mint for suggesting using a blog in the first place.

Elshof: Satre defining self-deception

Jean-Paul Sartre's characterisation of self-deception is, perhaps, the most concise and helpful for our purposes.  According to Sartre, to be self-deceived is to avoid using rational standards for evidence whenever it suits our purpose.

I Told Me So, p.27

The Books #6

It doesn't give an overall theology of prayer, it moves back and forth between story/biography/teaching points, it has no 1,2,3 guides, nor really any suggested schemes for praying.

But this is the book which has had the most effect on me with regards to prayer.  Unlike many books which systematically lay out what it is and how we should go about it, Cymbala's book leaves me feeling that prayer is real, living, necessary, vibrant - not simply a good idea or a healthy duty.   His simple story of the broken down church he inherited and the dire situation which nearly finished him off but instead drove him to prayer - which led ultimately to the Brooklyn Tabernacle - could have been a shiny, rags to riches, success story.  But instead one is left feeling that he simply found himself on a path which perhaps many of us miss, and it's a path that deep down we have been looking for.

It's not a polished book and, like everyone to whom something big has happened, it occasionally downplays other things God wants us to do.  But it is simply the most motivating book on prayer I have ever read

Prominence in the shot

If something is part of the story, make sure its prominence in the film is in proper relationship to its prominence in the storyline.

CT

Keller: becoming the preacher you can be

...it requires many years and hundreds of sermons before a preacher becomes as good as they have the capacity to be. Some of that means the preacher staying put and becoming involved enough in the lives of the people and city so as to be able to address their questions and issues well from the Scripture. Some of that means coming to understand the Bible well enough to always make it clear. Some of it means years of repentance and prayer that creates an increasingly holy, transparent character. 

Redeemer Blog (as previous post)

Keller: gathered preaching, dispersed ministry

There are indeed many "incarnational" approaches to ministry that do not require a gifted speaker, and we should use them all. In fact, I would argue that in a post-Christian culture, preaching will not be effective in the gathered assembly if Christians are not also highly effective in their scattered state. In our times, people will be indifferent or hostile to the idea of attending church services without positive contact with Christians living out their lives in love and service. Therefore the incarnational "dispersed" ministry of the church is extremely vital and necessary. 

Nevertheless, it is a mistake to argue that people in our society will not come to hear "real preaching." The fact is that, even in a very post-Christian city, if the preaching is of high quality, people will be brought and will come back. They will be shocked at how convicting and attractive the gospel message is, and they will feel like they've never really heard it before (even if they have been raised in a church).

Redeemer Blog

Future Shelf

Luther on the Lord's Prayer

The Lord’s prayer binds the people together, and knits them one to another, so that one prays for another, and together one with another; and it is so strong and powerful that it even drives away the fear of death.

Tabletalk 338

Keller: someone is always mad at you

Leadership brings a steady drumbeat of criticism and misunderstanding, even when things are going well. When things go poorly, people vent their frustration and anger on those in charge. A newly ordained pastor once said to me, “I didn’t know that, once you become a leader, there’s always someone mad at you!”

Tim Keller

1 Corinthians 2:6-9

We live in a world of experts, and many of them have stepped outside the boundaries which once marked the limits of their expertise, limits which once provided a certain humility. The most obvious and hackneyed of these would be evolutionary theorists, who now assume that their field – when combined with the broader “science” – provides our total knowledge about all things. Evolutionary science is not enough: now they have proclamations about life, ethics, meaning, society. You name it, they know about it. This can, I suspect, have a depressing effect on Christians, and generate feelings of inadequacy; this may especially be true for preachers.

In 1 Corinthians 2:6-9 we have a sobering and reassuring anchor point. The ‘wisdom’ which preachers are called to speak, as distinct from that of the wisdom of the age, finds its source outside and before creation as we understand it (v7). I assume this refers to its content, its vehicle (Jesus), and the power and the future of the gospel - God’s work of redemption for humanity. In which case, to feel inadequate is to miss out on the sheer scale of what we preach. It is huge, in that it is outside and in effect encompasses within its understanding all other discovered and derived wisdom (science, philosophy, political theory, ethics...). We may not be experts in those fields and not called to pontificate about them, but at least we do know they are fields: they have boundaries and limits which exist despite attempts to pull down fences. Which cautions people against pretending to be able to tell us authoritative wisdom on questions and issues outside their field. And outside-and-before-the-universe, and how the eternal impacts the now, is definitely, outside their field. Having the wisdom of this age does not qualify someone to pronounce on wisdom that transcends this age.

We should treasure all true wisdom that is unearthed and formulated from this age in which we live. But not uncritically. We can grasp how a lot of such wisdom helps in life, and even feeds into our understanding of the things of God. But not so that we get confused about jurisdiction. We need to see what we as preachers proclaim: the wisdom that is beyond the ages and that will not ultimately come to nothing (v6).

Badger

Deep originality

Strive for deep conviction more than superficial originality, and deep originality will come.

Doug Wilson (via Dickie Mint)

Elshof: acting consistently with belief

In response to the claim "I have trouble acting out my beliefs", Elshof says:

But with very few exceptions, no one has any trouble in acting out their beliefs. You do act in accordance with your beliefs.  More likely, you just don't believe what you've thought of yourself as believing.  Rather than trying to work up behaviour consistent with what we think we believe, we should be begging with the man who wanted desperately for Jesus to free his son from the demon that possessed him, "I believe;  help my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24)

I Told Me So, p21.

Ortberg: Amusing

...we don't want to be merely amusing. I'm using the word here in its classical sense. To "muse" means to reflect and ponder; put an "a" in front of it and you have the absence of reflection. Amusement is a way of boredom-avoidance through external stimulation that fails to exercise our minds. It's mere diversion. It is a kind of performance-enhancing drug for an attention-deficit society. "Amusement" is appealing because we don't have to think; it spares us the fear and anxiety that might otherwise prey on our thoughts.

Leadership

The Books #5

Well...you knew it was coming.  The trouble is John Piper has suffered a little from massive exposure over the last few years, which means his every word has been followed by the people who follow other people's every words - a pressure most of us don't have to live with, nor the consequences.

Anyway, when I bought this:

he had only just turned up on these shores (in fact I bought the American edition straight from DG).  And I can only say: it is the book I wished I had read at the start of my Christian life, it's just that good.  It would have saved me so much trouble - and especially and fundamentally with this: that happiness and Christianity were, to all intents and purposes, not really connected in my mind.  I don't know if someone had said that to me, but as a young Christian and onwards the impression I had got from church, leaders, other Christians was somehow joy was not the concern of Christianity.  Maybe my misunderstanding - but I suspect I wasn't alone.

So having heard him in '98, I got the book and it all fell into place, and powerfully so.  (I told a Christian friend what I had heard in '98 in a 3-minute summary and it is not too much of an exaggeration to say it changed his life).

And yet what we really find here is, basically, traditional evangelical thinking  - particularly, in places, Puritan; and especially and overtly, Jonathan Edwards.  I just hadn't seen it before - but there it was.  And every fella saying Piper was some kind of mad uber-charismatic heretic, simply had not been reading Banner's Puritan Paperbacks properly (as I hadn't).

In this book you get his main thesis (pursuing God's glory and pursuing personal joy is fundamentally the same thing) and then how all the key areas of Christian life fit into that (Bible reading, prayer, missions etc).  And with it such warm-heartedness and passion. Calvinism on fire.

Like anyone with a big idea, it's always possible to go too far and see it everywhere.  Most people with big ideas do.  But there is something pervasive and persuasive about the principle Piper works out here.  To any younger Christian with a good reading ability and struggling through the fundamental questions of the faith, this is the book I would give.

I finally found out...

how I end up with so many responsibilities:  it doesn't matter how long the meeting is or much tea and coffee is drunk, I am THE ONLY ONE who EVER needs the bathroom:
Dilbert

Elshof: self-deceived about self-deception

Due to the writings of the existentialists and other cultural trends, the "Good Person" was increasingly being understood as the "Authentic Person".  Being true to oneself became a - or in some cases the - chief good.  Self-deception, then, was given a promotion in the ranking of vices.  What was once a derivative vice - one whose primary importance was found in its ability to facilitate other, more serious, vices - became the most egregious of sins.

Now a remarkable thing happens when a sin get s a promotion...
[Elshof then uses racism as an example of his point]
So whenever a a particular vice gets a promotion in the ordering of vices, the temptation to be self-deceived about that fact that one exhibits that vice increases.  And with the rise of existentialism and the supreme value of authenticity, self-deception got a promotion in the ordering of vices.  And so, paradoxically, the vice of self-deception has been increasingly veiled from view by its own machinations.

Gregg Ten Elshof, I Told Me So, p10-11

Keller: James 1:9-10

...James proposes that the well-off person who becomes a believer  would spiritually benefit by especially thinking about her sinfulness before God, since out in the world she gets nothing but acclaim.  On the other hand, the poor person who becomes a believer would spiritually benefit by especially thinking about her new high spiritual status, since out in the world she gets nothing but disdain.

Generous Justice, p103-104

The Books #4

I seem to have slipped into some kind of chronological list at the moment - each of the 4 books so far are in the order I read them , with a year or three in between.  Won't last.

Anyway, for some reason I cannot remember (did we have lecture on him?) I bought this volume:

Schaeffer has tended to polarise people:  he has fans with such enthusiasm to rival even members of the Inklings Club, and others who say he wasn't anything to write home about.  All I can say is The God Who Is There was pivotal for me (it's one of the few books I have read twice).  Why?

Well for a start it was the first Christian book I had read which actually dealt with major cultural trends and schools of thought.  Of course it predated the rise of post-modernism so could not be expected to deal with it head on but, like Lewis, Schaeffer clearly sees something like it coming.  But taking a step back: it dealt with culture.  It didn't treat church as one thing and culture as another - it turned out we could interact with it AND there was a biblical way of viewing it that held water.  Blimey.  No one had told me.

Second it dealt with issues of doubt that, it transpires, were common for many Christians  - and plotted a way to think through them.

Third it took seriously the emptiness of modern man and that saying "Jesus loves you" would not be enough to tear down barriers to the gospel.  It was here I first saw the logic of "push their presuppositions":  that if you had arguments against the reality of God, you must be to some extent 'suppressing the truth in unrighteousness', and to do that you must be making certain assumptions on which to build your argument which simply aren't true (or not entirely so).  You could shout at them - or you could push the logic of them.  His point was that most people have not taken their presuppositions to a logical extreme because if they had their weakness would be seen.  So instead of arguing, why not gently lead them further along the path of their logic until the uneasy feeling crept in that something was wrong somewhere...then n that uncertainty point out a better way.  (Discerning readers will be thinking of certain Keller-phrases like "plausibility structures", and really the whole first section of The Reason for God).

Plus a supersonic overview of the development of post-enlightenment thought.

What a book.

Keller: Edwards on people who can't handle money

When answering the objection that the poor have often contributed to their condition, Edwards is remarkably balanced yet insistently generous.  He points out that it is possible some people simply do not have "a natural faculty to manage affairs to advantage".  In other words, some people persistently make sincere but very bad decisions about money and possessions.  Edwards says we should consider the lack of this faculty to be almost like being born with impaired eyesight:

Such a faculty is a gift that God bestows on some, and not on others.  And it is not owing to themselves....This is as reasonable as that he to whom Providence has imparted sight should be willing to help him to whom sight is denied, and that he should have the benefit of the sight of others, who has none of his own...

Generous Justice p72

Athanasius on Psalms

So then, my son, let whoever reads this Book of Psalms take the things in it quite simply as God-inspired; and let each select from it, as from the fruits of a garden, those things of which he sees himself in need. For I think that in the words of this book all human life is covered, with all its states and thoughts, and that nothing further can be found in man. For no matter what you seek, whether it be repentance and confession, or help in trouble and temptation or under persecution, whether you have been set free from plots and snares or, on the contrary, are sad for any reason, or whether, seeing yourself progressing and your enemy cast down, you want to praise and thank and bless the Lord, each of these things the Divine Psalms show you how to do, and in every case the words you want are written down for you, and you can say them as your own.

Letter to Marcinellus

Selling purity

Reflecting on the media commodification of girls, and Miranda Cosgrove's impending 18th birthday (given what has happened to most other teen starlets...)

Cosgrove’s pristine image is inextricably tied to her career, a dynamic that presents us with two key problems. Orenstein summarizes the first one in her book. Of the partnership between morality and profit she writes, “I suspect that you cannot commodify a girl’s virginity without, eventually, commodifying what comes after” (129). In other words, the entertainment industry isn’t promoting chastity; it’s selling what sells. Up until a certain age, innocence is a powerful marketing image, but when purity no longer garners attention, these young starlets turn to what sells. And what usually sells is sex.

CT her.menuetics.

Wesley on time

Though I am always in a haste, I am never in a hurry, because I never undertake more work than I can go through with perfect calmness of spirit. 

 John Wesley
gosh.

Strong pastors

Is it healthy or biblical for the church to cultivate an eldership of pastors (weak in the Word) and an eldership of professors (strong in the Word)?

John Piper, Brothers....p.84

(commenting on surrendering responsibility for in depth technical knowledge to the academy)

Keller: the gospel and sympathy for the poor

[Jonathan Edwards says] "The Christian spirit will make us apt to sympathise with our neighbour when we see him under any difficulty...we ought to have such a spirit of love to him that we should be afflicted with him in his affliction."   Christ literally walked in our shoes and entered into our affliction.  Those who will not help others until they are destitute reveal that Christ's love has not yet turned them into the sympathetic persons the gospel should make them....

...We all want to help kind-hearted, upright people, whose poverty cam upon them through no foolishness or contribution of their own, and who will respond to our aid with gratitude and joy.  However, almost no one like that exists.

Generous Justice, p69-71

The Books #3

I'd be lying if I said I remembered al the essays in this book.  But I do remember clearly reading through and perhaps this was the first book of essays  (other than Lewis) I had read.

What particularly stuck out for me were the ones entitled "Hot Tub Religion: towards a theology of pleasure" and "Joy: a neglected discipline" -  because I really think up until then that it had not occurred to me that Christianity was directly related to happiness.  I don't mean I wasn't ever happy;  just that the link between Christianity and happiness wasn't something that crossed my mind (which either says something about me or the churches I attended, or both).  For the first time I realised that saints of old had pursued joy, and that this was something intimately involved with knowing God, and outstripped earthly fun on every count.  No longer was it incidental, but something God was interested in. And it was something to be taken seriously.

It also had helpful chapters on issues of the (my) moment: guidance and healings etc.  But the two essays above were the ones that effected me and formed a preparation for the big bombshell of Desiring God some years later.

Planning for the end

When a believer acknowledges that he is headed toward death (tomorrow or in 50 years), he can stop expending the tremendous energy it takes to deny his mortality and start living into his eternal destiny, here and now. And he can be intentional about investing himself in the things he wants to be with him at the end...

Carolyn Arends, CT

John the Baptist's better approach to work

The major centre of the Dead Sea community was located near John's activities.  Tax collectors or soldiers who sought membership in the Dead Sea community would be required to sell everything, drop out of society, and join the ascetic life of the holy congregation. After a probationary period of testing, and if they proved worthy, they would be accepted.   According to Luke, John the Baptist gave a different answer to people who desired forgiveness.  When the tax-collectors asked John, "What shall we do?" they were seeking a true relationship with God through repentance.  They wanted to renew proper relationship with their Father in heaven.  John said, "Collect no more than is appointed you" (LK3:13).   The soldiers asked him the same question...He challenged them with the exhortation, "Rob no one by violence or by false accusation, and be content with your wages" (LK3:14).  In stark contrast to the religious community at Qumran, John did not even ask tax-collectors and soldiers to leave their questionable occupations and drop out of society...Instead his prophetic message implored the people to live  a holy life in the mainstream of society.  The religious mindset at Qumran could not tolerate John's approach...

Brad H Young, Jesus the Jewish Theologian, p16

The Books#2

I bought this one on holiday in Austria and started reading it one evening instead of going to the evening meeting (Oak Hall, in case you're wondering, 1988 or 9).

I really think it needs to be seen as one of the great books of the 20th Century.  And read by a good many very serious people who seem to go through life thinking Christians don't struggle.  Here is one of the all-time great serious people saying: actually we do have problems that get us down, and joylessness is a bad thing, and here's how the gospel deals with it.

It's just great, and so much more powerful coming from someone definitely in the serious-reformed-we-can't-call-him airy-fairy department.

Church buildings frozen in time

Rebuilding petered out during the middle of the 16th century,  The outsides of churches were frozen in time.  For the next 300 years the characteristic church in the Cornish (and indeed in the English) landscape was one of the 15th or early 16th century, usually with a tower and aisles.  What the builders of the period achieved became what people understood churches to be, an understanding that is still with us.

Nicholas Orme, Cornwall and the Cross, p156

(I love that last phrase)

Keller: Samaritan

By depicting a Samaritan helping a Jew, Jesus could not have found a more forceful way to say that anyone at all in need - regardless of race, politics, class, and religion - is your neighbour.  Not everyone is your brother or sister in the faith, but everyone is your neighbour, and you must love your neighbour.

Generous Justice, p68

Chesterton: paradoxical attacks on Christianity

As I read and re-read all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley to Bradlaugh, a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind -- the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing. For not only (as I understood) had Christianity the most flaming vices, but it had apparently a mystical talent for combining vices which seemed inconsistent with each other. It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons. No sooner had one rationalist demonstrated that it was too far to the east than another demonstrated with equal clearness that it was much too far to the west. No sooner had my indignation died down at its angular and aggressive squareness than I was called up again to notice and condemn its enervating and sensual roundness.

Orthodoxy, ch 6

Luther: valuing rightly

This is a great on a number of levels, especially two.  1st: recognising the value of things without losing perspective;  2nd: giving me implicit permission to be able to say "strumpet" in church.

A sanctified and upright Christian says: My wife, my children, my art, my wisdom, my money and wealth, help and avail me nothing in heaven; yet I cast them not away nor reject them when God bestows such benefits upon me, but part and separate the substance from the vanity and foolery which cleave thereunto. Gold is and remains gold as well when a strumpet carries it about her, as when `tis with an honest, good, and godly woman. The body of a strumpet is even as well God’s creature, as the body of an honest matron. In this manner ought we to part and separate vanity and folly from the thing and substance, or from the creature given and God who created it.

Tabletalk 294

Keller: Job & Justice

[Job] is not at all satisfied with halfway measures for the needy people in his community.  He is not content to give them small, perfunctory gifts in the assumption that their misery and weakness are a permanent condition.

Generous Justice, p14

Last one from Stark: where the prejudice lies

...national surveys, which show that evangelical Christians, including persons who identify themselves as supporters of the Religious Right, are substantially more favourable towards Israel, and somewhat more favourable towards Jews in general, than are liberal Christians or the irreligious - despite the fact that evangelicals continue to support missions to convert Jews to Christianity!  Moreover a new study has demonstrated that the only significant form of religious prejudice in America is "Anti-Fundamentalism" and is concentrated among highly educated people without a religious affiliation (Bolce & DeMaio, 1999).

One True God, 256

Child gambling

Millions of grade-school kids just like Jerry have become hooked on gambling. They often begin gambling between the ages of 10 and 13. Four out of five adolescents have gambled in the past year, according to the Annenberg Risk Survey of Youth.

A federal commission estimated that 7.9 million adolescents in the United States are problem gamblers — that's 113 NFL stadiums filled to capacity. Clearly, gambling is not innocent entertainment for children; it's a gateway to addiction.

Unfortunately, the problem doesn't stop at gambling. Recent research on seventh- to 12th-graders in Oregon indicates that students who gamble are two to three times more likely to consume alcohol, take drugs, have sex or become violent. Other research shows that suicide attempts among pathological gamblers are higher than for all other addictions.

Focus

Eagleton on evil

...We know nothing any more of choirs of heavenly hosts, but we know about Auschwitz …. Perhaps evil is all that now keeps warm the space where God used to be...

...original sin is not the legacy of our first parents but of our parents, who in turn inherited it from their own. The past is what we are made of. Throngs of ghostly ancestors lurk within our most casual gestures, preprogramming our desires and flicking our actions mischievously awry...

Terry Eagleton, CT Review

Hillenbrand: vicarious story

(Laura Hillenbrand is author of Seabiscuit and the current bestseller  Unbroken)

Hillenbrand suffers from debilitating chronic fatigue syndrome, and remains largely confined to her home. On the irony of writing about physical paragons while being so incapacitated herself, she says, "I'm looking for a way out of here. I can't have it physically, so I'm going to have it intellectually. It was a beautiful thing to ride Seabiscuit in my imagination. And it's just fantastic to be there alongside Louie as he's breaking the NCAA mile record. People at these vigorous moments in their lives - it's my way of living vicariously"

Washington Post via WP

Stark: willful distortion re evangelicals

"Fashionable" opinion "knows" that traditional believers, and especially those who conceive of God as an active, all-seeing being who actually hears prayers, are stupid, crazy, ignorant and dangerous.  But competent social scientists know that these are lies, entirely equivalent to fantasies concerning Jewish conspiracies or orgies in Catholic convents.  Nor are these beliefs about evangelicals to be excused on grounds of "ignorance".  I have too often acquainted reporters with the facts, only to find no trace of them in the final article or film segment.  Once again, let it be noted that htere is an immense body of research refuting these efforts to denigrate religious people.  It even turns out that religious people are rather superior in terms of their mental and physical health.

One True God, p254

Stark: secular civility

As for Southerners as ignorant fundamentalists, that brings me to the worst current offenders of norms of civility: secularists, both churched and unchurched.

Recently the local media expressed approval when the chief of police of Seattle prohibited his officers from wearing uniforms to take part in March for Jesus.  The media were equally agreeable when, the next day, the chief wore his uniform to march in the LGBT Parade...
[Stark goes on to give several other similar examples of this kind of dichotomy]
...The clear standard used by most of the media is that moral engagement is wonderful so long as it is entirely secular.  As for religious morality, or indeed any deeply felt religious expression, nothing could be more misguided or even dangerous.

One True God, p251-252

The Books#1

Not doing it in poptastic chart fashion this time, as I can't fathom an order.  And my criteria is the level of influence, not legendary status or even competence!  So in response to Minty's first:

Who would give a new Christian a copy of this?!   But I was, and the amazing thing is a I read it.  I also bought the remaining two volumes in the sequence as well.  I'd read pretty much no Christian books, and these three were amongst the earliest, and I lived to tell the tale.

Gurnall's work is a very long look at the armour of God and Christian life.  I have to say I can remember almost nothing specific from them (mind you it is over 20years since I read it), but what soaked in quietly I cannot say.

Here's why it starts my list (in addition to being practically the first thing I read): 
1. It taught me to keep going and follow an argument all the way through
2. It showed me that what "everyone knows" about Puritans is wrong.
3. What they hadn't said, though, is they take a VERY long time to say important things
4. It got me started reading Puritans ('Puritan Paperbacks', what a great concept)

Stark: pagan face of holocaust

The end of this story will never be known;  the Nazis destroyed the entire world.  East and West, from the most fully assimilated Jews to the most Orthodox, gone.  Ironically, after nearly two thousand years of conflict with their Christian neighbours, when the Holocaust came, it wore a pagan face and spoke the language  of race and blut, not faith.

One True God, 210

Stark: not so enlightened

...as Richard Fletcher put it, "Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch".  Indeed, it should be noted that when the Maimonides family and other Jews were required to convert or leave Moorish Spain, many Jews migrated to the Christian areas of northern Spain.

One True God, p169.

...List...

1996
The Problem of Pain - CSL
Around the World in 80 Days - Verne
He is There and He is not Silent - Schaeffer
Three Men on a Bummel - Jerome
Clash of Worlds -
The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass
She - Haggard
The Horizontal Epistles of Andromeda Veal - Plass
The 39 Steps - Buchan
The Cross - LloydJones(?)
When God's Voice is Heard
Spurgeon (the short biography)
Interesting Times - Pratchett
The Biography of Jonathan Edwards - Murray
Soul Music - Pratchett
Prayer - ?
Films in Close Up

Jon Dyer - brilliant comment on the new Bell hoohah

I'm not attempting to defend mean-spirited, polemical debate. I'm just saying that it's old news. The debates are still important, but what is even more important is how social media has changed the way those debates take place among everyday Christians.

Throughout the history of public theological debate, there was one constant—those debates only took place between a few select people—Moses, Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, and so on—who gained respect through a lifetime of scholarship.

But the invention of social media, like blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, created a radical departure in communication. In pre-2004 Christianity (that is, Christianity before Facebook was invented), only a small group of Christian leaders and teachers had access to the printing press—but today everyone has WordPress. In pre-2004 Christianity it was difficult to become a published author, but today everyone is surrounded by dozens of "Publish" buttons.

Every time we log into Facebook it asks us, "What's on your mind?" Twitter wants to know, "What's happening?" When controversies large and small erupt, there are devices in every direction begging us to not just take a side, but to declare our position on the largest publishing platform ever constructed by humanity.

What few of us realize is that when we press those "Publish," "Post," "Comment," and "Send" buttons, we are making the shift away from merely "believing" truth and stepping into the arena of publishing that belief. In doing so we are effectively assuming a position of leadership and teaching that prior to 2004 was not available to us.

....

We convince ourselves that by answering the questions social media asks us we are standing for truth alongside the great leaders of the church, but slowly and subtly as we respond to the prompts of our phones rather than our Bibles we begin to worship the false gods of immediacy, distraction, and celebrity in the Temple of Lord Zuckerberg. If you don't think the value system of technology affects you, ask yourself, If it was 2003 and some author wrote some book questioning some doctrine would I have felt compelled to publish my thoughts?

The result is that a million heresy charges isn't cool any more. You know what's cool? A billion heresy charges.

Christianity Today

Stark: poltical-geographical pogrom

It strikes me as significant that, aside from events in Spain, Jewish massacres during the Black Death were limited to the area along the Rhine River.  In part this reflected the terrible grip of tradition - where else in Europe did families identify themselves as Jew-roasters?  But it also reflected the prevailing weakness of both Church and State authority in this region....'the most politically fractured area' of Germany...

One True God, p155.

Stake in the ground...

Just to say I herewith announce the recommencement of the mid-life crisis and second childhood of me and Minty.  Very soon the lists will continue...

The first English visitor...

The first recorded visit from an Englishman to Cornwall was St Aldhelm (d.709).  His journey to Dumnonia (the name for the Devon/Cornwall region) he described as:

...taking him to 'dire Devon through comfortless Cornwall'.  This is one of the earliest clear references to Cornwall as a region.

Cornwall and the Cross, Nicholas Orme, p7

Robinson on science

I think it is true without question that the churches and religious culture in general have been deformed by a fear of science, and especially by deference toward bad science. They have more or less accepted the notion that the more people know, the less inclined they will be toward belief — a central assumption of atheism. With this comes the idea that whatever is most toxic from a religious point of view must therefore epitomize science. And all sorts of nonsense goes unchallenged.

Christianity has abandoned its intellectual traditions, ceding that ground to anybody in a white coat. Where it has tried to muster courage, it has too often tended to become irrational and shrill. Meanwhile, a great age in true science, an absolute catalog of wonders, passes by unnoticed.

CT

Owl City:loveydovey songs

"I wanted to move forward, play around with ideas, and just do something more mysterious or unexpected," he says. "You can only sing about love so much before you start to get annoyed with it"

Adam Young, on the new album.

Stark: Medieval Church and Jews

Because several attempts to condemn the church for not doing more to save Jews during the Holocaust have so misrepresented the position of the medieval church, it seems worthwhile to quote the most repsected of all Holocaust historians, Steven J Katz on this matter.  Calling "Thou Shalt Not Annhiliate the Jews" the "Eleventh Christian Commandment", Katz wrote:

Though Christendom possessed the power, over the course of nearly 1500 years, to destroy that segement of the Jewish people it dominated, it chose not to do so...because the physical extirpation of Jewry was never, at any time, the official policy of any church or of any Christian state.  Rather...Christian dogmatics entailed prtoecting Jews and Judaism from extinction...with the quasi-exception of Pope Leo VII (936-939), no pope pemitted the use of force in attempts to convert Jews, whereas Pope John XVIII (1004-1009) openly defended Jews against hostile Christian forces...

One True God, p125

Christian outrage publicity

I groaned upon reading a friend's recent Facebook update promising a review of the latest scandal-courting pop-fiction rewrite of the life of Jesus, Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. In our pop-cultural world, getting noticed is by far the most difficult feat. Any author who monitors his or her Amazon sales rankings can attest as much. Blogs and tweets and vanity presses—which once were supposed to empower the talented but voiceless—have instead created a cacophony from which scarcely any influential voices emerge.

One easy way for an author to break out is to offend Christians—easier, apparently, than writing something beautiful or profound. Literary merit cannot explain the meteoric rise of mediocrities like Dan Brown. Stephen King (yes, that Stephen King) called Brown's novels "the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese," and each of The Da Vinci Code's predecessors sold fewer than 10,000 copies.

....

Another thought experiment: Imagine if a journalist called a Christian leader to ask about Brown's latest Rome-based conspiracy theory, and the leader said, "That's a pretty tame theory. The Bible's own conspiracy theory is much wilder. It says that God is plotting to overthrow every worldly power and establish his own rule once and for all. And the entire Christian church is in on it." The magnitude of God's plan hardly needs exaggeration: This is the God who, when it came time to pick teams, chose an old man, then a tiny nation, then the youngest son of Jesse, and ultimately the life of a commoner from Bethlehem—and with this roster undertook vanquishing the mightiest empires of the world.

 Christian B Hays,  Christianity Today

He also refers to how a video game company cashed in on Christian outrage by hiring people to pretend to be a Christian protest group when launching their latest game!!!  Here's the link.

Stark: missionising Hinduism

Of particular interest is the additional claim that, because Hindus realise that all religions and Gods are one, Hinduism is not a missionising religion.  Ironically, this claim is made most often by people who are in the act of missionising on behalf of Hinduism, as in: "You should embrace my faith because it is so much wiser and more tolerant than that narrow and disgusting creed of yours."

...As the Danish religious historian Johannes Aagaard put it:

The nature of Hinduism is normally described in connection with the liberal reformers...Therefore the nationalist and revivalist line is turned down and the expansion and mission of Hinduism is not seen.  The result is a complete caricature of Hinduism and its nature and mission...for which the scholars are to be made responsible...It is not a minor mistake.

...The very idea that Yahweh, Jehovah, and Allah are alternative names for Brahman is anathema even to most Hindu intellectuals, let alone the rank and file.  Were it otherwise, how would one explain the chronic and brutal violence against non-Hindus that has gone on so long in India, especially since the British left, and the need to partition the subcontinent into Hindu and Muslim nations?

...But the definitive proof that Hinduism is a missionising faith is to be found in the presence of literally hundreds of Hindu mission organisations and centers in Europe and North America - many of which frankly include the word "mission" in their names.

One True God, pp106-109

Cottrell: brilliant para on casualties of change

With any real change in an organisation there will be some who are left behind and some who feel they have lost out.  Anticipating who these people will be and offering them care before the change takes place is not only the best way of honouring their disagreement, but also of preventing them from derailing the change.  In many organisations, and especially the Church, change is held back because a few people hold the leadership to ransom.  Or else real change is never even considered out of fear of this backlash.

Hit the Ground Kneeling, p58

(and I like the phrase:  'honouring their disagreement')

Cottrell: big vision

Spur yourself on with a ridiculously large vision of how things could be: one that is beyond human imagining...

Of course there will be a sense in which such a vision always remains beyond us.  But let us not settle for a small vision, one that fails to inspire or terrify...

Leaders are the guardians of this vision.

Hit the Ground Kneeling, p50&52

Determination, again...

A while ago I wrote a post on determination.  I think this has to go with it...

Fernando: vocational fulfillment

As a leader, I am the bond-servant (doulos) of the people I lead (2 Cor. 4:5). This means that my schedule is shaped more by their needs than by mine.

Vocational fulfillment in the kingdom of God has a distinct character, different from vocational fulfillment in society. Jesus said, "My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work" (John 4:34, ESV, used throughout). If we are doing God's will, we are happy and fulfilled. But for Jesus, and for us, doing God's will includes the Cross. The Cross must be an essential element in our definition of vocational fulfillment.

I try to tell these students that their frustration could be the means to developing penetrating insight. I explain that people like John Calvin and Martin Luther had a dizzying variety of responsibilities, so that they could only use their gifts in the fog of fatigue. Yet the fruits of their labor as leaders and writers still bless the church.

CT

Problems in perspective

I write this shortly after returning from a week of teaching pastors in the deep south of Sri Lanka. These pastors' experience shows that when people pioneer in unreached areas, they usually wait 10 to 15 years before seeing significant fruit and reduced hostility. In the early years, they are assaulted and accused falsely; stones are thrown onto their roofs; their children are given a hard time in school; and they see few genuine conversions. Many pioneers give up after a few years. But those who persevere bear much eternal fruit. I am humbled and ashamed of the way I complain about problems that are minute compared to theirs.

Ajith Fernando, CT

No one makes it alone

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell tells the strange story of Christopher Langan, a genius with a staggering IQ of 195. (For some perspective, Einstein's IQ was 150). During high school, Langan could ace any foreign language test by skimming the textbook 2-3 minutes before the exam. He got a perfect score on his SAT, even though at one point he fell asleep. But Langan failed to use his exceptional gifts and ended up working on a horse farm in rural Missouri.

According to Gladwell, Langan never had a community to help him capitalize on his gifts.

Gladwell summarizes the story of Langan in one sentence: "[Langan] had to make his way alone, and no one—not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses—ever makes it alone."

PreachingToday

Atlanta in a die

When couples choose in-vitro fertilization to create embryos to help build their families, the unused embryos are frozen for future attempts at pregnancy. Most couples are unprepared for what to do with remaining embryos once their family is complete. There are over 500,000 embryos currently frozen in storage at American clinics.

Although together these embryos occupy a space the size of a 12mm cube—the size of a board game die—they represent the population of a city the size of Atlanta. Size is subject to perspective. We all look mighty small from the moon. But to God, we are wondrously made and valuable at every stage of development.

CT

Marketing

Oh, things have gotten a lot better, but there is a long, long way to go. How I see it, too many churches try too hard to be relevant with all kinds of crazy gimmicks. In my opinion, people are looking for truth, honesty… real things. I feel that the gospel is often sold short because of some odd marketing schemes or being ‘the coolest church.’ It seems forced to me and not authentic. I think the main thing is to be true to who you are as the body of Christ and do all things with excellence. If you can’t do something well, find someone to do it better.

• Be honest about who your are as a church and what your mission is.
• Use design as a tool to help communicate the church’s vision and personality in a sincere way.
• Figure out a visual tone/style that is also appropriate to the project.
• Always do your best work with excellence, whatever it is that you are doing.
• Always strive to grow in passion, professionally and spiritually.

Michael Cina (top designer)

After the event - helping in trauma

There is a natural tendency to be fearful about talking to people who have been through trauma. For me, it was so encouraging to receive a card or have someone tell me they were praying for me. Those things are helpful. Even today, when someone says, "I still miss Fred," that is huge to me. Those moments are God ordained.

Every time someone has come up to me, emotionally present and honest, it has been helpful. Don't worry about saying the wrong thing or trying to make me feel better. You can't.

There is no such thing as making me feel better, and there is no way you could make it worse, so just be present and honest.

When people don't open up to me, then I don't get the chance to open up to them, and it perpetuates the separation, the distance.

Cindy Winters, wife of Pastor Fred Winters who was killed in a random shooting one Sunday morning.  Leadership

Cottrell - just one line

The leader has to model what the organisation must become.

Hit the Ground Kneeling, p49

Identity in pomo world

Who are we, really? To answer that, we need to ask whether the true self is a given that we discover or something that we progressively form. The two great competitors vying for our allegiance in sexuality—evolutionary naturalism and postmodern identity formation—have their answers.

Naturalism is all discovery—we are merely what we are—and what we discover is that we aren't much and that we don't matter much. No wonder so many struggle with despair.

Postmodern identity formation is all progressive formation—our selves are what we make them through the raw assertion of unbounded human will. Many believe our sexuality, in the words of Turner, "in some way defines the inner depths of the self" and is thus fundamental to the very "powers and abilities [which] the self is to discover, develop, and exercise in the course of daily life." It then follows that "denial of one's 'sexuality' is akin to denial of 'oneself' and so also one's basic 'identity.' "

The Christian vision of personhood takes us in a profoundly different direction: the true self is both discovered and formed.

CT

Stark: Missionaries & Imperialism

Finally, something must be said about efforts to depict Christian missionaries as servants of colonial capitalism.  This is a very old refrain.  In his play Man of Destiny (1897), George Bernard Shaw had Napoleon say that when an Englishman "wants a new market for his adulterated Manchester goods, he sends a missionary to teach the natives the Gospel."  Of course, not only was Shaw a dedicated atheist and socialist, he also worked hard at "offending" the conventional public, much as did Mark Twain (1901), who made similar charges about ties to imperialism in several nasty essays about missionaries.  Anyone who believes the notion of missionaries of Western imperialism has probably never met missionaries or read an informed account of missions (eg Neil, 1986), and has certainly not read any sampling of the letters, diaries or autobiographies of missionaries.  Four themes dominate these materials.  Love of God.  Loneliness for family and friends.  The satisfactions of forming attachments to those to whom they have been sent, and the resentment the missionary feels toward all Westerners or local rulers who exploit or impose on the people  It was not at all unusual for missionaries to become deeply involved in bitter conflicts with commercial and colonial leaders in support of the local populations (Hiney, 2000).

Rodney Stark, One True God, p104-5

CSL: theology for devotion

For my own part I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others. I believe that many who find that 'nothing happens' when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.

CS Lewis, quoted Piper When I Don't Desire God, p127

Piper: centrality of the Word

God can and does show himself in other ways, especially through the works of believers (MT.5:16; 1PT2:12; 1COR.12:7).  But none of them reveals God with the clarity and fullness of the Bible.  All of them orbit around the sun of God's written Word.  And if the central gravitational power of the sun is denied, all the planets fly into confusion.
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We need the Word of God not only to see God in the Word, but to see him rightly everywhere else.

John Piper, When I Don't Desire God, p.96

The gift of anxiety

But isn't there something we can give God that won't belittle Him to the status of beneficiary?  Yes.  Our anxieties.  It's a command: "Castall your anxieties on Him" (1Pet.5:7 RSV).  God will gladly receive anything from us that shows our dependence and His all-sufficiency.

John Piper, Brothers We Are Not Professionals, p41

Crisis Growth

The "growth" that comes in a crisis will stop when the crisis stops—unless it leads us to make lasting changes...

But eventually crisis fades, and spiritual urgency fades along with it. We need to help people learn how to make changes that will outlast the crisis.

It's as if in normal life we step onto a treadmill and begin running after something—money, security, or success—when adversity knocks us off. Suffering enables us to see the folly of chasing after temporal gods, and when people suffer, they often resolve to not return to their old way of life when things normalize. But you have a finite window of time to make changes, otherwise you drift back to old patterns.

Soren Kierkegaard wrote that "affliction is able to drown out every earthly voice … but the voice of eternity deep in the soul it cannot drown."

If you have courage to make changes in your life, something can happen in your soul. The Spirit will bring the courage if you keep asking while the experience of adversity is fresh. Ultimately, adversity can produce hope because of a reality much larger than you and me.

John Ortberg, Leadership.

Gospel Peace

During the genocide in Rwanda, 90 percent of the people claimed to be Christians. We don't want to see that happen again. We did some work in Uganda a few years ago between two tribes, both of which profess to be Christian. It was a situation very similar to Rwanda. After Idi Amin left Uganda, his armories were unguarded, and 14-year-old kids got AK-47s, and 50,000-100,000 people were killed in cattle raids.

A missionary seeing this bloodshed contacted her church in Portland, Oregon, for help. A team trained through our Peacemaker resources went to Uganda and trained 20 pastors from the two tribes. They went on to train warriors, women, and elders. Eventually the two tribes called for a reconciliation meeting in the valley between them, which had been abandoned as a war zone. Some 2,500 people walked 15 miles from both directions to participate.

The gospel was preached and a revival occurred with an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The people decided not only to make peace but to live together. They have now planted 60 villages of peace in that war-torn valley, 11,000 people have relocated, and truckloads of weapons have been taken away.

When visitors to the area asked, "What happened? How did you do this?" a woman who had been a catalyst for the reconciliation kept saying, "It's the gospel of Jesus Christ."

So whether the conflict is between a husband and wife or two warring tribes, the peacemaking principles remain the same. And church leaders committed to peacemaking will see it spill over into other areas.

Leadership

Luther: spite the devil

We must reject the law when it seeks to affright the conscience, and when we feel God's anger against our sins, then we must eat, drink, sleep, and be cheerful to spite the devil.  But human wisdom is more inclined to understand the law of Moses, then the law of the gospel.  Old Adam will not out.

Tabletalk 279

Lessons from the Silence 4

As well as its other effects, silence also helps to reveal one's essential helplessness in life.  Although I still lived in my home, and (once I felt well) saw people in the community, there was a sense in which not speaking prevented lots of things which produce, perhaps normally, unrecognised background noise to life.  You can't just speak for the sake of it and fill up the void with words, you can't talk fast and long during an adrenaline fuelled crisis, you can't just phone someone or stop someone to speak to because you don't want to be alone with your thoughts.

And this, I think, produced a sense of need: a more urgent realisation of the need for the presence and grace of God.  Which leaves another question:  how much of life is noise and activity and maybe superfluous yakking in order to cover up, on the one hand, how not-in-control of life we are, and on the other, our desperate need for the moment by moment conscious life with God?

Lessons from the Silence 3

This is more a sociological observation: roughly 50% of people (that's a guess) on discovering I couldn't speak, would then start whispering or mouthing words and waving their hands about in pidgin sign language.  The logical problem with this - it was me that couldn't speak, and I hadn't lost my hearing - didn't easily present itself to them.

I'm not sure there's a big application to life from this, other than: presumably this is what people with disabilities experience regularly, the assumption that when some faculty doesn't function as usual in a person, whispering/talking loud/waving arms around will help.

Piper: Spiritual Leadership

...I defined spiritual leadership as:
"knowing where God wants people to be and taking the initiative to get them there by God's means in reliance on God's power."

Brothers We Are Not Professionals, p11

Lessons from the Silence 2

Not only do we use a colossal amount of words each day, but because we seldom struggle with our voices nor have a limited reservoir of a permitted word-count, we use them with much less thought that we realise.

I had to write everything down, and the process of writing down a conversation is different from speaking.  It's even different than IM. 

When you are communicating with someone who can speak, but you can't, then one quickly discovers some Notebook-Dynamics:

1) Word economy:  you can't write as many words as you speak because you will end up with aching hands or cramps.  You have to use less words to say the same things.
2) Speed: you can't write as many words as you would speak in response to someone, because by the time you have written three sentences, that person is already mentally moving on.  By the time you finished the third paragraph of your florid creation, they are somewhere else entirely and have started a new conversation.  Then you end up in a Two Ronnies situation, where you are answering two questions previous to this one.  There just isn't time to write as we speak.
3) Clarity: brief precision becomes paramount.  And this requires thinking a good deal more before 'speaking'.  You can't do that thing where you start talking before your thought is fully formed, in the hope that you won't need to take a breath, thus preventing your friend from cutting in, before you finally produce the beautiful sentence you were after.  That just doesn't work when you can't speak: they can cut in whenever they feel like it.

All of which, when you think about it, makes sense.  All of which extends itself into being a critique of the profligate, superfluous and decadent way we treat speech.  But the question is, can these Notepad Dynamics be carried over into daily conversation?  And do we really want to give up being able to leave all the lights on, consuming vast resources, rather than having the single necessary bulb shining in the gloom?  In the verbal storm of modern life, do we really want succinct, elegant clarity?

Stark: comparitve tolerance

Comparative religion textbooks sometimes contrast a tolerant Islam with an intolerant Christianity, stressing that in 1492 Christians expelled Jews from Spain where, it is often asserted, they had lived peacefully and prosperously for centuries under Muslim rule.  These same textbooks ignore the fact that in 1148 Muslims also expelled Jews from Spain under the same terms  as the Christians did later, which surely demonstrates that these comparisons are at least uninformed and often probably disingenuous.

Stark, One True God, p81.

Stark: top-down paganism and bottom-up Christianity

Constantine's lavish support of Christianity came at the expense of paganism.  Unlike Christianity, the pagan temples were top-down rather than bottom-up organisations in that they were constructed and sustained by state funding and by gifts from a few very rich benefactors  Thus while Christianity had done very well without state or aristocratic support, paganism collapsed rapidly without it.

Stark One True God, p63

Luther: law and gospel

I was just going to quote the first two sections of this;  but actually the whole thing is worth reading:

The law is used in two ways; first, for this worldly life, because God has ordained all temporal laws and statutes to prevent and hinder sin. But here some one may object: If the law hinder sin, then also it justifies. I answer: Oh! no, this does not follow; that I do not murder, commit adultery, steal, etc., is not because I love virtue and righteousness, but because I fear the hangman, who threatens me with the gallows, sword, etc. It is the hangman that hinders me from sinning, as chains, ropes, and strong bands hinder bears, lions, and other wild beasts from tearing and rending in pieces all that come in their way.

Hence we may understand, That the same can be no righteousness that is performed out of fear of the curse, but sin and unrighteousness; for the law binds mankind, who by nature are prone to wickedness, that they do not sin, as willingly they would.

Therefore this is the first point concerning the law, that it must be used to deter the ungodly from their wicked and mischievous intentions. For the devil, who is an abbot and prince of this world, allures people to work all manner of sin and wickedness; wherefore God has ordained magistrates, elders, schoolmasters, laws and statutes, to the end, if they can do no more, that at least they may bind the claws of the devil, and hinder him from raging and swelling so powerfully in those who are his, according to his will and pleasure.

Secondly, we use the law spiritually, as thus: To make transgressions seem greater, as St Paul says, or to reveal and discover to people their sins, blindness, and ungodly doings, wherein they were conceived and born; namely, that they are ignorant of God, and are his enemies, and therefore have justly deserved death, hell, God’s judgments, his everlasting wrath and indignation. But the hypocritical sophists in universities know nothing thereof, neither do those who are of opinion that they are justified by the law and their own works.

But to the end that God might put to silence, smother, suppress and beat down to the ground these mischievous and furious beats, he has appointed and ordained a particular Hercules with a club, powerfully to lay hold on such beasts, take them captive, strike them down, and so dispatch them out of the way; that is, he gave the law upon the hill of Sinai, with such fearful thundering and lightning, that all people thereat were amazed and affrighted.

It is exceeding necessary for us to know this use of the law. For he that is not an open and a public murderer, an adulterer, or a thief, holds himself to be an upright and godly man; as did the Pharisee, so blinded and possessed spiritually of the devil, that he could neither see nor feel his sins, nor his miserable case, but exalted himself touching his good works and deserts. Such hypocrites and haughty saints can God by no better means humble and soften, than by and through the law; for that is the right club or hammer, the thunderclap from heaven, the axe of God’s wrath, that strikes through, beats down, and batters such stock-blind, hardened hypocrites. For this cause, it is no small matter that we should rightly understand what the law is, whereto it serves, and what is its proper work and office. We do not reject the law and the works thereof, but on the contrary, confirm them, and teach that we ought to do good works, and that the law is very good and profitable, if we merely give it its right, and keep it to its own proper work and office.

The law opens not nor makes visible God’s grace and mercy, or the righteousness whereby we obtain everlasting life and salvation; but our sins, our weakness, death, God’s wrath and judgment.

The light of the gospel is a far different manner of light, enlightening affrighted, broken, sorrowful, and contrite hearts, and reviving, comforting, and refreshing them. For it declares that God is merciful to unworthy, condemned sinners, for the sake of Christ, and that a blessing thereby is presented unto them who believe; that is, grace, remission of sins, righteousness, and everlasting life.

When in this way we distinguish the law and the gospel, then we attribute and give to each its right work and office. Therefore, I pray and admonish all lovers of godliness and pure religion, especially those who in time are to be teachers of others, that with highest diligence they study this matter, which I much fear, after our time, will be darkened again, if not altogether extinguished.

Martin Luther, Table Talk 274

Cottrell: leadership with stillness and composure

[the author, at scout camp, saw a friend fall 20 feet and lie still]

Seized with panic and shock we ran towards the scene of the accident, but we didn't know what to do...someone raced to get the scoutmaster, who made his way towards the scene.  But he didn't run, he didn't seem to realise it was an emergency.  And this made us cross.  His whole attitude appeared casual, undramatic.  He just walked purposefully towards the fallen boy.  Afterwards he told us why - it was a first lesson in a different sort of leadership.  He told us that he needed a few moments to think;  he'd needed time to weigh up the situation because his first action had to be the right one.  If the fall turned out to be as bad as he feared, there might be no opportunity for a second action. He also walked so he wouldn't be out of breath if he needed to give the boy mouth to mouth resuscitation.  Actually, this was precisely what was needed.  The boy was saved.

You see, it is not always best to be in a hurry.

Sometimes the best leadership requires stillness and composure.  Then the right decisions are taken.  Then the difficult decisions are faced.
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I want to dream a different way of leading, and my first point is this:  creativity is usually cultivated in the soil of contemplation.

Hit the Ground Kneeling, Stephen Cottrell, p1-4

Lessons from the Silence 1

After two weeks of enforced silence (during most of which, sadly, I was quite ill) what did I realise?

Humans are creatures made to communicate and relate.  On the first day I probably only managed a 70% reduction in speech - and that was HUGE.  It wasn't just a few conversations knocked out, it was vast amounts of talking.  So I quickly realised that most people spend most of their time talking (and I'm not taking into account the pseudo-talking involved in digital media and social networking). 

Lesson 1: I reckon the activity most often performed by most people, is talking.

Alzheimer care

Fascinating articles on a home in America, with a Christian foundation, taking the approach that residents are still complete humans, and trying some unorthodox alternatives to drugs and control:

CT

NY Times