my burg

What if the elites are right? I appreciated this article by Samuel James, not so much because he addresses the moral suitability of our current president (which is an issue), but because we evangelical conservatives need to avoid using the same kind of identity politics that we resent being used against us...  I wish so much that evangelicals would fully resist the allure of identity politics, especially the versions that seem to be popular in our conservative theological circles. Substitute the word “white” for “elite” in much evangelical political discourse, and you would end up with lengthy essays that would be logically indistinguishable from those of the wokest SJWs. Whether Galli and the staff at CT are elites has absolutely no bearing on whether they’re right about this president and the morality of supporting him. The argument fails for the same reason the common pro-choice canard about pro-life’s being “out of touch” with the physical and social trauma of unplanned ...

Oxford (UK) city skyline I've recently enjoyed articles by Alistair Roberts in the U.K. and his insights into the state of evangelicalism in our country.  In the first article he describes the decline of the impact of evangelical scholarship, and in the second he describes the influence of what he calls " Manichaean social justice ideology." "Lessons From the Collapse of American Protestantism" "Currently we face another critical juncture in the development of the American public square and Christians’ place within it. An increasingly dominant secular liberalism antagonistic to orthodox Christian faith will only accelerate the process of squeezing evangelicals out of public life." "Further Thoughts on How Social Justice Ideology Fuels Racism and Sexism" "Rather than adopting a gentle approach to navigating the differences between groups, seeking for ways for people with different values and beliefs to live together i...

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.  (1 Corinthians 15:3-5 ESV) Closer to our own time, Dr. Leon Morris, founding member of the Evangelical Alliance (Victoria, Australia), uses the verse above to explain what evangelicalism is. Here are some highlights from an article he wrote...  "An evangelical is a gospel man, a gospel woman. 'Evangelical' derives from 'evangel' : 'gospel'. By definition an evangelical is someone concerned for the gospel. This means more than that he preaches the gospel now and then. It means that for him the gospel of Christ is central. It is, of course, his message and he preaches it, constantly. But it is more than a subject of preaching. The gospel is at the centre of his thinking and liv...

J ust what is "an evangelical"?  (As in, "a certain candidate received such a percentage of evangelical voters ." )  Also, some churches are referred to as "evangelical churches", though they may be a part of a denomination or not.  What is an evangelical Christian, and what makes a church evangelical?   Evangelicalism in the west, in the modern era, has been connected to the spiritual awakenings (revivals) of the 18th and 19th centuries in England and America. From many church backgrounds people were converted and brought to faith in Jesus Christ.  Transcending different denominations, they held a conviction in common as to the truthfulness of the gospel and its essential truths.       Writing in 1877, the Bishop of Liverpool, J. C. Ryle, wrote about the general divisions, or movements, of people that made up the Church of England at that time.  He said there were three main groups:  1) The high church , such as the Anglo-Catholi...

Dr. John Frame was recently asked, "What is the greatest issue facing the American church?" His reply:  "The greatest issue facing the American church is its fidelity to Scripture, its fidelity to its foundation.  It seems every time there's some social movement that comes along, churches cave.  They go along with cultural change rather than holding fast to Scripture.  I think we need to have a rebirth of conviction that the Scripture is the Word of God, that God won't be trifled with.  If it's not God's Word, it's not good news.  If it's not God's Word, there's no point in paying any attention to it.  But if it is God's word then that has to be more important than any cultural expression that there is."  ~ Dr. John Frame, January 27, 2016.   See video here .  Btw, check out John Frame's reading shelf here .  

Enjoyed listening to this 9Marks interview between Mark Dever and Carl F. H. Henry in 1997.  This would be six years before Henry's death in 2003.   Dever asked Henry to identify some differences that he sees in evangelicalism between today and earlier in the 1950 and 60s.  Two points came out:  1) Earlier there was a need to call evangelicals, who had largely withdrawn from the culture, to be more active in, and engaged with, the culture. Today the problem, Henry says, is to get the contemporary culture -- very much degenerated -- out of the evangelical.  2) In the 1950s and 60s evangelicals saw that they needed one another and so worked together.  Today, Henry said, they do not feel that they need each other the way they needed each other then.  Too many evangelicals and churches are pursuing their own agendas and individual ministries apart from a relationship to the wider body of evangelicalism.  Listen to the full interview here . ...

" [Christianity] insists upon a purposive and moral as over against a purely mathematical universe; it insists upon a personal God, as against impersonal ultimates whether of space-time or élan vital variety; it insists upon a divine creation as over against a naturalistic evolution; it insists that man’s uniqueness is a divine endowment rather than a human achievement; it insists that man’s predicament is not an animal inheritance nor a necessity of his nature but rather a consequence of his voluntary revolt against God; it insists that salvation can be provided only by God, as against the view that man is competent to save himself; it insists that the Scriptures are a revelation lighting the way to the divine incarnation in Jesus Christ as the Redeemer of mankind, as against the view that they stand among many records of religious experience without a difference in kind; it insists that history is bound up with man’s acceptance or rejection of the God-man, rather than that hist...

"We know that in His sovereign providence God can enable us to penetrate the world with a living witness to the truth and power of evangelical theism.  In that awesome task I wish you Godspeed.  May you share as we did in the splendor of a spiritual sunrise, and not only in the sad defection of a secular society."  -- Carl F. H. Henry In "Coming Home to Say Good-bye",  chapel address given at Wheaton College, April 30, 1990.  Published in gods of this age or... God of the Ages? (Broadman and Holman, 1994)

Interviewer : Do you think the American church is heading down the  wrong path with its concert-style worship and feel-good lectures that  are part of many services? Os Guinness : I think that evangelicalism in America at the moment has  lost its way. It is profoundly worldly. It is almost as deep in what  Martin Luther called a Babylonian captivity as the pre-Reformation church was.   And much what we have here is more American than it is really  Christian.  And there are different examples.   If you look at the religious right, that has become an ideology that  practices things that are anti-Christian. They do demonize their  enemies, they do stereotype their enemies. I've been horrified this  year as you do and Stuart does and Ravi does, we love apologetics,  the defense of the faith. But it's to win people. Whereas the current  tendency in the American church is to turn apologetics into culture  warring. Us/the...

I'm reading again Christianity and Liberalism by J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937).  This is a classic work written in the early decades of the last century.  He shows how the liberalizing movements of his day were presenting not a modified Christianity but an outright denial of the gospel.   In the process he gives a very clear delineation of the essence of biblical Christianity.  For example on the topic of sound doctrine he says, "Christianity is based, then, upon an account of something that happened, and the Christian worker is primarily a witness. But if so, it is rather important that the Christian worker should tell the truth. When a man takes his seat upon the witness stand, it makes little difference what the cut of his coat is, or whether his sentences are nicely turned. The important thing is that he tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. If we are to be truly Christians, then, it does make a vast difference what our tea...

This is a third missive from a close friend who moved away from our community and his first real home church, relocating to a new community.  Their search for a solid evangelical church has been eye-opening to me, as to the options in our American culture.  My friend is not extreme, nor too curmudgeonly, but is very perplexed by the three-ring-circus display of the kinds of churches which call themselves evangelical. His first two installments are found here and here . It occurs to me this morning that [ our former church, a good experience, he says ] also needs to prepare its congregants for moving out into the larger world beyond it.  There should be a program guiding such folk in finding their next church and how to live among the cacophonous mess that calls itself Christianity.  [ My daughter ] has been invited to join a homeschooling house church. Fortunately, she has declined. One of their foundational beliefs is that creation occurred in six literal days ...

I think Gerry McDermott has made some valuable points on the state of American "evangelicalism" today .  He says there are two groups: Traditionalists and Meliorists, and it all goes back to their view of Scripture as authoritative.  Here are some of his insights... The logic of the Meliorist approach would lead evangelicalism to follow the path of mainline Protestantism over the last decades, as it continued to proclaim the authority of Scripture and respect for tradition while rejecting the Tradition (and in particular its reading of Scripture) at precisely the points where the culture was at war with biblical teaching. In moral theology, for example, if the words of Scripture are culture-bound and not inspired, the particulars of Levitical or Pauline sexual admonitions must give way to the true Word behind the words—love and non-judgmentalism—when confronted by the experience of committed love and presumed new knowledge. For most Meliorists, the Bible’s authority is pr...

What a blessing to receive a copy of this new book as a gift from some very good friends! Gerry McDermott is the editor of this Oxford-published volume of essays, backed by a who's-who list of contributors: Mark Noll, Alister McGrath, Henri Blocher, John Stackhouse, Donald Bloesch, Dallas Willard, Darrell Bock, and many others.   This is an important work for such a time as this, when the word "evangelical" has come to mean practically anything and often, virtually nothing.   In the opening essay Mark Noll notes that historically there have been four ingredients to evangelical religion: the importance of conversion, the ultimate authority of the Bible, the inevitable fruit of charitable works (and often social reform), and the centrality of the Cross (substitutionary atonement). Just getting started... The Oxford Handbook of Evangelical Theology, Gerald McDermott, editor .  

Here's Carl Trueman on "A Dissenting Voice on Lausanne III " First he wonders first if such declarations makes any difference to the world at large:  Evangelicals typically make the fatal mistake of assuming that the wider world actually cares about what they think. It does not: it increasingly regards us as fringe lunatics, rather as it did in the first century.    Then he wonders if anything new or ground-breaking came out of it, especially in light of its great expense... To read some of the blogs and reports on the conference, you would think that something new and radical was being proposed.  Nothing I have seen could not have been found better expressed elsewhere by somebody else at some point in the past.  The question then becomes: did we need a gathering of thousands of church leaders (though no leader from my own church, local or otherwise, seems to have been present), at huge expense, to tell us these things? He wonders about how representative ...

"Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching. ... Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers." (1 Timothy 4:13, 16 ESV) On the danger of not preaching the gospel to church members we assume are truly converted, Mark Dever writes: "...assumption on our part too often leads to presumption on theirs. That is, when we assume the Gospel instead of clarifying it, people who profess Christianity but don't understand or obey the Gospel are cordially allowed to presume their own conversion without examining themselves for evidence of it-- which may amount to nothing more than blissful damnation. Our ministries are ultimately about 'ensuring salvation both for yourself and for those who hear you.'" (The Deliberate Church, p. 42) Sometimes in pastoral counseling I will ask the counselee(s), "tell me why you think you a...

This is good -- an interview with Os Guinness... " Where have all the evangelicals gone ?" He concludes part 1 with ... So the collapse of the Religious Right has not led to the rise of a more responsible position, except for the minority, but to something which is horrendous. The trouble is, if this goes on, it will tarnish the church for a generation and that’s the tragedy. I put it even deeper. If you look at Europe, Europe is the most secular continent in the world because of reactions to corrupt state/church powers in the past. America never had that problem because of the genius of the First Amendment until the rise of the Religious Right and the culture wars, and you can see that in the educated classes, a steadily rising equivalent of the European repudiation of religion climaxing in the new atheist. We have created the monster we dislike, and it’s our fault. When asked what the greatest problem facing evangelicals today, he answers, The biggest problem is not specifi...

I've been contemplating Michael Spencer's blogs on the future of evangelical churches in America ( iMonk blog ). His three articles on his predicted collapse of evangelicalism are found here . It is important, I believe, to read all three articles. I find myself in agreement with much he has to say. Here are a few quotes... The determination to follow in the methodological steps of numerically successful churches will be greater than ever. The result will be, in the main, a departure from doctrine to more and more emphasis on relevance, motivation and personal success….with the result being churches further compromised and weakened in their ability to pass on the faith. ... For some time, we’ve been at a point that the decision to visit a particular evangelical church contained a fairly high risk of not hearing the Biblical Gospel. That experience will be multiplied and expanded in the years to come. Core beliefs will become less and less normative and necessary in evangelic...

I have so appreciated the faithfulness and tireless efforts of Bob Benne and others (including Gerry McDermott) as they have sought to keep Lutheranism true to its biblical foundations. Bob wrote this after the CORE meeting in Indiana to chart a new course for conservative Lutherans. I was especially moved by the last paragraph. My Interpretation of the CORE Assembly at Fishers, Indiana, Last Weekend I haven’t been so excited about church life beyond the local parish for a long time. The camaraderie, the singing, the hospitality, the powerful talks, the affirmation of biblical and confessional truth, the focus on the future……all were expressed in almost overwhelming portions. The 1,200 souls present were full of life and determination. The CORE assembly was quite an experience. For the first time in 25 years I felt liberation from the arduous struggle for the soul of the ELCA and freedom for the shaping of a future church life in which I could joyously participate. I had hoped fo...

The ARIS study was released, and contains a number of pertinent observations, none very surprising if you've been watching our culture. This quote from the Washington Post article caught my attention, because it is something I also have observed... The number of people who describe themselves as generically "Protestant" went from approximately 17 million in 1990 to 5 million. Meanwhile, the number of people who use nondenominational terms has gone from 194,000 in 1990 to more than 8 million. "There is now this shift in the non-Catholic population -- and maybe among American Christians in general -- into a sort of generic, soft evangelicalism," said Mark Silk, who directs Trinity's Program on Public Values and helped supervise the survey. ... "If people call themselves 'evangelical,' it doesn't tell you as much as you think it tells you about what kind of church they go to," Silk said. "It deepens the conundrum about who evang...