THEOLOGICAL PERSIFLAGE

Intro

Many people find Christianity unpersuasive and unbelievable because they think you have to just accept it blindly by faith. This is a false impression of Christianity. However, there are a lot of Christians who help promote this false impression because they actually believe that it’s true.

Also, many people find Christianity unappealing and unattractive because they think that it is basically a list of fun things that you can't do. Again, a lot of Christians promote this FALSE impression by believing and teaching this. In most churches you would try to visit today - Christianity is just dull, boring, and effeminate. I believe that this was not always the case. Something somewhere went wrong.

For Christians to be effective followers of Christ in our culture, we are going to have to restore what is missing. Over the years, the modern Church has gradually accepted more and more "Christian" ideas (about how to interpret Scripture, who God is, Christ's death on the cross, morality, knowledge, politics, reason and faith) as sound doctrine without even bothering to ask why this is what they believe. I'm passionately interested in reopening the discussion about God's truth that recently for some reason seems to have closed in a bunch of churches.

"This philosophy will teach us, that first principles are in themselves apparent; that to make nothing self-evident is to take away all possibility of knowing anything; that without first principles, there can be neither reason nor reasoning; that discursive knowledge requires intuitive maxims as its basis; that if every truth would admit of proof, proof would extend to infinity; that, consequently, all sound reasoning must rest ultimately on the principles of common sense - principles supported by original and intuitive evidence."
- James Wilson

"About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity ..."
- Hebrews 5:11-6:1

"The author of Hebrews has much he would like to tell the recipients of this letter. There is much knowledge he would like to impart to them, so many important things they need to learn. Unfortunately, what he wishes to communicate is 'hard to explain' not because it is obscure or difficult to understand, but because the people have become 'dull of hearing.' They are not stupid people and are not intellectually inferior, unable to grasp such truths. The reason he cannot relay these important truths is not because of what these people are by nature, but of what they have become. There is much the author would like to say, but he cannot and will not because of the spiritual immaturity of the people to whom he writes ... The recipients of the letter to the Hebrews are not new Christians or recent converts, for the author says that by this time they ought to be teachers ... We live in an age where too many who profess to be Christians rarely consider their spiritual maturity - an age when many consider spiritual immaturity a mark of authenticity, and when people associate doubt with humility and assurance with pride. Far too many people consider sound theology the mark of a person who is argumentative and proud. Far too many people are just like the audience to whom Hebrews is addressed."
- Tim Challies

“Whenever the devil harasses you, seek the company of men or drink more, or joke and talk nonsense, or do some other merry thing. Sometimes we must drink more, sport, recreate ourselves, and even sin a little to spite the devil, so that we leave him no place for troubling our consciences with trifles. We are conquered if we try too conscientiously not to sin at all. So when the devil says to you: do not drink, answer him: I will drink, and right freely, just because you tell me not to.”
- Martin Luther
http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/a-luther-quote-to-wake-up-the-sleepers

"The recipients of this letter were like many Christians today who think that theology is a waste of time. What difference does it make, people ask, whether God is a Trinity or not, whether Christ's righteousness comes by imputation or infusion, and whether regeneration comes before faith or after? What is important, they say, is that we get along with each other. Then they cite passages commending a childlike faith, as if that were the same thing as a childish faith, that is, one that is indifferent to or ignorant of the Word of God."
- Richard Phillips

"Almost everything about today's church - it's teaching style, its ministries, the way people are expected to behave, even today's popular images of Jesus - is designed to meet the needs and expectations of a largely female audience. Church is sweet and sentimental, nurturing and nice ... what does today's church emphasize? Relationships ... This is why [your average guy] hates to go to church. He finds it boring and irrelevant because he doesn't see his values modeled there. He finds church dull for the same reason he finds chick flicks dull ... [He] has no desire to fall in love with a wonderful man, even one named Jesus."
- David Murrow

Possibly one of the most devastating things that can happen to us as Christians is that we cease to expect anything to happen ... Or let me put it like this. You may feel and say - as many do - "I was converted and became a Christian. I've grown in knowledge, I've been reading books, I've been listening to sermons, but I've arrived now at a sort of peak and all I do is maintain that. For the rest of my life I will just go on like this."

Now, my friend, you must get rid of that attitude; you must get rid of it once and for ever. That is "religion," it is not Christianity. This is Christianity: the Lord appears! Suddenly, in the midst of the drudgery and the routine and the sameness and the dullness and the drabness, unexpectedly, surprisingly, he meets with you and he says something to you that changes the whole of your life and your outlook and lifts you to a level that you had never conceived could be possible for you ... Do not let the devil persuade you that you have got all you are going to get, still less that you received all you were ever going to receive when you were converted. That has been a popular teaching, even among evangelicals. You get everything at your conversion, it is said, including baptism with the Spirit, and nothing further, ever. Oh, do not believe it; it is not true. It is not true to the teaching of the Scriptures, it is not true in the experience of the saints running down the centuries. There is always this glorious possibility of meeting with Him in a new and a dynamic way.

- Martin Lloyd Jones

Christ, in His Divine innocence, said to the woman of Samaria, "Ye worship ye know not what" - being apparently under the impression that it might be desirable, on the whole, to know what one was worshipping. He thus showed Himself sadly out of touch with the twentieth-century mind, for the cry today is: "Away with the tendentious complexities of dogma - let us have the simple spirit of worship; just worship, no matter of what!" The only drawback to this demand for a generalized and undirected worship is the practical difficulty of arousing any sort of enthusiasm for the worship of nothing in particular.
- Dorothy Sayers

"... modern evangelicalism is a legitimate target [for satire] because of the claim to be a 'people of the Book.' We are Bible people, and we name our churches Bible churches, and we go to Bible studies, although Bibles are increasingly rare at them, and our holy hardware stores make megabucks selling study Bibles for 'whatever ails ya.' But the problem with making up titles of such Bible versions to illustrate a point here is that no matter how absurd I get, there is no doubt someone out there doing something comparable 'for real.' These are difficult days to be a satirist. But I will do my best anyhow. And so we have study Bibles for owners of King Charles cocker spaniels, study Bibles for litigious OPC pastors, study Bibles for the skateboarding youth of today, and study Bibles for Third Wives of Promise Keepers. Helpfully supplementing all the study Bibles - published for a people who would not know what study was if it poked them in the eye with a burnt stick - are a vast plethora of translations ...

"And so the word that should come to modern evangelicals who do not like being on the business end of a sharp, pointy object is a simple one. 'You have given us permission to do this. How? you may ask. Well, we read about how Isaiah spoke to the compromisers of his day, and we read all about it in your Study Bible for Menopausal Skateboarders. If you want us to stop, then you need to stop selling those things.'"
- Douglas Wilson

"Harvey and I sit in the bars and - have a drink or two - play the juke box. And soon the faces of all the other people - they turn toward mine - and they smile ... And they come over and they sit with us, and they drink with us, and they talk to us. And they tell about the big terrible things they've done - and the big wonderful things they'll do - their hopes and their regrets, their loves and their hates ... all very large, because nobody ever brings anything small into a bar. And then, I introduce them to Harvey. And he's bigger and grander than anything they offer me. And ... when they leave, they leave impressed."
- Elwood P. Dowd, from Harvey

"Christian reality is a rich and fascinating blend of truth, beauty, and goodness. It is an exuberant love of life and light and celebration. Even with some of the glorious heights of Christian culture reached in prior eras, the Church still hasn't truly begun to plumb the magnificence of the Triune God. We're only scratching the surface, all the while non-Christian visions are perennially addicted to death. In order to mature, Evangelicals need to move beyond the bumper sticker shallowness of the past four decades and long for true wisdom."
- Nathan D. Wilson

In those days I got as much criticism for playing Las Vegas, consorting with the whores and gamblers, as I did for doing prison concerts. My response was that the Pharisees said the same thing about Jesus: "He dines with publicans and sinners." The apostle Paul said, "I will become all things to all men in order that I might win some for Christ now." I don't have Paul's calling - I'm not out there being all things to all men to win them for Christ - but sometimes I can be a signpost. Sometimes I can sow a seed. And post-hole diggers and seed sowers are mighty important in the building of the Kingdom.
- Johnny Cash

Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: "Men of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around the looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.

The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else ..."
- Acts 17:22-25

"I'm sorry, but I can't believe that this ship, [these creatures], the whole perfection of the way they work, could possibly be products of natural selection. There had to be a design. Someone made all this."

Cielle nodded, smiling. "I've known a number of scientists in my lifetime, Nate, but I'm sure this is the first time I've heard one arguing in favor of a grand designer. What's that called, the 'watchmaker argument'?"

She was right, of course. It was an accepted premise that intelligent design in nature was not necessarily a product of intelligence, but merely the mechanism of natural selection of traits for survival and really, really long periods of time for the selections to assert themselves. Nate's life's work had been built on that assumption, but now he was giving Darwin the old heave-ho simply because his - Nate's - mind was too small to adapt to the idea of this craft. Well, yes, damn it. Screw Darwin. This was too strange.
- Christopher Moore, from Fluke

"Once upon a time the church was a brighter, fairer place. And then the Enlightenment hapened, and the scourge of modernism - systematic theologies, propositions, foundationalism, certainty, creeds, monological preaching, individualism, inerrancy, logic, indoctrination, deductive reasoning - began to crack down on the church ...

"But is it really modernism we are rejecting or something weightier? The decline in preaching goes hand in hand with a lost confidence in the importance of truth claims. Preaching presupposes there is a message that must be proclaimed and believed ... I find it disconcerting that Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz is supposed to be the new model for leadership. 'Rather than being a person with all the answers, who is constantly informed of what's up and what's what and where to go, she is herself lost, a seeker, vulnerable, often bewildered,' writes McLaren. 'These characteristics would disqualify her from modern leadership. But they serve as her best credentials for leadership in the emerging culture' ... Is the best corrective to domineering CEO pastors really bewildered Dorothy leaders?"
- Kevin DeYoung

"Slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation; that 'tis hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it ... I took into my hands [Patriarcha by Sir Robert Filmer] ... and cannot but confess myself mightily surprised, that in a book, which was to provide chains for all mankind, I should find nothing but a rope of sand, useful perhaps to such, whose skill and business it is to raise a dust, and would blind the people, the better to mislead them, but in truth is not of any force to draw those into bondage, who have their eyes open, and so much sense about them as to consider, that chains are but an ill wearing, how much care soever hath been taken to file and polish them."
- John Locke

"For the last year there had only been one pope, in the holy city of Amsterdam. But for the prior fifty years there had been two popes, the Retail Pope and the Discount Pope. After the Thirteenth Holy Crusade, when it was decided that to avoid future strife, the birthplace of Jesus would be moved to a different city every four years, holy shrines lost their geographical importance. There arose a great price war in the Church, with shrines offering pilgrims dispensation at varying competitive rates ...

"Soon a whole guild of low-priced shrine keepers around Europe named their own Pope - Boldface the Relatively Shameless, Discount Pope of Prague. The price war was on. If the Dutch Pope would give you a hundred years out of purgatory for a shilling and a ferryman's ticket, the Discount Pope would let you out for two hundred years and send you home with the femur of a minor saint and a splinter of the True Cross. The Retail Pope would offer cheesy bacon toppings on the Host with communion and the Discount Pope would counter with topless-nun night for midnight mass."
- Christopher Moore

I cannot, however, but be surprised to learn whence the novel taste arose which daintily calls everything spoken against an adversary abusive and acrimonious. What think ye of Christ? Was he a reviler when he called the Jews an adulterous and perverse generation, a progeny of vipers, hypocrites, children of the devil?

What think you of Paul? Was he abusive when he termed the enemies of the gospel dogs and seducers? Paul who, in the thirteenth chapter of the Acts, inveighs against a false prophet in this manner: "Oh, full of subtlety and all malice, thou child of the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness." I pray you, good Spalatin, read me this riddle. A mind conscious of truth cannot always endure the obstinate and willfully blind enemies of truth. I see that all persons demand of me moderation, and especially those of my adversaries, who least exhibit it. If I am too warm, I am at least open and frank; in which respect I excel those who always smile, but murder.
- Martin Luther

THEOLOGICAL PERSIFLAGE

Sunday, September 13, 2009

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