Blog Archive
for September, 2006
Beyond the Culture Wars? Differing Viewpoints Look at Post-Christian America: A Conversation with the Editors of Touchstone Magazine
— Friday, September 29th, 2006 —
Keep Reading...How Much Do You Hate Rick Warren?
— Thursday, September 28th, 2006 —
How much do you hate Rick Warren? Enough to endorse an atheist humanist book that ridicules not just Warren but Jesus, the Bible, evangelism, and the Gospel itself?
Prometheus Publishers, an atheist publishing house, has just released The Reason-Driven Life: What Am I Here on Earth For? by Robert M. Price. Price begins the book by discussing his evangelical Christian background, his studies for ministry, and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, his loss of faith in the authority of Scripture, and, ultimately, his abandonment of theism.
The book is a take-off on Warren’s best-selling Purpose-Driven Life, with chapters that make it clear there’s no divine meaning in life. It turns out, according to the book, it is all about you after all. The author scoffs at biblical authority, the doctrines of the Christian faith (including the deity of Christ and salvation itself), and holds his heaviest fire for evangelism, which he rejects altogether. In the end, the book is deeply sad, the hopelessness of a lost soul out to sea in a cold, impersonal universe.
This book did not make me angry. It made me sad, sad enough to pray that the author will find the Christ he’s rebelling against. What made me angry was an endorsement blurb on the back. The first two are non-surprising, John Shelby Spong and Don Cupitt, two Anglican atheist clergymen. The third, however, is an endorsement by Clark H. Pinnock, a member of the Evangelical Theological Society.
Keep Reading...It’s All About the Hamiltons, Baby
— Wednesday, September 27th, 2006 —
Jim Hamilton, a New Testament professor at the Houston campus of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, is one of the most energetic and prolific young scholars in conservative Protestantism today. He is a recent doctoral graduate of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, completing his dissertation under the supervision of Thomas R. Schreiner. His first book, God’s Indwelling Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Old and New Testaments, was released yesterday by B&H Academic. You should read it.
This volume, the first in a series of books on biblical and theological themes set in conjunction with the New American Commentary series, takes up the question of how believers ought to understand the “newness” of the Holy Spirit’s work in the new covenant. Hamilton argues that old covenant saints were regenerate, but did not experience the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, a reality that comes, he argues, only with the eschatological Temple built through Jesus’ atoning work.
Keep Reading...A Breeding Heart Conservative
— Wednesday, September 27th, 2006 —
The liberal Baptist Center for Ethics has an interesting article on some recent controversies between the SBC and its liberal splinter group, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. In the midst of this, the author wonders:
“Perhaps one reason Southern Seminary’s Russell Moore recently urged Southern Baptists to have lots of children is because that would likely ensure growth and thus ‘prove’ that the SBC is theologically correct. After all, research has demonstrated that the decline in mainline churches is actually the result of lower birthrates and not because people are leaving the churches in protest of the theology.”
Well, no. The BCE doesn’t get it. Here’s the nasty little secret behind my plea for more child-friendly SBC churches.
Keep Reading...Faith of Whose Fathers?
— Tuesday, September 26th, 2006 —
Some “young leaders” in the Southern Baptist Convention are asking to be heard. One of them, Chris Seay of Ecclesia church in Houston, gets a hearing from Mark Coppenger in the latest issue of Touchstone magazine, in which Coppenger reviews Seay’s book, Faith of My Fathers, in which the “emerging” pastor engages his father and grandfather (both also Southern Baptist ministers) with the help of Donald Miller.
It turns out, Seay the “young leader” is saying many of the same things some “old leaders” in the SBC were saying thirty years ago: the Bible has errors but it is as perfect as it needs to be, we don’t need a perfect canon because we have a perfect Christ, and so forth.
Coppenger concludes:
Keep Reading...Malibu’s Most Wanted
— Tuesday, September 26th, 2006 —
The Graphic, the student newspaper of Pepperdine University, reports that the Campbell/Stone movement-affiliated school in seaside Malibu, California, is facing a deficit: not of funds or endowment or students, but of Church of Christ faculty.
The Churches of Christ are the conservative stream of the “restorationist” movement started in the 19th century by Alexander Campbell, a movement emphasizing “no creed but the Bible.” Churches of Christ, then, and the institutions related to them employ no confessions of faith to define their identity. Pepperdine administrators say the accountability of Pepperdine to a loose, non-creedal group such as the Churches of Christ comes through maintaining a “critical mass” of faculty members who hold membership in Church of Christ congregations. The problem is that no one quite can articulate the definition of “critical mass,” a live issue now that the Church of Christ population on the faculty is declining, according to the administration.
Keep Reading...Who’s Afraid of a Mormon President?
— Monday, September 25th, 2006 —
Are social conservatives ready for a Mormon President of the United States? Would they vote for a Mormon if he agreed with them on abortion, marriage, stem-cell research, and religious liberty? That’s the question posed by the Wall Street Journal, reporting from this weekend’s Family Research Council summit.
The WSJ notes that Republican Party frontrunner U.S. John McCain of Arizona declined to attend the FRC event, but that the real question at the summit was which candidate will resonate with the social and cultural Right: Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, a Southern Baptist minister and former president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention; U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, a Roman Catholic leader in pro-life and religious liberty causes in the Congress; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Baptist twice divorced and three-times married? The WSJ speculates most particularly about the potential appeal of Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the candidate the newspaper suggests most surprisingly impressed the FRC attendees.
Romney, of course, is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Will evangelicals vote for a Mormon? Will they vote for a really committed Mormon, as Romney seems to be?
Keep Reading...The (Uneasy?) Conscience of a Conservative
— Saturday, September 23rd, 2006 —
Throughout all of American history, every generation will probably associate Barry Goldwater with the image of a little girl in a field of flowers. The image, of course, is from a Lyndon Johnson television advertisement, in which a flower-picking little girl’s counting chant turns into a countdown to the detonation of a nuclear bomb.
I just finished watching CC Goldwater’s HBO documentary about her grandfather, the late U.S. Sen. and 1964 Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. The film, titled “Mister Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater” looks at the Arizonan’s life and legacy, featuring testimonies from figures as diverse as John McCain, Goldwater’s successor in his Senate seat, U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who was a “Goldwater Girl” in the 1964 election, conservative columnist George Will, newsman Walter Cronkite, and Democratic strategist James Carville. The documentary traces Goldwater’s libertarian political theory from his days on the far Right of the American political spectrum to his final days defending abortion rights and the right of gays and lesbians to serve in the United States Armed Services.
More interesting to me than the political significance of Goldwater highlighted in this film was the personal angle of the man known as “Mister Conservative.”
Keep Reading...9/11/01
— Monday, September 11th, 2006 —
Every person reading this commentary probably remembers where he was, and what he was doing, five years ago this morning. As we reflect on the horror and heroism of September 11th, let’s remember that, as Christians, we have questions to answer: how does one respond to this kind of evil? What does our response to September 11th have to do with the Apostle Paul’s teaching about government’s responsibility to wield the sword against evildoers, and with Jesus’ admonition to turn the other cheek when attacked?
A few weeks after September 11, 2001, the Henry Institute hosted the first Henry Institute forum, “Onward Christian Soldiers? Christian Witness in a Time of Terror.” On the panel were Mark Coppenger, now professor of apologetics at Southern Seminary, Southern Seminary ethicist Ken Magnuson, Southern Seminary president R. Albert Mohler Jr., pacifist Baptist pastor Joe Phelps, ethicist Henlee Barnette, and me.
Keep Reading...Today’s Devotional Bible
— Saturday, September 9th, 2006 —
Enough has been said about the wretched Today’s New International Version translation of the Bible. I rarely mention it anymore, because it has not become the successor of the NIV, but more of a niche Bible for evangelicals who use it precisely to make a point about their views on gender, etc.
I was struck, however, by an advertisement for the TNIV’s new devotional Bible in this month’s Relevant Magazine (Relevant is a magazine for those evangelicals who wish us to know that they are relevant. They will know we are relevant by our body-piercings and our knowing appreciation of Bono). TNIV is the “official translation of Relevant,” the ad tells us.
The devotional Bible features, in the ad copy, four authors of the notes in the text: Saint Augustine, Brian McLaren, C.S. Lewis, and Rob Bell. No chronlogical snobbery here.
Keep Reading...
