Category Archives: Religion

Religion

Would That They Were Actually Pagan?

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C. S. Lewis wrote, “When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, `Would that she were.’” Because pagans have been shown to be convertible to Christianity, but post-Christians have shown more resistance. Pagans appeal to gods who cannot hear them and suffer for it. Post-Christians still benefit from the God they rejected and believe they have earned all they receive. Lewis wished we could find our spiritual poverty again so that we would see the riches to be found in Christ Jesus.

Today Englishman Bob Davey has taken up saving an abandoned church in Norfolk from local pagans. After cleaning up the church, he worked over the graveyard. “But even after he had driven the Devil from the door, still his acolytes returned. On every Witches’ Sabbath – special dates in the Pagan calendar – Mr Davey spent the night camped out in the church, on guard duty.” It can get ugly.

Meanwhile, “The Church of England is trying to recruit pagans and spiritual believers as part of a drive to retain congregation numbers.”

Religion

Announcing a New Spurgeon Center

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This just in. Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has begun to build a center to house it’s a extensive collection of documents from the great preacher Charles H. Spurgeon and offer space for lectures and study. They’re calling it the Charles Spurgeon Center for Biblical Preaching.

Non-fiction, Religion

What Exactly Does the Bible Tell Us?

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According to Michael J. Kruger’s review of Professor Peter Enns’ new book, The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It, the Bible doesn’t tell us anywhere near what we might think it does. Kruger says he always notes the cover endorsements on a new book, and some gave him pause.

But perhaps most illuminating was the inside flap, where the publisher describes the book’s purpose: “In The Bible Tells Me So, Enns wants to do for the Bible what Rob Bell did for hell in Love Wins.”

Not until after I read the book in its entirety did I realize how accurate this comparison actually is. Of course, Bell’s book (also published by HarperOne) challenged a core historical tenet of the Christian faith, namely the belief that hell is real and people actually will go there. Christianity has just been wrong, Bell argues, and we finally need to be set free from the fear and oppression such a belief causes. Bell positions himself as the liberator of countless Christians who have suffered far too long under such a barbaric belief system.

Likewise, Enns is pushing back against another core historical tenet of the Christian faith: our belief about Scripture—what it is and what it does. The Bible isn’t doing what we think it’s doing, he argues. It doesn’t provide basically reliable historical accounts (instead, it’s often filled with myth and rewritten stories). It doesn’t provide consistent theological instruction (about, say, the character of God). And it doesn’t provide clear teaching about how to live (ethics, morality, Christian living). Although Christians have generally always believed these things about Scripture, Enns contends that scholars now know they simply aren’t true. And when Christians try to hold onto such beliefs, it only leads to fear, stress, anxiety, and infighting. Like Bell, Enns is positioned as a liberator able to set believers free from a Bible that just doesn’t work the way they want it to.

In the end, Kruger says Enns’ book wants it both ways. Discover God in the pages of Scripture while understanding most of what’s written there is imaginary and contradictory. Repent and believe in Christ on the cross, but the Bible’s morality is untenable and inapplicable to you.

Religion

A Presbyterian Walks Into a Baptist Chuch

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Mark Jones writes about the differences between open and closed communion, meaning whether people in your church are allowed to take the Lord’s Supper with you regardless of the mode or theology of baptism.

During a conference last year at SBTS, I was treated to an excellent paper by a young Canadian scholar (Ian Clary) on Andrew Fuller’s communion practice. In the Q. and A. I asked (ipsissima vox):

“If you aren’t baptized by immersion, then you can’t be a called a Christian (in any meaningful ecclesiastical sense). And if you can’t be called a Christian, then you can’t take the Lord’s Supper. Is that the implication of the closed communion view of Fuller?”

The room was silent: here a Presbyterian was asking a Baptist (in a room full of Baptists) to admit they can’t call me a Christian.

My friend admitted that he believed/felt I was a Christian. But I countered: “Fuller’s theology of communion and baptism doesn’t allow you to call me a Christian in any official (ecclesiastical) sense. It is merely a private judgment.” My friend, had to (uncomfortably) concede my point.

This, friends, is one of the ways good doctrine matters. Are Presbyterians actual followers of Christ? Is closed communion a good way to govern your local church?

Religion

Ask a Southerner to Pray for You

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Because God answers more prayer in the southern United States than in other states, according to a new Lifeway Research survey. Wealthy people are far more likely to pray that bad things will happen to bad people than are those who have low income. Nearly half of respondents said they pray for those who mistreat them or their enemies.

Bookselling, Publishing, Reading, Religion

So What If School Library Dumps Christian Books?

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Rejected paperbacksRiver Springs Charter Schools in California is reportedly removing all Christian books from its library shelves.

The Pacific Justice Institute (PJI), a legal defense organization, has been circulating the accusation that this network of California charter schools is culling its stock of Christian material, notably The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom.

The school says it receives state funds and so cannot allow “sectarian materials on our state-authorized lending shelves.” On their Facebook page, the school states, “No, we are not banning Christian novels at all. We are not allowed to provide sectarian textbooks however, so this is where the confusion comes in. So it’s yes to novels, no to textbooks as a public school.”

But attorneys with PJI say the Supreme Court has a “long-established precedent that strongly disapproves of school libraries removing books based on opposition to their content or message.”

Now I fully understand that “sectarian” could be defined in wild and nonsensical ways. I mean, this is California. But I have a hard time understanding how a library is supposed to operate if it can’t remove books over content issues. How did the books get in the library to begin with? If they had a volume of a decade of Playboy issues, would librarians be able to remove it based on the content?

I’m told Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v. Pico is in play here. Continue reading So What If School Library Dumps Christian Books? →

Fiction, Religion

It’s Not About Winning, But Win Anyway.

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Jeffrey Overstreet talks about sports-and-faith movies in relation to the recent film When the Game Stands Tall. He says movies of this type usually reinforce bad ideas and behaviors.

“It’s a simple formula,” he says. “Show that winning and losing is fraught with trouble if the game is played for the wrong reasons (for glory, for money, for self-gratification). Then show the athletes learning some Sunday school lessons about humility and teamwork. And once they’ve learned those lessons, then give the audience the satisfaction of seeing those who are In The Right achieve personal victories (reconciling the family, winning the virtuous but skeptical girl, overcoming the bullies)… and, usually, scoreboard victories as well.”

The story easily preaches that good guys or the faithful will win, and God will win it for you, supporting the common belief that a good life with earn good rewards. There’s truth there, but when life gets hard or unjust, then we will crumble if our faith is in this formula, not the living God. I think the church in America needs the backbone that would come from knowing God is faithful even when we don’t win.

Jeff offers a good list of ideas he would like to see challenged in a movie about sports:

  • “how the commercialization of sports ends up encouraging lifestyles that are the antithesis of teamwork, health, and wholeness;
  • how money corrupts the whole enterprise, from outrageous salaries to the excesses of the circuses that tend to surround professional sports events;
  • how sports culture glorifies youth, and finds little of value in the experience of aging, so that athletes vanish from the national stage once they are too old to dominate the stage (unless they have enough charisma to become part of the youth-worshipping media machine);
  • how “fan spirit” usually devolves into tribalism.”

That’s only half of his list. Have you seen this movie? What did you think of it? If you like, share your thoughts on other sports-themed movies.

Authors, Religion

Authors Donating to Iraqi Christians

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A Facebook community of authors are donating September’s royalties to Iraqi Christians through Voice of the Martyrs. They call themselves Authors in Solidarity. We’ve reviewed a few of books featured in this community. Lars is donating his royalties from Hailstone Mountain (The Erling Skjalgsson Saga Book 4). There’s New Found Dream: Book Two of “A Healer’s Tale”, The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen, Bid the Gods Arise (The Wells of the Worlds) (Volume 1), and many more. Let us know if you join this effort to help Christians in Iraq.

Fiction, Religion

Following Your Heart Will Lead to Death

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“Dante shows us that you can just as easily go to Hell by loving good things in the wrong way as you can by loving the wrong things,” Rod Dreher explains. He has been reading The Divine Comedy for the first time and is working on a book about it.

All the damned dwell in eternal punishment because they let their passions overrule their reason and were unrepentant. For Dante, all sin results from disordered desire: either loving the wrong things or loving the right things in the wrong way.

This is countercultural, for we live in an individualistic, libertine, sensual culture in which satisfying desire is generally thought to be a primary good. For contemporary readers, especially young adults, Dante’s encounter with Francesca da Rimini, one of the first personages he meets in Hell, is deeply confounding. Francesca is doomed to spend eternity in the circle of the Lustful, inextricably bound in a tempest with her lover, Paolo, whose brother—Francesca’s husband—found them out and murdered them both.

She says romantic poetry taught her of Love’s power and held her entralled to her heart’s passion. “Can love be selective?” she might ask. Can anyone control their passions?

“We know, however, that it is really lust,” Dreher says, “and that her grandiose language in praise of romantic passion is all a gaudy rationalization.” Dante is overcome at the end of his encounter with Francesca, but not perhaps by her fate at a seemingly small thing. He may be overcome by the idea that his own poetry encouraged her to follow her heart into death.

Religion

Tribalism, Corporation, and Reading the Bible

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Politics...Anthony Bradley argues that most Christians today simply defend their political tribe using biblical language or proof-texts. They don’t hold to any confession of faith, but they believe their view of the Bible is right and other views are wrong or dangerous. “Progressive evangelicals, like their liberal mainline cousins, have simply traded off, in many cases, the tools in the Christian social thought tradition for the analytical tools of the social sciences and the humanities (critical race theory, feminist theory, etc.). For progressive evangelicals, the social sciences are authoritative and are often above critique.”

If we would fall back on sound theological confessions or a biblically developed history of Christian social consciousness, we could discuss issues like believers should and find common ground aren’t finding now. As Dr. Bradley concludes, “A lively discourse about the right application of Christian principles within the Christian tradition is far more fruitful and interesting to me than engaging in a tribal war that tries to prove whose tribe best represents Jesus.”

Speaking of a topic on which progressive Christians fail to think, Andy Crouch writes about the shrinking legal window on corporate identity: “In her dissent, Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited approvingly the idea that for-profit groups ‘use labor to make a profit, rather than to perpetuate a religious-values-based mission. The words rather than are key. In Justice Ginsburg’s view, it seems, corporations cannot serve—or at least the law cannot recognize that they serve—any god other than Mammon.”

Continue reading Tribalism, Corporation, and Reading the Bible →