I’m pretty sure this will be posted and linked to and all that all across evangelical blogs, but I have to quote it here. This is from a pastor’s colloquium at The Gospel Coalition.

“The social gospel has poisoned the church twice.”  The first time, of course, was when the social gospel was first introduced as a (theologically) liberal agenda that minimized the preaching of the gospel.  But the social gospel is poisoning us again, [Tim] Keller argued, because today evangelicals are so concerned about falling into the error of the old social gospel that we do not put nearly the emphasis that the Bible places on caring for the poor.

This is so true. If a Christian engages social justice issues, there seems to be a line of other Christians standing there yelling ‘Social Gospel!!’ I have seen this done to Derek Webb even though he totally denies the accusation. Let’s hope that when someone with Keller’s reputation condemns the practice the community listens. When I defended Webb I was ignored.

Todd Hiestand has poised an interesting question. Some big names in evangelicalism were asked 7 question. Todd wants to know not just what the big shots think, but what ordinary folks think. That is an excellent question. Sometimes the big wigs can get disconnected, pastors of small churches who don’t suffer from celebrity can probably more easily connect with the people. After all, ‘culture’ isn’t a thing on its own; it is made up of people.

No, I’m not a pastor; I’m just an over-educated IT nerd, amateur theologian, ordinary, marginally obedient Christian, but I’ll take a shot.

What trends in church and worship styles do you see? Are they positive or negative? Well, I think the worship wars are over and contemporary methods largely won. This is not good. There are churches who think ‘hymn’ is an archaic spelling for the first person, singular masculine pronoun. What is missing then, is any idea of our history and the rich theology beautifully spoken that is present in so many of those hymns. Negative.

At the same time, there is present in some musicians a desire to return to the hymns. Matthew Smith and Indelible Grace are devoted to it. Cademon’s Call did a hymn CD. Amy Grant did too. There are others. Sovereign Grace is launching a sort of modern hymn movement with some of their music. The problem is that I’m not sure it is making it into the churches so much. Not yet anyway.

Another thing I worry about in modern worship is the prevalence of technology. Technology should be there to support what is going on, but sometimes it winds up taking the lead. We use PowerPoint not support a point, but because we use PowerPoint. Video isn’t used to illustrate or tell a supporting story, but because we need video. Light shows? Please. That just adds to the feeling that church is a spectator sport, another entertainment venue.

How should Christians be involved in the political system? I have to admit that my thinking on this has been shaped by Carl F. H. Henry, Francis Schaffer and Derek Webb. I once told a co-worker that I’m part of the Evangelical Free Church of America. She said, “Evangelical? But not all that weird political stuff, right?” It is tragic that ‘evangelical’ has become so tied to ‘Republican’ that they’re thought of as almost the same thing.

I think Derek Webb said it very well. Christians, he said, should be ‘moving targets’ when it comes to politics. Not that we keep shifting our position, but that we stand for truth and what is right and so sometimes we side with the Republicans and sometime the Democrats and sometimes we stand alone. Those groups will at times line up with what is right and at other times they will oppose it so we shouldn’t be able to be pinned to any one of those groups.

How should Christians be involved? We’re ambassadors from a King and his kingdom. But for the Western Church, we live in democracies. We have to remember that democracy, for all its benefits, isn’t the political system that we’re going to live under when Christ returns. He won’t be elected as the ruler of the world. In the mean time, we should work and live here as aliens. Our hope is not in democracy or a political party but in Christ. We should vote according to our Biblically informed conscience as disciples of Jesus Christ. ¹Interesting side note here. ‘Christ’ is the Anglicized version of the Greek word for ‘Anointed’ which is used in the New Testament for the Hebrew word ‘Messiah’. The Messiah is a king. It is what David called Saul. So by confessing Jesus as Christ you are admitting your allegiance to a kingdom rather than a republic.

How can a Christian fulfill a passion for social justice as a middle-class American? Wow. Not that is a great question! This is something I’m wrestling with myself. One of the things I think of in this area is the concept of plundering the Egyptians. There are a lot of resources pooled in suburbia: time, people, money, stuff. I we could mobilize these resources to aid the poor and the victimized I think we’d be making great strides. I’m just not sure how to do that.

My point is that we need not always look for social justice issues in our neighborhoods in order to deal with them. If you’re aware of domestic violence in your cul du sac, then you should be dealing with it. But you don’t necessarily have to wait till is shows up on your door step to deal with it.

I am not currently doing this and my heart is heavy with disappointment. I need to get rolling on this, it is an important part of discipleship.

Where and how do you feel Christians can have the most impact on culture? Yet another important question. As I said above, culture is not an entity in and of itself. It is the product of people. You cannot impact culture without reaching people. Period. So if we want to impact culture, we need to be reaching people, not just the people who live in culture but those who shape and project it as well. I think Tim Keller is really on to something by working in New York. I wish we had someone who had a similar vision and equal success in Los Angeles.

But how and where can an ordinary Christian affect culture? It would be a horrible mistake for people who are not talented artists or musicians or poets or writers, etc. to try to engage in those activities simply because they need a Christian voice in them. All we’d do is look stupid for putting out crappy art. I think we need to just be us. Jesus will call and save artists if that is who he wants in his kingdom.  What we regular people need to do is not be afraid of culture. That doesn’t mean we can watch anything and everything on TV and at the movies. We still have to be disciples in the midst of it all. But I don’t think the avoidance of any form of culture we inherited from our Fundamentalist roots is the answer either.

So I don’t think it is right to say that we’re going to either focus on culture nor to ignore it.

Ben came home with his 17″ monitor and so I decided to see if I could bring the Powerbook back to life. Popped the bottom off and disconnected the display. I plugged in the external monitor, mouse and keyboard and fired it. Yes! The Powerbook lives. So now I need to figure out what kind of a case mod to do to turn it into a desktop. I’m thinking of finding a huge book and sticking it in that. We’ll see. I’m not very creative but you never know.

In this month’s Christianity Today, Carolyn Arends has an article whose name immediately caught my attention: “The Grace of Wrath“. It was one of the first things I read in this edition. What a disappointment. How badly she missed the point. So this blog post is going to be me rehearsing a potential letter to the editor. If I write it, it will be shorter and more pointed than this entry. This is just going to be me venting.

Right off the bat you know there is going to be trouble. When a Christian, especially an evangelical, takes theological cues from pop culture you have to wonder what they’re thinking. We evangelicals are supposed to be the ones who hold to Biblical inerrancy and sola scriptura. General revelation, including pop culture, is below that in authority.¹Pop culture is way below that. So when she starts out by citing Evan Almightly, of all things, I am really concerned. Here’s how she starts:

In the film, God (played by Morgan Freeman) claims that people miss the point of the story of Noah’s Ark because they think it’s about God’s anger, when really it’s a “love story.” Some Christians saw that statement as an offensive distortion of the Genesis account of God’s wrath. Their protest left me pondering what I suspect is a fundamentally important question: Is there any story about God that isn’t a love story?

Well, yes and no. It depends on what love you’re talking about. Was the flood account a love story? With mankind? Not with the mankind God got so angry at that he wished he’d not made them after all. God didn’t love them. What about Israel’s wilderness experience? According to Psalm 95:10 God loathed that generation. Are these love stories?

Yes. They are. But not in the way Carolyn means them. You see, Arends admits that she grew up with two ideas of God. One from Bernhard Plockhorst’s Jesus Blessing the Children and the other she describes as “a peeved Father Time crossed with an accusing Uncle Sam.” What comes to mind here is something J. I. Packer said in Knowing God:

Imagining God in our heads can be just as real a breach of the second commandment as imagining Him by the work of our hands. How often do we hear this sort of thing: ‘I like to think of God as the great Architect.’ ‘I don’t like think of God as a Judge; I like to think of Him simply as Father.’ We know from experience how often remarks of this kind serve as the prelude to a denial of something that the Bible tells us about God. It needs to be said with the greatest possible emphasis that those who hold themselves free to think of God as they like are breaking the second commandment.

Notice that Packer says that “remarks of this kind serve as the prelude to a denial of something that the Bible tells us about God.” This is important as we consider how Arends deals with these two ‘conflicting’ views of God. The crucial question is whether she has denied some Biblical truth in her formulation. Keep that in mind.

She asks,

What if God grieves sin less because it offends his sensibilities, and more because he hates the way it distorts our perceptions and separates us from him?

Well, what do you think? Is she denying or missing some Biblical truth here? All of those episodes of God’s wrath, she says, were merely expressions of his desire to be with us. He gets angry at the things that keep us apart. We’re the most treasured thing in God’s sight and so, since he is love, anything that keeps him from the objects of his love is subject to his anger.

But that doesn’t work and Carolyn knows it.

There are some pretty hard bits in Scripture. It is difficult to frame, say, the saga of Sodom and Gomorrah as a love story. But if we truly believe that God not only loves, but is love, we must believe there is no action he can take that is not animated by love.

Oh, it is much worse that that! What about episodes of eternal punishment?

So the angel swung his sickle across the earth and gathered the grape [rebellious human] harvest of the earth and threw it into the great winepress of the wrath of God. And the winepress was trodden outside the city, and blood flowed from the winepress, as high as a horse’s bridle [probably about 5 feet], for 1,600 stadia [about 184 miles!]. – Rev14:19-20

This is a pretty graphic example of God being very, very angry at people, not events or circumstances. This is much more serious than God’s destruction of two cities. This is Jesus triumphing over his enemies. If God loves people so much that he gets angry at things that keep Him away from them, what do we do with hell? What are we to do when God says that, for example, we “once were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind” (Eph 2:3)? That simply flies in the face of her attempted resolution of a perceived tension in scripture.

So how do we deal with this “problem” and remain true to Scripture? We must incorporate all of what the Bible says of God and not elevate the verse or two that describes Him the way we want to hear. God is love, yes. God is also wrathful. God is also jealous.²By the way, this was the very notion that drove Oprah away from the truth. She couldn’t reconcile a jealous God with a god who was no more than love. Probably the term that describes him most accurately is ‘holy’. God is holy. That encompasses all of his attributes. That God is love is true, but it is said only twice in the Bible and only in 1 John. That God is holy is said explicitly and implicitly all across the Bible!

But back to Arends’ original question. Let me rephrase it in what I believe might be a much more Biblical way; “What if God is angry at sin less because it offends his sensibilities, and more because it is an affront to his holiness?” In other words, God isn’t some crusty old dude (Father Time and Uncle Sam) who has picky moral standards. Rather, He is a Holy God who cannot look upon sin. Yet, he is love and so since he desires a relationship with his creation, he doesn’t simply wink at sin, he deals with it. He dealt with it in a most serious manner: he sent his Son to die to over come it!

You see, if we take Carolyn’s perspective, we cannot make sense of the cross. Did God love Jesus? Of course! And yet, it pleased him to crush him in order to bring many sons to glory.

Ah, this ramble is long enough for now.

According to Christianity Today, Willow Creek is changing the focus of their weekend services. For quite a while they focused on unbelievers “through polished music, multimedia, and sermons referencing popular culture and other familiar themes,” according to the article. Now, Willow is going to “gear its weekend services toward mature believers seeking to grow in their faith.” No word on when the change is going to take place. There are folks standing on the Willow Creek sidelines (and farther away) who have been wringing their hands waiting for this for years. If you think about it, this change was inevitable. There is only so big and ‘audience’ they’re going to reach with this approach and what do you do when you’ve been doing that for 30 years? What do you do with those new believers? For Willow it seems that a lot would grow in the faith and then move on to another church.

I know and really respect Jim Renihan. I’ve known him for years, even stayed at his house for a few days. So when I disagree with him, I want to be clear that I’m doing it with great respect and care. Jim has written an blog post about special music in worship. Jim holds to the “Regulative Principle of Worship” which, in a nutshell, says that what God has not commanded in worship is not permissible. I’m not going to argue the merits or weaknesses of that position here, but simply point out that Jim’s criticism of modern worship seems to me to be largely based on generalizations. For example, what would happen if Jim visited a church and the special music consisted of a truly excellent singer with a string quartet doing an incredible version of some great hymn? It just reminds me of John Piper’s comments about “worshiping excellence” in Let The Nations Be Glad. The answer isn’t easy in either direction: anything goes or nothing.

I got my tax rebate in my bank account today. Now, as I understand it, it was supposed to be $600 for me, $600 for my wife and $300 for a qualifying child. That would put my rebate at $1,500. What got deposited was $1,409. So what is that, $200 for the qualifying child and $9 for the cat?

Will I spend it? How will I spend it? Hum, tough questions. Right now it resides in a comfortable, wall-to-wall carpeted, fully air conditioned, money market account where beautiful slave girls fan it and feed it grapes and 2% interest. I doubt it is going to stay there long. Iron Man comes out today and I feel the need to go see it at a theater with a good sound system and a big screen. Loud and Big seem appropriate. After that? Well, the IRS has determined I owe them some money so it seems they’ll get some of it back. Then Wheaton and BIOLA, for some reason, expect me to pay for my children’s education. Go figure.

In the end, I think I’m going to be a failure as an American. Instead of running directly to WalMart or Target with my Magic Economy Stimulation Wand in hand, I’m probably going to spend precious little in relation to the economy and instead purchase me a few pounds of education for my gene pool. Not very patriotic, I know. I’m sorry.

When Mark Driscoll is good, he is very good. Here he is being good: