Archive for the ‘Deism’ Category
My Two Caveats for the Missional Church
I recently attended the Advance 2010 conference on Contextualizing the Gospel in the New Urban South. The content of the conference was excellent and the speakers were Gospel-centered and Christ-saturated. In the interest of full self-disclosure, I would willfully self-identify as being a part of the missional church movement. While steeping some of the teaching receieved, I am left with two potential pitfalls for the missional church movement.
I think the obituaries have already been written and the eulogies given for both the church growth movement and the emergent church. Hence, my first concern for the missional church movement is that it will just be another fad within evangelicalism. I’ve chronicled before the very fickle fadish-ness nature of American evangelicalism. We have the strong inclination to let our pendulums swing wildly, rarely finding any semblance of balance. If history is any predictor of the future, the missional church movement will gain steam, others will jump on the bandwagon, then the movement dies because many identified with the movement not for its intrinsic principles, but rather for its pragmatic ends. Nothing will kill a movement like the evil trinity of inauthenticity, superficiality, and pragmatism.
My second concern for the missional church movement is actually legalism. This may actually come as a surprise of anyone who saw/listened to any of the Advance 2010 material. Rightly so, Tyler Jones, Tullian Tchvidjian, Ed Stetzer and others railed against the quaint moralism (or think of Michael Horton’s, moralistic therapeutic deism) of the South. Here is how legalism could creep into the missional church movement… and it is really subtle and nasty. In your call to missional movement and mindset, create an implicit caste system within your church. In this caste system reward those who are ‘more on mission’ vs. those who are ‘less on mission.’ In this caste system the way to earn God’s favor is by doing the works of the mission of God. I don’t know if this kind of legalism is better/worse than any other form of self-salvation. Remember that legalism is one of those nasty sins like pride, that can literally manifest themselves in even the most counter-intuitive or even contradictory places (ie. one can be proud in one’s humility). We must be careful to still remind ourselves and others that our standing with God is not changed by even our greatest Gospel efforts or lack thereof.
In my view, we must guard the missional church movement from those who would see it as the next “it” way to grow your church (after shaving their soul patch and ceased showing movie clips). We must also guard against guilting people into being on mission. They must desire to be the church because of the Gospel not because it is the new way to rise in the legalistic caste system in your church.
Your thoughts?
3 Month Introspective
Introspective
So, I’ve been blogging consistently for three months. This is the week of Christmas and I’ll be all over the place. I thought I would briefly summarize the 3 months of blog series on here:
Blaise Pascal: We took a look at Blaise Pascal’s thinking, its use of aphorism and its relationship to both tri-perspectivalism and presuppositionalism. We also looked at his use of aphorism and his warnings against deism and atheism.
Thoughts on Evangelicalism Past, Present, and Future, Parts 1-7: We defined the term evangelical. We looked at its historical roots in the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening, and its ties to celebrity culture, democritization of knowledge, and modernism. Then we looked at the roots of liberalism, the Protestant split and suburbanization, and defined and outlined evangelical populism and their game plan for reaching America. Finally we assessed the current status of American evangelicalism and then made some predictions of future trends.
Introduction to Apologetics, Parts 1-7: We looked in broad strokes at the various schools of apologetics. We then took a more in-depth look at: Classical Apologetics, Evidentialist Apologetics, Presuppositional Apologetics, and the specific apologetics of Blaise Pascal and Alvin Plantinga. Finally, we employed the three phases football as an analogy for the different apologetic schools and I likened Tim Tebow to the presuppositionalists.
Thoughts on Evangelicalism Moving Forward, Parts 1-10: We looked at some analysis of some shifts evangelicalism will need to make moving forward: Doctrine, Worldview, Urbanization, Globality/Mobility, “Post-Modernism,” American Culture(s), Contextualization, Balance, and Final Analysis.
Top ~10 Books by Topic:
Top 10 Systematic Theology Texts
Top 10 Books on Science and Christianity
Top 10 Books on Christian Biography
Top 15 Books on Status of American Evangelicalism
Top 10 Books on Church History
Top 40 Books to Read While in College
Top 10 Books on Missions, Discipleship, and Evangelism
The 25 Most Destructive Books Ever Written…
Top 10 Books on Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility
Best Creeds, Confessions, and Catechisms of the Christian Church
A Comprehensive List of Top 10 Book Lists of 2009
Up Next: We will be looking at some thoughts on the economy and investment and then delve into the mind of Friedrich Nietzsche…
Mark Driscoll Worldview Vignettes
Mark Driscoll has some nice little worldview vignettes. They are worth watching if you have 15 minutes:
Atheism: Unyielding Despair
Deism: There is No Hero Coming
Pantheism-Panentheism: New Spirituality/Old Lies
Theism: We are Good and Have Great Hats
Christianity: How Jesus is Different
The Twin Dangers of Atheism and Deism
449. All those who seek God apart from Christ, and who go no further than nature, either find no light to satisfy them or come to devise a means of knowing and serving God without a mediator, thus falling into either atheism or deism, two things almost equally abhorrent to Christianity… They imagine that it simply consists in worshipping [sic] God considered to be great and mighty and eternal, which is properly speaking deism, almost as remote from the Christian religion as atheism, its complete opposite… But let them comclude what they like against deism, their conclusions will not apply to Christianity, which properly consists in the mystery of the Redeemer, who, uniting in himself the two natures, human and divine, saved men from the corruption of sin in order to reconcile them with God in his divine person. It teaches men then these two truths alike: that there is a God, of whom men are capable, and that there is a corruption in nature which makes them unworthy. It is of equal importance to men to know each of these points: and it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness without knowing the Redeemer who can cure him. Knowing only one of these points leads either to the arrogance of the philosophers, who have known God but not their own wretchedness, or to the despair of the atheists, who know their own wretchedness without knowing their Redeemer.
Atheism = Knowledge of wretchedness – knowledge of Redeemer = despair and nihilism
Deism = Knowledge of Redeemer – knowledge of sin = self-confidence and works-righteousness
Christianity = Knowledge of sin + knowledge of Redeemer = freedom and truth
Avoid the twin dangers of scylla and charybdis.
Modern Pensées 