Letters to the Point, Mostly

A couple issues back you shared a playlist (Americana), which I found kind of fun. While listening my way through I discovered some musicians I had not heard or heard of, who’s music and singing I enjoyed. You might want to try that again sometime.

James

It’s a little late to be writing parables about TGC and Mark Driscoll, but you must have a reason.

From my perch, it is my sincere hope that God does not judge you for publishing diatribes against humanity for being liars and totalitarians when they were merely fallible and caught asleep at the wheel.

FX

Where can I get a “Christ or chaos” T-shirt?

Jill

I am sure you have received many questions about masks; I would like to add one more, pertaining to the principle of stumbling block and liberty.

I have read your take that our Christian liberty means we make room for their standard (wearing a mask) and they make room for our standard (not wearing a mask).

How would you respond if someone brought up 1 Corinthians 8 and attempted to make this a meat sacrificed to idols situation? “By not wearing a mask, you are causing your weaker brother to sin and putting a stumbling block in his path.”

Liam

I am wondering if you could clarify something. When it comes to the coronavirus it seems like we’re basically past the emergency. If you’re below the age of 50 and healthy, the mortality rate is very very low (I would send you links, but I’m sure you get enough of those).

Are we at the point now that young healthy people should not take any extraordinary measures against coronavirus? In fact, are they almost duty-bound to get coronavirus to speed the time to herd immunity?

As a healthy person in my mid-40s, I will admit that I do not want to get coronavirus. But to be faithful, should I not try to avoid it? Is inoculation the way to go? If not this then what is the long-term goal for people who are faithful? We should try to get to herd immunity as quickly as possible, since our elders over 50 shouldn’t be all alone until we get a vaccine, especially since a vaccine is at least a year away, if ever.

Thanks.

David

I just saw the photo of your grandson wearing snorkeling gear to the grocery store. Ha! I am grateful for the warm chuckle that bubbled out of my concerned and somewhat weary soul.

I also like the idea of wearing a burka. We seven have joked about it during our evening meal around the dining room table.

My husband and I appreciate your encouraging words.

Racheal

It seems to me there are really two separate debates going on with the whole mask thing. On the one hand you have discussion over wearing of the mask and its disease mitigation abilities. This conversation involves epidemiology, statistics, and double blind studies etc, and is concerned with the biological life – the lung’s right to breathe. On the other hand is the recurrent debate of government overreach which, in this case, has as its central controversy masks, though has taken other forms in the past (abortion, Obergefell, etc.) This debate involves ideologies, philosophy and historical nuance and is concerned with Liberty — the soul’s right to breathe. Both sides are concerned about breathing and each side feels suffocated by the other, but each side thinks the other is having the debate on their own turf. In reality, they are two separate debates happening at the same time on opposite sides of campus, each one rebutting an empty lectern. These debates obviously intersect when we get to the prescription phase. When we don’t keep these debates in their own lanes we won’t be able to make a clear, educated, nuanced decision when they intersect.

For my money, it looks like Sweden struck this balance the best (article below). They didn’t mandate masks but put the responsibility back on the people, honoring their freedom and individual responsibility. Many states in the US mandated it from on high and acted surprised when a country which is founded on individual freedom refuses to comply with this new taxation without representation. Because it is a tax.

Many have forgotten the purpose of the masks, which has always been to not overwhelm the healthcare system. As an ER nurse, we have been enormously underwhelmed. We are seeing about 30% less patients over the past 3 months and the hospital system as a whole is hemorrhaging 120 million a month! What kind of pandemic is it when shifts of ER nurses are cut? But at this point people wear masks like it will keep them from getting sick. That was never the point. As the article I cited says about flattening the curve via masks adherence, “you don’t prevent deaths, you just change the date.”

Tim

I am grieved that my church will not open up despite other local churches. I have written a letter to the pastor and also an email. His response is summed up in the linked video, but his main premise is that we need to not be selfish and think about the community.

I feel conflicted about pressing the issue with him. I sincerely believe we should be open and worshiping our God, but I do not want to cause trouble in the church.

Finally, do you think online church meets the spirit of Hebrews 10:25? Why should we meet in person? I am torn because I don’t have a good reason to back up my strong belief that we should meet in person when there is a very strong argument for online church.

In Christ,

Travis

In last week’s letters, you responded to Chuck in Pennsylvania that you would “still kick” against the mask and isolation mandates by pointing to the wording of the statute. I agree with that. But you’ve also talked about higher authorities, constitutions and the Bible. Would you say in Chuck’s case that even if the statute had clearly provided the authorities unambiguous authority to mandate masks and isolation for healthy people that he would still have leave to kick because of the U.S. Constitution and/or the Bible?

Bill

The subject on the masks has been beaten like a dead horse, so I’m going to continue beating it. Masks are the new fad, but also the new topic to either protest against or protest for. I’m on the side of hating the masks, but unfortunately I wear them when I’m in Target or the grocery store or at a restaurant. Rather not go to an establishment that enforces the mask, if I have to wear them.

Once my profession starts up, I will have to teach in a classroom from 7am until 2pm wearing a mask. Not my cup of tea, but I need to provide for the two-income household our capitalistic society demands!

When asking a fellow teacher (union rep), if I were not to wear the mask at school what would happen? No hesitation: “You’ll be written up and potentially dismissed.” Well, that ends that debate. What do you think I should do? Start my own school?

Rob

Masks and a Lesson in Narnian Civics

Thank you for your posts and for the way you help believers think through these issues! I wondered if you could recommend a book on the Christian’s engagement with government and all the relevant Scriptures (Romans 13, 1 Peter 2, etc.). Thank you!

Kirk

I appreciate all that you’re doing. You and I would disagree on quite a bit but my heart hurts over the “wokeness” and denial of biblical categories for morals. I’ve tried to show how no one could have a biblical understanding of government and support public education, how gender roles are explained away, or how the moral concerns are dictated by their media choices not the word of God. I left grad school 12 years ago pumped to be reformed baptist, and was a devotee of Calvinist organizations like TGC and reformed schools. But even they are starting to sound like a state college professor lecturing on cross sectionality and preaching more like Gustavo Gutierrez then Edwards. It breaks my heart especially after living in a Marxist country and realizing that the very ideology of blaming individualism for everything that is destroying so many lives even now is being embraced. Thank you for not feeling totally abandoned. I hitched my wagon to the reformed world because it was soli deo Gloria, focused on God not man. Now it’s only focus is human flourishing. If I have children and grandchildren I’ll be lamenting to them that I remember a time the SBC and PCA weren’t liberation theology proponents.

Luke

I see a potential threat to our faithful Christian friends from our trained Marxist friends: Our Bible translations could be flagged as “white translations,” and therefore the churches who use them be flagged as hate groups to be removed. This would make the persecutions look like they are not anti-Christian, but rather like they are just carrying out another Anti-Racist tenet.

If the Marxists are trained as they say they are, they will probably go for a more divide-and-conquer approach in flagging the translations, in a manner similar to the statues. First, they start with the KJV (and prior translations) as low hanging fruit. Then, they go for the more popular conservative versions: NASB, RSV, ESV, etc. Then finally, they come for the popular evangelical translations: NIV and the like, with all the paraphrase versions.

In the meanwhile, they will be “translating” the Bible according to the philosophy of the Smithsonian and in line with the tenets of Black Lives Matter. (They might leave Psalm 23 alone, for the comfort of the woke and squishy evangelical masses.) To reject that version would be to reject the translation from the perspective of people of color and therefore be associated with white supremacy.

Thank you for your ministry,

Luke

I have been trying to find this Ride, Sally, Ride–is this another novel by Doug. I hope so, but I can’t find it.

Mark

RE: Olford’s statement on calling for a verdict. Excellent statement. T. Austin Phelps wrote a book entitled The Theory of Preaching. It has been long out of print. He defines preaching in a chapter that takes many pages (about 100 as I recall). His definition of preaching is: “Preaching is an oral address, to the popular mind, upon religious truth as contained in the Christian Scriptures, and elaborately treated with a view to persuasion.” Each of those phrases is a major head in the chapter. If we haven’t persuaded, we haven’t preached. Persuasion seems to be the fundamental distinction between teaching and preaching.

Fred

George MacDonald is a terrible novelist and a worse theologian. After a lifetime of having his books foisted on me on the strength of back-cover blurbs by Lewis & Co., a dear friend has recently made shipwreck of his faith by following MacDonald out of the plot-less candy-land of his fiction into the abattoir of his pathetic heresies.

I’ll read heterodox geniuses (Pascal! Milton! Eliot!), and I’ll read orthodox mediocrity (Crossway books!), but tell me why I should bother with MacDonald’s heretical drivel?

Why will no one else admit this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!

Philip

One small issue with your article. You say, “They were attracted to what was called “worldview thinking,” At the very least they wanted to be able to go to R-rated movies without anybody at church giving them grief about it.”

My issue is with the phrase “at the very least.” I think that is wildly understating the issue. This is the whole issue. Unregenerate people desire sinful things of the world, but want approval while doing so. So for decades now, American “Christians” (heavy emphasis on the air-quotes) have been drinking the worlds movies, music, magazines, clothes, etc and justifying it in a myriad of ways. Any pulpit calls for discernment in areas of entertainment or modesty are decried as legalistic. This cancer has soaked so deep into American “Christianity” that TGC openly promotes much of this worldly filth. So what do you expect when the world goes even further into crazy-town. They march right along with them, because they’ve been doing it for decades. This is exactly what we should have expected.

This is why the call to American “Christianity” should not be, “don’t you see that Critical-Race Theory is dangerous” (although this is true). The call should be, “repent of all this wickedness you’ve allowed into your homes.” Only when American “Christianity” wakes up to it’s love of the world and repents of it, will it have eyes clear enough to see the other dangers around it.

Thanks for your writing.

Roger

In your most recent Plodcast 151 you demonstrated how to pronounce IMPIOUS. Actually, according to Merriam-Webster, you can pronounce it either way — IM-pious or IM-PIE-OUS.

Just call me the Grammar Curmudgeon.

Marilyn