So then, yesterday I read an article by Anthony Bradley, here, that I thought was fantastic. And so I tweeted this:
“Gosh, this was good. Anthony Bradley jacks it out of the park.”
Afterwards, I read this tweet from John Piper:
“Bradley messes up a good article by saying David Platt “misses ‘radical’ ideas in Jesus’ own teachings like ‘love.”
Of course, I still think it was a great article, the general point of which needs to be hammered home, again and again. But John’s tweet made it apparent that I needed to say something containing more than 140 characters.
I was not saying anything about Anthony’s specific comment about David Platt — not having read him, I am in absolutely no position to do so. I have seen examples of what Anthony was talking about, but my tweet shouldn’t be taken as endorsing any negative views of Platt. Nor should the fact that I haven’t read Platt be taken as an implied criticism. I have books all over the place that I ought to be reading, probably right now, not to mention many books that I don’t even have that I ought to be reading.
Since Anthony and I have collided publicly several times in the last year or so, I had wanted to simply commend his article without any qualification — no damning with faint praise, or anything like that. So I just exuberated within the alloted character limit.
These efforts at agreement and peacemaking were intended to extend an olive branch to Anthony, but not having read Platt, that comment didn’t register with me, but I now see that I inadvertantly stuck a burnt olive stick into David Platt’s eye. So, my apologies to him.
My efforts at peacemaking are now concluded, and so I retire from the field.