All right — we need to talk for a moment about propositions, and tie it in with the point of my previous post. Emergent advocates consistently oppose the importance of “story” to the land of arid “propositions,” whence they are departing. I have argued that this is simply a profound category confusion — stories are …
Painting the Couch
One of the most exasperating features of emergent church thinking is the constant tendency to set propositional statements over against narrative. Abandoning propositions, they are trying to recover the idea of pastor as story-teller. As I have pointed out before, this is like abandoning verbs and nouns in favor of sentences, or lumber for houses. …
The Centrality of Peripherals
Incarnation trumps abstraction. The things we do every day, the things we do all the time, matter to us far more than those things we might think (or say) are crucial elements in our worldview. This explains, among other things, why the worship wars go the way they do in church. Someone could attend our …
Getting Miered Down
For many observers, the conservative revolt over the Miers nomination to the Supreme Court was out of the blue. But for those paying attention, it is not hard to explain at all. For a number of years, movement conservatives have been holding their noses (and largely keeping quiet) over lots of issues — the appalling …
When And What To Plunder From the Egyptians
Whenever believers confront unbelieving cultures, the perennial question arises — what can and cannot be taken from them and used by us in the advancement of the kingdom? One of the most enduring illustrations of what to do here is the image given by one of the early church fathers, which is that of plundering …
More Red Statey Extremism
Nick Gier, one of our Intolerista honchos, had a letter in our local paper tonight. This is a letter which I would like to gloss for you as a public service. His letter is in bold, my comments are interspersed. I was shocked to learn that the Daily News has given Ed Iverson, someone closely …
Godly Cover Ups
One of Jane Austen’s characters (somewhere) says that honesty is a greatly over-rated virtue. Of course we should not take this as a basis for justifying ungodly lies or other forms of unrighteous deceit. But at the same time, we should recognize that within the Church there are a number of verbal sins which are …
Covenant Renewal Worship
As we change our order of worship, we need to be mindful of the fact that we do not change for the sake of change — we are not merely rearranging the furniture to keep from becoming bored. That is a mentality that comes from restless spirits, who think that spontaneity is the justification of …
Hypocrisy on Stilts
The problem of Pharisaism is not solved by dropping the phylactery that is “wider than yours” and picking up the Bible that is “more underlined than yours.” You cannot solve spiritual problems of the heart simply by rearranging the furniture. We are born casting sidelong glances, and the solution to this is repentance, not really …
Hollow As A Jug
I am over in Portland for the presbytery meeting of the CREC, at which we have been doing lots of cool presbyterial stuff. Anyhow, I posted what I did this morning on affected authenticity, and went off to presbytery. When I got back this evening there was a small mountain of comments, etc., which I …