“In the old days, this trick had to be accomplished by means of respectful titles like the ‘Rev.’ But nowadays, in these egalitarian times, the attitude of spiritual conceit has had to be a little more creative, and a pastor shows his prowess in humility by asking people to call him Joe. Behind the scenes …
Right
“In other words, I always believe that I am right. This is not the same thing as believing that I am always right. I know that I have often been wrong. Nevertheless, I, along with everyone else in the world, always believe (at the time the view is maintained) that I am right. No one …
Audio Reading of Post
Ethical Dyslexia
“The apostle Paul says, ‘For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake’ (2 Cor. 4:5). In the biblical pattern, arrogance preaches self while humility preaches Christ. In the modern world, we see how the reality of our inescapable concept takes over. In order to revolt against …
What Standard?
By what standard? This is one of my favorite questions, and we should ask it more often than we do. This includes those times when the right course of action is disputed among Christians, or when we are honestly confused about what we ought to do. What standard are we using? On paper, the answer …
Definitions of Arrogance
“We see the same thing in the conflict between biblical and modern theories of preaching. The biblical preacher is a herald, a steward. He has been entrusted to declare something that would have been true if he had never been born. He is to preach it with a strong view of his own ultimate irrelevance. …
Christ the Un-Christ-like
“Instead of seeking to learn our paradigms of behavior from the Scriptures, we tend to bring our assumptions, learned elsewhere and from others, and view the Scriptures through those assumptions. This is not a superficial problem; it goes down to the bone. The prophets, the apostles and our Lord Jesus all exhibit a vast array …
What Do We Imitate?
“And this is because certain non-Christian assumptions have come to dominate how we read the Bible. When Jesus looked on the rich, young ruler and loved him, it is very easy for us to say that we should be loving as He was. When preachers make such applications, no one thinks anything of it. But …
One Kind of Satire
“The Juvenalian approach can be harsh or buoyant. When Jesus describes His adversaries as vipers, the tone is a straightforward denunciation. But if someone were to describe a bureaucrat as one asleep at his desk so long that one side of his head was flat, this would be Juvenalian also — the point being most …
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 …
Axis of Treacle
“For now it should suffice to say that modern evangelicalism (not historic evangelicalism) is represented by what one president called the axis of treacle — Christianity Today, the Christian Booksellers Association, Wheaton College and its environs, Colorado Springs and its environs, Thomas Kinkade, and Jerry B. Jenkins” (A Serrated Edge, p. 13).