November 2006

Here are two pieces that wonderfully illustrate the blessings God pours out on this evil world through Christians who, from love for God and man, work for justice in civil society. The first is a short op-ed piece by Kathleen Parker that ran in today's Baltimore Sun. The second is this letter to the editor written by Chuck Colson that appeared in today's New York Times:

To the Editor:

David Kuo cites the idea that evangelical Christians take a two-year fast from politics ("Putting Faith Before Politics," Op-Ed, Nov. 16).

Hmmm. What would have happened if Christians over the last two years had taken a leave of absence from politics? Here's what would not have happened:

The Bush administration would not have taken on the issue of slavery in Sudan, AIDS in Africa or global sexual trafficking. We wouldn't have seen Congress pass a ban on "partial birth" abortions or take on prison rape and prisoner rehabilitation, or highlight the horrors of persecution in North Korea.

And what about Christians in public office? Leaders like Sam Brownback and Frank Wolf, who have risked their lives to go to troubled spots of the world to protect human rights and human dignity, would have just stayed home.

Christians should be engaged in public life as instruments of justice and righteousness.

A two-year fast? No thanks.

Charles W. Colson
Lansdowne, Va., Nov. 22, 2006
The writer is the founder of Prison Fellowship.

(Thanks, Jim and Mark.)

Every time someone asks a candidate for licensure, "Tell me why dispensationalism is wrong," in the candidates and credentials committee of my presbytery I cringe.

I'm not a dispensationalist, but the answers sought and given are often caricatures rather than fair assessments.

Some years ago I sought to explain to one of the last dinosaurs of dispensationalism why dispensationalists couldn't be true Calvinists. The dispensationalist I was talking to was John Sailhamer. The setting of our talk was a breakfast at the 2000 meeting of the Evangelical Society in Boston--where John was assuming the presidency of ETS. The issues we discussed were Amyraldianism and the order of God's decrees (infralapsarianism vs. supralapsarianism). And what I learned was that I didn't know Reformed theology as well as my dispensationalist friend, let alone dispensationalism.

By the end of our conversation most of my cocksure views had been gently removed and I promised myself I would never again presume to define dispensationalism's faults--at least to a real live thinking dispensationalist. I don't agree with dispensationalism, but I'm not an expert on it. And when I did meet an expert, I found certain stock Reformed criticisms of dispensationalism rather threadbare. Dispensationalists deserve to be taken seriously. Reformed believers don't appreciate being accused of the things Arminians suggest against us. Most are false. We need to be as careful in what we say about dispensationalism as we ask Arminians to be toward us.

For more on illegitimate criticisms of dispensationalism read this post by Dan Phillips.

The unmentioned scandal of late-20th/early-21st century preaching is not the number of preachers seeking outside inspiration for their sermons. That's well-documented. Just as baleful in its effect on modern preaching has been the number of preachers who have turned from preaching sermons to a flock to writing sermons for an audience.

My father used to tell his children that written and spoken English are two entirely different languages. And it's true. Equally distinct are sermons addressed to a particular flock and sermons written for a broad reading audience.

Throughout the centuries a number of great preachers have had their sermons collected and published. But the sermons contained in such volumes were seldom prepared with publication in mind. Rather, they were preached to a congregation (often from notes or extemporaneously) and later made available for publication. For instance, John Calvin's sermons are available in written form due to the work of a French shorthand expert named Denis Raguenier who took verbatim shorthand notes from Calvin's extemporaneous preaching. Luther's sermons were carefully recorded by a variety of listeners. Martyn Lloyd-Jones' sermons were mechanically recorded and later transcribed. Jonathan Edwards sermons are still being culled from handwritten manuscripts and must be edited for publication.

Today many preachers write sermons with minds divided between a local congregation and the national audience they hope to reach through a book they intend to publish out of their current sermon series. The result is wretched preaching (and often wretched publishing to boot).

Many of the greatest preachers of our time have declined in power as they have shifted focus from a local church and specific congregation to a national audience. If you listen to early sermons by many preachers whose sermons are routinely published today you find power not present in current preaching. Sadly, the powerful preaching of a young pastor often leads a publisher to offer book contracts for future sermons and those book contracts become the death of the preacher's power.

It's also true that preachers whose sermons are routinely broadcast often fall into a similar trap of preaching for a broad audience rather than preaching to build a particular Church

Preaching for posterity rather than for the current needs of a particular flock leads to emasculated preaching. Those who preach for publication can be divided into two camps: populists and scholars. Populists tend to become more oratorical, to illustrate more liberally and to over-simplify. Those preaching for more scholarly publication (commentaries, for instance) become more pedantic and theoretical. Both types of preaching are devoid of pointed application.

Many good preachers also write great books. But in the end, I am convinced that preaching for publication is preaching for pay and honor. And that always bodes ill for power.

A staple of growing up in an Evangelical church was this explanation of Cain's rejected sacrifice: "Cain's offering was a verry baaad offering because it came from the fruit of the ground rather than the fat of the flock like Abel's. God likes lamb offerings. God doesn't like fruit or grain offerings."

Legalists find such reasoning essential. There must be an objective reason grounded in the actions of Cain and Abel to account for God's disregard of Cain's offering and embrace of Abel's. And the easiest such explanation lies in the distinction between what was offered. Cain's fruit-of-the-ground offering was rejected because it was deficient, of lesser worth or excellence: "When God later establishes a sacrificial system for Israel, dear children, He demands lambs goats and bulls. We must therefore bring God our agricultural firstfruits, our lambs, the very best and most objectively beautiful of the fruit of our farms...."

There are two problems with this explanation, one rather obvious, the other less so. The more obvious is that, when established, God's sacrificial system actually does provide for grain, oil, and wine offerings--fruit-of-the-ground as well as fruit-of-the-flock worship.

Bloomington's city council recently passed a gender identity ordinance opposed by the testimony and public opposition of a number of the members and officers of Church of the Good Shepherd. The ordinance was modeled after similar ordinances passed around the country in the past few years, all aimed at protecting an individual's right to identify his gender any way he chooses regardless of his biological sexuality. Among other things, such laws guarantee the individual's right to use whatever dressing room, locker room, or bathroom he'd like. So in public schools in Los Angeles, for instance, the law forbids teachers from stopping men from using the women's locker room. But it gets worse.

The New York Times reports that New York City's Board of Health now plans to allow individuals to go back and alter the sex marked down on their birth certificate. Yes, you read that right...