*update: John Piper tweeted this link regarding the hermeneutic of suspicion today. Fits in well with the theme of this post.
Here’s a special Monday edition of Clicki, Vidi, Linki (I clicked, I saw, I linked).
What did you hear at church yesterday? Did you hear the public reading and preaching of God’s Word…or was it something more “relevant?” Knowing many of the readers of this blog I have confidence that a good number of readers would cringe at that sentence since they understand that there is nothing more relevant to any culture than the inerrant, inspired, Holy Word of God. But alas, that apparently is not a connection that is being made in many “christian” churches. In dealing with this issue Al Mohler makes this statement:
In many churches, there is almost no public reading of the Word of God. Worship is filled with music, but congregations seem disinterested in listening to the reading of the Bible. We are called to sing in worship, but the congregation cannot live only on the portions of Scripture that are woven into songs and hymns. Christians need the ministry of the Word as the Bible is read before the congregation and God’s people — young and old, rich and poor, married and unmarried, sick and well — hear it together. The sermon is to consist of the exposition of the Word of God, powerfully and faithfully read, explained, and applied. It is not enough that the sermon take a biblical text as its starting point. read the entire article here
In the re-release preface of his book “Ashamed of the Gospel“, John MacArthur pinpoints one of the problems as the fad-driven church.
Western evangelicals had been gradually losing interest in biblical preaching and doctrinal instruction for decades. The church in America had become weak, worldly, and man-centered. Evangelical ears were itching for something more hip and entertaining than biblical preaching (cf. 2 Tim. 4:3), and business-savvy evangelical pundits declared that it was foolish not to give people what they demanded. Without pragmatic methodologies numerical growth would be virtually impossible, they insisted—even though such pragmatism was manifestly detrimental to spiritual growth.
MacArthur than shows how that detrimental philosophy migrated from the church in the west to the church in the east after the fall of communism. More of the preface can be read here.
It appears that people may indeed be looking for a “new kind of Christianity” but apart from God’s Word what they will find is yet another way to wind up eternally unsatisfied.
Which allows me to segue to this link which I highly recommend for those who are reading, have read or are considering to read “A New Kind of Christianity”. After reading many of the excerpts on the author’s blog, direct quotes from reviewers and opinions from other people in the ministry (one seminary student tweeted that the book is the best argument for getting a seminary education) I have decided that for now anyway I shall not waste God-given resources (i.e. time and money) one something that is obviously an affront to Christianity. I think the tipping point came when I read this quote:
Scripture faithfully reveals the evolution of our ancestors’ best attempts to communicate their successive best understandings of God. As human capacity grows to conceive of a higher and wiser view of God, each new vision is faithfully preserved in Scripture like fossils in layers of sediment.
Unless that quote was prefaced with “the following is an extremely bad view of revelation” and/or followed by “those who view the Bible this way are naive and embracing heresy” – I cannot justify reading my reading it, even for the sake of pointing out the heresies since it seems that Kevin DeYoung has already done a fair and probably more charitable job.
