The Big Issues - How Can the Church Prepare?

via thegospelcoalition.org

Tim Keller has penned an excellent analysis of what the church ought to be doing to address the huge challenges it currently faces. One of his recommendations stands out in my mind - a renewal of apologetics in the church. Keller believes that the contemporary church's laxity in this area reflects a larger hole in western thinking. Keller cites two primary reasons for renewed Christian apologetics:

First, Christians in the West will finally be facing what missionaries around the world have faced for years — how to communicate the gospel to Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and adherents of various folk religions. All young church leaders should take courses in and read the texts of the other major world religions. They should also study the gospel presentations written by missionaries engaging those religions. Loving community will be extremely important, as it always is, to reach out to neighbors of other faiths, but if they are going to come into the church, they will have many questions that church leaders today need to be able to answer.

Second, there a real vacuum in western secular thought. When Derrida died I was surprised how many of his former students admitted that High Theory (what evangelicals call ‘post-modernism’) is seen as a dead end, mainly because it is so relativistic that it provides no basis for political action. And a leading British intellectual like Terry Eagleton in recent lectures at Yale (published as Religion, Faith, and Revolution by Yale Press) savaged the older scientific atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens as equally bankrupt. Eagleton points out that the Enlightenment’s optimism about science and human progress is dead. Serious western thought is not going back to that, no matter how popular Dawkins’ books get. But postmodernism cannot produce a basis for human rights or justice either.

Emphasis added.  I think this analysis is spot-on. If you are interested in apologetics, I can recommend a wonderful starter book called the Holman QuickSource Guide to Christian Apologetics by Doug Powell.

Please note that if you elect to purchase the book through the above link, I will receive a small percentage of the sale price.

Posted via web from The Central Point

Gamechanger

via blog.beliefnet.com

Ben Witherington reports on an amazing find in eastern turkey - a temple complex approximately 11,500 years old called Gobeckli Tepe - and discusses the implications.

Posted via web from christopherdrew's posterous

From the "Unintentionally Entertaining" File

Here is an amusing article wherein Christopher Hitchens, atheist, demonstrates a deeper knowledge of orthodox Christianity that his interviewer, who happens to be a Unitarian Universalist minister. See especially the fourth question by Marilyn Sewell and Hitchens's response:

[Sewell]: The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make and distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?

[Hitchens] I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.

I respect Hitchens, who is generally a great thinker despite his tragic disbelief. It speaks volumes that he is so informed on the apostolic faith while the "minister," also tragically, is not.

A New Year, A New Blog

Happy New Year!

As we enter the year 2010, I have decided that it's time to resume the blogging enterprise. My old blog, ::What Next?:: was much fun.  It's now retired.  I've copied all of the entries to this blog, and the old one will go by the wayside permanently at some point in the future.

In deciding to jump back onto the horse, I had to determine what God might want me to accomplish by rebirthing this blogging work.  It's taken a long time to discern what this could be.

I've been galvanized lately by some great preaching and wonderful reading.  In all of that, one thing stood out as the mission for this new blog - that it be a vehicle for the expression of joy in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

That joy could assume a variety of expressions.  Polemic can even be joyful as long as it glorifies God.  We'll see what happens.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you in this New Year.

John Calvin on Matthew 15:1/Mark 7:1

We see the extraordinary insolence that is displayed by men as to the form and manner of worshiping God; for they are perpetually contriving new modes of worship, and when any one wishes to be thought wiser than others, he displays his ingenuity on this subject. I speak not of foreigners, but of the very domestics of the Church, on whom God has conferred the peculiar honor of declaring with their lips the rule of godliness.

Emphasis added. "The very domestics of the Church."

Peril

While reflecting on the lectionary gospel reading for this Sunday, Mark 4:35-41, I came across this wonderful prayer from a great little book called "The Valley of Vision: Puritan Prayers and Devotions":

Sovereign Commander of the Universe,
I am sadly harassed by doubts, fears, unbelief, in a felt spiritual darkness.
My heart is full of evil surmisings and disquietude, and I cannot act faith at all.
My heavenly Pilot has disappeared, and I have lost my hold on the Rock of Ages;
I sink in a deep mire beneath storms and waves, in horror and distress unutterable.
Help me, O Lord, to throw myself absolutely and wholly on thee, for better, for worse, without comfort, and all but hopeless.
Give me peace of soul, confidence, enlargement of mind, morning joy that comes after night heaviness;
Water my soul richly with diving blessings;
Grant that I may welcome thy humbling in private so that I might enjoy thee in public;
Give me a mountain top as high as the valley is low.
Thy grace can melt the worst sinner, and I am as vile as he;
Yet thou hast made me a monument of mercy, a trophy of redeeming power;
In my distress let me not forget this.
All-wise God, Thy never-failing providence orders every event, sweetens every fear, reveals evil's presence lurking in seeming good, brings real good our of seeming evil, makes unsatisfactory what I set my heart upon, to show me what a short-sighted creature I am, and to teach me to live by faith upon thy blessed self.
Out of my sorrow and night give me that name Naphtali - "satisfied with favor" - help me to love thee as a child, and to walk worthy of my heavenly pedigree.

[Bennett, Arthur G. The Valley of Vision A Collection of Puritan Prayers and Devotions. Carlisle: Banner of Truth, 2003, 184-185.]

A Minister's Preaching

My Master God,

I am desired to preach today,

but go weak and needy to my task;

Yet I long that people might be edified

with divine truth,

that an honest testimony might be borne

for thee;

Give me assistance in preaching and prayer,

with heart uplifted for grace and unction.

Present to my view things pertinent to

my subject,

with fullness of matter and clarity of thought,

proper expressions, fluency, fervency,

a feeling sense of the things I preach,

and grace to apply them to men's consciences.

Keep me conscious all the while of my defects,

and let me not gloat in pride over

my performance.

Help me offer a testimony for thyself,

and to leave sinners inexcusable in neglecting

thy mercy.

Give me freedom to open the sorrows of thy people,

and to set before them comforting considerations.

Attend with power the truth preached,

and awaken the attention of my slothful audience.

May thy people be refreshed, melted, convicted,

comforted,

and help me use the strongest arguments

drawn from Christ's incarnation and sufferings,

that men might be made holy.

I myself need thy support, comfort, strength,

holiness,

that I might be a pure channel of thy grace,

and be able to do something for thee;

Give me then refreshment among thy people,

and help me not to treat excellent matter

in a defective way,

or bear a broken testimony to so worthy

a Redeemer,

or be harsh in treating of Christ's death,

its design and end,

from lack of warmth and fervency.

And keep me in tune with thee

as I do this work.

[Bennett, Arthur G. The Valley of Vision A Collection of Puritan Prayers and Devotions. Carlisle: Banner of Truth, 2003, 348-349.]