Missing the point, again

Pyromaniacs: The-Holy-Spirit, not-the-Bible dodge (NEXT! #14)

It's not that biblidolatry leaves no room for the Holy Spirit - it's that it attempts to limit, box in, control God. After all, the bible can be studied, classified, theologized. The Holy Spirit is uncontrollable by you and I. And that is a frighting thought

Quote of the Day

The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any word in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

Soren Kierkegaard

Thank You For Selling Your Soul To The Republicans, Mr. Moral Majority/James Dobson/Religous Right

Because you have proven your faithlessness.

From GQ, perhaps the most disturbing thing to come from the Bush II White House - terrible exegesis, and all in all a insanely bad witness to the world.

You all rode that horse, now you go down with him. Perhaps there was a reason Jesus formed no political party, took no position on monetary systems?

Irony Abounds

Slandering fundamentalists is something of an acceptable pastime for evangelicals (not to mention the wider Christian community and culture). But since slander is sin, we're better off showing respect (even when we critique) and seeking to learn what we can.

(spelling correction and bold are mine)

Thanks for the cup of Fe -
Between Two Worlds: Fundamentalism 101

Enabling the Fault Finders - Should Bloggers turn from the Carnage?

Tim Challies posted on fault finders (a.k.a. known as Watch Bloggers, an all together too referential and polite term for the worst of the vermin).

Filling our minds, our hearts, our computer screens, our blogs with all that is wrong in the church will do little to conform us into the image of the Savior. It can do little. My encouragement to you, whether you are a regular visitor to one of these sites or whether you simply visit them occasionally, is to examine your heart and to examine your motives. Do you visit such sites because they have information that you truly need to know? Or do you visit as a means of entertainment? Are you delighting in what is good and true and pure and lovely, or are you finding a strange, sick delight in all that is evil and ugly?

This has made it's way around the blogosphere, with interesting, if predictable results. including Challies having to shut down comments because of the crazies.

Phil Johnson tweeted it (and then deleted his tweet - that is odd), at which point it hit the fan, including when Justin Taylor picked up on, along with the usual suspects who are now calling for Challies to repent for calling them out (sort of, as he never named names).

The Question is this ---

If bloggers agree that Fault Finders function (at best) no more than watching bubble headed bleach blonde's telling us about plane crashes with a gleam in their eye ... Why do bloggers link to them? Why are they placed in their blog rolls???

If they function as parasites to peoples souls - then pluck them out and cast them away. De link Fault Finders. Get them away from you.

And yes, I mean Ken Silva, Ingrid, and all their ilk. I will name names, but I won't link. I stopped reading them because they are poison to the soul. And I began the process of de-linking long ago.

Postscript - Frank Turk in Challies meta (which Challies closed because of how it degenerated) describes watch bloggers as:

Any blog-like website which has the primary objective of “exposing” the church life errors of people in the English-speaking, North American church; sees “apologetics” as primarily the prosecution of guilty heretics and not as turning a brother away from sin; rarely turns its attention to exhorting the exceeeding beauty and sufficiency of Christ.

fair enough

Where is the charity in amoungst the NeoReformed Bloggers?

"In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, charity."

Attibuted to many, the phrase has been adopted by many.

Yet charity seems to be lacking amoung the Neoreformed

Let's define charity first - it has been defined as unlimited loving-kindness

I propose a simple definition for bloggers - not assuming ill, or fault, where there is no reason to do so. Basically - I will not blog unchartably about someone without more evidence than ....

-- 28 words qouted by a reporter in a newspaper (instead of assuming that a world renkowned Bible Professor might have said something just a little different) and proceeding to sub title the post "Unrepentant Professors...."

-- taking the words from an interview about a particular subject, then completly missunderstanding them, while declaring his views "claptrap" (although at least an apology came from that)

-- labeling a reknowned author and professor books to be worthless, not because he has read the works (because he admits he has not), but because of the authors association with the Anglican church.

Why the Conversation Matters

The text doesn't mean one thing today and something else tomorrow.  Whatever it means, it means forever.  But you will never cease the process of applying the truth to your life (Howard and William Hendricks)

Some of the NeoReformed will camp out on the first part of that concept - especially when they hammer on Emergent' s.  But the fact is, the conversation is all about the second part - how do we apply that truth in our lives?