Sunday, March 25, 2012

On Evil's Elimination

Later this year, the University Fellowship of Christians have their God vs. Evil events. I'm really looking forward to them, and I figure now is a good time to prepare for it by getting my head back in the game, so to speak.

Obviously, you could scarcely manage to be a Christian for as long as I have without giving evil/suffering/pain considerable thought. For instance, I particularly appreciated Henri Blocher's, Evil and the Cross.

More recently, I liked Alvin Plantinga's video interview on CPX a couple of years ago (the last part of the interview, especially).

But just today, I read the transcript of this address by Greg Clarke, also from CPX. It's entitled, The Elimination of Evil.

At one point, Clarke compares a popular estimation of God's judgement with a biblical picture:
This gracious act of Jesus, as God incarnate, is an entirely different kind of act to what people expect of a perfect God who is judging evil. It is almost the opposite of what Zizek [...] calls ‘divine violence’ [...] a gleeful divine punishment, pleasurably handing out what the evil creatures deserve. But the message of Christianity is vastly different.
Well worth a read. And it comes with a bonus: Clarke also includes a lengthy quote from Bono, which is bang on target.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Beyond Hellish Self-Centredness

Recently, I finished reading David Powlison's, Seeing with New Eyes. My ol' mate Kristan recommended it to me years ago, and I'm very thankful that he did.

Powlison's writing about Counseling as a professional in the field. But he's an evangelical trying to put the horse back in front of the cart in a discipline where the cart has led the way for a good while. (Note: this book pre-dates Tim Chester's, You Can Change, by some 5 years, I think).

I particularly appreciated his thoughtful critique of Gary Chapman's, The Five Love Languages. Chapman's book, says Powlison,
"...not only leaves fundamental self-interest unchallenged, it plays to self-interest." (230)
He pithily captures the dynamic here:
"[Five Love Languages] does slightly alter the 'You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours' calculus. It is a 'glorified version', taking a small step in the right direction by reversing the order. 'I scratch your back (and then it's likely you'll scratch mine).' " (232)
Now, let's be clear, there's lots of handy stuff in Chapman's book as Powlison is quick to point out. But oh-so-many Christian-ish psychology books pull the same move (e.g. Kevin Leman's books spring to mind).

Powlison pin-points the problem when he makes the gospel his point of comparison:
"The love of Christ speaks a 'love language'--mercy to hellishly self-centred people..." (236)
That's the language in which Christians must become fluent.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Cultivating Intelligent Engagement with Common Objections

Recently I was looking over the Effective Ministry stuff again. These common objections caught my eye (numbers are percentages for people in their twenties):


  • Irrelevant        13
  • It’s for non-copers        17
  • Set of rules        5
  • Science disproves it        6
  • No proof        10
  • For the well off        2
  • The only way?        9
  • Problem of suffering        31
  • Truth of the Bible        27
  • Good, but not for me        21
  • Too many hypocrites        5
  • I’m not good enough        5
  • Other        3
It got me thinking, "Where are we equipping our people to intelligently engage with these common objections?". It's not hard to relate any of them back to the gospel, either, as (for example) Tim Keller has shown in The Reason for God.

But then a second reflection came to mind: perhaps there's an implicit assumption that undergirds all of these objections. Let me put it positively in the language of a hypothetical objector:

"I want to be thoughtful about how I live in this world, and why I live that way. And I just don't think churches are in the habit of intelligently engaging with real issues with satisfying depth."

As an axiom, it's kinda the flip-side of the naming of the Brights Movement, for example.

So what? Well, if I'm right, then...
  • we've gotta assume that our public communication (e.g. advertising for church) has to punch through that assumption to register anything more than glib dismissal.
  • where we fail to engage with current issues, it will more likely be taken as deriving from our inability to do so, rather than our burden for evangelism-ahead-of-apologetics.
  • the task of training our people in winsome apologetics paves the way for evangelism methodologically, as well as topically.
  • the way we engage is important--and I don't mean rhetoric. But as we carefully articulate our engagement with any of the above topics (or indeed, something else altogether), we undermine the knock-down strength of all of them by illustrating the depth and integrity of Christian thought.

Friday, March 2, 2012

RTR now (finally) has a website

At long last, the brilliant Australian journal, Reformed Theological Review, has a website.

In the past, if you wanted to, say, change the mailing address for your subscription, you had to use one of those red post-box things in your street, together with stamps, an envelope, etc.--I could never figure it out.

No longer!

Subscribe now. Here. I dare you.