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This Month's Scripture Verse:

1 But false prophets also appeared among the people, just as there will also be false teachers among you, who will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing swift destruction upon themselves. 2 Many will follow their indecent behavior, and because of them the way of the truth will be maligned; 3 and in their greed they will exploit you with false words; their judgment from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep..
II Peter 2:1-3

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Showing posts with label The Reformation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Reformation. Show all posts

Monday, November 6, 2017

ONIM For November 6, 2017

10 Best Fact Checking Sites Found Here.

If you are not sure about the validity of a news story linked to below, you can use  mediabiasfactcheck.com to check out the credibility of the source of most of the stories linked to here.


Christian News

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Friday, November 3, 2017

On Past And Future Reformations

In the month of October, much was written about celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. In reality, the Reformation didn't have one specific starting date. But because Martin Luther is deservedly a central person in the Reformation, the 500th anniversary has revolved around his nailing of the 95 theses that challenged the Roman Church (click here for those 95 theses). 

Luther's theses revolved around man's spiritual state and the Roman Church's abilities and inabilities to minister to that state of both dead and the living Christians. The purpose of his Theses was to spark debate in order to reform the Church. Instead, it served as one of the beginning points of splitting the Church. That split served as the 2nd splitting from the Church since the breaking away of the Roman Church from the Orthodox Church served as the first split.

But times have changed since Luther wrote his 95 Theses. And in this time, just as the Church in which Luther found himself was in need of change, today's Church is in need of change. Enter then Jonathan Aigner (click here for a bio). He just recently wrote an article on 95 additional  theses that the Church must address today (click here for the article). These theses seem to have today's more modern evangelical churches in mind.  And his article is the subject of today's blogpost. And while Luther's 95 theses dealt with two subjects, Aigner's 95 theses are concerned with one subject: the proper worship of God. 

 Aigner is concerned that too many worship services today have been prostituted by concerns to remain relevant and to draw people. Worship services that focus on remaining relevant do so in order to attract and keep people coming to church. Aigner's complaints here revolve around compromises churches make in accommodating worship services to what is popular in culture. Thus, the worshipers are what worship services are designed to serve. That means that the object of worship, or God, is receiving less and less attention as while those who are worshiping are receiving more and more attention.

 Overall, Aigner's theses contain a lot of good suggestions. Some of them include the following
  • Therefore, worship is more important than any ministry of the church, even then the sacred cows of children’s and youth ministry.
  • Therefore, we should stop bastardizing the church’s worship by reinventing it in each generation’s image and using it as a hook.
  • A sermon is to be received by the people as part of God’s work on their behalf, not aim to solve their problems and help them live happier lives.
  • Churches are designing ad hoc worship “experiences” to stave off the boredom brought on by cultural media saturation.
  • Theology, not taste, should determine how we worship.
  • Corporate worship that is either contemporary or traditional is toxic to the church.
  • All worship should be historic because it recalls the creative and redemptive acts of God.
  • Worship is about doing God’s story.
  • Bad worship begets bad theology. Bad theology begets a bloated, unhealthy church.
  • We deceive people and compromise our worship when we preach that everyone is entitled to find worship that “fits them just right” in terms of personal preference.
  • Worship that seeks personal fulfillment, release, or refreshment is a masturbatory act.
  • Worship should be exceedingly boring in that it doesn’t offer that over-stimulation that the masses crave.
  • To outsiders, the Eucharist is foolishness. That is why no megachurch model takes it seriously.
  • Worship is not for God’s sake. It’s for ours.
  • In worship, God is the subject, the great Mover and Shaper, and we are the ones being moved and shaped by God’s story.
  • Worship will be more impressive than expressive. Me-worship is about expressing my story. True worship is about being impacted by God’s story.

Though I have not read every single thesis, of the ones I have read, I see no problem with any of them. Aigner is providing necessary corrections in how churches should approach worship services today.

 The problem I do see with Aigner's article is that the Church needs reformation in other areas in addition to worship. Thus, trying to write 95 theses just for worship seems a little gimmicky while it shows a negligence in addressing other problem areas in today's Church. 

 In addition, to just focus on the Church's problems with worship furthers the insularity of the conservative Church. For its insularity is its biggest obstacle to effectively preaching the Gospel to a larger, more diverse audience. In wanting to preach to a more diverse audience, I am not talking about the kind of relevance that tricks people into coming to church. Rather, the kind of relevance of which I speak concerns itself with being able to effectively preach the Gospel to those who do not hold to an America-first, politically conservative audience. For American conservative churches are drawing an overwhelming ratio of political conservatives compared to political non-conservatives. This not only violates the spirit in which Aigner wrote his 95 theses, it robs political non-conservatives chances of hearing the Gospel and of finding religiously conservative churches to belong to which do not assault their political consciences. In addition, this overwhelming appeal to political conservatives strongly suggests that only political conservatives can belong to religiously conservative Christian churches.

The Church needs to read Aigner's 95 theses. At the same time, there are other areas in which theses, not necessarily 95 of them, must be written in order to correct major problems in today's Church.






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Wednesday, November 1, 2017

Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For November 1, 2017

Oct 31

To Kevin DeYoung and his blogpost on celebrating the Reformation and what it has brought. He also acknowledged challenge brought by the Reformation and today’s world. This appeared in the Gospel Coalition website

One of the challenges not mentioned above is that of removing the stumbling blocks that sinful acts done and positions taken in the name of Christ have provided. In our nation alone we have the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans from the land and the harsh persecution and oppression of Blacks pursued in various forms done by many in the name of Christ. Or we have our nation's seemingly carte blanche support for Israel as it practices a brutal occupation against the Palestinians and that support is promoted by many religiously conservative Christians as being biblical. Or we have the religiously conservative Christian support for the exploitation that has occurred because of our Capitalist economic, this is especially true with today's form of Capitalism called 'Neoliberalism.' Europe's empires and wars, along with America's previously mentioned sins, have played significant roles in ushering in Post Modernism. For Post Modernism makes a strong historical case for rejecting the metanarratives provided by faith, even the Christian faith.
If we are serious about checking today's growing secularization, we have to acknowledge our past faults and sins noting that because of time and the extent of our wrongs, we can't fix what was already done or make restitution for it. That makes us beggars for mercy.
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To Arthur Versluis and his blogpost extolling a conservative, Jeffersonian approach to relying on a smaller Federal government. This article appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog.

I see two problems with this article. First, there is the proof by example attempt when arguing against the Hamilton model. Just because the Hamilton model has eventually produced what we have today doesn't mean that centralization always fails.
The second problem I see is that, for the most part, the evaluation of government is done by size alone. I've constantly argued that government is like love, size doesn't matter, fidelity does. The writer of this article acknowledges that  some projects require the assistance of larger entities than local government. So in some areas, the need for a good sized government is necessary. And that should apply to the federal government as well as state governments.

Where government has gone astray is not necessarily in size, but in representation. We have two ways of representing people by location. But what is absent, especially in the era of big money politics, is the representation by vocation. So what if all the states have two ways of being represented in government decisions. If the demographics of those representations draw on a limited population based on select vocations, then fewer people will be represented and those who are will tend to be those who have wealth and thus power. Limiting federal government does not limit power. Rather, limiting government can conveniently enable government to abdicate its responsibilities to private sector elites and we will get the same results as we get when corporations are able to buy representatives as mentioned in the article above.

Since Versluis mentioned Chomsky and his opposition to the centralization of government through the military industrial state, we should add that this severely imbalanced representation in government can start to be challenged when we allow workers to run their places of work rather than owners. And the first place this would be good to at least partially implement is in publicly owned companies where shareholders often act like dictatorial slumlords. And Europe's different implementations of codetermination show that we don't have to take all-or-nothing approaches at worker-run workplaces.

After increasing worker control over the workplace, we would still need to restructure our government to fix many of the current problems. That restructuring should not focus on size but on representation so that people from all walks of life, as well as all locations, are well represented. The idea of soviets that would eventually lead to either another legislative branch of the government or a revamped  the House of Representatives could increase representation of all Americans as opposed to just the representation that the wealthy have been able to purchase for themselves.

However, one other concern is important. That is the general ethical standard or moral code of the people also needs to change. We need to become a more person-oriented society where people are counted as being more important than gadgets, profits, and property rights. Without that, we are condemned to not only the racism, militarism, and materialism that King warned against, but an unfaithful and, perhaps, big government that is necessary to feed the appetites of those with wealth and who profit from racism, militarism, and materialism.

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To Joe Carter and his blogpost that introduces a paper on how the Church should approach wealth creation. This appeared in the Acton blog.

The relationship between wealth creation and the Church is oversimplified in the approach listed above. For wealth creation is portrayed as a whole pie rather than merely a slice of a larger pie. Thus, the emphasis on wealth creation as encouraged above, will focus on a financial bottom-line approach to creating and distributing wealth despite the concerns expressed for the poor and a fair wealth distribution. And without government's help, the Church, at best, will be impotent in making sure that the bottom-line doesn't become the only criteria in evaluating methods of wealth creation. The not at best scenarios have their historical precedents in the pre-revollutionary times of France, Russia, and Spain where the Church sided with wealth and power.

We need to see wealth as a piece fitting in a larger puzzle that describes how we will share society with each other. The relationships between people must take priority over any financial bottom line. If it does not, we will still have a thing-oriented society as described by Martin Luther King Jr. And for as long as we have a thing-oriented society, we will be plagued with racism, militarism, and materialism.







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Monday, May 22, 2017

ONIM For May 22, 2017

If you are not sure about the validity of a news story linked to below, you can use  mediabiasfactcheck.com to check out the credibility of the source of most of the stories linked to here.


Christian News

World News

Protest News

Trump News

 Pick(s) Of The Litter
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Friday, November 6, 2015

So Much For Always Reforming

R.C. Sproul (click here for a bio) has written an article with a question that should strike fear into the hearts of all conservative Christians. Is the Reformation over (click here for the article), he asks. What are the grounds for his concern? His grounds consist of the deemphasis on the Reformation's doctrine of justification. In short, this doctrine declares that we are saved through faith in Christ alone and that our works do nothing to secure our salvation. The existence of this deemphasis, according to Sproul, is shown by the attitudes more and more evangelicals are showing toward this doctrine.

To his credit, Sproul shows a deep concern for the heart of the Gospel. And while Sproul shows balance by contrasting the progress that has been in terms of how we disagree with one another since the 16th century and how a Church with whom he has many differences has positively contributed to the moral life of society, in the end, he shows why he doesn't fully understand why the deemphasis is occurring. How does he show this? It's very simple. He shows it by not reporting any dialog with those who are minimizing the significance of justification. Instead, he either covers old debate issues with old opponents such as the Roman Church, or he cites questions asked by a theological ally. In the end, one's personal salvation is what Sproul sees as not just the most important issue for all people, it is apparently the only issue. And Sproul shows it is the only issue at hand for him by not mentioning any current issue which has distracted people from listening to the Gospel.

 The math of the issue at hand adds up this way: you start with a very individualized, personal Gospel + an examination of the issue that is predominantly from the past - adequate feedback from those who show a different emphasis on the Gospel = a number of possibilities. It can equal insularity. It can also equal self-absorption. How can we ever determine why others are not putting the same emphasis on the Gospel that we are unless we escape our theological shell and ask for their input?

 Many of us religiously conservative Christians often expect not only rejection for preaching the Gospel, we are taught to expect persecution. And these expectations prevent us from either seeking or considering feedback from any secular audience. And it is that feedback that we need most. 

 If I were to speculate why the Gospel is being deemphasized today by fellow evangelicals, one of the reasons could very well be our resistance to listen to those outside of our theological circles. And though these fellow evangelicals are in err when they lessen the imporance of the Gospel, they are correct by adding other concerns some of which could be coming from listening to their own audiences, to those outside their theological circles. When we do what Sproul seems to have done in the writing of this article is to say to the world: 'You need to listen to us, but we don't need to listen to you.'  Such an attitude requires a significant amount of arrogance--a trait that goes against the very nature of the Gospel.





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