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On October 4, 2016 By In Family and Children, Music

Why Don’t Men Sing in Church?

Why are men not singing in Church? Various articles have attempted to answer that question recently. But before we can try to offer a rationale for such a spectacular question, we need to observe that some are entirely comfortable allowing this trend to continue. After all, music plays a minimal role in their worship expressions. Others find the issue of congregational singing irrelevant due to the trained praise bands that lead worship each Sunday. “Let the professionals lead.”

Certain environments encourage people to hear and feel the music rather than sing it. And some groups have placed such high priority on the preached word that the very idea of a singing congregation seems secondary, if not tertiary in the priority list.

But on to better things.

Fortunately, there are a vast amount of churches and leaders that still treasure congregational singing and long for a time when men return to the old-fashioned task of singing God’s melodies. The cruel reality is that we are far from the mark. In my many visits to evangelical churches over the years, the few men who opened their mouths, timidly read the words like a child attempting to spell out his phonics assignment.

Timid singers make for timid Christians. (more…)

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On September 1, 2016 By In Scribblings

Obsession with the End

When I was younger, fascination with how the world was going to end was an all-consuming passion. I read the books, marked the proof-texts, speculated alongside Bible prophecy “experts,” and proclaimed the Gospel that the “end is near.” Almost 20 years have gone by since I left that world. What fascinates me today is not so much the chronology of the end, but the joys of the present. God is doing a work in our midst. He is building awe among his creatures. And we must see the good he is doing around us, lest we miss his good gifts. Here is what I know: Fairy tales are good and noble. Giggles from children are beautiful, community life is sublime, the Church is motherly, and the “love of wife,” to quote Luther, is desirable. Obsession with the end robs us of the present joys. Your eschatology forms your theology of the present.

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On August 31, 2016 By In Scribblings

Experiential Genealogies

It is hard to read the story of the prodigal son and not be undone by the grief of the father and his jubilance as his son returns. Can you read that story and simply conclude: “Well, that young man certainly made a rational decision to come back home?” I doubt the common man stops there. He immerses in the agony and glory of this reconciliation story. It’s a kind of death and resurrection narrative. But our tendency is to see this experience as unique in the Bible. Everything else is propositional truth which serves the purpose of enlightening our minds and nothing else. What if, however, these propositions are meant to change our experiences? What if genealogies, temple tools, and descriptions of sacrificial rituals were meant to build us in truth and enhance our emotional taste buds to the entire meal of Scriptures? What if these “random” details were meant to make us more human and better friends and worshipers? What if Paul was right when he said, “All Scripture is profitable for training in righteousness?” Have we become selective in what is profitable and what is not? All texts shape us, even the ones we choose to overlook.

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On August 29, 2016 By In Scribblings

We are all historians

We are all historians. We all look at events around us and offer the most cogent interpretation of those events. But not all historians are created equal. Some historians can offer a healthy interpretation of facts. These historians read well and are well read. They have a good grasp of biblical reality and its future. They engage others by listening, meditating, and even deliberating over ideas that may conflict with their own interpretations. Other historians are immersed in silly little novels and TV shows. I am not opposed to informal reading and watching, but if this satisfies your intellectual curiosity, then count me in the opposition party. These latter historians will offer very different accounts of history.
The first historian is judicious; she listens, learns, and therefore interprets. The other will make dogmatic assertions based on his microscopic worldview. In fact, his world is so little that dogmatism is the only response he has (“How dare you oppose the party spirit!”). He can’t engage since engagement requires eclectic habits. He makes assertions about how things have always been in his thinking and how they shall ever be world without end.
 
To avoid this solitary world, we must become good historians; historians in need of refinement and eager journalists of time. We read, listen, and watch carefully and discerningly. We talk to one another. We should be slow to speak and quick to listen. Some historians drink deeply while others find contentment with a few drops.
 
We are all historians. So historicize well so your children and those closest to you may add a better chapter than the one you wrote. That’s a good thing. In fact, good history is like good wine: it gets better with time.

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On August 27, 2016 By In Scribblings

Amputating Scriptural Intent

We must confess the truthfulness that evangelicalism has turned the Old Testament pages into a series of unconnected moralistic stories. This reminds me of a lecture delivered by R.C. Sproul one time where he asked for a copy of the Bible. A young college student threw a copy of the New Testament Gideon’s Pocket-Size Bible to him. Sproul looked at it and threw it right back and said, “I asked for a Bible, young man!” We have disassociated the Scriptures and treated it as a collection of unrelated stories. The reality, however, is that the Bible is a collection of unified stories made to build on one another with each story adding a more nuanced and elevated art form to the big picture. The Old Testament Scriptures are far more than moral lessons, it’s the very environment that makes the New Testament coherent. The presuppositions of the Gospels and Apostolic writings depend heavily on the assumptions of the Law and the Prophets. The Bible, to paraphrase Luther, “is alive, it speaks to me; it has feet, it runs after me; it has hands, it lays hold of me.” To categorically divide Old and New is to amputate the Scriptural intent to hold and illumine our hearts and minds.

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On July 9, 2016 By In Politics

Reconciliation at the Table

We are a divided people. Children turn against parents, parents turn against children, politicians turn against politicians, and we turn against those who rule over us. From within, we have been working steadily to undo Paul’s great theme in his writings: the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile in Christ Jesus. Our oneness is challenged daily as we hear of reports of brothers and sisters tearing one another, gossiping, cursing one another. Authority figures are being killed and authority figures are unjustly killing. If you try to find a consistent trend there is none. We destroy our unity because we have sabotaged the image-bearing status of humanity, as Al Stout noted here.

But our solution is near us. It seems too simple; too safe and yet too dangerous.

When we taste the Eucharist we taste physical elements offered to God’s people for edification, wisdom, and nurture. Yet when tragedy strikes we run away from the meal that brings together male and female, slave and free. What would the world be like if police officers and their black neighbors were to eat and drink at the table together? What would it look like for the one in authority to partake of bread and wine with the tattooed Hispanic convert? What would it look like to be formed by something given to us, something served each week by a minister of the Gospel? What would it take to get estranged brothers to embrace each other at the culmination of worship, and then say, “Peace be with you,” as they look into each others’ eyes and drink the blood of Christ and eat his body?

The Gospel of the sacraments ought to do that for us. The Apostle Paul understood this when he wrote: “For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.” a Baptism unites us into the oneness formed by the Spirit. God takes us from our diversity and unites us into his Threeness and Oneness.

Why have conversations about unity abandoned conversations about the table?

If the Church wishes to see unity, let’s encourage the weak and strong, young and old to build ecclesiastical patterns of weekly eating, weekly partaking, weekly loving, weekly embracing, and weekly serving one another—in and through our diversity—that we may find union with Messiah Jesus: the source of all true reconciliation. So this Sunday b come and serve your brother and sister with intentionality as you eat and drink in the name of One Lord, one faith, and one baptism.

  1. I Corinthians 12:13  (back)
  2. or whenever your church communes at the table  (back)

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On May 23, 2016 By In Books

A Review of Joseph Loconte’s A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918

Guest Post by Tom Robertson

The little knots of friends who turn their backs on the ‘World’ are those who really transform it. -C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Joseph Loconte gives needed attention to the part played by the Great War – the “cataclysm of 1914-1918,” as he calls it – in helping to shape the men we would come to know, simply as Tolkien and Lewis. This horrific experience, far from killing the imaginations of these beloved men, and far from causing them to retreat from the world, provided a context for friendship and imagination. Rather than extinguishing the idea of heroism and of true friendship, as it did for many of their contemporaries, their imaginations were aflame with deep fellowships, enduring love, ultimate sacrifice, and epic valor.

Loconte has managed to capture the spirit of the rapidly changing culture that existed both before and after World War I while presenting Tolkien and Lewis as valiant men in their own right, who not only resisted the lure of “the myth of progress,” which helped to usher in the Great War, but emerged to become hopeful, prolific, influential men even after the myth was shattered. One is presented with two men who, against all odds, helped one another swim against the stream of pessimism, pacifism, and realism that flooded the literary imaginations of postwar Europe as the great myth burst. And they did this in the most heroic fashion. Loconte says although “the Great War produced many cynics and pacifists” who found “nothing heroic about the folly of war, yet, as veterans of this conflict, Tolkien and Lewis chose to remember not only its horrors and sorrows: they wanted to recall the courage, sacrifice, and the friendships that made it endurable.” These two, with the encouragement of their little knot of friends – ‘The Inklings’, as they called themselves – provided a little rivulet of their own.

Their hopeful stories, filled with heartbreaking tragedy, acts of valor, and happy endings, provide a spring of cool fresh water for many thirsty would-be Hobbits and Narnians. They are the kind of stories that are seeded in the experience of pain and watered by joy. “It is a good bet,” says Loconte, “that only men who…experienced [friendships] on the field of combat…could write passages of such compassion, grit, and courage.” The Inklings, says Loconte, was their attempt “to recapture something like the camaraderie that sustained them during” the Great War. “It is a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” In A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, And A Great War, Loconte has given us a book which may very well serve to inspire the next “little knot of friends” to enter into the “dangerous business…of going out your door,” and to “turn their back’s on the ‘World.'” For they, like Lewis and Tolkien, may one day be “those who really transform it.”

Tom Robertson leads a weekly gathering of future military aviators centering around the writings of C.S. Lewis. Debbie and he will have been married 30 years in June of this year. They have two children, Jourdan and Andrew.

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On May 6, 2016 By In Politics

Scholars Speak on Trump’s Nomination

Ted Cruz’s departure from the Republican race, and most recently, John Kasich’s, catapulted long-time front-runner, Donald Trump, to become the national representative of the GOP in this election cycle. Trump’s remarkable rise has shocked the media and many of the conservative voices of our day. Many of these conservative voices have made it abundantly clear that voting for Donald Trump will precipitate the end of the party and the end of the conservative ethos of the party of Ronald Reagan.

This entire process has left conservative evangelicals asking the question: “How shall we then think?” Kuyperian Commentary asked several Christian scholars to offer their answers to such a profound question.

Andrew Sandlin
Founder and President, Center for Cultural Leadership

More troubling than Trump the candidate are the cultural forces that have propelled his success. That long list is topped by the erosion of classical liberalism ( = modern conservatism). Its chief features include the dignity of the individual, the separation of powers, the priority of reasoned discourse, the protection of private property, and the universality of moral standards. The cultural Marxism that gradually captured the Democratic Party since the late 1960’s undermines every tenet of classical liberalism. The truly shocking development has been the more recent and swift adoption of  Trump’s populism, which also abandons classical liberalism:

He champions his own form of identity politics that mirrors cultural Marxism.

He considers Congress an obstructionist institution that should be bypassed.

He shouts down thoughtful opposition, just like campus neo-Marxists.

He disdains reasoned discussion in favor of ad hominem denunciations.

He advocates trade policies that raid the wallets of middle-class American consumers.

He employs almost any gangbanger tactic — just like the neo-Marxists — as long as it accomplishes his sordid political objectives.

The most ominous aspect of this development is that classical liberalism, the political theory of the Founding and rooted in Christianity, is no longer represented by a major American political party.

This development is unprecedented in American history.

Brian Mattson
Senior Scholar of Public Theology, Center For Cultural Leadership

Vote your conscience. Some musings:

My loyalty and obligations are to the truth, not a political party. The GOP electorate has decided it will no longer be a welcome home for classical liberalism, and therefore it is no longer my home. Political realignment is now a full-scale reality, whether I realize it, like it, or even participate in it.

One approach: vote for Donald Trump and hope for the best. Stack a final, tiny, leaky sandbag on the pile, hoping and praying it stops the torrent of radical leftism while not producing something even worse. But with the distance between two evils so slight (in my view), I think subsidizing this ideological decline with our votes might be the real abdication of our civic responsibilities.

Another approach: Reject Donald Trump. Energetically participate in the political realignment. Congress is the levee wall: support solid down-ballot candidates. Bolster institutions that stand for the truth, strengthen alliances, and plant long-term seeds that will flourish when (if) our national nightmare recedes. I am sitting here looking at my daughters, and I owe them better than a sandbag and a wish.

Maybe you can do both. But I can’t and won’t.

Peter Leithart
President of the Theopolis Institute

Andrew Sullivan has determined that the Donald’s candidacy is a blast from the last trump, announcing the end of democracy. Sullivan underestimates the federal government’s blessed capacity for gridlock, and Trump’s capacity for compromise, change, and moderation.

The real worry is less that, if elected, Trump will make good on his promises; he won’t. The real worry lies elsewhere. Trump’s campaign has been a masterpiece of scapegoating, blaming our economic stagnation on China and Mexico and our decline in global prestige on feckless political and media elites. You can be morally certain he won’t accept responsibility for his failure. And then who will the Trump tribe find to blame?

If Trump isn’t the end of the world or American democracy, he may be the end of the GOP as we know it. To that, we can say a hearty Good riddance. It’s become difficult to see what the conservative party still conserves, other than the wealth of its donors and the lifestyle of its Beltway elites.

What we’re hearing is not the last trump, but Trump may be an agent of divine judgment against the Party that has been most promiscuous in invoking God’s name. Here’s hoping He shakes the GOP down to the foundations, and keeps shaking until only permanent things are left standing.

Thomas S. Kidd
Distinguished professor of history, Baylor University

I’ve said for months that I could never vote for Donald Trump for president. Trump becoming the presumptive GOP nominee has not changed that. I will not vote for either Trump or Hillary Clinton, assuming she becomes the Democrats’ nominee. Christians will argue about which of these two options is worse, and I’m honestly not sure how I would distinguish between the two. In any case, I can’t vote for either of them.

What to do in November, then? I will wait to see if there is a reasonable choice for a third party or write-in candidate. If not, I won’t cast a vote for president. I do believe that we have a civic obligation to participate, however, so I will vote for the down-ballot offices. I generally won’t vote for Democrats, but this time, I also won’t vote for GOP candidates who actively support Trump. I may have a relatively incomplete ballot!

We Christians should remember that as we express dismay about election 2016, we are hardly without hope. American Christians have too often put too much importance on politics, anyway. It’s a great time for us to remind ourselves that our ultimate citizenship is in the Kingdom of Jesus Christ.

George Grant
Pastor of Parish Presbyterian

During that particularly distressing post-Nixon, pre-Reagan period in American history, Francis Schaeffer prophetically declared,

“This is our moment of history and our responsibility: not to just to write and talk of far-off ideals, but to struggle for Scriptural and practical means of doing what can be done in a fallen world to see people personally converted and also to see what our salt and light can bring forth in the personal life and the political and the cultural life of this moment of history.”

His exhortation is as apt today as it was then—and perhaps, even more so.

Faced with the prospects of a desultory presidential electoral cycle, many Christians today have given vent to handwringing jeremiads. In truth, this election affords us a tremendous opportunity:

We have the opportunity to stand courageously for Biblical truth severed from the compromises of political partisanship. The Republican Party has long disregarded us. Now, it has altogether discarded us. We are thus morally, culturally, and politically unencumbered by their half-measures, empty promises, and feeble entreaties.

We have the opportunity to mobilize a groundswell of support for principled and purposeful reformation at a time when the two major parties have little more to offer than revolutionary fantasies.

We have the opportunity to model ardent prayerfulness. It was John Bunyan who quipped, “You can do more than pray, after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.” We have acted as if the opposite were true. We no longer have the luxury of that foolhardy project.

Finally, we have the opportunity to display an unwavering confidence in the Gospel hope. When all about us are despairing, we can reaffirm that the throne room of the Most High has not been vacated, that the Ascended Christ still has His iron scepter and the earth remains His footstool. As Chuck Colson asserted, “Thankfully, hope doesn’t ride on Air Force One.” We need not set our hopes upon either Tweedledee or Tweedledum.

This is our moment. It is past time for us to roll up our sleeves and go to work. It is high time for the church to be the church.

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On May 5, 2016 By In Theology

The House and the Ascension

Long ago, our Father in Heaven had a plan. His plan was to create the world as a theater to display his glory. The world was to be a house that reflected his name. The Shekinah glory was to remain there forever. And through many dangers, toils, and snares, the house was little by little losing the purpose the builder had for it.

It would appear that God’s building project had become an abysmal failure. But God’s construction plans are not like our building projects. His ways are not our ways. He had a plan. He had a restoration project. He was going to restore, rebuild, and reclaim his own house. This time, the house was not going to be built on spiritual adultery or religious idolatry. It would be on the Rock, which is Christ. The builders rejected him, but the new humanity composed of men and women, and children united to the Rock, will no longer deny him.

In the life of Jesus, the foundation was poured on the earth. In his death, the wall and roof were placed to cover the world and give it shade. In his resurrection, fresh, clean water is available. Come and drink of the river that never runs dry. But there is one part of this earthly construction that is missing. There is a foundation, a roof to protect you from the storms, running water to shower and be replenished, but now we need to turn it on. We need electricity! We need the power to turn the refrigerator, stove, microwave, air conditioner, heater, fan, laptops, cell phones, etc. We need to activate the house so that everyone can live with a purpose. I propose that the Ascension of Jesus is that singular event in history that gives life to everything; that sets everything into motion. It is the electricity that the Church needs to disciple the nations.

Without the Ascension, we are living in an almost finished property. The Ascension means that the house/world is ready to be inhabited once and for all. The power is on. We can now move in together as a Church and take care of it. The workers can all go home. Our only task is now maintaining the house. Now, this house is the world. And the world is a big place. It needs to be energized by the Ascension. The Ascension is God’s way of saying: “My Son’s work is done! Now it’s your turn!” (more…)

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On April 25, 2016 By In Family and Children, Theology

The Radical Nature of the Ordinary

There is an incredible investment in the evangelical community in the word radical. There is nothing inherently sinful about the word, but its common usage has turned into a marketing scheme. For instance, well-known author David Platt in his book Radical observes:

“Radical obedience to Christ is not easy… It’s not comfort, not health, not wealth, and not prosperity in this world. Radical obedience to Christ risks losing all these things. But in the end, such risk finds its reward in Christ. And he is more than enough for us.”

Whether or not we are comfortable with Platt’s conclusion is a different question. But crucial to this discussion is the use of the word as an accentuation of the Christian faith. Ordinary faith+radical faith=authentic faith. But is this how the Bible portrays the Christian life? In other words, why do so many authors and speakers find the need to insert the word radical into the clear commands of the Bible? Is “love your neighbor” not a pure example of a kind of life that is diametrical to the human experience? Is radical faith a kind of secret life that only few can find through a consistent impulse to abandon wealth and prosperity and the American dream? Simply put, are we making Jesus’ yoke hard and his burden heavy? Are we creating a sub-culture of radical Christians who do the risky thing for Jesus while the others are left in this trite category of non-radical?

Part of the genius of the Christian Bible is that the ordinary is radical. Forcing an alliance of radical Christians into the Scriptures makes the ordinary unnecessary. Certainly the impetus of such move is to offer the evangelical world a more robust expression of Christian living. But my assertion is that creating a radical platform to encourage people to do their ordinary work is not an encouragement, but a detriment to pursuing the ordinary work of Christian living. Who, after all, feels radical after a long bout of chemotherapy? You feel ordinary. In fact, you feel incapable of being anything more than ordinary. In fact, your calling at this point is to be as ordinarily Christian as you can as your body decays from within.

Ordinary Christian living is different from radical Christian living. It does not feel shame in the comfort of a hammock at the lake or in the luxury of an afternoon game at the stadium or the perfectly grilled steak. Ordinary Christian living does not negate the good, it gives thanks for the good. It does not negate the routine of a mother’s third diaper change of the day, it exalts the role of motherhood. I do not doubt many in this movement would affirm these assertions, but the reality is that the kinds of disciples these authors and speakers are producing are either misunderstanding the message of Radical proponents or they are using this message as a way of escaping the ordinary.

We live an age where we need less radical things and more ordinary things lived out daily in the Church. We need more bread and wine, more hugs, more encouragement, more connection with one another, more good night kisses and more tickling of babies. We need more ordinary. Jesus accomplished the radical. Let’s live out the radical nature of the ordinary in faithful obedience.

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