biblical or un-biblical

Does God hate sin but love the sinner?

Related question: does God send the sin to Hell for all Eternity or the Sinner to Hell for all Eternity?

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John1 - John the Baptist

Please listen to my first Sermon by clicking the hyperlink above John1-John the Baptist

For your convenience these are the passages below:

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light. The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. (John 1:6-13 ESV)

They asked him, “Then why are you baptizing, if you are neither the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?” John answered them, “I baptize with water, but among you stands one you do not know, even he who comes after me, the strap of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie.” These things took place in Bethany across the Jordan, where John was baptizing. The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks before me, because he was before me.’ I myself did not know him, but for this purpose I came baptizing with water, that he might be revealed to Israel.” And John bore witness: “I saw the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.” (John 1:25-34 ESV)

a must read from thecripplegate.com

7 reasons movie illustrations are lame

by Jesse Johnson

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A good friend of mine recently asked me what I think of pastors using illustrations from movies in their sermons. My friend uses them because he thinks they are helpful in relating to a culture that increasingly has their world view formed through entertainment. In that sense I guess using an illustration from the cinema is a form of condesencion—God uses language to speak to us, we use stories from movies to speak to post-post-moderns.

But I don’t buy it. In my experience, illustrations sparked by the golden screen (or Netflix, or what have you) generally fail, and are almost always unhelpful. Here are seven reasons why:

1) They don’t communicate well. These kind of illustrations almost always go this way: “Ok, so I don’t know if you have seen the Avengers or not, but if you haven’t, Samuel L. Jackson is this one guy—I forget his name—and he is good, even though he is making the other people do things they don’t want to do. Anyway, he has this ledger, but it is not an actual ledger, it is just in his head. And some people have red in their ledger, because they have done bad things. And they need to do good things to get that red taken away. But Jesus, he takes our red away by being our red!” Or something.
It takes a lot of work to even communicate an illustration from a movie clearly. The pastor has to tell a story that was conveyed visually, bring the audience up to speed on something they may or may not have seen to begin with, and then clearly draw out his point—which more than likely was not the point of original scene anyway.
It is difficult to do because a movie conveys its message visually, and over time. There are medium issues here. For a pastor to bring his people into the movie, they have to tell the plot verbally. This takes a while, is generally confusing, and unnecessarily complicated. Ultimately, even if it is told well, it is a long walk for a short drink of water.

2) People haven’t seen the movie. No matter what the movie is, there are people who haven’t seen it that are in your audience. Just because all of your friends have seen Avengers, and other Christian bloggers have declared it the best movie ever, and you have seen it three times, does not mean that all of your listeners have.
Even movies that are cultural icons have this same problem. As inconceivable as it is, there may be people listening to you that have not seen Star Wars. If you are a college pastor, you could have international students in your congregation. They didn’t grow up with HBO, and they definitely didn’t grow up with ubiquitous presence of The Christmas Story on TV. So if you use an illustration from a movie, you have to either lose some of your audience, or waste so much time in your sermon telling the story, that the whole illustration is burdensome. You have 40 minutes; do you really want to waste five of them describing some scene from a movie that probably doesn’t even help your sermon that much?

3) People have seen the movie. And when you start down the movie illustration road, for everyone in the congregation who has seen it, they are immediately critiquing your version of events. Was Samuel L. Jackson really good? Why did he lie to get others to do his bidding? Didn’t he make the Black Widow do bad things to begin with? How come she has red in her ledger, if she was made to do that interrogation anyway?
So you lose/bore the people who haven’t seen the movie, and the ones who have simply spend then next few minutes thinking of all the ways you are wrong. For movie nerds, they get offended, and immediately start wondering what else you are messing up in your sermon. You thought the point about getting red out of your ledger was cool, and that it would illuminate your point. In reality, a handful of people will agree with you, others probably made the connection without your illustration anyway, and the rest of the audience is just wondering why we’ve spent the last four minutes talking about superheroes.

4) Biblical principles in movies are a one-way street. Entertainment, movies, literature, etc., all have value and moral intelligibility as they correspond to a biblical word view. The Bible does not derive its value and moral intelligibility by corresponding to movies. In other words, this is a one-way street, and using movie illustrations in sermons is not going with the flow of traffic.
In evaluating the themes of movies, it is helpful to compare them to events in the Bible. In understanding the word view and implications of a film, obviously applying Scripture and seeing how the two correlate is essential. The Word of God is a flashlight and it illuminates the moral content of every story, even those told in 3-D. To use stories from movies to illustrate passages in the Bible is to hold the flash light backwards. Even if the light is on, and even if it is bright enough, its not going to help you see what you are looking for. The concept of the ledger from Avengers is cool because it relates to a biblical world view. But the concepts of atonement and imputation are not illuminated by comparing them cinematic superhero ledgers.

5) I also have fundamentalist issues with movies in sermons. I eschew the idea of worldly entertainment creeping into the church. I loathe the notion that the church needs producers to make God’s plot really come together. Our people live in an entertainment-driven, visually stimulating world. They are surrounded by movies, art, videos, and a 24-hour news cycle. The church on the Lord’s Day should be an island from that. It should be the place where their instruments are calibrated, and their compass aligns to True North. We should be a refuge from the world, and not act as if we need to borrow the world to make our point.
But my fundamentalism keeps going: when you use a movie illustration, you are unknowingly harnessing yourself to the moral baggage which that movie brings. Take The Christmas Story. You have only seen the TV version (and that—if you are 35-years-old, times seven viewings per Christmas—245 times). It is clean. So you use an illustration from it (materialism never delivers; remember that one time when Ralphie really, really wanted some kind of decoder ring? And he wasn’t happy when he got it?…). But you don’t realize that the actual version of the movie, the version people rent, actually has offensive language all over it. They cleaned that out for TV. And now, on the Lord’s Day, you are using an illustration from a movie that has troublesome language in it, and people in your congregation think that you must approve of that language. You probably let your kids use it too.  Finally, you also have offended not only those people, but the parents who are sitting there with their kids, who do not let their kids watch that movie. And you did all this so that you can make a lame point about materialism?

6) Using movie illustrations fosters biblical illiteracy. Instead of telling the story from Avengers to illustrate the concept of a ledger, how about a story from Kings? Or 2 Samuel? Is there a king, or maybe a general, who did bad things in his life, and who needed to make up for them before he died? Is there a captain who had red in his ledger who had others with enough merit to spare ransom him out of the penalty he deserved? Then use those illustrations instead.

7)  No, these objections don’t apply to literature. This may seem incongruous, but these same objections are not necessarily true of illustrations from literature. While certainly they can apply, often/occasionally it is helpful to illustrate points by using scenes from books, history, Shakespeare, the news, your life, etc. With movies, you are describing a visual scene verbally. With other illustrations, you are describing a written scene (or a scene from real life). That is easier to do with clarity. People don’t critique your description of the scene, because if you describe it with the same words used in the book, you are creating the same picture that was in their mind when they read it. And literature illustrations don’t cater to the lowest-common-cultural-denominator. Using an illustration from the book Braveheart avoids offending parents who don’t let their kids watch R-rated movies, while still letting you feel cool.
Just don’t say, “Mel Gibson, I mean William Wallace…”

Orthodoxy vs Polydoxy

Emergent, post-modern liberals are in love with this new heresy called...Polydoxy. Here is a quick little primer on the next official American Religion that will imprison and martyr actual Christians since actual Christians cannot support Polydoxy. 

The word orthodox, from Greek orthos ("right", "true", "straight") + doxa ("opinion" or "belief", related to dokein, "to think"), is generally used to mean the adherence to accepted norms, more specifically to creeds, especially in religion. In the narrow sense the term means "conforming to the Christian faith as represented in the creeds of the early Church". I would tweak this definition to be "conforming to the Christian faith as represented in Word of God, the inerrant Scriptures, inspired by the Holy Spirit." 

What is a "polydoxy”?

A polydoxy is a religion whose fundamental principle is that every person is her or his own ultimate religious authority with the right, therefore, to accept and follow whichever religious beliefs and observances she or he thinks true and meaningful. Accordingly, members of the same polydox community (a religious community that subscribes to a polydoxy) may hold different views on such subjects as the meaning of the word God or the existence and nature of an afterlife. All members’ beliefs regarding the great subjects of religion are equally acceptable so far as the polydox community as a whole is concerned. (Members of a community that subscribes to an orthodox religion, by contrast, are all required to accept fundamentally the same religious beliefs and to follow basically the same ritual observances.) The fundamental principle of a polydoxy may be stated in terms of a covenant: Every member of a polydox community pledges to affirm the freedom of all other members in return for their pledges to affirm her or his own. Equally binding in a polydoxy is the corollary of their covenant: Every member’s freedom ends where the other members’ freedom begins. 

THIS IS FROM THE BLOG POST ENTITLED

Exploring Polydoxy BY JOHN VEST

Several weeks ago my friend Christopher Rodkey introduced me to the theological concept known as polydoxy. Catherine Keller (a theologian at Drew University and one of his teachers) and Laurel Schneider (a theologian at Chicago Theological Seminary), have assembled a collection of essays that explore this intriguing concept. If orthodoxy is the notion that there is one right way to believe, polydoxy suggests that perhaps there are multiple right ways to believe. I find this fascinating.
This is an idea well suited for the postmodern, post-Christendom, pluralistic world in which we live. Polydoxy recognizes that Christian theology has always been characterized by multiplicity and diversity—orthodoxy has always been an illusion advanced by the winners of theological debates. Polydoxy embraces uncertainty and ambiguity, recognizing that it is impossible to know the mysteries of life with any precision. John Calvin knew this when he talked about our propensity for idolatry. Paul Tillich knew this when he talked about the “Protestant Principle” that refuses to make absolute what is relative. And polydoxy is grounded in the relationships that bind us all together, a posture that corresponds well to our flat, networked world.
I’m just beginning to read this book, but last week I used this concept to think about what a Pentecost-like experience might suggest for us today. Could it be, that just as God’s Spirit surprised the Jews gathered in Jerusalem for Pentecost by showing them that each could hear God’s word in their own language, God’s Spirit may surprise the church today by showing us that we can each hear God’s word in different ways, and that this is not a problem but a gift? Why must we spend so much energy trying to say who is right and who is wrong? Why must we fight over difference of belief and practice? Why must we view diversity as a danger?
At Fourth Presbyterian Church, we articulate and share the gospel in a particular way. It doesn’t take much exploration in Chicago to find other ways of articulating and sharing this good news. Even within our church, each pastor probably does it in a slightly different way. And my hunch is that every individual who participates in our community of faith understands God’s good news in some unique way.
Polydoxy suggests that this is the way it has always been and always will be. And God’s Spirit—opening our ears, opening our hearts, opening our minds—tells us that this is okay. We don’t need to be in competition with each other. It’s not a zero sum game: the rightness of one does not necessitate the wrongness of another. God calls us to something much bigger than this.
I don’t believe that God’s Spirit ignited the imaginations of one group of people two thousand years ago and then took the next two thousand years off. God’s Spirit continues to move, continues to inspire, continues to challenge, continues to unsettle, continues to shake things up.
Have you read this book or engaged this concept? What do you think?

George Bernard Shaw

“The statistics on death are impressive.  One out of one dies.”

Classic, sad and true of the Apostacy of the American Church

Board of Directors for GigaChurch Corp. Force Resignation of Jesus Christ

Lake Forest, CA - The Board of Directors for GigaChurch Corp. announced today that they had forced the resignation of Jesus Christ as the head of their organization.  The reasons cited for Jesus’ abrupt departure from GigaChurch Corp. included Jesus’ increasing lack of understanding of the unique needs of 21st Century spiritual consumers as well as recent marketing data that showed that Jesus’ old school message of 
“repentance and the forgiveness of sins in His name” was just not resonating with today’s "spiritual but not religious" consumers.
Rick Warren, Chairman of the Board, for GigaChurch Corp. in an email sent to the media said, “This was a tough decision to have to make.  Jesus has been the head of our organization since its inception.  But, Jesus’ insistence on sound doctrine and a core message that conjures up visions of sin, hell, God’s wrath and Jesus’ scandalous bloody death on the cross between two common thieves just isn’t relevant anymore.”  Said Warren, “Despite our insistence at previous board meetings that Jesus get his head out of the First Century and update His messaging to meet the felt needs of today’s spiritual seekers, Jesus stubbornly refused to take our sage business advice.  Ultimately, we had to think about the future of our organization and it was clear that we just wouldn’t meet our growth goals for our 2014 Vision if we continued to use a 2000 year old message.”
Bill Hybels, Senior Member of the Board of Directors for GigaChurch Corp., commenting on Jesus’ abrupt resignation said, “This decision was long overdue.  Truth be told, no one is indispensable and despite Jesus' claims to the contrary, we don’t need Him to grow GigaChurch Corp.  Now that Jesus is no longer at the helm we expect our growth to sky rocket.

Joel Osteen, Junior Board Member for GigaChurch Corp., sounded relieved.  Said Osteen, “With Jesus out of the way, we can finally tell spiritual consumers exactly what they want to hear.”
Wall Street received the news of Jesus’ forced resignation favorably, and GigaChurch Corp’s stock price shot up to nearly $7 a share and closed at $6.66 a share in late afternoon trading.

Zondervan concerned about Christ or Cash profit?

Playful Puppies Bible?!?!

Seriously, what on earth is Zondervan thinking?! They're getting ready to release a Bible filled with photos of playful puppies. Here's what the product description says:

If you love puppies, you will love this Bible! Inside you will find 12 color pages of adorable puppy photos with inspirational thoughts that will encourage you day after day. The Playful Puppies Bible is just the right size to take along wherever you go. Features include: * Presentation page for gift giving * Ribbon marker * Words of Christ in red * 12 pages of adorable puppy photos, Scripture references, and inspirational thoughts * The entire Bible in the New International Version (NIV)

If this is not an example of crass consumerism then we don't know what is. What's next?? The Kute Kittens Bible for cat lovers or the Peppie Parrots Bible for bird lovers or the Nascar Bible for...oh wait...sorry they've already made the Nascar Bible.