by Brian
My pastor recently gave a talk on Fundamentalism which I think is very helpful.
I also appreciated his comments in the FBFI panel discussion on conservative evangelicalism. (I recognized the voices of Dr. Shumate and Dr. Bauder, and I found their comments helpful as well.)
His sermon at the FBFI is also well worth listening to.
by Brian
This summary of a lecture by D. A. Carson on current trends in the church is worth reading.
by Brian
The October issue of First Things also includes a thoughtful reflection by R. R. Reno on Kerouac’s book On the Road.
These are the paragraphs from the article that I found most thought-provoking:
The Beats were quintessential bohemians who felt the plain-Jane expectations of middle-class American life as an infecting, constraining force. Wife, career, mortgage, children, savings accounts, and quiet suburban streets: These were realities overlaid by the deadening expectations of conventional morality. Escape was essential, and, although Kerouac and the other Beats lacked Rousseau’s clarity about the constant impulse of human nature to accept and submit to social authority, they intuitively recognized the need for dramatic acts and symbols of transgression.
. . . . . . . . . .
In 1957, the New York Times review hailed the novel’s publication as “a historic occasion.” The review trumpeted that On the Road offers “the clearest and most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat,’ and whose principle avatar he is.” Of course, as David Brooks so cleverly observed in Bobos in Paradise, we’re all weekend beatniks now. The counterculture of transgression that dominates On the Road has thoroughly colonized our middle-class world.
Transgression and marginality have become the new normalcy. The bohemian rejection of social convention was first theorized as a normal stage of psychological development (“adolescent rebellion”), and more recently it has been made into both commercial fashions and academic dogma. Aging rock musicians go on tours and play their songs of youthful lust and rebellion to graying Baby Boomers . . . . College professors theorize transgression as an act of political freedom. It’s easy to see that Kerouac’s road that leads from the Beat fantasies of primal innocence to our own day, where white boys from the suburbs dress like drug dealers, girls like prostitutes, and millionaires like dock workers. Crotch-grabbing rap singers play the role of well-paid Dean Moriartys.
. . . . . . . . . . .
It is as if we very much want to believe in Dean, but, like Sal at the end of On the Road, we know we cannot rely on him to give us guidance. We want to believe the promises of bohemian life—to live according to our own innermost selves—but we are surrounded by the sadness of disappointed hope. The transgressive heroism of our imagination now looks as tawdry as daytime television. Bohemianism becomes banal and disappointing as it becomes dominant. We suffer the failures of the countercultural project even as we surround ourselves with its music, its rhetorical postures, and its fashions.
These paragraphs raise this question: If the current culture’s music, postures, and fashions reflect a “banal” and “tawdry” culture of transgression seeking to escape from conventional (and oftentimes Biblical) morality, then should not the church reject this culture’s music, postures, and fashions? Should not the church be culturally distinct in ways that point the surrounding society beyond its own cultural failures toward the culture of shalom that Christ will establish at his return?
by Brian
The Jonathan Edwards Center notes a new book, The Preaching of Jonathan Edwards, by John Carrick of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
Carrick has also written a helpful “theology of sacred rhetoric,” The Imperative of Preaching. This along with a lecture posted at the GPTS website provides a helpful balance to an over-reaction by some to the moralistic approach to Scripture critiqued recently (and rightly) by Mark Ward.
by Brian
A common objection against the practice of separation from brothers in Christ is that separation implies the brother is in sin and no true Christian can remain in sin. If the fundamentalist (here defined as an orthodox Christian who practices the doctrines of separation from both false teachers and persistently disobedient brothers both within and beyond the local church) grants this objection, he is forced either to concede that his evangelical brothers’ failure to practice separation is not sinful or he is forced to conclude that evangelicals are, in fact, not truly brothers at all.
While this objection must be (and can be) met on exegetical and theological grounds, parallel situations in church history often helpfully shed light on present debates.
An example of this may be found in the discussions about unification between the northern and southern Presbyterian churches after the Civil War. In these discussions B. B. Warfield recognized both that different sins required differing levels of responses and that in certain situations a sin may require ecclesiastical separation without casting doubt on the professed salvation of those separated from.
Note this letter from Warfield to a fellow Presbyterian pastor in 1887:
I must confess to you that I am one of those whom you perhaps consider grossly inconsistent, who heartily accord with both the deliverances of 1818 & 1845. I do think slavery a gigantic evil & entirely inconsistent with the spirit of the Gospel & a sin in the slave holders: & I do not think it a disciplinable offense or a fit test of communion. It is possible ‘to sin against Christ’ & yet not be subject to exclusion from his table (1 Cor. viii. 12, compared with the context & the parallel in Romans xiv, e.g. Ro xiv 3). . . .
. . . That the Southern Church has not repented of its sin in regard to slavery would be no bar to my union with it: I could unite with it in a free conscience tomorrow. But that it is not awake to its duty to the Freedman & that organic union with it would injure if not destroy our work among them makes me deprecate & pray against reunion in any near future.
Cited in Bradley J. Gundlach, “Warfield, Biblical Authority, and Jim Crow,” in B. B. Warfield: Essays on His Life and Thought, ed. Gary L. W. Johnson (P&R, 2007), 163.
In other words, Warfield insisted on remaining ecclesiastically separate from R. L. Dabney, but he was not casting doubt on the intransigent Dabney’s regeneration.
