Spineless Christianity

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! – Isaiah 5:20

In an article, selected by an Evangelical magazine which is going the way of the United Church Observer; a missionally-minded blogger serves as proxy to reflect that magazine editors’ disdain towards those who advocate and join a boycott of Target; a retail outlet, which is spearheading a campaign for transgender rights in the use of their public bathrooms. The essence of Aaron Wilson’s argument is that taking a firm, public, and meaningful ethical stand in this manner will undermine efforts to “engage our culture with conversations that gracefully illuminate the reason for our hope.”

The American Jew in Light of the Implosion of Evangelicalism

The State of Israel and the American Jew has not found a more supportive constituency within the United States than the American Evangelical.[1] This is about to change.

This change shall occur because of a subterranean spiritual deterioration within Evangelicalism, which is now undeniable in light of the 2016 Republican Primaries and the Trump phenomenon. This change shall occur because the stream of Evangelicalism most favorable to the Jews, namely Dispensationalism, is declining in credibility and influence, relative to their “supersessionist” counterparts. This change shall occur because the political needs and actions of the American Diasporic Jew tend to work against Evangelical interests, even to the point of now threatening the latter’s socioeconomic welfare. This change shall occur because the prevailing cultural notions within the over-sized influence of American Jewry is contrary to the cultural heritage of the host country.

Corporate Prayer

I do not like corporate prayer; nor do I do it very well. True corporate prayer is as intimate as sexual relations. And the former can and has very much led to the latter. True corporate prayer means vulnerability. And in anyone who has received a steady diet of barbs and rejection by the visible church over the years, such are disinclined to be that exposed. I do not know how to reconcile this.

Most of what I have observed and experienced in corporate prayer is formulaic and at arms-length. I have been to one men’s group in which each man took dutiful turn praying for one of the others in a painfully formalist exercise. I expect that it is all quite ineffectual and worthless.

Wednesday prayer meetings are the worst. Above eighty percent of prayers offered deal with someone’s sickness or some other malady with pleas for recovery. I am seriously tempted to go “full heretic” and pray that someone that I know be killed off.

And then there are those who self-ordain themselves as prayer warriors. These tend to hog the allocated prayer time with largely incoherent mumbles. They might as well as be praying in tongues. Actually, it would be an improvement since we could then demand an interpreter of the tongue.

Some have complained on this count. I have hitherto tended to excuse such prayer warriors; although I have often prayed, during those ordeals, that I was snoring narcoleptic. However, there was a recent incident, in which one self-styled prayer warrior was quick and indeed manifested a readied preparation beforehand to reject a personal request in a somewhat desperate situation.

If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? (James 2:15–6)

Consequently, my belief is that unless one is willing to be the sacrificial conduit in the fulfillment of those muttered prayers, those mumbles are but one long and tedious liturgical blasphemy. For if the prayer of concern is not matched by a conduct of concern, it emits the stench of disingenuity and hypocrisy. Certainly, this would inherently reduce the length of those warrior’s prayers.

Imputed Injustice – The Judicial Importance of Consent

Imputed Injustice

Imputed Injustice – Calvin Against the Calvinists

It is my empirically justified belief that modern Protestant Evangelicalism, and particularly its seminarian elite, have little comprehension of the nature and principles of Justice, including that of due process. In this, the seminarians have seriously failed to uphold the triumvirate of concerns that Christ Jesus deemed primary: judgment/justice, faith, and compassion (Matt 23:23). And if one does not comprehend the nature and principles of Justice, one cannot comprehend the Justice in the Justification in the Atonement.

A, if not THE primary argument deployed to validate the notion of humanity’s collective guilt in Adams’s sin is proof by blackmail. If one repudiates the imputation of Adam’s sin and guilt upon all, neither can one subscribe to the imputation of Christ Jesus’s work on behalf of those who put their faith in Him. We would thereby still be hopelessly dead in our sins.

The Defrocking (Firing) of Darrin Patrick – Church Discipline

The Defrocking (Firing) of Darrin Patrick – Part 1

The Defrocking (Firing) of Darrin Patrick – Part 2

The Defrocking (Firing) of Darrin Patrick – Part 3

Mars Hill imploded a little while after my brief flirtation with Harvest Bible Chapel. While at Harvest, I met young males who were initially quite enthused about the masculine Christianity that Driscoll represented. As for myself, I have complicated thoughts and feelings about this now “Goldstein” in the New Calvinist pantheon. This is as it should be. Contrary to the Manichean stick figures of Hollywood, the larger part of humanity are a complexity.

I do not wish to speak to Driscoll’s attitudes, personality, and failings; nor to the hostile milieu which confronted him, globally, locally, and within his own multisite megachurch; nor the interaction between such, which contributed to greater contention in feedback loop. Others, many with personal acquaintance with the actors involved, have better testimonies to those elements.

Rather, it is Mars Hill’s Church Discipline in the Bible (2012) in-house document, which I found of greater pertinence and enduring import. For contained therein is a systemic theological understanding and ecclesiological practice, common with other New Calvinist churches. The purpose of this essay is to suggest a traceable link between those systemic understandings and the various scandals that consistently plague New Calvinist churches in various forms.

American Crassus

The potential for Donald Trump to be next American President first brought to mind the last scene in an old, historically inaccurate, and tad overwrought movie, The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), whereby the imperial title of Caesar was being auctioned off after the death of Commodus, and closing with this somber warning of Ariel Durant.

This was the beginning of the fall of the Roman Empire. A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

The title had once been auctioned off to a wealthy senator, Didius Julianus, in 193 AD by the Praetorian Guard. But this was one emperor removed and three months after Commodus. Disgust by local Romans to that “election” would thereupon encourage military generals to vie for the throne.

But while culturally, America may be in that interregnum between Marcus Aurelius and the Crisis of the Third Century, the wrong Fall and the wrong plutocrat is being referenced. A more appropriate historical parallel is the fall of the Roman Republic in first century BC. The more appropriate plutocrat was Crassus who, along with Pompey and Julius Caesar, constituted the First Triumvirate.

Imputed Injustice – Calvin Against the Calvinists

Imputed Injustice

Yet we still quarrel. We still contend with the Almighty. We still assume that somehow God did us wrong and that we suffer as innocent victims of God’s judgment. Such sentiments only confirm the radical degree of our fallenness. When we think like this, we are thinking like Adam’s children. Such blasphemous thoughts only underline in red how accurately we were represented by Adam.[1]

According to R.C. Sproul, repudiating the imputation of legal guilt for Adam’s sin upon ourselves as his descendants constitutes blasphemous thoughts, indicative of the radical degree of our fallenness. Then I am the chief of blasphemers; having visceral and vehement contempt and detestation for this ecclesiastical innovation! Had I first heard this nonsense, confirmed by the larger part of Christendom, I would have rejected Christianity outright as perversely absurd and unjust. I would have been as Christopher Hitchens, as Sam Harris, or as Richard Dawkins. Thank God that He saved me from His church, albeit in a most painful way.

Apparently, I am not alone in my radical blasphemer and radical degree of fallenness.

The New Romanism of New Calvinism

Having to periodically engage with New Calvinists, as unpleasant as that is, it does foist enlightenment as to their fundamental ethos. And this realization, or rather the fullness of this realization fills me with alarm, despair, and trepidation for the souls of their congregation.

I am currently reading Matt Chandler’s “The Mingling of Souls,” which as Chandler himself admits, is highly adapted from the 1991 sermons by Tommy Nelson on the Song of Solomon. I have listened to a few of Nelson’s sermons myself, and they have worth. However, as I recollect, Nelson is too coy and even too esoterically Christianese in an era, which has suffered such a dramatic decline of the mind and culture. (The only historical equivalent that comes to mind is the period from the death of Marcus Aurelius (180 AD) to that of the assassination of Severus Alexander (235 AD), after which began the Roman Empire’s Crisis of the Third Century, with one military overlord after another jostling for the Purple.)

Furthermore, the formal six point pattern that Nelson contrives bumps up against what many Puritans considered to be the most romantic couple of Scriptures; that being Isaac and Rebekeh.

Reclaiming Complementarianism – Part 1

Scriptures and even existential realities advocate and prohibit a limited set of particular functions between the sexes. However, this hardly constitutes a framework of rigid gender roles. Alternative rational paradigms can justify the existence of these exclusionary functions. But before visiting the biblical counsel, which is understandably most psychologically problematic for women (Eph 5:23), it behooves to frame an alternative paradigm of complementarianism.

Rather than conceiving of man/husband and woman/wife in terms of gender roles, it would prove more apt and productive to conceive each sex as having intrinsically dominant propensities. These should not be thought of in terms of being rigidly defined or unchangeable. For each category of attributes, individual members will vary within a range for each sex (and even overlap with the range of the other sex). These differentiating propensities better endow one spouse or the other to certain functions within the marriage. However, since Scriptures is circumspect concerning the allocation of these abilities, a flexible casting of functions proves more profitable.

These propensities are not socially constructed, although they may be confirmed and re-enforced by socialization. Evidence from science, history, psychology, and sociology can be enlisted to validate this contention, although full discourse would be too long-winded for the purposes of a blog. But to give a couple of examples:

Gender Differences in Navigation

The Defrocking (Firing) of Darrin Patrick – Part 3

 

The Defrocking of Darrin Patrick – Part 1

 The Defrocking of Darrin Patrick – Part 2

The Defrocking Darrin Patrick – Church Discipline

The more that I have learnt of Darrin Patrick’s person and ministry since April 13, 2016, the more that I have come to like the man. This does not make me his fanboy. He is not that pretty. However, I am a man with an acute sense of justice, and fierce Scythian loyalty to protect those who I deem to be one of “my own,” even to the point of savaging the reputations and livelihoods of those who would so dare hurt those I love.

Aspersions of sinful leadership and deceit in Darrin’s life are continuing to be promulgated by The Journey cabal and their allies. But the facts that are publicly available betray this narrative. There is total disconnect. And it is only because of the sheeple propensity of those within the Reformed/New Calvinist congregations, which allows this narrative to persist. But to trust the word of mere men, Evangelical mini-popes, over the plain rendering of Scriptures or the objective realities of the situation is to give evidence of a perilous salvific status. For such sheeples have made these elders, who proclaim to be the trumpets and anvils of God, to be the ultimate authority, even over the God of Scriptures.

From my vantage point, deep injustice has been done to Darrin Patrick. A predominantly conservative–minded faction among the eldership resent their more sociopolitical moderate colleague who has pursued the lost beyond the gated culture communities of white sepulchered Christendom. They have exploited the passages concerning the qualifications of elders, while blatantly violating other explicit scriptural passages that insist that the facts of Patrick’s supposed moral failings be laid out before the congregation for them to decide (Matt 18:15–7). In this, I see a successful bid by Satan, exploiting the envy of these moralistic and Pharisaic wolves that currently lead The Journey, to discredit and destroy one who has hitherto been able to successfully assault the gates of Hell. The facts of that reality, even these wolves have been disinclined to discredit. This is a better narrative, which fits the factual circumstances, and in light of scriptural and Christian history, than the narrative that seems to be in the process of morphing as we speak.

For according to the latest rumors that have been fed to Christianity Today and Barnabas Piper, the son of John Piper, “sexual behaviour was not the issue at hand, but the issue at hand was basically pride.”[1] Last week, innuendos of sexual impropriety and lack of self-control was the mainstay of The Journey’s assault on Darrin’s honor and reputation. But apparently this first lob of flak was too incredible, even for the credulity of those on their pews, to stick. So the current narrative is one of “Darrin Patrick . . .  was fired for violating his duties as a pastor and one of the major behavioural issues that his church board or elder board cited as the reason for their firing was a history of building identity through ministry and media platforms.”

Determination of pride is a very difficult and elusive judgment call, usually requiring “by their fruits, you will know them” forms of palpable and measureable evidence (Matt 7:16, 20). Even New Calvinist leadership will counsel that one may refute perceived erroneous doctrines with gusto, but be very careful, and having plenty of evidence, in the aspersion of bad motives and attitudes. But as exemplified in Darrin Patrick’s response to a critique of one his books from John MacArthur, extant evidence on social media betrays this elusive pride that these church elder board members have apparent deep insight into, (even as their lead pastor, a psycho-socially oblivious Jeremy Bedenbaugh, publicly dishonored his wife).[2] But if one takes the time to listen to Darrin Patrick’s talks, the vanity of pride is not among the top five impressions one receives, unless one has a prejudice, agenda, or anvil to grind.

But let us take up the issue of “a history of building identity through ministry and media platforms.” If this be true of Darrin Patrick, who I have never heard of prior to last week, what can it be said of Barnabas Piper’s father, John Piper, who I have heard of, who was quick to make his presence known in the Oklahoma tornado? If this be true of Darrin Patrick, what is one to say about all those other books by New Calvinist pastors and theologians with pages of endorsements from their peers (John 12:43). I actually find it difficult to believe that they have been read by their endorsers. For what busy bee minister would have the time to read all the books that they have endorsed?

Is writing a book contrary to the declared will of God? If not so, then the public should be aware of the current state of the publishing industry. An author is required by the publisher of his book to establish a media platform. I know this, because in order to have an academic book published with Wipf & Stock, which was already accepted (“Faith from First to Last”), this has been a requirement laid upon me. But because I am just a non-credentialed grunt on the pew, in a Laodicean locality with a dearth of spiritual vitality to support my ventures, and without the network of endorsers, that book will have to be withdrawn from them.

The publishing market is so savagely competitive, especially with Amazon, traditional publishers no longer perform the promotional stuff that they once used to. Therefore, Barnabas Piper, who has published a book and should know better, but has the promotional advantage of nepotistic connections, is being deceitfully disingenuous.

♦                    ♦                    ♦

I am tiring of this travesty of justice. If The Journey will not self-correct or prove the facts of their aspersions concerning Darrin Patrick; and if Act 29 leader, Matt Chandler, or all the other New Calvinist leadership do not correct this situation; then just as the elders of The Journey have arrogated unto themselves to be the trumpets and anvils of God, so shall I do likewise. And just as my Father saw fit to hiss for the Assyrians and Babylonians to discipline “physical Israel”; in imitation of Him (Eph 5:1), perhaps I should hiss for the Assyrian and Babylonian presses to discipline “spiritual Israel.”

[1] Morgan Lee, “Darrin Patrick, Pastors, and Pride with Barnabas Piper,” Quick to Listen (Christianity Today), April 21, 2016, https://soundcloud.com/christianitytoday/barnabas-piper, Min 2:30.

[2] “When I make my vows to my wife in my marriage ceremony, I said, you know, richer or poorer, sickness or in health. And I will love you until all eternity. No. What do we say? I will love you until death do us part. There will be an ending of marriage.” From Jeremy Bedenbaugh, Singleness (sermon), St. Louis, MO: Tower Grove Church, October 18, 2015, http://thejourney.org/media/local-church-sermons-2015-16/singleness, 3:50 – 4:06.