There's Beauty in the Bellow

What does a Christian gravestone look like? Our church sits next door to a funeral home and cemetery. I wandered through the cemetery one day and was impressed by the blankness of most of the headstones. Most have merely the name and lifespan inscribed. There might be an inscription noting the branch of the military or the war that a veteran served in. Maybe a "beloved wife and mother." There was one stone for a young serviceman with the logos of his favorite pastimes/hobbies: NASCAR, a football team, the Marines, a baseball team -- a strange combination of altar and shrine, but ultimately meaningless and empty. We know that our culture fears death. We belittle the old who look and act old, who "turn in their sexy card." We hide them away in special homes. We market "anti-aging" and "life-extension". It's strange to look at the empty headstones over the remains of (let's assume) a full life. Our expectations for the after life are eq...

Strong paedobaptist covenantalists frequently talk about the corporate nature of God's covenant(s) and the Bible's style. Unless the speaker/writer is directly addressing an individual (Ahab, Mary, Hezekiah, Philemon, or Yahweh for example), most of the "you's" in Scripture are plural. Paedobaptists argue that credobaptists overlook this corporate nature and read the Bible too individualistically: Credos just can't help it: it's wired into their theological DNA. If credobaptism only originated with the anabaptists, or the First and Second Great Awakenings (I know, that's a really broad swath of history) -- then maybe individualism is intertwined into the credo baptist position. That doesn't mean that it has to be. After all, we are learning that we can improve upon our physical genetic material -- say, diet and exercise can diminish a strong genetic tendency towards heart disease. I've been memorizing Psalm 139 and have just started verse 1...

Why work for diversity in the Church? I've seen this question posed a couple times. Partly out of concern for tokenism, partly out of concern for creating a new legalism. As I see it, there are three major reasons for seeking diversity and racial reconciliation: coming to terms with our own history, a vision for maturity in the American church, and the Eschatological Church. Reckoning with our own history (especially the SBC) I don't remember where I got this observation (I think it was Tim Mackie), but here it is: In chapter nine of the book of Daniel, Daniel offers a prayer of repentance for Israel's past sins -- the corporate sins that culminate in the Babylonian exile that contextualizes the book. Daniel has acted uprightly in every dilemma presented him, so why should he have to repent for others? It's a strange idea for our autonomous age. The Southern Baptist Convention broke off from the American Baptist over the preservation of slavery. Chattel slavery as...

Stop trying . You really should. What freedom can your own forgiveness really grant you? What meaning does it have anyway? Are you God? You make up your own moral code, you violate it, and now you find your own remission inadequate. Funny, isn't it? That you are enough to determine your own truth but not enough to keep it or clean up your failures? Psychopaths, for the record, are chillingly good at forgiving themselves My college pastor had this to say: when you confess your sins to God and you still carry guilt -- confess your unbelief. You might not like the sound of that, but I'll tell you: it sure gets you off that merry-go-round of confession and guilt. When you pray the words of that desperate father: I believe; help my unbelief! You remember how gracious Jesus was to that poor man and how He went and healed the child. Confessing your sins, even in private to all-knowing infinite God, is frightening. It's frightening to see yourself. Maybe your sins are small, bu...

I recently came across an article warning that The Bible Project has an insufficiently robust explanation of the Atonement. ( The Bible Project: Brilliant but Flawed ) I love  the Bible Project. The visuals are nice but I really love the depth and clarity of their content. Really, I prefer the podcasts. I appreciated the criticism because heretofore I've not seen any. And for all its perfections, it must  have some flaws. The author of the article ended by saying that he would not recommend TBP at all. I wouldn't go so far as that. But this instance was a good reminder as the Church deals with a new series of scandals: do not follow any one leader or thinker slavishly. Tim Keller believes in Old Earth Creationism. C.S. Lewis was an open theist. Greg Bausen had rather too large an ego. Martin Luther had some unsavory sentiments (antiSemitic if I remember correctly). Charles Spurgeon had some exegetical problems. Wayne Grudem might have some problems explaining the Trinity. ...

The royal wedding (or sort-of sub-royal) is old news but I want to add my little 2 cents to the non-gushing side of things. Bishop Michael Curry made quite a stir with his sermon. The Americans have been raving about it. I noticed a line featured on the cover the People special wedding edition. It seems that most of the "love" is simply patriotic fervor because Curry is American. There are plenty of churches in America where similar sermons are given -- perhaps with less flair -- with little publicity. Hillsong, for example. I'm pretty sure that exact sermon gets trotted out every so often. Maybe Bieber finds it inspiring. It should be noted that Bishop Curry smooshed together all the various kinds of love into one amorphous mass. He spun the Song of Songs as puppy love; it had as much depth as a Beatles song but four times as long.  It had little in common with the mighty unquenchable love that Dr. Martin Luther King spoke of. He did happen to mention Jesus. There...

So now I'm here: married to a credo-baptist who is crowned with the fruits of the Spirit and who possesses a warm and generous heart. We attend an SBC Reformed Baptist church. I had to receive believer's baptism before I could join. And from my solid upbringing, church membership is a vital ingredient for spiritual maturity. As I started spending more time with Baptists, I started wondering why Presbyterians (of a certain sort at least) seem to continually harp on baptism -- even to the point of implying that Baptists can't fully grasp the Gospel because they don't subscribe to infant baptism. My Baptist husband and friends seem somewhat bewildered by the vehemence over paedobaptism. Michael Bull over at Bully's Blog has been invaluable at pointing out something so simple, I can't believe I overlooked it: Baptism is not the new covenant equivalent of circumcision, because the "circumcised," transformed   heart  is the sign of the new covenant. It a...

A little over three years ago, I joined a Reformed Baptist church. The Baptist part was some time in the happening. I worked for a baptist and my work took me to a couple Southern Baptist Convention annual meetings. He mostly brought me to pique his vanity and as an attempt to bring me to the "dark side." I had grown up in various Presbyterian and Reformed churches, culminating with the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). Other than early childhood outside of big cities in California (plus a babyhood stint in Minneapolis of which I have no recollection), I've spent the last 20 years in a small town in the "lower Alabama" part of Florida. (i.e. the Panhandle) I've been in small churches all my life (other than the fountainhead of the CREC in Idaho) and small towns. In all the churches I had ever been in, almost everyone was white. In 27 years, there was a total of three  black members and they were all single and never at the same church at...

The media outlets featured an early foray into activism by the Duchess of Sussex, then a ten-ish year old Meghan Markle. She called out a company for advertising dish soap to women. The company in question acquiesced and changed its campaign language to "millions of people ." Fair point: women aren't the only ones who wash dishes. In fact, humans aren't the only ones who use dish soap either. One brand advertises that its users include needy marine life. I have an uneasy relationship with "Activism". It seems too close to "lobbyist." Moreover, it seems synonymous with "busybody." I do fervently believe in being active  and actively useful . Maybe some might deem "useful" as demeaning but I would retort: not nearly as demeaning as use- less . But I should hope that one's activity would result in the noise of industry and not the noise of scolding. At any rate, that's an aside and I know that the Duchess intends, wit...

Aimee Byrd noted (somewhere on her blog in the archives) that the Complementarian movement needs to address men using its tenets to hide domestic abuse. I came of age when the Biblical Patriarchy movement was in vogue. We did not hold with many of its dictums (especially the one about girls staying home all the freakin' time and avoiding college) but it still affected us. My dad was just fine with me and my mom wearing pants, but I often felt self-conscious about it. (Really, a stupid thing to obsess over.) I often felt that my hair was not long enough nor our family big enough. (The patriarchy movement seemed to believe that fertility was next to godliness.) When I learned about Complementarianism, it felt like fresh air. Patriarchy stressed hierarchy to the point of totally overlooking "in the image of God He created them, male and female." Reading Genesis it appears that my womanhood has something to tell us about what God is like. I felt strangely relieved when the...

We've just marked Easter -- or rather, we've just entered Easter season which culminates in Ascension Day on May 10th. Apologetics on the necessity of Christ's gruesome death and the certainty and reasonableness of His Resurrection are a regular this time of year. And so I would like to remark on the elegance and vigor of Christian apologetics. Randy Newman spoke about evangelism and apologetics to our church a little while ago and my husband speedily bought his book, "Questioning Evangelism." Newman makes the case for a more Socratic approach to evangelism rather than the traditional Grab Them by the Collar and Give Them Hell, Buy Now! sales pitch. I'm very adverse to the latter. For one thing, it's generally too wrote. For another, it would require a personality change and I think those are harder to come by than sex changes, even in this age of redefinition. One hears over and over of atheists growing up in religious households where asking Why? ...