My new favorite, concise, and to-the-piont blog: 22 Words by Abraham Piper

Great audio presentation by James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries on why he is a Christian.  In this presentation he begins by defining what exactly is a Christian to then relate why he himself is a Christian.  If you don’t have much knowledge about Christianity, this would be a good place to start.

Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary Alum was recently portrayed in The Wall Street Journal.  The article addresses their beginning of a new church in Detroit and the litany of issues that comes with it.

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USA Todaydid a cover article on Tim Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church and the multi-site church strategy sweeping America.

Speaking of USA Today, Cathy Lynn on her Faith and Reason blog posed this question, “Are you  megachurch dropout?”

Today there seems to be this notion that hyper-fundamentalism equals an emphasis on actual bible teaching.  Green Baggins addresses this issue briefly in defining what exactly is true scholarship, in the biblical sense.

Ligonier Ministries has posted their significant books for 2009.  The list covers such areas as John Calvin, Church History, Systematic Theology, Practical Theology, and Biblical Studies.

Well, with 2010 approaching with the quickness, here is a list by David Dunham at Christ in the City on books to look for next year.

Is there more to being dubbed Reformed and/or a Calvinist than acknowledging the Five Points of Calvinism (i.e. T.U.L.I.P.)?  Well, I think so and so does Caleb at Discover Orthodoxy.

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Young Pastor or Seminarian?  Here is advice from Tim Keller on gaining early ministry experience.

Since I expect to graduate from Seminary in August of 2010, I’ve been looking for encouragement and practical advice in pursuing Pastoral Ministry afterwards.  So, here is another blurb on being a Pastor from Matt Chandler.

Even though I’ve argued before that Christians have an obligation to be involved within America’s Political Process, I’m not naive enough to know that the danger of Religious Nationalism.  Eric Carpenter of A Pilgrim’s Progress reminds us of that threat through a series of pictures revealing an unhealthy mix between Christianity and Nationalism.

In response to an article in Christian Century, Kevin DeYoung offered pilthy advice for those that identify themselves with the “New” Calvinist movement

The Real Saint Nicholas by Ted Olsen in Christianity Today:

December 6 marks Saint Nicholas Day, and I thought I’d mark the beginning of the Christmas season by telling the story of Santa Claus’s namesake. But before I do, I should remark that, historically speaking, there’s not much we really know about Nicholas. Though he’s one of the most popular saints in the Greek and Latin churches, his existence isn’t attested by any historical document. All we can say is that he was probably the bishop of Myra (near modern Finike, Turkey) sometime in the 300s.

That said, there are of course many legends about Nicholas, and since these have influenced people throughout history, and they likely illustrate something about the historical man, they are fair game for a publication, like ours, devoted to Christian history.

Supposedly, Nicholas was born to a wealthy family in Patara, Lycia. His parents died, and he inherited a considerable sum of money, but he kept none of it. In the most famous story about his life, he threw bags of gold through the windows of three girls about to be forced into lives of prostitution. At least that’s the most common version of the story; there are others, including an excessively grim one where the three girls are beheaded by an innkeeper and pickled in a tub of brine until Nicholas resurrects them.

After a couple of miracles (he’s sometimes called Nicholas the Wonder-Worker) performed while he was still a boy, Nicholas was chosen by the people of Myra to be their new bishop. But it wasn’t long before Diocletian and Maximian began their persecutions of Christians, and the new bishop was imprisoned.

When Constantine became emperor, Nicholas was released with countless others and returned to his preaching only to find a new threat: Arianism. According to one biographer (writing five centuries after Nicholas’s death), “Thanks to the teaching of St. Nicholas, the metropolis of Myra alone was untouched by the filth of the Arian heresy, which it firmly rejected as a death-dealing poison.” Other biographers claim Nicholas attacked the heresy of Arius (who denied the full divinity of Christ) in a much more personal way—he traveled to the Council of Nicea and slapped Arius in the face! As the story goes (and this should be taken as fantasy because there are pretty good records of the council, and Nicholas isn’t mentioned), the other bishops at Nicea were shocked at such rude behavior and relieved him as bishop. But then Jesus and Mary appeared next to him, and they quickly recanted.

That’s the questionable legend of Nicholas. But not the end of the story. Even by the reign of Justinian (d. 565), Nicholas was famous, and the emperor dedicated a church in Constantinople to him. By the 900s, a Greek wrote, “The West as well as the East acclaims and glorifies him. Wherever there are people, his name is revered and churches are built in his honor. All Christians reverence his memory and call upon his protection.” The West became even more interested when his “relics” were taken from Myra to Bari, Italy, on May 9, 1087. He’s said to have been represented by medieval artists more frequently than any saint but Mary, and nearly 400 churches were dedicated in his honor in England alone during the late Middle Ages.

With such a popularity, his legends inevitably became intertwined with others. In Germanic countries, it sometimes became hard to tell where the legend of Nicholas began and that of Woden (or Odin) ended. Somewhere along the line, probably tied to the gold-giving story, people began giving presents in his name on his feast day. When the Reformation came along, his following disappeared in all the Protestant countries except Holland, where his legend continued as Sinterklass. Martin Luther, for example, replaced this bearer of gifts with the Christ Child, or, in German, Christkindl. Over the years, that became repronounced Kriss Kringle, and ironically is now considered another name for Santa Claus.

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By C.J. Mahaney of Sovereign Grace Ministries.  C.J. does a great job in reminding us of the grace of God at work in our lives.  Not only in redeeming us from the penalty of sin, but also redeeming us from the power of sin that too hunts us, not like the media is hunting Tiger. 

Tiger Woods wants his privacy back.

He wants the media entourage to disappear from his life.

He wants to be left alone so he can manage his personal problems in private.

Not a chance.

The story began unfolding in the early hours of last Friday when he crashed his Cadillac Escalade into a tree and a fire hydrant near his Florida home. He refused to speak with the police about the incident, raising curiosity about the circumstances. The story has now escalated into allegations of marital infidelity, and that generated a blog post from Tiger that stated, “I have let my family down and I regret those transgressions with all of my heart.” This statement by Tiger has led most to believe that the allegations of infidelity are true.

Hunted by the Media

As expected, the allegations of adultery involving a public figure are attracting a media pile-on. This is a big story with a big audience and it’s a story that will not disappear soon. Tiger Woods is being hunted by the media.

But let us make sure we do not join the hunt. A Christian’s response to this story should be distinctly different. We should not be entertained by the news. We should not have a morbid interest in all the details. We should be saddened and sobered. We should pray for this man and even more for his wife.

And we can be sure that in the coming days we will be in conversations with friends and family where this topic will emerge. And when it does, we can avoid simply listening to the latest details and speculations, and avoid speaking self-righteously, but instead we can humbly draw attention to the grace of God in the gospel.

Hunted by Sin

But Tiger is being hunted by something more menacing than journalists. Tiger’s real enemy is his sin, and that’s an enemy much more difficult to discern and one that can’t be managed in our own strength. It’s an enemy that never sleeps.

Let me explain.

Sin Lies

The Bible in general, and the book of Proverbs in particular, reveals an unbreakable connection between our character, our conduct, and the consequences of our actions. These three are inseparable and woven by God into His created order.
                                              
Deception is part of sin’s DNA. Sin lies to us. It seeks to convince us that sin brings only pleasure, that it carries no consequences, and that no one will discover it. Sin works hard to make us forget that character, conduct, and consequences are interconnected. And when we neglect this relationship—when we think our sins will not be discovered—we ultimately mock God.

Sin Hunts

We’ve all experienced it: Sin lies to us. We take the bait. And then sin begins to hunt us.

For the rest of the post click here.

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by Justin Hooper New York Magazine:

It’s a Sunday evening at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, and the pews are full. Redeemer is a conservative Evangelical Christian congregation, but the parishioners don’t fit the easy Bible Belt stereotypes. They are a cross-section of yuppie Manhattanites�doctors, bankers, lawyers, artists, actors, and designers, some of them older, most of them in their twenties or thirties. The peppy Christian-pop anthems, performed by Broadway-caliber singers and working jazz professionals, seem to go by in double time, the faster the better to get to the main event, the weekly sermon, delivered by pastor Tim Keller.

Keller is a 59-year-old bald, large-framed man, dressed today in a blue blazer and gray slacks. For those expecting hellfire and brimstone, the first surprise is the voice. Keller doesn’t speak in theatrical, over-the-top tones but in a soft, conversational manner, as if he’s sharing a confidence with a friend. For today’s sermon on a passage from the Old Testament Book of Habakkuk, in which a minor Jewish prophet rails about the misery brought on by the Babylonians in the seventh century B.C., Keller jumps to the recession and what he sees as shameful finger-pointing by both liberals and conservatives. �The Bible doesn’t let you do that,� Keller intones from the pulpit. �The Bible is nowhere near as simplistic, dare I say it, as either the New York Times’ or The Wall Street Journal’seditorial page. You can write that down. Put it on your blog, I don’t care.�

Now Keller takes Habakkuk’s rap against the Babylonians�their �need to clothe themselves with glory��and aims it straight back at his ambitious, striving Upper West Side congregation. He notes that tennis legend Chris Evert once admitted in an interview that she was driven to win because �winning made her feel pretty� and that Madonna confessed she felt special only when she was breaking through to new levels of fame. Whether we’re athletes, artists, businesspeople, or preachers, Keller says, we all suffer from the same malady�trying to fill our empty spaces with achievement when only accepting God’s grace can do the job. �We want to feel beautiful, we want to feel loved. We want to feel significant and that’s why we’re working so hard and that’s the source of the evil.� In another sermon, on another Sunday, he asks the congregation point-blank: �Why are you in New York? Deep down, you think something is wrong with you.�

Although relatively few secular New Yorkers know about it�Keller prefers to keep Redeemer mostly under the media radar, in part for fear of generating hostile publicity�an Evangelical Christian megachurch is growing in the heart of Manhattan. In the late eighties, Keller came here on what at the time seemed close to a theological suicide mission�to create a strictly conservative Christian church in the heart of Sodom. Today, Redeemer Presbyterian holds five Sunday services at three packed rented venues (in the morning, there are services at the Ethical Culture Society auditorium at 64th Street and Central Park West and at Hunter College’s capacious, 2,000-seat auditorium on 69th Street, between Park and Lexington; in the evening, there’s another service at Hunter and two at the First Baptist Church at 79th Street and Broadway). On any given Sunday, some 5,000 Manhattanites and fellow travelers hear Keller preach in person, and roughly 25,000 download his sermons every week from the church’s sophisticated website, redeemer.com. Late last year, Redeemer closed the deal on a permanent home at 150 West 83rd Street. What is now a defunct four-story parking garage is, in two years, set to become a $50 million modern worship center. The project is believed to be the first significant new church to be built in Manhattan since St. Peter’s went up, more than 30 years ago, next to what used to be known as the Citigroup Center.

Keller has also been building his brand in print. Last year, after his book The Reason for God hit No. 7 on the New York Times’ nonfiction best-seller list, his publisher, Dutton, conceived the idea for a new Redeemer imprint. Keller’s latest book, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters, out in October, speaks directly to the concerns of New York and New Yorkers. The book, like the sermons it’s derived from, delivers a sharp spiritual rebuke of the very things�ambition and achievement�that brought many, if not most, of us here. Keller’s message, in other words, is a slap in the face to our civic religion of success. And scores of us seem to be flocking to him.

On a sunny morning not long ago, Keller greets me at his upper-floor apartment on Roosevelt Island and ushers me into his study. Lined with overflowing bookcases, the office could belong to a professor or a shrink. On this day, Keller’s wife, Kathy, is recovering from surgery at New York�Cornell Hospital. Keller points at the large window just beyond his desk that opens onto the East River and, across it, the Upper East Side: �I know what window is hers. We can look window to window.

For the rest of the article, click here.

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From World Magainze, October 13, by Warren Cole Smith and Rusty Leonard

Controversial compensation

CHARITY: Franklin Graham’s pay package is unlikely to lead to suspension from a financial accountability group

According to Chronicle of Philanthropy figures released late last month, Graham, 57, received in 2008 two salaries, two retirement packages, and other payments from the ministries totaling $1.2 million. The total made him the highest-paid executive at a Christian ministry listed in the survey, and one of the highest paid non-profit executives of any kind. The figures included, as the newspaper pointed out, $669,000 from BGEA, where 55 employees were laid off—more than 10 percent of the staff—in February. Revenue at BGEA dropped 18 percent last year, while at Samaritan’s Purse it climbed 11 percent.

With local and other media attention focused on Graham, he sent a memo to BGEA employees just before the end of the workday on Friday, according to the Observer, announcing that he had asked the BGEA board of directors “to consider that I work for no compensation. I feel that God has called me to this ministry and that calling was never based on compensation.”

In all due respect, when was his call not based upon compensation?  Before or after he banked $1.2 million in one year and untold media attention? 

For the entire article, click here.

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 From Foxnews.com:  Pastor Benny Hinn: Charlatan or Man of God?

 Pastor Benny Hinn is being investigated by the Senate Finance Committee and was recently denied entry into the United Kingdom. The press has been bad, he says, because the media doesn’t understand him.

But the Texas-based faith healer, whose “Holy Spirit Miracle Crusades” pack sports arenas across the United States, is fielding questions about his controversies nonetheless. He says he needs to voice his concerns over the land of his birth, Israel, and the threat to it posed by a nuclear Iran — which he talks about in his new book “Blood in the Sand.”

“[The media] are never going to paint me as I want to be painted,” Hinn said in an exclusive interview. “But, really, it doesn’t matter as long as people give me the chance to talk.”

And talking he is … about the finance probe, his lavish lifestyle and accusations that his faith healings are fake because he offers no documentation or verification that he has, in fact, helped the blind see and the crippled walk.

“They question me on why I don’t verify,” Hinn says. “I answer, ‘God never called me to verify. I’m not a doctor.’”

He says that after a tabloid news show aired an exposé on his worldwide Benny Hinn Ministries, he tried to make changes. The exposé reported that though thousands of people attending Hinn’s religious gatherings said they were healed, the ministry couldn’t prove they suffered from any infirmities in the first place, or that they actually had been miraculously healed.

So, Hinn says, his ministry created a department to handle verifications and follow up on the “miracles.”

“It was chaotic. It was a mess,” he says. “The staff would call and people would be mad and say, ‘Why are you questioning that I was lying up there?’”

“Then we would call the doctors. They wouldn’t talk to us most of the time … so it didn’t work.”

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While watching Good Morning America (GMA) just the other morning, my wife happened on an intriguing observation.  During the broadcast a segment aired entitled “In Vitro Mix-Up.”  Nothing in particular was glaringly wrong with this segment.  It was a piece delivered to relate that fertilized embryos were implanted in the wrong women (you can see the broadcast here). 

During this segment there were many times where the anchor or interviewees commented on the emotionally gripping experience that they went through in the embryo mix-up, and may I add, “rightfully so.” 

Now, on the other hand, when Good Morning America aired a piece on Stem Cell Research, which destroys such embryos in research and medical experiments, they lauded these efforts by doctors as “a breakthrough…the beginning…this is the dawn….[and]…the ethics debate continues” (for a recent example go here).

So here is the  conundrum that we found ourselves in when attempting to make sense of Good Morning America’s position – or lack thereof - on embryos. 

If fertilized embryos lead to the birth of a child – as observed in the embryo mix-up story and modern medicine - how can their destruction in research and testing be lauded as a breakthrough or the beginning of a new era? 

Do you think that GMA has a position either way?  Or do you think that their programming is based upon ratings?  In the end, do you think this is hypocritical act of GMA? 

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In response to, “What is the Christian View of Cloning?” Rev. Richard Phillips – Chair of Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology – said:

Few hot-topics in our culture have more potential for conflict than human cloning.  On one side are many who promise phenomenal blessings from various forms of cloning, while on the other are those who prophesy gloom and doom.  A good question, then, is how should Christians think about human cloning in light of the Bible?

There are three main kinds of cloning.  One is embryo cloning, which seeks to duplicate the process that nature uses to produce twins.  Another is therapeutic or biomedical cloning, which creates an embryo so as to harvest its stem cells, which are useful for regenerating damaged tissue and organs.  The third kind of cloning is reproductive cloning, which seeks to produce a duplicate of an existing animal.  So far reproductive cloning has produced a sheep and other animals, but it is not know to have been performed with humans, which is illegal in many countries.  Biblically, how are we to assess these kinds of cloning.

One place to start with ethical questions is the Ten Commandments.  The sixth commandments forbids the murder of human life (Ex. 20:13).  Because most people still agree that murder is wrong, the question becomes how to define human life.  In my view, the sixth commandment ought to instill in us a profound conservatism when it comes to taking life, so that the burden is not on those who define embryos as human beings and not on those who deny them this status.  Those in favor of cloning, especially biomedical cloning for the use of stem cells, vigorously deny that embryos created for this purpose are really humans, apparently because their intent is to keep them from ever developing very far into life.  TIME magazine’s Michael Kinsey callously argues that since embryos do no have hands or feet, “there is nothing human about them.”1  I sometimes answer people with such views by bringing forth one of my little children and asking, “At what point after conception would it not have been her?”  It is obvious that had we aborted or harvested one of my children as an embryo, it would have been the so-human child we know today that we would have killed.  Philip Ryken rightly says, “There is little doubt that an embryo is a human being. What else could it be?  It must be a human, because it is the genetic product of two other humans.”2  The Bible agrees, frequently speaking of human personhood for those in the womb (Ps. 51:5; Ps. 139:13; Jer. 1:5).  Ryken concludes, “Once we understand this, it becomes apparent why embryonic stem cell research is immoral: It inevitably involves the destruction of a human being designed to be in the image of God.”3

Another reason why cloning is immoral is that it dehumanizes humanity.  In 1995, the Ramsey Colloquium ruled that “A being that is human is a human being.”4  But that leaves human to decide what constitutes being human – that is, it leaves a certain small group of people to make such a decision.  If an embryo needs hands and feet to be considered human, what about those born with defects so that they lack hands and feet?  Are they not human?  If being human requires reasoning ability, what does say about the mentally retarded and Downs syndrome children?  What about elderly people suffering from Alzheimers Syndrome?  To give sinful humans the power to decide the definition of humanity is a chilling prospect indeed.

Another concern we should have about cloning is the increased capacity for human folly and evil to manifest itself.  This is especially true with regard to reproductive cloning.  One advocate asserts that “human cloning allows man to fashion his own essential nature and turn chance into choice.  For cloning’s advocates, this is an opportunity to remake mankind in an image of health, prosperity, and nobility; it is the ultimate expression of man’s unlimited potential.”5  It is not difficult to hear echoes of the original hubris that Satan displayed in the Garden, promising Eve that by rejecting God’s boundaries, “You will be like God” (Gen. 3:5).  Given mankind’s track-record in producing utopias, we ought to view reproductive cloning with a particular dread.  In the place of man made in the image of God, humans made in the image of sinful human designers are far more likely to become monsters than messiahs.  At the heart of designer-cloning is a profound rebellion against God and a great pride that must surely go before an even greater fall.

Sometimes people ask if a cloned human duplicate would possess a soul and thus be genuinely human.  I am not qualified to answer such a question, although I would be biased in the direction of dignifying any human with all the dignity God has bestowed on our race.  But the question itself reveals an inevitable product of cloning, namely, that cloned human beings will be seen as tools rather than brothers and sisters.  It is evident in God’s moral law that human beings are not a means to another end.  This is an important objection to biomedical cloning (stem-cell research), that we sacrifice one human’s life to serve the interests of another.  This would be greatly exacerbated in full reproductive cloning.  It is inevitable that we would create clones to meet some desire of our own: be it companionship or recreation or labor.  If we consider ourselves the creators and designers of cloned humans, it is certain that we will make ourselves their masters.  At present, we create embryos for stem-cell treatments and grant ourselves the right to kill them.  It is certain that we would regard full-fledged clones as our slaves. 

Man always justifies his usurping of God’s role and authority by promising a new paradise.  This was the case with the Tower of Babel, just as it was the Pax Romana and Nazi Germany.  But the result is always cruelty and death.  We must remember this when we hear and read the golden promises made regarding a new dawn for humanity through cloning.  Cloning would make us Pharaohs over a slave people of our own making.  God’s opinion of this endeavor was given not only in the Ten Commandments, but was acted out in his violent judgment of Pharaoh.  In the end, cloning will enslave and destroy our humanity, just as sinful rebellion against God always does, and result in God’s judgment for the horrors we will inflict.

1 Michael Kinsey, Time, June 25, 2001, 80.
2 Philip G. Ryken, My Father’s World, (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2002), 133.
3 Ibid., 134.
4 Ibid., 133.
5 Patrick Stephens, “Cloning: Toward a New Conception of Humanity,” The Reproductive Cloning Network, accessed at www.reproductivecloning.net.

 

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