Joel Johnson writes a familiar but sad story. Malfeasance from a pastor drove him out of Christianity. He’s not alone; writer Sue Monk Kidd tells a tragically similar story. I’m absolutely certain the two are not alone in their experience. And they pose a conundrum, to believers and to those who have left because of this sort of thing.
As believers these sort of stories should serve to remind us of the burden we bear. We know we’re far from perfect. We know we’ll do things that offend others, sometimes egregiously, and even sometimes intentionally. There’s always that possibility; it comes from being human. And the burden is that when we do so, the world around us will blame our church, our faith, our Lord, rather than put the blame where it belongs — on us.
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When I started this blog, one of the things I wanted to talk about was the relationship between Good and Evil. Not in any sterile, merely philosophical way. I wanted to talk about the effect they have on each other, the responses they call forth from each other.
Ben Witherington, author of the Gospel Code, which I wrote about earlier has located a stellar example in the events in Amish schoolhouse.
We can learn much from the example of the Fishers, mother and daughter. Both of them stood up, at a time when the rest of us would have excused them from the duty, for what they knew to be Right, to be Good.
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I don’t like books “exposing” flaws in The DaVinci Code, if for no other reason than they display a lack of sportsmanship. Finding errors in that book is like fishing at a trout farm; the only real question is how many minutes will it take to catch one. That having been said, I’d like to offer a solid recommendation for Ben Witherington’s The Gospel Code.
The major difference between Witherington’s work and the rest is that he limits himself to pointing out just seven major errors, occupying less than the first third of his book. The rest of his book is spent in analysing the deeper errors, made by some more renowned scholars, which tend to feed into books like The DVC.
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At my father-in-law’s for his 90th birthday bash, but with my left hand rendered inoperable by my table saw and my right side impaired by a strained neck muscle, I got to feeling mighty useless. And that, in turn got me thinking in general about the question of the value of a man.
I’m not sure when it started, but here in the US we’ve fallen hook, line and sinker for the old utilitarian definition of value. Your worth is what you do. A person’s value is directly related to what they do and have done.
Don’t believe me? Try this sinmple test: Ask anyone what they do (ask yourself, even). It’s nearly certain the response will be phrased “I *am* a(n) blank” with the blank replaced by the name of an occupation. In other words, they are defining themselves by their occupation. (more…)
This book by Frankie (son of Francis) Schaffer isn’t a new one, and it isn’t new to me. But I went back and reread it a little while ago.
It makes some very good and very interesting points. Frankie isn’t the thinker his father is, but who is? His main point is that Christians are ghetto-izing (that neologism is mine, so don’t blame him) themselves in the arts. Christians are creating subgenres of almost every art form by prepending the word “Christian” to it. And the entries in these subgenres aren’t very good. “Christian movies” (a subgenre close to his heart, as he is a movie maker himself) for example, have lower production values and the acting is worse than in their mainstream counterparts. And worse, the writing and plotting are stale.
Can his premises be argued with?
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