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What an odd thing to say, what a backhanded compliment, but I truly would like to thank Pastor Doug Wilson and a few other sad sacks from the Christianese twitterverse, people who have totally repulsed me, who have just sent me careening down the hill at full speed driving the crazy train.
I wanted to know “why” the world had gone crazy, “why” the church was so reviled and hated, “why” there were such deep divisions, “why” people were deconstructing their faith. And perhaps in a more personal way, “why are liberals always so angry?” Well, “seek and you shall find, ask and you shall receive.”
It’s been an interesting journey, one filled with so many accusations of heresy, blasphemy, endless hate mail and threats to notify either my husband or my pastor about what a horrible person I am. (Side note here, but shhhh, I think they probably already know.)
I really like the Twitter bunch the other day who declared that the, “alleged sanctity of the pulpit” would be better preserved if the office were held by a pedophile rather than a woman. Besides the bone crushing, soul rot of such comments, in a moment of irony I thought, and that seems to be precisely what you have created. Congratulations.
Let me tell you, if I’ve been on the receiving end of all this “Christian love,” others have experienced it ten fold, have had it wormed into their consciousness so deeply, God Himself will have to reach down and pluck it all out.
It wasn’t until I read Wilson’s words today that it all clicked, his posting of a speech he did at the ACCS conference in Atlanta called, “Arrogance and Humility: Worlds in Collision.”
I am so, so grateful the world actually is in collision, that the world is in rebellion, that the culture has lost it’s darn mind, because what they are rejecting is such a cheap counterfeit, such a dark and ugly imposter, such a sour bit of leaven that has somehow wormed it’s way into Westernized Christianity.
I love the fact that there are Christians who care about human rights, care about social justice, care about how other people are treated. I hate that the SBC, or those often affiliated with it, have allowed so much racist, misogynistic crap to just slide on by like it’s somehow okay, like if anyone objects to outright abuse, it’s just because they obviously hate God and God’s word.
People don’t hate God and God’s word, people hate the unkindness, the bullying they’ve experienced at the hands of Christian people who prop up religion as institution. Most people don’t even know God and His word! They’ve been too busy listening to your ugly words.
Wilson, always the wordsmith, said something I really liked, although not in the way he intended at all. It’s supposed to be a Very Bad Thing, a very bad thing indeed, but it made my soul skip a little quickening of joy much like Baby John once did a flip while he was curled up in Elizabeth’s womb. Wilson said,
“But in our postmodern times, we are standing on the very lip of the Void, and it is a trembling lip that is about to give way underneath us. This is the abyss. This is the way of madness. This is a culture-wide delirium, a culture with no categories—we are uprooted trees, restless sea foam, clouds without rain….”
Three cheers for the lip of the void, for the abyss, for the way of madness, for that is where God truly lives and shines and does His very best work. I should know, I am after all, insanitybytes.
Be an uprooted tree, a restless bit of sea foam, a fluffy cloud without rain, just be your glorious self and remember that God is love. It says that in the Bible. That means it is biblical. Also, God is a person, the personhood of Jesus Christ, not an institution, not a set of political beliefs, and not a bunch of narcissistic Christian leaders who wouldn’t know the first thing about humility if it jumped up and bit them on the behind.
“People don’t hate God and God’s word…” Sorry IB, lots of people hate God and His Word. I used to be one, through college, through the military, without ever having been preached to, lectured on my sins, or received any unkindness from any church or self declared Christian. I delighted in demolishing the loving attempts to win me for Christ. Our Campus Crusade leaders in 1965-68 were unfailingly kind, reasonable and hospitable to me, despite my sarcastic smug demeanor. My heart grew harder as I got older, not at all because of Christians, churches or warnings. I was hard because they were all too soft, not because they were hard. Only when I met the living Christ through a person who was harder than me, not in attitude but in ability to rise above his circumstances, was I able to face myself. Wilson isn’t for you, but I—the ultimate hard case—needed someone like him.
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The Apostle Paul said, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”
No where does the Bible speak of creating hard hearts in His name. In fact, Jesus actually warns us, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.”
To have a hard heart, to be a hard man, and to hurt those who are weak and vulnerable, is to be a child of hell.
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Saul of Tarsus was as hard as they come. God met him where his heart was at. Was it necessary to blind him for awhile? Nowhere did I speak of creating hard hearts in His name either. I needed to hear from someone who I perceived was tougher than me. When I met a man who had suffered grievously in Vietnam, yet radiated the spirit of Christ, I was in! When God had Jonathan Edwards’ preach a sermon piercing the spiritual deadness of the time, kindling the first Great Awakening, that sermon was called “Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God.” That was the message needed for those people of that time in that place. Plenty of other, more “loving” messages have worked for others at other times and places. People can take what they need from a message, and leave the rest, but cannot insist that only one kind of message is acceptable.
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Ah Curm, you’re far too likeable and I just don’t want to fight with you.! The thing is, Jonathan Edwards wrote his sermon on the back of a receipt which marked his purchase of a 13 yr old slave, a girl named Venus. I wonder if she ever missed her family or dreamed of freedom? Cried herself to sleep?? I wonder what she thought of Jonathan Edward’s “angry God,” the god who had completely forsaken her?
Only one kind of message is acceptable because only one kind of message reflects the truth of who God really is.
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I am grateful that you pointed out that fact about Jonathan Edwards. In researching it, I came upon a dialogue on the website, DesiringGod, between John Piper and a seeker. I just published the entire dialogue as my latest post. It is SO instructive to every human being, believers or not. I am highly blessed by pastor john’s response, and therefore, by your indirectly leading me to it. Thanks.
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Gotta say I don’t see what was wrong with his speech. For the rest, I think I’m out of the loop.
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I knew you wouldn’t understand, and I’m not picking on you personally, but that’s a big part of the problem. We have a church with it’s fingers in its ears and its eyes covered.
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Wow.
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Iyou knew I wouldn’t understand? I would be surprised if you have me in mind of late. I was not aware that we had apparently ended up on different pages…if we have some doctrinal disagreement over matters of faith you’ll have to fill me in, especially on whatever compels you to dingle me out with such arrogant dismissiveness.
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We don’t have a doctrinal disagreement, we have a heart disagreement. I often speak the truth about what is going on in the church at large, and you often refuse to understand, dismiss me, and then accuse me of something like “arrogant dismissiveness.”
I spoke of bullying and hatred, of pedophilia and the #churchtoo movement, and rather then address any of that, you choose to declare that you don’t see anything wrong and that you are out of the loop. So basically you have just completely dismissed my concerns and pretty much implied that I have no idea what I’m talking about. And now you are hurt because I have not validated your feelings of complete disrespect for me?
So yes, a big problem in the church as a whole is that it covers its eyes and sticks in fingers in its ears.
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We don’t “often” interact at all. I haven’t read your or nearly anyone else’s blog for over a year. I meant no dismissiveness toward what you were saying. I only said that the speech you linked to by itself, stznding alone, looked ok to me. I lack knowledge of the internal politics that supplies condemnation to such a plain speech. I literally don’t know about the other things you were talking about– thus I am out of the loop. I was not being snarky but confessing my own ignorance.
You came back at me like we have some history of opposition and that you kni4w all about what I think. That knowledge has to be imaginary because I have not supplied you with that. I have no idea why you think I deserve such hate and accusation. I was truly surprised.
Pkease do not kump me in with zny of the groups in your oersonal narrative. I am me and I think I should expect a sister to treat me as such rather thsn with tribal bitterness. Be well.
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Do you feel better now? I hope you have unburdened yourself about my alleged hatefulness, my alleged tribal bitterness, and my so called imaginary narratives. Be well.
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Reminds me of the 19th chapter of Isiah.
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I’m sorry, but I just could not read the whole article to which you linked, IB. I had to stop after this line: “This is a world in which the reality of objective truth is acknowledged, and the debate is over which ‘truth’ is in fact that truth.” I think that shows a bit of ignorance about the way the world is going. He obviously hasn’t read Abdu Murray’s Saving Truth or considered the many fine points he made dealing with the issues of gender identity and the like. There’s nothing about “objective truth” in any of that. It’s all about feeling. As Murray says, we are now a post-truth culture. If anyone’s interested, they can read my review of the book here: https://rebeccaluellamiller.wordpress.com/2018/05/16/saving-truth-blog-tour/
But to the point here, I wonder if we believers should engage the Doug Wilson’s of the world or the Joel Osteen or a list of other false teachers whose words don’t stack up well when compared to Scripture. Is that putting our fingers in our ears and covering our eyes? I think it’s more like knowing the genuine article so well we can easily spot the fake. I’d rather listen to a Tony Evans or an Alistair Begg or a Ravi Zacharias because I am encouraged by the fact that they boldly share the word of God and open it up for our understanding.
Becky
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The root of the word “arrogance” is the Latin verb *arrogare*, “to claim for oneself.” What people “claim for themselves” is probably the important thing here. Sometimes people who claim for themselves the ability to speak for God with complete accuracy and certainty forget to remember some parts of the Bible, like Philippians 2:5-8. That in turn makes it hard to remember that seeking and saving the lost is different from telling people how wrong they are and how much God hates them for that.
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That’s a really good point, Hat. “To claim for oneself,” great definition.
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Oh, you got me curious there! It has been so long since I had the chance to deconstruct a really traditional, Christian sermon. And, oh boy, this one is a doozy!
But you know, in many ways the man is actually totally correct. “How can we be counter-cultural without knowing what culture we are countering?” True, very true.
Though, somewhat confusingly, he then does go on to claim that the “key to understanding this is understanding the lordship and supremacy of Jesus Christ.” Which doesn’t make sense to me – because that is not a “culture”, it’s a religion and he ought to know the difference, no?
But to continue – adding confusion to confusion, he then proceeds to speak about a “battle for the Bible”, which to my mind was lost already at the Council of Nicea, but that could be just me…
I would like to digress here though, for there is an important point to be made. The Bible which he seems to venerate so much – that book is actually a compromise of opinions held by mortal men at a politically-mastered council of priests and other religious-minded people, more than fifteen hundred years ago. It is, frankly, a cobbled-together book which contains scriptures and stories which were more-or-less acceptable to the majority of them…
To claim that the Bible is the “Word or God” is… well, about as accurate as to claim that the Earth is the sum total of God’s creation.
Yes, the Bible is *also* the “Word of God” – to the extent that its contents have not been altered or manipulated by men over time (which is itself a doubtful claim to make). But there is nothing in it or in its history to make me believe that it can in any way be the *only* “Word of God”.
So maybe a really good starting point for this “definition of common words,” which he seems to desire so much, would be: define “Bible”?
He goes on then to speak about himself and some kind of epiphany and the dangers of inverting the soul into a black hole (which Augustine was actually rather good at doing, so no quibbles there). And then onwards to one of the key questions of all existence: “What is truth?”
Not that he answers it, of course. But it’s always a good question.
Anyway, it seems to me that he is entirely in accord with the rest of Western culture when he claims that schools are “built on the truth, that instruct children in the truth, that love the truth…” etc. Nothing to disagree with there. Truth is very important.
Though…
One wonders. How does he define “truth”? We really have no idea today; the “truth” we have today is as likely as not to be the outmoded superstitions of tomorrow.
So even more important than “truth” is the ability to THINK. To reason. To ponder. To consider. To see – not only what is placed in front of you, but all the other aspects of it. To walk around it and look at it from all sides. For only thus can “truth,” ephemeral and temporal as it may be, be found.
He does do that, though, to some extent. After all, he is open to the idea that truth may not be held by the Bible only, but also by the Koran, the Book of Mormon, or Darwin’s Origin. Which is kind of amazing, as I had thought him a hardcore old-school Christian up to that point. Silly me. I don’t really see the conflict between the Bible and Darwin, though, unless you insist on reading the Bible in the most literal sense – and where is the sense in that, these days?
But he is good at the poetical imagery, I will give him that.
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Well done! I enjoyed your sermon deconstruction.
As to the Bible, it really is 66 different books written by different people across centuries. So for me, what makes it inerrant, what makes it the word of God is actually supernatural, mysterious, “God led,” for lack of a better description. It’s kind of like how 10 diverse people can just suddenly all come into agreement about what is good, what is the right thing. A lot of human hands and opinions went into collecting the Bible, but Someone led them, guided them, inspired them. God.
Also for me, “The Word” is not just the Bible. The Word is also a person, the personhood of Jesus Christ. LOL, it actually says that in the Bible! For many hundreds of years Christians didn’t even have access to Bibles. Sometimes in the modern West it seems like we’ve forgotten this and so we almost idolize the Bible as if the book itself were God.
I like what you said about truth, “to see.” Another word for that would be “to perceive, to know.” Truth can be a trippy thing, subjective, reflective, objective, hard to pin down. The Bible actually tells us that Jesus is not only “The Word” He is also oft5en called “The Truth.”
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Well spoken, Insanitybytes! And I should say – actually, should have said before I made the comment above – that I meant no disrespect in what I said. Faith is a very personal thing and truth wears many faces.
Though, having said that … I do intensely dislike the traditional, rigidly-blind, Christian-conservative movement which Wilson seems to rejoice in. Faith is an intensely personal matter and I won’t ever criticize anyone’s choice in the matter – as long as they extent the same courtesy to me and mine. But he and his ilk strain to impose their faith on other people, whatever the cost, and that is not something which I will ever respect – or tolerate.
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Well said, in your unique way. I’m seeing this in my Tribe–of wanting to walk with the culture and it’s devastating. We are called to be in “collision” with the world. Didn’t some guy say (I think it was Jesus), “I haven’t come to bring peace–but a sword!”
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