The Week-est Link, August 22, 2008: Final Link

1. Ligonier Ministries, the ministry outfit of R. C. Sproul, is offering extra copies of its current issue which covers what is commonly called the "New Atheism". Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and others have popularized this brand of thought. See if you can get a hold of this magazine issue, and equip yourself (and your small group, or your church) to meet the worldview challenge of the day. (HT: Challies)

2. It came out recently that Barack Obama had make a mistake in recalling his voting record on abortion. In fact, he said that those who in fact had the record straight were liars. Rich Lowry details the sad truth about Obama's record on abortion, showing that he is not a moderate at all on this issue but an extremist who worked to defeat a bill that would have saved babies accidentally born during abortion procedures. An Illinois hospital was leaving these babies to die; thankfully, most of the Illinois legislature supported the bill that would have made such action illegal. As an abortion extremist, however, Barack Obama sought the defeat of that bill (even after a clause was inserted that made the bill neutral in terms of Roe v. Wade and the larger issue), and succeeded. Such action is utterly inexcusable, morally reprehensible, and leaves little doubt about Obama's past stance on abortion.

3. Bookmark this blog on biblical theology. It's led by Jim Hamilton, an exciting young theologian, and should prove very insightful. The trend toward biblical theology is very exciting and will be helpful for preachers who want to understand the full scope of scriptural theology when preaching a given passage. (HT: Justin Taylor)

4. Signing off for consumed. Thanks for reading. It's been a great run. I'll pick up on Monday at http://owenstrachan.com.

--Have a great weekend, all!

The Week-est Link, August 16, 2008: The Death of Death

1. Have you read J. I. Packer's classic introduction to John Owen's The Death of Death in the Death of Christ? If not, you should. It's illuminating and expanding. (HT: Monergism)

2. The Southern Seminary fall chapel calendar is up. Note the Darrell Bock Gheens Lectures in early November. (HT: Blake White)

3. Interesting Mark Driscoll video on the Bible's use of harsh language. This is a tough issue, particularly on matters of personal application.

4. McCain and Obama are at Saddleback Church, the church that Rick Warren pastors, for a discussion of issues of faith and humanitarian concern. The New York Times has noticed.

--Have a refreshing weekend, all.

Obama's Youthful Flip-Flopping Tendencies

Over at Justin Taylor's blog, James Grant posted this terrific Dick Morris piece on Barack Obama's tendency to flip-flop on issues. I'm not one to criticize young talent, but this piece does reveal something, I think, about Obama's youth. Put simply, he can't seem to make up his mind.

"Dick Morris has a recent article examining the current presidential race and why Obama has lost some ground. While some of the gain is due to McCain, Morris says that part of the slippage is Obama's fault. In the words of Dick Morris:

"Obama has carried flip-flopping to new heights. In the space of a month and a half, this candidate -- who we don't really yet know very well -- reversed or sharply modified his positions on at least eight key issues:

• After vowing to eschew private fundraising and take public financing, he has now refused public money.
• Once he threatened to filibuster a bill to protect telephone companies from liability for their cooperation with national security wiretaps; now he has voted for the legislation.
• Turning his back on a lifetime of support for gun control, he now recognizes a Second Amendment right to bear arms in the wake of the Supreme Court decision.
• Formerly, he told the Israeli lobby that he favored an undivided Jerusalem. Now he says he didn't mean it.
• From a 100 percent pro-choice position, he now has migrated to expressing doubts about allowing partial-birth abortions.
• For the first time, he now speaks highly of using church-based institutions to deliver public services to the poor.
• Having based his entire campaign on withdrawal from Iraq, he now pledges to consult with the military first.
• During the primary, he backed merit pay for teachers -- but before the union a few weeks ago, he opposed it.
• After specifically saying in the primaries that he disagreed with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's (D-N.Y.) proposal to impose Social Security taxes on income over $200,000 and wanted to tax all income, he has now adopted the Clinton position."

Does Politics Have Something to Teach Us About Evangelism?

I found this quote from the New Yorker piece on Obama very interesting from an evangelistic standpoint:

"Gradually, Chicago caught up with the rest of the country and media-driven politics eclipsed machine-driven politics. “It became increasingly difficult to get into homes and apartments to talk about candidates,” Rose said. “High-rises were tough if not impossible to crack, and other parts of the city had become too dangerous to walk around in for hours at a time. And people didn’t want to answer their doors. Thus the increasing dependence on TV, radio, direct mail, phone-banking, robocalls, et cetera—all things that cost a hell of a lot more money than patronage workers, who were themselves in decline, anyway, because of anti-patronage court rulings.” Instead of a large army of ward heelers dragging people to the polls, candidates needed a small army of donors to pay for commercials. Money replaced bodies as the currency of Chicago politics. This new system became known as “pinstripe patronage,” because the key to winning was not rewarding voters with jobs but rewarding donors with government contracts."

I'm not concerned with the broader point of this article. I'm interested in what this brief quotation on the public dynamics of inner-city Chicago might suggest about the currents of American society. People, it seems, don't want to be bothered when at home. They want to be left alone. They don't want strangers coming around, knocking on their doors, interrupting their daily routine (or lack of it). They want to be anonymous.

Why am I bothering to work through this? Because it might shed light on how to do evangelism in the current day. I am not one to say that evangelism must be done in a particular way in order to evangelize a particular group of people. While I do acknowledge that wisdom and strategy are a part of witness (see Paul in Mars Hill in Acts 17), I would also say that God's gospel can penetrate human hearts in a variety of ways. People get saved in predictable and unpredictable ways. Street preachers, tracts, door-to-door witnessing, music, friendship--in these and many other ways, the gospel goes out, the Spirit of God moves, and people get saved.

So I would not consign door-to-door evangelism to the woodpile. I think it can be useful and good. However, I think that this quotation instructs we who are the church to reach out in creative ways in a closed-off society. In many places, people don't sit on their front porches (they don't have front porches to sit on), they don't engage with strangers in their homes, they put up signs to discourage solicitors, and they generally want to be left alone when at home. Many of these same people, though, do go to coffee shops and other "third places" to relax in a social environment.

It is my suggestion, then, that we not necessarily jettison door-to-door witnessing, but that we refine our model of evangelism, and try to reach people in natural settings in which they are comfortable being approached by strangers. Joining leagues, playing sports, attending book discussions, going to coffee shops--these are the kinds of things that I think Christians should do, and do evangelistically. Though people like anonymity and privacy at home, they also crave community, particularly because many of them have lost ties to traditional institutions like the church. Men's and women's clubs, mainline denominations, political organizations--all have seen numerical decline in recent decades (see Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone for more on this). And yet as people migrate away from established socializing, they migrate toward unstructured interaction in places like Starbucks. We should see this cultural shift and move into it.

I'm not seeking an evangelistic revolution here (good thing!), but am rather trying to pick up cultural cues for the purpose of effective witness in our age. I wouldn't jettison older methods of evangelism, but I would seek to add newer methods, all for the purpose of glorifying God through the salvation of lost, lonely, isolated, unhappy sinners just like I once was.

The Week-est Link, July 18, 2008

1. You thought your tryouts for your high school teams were tough? Trying living in California and trying out with the sons of Joe Namath, Wayne Gretzky, and Will Smith.

2. Ever wonder how an album gets recorded? Here's a peek into the recording of the "Looked Upon" album I mentioned last week.

3. How was Barack Obama shaped by his time in Chicago? The New Yorker answers the question in no less than fifteen "pages" of online content. I can't believe that they give this stuff away for free.

4. Future historian of note Matthew Hall surveys a number of important works on the history of religion in the South. A rich field of study, for sure.

--Have a great weekend, all.

The Week-est Link, June 20, 2008: New England Pastors

1. I don't know if you saw this from a few days back, but a New England pastor named Josh left a moving comment on my blog about small churches. Here it is in its entirety:

"I am a New England pastor, and I would wholeheartedly agree with your assessment. The pastors in my association are good men who devote a lot of time to their people. Most of us are bi-vocational, because our churches are too small to pay us full-time. Were any of us to go to other parts of the U.S., we would probably see more tangible results because of the myriad differences in culture. However, we are doing what we can up here to fulfill the commissions given to us. To say that results are the measure of success, instead of fidelity to the Gospel, is probably well-meant but really quite wrong. Results cannot be the be-all end-all for churchmen if our ministries are to be cruciform."

An elegant testimony, and a true one. Thank you, Josh (I don't know him to my knowledge) for commenting. Are there any other New Englanders who want to chip in? Or, is there anyone else out there who labors in a small church as a layman or pastor who would like to comment? I'd love to get your thoughts.

2. My buddy Jed Coppenger, a PhD student in Systematic Theology at Southern Seminary, wrote a stirring tribute to his dad about ten days ago. Read it both to enjoy Jed's reflections and to shape a little bit of your vision for your own family and the families in your churches.

3. An interesting piece from a New Yorker blog about how Barack Obama failed to act with chivalry toward Hillary Clinton during their debates.

4. Get Coldplay's "Parachutes" album for a stunning $1.99. Thanks, Vitamin Z, for the link.

5. Are you weary in your faith? Do you need some music to lift you up? Then pick up Sovereign Grace Music's new cd "Come Weary Saints". You will find several tunes that encourage you and direct you to the promises of God. The first song, "Hide Away in the Love of Jesus", is alone worth the price of the album. It is literally one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard. Click the link to hear lengthy samples of the songs.

Have a great weekend, all.

One Thing Jeremiah Wright Has Right: The Pastor Is a Theologian (and the Theologian Is a Pastor)

There's been much to-do about Barack Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I came across a helpful collection of resources from NPR on the theological stream in which Wright fits, the black liberationist theologians and preachers. If you have a few moments, take a listen. NPR, of course, slants strongly left, but they're well-researched.

Beyond that, I don't have much to say personally about Rev. Wright that has not been said. (Russ Moore, for example, has some helpful thoughts on this subject.) It's not really my bag to write about what other people who share my general perspective have written. With that said, there is one aspect of this whole controversy that I haven't heard much discussion about. It is clear that Rev. Wright styles himself as the thought-leader of his church. He does not seem to adhere to the "CEO" model of ministry or something like that, at least not in his pulpiteering. No, he's almost old-fashioned in that he clearly attempts to teach his people a theological system (that of black liberation theology). It so happens that I think that this system veers well off the scriptural course, and that is hugely lamentable, but I do admire one (and only one) aspect of Wright's program: he does not shirk back from arbiting theology and doctrine to his people. He is clearly the theological gate-keeper of his church. He is unquestionably the doctrinaire of his congregation. He jealously guards the right to provide spiritual direction to his people. In this light, Rev. Wright fits comfortably in the historic stream of theologian-pastors, a line that is slowly reviving after being crushed by the heel of pragmatic, anti-doctrinal ministry methodology.

Do not be confused. I am in no way endorsing Rev. Wright. I simply found it fascinating to find a man, albeit a man I view as tragically misled and confused, claiming unapologetically the role of pastor-prophet in an age dominated by "visionaries", "CEOs", and "professionals". This is not to say that there are not others who fill this role. In recent decades, we have seen something of a renaissance of the theologian-pastor in evangelical circles, with men like John Piper, Phil Ryken, Mark Dever, John Stott filling pulpits across the world. Each of these men could easily be an academician, but they have all chosen the pastorate as their primary role. There are many others who fit this same bill who are currently pastoring, and there are many, many more--a whole movement's worth--who are currently in training and who will, I would predict, fundamentally change the face of the American pastorate in coming years. Many Christians of my generation has rebelled against a vacuous, doctrinally wispy life and have instead embraced a robust, meaty way of thinking and living as redeemed people. A sizeable corps of young men have committed themselves to years of academic and ecclesiastical training in order to serve churches as theologian-pastors. These are exciting, heady times, and they signal, I believe, a coming shift for the American church--and, one can hope, for the global church.

Okay, okay, you may be saying. Great. But what's with all this confusing language--"pastor-theologian" versus "theologian-pastor"? And furthermore, Owen, why have you reversed these terms? Because of this: I think we might be misusing the term "pastor-theologian". This term should properly refer not to a person who is first and foremost a pastor, but a theologian. "Pastor" in such a phrase is modifying "theologian", after all. Therefore, those of us who want to be pastors should call ourselves, most properly, "theologian-pastors", because there the modifying word is "theologian". Does this make sense?

But with this minor squibble aside, let me say something that I've been thinking a bit about. Just as we need "theologian-pastors" (by which I'm referring to theologically astute pastors), so also are we in great need of "pastor-theologians" (by which I'm referring to academic scholars who bring pastoral concerns to bear on their work). There is a gigantic need for exegetes, historians, theologians, systematicians, and philosophers who see their work as done, generally speaking, in service of the church. Perhaps you've encountered scholars who don't seem to practice such a philosophy of scholarship, but who do theology in such a way that they talk in abstracted terminology, chase rabbits (for multiple books or classes) that have little relevance to an actual person, and generally show evidence of forgetting that their ministry is accountable to their local church and responsible for equipping pastors and laypeople. Such a class of thinker, it is hoped, is on the wane in Christian circles, even as the ecclesiastically attuned class of theologian is on the rise.

These scholars do not study, publish, and teach to pursue their own eccentric interests and doctrines, but to assist Christians in the task of understanding the Bible and its teachings as they apply to life and ministry. For this class of thinkers, church members are not a burden, but an audience; questions of all theological stripes are tackled not simply to satisfy one's curiosity, but to teach believers; and writing is composed not to wow fellow academics, but to instruct local church pastors and their members. This is not to say that there is no place for theological, historical, exegetical, and philosophical works of advanced depth and narrow focus; there is, and I would never seek to belittle such projects or demean them as unvaluable. These endeavors may well have value, perhaps great value, and we should regularly encourage our scholars to undertake them and to engage in the highest levels of scholarship. At the same time, it is my personal conviction that we should encourage our gifted scholars and teachers to reach us with their teaching--and not only this, but to aim at us. How blessed we would be if theologians styled themselves as pastor-theologians, and aimed to instruct the local church not incidentally, but primarily.

We need theologian-pastors (shepherds). This is our greatest need. But we also need pastor-theologians (scholars). We must be careful not to think that only one group is important. We do not need merely a continuing recovery of a vital, doctrinally focused pastorate. No, we need the continuing recovery of men like Carson and Sweeney and Ware and Mohler and Hamilton and Packer and Akin and Wells who engage in the sacred task of Christian scholarship in order to bless, help, rescue and vitalize the local churches that populate our world. Here's hoping that the future will bring, as I think it will, an army of doctrinally savvy, theologically precise, culturally engaged pastors who will lead local churches with great energy and faithfulness. And here's hoping that marching alongside them will be a great cavalry of scholars, who will help those pastors to steer Christians away from error, to love truth and live life doxologically, and to emerge victorious in the great struggle for true life that engulfs us all.

How Does a Christian Deal with the Obama Phenomenon?

I've become aware in recent days that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is drawing a fair amount of interest and perhaps even support from evangelical Christians. This topic interests me not because I am concerned about Christians supporting a Democratic candidate but because Barack Obama is one of the most pro-abortion candidates for the nation's highest office that we've ever seen.

This last statement draws us into a question that I've heard debated a good deal in the last few years, the matter of single-issue voting. Some Christians say that it is right to vote for candidates based on one major issue (or perhaps a few) while others decry this sort of mindset, painting it as narrow-minded and undeveloped. I can understand the critique of this second group. Many who make it are, I think, reacting to a troublesome tendency evinced by many of us to not think solidly, soundly, and roundedly about things. That is to say, we get stuck on our biases, on our natural bent(s), and never advance past them. We become so anchored in historic truths and positions that we fail to consider current trends of thought and legitimate issues being raised in the current day. Today, for example, we would put in this class things like global warming and care for the poor. Sadly, I think that many conservative evangelicals like myself fail to give adequate attention to these matters. Because we so concentrate on matters like abortion and euthanasia, matters of life and death, we have a tendency to automatically write off other less-pressing matters simply because, well, they're less pressing. Though we are to be commended for prioritizing matters of life and death, we are to be chided for making the mistake of converting issues of less importance into issues of negligible importance.

What does all this have to do with Barack Obama and his presidential campaign? Well, I think that many Christians are drawn, as many people are, to Obama by virtue of his youth, his eloquence, his "coolness", his purportedly fresh-thinking manner. I can understand some of this interest, though I am not as charmed by Obama as some. I am concerned, though, when I hear that fellow Christians are not simply impressed by Obama but won over by him. That is to say, I am distressed when I hear that Obama is gaining support among conservative Christians. Remember that Obama is pro-choice, and not just pro-choice, but ardently so. (See here for more on this matter.) On a matter like abortion, we are not being small-minded when we prioritize it. We are being logical. Matters of life-and-death must take priority in our political philosophy. However much we may be charmed by a candidate's native gifts or his perceived ability to unite people, we must evaluate him by his positions, and his positions on the most important matters must take intellectual precedence. It is no bad thing to want a candidate who cares for the environment or the poor--we would hope for such candidates!--but it is only biblical to first and foremost desire a candidate who will actively work to stop the slaughter of millions of babies.

In adopting such a mindset, we may well draw derision from some as "narrow-minded" or "intellectually unsophisticated." We will need to work to show such folks that we are in fact thoughtful. Accordingly, we should not merely bite back, and we should show them the reasons biblically for our thinking. However, ultimately, if it is our fate to be labeled such, we must accept this fate. We must stand for the truth on matters of life and death. We must not allow fear of intellectual sophisticates to drive our decision-making. Much as we may admire aspects of Obama's person, we must oppose his program, and thus actively oppose his campaign. Though he has a great smile, and a charming manner, he is a pro-death candidate. We may well draw sneers for saying this, and standing for it, but this is the price we pay for standing for truth in a fallen world. May we not be so charmed by talent, or so afraid of opprobrium, that we will not stand for truth--and life.