You may have noticed the numerous warnings that Carl Trueman gave last year about celebrity pastors and the conferences that feature them (see here, here, here, here). The one that really got me was the anecdote he shared about a pastor who was kicked out of the VIP section at a recent mega-conference. Trueman’s remarks led to a spirited and generally helpful exchange with Thabiti Anyabwile. It was a real coup that Trueman agreed to appear at T4G last week to discuss the issue again. This time he did so with a panel of celebrity pastors before a gathering of 8,000 people. The panel featured Trueman and Anyabwile along with…
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A Word about Salacious Sermonizing
Carl Trueman has an interesting take on the current obsession that evangelical pastors seem to have with sermons on sex. They are becoming increasingly frequent and in some cases bawdy. Trueman writes: The current evangelical obsession with sex seems more like an intrusion of the culture than a priority of scripture… If, for the sake of argument, we were to allow that there might occasionally, just occasionally, be a vague and distant analogy between Hollywood and the church, I wonder if middle-aged pastors writing and speaking about sex is not becoming the evangelical equivalent of forty-something actresses doing nude scenes. Look: your career is in decline, the only cover shoot…
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A Helpful Definition of Pornography
Defining what constitutes pornography has always been a bit of a struggle. It was Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who once illustrated the difficulty by giving his own subjective definition: “I know it when I see it.” I just read today that Carl Trueman has found as good a definition as I have ever seen, and he got it from The Catechism of the Catholic Church. Here it is: 2354: Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to…
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Her Dad Was a Porn Addict
Michelle VanLoon has a gut-wrenching testimony of her father’s porn addiction. She shows that pornography not only destroys marriages, it also wreaks havoc on relationships between children and parents. She writes:
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Evangelical Bigots?
Carl Trueman notes that for Americans under 35 years of age, homosexual marriage is not even an issue. That figure indicates a great generational divide over attitudes toward homosexuality. The trend lines in our culture are moving decidedly in the direction affirming homosexuality as normal. Trueman predicts, therefore, four challenges that lie ahead for Christians. Here’s the fourth challenge that Trueman mentions: “Those evangelical leaders, academics and evangelical institutions that prize their place at the table and their invitations to appear on `serious’ television programs, and who enjoy being asked to offer their opinion to the wider culture had better be prepared to make a choice. As I have said…
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He over-repented
Ted Haggard tells The Wall Street Journal that he “over-repented” from the public sin that ended his ministry in 2006. Even though his former church has said he does not belong in pastoral ministry, he has started a new church just a few miles from the one he fell from. Haggard’s new ministry is out of step with the New Testament in a number of ways (1 Timothy 3:2-7; Titus 1:6-9). Nevertheless, Haggard provides this justification: “Tiger Woods needs to golf. Michael Vick needs to be playing football. Ted Haggard needs to be leading a church.” I agree with Carl Trueman on this one. Haggard’s words sound more like “personal…
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The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
Carl Trueman has another gem of an article in the latest 9Marks journal. It’s cleverly titled “The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.” So what’s the “scandal”? He explains: “Years ago, Mark Noll wrote a book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, in which he argued that the scandal was that there was no such thing. When it comes to evangelical scholars and scholarship, I disagree: the scandal is not that there is no mind; it is that these days there is precious little evangel.” Trueman is on point with this article. Read the rest here
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Feel My Pain
Carl Trueman writes with poignancy and verve. His essays on Reformation21 are always must-reads. His latest one on whining is no exception. You’ll need to read the whole thing, but here’s the conclusion: ‘Expressions of hurt are too often really something else: cowardly attempts by representatives of a cosseted and self-obsessed culture to make themselves uniquely important or, worse still, to bully and cajole somebody they dislike to stop saying things they don’t want to hear or which they find distasteful.  My advice to such is akin to that of the counselor in the Bob Newhart sketch: Stop it! If somebody’s writing or speaking hurts you, ask yourself “Why?”, don’t…
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President of Evangelical Theological Society Becomes Roman Catholic
Dr. Francis Beckwith announced his return to the Roman Catholic Church today. He also announced the he has resigned from the presidency of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS). I did not post about this news yesterday when I heard about it because I suspected that Dr. Beckwith had not authorized the bloggers who were writing about it to make the announcement for him. It turns out that I was right. But now that the cat’s out of the bag, Dr. Beckwith has posted his own explanation of his recent conversion and how he intended to phase out quietly from his leadership position in the ETS. Here’s the link: “My Return…