If last summer’s trinity debate did anything, it raised awareness among evangelicals about the primary importance of eternal generation in distinguishing the persons of the trinity. As I have written previously, it also highlighted the fact that the Nicene Fathers were interpreting scripture when they confessed Jesus to be the “only-begotten” son of God. As we approach the one year anniversary of the beginning of last summer’s trinity debate, I thought it might be worth noting one small way that the debate impacted the liturgy of the church where I serve as a pastor. Our church follows a regular liturgical order, which includes a recitation of the Apostles’ Creed before…
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Check Your Privilege
I mentioned a few weeks ago, that I’ve been doing some reading on intersectionality and identity politics. One item that I have observed in this reading is the tendency among some to assign moral guilt based not on moral action but based on identity. The thinking goes like this. If a person possesses a privileged identity (e.g., straight, male, abled, etc.), that person benefits from an unjust system of social privilege. Therefore, the person benefitting is morally guilty of injustice just by virtue of possessing the so-called privileged identity. A few weeks ago, I came across a column in the Harvard Crimson that illustrates the point. In this column, Nian…
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Treating young women as sisters in absolute purity
Yesterday, I wrote about how pastors are to relate to different sex and age groups within the congregation. The apostle Paul helps us to think through this in his instruction to young pastor Timothy in 1 Timothy 5:1-2. Here’s the rendering I provided yesterday: Do not speak harshly to an older man but exhort him as you would a father. Do not speak harshly to younger men, but exhort them as brothers. Do not speak harshly to older women, but exhort them as mothers.Do not speak harshly to younger women, but exhort them as sisters, in all purity. Everything that we observed yesterday—about treating people with respect and about honoring…
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Pastors, don’t be a jerk. Be a shepherd.
The venting of the proverbial spleen seems to be the order of the day from cable news to social media and sometimes even in interpersonal interactions. We like to hear someone who agrees with our views “tell it like it is,” especially if the telling involves a few zingers against people whose views offend us. We thrive on this kind of outrage because it appeals to our sense of self-righteous indignation. It feels oh so good to be oh so right. And there’s nothing quite as satisfying as dressing down “those people” who don’t agree with us. This spirit is destructive wherever it is found, but it is especially destructive…
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Feed my giraffe?
The apostle Paul once gave an exhortation to his disciple Timothy about the job description of a pastor. Among other things, Paul said this: “If you put these things before the brothers, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 4:6). In context, “putting these things before the brothers” means teaching God’s word to God’s people. And in this case, teaching that word involved a direct confrontation with false teaching. This means that the main labor of a pastor is to understand and explain what the Bible means. But a faithful pastor can’t leave it there. If he does, it’s just a lecture. A good servant is…
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David Gushee: Our “differences are unbridgeable”
David Gushee has a column at Religion News Service about Jonathan Merritt, Jen Hatmaker, and LGBT “inclusion” within the church. Gushee says that he exited evangelicalism 30 months ago, and since then he has concluded this: I now believe that incommensurable differences in understanding the very meaning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the interpretation of the Bible, and the sources and methods of moral discernment, separate many of us from our former brethren — and that it is best to name these differences clearly and without acrimony, on the way out the door. I also believe that attempting to keep the dialogue going is mainly fruitless. The differences are…
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It is not “character assassination” for the church to be the church.
Last night, Jonathan Merritt penned an article for Religion News Service excoriating Christians who have distanced themselves from Jen Hatmaker. He writes: Hatmaker’s original sin is that she broke ranks with the evangelical powers-that-be on same-sex relationships. In an interview with me last October, Hatmaker stated that if she found out one of her children were gay, she would love that child just the same. If an LGBT friend of Hatmaker’s got married, she said she would attend the wedding. And Hatmaker said she believed LGBT relationships could be holy. In the interview, Hatmaker did not deny a line in the Apostles Creed. She did not promote a historical heresy.…
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The mistakes Christians make in dismissing biblical teaching on modesty
Katelyn Beaty has written an Op-Ed for The New York Times lamenting “The Mistake Christians Made in Defending Bill O’Reilly.” I agree with her main point that Christians should have no part in defending the indefensible. I think that much should be uncontroversial as the scripture is so clear on this point: “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them” (Eph. 5:11). Having said that, I have to take issue with some of the evidence she adduces to establish her point. Beaty links to a 2007 article written by John Piper as evidence of what is wrong in the Christian church. She writes: In churches,…
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Some thoughts on intersectionality and “activist science”
I’ve been doing some reading on intersectionality1 recently, and I came across an article by a feminist psychologist named Stephanie Shields. She argues that intersectionality should be an urgent concern for behavioral scientists and should determine the outcomes of their research. Shields writes: “Intersectionality is an urgent issue because it is critical to the effective, activist science that feminist psychology should be. The goal of activist science itself is not to create policy, but to inform it. Research undertaken from an intersectionality perspective does originate from a point of view which includes an agenda for positive social change, but the agenda requires data to support it. This approach reflects a…
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It is never right to be angry at God. Ever.
Over the weekend I posted a tweet that proved to be unexpectedly controversial. Well, unexpected to me anyway. It is never right to be angry at God. Ever. — Denny Burk (@DennyBurk) April 28, 2017 I had no idea it would be so provocative simply to say that it is never right to be angry at God. But provocative it was—more so than I ever anticipated. Some readers were downright angry about the tweet. Not all of them were like this, but there were more angry responses than I could count. The objections people raised fell into two broad groups. And I thought it might be worthwhile to offer some…
