Review: By the Waters of Bablyon
Scott Aniol’s new book, By the Waters of Babylon: Worship in a Post-Christian Culture, argues at length against the architects of missional evangelism—not because Aniol thinks the attractional model (of Hybels, Warren, et al.) is better, but because he doesn’t see cultural forms as neutral, suitable for any message including the gospel. Here’s what I take to be his thesis paragraph for the book: Although the missional church seems to correctly recognize the nature of the Christendom paradigm...
Bible Faculty Summit 2016
Last week for the third time I attended the Bible Faculty Summit. For the third time I delivered a paper. For the third time I was encouraged, edified, and fattened. This year we all went to Maranatha Baptist University in Watertown, Wisconsin. (I managed to enjoy a little pick-up ultimate in Milwaukee the night I arrived—it was awesome!) Larry Oats and the folks at MBU were very welcoming and generous. I got in a bit early and spent all day Tuesday in their beautiful library finishing up my...
Review: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath My rating: 3 of 5 stars I purposefully let this book marinate in my mind for a week or so after I completed it before sitting down to write the review. I wanted to see what stuck. For me, it was the idea that my communication needs to be simple (find the central idea) and concrete (like a story) in order to stick. The SUCCESs acronym didn't fully stick, so I had to look it up again to confirm what it was: Simple, Unexpected,...
Love Does Not Equal Tolerance of Whatever You Want to Do: A Prooftext
I like it when people think clearly enough to advert to their epistemological controls, their critical foundations. I think it's a rare gift in a world in which most educated people seem to hold tightly to moral relativism and scientistic absolutism at the same time, but fail ever to look down at what they're standing on. So when I got to the end of pro-gay biblical scholar and Yale religious studies professor Dale Martin's essay arguing that ἀρσενοκοίτης (arsenokoites) in 1 Cor 6 and 1 Tim 1...
Psalm 44 and the Prosperity Gospel
Prosperity preachers know just what to do with the first part of Psalm 44. They even get it kind of right: God is gracious to us and saves us and allows us to boast in him continually. But the prosperity movement doesn’t have a category for inexplicable divine rejection and undeserved, intractable public disgrace—the theme of the second half of the song. Kate Bowler in Blessed: a History of the American Prosperity Gospel, describes the sad story of an elderly woman who had long been faithful...