I will be retiring this one at a later date.

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Thanks for reading, and for all of you who made comments!

Stay tuned.

Here are some interesting stats for my career of blogging.

• I have been blogging for a little over 3 years.
• I have done 1,503 posts.
• My busiest day had about 5,00o hits.
• I have averaged about 150 hits a day over the 3 years.
• I have changed my title once, but wanted to change it about 7 times.

I would not like my life to result in the founding of a new school. I would like to tell anyone who is prepared to listen that I myself am not a “Barthian.”

Emphasize my name as little as possible. There is only one interesting name, and brining up all the rest only leads to false loyalties, and can only arouse tedious jealously and stubornness among other people And do not accept anything from me without testing it. Measure everything by the Word of God, the sole truth, which is our judge and our best teacher! You will understand me correctly if you allow what I say to lead you to what he says.

A good theologian does not live in a house of ideas, principles, and methods. He walks right through all such buildings and always comes out into the fresh air again. He remains on the way. He has his eyes on the horizon, the high mountains and the infinite sea–and at the same time also has at heart the good and the bad, the fortunate and the unfortunate, Christians and pagans, his fellow-men from East to West, to whom he is allowed to make his modest testimony.

Karl Barth

Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His life from letters and autobiographical texts, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 417.

Some think that Christ died, and yet, that some for whom he died will be lost. I never could understand that doctrine. If Jesus, my surety, bore my griefs and carried my sorrows, I believe myself to be as secure as the angels in heaven.

God cannot ask payment twice.

Charles Spurgeon

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he saw evidence of the ‘vices of German youth: they make a guillotine out of any principle they hardly understand, and chop off heads with it indiscriminately.’

Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His life from letters and autobiographical texts, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 203.

If there is no author, everything is permitted.

Dostoyevsky

Priest, teacher, artist.

The western world left the priest (tradition) some time ago, during the enlightenment.

For the priest reality is revealed, for the teacher reality is rational.

Now we are entering the era of the artist, an era marked by ambiguity, mystery, and aesthetic appeal.

This characterization fits pretty well with the general move in hermeneutics over the centuries.

First it was tradition, then reason, and now we are taking the literary turn. Just look at Gospels scholarship.

Words written are easier to interact with (and be concerned about) than words unwritten. Pastors like Driscoll frequently get in trouble for things they write and say. This book has been called “dangerous.” In the meantime, other pastors rarely get in trouble for things they didn’t write and didn’t say. But — and here I am convinced that the Driscolls are exactly right — a lot of damage has been caused by the church’s unwillingness to address certain topics, an unwillingness to bring the whole counsel of God to bear on this subject. Silence is also dangerous. Sex is volatile. Writing about it can blow up on you. But not writing about it can do the same thing. But the damage that is caused by the sin of silent omission is untraceable, it cannot be pinned on anybody. People are just as hurt and just as damaged, and no pastoral fingerprints anywhere. Nobody is going to lose their job over it.

Stipulate whatever distance you might think exists between what Scripture says about sex and what the Driscolls say about it. That is a distance that would be a lot shorter if our translations hadn’t done a lot of tidying up for us. A Victorian Bowlderization taint continues down to the present. Pastor Mark might not get invited to your conference now, but — truth be told — neither would Pastor Ezekiel. Actually, we would invite Ezekiel because our inerrancy statement says we have to, but we would probably arrange for him to speak with a video feed on a ten-second delay.

All this said, please don’t assume that I won’t be expressing disagreements with Real Marriage, up to and including significant disagreements. The Driscolls anticipate that, and welcome it. It is only to say that I, for one, appreciate the opportunity that he and Grace have created to talk about these things. The fact that these things would never be talked about in your church does not mean they are not going on. In short, this is a good opportunity– but only if we receive it as such. The publication of this book is an event that God wants the whole evangelical world to use as an opportunity for sexual stewardship. That won’t happen if we try to shout it down.

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

Gustave Flaubert

If you want a brief history and a good explanation of what has been happening with postliberal theology and evangelicals see Roger Olson’s article in Christianity Today.

Evangelicals and postliberals find much in common when they meet as they did at the Wheaton Theology Conference in April 1995. Above all else, they affirm one another’s devotion to Scripture; thus, they are both “back to the Bible” movements in theology. Many postliberal theologians, however, see the majority of evangelicals as “premodern” in their attachments to objective, propositional revelation and literal historicity of Scripture’s stories. They fear that this leads inevitably to a divorce between Scripture and the explanatory schemes and theories that get built up into systematic theologies and rational apologetics based on propositional truth claims that end up replacing the literary form of Scripture.

Evangelicals, on the other hand, are uneasy about postliberal theology’s general disinterest in Christianity’s “objective truth” and the Bible’s “space-and-time historicity.” To most of us, the Yale theologians seem to go too far with postmodernism’s “incredulity toward metanarratives.” That is, they appear ambiguous and ambivalent regarding the question of Christianity’s universal truth status relative to competing accounts of “the ultimate nature of reality.”

The main thing is not scholarship, nor learning, nor criticism, but to love the Lord Jesus. We need a living relationship with God, and we must ask the Lord for that.

Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His life from letters and autobiographical texts, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 68.

A Man Enflamed

There is more to like about Tullian Tchividjian’s newest book than a sleek, simple, and smooth cover and design.

Most importantly, this is a man who bears all the stripes of someone who has rediscovered the all sufficiency of Jesus.

Tchividjian in Jesus + Nothing = Everything shares some of his personal experiences with rediscovering that all we need is Jesus. He does this primarily through expositing Colossians 1, taking a deeper look at the supremacy of Christ in all things. The book is easy to follow, he takes the equation in reverse and then forward again, in a chiastic pattern. He reveals how we all try to add to Jesus, but this is nothing more than setting up idols alongside Jesus.

He wants Jesus alone, nothing else. He wants this for you, for me, and he is learning it afresh through trying circumstances at his church.

Wanting More Story

But this brings me to something that I thought the book was lacking, more of his story.

In reality his story framed this book, but ninety-five percent of the book is exposition and explanation. I longed to hear specific examples of how this equation was crystallized as his car was getting keyed, as blogs were being birthed, spreading hateful words about him. I needed more practical examples, and the reason I needed more of his personal story is that there are so many good books that pretty much say the same thing (such as Elyse Fitzpatrick’s Because He Loves Me and Tim Keller’s Counterfeit Gods).

I was hoping this would be the personal story of him rediscovering it, not the sermons that came out of his rediscovery. Some of this could be explained by his desire not focus on his persecution, or the churches failings. However, by so doing, I sensed that some of the power was squeezed from the book. He experienced it, but he stops us from experiencing it with him.

Gospel Centered Reality Check

Finally, a word about the danger of this “gospel-centered” hit list.

Sometimes I feel as if it takes the teeth out of the imperatives in the Bible. Yes, I agree that the imperatives are fueled by the indicatives. Yes, I agree that if we give imperatives without grace they will never take root. Yes, I agree that we are saved not by what we do, but by Jesus alone.

However…there are roughly 550 imperatives in the Epistles, and therefore it is right and good for our pastors to give imperatives, and us not scream legalism. Tchividjian does put on his helmet, but it is more a protective helmet, in that he gives a nod of approval to the imperatives because he knows it is the right thing to do, but it is only a nod.

In addition, justification is only one of the the many images for our salvation, and as others have pointed out, when this doctrine gets elevated, sanctification gets the burnt edges.

But I do not want to end on a negative note, and there is still much to appreciate about this book. Like I said at the beginning, if you are looking for a man who is “red bulled” to re-awaken within you the all sufficiency of Christ, this your book.

Far from seeking . . . merely to make us forget our own reality for a few hours, it seeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own life into its world, feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history. Christians who tell these stories, stories that are rich, enigmatic, sometimes puzzling and ambiguous, can find that their lives fit into the world they describe — indeed, that our stories suddenly seem to make more sense when seen in that context.