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Evolving With Enns: Reflections on “The Evolution of Adam”

February 2, 2012 in Books, Evangelism, Evolution, Theology with 5 Comments

*The following is part of the Evolution of Adam Blog Tour.

About four years ago, a glaring issue terrified me.  At this point in my spiritual journey, I had dealt with many theological assumptions bequeathed from popular Evangelicalism.  The grand shift of recognizing God’s love for the cosmos and God’s intention to join heaven and earth in renewed creation started a chain reaction.  Several significant changes can be traced back to this fresh realization in college.  With all of the paradigms shifts up to this moment of fear and trepidation, I feared I now was stepping into sacrilegious territory: an openness to biological evolution.

Believe it or not, at that time I was fairly immersed in the emerging church dialogue, but had never read Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian trilogy.  When the main character was scripted as a science teacher who embraced both evolution and Jesus, my worldview felt like it was crumbling.  It didn’t help that as I struggled with these questions in the subsequent months that I was accused of being an atheistic youth pastor by friends.  But now I digress.

I wrestled with God, dialogued with others, and found myself in want for helpful resources.  Some books were written with people like me in mind, but many of these didn’t quite give me the answers I wanted.  Each moved me closer and closer to understanding how to handle biblical authority and modern science with integrity.  Then, resources like Biologos.org came along and I started to move beyond superficial answers such as “Genesis 1 is a poem,” etc.

I also discovered that other prominent evangelical leaders have an open posture toward evolution, such as – Billy Graham, Timothy Keller, Greg Boyd, N.T. Wright, C.S. Lewis, and John Stott – and my fear of sacrilege subsided. Continue Reading…

Preaching Against Evolution in Evangelical Churches Creates Atheists

January 12, 2012 in (Series) Video to Ponder, Evangelism, Evolution, Video Blog with 173 Comments

First video blog I’ve made in a couple years… with the exception of the Compassion Water Video. I hope the fact that it is only 3 mins and ask a direct question keeps you interested :-)

Can You Lose Your Salvation? Greg Boyd and Mark Driscoll in Dialogue

October 13, 2011 in (Series) Video to Ponder, Evangelism, Foreknowledge, Gospel, Greg Boyd, Salvation, Theology with 35 Comments

This is the age old question: Can a person lose their salvation? Of course, two broad schools of thought emerge in theological discourse.

On one end of the spectrum are the 5.5 point Calvinists (not really sure what the .5 is all about). This is representative of Mark Driscoll’s perspective (and basically most of the Gospel Coalition folks). This group of thinkers believe that God not only preordains all things (yep, every last event in world history) but that God ordains some to eternal life and some to eternal torment. They would then contend that all people deserve eternal torment and therefore the fact that God chooses some demonstrates his infinite mercy and wisdom.

And no, lets be fair to this perspective: they don’t believe that evangelism is void (as many on the free will end of the spectrum often accuse). Rather, they believe that the truly elect will hear the message (through evangelistic efforts) and will awaken to their right standing before the Father (upon repentance and a belief in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus). Evangelism matters here still because we are the heralds that God uses to summon sinners into their elect-ness. Those who refuse persistently to believe the message must not be elect. Here is what Mark Driscoll has to say about this issue: Continue Reading…

Drive Thru Evangelism – The case of the old bait and switch

October 6, 2011 in (Series) Video to Ponder, Evangelism, Gospel with 33 Comments

I wonder if you have any thoughts on this video?

My thoughts:

1) Tracts, in themselves, are terrible representations of the Gospel and make Christians look silly.

2) Tracts tend to focus on “getting a soul saved” with the assumption that hell, damnation, and rapture are imminent. This is dualist at best, and escapist at worst. Continue Reading…

The Good News of King Jesus is Better than 4 Laws!: Reflections on The King Jesus Gospel by Scot McKnight

September 20, 2011 in Books, Evangelism, Gospel, Kingdom of God, Missional, New Creation, Roman Empire, Sermon on the Mount, Theology with 13 Comments

If you grew up in the church, there’s a chance that the Four Spiritual Laws were presented as the Gospel.  When I decided to be baptized at the age of 12, the class for church membership involved using the old yellow tract as the textbook out of which I was affirmed as saved.  There’s nothing wrong with this sort of a Plan of Salvation, but this is not the Gospel.

When I was in college my study requirements included a course on Evangelism.  Our guide: Evangelism Explosion (EE).  By the time I came to this part of my program, I was already reading books by Scot McKnight, N.T. Wright, Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, and others.  So, memorizing the infamous EE outline with the “two diagnostic questions” made me cringe in rebellion.  The questions were – 1) If God were to ask, Why should I let you into my heaven?, how would you respond? 2) If you were to die tonight do you know that you would go to heaven?  Not only does the Bible not ask these sorts of questions, but neither does our post-Christendom culture.  This form of “persuasion” still bothers me to this day.  This is not the Gospel.

Scot McKnight’s The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited, rightly exposes the flaws of equating such “Plans of Salvation” with what the Bible means when it uses the word Gospel.  To make a one-to-one correspondence in this way is reductionistic at best and potentially a distortion of the aim of the biblical narrative.  In order to avoid the mistakes of our Evangelical “salvation culture,” Scot invites readers to imagine what a “Gospel culture” might offer the church.  The Gospel is not “justification by faith” but rather such a reality flows out of the Gospel. Continue Reading…

What Good Does It Do When Christians Are Offended? (Dale Best)

July 1, 2011 in Culture, Evangelism, Fundamentalism, Guest Contributors with 17 Comments

The talk in some circles of American Christianity this week is what NBC did, or rather didn’t do, this past Sunday afternoon during their US Open broadcast. Because the golf tournament was held in Washington, DC, the network put together a short montage of patriotic clips with an audio byte that included a reading of the Pledge of Allegiance.

Only one thing: they forgot to include three little words … under God, indivisible. Two of which are words that throw all most some Christians into a tizzy if someone messes with them.

NBC has since apologized.

I’m one of those Jesus followers who happened to not be offended. Because I don’t think it does any good.

You see, I’ve never met someone who was offended by something and they haven’t told at least one person about it. When we’re offended, the emotion that’s displayed is very outward and vocal. And in this age of social media, it’s easy for our anger over a  mistake or mishap to spread quickly. (In fact, FB and Twitter talk had spread so quickly, one of the commentators apologized before the end of Sunday’s broadcast.)

When we’re offended by things, it’s obvious that we take our time and influence and energy and devote those things to tell others about how horribly we’ve been wronged. The flipside is bottling that offense inside and letting it stew and simmer into resentment. And let’s be honest … how healthy is bitterness to someone’s emotional and spiritual well-being? Continue Reading…

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