And if you take off the tin foil hat, you can hear them talking to each other.

Or maybe that’s singing karaoke. I can never tell.

Anyway, was finally able to get Driscoll’s talk downloaded, and having listened to it a few times, here’s my couple of pennies worth.

I enjoyed it. I didn’t think he came off too pushy, nor that he was doing what he was doing from any motive to hurt, but to warn.

Much of what I think of it assumes, of course, that his information is accurate. I do know enough about Crossan and Borg to think that he is spot-on about them, and while I would say that their positions shouldn’t negate all that they would say, it would be wise to bear in mind that they are people who essentially deny the foundational teachings of the biblical account of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection–in other words, these are really not Christian teachers.

I don’t know much about ‘A Brief History of Everything’, but if what Driscoll says about it and it’s author are true, then I don’t think it unfair to ask of any Christian author who recommends it what are they things they find in it that they found so important as to recomment the book.

I would say that Driscoll’s quote of McLaren concern homosexuality, something like “I don’t know what to say, because no matter what I say, someone on either side will get hurt”, shows what I’ve found to be one of the problems with the EC conversation–an unwillingness to deal with the hard parts of the Bible because they cause people discomfort or pain. I’ve noticed it in what I’ve read of Velvet Elvis, where for example Bell recounts the group who met to support the biblical teaching of wives submitting to their husbands, and he goes off about why they were stressing that and not the verses around it and anyway look at how much abuse has been perpetrated because of that verse.

I like Driscoll’s one phrase towards the end concerning relevance, let me see if I remember it correctly, “timeless truths presented in a timely fashion”.

iggy mulder

Yeah. Now the margins are proper again. Weird, bizarre, what’s going on…

I’m going to go lie down, and think about bunnies and kittens now.

Yeah, I’ll…let you talk to Agent Mulder about that one.

I would argue that this is happening in large part because people are going to different churches. Multiple studies have shown that mega-churches have very few new believers in their growth, but instead grow because people “transfer” to a new church.

My main point is that the Nephilim are still coming!

iggy
= 0

Sorry, when I commented on the smiley in the last post, the margins had been back to the right of the gray line. Now it’s back to the left.

Odd.

Anyway, iggy, my main point was that was that we can’t really say that ’success = relevance’. The idea is the what God says is relevant, meaning for example that the Gospel message of repentence and belief in Christ is of universal relevance (all persons in all places at all times need to hear it), but that people’s responses to it may not be the best.

I suppose another way of saying it is, relevance has more to do with what we need to hear then what we want to hear.