[Vision2020] Say What?
Art Deco
deco at moscow.com
Thu Oct 1 20:36:36 PDT 2009
Reinforcing your last paragraph, here is more crackpotism from the Christ Church Cult:
Reformed Pastor Preaches on the Proper Role of Ministers
By Lillian Kwon
Christian Post Reporter
Mon, Sep. 28 2009 02:29 PM EDT
A minister who preaches on the authority and infallibility of Scripture is often accused of being arrogant, said one pastor. Such criticism, however, is withheld from someone who sits on a stool in a cardigan and chats with the congregation, telling personal stories.
Enlarge this Image a..
(Photo: Desiring God)
Doug Wilson, pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, speaks to hundreds of people at the Desiring God Ministries' 2009 national conference in Minneapolis on Saturday, Sept. 26, 2009.
Related
a.. Evangelicals Challenged to Preach Bold, Hard Truths
b.. Evangelicals Urged to Heed Calvin's Voice
Criticizing the latter form, Doug Wilson, pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, made the case for the preacher who declares "thus saith the Lord."
"A minister should ascend into the pulpit in order to declare what would have been true had he never been born. He is there to preach what was written in the Word before all ages and is utterly disconnected from his personal dreams, hopes and aspirations," Wilson said at the Desiring God Ministries' national conference in Minneapolis on Saturday. "A minister is not up there to develop a relationship with everybody individually."
Ministers are not supposed to be extemporaneous actors trying to figure out their lines from everything other than the Bible, he noted. They may maintain that their scripts are better, their plot lines are grittier or that their shows make more money, but a minister's script is Scripture, Wilson stressed.
"He is there to declare something that is outside of his control. What God has revealed to us in the Bible is the message. That's the script."
Wilson, who describes himself as a biblical absolutist, gave a nearly 60-minute talk on Calvin, the Bible and the Western world during the three-day conference themed "With Calvin in the Theater of God."
The Moscow pastor, who also helped to establish the Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, sees ongoing battles today on the infallibility and inerrancy of the Word of God. But believers, he said, are neglecting the battle over the place of the Bible.
"Conservative evangelicals believe the Bible has no mistakes in it ... but who today believes as Calvin did? Who treats the Bible as Calvin did?"
Sixteenth century reformer John Calvin taught and preached as if the Bible was the sun around which everything else revolved, but many Christians have drifted far away from this, Wilson lamented. Some modern believers are heliocentric on matters of personal piety or the denomination's confession while geocentric with regard to matters involving the public square, he pointed out.
"What good to us is a perfect sun ... if it revolves around a very imperfect earth ... and is orbiting us at greater and greater distances out so that now in the 21st century for most of the church it almost appears as a star. It doesn't matter if you say it's a very perfect star if it's way far away and orbiting us," he said.
"If we want to learn Reformation basics from John Calvin, this is what we need to recover. An important issue concerns the nature of God's word but in our day, the thing we are really clueless about is the authoritative centrality of God's Word."
The conference speaker, however, cautioned ministers from making the subtle mistake many make while defending the inerrancy and centrality of Scripture.
He explained, "We have fallen for the trap of thinking that inerrancy requires us to be grade nerds – always the best student in the class but one who cannot abide making a mistake and who will argue with the teacher (Mrs. Enlightenment) over every last point."
But what's even more fundamentally wrong is that the Bible is subject to proof and reasoning and weighed by the world's standards.
"The Bible is not which meets the standard. The Bible is that which sets the standard," Wilson emphasized. "The Scriptures are not a possession of ours which we may put into the world's balances to be weighed. Rather, the Scriptures are God's scales in which He places the entire world and all the nations of men."
While Christianity isn't blind leap fideism, Wilson said that in order to understand the Scriptures rightly, one must be converted to Christ. Otherwise, "if you're argued into Christ, you can be argued out of him."
The role of preachers then is to declare the necessity of hearing the Word of God, he highlighted. They were not sent to make a few mild suggestions, dialogue with the world and tell the world that it's quite right, or to indulge in a few postmodern dabblings of a theological nature, he noted. Rather, they were sent to "declare what has been accomplished" and not what they would like to have accomplished.
The Desiring God conference was held Sept. 25-27 and included speakers John Piper, pastor for Preaching and Vision at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, and Mark Talbot, associate professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College, among others. The theme of this year's conference was chosen in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of Calvin's birth.
----- Original Message -----
From: Joe Campbell
To: Nous Tweaker
Cc: <vision2020 at moscow.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 01, 2009 8:00 PM
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Say What?
You are a sick man because in a post where you try "explain" why
you're not a racist, even though you like to tell racist jokes, you
close with a "joke" about the military murdering the (black) President
of the United States.
But you're a "Christian" and not a racist and (presumably) "pro-
American." Holy crap! How do you nuts get away with this junk? And why
isn't everyone concerned that a local Moscow church promotes such
hateful rhetoric?
Do you realize that your whole world view rests on the hope that
logicians know nothing about reasoning, biologists know nothing about
the origin of life, etc.? It is hard to climb out of the irrational
hole you're put yourself in, brother. There is really nothing for you
to hold onto other than your own arrogance.
Sent from my iPhone
On Oct 1, 2009, at 3:55 PM, Nous Tweaker <noustweaker at hotmail.com>
wrote:
>
> Joe Campbell wrote: [[ You are a sick man. ]]
>
> Would you care to elaborate on that? Am I a "sick man" because I
> have a strong desire to live according to Scripture? Or because I
> try to deal charitably with other people who are also trying to live
> according to Scripture? Or is it perhaps because I question the
> received "wisdom" of our ungodly age? On top of the fact that it can
> require a lot of hard work to understand the full implications of
> the Bible's teachings, sinful people are good at self-deception, and
> since I am a sinful person, I can't exclude for myself the
> possibility that I or another Christian or group of Christians might
> be barking up the wrong tree with regard to the interpretation and
> application of Scripture. But I am not prepared to admit that
> Scripture itself is "the problem." The Bible contains the solution,
> and is never the problem. I would say that taking the Bible
> seriously is a healthy sign, not a sign of sickness. But that's just
> my Christian faith talking . . . In any case, I am neither ashamed
> of anything in the Bible nor of anyone's desire to live according to
> its teachings. We need to constantly examine the Scriptures and our
> own hearts for error, but in principle the desire to live according
> to God's Word is a good thing, and I thank God for instilling such a
> desire in the hearts of His children. May God in His mercy help us
> to know and rectify our errors! But trusting in His Word is not one
> of them.
>
> Nous Tweaker
> ===========
> Can you handle the truth?
> http://noustweaker.blogspot.com/
>
>
>
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