31 Days of Prayer for One Thing
May 31, 2005
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Church Issues, Community, Counterculture, Prayerfulness Feedback : 5 comments
Back on the first of this month, I said I’d be praying for the Body of Christ in one area: unity. Today ends my last day of praying for this daily. I’m sure it will continue to be a concern I raise periodically, but I’m moving on and letting this lie fallow for a bit.
Since the beginning of the year, I’ve written numerous times on the issue of disunity within the Body of Christ. Sadly, I think we are becoming more disconnected rather than less. 
And before anyone claims that I’m just another of those mamby-pamby ecumenists, I just want to say that I’m a firm believer in solid doctrine and disciplining those who pursue “another gospel.”
That said, much of the Christian discourse I’ve seen lately on the Web isn’t Christian and it isn’t discourse. It’s more of an attempt by some of us to be right all the time, even if we have to savage others to do it. What I don’t see much of is an attempt to restore the wayward. Branding someone with a noxious tag is easy; restoring them to a place of wholeness and firmness in Christ is vastly harder.
It’s the nature of the Internet to be impersonal. I can think of no better place for someone to be an anonymous voice crying in the wilderness. But faceless prophesying isn’t the model that the Bible upholds for us; people faced their accusers and were restored to them in person. That’s a gutsier model than the one we uphold out in the frigid fringes of the Internet, a place where—as the old New Yorker cartoon goes—no one knows you’re a dog.
I started this month with a thirty-year old song (based on Psalm 133) by Rick Ridings that I used to sing as a much younger man. Here are the words again:
Father, make us one,
Father, make us one,
That the world may know
Thou hast sent the Son,
Father, make us one.Behold how pleasant and how good it is
For brethren to dwell in unity,
For there the Lord commands the blessing,
Life forevermore.
Life forevermore. The world is dying to have what we Christians so easily take for granted, yet how poorly we model the unity that makes it possible for the world to believe. Instead of the open hand of God, we’ve become hidden snipers. I’m not saying we should abandon good doctrine, but neither should we so patently ignore the log in our own eye. All too often, the speck in our brother’s eye is made out to be an oak, while our own sequoia goes left unattended.
I think we can still point out error and retain unity. But the condition for this is to correct with a greater acknowledgment of our own failings and with a greater heart toward restoring the wayward. If we bludgeon them to death first, our path to restoring them is made that much more difficult.
Father, make us one.
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Arrogance, Ignorance, and “I Don’t Know.”
May 28, 2005
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Apologetics, Best of Cerulean Sanctum, Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Discernment, Godly Character, Grace, Heresy, Humility, Jesus Christ, Judgmentalism, Love, Maturity Feedback : 7 comments
Slice of Laodicea notes an Al Mohler article that brings up good talking points about the state of today's Church in light of the proliferation of cults. Mohler's basic comment is that poor doctrinal defense and an inability to nip error in the bud have resulted in Christianity being dogged by a plethora of pseudo-Christian cults all clamoring for legitimacy. Given that Eerdmans, long a stalwart in Evangelical publishing, just published a defense of Mormonism, fueling the growing desire of Mormons to be considered mainstream Christians (rather than gladhanders in bleached white Oxfords trying to dig up the remnants of a civilization as non-existent as Plato's Atlanteans), Mohler may have a point.
But then again, nah.
Mohler's piece is written as if no Church existed before 1800. Witness this assertion:
Writing early in the last century, J. K. Van Baalen argued that "the cults are the unpaid bills of the church." Van Baalen's influential work, The Chaos of the Cults, represented one of the very first comprehensive efforts to evaluate the various cults of the day from the vantage point of orthodox Christianity. Van Baalen's survey considered movements and groups such as Spiritism, Theosophy, Christian Science, Rosicrucianism, Swedenborgianism, Mormonism, and the Jehovah's Witnesses, among others.In Van Baalen's analysis, orthodox Christianity had opened the door for the cults to emerge and to proliferate throughout the culture. Sidelined by pragmatism, distracted by divisions, and committed to a "smallest common-denominator faith," the orthodox churches had left the larger culture, and even some of their own members, unprepared to meet the challenge of the cults.
If anything, the problem is more acute in our own day. The seductions of postmodernism and the complexities of a pluralistic culture compound the difficulty involved in engaging, understanding, and confronting the cults.
Is the problem more acute in our day? Well, if the Scriptures are to be believed, the first NT writings were not even dry on the page before the Church was confronting cults. We know that the Apostle John wrote to counter the nascent Gnostic heresies and that the Lord Himself called out the Nicolaitans in Revelation. In fact, as long as there has been Christianity there have been cults of Christianity. Paul was constantly squashing one heretical belief after another and even came into conflict with Peter over the Judaizers, a group that Mohler would be forced to tag as a cult if it existed today.
The list of heretical leaders and the groups that formed around them in the early days of Christianity's spread could take up a leather-bound tome in itself. Mohler's amnesia here is startling: Marcion, Pelagius, Apollinarius, Montanus, Arius, Nestorianus and on and on. Yes, the Church did put them down, but even today groups of pseudo-Christians cling to the remnant teachings of these heretics. Still, their ideas did not die; even a casual glance around proves Pelagianism is alive and well in the 21st century.
The issue of what constitutes a cult in the history of the Church is also difficult to ignore. To the orthodox Church (and Mohler makes much of what is "orthodox"), Martin Luther and his band of German ne'er-do-wells were a cult. Same goes for that Calvin guy and that fellow Knox. To those early Lutherans and Presbyterians, the Roman Catholic Church was a cult and plenty of Christians today still maintain that view.
In fact, you can trace every modern denomination in Christianity to a blistering reaction by that denomination's adherents to an "apostate orthodox church." Methodism, the Restoration Movement, the Quakers, the Puritans, all had a start as folks who came out of a church that was backslidden and given to cultic practices—at least as they saw it. How Mohler fails to consider this is beyond me.
Worse still, Mohler attributes the problem of cult proliferation in the last one hundred-fifty years solely to the Church's inability to promote correct doctrine. To be honest, I don't believe that this is the whole story, especially since Mohler lumps seeker-sensitive and Emerging churches in here. Again, an honest assessment shows that these two came not out of bad doctrine, but a reaction against an orthodox Church in America that simply wasn't doing its job. A lot of denominations started out that way, but when they left their parent churches, the angry ones left behind were bellowing, "Heretics!" even as they smarted over the possible truth behind the breakaway group's leaving. It was easier to blame them for bad doctrine than it was for being right about the status quo's calcification and deadness.
Every doctrine of the Church is not nailed down. If we were honest with ourselves we would have to admit this. Get one hundred Christians of all "orthodox" persuasions in a room, and you'll have at least twenty distinct eschatologies. And while some may say that eschatology makes no difference, many of the cults that arose in the mid-Nineteenth century did so because of eschatological beliefs. Nor does one's eschatological view exist in a vacuum. The very way we live our lives every day is a reflection of how we think the world will end. If you don't think that's true, then compare and contrast Booth's Salvation Army with today's Christian survivalists.
I'm going out on a limb here and will certainly get angry comments, but even Paul didn't have his theology crystal clear on all points—at least as many orthodox Christians might see it today. We know that Paul publicly confronted Peter over his falling in with the Judaizers, but Paul was not so sure of the issue of circumcision early on in his ministry (Acts 15), but then after it was decided that circumcision was not necessary, Paul went ahead in the very next chapter and circumcised Timothy in order to get a better opportunity to preach to the Jews who would have disqualified his testimony because of his uncircumcised co-worker in the Faith. Later on, we have Paul abiding Nazarite vows and ritual cleansings in Acts 21, acts that would drive batty those orthodox believers who eschew anything that looks like a ritual or smacks of legalism.
So just who is wrong here? And better yet, who's willing to admit it?
It's that latter sentence that may explain some of the reason why we have cults: dogmatism. Cults— and Christian denominations—exist in large part due to inflexibility of beliefs. They are all backlashes against a rock-solid dogma that chafed. Sometimes (and yes, I know, not always) we Christians must acknowledge some negotiables. Paul did so when he circumcised Timothy. Who here is willing to toss him out for that act? Was it a sin? Was he violating doctrine? Or was the Holy Spirit leading him outside the newly established boundaries just this once in order that some might be saved? That Paul also consented to a similar act (the vows) later on in order to win some to the Lord should give us pause.
Frankly, if Mohler were honest, he'd just skip to the punchline and say, "I'm a Baptist. From my perspective, anyone who baptizes infants is a heretic and their church is a cult." The problem is, he can't bring himself to say that because he mentally assents to some doctrinal "wiggle room" himself.
I'm not positive on a lot of points of established "orthodox" doctrine. I believe that because Man is made in the image of God, he's a tripartite being, just as God is. Wayne Grudem, whose Systematic Theology is a work I deeply respect, does not share that belief. That makes one of us wrong. Applying the standard that Mohler asks, one of us is therefore a heretic.
The Holy Spirit will guide us into all Truth, as the Scriptures say, and yet we see through a glass darkly. I believe both those statements. I believe that the Holy Spirit will progressively make me more like the Lord and I will take on more of His Truth in doing so, but I also believe that I will not have all the answers in my lifetime. As Paul's "man caught up into the third heaven" can attest, there are answers to questions we may never ask this side of eternity. And if we've never asked them, how then can we be perfect in our doctrine?
Arrogance led to erecting a gospel of stone, a weight that not only were the cultists not ready to accept, neither were the leaders of Christian denominations who broke off from the accepted teaching of the day and went down another path. On the other hand, there is no purity in ignorance. Certainly ignorance accounts for the cults and some of those same Christian denominations—ignorance of the Word and of sound doctrine.
Perhaps the reality we face this side of heaven is that on some issues the believer must be more humble, even to the point of saying, "I don't know." While I don't ascribe to the belief that everything is a mystery, neither do I believe that everything is set in granite. I don't believe that Jesus came to establish a set of dogmas used to crush ordinary people with, and yet He never tolerated erroneous teaching, either.
No matter what the case, we all need a bigger dose of humility when it comes to this issue of who is right and who is wrong. We use the word "heretic" far too often today. The Christian blogosphere is choking on the brutal arguing going on over who's perfect and who isn't. I don't want any part of that anymore. It's possible to call others to holiness without strangling them to death with a noose of righteousness. That's the way I'm going to try to take, because in the end, I'm not perfect.
Now where's my comfy chair?
Tags: Apologetics, Best of Cerulean Sanctum, Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Discernment, Godly Character, Grace, Heresy, Humility, Jesus Christ, Judgmentalism, Love, Maturity
Tougher People
May 26, 2005
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Best of Cerulean Sanctum, Boldness, Dying to Self, Faith, Godly Character, Grace, Joy, Love, Maturity, Prayerfulness Feedback : 12 comments
I don't usually blog about my emotional well-being, but it's been a rough week. Monday I got bad news about a serious dental problem I have that can only be resolved by drastic, painful surgery to the tune of a year's tuition (or more) at Harvard. With both of us deflated by this news, my wife asked me what people with my condition did before this kind of surgery was available. The only answer? They lived with it.
So I've been thinking since then about folks who lived long before any of the amenities we take for granted today. Amy Carmichael, missionary to India, never took a COX-2 inhibitor in her life, bedridden with constant pain for twenty years before she met her Maker. Yet her poetry and wisdom live on long after she succumbed to the affliction of living on this planet. Millions of women somehow got through childbirth without an epidural. And after suffering through the mind-numbing agony of a kidney stone late last year, I don't understand how anyone could have existed without opiates to dull the shrieking nerves.
Dentistry back in the old days consisted of a pair of pliers and a bottle of rotgut. There were no bionic limbs two hundred years ago for the soldier maimed in war; a hook or crutch would have to do. Infection took its toll on many body parts and no plastic surgery plied his trade in making torn bodies whole again. Deformity was life and you went on living it no matter how much you wanted the mirror to lie, if only for a moment.
Couples buried their children by the dozen. Mothers often accompanied their mis-born children to the grave. Life was often brutish, nasty, and short. Ask Hudson Taylor, the great Asian missionary, who returned to England—his own health shattered—after leaving his wife and several children in the cold Chinese soil. Many could tell you that living seemed much more about avoiding being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A simple handshake with the wrong person could leave a deposit of microbes for which there was no known cure, diseases like diptheria or pertussis that are rarely spoken of today.
You can't dismiss that people were tougher then. No one thought himself a victim of fate, either. One simply pressed on and that was it. There weren't scores of therapists to hear Abraham Lincoln talk about his sadness over the deaths of his children and the increasing mental instability of his wife at a time when the nation he presided over was torn in two, brother set against brother. More pressing needs begged for his allegiance, so he soldiered on.
I can't see myself crowded around Jesus, trying to clutch at His robe saying, "If only…." Instead, I would be marveling at the truly shattered people who flung themselves at him, people so broken that some of them weren't recognized as human any longer, except by the Lord Himself. I think I would have to give up whatever place I had in line if I'd seen someone like that. Those were hard days and it's a miracle to this child of the 1960s that anyone could live at all.
There aren't too many tough people in the West anymore. Perhaps this is why we are so willing to forget about the Lord; we have other answers for our problems, even the tiniest ones. A balm exists for whatever ails us as long as the price is right. And even when it isn't, the lengths we'll go to in making it right shows how easily we are bought, sold, and traded on the open market.
It's sobering to know I would've been one of those casualties a hundred years ago. I was hospitalized for two weeks at two years of age for pneumonia, a dreaded killer in the time of my great-grandfather, but not for someone born in the Camelot of Kennedy's era. Should my recovery have been only partial (and partial was what many hoped for in the fin de siecle), I would've been known as a "sickly child," a terminology we don't toss around today simply because we don't see it too often.
Jesus wants tough people who rely on Him for everything, particularly when everything is not provided without fail. If that's my prayer for myself right now, then it's my prayer for you, too. We can't live on "what if?" or "if only…." Faith demands more and asks for tougher people. On that Day, the Bride of Christ will be radiant in her beauty, but She will have gotten there bloodied and beaten—yet not defeated.
Be tougher.
{Image: Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" (1936)}
Tags: Best of Cerulean Sanctum, Boldness, Dying to Self, Faith, Godly Character, Grace, Joy, Love, Maturity, Prayerfulness
Strange Bedfellows
May 25, 2005
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Uncategorized Feedback : 8 comments
One way the Church in America is going to hurt the cause of Christ in the long run is if we are indiscriminate with our hitching of Christianity to politics. I have a serious issue with this because I suspect that one day the wagon of politics is going to roll right over the top of us Christians.
Beyond that, syncretism has destroyed more than one pastor, teacher, author, church or ministry over the years. In fact, I tend to believe that in this day and age syncretism of any kind is philosophically Enemy #1. Paul wrote:
Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?
—1 Corinthians 5:6 ESV
Syncretism sneaks in like a microbe and the next thing you know, everything’s been rotted from the inside out.
This is why I couldn’t believe this Web site or the product it is selling: Bushfish.org.
I keep on telling myself it’s a joke, but if it is, it’s not a very funny one. If it’s not, well…I like President Bush and I think he has been a good president, but this is just wrong. In this same vein, I saw some T-shirts and ball caps that had the name of Jesus printed out in a font that consisted of the American flag and it took just about every ounce of my self-control to keep from screaming.
We’ve got to be very wise. I think that Evangelicals especially have tried to wrap themselves in the robes of Christ’s righteousness and an American flag cloak at the same time, but we simply can’t wear both. Christians belong to a different nation altogether. There is no equivalence between being a citizen of Heaven and a citizen of the United States. One of those must come second—a distant second.
I am totally for our country-there’s never been a country like this one—but we simply can’t syncretize America and Jesus. He’s Lord of all, not just Americans, and being an American is not the magic pass key through the gates of Heaven. Love America a little, but love the Lord a whole lot.
To quote a famous line from an old TV show: “People, let’s be careful out there.”
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So Men Want a Challenge?
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Uncategorized Feedback : 5 comments
Recently, I wrote about issues facing men in our churches (or not in them, as the statistics point out), so I thought I would go over to the Church for Men site to see what men are saying about why they aren’t in church or why they feel the Church is not providing what men need. I’ve popped in there from time to time, and while I’m trying to take part in the conversation, I leave scratching my head.
If one factor defines that conversation, it’s the endless chorus of male voices chanting: “Men want a challenge!” Now this confuses me to no end because the list of challenges facing the Church is exceedingly long and certainly daunting if taken at face value. But I want to be game about this need that men have for a challenge, so I’m offering a challenge to every man out there:
That’s it. Nothing fancy or earth-shattering. But also nothing more needed or more missing in the lives of churches and the men in (or not in) them.
Can’t find anything to pray about for an hour? Then start asking everyone you see on a regular basis what they would like prayer for. Don’t make distinctions between Christians and non-Christians; ask everyone. Ask what their greatest need is and start compiling a list that you pray over every day. 
There’s not a human being alive who doesn’t need prayer. What can be more challenging than meeting a need that goes largely unmet in the lives of every person on the face of the planet?
If you find that’s still not filling up more than sixty minutes of your day, then ask God to open your eyes to every issue confronting your own church. Statistics say that most Christian teens are sexually active. Are you praying for the purity of the teens in your church? Christians tend to divorce at a rate not much less than the general public. Are you praying for the marriages of every couple in your church? Satan would like nothing more than divide and sift everyone in your church. Are you praying against the dark forces that seek to destroy every spiritual leader, every family, and every individual within your church down to the tiniest child ?
Okay men, there’s the challenge. Get back with me in a month and tell me how it’s going.
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