Notable Christians

Everyone Wants a Piece of Tozer

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A.W. TozerAiden Wilson Tozer is perhaps my favorite Christian author. Every book of his that I have read has stunned me, driven me to tears, left me broken, raised me up again, and filled me with joy. I believe he was a prophet, too; you read his books written in the 1950s and they are still speaking directly to the state of the American Church today.

But one thing I’ve never understood is how so many Christians who would profoundly disagree with Tozer in many regards still hold him up as the gold standard of 20th and 21st century Evangelicalism.

Tozer was a proponent of Christian mysticism. It’s baffling that so many Christian leaders who will pummel anyone who espouses Christian mysticism today give Tozer a complete pass as if he never once quoted Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, or The Cloud of Unknowing.

Tozer was completely anticessationist; just this last week I included a Tozer quote saying as much. Tozer saw that the Church of AD 70 and the church of AD 2005 are to be the same Church in power, giftings, and so on. Yet cessationists quote Tozer as if there were no issue with his opposition to their position.

Tozer was not a proponent of Calvinism; I can’t remember him even mentioning that word in anything he’s written, yet Calvinists seem to love him, nonetheless. Just in the last few days both Steve Camp and Al Mohler held Tozer up as the example of doctrinally righteous Christianity. Curious.

Tozer damned “easy believism” and Christianity as “entertainment”—yet the bookstores of seeker-sensitive megachurches stock his books and their pastors even quote him.

Frankly, it startles me that Tozer is almost universally acclaimed by Evangelicals, yet most of them reject the foundational ideas he espoused in his preaching and teaching. Given that so many other preachers and teachers are routinely castigated in the blogosphere for even straying slightly from what is approved, why does Tozer, a man who preached a Christianity so unlike what so many others approve of today, get let off the heretic hook?

If you’ve never read Tozer, I say, Stock up! Start with The Knowledge of the Holy. There’s more truth in one of his books than any hundred teachings out there on the Web. Having said that, you can find Tozer’s teachings and sayings all over the Web—just Google “AW Tozer”. I would encourage you to do so.

MacArthur, MacArthur Everywhere!

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John MacArthurOne of the phenomena I’ve encountered in the portion of the blogosphere I regularly visit is an absolute mania for all things John MacArthur. In my post about Jack Hayford, I noticed that I, too, uttered the name that crops up everywhere I turn.

Now John MacArthur seems to be a nice man who honestly loves the Lord, a solid preacher, and a prolific author with some good books, but I have to wonder, What is the obsession with him that I see on blog after blog after blog? Is it just that so much of the message we are getting today from other sources is so ridiculously poor that MacArthur’s receives adulation for merely being good?

Here’s my dirty, little secret: I’ve heard him speak on his “Grace to You” radio program and read a few of his books, yet I’m left curiously unmoved. Never once has his radio program or his writing driven me to my knees or made me want to lift my hands in spontaneous worship. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never been happy with his cessationist views or the fact that he took on the fringes of the charismania out there and painted it as the rational middle, gutting the whole of it in the process. Nor do I support his dispensationalist eschat0logy. Still, there are preachers I disagree with far more whom I resonate with more than I do MacArthur.

So I don’t get it. I’m glad we have him out there, but he barely registers in my library or in my listening. As for me, I’ll stick with Tozer, Ravenhill, Lloyd-Jones and their like. In fact, just the other day I saw a Ravenhill video that has still got me all scrambled up inside trying to work through the depth of it. I’m not sure the entire collected works of MacArthur could do the same for me.

Readers, please tell me why so many can’t stop talking about MacArthur because I feel like I must be failing to understand something that everyone else knows intrinsically.

From CT: Two Men Swimming Against the Tide

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I almost blogged about my epic trial this week to locate a single copy of Christianity Today. For a magazine that was once the most widely published of its type, I couldn’t believe what a struggle it was to find the title anywhere.

That said, the online version serves up two articles I think are worthy of note.

First, the man gracing the cover of the July edition is one of my favorite preachers/pastors, Jack Hayford. The title of the article about him, “The Pentecostal Gold Standard“, nails it. Christianity Today feature on Jack HayfordI’m glad to know that Jack Hayford is on the side of folks like me who have a charismatic background. As much flak as Hayford takes for being a Pentecostal, John MacArthur counts him as a close friend, as does Lloyd Ogilvie. What a testimony that Hayford can serve as that kind of a bridge. When white flight hit his church’s surrounding neighborhood, Hayford stayed put. And he always prays over every seat in the massive Church on the Way that God blessed him with, a church that started out with just a handful of people. Not only has Hayford never pastored anywhere else, but he’s never had a desire to. A man of that kind of character is so very rare today. God bless him!

Second, an interview with Dennis Bakke stirred my heart after my business series. Formerly the CEO of a large energy company, Bakke realized that it took more than lip service to “Kingdom Principles of Leadership” to bring the empowerment of Christ into the workplace. His radical ideas of how to make work enjoyable and to truly cultivate teamwork are insane from the viewpoint of what many Christians have been told work should be. But I have to admit, I loved everything he said. He has a new book out, too, that I will have to read. It may be the breath of fresh air we all need after years of stifling books on leadership. I’ll let you read the article to find out the book’s title, okay? 😉

Two Christian men trying to do it right while doing it differently—kudos to both of them!