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We have this treasure in earthen vessels
2 Corinthians 4:7

Behind the Big Picture

4/29/2018

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While preparing the Big Picture I did my best to keep things as accessible and brief as possible. Which means that if you’re a teacher or other leader, you probably have a few more questions. So here are the works I drew on while preparing our material. If you have any other questions, feel free to hit me up at www.inearthenvessels.com/contact.

+ WORKS THAT SHAPED THIS STUDY
  • The Bible Project. Creative Directors: Jon Collins & Tim Mackie. Online video commentaries at thebibleproject.com & readscripture.org. These guys are master-storytellers. I’ve used their resources twice in back-to-back classes with middle- and high-schoolers, so you’ll see a few of their videos throughout the study.
  • Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together. Trans. Daniel W. Bloesch. Bonhoeffer Works—Reader’s Edition. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015. iBooks. Bonhoeffer turns exegesis into poetry, and places it at the center of Christian community. Absolutely the best book on “life together under the Word.”
  • Buzzard, Justin. The Big Story: How the Bible Makes Sense Out of Life. Chicago: Moody, 2013. iBooks. I came across this pretty late in the game, but if you’re looking for a book-length treatment of the subject, start with this one.
  • Chesterton, G.K. Orthodoxy. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1908. A must-read for just about everyone, and the source of the one extra-biblical quote you’ll see in the text.
  • Ferguson, Everett. The Rule of Faith: A Guide. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015. Print. Brother Ferguson is one of my favorite scholars, and in this short little book he shows how the early church remembered the Big Picture and then used it to disciple others.
  • Hauerwas, Stanley & William Willimon. Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, Expanded 25th Anniversary Edition. Nashville: Abingdon, 2014. iBooks. From the front cover: “A provocative Christian assessment of culture and ministry for people who know that something is wrong.” If Bonhoeffer is a poet, these guys are prophets, shaking contemporary churches out of their sleep.
  • Lloyd-Jones, Sally. The Jesus Storybook Bible. Grand Rapids: Zonderkids, 2007. Print. If you only read one book here, read this one, especially if you’re doubtful about a story-telling approach to the truth. And no, it’s not just for kids!
  • Pixabay.com. This where I got all the cool pictures. From their site: “All contents are released under Creative Commons CC0, which makes them safe to use without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist - even for commercial purposes.” But you can buy the photogs a cup of coffee!
  • Vosburg, David A., PhD & Kate Vosburg. Jesus, Beginnings, and Science: A Guide for Group Conversation. Farmville, VA: Pier, 2017. iBooks. This little book is a joy to read. Their conversational approach and discussion format show through a lot in this guide.

+ THREE BIG QUESTIONS
  • MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 3rd ed. Notre Dame, 2007. iBooks. This is probably the most important book by any living philosopher. MacIntyre talks a lot about the problems with modern moral systems. Part of his solution: tell better stories. He’s also the inspiration for the third big question.
  • McGrath, Alister E. Surprised by Meaning: Science, Faith, and How We Make Sense of Things. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2011. iBooks. If science doesn’t make your heart stir, start here. If the idea of faith seems irrational, start here. And if you know a lot of people in one of those two camps, start here. This is the source of the first quote you’ll see in the slides, the inspiration for my first and second Big Questions, and one of three sources (along with The Language of God and Questions of Truth) I used to prepare the slides on the fine-tuning of the universe.
  • Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy-stories.” Tales from the Perilous Realm. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008. Print. If words like “story,” “myth,” and “fairies” give you the willies, then this is the essay for you. Tolkien wrote this as a lecture, which means the tone is conversational and it can be easily read aloud. One major point: the reason why stories move us is because they reflect the world’s greatest story—the gospel.
  • Yeakley Jr., Flavil R. Why They Left: Listening to Those Who Have Left Churches of Christ. Nashville: Gospel Advocate, 2012. Kindle. This book is a must-read for shepherds, preachers, deacons, and teachers. Brother Yeakley presents the results of a survey he conducted among former members of the church, along with additional insights on human behavior, group dynamics, and just how to be the church.

+ A STORY WORTH SHARING
  • The ESV Study Bible. Ed. Lane T. Dennis & Wayne Grudem. Wheaton: Crossway, 2008. This is like a one-volume commentary, plus a systematic theology, plus a practical theology all rolled into one. You should also check out ESV.org and its companion apps for iOS and Android. Of particular note here are the articles on how we got the Bible. These are also published separately as Understanding Scripture, edited by Wayne Grudem, C. John Collins, and Thomas R. Schreiner.
  • Gilbert, Greg. Why Trust The Bible? Wheaton: Crossway, 2015. iBooks. This is by far the most accessible book I’ve read on this subject.
  • Lightfoot, Neil R. How We Got the Bible. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003. iBooks. Brother Lightfoot does a great job telling about the story and evidence behind our Scriptures.
  • Preface to The New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982. I usually begin my studies in the NKJV, before switching over to the ESV for teaching. The preface does a fantastic job summarizing the evidence for our Old and New Testaments, as well as different ways scholars approach that evidence in the New Testament.

+ IN THE BEGINNING & THE IMAGE OF GOD
  • Aristotle. Politics. Trans. B. Jowett. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, 1994. iBooks. This may be a strange one to see here, but modern psychology has confirmed and extended Aristotle’s nature-habit-reason paradigm in important ways. This helps us better understand what the Bible might mean when it says we’re made in God’s image. 
  • Collins, C. John. Genesis 1-4: A Linguistic, Literary, and Theological Commentary. Phillipsburg. NJ: P&R, 2006. Kindle. This is probably the best commentary I’ve seen on these four chapters, and is both academic and accessible. Collins’ comments on covenants are also helpful.
  • Collins, Francis S. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. New York: Free, 2006. iBooks. This book is my second-favorite on the science-faith dialogue, right behind Surprised by Meaning. Collins’ personal journey from churchgoing, to agnostic, to atheist, to scientist, to believer, to the leader of the Human Genome Project is inspiring. His information on the moral law, genetics and fine-tuning is also helpful.
  • Dahlsgaard, K., C. Peterson & M.E.P. Seligman. “Shared Virtue: The Convergence of Valued Human Strengths Across Culture and History.” Review of General Psychology, 9: 203-213 (2005). A cool but completely unwitting confirmation of the Moral Law. This is the source of the two slides in “The Image of God” titled, “Is There a Moral Law?”
  • Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon, 2012. iBooks. This is perhaps the strangest book here. Haidt synthesizes a vast array of findings across the fields of neuroscience, psychology, biology, and anthropology to present his view on human nature. He sometimes takes a negative view of revealed religion, but his thoughts on oxytocin, mirror neurons, intuition, and the art of persuasion are important.
  • Lewis, C.S. The Abolition of Man. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001. Originally published in 1944 as a book on English education, I tell people all the time that these are the best 100 pages written in the last 100 years. Lewis’ ethical work is a natural bridge from the works of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas to even more modern writers, like Alasdair MacIntyre, John Collins and Alister McGrath.
  • Polkinghorne, John & Nicholas Beale. Questions of Truth: Fifty-one Responses to Questions about God, Science, and Belief. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2009. Kindle. This is the second strangest book. The authors do a pretty good job answering common questions about science and faith, but their theology is a bit off at times. However, their appendix on fine-tuning is the best of three books I used here.
  • Sinek, Simon. Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print. Okay, so maybe this whole section is strange. This one is here because it’s my favorite book on leadership. But it is also the best summary of the WHY and the HOW, and their relationships to the brain’s limbic system and neocortex (respectively). This also explains some of the strange capitalization I use in “Follow Me.”

+ COVENANTS OF PROMISE & FOLLOW ME
  • Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Discipleship. Trans. Barbara Green & Reinhard Krauss. Bonhoeffer Works—Reader’s Edition. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015. iBooks. Bonhoeffer again outdoes himself: discipleship, the Sermon on the Mount, evangelism, and “the visible church-community--all in one book. This is longer than Life Together, but well-worth the read.
  • Chambers, Dan. Churches in the Shape of Scripture: Churches of Christ and the Quest to Be More Than Just Another Evangelical Church. Franklin, TN: FaithWorks, 2012. Print. Chambers’ title pretty much says it all. His strength is dealing with fairly controversial issues (baptism, instrumental music, women leadership, etc.) with the love of Christ. He also proves that being right doesn’t mean you have to be boring.
  • Ferguson, Everett. The Church of Christ: A Biblical Ecclesiology for Today. Grand Rapids: Eerdsmans, 1996. Kindle. That title might not sound like your cup of tea, but Ferguson’s book really is a great book about everything. His thoughts on covenants, the Messiah, and ministry have been particularly helpful for me.
  • Rhodes, Kevin W. Follow Me: A Call to True Discipleship. Kevin is a good friend, and one of the most thoughtful, hard-working people I know. In the foreword, Mike Vestal says it well: “Kevin offers … a veritable theology of discipleship.” You can also catch some of Kevin’s thoughts in a series of lessons called, “Follow Me,” at Polishing the Pulpit 2018.
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Follow Me

4/22/2018

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+ WATCH “The Gospel of the Kingdom” from the Bible Project

+ PRAY for open hearts and minds, especially yours.

+ READ Acts 1-2 (ESV)

+ REFLECT
As we wrap up the Big Picture of the Bible, I don’t want you to think the story is over. You see, if you’re hearing this for the first time, your journey is just getting started. But before you head down that path, it’s important to know the answers to two big questions: (1) WHERE are you going? and (2) WHY are you going? The first question is pretty obvious. Just try to hit “GO” in Apple Maps without a destination and see what happens.

But what about that second one; why is WHY important? Well, unless you’re the freest of spirits (or exceedingly bored), you probably don’t just jump in your car and head off into the unknown. There’s probably a reason you’ve selected your destination. You need the WHY for other reasons too, like, When do I need to be there? When do I need to leave? If it’s for an event (family, work, fun, etc.) the WHEN might already be set. But you probably don’t treat all those as equally important. The WHY might dictate you will be there, no matter what.

So what is your WHERE and your WHY? For a Christian, the answer is simple: it all comes down to a WHOM: Jesus. To be a Christian means to be a disciple of Christ, walking in his footsteps, and obeying his every word in love. And that’s not an easy thing to do. Jesus says it best: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). You see, we can’t come to him on our own terms. We can’t decide WHAT’s really important or WHEN’s the right time, because we know the WHY and he is a WHOM. And because of that, we follow—no matter how we feel, no matter what we have to give up, no matter how many times we fall—we take his hand and follow him.

Seven weeks to the day after Jesus rose from the dead, people from all over the world were gathered together in Jerusalem. Many of them had been there the day Jesus died, crying out, “Crucify him!” But when they heard what God had done for them through his own Son—by becoming human, dying for their sins, rising from the dead, and sitting at God’s right hand in heaven—there was really only one question that remained: “What shall we do!?” Peter doesn’t tell them to say a prayer, or to join the church of their choice. Listen to that first sermon:
“Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” … So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. (Acts 2:38-42)
When you first come to Christ, it can be hard. You have so many questions. There seems to be so much to learn. Things just aren’t the same anymore. But don’t let that stop you. He is the one who created you. He is the one who died for you. He is the one calling you. He is the one that all history longs for. And he’s coming again. Be transformed. Be baptized. Give yourselves wholly to his church. Let us help you. And obey the voice of the one who calls, “Follow me.”

+ ASK Three Big Questions
  1. How is God revealing himself?
  2. How does this make sense of us?
  3. Where do I stand in this story?

+ DIG DEEPER with slides for group discussion.
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06 Follow Me.pptx
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The Benedict Option

1/1/2018

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A few weeks ago we took a look at Rod Dreher’s first book, Crunchy Cons, to better understand Dreher’s journey from a countercultural politics to a countercultural church, what he calls “The Benedict Option.” A much shorter version of this review appeared in the December 2017 issue of The Christian Chronicle. For more on The BenOp and what it means to be the church, check out our thread on The Body of Christ.

Post-modernity. Post-Christianity. Post-truth. How should the church respond?

That’s the question Rod Dreher explores in his latest book, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. Dreher is currently a senior editor and blogger for The American Conservative, and has been writing off and on about “The BenOp” for over a decade.

His inspiration comes from the closing paragraph of Alasdair MacIntyre’s work, After Virtue. There, MacIntyre writes:

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognizing fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict. (ch. 18; unless otherwise noted, all emphases added)
In his first book, Crunchy Cons, Dreher discussed what he saw as the chief failure of modern conservatism: a consumerism that threatens our health, our homes, and our habitats. But as Dreher muses in his final chapter, maybe MacIntyre’s right. Maybe politics just isn’t what we’ve made it. Maybe we’ve been asking the wrong questions. Maybe it’s not enough to change Washington.

So while Crunchy Cons moves steadily from politics to culture to religion, The Benedict Option moves in the opposite direction, from religion to culture to politics. Instead of explaining why society needs Christianity (apologia) or proclaiming the truth of Christianity (kerygma), Dreher shows what classic Christianity looks like when lived confidently (ekklesia). He continues:
I have written The Benedict Option to wake up the church and to encourage it to act to strengthen itself, while there is still time. If we want to survive, we have to return to the roots of our faith, both in thought and in practice. We are going to have to learn habits of the heart forgotten by believers in the West. We are going to have to change our lives, and our approach to life, in radical ways. In short, we are going to have to be the church, without compromise, no matter what it costs. (Introduction, emphasis in original)
The good news is that we’ve been here before. Joseph saw it, as did Daniel, Esther, and Peter. And as Dreher points out, so did Benedict. After Rome fell in the fifth century, Benedict of Nursia renounced the pride of politics for the beauty of holiness. He recognized he couldn’t save the city from within its ruined walls, so he headed for the hills. And remarkably—and in hindsight—that’s when things started to look up:
Benedict’s example gives us hope today, because it reveals what a small cohort of believers who respond creatively to the challenges of their own time and place can accomplish by channeling the grace that flows through them from their radical openness to God, and embodying that grace in a distinct way of life. … This is not just about our own survival. If we are going to be for the world as Christ meant for us to be, we are going to have to spend more time away from the world, in deep prayer and substantial spiritual training—just as Jesus retreated to the desert to pray before ministering to the people. We cannot give the world what we do not have. (ch. 1)
So what does the BenOp actually look like? Although The Benedict Option provides several good examples, its core principles are best stated in the afterword to the paperback edition of Crunchy Cons. There Dreher outlines what he calls “a Benedictine-inspired rule adapted for modern countercultural living.” Here it is in full:

We are a school for the service of God. Everything we do, alone or together, can only be done through him and for him. Our purpose is to help each other live out the virtues in a community bound by faith in God, love of neighbor, and commitment to the principles in this Rule.
​

  1. We are nonsectarian; Benedict of Nursia is a spiritual father of all Christians. Though the spirit of this community is Christian, all who cherish the virtues taught by the Judeo-Christian tradition and who will observe this Rule are welcome.
  2. We practice regular prayer, particularly together with our families and others.
  3. We consider all honest work to be a form of prayer, consecrated to God and valuable in itself, not merely an activity carried out for money.
  4. We consider our homes and communities to be secular monasteries, with virtual high walls behind which an ordered and peaceful life devoted to prayer, learning, and the practice of virtue can be carried out—but with doors always open to the world.
  5. Hospitality and charity to those outside our circles is a fundamental obligation. We will seek to serve those in need, and be kind to strangers, who are travelers along the way. We have a special obligation to help the poor, who suffer the most from a materialist culture that exploits their weakness, isolation, and rootlessness.
  6. We seek silence. The use of television and mass media in our homes is limited.
  7. We affirm the principle of localism. We seek to build up local economies, and to encourage communal self-sufficiency. Whenever reasonable, we will buy from local farmers, artisans, and independent merchants—especially those in our community. Our first obligations are to those people and places closest to us. We are constrained by a decent respect for the needs of our community.
  8. Small is beautiful. We strive to shape our everyday lives to a human scale. Quality is better than quantity.
  9. For the sake of stability, we commit to putting down roots where we are, insofar as that is reasonable. We will work to create economic opportunities that make it easier for our neighbors to stay—and for our adult children to return.
  10. Conservation of and respect for the natural world is part of our vocation. We practice good stewardship of the world God has given us.
  11. We choose to disdain or downplay identification with secular political factions. Contemporary labels confuse more than clarify. Though we do not deny legitimate differences, we work to esteem above all the love of virtue, and the humanity we hold in common.
  12. We prize unity in essentials, but otherwise appreciate the diversity of traditional life, and what Russell Kirk called “the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence.”
  13. We practice the asceticism of everyday frugality, respecting natural limits and rejecting the false allure of consumerist society.
  14. Raising children to respect virtue and legitimate authority is a communal duty that all must share.
  15. We feast, and feast together. Meals taken in common with family and friends are an important part of the good life.
  16. It is not enough to avoid harmful things. We must also choose good things, and cultivate an appreciation for moral and artistic excellence as a habit of the mind and the heart.
  17. Seeking to conform our lives, in balance and cheerfulness, to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful is the only realistic way to live. We answer the psalmist cited by Saint Benedict by affirming that we are the men and women who “will have life, and desire to see good days.” [Psalm 34:12]

The hardest part of this modern BenOp is that these changes have to start with us. Some might not seem that radical, but others strike closer to our modern roots, presenting challenges even for the faithful. In short, if we are to point others to the Truth, we can’t merely talk about it, we have to show them the Way, show them the Life—and that means walking it ourselves (John 14:1-6). Dreher again:
    Put more plainly, unbelievers today who cannot make sense of the Gospel’s propositions may yet have a life-changing wordless encounter with the Gospel through Christian art or works of Christian love that pull them outside themselves and confront them with the reality of Christ.
    The first Christians gained converts not because their arguments were better than those of the pagans but because people saw in them and their communities something good and beautiful—and they wanted it. This led them to the Truth. (The Benedict Option, ch. 5)
The same is true for the church today. There are parts of the BenOp that I still can’t endorse and many others that I’m still working on, but Dreher’s chief point remains: We are going to have to be the body of Christ, embodying His grace in a distinct way of life, confronting others with His own divine reality. Or in Dreher's own words, “If you ask me, it’s time that we became our own Benedicts” (Crunchy Cons, ch. 8).

Benedict is a good model, but in Christ we have an even better one; because this is what Jesus did (John 1:14, 17), and this is what He calls us to do. As John wrote, “By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world” (1 John 4:17 ESV). The world comes to see the resurrected and ascended Christ only in Christ’s own confident and loving people, the church.

But to be for the world, we cannot be of the world. We have to be the church; we have to be more like Christ.
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Always Winter, Never Xmas

12/14/2017

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T.S. Eliot & the Wonder of Christmas Trees
Casey N. Cep, Paris Review

Jesus is the Reason for Every Season

Wes McAdams, Radically Christian

Keep Happy in the Holidays
Scott McCown, The Morning Drive

The Scandal of the Incarnation
Andreas Kostenberger & Alexander Stewart, Crossway

Christmas in a World Upside-Down
George Weigel, First Things

How December 25 Became Christmas
Andrew McGowan, Biblical Archaeology Society

Jesus Was Not Born in a Stable
Ian Paul, Psephizo

Xmas Does Mean Christmas
Matthew Schmitz, First Things
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The Reformation at 500

11/3/2017

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October 31, 2017 marked the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing (or mailing) his 95 Theses, and launching what came to be the Protestant Reformation. Since then believers have divided over Scripture, the sacraments (two, four, seven?), and much less serious issues. So what does this mean, and why should we care? The links below (mostly from First Things) hopefully help you answer some of those questions. For my some of own thoughts on unity in truth, please also see what I believe. And continue to pray and into the unity for which Christ died.

Holy Father, sanctify us in the truth of your word. Grant us faith in your wisdom and not our own, that we may all be one, just as you are in Christ and Christ in you, that we also may be in you—one body.

Help us, Lord, to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, that the world may believe that you have sent your Son and loved us even as you loved him.

Keep before us, O God, our hope in Christ alone, that we may be with him where he is—with you—to enjoy the glory and love that is yours from before the foundation of the world.

Wash us in one baptism, feed us from one loaf, refresh us in one cup, that we may praise you with one voice, from one heart, one soul, and one mind.

Amen.

Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification
Lutheran World Federation & the Catholic Church

A Catholic View on the Reformations
George Wiegel, First Things

Lutheranism Turns 500
Matthew Block, First Things

From Henry VIII to Henry Ford
Carl Trueman, First Things

On Mere Protestantism
Dale M. Coulter, First Things

The Unity That Might Have Been
Peter J. Leithart, First Things

Why We Should Care About Martin Luther
Frank Bellizzi, The Christian Chronicle
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Building Like Benedict

7/6/2017

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In the summer of 2015 we ran a series of posts on American religion by the numbers, how we as Christians should be preparing for exile in the post-Christian age, and Rod Dreher's idea of The Benedict Option. Later on, we addressed what this means for the church and for Christian civics. This week, we pick up where we left off, with several reviews of Rod Dreher's new book, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (2017). I've also created a new category so you can follow our discussion of the Body of Christ in one thread.
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The Benedict Option's Vision for a Christian Village
Rod Dreher, Christianity Today

Becoming Redemptive Change Agents
Robert Osburn, Wilberforce Academy

The Centurion Option: Not Retreat, but Engagement
James Mikolajczyk, Christian Origins, Modern Faith

Living Comunally in God’s Good Creation
David T. Koyzis, First Things

Thinking Locally & Historically
Alan Jacobs, First Things

Tough Questions, Tougher Answers
Rowan Williams, The New Statesmen

Demonstrating the Beauty of The BenOp
Rod Dreher, The American Conservative

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Ethics, Epics & The Ekklesia

5/21/2017

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Over the past few weeks I’ve shared a bit about my favorite books, what reading has taught me, and a short-list of truly “great” writers. But as I mentioned a few weeks ago, these are all merely glimpses of what is truly good in our world and beyond. So this week I want to share with you some of my own areas of interest and how I plan to delve deeper into them.

You can organize my interests (very loosely!) under three headings: Ethics, Epics, and the Ekklésia (or Church). In fleshing out how I wanted to approach these subjects, some of these books simply fell into my lap, either as gifts from family and friends, or as free or discounted eBooks available from their publishers. But most of the fifty-two works below were pointed out to me by a handful of books I read the last few years (or even months!):

~ After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre
~ Common Prayer by Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove & Enuma Okoro
~ The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher
~ Early Christians Speak, Vol. 1 by Everett Ferguson
~ The Language of God by Francis Collins

After Virtue is preeminent on the list for three reasons. First, reading it last year, MacIntyre reminded me just how much I still have to learn; so many of the works listed under ethics are due to his influence. But he is also one of the reasons why I want to immerse myself in epic poetry. Much like Kirk, MacIntyre points out how ancient epics informed the virtues of heroic societies, the subject and title of his tenth chapter. So while many of the epics I’ve chosen were influenced by Lewis (That Hideous Strength) and Tolkien (The Legend of Sigurd & Gudrún, The Fall of Arthur, and The Story of Kullervo), MacIntyre has given me new reasons to read in that direction. Finally, MacIntyre is also the inspiration for Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, which means that there’s not really an area I’m interested in that he hasn’t already thought and written about extensively.

The next two on the list really go hand-in-hand. I used Common Prayer for my daily devotionals in 2016, and I read though The Benedict Option this year in the first week after its release. Both demonstrate the need for the modern church to reclaim something she has lost through the ages in order to transcend our politics of lust and greed. But there are also several differences between the two perspectives, CP approaching things from the Left and The BenOp from the Right (see here and here). And yet there were four books recommended by both CP and The BenOp, which seem to merit my attention: The Rule of St. Benedict; Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon; and Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community by Wendell Berry.

But if I had to sum up the problems with both CP and The BenOp, it would be that they assume the wrong frame of reference for their diagnosis and prescriptions. Both try to recover the wisdom of the early church, but neither of them goes far enough back (only the fifth or sixth century). And that’s where Everett Ferguson comes in with Early Christians Speak. Ferguson combines representative quotes from the first three centuries of the church, organizes them by topic, and then discusses what this teaches us about being the church then and now. So far I’ve read about half of his monographs, and am hoping they eventually digitize his several edited works. He has also pointed me back to many other Restoration Movement writers, many of which are seen below.

Of these five works, though, the one that surprises me the most is still The Language of God. Francis Collins served previously as Director of the Human Genome Project and is currently the Director of the National Institutes of Health. He’s also a committed believer who has tried for over a decade to reduce the friction between the fields of religion and science. The connection between him and some of the works below is probably fairly obvious, like the last three under ethics (although ethics is actually where I disagree with him most). But Collins also draws extensively on Lewis (whom he calls his “familiar Oxford adviser”), as well as Augustine, both of whom appear below.

To illustrate how you can weave the Great Books and other good books into a course of reading, I’ve once again numbered the authors recommended in Mortimer Adler’s classic, How to Read a Book. Although each list is roughly chronological, I don’t necessarily plan on reading them that way. Books I plan on re-reading along the way have been marked with an asterisk (*).

ETHICS
10. The Republic of Plato, trans and ed. Allan Bloom
Plato’s Theory of Education by R.C. Lodge
11. Metaphysics, Rhetoric*, Poetics*, The Constitution of Athens, and Fragments, all attributed to Aristotle
Augustine on the Christian Life by Gerald Bray
32. City of God by Augustine
The Allegory of Love, Mere Christianity*, The Four Loves*, The Discarded Image, The Weight of Glory, Christian Reflections, Poems, and Present Concerns by C.S. Lewis
Dependent Rational Animals by Alasdair MacIntyre
Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community by Wendell Berry
Embracing Creation by John Mark Hicks, Bobby Valentine & Mark Wilson
The Faithful Creator by Ron Highfield
Reconciling the Bible and Science by Kirk Blackard & Lynn Mitchell

EPICS
Beowulf*, trans. Seamus Heaney (alongside Tolkien’s commentary)
33. The Song of Roland
35. The Story of Burnt Njal
The Saga of the Volsungs
The Prose (or Elder) Edda
The Poetic Edda
The Legend of Sigurd & Gudrún* by J.R.R. Tolkien
The History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth
Kalevala, ed. Elias Lönnrot
Early Irish Myths and Sagas by Jeffrey Gantz
The Mabinogion
Beren and Lúthien by J.R.R. Tolkien (ed. Christopher Tolkien, forthcoming June 2017)
The Lord of the Rings* by J.R.R. Tolkien

EKKLÉSIA
The Backgrounds of Early Christianity, Inheriting Wisdom, The Early Church and Today (Vol. 2), The Early Church at Work and Worship (Vols. 2 & 3), and Gregory of Nyssa: The Life of Moses by Everett Ferguson
The Rule of St. Benedict
Life Together and Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas & William Willimon
Reviving the Ancient Faith and Reclaiming a Heritage by Richard T. Hughes
The Cruciform Church by C. Leonard Allen
The Crux of the Matter and Will the Cycle Be Unbroken, by Douglas A. Foster et al.
Why They Left by Flavil R. Yeakley
Why We Stayed, ed. Benjamin J. Williams
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A Nation of Heretics?

10/20/2016

1 Comment

 
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How Ancient Heresy Explains our Culture's Decay
Valerie Schmalz, ChurchPOP

Survey Finds Most American Believers are Actually Heretics
G. Shane Morris, The Federalist

The State of Theology in the United States
Ligonier Ministries and Lifeway Research

Infant Baptism: Answering Their Four Best Arguments
Wes McAdams, Radically Christian

Six Steps for Teaching Better Bible Classes
Wes McAdams, Radically Christian

How to Be a More Effective Bible Teacher
Bailey McBride, The Christian Chronicle

Is Wayne Grudem Right About the Trinity?
Carl Trueman, Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

Whose Position on the Trinity is Really New?
Wayne Grudem, The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
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More than Missional

10/13/2016

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Christianity Without Denominationalism
House to House, Heart to Heart

Dollars and Souls: Funding Stateside Mission Work
Jay Repecko, The Christian Chronicle

House Church: Faith Beyond the Brick and Mortar
Katie Jones, The Christian Chronicle

Imagine What Could Be
Jeremy Houck, Wineskins

Leaving a Street Gang for Christ
Jovan Paynes, Gospel Advocate

Not Just a Fad: Faithful Presence, Gracious Hospitality
Gailyn Van Rheenen, Missio Dei Journal​

The Very Best Way to Tell if a Church is of Christ
Wes McAdams, Radically Christian
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The BenOp: Rethinking Christian Civics

6/24/2016

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In a series of Gleanings posts last summer, we took a look at American religion by the numbers, how we as Christians should be preparing for exile in the post-Christian age, and Rod Dreher's idea of The Benedict Option, and later addressed what this means for the church. This week's Gleanings looks again to the BenOp and its call to rethink Christian civics, as well as learning from some who have gone before us.
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The Benedict Option: Regrouping & Rethinking
John Burger, Aleteia

Eating Locusts Will be (Benedict) Optional
Carl R. Trueman, First Things

The BenOp as Culture War: A Response to Trueman
Greg Forster, First Things

Politics of Resentment?: A Response to Forster
Carl R. Truman, First Things

The Virtues of Alasdair MacIntyre
Stanley Hauerwas, First Things

Why Philosophy Still Matters in a Scientific Age
Olivia Goldhill, Quartz

Mercersburg Theology, Eucharistic Union & Civil Society
James R. Rogers, First Things

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Testimonies in Blood

6/3/2016

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The Apocalypse is Not Just About the Future
Charles E. Hill, Crossway

Apocalypse Now: Picturing the End of the World
Natasha O'Hear, CNN

​Carrying Our Crosses Daily
Peter J. Leithart, First Things

Canadian Churches Embrace Syrian Refugees
Bobby Ross Jr., The Christian Chronicle

ISIS, Genocide, and Us
George Weigel, First Things

Reading Revelation to the End
Peter J. Leithart, First Things

Silence of the Churches
Nina Shea, First Things

Why We Have to Call it Genocide
Mark Movsesian, First Things

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Making Disciples

4/29/2016

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What is the Primary Goal of Evangelism?
Wes McAdams, Radically Christian

Don't be Missional: Make Disciples
Mike Breen, Verge Network

God is Not Safe, But He is Good
Steve Higginbotham, Southeast Institute of Biblical Studies

Living an Others-Oriented Life
Mark Dever, Crossway

Make Disciples, Not Converts
Frank Powell

Speaking the Truth in a Skeptical Age
Samuel G. Freedman, The New York Times

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The BenOp: Christianity in Exile

2/12/2016

2 Comments

 
In a series of Gleanings posts last summer, we took a look at American religion by the numbers, how we as Christians should be preparing for exile in the post-Christian age, and what this means for the relationship between Christ and culture, particularly Rod Dreher's idea of The Benedict Option. This week's Gleanings brings us up-to-date on further developments in that conversation.
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A Benedict Option FAQ
Rod Dreher, The American Conservative

A Q&A for People who Hate the Benedict Option
Matthew Loftus, First Things

Benedict & Nothing: A Response to Loftus
Rod Dreher, The American Conservative

The BenOp & New Monasticism (Part 1 & Part 2)
Rod Dreher & Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Red Letter Christians

The Ecclesiastical Failure of Christian America
James R. Rogers, First Things

What Does Evangelical Even Mean?
Jonathan Merritt, The Atlantic

The Need for Epiphanic Evangelicalism
James R. Rogers, First Things

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Rethinking Christ & Culture

8/21/2015

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The Benedict Option
Rod Dreher, The American Conservative

The Dominican Option
C.C. Pecknold, First Things

A Franciscan Moment
Timothy George, Patheos

The Calvary Option?
Carl R. Trueman, First Things

Sojourners & Strangers
Russell Moore, Patheos

Seeking Shalom in our Cities
Matthew H. West, First Things

SERMON: Embodying the Love of Christ
Jon Burnett, Waldorf Church of Christ

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Upholding Biblical Marriage

8/7/2015

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Agape Wins
Molly Oshatz, First Things

Christ is Still King
Dominic Bouck, First Things

The Courage to Be on the Wrong Side of History
Ryan Shinkel, Public Discourse

Gay Marriage: WWJD?
Jacob Rutledge, Start2Finish

Loving Service: The Only Path to Societal Renewal
Dan McConchie, The Gospel Coalition

Pray, Listen, Remember, Prepare, Persevere
Brian Orme, faithit

Witnessing with Conviction & Kindness
Russell Moore, The Washington Post

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How (Not) to Grow the Church

6/18/2015

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Want to Destroy the Church? Ignore the Bible
David French, National Review Online

Want Christianity to Die? Encourage Shallow Faith
Matt Walsh, The Blaze

Want to Reach Millennials? Stop Faking It
Wes McAdams, Radically Christian

Want to Reach Nones? Practice Deep Discipleship
Dominic Douck, First Things

Want to Be a Christian? Follow Jesus
Kevin Rhodes, Hopkins Publishing

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American Religion by the Numbers

6/11/2015

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America's Changing Religious Landscape
The Pew Research Center

The Churches of Christ in 2015
The Pew Research Center

Factoring in Conversions & Birth Rates
Leah Libresco, FiveThirtyEight

The Real But Overstated Decline of American Christianity
Ross Douthat, The New York Times

The Religious States of America in 22 Maps
Niraj Chokshi, The Washington Post

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The Joy of Baptism

3/23/2014

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The last few months have been exciting for our congregation: five people have been immersed into Christ (see Rom 6:3)! Though baptism is not a subject most people get excited about, the Bible’s discussion of immersion is truly joyful!

Consider the example of the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26-40). Not only did he find baptism essential for his response to the “good news about Jesus” (v. 35) but when the Spirit whisked Philip away to another work, the eunuch “went on his way rejoicing” (v. 39 ESV). He understood the importance of what had just happened and rejoiced in the blessings he now had in Christ. Look briefly at what the New Testament says we are doing in baptism:

  • We submit to divine authority (Mat 28:19; Acts 2:38; 10:48; 19:5)
  • We declare our faith in the good news of Christ (Mark 16:15-16; Acts 8:12; 18:8)
  • We change our minds about sin (Acts 2:38; 16:33; Rom 6:1-6)
  • We accept God’s word (Acts 2:41)
  • We declare our faith in the good news of the kingdom, his church (Acts 8:12; see Mat 16:18-19)
  • We begin our fellowship with other believers (Acts 8:13; 10:48; 16:15; 1Co 1:13; 12:13)
  • We call on the name of the Lord (Acts 22:16; 2:21; 1Pe 3:21)
  • We participate in the sufferings of Christ (Rom 6:3-4,6; Col 2:12)
  • We put on Christ (Gal 3:27)
  • We declare our faith in the powerful working of God (Col 2:12)

Baptism, though, is not primarily about what we do. As the above passages imply, it is about trusting in what God has done and will do for each of us through his Son. It is about believing and accepting his will for our lives, which he has revealed to us through the good news of his written word. Note what the Bible says God does through baptism:

  • He saves us (Mark 16:15-16; 1Pe 3:21)
  • He forgives our sins (Acts 2:38; 22:16)
  • He gives us the gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38; 1Co 12:13)
  • He adds us to the assembly of the saved (Acts 2:41, see v. 47 NKJV; “one body,” 1Co 12:13)
  • He raises us to walk in newness of life (Rom 6:4; Col 2:12)

Biblical baptism is neither “salvation by works” nor “baptismal regeneration.” It’s not about what you are doing and it’s not about the water; it’s about Jesus Christ and the death he died for you. “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph 2:8-9). The question now is whether you have allowed the Lord to do for you what he can, or whether you’ve denied the very means by which he does it.

I rejoice for all my new brothers and sisters in Christ, knowing the joy and love they feel for the Lord who saves us, but I also mourn for those who are yet to make this same step in obedient faith. Friends, remember the example of our Lord and follow him. “Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him” (Heb 5:8-9).


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