Who's Your Paleoevangelical of the Year?

I've been thinking about this year's recipient, and I'm finding myself torn between two really deserving individuals. Then the thought struck me, "Wouldn't it be great to hear what Paleoreaders think? Who would they come up with?"

So here's your opportunity. Just tell me your rationale in 2 or 3 sentences (more if you want). The criteria? Established not quite a year ago, the Paleoevangelical of the year is . . .

. . . the person or people that God has used most to incline my thoughts, affections, and life most towards the gospel during the past year.

Guess This Quote of the Weekend

No googling. My last TNIV goes to the winner. Here it is:

"Humility comes before honor."

The correct answer is not Solomon.

Here's How You Know You've Been in a Great Class

After the final exam is done, all the students want the professor to lecture through the end of the allotted time.

What's Right with the Emerging Church?

Phil Johnson offers some insight in the final installment of his series at the Pulpit Magazine blog. My perspective is less informed than his, but I agree with all his observations. I think this one is the most salient:

They are right to point out that millions of American evangelicals live lives of gross hypocrisy and narcissism, ignoring the needs of the poor while indulging themselves with entertainments and luxuries while the church struggles, and many pastors live barely above the poverty level (if that), and our Christian brothers and sisters struggle in many parts of the world because they don’t even have clean water or basic medical care. We have the resources, and yet we are too prone to spend them on ourselves. I often think American evangelicals will have a lot to answer for when we are called to give account for our stewardship.

Youth Ministry as the Incubator for the Emerging Church

Here's a provocative portion of Phil Johnson's post at the Pulpit Magazine blog yesterday:

I have friends who have suggested that the emerging church idea is the predictable fruit of churches that tailor their youth ministries to whatever style is currently fashionable, hold alternative church services for the youth in a separate building (”the youth building”) and never incorporate them into the actual life of the church itself. They’ve grown into adulthood while their styles and preferences were catered to in a special “church” service all their own. The actual church service was something they weren’t expected to like. Many of them were never really exposed to worship in the context of the actual church, with real adults. They were deliberately entertained instead, and thus they were conditioned to think that way. They grew old, but they never grew up, and now even as adults, they want to continue to play at church, but outside the mainstream of the historic church. (My friend characterized the emerging church worship style as “Church services for the ADHD generation.” Read the Christianity Today account of Emergent’s national convention and you will understand why he said that.)

So keep on building your youth ministry on the sand of entertainment and excitement if you must. Warm the kids up to worship with skits and games. Dream up grosser and more outlandish spectacles. Keep on denying that what you reach them with is what you reach them to. And maybe one day you'll have your own little heretical kingdom that rises from the ruins of the Emerging Church.

Just don't forget to use your sermons to scorn all the small-minded people who said this was a bad idea. (Ha! Silly me. Sermons are so first century.)

"As If They Had Not Done Their Job Hard Enough"

Here's a gut-wrenching story on the last reunion of the survivors of Pearl Harbor.

Which Came First: The Chicken or the Social Gospel?

I'm wondering whether allowing universalist exegesis in your pulpit leads to the social gospel, or whether adopting the social gospel leads to allowing universalist exegesis in your pulpit. Any help for me here?

Speaking at Saddleback Church's Global Summit on AIDS and the Church, Senator Barack Obama delivered these remarks:

Or we can embrace another tradition of politics - a tradition that has stretched from the days of our founding to the glory of the civil rights movement, a tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another - and that what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done for the people with whom we share this Earth.

. . .

Corinthians says that we are all of one spirit, and that "if one part suffers, every part suffers with it." But it also says, "if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it."

I think this video will give you everything you need to know about Warren. Just because you say you're about more than the social gospel doesn't make it true. Judge for yourself. (HT)

"Fundamentalists Have Altered Radically"

It shouldn't come as news to anyone that much of the fundamentalist movement has for decades been rather inconsistent (at best) regarding its ban on movie theater attendance. What is news to me is the historical background to the rise of this inconsistency, which Kevin Bauder has most helpfully sketched. Apparently, many "historic fundamentalists" aren't quite as historic as they would like to think.

But amid all the SI comment chatter (some of which is comical . . . at best) about things he hasn't even begun to address, I fear that the point will be lost—at least the point that jumped off screen to me. Here it is: It's less significant that fundamentalism now accepts theater than how it arrived at that conclusion. Sure fundamentalism kept some (not all) of the external moral standards for appropriate content, but it's a hollow M&M—a bit of air covered by a thin candy shell (at best). For in the sweeping consignment of Tertullian, Augustine, Pascal, and Tozer to the trash heap, fundamentalism eviscerated itself of thoughtfulness in this matter.

I really don't know what these men said, and I surely don't know whether they were right or wrong. I'm looking forward to finding out what I believe. And at the risk of losing my Young Fundamentalist membership card, I'm open to hearing and embracing objections to the medium as a whole. But in spite of what I don't know, what seems patently obvious to me is this: Once again, Bauder has demonstrated that fundamentalism as it exists today is not serious.

By the way, has anybody out there come up with an authoritative decision yet on whether it's ok to see a "film" in an IMAX theater while it's showing in ordinary theaters?

Piper on the Kind of Faith That Saves

I hate to rip quotes from context when they could be misconstrued apart context, but this comment from John Piper's recent sermon on Romans 7:1-6 is worthy of some reflection:

It is possible to receive things you do not like. It is possible to believe in things you do not admire and esteem and treasure. And I want to make sure you understand, saving faith is not a believing in something you don't like. Saving faith is not believing in a person you don't cherish and treasure and love. Saving faith is a believing in and a receiving of a treasure, or it does not save.

Oh, that's so important to make plain in our easy-believism age where people are just called to make this or that decision or the other, and nothing ever changes--Christ just tacked on to their American Way.

For some reason, this quote does't appear to be in the transcript, but I'm listening on the podcast, and the date matches. If someone figures out the apparent discrepancy, please let me know.

The Most Influential Person You've Never Heard Of?

This is heavy stuff for a weekend, I know. But I hate to let the death of Milton Friedman without comment. Even though the American economy is still largely socialistic, it would be far more so were it not for Friedman's influence. Thomas Sowell wrote a respectful tribute that included this high praise:

Milton Friedman may well have been the most important economist of the 20th century, even if John Maynard Keynes was the most famous. No small part of Friedman’s achievement was rescuing economics from the pervasive and virtually unquestioned Keynesian orthodoxy that reigned in many places.

Ironically, Friedman began his career as a believer in both Keynesian economics and in the liberals’ vision of the world with which it was so compatible. Yet, in the end, no one did more to dethrone both. It is doubtful whether Ronald Reagan could have been elected president in 1980 without the changes in public opinion produced by Friedman’s work in the previous decades.

Just after Friedman's death I caught part of a rerun of his interview from a couple years ago on PBS' Charlie Rose show. At that point he was already into his 90's but was more sharp and articulate than I could ever hope to be.

Friedman made a point I've wondered about for a few years: The best arrangement of power for a balanced federal budget is a Democratic president and a Republican-controlled Congress. (He didn't say anything about how it works out for judicial appointments.) I wonder if that makes what we're about to have the worst. Take it for what it's worth.