living in the post-modern

Even though team-pyro believes God is dead or has at least changed His nature, they can still come up with Biblical reasons for Christian living today. Phil Johnson has accurately identified two key issues faced by the Church today, i.e., an untaught church and an increasingly hostile world. To this he proposes a five-step approach.

1. Remember why we're not modernists - "How about let's forget trying to accommodate the fickle shifts of contemporary culture and worldly thinking altogether? Gimme that old-time religion."
2. Recover the role of teaching in the church
3. Re-emphasize the certainty of revealed truth
4. Reinstate holiness on our list of priorities
5. Regain our true missionary emphasis

This a short piece worth reading.

Now for a long tirade that has nothing to do with the main point above - some of you might be tempted to ask me why I say team-pyro believes God is either changed or dead. To that I say you need only read their perverse understanding of how He stopped interacting in history. They have taken the beauty of Scripture and turned it into a text book to be dissected in bits and pieces. In doing so, they missed the big picture of how a living God interacts in space, time, and history. This past week's series of posts demonstrate the degree of their falleness.

A word to those who demand signs, wonders, and private messages - one of many "innocent" quotes of the great Charles Spurgeon where the Pyro guys (1)insinuate that those who believe in signs and wonders "demand" them for faith and (2) wrongly represent Spurgeon as a fellow unfamiliar and against the miraculous in his life.

Intuition and Superstition: An Admonition - here the Pyro guys build on their idea that while God spoke volumes to all manners of people in history, everything not recorded in Scripture and all such instances since then are intuition and superstition. To that they add the mistaken notion that while the senses that might allow us to "hear" God remain unreliable (radically effected by sin), God has somehow redeemed (or is redeeming) our sense of reason such that a mature person can rely on this.

Interestingly, they later say exactly what many Charismatics would say regarding "impressions" they might have. The sad part of their argument is that they believe the same as many Charismatics but they are so filled with distain and self-pride that they cannot see it. They fear confusing the voice of God with the desire of their own heart so much that they openly attack anyone who is willing to suggest some revelation might actually be God.

The Amazing Dr. von Cipher's "Conversation" with "God" - a long, long piece (admittedly I didn't understand it all) but the gist is if it isn't verifiably 100% God then get rid of it. Since nothing outside of Scripture meets that criteria, conversation over. That's interesting since that is not the Scriptural pattern or instruction.

Ecstasy - a classic - let's attack the guy that used the word "thrilled" in association with experiencing some revelation from God. I read and reread this article (because it was short) and still got nothing other than the Pyro guy is nasty. Scripture states the gifts of the Spirit are to edify. To me, that seems "thrilling". I'm struggling with why Pyro feels a need to attack the use of the word "thrill" and then presume that some real point was proven. This only shows the extent they are willing to go to attack anyone on the "other side" regardless of how petty the point.

Emotions? Sure. We got 'em. . . - more of the same nonsense. If it doesn't look, feel, sound, etc. identical to Scripture, it ain't God. I'm wondering which Scripture supports that criteria? And than, true to form, they pick Benny Hinn as the model Charismatic to poke at. Apparently the 20 or so years of the same argument with the same people over the same points haven't made the slightest impact with this crowd. Their arguments are worn out. Their attack of straw-men has been exposed. Etc.. Yet somehow their following continues. They believe God is dead and they are proud.

Voices in our Heads - simply too long to comment on. I love the ending however. Here I agree with the author except that the author thinks this is a problem for the Charismatic. It is not a problem at all. It only demonstrates Pyro's failure to understand that just like there is a wide variety of people in their "God is dead" crowd, there is a wide range of beliefs in the Charismatic crowd. Years of discussion hasn't helped them understand that.

Anyway, to end on a positive note, here is the super cool part of this post.

... Piper rightly cloaks that non-normative event [God speaking "audibly"] in the necessary and normative event of hearing and experiencing God through the words of the Bible ...

What's at stake here is if we are first using God's precious gift of Scripture to seek Him and find Him, not whether some voice in one's head is the voice of God ...

And finally, I love and agree with this one.

... when you pick up the telephone and you hear a voice on the other end, can you know who it is if you have never really heard that person speak before? So how can you know if that voice in your head is God's voice if you have never listened to Him say what He's been saying since Paul and Peter were in short pants?

Here's the conclusion. These guys don't believe God is dead nor that His nature has changed. And while I think they may have some concerns and disagreement with the "Reformed Charismatic" crowd, their fear, aversion (insert whatever word is appropriate) attitude to the extreme Charismatic causes them to argue poorly, to argue ugly, to misuse Scripture, to not recognize potential other understandings of Scripture, and to speak as from the opposite (and I think equally wrong) end of the pendulum. It's very sad.

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