Chris Green, Vice Principal of Oak Hill Theological College, has noted that among the 35 contributors to John Stott: a portrait by his friends, there is none from ‘the other side’ of the 1966 debate with Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones. ‘Perhaps,’ Green suggests, ‘some issues are still too raw.’
It seems extraordinary that such a situation should pertain nearly half a century after the event. I would like to revisit the momentous events of that 1996 debate and its consequences.…
Peter Lewis writes in a recent edition of Evangelicals Now:-
…A short while back, Bel Mooney interviewed Philip Pullman, author of the famous children’s books where the church is the evil power that abuses children and ‘God’ is a fake, an extremely old angel who came into existence as a throw-up of evolution, pretended to be ‘God’ and has to be preserved in a block of ice by other angels. The great deliverance is to be freed of the idea of God and then everyone is free to go on into non-existence when they die.
According to one commentator, when Matthew came to write his narrative of Jesus’ birth, he based it on Luke’s account. Matthew, however, was writing for a different readership, and so changed Luke’s true story about the humble shepherds coming in from the fields to visit the baby Jesus into a fictitious one about some high-ranking Magi coming from the East to pay their respects, offering costly gifts. Matthew re-told the story because he wanted to emphasise Jesus’ mission to the Gentiles. …
I’ve been listening to the latest podcast from Premier Radio’s ‘Unbelievable’ show.
Last Saturday (7th August) saw Adrian Warnock and Rev Jonathan Clatworthy debate the resurrection of Jesus.
Adrian represented an evangelical perspective, Jonathan a liberal approach. At one level, Jonathan tried to present the differences as, ‘Well, we both believe in the resurrection; it’s just that you believe in a physical resurrection, whereas I don’t.’ But the more they spoke, the more you could sense the yawning gulf between them. …
Many of my readers will have heard of ‘Bishop Ryle’. They will know something of the English clergyman who served churches in East Anglia for many years, before being appointed the first Bishop of Liverpool. J.C. Ryle was considered something of a ‘conservative’ even in his own day (he lived from 1816-1900). He defended expounded and defended evangelical churchmanship – the vigorous Protestantism of the Reformers and the Puritans – in the face of Anglo-catholicism and ‘modernism’.…
New Testament scholar Scott McKnight is a friend of the Emerging Church, but not in an uncritical way. He sees the movement as in part a protest movement. Its primary target is evangelicalism, and McKnight identifies ten items of concern. I quote at large:-
First, it protests too much tom-fakery in traditional churches. This generation of Christians is not as capable or interested in putting up fronts when it comes to “church” or when it gathers.
It occurs to me that theological liberalism reached the height of its influence in the period leading up to 1977. In fact, Alister McGrath makes a comment to this effect in his biography of J.I. Packer, To Know and Serve God, p212. In that year two books were published by SCM Press which seemed finally to demonstrate that liberalism was, in the end, an impoverished, negative, destructive influence that was incapable of serving the purpose of Christ in this or any other generation. …
Nine down, one to go, in this chapter-by-chapter review of Dave Tomlinson’s The Post-Evangelical. Even though the book has been out for some time (published in the UK in 1995) I’ve gone back to it because it seems to have had a seminal importance in the ‘movement’ now known as the ’emerging church’.
In the final chapter, Tomlinson argues that post-evangelicalism is linked to the shift from the modern to the postmodern. The challenge is ‘how to express eternal truth in and through this emerging culture.’ …
Chapter 9 of Dave Tomlinson’s The Post-Evangelical discusses ‘positive worldliness’.
The author informs us that he was brought up to have a deep distrust of ‘the world’. The Christian was not to feel at home in the world. It was there to be evangelised, but not to be enjoyed. Of course, things have loosed up in more recent years, but the legalistic prohibitions have been replaced within the sub-culture by christianised alternatives. We have Christian festivals, Christian theatre, Christian computer games, and Christian aerobics set to Christian music. …
Chapter 8 of the The Post-Evangelical, by Dave Tomlinson, asks a ‘straightforward’ question: what is a post-evangelical view of the Bible?
First, Tomlinson feels that there is a need to ‘exorcise’ the ghost of inerrancy. He finds it incredible that anyone thinks it even plausible to believe in such a thing.
Contrary to what proponents will tell us (says Tomlinson), the notion of inerrancy is a relatively modern one, arising out of the fundamentalist/modernist conflicts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. …
