Paul's Passing Thoughts

Point One: The totally depraved preaching the gospel to themselves everyday. We gotta believe that they aren’t very good sermons (Jess—thanks for this one).

Point Two: Do what you know God wants you to do even if joy is not present, but it is sin. So, there are some situations where God would prefer that we sin (ebook: “Delight as Duty is Controversial,” John Piper, Desiring God website).

Point Three: New Calvinism encourages us to contemplate Christ in the Scriptures to make Him bigger and us smaller. The bigger the Jesus, the more humbled we are, and the more we realize how worthless and totally depraved we are as well. Yet, no Christian movement in all of redemptive history has invested more in IMAGE than the TGC and T4G. No “Christian” movement in redemptive history has been more image conscience than the leaders of TGC and T4G, sporting their super-yuppie sports wear and Sarah Palin like eyewear. No group of leaders has ever sought to draw attention to themselves via niche identity / personality / credentials like this group.

Point Four: Two different interpretive hermeneutics. When a text seems to confirm their doctrine literally (especially Gal 2:20), they want you to interpret it literally. But when not, they want you to view the text “in its gospel context,” ie., Christocentric hermeneutics.

Point Five: In my opinion, more deliberate deception than contradiction, is the TGC and T4G’s contentions against postmodernism and the Keswick movement, when they share many of the same elements. Note what Terry Johnson writes concerning Sonship theology (pdf available in right column):

“Many of us will have to be forgiven if we hear the quacks of the “higher life” movements from which we ostensibly escaped by coming to the PCA. We fled Keswick, the “Victorious Life,” the “Abundant Life,” and other perfectionists aberrations into the safe and sane arms of Westminster/ Puritan spirituality. Forgive us if we are nervous about losing the realism and balance of Reformed piety, where grace and law, love and duty, affection and fear, God’s power and our responsibility all stand in beautiful, biblically proportioned relation to one another. We liked the products of that spirituality: the Huguenot, the Puritan, the Covenanter; the modern missionary movement, the Protestant work ethic, precise morals, zeal for holiness, faithfulness amidst suffering, and what Packer calls “an ardor for order,” that orderliness that facilitates the fulfillment of all one’s duties. We will not quickly abandon this heritage for a reformulation that quacks suspiciously like the failed stepchildren of Wesleyanism.”

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