It’s a Major Award.

No, actually, without handing out awards, I want to list the IMonk’s Top Ten Blogs for 2005. These are blogs that I value and appreciate, and that I believe do what they do exceptionally well. [Continue reading]

Theology In Fazoli’s: Second Rate Italian Food With Pictures of American Christianity

7:22 p.m. Wednesday, December 28. Quite possibly the longest day of my life.

I am sitting in Fazoli’s (Italian Food…Fast) in Lexington, Kentucky. I’ve just delivered a U-Haul full of furniture to my daughter’s storage facility, and now my wife, my mom, myself and a car full of what’s left of my mom’s possessions are on their way to my home, two hours away in eastern Kentucky. We’ve been in mom’s apartment for two days, cleaning out, throwing away, giving away my mother’s earthly possessions. One of the inevitable tasks of the middle-aged, only child. I’ve done the best I can, and the job is near completion. [Continue reading]

The writer in the family is my wife, Denise. She’s a professional editor, heads our school publications operation and writes a bookful of creative ministry material every year. I can’t get her to blog, but if I could, this is the kind of gold you’d be reading.

You can write denise at denisespencer@mail.com

Our First Christmas With Grandma by Denise Day Spencer

It is our first Christmas with Grandma.

She came to live with us two months ago. Eighty-three years old, increasingly frail, almost completely blind, she needs us now. She’s a great Grandma. She’s a great mother-in-law. I love her dearly.

And I’m still adjusting.

The day after Christmas, we must return to our hometown to move Grandma out of her apartment. We have a plan. We’ve rented a truck. We’ve told her countless times how it will all go down. [Continue reading]

The year of Our Lord, Two Thousand and Five, will forever be known as the year where the same churches who boycotted stores for cancelling Christmas decided it was in the best interests of everyone to cancel Christmas services, being as the day had the bad form to occur on a Sunday, and we could all take a DVD home and have Christmas worship in front of a large flat-screen television.

We come to the end of the year with the New York Times telling us that the government is monitoring Americans for radiation and rhetoric from nuclear bombs and bombers, and thousands of Americans do their best imitation of civil libertarians on September 10th. Strangely believing that recent events in London and Madrid indicate that Muslim terrorists have gone out of business, the concern for threatened civil liberties continues, while some crazed mullah blesses the bomb being constructed in the Mosque basement. [Continue reading]

“Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.” (Eph. 4:29, ESV)

“Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving.” (Eph. 5:4, ESV)

In the discussion of “bad language” at the Boar’s Head Tavern and in the IM comments, these two verses from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians were cited by both ordinary readers and by my critics. I would like to record a few thoughts on these verses, not because I believe they are misunderstood- they are extremely simple- but because I believe they need to be heard and obeyed as Holy Scripture. [Continue reading]

The topic of the week here at InternetMonk (and the tavern across the road) is bad language. It’s a strange theme for the fourth week in Advent, I admit, but it’s what’s got my brain in gear.

Even stranger is the fact that I am going to prominently use the word “prissy” in this post, which is odd because I have a strong adverse reaction to any kind of taunting that questions anyone’s manhood. Working around teenagers, the constant questioning and ridiculing of inadequate masculinity is a regular feature of daily life, especially with middle-school males. Why would I adopt anything resembling such a taunt for my purposes?

The answer is simple: there are times that the subject requires the right word, and “prissy” is simply the perfect word. You may judge if I have overstated the case when this post has run its course.

So here is my thesis: There is a virus of prissiness afoot in evangelicalism; a kind of prissiness that has a strange history indeed, but which being recently energized with the feminization of evangelicalism since the Victorian era, now threatens to transform the Christian faith from a hearty, incarnational faith into an airy, fragile, whining and shrill movement of pushing our “values” on an increasingly resistant mankind. [Continue reading]

A Survey of The Surprising Language of the Bible, by Philip Winn

BHT fellow Philip Winn has written a survey of crude language in scripture. It’s a helpful orientation to some little known statements in the Bible, and the language Christians believe- in one way or another- is divinely inspired. It’s an eye opening tour, and will give your youth groups plenty of Bible reading opportunities. PW is an excellent teacher. Be his student for a while. -Michael

I’ve previously written about the horrible content of the Biblical book of Judges, but perhaps I should have set my sights a little wider. After all, Scripture is littered with offensive passages and words and phrase choices, and purpose, too. The Gospel itself is offensive, involving as it does a recognition that our own efforts at “being good” are as worthless as used feminine hygiene products!

But that’s not all… [Continue reading]

How do we honor Paul’s pastoral advice, but not let the most easily offended among us become tyrants in the body of Christ?

1 Corinthians 8. Romans 14. These chapters have been my nightly reading many times after a controversy with my opponents on the reformed watchblogs.

How do we treat those with whom we disagree within the church, both local and universal? Who are the brothers who are “weak” in faith? How much power does their offendedness give them? How much does our understanding of the full implications of the Gospel and Christian freedom play into areas of disagreement over controversial behavior?

Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8 are great chapters…but a lot of trouble for me to understand at times. By trouble I mean this: Paul introduces some pastoral ideas here that are vital to both evangelism and the life of the church, but the concepts create real problems for many Christians. The common application of these passages tends to leave me thinking that something important is badly amiss. [Continue reading]

Why our conflicts over the Bible and Theology may sometimes have nothing whatsoever to do with being right.

Every so often, I will have a bit of an Epiphany. I wish I had written them all down, because sometimes the clarity of the moment balances weeks, months, years of confusion and I feel like I’ve learned something that matters.

So here’s one of those moments: Sometimes, the Bible doesn’t give you enough evidence, one way or the other, to settle a question beyond the possibility of a continuing discussion and debate. If this is true, and if the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit does not remove this ambiguity, then there are points beyond which dicsussion and debate ought to proceed only with considerable and generous amounts of respectful humility. [Continue reading]

Father Andrew Greeley may be writing with a wink when he wonders if evangelicals have considered the possible irony of their current interest in movies, but the point is still well made.

Secondly, it seems to me that the evangelicals slip dangerously close to Catholic idolatry when they embrace a wondrous allegory as a summary of the biblical story. Jesus is not and never was a lion like Aslan in the film. To interpret him as a lion is to go light years beyond literal, word-for-word inerrancy. The evangelical enthusiasm about the sufferings of Jesus in Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” put them one step away, it seemed to me, from importing crucifixes and Stations of the Cross into their churches. I’m afraid that their enthusiasm for both films shows just how seductive the Catholic temptation is. We delight in pictures and stories and allegories and symbols and signs because they appeal to the whole human person and not just to the rigid, rational mind.

There is nothing that is more of the essence of conversion than the capturing of the imagination. This is a truth that has confronted me in my mid-life years as have few others. Despite the neglect of the imagination in my own fundamentalist tradition, I have discovered that it remains a essential part of human nature. Fallen and fragile, but powerful and influential. To understand how to appeal to the imagination effectively is to be able to influence human beings on a much more deeper level than the appeal of reason alone. [Continue reading]

Chuck Colson writes a riveting piece in Christianity Today on his own dark night of the soul. The key quote (my bold):

Exhausted from hospitals, two years of writing The Good Life, and an ugly situation with a disgruntled former employee, I found myself wrestling with the Prince of Darkness, who attacks us when we are weakest. I walked around at night, asking God why he would allow this. Alone, shaken, fearful, I longed for the closeness with God I had experienced even in the darkest days of prison….I’m not sure how well the contemporary evangelical world prepares us for this struggle, which I suspect many evangelicals experience but fear to admit because of the expectations we create. At such times, we can turn for strength to older and richer theological traditions probably unfamiliar to many writings by saints who endured agonies both physical and spiritual.

[Continue reading]

Fool’s Gold, John Macarthur, general editor, 2005 Crossway Books, with chapters by Nathan Busenitz, Scott Lang, Phil Johnson, Daniel Gillespie, Rick Holland, Carey Hardy, Kurt Gebhards, Dan Dumas.

The following review by Dr. John Bombaro, (Ph.d, Edinburgh University) is reprinted in its entirety, with permission, from the most recent issue of Modern Reformation Magazine. [Continue reading]

Colossians Remixed by Brian Walsh and Sylvia C. Keesmaat. IVP, 2004.

Reading, rereading, hearing, rehearing, teaching, reteaching, discussing, rediscussing….the letters of Paul and books/sermons/teaching from them. Sometimes, I become quite bored, I’ll admit. In the conservative evangelical circles I move in, Paul gets a lot of attention, and everyone assumes they understand him. He is didactic and blunt. He’s easy for preachers to expound (except when he’s not.) He comes out and says things without having to wade through parables and stories. There is a conservative concensus on most of the background of his letters. For most conservative Bible teachers, Paul is the preferred source. [Continue reading]

Some of America’s largest megachurches won’t be open on Sunday, December 25. After multiple services on Christmas Eve, they are giving their congregations, volunteers, staffs- and thousands of twice a year attenders- the day off to spend with their families.

I first saw the story of Kentucky’s two largest mega-churches cancelling services on December 25 in this Kentucky.com story. Similar stories have appeared all over America, such as the Chicago Tribune.

Get Religion has good coverage and a developing discussion.

Ben Witherington III – prominent New Testament scholar at Asbury Theological Seminary and a resident of the Lexington area- blogs in response. You won’t hear many seminary professors be this blunt with the megachurch. [Continue reading]

I am reprinting this essay by request and in order to get it into the search engine. If I were writing this today, a few things would be changed, but it is still by best contribution in regard to my own belief about the nature of Christian scripture.

Another helpful essay is “Magic Books, Grocery Lists and Silent Messiahs: How rightly approaching the Bible shapes the entire Christian Life.”

And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself…They said to each other, “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?”…Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures…Luke 24:27, 32, 44-45 [Continue reading]