Here, for the record, I am copying and saving some recent comment threads from Adrian Warnock’s blog. I think I have included all posts which have any comments (even the one on football!) back to the beginning of November, which includes the whole series on Piper’s book about Wright as well as the controversial Mark Driscoll Firm, But Kind, About Joel Osteen on Prosperity Teaching. Continue reading
I am asking my readers and anyone else to stop reading Adrian Warnock’s blog. This is because Adrian has made a deliberate decision to refuse to be accountable for any errors and distortions which might be found on this blog. He read my post yesterday on the need for accountability in blogging, and commented on it, and then made the decision to go ahead with closing his blog to comments.
If you want to make your opinion on this matter known to Adrian, please e-mail him on this address, which he makes public on his blog.
I may write more about this later, but I must go out now.
A couple of days ago I criticised Adrian Warnock for censoring comments. He has shown the inconsistency, or at least the arbitrary application, of his comment policy by accepting the following comment – not written by himself, of course, in fact from an otherwise unidentifiable “Mark”:
every time I hear/read Driscoll he gets more and more obsessed and more and more extreme
while rejecting my much less ad hominem one, even when toned down to present the “accusation” as a question, like Adrian’s (in post titles) “Is N. T. Wright Preaching Another Gospel?” and “Does Piper Neglect the Resurrection?” But I am pleased to see in the latter post a critical evaluation of one of those I have called his idols.
Well, Adrian of course has the right to accept or reject comments as he wishes. But if he wants his blog to retain any respect or credibility the comments he should be rejecting are ones like anonymous Mark’s rather than mine.
Now I can understand Adrian wanting to get rid of the problem of comments completely. He wrote in a comment here on this blog
I am thinking seriously of nuking the whole concept of comments over at my place. I do hope you guys understand my dilemna.
Yes, Adrian, I understand your dilemma. Justin Taylor faces a similar one, and is also considering disabling comments. But I still feel that your problem is that you are over-sensitive. Blogging is like a kitchen, if you can’t take the heat you need to get out of it. Continue reading
The issue I was trying to raise in my rejected comment on Adrian Warnock’s post has been ignored in the discussion which has raged about it. But it is an important issue. Here is part of what Mark Driscoll said at the MenMakers conference in Edinburgh, as reported by Adrian:
The only thing that was described as “not good” before the fall was man being alone. Some single guys are strange, and what they need is a woman. There is nothing that sanctifies a man like a woman can sanctify him. Many young men run away from responsibility and think being alone is good. This is not true. The difference between a man and a boy is the responsibilities they carry. You need help! …
God is not alone. He is trinitarian. Man does not have that relationship in himself. He cannot fully reflect God unless he has someone alongside him—namely a woman. …
So, according to Driscoll, we single men are “strange”, irresponsible, boys rather than men, and, most damagingly of all, unable to fully reflect God. Now I can understand him coming to this conclusion from reading the Old Testament. Indeed it seems to have been the majority Jewish view, both in Jesus’ time and today, that men are fulfilled only in marriage. But in the New Testament we see a very different picture. So, no wonder I wrote
Looks like Driscoll has not read 1 Corinthians 7:25-32, or noticed that Jesus was not married. Come to think of it, looks like Driscoll has not read the New Testament at all, except perhaps for isolated verses, …
If, as Driscoll teaches, a single man “cannot fully reflect God”, then what does that imply for his view of Jesus? Is he not “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15)? In principle, as shown here, Driscoll accepts that Jesus should be an example for Christians, that
Being spirit-filled means living the life of Jesus.
But why is it not Spirit-filled but rather irresponsible and not reflecting God to follow Jesus’ example of singleness?
Within the Christian church there has always been an ambivalence towards marriage. Continue reading
For the first time for a long time I have seen some news offering a ray of hope for the Anglican Communion and the Church of England. According to the Daily Telegraph as reported by Anglican Mainstream,
The Archbishop of Canterbury is preparing to target individual bishops whose pro-gay policies threaten to derail his efforts to avert schism … by withdrawing their invitations to next year’s Lambeth Conference.
It seems to me that this is almost the only path which Archbishop Rowan Williams can take which has any real chance of holding the Anglican Communion together. Postponing the Lambeth Conference would help, but only by postponing the inevitable unless combined with some other strong action. But by excluding from the Conference bishops who deliberately flout the church’s agreed policies on homosexuality, he just may be able to avoid the threatened mass boycott by more conservative bishops, which would imply a schism right through the heart of Anglicanism.
The problem now for Dr Williams is exactly who to take off the Lambeth invitation list. Continue reading
I tried to post this comment on Adrian Warnock’s blog, in response to his post on Mark Driscoll at the Menmakers conference in Scotland:
Looks like Driscoll has not read 1 Corinthians 7:25-32, or noticed that Jesus was not married. Come to think of it, looks like Driscoll has not read the New Testament at all, except perhaps for isolated verses, for his “gospel”, as seen here and in the previous post about him, seems to leave humanity fallen and sinful with God hating them.
Charity, the basis for the argument you mention is a dubious translation of Genesis 5:2 which was new in the RSV.
Adrian, who has recently reintroduced comment moderation on his blog, refused to publish this comment because I dared to suggest that Driscoll might not have read the whole New Testament.
Well, first he doesn’t seem to have realised that this is very obvious hyperbole, rhetorical exaggeration. My real point is of course that Driscoll is ignoring most of the New Testament in his teaching. Perhaps I could have got away with writing that. But I am not going to allow Adrian to determine what literary style I can use in response to his blogging. If he doesn’t want my response on his blog, he can have it here, and I will send him a link.
But what this really shows is Adrian’s hyper-sensitivity, so typical of Reformed Evangelicals, to any criticism of their favourite preachers. It is not that they are sensitive to critical comments in general. They seem quite happy to accuse well known Christian teachers from different strands of preaching another gospel or blasphemy. So they can’t claim that they dislike criticism because it is not showing Christian charity. No, instead they seem to react like fundamentalists of some religion who hear their gods being criticised. For it seems to me that favourite preachers like Piper and Driscoll have become idols in the minds of certain people, who treat their words as infallible and beyond criticism, and react intemperately to anyone who disagrees on this.
If Adrian Warnock’s summary of his words is to be believed, in a sermon on the atonement, preached yesterday in Edinburgh, Mark Driscoll said:
A war is brewing over this issue. This is the issue we must be willing to fight over. If we lose this, we lose the gospel. … if you deny this, you have essentially lost the Christian faith …
I MURDERED GOD!
Now Driscoll can confess this of himself if he likes, but he seems to require every Christian to confess the same. Now I have committed a large number of sins, but I do not confess to this particular murder, or indeed to any murder. Continue reading
I may have got myself into trouble with some comments I made on Adrian Warnock’s blog, on his post 2 Corinthians 5 and Romans 5 – Two Critical Passages on Justification. This post is part of Adrian’s series on John Piper’s new book The Future of Justification. I was commenting mainly on these words which Adrian quoted from Piper:
Justification . . . happens to all who are connected to Christ the same way condemnation happened to those who were connected to Adam. How is that? Adam acted sinfully, and because we were connected to him, we were condemned in him. Christ acted righteously, and because we are connected to Christ we are justified in Christ. Adam’s sin is counted as ours. Christ’s “act of righteousness” is counted as ours.
In my first comment I argued that Piper is here basing his theology of justification on an analogy with Augustine’s understanding of original sin, an understanding which is faulty because, as widely recognised and as I explained in a previous post here, Augustine misunderstood Paul’s meaning in Romans 5:12 based on a poor Latin translation.
I went on to begin to sketch out some alternative views of my own. Continue reading
The argument is sometimes made that there is a “slippery slope” of “concessions” by the church to modern culture in the area of inter-personal relationships, and especially gender issues. The various stages on this slope are, perhaps:
Now to be fair by no means all of those who use the “slippery slope” argument start it with abolition of slavery. But some do. And the general argument seems to be that acceptance of one of these stages necessarily opens the way to the next stage. So, the people who argue like this position themselves with pride on a supposedly solid mountain top, often based on a fundamentalist understanding of the Bible, and condemn any shift from this position as starting on the slippery slope. Perhaps they are thinking in terms of the psalmist’s image of his feet slipping in Psalm 38:16 and elsewhere.
But is the slope in fact a slippery one, or is it broken by a ledge or barrier made of solid rock, a “shelf of rocks” as Ben Witherington renders part of Matthew 16:18, of biblical truth? Can this determine how far Christians can legitimately part company from one another without betraying the gospel abandoning their faith?
Chelmsford Anglican Mainstream quotes from an interesting press release from Changing Attitude, a pressure group which is “working for gay and lesbian affirmation within the Anglican Communion”, and of which the Bishop of Chelmsford is a patron. The press release, written by Davis Mac-Iyalla, director of Changing Attitude Nigeria, is interesting for its argument that full acceptance of homosexuality in the life of the church is analogous to the abolition of slavery.
Now in my post yesterday A further implication of Christianity being cross-cultural I noted (quoting an older post) that
slavery is accepted in the Bible because it was accepted by all in the cultural context, but this does not imply that it is normative for Christians.
In other words, it is right for Christians to support the abolition of slavery because the acceptance of slavery in the Bible was a culturally relative matter. This argument is in practice accepted by almost all Christians today, although it was highly controversial in the 19th century. Many evangelicals, including myself, apply the same argument to biblical passages which appear to teach that church leaders must be male, but this remains a controversial issue.
But does the same argument apply to homosexuality, as Mac-Iyalla seems to claim? Where should the line be drawn between what is culturally relative and what are the fundamental and unchangeable principles of the Christian faith?