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If you want to experience real life in Christ, stop caring about “big ideas” those running denominations and parachurch orgs obsess over. They all lost the plot long ago. Instead, find a group ministering weekly to a population who can offer them nothing in return, and join them.
Hindsight being 20/20, I would have never written my book. All it did was suck me into an industry of bitterness posing as righteousness for profit, in which I participated for years (sans the profit).
I repent of it, and will jettison to a place of ascesis and introspection.
Having dedicated most of this year to reading as many early Christian texts on ascesis and personal holiness as I could find, I can say with confidence that most pastor/theologian/pundits trying to define contemporary Protestant action in the public sphere are uninformed by them.
If you’re wondering what I’m speaking of, start here: archive.org/details/the-life…
Wolfian-CN arguments boiling down to an appeal to the tradition/authority of whatever cherry-picked quote from a Reformer agrees with the point they're trying to make aren't that compelling when others can go all the way back to dudes who knew John for a differing opinion.
I'm still wrapping my head around how, to have a stronger Christian ethic on the sanctity of human life than those running the second largest seminary in the country, one just need hold to a view England and all but the frontier of America agreed upon by the mid-19th century.
If your sense of justice and national pride would not flinch at watching Navy SEALs double-tap bin Laden, why then recoil at a similarly-situated event like Hasan’s execution? dailywire.com/news/why-nidal…
At this point, many, if not most, Americans see "Christians" as little more than a belligerent political tribe.
The best thing we can do is to be conspicuously kind and self-sacrificial. That won't happen at the institutional level. You have commit to that pattern of behavior.
William Wolfe has spent years exhibiting rage-fueled revilement online, while his politics long-ago descended to *there are too many non-whites in the neighborhood*, and yet he's maintained direct access to SBC and SBTS presidents. What an utterly disqualified institution.
On one end, it's unsurprising that reviling people and becoming increasingly overtly racist, as William Wolfe has for years, resulted in him being universally denounced within sane right-wing politics. On the other, its damning of evangelicalism that he still has travel there.
The problem is, among Baptists and Presbyterians especially, things have polarized to the point where one cannot attain the requisite level of influence in a convention/denomination to enact a change of course without the blessing of those most friendly to the crazies.
In conservative evangelicalism, a pastor will face more professional backlash for holding to moderate egalitarianism than for championing nationally-broadcast executions. Their system is ethically broken, and there is no sense in paying their protestations any mind.
Expressed ambivalence towards, or outright support for, nationally broadcasting a firing squad from famous SBC pastors and theologians, which will come with no consequences from their peers, is a moment of institutional disqualification on par with anything the mainline has done.
The gospel is more than a legal transaction to affirm. It's the Way of true life, which all who believe in the moment of divine sacrifice are called to give every thought to attaining. It's what this Pope exudes, yet is conspicuously absent among Protestants of similar notoriety.
You can have just capital punishment just like you can have a benevolent autocrat, but, as we've seen this week, the kind of people who clamor for either serve as evidence of why there are more preferable systems.
I don't see a future for conservative Protestant denominations that allowed a schoolyard bully behavior to settle among a contingent of their clergy, often directed at their peers, and where standing up to the bully is what's considered uncouth. People rightly recoil from such.
Seriously, if you want to fight the growing sadism in our society—and, sadly, our religion—the best thing you can do is commit to serving with a local charity. Find people who need more friends in this world, and be someone they can count on.
In referencing scripture to justify barbarism, you are witnessing the fruits of theology designed around winning debates instead of cultivating disciples, theology that values knowing predetermined “gotcha” verses for a topic above knowing Jesus' example of holy human character.
It's directly because of things like evangelical pundits lining up to performatively oppose the Pope stating the known Catholic position on the death penalty, while their peers support broadcasting a snuff film, that conservative Protestantism will continue to shrink in the U.S.
