My father taught me at a young age that people do not appreciate what they do not have to pay for. I have had forty years of consistent confirmation of the truth of this principle. Give someone free housing and it will be destroyed inside of two years. Give a sixteen year old a new Corvette, requiring no personal investment of their own, and they’ll be driving it like a rental by the end of the first day. Give a man a fish… you get the point. Continue Reading
The natural consequence of the emergents and post-moderns rejection of certainty (regarding scripture or anything else) is a very natural outflow of that lack of certainty into their theology. The religious relativism and deconstruction of the “certainty” regarding a theology of Hell discussed so far are only a small sampling of the complete historical re-writes which many in the emergent movement are conducting on every theological idea previously defined. For people who do not believe theology is very important, they do an impressive job disassembling and rebuilding it in their own post-modern image. Even more ironically, those who reject notions of absolute truth speak quite absolutely concerning their own redefined theological platform. Continue Reading
Deconstruction is a philosophical idea which fits nicely into post-modern, and consequently emergent, thought processes. Essentially, deconstruction is the systematic removal of all certainty and propositional truth from a text based on the assumption (loosely) that a text finds its meaning from its readers rather than having a finite and comprehensible intent of its own. Or, put another way, there is no way to understand a text outside of our own insights. This is supposedly due to the subtle biases which exist in every society. Therefore, no text is able to produce a singular, declarative truth outside of a communal consensus which can remove all such biases through continued examination. Continue Reading
Many of us have received an email concerning Jesus’ folding of his napkin upon his resurrection. As a pastor, I’ve received it dozens of times, myself. At first, I – like many people- found the story fascinating and was actually moved at the thought of it. But, a bit of internet wisdom compelled me to investigate further. Continue Reading
“Relativism” is the philosophical concept that a certain aspect of one’s experience is dependent upon another. For example, one person may believe an individual to be beautiful while another person believes that same individual to be quite unsightly. In such cases, the application or understanding of beauty is indeed “relative” to the person interpreting it. In certain applications however, relativism is the philosophical enemy of the concept of “absolute truth,” (or universal truth) which essentially asserts that what is true for you is true for me, and it is true for people of all times and places. Continue Reading
The Emergent/Emerging movement needs special explanation concerning its inclusion in the Wolves in Wool: Creeps in The Church series. More specifically, a disclaimer should be noted concerning this movement. Unlike the Word of Faith movement studied up to this point, the Emergent/Emerging movement is much more difficult to define. And, its definition leaves perhaps half of the movement in the “Creeps” category, while the other half of the movement – though suspect- appears to be attempting to uphold orthodox theological thought. Continue Reading