I don't Twitter (or is it tweet?).  But I can't claim total purity, since I have facebook, myspace, and I blog.  Still, I've been purposefully avoiding the Tweet scene because it seemed to me to represent the worst of the other three.  No genuine conversation or community whatsoever, just an endless flow of (mostly trivial) information. 

I may rethink this position.  Not only did Abraham Piper point out that a narcissist is a narcissist regardless of where he is or how he spreads his narcissism (i.e. the powers of Twitter can be used for both good and evil, it all depends on the person), but the boys at Middlebrow (the podcast of Scriptorium Daily) have brought up a point worth considering:  If Christians are called to witness to the world and bring the gospel to the marketplace, and our marketplace is Twitter, isn't that exactly where we should go? 

It certainly is.  Christians who avoid new technologies and cultural trends altogether are not paying attention to the book of Acts.  Meeting unbelievers where they are and speaking their language is essential to evangelism.  But there's a danger lurking.  I would not be the least bit surprised to hear someone advocating "Twitter church" pretty soon.  This would be nothing new, of course.  Evangelicals have been advocating a move away from traditional church structures to private religion for years.  The point is that God knows what he's doing, and it's not up to us to decide to change the rules of the game. 

Dr. Reynolds has noted that Christianity is a religion of a book, not a movie.  This means that, however good it is that we are becoming more and more video literate as a culture, we can't allow our normal literacy to decline, because God isn't likely to send us an inspired DVD any time soon.  As a Christian, being video literate is important for witnessing to a video culture, but we can't allow ourselves to lose the ability to read and interpret a written text.  If we do, we will lose our only direct tie to the foundation of Christianity itself, the Word of God.

Likewise, Tweeting is not preaching.  In the Old Testament, the Word of God was delivered to messengers called Prophets, who personally and incarnationally brought that Word to the people.  In the Apostolic age, the Word was made flesh and the gospel of that Word was delivered by the Apostles through preaching.  It is in hearing the preached Word that God has promised to meet his people, to create and increase faith, and to seal believers with the Holy Spirit.  This simply can't happen on Twitter.

Just as we need to become more video literatre while not losing our ability to read and understand written texts, we must be careful not to let our increased Twitteracy diminish our ability to engange in genuine communication with real people in real community.  The more we retreat into Twitter and other online communites, the less at home we will feel in true, physical communities (such as church).  The body of Christ, like the Son of God Himself, is incarnational. 

Here are the prayers for Easter Sunday!

From the Lutheran Book of Prayer:

O almighty and eternal God, who through the death of Your Son has destroyed sin and death, and by His rising to life again restored innocence and everlasting life, that being delivered from the power of the devil, I might live under You in Your kingdom, grant that I may be forever comforted by true faith in the resurrection of Your dear Son.  Do not let the thought of death fill my heart with terror, but give me the blessed assurance that, just as You raised Christ from the dead, I will not remain in the grave but will rise again at the end of days.  And when, by Your grace, I have finished my course, let Christ's resurrection be for me a sure pledge that an inheritance that does not fade is reserved for me in heaven.  While I live, guide me with Your holy counsel, and while I die, give me the crown of life, that with all the holy angels and the elect I may praise and glorify You, world without end, Amen.

From The Book of Common Prayer:

O God, who for our redemption didst give thine only-begotten Son to the death of the cross, and by his glorious resurrection hast delivered us from the power of our enemy:  Grant us so to die daily to sin, that we may evermore live with him in the joy of his resurrection; through the same thy Son Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, now and forever.  Amen.

He is risen!  He is risen indeed!

Here are the prayers for Holy Saturday.

From the Lutheran Book of Prayer:

Heavenly Father, I am silenced at the gave of Your Son, who knew no sin, yet was made sin for us.  You permitted Him to die, exchanging His innocence for our guilt.  In love He came to save us, but He was rejected by hate.  He taught us obedience, but men rebelled against Him.I confess that a great mystery confronts me at this tomb of sin and death.  He was buried behind the great seal of my sin and my death.  By faith I know also that He who dies is also the one who unlocked the great secret of Your love.  His tomb is my tomb.  He carried with Him to the grave my sin and my death, that He might break their hold on me.Trusting in the Lord's promise that He would rise again on the third day, I come not to mourn Him but to confess the sin that He would leave burried.  Have mercy on me, O God!  Have mercy on me.  Amen.

From The Book of Common Prayer:

O God, Creator of heaven and earth:  Grant that, as the crucified body of Thy dear  Son was laid in the tomb and rested on this holy Sabbath, so we may await with him the coming of the third day, and rise with him to newness of life; who now liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

Longing for the third day!

Here are two traditional prayers for Good Friday.  Apologies for waiting until Saturday morning to put them up!  There will be prayers for Saturday and Easter Sunday as well.

From the Lutheran Book of Prayer:

O Christ, Lamb of God, slain for the sin of the whole world, with penitent heart I come to your cross, pleading for mercy and forgiveness.  My sins - and they are many - have added to the burden of Your suffering and have nailed You to the accursed tree.  For me You tasted the agony of the utter darkness that I might not perish, but have everlasting life.  Have mercy upon me.O Christ, Lamb of God, embrace me with Your love, and forgive me all my sins.  Your death brings healing to my soul, peace to my mind, cleansing to my heart.  If You would mark iniquity, I could not come, for my hands are unclean, my lips are sullied, and my heart is blackened by sin.  But beholding You bleeding, despised, forsaken, dying, pierced, I come to be cleansed and forgiven.O Christ, Lamb of God, grant that I may hate sin and wickedness more and more as I behold You in Your great agony.  My grateful heart today finds hope in Your words, comfort in Your promises, and salvation in Your finished work on the cross, by which You have overcome sin, Satan, and death.O Lord, have mercy.  O Christ, have mercy.  O Lord, hear my prayer.  Amen.

From The Book of Common Prayer:

Almighty God, we beseech thee graciously to behold this thy family, for which our Lord Jesus Christ was contented to be betrayed, and given up into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross; who now liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, on God, world without end.  Amen.

World without end, Amen!

Allen Yeh, a Professor at Biola Univeristy and tutor in the Torrey Honors Institute, has written an article in which he argues that missions is the central theme of Christianity.  The Bible, he says, is a means to an end, and that end is missions.

He offers many reasons for his choice of missions, such as the fact that all of the Apostles were missionaries, Jesus' lasts words on Earth were a call to missions, there is a whole book (Acts) devoted to chronicling missionary activites (and on top of that, most of Paul's letters are written in a missionary context), etc. 

Now, I agree with nearly everything that Dr. Yeh says.  Missions is an extremely important biblical theme, and it's one that can tend to be denegrated among academic theologian types (like myself).  At one point, Yeh comments, "The center of gravity of Christianity has shifted away from the Western world, and most of the Christians in this world are now in Asia, Africa, and Latin America."  This is no small matter.  Christianity is incurably multi-cultural and this is a direct result of its missional nature.  But is "missions" in and of itself really the "central theme" of Christianity?  If the Bible is a means to missions, might we ask if missions isn't a means to something else?

Yeh does stop to mention a few other candidates:

scholars have proposed various possibilities for what might be the main theme of the Bible. Some people say it’s the Kingdom of God. Some say it’s God’s sovereignty. Others say it’s God’s love. Still others say it’s worship (one of the most famous proponents of the last is John Piper, as he says in his book Let the Nations Be Glad: The Supremacy of God in Missions, “Missions exists because worship doesn’t”). Other possibilities include: the two Greatest Commandments (love God and love neighbor); the Great Commission (there are actually five Great Commissions, one in each Gospel and one in Acts); the Covenant; the Promise; and the glory of God. While I think all of these are valid, again I would argue that it is only mission that adequately encompasses all of these.

Later on, referring back to the reference to John Piper above, Yeh says:

Now it is here that I beleive Dr. Yeh falls into a common error that has plauged evangelicalism for a long time.  He places the proclaimation of the gospel exclusively in the realm of missions.  It is easy to see, then, why missions itself would become the central theme of the Bible.  A few paragraphs later, he says, "In most Protestant churches, the central part of the worship service is the sermon. The original function of the sermon was evangelism, as seen in the Greek word kerygma which means “proclamation” (of the Good News)."  Again, proclaimation of the good news is used here as a synonym for evangelism.  But this not how the Biblical authors treated the gospel.  Paul, in his letter to the Romans, begins (in chapter 1, verse 8) by thanking God for the church in Rome, because their "faith is proclaimed in all the world."  They are Christians (and apparently Christians of amazing faith) not pagans in need of evangelism.  And what does Paul go on to do?  In verse 15 he says, "So I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome."  The first thing Paul does is proclaim the good news, to those who are already Christians.  This is how the gospel is treated in Scripture.  It is not a one-time bit of useful information that, once responded to, is no longer necessary.  It is the heart and soul of all Christian teaching and worship.  This is something that the Reformers recognized, which is why the sermon did become so central to Protestant Christianity.  Thus it would probably be better to view Missions and the local church worship service as two seperate but equal "pillars" that are the foundation of Christianity.  Both are important, both are commanded by Christ, and both are acts of worship that encompass all the myriad themes found in the Bible.  Theologians may have a tendency to forget about the unreached (except as an abstract theological concept in their systems), but missiologists can also have a tendency to forget about the reached! 

I also think Piper's comment is worth returning to, because I think Yeh may have misunderstood it.  When Piper says, "Missions exists because worship doesn’t", I doubt that he's trying to say that worship per se is the central theme of Christianity.  Once again, worship is a means to an end, and that end is to glorify God.  It seems to me that missionary activity is also a means to an end.  It is a means to bringing people to Christ, allowing them to come into his presence and worship Him, and ultimately spend eternity with him.  And as Yeh pointed out, missions can itself be an act of worship, which would in turn be an act of glorifying God.  Thus missions is not only an act of glorifying God in itself, but a means to the end of furthering God's glory throughout the world.  This is probably what Piper is getting at, and it seems to me to be the best understanding of the true central theme of Christianity.  Yeh is right to stress how important missions is, but we must always remember WHY it is so imporant (for the glory of God).  

This year's Ligonier National Conference, The Holiness of God, is being webcast live.  It will continue until tonight and pick up again early tomorrow morning.  Click here to watch!

Over the next year or so I will be exploring the concept of the "energies" of God.  This is an ancient Christian doctrine that goes back to the Early Church Fathers.  While it remains an integral part of the doctrine of God in the Eastern Orthodox churches, it never truly took hold in the Latin West and seems to have been almost entirely forgotten until the Reformers.  Both John Calvin and the Reformed Scholastics (such as Francis Turretin) made frequent use of the essence-energies (E-E) distinction in their theology.  Sadly, this began to fall out of practice even in Reformed circles, so that today virtually no Western Protestant has even heard of the energies of God. 

So, what are the energies?  Crudely speaking, they are the "activites" of God.  Because God's essence is wholly other, outside of the realm of space and time, incomprehensible, we cannot come into direct contact with it.  And yet God is a God who intervenes in his creation and enters into relationship with his creatures.  It is the energies of God that we come into contact with.  God's glory and love and goodness are all energies.  According to Mike Horton:


But we must also keep in mind that the energies are not ontologically separate from God's essence, nor are they parts or pieces of God.  They are God. 

This may seem a bit confusing, and I have not even begun to do the topic justice.  This is merely an introductory post that, I hope, will show that such a distinction is desperately needed in Western Protestantism today.  All that is important at this point is that idea that there is a distinction between God as He is in Himself (His essence) and God as He manifests Himself to His creation (His energies). 

Now then, three reasons Evangelicals need to start thinking about this distinction:

1) Pantheism (or Panentheism)

There has long been a tendancy in the West toward a kind of Pantheism.  Medieval mysticism and its quest for the Beatific Vision was an extreme form of this.  If God is absolutely simple and "only" an essence, how do we come into contact with Him without in a sense become a part of Him?  What does the Apostle Peter mean when he says that we will "partake" of the divine nature?  Do we partake directly of God as He is in Himself?  At the very least, this seems to imply some sort of Panentheism, which is the belief that God is contianed within and permeates all of the natural world, as if He were the "world soul."  By positing the doctrine of the energies of God, we can explain how it is that we come into direct contact with God and even partake of Him without falling into this dangerous tendency of Western theology.

2) Stoicism

This is not as dangerous of a problem for Protestants today, but it is always a potential.  If God is, as traditional Christian theology has always maintained, unchanging and impassible, not affected by his creation (as He says in Samuel, He is not a man that he should repent), one could easily come to the conclusion that God is like the great Stoic philosopher in the sky.  After all, impassible could mean "cold" and "unfeeling."  Perhaps God is just an impersonal being from which all reality flows, a being who doesn't care about us or love us (certainly not enough to save us from our sin).  Again, the E-E distinction saves us from such extremes.  God in His essence is simple, unchanging and impassible.  But his energies are manifold.  Through His energies He comes into contact and enters into relationships with his creatures, and in an analogous way He feels with them, responds to their pleas, etc. 

3) Open Theism

I saved the best for last!  Of the three reasons I've given, this one is obviously the biggest potential danger for contemporary Protestantism.  After considering Stoicism, it should be easy to see how the E-E distinction will help here, since Open Theism is simply the opposite problem.  Open Theists want a God who can feel our pain, react to our cries for help, and genuinely respond to our prayers.  Ignoring for the moment that the incarnation of Christ solves many of these problems (Hebrews specifically addresses how Christ can empathize with our struggles with sin, for example), the E-E distinction does as well.  God's essence can remain unchanging while  His energies remain manifold.  His essence is simple while His activities in creation are varied.

So, are you interested yet?  At any rate, I hope you can see how potentially important this distinction can be for the problems facing modern Protestantism.  As I said, I will continue to explore this theme in greater detail over the next year.  This is only the tip of the iceberg.  If I've managed to whet your appetite, you can hear more on the E-E distinction in Mike Horton's systematic theology lectures (click here), specifically the most recent lectures on the incommunicable attributes of God.  For a slightly more detailed introduction to the topic and its relation to the early Reformers' theology, check out the last section of Dr. Horton's book Covenant And Salvation.

Dr. Mike Horton is teaching a class on systematic theology at Christ United Reformed Church in Santee, California (where he serves as Associate Pastor).  The audio of the class is available online for free.  Dr. Horton will be coming out with a new, one-volume Systematic Theology for Zondervan next year, and this class is a sneak preview.  He's just finished the first section, "Prolegomena", and is now a few weeks into section two, "The Incommunicable Attributes of God."

To have a listen, click here. 


(Dr. Horton is also host of The White Horse Inn, a weekly radio show about theology and culture).

The videos of all speaker addresses and panel discussions from this year's T4G conference are available online for free at Ligonier.org (for a limited time).  These conferences are amazing, encouraging (and often humorous) and it would be well worth your time to watch the videos (if you don't have a lot of time, just watch the panel discussions!)

Check them out here. 

Unfortunately this will not be a book review.  I haven’t had the opportunity yet to read the book, though I plan to in the near future.  I did however read the Christianity Today article bearing the same title two years ago, and I’ve seen, heard or read several interviews with the author (here's a good one).  Here I simply wish to make a few comments in light of a recent study done by ChurchRelevence.com (more on that in a moment).

Basically, a good chunk o’ Christian youth (roughly 18 – 25) are moving away from the Arminian, mainstream evangelicalism of their childhood toward (to differing degrees) classical Reformed theology (the primary motive being, at least according to the CT article, a desire for deeper theology grounded in historic creeds and confessions).  The majority of the credit for this Renaissance of Reformed thought is given to John Piper.  Because of his passionate preaching and evident concern for world missions, Piper has managed to break into circles (such as the annual Passion Conference) that were previously closed, sometimes even hostile, to Reformed theology.   Thus, Let The Nations Be Glad became a “gateway drug” to Piper’s deeply Reformed emphasis on the radical sinfulness of man, the radical holiness of God, and His absolute sovereignty in all things. 

All this makes sense to me (and I have no doubt that it’s true), but as a blogger, I can’t help but wonder if the recent advent of New Media has contributed to this exodus into the Reformed promised land.  R. C. Sproul was on the cutting edge in the late 80’s and 90’s.  Ligonier made use of every available medium of communication, from radio to cassette tapes, to videos.  Now Dr. Sproul’s teaching series are available daily on the internet and satellite TV.  So, you might ask, why wasn’t there a Reformed Renaissance in the 90’s?  I think it has been slowly building.  Many today who are in the 18 – 25 bracket could have grown up with Dr. Piper’s or Dr. Sproul’s ministries, or their parents could have been first introduced to it.  The use of so many different forms of media mean that some folk who would not have otherwise been exposed to Reformed teaching had the opportunity to see loving, Christ-like pastors and teachers arguing passionately for the clear teaching of Scripture as expressed by historic Reformation theology.  Both Piper and Sproul (and others), it must be admitted, break the mold of what most non-Reformed people tend to think of Reformed people (or worse…Calvinists!).  The point being, there have probably been 1,000 John Pipers preaching faithfully to their small Reformed congregations over the last 100 years, but no one outside their limited communities knew them.  And no one would actually pick up the writings of Calvin or Edwards because of the stigma surrounding “Calvinism.”  Godly men like John Piper, in most cases, remove that stigma.

Now fast forward to 2009.  ChurchRelevance.com has posted a list of the “Top 60 Church Blogs.”  As I looked at the list I was suddenly struck by how many of these blogs are Reformed (some of them are even “confessional”!).  Not only are the top 2 blogs Reformed, which really says something all by itself, but of the 60, a total of 10 are definitely Reformed, at least 1 (the Evangelical Outpost, formerly of Joe Carter) was Calvinist, though Joe didn’t wear it on his sleeve, and perhaps 2 or 3 others as well, but I’m not confident enough to say for sure.  Now 10 – 12 isn’t a LOT out of 60, but consider that no other single theological strain or movement has nearly so many (the Emergent movement had 3 or 4 by my count). 

Now, the correlation-causation relationship is always tricky.  Are there so many popular Reformed blogs because of the movement, or has the movement grown, at least in part, because of so many average Reformed Joes and more-than-average Reformed mega-stars getting into New Media and using it more effectively than the other guys?  I can’t really say for sure, but given what I’ve seen happen with New Media in other arenas over the past decade, I’m inclined to think the latter. 

Has anyone read Hansen’s book?  Does he address this issue at all, and if so, what does he have to say?