The News Beats

The book Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton is a collection of collegent digressions where the author toys with reversing positives into negatives and examining what is right side up wrong side down in a lateral thinking game.  It is an exercise of applying thesis against antithesis from an arbiter’s middle perch;  the vantage point which seems to imbue those who successfully entertain such exercises with enviable perspicuity.  This is the stuff passed around dormitories where unsuspecting sophomores have their Bohemian days.

It is sad that those rumored to have maturity in the faith would take the time to study under Chesterton, and cite him in their own works on the faith. At point is John Piper, who is pressed by admirers to be some Christian thinker of our times.  Indeed, Piper has authored several Christian books over the years.  Nevertheless, he remains so impressed by Chesterton’s prose lamenting mankind’s lack of conviction for the truth that he included it in his book Brothers We Are Not Professionals, and Piper quotes this from him:

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place.  Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition.  Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be.  A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth.¹

This, for all its purported value in assertiveness training for truth bearers , is but nothing more than a self-affirmation that Chesterton was a living example of his own complaint.  It will turn out well for all those who were enamored with Chesterton, for all his sophistry, and who later discover that he was a fool; he would as soon doubt the word of God as toy with the implications of doing so.

On page 30 of Orthodoxy, Chesterton caves under the scientific evidence available to him in 1908, and joins the throngs of Darwinists happy to call God a liar:

If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for orthodoxy; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly , especially if , like the Christian God, he were outside time.²

Appealing to the fact that God can do things the way He chooses to argue in favor of theistic evolution is asinine.  Where the Bible is silent, good men may speculate, but to contradict it where it has spoken is to wield the sting of poison.  On the subject, thus saith the Lord:  “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Gen 2:7).

Let the writer here repeat himself from an earlier defense of the Bible where this verse was treated:

At one time, and in one instance, man was fully formed up to his nostrils before he had any life in him at all-no living cells struggling for survival, no grotesque mutating and mindless devouring as protoplasm. God completely formed him out to the dust of the ground and then breathed into him the breath of life, and by miraculous means man became a living soul; not an intermediate soul, not half a soul, but a living human soul in its entirety starting life in the image of God.³

What then of these Christian writers who fawn over purveyors of heresy?  Is it a case of much learning making them mad?  Festus leveled that charge against the Apostle Paul in an attempt to discredit him and the gospel (Acts 26:24).  Of course it was not true, but the charge itself is not without meat.

We should have discussions about what’s important, but not forget the rule and caution of discussion.  The more that we dialogue, the further away from the point we get.  This is why conclusions are necessary in writing, and, more importantly, why we who are in the faith must strive to finish well.  The Lord does not lie, though his ways are past finding out; God made man out of the dust of the ground during one day, he raised another from the dead in only three.  Let the redeemed of the Lord sing: “Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints” (Rev 15:3).  We must contend for the faith.  Let us not write so much about something that we remove ourselves from the something we’re supposed to be about.  Nor let us knowingly endorse those in our citations who deceptively plant seeds of doubt attacking the word of God.

Notes:

^1. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, (1908): quoted in John Piper, Brothers We Are Not Professionals (B&H Publishing, 2002), 162.

^2. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, (Dodd and Mead, 1908; New York: First Image, 1936), citation to the First Image edition. 

^3. David Dansker, “Immediate Man,” TheNewsBeats.com/TheBibleBeats.com, February 16, 2008. http://www.thenewsbeats.com/bible/?p=30

Every year more and more packages of small group curricula are marketed to churches under the pretense of helping pastors to do their job better. A popular theme this year is apologetics, and there are several products to choose from. Lee Strobel is broadcasting his “Investigation Faith” seminars, and his small group curriculum will be released this Fall. Strobel also endorses Garry Poole’s Seeker Small Groups (which is also endorsed by Nicky Gumbel, of The Alpha Course). Outreach Training’s Mark Mittelberg, who coauthored Becoming a Contagious Christian with Willow Creek’s Bill Hybels, encourages pastors to purchase their resources in order to get “key sharp lay leaders” to perform apologetics ministries, among other things.¹

It seems that nothing has been left to chance, or the Holy Spirit, at Outreach Training; they have even chiseled four “laws” of outreach ministry, with several codices for each. The first law, according to Outreach, requires churches to create an “identity” by using the marketing technique of “branding.”² Once the church designs a marketable image, they move on to work the sections in law number two which cover how to attract visitors. The first section in this law is titled “Doing Marketing God’s Way,” and it includes a particularly horrible take on the Pentecost, and advises that:

Churches and ministries should examine the communication channels (or media) available to them and strategize effective ways to use them for the Kingdom in their own communities.³

There seems, always, to be interspersed in these money making programs some talk about building something for the Kingdom, to lure the unlearned into thinking they are being extended an opportunity to construct an edifice to commemorate their meritorious sacrifices; if only to have it displayed as a small brick in the wall of the celestial city to come. All of this to be gained, claim the authors, by looking to the world’s method of marketing to know what to do. After all, this is the section on marketing, but it raises the critical point.

Are pastors allowing this shameless merchandising of the saints under their care because they really do need help doing their job; because they don’t know how to do it? What else to conclude but that too many young seminary graduates are actually psychology majors stopping over for the time being while they get up nerve to hang out their own shingles in practices elsewhere. Ambitious young men who are after more respectable and higher paying counseling jobs so that they can live in the houses they want to live in, and drive the cars they want to drive. Unless, of course, they could get the marketing right in one of these churches and build attendance into an income tsunami they could ride to prosperity on.

The authors of these programs counter that apologetics is some specialty ministry requiring their expertise and (well paid) assistance. They clamor that orchestrated attacks are mounting from the atheists, and time must be spent by pastors studying their arguments and crafting rebuttals. Yet, all atheism boils down to only one argument, and it is the easiest to rebut using only a book that pastors should already have in their possession.

The only thing that would establish atheism as the truth of the universe is the fact of Darwinian Evolution; and it is a theory that is almost effortlessly demolished, proved to be a universal lie, using only the first two chapters of Genesis. Are there not so many such men as are called pastors, who have faith in God and His word, who could teach from the first book in the Bible? Is it true that the best course for men in saving souls is that they should vex themselves by steeping their minds in the convoluted reasoning of reprobates and unregenerate men?

This is a digression of the worst sort. No such valuable time should be liberally applied to these pursuits, and especially not by pastors who admit, by their temptation to purchase these sordid professional development programs, that they lack familiarity with the Bible itself. Here is acquaintance on the subject of persuading those who would seek God, and what needs actually exists for supplementing the gospel. Open the book and read, even from the beginning. For our Lord spoke on this subject: “And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead” (Luk 16:31).⁴

Notes:

^1. Katherine T. Phan, “Apologists Ask Churches to Step Up Response to Militant Atheism,” Christian Post, February 13, 2008. http://www.christianpost.com/article/20080213/31176

_Apologists_Ask_Churches_to_Step_Up_Response_to_Militant_Atheism.htm

^2. Resources, Outreach Training, http://www.outreachtraining.com/resources.html. (accessed February 20, 2008).

^3. “Doing Marketing God’s Way,” From Outreach, Inc. Products Division. http://www.outreachtraining.com

/documents/DoingMarketingGodsWay.pdf. (accessed February 20, 2008).

^4. This from our Lord’s account of two certain and particular men who died and received their separate and eternal reward, and here He quoth Abraham.