CHRISTIAN READER

A New Kind of Church

In Matthew 16, Jesus asks His disciples who they thought He was. Peter, as usual, is ready with an answer when he proclaims: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." Jesus, in confirming Peter's answer tells him that "flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven." Jesus continues His point by saying: "You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it" (Mt. 16:16-18). Although much has been made of this verse by both Catholics and Protestants, neither Peter nor his confession of Jesus as the Christ will be our focus here. I only want to make the reader aware of a simple pronoun: "My." Jesus referred to the church as "My church." The church belongs to Jesus, not to us.

The Right Use of this Present Life

by Brian Carpenter

(This is Part 6 of a series. Click here to begin at Part 1.)

In the quest for the right use of this life and the things of this life, we are often tempted to go to one extreme or the other.  We either despise the things of this world and set up for ourselves (and others) a rigid system that says who can have what and how much. Or else we use our liberty as the pretext for the material equivalent of gluttony.

A New Kind of Gospel

François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, is credited with the famous saying about man creating God in his own image. He worded it this way: "If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor." Many variations of this quotation have been used by various authors over the years to communicate the idea that man has a natural predisposition—the Bible calls it sin—to think of himself as the center of the universe. It was pointed out to me in a sermon I heard in my early days of becoming a Christian that man employs two methods of making more of himself than he ought. The first is fairly obvious: man makes much of himself. But the second is less obvious and more difficult to deal with: man makes little of God.

Delay of Gratification

by Brian Carpenter

(This is Part 5 of a series. Click here to begin at Part 1.)

When my wife was a child, she was told a story about two little girls who magically got to choose between two life scenarios. Have the first half of life be pleasant and easy, but the last part be painful and marked by hardship, or let the first half be marked by hardship and pain and the last half be marked by pleasure and gain and ease. Then the story followed those two girls in their decisions. The moral was that pleasure now and pain later equips you neither to use the pleasure appropriately, nor handle the pain later. But pain now and pleasure later equips you to handle both. She learned a great lesson from that story and has always been miles ahead of me in this area. My own upbringing was more "normal." It was marked by just the opposite approach.



The Authority of the Bible

by D.P. Brooks

How can we account for the amazing vitality and relevance of the Bible? It was written over a period of many hundreds of years by all kinds of people: kings, shepherds, statesmen, farmers, prophets, fishermen. We have writers today who are far better educated than were the biblical writers. Many men in our culture have literary skills far beyond that of most of the humble people who helped write the Scriptures.

A New Kind of Jesus

The fourth question that is "transforming the faith," according to author and speaker Brian McLaren, is the question of who Jesus is. This may seem to be something of an odd question because Christianity itself is dependent on the Person of Jesus. If we don't know who Jesus is then we probably don't know what Christianity is either. In fact, this is precisely the point McLaren is trying to make in this section of his book. He writes, "just saying the name 'Jesus' doesn't mean much until we make clear which Jesus we are talking about. We must face the fact that many different saviors can be smuggled in under the name 'Jesus,' just as many different deities can be disguised under the term 'God' and vastly different ways of living can be promoted under the name 'Christianity'" (p. 119). He is, of course, absolutely right about this, but simply making the observation that many different interpretations exist of who Jesus is doesn't automatically make your interpretation the right one. We must now take a closer look at what McLaren claims the "real" Jesus is like.

Trusting God to Provide

by Brian Carpenter

(This is Part 4 of a series. Click here to begin at Part 1.)

One of the reasons behind our lack of contentment and our restless desire to have more and more and more is fear.  It’s perhaps not an articulated fear or even a recognized fear.  But we fear not having enough and so we have to have the trappings of prosperity around us to assuage our fear.

God's Channel of Communication

by D.P. Brooks

The place of importance held by the Bible is not primarily man's choice but God's, because he has chosen the Scriptures as his channel fro communication with man. Alan Richardson, in A Preface to Bible Study, makes a momentous claim for the Bible:

The Bible is the place where God is encountered, where His message is spoken and His will is proclaimed... What we are saying is that God does speak through the Bible, that the Bible is the medium of His message to the world, that the Bible is God's own appointed channel of communication with men. That is to say, the normal order of things is that man hears God speaking to him as he kneels with the Bible in his hand.

A New Kind of God

As we continue through Brian McLaren's new book, A New Kind of Christianity, we now come to his third question that is "transforming the faith." This question concerns the seeming contradiction between the God that we read about in the Old Testament (OT) and the Jesus that we find in the New Testament (NT). It is often pointed out (usually by skeptics) that the "OT god" seems to be terribly bloodthirsty and sadistic, seeking to subjugate His people under laws and rules that they could never keep, while the Jesus of the NT seems to be one of forgiveness and love, seeking to spread grace as liberally as the OT god spread vengeance. This antimony between the testaments often causes problems for many Christians—McLaren among them—and often results in Christians being thoroughly unread and unfamiliar with the Old Testament, which accounts for nearly two-thirds of the entire Bible.

Wrapped Up in Carnal Delights

by Brian Carpenter

(This is Part 3 of a series. Click here to begin at Part 1.)

Nietzsche said, famously, that God is dead.  By that he meant that the idea of God as a potent cultural force is dead.  In the Middle Ages people lived lives more or less consistent with the notion that this world was not the primary home of a human being, and that an omnipotent judge would one day bring all men to account using His own law as the yardstick of judgment. In his day (the late 19th Century) Nietzsche observed that those professing Christ lived as though this world and its comforts and pleasures was pretty much all there was.  In other words, they did not live as if God actually existed.  He once said, “I might believe in the Redeemer if His followers looked more Redeemed.”  It’s a cheap shot, of course, but not wholly without merit. If we consider what is, instead of what ought to be, then I think Neitzsche got it pretty close to right.  And I would submit that the average professing Christian in our day is even more of a worldling than the average professing Christian of Nietzsche’s day.