Until we realize that the entire religious apparatus in America has been to coax & mitigate the psycho-social-spiritual fallout of late modern capitalism & that the current catastrophe in the church is the direct result, we will not be able to bring any relief to Christians. Nothing less than a radical uprooting of the current view of Christianity in this country will do anything to relieve the current stressors. Anything less is to simply re-instantiate the same problems over and over by robbing Peter to pay Paul.

On the Failures of a Redemptive Historical Method: Adopting a redemptive-historical view of Scripture and discipleship is insufficient because it fails to see how Scripture itself overcomes Lessing’s Ditch with its own inherent cosmology and supernatural logic of participation in the life of Christ by the Spirit.

"As long as I keep running about asking: "Do you love me? Do you really love me?" I give all power to the voices of the world and put myself in bondage because the world is filled with "ifs." The world says: "Yes, I love you if you are good-looking, intelligent, and wealthy. "I love you if you have a good education, a good job, and good connections. I love you if you produce much, sell much, and buy much." There are endless "ifs" hidden in the world's love. These "ifs" enslave me, since it is impossible to respond adequately to all of them...

“Man’s reality is an embodied reality, and so much is this the case that for him to think or attempt to act as though he possesses a soul apart from a body is to cripple his nature at its roots. It is this ensouled body or embodied soul which has issued as his true and unique self from the hands of his Creator.”
Philip Sherrard, Christianity and Eros

You can’t love Jesus and let racists and abusers be in charge of his Bride. You can’t love Jesus and feed his Bride to the wolves.

God wants us to see the Giver behind the gifts, even the gifts of salvation. Until we have come to realize that He is the greatest gift of the #Gospel, we will never really understand it or Him. Our hearts will never be melted by God's love if we do not look to Him as THE GIFT.

We can so easily domesticate him with our expectations merely getting what we want, including "escaping hell." This really misses the heart of the Gospel and still sees God as tyrannical.

Lessons Learned after seeing a decade of #SpiritualAbuse and #Racism #Threads

Heres's the story.

https://twitter.com/word_water_wine/status/1489723485853208582

Public sin needs public repentance and restitution for the sin in particular.

https://twitter.com/word_water_wine/status/1485720760639533060

Bavinck against Capitalism

"Today's Christianity is narrow-minded & selfish. One evil day it enlisted in the service of wealth and power, thus positioning itself over against the sick and the weak. The altar today serves only to protect the throne. The priest has lowered himself to be an accomplice of the monarch, & the church has become a mainstay of capitalism. But original Christianity had an entirely different purpose. It opposed all competition btwn social classes. It wanted community & cooperation of its members.

Spiritual Abuse and #Racism at the @WhiteHorseInn @Core_Christ @MichaelHorton_ and the URCNA.

I wanted to share part of my story and the #spiritualabuse that I experienced in seminary @wscal, in a confessional Reformed church, and in working for a Reformed non-profit. Between listening to the podcast on the fall of Mars Hill, seeing the abuse around John Piper and his school, the doubling down of institutional support in many corners of Reformed Evangelicalism, and the continued retrenchment of white

Sadly, “service to the Lord” in American church culture often means taking on unreasonable expectations & duties for the church.

This often leads to sacrificing one’s family on the altar of the ministry, and this can happen very accidentally. To quote Arcade Fire, ministry today often means “working for the church while your family dies.”

What’s the common thread and theme that holds Evangelicals together in America? It’s the adoption of a political ontology of power that holds on to the American dream of Empire — whether they are baptist or charismatic or non-denom or confessional Reformed— that’s the linchpin. The folks that stand out against this tradition are the anomalies, not the borders or keepers of this movement. Only those who have a distinct political ontology can withstand the pressures to fall in line with that. But not many have offered a different metaphysic robust enough.

We need to understand the social contexts of *why* we choose to have abusive leaders & why are they are so appealing if we are to create healthier cultures & systems of power. We need to understand this dynamic if we are to root out why our Christian cultures are often so blind. Why are we addicted to toxic, abusive leaders in the church and in society? Why do we so readily put up with them?

If so much of Scripture is poetry, song, and apocalypse, why doesn't our theology/teaching/preaching sound like that? We need to recover the mythopoetic resonances of Scripture since that is how we capture the imagination and how God chooses to reveal himself. Liberals look at the mythopoetic aspects of Scripture, see that they are really there, but conclude the Bible cannot be true.

Conservatives adopt the same historical positivism and essentialism and conclude that these aspects can be literalized and quantified & therefore true.

When it comes to thinking about #deconstruction in Christianity, Paul Ricoeur rightly argues for the creative and spiritual uses of Freud, Nietzsche, Lessing, et al. They are helpful on many fronts. They help us see what is “not God” and hear God more clearly. They allow us to use a “small hammer” to tap the idols we are worshipping and hear their hollowness and emptiness. We need deconstruction as we learn to reinterpret the sacred texts and dogmas once again.

To truly be free from shame and guilt, to offer ourselves to others, to be open about our failings and strengths, first requires us to look at ourselves truly and compassionately. Openness, vulnerability, and courage are all based on self-compassion. Self-compassion looks at ourselves as flawed & finite whose brokenness & neediness are not causes of shame. Sin brings shame & guilt but this is not inherent to who we are or our neediness. Self-compassion is rooted in God’s love for us as his creatures & as his redeemed people.

What we’re seeing w/ the “anti wokeness” policing and legislation coming from this evangelical and Reformed consensus is directly due to bad histories of modernity like Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. These attempts at finding out how and why we are in this conundrum in the West downplays the role slavery, colonialism, empire, and racism had in building modernity. The modern mind is plagued with guilt over these sins by which the West became a dominant superpower.

I think we have to say emphatically there’s a place for our emotions with God and each other— whatever they are. God wants us to come to him with all our baggage and wounds. He wants us, not an idealized version of us. He doesn’t promise to immediately vaporize our sorrows or problems but asks us to lean into Him as the safe haven of home that will lead to healing and joy, many times without God removing the thorn in our flesh.

For those wishing to understand my previous comment concerning Jonathan Edwards' Occasionalism & the denial of Trinitarian Concursus, I offer some articulations & how it results in such a tragic view of God's grace, joy & the "evaporation" of anxiety. (see pic) Oliver Crisp describes Edwards in this way: “In early modern theology the question of divine causation loomed large in light of Newton’s mechanical philosophy and the pantheism of writers like Spinoza....

When worldview as a heuristic is the only way we think right action comes about (ie ideas have consequences), we neglect all other forms of virtue and habit formation, structures, and discipleship. The logical part of our brain is not the basis for change of action or belief. This is why it is so critical to capture the imaginative part of the brain which subconsciously affects the rational capacity. One's deep beliefs are much more basic to change in action than pure rationalization which is often done after the act of belief.

Why are we addicted to toxic, abusive leaders in the church and in society? We fear the social breakdown that we see all around us. We cannot control the forces of nature that seem to steal away the good life we want so desperately so we turn to the "powerful." We elect the "powerful" to hide from the raw evil we have unleashed into the modern world. We elect people who we feel can "protect" us from what we fear and dread. We elect the people that act like us if we had power.

Be careful to not only read the theological texts of the Reformation and not look into the biblical insights they had into law, civil society or politics. Otherwise, we will have a truncated view of the gospel and what #Reformation actually was. A biblicist approach to the Reformation will fail to see how they ministerially used all kinds of disciplines and philosophies to support their theological and juridical arguments. Using sociology or CRT as a subordinate heuristic is not inherently contrary to the Reformers.