Tag: JesusNeedsNewPR

Here, There, and Everywhere

~ K ~ 5 Comments

“To lead a better life, I need my love to be here.”

I have a bunch of things I feel like writing about but they’re not topically related so here’s my mishmashed post.

Music.

I am enjoying listening to Danger Mouse’s new group, The Broken Bells. Hat tip to Derek Webb on that one.

Theology.

Up on The Resurgence blog this week:

Question 74 – Should infants, too, be baptized?
Answer – Yes. Infants as well as adults belong to God’s covenant and congregation. (Gen. 17:7; Matt. 19:14) Through Christ’s blood the redemption from sin and the Holy Spirit, who works faith, are promised to them no less than to adults. (Ps. 22:11; Is. 44:1-3; Acts 2:38, 39; 16:31) Therefore, by baptism, as sign of the covenant, they must be grafted into the Christian church and distinguished from the children of unbelievers. (Acts 10:47; I Cor. 7:14) This was done in the old covenant by circumcision (Gen. 17:9-14), in place of which baptism was instituted in the new covenant. (Col. 2: 11-13)

I seriously struggle with the idea of infant baptism also known as paedobaptism. I am a member of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and appreciate that I do not need to agree with the concept of paedobaptism to be a member of the covenant community. I’m not even fully convinced that I hold to covenant theology but that’s too broad of a matter to tackle within the subject of paedobaptism.

The best case I’ve seen for infant baptism has been presented by Greg Bahnsen here. But again, it’s not that I’m not open to viewing infant baptism as scriptural or that I am adamantly opposed to it per se but I find that there is a clearer Biblical case for believer’s (or as some have called it, “professor’s”) baptism.

Perhaps, however, if I fully subscribed to covenant theology and saw baptism as a replacement for circumcision, then infant baptism would make logical sense. As a Christian who previously subscribed to dispensational theology, the jump to covenant theology is not easy. (Here’s a chart for a comparison between the two. However, I did stumble upon this, and from a quick glance, it would seem like I agree more with New Covenant Theology.)

Scripture.

Relevant Magazine had an article on the most misused verse in the Bible:

Jeremiah 29:11 that says, “‘For I know the plans that I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.”

I thought the article had great insight, especially given that as humans, we have a tendency to look at God as a vending machine: pop our prayer request in the coin slot and wait for our requested result. The author expounds on the context surrounding this oft-quoted verse which shows this verse is not telling readers that God will give us whatever we desire.

Stay-at-home dads.

Matthew Paul Turner at JesusNeedsNewPR tweeted a link to Nicole Wick’s post about Mark Driscoll who bashed stay-at-home dads.

The video is a little old but I was surprised to hear this view from Driscoll given the fact that I usually agree with him. The fact that he was only willing to make “rare exceptions” for men to stay at home to take care of the family was rather appalling to me. In this economic climate and culture, it’s possible for wives to have a better-paying and steadier job than their husbands. In that case, the right way for a husband and father to provide for his family is to let his wife bring in the necessary income for them so that he can be at home rearing the children. (We are assuming in this scenario that the parents have decided they will live off of one income so that one of the parents can be home to raise the children.) An ideal situation would be for a mom to be at home with her children (should she choose to do so) but that is not always the case and I don’t believe that it must always be the case. Driscoll is way off the mark here.

Miscellaneous.

I think there’s more a-brewin’ in my head but the words are all jumbled and I can’t get them out coherently. Some other things going on:

  • I’ll begin editing on my novel soon so that will be quite a challenge. (See hard copy mess in right photo.)
  • I’ll be leading the women’s weekday Bible study during the summer so that’s another exciting thing on the horizon.
  • I’ll also be part of a book club in which we’ll we reading Ed Welch’s When People Are Big and God Is Small. I read through it for the third time last year but highly enjoy the book and find that it’s chock full of wisdom to the point where I don’t mind reading through it again.
  • My husband and I may be going on a trip to Cancun during the summer with my paternal cousins, which I’m highly looking forward to so that I can establish solid relationships with them.

Perhaps you didn’t care to know all that but it made me feel better to type it out.

Thoughts on “Hear No Evil” by Matthew Paul Turner

~ K ~ Leave a comment

I’m not writing a book review on Hear No Evil because I wasn’t planning on it. But as I read through Matthew Paul Turner’s book, I wanted to offer a few thoughts. (Thanks to Jezamama for sending the book to me after winning her book giveaway contest!) I found some choice quotes that seemed especially insightful to me:

“The odd thing about Christians pursuing fame is that they do it while pretending not to be interested in fame. Their goal, most say, is not to bring fame and fortune to themselves. Their only interest is to make Jesus known. But in the process of making Jesus better known than he already is, a lot of Christian musicians find fame and fortune for themselves too.”

This thought gets to the heart of two main things about Christians:

  1. We want to do good things for God but because we’re sinful, our motives are always tainted and impure.
  2. We want glory and honor for ourselves under the cover of doing great things for God.

Turner does an especially great job at illustrating this through his encounter with Jeff and Jack. (Btw, the section where he describes meeting Poppa Gladstone and going to his concert was HILARIOUS to me.)

Another quote that jumped out at me:

“I liked being Calvinist because it made me feel controversial and edgy to believe something different than what my parents believed.  … I think that’s why people like Josiah and me sometimes turned into Calvinists. We could be passive-aggressive toward our parents and our past lives without being considered unchristian. Reformed doctrine offered a different way to think about God. And sometimes different, even when it really isn’t that different, is all we need to make us feel alive, creative, and in control of our own destiny.”

I’m part of a Christian message board in which the Calvinism vs. Arminianism debate is as worn out as a pair of sandals on a Middle Easterner. But a recent debate I engaged in questioned whether young people adopt Calvinism to buck responsibility. Turner sums the adoption of Calvinistic thought among young adults much better than I could have ever thought to put it.

Overall, I found Hear No Evil to be a humorous and an amazingly well-written book.

  • My eyes nearly fell out of their sockets when I read about the naive Christian rocker who didn’t know the famous person sitting in the corner (end of Chapter 1);
  • I guffawed (and I mean, guffawed) at the names “Sandi Fatty and Sandi Cow Patty;”
  • I read in amusement as no Christian denomination gets out of Turner’s book unscathed (well, except for maybe the Roman Catholics);
  • I winced as Turner describes his encounter with a church member who attended Pensacola Christian College;
  • I wondered how a CCM editor ethically handles seeing a story with fabricated quotes of a Christian musician who was in the process of healing after a painful divorce;
  • And my heart broke as I read about a man who attended church after having been kicked out of his old one because he was gay.

I didn’t grow up Independent Fundamental Baptist (IFB) but it is amazing how I was able to relate to many of Turner’s anecdotes despite my short stint in that realm in young adulthood. In a way, Hear No Evil is really Chicken Soup for the Recovering Independent Fundamental Baptist’s Music Soul. Turner’s book on his general IFB experience, Churched, is on my must-read list now. You can connect with Turner on his blog at http://jesusneedsnewpr.blogspot.com or through Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jesusneedsnewpr.

—

Apologies for not providing page numbers for the quotes. I’m already shipping the book off to a friend who lost a contest to win the book. This book is too good to keep to myself.