Tom’s Big Picture

The comments on the previous post have gone in a more general direction than the specific criticisms/questions expressed about Mr. O. I’ll take some space here to summarize my positions on the general issues:

Dispensationalism, prophecy, etc.:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispensationalism

For an advocacy of the more traditional position, this from the Founders organization (a Southern Baptist group dedicated to restoring the SBC to its Reformed roots):

www.founders.org/FJ09/article1.html

Not many Christians have a systemic view of prophecy, just what they’ve picked up here and there. Very few realize that the whole framework of the rapture, Israel, the tribulation, etc, are rather recent inventions unknown before about 1820, and really only popular after about 1900. I would probably be classified as an amillenial on this issue:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amillennialism

Though when I am feeling particularly optimistic and want to annoy liberals I consider postmillenialism:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmillennialism

I am not qualified to make more than basic arguments for any position, and really smart, genuine Christian theologians disagree on them. My macro-reasons for rejecting dispensationalism have to do with its newness, its pessimism and the secondary role it gives to the church. I do not believe the church is a mere parenthesis or pause in the story so God can get back to the original plan of Pharisee priests offering temple sacrifice (I am being cheeky here, but dispensationalists really do believe temple sacrifice will be restored and sanctioned by God post-rapture). I believe Christ fulfilled all prophecy for all time, including prophecies formerly meant for physical Israel. I think dispensationalism makes some of the same errors as people made about Christ, in imagining Him to be a physical earthly king instead of a spiritual king:

Luke 17:20-21

20 And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation:

21 Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.

Similarly, I think Galatians makes it clear that the true, spiritual Israel is the church and “heirs to the promises thereof”.

If you haven’t considered these issues before, it’s hard to comprehend how many of your assumptions about end-times are not universal among Christians and largely ahistorical to both Protestants and Catholics, but rather are a popularized theological scheme invented by a small American sect (and one person in particular, the theologian Darby) in the 1800’s.

I do not think this is an issue that is in any way critical, nor is theological correctness on this issue any reflection of status or virtue. It is an issue where I understand how people view it differently and can simply disagree.

For more information:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summary_of_Christian_eschatological_differences

Seeker-friendly churches/etc:

Based on the fruit produced by modern evangelicals (i.e. the lack of any statistically significant deviation from worldly norms of divorce, the massive falling-away rate of our youth, etc), I think there is a significant chance the way we teach salvation and/or handle the salvation process in the contemporary church is not effectual for salvation. By seeking growth and soft-selling sin and repentance (which is what Osteen, Warren, et. al. do; though, really, they are merely the endgame of a long trend of Gospel minimalism), we are risking not truly growing the church- we may be producing many people who only think they are Christians, which is worse than KNOWING you’re not. At the very least, we are producing very immature believers when compared to the historical context of Christian belief: the average illiterate medieval serf received more spiritual red meat watching a morality play than is often provided by the feel-good self-help sermons we have become accustomed to.

I see three historical mechanisms for church growth:

1) Primarily and foremost, through the children of believers. This is a major point of failure in the contemporary church, which does not give due credit or support to the front-line missionaries of any church: mothers. We sing the praises of missionaries to exotic lands, but rarely a word for mothers whose thankless work renews the Church each generation. We also do not explicitly encourage Christians to have large families so that the Kingdom of God grows rather than shrinks.

2) Through long-term personal relationships with unbelievers, who seeing the peace and community of believers, desire this for themselves or by contrast feel their need for salvation.

3) Through occasional God-ordained revivals that man cannot control or engineer. The last one of massive scale in this country occurred during the War Between the States. These revivals, if anything, have an even greater emphasis on sin, hellfire and condemnation, which belies the claim of the Church Growth Movement that we need to reinvent these concepts. The most famous hellfire-and-damnation sermon, “Sinners in the Hand of An Angry God“, was during the previous revival of the 1700’s- and was delivered in (if I recall my history correctly) monotone by its not-very-charismatic (in the personal persuasiveness sense) author Jonathan Edwards. When God decides to grow the church in a massive way, He does so at Will, and there is nothing we can do to hurry or engineer the process. He will use whoever is willing to deliver his unvarnished message of repentence (even a rather drab messenger like Edwards as opposed to pretty-boy Osteen) to get the job done, because the people involved are just window-dressing to His work.

The Church Growth Movement is an attempt to engineer revival, which is about as ridiculous as man attempting to build another moon. We see the results of man’s shoddy attempts, however, in a cheap salvation whose non-existent fruit makes one question its validity.

Legalism:

I think the fact we are dealing with a general discussion makes it harder to agree; legalism is hard to define, but most people know it when they see it. My one additional point of caution would be to make sure that the spirit of our age does not bias you towards being more eager to condemn those to your “right” (as in more conservative) while being more tolerant of those to your “left”.

I notice that sometimes we are more careful in our words when dealing with a popular liberal (Osteen) while reserving unmetered condemnation for someone just a little bit more conservative than ourselves- this temptation is from the culture, where “conservatives” jockey for position and demonstrate moral superiority in the liberal societal framework by condemning those further to their right, or sometimes those who are just a little less equivocal in how they express their views.