Down-under round-up: 11 November 2015

Issue of the week

Murray Campbell gave a good response to the “religion makes us meaner” study, noting over-reach and methodological limits, but also rightly agreeing in part about the dangerous potential of ‘religion’!

Making disciples of Jesus

In ‘When life gives you oranges’, Andrew and Rachel Wilson write on raising kids with special needs like severe autism. Moving, realistic, helpful, hopeful, and profoundly Christian.

Mark Jones writes at Reformation21 about a class of churchmen emerging in reformed circles that excites him. I’d be interested in your comments on the GoThereFor Facebook feed.

I prefer his alternative title for this group—reformed irenics—over his headline for them, reformed Catholics. It’s simply because ‘catholic’ is too little understood in the ‘of the whole’ or universal sense, but remains a red flag for former Roman Catholics who’ve embraced the gospel of grace in Christ alone, as Jesus comes to us clothed simply in the Scriptures.

My other comment is that it seems reformed irenics share the same praiseworthy impulse of graciousness to other Christians often attributed to ‘generous evangelicals’, but without the doctrinal indifference that sometimes (often?) accompanied the latter. That, it seems to me, is good, since we will still come up against the need for judgement calls on when to call something false teaching, or worse still, heretical.

Michael Jensen writes for our Australian public broadcaster in ‘Rescuing ‘martyrdom’: Dying for one's faith is not the same as killing for it’.

It’s a critical point to keep making, that our radicalism as followers of the Lord Jesus Christ is so different from some other forms of religious radicalism. 

As a slightly pedantic aside, I note my genuine discomfort with Michael using ‘saint’ in the contemporary societal way when referring to “our justified reverence for modern saints like Gandhi”. Gandhi was not a believer in Jesus Christ as Lord, and cannot be spoken of as sanctified in Christ; in addition some of his conduct was of deeply dubious morality. (Here is an assessment by an admirer of how history has whitewashed some problematic deeds and attitudes.)

David Ould writes us of an exposed liberal theological and political method in the Pemberton case. In this UK situation, a gay Church of England priest rightly lost his appeal against losing his licence from the Bishop (and hence his job as a chaplain) because he’d entered a same-sex civil marriage.

Youthworks College Principal, Bill Salier, challenges churches to know your young people by name, reflecting on Jesus with Mary in John 20:16-17.

Image of the week

Noting Mark Jones’ warning linked above to avoid “going for the jugular too easily”, Challies shares a quote from Kevin DeYoung, with an unhappy truth we still need to face. The image should tell you exactly what he’s talking about (hint: Matt 7:15; Acts 20:29).