Hi Ben -- your facebook post about this article just popped up for me, and since you requested comments, I thought I'd say a couple of things.
This is good: Churches should be "Man’s-Relationship-To-God-Centered".
This is good: It does us no good to shadow-box against irrelevant enemies only to fail to fight the enemies of our day.
You are right. "Church music" has been "elevated to the point of being a moral principle", when in fact, it is a minor question. Although it is "one of the big things" among Presbyterians.
John Frame's "The Doctrine of the Christian Life" is one of the best books that he ever wrote; I was deeply disappointed that he writes at length on "church music", but not on "dealing politically with the world around us".
This is a true paragraph: "In man’s-relationship-to-God-centered Christianity, we cannot afford to believe our ideals to be real life. We need to be more honest. Traditions and confessions have not filtered out the wolves from the flock. Each year brings a new batch of confessional pastors who fall by scandal or predation. They have not generally improved our own personal walks with God: driving us to prayer, helping us overcome the sins of youth. They haven’t helped us to reach the lost. Embarrassingly, most confessional church growth is from theological changes in people that got saved in modern big-box churches, or from childbirth of confessional Christians."
One of the problems I have seen with "the church", and especially harmful to the notion that we need a "futuristic church", is that all too many Christians have given up on the world's future, and are looking forward to "the Rapture".
Of course, the real church needs to be "forward facing", and they need to "provide answers, wisdom, and comfort in changing times". At this point it is important to suggest the differences between "making progress" ("progressivism") and "conserving the good that we have" ("conservativism").
You have identified a big thing, but this thing is only bigger than what earlier generatiosn had to accomplish, because our world is much bigger.
So we need to situate this discussion in the world today -- Not only to be "man's-relationship-to-God" centered, but "man's-relationship-to-the-rest-of-culture" centered. And not just "man's relationship to the rest of culture" centered, but "the church's relationship to the rest of culture" centered.
(Here, I used the word "culture". But changing that to the word "society" will change the meaning of that phrase, and then changing that word to, say, "government", will change it again.)
I supposed to be "centered" in all of these different ways, is to dilute the meaning of the word "centered". It should be more appropriate to understand "church" as "body" with various "body parts". And as we understand Rippetoe's version of strength training, "working the body as a complete system", we should have some sense of "working the church as a complete system".
As is usually the case, however, understanding "how we ought to do this in real life" is a real challenge.
Reminds me of:
https://fiatiustitia.substack.com/p/the-infancy-of-traditionalism
And this critique of traditionalism from Glory of Kingz podcast.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/postmortem-2-all-122509083
Cal and I are on the same wavelength here and I really enjoyed both of these pieces.
Hi Ben -- your facebook post about this article just popped up for me, and since you requested comments, I thought I'd say a couple of things.
This is good: Churches should be "Man’s-Relationship-To-God-Centered".
This is good: It does us no good to shadow-box against irrelevant enemies only to fail to fight the enemies of our day.
You are right. "Church music" has been "elevated to the point of being a moral principle", when in fact, it is a minor question. Although it is "one of the big things" among Presbyterians.
John Frame's "The Doctrine of the Christian Life" is one of the best books that he ever wrote; I was deeply disappointed that he writes at length on "church music", but not on "dealing politically with the world around us".
This is a true paragraph: "In man’s-relationship-to-God-centered Christianity, we cannot afford to believe our ideals to be real life. We need to be more honest. Traditions and confessions have not filtered out the wolves from the flock. Each year brings a new batch of confessional pastors who fall by scandal or predation. They have not generally improved our own personal walks with God: driving us to prayer, helping us overcome the sins of youth. They haven’t helped us to reach the lost. Embarrassingly, most confessional church growth is from theological changes in people that got saved in modern big-box churches, or from childbirth of confessional Christians."
One of the problems I have seen with "the church", and especially harmful to the notion that we need a "futuristic church", is that all too many Christians have given up on the world's future, and are looking forward to "the Rapture".
Of course, the real church needs to be "forward facing", and they need to "provide answers, wisdom, and comfort in changing times". At this point it is important to suggest the differences between "making progress" ("progressivism") and "conserving the good that we have" ("conservativism").
You have identified a big thing, but this thing is only bigger than what earlier generatiosn had to accomplish, because our world is much bigger.
So we need to situate this discussion in the world today -- Not only to be "man's-relationship-to-God" centered, but "man's-relationship-to-the-rest-of-culture" centered. And not just "man's relationship to the rest of culture" centered, but "the church's relationship to the rest of culture" centered.
(Here, I used the word "culture". But changing that to the word "society" will change the meaning of that phrase, and then changing that word to, say, "government", will change it again.)
I supposed to be "centered" in all of these different ways, is to dilute the meaning of the word "centered". It should be more appropriate to understand "church" as "body" with various "body parts". And as we understand Rippetoe's version of strength training, "working the body as a complete system", we should have some sense of "working the church as a complete system".
As is usually the case, however, understanding "how we ought to do this in real life" is a real challenge.
I'm open to discussing this further.