Radical Reformission Quote #15

From chapter 1, eat drink and be a merry missionary: imitating the reformission of Jesus.

Reformission is ultimately about being like Jesus, through his empowering grace. One of the underlying keys to reformission is knowing that neither the freedom of Christ nor our freedom in Christ is intended to permit us to dance as close to sin as possible without crossing the line. But both are intended to permit us to dance as close to sinner as possible by crossing the lines that unnecessarily separate the people God has found from those he is still seeking. [...]

I am advocating not sin but freedom. That freedom is denied by many traditions and theological systems because they fear that some people will use their freedom to sin against Christ. But rules, regulations, and the pursuit of outward morality are ultimately incapable of preventing sin. They can only, at best, rearrange the flesh and get people to stop drinking, smoking, and having sex, only to start being proud of their morality. Jesus' love for us and our love for him are, frankly, the only tethers that will keep us from abusing our freedom, yet they will enable us to venture as far into the culture and into relationships with lost people as Jesus did, because we go with him.

Radical Reformission Quote #14

From chapter 1, eat drink and be a merry missionary: imitating the reformission of Jesus.

[Talking of Jesus's conversation with the woman at the well] Lest we overlook the magnitude of this moment, notice that this is the only place in John's gospel that Jesus declares that he is the promised Old Testament Messiah. And he reserved this great revelation not for the seminary professors or megachurch senior pastors but for the woman he had come to earth to spiritually court at a lonely well in the heat of the noontime sun. And Jesus revealed her sin, putting his finger on the dirtiest and most scarred portion of her soul, which smelled like death, hell, and sin. He cleaned it, healed it, forgave it, and replaced it with grace and the Holy Spirit, as only he can.

Born again, the woman decided to start her life over, which is the essence of repentance. She sprinted back to Sychar with good news to tell. She told anyone who would listen that she had been a sick and wicked woman governed by her loneliness and perversion but that things had changed once she met Jesus. We can only imagine the looks on people's faces, including the many men who likely had seen her unclothed but who had never seen her clothed in righteousness.

Radical Reformission Quote #13

From chapter 1, eat drink and be a merry missionary: imitating the reformission of Jesus. See the previous three quotes for background.

As I left the bar, God convicted me of my proud addiction to morality and my attempt to look like a decent guy so that others will like me. I was so insecure that I feared not only that my Christian friends would see me walking out of a gay bar with queer cowboys but also that the queer cowboys would reject me for being a Bible thumper who, deep down, believed they were running to hell in their cowboy boots. I cared more about how I appeared to people than about whether I shared the passion of Jesus for those who are lost.

That night, I learned that reformission requires that Christians and their churches move forward on their knees, continually confessing their addictions to morality and the appearance of godliness, which does not penetrate the heart and transform lives. In the end, I learned that God's mission is not to create a team of moral and decent people but rather to create a movement of holy loving missionaries who are comfortable and truthful around lost sinners and who, in this way, look more like Jesus than most of his pastors do.

Radical Reformission Quote #12

From chapter 1, eat drink and be a merry missionary: imitating the reformission of Jesus.

[Mark goes to a gay rodeo committee meeting upstairs from the bar. See the previous two quotes for background.] The meeting started with introductions, everyone giving their names and vocations. [...]

When it came to my turn, I tried to avoid the inevitable conflict and lied to them by saying I was a spiritual something-or-other, hoping the queer cowboys would smile, nod, and ignore me. But one of the cowboys asked what my religion was. So I came out of my closet and told him I was a Bible-thumping, old-school Christian preacher, causing some of the guys to laugh, thinking I was kidding. [...]

[After the meeting] One of the guys asked if I was actually a real pastor and began explaining how his lover and many of his friends had died of AIDS. Actually, he began discipling me, articulating with great pain the loneliness and death that filled his community and explaining why he feared death. [...] I sought to relate the gospel to his life: sin causes death, but Jesus is God who became a man and died -- when he was about the same age as this man -- in order to rise from death, forgive sin, and give eternal life to those who repent of sin and trust in him.

Radical Reformission Quote #11

From chapter 1, eat drink and be a merry missionary: imitating the reformission of Jesus.

My friend took me to the bar and introduced me to a number of his gay buddies, who were drinking -- of course -- light beer. Feeling like I was wearing someone else's underwear, I stood there and tried to be inconspicuous, praying that no one would recognize me. Then someone I had graduated from high school with approached me with a surprised look. She asked, "What are you doing here?" And I quickly blurted, "I'm married to a woman and here with a friend, but I'm not a gay guy, so please don't tell anyone I'm a queer." She laughed and we chatted for a few minutes until a song she obviously liked came on, and she then shuffled off to the dance floor with her girlfriend.

Then a guy introduced me to himself and hit on me. Stunned, I did not immediately respond but instead stared at the poor guy, trying to figure out why he looked so familiar, how he could mistake me for a gay guy, and if I was really good looking. It then hit me and I asked him, "Are you my mailman?" He replied, "Yes, I am a mailman." Suddenly, I wanted to kill myself and never get mail again.

Radical Reformission Quote #10

From chapter 1, eat drink and be a merry missionary: imitating the reformission of Jesus.

I got a phone call from an old college friend whom God had used to bring me to faith. [...]

Over lunch, he informed me that he had been a closet homosexual throughout college, had joined the military after graduation, and had recently been discharged for having sex with fellow soldiers. He was presently frequenting public bathrooms throughout the city and having anonymous sex with various men. He shared that he was wrestling through whether he believed that he was a sinner and whether he still believed in God. When I invited him to attend church with me, he declined, saying it was unfair for me to expect him to come into my Christian subculture since I was unwilling to go with him into his homosexual subculture.

And he was right. So, feeling convicted to be like Jesus, I told him I would be happy to go into his world if he would come into mine. Seeing an evil dervish grin emerge on his face, I knew I was in trouble. He invited me to a gay country and western bar he frequented.

Radical Reformission Quote #9

From chapter 1, eat drink and be a merry missionary: imitating the reformission of Jesus.

Doesn't the story sound like the plot of a trashy, daytime television talk show? The God-Man is born to a teenage virgin in an animal stall, grows up with a blue-collar dad in a dumpy rural town, and has a weird cousin named John, who lives in the wood and survives on a steady diet of bugs, sugar, and repentance. [...]

The constipated religious leaders of his day accuse him of being a drunkard, a glutton, and a crooked guy who always hangs out with the wrong people: easy girls like Mary, crooked mafia types like Matthew, and the kids in high school who always wear black concert T-shirts, sport greasy male ponytails, and smoke cigarettes just off school property during lunch (Matt. 11:19).

Radical Reformission Quote #8

From chapter 1, eat drink and be a merry missionary: imitating the reformission of Jesus.

As time rolls along, God also works through a cowardly old man named Abraham, who is happy to whore out his loving and beautiful antique of a wife to avoid conflict. God also chooses to work through a guy named Jacob, even though he's a trickster and a con man. Later, God raises up a stuttering murderer named Moses to lead his people. Years later, a king named David comes onto the leadership stage, but he becomes an adulterer, a murderer, and an odd type pointing ahead to the promised Christ. David's son Solomon redefines addiction, with more wine, women, and money than any guy could possibly know what to do with, though he gave it a good Hefneresque run.

Radical Reformission Quote #7

From the introduction: my personal reformission and the growing reformission movement. (See the previous quote for context.)

[...] the parachurch, which includes evangelistic ministries such as Young Life and Campus Crusade for Christ. [...] The failure of such ministries is that they are often disconnected from the local church, connecting unchurched people to Jesus without connecting them to the rest of Jesus' people. This can lead to theological immaturity. [...]

This is classic liberal Christianity, and it exists largely in the dying mainline churches. [...] Their failure is that they bring to the culture a false gospel of accommodation, rather than confrontation, by seeking to bless people as they are rather than calling them to a repentant faith that transforms them. [...]

Though they know the gospel theologically, they rarely take it out of their church. This is classic fundamentalist Christianity, which flourishes most widely in more independent-minded Bible-believing churches. [...] Pastors at these churches are prone to speak about the needs of the church, focusing on building up its people and keeping them from sinning.

Radical Reformission Quote #6

From the introduction: my personal reformission and the growing reformission movement.

Reformission is a radical call for Christians and Christian churches to recommit to living and speaking the gospel, and to do so regardless of the pressures to compromise the truth of the gospel or to conceal its power within the safety of the church. [...]

Reformission therefore begins with a simple return to Jesus, who by grace saves us and sends us into mission. Jesus has called us to (1) the gospel (loving our Lord), (2) the culture (loving our neighbor) and (3) the church (loving our brother). But one of the causes of our failure to fulfill our mission in the American church is that the various Christian traditions are faithful on only one or two of these counts.

Gospel + Culture - Church = Parachurch
Culture + Church - Gospel = Liberalism
Church + Gospel - Culture = Fundamentalism

Update

If you're just joining us, welcome! I'll be posting quotes from Mark Driscoll's The Radical Reformission this quarter. Feel free to do whatever you want with this blog.

I've decided to go back to the quarter system and post quotes from Mark Driscoll's The Radical Reformission on every day when Caltech has class this fall term. There were several reasons for this: I fell behind, the post office lost a shipment of most of my Christian books to me, and most of the blog's followers that I know of are still at Caltech. In any case, I have a new copy from Amazon, and plan to continue posting these quotes after all. Spread the word!

Radical Reformission Quote #5

From the introduction: my personal reformission and the growing reformission movement. (Note: There are a lot of funny one-liners throughout the book that give the flavor to Mark's personality. I'll post a bunch like this some Fridays.)

• I wasn't much of a theologian at the time, but killing Jesus did seem like a bad move.
• To me, sins were terrible things that very bad people do, such as rape, murder, drug dealing, and what my construction-worker dad called being antiunion.
• I had a class in women's studies in which I learned that men are a plague ruining the world and that I needed to get in touch with my feminine side, which made about as much sense as telling a dog to get in touch with its feline side.
• To pay the bills, I edited the opinions section of the campus newspaper, writing inflammatory columns that led to debates, radio interviews, and even a few bomb threats -- which was wonderful, because the only thing worse than dying is living a boring life.

Radical Reformission Quote #4

From the introduction: my personal reformission and the growing reformission movement.

Shortly thereafter, I found a good church that met my criteria. First, the pastor was a man who had been in the military and knew how to kill people in self-defense. Second, he taught the Bible verse by verse, so that I could learn to trust the Scriptures and love Jesus without feeling like we had a thinly veiled homosexual relationship. [...]

After graduation, Grace and I moved back to Seattle and began visiting churches. We finally settled into a large suburban church where I felt at home because it met my criteria. First, the pastor (who looked like Mr. T) had been an NFL linebacker and knew how to kill people in self-defense. Second, he taught me the Bible verse by verse in a real way, one that enabled me to have a relationship with Jesus that did not feel like he was my lifelong prom date.

Radical Reformission Quote #3

From the introduction: my personal reformission and the growing reformission movement.

That week, I started teaching my first Bible study. At the time, The Simpsons on television was all the rage among drunken college guys. My dorm room had cable television, also known as evangelistic bait. So I gathered the guys from my dorm floor together and told them they could watch the show if they also attended my Bible study beforehand. Much to my surprise, about ten guys showed up.

It then dawned on me that I had been a Christian for only a few days, had never been in a Bible study, and did not really know anything in the Bible other than the fact that I sucked and that Jesus is God. So I told the guys they could ask me any question about the Bible and I would take the following week to research the answer, since I didn't have any answers yet. This was my first ministry, and it inspired me to begin buying commentaries, reference materials, theology texts, apologetics books, and the like, which were more interesting by far than most of my classes.

Radical Reformission Quote #2

From the introduction: my personal reformission and the growing reformission movement.

In my first college philosophy class, I read Augustine, who said that sin naturally flows from our polluted hearts like sewage out of a culvert. He explained that the root of sin is pride and that the worst sins include things like false morality and autonomy from God. This was, I believe, God's extending to me the right foot of fellowship.

I then read the entire New Testament over the course of the next few weeks. God opened my eyes to the fact that I was a Pharisee and that the worst sinners are often the most moral and spiritual people who, like I was doing, pursue righteousness apart from Jesus.

Radical Reformission Quote #1

From the introduction: my personal reformission and the growing reformission movement.

Growing up, I thought that as long as I believed in a nebulous Sky Fairy named God and was a decent, moral person outperforming those below me on the ethical food chain, I would end my life hearing the old theme song to The Jeffersons television show and be "movin' on up" to heaven with all the other good guys. So I worked through high school and graduated Most Likely to Succeed and student body president. I was very proud to have never drunk alcohol, smoked a cigarette, tried a drug, or voted Republican. [...]

[In college] Without a car and majoring in boredom, I began reading a nice Bible my high school girlfriend had given me as a graduation present. She was a pastor's daughter who, in retrospect, should not have been dating me. Nonetheless, she has turned out to be an amazing wife who is the embodiment of her name, Grace. To this day, I preach each Sunday from the Bible she gave me, even on the Sundays when, as a good professional hypocrite, I tell the unmarried people never to date non-Christians.

Introducing: The Radical Reformission by Mark Driscoll

Hello everyone! Welcome to those who followed the link on my Facebook page, and welcome back all those who followed this blog last year through Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Four Loves by CS Lewis, and Good News for Anxious Chistians by Philip Cary.

I now attend MIT, where classes start this upcoming Wednesday, September 5th. Accordingly, I will start posting quotes then. For the fall semester, I have chosen Mark Driscoll's The Radical Reformission to gather and post quotes from. I first read this book this last spring, and while I'd heard many of the points in Pastor Mark's sermons, it was refreshing to see them all in one place.

A warning: You might find some of Mark's style especially biting and even possibly offensive. He isn't crass, but he doesn't hold back the criticism of the way a lot of American churches work. If you find yourself reacting that way, I'd challenge you to address those criticisms! Don't become an automatic defender of the tradition you're familiar with. On the other hand, you also might find, as I did, that his analysis of the situation is refreshingly clear-minded. He is very well-read and exposes himself widely to the culture he's a part of. I wouldn't be posting quotes from this book if I thought otherwise.

This topic is especially relevant for me today as I search for a new church to attend in Boston. For anyone in a similar situation: Don't make them the only criterion in your search, but I'd urge you to join a church with the "radical reformissional" (reformed and missional) focus that Mark expounds upon here.

Good News Quote #50

From Chapter Nine, Why "Applying It to Your Life" Is Boring: Or, How the Gospel Is Beautiful.

You may have heard the saying that the preaching of the gospel is like one beggar telling another beggar where to get bread. I don't think that's quite right. If the only preaching we heard was advice about where to get bread, then we'd be in trouble: we're weak and starving beggars, and we might not have the strength to follow the instructions we're given all the way to the bread. We could die along the way. But thank God, the preaching of the gospel is more merciful and more powerful than that. It's not one beggar giving advice to another beggar about where to get bread; it's one beggar giving another beggar the bread of life. It's like a pastor giving us Christ's words, "This is my body, given for you," and then putting a piece of bread right in our hands. That is the divine authority given to a preacher of the gospel: you're a beggar giving other beggars nothing less than Christ, the bread of life.

Good News Quote #49

From Chapter Nine, Why "Applying It to Your Life" Is Boring: Or, How the Gospel Is Beautiful.

So here is another thing that the preachers who want to be "practical" don't get. They are apt to conclude the sermon with an application that goes like this: "We need to ask ourselves: Am I really following Christ, focusing on him, loving God with my whole heart, caring about my neighbor," etc. The most truthful answer to such questions is surely, "Of course not! I'm not like that!" But then I want to ask the preacher, "Now do you have any good news for sinners like me?" Unfortunately, there's usually no good news coming, because that's the end of the sermon. The whole point is to throw the ball in our court and see what we can do with it. It's a "practical" sermon, so it leaves us trapped, left to our own resources and cut off from Christ.

Good News Quote #48

From Chapter Nine, Why "Applying It to Your Life" Is Boring: Or, How the Gospel Is Beautiful.

The "application" part of the sermon works by making people anxious about whether they're living the way "we as Christians are supposed to: faithful, loving, caring, experiencing the fullness of the Holy Spirit, and so on. It's a trap. Either you believe that stuff about yourself, which makes you self-righteous, or you don't, which makes you anxious. Either way you're stuck. You can try to convince yourself you're oh-so-loving (so much more loving than your neighbors -- now isn't that nice!) or you can worry about how shabby your Christian life is (haunted by that feeling, "what's wrong with me?"). There's no escaping the trap unless you believe that Christ came to save sinners and that includes you. As the apostle Paul wonderfully put it: "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost" (1 Tim. 1:15). For each one of us, the foremost sinner is the one we're talking about when we say the word "I."

Good News Quote #47

From Chapter Nine, Why "Applying It to Your Life" Is Boring: Or, How the Gospel Is Beautiful.

To see what I mean, try this thought experiment. Imagine you're someone who likes poetry and drama, and you're looking at courses being offered at a local community college. Two courses have caught your attention, one titled "The Poems and Plays of Shakespeare" and another titled "The Relevance of Shakespeare to Our Lives." Which one would you rather take? I figure that if it's poetry and drama you really want -- if you're eager to encounter the beauty and power and wisdom in Shakespeare's poems and plays -- then you'll avoid the second course. You want to take in Shakespeare's words, not listen to some professor going on for a whole semester about how they're suppose to be relevant to you. At least that's what I'd choose. When I want to learn something interesting or beautiful, the last thing I want is a series of lectures on how that thing is relevant to my life. I want to encounter the thing itself: literature or history, math or biology, music or the gospel, all of which move me because of their beauty as well as their truth.

Good News Quote #46

From Chapter Nine, Why "Applying It to Your Life" Is Boring: Or, How the Gospel Is Beautiful.

My contention is that the kind of sermon that gives real help living the Christian life is not about us but about Christ. It does not tell us what to do, but what Christ does. [...]

Think of it this way: we who believe in Christ belong to him like a bride waiting for her Bridegroom. He is on his way to us and our whole life is a preparation for his arrival. And we want to be a good bride, pleasing him in everything we do. So what can we hear that will help prepare us for his coming? You could give us sermons about how to be a good bride, but that gets tedious very quickly. This is not because we don't want to be a good bride, but because we don't want to hear about ourselves all the time -- we'd rather hear about our Beloved!

Good News Quote #45

From Chapter Eight, Why You Don't Always Have to Experience Joy: Or, How God Vindicates the Afflicted.

There are many enemies of the virtue of patience, including our own unwillingness to suffer and our egocentric desires to be the kind of person who makes a difference in people's lives. There is also a kind of intellectual impatience, and unwillingness to wait for understanding. We can be tempted to think we must already have a solution to what philosophers call the "problem of evil," the problem of why God allows such suffering in the world. Like Job's friends, we can make the terrible mistake of thinking it's our job to defend God and explain his ways.


The Bible in its wisdom offers us no solution to the problem of evil. [...] We live without a solution but not without hope. No matter how little we know of the meaning of our suffering, we know that it is a story with a happy ending. This may not make us feel any better -- and it is a terrible mistake to demand that the afflicted feel better because of it -- but it is nonetheless the truth.

Good News Quote #44

From Chapter Eight, Why You Don't Always Have to Experience Joy: Or, How God Vindicates the Afflicted.

[Job's three friends] did better when they did nothing. That's a hard lesson to learn, but it's indispensable for anyone who really wants to comfort the afflicted. Sometimes there is nothing we can do to comfort them, and this itself is a form of suffering that is hard for us to bear. But it is also a way that we enter into their suffering and share it. It is essential to the work of sympathy and compassion -- both of which are old words meaning to suffer with someone. And it is hard work to sit in silence and listen to someone we love groan and cry and say dreadful things about God. Sometimes the most we can do to relieve their suffering is just hear their awful words and bear with them patiently. This is the cross of listening, a cross Job's friends were unwilling to bear. They thought they had to do something about his awful words.

Good News Quote #43

From Chapter Eight, Why You Don't Always Have to Experience Joy: Or, How God Vindicates the Afflicted.

One temptation we have is to blame the afflicted for upsetting our worldview. The very existence of their undeserved suffering raises questions about our theology and our faith that are hard to face. [...]


There is a whole book of the Bible that deals with the temptation to blame the afflicted for upsetting our worldview. I'm talking of course about the book of Job. [...]


Job's speeches hardly mention the literal or physical aspects of his suffering, his foul skin disease and the death of his children. Job makes it clear that his real problem is with God. [...]


But he wishes things were different: there ought to be someone in heaven who could speak up for him!


And it turns out, Job has his wish and things are as they ought to be. For the whole story began with God speaking up for Job in heaven, and that in fact is why Job is suffering -- so that God may be proved right when he speaks up for Job. But Job is in no position to know that, which is why he suffers so badly.

Good News Quote #42

From Chapter Eight, Why You Don't Always Have to Experience Joy: Or, How God Vindicates the Afflicted.

What also happens is that the biblical exhortations, such as the apostle's words, "Rejoice in the Lord always!" (Phil. 4:4) are turned into a kind of command, even a kind of condemnation. Instead of inviting us into joy, they demand that we be joyful, or else.


In this case, it's our individualism that turns invitation into condemnation. Like the passage about being filled with the Spirit discussed in chapter 1 (Eph. 5:18), this exhortation is addressed to the church in the plural. In the Greek, it's more like, "You guys! Be celebrating the Lord Jesus all the time!" It is not about how each individual is supposed to feel every hour of the day, but about how the life of the church is always to be a kind of advance celebration of the marriage supper of the Lamb.

Good News Quote #41

From Chapter Eight, Why You Don't Always Have to Experience Joy: Or, How God Vindicates the Afflicted.

It goes something like this. The Christian life is supposed to be an abundant life, a life of victory -- so you can't go around telling people that it really hurts inside. People at church may not understand if you start talking as if your life was a failure. You're not really allowed to be sad at heart, because everybody says Christians are supposed to have an inner joy deep in their hearts, which is always there beneath all the troubles of life. So it can't be that at the center of your feelings is a great ball of hurt and suffering. Not if you're a Christian! [...]


Now it's true that God has many ways of comforting us with joy in the midst of sorrow and pain. These are some of his most precious gifts, for which believers throughout the ages have raised songs of thanksgiving. But it is also true that sometimes the cross we bear means suffering without joy, without any kind of emotional consolation. For our feelings, like our bodies, remain human through and through, capable of agony and emptiness, vulnerable to crosses that can deprive them of all comfort.

Good News Quote #40

From Chapter Seven, Why You Don't Have to Keep Getting Transformed All the Time: Or, How Virtues Make a Lasting Change in Us.

We cultivate our feelings the way we cultivate a garden: we can't entirely prevent weeds from coming up, but we can take care to remove them before they do much harm. We cannot simply choose never to get angry, and we cannot fully control it when we do get angry, but the more disciplined our moral lives are, the more likely we will be able to keep our anger under some measure of control. For example, we can discipline ourselves in how we think about people in private (not cultivating a sense of resentment against them), how we talk about them behind their back (not gossiping), and how we interact with them in public (not speaking with disrespect or trying to embarrass them). These disciplines will not eliminate any poisonous feelings toward other people, but they will keep them from growing strong and overshadowing the better feelings in the garden of our souls.

Good News Quote #39

From Chapter Seven, Why You Don't Have to Keep Getting Transformed All the Time: Or, How Virtues Make a Lasting Change in Us.

Genuinely life-changing experiences lead to something more lasting. The key example is conversion to Christ, which changes our lives not because it's such an intense experience -- lots of good Christians never have an intense conversion experience -- but because it begins the life of faith, in which you are united to Christ, our Bridegroom. Conversion can be a lot like falling in love, leading to the one Christian marriage that is at the basis of all marriage: union with Christ. By the same token, just as falling in love is not necessary to a good marriage, no particular experience at all is necessary for faith in Christ. What matters is believing that his word is true, just like what matters in marriage is believing and keeping the promises you make in your wedding vows.


Nor is it especially important, in either case, to "keep the feeling alive." Feelings come and go -- that's what they're for. They change all the time, because they are about responding to the immediate situation. But over the course of a lifetime they do tend to settle into predictable patterns, such as are found in the virtues and blessings of a good marriage.

Good News Quote #38

From Chapter Seven, Why You Don't Have to Keep Getting Transformed All the Time: Or, How Virtues Make a Lasting Change in Us.

If falling in love is a kind of discovery, then it's not surprising that it happens at the beginning of many relationships. Perhaps there are exceptions, like when old friends fall in love after they've known one another for years, but even then I'd figure that's because they discover something new in each other. In any case, when you make such a discovery it's meant to point in the direction of something more lasting, like the lifetime of love in marriage and the raising of children together that comes from it. Falling in love is a perception that says, "This would be a wonderful person to share a lifetime with, to be the mother or father of my children. If I were to grow old with this person, seeing our children grow up, it would be the fulfillment of my deepest desire on earth.


If I'm right, the importance of falling in love lies not in how it feels, but in what it perceives. And as always with our feelings, the key moral issue is how truthful the perception is. That is why, as I said in chapter 4, I urge my students considering marriage to ask the questions: is this really a good person, someone good for me that I can be good to, someone with whom I could be a good parent? Falling in love is a sign that this might be someone with whom you could make a good marriage. Still, it's not enough, because the feeling is not always as perceptive as it should be. You can fall in love with people who seduce you (seductive people are good at getting you to fall in love with them) or, if you're emotionally unhealthy, you can have a repeated pattern of falling in love with people who are bad for you.

Good News Quote #37

From Chapter Seven, Why You Don't Have to Keep Getting Transformed All the Time: Or, How Virtues Make a Lasting Change in Us.

I've heard both pastors and students try to explain this by saying that love is not a feeling, it's a choice. But I'm afraid that's still consumerism talking. [...]


But love is not a choice -- or rather, it is not only a choice, just like it is not only a feeling. Love is a way of life for the long haul (again, think of love for your children) and its presence in our hearts is what Christian doctrine calls a virtue -- an enduring pattern of feeling and thought, choice and action and perception. Love involves all these things, including choices -- many, many choices over the course of a lifetime, made in light of the people and things you love. But of course it also involves feelings -- how could it not? When we look at the children we love, playing or sleeping, we are filled with tenderness and delight. What loving parent doesn't have such feelings?

Good News Quote #36

From Chapter Seven, Why You Don't Have to Keep Getting Transformed All the Time: Or, How Virtues Make a Lasting Change in Us.

In consumerist spirituality, the new stuff on order is mostly new experiences, "transformative" experiences that you're supposed to get if you don't want to miss out on something special in your spiritual life. Often there are books and videos and ministries to go with it, but the selling point is usually some experience or other. Which means, of course, that if you've never had the experience they're selling, they'll do their best to make you wonder what's wrong with you. You'll feel you're missing out on the prayer of Jabez, or being filled with the Spirit, or speaking in tongues. It's not like you have to have this experience to be saved (you will be reassured), but you'll also be told that without it you're just an ordinary, plain Christian, lacking the extraordinary power and blessing that God wants you to have in your life.

Good News Quote #35

From Chapter Six, Why You Don't Have to Worry about Splitting Head from Heart: Or, How Thinking Welcomes Feeling.

Questions ought to have a place in our hearts, because asking questions is a way of seeking the truth and the love of truth is an important virtue. [...]


It's not just idle curiosity or intellectual pride. Above all, it shouldn't be confused with the obnoxious desire to be right all the time, which is a vice, not a virtue. The people who love the truth are not the ones who are always trying to prove they're right and everyone else is wrong. They're people who are glad to discover when they're wrong, because that gets them one step closer to the truth. And that shows how rare and difficult this virtue is. It's close kin to repentance, because it undermines our desire to justify ourselves and put others in the wrong, and thereby makes us more fair and just in our relationships. Without it morality is just a sham, a game we play to impress people or to persuade ourselves that we're good Christians.

Good News Quote #34

From Chapter Six, Why You Don't Have to Worry about Splitting Head from Heart: Or, How Thinking Welcomes Feeling.

One last unit in that army of cultural stereotypes fighting against people who think too much is what I call the "God makes no sense" move. My students make this move a lot. They say things like "I can't explain it, it must be God" or "It makes absolutely no sense, you just have to believe it" or "Faith means you have to let yourself believe in something crazy and illogical that you can't understand." These are the cliches of people who have taken to heart the warning that they'd better not think too much. It looks to me like they're trying to preserve their faith by not even admitting to themselves that they have questions about it.


And this is sad. It treats Christian faith as if it were make-believe. If you're a child trying to hang on to your belief in Santa Claus, then you really do need to keep yourself from thinking about it too much. Critical thinking really will kill your faith in Santa Claus. But the Christian faith is true, so it can stand up to serious questioning.

Good News Quote #33

From Chapter Six, Why You Don't Have to Worry about Splitting Head from Heart: Or, How Thinking Welcomes Feeling.

As reason welcomes emotion and subjects it to the self-criticism that values truth over self, the two end up pulling together in the direction of making us better people.


Of course not all our reasoning works in that direction. When it goes off in the wrong direction, the problem is not that we're thinking too much, but that our thinking is bad, lazy or dishonest. Our reasoning then is not in the service of truth, which is what reason is really for, but promotes our own self-serving agenda. This results in the perversion of reason that psychologists call "rationalization," as I mentioned before. It's a form of irrationality in which our thinking is all about serving emotional needs that have nothing to do with what's really true. So instead of learning to put truth before self, and thus turning emotions toward justice, generosity, and humility, our thinking is corrupted by the wrong kind of emotions, which end up driving everything.

Good News Quote #32

From Chapter Six, Why You Don't Have to Worry about Splitting Head from Heart: Or, How Thinking Welcomes Feeling.

This goes against an old stereotype about reason or rationality (I'll use these two terms equivalently). The stereotype is that in order to be rational, you have to deny your emotions. But that's never made sense to me. Reason is about finding the truth, whereas denying your emotions means telling lies to yourself about what you're feeling. There's no rationality in that. Some psychologists call it "rationalization," but that doesn't mean it's rational. In fact, "rationalization" is a technical term in psychology for a certain kind of irrationality, precisely because it refers to an attempt to avoid realizing the truth about ourselves.

Denial of reality is not what reason is for. And getting in touch with reality is one of the most important things our emotions are for. That's why reason and emotion -- thinking and feeling -- belong together: they both help us get at the truth about reality. But they get at the truth in different ways, which is why they need each other.

Good News Quote #31

From Chapter Six, Why You Don't Have to Worry about Splitting Head from Heart: Or, How Thinking Welcomes Feeling.

I've never heard anyone warn people about splitting their head from their heart when they're in the grip of strong, raging emotions that obliterate their capacity to think straight. No, it's always when you're thinking a lot that people warn you about splitting your head from your heart. And what seems to make them especially nervous is when you think too much about your feelings. [...]

There's nothing in the Bible to suggest that there's any such thing as thinking too much. And since there's no such thing, it's not something to worry about. We should all go ahead and think as much as we need to, just as we should feel as much as we need to. You can't really do too much of either. What you can do -- and this is what we should be concerned about -- is think dishonestly carelessly, uninsightfully, just as we can also have feelings that are dishonest, malicious, arrogant, and so on. There are evils to watch out for in both our thinking and our feeling, but sheer quantity is not the problem. The problem is not too much thinking or feeling but evil thoughts and feelings.

Good News Quote #30

From Chapter Five, Why You Don't Have to Be Sure You Have the Right Motivations: Or, How Love Seeks the Good.

There is of course a sense in which love for neighbors is unselfish. But this is not because it is motivated by the desire to be unselfish. Rather, it is motivated by desire for the good of the other. Think of how we love our children, seeking their good as well as taking delight in their very being. But sometimes, when you have to wake up in the middle of the night to deal with your screaming infant for the fourth or fifth time, there is no delight in your heart, just sheer exhaustion and devotion to duty. For once again, if you love, you'll do your duty for the one you love: you'll drag yourself out of bed to deal with this tiny bundle of misery, not because you desire to be unselfish but because she needs you. That's the shape of love, the way it directs your attention: it's not about you, it's about her. The delight is lovely when it's there, but it's not the essential thing. And the desire to be unselfish is surely not enough to get you out of bed for the fourth or fifth time -- it's too self-centered. Only love for your child can do that.

Good News Quote #29

From Chapter Five, Why You Don't Have to Be Sure You Have the Right Motivations: Or, How Love Seeks the Good.

So what should you do if you do discover that you have bad motivations for doing good things? First of all, join the club. You are a fallen human being, and you too have a deceitful heart. So of course you have mixed motives all the time. [...]


That doesn't mean that you shouldn't do anything about it. But instead of trying to improve your motivations or find the right one, the thing to do is repent and confess your sins. [...]


This is a point we often get backward. For some reason, we think we can make Christianity attractive to non-Christians by telling them how God's Spirit has been working in our lives to make us such good, loving people -- so different from our nasty, unloving Christian neighbors. And we wonder why non-Christians think we're self-righteous! It's one thing for a former drug addict to testify about how Christ has turned his life around; but when nice, well-off people who have their lives together talk about how powerfully God is working in their hearts, it's obnoxious.

Good News Quote #28

From Chapter Five, Why You Don't Have to Be Sure You Have the Right Motivations: Or, How Love Seeks the Good.

It's perverse to be motivated by the desire to be unselfish: it's one of the most self-centered motivations in the world. It's all about proving to ourselves what good Christians we are, which, if you think about it, is a pretty obnoxious motivation. [...]


Do you see the trap here? There is nothing more self-centered than the project of being unselfish -- it's all about what kind of self you want to be. So people who are driven by the need to have the right motivations, such as unselfishness, are inevitably stuck with the wrong motivations -- selfish motivations that other people rightly find obnoxious. Being driven by the motivation to be unselfish traps you in a life that's all about yourself.

Good News Quote #27

From Chapter Five, Why You Don't Have to Be Sure You Have the Right Motivations: Or, How Love Seeks the Good.

The key point my student needed to realize was simple but powerful: it's okay to do the best thing. After all, if your desire is to do the best thing, then your motivation is good enough! [...]


For example, to love your neighbors means to seek their good. So it would be perverse to wonder whether you had the wrong motivation for seeking their good. If what you're trying to accomplish really is good for your neighbor, then that's good enough. For Christian love is about the good of your neighbor, not how good your heart is. (It's not about you.) The difficult part is knowing what really is good for your neighbor. [...] So that's what a loving person worries about -- "Is what I'm trying to do really good for this person?" -- rather than worrying about whether you're doing it out of some selfish motivation.

Good News Quote #26

From Chapter Five, Why You Don't Have to Be Sure You Have the Right Motivations: Or, How Love Seeks the Good.

I learned about this from a student who stayed after class one day, early in the semester, to get my advice about whether to drop my course. She was in a quandary because she was worried that her motivations were wrong. [...] Was it all about grades? Was she avoiding a good course just because of a selfish fear that it might hurt her grade point average?


What made it all the more complicated for her is that she really needed to drop the course in order to graduate on time, which provided the perfect excuse for her to chicken out of it. [...] So now she really had a problem: it looked like reality was reinforcing her bad motivations!


Wouldn't it be nice, I wondered, if this poor student could just make her decision based on reality instead of her motivations? It took me a while, asking questions and listening, before it dawned on me that this is exactly what she needed to do.

Good News Quote #25

From Chapter Four, Why You Don't Have to "Find God's Will for Your Life": Or, How Faith Seeks Wisdom.

For our thinking is to be mature, which is to say grown-up and adult or, in Jesus' vivid words, "wise as serpents." We are not allowed to suppose that the dove of innocence is incompatible with the serpent of wisdom.


Such language -- wise as serpents! As usual, our Lord teaches with a boldness of authority that is enough to get people rattled. We might ask, "You mean, like the serpent in the garden who god Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?" Yes, that serpent. Jesus knows how to choose his metaphors. We are to be wiser than that serpent and all his ilk, staying away from his shortcut to the knowledge of what is good and bad.


The name of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Hebrew contains the same pairing of words as Solomon's prayer asking for a heart that discerns between good and bad. Solomon is praying for what the serpent was offering, but he's not accepting the serpent's shortcut. He doesn't believe in magic potions or recipes or fruit that could make him wise with one bite. He wants the real thing, which means it must be his own heart that is shaped in wisdom by the Spirit of the Lord; he's going to have to learn. That's why the book of proverbs of Solomon begins with a scene of instruction and the commandments to seek wisdom and understanding. There is no shortcut to learning wisdom, no bypassing the hard work of learning to make good decisions, because the aim is to acquire a heart of wisdom -- and such a heart must be formed by a wisdom that is truly its own.

Good News Quote #24

From Chapter Four, Why You Don't Have to "Find God's Will for Your Life": Or, How Faith Seeks Wisdom.

Take for example the most far-reaching spiritual investment that most of us ever make: "Should I marry this person?" It's a huge question for young people to face, and they need some help from those of us who've already faced it. We shouldn't misdirect them by getting them asking the wrong questions. The worst question of all is: "Is this the one?" The assumption behind this question is that God has a particular person in store for you to marry: that's his will for your life, and you need to find out who's the one he has in mind. This way of thinking makes your most fundamental investment -- the person in which you invest your whole self for the rest of your life -- a guessing game about what's in the mind of God.


But suppose God wants you to seek wisdom, like a steward learning to make good investments. What sorts of questions should you be asking then? Here's what I tell my students: you ask a series of questions about what's good. You ask, first of all, "Is this a good person?" For you should marry a person of Christian virtue: kind, faithful, and generous of spirit. Then there's a second question to ask, more specific: "Is this person good for me?" That is to say, you should marry someone who resonates with you in particular. [...]


There are many good people out there with whom you can make a good marriage, and a good marriage with a good person is good enough. Indeed, it is more than good enough; it is one of the greatest blessings on God's green earth.

Good News Quote #23

From Chapter Four, Why You Don't Have to "Find God's Will for Your Life": Or, How Faith Seeks Wisdom.

If you're looking for a recipe, formula, or method for making decisions, then you're looking for the wrong thing. There is no recipe. There is only wisdom, the heart's intelligent skill of discerning good decisions from bad ones. This is a skill, not a method -- not a formula you can apply to particular situations simply by following the rules, but a habit of the heart you have to develop through long experience of your own, which includes making mistakes from time to time. The concept of wisdom is what every method for "finding God's will" leaves out of the decision-making process. It's left out precisely because the project of "finding God's will" is an attempt to guarantee you won't make a mistake. All such guarantees are falsehoods, attempts to short-circuit the hard work of acquiring wisdom.

Good News Quote #22

From Chapter Four, Why You Don't Have to "Find God's Will for Your Life": Or, How Faith Seeks Wisdom.

The providence of God is called his "hidden will" for good reason. Like the future itself, God's will for our future contains great depths that we can't see very far into. [...]

There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes a prophet will tell God's people what God has in store for them. But even then there is much that remains hidden in God's will for their future. This is illustrated in one of the most famous passages about the will of God in the Bible. It's where the prophet Jeremiah speaks words of comfort to the exiled people of Israel in the name of the Lord their God: "I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope" (Jer. 29:11). God knows these plans, but Israel doesn't. He does not in fact reveal much about them. Through the prophet, he tells them that they will remain in captivity for seventy years, and then he will bring them back to their own land. But that's about all. He doesn't reveal the details. The point is clear: God knows his plans -- we don't.

Good News Quote #21

From Chapter Four, Why You Don't Have to "Find God's Will for Your Life": Or, How Faith Seeks Wisdom.

The way my students talk about it, God's will is out there waiting to be found, like the one person they're convinced God has for them to marry. But how do you know where to look? And how do you know when you've really found it? (Once again, the "how do you know?" questions, with their accompanying anxieties, are a sign that something's gone wrong). What happens if you mistake the will of God and don't marry "the one" that God has for you? (Do you wonder why evangelical Christians have as high a divorce rate as everyone else?) Or what happens if you only get God's "second best" will for your life? (Do you wonder why "disappointment with God" is such a trend among evangelicals?) A whole boatload of anxieties is tied up with this notion of "finding God's will."

Good News Quote #20

From Chapter Three, Why You Don't Have to "Let God Take Control": Or, How Obedience Is for Responsible Adults.

Sometimes the logical contradictions lead to contortions that really are very hard to ignore. Take for example another thing you're supposed to say when you're playing this game. Whenever you aim to do some good deed, you have to try not to do it "in your own strength." So it seems there is this special way of doing things -- not using your own strength -- and that's what Christians are supposed to do. So how do you do it? My students have tried to explain it by saying, "you have to do it... through God." That captures the weirdness of the game about as well as possible. You're actually doing it all, but you're doing it through God. Which seems to mean: you're doing it by making God do it -- that's how you have to do it -- and you do that not by doing it, but by "letting" God do it. Get it?


I don't.

Good News Quote #19

From Chapter Three, Why You Don't Have to "Let God Take Control": Or, How Obedience Is for Responsible Adults.

We're supposed to give control to God, which mean we're the ones who are in control to start with. That means it's ultimately up to us -- God has no control unless we give it to him. It's often put this way: God can't work in your life unless you let him. This is an astonishing piece of fantasy. Where in the Bible or anywhere else in God's creation did people get the idea that God was so helpless? If God can't do anything unless we let him, then God is not really God, and indeed he is less real than any person we know. After all, you don't have to "let" real people work in your life. They have an effect on you whether you like it or not, precisely because they're real. Of course, working with them (cooperating or obeying) is different from working against them (fighting or rebelling). But they have an effect on your life one way or another, because real people do stuff that affects you whether you let them or not.

Good News Quote #18

From Chapter Three, Why You Don't Have to "Let God Take Control": Or, How Obedience Is for Responsible Adults.

Because we are persons, we are not controlled but commanded. And of course the nature of the command is important too. The lord gives his stewards talents and some general instructions about doing business (see Luke 19:13) but he does not tell them what decisions to make. That's their responsibility. That's what their own heart, will, and intelligence are for: not to be yielded or surrendered, but to be used as best they can.


And that means they'll have to learn. For they are not God and they will make mistakes. Nothing in the lord's instructions suggests that his servants are supposed to be infallible. They will probably make some bad investments from time to time. But if they keep at it, practicing the art of investment (meaning, of course, how to invest their talents in the growth of the Lord's kingdom) and learning from their mistakes, then they will grow in understanding and wisdom, and they'll do well enough.

Good News Quote #17

From Chapter Three, Why You Don't Have to "Let God Take Control": Or, How Obedience Is for Responsible Adults.

To do the good works that God has commanded us to do is obedience, which is the heart of traditional Christian morality. To see the difference between this Christian obedience and the very untraditional notion of "letting God take control," we can look at our Lord's parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14-30). [...]


The first thing to notice here is who's giving control to whom. The servants do not give control to the master, but the other way round. He has put a certain number of talents in their control, and they're the ones who have to do something with what's now under their control. So they're in no position to just "let the lord take control." That would be getting things completely backward! Just imagine how the master would respond if any of his servants tried to give control of the talents back to him, saying, "I'll let you do it all, Lord. I give control to you. I surrender all -- I yield it all to you!" That's not a way to honor him: it's disobedience, an out-and-out refusal of the work he has given them to do. What will the lord do with such foolish servants?

Good News Quote #16

From Chapter Three, Why You Don't Have to "Let God Take Control": Or, How Obedience Is for Responsible Adults.

The misunderstanding on which much of the new evangelical theology is based is the idea that when God is working in you, then you're not working. It's as if his working replaces yours, so you're not doing anything -- you're just letting God do it. But that doesn't really work, because then you have to make sure that you're really letting God do it -- and so you get all anxious about whether you're really doing that -- and "letting God" becomes one more thing you have to do on top of everything else -- and it's the worst of all because it's so inward and psychological and hard to see -- and you have to wonder: how do you know if you're really letting God do it -- or are you still just trying to do it in your own strength? As usual, the obsession with "how do you know?" questions is a sign that something's wrong -- there's a false presupposition here. The truth is that you don't have to know whether you're really letting God do it, because in fact you're always the one who's doing it. The inner acts of your heart are always your own, even when they're a result of God working in you. That's the both/and. The false presupposition is that it's an either/or proposition: either you're doing it or God is, so if you're at work, God isn't.

Good News Quote #15

From Chapter Two, Why You Don't Have to Believe Your Intuitions Are the Holy Spirit: Or, How the Spirit Shapes Our Hearts.

But then -- we might want to ask -- how do we know the Spirit is working within us at all? Like many "how do you know?" questions, this turns out to be a very modern obsession, which often results in our searching our own hearts instead of searching the Scriptures. The biblical answer to questions about how we know God keeps coming back to God's word and especially his promise. There is a promise of the Holy Spirit in the Scriptures (Gal. 3:14; see also Acts 2:38). If we think that's not good enough, then we'll end up having to look to ourselves for an answer. So the more anxious we are, the less we trust God's word, and the more likely we are to try looking into our own hearts to find the Holy Spirit.


But honestly, God's word is good enough. It is hard for us sinners to trust it -- we would much rather see things for ourselves than trust what God has to say, even about himself -- but trusting God's word is what faith does, and faith is how we know who God really is.

Good News Quote #14

From Chapter Two, Why You Don't Have to Believe Your Intuitions Are the Holy Spirit: Or, How the Spirit Shapes Our Hearts.

So the fruit of the Holy Spirit is a sanctified heart. And the intuitions of a sanctified heart are well worth listening to. To listen to the sanctified heart -- which normally means hearing what other Christians have to say -- is to benefit from the fruit of the Spirit in them. It is not to hear the Spirit's voice directly -- for again, the voices belong to human beings, even when what they are saying, teaching, or preaching is the word of God. But it is to hear the fruit of the Spirit's work, growing from the freedom of a heart shaped by Christian virtues.


The connection between the intuitions and the sanctified heart is essential. Intuitions coming from a heart that has not been formed in Christian virtue are not spiritual -- not in the biblical sense, which is always tied to the Holy Spirit and therefore to the holiness of Christian virtues. And that leads us to one of the deepest errors of the new evangelical theology. It teaches people to identify their intuitions as the Spirit speaking, without teaching them the virtues that are the real fruit of the Spirit working within. It tries to find the voice of God in the intuitions of the unsanctified heart.

Good News Quote #13

From Chapter Two, Why You Don't Have to Believe Your Intuitions Are the Holy Spirit: Or, How the Spirit Shapes Our Hearts.

Take kindness, for example. A kind person looks at the world differently than a cruel or indifferent person. A kind person sees people differently -- she will notice when you are hurting, for instance, even when others don't. So kindness is a form of perception in addition to everything else: a form of feeling, a readiness to be moved to compassion, and a willingness to do what needs to be done. It's all part of the same package, the same shape of the heart. Like all virtues, kindness is a habit of perception, feeling, thinking and action, all rolled into one.


And with other intelligent habits, the perceptions of a kind heart may outrun our ability to explain them. A kind-hearted person may see that you're hurting, for example, without knowing why. She'll notice things about you without knowing exactly what it is she's noticing -- she "just knows" there's something wrong, something that's eating at you, even though she doesn't know how she knows it. That's why her kindness can be so surprising -- to both of you! She sees what's going on with you, maybe before you do, and suddenly you're having this heart-to-heart talk that you've needed for a long time, without even knowing you needed it.

Good News Quote #12

From Chapter Two, Why You Don't Have to Believe Your Intuitions Are the Holy Spirit: Or, How the Spirit Shapes Our Hearts.


Explaining things is its own kind of skill -- mainly a skill of putting things into words. [...] That's why the feeling that "I can't explain it" is not a sign that it's God working in our hearts. Most of the time what that feeling really means is: "I don't have the vocabulary I need to say this right" or "I'm not good at talking about this kind of thing." It's not mysterious. It's just the situation of someone who hasn't learned how to be very articulate about his perceptions. That's how it often goes with the habits of the heart. We learn the skills first, then we learn how to talk about them. And even when we do know how to explain them, having the intuition is very different from explaining it. The explanation comes second, if it's needed at all.

Good News Quote #11

From Chapter Two, Why You Don't Have to Believe Your Intuitions Are the Holy Spirit: Or, How the Spirit Shapes Our Hearts.

Everybody has intuitions: you don't have to be a Christian, you don't even have to be a good person. You can intuitively come up with a brilliant plan to cheat somebody -- on the spur of the moment, without thinking it all out, without knowing where the idea came from. And you can "just know" the right thing to say to really hurt someone's feelings. The words come out spontaneously: you don't have to think about it but there they are, tumbling out of your mouth before you know it and aimed straight at the other person's heart. Anyone who's had much experience quarreling with family members has had a few intuitions like that. And they're obviously not God's doing. I think that sort of experience tells us that intuitions, whether for good or for evil, are part of the ordinary equipment of the human heart.

Good News Quote #10

From Chapter One, Why You Don't Have to Hear God's Voice in Your Heart: Or, How God Really Speaks Today.

Imagine what it was like hearing God's word in Old Testament times. You didn't go listening to your own heart; you listened to the words of the prophets. For the Spirit of the Lord is the Spirit who speaks through the prophets. "Thus says the Lord!" the prophet would cry aloud, and what you heard next was God's word given to the people Israel. Things have not changed that much since then. The word of God still comes out of human mouths and resounds in the ears and hearts of his people. That's where you go to hear God -- you dwell in the community of his people, because that is where his word is. [...] God speaks to us like any real person, as someone outside our own hearts whom we love.

Good News Quote #9

From Chapter One, Why You Don't Have to Hear God's Voice in Your Heart: Or, How God Really Speaks Today.

This leads to the great irony of consumerist spirituality. The practice of inward listening is not an escape from external forces like mass media, social engineering, electronic technology, and statistics. On the contrary, it's promoted and supported by the marketing techniques of consumerist churches. There's an important lesson here. For good or ill, the heart is always shaped by outside forces -- by the gospel of Christ, by the influence of good friends, by bad company that corrupts good morals (1 Cor. 15:33), or by the forces of consumerism that train us to desire what others want us to desire. What really matters, of course, is which of the voices outside us we're listening to. And the problem is that listening to inner voices, without noticing how forces outside us are acting on us, means being subject to manipulation by those outside forces without knowing what's happening to us.

Good News Quote #8

From Chapter One, Why You Don't Have to Hear God's Voice in Your Heart: Or, How God Really Speaks Today.

One of the most important things to know about the voices of our hearts is that, like our hearts themselves, they are formed to a large degree by what comes from outside them. [...] And in the more consumerist side of American evangelicalism, there are all sorts of voices that also aim to manipulate you and tell you what God is saying in your heart. It's not all that different from the manipulative boyfriend. You maybe have heard more than one fundraising speech or stewardship sermon in which the speaker says something like this: "Just close your eyes and hear what God is saying your heart, and listen to what he's telling you to give. Maybe it's a little. But maybe it's a lot more than you thought. I'm not telling you how much to give. I'm just saying, listen to what God tells you. What is his Spirit saying in your heart today? What does he want you to give?"

Good News Quote #7

From Chapter One, Why You Don't Have to Hear God's Voice in Your Heart: Or, How God Really Speaks Today.

As a part of responsible thinking, it's also important for people to listen to their own feelings. Like thoughts, feelings are not always right, but they still often tell us something we need to hear. Labeling some of the feelings "God" or the voice of the Spirit gives young people an excuse to listen to them, which is something they really need sometimes. Unfortunately it also short-circuits the process of growing up. It reinforces their sense that their feelings are not really worth listening to -- as if they don't really have a right to pay attention to their feelings unless their feelings come directly from God. And this in turn makes it hard for a young woman to learn, for instance, that she has a right to stand up to her boyfriend when he's doing things that make her feel wrong, unsafe, or boxed in. And that's the sad thing. She doesn't believe that it's okay for her to be perceptive about her situation, that it's okay to realize that her boyfriend is bad for her and to do something about it -- for instance, to defend her integrity and well-being (and maybe her chastity) by telling him "No."

Good News Quote #6

From Chapter One, Why You Don't Have to Hear God's Voice in Your Heart: Or, How God Really Speaks Today.

The first time I realized how seriously anxious the new evangelical theology can make people, I was reading a student's paper [about revelation] [...] The problem with revelation, my student wrote, was that you can never really tell if it's the voice of God. For how do you know which voice you're hearing is really God's voice? And if you can't tell it's God's voice, then how can God reveal anything? I realized pretty soon that she wasn't talking about the word of God in holy Scripture. That's just not what the term "revelation" meant for her. It meant a voice she was supposed to listen for in her own heart. And her anguish was: how can you tell whether you're listening to the right voice? How can you be sure you're not mistaking your own voice for God's voice? How do you know?

Good News Quote #5

From the Introduction: Why Trying to Be Christian Makes Us Anxious.

We're all in this together, which means part of our job is to keep reminding each other about the Beloved, the Bridegroom who is ours, who is also the glorious one whose coming we await. Which is another way of saying: it's our job to keep preaching the gospel of Christ to one another. We don't stop needing to hear this good news just because we've become Christians. This good word, the gospel of Christ, is the bread of life that feeds our souls, because it is the way we keep receiving Jesus Christ every day. It is our daily bread, so we need to keep hearing it and feeding on it in our hearts by faith.

Good News Quote #4

From the Introduction: Why Trying to Be Christian Makes Us Anxious.

To everyone who reads this book, I say: don't believe any of this just because I'm saying it. Please do think critically -- and that includes thinking critically about what I say in this book. Above all, search the Scriptures to see if these things are so, like the Jews and Gentiles who first heard the gospel in Berea (Acts 17:11). Bad theology cannot stand up against the Scriptures, and does not fare well under the gaze of critical thinking either. But truth is different: if what you believe is true, it can stand up to critical thinking and Scripture will confirm it. So if you seriously believe your faith is true, you don't need to be afraid to think critically.

Good News Quote #3

From the Introduction: Why Trying to Be Christian Makes Us Anxious.

Pastors and other Christian leaders have been taught to use these techniques and get you to use them too. They do this with good intentions, thinking that this kind of "practical" and "relevant" teaching will transform you and change your life -- precisely the kind of thing that consumerist religion always promises to do. Just look at the books on the self-help shelf in any bookstore: they all say they'll change your life! And the same thing with the New Age spirituality shelf, and the Christian spirituality shelf too. They're all competing in the same market.

Good News Quote #2

From the Introduction: Why Trying to Be Christian Makes Us Anxious.


The New Evangelical Theology
Every era in the history of Christianity has its own dangers and failures, which include its own particular ways of distorting God's word. This book is about the distortions of our time, as found in a new theology that has more or less taken over American evangelicalism in recent years. [...]


They are the words of what you might call a "working theology," which is not an academic theory but a basis for preaching and discipleship, prayer and evangelism and outreach. It's a theology that tells people how to live. It gives people practical ideas and techniques they're supposed to use to be more spiritual.

Good News Quote #1

From the Introduction: Why Trying to Be Christian Makes Us Anxious

"Do not be anxious about anything," says Scripture (Phil. 4:6). The problem is: this makes us anxious! We have enough things to be anxious about already in life, and now we have to worry in addition about how to manage not to be anxious about any of it. And so the way we respond to this word from God, which is clearly meant to comfort us, actually adds a whole extra dimension to our burdens.

Introducing: Good News for Anxious Christians

Hello to everyone who still reads this blog!

First, I want to apologize for delaying the posting of the last few The Four Loves quotes. They are up according to the date they should have been posted on, but didn't actually make it up until my Spring Break.

For the next term, I'll be recounting the single book that has most changed my views during my college years, one that I've already recommended to many Christians, particularly those who have been Christians for a while. There are some misstatements that seep into our thinking from being in the church a while that just aren't true, and this book is both a counter to that and a reminder to all of us what the real gospel is. The book is Good News for Anxious Christians: 10 Practical Things You Don't Have to Do by Philip Cary (2010).

There are ten chapters, and I'll be sharing my favorite quotes from each chapter, one per week. Feel free to read along with the book this term, or just to enjoy these choice snippets. I'll start posting tomorrow.

The Four Loves Quote #51

From Chapter Five, Charity.

We are, however, much helped in this necessary work by that very feature of our experience at which we most repine. The invitation to turn our natural loves into Charity is never lacking. [...] In everyone, and of course in ourselves, there is that which requires forbearance, tolerance, forgiveness. The necessity of practicing these virtues first sets us, forces us, upon the attempt to turn -- more strictly, to let God turn -- our love into Charity. These frets and rubs are beneficial. It may even be that where there are fewest of them the conversion of natural love is most difficult. When they are plentiful the necessity of rising above it is obvious. To rise above it when it is fully satisfied and as little impeded as earthly conditions allow -- to see that we must rise when all seems so well already -- this may require a subtler conversion and a more delicate insight. In this way also it may be hard for "the rich" to enter the Kingdom.