As a gardener, I’m notorious for only planting what can be eaten. My family, however, is fond of pear-less pear trees. They are called “ornamental pears.” They have nice white blossoms, but they have been carefully bred not to produce any fruit. Ornamental fruit trees have become quite popular. So have ornamental Christians.

Our culture is poorer for having segregated some useful ideas into a religious ghetto, isolated from society’s mainstream. One such concept is salvation. For most Westerners, the word “salvation” conjures up images of sweating American preachers in tent revivals. But “salvation” is simply the noun form of the verb “to save.” Continue reading “Salvation is a secular concept”

The originator of “Method acting,” Russian theatrical director Constantin Stanislavsky (1863–1938), taught his actors not to ask, “How should I position my eyebrows, hands, and mouth to express this line?” but rather, “If I had a domineering father, an ambitious wife, and coarse underwear, how would I express this line?” Continue reading “The Stanislavsky Method of Biblical Interpretation”

More than anyone else, I guess, I’m concerned for people who seem to have no motivating force in their lives. They remind me of marionettes without a puppeteer. In the hands of a master, nearly every string of a marionette is taut, ready for action, ready for movement. In the bottom of his box, every string of a marionette is slack, not only unmoving but unready to be moved. People who are empowered by the Holy Spirit seem ready to respond to their master’s slightest motion, without the slightest warning.

It’s good to claim the Bible’s promises, but most of them are conditional: either explicitly conditional, (“If we confess our sins” I John 1:9) or implicitly conditional (“and the peace of God… will guard your hearts” Phil. 4:7)

A Bible promise for which we have not met the conditions is not a Bible promise that applies to us. Continue reading “You are not in the Bible.”

Now that my former boss Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom has been sentenced to 25 years in prison, it’s become easier to think of him as a ruthless criminal instead of a Baptist Sunday School teacher. It’s more comforting that way. Continue reading “Safer to separate the sinners from us nice people”

The problem with loudly claiming the Bible as your only guide to faith and practice is that, at the same time, you may be quietly claiming your own intellect as your only guide to the Bible. If you aren’t, what other guide to the Bible do you claim? Can’t think of one? I suspected as much. Continue reading “Worship the Bible and worship yourself”

Originally, about one hundred years ago, some people wanted to be baptized in the Holy Spirit, so they tarried and prayed and repented until they felt themselves immersed with the power of God, and spoke in tongues. Continue reading “A flippant history of the charismatic movement”

My family heard about the gospel of salvation and the authority of the Bible around the same time. Like many evangelicals, we assumed that they always go together. Then I observed that people can be orthodox but lost. And I learned that in previous centuries of American history, almost everybody believed the Bible had authority and that Jesus was the Savior of the world. The Deists believed that too, but didn’t claim to have experienced personal conversion.

A controversy during the Reformation was whether a priest could properly serve the Lord’s Supper if he was living in sin. Continue reading “The perils of leading worship”