The Saga cometh to an end

Finally the three year saga cometh to an end... over three years ago I purchase the book, "Don't Waste Your Life," by John Piper. I was a proud owner of the book for about a day, when mysteriously it disappeared, vanished and to appease all you dispensationalist is was Raptured! Hence for the last three plus years I've been wasting my life....But now, just today, not even 10 minutes ago, "it" reappeared in my mailbox! Now off to reading and not wasting my life, and may God redeem and forgive me for the last three years...Thanks Phoebe!

The New calvinist.: From Time.

Original article can be found here.

If you really want to follow the development of conservative Christianity, track its musical hits. In the early 1900s you might have heard "The Old Rugged Cross," a celebration of the atonement. By the 1980s you could have shared the Jesus-is-my-buddy intimacy of "Shine, Jesus, Shine." And today, more and more top songs feature a God who is very big, while we are...well, hark the David Crowder Band: "I am full of earth/ You are heaven's worth/ I am stained with dirt/ Prone to depravity."

Calvinism is back, and not just musically. John Calvin's 16th century reply to medieval Catholicism's buy-your-way-out-of-purgatory excesses is Evangelicalism's latest success story, complete with an utterly sovereign and micromanaging deity, sinful and puny humanity, and the combination's logical consequence, predestination: the belief that before time's dawn, God decided whom he would save (or not), unaffected by any subsequent human action or decision.

Calvinism, cousin to the Reformation's other pillar, Lutheranism, is a bit less dour than its critics claim: it offers a rock-steady deity who orchestrates absolutely everything, including illness (or home foreclosure!), by a logic we may not understand but don't have to second-guess. Our satisfaction — and our purpose — is fulfilled simply by "glorifying" him. In the 1700s, Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards invested Calvinism with a rapturous near mysticism. Yet it was soon overtaken in the U.S. by movements like Methodism that were more impressed with human will. Calvinist-descended liberal bodies like the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) discovered other emphases, while Evangelicalism's loss of appetite for rigid doctrine — and the triumph of that friendly, fuzzy Jesus — seemed to relegate hard-core Reformed preaching (Reformed operates as a loose synonym for Calvinist) to a few crotchety Southern churches.

No more. Neo-Calvinist ministers and authors don't operate quite on a Rick Warren scale. But, notes Ted Olsen, a managing editor at Christianity Today, "everyone knows where the energy and the passion are in the Evangelical world" — with the pioneering new-Calvinist John Piper of Minneapolis, Seattle's pugnacious Mark Driscoll and Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Seminary of the huge Southern Baptist Convention. The Calvinist-flavored ESV Study Bible sold out its first printing, and Reformed blogs like Between Two Worlds are among cyber-Christendom's hottest links.

Like the Calvinists, more moderate Evangelicals are exploring cures for the movement's doctrinal drift, but can't offer the same blanket assurance. "A lot of young people grew up in a culture of brokenness, divorce, drugs or sexual temptation," says Collin Hansen, author of Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist's Journey with the New Calvinists. "They have plenty of friends: what they need is a God." Mohler says, "The moment someone begins to define God's [being or actions] biblically, that person is drawn to conclusions that are traditionally classified as Calvinist." Of course, that presumption of inevitability has drawn accusations of arrogance and divisiveness since Calvin's time. Indeed, some of today's enthusiasts imply that non-Calvinists may actually not be Christians. Skirmishes among the Southern Baptists (who have a competing non-Calvinist camp) and online "flame wars" bode badly.

Calvin's 500th birthday will be this July. It will be interesting to see whether Calvin's latest legacy will be classic Protestant backbiting or whether, during these hard times, more Christians searching for security will submit their wills to the austerely demanding God of their country's infancy.

A Responce to Pyromaniacs blog on "Gifts"

(This is a response to Pyromaniacs blog which can be found here. The topic is "signs and wonders". This was posted as in the response part of their blog)

DJP

Mark Driscoll considers himself to be a charismatic with a seat belt, I would consider my self a continualist in a straight Jacket.

I can't see in the scriptures were the gifts have been done away with.

Does God still heal? Yes.
Does He still Speak? Yes. (I say yes because the bible still speaks) as far as the usual charismatic usage of prophesy I have serious doubts.

Does God still do wonders. Yes.
What's more wonderful then an unregenerate becoming regenerated? which is harder?

I like the word continualist mainly
because it distances one from Charismatics.

One thing is very clear, and that is that signs and wonders mean nothing in and of themselves. Paul tells us in II Thes. 2:9 that the Man of Lawlessness does SaW, but Paul mentions in II Cor. 12:12 that he did SaW. SaW don't necessarily validate the messenger, but it can.
Jesus himself didn't put any trust in them (John 2:24-24). People don't get saved because of signs and wonders. Its by His calling and electing in love.

Hence I usual sound more like a 'Christian' as Frank turk said in jest.

But in times like these I side with John Piper. (thats called name dropping.) And see no reason for the ceasing of the gifts today.

(35.minute mark for the above DG sermon)

The Most Important Paragraph in the Bible

This is a great sermon, one of the best I've ever heard.

Period.


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Let the chips lie where they fall.

What Is the Hypostatic Union? From Desiring God

The term hypostatic union is much easier than it sounds, but the concept is as profound as anything in theology.

The English adjective hypostatic comes from the Greek word hupostasis. The word only appears four times in the New Testament—maybe most memorably in Hebrews 1:3, where Jesus is said to be “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature.” Here the author of Hebrews uses the word in reference to the oneness of God. Both the Father and the Son are of the same “nature.” Jesus is “the exact imprint of his nature.”

However, in early church discussions, as Greek thinkers tried to find agreeable terms with those who spoke in Latin, the word hupostasis came to denote not the sameness in the Godhead (God’s one essence) but the distinctness (the three persons). So it began to be used to refer to something like the English word person.

The Personal Union of Jesus’ Two Natures

So “hypostatic union” may sound fancy in English, but it’s a pretty simple term. Hypostatic means personal. The hypostatic union is the personal union of Jesus’ two natures.

Jesus has two complete natures—one fully human and one fully divine. What the doctrine of the hypostatic union teaches is that these two natures are united in one person in the God-man. Jesus is not two persons. He is one person. The hypostatic union is the joining of the divine and the human in the one person of Jesus.

What Is the Significance?

Why bother with this seemingly fancy term? What good is it to know about this hypostatic union? At the end of the day, the term can go, but the concept behind the term is infinitely precious—and worshipfully mind-stretching.

It is immeasurably sweet—and awe-inspiring—to know that Jesus’ two natures are perfectly united in his one person. Jesus is not divided. He is not two people. He is one person. As the Chalcedonian Creed states, his two natures are without confusion, without change, without division, and without separation. Jesus is one.

This means Jesus is one focal point for our worship. And as Jonathan Edwards preached, in this one-person God-man we find “an admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies.”

Because of this hypostatic, one-person union, Jesus Christ exhibits an unparalleled magnificence. No one person satisfies the complex longings of the human heart like the God-man.

God has made the human heart in such a way that it will never be eternally content with that which is only human. Finitude can’t slake our thirst for the infinite.

And yet, in our finite humanity, we are significantly helped by a point of correspondence with the divine. God was glorious long before he became a man in Jesus. But we are human beings, and unincarnate deity doesn’t connect with us in the same way as the God who became human. The conception of a god who never became man (like Allah) will not satisfy the human soul like the God who did.

One Person, For Us

And beyond just gazing at the spectacular person of Jesus, there is also the amazing gospel-laced revelation that the reason Jesus became the God-man was for us. His fully human nature joined in personal union to his eternally divine nature is permanent proof that Jesus, in perfect harmony with his Father, is undeterrably for us. He has demonstrated his love for us in that while we were still sinners, he took our nature to his one person and died for us.