Blog - Page 102 of 318 - John H Armstrong

Naked Spirituality: A Life with God in 12 Simple Steps

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:17:12-05:00September 23rd, 2011|Categories: Books, Emergent Church, Spirituality|

I have read about half of Brian McLaren’s published books. Some have moved me and some have left me puzzled and have not proven entirely helpful. Brian is an eloquent man, a good thinker and a serious Christian. My personal relationship with Brian has included both private and public conversations. He has always proven to be vulnerable, gentle and receptive.

When Brian’s well-known book, Generous Orthodoxy, was published I read it with great interest. I even required a grad class of mine to read it as one of our texts. There is much in it to like. There is some in it to question. I think Brian intends this, at least so far as I understand both his thinking and his writing style. Eventually, I decided to devote a serious group of review articles to this book that were published in our quarterly journals. (The journal is no longer published, sadly. It suffered the fate of most print journals during the last five years or so. If you […]

Overregulation Cuts Across Both Parties: The Real Danger of Xenophobia

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:17:12-05:00September 22nd, 2011|Categories: America and Americanism, Current Affairs, Immigration, Politics|

Republicans routinely criticize the Obama administration for overregulation. I believe this criticism is just in many instances. It is interesting to see this administration back away from a whole host of regulations in the present recession because they realize (pragmatically) they cannot defend these and be re-elected in this bad economy.

But the Republicans are sometimes guilty of the same problem, just in different ways. Consider the immigration issue. Recently the House Republicans have made noise about trying to counter the costs of their own version of restrictive policies. The House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith has routinely fought what he calls “cheap foreign labor.” One of Smith’s pet political projects is to harass American business into becoming the line of defense in keeping immigration laws in force. The Texas congressman recently introduced what is called the Legal Workforce Act, a bill that would require employees to run the names and Social Security numbers of all new hires through E-Verify, a federal database. Employees can use E-Verify voluntarily at […]

Why We Do Evangelism: What Does Hell Have to Do with It?

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:17:13-05:00September 21st, 2011|Categories: Evangelism, Theology|

In the recent debates about hell, stirred by the book Love Wins and the various blogs, articles and books now written in response to Rob Bell, I have heard many rather ridiculous arguments and statements on every side of this debate. At some point I may say more but there is one argument I want to take up today that I’ve heard all my life and find completely lacking in biblical evidence.

The argument goes like this—if people are lost eternally without consciously knowing and hearing about Jesus then if we remove this doctrinal point, namely that they must “hear” or they will burn in hell forever, we destroy the/a primary motive for our doing evangelism. My point here is not to open Pandora’s Box about the destiny of the un-evangelized but rather to ask a simple question: “Is this motive about saving people from hell who have not heard really a necessary and biblically given motive for evangelism?” So far as I can tell it is not.

To […]

Friday Night Lights Gets Much Deserved Recognition

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:17:13-05:00September 20th, 2011|Categories: Culture, Film|

Several friends pointed out to me on Monday that my favorite television series, Friday Night Lights, was one of the big surprises at the Emmy Awards ceremony Sunday evening. Not only did Friday Night Lights win for best program for its final season (in its five-year run) but it also won for best dramatic actor, Kyle Chandler who was the brilliant Coach Taylor, and for the best drama writing, Jason Katims, who was the first executive producer and head writer.

Jason Katims gave a speech described by a media source as “lovely [and] graceful” and ended it with the most famous line of the whole series: "Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose." This memorable line, for those of you who have yet to see this series, is Coach Taylor’s great line used repeatedly at moments of intense drama just before his team took the field to play an important football game! Katims won his award for writing the show's finale, titled: “Always.” Personally, I believe this was the […]

The Power of the Word

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:17:13-05:00September 19th, 2011|Categories: Missional-Ecumenism, Roman Catholicism, Scripture, Spirituality, The Church|

Several weeks ago I wrote a blog about the authority of Scripture and how the church has disagreed about the role that tradition and the Catholic Magisterium have in forming the doctrine of the church. I made particular reference to the teaching of the Catholic Magisterium and they differed with the magisterial Protestant Reformers. The main reason I wrote that particular piece was to show one of the reasons why I was not a Catholic. Another reason I wrote was to show that one could hold to the final authority of Scripture without holding to the typically fundamentalist views of the Bible many conservative Catholic apologists accuse Protestants of holding to even when they clearly deny these views. My blog was not meant to be a polemic against Catholics, or even Catholicism, even though I am not persuaded by the Catholic argument at all. It was meant to be more of a confession about my own journey and understanding than anything else. It was a type of statement that very simply stated why I remain where I am in terms of the church. Most readers understood […]

Brothers and Sisters Pray for Me

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:17:13-05:00September 18th, 2011|Categories: ACT 3, Personal|

I write today, on the Lord’s Day of September 18, 2011, asking you to pray for me personally. Unashamedly I request your intercession in your corporate worship today and in your private intercession as well. Why?

1. I am a simple servant of the living God, like you, and thus I need the prayers of all God’s people. Revelation 5:6-8 says:

Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing at the center of the throne, encircled by the four living creatures and the elders. The Lamb had seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. He went and took the scroll from the right hand of him who sat on the throne. And when he had taken it, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each one had a harp and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of God’s people.

The metaphor used here is of a golden bowl full of incense offered to The Lamb on the throne—Jesus. These bowls are […]

Farewell: A Spy Movie Worth Seeing

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:17:13-05:00September 17th, 2011|Categories: Film|

I discovered the film Farewell (2009) this past week. I checked it out of the public library’s new movie section and took it home to enjoy an evening with what struck me as a potentially good spy movie. It blew me away. It proved to be one terrific thriller and it is based on a fantastically true story. (There are a few small errors in the film that are out of place because of context, such as music and the reference to artists of this music and their actual time in history.) But the story itself is based upon one of the greatest spy plots of all time! It is entirely factual. Believe me and do yourself a favor and watch Farewell. Roger Ebert is right in giving Farewell four-stars.

In 1981, at the height of the Cold War, an ordinary French engineer based in Moscow met with KGB agent Colonel Grigoriev (real name – Vladimir Vetrov). Grigoriev had become disenchanted with what […]

We Must “Put Butts in the Seats”

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:17:13-05:00September 16th, 2011|Categories: Evangelism, Missional Church|

My son, an advocate and practitioner of missional-ecumenism, had a conversation with a staff member of a large church recently. As he appealed to this person to see the priority of reaching into the public schools to make disciples of Jesus he met resistance. This church, like so many other large churches, invests a lot of money and effort in tutoring and mentoring in the school system but without bringing the good news to those that they tutor and teach. Somehow they seem to separate their good works shown through tutoring from the actual sharing of the good news in their words and actions. This should not be an either/or choice but a both/and response. The fact is that Christians and churches can do both in public schools, as I’ve said here before. Matt’s Crossroads Kids Clubs mission demonstrates this clearly.

As Matt spoke to this person they said to him, “With our very large facility and campus our goal has to be to put butts in all our seats.” That says it very well. The building was built because of the mission but […]

Conversations with Theologians

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:17:13-05:00September 15th, 2011|Categories: Biblical Theology, The Trinity, Theology|

More than twenty years ago an evangelical professor of theology at Hillsdale College, Dr. Michael Bauman (photo), decided to interview some of Europe’s leading theologians. He selected Anglican, Reformed, Lutheran, Orthodox and Catholic thinkers. He sought out eleven people because he thought they had in them the unmistakable marks of having lived a truly theological existence. The theologians included Hendrikus Berkhof, Alister McGrath, Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Bishop Kallistos Ware, Sister Benedicta Ward, Thomas Torrance, Gareth Moore, John Macquarrie, Bishop Graham Leonard and Dorothee Sölle.

This excellent small book, now available only from out-of-print sources, was titled Roundtable: Conversations with European Theologians. As I was recently going through my library to purge several thousand books I re-discovered this little book of only 142-pages. I found it so immensely interesting that I decided not to part with it quite yet.

Michael Bauman suggests that evangelicals are often extremely insular when it comes to doing theology. We are far more likely to read authors that we already know and agree […]

Paul: Converted or Called?

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:17:16-05:00September 14th, 2011|Categories: Biblical Theology|

Scholars debate the story of Paul’s conversion, or call, and some even question the three accounts in the Book of Acts and how they sync with the personal references in the epistles. The simple fact is clear to all – Paul, or Saul as he was initially known, was a persecutor of the church and a rigorously faithful Jew who rejected the idea that Jesus was Israel’s messiah. In Acts 9:1-31 we have an account by Luke of Paul's conversion story and in 22:6-21 and 26: 12-20 we have speeches of Paul about how he came to faith in Jesus as messiah. The final account speaks of a conversion type of experience. Is this the primary way we should think of Paul’s account of his great change?

This is what we know: Saul was a ferocious antagonist of the early Jesus followers in Jerusalem. He obtained authority to travel to Damascus to arrest the followers of Jesus. While on the road to Damascus he experienced a blinding light […]