Yesterday I said I was getting down to basics as I seek to understand discipleship. On a related note, taking his cue from D. A. Carson's
What is the Gospel, Rob at
Naked Church expounds on Carson's view:
If the gospel is merely assumed while relatively peripheral issues ignite our passion, we will teach a new generation to downplay the gospel and focus on the periphery, be those matters of evangelism, justice, confronting Islam, or what have you.
And then there's the inestimable Mark Lauterbach, whose post,
Of the Making of Many Tangents, is exceptional. Mark writes:
So -- what are tangents? Anything that gets blown up out of proportion compared to its NT emphasis. That includes endless discussion of the nature of the eternal decrees, details of eschatology and the signs of the times, debate and argument about the limited nature of the atonement, and even overemphasis on something like marriage and family to such a degree that we produce family-centered Christians rather than Christ-centered families.
That's it. There's a lot of tangent-taking going on, don't you think? All it takes is an enthusiastic presentation to send whole crowds of Christians off on a wild-goose chase, or so it seems to me. Read all of Mark's post for a spot-on development of this theme.
2 comments:
i agree. it is easy to want to seize upon things that appear to be related to the basic truth, because it might fit in with our own agenda, and go off on our own path. we wander on down our own path, and then are surprised when we run into a dead end.
Well said.
Post a Comment