Couldn't Help Noticing

How To Reach Post-Everythings

Tim Keller asked the following question to his denomination:

How do we, as a denomination, do renewal and outreach in the emerging post-everything United States culture? ‘Post-everything’ people are those who are now in their teens and twenties—and they are our future.

In this brief article, Keller lays out six issues at stake in engaging this group and how Reformed theology offers the resources to address these issues:

Issue: Post-everythings like narrative and story

Resource: Geerhardus Vos:

If you know how to do Christ-centered preaching, then you turn every single sermon into a kind of story. The plot of the human dilemma thickens, and the hero that comes to the rescue is Jesus. Christ-centered preaching converts doctrinal lectures or little how-to talks into true sermons. Post-everythings who are interested in narrative are reached by such preaching that is deeply Reformed.

Issue: Post-everythings are experientially oriented

Resource: Jonathon Edwards:

Edwards taught that a sermon should not only make truth clear, but also should make truth real. In Edwards we find ways to preach that are Reformed, committed to objective truth and, at the same time, deeply experiential.

Issue: Post-everythings are set against moralism and self-righteousness

Resource: Martin Luther:

Traditional gospel presentations assume that the people want to be ‘good.’ But our kids' generation wants to be ‘free.’ Luther said, ‘Look, you want to be free? Good. It's good to be free. But you're not. You are living for something and, whatever that something is, it enslaves you.’ If a person lives for reputation, then he is a slave to what people think. If a person lives for achievement, then he will be a workaholic. As did Luther, we should tell such people, ‘You want to be free? Fine. But you're not going to be free unless Jesus is your salvation.’ When post-everythings rejected Christianity they thought moralism and Christianity were the same thing. But we can show post-everythings that the two are not the same, and that freedom really is in Jesus.

Issue: Post-everythings have a concern for social justice

Resource: Hermann Ridderbos:

[Go to] Ridderbos and other Reformed theologians who stress the coming of and the presence of the Kingdom. The Reformed understanding of salvation is not simply that God is rescuing individual souls out of the material world, but rather he is also redeeming all of creation. God is going to bring complete healing and shalom to the material world eventually.

Issue: Post-everythings love art because they love the material world

Resource: Abraham Kuyper

Abraham Kuyper's understanding of Reformed theology enables us to say to post-everythings, ‘Christianity is not just a way for you as an individual to get peace, love and groovy vibes in Heaven. Christianity is a comprehensive worldview. You can be a Christian artist, dancer, manager, or minister and these are all ways of living out the gospel.’ When post-everythings hear that, they get extremely excited. They have never considered that Christianity embraces the whole of life.

Issue: Post-everythings are not swayed by evidential apologetics

Resource: Cornelius Van Til:

If you start to present evidence for the deity of Christ or the proofs of God, post-everything eyes will glaze over. But the presuppositional apologetics of Cornelius Van Til can work with post-everythings. I think Reformed theology provides us with tools for our culture that Josh McDowell's kind of evidential apologetics does not.

Salvation begins

Another book about Genesis, more recent than Kidner or Clines, and every bit as useful for the Bible study leader, is Andrew Reid's Salvation Begins in the "Reading the Bible Today" series. In fact, it is hard to think of a better brief introduction to the whole of Genesis than this one, aimed at the level of an average group leader in a church.

Reid goes easy on maps and technical discussion of Ancient Near Eastern myths (thanks Andrew!), but it's not because he's ignorant of such questions. They are referred to where needed to help give depth to discussions about the most important thing of all: the text of Genesis itself. I have used this commentary, and, bar the Lord's return, will be using it in future.

The Theme of the Pentateuch

The ‘Pentateuch’ is theologian-speak for the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. They are generally associated with Moses, although he can't have written all of them since in Deuteronomy 34 he dies and is buried.

If you are trying to get a feel for where Genesis is heading and, in particular, how it helps set up the framework for the rest of the Old Testament, the Theme of the Pentateuch by David Clines (Sheffield: JSOT Press. 1984 [1978]) is gold. Although written for scholars, it is short (118 pages, excluding footnotes, bibliography and indices) and well worth a read as a starting point for getting into the overall theme of this part of the Bible.

Let me quote chapter four in full:

My proposal is: The theme of the Pentateuch is the partial fulfilment—which implies also the partial non-fulfilment—of the promise to or blessing of the patriarchs. The promise or blessing is both the divine initiative in a world where human initiatives always lead to disaster, and a re-affirmation of the primal divine intentions for man ...

The promise has three elements: posterity, divine-human relationship, and land. The posterity-element of the promise is dominant in Genesis 12-50, the relationship-element in Exodus and Leviticus, and the land-element in Numbers and Deuteronomy. The contrast and similarity of the promises to what precedes the patriarchal history is to be developed in Chapter 7 below, on Genesis 1-11.

Top stuff!

Unfortunately, like so many other specialist Old Testament people, he doesn't mention Jesus anywhere in the book. That's okay for the academics, but a bit of a hole if you believe, with Jesus, “that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled” (Luke 24:44). But Clines gets us off to a good start.

And, lest I put the average reader off, let me say that I think a Sunday school teacher or children's worker who has read and appreciated Graeme Goldsworthy's According to Plan (and read this before you read Clines!) will benefit from Clines' insights.

An illegal abortion?

This report in The Sydney Morning Herald includes the following devastating account of the result of a (probably) illegal abortion of a 23-week old foetus here in New South Wales:

...the jury had to decide if the baby was alive—an issue the medical expert witnesses in the trial could not agree on.

The ambulance officer, John Hando, who pulled the blue-coloured baby out of the toilet bowl initially thought it was dead, but later described seeing the boy take some gasping breaths in hospital and hearing the midwife say “It's alive”.

But some medical experts said it was possible the gasping was a mere reflex—not enough to qualify as a sign of life.

Pediatrician Dr Vanessa Sarkozy also noted an apex beat of the baby's heart. Experts disputed whether this was a muscle reflex or a sign of life.

The baby, which had turned pink in colour by then, was not given resuscitation because doctors believed he had no chance to survive. He did not move.

The story is all the more horrifying when you realize that there is now sufficiently good medical technology available that babies born prematurely at this 23-week stage have some possibility of surviving to live normal and happy lives.

Perhaps surprisingly for some, abortion is still technically illegal in New South Wales. “Technically”, because most people assume that abortion is legal—and under certain vaguely defined loopholes it probably is.

This case, however, is testing the limits of the law in this state, while revealing some of the shocking realities of the abortion industry. CHN readers might pray that people are reminded of the illegality and the immorality of killing little children.

Protestant kangaroos

Good to see a report indicating that the kangaroo population around Canberra is largely of a Protestant persuasion.