Jordan Peterson, and our comfortable evangelical ghettos

There's an interesting article on Jordan Peterson here.

I posted this comment:

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Evangelical anti-intellectualism and navel-gazing has really hurt us. We have a dearth of Christian public intellectuals. Too many with these gifts have gone ‘in-house’, doing the tour of the Christian conference circuit, where they are lauded and beloved, but not challenged. Or disappeared into the world of academic theology where they debate other academics, but have little impact beyond that sphere – hoping that eventually their ideas will tricked down into the outer world through a long chain of academics and students and eventually people taught by those students. And/or they churn out endless books repeating the same thing, with only very minor modifications, as 20 other people published in the last 5 years. Who is the last major Christian intellectual in the public square who had a platform that wasn’t largely preaching to the choir? C S Lewis?

There are non-Christians, of various sorts, like Petersen, Ben Shapiro, and then Christians with weak theology like Peter Hitchens, who have platforms out in the public square, and who are willing to bring serious intellectual analysis to things. But we evangelicals seem to have built so much comfortable infrastructure, our own private world, our safe haven, that we’re very content to live in it, and talk to ourselves, instead of interacting with the one that Jesus told us to “Go” out into. (Hey, look! A draw for a free Spurgeon bobblehead!).

The article points out, correctly, that we can find all the best bits of Peterson, in books. But the realities of physical human existence and community require more than that. Truth must be embodied. Peterson is very attractive, because he’s not just writing books and throwing them over the fence. I’d say that he’s actually exposing some of our rot. We can see what’s possible – and what we’ve failed to do.

42% of the world's souls are living in unreached people groups

42% of the world's souls are living in unreached people groups.

Jesus said "Go" and "surely I am with you until the end of the age".

"Who will go for us?"

Psalter21

There's a lot of high-quality material here; not 'only' Psalms, but songs, and catechetical songs:

http://www.psalter21.com

50 shades of glamourising abusive relationships

https://protectyoungminds.org/2018/02/06/fifty-shades-abuse-5-lies-to-recognize/

Modern "be like men" feminism is redundant

A comment I just posted on someone else's blog...

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The observation that this post makes, is of wide and general application. When 'feminism' persuades women to behave like men (which is a really weird set of behaviours to label as 'feminism' rather than 'masculinism'), it persuades women to make themselves redundant.

Men already exist.

What women have, that men don't, is femininity. 'Feminism' treats femininity as worthless or pointless. But it is itself the thing that is worthless/pointless. No sane person who appreciates the real virtues of a godly woman would trade them for something else.

Do you agree with Ofsted that evangelical Christianity is dangerous, anti-British extremism?

Do you agree with Ofsted that evangelical Christianity is dangerous, anti-British extremism?

And if not, are you going to do anything about it?

In a speech reported in The Times today, the head of Ofsted used the Christian Institute - which defends nothing more than mainstream evangelical Christianity - as an example of dangerous extremism whose ideas need to be explicitly and deliberately combated by school-teachers.

That Ofsted thinks and operates like this - quite openly, quite explicitly - is is not really news. The aggressive promotion of a particularly intolerant brand of secularism to all schoolchildren under its remit has been normal for Ofsted for several years. They don't expect to be contradicted if they say, and operate, in accordance with the idea that mainstream evangelical Christianity is extreme and dangerous, and that combating it is a child welfare issue.

But it is, unfortunately, apparently still news - or too hard to believe - for large swathes of evangelical Christians and churches in the UK. We are, by and large, quite happy to keep having our children educated under a regime run along these lines, in the naive and wrong beliefs that a) they probably don't mean it, and b) even if they do mean it, it doesn't make a difference to what happens at school, and c) even if it does influence them, then we can undo that fairly easily.

I'm convinced that everybody who claims to believe these things really does. I'm sure there's a large element of fear involved. If we admit that it's really the case, that has implications. It'll involve blood, sweat, and tears - not least in dealing with fellow Christians who disagree with us. And who wants that?

Well, ultimately, we should want it - because we want to please Jesus, and that means, not allowing our children to be indoctrinated into intolerant, aggressive secularism 6-7 hours a day, 5 days a week. We have to choose, and quickly, whilst the window of opportunity is still open for us to do so.