Zeal For Your House

After almost a year of silence on ZealForYourHouse.com (unless you count a few thousand spam “comments” I’ve had to delete), it’s time to point what readers I may still have (who ARE you, anyway???) at my more active venues…

Internet Noise Floor (Adam’s Personal Blog): http://adamdbradley.wordpress.com/

Neoredemptive Wiki: http://www.neoredemptive.com/wiki/

Neoredemptive is a dream-in-the-works of myself and my friend Travis. It’s entirely, wholly, and in all possible ways a work-in-progress, so read everything you may find there with a dousing of grace and a grain of salt.
I’ve closed comments on all posts here, since they seemed to just be spam magnets. Much of what’s worthwhile here will probably get moved (sooner or later) over to Neoredemptive.

We know that our God is holy, just, faithful, merciful, and loving. But try to wrap your head around this: He is never one at the expense of the other.

When He forgives the vilest of sinners, He does not for an instant cease to be just. When He executes his judgments, He does not for an instant cease to be merciful. When He makes Himself known through the most intimate and immanent instruments of culture, He never for an instant ceases to be Holy and transcendent. As He reigns over all of creation, he never ceases to be Emmanuel. Though He dwelt with us as a man, He never ceased to be God; and though He is now seated at the right hand of the Father, He will never cease to be “Christ, our brother”.

Few things could be more fundamentally damaging to our theology than to break the particular ways that God’s Holiness and perfection express themselves into categories and then prioritize them, one over the other. A god who is loving but not just is not, in fact, loving; a god who is just but unloving is, in fact, unjust. His perfection, His holiness, His wisdom, His understanding, His patience can hold all of these things together; we do Him no favors by saying that He cannot.

We have no interest in engaging in rancorous debates with those who use the bible to back up human-centered and demonic doctrines instead of exploring and submitting to what the Scriptures say. We love a spirited discussion and often have them, whether we agree or not; what we will not do is pretend we agree on first principles when we do not.

Reposted at http://www.neoredemptive.com/wiki/Preaching

One popular (and tired) emerging church talking-point is the death of preaching. It is said that the post-modern ethos of inclusiveness, ecumenism, tolerance, and dialog leaves no legitimate place for preaching.

First, I’m not convinced that this is actually the case. Our media-saturated culture is, by definition, full of preaching. The content found in print, radio, and television are all rife with assumptions, presumptions, and declarations of what we should idealize, idolize, normalize, and marginalize. The blogosphere, despite its hype, less resembles “dialog” than it does a frenetic game of thousand-team position-statement volleyball. Post-moderns love to preach and to be preached to; if they didn’t, the industries their habitual mass media consumption props up would promptly collapse. What they dislike is not preaching per se, but (sometimes) some approaches to preaching, and (more often) what is preached - the gospel. (Or, most likely, a bad caricature of the gospel.)

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It’s all good. We play the music we play because we like it and because God does too. Musical styles are not value-free; for this reason we value songs that are bold, loud, faith-filled, rich and deep in truth, and which afford liberty in expression and performance. We sing and play to teach, to encourage, to admonish, to confess, to rejoice, and (perhaps most importantly) for the love of a good God-song.

Each of us has our story, and often our story says something important about the way we approach God and faith in Christ. While reading David Wells’ “God in the Wasteland”, I happened upon a passage that captures pretty well the kernel of thought that led to my conversion. It is not a story of God’s faithfulness, or of a miraculous deliverance, but a simple leak in the dike of self-love, self-service, self-definition, and self-worship that, once discovered, brought the whole thing crashing down and opened the floodgates of a theologically conservative (orthodox) vision of the Christian faith.

Barth says that Schleiermacher viewed God as the mirror image of the self. If the result was, as Friedrich Schlegel charged, a God who was “a little skinny,” the reason, of course, was that God could be no larger than the self of which he was a reflection. Barth later pointed out that we cannot call “God” by shouting “man” in a loud voice.

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We don’t trust any attempt to explain our brokenness without reference to God, sin, and the Fall. We’re also not crazy about spending your life focused on finding pathologies, because you tend to become like that which you obsess upon. What we need is not therapy, because therapy presumes there is enough goodness in us to overcome our brokenness; what we need is to be made a new creation.

We like pets, and don’t trust people who torture them. We like both meat-lovers and vegetarians, and think Jesus does too.

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and wisdom is better than knowledge, and we are willing to pay the price - though it cost us everything - to work through our experiences, knowledge, and life habits, cultivating wisdom at every turn. We know in part, and will continue to until the End, but God now gives us of His wisdom generously. Scientific reason (and every other passing wisdom of every other passinig age) reveals what seems to work, at least until another scientist does it one better; God simply reveals as and what He sees fit, and what He reveals remains true, period. We deconstruct only with an eye toward rebuilding, critique only with an eye toward the praiseworthy, question only when we are ready to seriously think and work to uncover the answer.

We like nuclear families, single moms, latchkey kids, corporate execs, screaming queers, jocks, geeks, ADD-ers, creative flakes, science nuts, agorophobes, arachnophobes, homophobes, heterophobes, triskadekaphobes, and people named Phoebe. We don’t think the Bible says that any of them are “okay”, or that anyone else is for that matter. We are not fit to live an eternal life when our lives are so full of death and so consumed with that which doesn’t last - the self. We need for God to give us new life - Christ’s life - which we gladly exchanging for our own at the cross.