So Preston Sprinkle went into the overflowing hopper of Christians Who Think They’re Saying Something New and Exciting But Aren’t, and we all moved on. Then around Easter I caught wind of him proudly announcing that he’d written some more stuff on the subject and done a podcast or something, and I found myself groaning inwardly.
I’ve been coming into contact with a lot of different ideas about apologetics itself as a field. One of the more intriguing of those ideas comes from Myron Penner, a Christian who wrote a book called The End of Apologetics. He did an interview with a blogger when the book came out, and the reactions to that interview were so fascinating that I wanted to show them to you.
It seems fitting, however, to return to this topic of power now as we look at the Christian glurge movie/book The Shack and observe its main teaching: that independence is to be distrusted and rejected.
The Shack, the latest popular Christian glurge to get made into a movie, pretends to be a serious answer for the age-old question plaguing Christians: why does their god, who is supposed to be omni-everything as well as loving and gracious, allow terrible things to happen in his created world?
The Shack, the latest in a long line of Christian glurge movies and books, lives in that weird middle ground where Christians think they’re being progressive and yet turn out to be as locked in systemic racism as any of their peers.
The Shack is one of a very long line of Christian glurge media that recreates reality for believers, giving them the thrill of “seeing” their beliefs mesh at last with the real world. But for everyone else, stories like this one simply make the religion sound worse.
In comments last time we met up, we learned about yet another set of those guesses, all presented as amazing new ideas that would totally work to convert people without backfiring and making evangelicals look like pickup-artist creeps.
I’ve seen pastors try off and on to stop their congregants from accessing the internet, but this new book that just came out, What Falls from the Sky, really takes the cake on that score.
These stories are related. They both reflect an endemic issue within Christianity: its broken systems’ inability to recognize basic human rights.
The biggest Protestant denomination in the United States continues to suffer serious churn in its membership, and those of us who are rooting for its failure won’t be disappointed to hear how they’re dealing with it. I recently discovered a quiet little update to one of their most surprising task force meetings.