Urban Reformation

Some months back on my old blog site I wrote a post on the tensions in the bible that seemed at times to be set hard against one another. These tensions in the bible –ie. grace vs. law, love vs. wrath, truth vs. unity, these are things in the Bible that appear to be contradictory at times, they’re not, but there are times where they appear to be so.

The Bible is not entirely logical in the sense that if the Bible were totally logical for example, able to be wholly understood by man, then it would not be considered a divine work.

The mind of God is far beyond anything we can come within reach of or grasp. Even though God has chosen to communicate eternal truths to us, there are bound to be some things that are beyond human comprehension. I am not saying they God has made them “unknowable” what I’m saying is that with our limited finite capacity there is only so much we can grasp unless God grants it. Therefore it is in our best interested in embracing truth to find the narrow road and to walk the narrow way between these healthy tensions.

Christians are notorious for swinging one way and then the other. I was reading “Preaching & Preachers” by Martin Lloyd Jones, and he makes this contrast in preaching where some places would have removed all emotion or pathos from preaching, and in so removing they have attempted to handicapped the preaching of the word because it will no longer move anyone to action. The contrast to this, and I’m paraphrasing, is in the charismatic movement where they remove doctrinal truth, and play emotions as if they were an instrument in order to work something up.

Page 93. from the book “Preaching & Preachers” states -

” Modern sophisticated man may laugh at this, but it is only when we begin to know something of this melting quality then we shall be real preachers. Of course a man who tries to produce an effect becomes an actor, and is an abominable impostor. But the fact is that when ‘the love of God is shed abroad’ in a man’s heart as it was in Whitefiled’s pathos is inevitable.

This element of pathos and of emotion is, to me, a very vital one. It has been so seriously lacking in the present century, and perhaps especially among Reformed people. We tend to lose our balance and to become over-intellectual, indeed almost to despise the element of feeling and emotion. We are such learned men, we have such a great grasp of the truth, that we tend to despise feeling. The common herd, we feel, are emotional and sentimental, but they have no understanding!

Is not the danger in the tendency, to despise feeling which is an essential part of man put there by God? We do not know what it is to be carried away, we no longer know what it is to be moved profoundly.”

He goes on to say on page 95. -

“Can a man see himself as a damned sinner without emotion? Can a man look into hell without emotion? Can a man listen to the thunderings of the Law and feel nothing? Or conversely, can a man really contemplate the love of God in Christ Jesus and feel no emotion? The whole position is utterly ridiculous. I fear that many people today in their reaction against excesses and emotionalism put themselves into a position in which, in the end, they are virtually denying the Truth. The Gospel is meant to do that, and it is that. The whole man is involved because the Gospel leads to regeneration; and so I say that this element of pathos and emotion, this element of being moved, should always be prominent in preaching.”

His contention is the same that there must be a healthy balance of substance or truth, and pathos or passion, in the preaching for the preacher truly be a tool in the hand of God.  There are more evidences of this in the book but these are just a small sample of this healthy balance between tensions.

The point being that the Bible contains tension, these two apparently opposing tensions, yet proclaims both sides of the tension as being absolutely true.

Our duty as Christians is to believe and proclaim both sides of the tension while walking the walk of the narrow way on the narrow road.

We cannot compromise either side of the tension or else we destroy both.

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