This and That

From around the blogosphere:

For fun, here’s some dogma for you courtesy of Ed Stetzer and friends. Even if you don’t like Ed, you should find this funny.

Now on a serious note, Kevin DeYoung writes about liberal theology. What’s interesting to me is how familiar it sounds, not to those who know history but to those know who know the present. If you didn’t know the names and didn’t know that the title of the book from which he is quoting includes the dates “1805-1900” there is little to make you think he is writing about anything other than today. Surely the Preacher was right: There is nothing new under the sun.

C. Michael Patton writes about Rob Bell and expectations:

Frankly, when I heard that Bell might come out on the side of universalism, I thought to myself, “Oh, I thought we already knew that.” I don’t expect much these days from popular writers who don’t screen their thought through historic Christianity and contemporary Evangelical scholarship.

Time may reveal that some jumped the gun on Bell’s universalism, but there little’s doubt that Bell long ago left orthodoxy in some pretty major ways. (See DeYoung above.)

Louis Markos writes about cellphones:

I refer more broadly to the coarsening of manners and the increase in narcissism that heavy cell phone usage has both created and facilitated. …

If the offenders in these scenarios were to be called to account for their behavior, they would all offer the same basic excuse: they had to take the call; it was “urgent.” And therein lies the essential (spiritual) danger of the cell phone. We live in an age that has lost not only its moral compass but its right ordering of values. With each year, we grow less and less able to distinguish between that which is important and that which is trivial, between the lasting and the ephemeral, the vital and the frivolous, the sacred and the secular. …

But the measure for that now is neither ethical nor philosophical nor theological. It is, instead, personal, subjective, and egocentric. I want it now, and so I will have it now—even if it corrupts rather than nurtures, degrades rather than edifies.