Never been a big fan of Mark Driscoll, but this puts me off of him completely. Requiring a member to detail and reveal all of their past sexual sins as part of a “restoration” process? Sorry, no. Not Christian. Not Biblical.
Apparently not.
“Sportianity. A mixture of sports and a form of Christianity. A form that says “To the victors belong the spoils.” A form that renounces losers and favors winners. Just imagine: If the Broncos had finished 2-14, how many would be heralding Tebow as an example of a victorious Christian? Or think of it this way: How many athletes do you hear thanking God after a brutal loss? How many golfers have given thanks when they come in at 15-over-par? Have any basketball players, after missing a last-second layup that would have won the game, ever said, “Praise God for that last missed shot. If I had made it, I might swell up with pride.”
This is my desert island Chick Tract. The one I’d keep if I have to give up all my others. Never one to pass up a trend, Chick wrote “Soul Story” to cash in on the Blaxploitation film craze of the Seventies. (Think Shaft or Super Fly). No blaxploitation cliche is left unplundered. How can it miss when the protagonists’s name is “Leroy Brown” and the dialogue includes such pithy phrases as “You stupid jive turkey!” and “Right on!” This tract contains Fred Carter’s best art, in my opinion. And given that Fred Carter is a black pastor, why did he let Chick get away with the stereotyping? I guess when you’re tying to save souls, you can’t worry about a little racial insensitivity.
Read or Download Soul Story
"In the days of Jonathan Edwards and his contemporaries, it had been customary to look upon revivals as the consequence of divine visitations. … By the time of Finney, this notion was in decline, and the voluntarism characteristic of the American evangelical tradition was in the ascendant. “Religion is the work of man,” Finney insisted. … A revival of religion, Finney asserted, “is not a miracle, or dependent on a miracle, in any sense. It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means."
— Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism and American Life , p. 109
