I'm in ur face, blotorchin ur adiktionz!

"J-Pip is my rapper name yo!"

John Piper, for those of you who don't know, is a heavily Reformed, strictly Calvinist pastor in Minnesota capable of cranking out fairly intelligent books at about the rate that you and I internally monologue. Though I don't necessarily agree with every doctrinal stance he holds, it's difficult to not admit the guy is pretty amazing. In fact, I have doubts that John Piper is human rather than a futuristic robot fueled by God's divine will, overflowing so heavily with the Holy Spirit that it leaks out his eyes and lisp-twisted mouth. He is most famously known for his push into the "Christian Hedonism" movement, and coining the catch phrase "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him."

Beyond that, Piper has a reputation in the Twitter world (@JohnPiper) for spouting these really abstract phrases from time to time that make people blink, then immediately spout "what the?"

Sometimes these are controversial statements, an example of this was when the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church of America) was meeting in a conference center to discuss if they should allow gays to not only receive church membership, but to allow gays to serve as clergy as well. In the middle of this meeting, a tornado... no joke... formed outside of the building, ripped through it, and disappeared. I don't think ten minutes had passed before Piper lit up the Internet with his public acknowledgement of God's divine will made manifest to those depraved near-apostate Lutherans and that they had better fall on their knees immediately and repent earnestly lest they be smote. Unfortunately they cleaned up his original post shortly after "they" (whoever "they" may be... its pretty slippery, but everyone has them) realized the controversy that could latch onto this sort of a comment. The neutered version can be found here: http://bit.ly/239uty

But what brought me to blog was this comment which I received via Twitter this afternoon from good ole J-Pip.

"Is anyone really addicted to porn? Put a blow torch in their face; they will turn off the computer. IF they believe its real."

I've thought about this sentence for most of the day, trying to ascertain what exactly he is trying to get across, but what I think Piper is trying to say is that people many times try to abuse the term "addiction" as a crutch to excuse their human (Calvinist depravity!) demand to sin. He then qualifies his statement by saying (in my words) "Ohhh you think you're addicted huh? How about I blowtorch your FACE and see how quickly you drop that net connection!" Because in John Piper's mind, addiction is a powerful hold that would sustain through a facial flame-broiling. If you give up your grasp on pornography, drinking, drug use, casual sex, etc by threat of facial reconstruction with an angry flame, then you probably aren't addicted, and you're just lying to placate your desire.

What do you guys think? Just keep in mind, in the time it's taken us to discuss this, John Piper has already cranked out another book. What have you done today?

Reformed Passion

Click on the image to see a bigger view of it.

Spirituality is serious beans folks. A handful of seriously serious beans.

Without going into a great deal of detail, and I know a good portion of my current audience already knows this story, but a powerful transition took place in my life over two years ago where I was faced with the fact that I knew a lot about God, but I never really knew God. This is easy to do when you have so much scripture thrown at you growing up that you think you already know all the good parts and no longer need to crack your Bible open.

In sense, you become inoculated to Christianity

After this transformation in my life I had an unfathomable desire to consume God's word. With this addiction came an unexpected, yet necessary and perfectly logical desire. I wanted to know why I believed what I did. I wanted to strip down every doctrine I had adhered to, every opinion I had argued for, and everything I thought Christianity was and seek purely after Biblical truth.

I wasn't prepared for how this decision was going to eat my entire Christian paradigm inside out. This happened in a few different areas, and it is probably better saved for possible blogs down the road. But this introduced me to some concepts that I was ignorant of beforehand. Ignorant either because I was completely unaware, or because I thought I understood what a particular concept was only to find I was oblivious.

It also introduced me to two words that were vaguely familiar, and yet I had no clue what they had meant at the time. Calvinism, and Arminianism.

When I found myself in a position where I craved to know what the Bible said about, well, anything, I found myself continually drawn to these fantastic resources made available by a group of people who are now being called (most recently by TIME magazine) as the "New-Calvinists." I found myself challenged more than I had at any other point in my life by sermons from John Piper, Matt Chandler, and the always controversial and Seattle's own, Mark Driscoll.

What struck me as strange was that they had a few (not many, but key) viewpoints that differed a great deal from my upbringing in the church. What was more difficult, was that they had very strong scriptural support for these views. I found myself digging deeper into the Bible, looking up Greek and Hebrew translations and cross-referencing the stitching out of my Bible trying to build the strongest foundation I could construct.

Throughout this period I slowly came to a conclusion that currently saddens me.

You see, I grew up in a Pentecostal Spirit Filled atmosphere. It has been my experience that these churches tend to be very strong when it comes to emphasizing the emotional aspect of the Christian walk. Now this isn't necessarily a bad thing either. The times in a church service that I have felt the most intimate with God has been in Spirit Filled churches. There's an openness that invites you into worship and draws you into feeling God's presence. The problem is that where the many Spirit Filled churches excel in passion, they drop the ball when it comes to intellectual doctrinal teaching.

This is where the Reformed church has been stepping in for the rebound over the last few years. I've visited Mars Hill a couple times since moving to Seattle and as controversial and... different as Mark Driscoll is, I can assure you that I learned so much at his church. Even my wife became extremely interested in his church, feeling like she had gained a great deal during our visits there.

There's only two problems here.

One: These "New-Calvinists" / Reformed / Resurgence churches proclaim to be Spirit Filled churches. From what I can tell, this is part of what separates the New-Calvinist from the older brand. This doesn't really change the fact that there's still a "difference" between churches when I've visited. Now granted, I've only visited Mars Hill twice and that isn't exactly a definitive sample size, yet their worship services have never matched up to the intensity that I've seen at my very own chapel services at Northwest University.

Two: Predestination. I just cant do it. For a scriptural paradigm that is supposed to be so definitively biblical, and for a group of people that emphasise the obviousness of predestination, I simply cant get it to stick.

As many verses as I can find that talks about God predestining us for anything, all of them can still be interpreted in a way that allows complete free will, and yet none of them (that I've found thus far) can explain some of the specific events that take place in the Bible.

Gen 3:22 has God kicking Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden "lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” Many Calvinists explain that Adam and Eve "enjoyed free will" before the fall, and yet after the fall it appears that God is stating that he doesn't trust the free will of man to not eat from the tree of life. Where is the predestination?

Exodus 32:10-14 God is royally ticked at the Israelites and is about to smite the dickens out of them when not only does the Bible say that Moses reminds God of his covenant with Abraham, but that God changes his mind after listening to Moses. Predestination?

This doesn't count the fact that Abraham had what seems to be a relationship with God, interacts with God, and God takes Abraham's opinions into hand when making decisions.

Or in 1 Corinthians 9:27 that Paul says that he must discipline himself daily lest after preaching to others he himself should become a reprobate.

How can any of these things exist in a world with 100% complete no-compromise predestination founded from before the beginnings of creation?

As far as I can tell, it cant. Fee free to explain to me how if you can. There's a ton about Calvinism that I can dig to some degree, I wouldn't take it as far as Hyper-Calvinism, but there's some really smart people out there that are totally into Predestination, and I don't claim to be a genius but I'm not an idiot either, and I cant see how anyone can look past this.

If you have an opinion on the matter, please comment. I've been reading sermons, listening to sermons, reading scripture, reading defenses, trying everything I can to see how these things can be reconciled. I cant find it.

In slightly more lighthearted news, like I mentioned in my last blog, I ran for student senate at my university to rep the commuting students. Election day was last Monday, and the results haven't been announced yet, but I'm feeling pretty confident here because when I went to go cast my vote, I saw that I was the only one on the ballot for my constituency.

It was this that helped me feel not so bad when I voted for myself.

I was thinking about it on the way home, but what kind of victory is something when you had no one to race against? Therefore, in honor of our beloved President, I decided to name my pending victory after his first adventure into politics.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I expect an announcement for not my victory, but my Obamictory. Winning by virtue of having no one running against you. This is how the President first made it into state politics in the first place. With that kind of track record, who knows what I can accomplish next!

Seriously though, if you need to sign up for an account to comment on this blog, go do it. It takes two seconds and it wont hurt you a bit. Leave a comment on the topic of this blog. What is your opinion of Calvinism? New-Calvinism. Do you like Pie? I like Pie. What do you think of Predestination?

Was I predestined to have an Obamictory?

I think the answer to that is maaaaaybe!