Mike Wittmer

Month: February 2010

  • Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, Question 5, Part 1

    What is the gospel? In this section Brian reveals how liberalism grows in orthodox churches.  He says that at the beginning of their movement, he and his friends were “peace-loving people” who didn’t “want to needlessly upset anyone,” so they thought, ‘Maybe this new understanding can simply be added to what we already have, gradually,…

  • Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, Question 4

    Who is Jesus and Why is he important? Brian begins this section with a good reminder that we must beware of the temptation to remake Jesus into our own image.  I wish he had followed his own advice, for his Jesus ends up looking a lot like a beefed up Brian McLaren.  This section reminded…

  • Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, Question 3

    Is God violent? Brian begins this section by admitting that he has a big problem.  It helped his new kind of Christianity to assert that the Bible is our cultural library rather than authoritative constitution, but he still has to wrestle with the fact that this library contains many bloody books.  In Brian’s words, he…

  • Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, Interlude

    The Defining Issue Before I examine Brian’s next question, I think it is important to interact with the foundational thesis which grounds everything else he says in this book.  Brian’s underlying point is that what Christians call the Creation-Fall-Redemption narrative actually starts with Plato and was adopted later by imperial Rome.  It is this “Greco-Roman…

  • Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, Question 2

    How should the Bible be understood? Martin Luther warned us not to destroy something good simply because it is abused.  He said that some people worship the sun and moon, but we don’t “pull the sun and stars from the skies;” some people visit prostitutes, but we don’t “kill all the women;” and some people…

  • Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, Question 1

    What is the overarching story line of the Bible? Kuyperians such as Al Wolters (Creation Regained) Neal Plantinga, (Engaging God’s World), and myself (Heaven is a Place on Earth) have argued rather persuasively that the evangelical church can free itself from Platonism by recovering the biblical story of creation, fall, and redemption.  So I was…

  • Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, Introduction

    I read the introductory three chapters of A New Kind of Christianity, and so far it’s an updated version of the Brian we’ve seen before.  He claims to be “a mild-mannered guy” who is only looking for a new way to be a Christian that will boost the declining numbers in our churches, and he…

  • your brain on google

    Last night I watched the first 30 minutes of the Frontline episode, “Digital Nation,” in which MIT and Stanford professors discussed the deleterious effects which the Internet and virtual reality have on their students’ ability to think (if you don’t know the meaning of the big word in that last sentence, maybe you’ve been spending…

  • our beyonce

    Congratulations to our very own Matthew Westerholm, a GRTS student  who arranged a song, “The Power of the Cross,” on Heather Hadley’s CD, which Sunday night won a Grammy for best contemporary R & B/gospel album.  Matt also got his picture taken with Taylor Swift (he prudently avoided being photographed next to a half naked…