Mike Wittmer

Category: Emergent Church

  • theological porn

    I have spent the past few days reading Peter Rollins:  How (Not) to Speak of God, The Fidelity of Betrayal, and The Orthodox Heretic.  I say it’s like reading theological porn because it’s titillating, it makes you feel dirty, and you could lose your soul doing it.  I suspect that Pete would happily agree with…

  • bracketology

    {On [multiple occasions in the past month] I have heard people defend a [heretical] statement by saying that the author told them that he doesn’t necessarily believe everything he writes. According to them, this author, let’s call him [Pete Rollins]—a man who is extremely likeable—can pretty much say anything [e.g., we have no revelation; Jesus…

  • schmalliteration

    Is this ironic? The Grand Rapids Press on Saturday wrote this about Rob Bell’s homiletics conference: “Absent from the agenda at an upcoming seminar on sermons: How to alliterate three preaching points by starting them all with the same letter [isn’t the last part of this sentence redundant?]. After all, turning gospel teaching into rational…

  • if it walks like a duck

    What do these two quotes have in common?  1. Harry Emerson Fosdick was a liberal pastor who wrote this in The Modern Use of the Bible (1924):  “From naïve acceptance of the Bible as of equal credibility in all its parts because mechanically inerrant, I passed years ago to the shocking conviction that such traditional…

  • no answer

    I know of three things today which have no answer:  the Cleveland Cavaliers, Roland Burris, and those who oppose penal substitution.  The first two are self-explanatory if you are following the news, but I should explain the third.  It hit me recently that those who deny penal substitution are unable to explain exactly how the…

  • mile high

    I’m in Denver for the Gospel Rescue Missions national conference, and last night I missed the first half of the free-throw shooting contest in Orlando to attend the plenary talk by Shane Claiborne.  Shane was in the Christian news last year when my alma mater disinvited him (not his fault), so I was interested to…

  • not everything must change

    Last week I received a mass email from Brian McLaren regarding his “Everything Must Change” tour, in which he lamented that “many if not most Christians in the US remain focused on” their “intramural religious debates” rather than the global crises confronting our world.  He wrote:  “In one Q & A session after another since…

  • an interesting analogy

    Julie and I have spent the last four days in South Florida, speaking on Christian worldview at a women’s retreat (thanks, Tullian!), collecting sea shells on Sanibal Island, and watching drunk old people dance in the streets of Naples (are you sure this is the greatest generation?).  The weird part is that I haven’t missed any of…

  • my centered-bounded set

    I ran into it again last week, and I’m hearing it often enough now that I think it deserves a response.  Many leaders are claiming that we who believe in the importance of the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth, and the need to believe in Jesus are suffering from bounded set thinking.  Our problem…

  • Machen on faith and knowledge

    This morning I was reading J. Gresham Machen’s book, What Is Faith? (1925), and I found his remarks on our need to know in order to believe especially relevant to a recurring discussion on this blog.  The fact that Machen’s old words could be addressed to any number of emergent leaders reminds me that our…