This isn’t a rant. Neither does it qualify as thought. It’s really just a list of a few things that I’ve been thinking about off and on… things that bother me a bit as a theological conservative and that I should give attention to.
I was planning to post something I wrote some time back… a short piece firing most of the African-American Civil Rights leadership… but my wife prevailed in her wise discouragements not to post it.
So, I’m down to my list… which may get more treatment over the week. As a theological conservative committed to historic Reformed orthodoxy as the best approximation/summation of the Bible’s teaching, I’m bothered by:
1. Reformed heros of the faith who held slaves, and…
2. My contemporaries who sometimes defend them;
3. Poor or altogether absent articulation of a compelling, theologically conservative, gospel-centered statement on the church qua church and engagement in social issues;
4. The equation of theological conservatism with political conservatism as if the two are synonyms or one necessarily leads to the other, especially where “political conservatism” is read Republican and Republican-platform public policy;
5. The label “evangelical,” especially when it’s a thin mask for an already-failed, doctrinally soft or indifferent ecumenism; and
6. My own heart’s wandering. “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it; Prone to leave the God I love.” Oh, “take my heart Lord and seal it for thy courts above!”