Month: September 2019

I recently found the following tweetstorm by Austin Fischer in my Twitter feed:

“Why settle for being conservative or progressive when you can be conservative and progressive?

Reject the binary choice. It is not a decision Jesus has asked you to make.

Christians must be conservative. Ours is a received faith, which means we don’t get to make it up. We must tie ourselves to historic orthodoxy.

Christians must be progressive. Ours is a nimble faith, which means we must be responsive to the surprising work of the Spirit of God.

It’s like flying a kite. We need an anchor, but we also need some slack and a mighty wind.” [1]

I don’t know Austin Fischer from Adam (apparently he’s a pastor), but I certainly agree with that.

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[1] Austin Fischer, Twitter post, September 5, 2019, 2:52 p.m., twitter.com/austintfischer/.

I wanted to share this great quote on what the scriptures are actually for by Eugene H. Peterson:

“By and large the Christian community accepts the position that the Bible is the authoritative text by which God reveals himself. I don’t intend to argue that here; it has been well argued and thought-out by our theologians and Scripture scholars. … Christians feed on Scripture. Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community as food nurtures the human body. Christians don’t simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into your lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus’ name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.” [1]

Let us listen carefully to the public reading of scripture in our worship services, let us join in the corporate study of scripture in Sunday School and Bible studies, let us attend to the private, devotional reading of scripture in our homes, let us take it up and metabolize it “into acts of love” and “cups of cold water.” For if it doesn’t become those things in our lives, we need to ask ourselves if we have really taken it in at all?

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[1]  Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: a Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2006), 18.