Joe Fleener

• The Christian life runs on twin engines—both our individual relationship with the Lord and our congregational relationship with other local believers in a covenant community, a local church
• Our preaching has inherited this imbalanced Christian individualism, resulting in weakened local churches. Today’s preaching largely aims at the individual Christian and neglects a congregationally shaped view of the Christian life.
• Expositional preaching, then, exposes God’s Word to his people and helps them live out the truths found in the Bible. Because the Bible is congregationally shaped, our preaching must be congregationally shaped; it must be ecclesiological. In fact, if your preaching is not ecclesiological, you’re not truly doing exposition.
• While modern expositional preaching results in sermons to a group of individuals, ecclesiological exposition helps Christians grow in their individual walks with the Lord while also helping them relate to one another and fulfill Christ’s mission in the local church.
• Preachers who do this kind of preaching will explain the corporate implications of a text and apply the text to the congregation as a whole

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• The most basic principle on which I work is that theology is for the people of God everywhere. It is not the confines of scholars, but the bread of sinners. As such we must make the most profound truths accessible.
• Don't substitute the theological for the pragmatic. By which I mean that the best way to build up people is to ground them in the truth of the theology of the Word of God; nothing can substitute for that.
• A sense of its own history. The church in Scotland was forged through battles over its confession, which it needs to recover. It was also blessed with men who were mighty in the pulpit, which it needs to find again. And it was blessed with periods of genuine Holy Spirit revival, in which the fear of God gripped whole communities; and that we certainly need to experience again.

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• If gradual growth in Christ is exchanged for a radical experience, it is not surprising that many begin looking for the Next Big Thing as the latest crisis experience wears off. Even in my own lifetime, I’ve witnessed—and participated in—a parade of radical movements. And now, according to Time magazine, the “new Calvinism” is one of the top trends changing the world. This movement has also been identified as “Young, Restless, Reformed.” But as long as it is defined by youthful restlessness, it may tend to warp what it means to be Reformed.
• To be young is to be restless. We’re lost in impatient wonder and selfish impulses. But we are called repeatedly in the New Testament to grow up, to mature, to put away our childish ways.
• First and foremost, any renewed appreciation for the ordinary begins with God.
• In providence, God’s ordinary way of working should surprise us with wonder.
• And who knows? Maybe if we discover the opportunities of the ordinary, a fondness for the familiar, and a wonder for the mundane, we will end up being radical after all.

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• Countless unbelievers experience and consciously enjoy the gift of exercise, but they do not adore Jesus or have the Holy Spirit. Should there be anything distinct about how a Christian exercises? How do we experience God’s natural gift of exercise in such a way that we benefit spiritually?
• Step one in making our exercise holy is receiving it as the gift it is, not taking bodily movement and physical expenditures for granted, but explicitly thanking God
• Contrary to the siren voices sounding at every turn today, your body is not your own, but belongs to God — and doubly so
• Yet the charge to bodily exertion is always chastened for the Christian
• As Christians, our final aim in bodily exertion is not weight-loss or maximal long-term health — and definitely not mere physical appearance. Rather, we aim at greater joy in God, and greater love for neighbor. What makes exercise holy, and loving, is the prayer that our expenditures of energy will lead to our increased readiness to expend ourselves in sacrifice for others.

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• It is strange to read that essay now and to consider in retrospect how quickly McLaren faded from evangelical view. At the time, the emerging church still had some purchase within the evangelical movement. Now that entire project is defunct and so are its major proponents. They pushed the very edges of the leftwing of the evangelical movement until they pushed themselves right out of the movement. Many of them did so by adopting unorthodox positions on sexuality.
• How quickly its heterodoxy doomed it to irrelevancy and demise.
• It doesn’t mean that the Christian faith is changing its posture on marriage. It means that some people currently associated with evangelical Christianity will be leaving us. They will follow a “stranger’s” voice right out of the faith.

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• On the one hand, knowing the Bible enables us to see much more in literature than we would otherwise see, partly because the Bible is the greatest source and influence for English and American literature
• Acquaintance with English literature instills a grasp of literary form and technique and thereby improves a preacher’s ability to interact with the biblical text, which regularly employs literary techniques.  One reason preachers often reduce the Bible to a set of ideas is that they do not know how to interact with a literary text.
• Out of the abundance of one’s reading the minister speaks, and much of the time our ministers speak from a somewhat sterile world of Bible commentaries and religious books

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• I have to confess that I get somewhat weary of the pattern. A popular author decides to say something controversial. He or she writes a book or seeks to make a provocative video or orchestrates a softball interview with a journalist-activist to break some news. Once it all goes live, the usual suspects fire up their responses, which themselves generate a lot of traffic. Then the controversialist feigns surprises and lament at how the body of Christ is failing to love one another when news of defection from orthodoxy is announced.

• Non-Christian scholars know better than to try to “rescue” the New Testament from itself. Which is why Louis Crompton, a gay man and pioneer in queer studies, could write: “Nowhere does Paul or any other Jewish writer of this period imply the least acceptance of same-sex relations under any circumstances. The idea that homosexuals might be redeemed by mutual devotion would have been wholly foreign to Paul or any Jew or early Christian”
• I fail to see how the logic for monogamy and against fornication is obvious according to Hatmaker’s hermeneutic. I appreciate that they don’t want to completely jettison orthodox Christian teaching when it comes to sex and marriage. But the flimsiness of the hermeneutic cannot support the weight of the tradition.
• The appeal to Christ and the church does not support Hatmaker’s argument; it emphatically undermines it.

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• It worked, journalist and economist Tim Harford argues in a new book, because it was messy, unorganised, reconfigurable, and under the control of the people who worked in it.

• But one virtue it does not possess is interpretive charity. Indeed, I’m trying to remember when I last encountered an argument for changing the church’s historic view of marriage that engaged so flippantly and superficially with the Christian tradition.
• But this omits entirely the Christian tradition’s claim that love is only intelligible in light of the telos given to us as human creatures by our Creator. If I try to nurture, cherish, and will the good of someone to whom I’m not married by having sex with them, the Christian tradition would say that no matter how gently, kindly, devotedly, and self-sacrificially I feel and behave towards that person, I am not in fact truly loving them. Truly to love them, I would need not only to care for them emotionally; I would need also to will their greatest good in accord with how they were designed by God to flourish. I would need to reflect on the moral order built into the cosmos and seek to care for them in light of that, willing their good even when—or especially when—it may conflict with what I (or they) feel would be most satisfying. So, at any rate, has the Christian tradition argued. And so Wolterstorff declines to mention, let alone explore.
• One would never learn from Wolterstorff’s reading of Romans 1 that multiple New Testament exegetes have offered cogent responses to Boswell’s interpretation, undermining its credibility even for most “progressive” Christians writing in this area today.

• Several years ago, a Reformed scholar hoping to overturn some aspects of his tradition’s doctrine of God wrote these words: 

  I regularly tell my students that I will not allow them to take cheap shots against the tradition; they have to earn their right to disagree by working through the tradition and understanding it at its deepest level. Every now and then when they do take what I regard as cheap shots I say to them: “Would you still say what you just said if Augustine were sitting right across the table from you?” Or Anselm, or Aquinas, or Calvin? In short, it is our duty to honor those forebears in the Christian tradition.

  The scholar who wrote those words was Nicholas Wolterstorff. Would that, in his case for same-sex marriage, he had heeded his own counsel.

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