This essay was originally published on June 5, 2015. Kevin T. Bauder The state of Israel is in the news at least weekly, sometimes daily. The United States is still the greatest supporter of Israel, but public perception is that the Obama administration’s backing is less than enthusiastic. In spite of this assessment, the Obama… Continue Reading
Every so often a book warrants the thought in my mind, “I wish I would have written this book.” Such is the case with What Happens When We Worship by Jonathan Cruse, pastor of Community Presbyterian Church in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Cruse’s primary concern is Christians who find worship boring; the solution to this problem, Cruse… Continue Reading
How is Christian imagination shaped? A true but not very helpful answer would be to say, “everything shapes imagination”. Visits to the doctor, watering the garden, schoolwork, housework, trading and every other activity shapes our outlook on reality in small or big ways. But it is also true to say that certain actions imprint the… Continue Reading
In a couple of weeks, I’m scheduled to head down to Illinois to attend a pastors’ conference. There are several speakers at the conference that I’m glad to hear. One is the pastor of the church I grew up in. Another is the president of one of the seminaries I graduated from. But to be… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder One of the best periods in the history of Central Baptist Theological Seminary unfolded during the first two thirds of the 1960s. With Richard V. Clearwaters as president and Warren Vanhetloo as dean, the seminary assembled a cluster of amazingly bright young professors. These included men like Ernest Pickering, Robert Delnay, and… Continue Reading
A biblical understanding of the corporate importance of gathered worship should impact everything we do in corporate worship. First, although every church member is a priest with direct access to God, we do need to remember that the Spirit of God does gift different individual Christians in different ways, and he does gift some men… Continue Reading
What does the Christian imagination look like when it is fleshed out? We can imagine it as a spectrum, beginning with Scripture itself and working its way out from the explicitly biblical to what is only implicitly so. The Bible. Scripture itself is the archetype of all Christian imagination. Its content and form are the… Continue Reading
The medieval church suffered from a kind of sacerdotalism that removed worship from the people and made it the worship of priests on behalf of the people. But as we have seen the last couple of weeks, the New Testament clearly identifies all believers as priests who have access to God through Christ by the… Continue Reading
If Christian imagination is the best way of referring to how Christians know and perceive the world, does thinking of it in this way have any practical effect on our lives? Much in every way. If imagination is the ultimate way that we understand reality, then this affects how Christians communicate the faith to believers,… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder The Civil Air Patrol (CAP) was founded less than a week before the invasion of Pearl Harbor. Its purpose was to use general aviation (light planes flown by civilian pilots) to supplement the domestic operations of the United States military. The CAP proved its worth by helping to patrol the borders and… Continue Reading
Last week we saw that since all who are in Christ are priests who are able to draw near and offer sacrifices to God, therefore, all believers should be active participants in worship. But there is a second biblical reason that all believers should actively participate in corporate worship, and it is connected to the… Continue Reading
If “Christian imagination” is really another way of saying Christian knowing, or Christian knowledge, why persist in calling it imagination? Why not simply call it by the more regular words, such as knowledge, worldview, understanding, presuppositions or, for the more philosophically inclined, epistemology? The answer is that the Christian (or true) way of knowing is… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder This weekend I am traveling to Lake Benton, Minnesota, to address the southwestern fellowship of the Minnesota Baptist Association (MBA). The MBA is the current permutation of what used to be the Minnesota Baptist Convention. It is the organization that W. B. Riley and Richard Volley Clearwaters managed to separate from the… Continue Reading
In the year 365 a council of church leadership met in the city of Laodicea to discuss various problems that had arisen in the churches of the region and decide what to do about them. The fourth century was a time of theological controversy and unrest in the church. Church meetings had become disorderly; heretics… Continue Reading
Should Christians persist in referring to “Christian Imagination”? Since we are concerned with truth, should we not avoid terms that have connotations of what is merely fantastical or unreal? We may choose to drop the term Christian imagination. If we do, however, we will have to use several other terms in its place, to capture… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder According to 2 Timothy 3:16, all scripture is God-breathed or inspired. In other words, inspiration applies to the scriptures themselves, not to the process by which they were produced. The word inspired is a result word, not a process word. The writers were not inspired. The thoughts were not inspired. The various… Continue Reading
Over the past several weeks I have been developing the biblical idea of the dialogical structure of corporate worship. Historically, church worship services have been designed in such a way to both display and nurture this kind of communion by being structured as a dialogue. God speaks, we respond. God calls us to worship him… Continue Reading
Christian imagination is not a term that will immediately draw approving responses. These days, Christianity is on the back foot anyway, and anything that sounds as if Christianity is dabbling in the unreal, the fantastical, or the faked, seems unhelpful. But G. K. Chesterton reminds us, “But imaginative does not mean imaginary. It does not… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder When people think about the inspiration of the Bible, they tend to imagine it as a process. They think of inspiration as a way of stating how the Bible got to be what it is. Trying to answer the how question is one of the reasons that we are surrounded by so-called… Continue Reading
Last week we noticed the dialogical structure of worship manifest in the terms “spirit” and “truth” in John 4. So let’s unpack this two-part, dialogical structure of worship. First, God speaks. One of the most remarkable statements Jesus makes in this conversation is what he says at the end of verse 23: “The Father is… Continue Reading