Greg just posted a great reflection on our group blog for all you theology nerds out there. I'll repost the whole thing here for you:
Last night my beautiful wife cooked some spaghetti pie for our neighbors, Kay and Kelly. They are a crazy fun couple, she being a OBGYN and he a crazy nascar belly shirt wearin’ bud drinking car-part man. We had a blast, talked long into the night, and enjoyed some quality wine.
One thing I noticed however, was the lack of 15 syllable words, footnotes, and extensive bibliographies. In fact, we didn’t even debate the issue of pre-temporal soteriology in the eschaton one time. Sad.
Not really, not sad at all. In fact, praise God. Praise God that we were able to have the simplest of all conversations about the simplest of truths, God has loved us at the great expense of Christ.
So, you know I’m not hating on jargon (nerd talk is still a personal passion), but let us remember that the call of the gospel is, in simple terms, for everyone, not just those card carrying covenantal calvinistic types like ourselves. We never have to dumb truth down, but that’s just the beauty of Christ’s truth being made alive by the spirit, even the most common expression has the power to save.
I was so convicted about how little I get out, love those who don’t know Christ, and have real conversations about aging grandparents, car parts, and hospital shoes. May those ordinary topics be used by us ordinary means as a way for God’s love and justice to be communicated clearly.
Perhaps, one of the most powerful apologetics is to presuppose God’s authority as you LISTEN.
Amen, Greg. Keep preachin' that one.
1 comment:
Agreed! Listening, and speaking carefully and simply when we do speak, are marks of humilty, especially in conversations with people who don't yet know Christ. The opposite displays thoughtlessness and arrogance, and we should pray for God to guard our hearts against such attitudes. Also, as Greg writes here, it's not a bad thing at all to speak of the Gospel in simple terms to fellow Christians! Even because some of us might know the more complicated theological terms doesn't mean that we always have to use them! :-) We don't even always have to talk about theology proper, because all of life is theological, from salvation to ice cream!
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