Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
The supply side economics of the YRR movement is also worrying here, as it can easily foster such idolatry by building up a leader's importance out of all proportion to his talent. Let's face it: no preacher is so good that his every sermon deserves to be printed or his every thought published; but some contemporary leaders are heading fast in that direction, and this can only fuel their cultic significance for those needing someone to follow. Come on, chaps, everyone preaches a disastrous clunker once in a while; and many actually preach them with remarkable and impressive regularity. The world therefore does not need to read every word you ever utter from a pulpit; and not every electrical impulse which sparks between the synapses in your grey matter needs to be written down, turned into yet another expository commentary, and sold for 15% net royalties at the local Christian bookshop.
Look, if I wanted a pretentious and incomprehensibly abstract theology with an impeccable record of emptying churches, I'd convert to Barthianism, wouldn't I?
Unwarranted attacks on me as well. I'll have you know I've never personally preached a stinker of a sermon. They've all been solid gold.
Actually, one of the truly humbling things the Lord does is when you've preached a sermon but it's be "less than stellar" (so you think), and a member of your congregation later tells you that the Lord used that sermon in a truly great way in his/her life. Then you know that you are but the mouthpiece and it is the Spirit who moves and teaches and applies His wonderful word.
Talk about cults of personality. If it wears a powdered wig, it gets better reading from some of yall here on the PB.....some of you all that would bash Piper, Macarthur, and those others clumped into "The New Calvinism." Maybe Piper ought to wear a powdered wig.
I would read Trueman before Piper or John Mac. It matters not what wig they wear or their popularity to me. I am not a big Piper fan nor am I a MacArthur Fan. I am a Baptist and would still prefer Trueman. He is a better Scholar. I do not follow the modern trends nor am I just satisfied with the most recent books. It has nothing to do with personality. It has everything to do with being correct and biblical.
What ever happened to the Gospel of the Kingdom, the RPW, Covenant Theology, and the Confessions. They are not the norm of the New Calvinism which really isn't Calvinism.
I think he needs to stop pouring sour milk into his corn flakes .
I think he needs to stop pouring sour milk into his corn flakes .
Sour Milk? Where is the Mr. Yuk smiley?
Talk about cults of personality. If it wears a powdered wig, it gets better reading from some of yall here on the PB.....some of you all that would bash Piper, Macarthur, and those others clumped into "The New Calvinism." Maybe Piper ought to wear a powdered wig.
Also, it is ironic to complain of more sermons being printed, while some of you have the complete Metro Tabernacle Pulpit bending down your poor bookshelves at home and have collected virtually every sermon in existence for Manton, Owen, Spurgeon, etc. And what's wrong with conferences? These hardly seem to be the dangers of our age.
Cult of personalities? Trueman admits, when he mentions that Luther, Calvin, et al, were key figures in the reformation. During times of change, key figures always arise.
I can't imagine that conferences, and lots of printed sermons can be a bad thing.
Not sure of the validity of the points he brings out. His article seemed just a waste of time. He either needs to make his article into a critique of the New Calvinism for reasons other than its popularity, or he needs to make his piece into a reminder that it is the dull, routine labor of nameless servants that advances the Gospel. He tries to do both and I am left wondering what his one main point is...is it (1) that New Calvinism is bad (and why? Because it is popular and has dynamic leaders), or, (2) is it mainly an encouragement for us unknown servants to keep pushing on, whether we gain popularity or not?
Yes, the nameless ones always push forward the work of the church. That doesn't make Calvin, Luther and those other Reformation-era celebrities bad even though it was the bible-smugglers and poor Paris priests turning protestant that helped spread the flame of the reformation for the most part. Neither should it make us look for reasons to despise Piper, Mohler, or the other New Calvinists for helping Calvinism hit the mainstream.
Talk about cults of personality. If it wears a powdered wig, it gets better reading from some of yall here on the PB.....some of you all that would bash Piper, Macarthur, and those others clumped into "The New Calvinism." Maybe Piper ought to wear a powdered wig.
Talk about cults of personality. If it wears a powdered wig, it gets better reading from some of yall here on the PB.....some of you all that would bash Piper, Macarthur, and those others clumped into "The New Calvinism." Maybe Piper ought to wear a powdered wig.
Also, it is ironic to complain of more sermons being printed, while some of you have the complete Metro Tabernacle Pulpit bending down your poor bookshelves at home and have collected virtually every sermon in existence for Manton, Owen, Spurgeon, etc. And what's wrong with conferences? These hardly seem to be the dangers of our age.
Cult of personalities? Trueman admits, when he mentions that Luther, Calvin, et al, were key figures in the reformation. During times of change, key figures always arise.
Talk about cults of personality. If it wears a powdered wig, it gets better reading from some of yall here on the PB.....some of you all that would bash Piper, Macarthur, and those others clumped into "The New Calvinism." Maybe Piper ought to wear a powdered wig.
I'm recently seeing all this from recently coming in from isolation; I don't know who any of these people are except Piper, who I only heard of within the past 6 months! (My pastor has said I need to get more balance by reading from more authors who lived after the 17th century and maybe he was right ) But coming onto the PB I have been struck with how some "celebrities" can do no wrong and an apparent lack of discernment in individual writings once a celebrity has been categorised as "right on", and they are read wearing "agreement-spectacles".
Talk about cults of personality. If it wears a powdered wig, it gets better reading from some of yall here on the PB.....some of you all that would bash Piper, Macarthur, and those others clumped into "The New Calvinism." Maybe Piper ought to wear a powdered wig.
Also, it is ironic to complain of more sermons being printed, while some of you have the complete Metro Tabernacle Pulpit bending down your poor bookshelves at home and have collected virtually every sermon in existence for Manton, Owen, Spurgeon, etc. And what's wrong with conferences? These hardly seem to be the dangers of our age.
Cult of personalities? Trueman admits, when he mentions that Luther, Calvin, et al, were key figures in the reformation. During times of change, key figures always arise.
I can't imagine that conferences, and lots of printed sermons can be a bad thing.
Yes, undoubtedly there were some breathless Lutherans; but that doesn't mean that Luther encouraged or profited from those groupies. There being key persons, persons of vast influence, is not the same thing as there being a cult of personality. And the key persons need to try to restrain such an attitude if it should arise.Yet the hype surrounding today's leaders of the YRR movement far outstrips anything these earlier heroes enjoyed in their lifetime; indeed, Luther never became rich, despite his great stature, and never headed up a ministry named after himself, or posted a fee-schedule for speaking engagements on his website.
Not sure of the validity of the points he brings out. His article seemed just a waste of time. He either needs to make his article into a critique of the New Calvinism for reasons other than its popularity, or he needs to make his piece into a reminder that it is the dull, routine labor of nameless servants that advances the Gospel. He tries to do both and I am left wondering what his one main point is...is it (1) that New Calvinism is bad (and why? Because it is popular and has dynamic leaders), or, (2) is it mainly an encouragement for us unknown servants to keep pushing on, whether we gain popularity or not?
Ultimately, only the long term will show if the YRR movement has genuinely orthodox backbone and stamina, whether it is inextricably and inseparably linked to uniquely talented leaders, and whether `Calvinism is cool' is just one more sales pitch in the religious section of the cultural department store.* If the movement is more marketing than reality, then ten to fifteen years should allow us to tell.* If it is still orthodox by that point, we can be reasonably sure it is genuine.*** Indeed, when torn jeans, or nose rings, or ministers talking about their sex lives from the pulpit become passé or so commonplace that they cease to be distinctive, we will see if it is timeless truth or marketable trendiness which has really driven the movement; and, even it proves to have been the latter, we should not panic.* We will still be left with the boring, mundane and nameless people and culturally irrelevant and marginal churches - the nameless ones -- upon whose anonymous contributions, past and present, most of us actually depend.
Yes, the nameless ones always push forward the work of the church. That doesn't make Calvin, Luther and those other Reformation-era celebrities bad even though it was the bible-smugglers and poor Paris priests turning protestant that helped spread the flame of the reformation for the most part. Neither should it make us look for reasons to despise Piper, Mohler, or the other New Calvinists for helping Calvinism hit the mainstream.
On most critiques of the New Calvinism, the true "Nameless One" is Mark Driscoll and all critics paint the whole movement by his most extreme antics. Like the over-the-top Peter Masters screed about worldy calvinists, they seem to take the worst of Driscoll, caricaturize it, and then paint the whole movement in the same light.
Driscoll is the convenient punching bag of those that want to run down this great resurgence of sovereign grace we see in our land. I myself am glad to see God being glorified; print every Piper sermon you want, it is not too much.
(Emphasis added.)*If leader-as-celebrity-and-oracular-source-of-all-knowledge is one potential problem in the YRR culture, then another concern is the apparent non-exportability of the models of church on offer.* Everyone knows the amazing works that have been done through the ministries of men like Tim Keller in Manhattan and Mark Driscoll in Seattle; but the track record of exporting the Redeemer or Mars Hill models elsewhere is patchy at best, raising the obvious question of whether these phenomena are the result less of their general validity and more of the singular talents of the remarkable individuals.* To be clear, this is in no way to suggest that these churches are not faithful; but it is to ask whether they are not more unique and unrepeatable than is often acknowledged.* If the secret lies in the gifts of the individual leader, then time spent trying to replicate the models elsewhere with less talented or differently gifted leaders is doomed to failure and a waste of time.
Talk about cults of personality. If it wears a powdered wig, it gets better reading from some of yall here on the PB.....some of you all that would bash Piper, Macarthur, and those others clumped into "The New Calvinism." Maybe Piper ought to wear a powdered wig.
Also, it is ironic to complain of more sermons being printed, while some of you have the complete Metro Tabernacle Pulpit bending down your poor bookshelves at home and have collected virtually every sermon in existence for Manton, Owen, Spurgeon, etc. And what's wrong with conferences? These hardly seem to be the dangers of our age.
Cult of personalities? Trueman admits, when he mentions that Luther, Calvin, et al, were key figures in the reformation. During times of change, key figures always arise.
I can't imagine that conferences, and lots of printed sermons can be a bad thing.
I thought we dealt with the powdered wig thing the other day? Look, John Goodwin and Tobias Crisp presumably had powdered wigs in their closet, but we are (mostly) not well acquainted with either one of them. I doubt there was a lot to choose from in the way Arminius dressed over against Junius, but a lot of us can't bear to read the weasely one. So when we are reading people from the past, the tendency is to read the cream of the crop. In the tumult of the contemporary it's not always clear who is going to rise to the top of the refiner's crucible and get skimmed off as dross, and who is going to remain.
Trueman's point about sermons was that not everything that everybody says is worthy to be preserved and published and sold. That seems like it should be a pretty uncontroversial remark.
You raise the cult of personalities, and then talk about key figures. But look again at what Trueman actually said:
Yes, undoubtedly there were some breathless Lutherans; but that doesn't mean that Luther encouraged or profited from those groupies. There being key persons, persons of vast influence, is not the same thing as there being a cult of personality. And the key persons need to try to restrain such an attitude if it should arise.Yet the hype surrounding today's leaders of the YRR movement far outstrips anything these earlier heroes enjoyed in their lifetime; indeed, Luther never became rich, despite his great stature, and never headed up a ministry named after himself, or posted a fee-schedule for speaking engagements on his website.
Trueman spells out why conferences can be a bad thing. He is looking at the negative impact that excitement can have when the stimulus for it disappears.
I'm wondering why you're wondering what his main point is when he stated it flat out?
What he's driving at is that here is a popular movement, that gets a lot of things right. There are some dangers in that movement, which he identifies and explains (and it's always good to have someone saying, "There could be a downside to this"). But his point is that time will enable us to tell whether what they get right is of the essence of the movement, or whether it is accidental (in the sense of non-essential). If all this excitement and movement should turn out not to be genuine, though, we can still be encouraged: it's not the end of the world, because those who do the bulk of the work, though their profile is so low as to be unnoticeable, will still carry on just the same as always.
Why do you assume that people are looking for reasons to despise anyone? I think that is problematic on multiple levels. It isn't very charitable towards the cautious, for one thing, because it assumes that they are looking: in other words, that before finding any reason they are determined to dislike, and so hunt out a rationalization for it. It's possible to see problems without doing any looking beyond what Paul requires of us all in 1 Thessalonians 5:21. It's also possible to see problems without despising (as Paul didn't despise those whom he felt compelled to baptize in Acts 19, though there was obviously a problem with their theology before he came along to straighten them out).
On most critiques of the New Calvinism, the true "Nameless One" is Mark Driscoll and all critics paint the whole movement by his most extreme antics. Like the over-the-top Peter Masters screed about worldy calvinists, they seem to take the worst of Driscoll, caricaturize it, and then paint the whole movement in the same light.
Driscoll is the convenient punching bag of those that want to run down this great resurgence of sovereign grace we see in our land. I myself am glad to see God being glorified; print every Piper sermon you want, it is not too much.
I'm not sure how Driscoll is supposed to be nameless in Dr. Trueman's article, given his explicit mention by name! Look again at the qualifications Trueman made:
(Emphasis added.)*If leader-as-celebrity-and-oracular-source-of-all-knowledge is one potential problem in the YRR culture, then another concern is the apparent non-exportability of the models of church on offer.* Everyone knows the amazing works that have been done through the ministries of men like Tim Keller in Manhattan and Mark Driscoll in Seattle; but the track record of exporting the Redeemer or Mars Hill models elsewhere is patchy at best, raising the obvious question of whether these phenomena are the result less of their general validity and more of the singular talents of the remarkable individuals.* To be clear, this is in no way to suggest that these churches are not faithful; but it is to ask whether they are not more unique and unrepeatable than is often acknowledged.* If the secret lies in the gifts of the individual leader, then time spent trying to replicate the models elsewhere with less talented or differently gifted leaders is doomed to failure and a waste of time.
To me it seems like you have an image in your mind about TR people, and when anyone hints that the YRR have something to learn; or that Paul's warning about party spirit is applicable in our own days; or that someone dead got something right and we've since largely forgotten that, you assume that they are Cult of Powdered-Wig, Crumbled-Into-Dust Stick-in-the-Mud Worshippers who can't ever be happy over a sinner who repents without first having memorized the Larger Catechism. But while there are undoubtedly some people who ought to be buried in the British Museum and kept from making any observations on the state of society or the church, it is just as uncharitable to assume that everyone is like that as it is to assume that Piper or whomever are trying to corrupt the church for the money.
I don't mean to be harsh, but caricatures work more than one way, and if anything you were a little harder on Dr. Trueman than he was on the YRR.