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Following the Great Awakenings, man’s passion for God and passion for truth was replaced by a passion for lost souls, and the theology of pragmatism began to take hold. Whatever brought more “souls” to Christ or attracted more people to the church had to be right because it was “working!” It appeared that God was blessing the method or that God had anointed the man. The purpose of the Sunday worship services shifted from being focused upon God and how His people could honor Him, to the needs of lost people and how the church could reach out to them. And the spotlight of glory shifted from Jesus Christ, the Savior of all men, to those men who could attract the most…

This article is a reprint from Christianity Today cir. 1977,  by A. Duane Liftin Though it is written primarily to the preacher, it holds great wisdom to the lay person who follows the Lord's command to "go into all the world and "preach" the Gospel" and is as pertinent today as it was in 1977.   The study of human persuasion has a long and noble heritage, reaching back at least as far as the ancient Greeks and Romans.  For most of its history the subject was pursued under the banner of “rhetoric,” but in more recent times it has been studied by social scientists under such rubrics as “persuasive theory,” “attitude change,” and “social influence.” The relation between secular views of…

“And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and discernment, so that you may approve the things that are excellent, in order to be sincere and blameless until the day of Christ” (Phil. 1:9-10). How Postman Saw It Neil Postman (1931-2003) was an educator and cultural critic who saw things more clearly than most. In the introduction of his highly acclaimed and criticized book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Postman demonstrated that he had his finger on the pulse of our culture in a way most others did not. This comparison between the pessimistic visions of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley is worth quoting at length: “We…

This is an opinion piece taken from the WSJ. A theologian’s talk on the Christian view of sex was deemed a ‘content violation.’ By Salvatore J. Cordileone and Jim Daly Aug. 12, 2021 6:29 pm ET Carl Trueman is a distinguished scholar, bestselling author and ordained Presbyterian minister. On Aug. 7 he gave a series of talks to the Sacramento Gospel Conference, live-streamed on the YouTube channel of Immanuel Baptist Church. Twice during the event, the live broadcast was booted off the air. Viewers were informed that the first interruption was due to a copyright violation, possibly the result of Christian music that the conference organizers played during a break. But in the second, more mysterious instance, Mr. Trueman’s presentation went dark…

  O taste and see. (Psalm 34:8) It was Canon Holmes, of India, who more than twenty-five years ago called attention to the inferential character of the average man's faith in God. To most people God is an inference, not a reality. He is a deduction from evidence which they consider adequate; but He remains personally unknown to the individual. `He must be,' they say, `therefore we believe He is.' Others do not go even so far as this; they know of Him only by hearsay. They have never bothered to think the matter out for themselves, but have heard about Him from others, and have put belief in Him into the back of their minds along with the various odds and…