Josh Benner

Category: Ethics

  • What’s the greatest danger to the American church?

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    There are 300,000 churches in America.
    There are many wonderful churches that boldly proclaim the gospel and faithfully teach the Bible every week. There is no perfect church in the world, because every church is full of members who are imperfect people.
    I think that the biggest issue the American church faces today is related to truth and love.
    Love that undermines truth and truth that doesn’t practice love. I’ll briefly explain what that means.
    Love that undermines truth 
    Love is important. The greatest command in scripture is to love God and to love people. God is love.
    But some churches can emphasize love to the point where it undermines truth.
    For instance, there is a temptation in some Christian circles to consider the love of God and reason that: “since God is love, his love extends to all people, whether or not they believe in God and whether or not they want or accept his love.”
    God is love. But that is just taking a slice of the character of God and acting as if that’s the whole pie. God is love. But he is also just, and righteous, and holy. He judges, he has wrath towards sin. God has all of those qualities at all times.
    God is love. But the idea of love is not only exclusive to what our culture defines love as.
    We tend to value acceptance and tolerance as what it is to love. And it’s true that God meets us where we are, but Jesus doesn’t save us to keep us the same. God is a perfecting God. We sin. We sin so much that we needed a savior, and the gospel is not a message that teaches us that we’re ok and we should just keep doing what we’re doing. We need to live for God and pursue him.
    Making love purely about acceptance and tolerance is not the full Biblical scope of what love is. And so it undermines the truth of scripture. And it runs the danger of undermining the inerrancy of scripture (taking the Bible as practical wisdom rather than the infallible word of God). And this view runs the risk of undermining the gospel itself.
    Assuming that love and  demand for justice are mutually exclusive.

    I observe this being the great risk in more liberal denominations.

    Truth that doesn’t practice love

    I think this is more of a danger in conservative and evangelical circles. We place a high value on the scripture and theology. And well we should because both of those are hugely important.

    But we can get so preoccupied with having the right answer that we lose sight of actually living out what we know. This is very similar to the failure of the Pharisees in the gospels. They were very well studied and trained in theology, but they missed the heart of the message.

    It can be easy to know the right answer but it’s difficult to live it out in practice.

    Truth and love. It comes down to belief and practice. We need both.

    Originally published May 9, 2018 under the title “What’s the greatest danger to the church?”

    Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what you think, and don’t forget to subscribe!

    Josh Benner has a Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He has served churches in Minnesota and Illinois. He enjoys writing about faith and culture. He lives with his wife Kari in St. Louis.

     

  • British judge orders woman to have abortion

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    Update: A British appeals court has overturned this decision. I’m pleased by that result, however this story is still a chilling reminder of the control a government can try to exercise over citizens. 
    A British court has ordered a British woman to have an abortion. The unnamed woman is in her 20s, but due to a mental disability, has the mental capacity of a child between the ages of six and nine.
    The judge called the decision “heartbreaking” but also believes that the ruling is in the best interest of the mother.
    According to reports, the woman wanted to keep the baby. Her mother, a former midwife, had said she would help her daughter raise the child. Yet the judge still ruled against her.

    (more…)

  • Southern Baptists address issues of sexual abuse

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    Last week, Southern Baptists from around the country met in Birmingham, Alabama for their annual meeting. A major focus for Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) president J.D. Greear is sexual abuse within the SBC, America’s largest Protestant denomination.

    In February, the Houston Chronicle ran a piece outlining hundreds of examples of sexual abuse allegations within the Southern Baptist Convention since 1998. (more…)

  • Born at 23 weeks, smallest surviving premature baby discharged from hospital


    She’s the smallest newborn to ever survive.

    Born from an emergency c-section in December, the little girl, nicknamed Saybie, was born at just 23 weeks. This week, the baby was discharged from the hospital.

    When she was born, Saybie weighed just 8.6 ounces.

    Not 8 pounds, 6 ounces. That would have been a healthy, above average birth weight.

    Saybie weighed 8.6 ounces! About the weight of a juice box. Doctors knew she was going to be small, but when Saybie was born, even they were surprised. (more…)

  • The Problem of Pain: C.S. Lewis and human suffering

    painOriginally published November 14, 2012 as “The Problem of Pain and C.S. Lewis”

    Early in the book “The Problem of Pain,” in an analogy which is the epitome of the brilliance and humor of C.S. Lewis, he compares the relationship of God and man to that of a dog owner and his dog. It is for the dog owner’s joy that he owns the dog. It is not inherently for the dog’s joy. It is also so that the owner has another being that it can love. The master values the dog loving him too, but to mature the dog, there are things which must be done that might not always be pleasant for the canine. Being washed, trained not to steal, and the dreaded process of house training are all part of the process. But in the end, those unpleasant activities are for the good of the dog.

    With his rapier wit, Lewis writes, “To the puppy the whole proceeding would seem, if it were a theologian, to cast grave doubts on the ‘goodness’ of man: but the full-grown and full-trained dog, larger, healthier, and longer-loved than the wild dog…would have no such doubts.” (more…)