Campus Preacher

I get asked about being a postmillennialist and we discuss the reality that the Bible teaches that God hates. What does this strange doctrine mean? I seek to brush on that in the context of open-air preaching where students accused me of “hate speech” and preaching that God “hates.” Well, I believe God hates. I don’t believe all “hate” is equal and we need to understand what the Bible means that God hates and that He loves.

Did David rape Bathsheba? I address some tweets/texts suggesting he did, and I seek to develop a paradigm for answering an objection to the Bible that “virgin’s must marry their rapist per Deut. 22:28-29.”

One of the most common questions I get is, how do you get started? I briefly discuss that here. Also, I am asked almost daily, “WHAT ABOUT THE JEWS?” Which is framed to suggest that any suggestion the Jews are not saved is some how anti-semitic…Here’s an interaction with a young man from campus after he asked, “I’m Jewish, am I going to Hell?” As always, I want to thank the All Saved Freak Band for allowing to use “Sower” in the intro and outro.

Here are two conversations from campus that are centered on the idea of “Christian Supremacy.” The basic idea is that something is going to be supreme in a culture and, since Jesus is the Truth, I maintain that Jesus and his supremacy ought to be maintained by the Christian. In the mind of many, the concept of “supremacy” means oppression, but it is the Most High God that comes and serves, washing the feet of his enemies.

Drew Brees took some heat from encouraging kids to bring their Bibles to school, then he took heat from some in the Church, and I think we need more wisdom on these types of issues. Also, I play two clips from campus. One discussion is with a humble agnostic kid and the other with a Christian seeking clarification.

Robert Jay Lifton has an outstanding book called “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of ‘Brainwashing’ in China.” In chapter 22, he lays out 8 phenomena of “Ideological Totalism” and he discusses “thought-terminating cliches.” This is an important concept that is helpful in our evangelism, because we realize that people are given cliches to prevent them from thinking further and deeper about issues. Once we recognize these cliches, we have the opportunity to deal with this terminating language and press certain issues further.

A couple weeks ago, there was a glitch in the matrix, so Ep. 29 & 30 did not properly upload. This week I’m blessed with something close to laryngitis, so it works well for me. In this episode, I finish my interaction with Peter Atherton’s NYTimes opinion piece “The God Problem,” which isn’t really a problem, but a problem with poor definitions.

As the Church faces increasing social marginalization, we need to return to the basics of the church and evangelism.

Central to our evangelism is addressing the nature and reality of sin. Often sin is dealt with in a trivial – everyone knows they’re a sinner – so we rarely address the depths of the nature of the sin of man in our evangelism and relying on “human flourishing” or mere psychological categories. A recovery of the reality of sin is what our soul sick culture needs.

Joshua Harris, an influential “purity culture” advocate and pastor, has renounced the Faith. We look at his apostasy and seek to relate it to the most common question I get in the Church, “How do you keep your kids in the Faith?”