Phil's Back

by Phil Johnson

t's been more than six years since I retired from the blogosphere. For half a decade, whenever someone would ask if I missed blogging, my honest answer was, "Not at all. Never even once." There wasn't a single moment in all those years when I thought, I wish I were still blogging so I could write something more than a Tweet about this issue. In my seven years of blogging, I had posted on practically every issue I really cared about. I ran out of opinions.

Some History
I began blogging in 2005 because I was concerned about my fellow evangelicals' blithe acceptance of the so-called Emerging Church Movement. It seemed as if every elite evangelical agency—from Christianity Today to the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC)—was foolishly hoping the Emergent Narrative would be The Next Big Thing. They were practically cheerleading for the movement! D. A. Carson was a rare voice of dissent, but his reply to the Emergent idea was (in my view) much too tepid to be an effective critique.

I had tried posting some opinions in the comments sections of a couple of popular blogs, but they made it clear they were not interested in dissenting views. One famous blog closed their comments completely when I tried joining their discussion. So on the last weekday of May 2005 I formally opened my own blog. My main goal was merely to articulate and catalogue my own misgivings about the drive to postmodernize evangelical Christianity. I had no expectation that anyone outside my circle of friends (and my Sunday school class) would be any more interested in my opinions than those blogs that had shooed me away when I commented.

My first real blogpost went live the day after Memorial Day that year. It was a poke at the "Young, Restless, Reformed" movement, though I wrote it a year and a half before Christianity Today and Collin Hansen gave that movement its name.

Right away, readership far exceeded what I anticipated. I immediately realized that I had inadvertently jumped into the deep end of the pool without any floaties.



PyroManiacS: The birth of the Group Blog
So six months in, I invited Dan Phillips and Frank Turk to partner with me in the effort. I'd never met either one of them before, but I'd read their comments on line, and I knew 1) that they shared my views about the folly of postmodernism, and 2) that they were gifted writers with minds full of verbal mischief, more than capable of the kind of critique I wanted to level against the Emergent movement. So we launched the team blog in January of 2006.

We wrote a lot of good, thoughtful posts attempting to provide Emergents with the "conversation" they were saying they wanted. But we quickly noticed a couple of surprising trends. First, the more purposefully rational and irenic our content, the less discussion our writing evoked. Second, no matter what we wrote or how we wrote it, there were swarms of smug postmoderns prepared to deconstruct our prose, pleading for every kind of "tolerance" other than tolerance of others' ideas, preaching love and kindness while eagerly spoiling for a fight with us.



The High-Water Mark
Frankly, making fun of postmodernism's foolish inconsistencies did far more good than trying to reason with postmoderns. Looking back, it seems to me that the Po-Motivators® may well have done more to open readers' eyes to the dangers of evangelical postmodernism than all the text we wrote combined. I'd hate to think those posters were the blog's high water mark, but it's true that the advent of the posters marked the turning point after which our postmodern critics dropped some of their trademark arrogance, and some of them actually left the Dark Side and joined the discussion we were having.

Anyway, the Emergent movement finally died, and we're thankful for that. When we knew the fad was well and truly over (that the popular movement phase had passed, anyway), blogging seemed less urgent and less appealing. I formally retired in 2012 on my 59th birthday, and most of the evangelical blogosphere breathed a deep, cosmic sigh of relief.

At the time, I remarked to anyone who raised the subject that although Emergent was dead and discredited as a movement, it had unleashed countless postmodern ideas and deconstructionist methodologies into the evangelical community, and these would bear some nasty fruit within a decade or less.

I see the fulfillment of that prophecy in a myriad of ways today—including the emboldening of Andy Stanley, the rise of a quasi-evangelical brand of Critical Race Theory, eroding definitions of "biblical inerrancy," evangelical waffling on the moral questions raised by people who classify their own "sexual orientation" as LGBTQ, evangelicals still craving academic recognition or popular esteem from worldly minded people, the recent drift of Russell Moore and the ERLC—and other related or similar issues.

So Here's the Thing . . .
I suddenly have the itch to write about some of these things. Not every day, of course, but from time to time—perhaps weekly or so. Dan Phillips is now blogging to a bigger audience at PJ Media, and Frank Turk is more determined than I to maintain his retirement from controversial social media. Still, I'd love to get occasional contributions from them—or from others, such as Darrell Harrison, Justin Peters, Josh Buice, or anyone else who shares both my passion for biblical Christianity and my contempt for every effort to make the evangelical movement more politically correct. Consider this an open invitation to submit articles you think might be of interest to my readers. If you write enough blogposts that fit, I'll give you a set of keys to the blog and make you an official PyroManiac.

Watch this space for my first actual issues-oriented re-entry into the blogosphere. If the Lord wills, I'll post it sometime next week.

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If I could give only one piece of advice to bloggers who want to be heard, it would be...

by Dan Phillips

...write less, but more often.

Oh, there, I gave away the punch-line without any buildup! And yet, you're still reading. Why is that? Probably three reasons:

1. Some: because you've learned you like my writing style. (Thank you! I appreciate you!)
2. Some: because the dialogue-style of this post has you engaged. And...
3. Some: because your peripheral vision tells you it isn't that long of a post, so a huge investment won't be necessary.

Now, there's a lesson in all of that. The first category has been earned, perhaps, by my ten-or-however-many years of blogging. I've built a readership. Again, thank you!

The second is something I've developed over the years.

The third is just the way it is. Unless your name rhymes with Zigon Zuncan or Xon Xiper or Pevin PeYoung or Qug Qilson or suchlike, you haven't earned the expectation that a huge time-investment in reading your writing would surely be rewarding. So don't write 30,000 word dissertations and ask everyone what they think. I'll tell you what they think: "That's too danged long!"

Seriously. I can't tell you how many times I've felt truly bad, because some good brother says "Please read this, tell me what you think." And, dutifully, I click over, and... my eyes go down, down, down, down, and yes once again, down. As they do, they glaze over, hope fades, my heart sinks, and I don't even want to start because I know I won't want to have to endure to the end to be saved.

So: you are bursting with a message. That's great. You want people to hear you. Of course you do! So write something snappy, to-the-point, and short. It won't say everything you want to say. But if you want anyone to want to hear what you have to say, you'll need to earn that. Start by respecting their time, and not overstaying your welcome.

After all, it's your blog. Today's a great day for Part One. Part Two can come tomorrow. Leave your readers wanting more, and they'll come back.

Put another way: use words like you have to pay for each one, instead of like you're paid for each one.

I'm done. See? Like that.

You're welcome.

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A Pint of Baby Orphan Tears

by Frank Turk

Before we get too far here, two things.

Number One: Thanks for asking - my vacation was great.

Number 2 (HT: Fred Butler and DJP):



A truly-inspired video, and a truly-irreplaceable pet.  If my Big Dog screamed like that, I'd have him in movies, but only because it would be impossible to have him in a middle-class neighborhood around anything which would cause him to make that noise -- a noise which makes the shriek of a witch-king pierced by an unexpected woman on a battlefield sound rather cheery.

Now: why post that soul-jarring scream on a moderately-serious blog like this one?  Well, it came to my attention a couple of weeks ago that there is a 5-year-old white paper out there by Tim Keller and David Powlison (men I respect and have defended in the past, and would still do so) entitled Should You Pass on Bad Reports?

Unremarkably, their verdict is, "no."  I know it's unsurprising, but as they summarize the matter, it goes like this:

• The first thing to do is to simply suspend judgment. Don’t pass on bad reports.
• The second thing to do is “cover” it in love, reminding yourself that you don’t know all about the heart of the person who may have done evil—and you know your own frailty. Don’t allow bad reports to pass into your own heart.
• The final thing to do is go and speak to them personally.

And they reach this conclusion through a significant exercise of walking through relevant Scriptural admonitions in order to reach a conclusion which, it seems, nobody can argue with.  It's offered, btw, from the blogger who posted it as something he hopes will resonate with all bloggers, to be posted far and wide on other blogs, to spiritually season Christian conversations on the internet.

Because: nobody wants to be the little white fluffy dog whom others perceive as howling like a cannibal's wedding feast.  Nobody wants to be the one whom others look at the way we all look at the little video above and be the object of dismay, scorn, and derision.  We don't want to be laughed out of the conversation, and moreover: we don't want to be dismissed because we are just a yowling mess.

In that respect: this is good advice.  Nobody should be a perpetual fault-finder -- if for no other reason than it actually makes less of you.  Someone who can find nothing good in other people is someone who is feeding himself only emotional poison.  Being constantly disappointed in other people -- or worse, always being outraged at them -- simply causes you to fail to see the image of God in those people.  Scripturally, you must do better -- and Powlison and Keller spell out why.

What?  Why are you looking at me like that?

I can't agree with good advice?

Oh, I see: you expect me to find fault with this particular consideration of bad reports of other people for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is because it is in some very specific and obvious ways responding to bad reports without, it seems, taking its own advice.  "Like Ministry" and all that.  Well, you seem to have worked that one out on your own.  Why do you need me to work it out for you?

What? You were actually hoping that I'd see if this advice actually works in realy life somehow -- like comment on Challies' on-going crusade against pornography as it relates to this good advice from pastoral minds?  Now: why should I do that?  Is there anyone reading this blog who is not actually aware that pornography is sinful and causes us to sin?  In fact, are there any readers of Tim's blog who are not readers of this blog (there are many of these people) who are not morally opposed to pornography?  We are on the same side of this issue -- why should I try to apply this advice to those posts?

What do you mean, "in what way is it in compliance with this advice to rail on against a particular sin abstracted from particular people? Doesn't that approach violate all of this advice -- first, by believing the worst of essentially all Christians; second, by judging the hearts of others; and third, by utterly neglecting to take the matter to them personally?"  Why would you say such a thing about a fellow everyone agrees is both discerning and utterly nice?  Do you think there's something wrong with general good advice?

Oh:  I see what you're driving at.  You're actually saying that the advice itself it a little bit too facile, too superficial -- that if somehow when it gets applied to the nicest fellow on the internet and somehow makes him out to be a watchblogger, it must somehow be faulty.  And by "Faulty," you mean the way a small dog that bays with the wails of demons demanding a pint of baby orphan tears is faulty -- it is neither useful, nor practical, nor as domesticated and harmless as it looked before it opened its mouth.

That's a pretty serious thing to say about useful fellows like Keller (who has sold a bajillion books, and gets to appear on Morning Joe) and Powlison (who has his own place in the pantheon of useful, center-bound Gospelistas in spite of his lesser status as a published author).

I'll consider your opinion and get back to it next week.

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