Heat and Light

I was perusing a few of my favorite blogs tonight and came across a video at Slice of Laodicea posted by Sam Guzman entitled “Just Stop and Think“.  I had never seen nor heard of the video before so I watched it, and was disturbed.  My “synergism alert mechanism” was in full red alert mode well before the video ended, and I was left scratching my head and wondering, “why in the world would something like this be posted at Slice?”

Interestingly the original poster extended an olive branch of sorts to his “reformed brothers and sisters who may object to this style of Gospel presentation“ by linking to a Pyromaniacs post by Frank Turk.  I thought, “hey, that’s me!”, so I skipped over to Team Pyro to read up on what CenturiOn (Frank Turk) had to say on the subject.

I discovered that in his piece Frank had responded to criticism of the video by Steve Camp, which thing rapidly expanded out to various corners of the Christian blogsphere, hence the title of my missive, “Heat and Light”.  In my opinion it’s truly a rare thing in the Christian blogosphere to find a spiritually healthy balance of heat and light on a rather controversial subject: the love of God as it relates to the reprobate, and the “good faith offer” of the Gospel to all mankind; but it’s my well considered opinion that the ensuing discussion in this case did serve to generate valuable Biblical light in addition to the all-too-frequently generated – and often personality driven - heat.

With that I’d like to direct your attention to the video itself, and to Daniel’s Place where he seems to have compiled a fairly comprehensive list of links dealing with this short video, and the virtual tempest-in-a-teapot that it generated some two and a half years ago.  I would encourage you to read through the various posts and the related combox discussions because you need to deeply consider the ramifications of this extremely important subject – the proclamation of the Gospel. So grab your Bible, a glass of tea, and a comfy chair, and slog your way through this material for your own edification and to the glory of Christ.