Tried With Fire

I've been waiting for Rosaria Butterfield's new book, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, ever since she and her husband, Kent, spoke at our theology conference two years ago. The books arrived yesterday, so I started flipping through a copy. My first reaction is - "Fasten your seat belt." I don't know where the idea came in that hospitality = entertaining and entertaining = Martha Stewart. Maybe it's my own introvert insecurity making a wrong connection, but Rosaria's book couldn't be farther from this. Radical ordinary hospitality gives evidence of faith in Jesus's power to save. It doesn't get dug in over politics or culture or where someone stands on current events. It knows what conversion means, what identity in Christ does, and what repentance creates. It knows that sin is deceptive. To be deceived means to be taken captive by an evil force to do its bidding. It knows that people need to be rescued from their sin, not to be giv...

The Romantic period is typified by an uncontested embrace of personal experience, not merely as self-expression or self-representation, but also as epistemology and personal identity (who I am, ontologically)... Romanticism claimed that you know truth through the lens of your personal experience, and that no overriding or objective opposition can challenge the primal wisdom of someones subjective frame of intelligibility. In romanticism, this knowing and being known is identity-rooted and identity-expressive. Romanticism went beyond a solipsistic, me-centered understanding of selfhood. Solipsism is the belief that only one's own mind and its properties are sure to exist. Romanticism took this one step further to declare personal feelings and experience the most reliable measure and means of discerning truth. 1 This quote from Rosaria Butterfield's Openness Unhindered  makes the case that sexual orientation as identity is a byproduct of romanticism. I agree with her complet...

These excerpts from Rosaria Butterfield and Francis Schaeffer are rather uncanny given the latest round of Christian scandals. I have no intention of discussing the scandals themselves. Neither do I intend to gloat over anyone's moral downfall. But I think it is worth taking a very hard look at the movements in the Christian subculture that all but guarantee the perfect Christian family. There are conferences and books galore which play off of fear, especially the fear that our kids will fall into sexual immorality. This is a legitimate concern for parents, which I do not want to make light of, but the solutions are often long on rules and short on gospel. Success is achieved and measured by external behavior, and shame is used to enforce the methodology. When a person falls, he/she needs to own that sin without shifting the blame. But I can't help but wonder if these systems set up their adherents for failure. Moralism never kept anyone from sinning. From Rosaria Butterfield...

I am reposting a review of Openness Unhindered by Rosaria Butterfield at Out of the Ordinary today. Read the post here. As providence would have it, the Mortification of Spin team has done a podcast on the book today with another one to follow in a few weeks. Listen  here .

Openness Unhindered , Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Crown & Covenant Publications, July 2015, 206 pages. The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert by Rosaria Butterfield is one of the most thought-provoking and challenging books I have read. I was convicted of my lack of love for the lost and lack of faith in the power of the gospel, but it also encouraged me to believe that God is able to save to the uttermost. If you haven't read it, read it! Because of Secret Thoughts , I was eager to read Butterfield's second book, Openness Unhindered . Identity and specifically sexual identity are hot topics and even more so following the Supreme Court's ruling on same-sex marriage. How should Christians address the issue of sexual orientation and identity? How do we come alongside our brothers and sisters who struggle with sexual sin and have made the choice to live "in chastity with unwanted homosexual desires?" (pg. 144) These are a few of the issues tackled ...

Openness Unhindered is the latest book by Rosaria Butterfield, the author of S ecret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert . If you haven't read her first book, read it. It's a testimony to the present and active power of the gospel. Her second book, however, is less focused about her journey to Christ and more on what the Bible has to say about our identity (specifically sexual identity), temptation, repentance, and living our lives unto God. I'm only halfway through Openness Unhindered , and it is excellent so far. Here are a few quotes that jumped off the page: It is not the absence of sin that makes you a believer. It is the presence of Christ in the midst of your struggle that commends the believer and sets you apart in the world. Real conversion gives you Christ's company as you walk through the valley of the shadow of death. (pg. 8) If I create an identity carved out of my person pain, even one caused by the sins of my flesh, I will forever struggle in a separa...

ht: Justin Taylor The video is a Q&A session with Rosaria Butterfield , author of The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert .   It's one of the best books I've read this year in which she relates her conversion from lesbian, atheist, feminist college professor to psalm-singing, OPC pastor's wife and homeschooling mom. If you don't have time to watch the whole Q&A, watch from around 11:00 - 15:00. Butterfield answers a question about how can the church help believers who are struggling with sexual sin. I think one could make the same application for all the sins believers still struggle with, not just the ones of the flesh. I do not believe she is advocating giving sin a pass. Rather, it probably wouldn't hurt any of us to examine our hearts to see if our prejudices and fears keep us from believing that God is able to save or if we would prefer that God save those people, whoever those people may be, in someone else's church or at least clean them...

I borrowed Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield on Wednesday and finished it by Saturday. It is the amazing story of the conversion of an atheist lesbian college professor to Christ. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and found it hard to put down. She writes candidly about her struggle to come to faith and the complete train wreck it made of her life. She also tells of her transition to becoming a Reformed Presbyterian pastor's wife and their journey to parenthood through adoption and foster care. But I was especially moved by the process of her conversion because God used a means as simple and ordinary as friendship. Butterfield was befriended by a Reformed Presbyterian pastor and his wife. Ken and Floy Smith invited her to their home. They didn't ram the gospel down her throat, even waiting two years before inviting her to church. They were honest about their belief in God, His Word, and what it said about her lesbianism, but that did not d...