The Spirit comes to us as an earnest, a pledge, a down payment on final redemption. He is here and now the foretaste of future glory. But His presence is also an indication of the incompleteness of our present spiritual experience.

How do we distinguish the promptings of the Spirit of grace in His guiding and governing of our lives from the delusions of the spirit of the world and of our own sinful heart? This is a hugely important question if we are to be calm and confident that the spirit with whom we are communing really is the Holy Spirit.
John Owen suggests four ways in which the Spirit and the serpent are to be distinguished.
1. The leading of the Spirit is regular.
The leading of the Spirit, he says, is regular, that is, according to the regulum: the rule of Scripture. The Spirit does not work in us to give us a new rule of life, but to help us understand and apply the rule contained in Scripture. Thus, the fundamental question to ask about any guidance will be: Is this course of action consistent with the Word of God?
2. The commands of the Spirit are not grievous.
They are in harmony with the Word, and the Word is in harmony with the believer as new creation. The Christian believer consciously submitted to the Word will find pleasure in obeying that Word, even if the Lord’s way for us is marked by struggle, pain, and sorrow. Christ’s yoke fits well; His burden never crushes the spirit (Matt. 11:28-30).
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Nearly two decades ago Os Guinness released a brief but powerful volume entitled Prophetic Untimeliness (Baker, 2003). It is well worth revisiting – or for many of you, being introduced to for the first time. In his Introduction he explains the book’s title: “Prophetic Untimeliness is a term adapted from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche but shaped by the precedent of the Hebrew prophets rather than the German iconoclast. Nietzsche saw that independent thinkers would always be out of step with the conventional wisdom of their generation.”

What follows might sound quite strange to many Christians, but ALL God’s people today ARE called to have a prophetic ministry, and ALL God’s people today ARE called to be engaged in resistance thinking – and action. The only reason this sounds alarming and foreign is because we have moved so far away from New Testament Christianity.
The idea that we should have a prophetic voice and lifestyle, and that we should be actively resisting the ungodly culture all around us is really just basic Christianity 101. But it is a sign of the times that such basics sound radical and even revolutionary to most Christians – at least in the West.
I could cite countless believers from over the past two millennia who have spoken about such matters, but let me refer to just one: an 80-year-old Christian that I just highlighted in an article yesterday: billmuehlenberg.com/2022/06/14/notable-christians-os-guinness/
Nearly two decades ago Os Guinness released a brief but powerful volume entitled Prophetic Untimeliness (Baker, 2003). It is well worth revisiting – or for many of you, being introduced to for the first time. In his Introduction he explains the book’s title:
“Prophetic Untimeliness is a term adapted from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche but shaped by the precedent of the Hebrew prophets rather than the German iconoclast. Nietzsche saw that independent thinkers would always be out of step with the conventional wisdom of their generation.”
As to prophets, he says this: “We might distinguish capital-P ‘Prophets’ from small-p ‘prophets.’ The former are those, like Isaiah and Jeremiah, who have heard a direct, explicit, supernatural word from God and can legitimately say, ‘This is the word of the Lord.’ The latter are those who interpret their life and times from a biblical perspective and therefore ‘read the signs of the times’ with greater or lesser skill, but never presume the authority and infallibility of ‘This is the word of the Lord’.”
He also explains that the notion of “resistance thinking” is adapted from a 1945 essay by C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics”. I dug it out from his God in the Dock, where Lewis said this:
“Science progresses because scientists, instead of running away from such troublesome phenomena or hushing them up, are constantly seeking them out. In the same way, there will be progress in Christian knowledge only as long as we accept the challenge of the difficult or repellent doctrines. A ‘liberal’ Christianity which considers itself free to alter the Faith whenever the Faith looks perplexing or repellent must be completely stagnant. Progress is made only into a resisting material.”
So the Christian is to be a prophetic voice and resist the world and its wayward direction. But Christians resist the world and its wrong paths because we want something better of the world:
“A vital secret of the church’s power and glory in history lies in its calling to be ‘against the world, for the world.’ C. S. Lewis calls this the ‘two-edged character’ of the Christian faith.
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Written by James E. Hanley |
Friday, September 17, 2021
CRT is just a sophisticated legal theory taught only in law schools and graduate schools. Others say that CRT is the simple factual truth about the history of race and politics in the U.S. and conservative opponents are trying to block teaching that in public schools. These two claims cannot both be true. A complexly sophisticated idea taught only in graduate school cannot simultaneously be a simple idea taught in elementary and high schools. One need not even critique CRT to agree to this. So why do its defenders contradict themselves?

In recent months defenders of Critical Race Theory have given two conflicting stories. Some tell us that the flap over critical race theory (CRT) in K-12 education is a strawman because CRT is just a sophisticated legal theory taught only in law schools and graduate schools. Others say that CRT is the simple factual truth about the history of race and politics in the U.S. and conservative opponents are trying to block teaching that in public schools. These two claims cannot both be true. A complexly sophisticated idea taught only in graduate school cannot simultaneously be a simple idea taught in elementary and high schools. One need not even critique CRT to agree to this. So why do its defenders contradict themselves?
In our search for a reason, we should look for an explanation that is both charitable and grounded. By charitable, I mean we assume CRT’s defenders are not consciously trying to deceive. By grounded, I mean one that easily fits known facts and theories, without need for special pleading. Collectively, these two principles are the foundation of Hanlon’s razor, which warns us to never assume malice when ignorance is an adequate explanation.
In the case of CRT, I believe we can explain its defenders’ confusion through the simple lens of costs and benefits. Put simply, acquiring knowledge is costly, and thinking logically is costly, but feeling morally righteous or smugly superior is psychologically valuable and attained at low cost. Just as any of us prefer a good meal we don’t have to pay for, we face a temptation to latch on to the feelings of moral or intellectual superiority without paying the costs of gaining real knowledge and engaging in careful thinking.
Let’s begin with those who say critical race theory is just a high-level academic theory. They clearly err, because no influential academic theory remains only at the law school and graduate school level for decades. Although CRT originated in law schools, legal scholarship is not hermetically sealed off from the rest of academia. Some social science and humanities scholars found the ideas of CRT useful for their scholarly pursuits and adopted them. Blossoming scholars then learned these ideas in graduate school and applied them in their own scholarly thinking, and then, when they got academic jobs, in their undergraduate courses.
That sophisticated scholarly ideas sometimes get watered down in undergrad courses is no secret. So the CRT a student learns in an undergraduate Sociology or African-American Studies course may be incomplete in the same way that undergrads get an incomplete version of Plato or Marx. That doesn’t make it not critical theory. And if some of these undergrads go on to teach in elementary or high schools, some likely will introduce some of these ideas, likely in an even more watered-down way.
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