Wrestling with RPW

[KMK]

I also oppose using secular songs for worship. I think it is bordering on blasphemy when "worship" leaders sing songs like "J-E-S-U-S and Jesus was His name-o" or "ding dong the witch is dead, the wicked witch is dead (religion witch)". Those are two actual examples and I could list the artists that I heard sing those songs during worship.

What in the world is a 'religious witch'?

A spirit of religion or a religious spirit.

A cursory Google search leads me to believe that this is otherwise known as 'Phariseeism'. I have never heard this phrase before, in the Bible, or in Christianese.

I guess that growing up I heard people teach so much on the 'religious spirit' that I never thought about it being "Christianese". I think you see that kind of language used in some Reformed circles though when they talk for instance about religion saying something that contradicts unconditional election for instance. Some Reformed people would say that someone who teaches conditional election is peddling "religion". Mark Driscoll has used the word "religion" in this way. But then, he is a "Charismatic with a seatbelt".

I heard John Piper talking one time about how the adjective "religious" used to have a positive meaning as in the title of Jonathan Edwards's book "The Religious Affections" but now it has a negative meaning implying that someone is legalistic and pharasaical. In this case, the word "religious" is being used in opposite ways.

The Christian rapper Tedashii is featured in the Trip Lee song "Bear With You" speaks of true salvation and says "that's when it goes past religion".

Whereas Reformed people use the term "religious" to refer to doctrine that is counterintuitive to the Gospel, Pentecostals use the term to refer to worship that they feel is stodgy and restricting. It's just that the application in each case is different.

If 'religious' means 'pharasiacal' then what does 'pharasaical' mean? From your description it sounds like some Pentecostals have a 'spirit of a witch' in their view of us who are 'stodgy'.

 

[jwright82]

I don't see what is so restrictive about NC worship? My church has a traditional and contemporary service. They are both "done in good order" and liturgical in the traditional sense. So how is it "restrictive" if we don't have dancing? That sounds like a Post-modern, and not a biblical, argument. In PM extreme emphasis is placed on individual experience, you experience it your way and I'll experience it mine. A type of restricitive arguments are used by them to be more inclusive. For instance post-conservitive theologian Brian Mclaren says somewhere, I'll paraphrase it, that he sees himself as withen the Calvinist tradition because he has a version of the TULIP, never mind that it is 100% different from the traditional TULIP.

The point he is arguing for less doctrinal restrictions. I know that you are not but I see a correlation because you were making the same kind of argument for the RPW as being too restrictive, I know that you have thought through it and except it now. It is just curious to me that with the rise of the Pentecostal movement to a degree coincided with the rise of PM, just an observation not a well worked out argument.

 

[deathtolife]

Brother,

I struggled with the RPW for quite sometime.
It is when I realized that God never needed us to worship Him in the first place that I -by the grace of God - accepted the sovreignty of God over how we ought to worship Him. Never forget it is by His grace alone through Christ Jesus that we can approach His throne worthy to worship Him. The RPW is really a desire to please the Lord as we worship in "Spirit and in truth".