Thursday, June 19, 2008

Passion KL (& Jarkarta)

My brother-in-Christ Huaizhi (whom I have met once in less-than-ideal circumstances) has posted a blog post on this event quite some time ago, and after thinking about it, I thought this should be an interesting event which should be much, much better than those very shallow and somewhat questionably-orthodox conferences like the Festival of Praise with Hillsongs and other such bands.

What I am talking about is the Passion conference, which according to Colin Hansen in his book Young, Restless and Reformed is at the heart of the New Calvinist movement sociologically. It seems that it is going worldwide now, and that seems to be an interesting opportunity to look at it first-hand. The conferences closest to Singapore will be held at KL, Malaysia on the 3rd August, followed by at Jakarta on the 5th August 2008. I will not say that I am for it, but I am neutrally positive towards the event. After all, I would place myself in the Reformed wing of the New Calvinist movement sociologically. [On such a scale, Piper would be centrist and Driscoll and Keller would be on the Progressive/Pseudo-Emerging side].

2 comments:

Joel Tay said...

Yea. God seems to be doing something in this recent resurgence in reformed theology among the late teens and twenties. It has been happening in US, I saw it in a large degree in the Brisbane when I was there, and I see it happening in Singapore. It'll be interesting to see what comes out of it.

Paul Washer, in speaking about this new reformed movement, say something like... in history, a return to the word of God is often used to prepare the church before a time of great persecution or natural disaster. I'm just recalling from memory.

What do you mean by reformed wing? The Piper position, I assume?

Daniel C said...

Reformed wing? As in Richard Phillips and the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, and their pressence in the Reformation 21 website, Greg Bahnsen and (on the peripheral) Gordon Clark.

Paul Washer did mention something like that I remember, but like you I cannot remember exactly where.

That said, I do have some concerns over the movement. I haven't articulated most of it, but I have made some comments on various posts under the label 'Neo-Calvinism'