For most people I am not convinced that they identifying the real issue. Have they complained about Aslan in Chronicles of Narnia? What about Jesus use of God as the Vineyard owner in his parables. There are many fictional representations of God. None of them are complete, all of them if taken too far are heresy. But they still have been helpful for Christians throughout history to better understand the Character of God.

The problem is the slippery slope of Piper's argument. He starts by saying that he has serious concerns about online church, but what most people will hear is that online church is wrong and should never be done. I think most people really don't want online church as a replacement for physical church but as a supplement. And why would we ever want to keep people from additional expressions of church?

When you say that Jesus didn't use the same language I am not sure you are completely correct. The langauge that Jesus used to describe the Pharasees was very strong (our bibles usually tone it down a bit). And because we don't know everything that Jesus said to claim that Jesus never did something can be hard. What we can say is that he didn't sin. So the language that he did use was not sinful. Paul was not without sin, but the langauge that he used in a couple places was also quite strong. As was noted above, he used the rough equivelent of s**t, and told a people that they should cut their balls off if they were going to teach things inappropriately about cirucumcision. My hebrew and greek scholar friends all agree that our bibles are cleaned up versions of what is sometimes there.

I think that is one of my frustrations at this point in the book. At this point in time, virtual communities are a part of the world we live in. I assume that Hipps will address that at some point.

I am not really looking forward to the mispronounced and made up words. My niece used to call me guy (or her version of it) because her Dad when trying to get her to say my name would always say "who's that guy". Now she approximates my name as "an" or occationally "aum".

My current favorite is her version of "I'm coming" which she uses all the time to make sure we know where she is and that she is interested.

Happy Parenting John : )

That is a great phrase. I was talking about it with some friends tonight. My friend totally agreed with it. She saw about 6 or so friends from high school that she doesn't usually see in person but are all friends on twitter. Their "ambient intimacy" gave them a relational comfort that was quite disproportionate from the amount of time they spent together in high school.

I friend of my wife's is friends on facebook with me. We are both stay at home "parents" (I am actually a nanny for my niece not a parent). But we frequently talk over facebook about the little details of our day. She actually talked about missing my wife and I's posts when we were on vacation and not posting much. By her description she actually missed us, not just our posts, even though I only have met her a couple times and my wife only sees her every couple months.

His camp songs posts a couple weeks ago were cracking me up.

I agree they are very different. But like I said I think blogging is much closer to preaching than Piper wants to admit. In fact, I think that Piper and many others lift up the sermon way higher than they should. The sermon is an important part of the Christian life, but we have made it central not only to our learning, but our evangelism, our discipleship, and our sacraments. So while I think it is not really preaching, I think that is a good thing. It is actually two-way in many cases and relationship building. I don't think anyone really would describe preaching as a relationship building experience. If you believe, as I do, that evangelism is primarily about the relationship (and not the information sharing) then you would want to put more effort into blogging and other relational mediums and less into preaching.

Blogging is no more (and maybe less) limiting than most other written forms of communication. Written communication has been proclaiming the gospel for thousands of years so I don't think we need to worry about it too much. On the less limiting sides, the opportunity for two way communication with comments and longer term relationships between author and reading actually moves it up past books and most other forms of written communication.

My comment on Ed's blog is a different take. I agree with Jay's basic point. And I agree with your ABC points about why you don't curse. But my frustration with Ed and many other anti-cursing advocates is that what they are doing is removing a language of frustration from Christian vocabulary. We as Christians have much that we should be frustrated about. If we don't have a way to be frustrated and be Christian then we are ignoring a range of emotion that is both valid and part of Christ's own example.

Most, if not all of the words that Ed Young used were not cursing in the biblical sense (either using the Lord's name in vain or actually calling harm from God on someone). The words that Ed Young complains about are either variations of words describing bodily functions (that now really mean something else) or words that are just corse according to proper language usage. I don't think we should be drawing a bright line about what words are ok (I agree with Dewde - regional and cultural differences really do matter in this poing), but if you do draw a bright line, then you need to be more careful.