In my circles, branding someone a “self-professing” anything generally doesn’t rise to the level of a compliment.<\/p>\n
I find that odd.<\/p>\n
I profess to be a Christian.<\/p>\n
Does that make me a self-professing Christian?<\/p>\n
I believe so.<\/p>\n
You got a problem with that?<\/p>\n
Maybe you think I’m suspect as a Christian because I profess to be one?<\/p>\n
Really, though, it’s weird to read or hear one self-professing Christian use self-professing<\/i> to speak of another self-professing Christian.<\/p>\n
I just read another instance of that in Issue 100 of the newsletter from Faith builders. In an otherwise excellent article (The Anabaptist Advantage Among Muslims<\/a>) by self-professing Christian TDW, this:<\/p>\n Then in 2001 the self-professing “born-again” President George Bush called for another round of violence against the Muslims when he said…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n OK.<\/p>\n Like I said, TDW’s article is excellent. I hope to secure permission to republish it on one or more of my sites. I truly do expect them to grant me permission, even though I plan to chide them for the above reference to the President.<\/p>\n After all, how can I possibly believe that my self-profession is more accurate than anyone else’s?<\/p>\n And, still, I use self-professing<\/i> on others, though less and less intentionally so.<\/p>\n And when I do, it’s less easy to overlook the importance — the urgent necessity<\/b> — of making sure that my own self-profession is under-girded and made believable by the evidence blooming fragrantly from my own life.<\/p>\n PS: I understand that we adjective-ize someone with self-professing<\/i> when we have reason to question the sincerity and depth of his commitment to Christ. But still…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In my circles, branding someone a “self-professing” anything generally doesn’t rise to the level of a compliment. I find that odd. I profess to be a Christian. Does that make me a self-professing Christian? I believe so. You got a problem with that? Maybe you think I’m suspect as a Christian because I profess to … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,395,534],"tags":[72],"class_list":["post-2162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christianity-101","category-dumb-and-such","category-todays-thought","tag-christianity"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prJUJ-yS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}