When a man has been blessed with long life, faithfulness to the Lord, and great success in using his God-given gifts, I believe we should view his passing as a day of celebration. So today I rejoice in the life and death and entrance into glory of Dr. D. James Kennedy. Our prayers go out to his family and friends, but our thanks goes to God for yet another example of God's grace to this land.
Okay, we are Calvinists, so we have to insert a few jabs. We have problems with Evangelism Explosion. We can't be using Arminian tactics to win the lost: Let our neighborhood Arminian churches do the field work. Then we can have deep talks with the cream of their converts and give them Reformed books and grow our churches without ever having to darken the door of an unbeliever's home.
And Dr. Kennedy had favorable things to say about Abraham Lincoln. Basically, he taught that Lincoln got religion along the way leading up to the end. Of course, those of us in the old Confederacy are willing to grant that grace extends north of the Mason-Dixon line. And maybe if Lincoln had been converted earlier and had spent a few afternoons across the Potomac attending R.L. Dabney's lectures, we could have avoided the whole 1861-1865 mess.
Dr. Kennedy was one of the few among our guys who has achieved the status of pastor of a mega-church. Sometimes I am prone to think that a work cannot be very good or very faithful unless the numbers are small and preferably diminishing. My postmillennialism is all too often confirmed by God's blessings on works that don't fit my other theological paradigms. I am all too much like the lady in Flannery O'Connor's short story 'Revelation' who sees a vision of all sorts of people ascending into heaven ahead of people like her self-righteous husband and herself.
Some of Dr. Kennedy's political forays had the same tendencies that irritate true liberals to the hilt, but irk true conservatives as well.
So from the ground, I can detect a few minor flaws in this spiritually gigantic man of stature and grace. And a giant he was. Giants do two things for us: When they are on our side, they provide us with great comfort, and they make us see how small we are. May God raise us more such giants to stalk our land.
"A way a man. Take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.'
Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2
The preacher of Ecclesiastes tells us, "Of the making of many books, there is no end." To which we add, "Of the buying and reading of many books, there is no end."
