Deep Dive into The Passionate Pursuit of Revival and Christ-Exalting Joy by John Piper - Evangelist Bill Piper: Fundamentalist Full of Grace and Joy

Paradox and irony are fundamental to Christian identity and experience, profoundly shaping lives and expressions of faith. Irony is the incongruity between expectation and reality. This inherent nature stems from Christians being simultaneously fallen and redeemed, a state of being "saved, and . . . not yet saved." This leads to biblical paradoxes: adopted yet waiting for adoption, pure yet needing to become unleavened, heavenly citizens yet earthly exiles, bought with a price yet subject to institutions, and having already died yet told to consider themselves dead. The text asserts that if one is not a paradox, they are not saved, and perhaps not truly human, as even human identity paradoxically denies its Maker.

Bill Piper's life reflected these paradoxes. He was a "blood-earnest soul-winner" who, in his sixties, celebrated his wife's body with poetic, Song of Songs-like verses. Corporate paradoxes also emerged, like Bob Jones University, a highly fundamentalist institution, performing Shakespearean plays for commencement, an irony given Shakespeare's historical ridicule of Puritans. Piper himself experienced the irony of his separation from Bob Jones University, the movement that shaped him, for refusing to renounce Billy Graham, only to be reconciled later in life.

Bill Piper's primary identity, second only to being a child of God, was that of an evangelist. This calling defined his life from age fifteen to eighty-eight, solidified by his first sermon leading to ten conversions. Even in his final years with dementia, his mind focused on evangelistic crusades.

He defined modernism as ministers who denied fundamental Christian truths, specifically Jesus Christ's miraculous conception, absolute deity, vicarious atonement, bodily resurrection, personal visible return, the need for Holy Spirit regeneration, and a literal hell. For Piper, this was a battle over the "essential elements of the Christian faith."

Ultimately, his life exemplified a "fundamentalist full of grace and joy," where profound satisfaction in Christ allowed him to embrace strict standards with internal conviction, demonstrating how paradox enhances Christian identity and hope in God's grace.

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