The following is food for thought from a post on Pyromaniacs by Phil Johnson:

Turning a Blind Eye to Evil Is Evil, Too

. . . in which I (kind of) disagree with Tim Challies
by Phil Johnson

“They strengthen the hands of evildoers, so that no one turns from his evil” (Jeremiah 23:14).

was writing something to agree with and embellish a comment left by Gilbert under Frank’s post yesterday, but it got long, and I decided to make this a full post. I’ve got to say this, and I don’t want it buried at the end of a 120+ comment-thread.

First, some background: The venerable Tim Challies set our little corner of the blogosphere abuzz earlier this week with a post on the dangers of “watchblogs.” There’s quite a lot to applaud in what Tim said, but I don’t think he said everything about the subject that needed to be said. As a result, I thought his post was (quite uncharacteristically for Challies, of all people) lacking in balance.

One of the unintended side effects of Tim’s post has been a widespread and sometimes lively discussion about whether PyroManiacs qualifies as a “watchblog” or not. In the midst of one of these conversations, Gilbert (a long-time reader and commenter here, and a skilled meteorologist to boot) came very close to identifying what I see as the key difference between healthy discernment and the obsessive/compulsive peevishness some of our fellow critics seem to think is the mark of real orthodoxy. Gilbert said:

Gilbert: “Without putting words into [Phil Johnson’s] mouth, he’d rather spend his time building up believers and himself in the Word rather than calling people out for damnable heresies that are causing people to drift away from the true faith and send[ing] them to hell.”

Quite right. But let me add this: It needs to be said that “calling people out for damnable heresies that are causing people to drift away from the true faith” is a shepherd’s duty, not an option—and it can be quite edifying if done well.

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