Pyromaniacs

Faithfulness, "Fruitfulness," and the Twisted Notion of Evangelical Celebrity

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Johnson) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:01:00 +0000

by Phil Johnson

econd Timothy 3 begins with a stern, prophetic warning: "But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty." And then Paul gives a dead-on job description for the typical 21st-century celebrity: "People will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God."

But get this: When Paul says "People," he is not talking about People magazine or the secular celebrities that grace the cover of that periodical. He is predicting a time when those traits will be characteristic of church leaders. Notice that the people he is describing "hav[e] the appearance of godliness, but [deny] its power" (v. 5).

We are living and ministering in a time such as Paul described. Watch today's rock-star pastors on their YouTube channels and you will see every characteristic Paul listed played out in vivid detail on the church stage.

So what are Paul's instructions to Timothy? Should he mentor these guys, invite them for Elephant-Room-style dialogue, become a headliner in their conferences, or publicly embrace and encourage them in the hope that he can harness their popularity and perhaps influence them for good? Not at all.

With regard to pastors and church leaders who promote and model innovative, worldly, self-loving ministry philosophies, "reckless [church leaders], swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure"—Paul wants Timothy to be a separatist: "Avoid such people" (v. 5). In fact the Greek term is active, aggressive: "from such turn away."

Paul then reminds Timothy of his singular duty to be both a student and a herald of the Word of God: "As for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed . . . . All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work" (vv. 14-17).

This has been a repeated theme in Paul's counsel to Timothy. First Timothy 4:6: "put these things before the brothers." What things? "the words of the faith and of the good doctrine that you have followed." Verse 11: "Command and teach these things." Verse 13: "Devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching." Chapter 6, verses 2-4: "Teach and urge these things. If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing." Second Timothy 1:13: "[Hold fast] the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me." Chapter 2, verse 15: "Present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth."

New Testament pastors are called to be simple and single-minded in the carrying our of a single task. Yet, amazingly, the straightforward clarity of Paul's charge to Timothy seems utterly lost on many 21st-century church leaders. They have been blinded to it by the quest for celebrity and a worldly standard of success.

What's ironic about that is that even the great apostle Paul would not have measured up to their notion of "fruitfulness" and prosperity. Both of his epistles to Timothy end by noting how many unfaithful former companions forsook him when the cost of standing firm became too high. He was neither popular nor "fruitful" by the Elephant-Room standard of fruitfulness.

That ought to make us stop and reassess the direction of the contemporary evangelical movement. I, for one, don't want to go where the movement seems headed.

About any claim of a word from God: application

noreply@blogger.com (DJP) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:44:00 +0000

by Dan Phillips

Let's make a step forward from the basic considerations we laid down about any word from God, a couple of posts ago. I'll take this as established:

There is no such thing as a word from God that is erroneous. If a word affirms error, it is not God who is speaking (Num. 23:19; Jn. 17:17; Tit. 1:2; Heb. 6: 18).
There is no such thing as a word from God that is not absolutely morally-binding (Deut. 18:19; Jn. 15:22). This absolute obligation is all-encompassing: if God tells us to act or refrain from acting, we must comply; if God tells us to think or believe, we must agree. I sin equally if I fail to love my wife (Eph. 5:25), and if I fail to refrain from committing adultery (Rom. 13:9) — but I also sin if I do not believe that Christ is God (Jn. 1:1) and that He became flesh (v. 14).

Sad but true, I wish I could say that all professed Christians (myself included) "get that" in terms of accepting and embracing and practicing it with complete consistency regarding the Bible. Sanctification is a process.

But I'd like to stir your pure minds to thought in another direction. Take a hypothetical — oh boy, I wish it were hypothetical. But let's put it as one.

HYPOTHETICAL: Brother X says that God "told" or "has called" him to do Y, which is not in any way directly stated or contained in Scripture.

Now here are my questions, and I really would urge you to think hard about this. Picture me looking you straight in the eye, requiring that you lock gazes with me as I say very intently: it is failure to think through the implications of such claims that accounts for a great deal of sloppiness and error in the professing church today.

My questions, then:

What absolute and immediate obligation does that put on every person who hears that assertion?
What must the consequences be for church discipline?

Have at it.

The Eddie Haskell of Pastoral Trouble-Making

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Turk) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:01:00 +0000

by Frank Turk

Before we get full-on blog here today, my friends Steve Hays and Jason Engwer are waging the war against popular old-school atheism. By that I mean they are actually engaging the old-school atheists and basically beating them down in a manner suitable to the means presented by the lot of them. I mention it because Steve and Jason have written a response to the latest tome from the John Loftus school of inbred atheism, and it's called The End of Infidelity. The e-book is available at this link, and I commend it to you if you care at all about atheist apologetics.

Note to Steve and Jason & the rest of the Triabloguers: The reason I say "old school atheists" above is that the hard-core post-modernist bent has set in, and the old rationalist, materialist, neo-positivist atheism is, frankly, running on empty. Nobody wants all that philosophical baggage any more these days, and the next generation of atheists will be in the same vein as a young fellow named Chris Stedman, who is on staff at the (now get this) Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University. He's the face of nice atheism, and has a book coming out called (F)a(i)theist. In 10 years, John Loftus will be a homeless person muttering to himself about his self-published archive that banished Theism into the outer darkness of people he wouldn't associate with anyway, but Stedman and his lite version of interfaith collegiality between unbelief and belief will be alive and well among those who think superficial "nice" is the most important virtue. Let's find a way to preach the Gospel to that, and stay ahead of the curve.

OK -- so you're all over the Elephant Room 2 fiasco, right? There's nothing left to say, it's been said, and we need to just move on. Carson and Keller have offered the penultimate careful evaluation (the ultimate to take place behind closed doors with no chance that anyone will see how this gets resolved), James MacDonald has stopped posting videos extolling his own humility (at least through the moment at which I am typing this), and we're done.

Um, no.

Mark Driscoll has, with his usual panache, escaped all scrutiny. He's the Eddie Haskell of pastoral trouble-making, usually getting someone else on the hook for his own impishness, and getting away with most of it because he's really such a nice boy according to Mrs. Cleaver. And this is a very troubling issue as his tribe of manly men for Jesus (the Acts29 network) are not usually this quiet -- unless Pastor Driscoll has put his foot in it (again).

Now, what I am very excited about is that not everyone has let what he has done here go unnoticed. To their credit, Carson and Keller said this much in their pronouncement from Mount Caritas:

Here is where the distinction becomes interesting. Neither the terminology of "manifestations" preferred by Oneness Pentecostals and other modalists nor the terminology of "persons" supported by historic creeds is directly used in Scripture. Where does it come from? It comes from thinkers two or three centuries after the New Testament was written who were doing their best to summarize large tracks of biblical themes and texts in faithful, accurate summaries, even if the terminology was not directly dependent on the terminology of a specific verse or two. History has shown, for the reasons briefly set forth in our first pairing, that the terminology of "manifestations" was soundly trounced and declared heretical: it simply could not be squared with what the Bible says. The "persons" terminology prevailed (along with words like "subsistence") not because it derived directly from usage in the biblical documents themselves, but because it could be shown that this terminology did a great job of summarizing what the Bible actually says.

And then again:

To attempt theological interpretation without reference to such developments is part and parcel of Biblicism One; to attempt theological interpretation that is self-consciously aware of such developments and takes them into account is part and parcel of Biblicism Two. We hasten to add that both Biblicism One and Biblicism Two insist that final authority rests with the Bible. All the theological syntheses are in principle revisible. Yet the best of these creeds and confessions have been grounded in such widespread study, discussion, debate, and testing against Scripture that to ignore them tends to cut oneself off from the entire history of Christian confessionalism. The Bible remains theoretically authoritative (Biblicism One), but in fact it is being manipulated and pummeled by private interpretations cut off from the common heritage of all Christians.

Statements with which I whole-heartedly agree -- but which Pastor Driscoll has tacitly denied in his interaction with Jakes (and has openly denied as demonstrated here). So on the one hand, the clever person can see the distancing of TGC from Driscoll's new friendship and new alliance with a man TGC does not hold in such high esteem, and at the same time we can also see the basis for a rebuke for what has happened.

But what's going on with Acts29? Not a statement? Not a mention? Not a notice that they have seen it and therefore rebuke the twittering pajamahadijn for making such a big thing of this?

Listen y'all: this is a big thing. Driscoll himself has rebuked Osteen-ism from his own pulpit, and wants you rubes to man up and shoot the wolves. But here he is with the only other fellow in the English-speaking world who has the scope of influence of Osteen and the self-same lousy Gospel and theology, and the same worn out lines which Christianity Today can't recognize from 2000 even tough they printed them, and he's shaking hands with this fellow in a way which even Keller and Carson find dubious.

See: I get it when you guys are offended that Phil or John MacArthur wag a finger at you and yours -- because it feels like your father wagging his finger at you for forgetting to fill up the car when you just drove home from saving all the orphans from a house fire. You guys see yourselves reaching a generation for Christ, and the (from your perspective) indignation over holiness (which looks, from your perspective, a little stilted) seems to be unwarranted parental umbrage. So if they tell you that you ought to say something about Mark or to Mark, they can just go mind their own business. You're busy with something else, like ministry.

But you have to ask yourselves: is it right that the President of your Church Planting Network (they called those "conventions" back when your pappy was a deacon; they called them "associations" in the 1980's) can embrace a guy that the rest of you know is not someone you would bring into the fold? You know you wouldn't let Jakes preach from your pulpit - shouldn't you at least ask what is now expected from you and your tribe after Mark gave him the Big Hug and the "welcome to the Family" speech?

Apparently all the right people are on the bus ...

The Gospel Coalition has made it very clear about where they stand on this. I am grateful for what they have said, even if it's too little, too late. But you guys are silent?

Well, maybe that's how it goes. Maybe there's a bro-code I don't know because I'm not a bro, and you guys can accept that Mark Driscoll can lead you into associations with people you know will be harmful to your local church's theological and missional well-being with no consequences because he's "fruitful" and "humble". Lumpy never ratted out Eddie, after all.

But let's be honest: that's showing something which, in the final account, we might be able to call "fellowship" or "perseverance" or some such Bible word that puts a good face on it. But that's not being a leader by any means. That's not showing leadership. And in the end, you're supposed to be pastors and not merely a hipster mutual appreciation society.

UPDATED: Wow. As I was writing this post, it turns out Acts29 was making an announcement which shows they are "excited about the future of Acts 29". You can read the whole thing here, but as it turns out Pastor Mark's performance at the Elephant Room will not only have no effect on his status inside A29: he actually is going back to being the leader of the pack. (cue motorcycle music)

And before things go completely south from that announcement, let's remember that when those guys are using the terms "Prophet," "Priest," and "King," they are using Bible terms to identify organizational functions, not theocratic anointings. That Driscoll is now the leader of their "Prophet board" does not mean anything more than he's the leader of their board of directors. That they feel like they have to call themselves a "Prophet board" rather than "board of directors" is funny enough; let's not escalate the hilarity by trying to figure out which visions Driscoll will see now ...

ANOTHER UPDATE: Oh brother. Apparently James MacDonald is now repeating his side of the story -- with some addenda (like the private repudiation of the Prosperity Gospel Jakes made to him). The round up of that activity is best found here.

"Careful"

noreply@blogger.com (DJP) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:22:00 +0000

by Dan Phillips

"Careful" has become a shudder-inducing word for me. Like "gay." In fact, very like "gay."

That's too bad, because it's a really good word in itself (like "gay"!; I'm going to stop saying that). It's a great word, in fact. Your kids are going on a hike, or to play touch football, or to the shooting range. "Be careful," you say. Right. Or I was chatting with a lady police officer the other day, and parted with "You be careful" and a prayer for her safety.

But lately the word has joined "nuanced" and "helpful" and "thoughtful" to give me the shudders. I don't think any of the words are irredeemable. But what I do fear is that all those words show up frequently in the writing of elites who think God's truth and damning error are nothing really to "get het up about," and certainly not worth passion or bareknuckled, plain-spoken, frontal, clear, and — let's just say it — masculine rhetoric. Not worth risking angering anyone, or being perceived as angry.

Isn't it good to be "careful"? To be sure, "careful" is a necessary and important adjective in many contexts. Don't we want to make careful distinctions between trinitarianism and tritheism, between the Biblical gospel and libertinism, between inerrancy and bibliolatry, between elder leadership and totalitarian thralldom, and a hundred other things? If we preach on prophecy, don't we want to be careful, sticking to the text and avoiding wild conclusions and leaps or cowardly equivocations?

Of course we do. But as used in those contexts, "careful" means factual, warranted, clear-cut, concise, unambiguous, forceful. It is a servant of truth, an enhancer of truth. It serves to make the truth of (say) the Trinity and the Gospel clearer and more obviously distinct from error and false teaching.

So when is it bad? I think elites are sometimes — and I want to be careful here, haha — using the word as a code-word for "dainty" or "harmless" or "toothless." I think they are using it sometimes to mean "nobody (and no ruinous error) actually got hurt." I think they are using it to mean "false teaching and particularly its purveyors are treated with kid gloves." I think they mean "false teachers are treated with great respect." I think they mean "false teaching is described, but inoffensively." I think they mean "nobody is made to feel too bad about perpetrating or embracing heresy or ruinous idiocy."

Plain enough?

See, that paragraph is an example. It was plain, wasn't it? It also had necessary qualifiers and distinctives, didn't it? It wasn't unnecessarily inflammatory, was it? Isn't that being careful, in the best sense?

But no elite is likely to link to this as a "careful" post — any more than they ever do to any of my posts, whether they're about atonement in Proverbs or repentance in a false teacher or anything else.

Why? Truth is, I don't really fully know. And I am also pretty sure (being honest, not sugar-coating) that my very real shortcomings, which I'm trying to overcome but am still a work-in-progress, haven't helped.

But I've come to think that it's partly because They are deeply, deeply concerned that no one feel too bad or get too worked up about soul-damning or otherwise ruinous false teaching. Perhaps we might reluctantly be forced to conclude that some course or doctrine is unadvisable, but we don't want anyone too upset, and we want to protect the respectability of apostates and false teachers and their enablers. (For instance, we won't apply those labels; that wouldn't be careful.)

These elites seem deeply, deeply concerned that false teachers and incompetent/irresponsible leaders remain dear colleagues and beloved friends whom they wish nothing but well and happiness and bunnies. They seem deeply, deeply concerned that, at all costs, they themselves be seen and lauded by all as careful, thoughtful, helpful, nuanced, judicious, measured, and all those dainty things. All the blood drains from their faces at the thought of being thought angry. "Oh merciful heavens and frisky penguins, not that!"

You see, now, those paragraphs weren't careful. They make people look bad if they are more concerned about their reputation and collegial relations and Club membership than they are about God's truth and Christ's church. And of course, they would admit none of these things of themselves. That is part of being careful: not describing anyone or anything in terms that person wouldn't apply of himself.

But I ask you who have reached out to cultists and other false teachers: how would that modus operandi work out? I wager that every one of you is shaking his head ruefully. Cultists and false teachers never describe themselves in unflattering terms. Mormons, Roman Catholics, you name it: overhear their conversation, and it's all about various facets of their error. Confront them about those very errors, and they deny it. RC to RC will talk about praying to this or that dead person all day long; but if you say "You worship dead people, and that is idolatry," and they'll say they do no such thing. Disagree, and you're "ignorant." Then, once you've left the room, the conversation resumes exactly as you described it.

These elite will embrace select apostates to Rome as great and esteemed friends. But they will shun more frontal, edged, bareknuckled, passionate-for-truth, doctrinally-sound folks like the plague. They will feign both blindness and deafness, then carry on as if no one had said anything, congratulating themselves and "disappearing" contraries, so that they never happened.

The question I think we are left with is: which best serves Christ and His church? Which more effectively alarms sheep against wolves, encouraging and admonishing and instructing the former while exposing and refuting and repelling the latter?

Our problem of course is that we are ever the pendulum. Dainty brothers will say I've painted a caricature, an extremity, and that's not them. Then they will turn around and depict what I advocate in terms of hateful, (truly) ignorant, screaming, all-caps Courier font discernmentism at its worst and blindest and dumbest, and will say that that is what they reject.

So I'd just come down to specifics: Elephant Room 2. I'll ask the non-careful questions. Questions like:

Who was right, who was wrong?
Who was proactive, who was reactive?
Who warned sheep and opposed wolves openly and proactively, and who made the pasture easier pickings for the predators?
Who put himself out on the field during the time of battle and risked criticism and discomfort to guard the truth, and who stayed in the faculty lounge sipping tea and tut-tutting and holding top-secret discussions?
Who, now, by his actions, continues to extend legitimacy to the predators or those who failed to warn against them or sufficiently oppose their false teaching?
What are the consequences for either, now that the dust is settling?
Did we learn anything?
Will anything change?
When sounds of explosions and gunfire fill the air, who do you want to see at your door: a man in a smoking-jacket with a teacup and a bag of Constant Comment, or a rough fellow in camo, armed and trained and ready to go?

So in sum, trying to bring this bristling double-decker to a close, I offer this dialectic:

We should be careful to be Biblical, to be accurate, factual, on-target, articulate, proportionate, and appropriately concerned for showing that love which has God and His truth first in affection, and man a close second — and which remembers that truth and love are not mutually exclusive.

We should not be careful to sell out God's dignity, honor and truth and the health and wellbeing of His church by avoiding offending anybody, making our false priority to avoid trouble, to avoid disagreement, to blunt the edges of the Gospel or of truth, to protect the credibility of false teachers and enable their continued harming of souls, to avoid being unpopular and ill-thought-of by those among whom the truth is ill-thought-of, to avoid all criticism, to protect our reputation and popularity among the elite.

We should care about doing our best to see God's truth triumph decisively over error — first in our own lives, then in our churches — more than we care about how we ourselves are perceived.

There. Have I said all that should be said? Absolutely not. Have I said all that could be said? In no way.

Have I said something that needs to be said? I think so.

Have I said it carefully?

Probably depends on who you ask.

"Innovation" and Irrelevance

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Johnson) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 08:01:00 +0000

by Phil Johnson

After five decades spent obsessing over a warped notion of "relevance," American evangelicalism is overrun with "change agents" who are so steeped in worldly values that they can't distinguish true relevance from mere trendiness. Their philosophies of ministry are complex, wrong-headed, counterproductive, and hostile to the notion that some things—namely God Himself and the truth He has revealed in His Word—are by definition not susceptible to change.
By contrast, what Paul bequeathed to Timothy in two brief epistles was a remarkably simple, straightforward, but comprehensive ministry philosophy. Not only did Paul not urge Timothy to be innovative; what he did urge Timothy to do flatly contradicts practically every ministry philosophy currently in vogue.
This is part 1 in a series of posts I intend to write in the days to come.

onsider the undue stress today's leading church-growth gurus invariably put on innovation. We are relentlessly told that pastors and church leaders must be novel, "contemporary," cutting-edge—architects of change within the church.

Evangelicals have been obsessing for at least four decades about "relevance." But that word as used in evangelical circles has become practically synonymous with novelty and fashionableness. It has little to do with actual relevance.

Of course, the church's only true relevance lies in her role as a community where God's Word is proclaimed, where the whole counsel of God is taught, and from which the gospel is taken into the world. But when a church nowadays advertises itself as "relevant," we know exactly what is meant—and let's be honest: it isn't about anything Paul told Timothy to do; it's about being "innovative."

Consider how an organization like Leadership Network sells itself: "Leadership Network seeks to help leaders navigate the future by exploring new ideas and finding application for each unique context." "Our free indispensable twice-monthly email newsletter featur[es] the best in innovative church strategies." Podcasts feature "numerous conversations about various topics of church innovation." The organization sponsors three series of books:

Leadership Network Publications (Jossey-Bass) present thoroughly researched and innovative concepts from leading thinkers, practitioners and pioneering churches.
The Leadership Network Innovation Series (Zondervan) presents case studies and insights from leading practitioners and pioneering churches that are successfully navigating the ever-changing cultural landscape.
The Exponential Series (Zondervan) highlights the innovative practices of healthy, reproducing churches.

And don't forget "Engaging and inspirational videos from a number of today's innovative church leaders." Then there's "Connections,"—"Inspiring stories that show how Leadership Network is helping innovative churches and church leaders better realize their vision and maximize their impact." Something about "innovation" appears on virtually every line of that web page.

The Catalyst Conference has a similar theme. The main qualification for being a speaker at any of the Catalyst events is that you must be perceived as an innovator—a "change maker."

But, as it turns out, "innovation" in evangelical contexts almost never has anything to do with real originality. The best-known fruits of recent "innovative" thinking in the evangelical realm have been Emergent religion and hipster Christianity. But both Emergents and hipsters slavishly ape worldly fads and conform to postmodern and politically-correct values. "Innovation" has conditioned evangelical churches to follow every new wind of faddishness. "Innovation" itself turns out to be a worn-out cliche. There's nothing truly fresh or original about it. How it coninues to get so much publicity is a mystery to me. The more evangelicals imitate worldly fads and values, the more irrelevant they become.

Here's a gentle word of admonition for those who have made an idol out of "innovation": There is hardly any more wrong-headed approach for anyone who aspires to be a true spiritual and biblical leader in the church. It's an emphasis that is entirely missing from Paul's instructions to Timothy.

Actually, the truth is even more alarming than that: The church's current infatuation with novelty and contemporary fashion is antithetical to Paul's message to Timothy. It is irreconcilable with a Pauline approach to ministry. It represents precisely the path Paul warned Timothy not to follow:

"I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry" (2 Timothy 4:1-5).

If You Marry the Spirit of the Age You'll Soon Be a Widower

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Johnson) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 21:48:00 +0000

Your weekly dose of Spurgeon
posted by Phil Johnson

The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from The Spurgeon Archive. The following excerpt is from "His Own Funeral Sermon." That's a sermon Spurgeon preached on Sunday evening, 19 October 1890, the weekend after the death of William Olney, longtime deacon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle. Mrs. Spurgeon said the message would have been a suitable eulogy for Spurgeon himself. So when he died less than two years later, the sermon was published within a few days of Spurgeon's funeral.

eople talk nowadays about Zeitgeist, a German expression which need frighten nobody; and one of the papers says, "Spurgeon does not know whether there is such a thing."

Well, whether he knows anything about Zeitgeist or not, he is not to serve this generation by yielding to any of its notions or ideas which are contrary to the Word of the Lord.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is not only for one generation, it is for all generations. It is the faith which needed to be only "once for all delivered to the saints"; it was given stereotyped as it always is to be. It cannot change because it has been given of God, and is therefore perfect; to change it would be to make it imperfect. It cannot change because it has been given to answer for ever the same purpose, namely, to save sinners from going down to the pit, and to fit them for going to heaven.

That man serves his generation best who is not caught by every new current of opinion, but stands firmly by the truth of God, which is a solid, immovable rock.

But to serve our own generation in the sense of being a slave to it, its vassal, and its valet—let those who care to do so go into such bondage and slavery if they will.

Do you know what such a course involves? If any young man here shall begin to preach the doctrine and the thought of the age, within the next ten years, perhaps within the next ten months, he will have to eat his own words, and begin his work all over again. When he has got into the new style, and is beginning to serve the present world, he will within a short time have to contradict himself again, for this age, like every other, is "ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth."

But if you begin with God’s Word, and pray God the Holy Ghost to reveal it to you till you really know it, then, if you are spared to teach for the next fifty years, your testimony at the close will not contradict your testimony at the beginning. You will ripen in experience; you will expand in your apprehension of the truth; you will become more clear in your utterance; but it will be the same truth all along.

Is it not a grand thing to build up, from the beginning of life to the end of it, the same gospel? But to set up opinions to knock them down again, as though they were ninepins, is a poor business for any servant of Christ.

David did not, in that way serve his own generation; he was the master of his age, and not its slave. I would urge every Christian man to rise to his true dignity, and be a blessing to those amongst whom he lives, as David was. Christ "hath made us kings and priests unto God his Father"; it is not meet that we should cringe before the spirit of the age, or lick the dust whereon "advanced thinkers" have chosen to tread.

Beloved, see to this; and learn the distinction between serving your own generation and being a slave to it.

A Conversation with Lane Chaplin

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Johnson) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 08:01:00 +0000

On Evangelicalism's Current Cults of Celebrity
by Phil Johnson

hanks to Lane Chaplin for taping and posting this:

The Gospel as Performance Art

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Johnson) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 08:01:00 +0000

by Phil Johnson

f you subscribe to my Twitter feed, you already know that I flew back from Ukraine yesterday. It's great to be home, of course, but it was a remarkable privilege to teach pastors and seminarians at Irpin Biblical Seminary. It was an even greater thrill to spend a day with the saints in Grace Bible Church, Kiev. Last Sunday was one of the truly great and joyous highlights of my life—rich worship followed by a full afternoon of fellowship with the people of that church. It's a day I will never forget. The only thing that would have made it better would have been if Darlene could be there.

Anyway, this past week I've been thinking a lot about my first visit to Kiev, with John MacArthur, more than 20 years ago. I remember those days clearly. It was late September and early October 1991, exactly 50 years after the Nazis slaughtered 33,771 Jews at a Kiev ravine called Babi Yar—and less than two months after the collapse of the Soviet Union. People were hungry—starved—for the gospel.

Since then I have been to some 35 countries on five continents, and I've never seen any culture more eager to listen to the gospel than Ukraine (and the rest of the former Soviet Union) in 1991. The churches I visited were all crowded. A steady stream of recent converts gave their testimonies in every service I attended. Each new believer was brought to the front of the church and encouraged to "repent." And they did—confessing their sins with heartfelt remorse, and verbally professing their newfound faith in Christ with overflowing joy and enthusiasm. It was amazing and uplifting and deeply convicting to someone like me, who had become somewhat sluggish spiritually with the comforts and refinements (and superficiality) of Western evangelicalism.

Anyway, one of my most vivid memories of Kiev in 1991 was a day we were walking across a public square in downtown Kiev with a bundle of Russian gospel tracts and Scripture booklets. Ukrainian people crowded around us, clamoring to get one. I was caught quite off guard by the suddenness and enthusiasm of people's response. The moment was unforgettable.

But we weren't the only Western Christians in the square that day. There was a group of "gospel clowns" and mimes from some American church, and we inadvertently interrupted their performance, because even the people who had been watching them suddenly ran over to get gospel literature from us as we approached the center of the square. One of the mimes glared at me. And then, breaking character, he said something to me in English. He wanted us to move on so that they could get on with the task of pantomiming the gospel.

To this day it amazes and appalls me that anyone confronted with the openness of Eastern Europeans in the wake of the Soviet collapse would think wordless "performance art" is a better medium for declaring the gospel than straightforward preaching, simple one-on-one witnessing, and plain-language gospel literature. It's like anti-contextualization—culturally insensitive, incomprehensible to the target culture, and tainted with the scent of spiritual jingoism—but I'm certain those mimes believed their method was the very epitome of innovative "relevance."

And it occurs to me: That reflects precisely how multitudes of American evangelicals still think. They are more enthralled with their clever methodologies and ingenious "contextualizations" than they are with the gospel itself. Honestly, they seem at times to love their own flamboyance far more than they care about lost souls.

At least Rob Bell was honest about what he was trying to do. He openly called himself a "performance artist." But let's face it: the typical Noble/Furtick/EdYoungJr-style shtick is nothing more than bad performance art, too. The recent Code Orange Revival was promoted by garish floor gymnastics that looked like a poor imitation of something from Cirque du Soleil. Virtually all Mark Driscoll's major gaffes are products of a mind that has been overexposed to movies, rock concerts, cage fighting, Chris Rock, and whatnot. Even the Elephant Room, heavily promoted as a rare moment of candor and tough questions, turned out to be carefully scripted and strictly controlled so that no opinions were harmed during its filming.

A lot of what's called ministry these days is mere spectacle. Authentic apostolic-style gospel ministry is nothing like performance art.

When evangelical megachurches gave up the pulpit for a stage; traded psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs for AC/DC tracks; hired vaudevillians instead of pastors; and turned away their ears from the truth to follow fables, they chose a path of apostasy.

The only way back starts with repentance.

The mugging: a parable

noreply@blogger.com (DJP) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:18:00 +0000

by The Pyromaniacs: Dan, Frank and Phil

A few people noticed that a mugging was about to happen. There was no doubt. It was unmistakable: an act of violence was about to unfold right in front of their eyes, and it was going to be gruesome.

Something had to be done. Those who saw events begin to unfold could not imagine not doing what they could to prevent it. So they let out a shout of warning.

The moment they began to cry out, however, a circle of people formed around both victim and perpetrator. The circle was composed of big, respectable, decent folks. Their backs were turned towards those crying out.

Oh good. The right people were on the scene! Surely they saw what was going to happen. Surely they'd intervene.

And yet... they did nothing.

So the outsiders, really alarmed now, raised their voices. They were pointed, they were specific, they were passionate, they were eloquent to the point of heart-breaking. It was a life or death situation; this was not the moment for collegial tea and crumpets on the deck. But there was enough time, if someone did something in response to all their shouts and cries.

To all this, the inner circle of watchers maintained absolute, lofty silence, as far as could be told. It was as if they couldn't hear.

But how was that possible? The folks who were sounding the alarm were right there, and they were plenty loud. Yet these good, decent folks just stood there. But this one... did he actually have his hands over his eyes so as to "not see" the people waving their arms? And that one... were those his fingers, stuck in his ears so as to "not hear" the cries of warning?

Others formed in the crowd as well, onlookers...

Then, suddenly and inevitably, it happened. It was every bit as brutal and shocking as the outer circle had warned. Worse. Still, they gasped. They gaped. How could this have happened?

And then, at long last, the inner circle finally turned around and faced outward.

As the bodies were being carted off.

They made hushing, calming gestures with their hands. "Now, now," tutted a central figure:

"No doubt what happened was regrettable. It's a sad day, and a sad, sad thing that happened. We are all deeply grieved. All of us love peace. We all detest violence. We cherish exactly what you cherish. We are with you. We are you.

"No doubt many will be upset. No doubt many will wonder why something wasn't done. Well, just be assured, your leaders are in charge. They have the situation well in hand. There is absolutely nothing to be alarmed about, nothing to be upset or energized about, certainly nothing to raise your voices about. If there had been, you know we would have told you.

"Perhaps something good may even come of this!

"Now, back to your homes and churches with you, go on, that's a good lot.

"We may even write a book about this. If one of us does write a book, we'll be sure to let you know. And if we don't tell you, you don't need to know."

And to the slack-jawed amazement of those who had cried alarm and had been ignored, to their ears came the sound of...

Applause!

Applause, and shouts of praise for the inner circle of silent spectators. Praise for their sagacity, their "nuance," their "judiciousness," their "carefulness," their "graciousness" (towards the muggers), their "thoughtfulness," their "helpfulness"; the hours they'd put into such careful and intelligent watching and spectating, and then for so articulately commenting... after the mugging.

And so, in the end...

...nothing changed for the better.

Recommended Books

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Turk) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:01:00 +0000

by Frank Turk

We don't really do book reviews here at PyroManiacs because, well, you come here for the truly crafty reproaches which we lay out here. And, I might add, you people are hooked on the loads of introspection and honest-to-Gospel repentance we call you to week in and week out because let's face it: you people are a wreck, and you need the whole-grain goodness we dollop out.

But we do get a lot of books in the mail, and from time to time I find some of the books arrive in a somewhat-providential moment where they are simply and exactly what the doctor ordered in terms of content and relevance.

This week from Crossway, I got two titles which I am absolutely giddy about because they have a ton of insight to shed on my theme topic for 2012, which is spiritual leadership. You know: I have written about being a good non-pastor in the church over and over because I am a non-pastor in the church. However, it seems to me that this year those who are in some way fitted or called to lead God's church need a little encouragement (both the carrot and the stick) to get on with it for the sake of their charges. The two books I have to recommend here are a good place to start.

The first book is edited by Dr. Anthony Bradley -- a credible person with an internet personality probably in the same class as me. He's a fellow drunken master, and I am a great fan of his insights and work on all manner of issues, even if I can admit that I wince about 3 times per 25 sentences whenever I read him or hear him. He is the kind of crazy genius we need in the Reformed camp, and in the Evangelical camp, and in the Man camp.

Dr. Bradley has edited a book with the modest title, Keep Your Head Up: America's New Black Christian Leaders, Social Consciousness, & the Cosby Conversation. The book is a collection of 10 essays plus preface and conclusion in which fellow leaders in the Black Christian community, including Dr. Bradley himself, discuss the credibility of the critique of black culture presented by Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint in their 2007 book, Come On People. It is a fantastic examination of the need of mankind for the Gospel -- not just spiritually, but personally and humanly -- as applied to the condition of Black society and culture in America. The centerpiece of the book is Dr. Bradley's own unpacking of that thesis, and it is by itself work the price of admission.

From my perspective, which is not that of a black man in America, this book is teaching me about my own self-blindness and my own self-satisfaction, and my own continuing needfulness for the Gospel, for faithful preachers of God's word, and for His church because it speaks to the needs of others, different from me, who have the same need. I hope this book finds its place onto your bookshelf because it is an important book regarding the Gospel because it is not an egg-headed book of systematic theology. It is about bringing the Gospel home to human culture and letting the Gospel be the solution to those cultures.

The other book is in the 9Marks series of books on church life from Crossway. This one is by the beloved Thabiti Anyabwile, Finding Faithful Elders and Deacons. This is careful and simple book, expressly about the call and qualification of the servants of the church who are also its leaders, and I credit Thabiti for writing it to the church rather than to fellow theologians.

Let me say this about the books in the 9Marks series: Mark Dever's fingerprints are all over these books, and that's not at all a bad thing. Dever's fatherly love for the local congregation comes out from all of these books, but in this book especially. It's funny how much Thabiti doesn't say about the local pastor in this book: there's no chapter on white boarding; there's no chapter on productivity or time management; there are no references to secular business practices. There are no suggestions about how to hear what God's own voice is telling you to do. Selah.

Instead, Thabiti takes Paul's directions for calling Deacons, Elders, and Pastors, and lays them out for us real people to take seriously as God's plan for leading the local church. It's not even 150 pages long, which is to its credit: there is no fluff in here. This is the vernacular theology of how those called to be, as Thabiti says, the waiters in God's church ought to be trained up, and called out, and then serve and see their own service.

And I bring these two books up for one reason only: how much of the controversy of the last two weeks could have been cut off before it even became public if the advice and insight contained in these two books only could have been harnessed by men who we otherwise see as heroes of the faith and respected leaders? What if we rebuked the Americanisms and Secularisms in our own forms of leadership and our own perceptions of what leadership should accomplish for the telemetry of the Gospel and the call to sacrificial service inherent in the qualifications for deacons, elders and pastors? Would it have produced the Elephant Room, or would it have produced something else -- something that looks more like a shepherd with a flock of people in his sacred care, form who he is willing to be poured out for like a drink offering?

Read these two books, and I leave my question to your conscience. Be with God's people in God's house on His day this week, and get undone by the Gospel.

Elephantiasis

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Johnson) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:01:00 +0000

James MacDonald Plays the Race Card
by Phil Johnson

I know it's not my day to post, but this:

is probably the most blatantly racist presentation I have ever witnessed from an ostensibly "mainstream" evangelical source.

The take-away message is this: If you're an old white guy with any hint of Reformed theology in your confessional statement and you don't think T. D. Jakes's equivocations at Elephant Room 2 were sufficient to erase decades of concern about his Oneness leanings and his relentless proclamation of a false Prosperity Gospel—then you must be a racist. And even if you don't think you're a racist, you should shut up anyway. Because in the black community relationships are more important than any doctrine, including the gospel and the Trinity. We all should strive to subjugate doctrine to relationships anyway.

If on the other hand you are a young black man with Reformed convictions—or any black person who just has a keen interest in doctrinal and biblical accuracy—you are a sellout and a reproach to your own community. The only possible explanation is that you are guilty of "White Idolatry." You secretly wish to earn favor with Whitey. You should not only shut up, you should be ashamed. As far as the importance of relationships is concerned, we don't really care to have one with you.

End of discussion.

So much for open dialogue and not hiding behind walls of disagreement. The Elephant Room experiment clearly wasn't really about that in the first place. It wasn't about real unity or truth, either.

How does 2000 years of Christian consensus on the doctrine of the Godhead get sent to the back of the bus so blithely in the name of unity and racial reconciliation?

And why the deafening silence from so many men and ministries who supposedly are committed to standing for the defense and proclamation of core gospel truths? If you can be intimidated into silence by the race card when a greed-mongering prosperity-gospel Sabellian-sympathizer is being hailed by once-sound evangelicals as someone to be emulated, what doctrine will you defend openly and publicly?

Addendum 1[Added by Frank]: Chantry dropped a link to an article by Thabiti Anyabwile over at the TGC web site about this sort of thing, published the day before the Elephant Room. There are probably a dozen money quotes in that essay, but here's the one that stands out like a watchman on the wall:

I also want my non-African-American brothers to realize the harmful dynamic of pitting one African American against another. When two white brothers disagree publicly over a theological issue, there’s likely not a community “back home” trying to decide which brother is “black” and therefore which brother to follow. Historically, some white leaders have intentionally played one African American leader against another with the aim of dividing and weakening the community. That’s a history well-known and a strategy much hated in African-American communities. So, when a conflict between two African American religious leaders takes place publicly, care must be taken not to walk into this troubled narrative and trap. Inevitably, pitting two African-American leaders against one another is going to result in (1) one of those leaders losing “black” authenticity in their community, (2) one or both of those leaders being marginalized for their cooperation with “outsiders” to the community, and (3) the White brothers who do the pitting being seen as unconcerned about the Black community and unrighteously attempting to anoint the next Black leader. No one wins. if you’re from outside the African-American community, think very long, hard, and carefully about ever calling some African Americans to take your position in defense against other African Americans. It’s disastrous for everyone, and, frankly, you won’t begin to pay the deeper costs over the longer period that your African American friend will.

Read the Whole Thing. For the record: I mean you, A29 pastors & leaders (specifically people who were heckling Chad Vegas' blog post on quitting A29 over this event), HBC pastors, and specifically the staff of the mothership at HBC on James MacDonald's staff.

About any Word from God: basic considerations

noreply@blogger.com (DJP) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:10:00 +0000

by Dan Phillips

[You might expect something on ER2 and, eventually, I may write more about it. Meanwhile, I'd just ask you to re-read Thabiti's eloquent and moving post from October 1 of 2011, and this and this, and ask yourself where we would be today if the thoughts in posts such as those and other similar warnings, written months in advance of ER2, had been so broadly and publicly taken up that it would be impossible for MacDonald and Driscoll to ignore such concerns. Meanwhile, this.]

It is a central tenet of Christian faith that there is such a thing as a word from God (Gen. 1:1; 15:1; Jn. 1:1, 14, 18; 3:34, etc.). Without that assertion, made and affirmed, there simply and literally is no Christian faith (Rom. 10:17).

So, HSAT, let's think through some questions about words from God:

Does it change anything, if there is a word from God?
Does it change everything, if there is a word from God?
Does the Bible ever depict the arrival of a fresh word from God as intended to be welcomed as a casual, business-as-usual affair?
Is there such a thing as a word from God that is not inherently fully true, and thus inerrant?
Is there such a thing as a word from God that is not instantly, inherently and absolutely morally-binding?
Even in the cases of words from God that do not direct me to do something (i.e. Jer. 18:1; Jn. 1:14), are they not still inherently and instantly and universally morally-binding in that believers must affirm that they are God's words, and must believe them?
Does not the very existence of tests of prophecy (i.e. Deut. 13:1ff.; 18:15ff.) underscore the fact that, if it is a word from God, all people are obliged to embrace it appropriately?
If the elder(s) of a local church knew of anyone in the congregation that was in rebellion against a word from God, either by refusing to do what the word said to do, or refusing to believe that the word was God's word, would they not be obliged to confront and discipline that person, and ultimately to expel him or her as an unbeliever, absent repentance?
Can a body of believers be in the regular practice of disobeying, ignoring, or being ambivalent about words from God, without disastrous spiritual consequences?

There. Now I'll ask and answer two more questions:

Say... isn't that an awfully basic list of awfully easy questions? (Answer: in "evangelicalism" today? It should be, yes. Would to God that it were. But no, evidently it is not.)
Are you going somewhere with this, fella? (I mean to, yes; probably Thursday.)

The Sword and the Shaving Brush

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Johnson) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 08:01:00 +0000

by Phil Johnson

"Grace be with all them that love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity" (Ephesians 6:24).

'm in Ukraine for the remainder of the week, with a fairly grueling teaching schedule. So this is nothing more than one of those "This Is Where I am Right Now" posts that Frank Turk so despises. And here's a scene from last week's seminar on the life and ministry of C. H. Spurgeon:

Oh, and there's this:

D.A. Carson has responded to Mark Driscoll's attack on evangelicals in the UK.

I'm surprised Carson didn't mention Rico Tice in his short-list of young English preachers who answer Driscoll's challenge and debunk his caricature of UK evangelicals:

See especially how Tice punctuates his comment at 3:00.

A couple of years ago, I heard Tice preach a superb, solidly biblical message on hell at St. Helen's Bishopsgate in London. He's articulate, courageous, and (as one-time captain of Bristol University's Rugby team) surely more virile than anyone who thinks manhood is best exemplified by being a spectator at cage fighting events.

Anyway, I have to say I'm also kind of surprised Carson said anything at all. In the words of a friend of mine, here's the shorthand history of The Gospel Coalition's efforts to corral Driscoll's motormouth:

· Driscoll credits (?) God with playing porn in his head
[ crickets ]
· Driscoll accuses folks of child molesting...though says he could be wrong
[ crickets ]
· Driscoll writes another sex manual
[ crickets ]
· Driscoll validates a false-gospel preaching modalist
[ crickets ]
· Driscoll says Brit pastors are weenies
NOW YOU WAIT JUST A MINUTE, YOUNG MAN!!

No Doubt as to what we believe and teach

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Johnson) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 06:13:00 +0000

Your weekly dose of Spurgeon
posted by Phil Johnson

The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from The Spurgeon Archive. The following excerpt is from The Greatest Fight in the World: C. H. Spurgeon's Final Manifesto.

e have nowadays around us a class of men who preach Christ, and even preach the gospel; but then they preach a great deal else which is not true, and thus they destroy the good of all that they deliver, and lure men to error. They would be styled "evangelical" and yet be of the school which is really anti-evangelical.

Look well to these gentlemen. I have heard that a fox, when close hunted by the dogs, will pretend to be one of them, and run with the pack. That is what certain are aiming at just now: the foxes would seem to be dogs. But in the case of the fox, his strong scent betrays him, and the dogs soon find him out; and even so, the scent of false doctrine is not easily concealed, and the game does not answer for long.

There are extant ministers of whom we scarce can tell whether they are dogs or foxes; but all men shall know our quality as long as we live, and they shall be in no doubt as to what we believe and teach.

We shall not hesitate to speak in the strongest Saxon words we can find, and in the plainest sentences we can put together, that which we hold as fundamental truth.

Coupla-Five Additional Thoughts on the Events of the Week

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Turk) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:27:00 +0000

by Frank Turk

Before your weekend, you might need a few of these thoughts:

1. I repudiate all attempts to assign motives to the activities witnessed this week as reported/commented on in this blog space. Gazing into the hearts of people in order to make sense of their actions is for politicians with bad motives, self-promoting charlatans, and gossip-mongers. It is not anyone's place to discern what is in another person's heart. However, that does not forbid us from discerning what actually happened and framing our objections to that.

2. That cuts both ways, btw: when someone receives criticism, and they offer, "those people are just jealous," as one among several of the best excuses not to answer that criticism, that's just poisoning the well -- and not even a very clever application of it. It's sort of like poisoning the well while someone behind you is playing ominous music on a portable sound system and you're perfecting your evil Dr. Horrible laugh.

3. We all want to be on the receiving end of irenic discussions, but very few of us deserve them -- or even know how to participate in them. You know: I don't blog like this because you get more flies with vinegar than you do with honey. I blog like this because in the real world where we live, people wandering off the beaten path (specifically: of our faith) don't see gentle rebuke as rebuke at all. They see it as the infamous "agree-to-disagree" cover they need to do exactly what they intended to do in the first place. That doesn't mean we dispense with all the niceties. Those thinking I just tossed out red meat yesterday to drive traffic to our little blog here have a pretty short memory. Being clear about objections doesn't mean we weren't nice, but obviously the "nice" has gotten no one anywhere -- except to be branded "jealous" and "unfruitful" by those we have criticized. Somebody who wants an irenic discussion of their experiments in broader ecumenism ought to, at least, not be threatening critics with arrest when they show up at the front door.

4. I'm still looking forward to Acts29 telling us what Mark Driscoll's embrace of TD Jakes as a full-fledged brother in Christ means to them as a network of affiliated churches and church planters. It will be instructive.

5. You know: yesterday, when I was talking to Paul Edwards about this kerfuffle (a word introduced to this topic, btw, by D.A. Carson when he lined out what it means to be part of the Gospel Coalition back in October 2011), I mentioned that if you pressed, me, I might be willing to say that T.D. Jakes is possibly a brother in Christ. I'm sure that rattles a lot of cages, so let me line out what I mean by that and then you can blog all weekend to remove me from polite company.

Well, it walks like a Duck ...

For starters, I promise you my kids cannot pass an ordination exam regarding the nuances of Trinitarian theology -- and they are pretty sharp kids. That doesn't mean they aren't Christians: it means they have an incomplete theology which is growing in wisdom, in stature and in the favor of men (if I can say it that way and not also be drummed out of polite company). A person doesn't need to have a completely-complete systematic theology to be saved by Christ. Jakes might have the same lousy theological education that most adults in America have, and still have faith in Christ.
That said, that does not excuse him in the least for being a person who, for decades, has taught what is undeniably-modalist theology, and has trained others to do so. It doesn't release him from the requirement to repent and recant his false teaching, and to make it right by, at the very least, revising and remaking his remarks on this subject. He's a leader and not just Jack in the Pew: he has more responsibility than the average blogger, not less, when it comes to an item like this.
And this goes directly to the question of his Christian status as a brother in Christ. When I say something that's false or misleading, or I do something which fumbles the ball in some way, of course I should do the right thing and repent. When I do that, I prove I am an actual brother in Christ and not a faker or someone who is either self-deceived or intentionally deceptive. If he's my brother in Christ, saying, "I'm on a journey," and "It's actually too mysterious for words," and "well, I use 'manifestations' when you use 'persons' but we just mean the same darn thing," and so on is actually the opposite of humility and the opposite of brotherly love: it's self-justification. It says that all errors are actually par for the course, and that I have no culpability in them. That's not Christian faith speaking: that's something else, and it's ugly. You want me to treat you like a brother (much less: a leader and teacher) in Christ? Act like it. Do what we do. Real fruitfulness is repentance whenever we do something wrong, and not justifying our mistakes is a very corny, aw-shucks way.

And with that, I'm done for the week. The comments are shut down. When you read this, remember to be in the Lord's house on the Lord's day with the Lord's people, and have some faith in the real man Christ Jesus, who humbled himself before he was born to actually condescend to be born and then die for the sake of the rest of us who are daily mucking things up. It's a game-changer.

After the Circus Parade

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Turk) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 13:53:00 +0000

by Frank Turk

Yes, part 3 of my conference notes are already posted, so you can see them below. However, yesterday T.D. Jakes (apparently) came clean as a fully-throated Trinitarian, and suffered a round of brotherly acceptance from James MacDonald and Mark Driscoll, so the whole matter is settled and now you people seem to owe everybody an apology for your godless, cessationist carping about orthodoxy and such things.

Right?

Oh wait: James MacDonald resigned from the leadership of The Gospel Coalition just days before Bishop Jakes' revelation that "manifestations" and "persons" are, pretty much, the same thing as long as you make sure your footnotes are properly added (you know: there are things the Father does which the Son did not do, and so on). And the question of whether or not the Prosperity Gospel is in any way problematic with regards to the preaching of Christ, and Him crucified, (especially when it comes to the consequences of giving and, in the actions of a pastor, taking) just didn't come up.

So here's the deal: Phil is in deepest, darkest Eastern Europe this week, and I gave Dan the week off so I could post my conference notes here and link to the audio. That means I get to post the first response to the Elephant Room 2 content.

Ready?

Ahem.

1. Someone needs to check the date for Mark Driscoll's shelf life as a reliable person. In the past month, he utterly disgraced himself on the "Unbelievable" podcast by interrogating this host, Justin Brierly, and accusing him and the whole British Christian church of being a flop because they also don't have a Mark Driscoll, and they have a few women pastors. But, when the other shoe drops and he has Bishop Jakes sitting before him in a place where there are supposed to be hard conversations, Bishop Jakes gets the velvet gloves -- including a complete whiff at the issue of egalitarianism in Jakes' own theology and church. Of course, Jakes was not criticizing Driscoll's book, so the question of whether he's a good egalitarian or a bad one seems to fade in the distance.

2. The Gospel Coalition's response to MacDonald's resignation is par for the course for an organization that, frankly, values unity above the means to achieve unity (which is: sharpening each other with the truth). The dodge that they are a "center-bounded" organization also needs to be checked for its shelf-life date as this kerfuffle demonstrates exactly what it means to be "center-bounded" -- you can hang out with us as long as you don't embarrass us, and when you do embarrass us, you just have to excuse yourself and we'll smile and wave. If what happened yesterday was that Bishop Jakes exonerated himself from the charges of, as they say, bloggers, then credible people should embrace his clarifications (they certainly weren't any kind of recanting), and we happen to know of a group who are qualified to do just that. If Jakes' chat with Mark Driscoll does not finally clear things up, then what's the best way for the council of TGC to handle Mark Driscoll's (non-resigned council member) endorsement of Jakes' orthodoxy? I don't have any suggestions, but I think ignoring it is the way old-school Fundamentalists acted when their leaders did stupid things, and we know that TGC is not a group of Fundies, right?

3. TGC is not the only organization that has bacon in the fire after yesterday. Acts29 is full of men who, if you ask me, are serious and sober guys with theological convictions that the Gospel matters -- which is why they bring it to the least of these, wherever they are. I know Acts29 guys. I know they abhor the Prosperity Gospel, anti-trinitarianism, The Oprah/Osteen axis of feel-good pep talks (which passes directly through the center of Jakes' church), using the Bible like a fortune cookie generator, and phony expressions of anything, including unity. I'm looking forward to them helping us understand what happened yesterday because they, too, are not old-school Fundies who support their leaders no matter what, and the "matter what" has presented itself as if the circus parade has just come down Main Street.

So there you go -- you're going to miss a great post on what the Gospel means to marriage and the church today because you're going to get totally absorbed by this post. Good thing nothing ever disappears on the internet.

3 of 3: Why the Church needs Marriage

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Turk) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:01:00 +0000

by Frank Turk

This is Part 3 of 3. You can find part 1 here, and part 2 here. And the audio of the whole thing is here. Also: the audio for all the talks from the conference can be found here, including the panel discussion and both of Tim Challies' talks.

For those who asked, the whole talk as I delivered it can be found here in PDF form.

In the earliest periods of Roman history, Marriage meant that a married woman would be subjugated by her husband, but that custom had died out by the 1st century, in favor of Free Marriage which did not grant a husband any rights over his wife or have any changing effect on a woman's status. With this, the reasons for any divorce became irrelevant. Either spouse could leave a marriage at any point.

This was the state of things into the second century -- as the Christian church entered the ancient world. At that time, the Christians had no political power, no economic power, and were seen as weird and irrational atheists because they only worshipped one god. They had nothing -- no publishing houses, no televisions networks, no newspapers, no blogs. They had absolutely no advantages in the society in general.

In our view, that means the game is over. I think our view of it is deeply influenced by our own prosperity and our own good standing in the culture, but if we had no legislative recourse and no way to make movies about what we say we believe, we would see the problem of helping our culture rethink, refine and restore the institution of marriage as completely without hope.

Yet, the Christians in the –pre-christian west didn’t see it that way at all. We have a great way to document this. There’s a manuscript of a letter from a fellow who calls himself “Mathetes” to his friend “Diognetus”. This letter was written some time between 130 AD and 200 AD – plainly, safely, in the middle of the second century. Mathetes says he is writing his letter for a specific reason to his friend:

Excellent Diognetus: I see you are very eager to learn the way of worshipping God prevalent among the Christians. You have very carefully and earnestly asked questions concerning them: … what sort of relationships they have among themselves, and why this way of worshipping has come now rather than much sooner into the world. I am happy to encourage your questions, and I pray to God, because he enables us both to speak and to hear: allow me to speak so that, above all, you are encouraged and enlightened; and allow you to hear, so that I shall have no cause of regret for having done so.

Mathetes is trying to tell his friend about these disenfranchised Christians. As the primary exhibit of making this report to his friend, Mathetes says this (paraphrased):

These Christians are not distinguished from other men by country, language, or common customs. They don’t have their own cities, they don’t have their own language, and they don’t lead a lifestyle which is peculiar or spectacular. They haven’t developed a new philosophy invented by very smart men; they don’t proclaim themselves to be the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But, living in Greek and barbarian cities without preference, according to their lot in life, they follow the customs of the people who live where they live in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct. But they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life.

So they live in each country, but they live there as sojourners, travellers passing through. As citizens, they do what all citizens do, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They live their time on earth, but they are citizens of heaven.

They obey the written laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all. They are insignificant and condemned; they are put to death, and restored to life.

This view of life, but specifically of familial relationships, and especially of marriage, was a massive innovation from the Greco-Roman concepts and laws. And that the Christians held fast to them in spite of slander and persecution was even of greater importance – because it spoke to, as Methetes said, a striking method of life. They did not live in compliance to the law – their vision of what was right was not because the law set the standard. Their vision was not lived out because they were seeking to change the law – because they saw themselves as people who were strangers, foreigners in a land that they did not belong to. Their vision of life was completely apart from and above the Law.

Ultimately, Mathetes tells Diognetus why they live above the law:

As I said, what they believe is no mere earthly invention, nor is it a merely-human system of opinion, which they have decided to preserve. God Almighty Himself, the Creator of all things though invisible, has sent from heaven, and placed among men, a man who is the truth. He is the holy and incomprehensible Word, and He has firmly established Him in their hearts. One might have imagined, God might send a servant, or angel, or ruler, or any one of those who is influential in Earthly affairs, or one of with supernatural majesty and authority, but He did not. …

As a king sends his son, who is also a king, so He sent this man. He sent this man as a man among men, and as God among men, and as a savior to men. He came seeking to persuade, not to compel us; for oppression has no place in the character of God. He sent Him to call us, not as an avenger of justice to incarcerate us. He sent Him to love us, not as judging us – even though He will yet send Him to judge us, and who shall endure His appearing?

But when our wickedness was fully grown, it had been clearly shown that its reward ought to be punishment and death, and was impending over us. God had before appointed for that time to come. But God did not regard us with hatred, nor thrust us away, nor remember our iniquity against us because he manifested His own kindness and power, the one love of God, for men. Instead He showed great long-suffering, and then He took upon Him the burden of our iniquities.

He gave His own Son as a ransom for us. He gave the holy One for transgressors. He gave the blameless One for the wicked. He gave the righteous One for the unrighteous many, the incorruptible One for the corruptible, the immortal One for those that are mortal. For what else was capable of covering our sins other than His righteousness? By what other way was it possible that we, the wicked and ungodly, could be justified, than by the only Son of God? O sweet exchange! O unsearchable work! O benefits surpassing all expectation! that the wickedness of many should be hid in a single righteous One, and that the righteousness of One should justify many transgressors!

Does that sound familiar to anyone? Does it strike a chord? See: for Methetes, the Christians were people who weren’t concerned about making the Law acceptable to themselves – or worse, to make other people acceptable by the force of Law. Methetes believed that the Christians had something greater in mind than the law – They had the very Gospel in mind.

And this is the view which, in spite of the very uncertain economic and political environment of the next 15 centuries of Western Civilization, became the common view of marriage. That is, it is not merely a social construct or advantage, but an utterly spiritual endeavor which is rightly and primarily ruled by the church because of its deep meaning. While we may disagree with it, we can grant that the Catholic Church’s high view of marriage as a “sacrament” which has a greater demand on the two people involved than only a contract arbitrated by law can have is an easy mistake to make when we listen to how Jesus describes marriage as built into the very fabric of creation.

Now, more or less, this is the home stretch of my talk, and I have an answer here for the problem we’re considering which the readers of my blog will recognize immediately, but it will need to be unpacked. And it goes back to this argument of “have you not read,” or “God has said.”

The question for us today is the same as the question the Pharisees asked Jesus 2000 years ago: “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?" That is: “Should we define marriage for our culture through the law?” We know that society needs marriage. And the definition of marriage we own in the West is the Christian definition – regardless of the arguments of those who want to change that.

But let me say it simply and seriously now: improving the Law is not going to improve the shoddy and shameful slanders against the conservative Christian definition of marriage, or against the institution of marriage in our culture.

There is a myth that the rate of divorce inside the church is the same as it is outside the church – the Barna Group perpetuates this myth all the time. The truth is not quite that incriminating: a 2002 study by Larson and Swyers published in “Marriage, Health and the Professions” and cited in the National Review in 2006 spells it out that couples who attended church as often as once a month had divorce rates less than half of that of couples who attended church once a year or less.

Jesus has a definition of Marriage, and Society needs that kind of marriage – if for nothing else than stability and continuity. But does the Church need Marriage? Can the church abandon marriage to the culture and still be the sort of thing Jesus intended?

I think the answer, quite frankly, is no: the church must again bring marriage to society in a way that is greater than the Law. You see: marriage is a necessary way in which the church brings the Gospel to Culture – and in this case, the Gospel is actually the solution to culture.

This is why our argument for marriage, our apologetic for this union, is not merely an evolutionary argument which says that because there are two sexes, marriage is for two sexes only. Our argument rests not on the brute fact that men and women exist and seem to have the equivalent of matching Lego parts, but on the matter that God has actually said something about this.

This is why Jesus’ appeal, “have you not read,” is so shocking, so offensive: it is not merely that God has made things a certain way, but that he has given us a very extensive exposition of the union. While the first description of this is in Genesis, which is where Jesus points the Pharisees, the Old Testament apex of the image is in Hosea – where a man takes a wife not only for himself, but for the purpose of redeeming God’s people. And in that marriage, the question of adultery is utterly unquestionable: Hosea has married an adulteress. She is utterly beneath him. In fact, she leaves him for her former life. But God says something else here: love in marriage is a picture of God’s love for those who abandon him, and cheat on him for other means of satisfaction.

This is the point: God says it. That is: he makes it clear with words that this is what he means by it. Jesus sums it up briefly in his response to the Pharisees, but that question of “one flesh” comes up again as Paul instructs the church in Ephesus:

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, … that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes it and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”

And to the wives he said:

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

Now let me ask you: how can this be translated into a Law when it is in fact utterly the woof and weave of the Gospel? It cannot be translated into Law. Trying to do so makes it something which human people cannot do. You cannot legislate the humility this takes. You cannot legislate the priorities this requires. You cannot legislate the profound intimacy this creates. You cannot legislate the love at the very heart of this relationship which God wrote into the very creation of our kind.

Listen to me now as I close up:

The church needs marriage because it is a necessary part of God’s order in creation.

You know: society knows it needs this because this is how human kind not only carries on but flourishes. Marriage externally shows itself to be a good thing even when considered in the most superficial and materialistic ways.

But there is something the church knows which is not disclosed in mere creation. It is only disclosed by God’s Special revelation, and specifically and particularly in marriage. If we overlook that, or find that to be somehow second-rate in favor of other means, we will have made a Gospel fail – we will have given up something God made for the purpose of demonstrating His plan for all things.

If we think we can preach the Gospel and not use this example to preach it for reals, we’re kidding ourselves about how we understand what God is doing in and through the Gospel.

The church needs marriage because broken people need to be sanctified and to learn the meaning of sacrifice and love.

This is certainly not the least reason – this is the “for reals” of the Gospel. Look: nobody ever married a perfect person. My wife certainly didn’t – I confess it. But think about this, as told by Tim Keller in a recent RELEVANT Magazine essay:

The reason that marriage is so painful and yet wonderful is because it is a reflection of the Gospel, which is painful and wonderful at once. The Gospel is—we are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared to believe, and at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope. This is the only kind of relationship that will really transform us. Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it. God’s saving love in Christ, however, is marked by both radical truthfulness about who we are and yet also radical, unconditional commitment to us. The merciful commitment strengthens us to see the truth about ourselves and repent. The conviction and repentance moves us to cling to and rest in God’s mercy and grace.

The hard times of marriage drive us to experience more of this transforming love of God. But a good marriage will also be a place where we experience more of this kind of transforming love at a human level.

The church needs marriage to fully and rightly demonstrate the Gospel to society

I mentioned this right at the beginning of the talk: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.” This is what the church needs to demonstrate to Society, and society needs the example because it frankly cannot come from anywhere else, The message of the Gospel can only come from the church because we are the only ones entrusted with it, and we must deliver it through Gospel perfect example of marriage.

Is marriage the only way we send this message? Absolutely not. But consider the question we are asking today: what do we do about sexual confusion? What do we do about our society where the norm is quickly becoming illegitimacy and an knee-jerk retreat to divorce when things get hard? What do we do to show people what virtue is rather than beat them down over their failings when ours are frankly no less visible or obvious?

If our concern is whether or not our culture understands the right roles of men and women under God’s design and authority, the solution to the culture is the Gospel – as wrapped up in the design of marriage. Missing this, and setting our hope on the transforming power of the Law rather than on the work of Christ in the message of the Gospel, is never going to achieve what we intend to achieve.

If the church was serious about this kind of love – which is Christ’s kind of love, first and foremost demonstrated on the Cross for a specific bride in order to make her holy and spotless before God – it wouldn’t abide a social Gospel of nondescript good will or idiotic exhortations about “your best life now”. Listen: often in marriage, you are not on the receiving end of good things but are in fact in the middle of hard doings. And if you expect that your marriage should be about satisfying you instead of sanctifying someone else through sacrifice, you will want to end your marriage in short order – kids and social appearances out the window. And let’s be honest: since divorce in the church looks like divorce in the world – that is, we do it for all the same reasons – I suspect we think of “marriage” in the same way the world does. So when the world simply wants to make the law look like what we are actually practicing, we have to look in the mirror and admit to ourselves that we are to blame for what the world thinks of marriage.

There’s one last thing I want to tell you, which is critical to taking action if we understand that we will teach the world what marriage out to be. Paul said it to Timothy: “All who seek to lead a Godly life will be persecuted.” We should expect that if we are committed to marriage, it will be hard work. It will be hard to be a man who is literally giving up his life for the sake of his wife, for the sake of her nurturing and care. It will be hard to be a woman who looks to her husband as the one who will do anything, no matter what the consequences, to care for her as if she was his own body. But the benefit for you, for your marriage and family, for your church, and for society, is wrapped up by God in the very order of things. Have you not read: he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.'

If you can hear Him say that today, don’t harden your hearts against it. Trust him that he did what is good for you, and believe it.

My thanks for your time today, and may God richly bless you.

2 of 3: Does Society Need Marriage?

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Turk) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 08:01:00 +0000

by Frank Turk

This is part 2 of 3. You can find Part 1 (from yesterday) here.

This is an important point in this story: the Pharisees came to undo Jesus, to ruin him as a teacher and a leader, and in some sense as the very Messiah, with the Law. They came to him with a point of law, with which they were experts, and they believed they asked him a question that could not be answered wisely – from the Law. But Jesus gives them an answer that exceeds the requirements of the law.

“Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?" They asked him. He replied: "Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery."

Jesus doesn’t really give us a lot of wiggle room here by saying this. If Jesus were conducting the argument for marriage in public today, he probably wouldn’t say to people, “well, as long as the law makes it clear that it’s men and women in biologically-compatible pairs we’re talking about, OK. That’ll do. Maybe that’s all you folks can keep up with anyway.” Jesus says here something far more incriminating.

He says that the only purpose of the law regarding marriage is to manage your “hard hearts” – an interesting term lifted from the Old Testament. He means that Moses gave that Law to manage your disobedience and your uncanny ability to do what is right in your own eyes. It’s an effective way to tell them plainly: you’re asking this question because you are just like your fathers, just like the people in the book of Judges, and Joshua, just like the people in Kings and Chronicles and Isaiah and Ezekiel and Daniel and Zechariah. Why did Moses give you the Law? Because the Law is for law-breakers, and even with the law, it turns out that you fellows are still prone to abuse the Law and make yourselves and your wives into adulterers anyway.

In one sense, Jesus has painted a pretty hopeless picture here. It’s so hopeless that the scene ends with his disciples saying, “wow. In that case, maybe it’s better that nobody should get married at all.” That is: when they understand what it means to have marriage defined by the law, it looks like a recipe for failure. And let’s give the disciples credit here for knowing themselves pretty well: as they hear Jesus say these things, they realize that this is actually how they think about divorce: it’s an escape from something they no longer want, but Jesus says using the law like that only makes you worse, guilty of adultery.

So this brings us to the serious question we are considering today: do either the church or society even need marriage? I mean: if the disciples could hear what Jesus was saying here, and their response was, “um, maybe we should just not do this thing,” what should our response be? And how do we communicate that to society? Does society need marriage, really?

Well, what are the choices? For example, what if we compare those who are married, and stay married, to those who are either not married or not able to stay married.

In 2010, The National Review reported on the CDC numbers on birth rates in the United States, and Robert Rector had this to say about the results:

America is rapidly becoming a two-caste society, with marriage and education at the dividing line. Children born to married couples with a college education are mostly in the top half of the population; children born to single mothers with high-school degrees or less are mostly in the bottom half.

So plainly, having children outside of marriage is not a great idea – but can people thrive without marriage? That is: does the average person do better or worse if they are married?

Consider this: the common way to determine whether or not people are “in poverty” is to take the total number of households in a nation (in our case, the US), order them from the lowest household income to the highest household income, and divide that set of data into 5 groups, each containing the same number of households. This is called dividing the population into “quintiles” of income. In the US, there are roughly 113 million households, so each quintile has about 22.6 million households.

When you do this, you can examine the characteristics of each quintile to see whether or not there are other features in common in each quintile besides income. I know this is a little boring and seems off-topic, but follow me here: in the general population, 51.3% of all households are married couples – 58.1 million households. Of those, 13.085 million are below the middle quintile – which is 22.5%. The other 77.5% of married households are in the middle quintile or better, meaning that more than 3/4th of all married households are well above the poverty line. Most tellingly, 80% of all households in the top quintile are married couples, and when you narrow that down to the top 5% of all households the percentage grows to more than 85% being married.

Far more telling is that single-person households only account for 16% of all households, and less than 8% of all households in the highest quintile. It’s sort of an invincible fact that marriage is good for household units, and it’s not a very far leap to say that when you aggregate that family-unit benefit to larger sociological or political measuring units – town, city, county, state, nation, culture/society – the benefit for the household unit is a net benefit for society.

But that is merely the economic impact of marriage on household units. Does society benefit is other ways from marriage? Let’s consider another product of marriage: People. That is: children. This information is mind-blowing, so pay close attention.

In April 1998, City Journal published a study of birth rates based on the CDC annual review of birth rates in the United States. The author of the article, Heather MacDonald, had this to say about that review:

"Illegitimacy is the greatest cause of long-term poverty in this country; unless it comes down, the poverty rate won't, either. [women] who give birth [out of wedlock] will [statistically] drift in and out of low-paid work for the rest of their lives, futilely seeking the holy grail of a permanent, ‘living-wage’ job."

In April 2010, Robert Rector wrote the following in the National Review:

The disappearance of marriage in low-income communities is the predominant cause of child poverty in the U.S. today. If poor single mothers were married to the fathers of their children, two-thirds of them would not be poor. The absence of a husband and father from the home also is a strong contributing factor to failure in school, crime, drug abuse, emotional disturbance, and a host of other social problems.

And that’s a fairly-broad claim by Rector, but it is substantiated over and over again by all manner of sociological research. David Kopel, former DA for NYC, has pointed out that in that jurisdiction “Almost 70 percent of juveniles incarcerated in state reform institutions come from homes with no father or without their natural parents. Most gang members, 60 percent of rapists, and 75 percent of teenage homicide perpetrators come from single-parent homes.” (1997) Nationally, according to the CDC and national law enforcement agencies:

63% of youth suicides are from broken homes. (Source: U.S. D.H.H.S., Bureau of the Census).
71% of all high school dropouts come from broken homes. (Source: National Principals Assoc. Report on the State of High Schools).
85% of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders come from broken homes. (Source: Center for Disease Control).
80% of rapist motivated by displaced anger come from broken homes. (Source: Criminal Justice and Behavior, Vol. 14, pp. 403-26).
85% of all youths sitting in prisons grew up in a broken home. (Source: Fulton County Georgia jail populations, Texas Dept. Of Corrections, 1992).
90% of all homeless and runaway children are from broken homes.

It’s simply unquestionable: whatever it is that happens in a home where there is a father and a mother, it completely outstrips the socialization and behavioral characteristics of homes without 2 parents.

So marriage as such is a massive benefit to society – it is more likely to create financially-prosperous household units which, by and large, produce children less likely to commit suicide, drop out of school, exhibit behavioral disorders, and break the law. Society needs marriage.

Listen: society knows it needs marriage. You cannot find a society at any point in history which doesn’t have some sort of norms for establishing marriages and households. We didn’t really have the rattle off the long list of liabilities of non-married arrangements to make this case. The question is only this: how and from where do societies get their ideas of marriage?

Every society has marital norms, right? That’s actually a secular argument here -- You can find all manner of marriage arrangements if you do a little research. Wikipedia – the fount of secularized information that it is – lists dozens of types of marriage:

• Arranged marriage
• Boston marriage
• Celestial marriage
• Chinese ghost marriage/Spirit marriage
• Covenant marriage
• Endogamous
• Female husband marriage
• Fleet Marriage
• Ghost marriage
• Group marriage
• Hollywood marriage
• Human
• Intermarriage or Mixed marriage
• Interracial marriage
• Lavender marriage
• Levirate marriage
• Line marriage
• Love marriage
• Mixed
• Monogamy
• Multiple marriages
• Open marriage
• Polyandry
• Polygamy
• Polygyny
• Same-sex
• Serial monogamy
• Sexless marriage
• Sister exchange

And let’s be honest: this is an attempt by secular advocates to say that as long as we call it “marriage,” it doesn’t matter what definition we use. That is: the definitions here aren’t important, and the same outcomes will come under any of these arrangements – so let’s just settle on some kind of simplified version of this, something which appeals to the common denominator and common sense, and let’s move on.

Or worse still: it’s the way society reproaches us, the church, for the foundation of Jesus’ argument: “Have you not read,” and “God has said.” You know: if it’s that clear, and God has said something, how do we come up with dozens – maybe hundreds – of different definitions of marriage when we look across cultures? We may say that we should have read about this, but see here: none of these people have, and they’re perfectly fine.

A few years ago, Newsweek ran a cover story and featured articles about the definition of marriage, and this is what they had to say about the subject:

Let's try for a minute to take the religious conservatives at their word and define marriage as the Bible does. Shall we look to Abraham, the great patriarch, who slept with his servant when he discovered his beloved wife Sarah was infertile? Or to Jacob, who fathered children with four different women (two sisters and their servants)? Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists. The New Testament model of marriage is hardly better. Jesus himself was single and preached an indifference to earthly attachments—especially family. The apostle Paul (also single) regarded marriage as an act of last resort for those unable to contain their animal lust. "It is better to marry than to burn with passion," says the apostle, in one of the most lukewarm endorsements of a treasured institution ever uttered. Would any contemporary heterosexual married couple—who likely woke up on their wedding day harboring some optimistic and newfangled ideas about gender equality and romantic love—turn to the Bible as a how-to script?

Of course not, yet the religious opponents of gay marriage would have it be so.

Listen to that: “Would any contemporary heterosexual married couple turn to the Bible as a how-to script? Of course not!” Not only does this writer get the narrative of the Bible on this subject completely wrong, she runs rough-shod over the historical fact that the way we view marriage today as “harboring some optimistic and newfangled ideas about … romantic love” is completely and utterly a function of the Christian influence over this cultural institution.

But let’s be a little self-aware about confusion: it’s a direct consequence of the Protestant Reformation. Both Luther and Calvin, while having a very high view of the union of marriage, reacted against the Roman Catholic view of marriage as a sacrament by making it an important and God-ordained institution which, like all other vocations, ought to be administered by the civil magistrate. Calvin had second thoughts about this before the end of his life, but it is unquestionable that the Protestant states of Europe were the ones which, in an effort to take this power out the hands of ecclesiastical courts, put it in the hands of the civil courts. This migration had little immediate impact on the definition of marriage in Europe and America because all the judicial precedence for the civil courts were the decisions of the ecclesiastical courts. But over time as Western culture moved through the enlightenment, the legal definitions of contract became more and more the model for how the Law ought to view marriage. It was only in the 19th century that divorce became commonly legal in the English-speaking world, but the rate of divorce has become an epidemic in the last 50 years.

The collapse of the definition of marriage, folks, is because Christians wanted the Law to decide the answer to the question: “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?" Because we have handed it over to the courts to decide, they are deciding it.

Well, to respond to that, let’s consider this: how did the West ever get a Christian view of marriage? That is: Western Civ predates the church, the Christian faith. How did marriage become the domain of the church in the first place?

The ancient Greeks considered the relation of marriage a matter not merely of private, but also of public or general interest. The laws were founded on the generally recognised principle that it was the duty of every citizen to raise up strong, healthy and legitimate children to the state. The ancient Athenians liberally allowed divorce, but only the state, the magistrate, could declare the divorce.

In the earliest periods of Roman history, Marriage meant that a married woman would be subjugated by her husband, but that custom had died out by the 1st century, in favor of Free Marriage which did not grant a husband any rights over his wife or have any changing effect on a woman's status. With this, the reasons for any divorce became irrelevant. Either spouse could leave a marriage at any point.

This was the state of things into the second century -- as the Christian church entered the ancient world. At that time, the Christians had no political power, no economic power, and were seen as weird and irrational atheists because they only worshipped one god. They had nothing -- no publishing houses, no televisions networks, no newspapers, no blogs. They had absolutely no advantages in the society in general.

In our view, that means the game is over. I think our view of it is deeply influenced by our own prosperity and our own good standing in the culture, but if we had no legislative recourse and no way to make movies about what we say we believe, we would see the problem of helping our culture rethink, refine and restore the institution of marriage as completely without hope.

Yet, the Christians in the -pre-christian west didn’t see it that way at all.

... to be continued ...

1 of 3: Why the Church and Society need Marriage

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Turk) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 08:01:00 +0000

by Frank Turk

Last weekend, I was fortunate enough to spend the weekend with my wife and the extremely-gracious folks in Warsaw, IN, at Christ Covenant Church & Trinity Evangelical Church (and their friends at the St. Regis Club) for a conference on the meaning of human sexuality & marriage.

Tim Challies gave two very fine talks about definitional issues surrounding sexuality and marriage, and I got the simple and uncontroversial topic, "Why Marriage Is Necessary to a Civilized Society."

What follows today, tomorrow, and Thursday will be the substance of that talk, edited only to remove the topical items related to the conference. Enjoy.

From the book of Matthew, Chapter 19:

1Now when Jesus had finished these sayings, he went away from Galilee and entered the region of Judea beyond the Jordan. 2And large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.

3And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, "Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?" 4He answered, "Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5and said, 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? 6So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate." 7They said to him, "Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?" 8He said to them, "Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. 9 And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery."

10The disciples said to him, "If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry."

Let’s open in a word of prayer:

Jesus, you are life for all men, and the light to all men. You shine in the darkness, but the darkness has never understood it, and never overcome it. The Law was given through Moses, but through you, we receive Grace and Truth. Today, God, forgive us because sometimes we forget we are not the givers of law but in fact the ambassadors of Grace. Teach us, God, to say what you say about this subject for the purpose that you say it – which is to call your people to yourself. And help us, God, to be a light on a lamp stand in this dark world, the salt of the earth, and good and true neighbors to those who need you. We pray this for your glory and honor, Jesus. Amen.

Most of you have no idea who I am or why I’m qualified to speak at a conference like this. Maybe I’m not actually qualified, but I am pretty deeply attached to this subject because I am a married man – and I haven’t always been one of those. In fact, I can say with confidence that I was, for a long time, not qualified to be a married man. When I realized this, I was ruined. I mean: who doesn’t want to get married, right? And it’s not like anyone would have stopped me – it wasn’t illegal for me to get married. But there was no right-minded woman who would have married me.

And that was part of the conviction that led me to Christ: not that if I liked Jesus I could find a girl, but that there was something inside me which was deeply broken, and that anyone who knew me well enough to consider marrying me would know that much about me, and they’d say, “No. No way! He’s good for a laugh sometimes, but he’s a car wreck.”

So when I found Christ, I handed him my car wreck and told him simply, “I have no idea what to do with this. I just need you to save it.” And he did – he saved me from the car wreck of my sin so that the wrecker of judgment wasn’t going to haul me off to the junk yard of God’s wrath.

Which brings me back here to this topic of marriage. The title of my talk today is, “Better Together: Why the Church and Society both need God’s plan for Marriage.” It may seem obvious to most of you, but Jesus doesn’t just save us from the final judgment – although that’s important. Jesus saves us for the sake of doing something with and for the sake of this Gospel we want to proclaim. Right? Eph 2? “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.”

See: for me, I had to ask God to make me into a man who could be a good husband. God: what is a good husband? God: who must I be in order to find a good wife? God: what will our marriage look like, and how will I know when I have done what you have expected from me?

So to answer the first question here – that is, what qualifies me to come here to you and tell you why the church and society need God’s definition of marriage – it is because I need God’s definition of marriage, and you’re just like me. It doesn’t matter if you’re a believer who will ponder these few minutes we have together deeply or an unbeliever who has already tuned me out because of my Jesusing up here: you are just like me, and you’re a car wreck. I know what the tow truck looks like, and I know what it means to be towed out of the scene of the accident and be put back together. Often.

Let’s turn back to our passage of Scripture for a few minutes, and find God’s definition of marriage. I would be hard pressed to believe that most of you here today have never heard this story from the book of Matthew before: Large crowds were following Jesus around, and the Pharisees were worried about that. So they came to him, as they usually did, with a question. The question was simple: can a man issue his wife a divorce for any reason?

Now, this is a broad question – and in some way it seems almost too easy, right? “Any reason? You mean like for burning his lamb chop or not finishing the dishes? What sort of question is that? Of course divorce is not for just any reason.”

But it turns out that this is exactly what they meant – among the rabbis, there were two schools of thought on the matter. One of them did in fact say that a man could divorce his wife for any reason at all, and the other taught that divorce was only for adultery, and even then only for intentional and persistent infidelity. It’s a pretty big gap, and the commentators on this passage say that the purpose of this question was, of course, to trip Jesus up. The thinking here goes that the question was made so that if Jesus answered in favor of one school or the other, it would effectively split his followers in half – or worse, split them so desperately that they fighting would disperse them altogether.

So in one sense, the question is asked to make sure Jesus cannot win.

But in another sense, the question is asked to measure Jesus against the standard of the Law – against the standard of Moses. If Jesus did not answer the way the Law says he ought to, he was certainly a guilty man – someone inventing his own standard and teaching it to others. It would be easy to call him wicked if he did not make it clear how the Law should govern the matter, or if he was releasing people to act in any way which looked right in their own eyes.

But let’s look at the question a moment before we get to Jesus’ answer. It’s one of those moments in the Bible when we have to be careful not to read too solemnly, or else we’re bound to miss how utterly human and relevant the text is. Here are the Pharisees – the keepers of the Whole Law – asking Jesus when it was time for divorce because it was a common question. In a nutshell, the question is one that, if we are honest, is common in our culture: when is it OK to get a divorce?

Jesus, however, isn’t stumped by the question. He’s not left to ponder it a minute – he sees right through the question and takes it directly to the heart of the matter. We’ll come back to the first part of his answer is a few minutes: “Have you not read …?” There’s a very important special plea there that we have to look at, but it’s important enough to take up last even though he started there. But he said, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them.” That is: if we’re going to talk about marriage, we can’t start anywhere but “the beginning,” which is to say, the purpose of men and women.

This is a hard sell even in religious circles today – that people are made and are not making themselves. People want to be what they imagine they want to be, rather than what they ought to be.

This comes out of us in so many different ways. You know: we want to be comfortable and leisurely, but look at how we are made – we are made to work. We want to be somewhat sophisticated and cosmopolitan – in secular circles that is done by association with the rich and famous, and in our reformed circles, it’s done by quoting Calvin, Spurgeon, Luther and obscure puritans; we want to be very clever and be seen as clever, and if we were really clever, we’d write the pithy quotes rather than memorize them. We’re not clever and self-taught: we need instruction. We are made to be something by nature, by kind, and it’s no accident.

And Jesus underscores this: he actually takes out the question of “any reason” by pointing to the first reason: God made men and women. That is: “he made them and said.” That goes back to the over-arching argument, “have you not read?” but look at it simply from the standpoint of telling the story for a second: from Jesus’ perspective, God didn’t just make people with the animals, and the animals would be a kind of example for people and vice versa. From Jesus’ perspective, when God created man and woman, he had something to say to them right at the beginning, and it matters. What the Pharisees have asked him, then, is a sort of nonsense question: can marriage end for any old reason? Well, of course not – because it wasn’t started for any old reason. It was started when God made man and woman, so when you think about marriage, you have to think of God’s purpose in it, not man’s.

And here’s what God said, according to Jesus, right at the beginning when he made them: 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’

I think it’s interesting that a recent best-effort to set the law straight here in the United States was the Proposition 8 effort in California. The State of California presented a ballot initiative called commonly called Proposition 8 which would amend its constitution and formally define “marriage” under the law. The law read simply:

Section I. Title
This measure shall be known and may be cited as the "California Marriage Protection Act."
Section 2. Article I. Section 7.5 is added to the California Constitution, to read:
Sec. 7.5. Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

Jesus says, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”

In Malachi 2, the Bible says it this way:

But did He not make them one,
Having a remnant of his Spirit?
And why one?
He seeks godly offspring.
Therefore take heed to your spirit,
And let none deal treacherously with the wife of his youth.
“For the LORD God of Israel says
That He hates divorce,
For it covers one’s garment with violence.”

And somehow we offer that up in secular law as, “we only recognize marriage between a man and a woman.”

See: when Jesus says what he says, there are things which, frankly, the people asking him questions have either not remembered, or never learned. “The two shall become one flesh,” he says. Paul picks that up later in Ephesians, and tells us that a man who is married must treat his wife like his own flesh, and care for her, and nurture her. To say that marriage is only “between a man and a woman,” seems to be missing something by comparison.

Jesus’ point is that the first purpose is that man and woman are made for each other. That is, before we can talk about what the law might say about marriage, we have to see what marriage is for, and who it is for, and where it comes from. And Jesus’ point is utterly unambiguous: the law does not create marriage. Marriage comes far before the law, and it is built into the purpose of creation.

Now, there’s nothing new there for anybody in this room, right? Whether you’re a believer or an unbeliever, you have heard some version of this before. It shouldn’t be news to anyone that the Christian ideal of marriage is that man and woman are made for each other, and that they are to be joined together in a permanent way, in a miraculous way.

When Jesus tells the Pharisees that marriage was meant, from the beginning, to be an inseparable bond, they ask him a question: “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?" That is: Jesus – what you’re talking about here doesn’t look like the Law of Moses. How do you run this thing? We were asking you a practical question, Jesus, and you’re giving us a very lofty, but unworkable, answer. “One flesh? Moses gave us instructions on how to handle a divorce, and you come across with ‘one flesh’.”

It doesn’t look like a Law at all, does it? It looks like something far more impossible, more incredible than any law.

This is an important point in this story: the Pharisees came to undo Jesus, to ruin him as a teacher and a leader, and in some sense as the very Messiah, with the Law. They came to him with a point of law, with which they were experts, and they believed they asked him a question that could not be answered wisely – from the Law. But Jesus gives them an answer that exceeds the requirements of the law.

... to be continued ...

The Paragon of Perfect Love

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Johnson) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 08:09:00 +0000

by Phil Johnson

What follows is a message I wrote to an anonymous Internet hit-and-run commenter who posted an angry blast labeling some friends of mine "Pharisees" because, he said, they were "too concerned about orthodoxy and not concerned enough about unity, diversity, human dignity, and other' people's sensitivities."

The gadfly objected because someone in that forum had used the expression "theological miscreant" to describe a certain pernicious heretic. He went on for several paragraphs, scolding no one in particular but indiscriminately upbraiding anyone who might read. Then, oblivious to the irony of his closing remonstration, he wrote, "No one has the right to correct someone else's theology unless you have established a relationship based on love."

Anyway, I Tweeted the first sentence of the following response last week, and someone asked me for more context. Here it is:

he Pharisees' problem was not that they were too concerned with orthodox teaching, but that they had invented their own orthodoxy. Jesus condemned them for replacing and modifying the clear truth of Scripture with their own traditions (Matthew 15:1-9).

They were the chief theological miscreants of their day.

So how did Jesus treat them? Did He show them love—i.e., did He obey the Second Great Commandment in His dealings with them? Of course.

What did that love entail? First and foremost, Jesus declared the truth to them. He also frequently delivered public rebukes for the errors that threatened to damn them. He castigated them. He occasionally held them up to public ridicule. He obviously valued their souls more than their feelings. That is what authentic love looks like.

In other words, Christ, not Rodney King, is the paragon of perfect love.

The vast majority of Pharisees didn't heed Jesus' warnings, of course. The smug or snide ones might have even claimed it was because He didn't "have a relationship based upon love." It was nonetheless the right thing for Him to correct their false teaching and warn others of the danger posed by their error.

Christians in Name Only

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Johnson) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 20:13:00 +0000

Your weekly dose of Spurgeon
posted by Phil Johnson

The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from The Spurgeon Archive. The following excerpt is from "A Solemn Warning for All Churches," a sermon preached Sunday morning, 24 February 1856 (very early in Spurgeon's London ministry), at New Park Street Chapel, Southwark.

he first charge of general defilement Christ brings against the church in Sardis was that they had a vast deal of open profession, and but little of sincere religion. "I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead" (Revelation 3:1).

That is the crying sin of the present age. I am not inclined to be morbid in my temperament, or to take a melancholy view of the church of God. I would wish at all times to exhibit a liberality of spirit, and to speak as well as I can of the church at large; but God forbid that any minister should shrink from declaring what he believes to be the truth.

In going up and down this land, I am obliged to come to this conclusion, that throughout the churches there are multitudes who have "a name to live and are dead." Religion has become fashionable. The shopkeeper could scarcely succeed in a respectable business if he were not united with a church. It is reckoned to be reputable and honorable to attend a place of worship, and hence men are made religious in shoals. And especially now that parliament itself doth in some measure sanction religion, we may expect that hypocrisy will abound yet more and more, and formality everywhere take the place of true religion.

You can scarcely meet with a man who does not call himself a Christian, and yet it is equally hard to meet with one who is in the very marrow of his bones thoroughly sanctified to the good work of the kingdom of heaven. We meet with professors by hundreds; but we must expect still to meet with possessors by units. The whole nation appears to have been Christianized in an hour. But is this real? Is this sincere? Ah! we fear not.

How is it that professors can live like other men? How is it that there is so little distinction between the church and the world? Or, that if there is any difference, you are frequently safer in dealing with an ungodly man than with one who is professedly righteous? How is it that men who make high professions can live in worldly conformity, indulge in the same pleasures, live in the same style, act from the same motives, deal in the same manner as other people do? Are not these days when the sons of God have made affinity with the sons of men? And may we not fear that something terrible may yet occur unless God shall send a voice, which shall say, "Come out of them, my people, lest ye be partakers of their plagues?"

Take our churches at large—there is no lack of names, but there is a lack of life. Else, how is it that our prayer-meetings are so badly attended? Where is the zeal or the energy shown by the apostles? Where is the Spirit of the living God? Is he not departed? Might not "Ichabod" be written on the walls of many a sanctuary? They have a name to live, but are dead. They have their societies, their organisms; but where is the life of godliness? Where is inward piety? Where is sincere religion? Where is practical godliness? Where is firm, decisive, puritanical piety?

Thank God, there are a few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments, but charity itself will not allow us to say that the church generally possesses the Spirit of God.

The Sea, and All That Is Therein

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Johnson) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 08:01:00 +0000

by Phil Johnson

t was the summer of 1997. I was slated to go on one of those week-long ministry-sponsored cruises along the Inside Passage in Alaska with Darlene—a full week of Bible teaching and heavenly scenery. A floating Bible conference in the north Pacific. We were very excited about it.

One major problem: I had a stack of work on my desk I could not in good conscience leave behind. It was mostly correspondence from "Grace to You" listeners—people seeking counsel and biblical help. Some of them were asking for advice regarding fairly urgent issues; some were asking tough Bible questions out of curiosity. But I needed to answer them all, soon. Prior to the cruise, I had set all my correspondence aside for a few weeks in order to meet a deadline with a book project, and I desperately needed to get caught up.

So (carefully forgetting to tell Darlene I was planning to work during her "vacation") I smuggled this 5-inch-thick pile of papers into a green fabric Eddie Bauer briefcase and took it with me as carry-on baggage.

The cruise was leaving from Seward, Alaska. We were to fly from Los Angeles to Anchorage, then drive from there to Resurrection Bay to get on the ship. We had a layover in Seattle on the way to Anchorage, and while in the airport there, I left that green briefcase in a chair while I walked over to the drinking fountain. That's when Darlene first consciously noticed the bag, and she went and stood by it to keep an eye on it. I knew I was caught.

I took an extra-long drink from the fountain, and when I returned, Darlene said, "What's in that briefcase? You should keep a closer eye on it. You don't want to lose it."

I said, "On the contrary. That's a bag of correspondence I'm going to have to work on during the cruise. Frankly, the best thing that could happen would be if it fell in the ocean. I'd have a great excuse for not answering all those letters."

Darlene was very patient, as always, and she just rolled her eyes at me. Not a word of complaint when she discovered I had dragged that bag of work along. No wonder I love her so much.

Anyway, to make a long story short, when we boarded our ship the next day, some stewards took several passengers' luggage and loaded it on a rolling cart to push it up the gangplank. Almost as an afterthought, I put that briefcase on top of the stack of suitcases, thinking it best to let the professionals get it on the ship.

Less than 20 minutes after we boarded, they started paging me on the ship's loudspeaker. That is something they never do on cruise ships unless it's a very serious emergency. They asked me to come to the front desk to speak to the captain.

So I went immediately, thinking something must be terribly wrong. It occurred to me that they might have received word that someone back home might have been in an accident, or had a heart attack, or something like that. I prayed for mercy and grace as I hurried to the main deck. The feeling got more ominous the closer I got to the ship's lobby. When the attendants working the front desk saw me coming, I heard one whisper to the others, "That's him!"—and they all scurried into the back room, out of sight.

So now I knew something was seriously wrong. A grim-looking man dressed in an officer's uniform led me into a complex of offices, stopped, and just before opening a door, he looked at me and said, "Mr. Johnson, I'm afraid I have some bad news."

After a disturbingly long pause, he opened the door and said: "Your briefcase fell in the water."

Inside that office several of the ship's crew had spread dripping-wet papers from my briefcase across every surface. People were on their hands and knees frantically trying to pat my stuff dry with towels. They looked up in unison when I entered the room. I could see panic in every set of eyes.

I broke out laughing. I said, "I told my wife I hoped that bag would fall in the ocean. You should have let it sink."

The panic in those eyes turned to pity. I think they all thought I was insane. The ship's purser, still grim, said, "Sir, I'm afraid everything in that bag is thoroughly soaked. It's very serious."

So I assured him it was not serious and tried to explain why this all struck me as hilariously funny. I also reassured the purser that I didn't need any kind of compensation or complimentary liquor for the week, or whatever. And I wasn't going to sue or demand free passage on cruises for the rest of my life.

I finally managed to convince them I really wasn't upset or crazy, and they breathed a collective sigh of relief that was almost palpable.

There was one woman in the room dressed in civilian clothes. She followed me out of the room and said, "Mr. Johnson, may I have a word with you?"

She said, "My name is Jeannette Seale. I'm on staff at the Seward Seaman's Mission, an evangelical mission to crew members on cruise ships. I was there when your bag fell in the water. I saw something fall; I heard the splash; and I heard crew members frantically shouting, No! No!" I thought a baby had fallen overboard or something.

"Two men crawled down the ship's ladder, literally risking their lives to retrieve your briefcase. They allowed me to come on the ship, because I knew the crew member who dropped the bag, and he was utterly distraught. He is a Muslim." (The ship's crew was from Indonesia.) "And he was saying, 'Oh God! Oh, God!' and I said, 'Amir, Allah is not going to help you now. We need to pray to Jesus. And I prayed aloud that whoever owned this bag would not be seriously angry. Because if you were angry or demanded compensation, it would probably cost him his job.

"Then," she said, "when we opened your bag, I could tell immediately from the contents that you were a Christian in full-time ministry. And then I began to pray for you, because I have seen too many Christians in situations like this behave worse than the world. And I thought if you lost your temper it would damage your testimony, and mine, and all the Christians on the ship.

"So I was profoundly relieved when you reacted the way you did, and I wanted to tell you thanks."

Now I'll be the first to admit that I'm no hero in circumstances like these. I have lost my temper and shamefully damaged my testimony in other, more trivial circumstances. Ask Darlene. I'm much too prone to mutter really unkind things about other drivers on the freeway. And she always admonishes me to try to speak in a kinder tone with customer-service reps on the phone. If you are a long-time blog-reader who has seen my responses to persistently-critical blog-comments, you know that sharp-tonguedness is one of my besetting sins. I admit it to my utter shame.

But this was different, because I immediately saw the hand of Providence in the whole incident. I had virtually prayed aloud that my bag would get dropped overboard. I had said to the bag, "Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea." It seemed clear to me that God had answered in a dramatic way. When the bag fell into Resurrection Bay less than 24 hours after my flippant comment to Darlene, I knew instantly that it was God Himself who gave it a push. (A crew member told me that in 20 years of working with that cruise line, he had never heard of a passenger's bag falling into the ocean.)

Fortunately Eddie Bauer bags are sturdy and well-sewn. Though by no means watertight, the bag floated just long enough for the crew to retrieve it before it sunk. Their risky rescue operation was above and beyond the call of duty.

Subsequent events proved that the Lord had a good purpose for dropping my bag in the sea. There was a group of Indonesian Christians on the crew who always visited the Seward Seaman's Mission when their ship was in port, and when they heard what had happened, they invited me to come and preach at their worship service on the ship on Monday night. They work long hours every Sunday and Monday, and then at 11:00 Monday night, they have just one opportunity per week to hold a worship service. About 25 of them would meet together each week in the middle of the night in a partitioned section of the ship's large dining room. And they gave me and Darlene the rare privilege of worshiping with them.

Their worship and fellowship lasted well into the early morning hours—not because my sermon was long, but because they kept singing and praying and enjoying one another's fellowship until we all simply couldn't stay awake any longer. That late-night worship service was the highlight of the cruise for me. Indeed, it was one of the highlights of my life, like a little foretaste of heaven.

I have thought about this a lot in the ensuing years: All the trials we go through would be a whole lot easier to endure if we had more trust in the workings of Providence. If we would just bear in mind that God is fully in control of everything that happens to us—both "good" and "bad"—we would be far less frustrated, and far more confident that He is in charge, working all things (including the "bad" and merely inconvenient things) together for ultimate good.

By the way, the papers in that bag dried just fine. I answered every letter. Though wrinkled and covered with a layer of crystallized salt, they were all still readable. And each time I picked up the next letter and felt the salty texture, it made me smile. So even the work I had to do that week was a special, memorable joy.

Book review — 40 Questions about Christians and Biblical Law, by Thomas R. Schreiner

noreply@blogger.com (DJP) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:54:00 +0000

by Dan Phillips

40 Questions about Christians and Biblical Law, by Thomas R. Schreiner

(Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2010; 256 pages)

The meaning and role of Biblical law is a topic of great and regular interest in Christian thought, life, and preaching. Though I'd only read snatches and articles from Prof. Schreiner heretofore, I knew that Jim Hamilton (whose work I admire immensely) counts Schreiner as a mentor. Hence, I welcomed Kregel's provision of a review copy.

In 40 Questions about Christians and Biblical Law, Professor Schreiner very concisely offers a wealth of useful information. The book is laid out in five sections:

Part 1: The Law in the Old Testament
Part 2: The Law in Paul
Part 3: The Law in the Gospel and Acts
Part 4: The Law in the General Epistles
Part 5: The Law and Contemporary Issues

The first and fourth parts are shortest (three questions each), and the second the longest (twenty-two questions, divided into three parts). Schreiner tackles the big ones, such as:

What Does the Word Law Mean in the Scriptures?
Was the Mosaic Covenant Legalistic?
Does the Old Testament Teach That Salvation Is by Works?
What Does the Expression “Works of Law” Mean in Paul?
Is Perfect Obedience to the Law Mandatory for Salvation?
How Should We Understand the Use of Leviticus 18:5 in the Scriptures?
Does Paul Teach That the Old Testament Law Is Now Abolished?
According to Paul, What Was the Purpose of the Law?
Does Paul Distinguish Between the Moral, Ceremonial, and Civil Law?
What Is the “Law of Christ”?
How Should We Understand the Antitheses in Matthew 5:21–48?
Why Did Paul Circumcise Timothy When He Refused to Circumcise Titus?
What Does John Mean by Keeping God’s Commands in 1 and 2 John?
Is the Sabbath Still Required for Christians?
Should Christians Tithe?
What Is Theonomy, or Christian Reconstructionism, and How Should It Be Evaluated?
What Role Does the Law Have in Preaching?

My intent is to whet your appetite, and urge you to get and read the book, so I'll not be presenting Schreiner's answers to all of those questions. (It's a Golden Rule thing, speaking as an author who's been asked "Please reproduce X from your book so I don't have to get it.")

Readability. Schreiner is, in the overused phrase, a "world-class scholar," yet I find his tone engaging, candid and conversational. He admits to having changed his view from time to time (e.g 67, footnote 7). Schreiner works hard to keep the reader on the page, not assuming an understanding that may not exist. For instance, before discussing "legalism," Schreiner defines it (25), which can be dicey. The prose of the text is also broken up with a number of contentful, helpful tables and charts.

I think many will find the "summary" at the end of each chapter particularly useful. The discussion can be complex, but Schreiner always returns and nicely boils it down for us. A series of "Reflection Questions" also enhances usefulness in study group contexts.

A number of critical truths are excellently-put. For instance, "Faith looks to God's promises and his supernatural work, but law finds blessing through what human beings accomplish" (49). Also, in the context of Christian living, Schreiner emphasizes the dynamic of love — and adds "love also is defined by the content of the commandments so that love does not devolve into sentimentality" (197). Earlier, Schreiner had well said,

Love is like a river that replenishes the human spirit, but moral norms provide boundaries so that the river is not dispersed abroad but retains its strength and power. Because human beings are sinners, they are prone to deceit and may identify as righteous a course of action that is contrary to love. Moral norms stipulate the nature of love, clarifying what is righteous and what is unrighteous. (106)

Good writing and good teaching at the same time. Not as common as one could wish.

Substance. Schreiner isn't at all averse to running athwart common scholarly opinion. For instance, it has been common for decades to say that the Hebrew word tôrâ (commonly "law") means instruction, rather than commands. Schreiner demurs, noting that the term "usually refers to what human beings are commanded to do," though not denying that it can mean more than "commands and prescriptions" (19). I think that hits it right, as I see it as well. In an appendix to the Proverbs book, I say that tôrâ refers to "authoritative instruction that was meant to bring God’s own perspective to bear on daily living" (349). Schreiner's entire chapter on this question (19-23) provides an excellent survey of the meaning of common terms used, packed with plenty of useful citations and specifics.

Unlike the recent reissue of the ZPEB, Schreiner tackles the "New Perspective" at some length (35-64), concluding that its foundation "is not nearly as secure as some claim," and faulting it for being "overly simplistic" in some of its readings of the original documents (39), and noting that "The problem is with what the New Perspective brackets out of Paul's theology" (42).

An annotated bibliography adds to the value, as do indices and (of course, because after all this is a serious book) footnotes.

Sidenote: I notice that Schreiner addresses a number of issues by appealing to "a redemptive-historical standpoint" (175) — that is, to the location of a text within the flow of redemptive history. In other words, without meaning to put words in Prof. Schreiner's mouth, it is essential to relate a text to its administrative context, to where it falls in the unfolding of God's plan for the ages. Is it in the context of the Mosaic Law, for instance, or of the Law of Christ?

Of course I think that Schreiner is right, and to ignore this is to flatten the text of Scripture and, however unintentionally, to do it violence. Far lesser lights have also argued and developed the hermeneutical importance of this point at some length, though they use another term than "redemptive-historical standpoint." One wonders whether it may not be time to give that (here unnamed) school of thought a little deserved credit for enduring many slings and arrows for arguing for what every bacon-loving Christian has tacitly admitted for millennia.

This is a terrific book and and terrific help. I heartily recommend 40 Questions about Christians and Biblical Law to all, and expect to return to it repeatedly in years to come.

Briefly

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Turk) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 08:01:00 +0000

by Frank Turk

I had a great idea for a blog post, but Life got in the way. Shameless self-promotion today instead.

Yes, I really, really am going to be in Winona Lake, Indiana, the weekend for the 2012 Every Thought Captive Conference. (click the sidebar ad to get info) If you're anywhere in northern Indiana, Southern Michigan, or Western Ohio, you could drive in. I am driving from Little Rock, so you prolly aren't driving farther than me. (I'm looking at you, Ted and Zach)

The topic? They say "sexual confusion," but it's really about marriage and society. My hour will be interesting to say the least, and Tim Challies (headliner, superstar, publisher, pastor, humble disciple) will have two hours before and after to fix whatever it is I break. There will also be an open forum on Saturday afternoon after the talks.

Come join us -- it'll be a great time to be inside and stay warm and think about, well, lots of stuff.

Also: you need to be following Chris Rosebrough on Fighting for the Faith as he covers the Code Orange Revival. Stellar.

See you this weekend; if not, be in the Lord's house with the Lord's people on the Lord's day this weekend.

Play to your strengths, but challenge your weaknesses

noreply@blogger.com (DJP) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 13:08:00 +0000

by Dan Phillips

You may have heard that I wrote a book about Proverbs. True fact! Then in looking at my cred, you might notice that my M. Div. major was OT, and that I taught classes in Hebrew and OT Theology. More true facts!

So naturally you might assume that I did all that study, which resulted in all that teaching and writing, because I was naturally inclined to the OT and to Hebrew, and found those subjects easier and more congenial to study.

Untrue fact!

So why'd I do it?

I'll get there in a second.

I hope we can agree that it's a mistake, whether as a pastor or as any other Christian, not to play to your strengths. If a pastor is terrific in the pulpit but not so great at the one-on-one, he mustn't stop preaching/teaching so he can do vistation instead, just to address his failings. Equally, if a pastor is a terrific people-person but not so great in the pulpit, he can't simply cancel the sermon and hand out counseling numbers like tickets in a butcher's shop. ("Now being discipled... Number 1347!")

Paul tells the Ephesian elders, "I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable, and teaching you publicly and from house to house" (Acts 20:20). We must do both, though we are stronger in the one than in the other.

At the same time, an exceptional preacher or teacher may do a great deal of preaching and teaching, and an exceptional personal worker may do a great deal of personal work — while not neglecting the other. Meanwhile, we who are exceptional at neither simply work equally on both.

HSAT:

It is good for a pastor to give special effort to (A) get out of his comfort-zone, and (B) push himself in the areas of faithful service where he may be weak. In fact, if he is to grow, he must accept that he must push himself, or else he'll just naturally settle down in Comfy Rut Lane. Paul urges Timothy, "Take pains with these things; be absorbed in them, so that your progress may be evident to all" (1 Tim. 4:15 NAS). Do the hard work, let folks see you progress. Paul also presses Timothy to "do the work of an evangelist" (2 Tim. 4:5), perhaps suggesting that evangelism did not come easily to the timid apprentice (cf. 1 Cor. 16:10-11).

So why did I major in OT? Not because that is where I was strong, but because that's where I was weak. It was because I knew that around 2/3 of the Bible was, in fact, the OT, and I was called to preach the whole Bible, so it made sense to focus on the part I grasped less adeptly. So that led to focusing on the OT in my classes and thesis, which led in turn to teaching Hebrew and OT Theology and that little book-thingie I may have mentioned earlier.

Again, in an early pastorate I was challenged to teach Hebrews, and I did. Why? Partly because it was difficult. Because it didn't come easy to me. And because that meant that it would prod and challenge me to teach out of my comfort-zone, thus going into areas of God's counsel that I might otherwise bypass.

Don't misunderstand me. My point is nothing like "Behold Iron Dan Vs. Wild, as I eat grubs and leap off mountains to prove that I am mas macho!" I have many, many bitter regrets concerning areas where I failed to challenge myself and get out of my comfort-zone, and thus failed to be the faithful pastor I should have been.

My point is to share that challenge with you, pastor and non-pastor alike. Is prophecy hard for you? Then start preparing to teach a prophetic book, pastor; or get a good book and study, non-pastor. Is Proverbs hard? Well, maybe there's some good book that can help you so that you can get it, and dive in. The same applies in any area of theology or Christian practice.

If it's in God's Word, it's important.

And if it doesn't come easily to you, then it may be especially important for you and for those you serve.