Reformation21 Blog

Reformation21 Blog http://www.reformation21.org/blog/ en Copyright 2012 Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:27:26 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification Reformation21Bloghttp://feedburner.google.com Dick Lucas on 2 Timothy (Paul Levy) Yesterday morning 5 of us local ministers spent the morning with Dick Lucas. He gave us an overview of 2 Timothy. The guy is 87 and still reworking his material, it was remarkable. The benefit of just having a small group together and being able to ask questions together was a real privilege. One of the men had been a minister for 22 years in Twickenham, the rest of us were in our 30s.

Dick was in great form giving us great nuggets from 2 Timothy, here are some of my notes

''2 Timothy is about the Word - Preach it, Protect it, Adorn it, Suffer for it''

When thinking about the whole issue of being ashamed and being seduced which are constant themes in 2 Timothy 'I'm seduced by the beautiful gospel because I'm ashamed of the real gospel'

We spent a bit of time thinking through the Pauline pattern of ministry. Paul is so personal in 2 Timothy. He says it is my gospel, what you heard from me, join with me, follow me, do not be ashamed of me. In 2 Timothy Paul gives Timothy and all those to come a pattern of ministry. The danger for us is we will be ashamed of the gospel.and seduced by the gospel of the here and now.

We finished up with the 4 great imperatives of 4:5

1. Keep your head in all circumstances - which means be sober

2. Endure toughness - remember the pictures of 2 Timothy 2 - soldier, athlete, farmer

3. Do the work of evangelism - this is not complicated, 4:2 preach the Word which is the gospel.

4. Finish your ministry - same verb as Colossians 4:17, Acts 12:23

]]> http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/dick-lucas-on-2-timothy.php http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/dick-lucas-on-2-timothy.php Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:27:26 -0500 Mission of the church audio (Paul Levy) talk at a Soveriegn Grace Ministries conference which is a brilliant overview of many of the themes. It's a great way of gettinng people to want to read the book. ]]> http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/mission-of-the-church-audio.php http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/mission-of-the-church-audio.php Wed, 08 Feb 2012 07:09:08 -0500 So who exactly are the warrior children? (Carl Trueman) here.

It does make the question in the header an interesting one.
]]> http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/so-who-exactly-are-the-warrior.php http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/so-who-exactly-are-the-warrior.php Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:26:45 -0500 The End of Infidelity (Gabriel Fluhrer) excellent article for ref21 refuting the collection of new atheist essays published under the title of The End of Christianity (ed. John Loftus).

The book-length refutation of Loftus and company is now available in PDF here. Not only is it a wealth of solid, biblical argumentation, it is also (as any reader of Triablogue can attest) full of wit. Enjoy and share!

]]> http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/the-end-of-infidelity.php http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/the-end-of-infidelity.php apologetics atheism Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:42:13 -0500 The Rev. Thabiti Anyabwile Calls It As He Sees It -- And, Indeed, As It Really Is (Carl Trueman) post on the real cost of giving T D Jakes a pass. It is a moving story and one that deserves to be read by all -- especially those ministers who gave Jakes a pass the other week.

]]> http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/the-rev-thabiti-anyabwile-call.php http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/the-rev-thabiti-anyabwile-call.php Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:11:46 -0500 Magnificently Careless -- and Carefree (Carl Trueman) here. It is a great thing to limit one's feudal ties for it gives great freedom to speak.

]]> http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/magnificently-careless-and-car.php http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/magnificently-careless-and-car.php Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:30:44 -0500 Trueman Christianity Today Interview (Gabriel Fluhrer) Carl Trueman weighs in on James Macdonald's exit from the Gospel Coalition over at Christianity Today. Also, see Trueman's latest Wages of Spin article and a review of Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshear's Doctrine. A busy day at ref21!]]> http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/trueman-christianity-today-int.php http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/trueman-christianity-today-int.php celebrity pastors Trueman Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:28:30 -0500 Who Ordained You a Minister Over Me? (Carl Trueman) post from a little while ago at The Internet Monk. It is a most helpful reminder of a problem that the church has had since at least the advent of the printing press: if teaching in church is to be assigned to, and overseen by, men ordained to that task, how does one handle teaching by outsiders?

For full disclosure, I rarely read books by people in my own denomination. There are many talented contemporary writers, and it would arguably be an act of ingratitude not to benefit from the minds that God has given to the church at large, both of the present day and of previous eras. Thus, most of my reading comes from authors outside of the jurisdiction of the OPC. That is a good thing: I rejoice to live at a time when I can benefit immensely from Christians of all times and all places. That is what being a catholic Christian is all about.

But is also imposes responsibilities on all of us involved in public teaching: in a world where teaching in one place can so quickly be influential in another, how does the New Testament pattern of accountability apply? That is hard to answer and has been so since Luther's theses were printed and then spread across Saxony.

Even more important: when we are dealing with large parachurch organisations, it behooves those in authority to be especially careful in their choice of associations.   For example, if you organise a conference aimed at the church, the speaker may not be ordained to teach in my congregation. That is not in itself a problem; but if you market him to the church at large, the likelihood is that, though never physically present, he nonetheless does teach my congregation and that he does so with your imprimatur. That gives me a stake in your game, so to speak; and it places huge responsibility on you to listen to my concerns and to respond to them appropriately.

The Elephant Room should be irrelevant: my denomination was not represented at the table; and none of the congregation where I serve on session were in attendance.   Yet the fact that some of the participants enjoy the imprimatur of a large parachurch organisation headed up by good, reliable men meant that I do have an interest in what was said before, during and after. The event carried more cachet than otherwise because of that imprimatur or brand.

Thankfully, even Andy Warhol would probably be impressed at how brief fame is these days.   I suspect that in a year's time, the Elephant Room will be a distant memory for most and the question `T.D. who?' will be heard in church foyers up and down the land whenever the diet book is mentioned. Life will be going on for most of us as it was before. That is why it would be a shame if the really key issue in all of this is lost.

That issue is not ultimately the orthodoxy or heterodoxy of the participants, significant as that may be. It is rather the way parachurch organisations choose to place their imprimaturs on things.   All of us involved in parachurch groups need to reflect on this, though obviously the bigger the organisation, the more aggressively it markets itself as the next big thing, and the more like a denomination it looks, the more there is need for careful, critical self-examination.

In churches -- at least in the churches to which I have had connection -- a high premium has always been placed on transparency, procedure and wide accountability. Little is done behind closed doors. Sometimes it makes things seem tedious. This last Saturday I spent eight hours at a presbytery meeting; after a week at work and with two sermons to preach on Sunday, I would rather have been in and out in half an hour. Yet the time spent was important: everything was done transparently, decently and in order.   Any member of the church could have sat in on our discussions and seen how we handled the various matters before us.   That is critical as the means both by which we are able to maintain the trust of the congregant who has a concern and also by which we are held accountable to those who actually make up the church.

The real lesson of the Elephant Room is not actually doctrinal. Rather, it is a timely reminder that Christian leaders are responsible, under God, to Christian people; and the key question for parachurch organisations therefore is: who decides who runs the show; how do they make their decisions; what is your organisation's doctrinal position; and what are the processes by which the leaders of your organisation are held to that position. If the Christian public fund you, and you assume teaching authority outside of ecclesiastical structures, the least you should do is give cogent answers to these things. Process and transparency are basic to proper ecclesiastical accountability; I believe that all involved in parachurches owe it to the churches and people they influence and to which they assume the right to speak to make sure that public criteria of doctrine and process are clearly in place and transparently followed.   The question, Who ordained you a minister over me? is an acute one, and likely to become more so in an era of information technology and hard-sell parachurch marketing.
]]> http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/who-ordained-you-a-minister-ov.php http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/who-ordained-you-a-minister-ov.php Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:51:46 -0500 Williams on the Fathers and Atonement (Carl Trueman) here.]]> http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/williams-on-the-fathers-and-at.php http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/williams-on-the-fathers-and-at.php Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:20:56 -0500 Looking for material this Easter? (Paul Levy) ''Lifted - Experiencing the Resurrection Life''. There are 4 sections on Assurance, Transformation, Hope and Mission. Sam writes with freshness and a great turn of phrase. On Jesus authority he says, 'he preached without footnotes' (p26) and when speaking of the teaching of Hymeneus and Philetus, 'two names that wreak havoc, not just on the spellchecker but on the Christian faith as well.''(p82). I found myself making notes all over the book and plan to lift whole sections for sermons this Easter!

IVP published it in the UK but it's about to be made available in the US by P&R.
]]> http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/looking-for-material-this-east.php http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/looking-for-material-this-east.php Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:14:15 -0500 Beware of philosophers (Derek Thomas) here.]]> http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/beware-of-philosophers.php http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/beware-of-philosophers.php Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:52:16 -0500 Gnosticism, Nicea and Celebrity (Carl Trueman)
Methodologically, the telepathic ability to see into the minds of others and discern exactly what they are thinking is a great gift. I am quite envious; if I had it, I would not waste my time on webcasts; I'd be doing some telepathic insider trading and making a small fortune on the Dow. Unfortunately, I can only judge intentions by public actions which rarely if ever allow me to discern exactly why somebody does something. The ability to spot false consciousness is an even greater skill, though somewhat vulnerable to the Popperian critique of non-falsifiability.

Historically, one might add that this would seem to indicate that modalism is not the only early church heresy which is enjoying something of a comeback in evangelical circles. The methodological attributes outlined above were also hallmarks of Gnosticism whose basic strategy was `I have secret knowledge that you do not have but which allows me to understand the world - and even you - in ways that you cannot comprehend. So you need to shut up and listen to me.'

Still, let us go back to the fourth century and see how the `middle aged white guy' critique measures up. Well, at the Council of Nicea in 325, many of the participants were no doubt middle aged -- which Paul in the Pastorals would actually seem to think is quite a good thing in a church leader. But white?    I suspect they were ethnically more akin to modern day Turks or south eastern Europeans, not that racial categories really meant anything then. The key category in the fourth century was that of Roman citizenship, not skin colour.

More significantly, of course, had you been there yourself and looked around the council, you would have seen that many of the delegates had body parts missing - an arm here, a leg there, an occasional eye - because they were survivors of the terrible persecutions under Diocletian and Galerius. Indeed, many had probably lost close friends and family members too. Thus, the foundations for the creedal doctrine of the Trinity were laid by men who thought doctrine was something for which it was actually worth suffering and dying.

That someone is willing to die for a cause does not sanctify it; but when you add to this that Nicene orthodoxy has been universally agreed upon as important by millions of Christians of multiple races, nationalities and age profile, through sixteen centuries, surely that should give us pause for thought. The questions asked at Nicea were important and they were asked by serious men, men serious enough to risk death for their faith.   To dismiss all this with a wave of the hand or through simple lack of knowledge and competence, and to follow this up by playing the race card, is an interesting move.

But hey, if a bunch of middle-aged American pastors in the Elephant Room tell you Nicea and its delegates -- and all the Christians who have suffered and died to maintain its truth over the centuries -- are irrelevant, who am I to question them? To do so would surely be the height of arrogance. Ahem.

Which brings me back to the celebrity pastor thing.    When I raised the issue last year, I was widely derided as talking nonsense and many critics tried to dismiss the notion by conflating public figure with celebrity, pointing to the problems of defining the term, reducing it to trivia such as `Is signing somebody's book or being photographed with them at a conference really that wicked?' or the telepathic/Gnostic insight `The man's just envious that his church is not as big as theirs!'   Indeed, it was made very clear to me by a number of people that I was the problem, not the fetish pastors. Yet as I stressed again and again, my concern is not ultimately about being well-known or speaking at a conference or two; it is about the big personality pastor who turns into a fetish, and who gains great and widespread authority and influence by reason of that, without any proper accountability.   Remind anybody of anything that happened recently?

]]> http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/gnosticism-nicea-and-celebrity.php http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/gnosticism-nicea-and-celebrity.php Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:43:22 -0500 Rick Phillips on the PCA (Gabriel Fluhrer) here. ]]> http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/01/rick-phillips-on-the-pca.php http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/01/rick-phillips-on-the-pca.php PCA Rick Phillips Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:03:47 -0500 Chris Anderson on Recent Events (Carl Trueman) post from a Fundamentalist perspective, on recent events.

On another note, these recent events have really only brought to the surface tensions and problems which are bound to exist when one tries to make too hard and fast a separation between doctrinal confession and the practical in order to build some form of co-belligerent consensus. Confession and practice always stand in some relationship to each other. Given our fallen, messy world, it may rarely or never be a case of one simply and completely determining the other; but one cannot build the church simply on agreement on a few doctrinal points. Practice matters too.

]]> http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/01/chris-anderson-on-recent-event.php http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/01/chris-anderson-on-recent-event.php Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:13:15 -0500 Fast and Furious Fulmination (Scott Oliphint) Apologetics is a defense of the Christian faith; the word "apologetics" comes from a Greek word that means defense. In my last article, I mentioned that apologetics has been concerned, perhaps overly or exclusively so, to answer philosophical challenges with philosophical jargon. This emphasis has had two unwelcome consequences. It has led to a marginalizing of apologetics, such that its subject matter is reserved only for the specially-trained; apologetics is the domain of the egghead. It has also led to an over-intellectualizing such that the focus has been almost exclusively on the mind; it has little to do with matters of the heart, with the whole person. Its goal is simply to get us to believe propositions that we do not currently believe. Given these two consequences, it is not difficult to see why apologetics has had little relevance for the church. Like Mt. Ranier, it may be admired from afar, but is rarely taken on (and then only by the 'experts'), and is always cold, windy and barren at the top.

The challenges to the Christian faith, however, are much more diverse, more varied and often more subtle than those often lodged by philosophers. Current challenges to Christianity certainly include philosophical challenges, as well as things like the "new atheism," and those need to be addressed. But, perhaps more difficult, for example, because more subtle and less precise, are the challenges that come from (what a recent article called) the "apatheists," who seem currently to dominate the cultural climate. These are folks who claim they simply don't care about religion at all; their basic attitude to life is, "so what?" Their hero is Alfred E. Newman - "What? Me worry?" Why be concerned about such things as meaning, or the afterlife, or spirituality? Isn't life difficult enough without adding the difficulty of belief in something that is unseen and unprovable? Why in the world should I care about such things?

We would be kidding ourselves if we thought that attitudes like this (and this is just one example) do not challenge Christian belief -- perhaps even our own Christian belief. And wherever there is a challenge to Christianity, apologetics is meant to help address it. So, clearly, setting up base camp in the rarified air of philosophy will not do for apologetics; it must be able to address challenges from all comers and every quarter, and to respond in a way that both truthfully addresses the challenge and also offers the truth of the gospel. And this requires biblical revelation. So, why would anyone think that referencing the truth of biblical revelation in apologetics is out of bounds?

The primary reason, it seems, is that it is assumed that one can only debate or argue with someone on the basis of mutually accepted ideas. This makes some sense, of course. If I decide I want to argue that the moon is made of green cheese and my reason for believing that is that I saw it on the Oprah Winfrey Network, you would have good reason to doubt both the substance and source of my belief. You may cry foul because you refuse to accept as fact anything that is broadcast on OWN.

In discussions and debates about Christianity and its truth, however, the situation is in some significant ways quite unique. We will be discussing that uniqueness as we go along but at least one illustration of it may be helpful here. Whenever we determine to communicate the gospel to our unbelieving friends, the truth that we are communicating is decidedly not shared by those to whom we speak. Not only so, but the source of that truth (Scripture) is, by definition, rejected by them as well.

On a practical note, this doesn't mean that we strive to communicate that truth in such a way that it is as foreign as possible to our unbelieving friends. Nor does it mean that our goal is to be as offensive and confrontational as we can possibly be. The gospel carries its own offense; it is already a fragrance of death to those who are perishing (2 Cor. 2:15), no need to add our own three acres of onions to it. Part of gospel wisdom (Col. 4:5-6) is that we should desire, not simply to tell the truth, but to communicate that truth in a way that might resonate with the listener. We want them to see, not simply that the gospel is true, which it is, but that it is the only truth that will meet them where they are. So, we should try to be persuasive in our communication.

But the fact remains that our communication of the truth of the gospel recognizes that there is no admitted mutual common ground of authority, nor is the content we communicate necessarily shared by the ones to whom we speak. So on what basis do we presume to communicate this truth?

This is the all-important question, for evangelism as well as for apologetics (and for preaching as well). When I ask, "on what basis," I am not asking simply "by what authority." We communicate the gospel because God has commanded it. But when I ask "on what basis" I am asking if there is some common foundation on which we and our unbelieving friends stand in order, really and truly, to effect communication between us. If in our gospel communication we do not share the same authority, the same foundation and the same content, how do we "connect" with our interlocutor? The answer is as profound as it is simple. It is so profound, in fact, that, with respect to apologetics, it has often been almost completely overlooked and ignored. The answer is that we -- all men and every person, always and everywhere, no matter the place or position -- live, move and exist in the God of Scripture, and we know that we do. This is our foundation, it is the real authority behind our apologetics and evangelism.

When we communicate to someone that they have sinned against a holy God and thus owe him repentance, because what we say resonates with what they already know to be the case, the truth of the matter pierces their soul like a laser; it causes their "innards" to register 9 on the Richter scale. We may not be able to detect this response; it may remain on the inside. But like a deadly undercurrent, while the surface may look calm and peaceful, underneath there is fast and furious fulmination. God's truth resonates with every person because God is already, always and everywhere known, and so are his requirements (see Rom 1:18-20, 32; 2:14-15). So, the common ground between the Christian and non-Christian is not, foundationally, what we agree together to affirm, nor is it some assumed common source like the "deliverances of reason" or "laws of thinking" (though on the surface these may look the same). The common ground that we all have is that all that we have, are and know comes from the same Triune God, and we know that it does.

One of the primary things to keep in mind, therefore, in apologetics (as in evangelism) is that God has made himself known in such a way that we, all of us together, know we are his creatures, that we owe him worship, that we have offended him, that our rebellion against him is a capital offense, and that our behavior flies in the face of his holy character.

If this is true, would it change the way we think about a Christian defense? More importantly, would it change how we prepare ourselves to give an answer (cf.1 Peter 3:15)?

]]> http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/01/fast-and-furious-fulmination.php http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/01/fast-and-furious-fulmination.php apologetics Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:57:01 -0500