A Protestant Holiday

A few years ago I had the privilege of going to Israel and visiting some of the major sites in Jerusalem. We visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where were whisked past the probable location of our Lord's empty tomb, surrounded by the trappings of Romanism and the idolatry of secularism. We then hopped on the bus and went to the "garden tomb," the quiet and pleasant location of an ancient sepulchre frequented primarily by Protestants--Protestants who know that this is not the place where our Lord's body was laid, but like to imagine that it is. It was a good place to reflect on the goodness and special grace of God.

That's what I like about Thanksgiving. I know that Christmas and Easter are rightly regarded as the two major Christian holidays. Unfortunately, they've been so corrupted by idolatry and secularism that they scarcely feel like Christian holidays at all.

But Thanksgiving? Thanksgiving has been largely ignored by the secularists, and I'm glad for that. Of course, like the garden tomb, the biblical precedent for the Thanksgiving holiday is meager. It's precedent instead is a historical gathering of humble Protestant believers intent on worshiping God despite the horrific cost. A group who determined that a day ought be set aside to reflect quietly and graphically on the common grace of God. I trust that this will be your experience this year.


       Praise God from whom all blessings flow;
         Praise him all creatures here below.
       Praise him above ye heavenly host
         Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

 

A Few Thoughts About ETS

I just returned home from the ETS national conference, which is always an illuminating venue to attend. A few random thoughts that I jotted down about the conference are below:

1. Evangelicalism, despite strenuous objections to the contrary, is not much of a bounded set. But I'm not convinced it's much of a center set either. In fact, I'm not sure that set theory really works as a description for evangelicalism. At best "bounded set" and "center set" are hopeful prescriptions for the movement, and until there is consensus, the labels don't really work as descriptors. And I'm not sure that I even care.
2. That being said, I'm still convinced that amorphous, decentralized, and unbounded sets like the evangelicalism of the ETS can be quite valuable. The ETS offers a "village green" where I can talk with instead of at those with whom I disagree; a place for fair hearings and dialogue that are free from shrillness and incivility; a place where humility is fostered by the realization that the pond is so vast that all the fish are small; a place where my ideas can be sharpened, refined, and sometimes discarded by subjecting them to the reasoned objections of constructive critics who are quite often much smarter than I. 
3. I'm even more convinced that the bounded set of the church is of greater value than evangelicalism for the believer. One very gratifying conclusion that emerged unanimously from the panel discussion on the Spectrum of Evangelicalism was that while idea of evangelicalism might be a good one, the institution of the church is a great one, and its purity is deserving of the most rigorous defense. If we ever find that evangelical get-togethers (whether the scholarly or popular variety) are of greater worth than the church, we are much to be pitied.
4. There is a general (though not universal) disconnect between the exegesis papers and philosophy papers presented at ETS, and the systematic theology papers that have the capacity to bridge that divide are scarce. As a result, there are virtually no presuppositions that are sacred in the ETS. This is perhaps the greatest vexation I have when I come home from ETS each year. 
5. Inerrancy is dying the slow death of a thousand clarifications.
6. I know very little, but ETS has a marvelous capacity for encouraging me to know more.

MAS

Is Phil Also Among the Fundamentalists?

About ten years ago I had a brief conversation with Mark Dever down at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He was an engaging person and genuinely curious about what I meant when I told him I was a fundamentalist. He also asked me a pointed question: "What would I have to do," he asked, "for you and your circle of churches to welcome me into ecclesiastical fellowship?" It was a question that caught me a bit off guard, and I realized something important that day, viz., that I had no real expectation of ever remediating my non-fundamentalist acquaintances. I didn't think it could happen. Maybe, to my shame, I didn't even want it to happen.

But I had to say something to his inquiry, so I fumbled out something like, "We'd want you to practice secondary separation and repudiate any ecclesiastical alliances you might have with unbelievers."

Pastor Dever proceeded to suggest rather earnestly that he was attempting to do this very thing. And I was pleasantly surprised with the depth of his commitment to at least a form of secondary separation (though he never used that label). And as we shook hands and parted, I couldn't help but think that this man was, as it were, not very far from the kingdom (my fundamentalist kingdom, that is).

I've been reminded of this conversation twice in the past month. Once in a post by Thabiti Anyabwile and late last week in a post by Phil Johnson. In both cases, their blog posts clearly articulate a form of secondary separation. And I find in these posts a welcome and refreshing response to a serious problem.

And so instead of making my usual pontification, today, I'd like to ask a question of my fundamentalist readers: What would these Christian leaders need to do in order for you and your circle of churches to welcome them into ecclesiastical fellowship?"

MAS

How the World Sees Sin

With discoveries and allegations of immorality swirling about in the news today (e.g., Herman Cain, Jerry Sandusky, etc.), I've been contemplating how the world views morality. All unbelievers operate according to one moral code or another, because the very idea is inescapably written on their hearts. But as Romans 1 tells us, worldlings very early set about retooling their pre-programmed moral code, exchanging truth for lies, deliberately searing their consciences, and appealing to the elemental principles of this world rather than to Christ. But while every unbeliever establishes his own autonomous moral code, society cannot function apart from some level of consensus about sin, and so collective man has always seen the need to legislate morality. Society sometimes borrows elements from the Christian ethic, and rightly so; however, we need to remain acutely aware that a stark gap always exists between the view of sin held by believers and unbelievers respectively. Sins for the believer are carefully enumerated in Scripture, and are described in its pages as primarily against God (so Ps 51:4), a fact that tends to both intensify and in some degree to "level out" the heinousness of all sin. But that is not true among unbelievers. The possibility of offending God is largely removed from consideration here, and the offense of human victims is rendered primary. The American democratic idea of sin seems to follow roughly the following scheme:

• Sins that have no human victims are not sins at all. Thus describing as sin such vices as idolatry, pornography, taking God's name in vain, neglecting the church, and envy, leads to responses of perplexity, bemusement, ridicule, and anger from the world.
• Sins that have only self-conscious and self-determining (i.e., consenting) human participants are not really sins either. Sexual promiscuity, cohabitation, divorce, and the like are frowned at, perhaps, but not regarded as sin. These activities are consensual because no one got hurt beyond injury that is self-inflicted.
• Sins that have human victims that are neither self-conscious nor self-determining are not really sins either. Abortion fits here. If the victim didn't know about it, it didn't really happen.
• Sins that are have self-conscious, but to some degree non-self-determining (i.e., non-consenting) victims are true sins. Crimes against the weak, the minority, the variously "challenged," the disadvantaged, and especially the young are especially excoriated in American democratic society. 

This scheme is not shared universally. For instance, I once asked a Chinese woman what she thought the arbiter of morality was, and she replied, after thinking a bit, "The Government" (I didn't see that one coming)! In other cultures, sins against "societal order" are viewed with with much greater severity than sins against disadvantaged individuals. 

So what are we as Christians to do? Well, a few random thoughts:

• First, we must be careful to guard ourselves and those in our spiritual care against adopting a "worldly" or atheistic view of sin. The path to apostasy is paved with sins rendered benign by redefinition. God is the arbiter of sin, not societal consensus, human law, or me. And it against God (not other humans) that our sins are primarily directed.
• Second, we must be proactive in our apologetic in defining sin as God does. An unbeliever with a low view of sin will never have high view for the Gospel. But don't despair, because Paul tells us that while the world engages in wanton sin and gives hearty approval to sinners, they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death (Rom 1:31). The unbeliever's conscience is on your side as you detail his need for redemption.
• Third, as we've learned from such diverse sources as JoePa and Chuck Phelps, the world holds leaders to an extremely high standard, in counseling and discipline situations, when the sin in view is "sexual immorality of a kind that does not occur even among pagans" (1 Cor 5:1ff). In such cases the name of Christ and the integrity of his church require comprehensive action that exceeds the legal minimum.
• Fourth, we must be mindful that even though sin is primarily against God, Christ expressed peculiar sympathy for people who have been sinned against--and we should too.
• And finally, we must be ever mindful that Christ is able to save the worst of sinners, among whom, incidentally, we all were once numbered.

MAS


Update: For excellent expanded treatments of the third point above see this article by Al Mohler and also this one by Thom Rainer. 

Confessionalism and the Spectrum of Evangelicalism

Well, I've finished the book, and like many others I have concluded that there are two basic views represented here: inerrancy-emphatic evangelicalism and inerrancy-ambivalent evangelicalism. The funny thing, though, is that I'm not sure I find myself represented--not because I have any reservations about the inerrancy-emphatic part, but because I've become a bit disillusioned about self-identifying as an evangelical.

For me, the most reflection-inducing observation in this whole book comes in John Stackhouse's reply to Mohler's essay, "Confessional Evangelicalism" (pp. 104ff). Stackhouse sagely observes that in the history of evangelicalism, the movement has never been confessional, and that, in fact, Mohler proves this point nicely by failing to cite any evangelical confessions in the whole of his essay.

It is of course true that evangelicals have advanced a variety of doctrinal subscription points throughout the history of the movement (the fundamentals, the ETS statement on inerrancy, the content of the Gospel, the spread of the Gospel, etc.), but there has been no trans-generational evangelical agreement about what those points should be, and there has also been a persistent undercurrent of evangelicals who don't like the idea of subscription at all. It's hard to see confessionalism in all of this. This is not to say that one cannot be a confessionalist who is irenic toward evangelicals or an evangelical who is irenic toward confessionalists. But the idea of confessional evangelicalism, Stackhouse observes, has no historical precedent and no true representatives. As such, he concludes that "confessional evangelicalism" is an oxymoronic empty set.

If Stackhouse is right (and at least on this occasion, I think he is), then it seems we have in "confessional evangelicalism" a pair of polar interests tugging the subject simultaneously: the ecclesiastical stability of confessional/denominational identity and the para-ecclesiastical/ecumenical appeal of evangelical/transdenominational unity. And in the end, one or the other will hold sway.

The one major representative approach of orthodox Christians that appears to have been excluded in this book, then, is unqualified confessionalism. The book includes three separate adjectival evangelicalisms (confessional, generic, and post conservative) and also fundamentalism (interestingly, Bauder's position is labeled "fundamentalism" rather than "fundamentalist evangelicalism," which I think is a good move). Left out in the cold, though, is the confessionalist remnant that doesn't self-identify (as Mohler does) with the evangelical movement. And that was the essay I most wanted to read.

That is why I was quite excited to read in my newly arrived program for the 63rd annual meeting of the ETS that Carl Trueman, an unqualified confessionalist, will be appearing with Kevin Bauder and Al Mohler (who, interestingly, now represents conservative rather than confessional evangelicalism) for a series of presentations and a panel discussion. The exchange will take place on Thursday, November 17th from 3:00-6:10 PM. Perhaps I can get my itch scratched more fully then. Kudos to Andy Naselli for arranging this postscript.

MAS