Systematic Theology Matters

Thought Question for the Day

2012-01-24T13:10:00.005-05:00

I’m at home sick today and spending more time than I ought readingblogs.

Anyway, Darryl Hart had a very penetrating question on his blog today: “Isneo-Calvinism proximately responsible for the triumph of bad taste and poormusic in Reformed churches?”

…or, for that matter, in many evangelical churches?

Read the whole thing here.

Follow-Up on Evangelical Secondary Separation

2012-01-24T12:36:00.001-05:00

In November last year I asked you, the readers, a couple of questions about conservative evangelicalism and what any given conservative evangelical would have to change before ecclesiastical fellowship could ensue.

The response was not overwhelming, but the persistent answer was that secondary separation was the critical issue. Specifically, he needed to either purge or withdraw from alliances that include believers who grant Christian recognition to people who are demonstrably not Christians. The particular concern in view was James MacDonald, a founding member of the Gospel Coalition, who insisted on calling a oneness Pentecostal by the label brother. Today the news came out that James MacDonald has withdrawn from the Gospel Coalition.

Nowhere is it communicated by this statement or by those who accepted the resignation that MacDonald was "forced out," nor is there any statement of censure. If these occurred, they were private in nature, and as such can at best be inferred. This will no doubt be a stumbling block to some. But let me ask the questions anyway: (1) Is this secondary separation? And, as a follow-up, (2) what more would you, the reader, require in order to pave the way for fellowship?

Christianity and Rawlsianism

2012-01-20T11:51:00.002-05:00

As a Baptist and proponent of the two-kingom model of civil engagement I believe strongly in the separation of Church and State. But I don't believe in the separation of religion and state. In fact, I don't believe in the separation of religion from anything. While there is undoubtedly a civic sphere answerable immediately to Caesar and an ecclesiastical sphere answerable immediately to Christ, there truly is “not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry out: ‘Mine!’” (Kuyper). Everything that a person does in life is a testimony to whether or not he believes this fact, i.e., whether or not he fully embraces Christian religion. Political theory cannot be excepted from this rule.

While evangelicals have historically tended to vote as something of a conservative block, the idea of an evangelical "right" has been slowly eroding. Part of this is surely due to the fact that economic and foreign policies rather than social policies are "trending" right now. But even when one looks strictly at social concerns, the consistently evangelical right is disappearing. Two key issues seem to be feeding this trend: (1) abortion fatigue and (2) a considerable uptick in concern about social justice. About the former I can say nothing except that we simply cannot afford to become fatigued into ambivalence about the consent to and even advocacy of infanticide. I realize that in this election cycle "it's the economy, stupid." But it's hard to imagine how any issue can possibly ever eclipse mass murder of the helpless such that it becomes an ancillary issue.

But this post isn't about abortion. This post is about the second factor: social justice. The Bible is, of course, replete with divine expectations of justice, and at first blush, the political left seems far more attuned to this concern than is the political right. In fact, the genius of American political liberalism, expressed most neatly (perhaps) in John Rawls's Theory of Justice, is that the purpose of human government is to enforce "justice as fairness" in every sphere of life. To this end, society must be structured to attend to the most disadvantaged in society, irrespective (for Rawls at least) of the circumstances of their disadvantage. No greater good exists in society than equity or fairness, and the best government is the one that most successfully facilitates such fairness. In this model, the highest form of societal evil is for the socially advantaged to (1) refuse to share their wealth with the disadvantaged or to (2) discriminate in the sharing of their wealth. This is the prevailing political theory undergirding, for instance, the "Occupy" Movement.

Surely, no one wants to be perceived as an opponent of social justice. But here's the thing. Not everyone who champions social justice, and Rawls most especially, is championing the kind of social justice promoted in the Christian Scriptures. Note the following:

(1) Rawlsianism misdefines justice. The biblical concept of justice is not fairness/equity, but the establishment of moral rectitude in keeping with God's holy and revealed standard--a standard that almost immediately informs us that social welfare is not a matter of moral right, but of common grace. It is never truly deserved and is at times even inappropriate (after all, if an [able-bodied] man will not work, he should not eat--2 Thess 3:10), though select circumstances render it both appropriate and good.

(2) Rawlsianism offers an inadequate standard for justice. Rawls claims that the principles of justice are chosen from behind a "veil of ignorance," and represent the consensus of the "reasonable" from a "fair position." Of peculiar interest here is Rawls's insistence that private religion is a primary obstacle to social justice. For Rawls, the best politician is the one who can most completely excise private religion from his political theory. While Rawls is not opposed to "reasonable" religion (i.e., religion that can be normed by independent, socio-cultural standards), he sees "unreasonable" religion (which I most ardently and unapologetically practice) as one of the greatest enemies of justice. This is a serious problem for any true believer.

(3) In keeping with the previous point, Rawlsianism tends to deflect attention away from other biblically prescribed social structures such as the family and the church, vesting government with the social responsibilities that previously belonged to these other structures. As such, Rawlsianism actually tends to undermine the explicitly stated NT purposes for government, viz., to establish an environment in which "we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness" (1 Tim 2:2) and to, according to divine standards of righteousness, "punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right" (1 Pet 2:14).

(4) Rawlsianism confuses ontological equality with economic equity. While all mankind are created equally in God's image and have intrinsically identical worth (ontological equality), this does not mean that all share identity of station in life (economic equity). As nothing less than the Trinitarian arrangement informs us, there is no injustice in economic inequality. In fact, it is a necessary part of every orderly society.

(5) Finally, Rawlsianism operates on the presupposition of the goodness of man. The very idea that man can be expected to be rightly "reasonable" apart from dependence (witting or unwitting) upon the Christian worldview is absurd. Depraved man's tendency is always to exchange the truth of God for a lie.

I hasten to add here that this is not an argument for absolutely free capitalism. Untethered capitalism fares no better than Rawlsianism in the matter of depravity, creating a certain vulnerability to private oppression just as surely as Rawlsianism creates a certain vulnerability to public oppression. We cannot afford to be blind to this fact. More troubling still is libertarianism, which foolishly ignores human fallenness and pretends that government is therefore unnecessary. As Paul clearly opines, we cannot hope for moral rectitude to prevail in society without secular governors functioning (unwittingly at times) as "ministers of God for good" (Rom 13:4). Ironically, however, the presence of government, itself a manifestation of common grace, can effectively stifle other operations of common grace if it exceeds its biblical purposes.

This is by no means an argument for any particular candidate in either primary or general election. I can honestly say that I am still somewhat undecided at this point. What I am saying is that for the believer, politics cannot possibly be thought of as an activity independent of one's Christian worldview. Voting is no less a religious discipline than is preaching. And it is high time we realize it.

Back from Overseas

2012-01-15T09:02:00.000-05:00

Just got back yesterday from two weeks overseas. Thanks for all who prayed. Sorry about the silence. Happily I missed the Tebow 316-yard performance against my Steelers (which some likened to John 3:16). Instead I saw his 136-yard performance against New England, which undoubtedly should be connected with Matthew 13:6: "But when the sun rose they were scorched, and since they had no root they withered away." Which tells you what I really think about the hermeneutics of Tebowmania.

For what I think about the apologetics of Tebowmania, see this.

Sorry, that's all I have today. Just went 36 hours without sleep!

"He Had to Be Made Like His Brothers in Every Way."

2011-12-28T09:09:00.002-05:00

Also posted at our new Detroit Baptist Seminary blog, Theologically Driven

My pre-Christmas series on the virgin birth focused on preserving (1) the preincarnate divine personhood of Christ and (2) his impeccability. But the virgin birth also guaranteed that Jesus would be fully man as well. Christ was tempted at every point like as we are, with only one exception—unlike us he had no sin nature (Heb 4:15): Christ as God did not and could not have sinned. But apart from this exception, Jesus was "made like his brothers in every way"; indeed, the author of Hebrews can countenance nothing less (2:17).

Surely, we exclaim, there must be some additional exception to this statement! But as we look at the proposed exceptions, none seems to meet the test of Scripture:

Some suggest that Christ never got sick. But the author of Hebrews says that Christ was acquainted with our weaknesses (Heb 4:15). His earthly body was not glorified until after the Resurrection, and his vital connection with Mary would suggest that his body broke down just as ours from the effects of hunger, thirst, disease, and injury. There is no reason to think that he had any sort of “super-immunity” to shield him from these things. And when his body was subjected to the torture of the Passion, his horribly battered body ultimately stopped working: he died. We must insist, of course, that he had no personal sin or imputed guilt, but this does not mean that he escaped the inherited effects of sin on the human race in general.

Some suggest that Christ never suffered the effects of clumsiness and was always perfectly efficient in all that he did. But this does not follow either. Like the rest of us he tripped and stumbled as he learned to walk. In the carpenter’s shop, he did not at first hit all his nails squarely, and perhaps even struck his thumb or forefinger on occasion. That’s an ordinary part of learning, and there is no reason to think that he escaped this process of maturation (Luke 2:52). Surely he developed a healthy work ethic, but there is no reason to believe that he was anything more than an ordinary, hard-working carpenter’s apprentice (Isa 53:3–4).

Others have suggested that his body and blood were constitutively different from ours and even “divine” in nature—that there was something in their physical properties that made them intrinsically more capable of atoning for sin. But Hebrews 2:17 tells us that the palpable reason why Christ was able to make atonement for sin is his absolute identification with his brothers. His blood atoned not because of its constitutive superiority, but because of the sinlessness of the person who spilled it. In fact, if his body and blood are constitutively different from ours, his death does not help us at all. Our very redemption is jeopardized if we confound the divine and human natures of Christ.

One might look at the points above with consternation and conclude that I am denigrating the greatness of our Lord Christ by humanizing him overly much. On the contrary, Paul teaches us that the degree of Christ’s exaltation is coordinate with and dependent on the degree of his humiliation:

[Christ Jesus],being in very nature God,

did notconsider equality with God something to be used to his own
advantage;

rather, he madehimself nothing

by takingthe very nature of a servant,

being madein human likeness.

And being foundin appearance as a man,

he humbledhimself

bybecoming obedient to death—

even deathon a cross!

Therefore Godexalted him to the highest place

and gavehim the name that is above every name,

that at the nameof Jesus every knee should bow,

in heavenand on earth and under the earth,

and every tongueacknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to theglory of God the Father (Phil 2:6–11).

The Virgin Birth and the Christian Faith--Part 3

2011-12-22T16:33:00.000-05:00

I wasn't planning to do a "part 3" on thevirgin birth, but a recent kerfuffle in the blogosphere has raised aninteresting concern that my previous posts have ignored. While I've been intent on addressing the secular/modernist concern that saystoo little about the virgin birth, I've neglected another class of religiousthinkers, viz., those who say too much about the virgin birth--and sometimes withserious implications. Note the following:

• As the link above reports, somesuggest that any genetic connection of Christ with human parentswould destroy his sinlessness, and thus propose that God inserted a "fullyformed zygote cell" into Mary such that Christ "didn't inheritanything from either Mary or Joseph." Mary as such becomes nothing morethan a surrogate mother of an alien humanoid that has no real solidarity withthe human race. Were this the case, Christ's sinlessness would surely bepreserved, but a crucial purpose of the incarnation would be jeopardized, viz., thesolidarity of Christ with humanity necessary to redeeming it (so Rom 5, Heb 2,etc.). This is a troubling concern.

• Others,noting this tension, suggest that when Christ's mother Mary became "full of grace," she was miraculously rendered sin-free sometime prior to Christ'sconception, thereby insulating her child from sin. This Roman Catholic solution, however, leads to othertensions, most notably that Mary becomes a co-redemptrix and co-mediatrix with Christin direct violation of the NT Scriptures (1 Tim 2:5-6, etc.). See a recent post by Bill Combs that addresses this concern.

• Otherserroneously suggest that Christ is saved from sinlessness because he was bornof a woman only, and not of a man. The suggestion here seems to be that while women may be infected by sin, only men are "carriers" of the "sin gene." This is a popular (and clever) theory, but it rests on little by way of biblical support.

• Others, more reasonably, find it necessary for the Holy Spirit to miraculously block the transmission of sin from Mary by a miracle additional to that of the virgin birth. While this proposal is plausible, I am not convinced it is necessary. Since sin and guilt are predicated of persons and notof natures, it seems reasonable to suggest that Christ's preincarnate person (room for which is provided by the virgin birth) would alone be adequate to insulate him from original sin. Surely the Spirit did something to preserve the holiness of the child (Luke 1:35); I'm convinced that His facilitation of the virgin birth alone was adequate to that end.

To conclude, we must be cautious in our holy zeal to preserve the reality of Christ'svirgin birth not to damage the delicate hypostatic union by saying more aboutthe virgin birth than Scripture allows.

The Virgin Birth and the Christian Faith--Part 2

2011-12-21T22:37:00.001-05:00

We've already observed that a miracle of the magnitude of a virgin birth "fits" within the Christian theistic framework and sets it stunningly apart from the naturalistic worldview embraced by Western secularism. And for this reason alone we should confidently welcome it. Belief in such a miracle does not render us anti-intellectuals (as the unimaginatively narrow-minded scoffer claims); rather, it renders us consistent supernaturalists. Of all the people in the world, Christians should be most comfortable with a miracle-working God. A virgin birth should not embarrass us, but embolden us. This is the kind of exploit that our God alone can do. "What?" we should rather say to the scoffer in a spirit reminiscent of Jeremiah 10: "Your god can't do this? How humiliating."

We must further accept the virgin birth because it is described as historical fact in clear, unambiguous terms in our New Testament. Mary became pregnant "before Mary and Joseph came together" (Matt 1:18), by a miracle of the Holy Spirit (v. 20), while she was yet a virgin (v. 23). There can be no doubt here--unlike the ever-so-slightly-less-than-lexically-certain term used in Isaiah 7:14, the Greek term leaves no doubt about Mary's status--she had never had sexual relations. And so it can be said without confusion that this miraculously conceived child was not the biological son of Joseph, but the Son of God (Luke 1:35).

As others have very carefully argued this season, to deny this one piece of the Christ-narrative is to compromise all the other pieces and throw the whole of the Christian faith into doubt. Truly, one cannot deny the inerrancy of any part of the Gospel account without jeopardizing the whole. The virgin birth, as such, stands as a prominent test-case for the doctrines of divine supernaturalism and biblical inerrancy. No one can deny the virgin birth and remain truly Christian.

Some stop at this point with an "Amen" and an exclamation point. And indeed, this truth is an important one. But the importance of the virgin birth, it would seem, has greater significance even than the foregoing. Why? Because the miracle of the virgin birth preserves (1) the preincarnate, divine personhood of Christ, and (2) frees him from the ravages of a sin nature.

When Jesus Christ was conceived in Mary, his personhood did not spring into existence at this point in history. Rather the pre-existent second person of the Trinity was "sent" by the Father to "take on flesh." Had Mary and Joseph "come together" to produce a new child, that new zygote would have been, by natural procreation, a new person. Were this the case, then the pre-existent person of Christ would have been imposed upon and forced to co-exist with this new human personality as some sort of schizophrenic monstrosity, thus violating the cardinal Christological rule of "neither dividing the person nor confounding the natures" of Christ. Worse yet, any person that Mary and Joseph could have produced (and we know that later they did), would naturally have been sinful (a hereditary trait predicated of all persons conceived by natural procreation). And so Christ would have been not only a schizophrenic monstrosity, but also an evil schizophrenic monstrosity.

Without the virgin birth, then, the person of Christ would have been so confounded and corrupted that his death would have had no value in the least for the world. To appropriately turn a phrase used by the Apostle Paul of the resurrection, if Christ is not virgin-born, "our preaching is worthless,... your faith is futile; you are still in your sins" (1 Cor 15:12-19).

And so again, let us embrace the virgin birth. Not only because it reveals the supernatural power of our God, but because it magnifies the intricate wisdom by which he rendered redemption possible. It is a good thing not only to celebrate in this festive season, but also to ponder all that the virgin birth means to the Christian faith.

The Virgin Birth and the Christian Faith--Part 1

2011-12-14T15:46:00.001-05:00

The literature of the ancients is dotted with virgin birth narratives. The Indian god Vishnu inserted himself into the womb of Devaki to be born as Vasudeva. The god Bodhisat "ceased to belong to the hosts of heaven of delight [and] descended into his mother’s womb mindful and self-possessed" to be born as the Vapassi Buddha, the first of six incarnations preceding Gautama. And Yahweh sent his "holy spirit" to impregnate a virgin with his son, who consequently assumed a new identity as Im-manu-el or "God with us."

I crafted this last sentence deliberately to make a point, viz., that this is exactly how the Western world hears us when we talk about the virgin birth of Christ. They are incredulous that someone in the modern era could possibly still believe such biological absurdities (much less run for president!). Clearly there must be another, more credible explanation:

A fabricated miracle story designed to give credibility to an otherwise lame religion.
A puerile cover-up for a sexual scandal.
A god-in-the-gaps explanation for a culture with primitive medical technologies.
A Christian myth not intended to be believed as Historie but as Geschichte.

In short, they'll accept just about any explanation other than a divine disruption of the uniformitarian laws of science. But no other explanation will do. There is no possibility of us answering the fool according to his folly on this issue, or we will become horrifyingly like him (Prov 26:4). To be a Christian one must sever his ties with the secular worldview and embrace the Christian worldview.

And yet we may, in fact, answer the fool's folly. For unlike his worldview, which offers a patchwork of disparate explanations for the universe under the loose presuppositional umbrella of not-God (or some feeble divine stand-in), the Christian worldview alone makes sense of the whole universe in all of its parts. Properly presented, it puts the secularist to shame and makes him keenly aware that he is not so wise as he smugly pretends (1 Pet 3:15-16; Prov 26:5) We need not apologize for virgin birth, suppress it, or explain it away. Rather, we must embrace it. Announce it. Use it to facilitate that collision of worldviews without which no person will ever breach the doors of heaven.

NEXT POST: Why a virgin birth and not some other miracle?

Seminary: Learning to Fly in "Alternate Law"

2011-12-13T10:01:00.000-05:00

This morning I followed a link over at Tim Challies's blog and read a brief account of the last moments of Air France 447's ill-fated flight over the Atlantic on June 1, 2009. More than two years after the fatal flight, the flight data recorders have finally been recovered and analyzed, granting closure to family and friends that were heretofore ignorant of the details of the crash. The account offers not only the final words of the pilots, but also a running commentary in lay terms about what actually went wrong.

Without giving away the whole story (which is riveting), the plane crashed because of a complex of pilot errors including, but not limited to, a complete failure by the pilots to fly the plane successfully outside of "normal law." When in "normal law," a plane's computer restricts the ability of a pilot to enact procedures that might crash the plane. In emergency situations, however, a plane may revert to "alternate law," in which restrictions are removed to allow the pilot to use the full range of his training to control the plane. When the doomed plane went into "alternate law," however, the reader discovers that...

It's quite possible that [the co-pilot] had never flown an airplane in alternate law, or understood its lack of restrictions. According to [a U.S. Airways flight instructor], not one of US Airway's 17 Airbus 330s has ever been in alternate law. Therefore, [the co-pilot] may have assumed that the stall warning was spurious because he didn't realize that the plane could remove its own restrictions against stalling and, indeed, had done so.

What an arresting comment. The 32-year-old co-pilot had likely never flown outside of "normal law." He thought that the computer would not let him crash. He relied on the computer so absolutely that when it was removed, he was incapable of making basic observations and analysis, or of flying the airplane.

This kind of scenario happens all the time. Sometimes it is comical (a meteorologist announces sunny skies from his vantage in a windowless room, unaware of the rain falling outside); sometimes dangerous (a visiting trucker in the steep hills of Pennsylvania has no clue how to do an emergency gear down, maneuver on icy roads, or drive without cruise control).

It happens in seminary too. Sometimes students arrive with neither the ability to construct a footnote nor any intention of learning (we have Zotero after all). Others, similarly, have neither the ability to parse a verb nor any intention of learning (because we now have BibleWorks, Logos, and Accordance). Most have stunted ability to read a book and don't even know it (hasn't Control/Command F always been available to extract the key supporting sentence from that annoying forest of context?). Basic familiarity with and memorization of Scripture suffers (give me ten seconds and I can locate that key verse on my iPod thanks to OliveTree).

Much of the time, ministers can get away with this approach. Pastoral ministry usually operates, after all, in "normal law." But not always. And it is in those emergency situations that nothing can substitute for the intangible skill, forged by countless hours in the classroom and library, to operate in "alternate law." In a nutshell, that's why seminary exists.

The Inconsistency of Gender-Inclusiveness

2011-12-01T15:20:00.001-05:00

I like the translation philosophy of the NIV. I've gone on record defending it especially against those that suggest the NIV translation philosophy violates inerrancy or inserts undue "interpretation" into the translation process. But while I've not been put off terribly by the gender-inclusivism in the 2011 translation, I'm not particularly enthusiastic about it, either. Probably the biggest reason for this is the constant bruising of my grammatical sensibilities every time the new translation fails to maintain noun/pronoun agreement and instead uses the so-called (and oxymoronic) "singular they." Maybe I'm alone in this, but I find the practice incredibly distracting.

A few weeks ago I complained about this to a good friend, griping about the perceived need to bow the knee to political correctness and the radical feminist agenda. He responded quite aggressively, asserting that it was not political correctness that fueled the NIV translation policy of gender inclusiveness, but rather contemporary usage. Chastened, I resolved to start suppressing my internal grammar alarm and get used to this new era of noun/pronoun disagreement.

But after an experiment with the NIV 2011 the other day, I've decided that my initial reaction may not have been so wrong after all. After stumbling over two occasions in which the NIV translators inexplicably failed to be gender inclusive, I decided to read the entire book of Proverbs looking for this phenomenon. Excepting references to "sons" and "kings," which are consistently regarded as male in the NIV 2011, I discovered the following 13 passages where the translators of the NIV 2011 retained the generic he/him/his:

• 6:11 (correction, v. 13)—the troublemaker/villain

• 6:14–15—the one who plots evil.

• 6:30–31—the thief

• 18:9—a slack worker

• 19:24—the sluggard

• 21:24—the proud/arrogant person or mocker

• 21:25-26—the sluggard

• 22:16—the one who oppresses the poor

• 23:6–7—a begrudging host

• 25:13—a trustworthy messenger

• 25:21–22—your enemy

• 26:4–5—the fool

• 26:14–16—the sluggard

Does anyone but me notice a pattern here? If not, let me state the obvious: the NIV 2011 translators felt that it was fine to retain the generic he/him/his on twelve occasions where the referent was negative. But on only one occasion (25:13) did they retain the generic he/him/his on an occasion where the referent was positive. IOW, the generic he/him/his is fine when we're referencing the bad guys, but when it's the good guys, we need to make sure it's the good guys and gals. Now my sample set is not exhaustive by any means, so this could end up being an anomaly, but my preliminary conclusion is that the NIV translators do not seem to be motivated exclusively by the pull of contemporary English usage. Instead, what they really seem to be worried about is offending radical feminists.

I still plan to use my NIV. But I'm not sure that the translation committee is being completely objective on this issue. If they were it would seem that they would be consistent in their gender inclusiveness.

A Protestant Holiday

2011-11-24T06:00:00.000-05:00

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

2011-11-22T08:56:00.001-05:00

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.
Inerrancy is dying the slow death of a thousand clarifications.
I know very little, but ETS has a marvelous capacity for encouraging me to know more.

MAS

Is Phil Also Among the Fundamentalists?

2011-11-11T14:18:00.001-05:00

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

2011-11-09T14:14:00.000-05:00

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

2011-11-03T12:05:00.001-04:00

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

Parataxis and Hypotaxis: What They Mean and Why It Matters (Hint: It's About the NIV)

2011-10-31T22:20:00.001-04:00

Languages are distinguished by many features. One of these distinguishing features is the way that the syntax is typically arranged in a sentence. A paratactic language arranges independent clauses side by side and connects them with coordinating conjunctions (para--beside; taxon--order). Note the following representative sentence:

I am playing a game and I am kicking a ball at a net and I am receiving a point for every goal and I am not very good and I am not scoring many points and I am losing.

This sentence does not reflect natural, contemporary English. We might forgive a 2nd-grade classroom essay that sounds like this, but were we to submit it for publication, it would not be accepted. It's too choppy.

A hypotactic language arranges sentences by subordinating several dependent clauses under a single independent clause, connecting them with a variety of devices such as adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions of both the coordinating and subordinating variety, participles, infinitives, etc. (hypo--under; taxon--order). Note the following representative sentence:

I am playing a game in which I receive a point whenever I kick a ball into a net; however, because I am not very good I am not scoring many points, whereupon I am losing.

This sentence reflects better English than the first one, but it still isn't very good. (And please don't ask me to diagram it!) People just don't write like this today. True, this sentence can be understood as it stands. But it's not natural, contemporary English.

Perhaps a happy mediating rendition would look something like this:

I am playing a game in which I receive points for kicking a ball into a net. Because I am not very good I am not scoring many points. I am losing.

Of what value is this discussion? Precisely this: The Hebrew language is a highly paratactic language, Greek is extremely hypotactic, and American English is somewhere in between. And this means that not only the words, but also the sentence structure must be translated if one wants to create a natural English translation.

In order to render Hebrew into natural English, the relentless stream of ands (waw), must be interpreted and shaped into meaningfully complex sentences for maximum understanding. Sometimes the and becomes then or so or but or because. At other times the and becomes a semicolon or a period. Still other times the and is simply omitted as an unnecessary deterrent to understanding. The result is that the single Hebrew sentence that is Genesis 1, for instance, becomes a series of normal, readable paragraphs made from variegated English sentences.

In order to render Greek into natural English, the massive web of clauses, phrases, transitional and connecting devices must be untangled and simplified in order to qualify as excellent English. The result is that the single Greek sentence that is Ephesians 1:3-14, for instance, becomes a normal, readable paragraph of variegated English sentences.

In doing this, English translations subject themselves to two criticisms, both of which are valid, but both of which are also overstated:

First, they run the risk of excessive interpretation. In my first example I omitted all five ands, replacing them with other forms. There is a possibility that in so doing I failed to communicate the original intent. Perhaps rather than "Because I am not very good I am not scoring many points" the author intended to communicate "I am not very good because I am not scoring many points." These two sentences are not identical in intent, and in choosing the former, I am offering the likeliest meaning of this sentence. I might be wrong. But the reward of natural English is worth the risk.

Second, they run the risk of suppressing connectors that are pedantically explicit in the original languages. But explicit pedantry is not good English, and it is not necessary to understanding. For instance, in the complex sentence "I am not very good; therefore, I lost" the therefore may be removed without any loss of meaning. The sentence "I am not very good: I lost" communicates precisely the same intention as the earlier sentence--the only difference is that the the idea of result is implicit rather than explicit. Is there ever a risk of eliminating a connector and losing authorial intent? Absolutely. But the reward of natural English is worth the risk.

Does the NIV sometimes engage in "interpretation" or in "eliminating words"? Sure. Every translation does. The NIV just does these things with more self-conscious deliberation than other translations. But this does not make it a bad translation.

Pausing to Reflect

2011-10-27T19:14:00.000-04:00

I've never embedded a video before, but I thought this one would give a fitting background for reading this post. It's a beautiful score that I actually paid money to buy, but I have to admit that it is perhaps the most vacuous text in the whole history of choral music. Just click play and read on.

My friend Rod Decker set off an unlikely firestorm a couple of days ago when he expressed approval of the decision by the NIV2011 translation committee to relegate the word Selah to a footnote (not to remove it, mind you, but to relegate it to a footnote). Rod rightly notes that English Bible translations offer little to the church when they insert untranslatable and non-propositional musical notations for which meaning been permanently and irreparably lost. Rod's argument makes good sense.

But the NIV-never crowd (hereafter NIVN) has chosen this issue as an unlikely hill on which to die. Jim Hamilton has sounded the clarion alarm that "NIV 2011 Removes Selah from the Biblical Text." Now Denny Burk has joined the alarm, arguing seriously that "even though no one is really sure what Selah means...it still figures in to the reader's interpretation of the text."

Really?

I'll admit that I've got mixed feelings about the NIV2011. I'm not a fan of the "singular they" and am a bit troubled that some of the material in the book of Proverbs that was intended for young men has been rendered more gender-inclusive than is wont. But I am very happy with a number of the improvements that have been made. It's an accurate translation constructed after painstaking exegesis by orthodox believers deeply committed to the inerrancy of Scripture. Not perfect by any means, but a solid contribution to the market.

This kind of sniping is frankly misplaced, and I have to believe that it will help the NIV rather than hurt it. The NIVN crowd is teetering perilously on the edge of irrelevancy.

EDIT: Rod Decker responds here.

Together for Church

2011-10-06T11:29:00.000-04:00

In a post last week I suggested that the label churchman was more attractive to me than the label evangelical. The first question asked by a conscientious reader, naturally, was "what kind of churchman?" It was a good question and I agree that stipulation can be useful in this discussion. But my concern is that the very idea of ecclesiastical subscription as the primary vehicle for guarding the gospel has fallen on hard times--irrespective of the particular flavor one has in mind.

I take as my cue on this issue two Presbyterians, Carl Trueman and Darryl Hart. As a Baptist, I have deep-seated concerns about a handful of the teachings of their church, and I frankly couldn't share the Table with either one. But I think both of them are on to something in their advocacy of churchmanship and confessionalism as superior to evangelicalism as a means of guarding the Gospel.

The pillar and ground of the truth will never be T4G. The pillar and ground of the truth is the Church. And God has equipped the church as his appointed means of guarding the Gospel in the context of a holistic network of theological concerns collectively described in Scripture as "The Faith." I'm rather ambivalent about Gospel get-togethers. I don't see them as particularly dangerous, but I see their usefulness as singularly limited by the absence of the kinds of structure necessary to the guardianship of the faith. The church is in possession of this structure.

It's easy to adopt the label evangelical. It's handed out free just about everywhere. The label churchman is earned over time in the crucible of Christian experience. I covet the latter label more than the former. Getting together for the Gospel every two years undoubtedly has some value, but not nearly so much value as getting together for church every Sunday.

Dissidence in Music

2011-09-30T13:20:00.000-04:00

I hit a nerve last week among readers that I havetraditionally considered to be “on my side.” As you may recall, I suggestedthat conscientious abstainers from singing in church should consider not onlyverses like Romans 14:23 (abstaining from what is “not of faith”) but alsoverses like Ephesians 5:19 (fulfilling one’s covenantal obligation in thechurch to “speak to one another in songs”). It’s a thorny issue in whichChristian obligations seem to conflict, and I resonate with those who findthemselves in this difficult scenario. I’ve been there.

I haven’t gotten much hate mail in my sheltered ministerialcareer, but this particular post won me the honor. One email from another blogger informed memy arguments were the pitiful, ridiculous, and debased quackery of a religiouskook, full of concocted piety, willful ignorance, and high-handed humbug that tries to impose my poor taste in music on the more culturally refined. Wow. Allbecause I have weighed my personal objections against my ecclesiasticalobligations, and have concluded that "not singing" may not the best way of approaching this problem.

Apparently I am a traitor to the cause.

So let’s put this all out on the table again, laying asidethe food analogy that some readers found distracting. The scenario is this: youcome to the conclusion that your church is singing songs set to tunes that areinappropriate to the text or that detract, in your studied opinion, from themajesty of the God they purport to exalt. It's not just that you don't like the tunes--you are convinced that they are aberrant. What do you do?

1. You could become a dissident and not sing, riskingviolation of Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16.

2. You could sing anyway, risking violation of Romans14:23, enter into dialogue with your Christian brothers, and do whatever part you can to offer positive solutions to the problemas you see it.

3. You could abandon the assembly, trusting that you will be able to find another assembly that is in agreement with your musical convictions.

Having seen this kind of situation from both sides, I confess enormous sympathy both for those in the pastorate and for those in the pew. These are real and serious situations that all parties wish couldsimply go away. Ideally, one party or the other will simply adjust his convictions so that harmony may be restored. But such adjustments are rarely so simple, because both sides are convinced, based on their respective understandings of Scripture and its implications, that the advance of Christ's purposes for the church would be better accomplished by the other guy changing his convictions.

In the end, I don’t have all the answers. Not by a long shot. But I am convinced that the scenario of individual church members becoming musical dissidents is not the answer. Infact, of the three options I listed (and I welcome other options) I would arguethat this is the least viable solutionof all.

MAS

Zondervan Marketing Triumph

2011-09-28T18:15:00.000-04:00

I don't normally judge a book by its cover, but Zondervan makes this choice an obvious one:

So...Are YOU an Evangelical?

2011-09-27T15:52:00.000-04:00

Isuppose I should have seen it coming, but it caught me by surprise. I mentionedto a couple of the fellows in my Evangelical Theology class that I was reading the recently released book Four Views on the Spectrum of Evangelicalism. I expected them to respond by asking a probing, analyticalquestion like, "Do you think that Kevin Bauder portrays the Fundamentalistoption vis-à-vis the Confessional option with sufficient clarity tosuccessfully salvage the label?" I was ready for that one. But that wasn'tthe question. The question was simpler:

"So...AreYOU an Evangelical?"

Ifound myself deploying evasive measures, kind of like when I'm asked, "Are youa fundamentalist?" It depends, I suppose, on what you mean. I'm not a JackHyles fundamentalist. And I'm certainly not a Terry McVeigh fundamentalist.Likewise I'm not a Roger Olsen evangelical. Nor do I identify with Karl Barth'sself-denominated "evangelical" theology. I prefer terms that are lessvulnerable to equivocation.

• If you asked me about my religion, I'd say that I am a Christian:I hold to the absolute lordship of the Christian God asauthoritatively mediated through the Christian Scriptures.

• If you asked me with whom I am covenantally bound by mutual confessionand with whom I will share the Table in mutual fellowship, I'd say I belong toa Baptist Church.

Butevangelical? What exactly does that word add to what I've just said? Even if, forsake of argument, we could excise the aberrations that have multiplied underthe evangelical umbrella, does the label now have any practical value? If the question is whether I ascribe to the minimalist creed of biblical inerrancy,justification by faith alone in Christ alone, and the reality of new birth thatissues forth in Christian activity, then yes, I'm that kind of evangelical. Which is kind of like repeating my affirmation that "I am a Christian," exceptthat now I have added the vital caveat, "and I really, really mean it."

Butthe word evangelical usually involves connotative meaningsadditional to this. Too often it goes something like this: "I adhere to theidea that the Gospel can be preserved in isolation from the rest ofChristian orthodoxy, without any necessary reference to the Christian Church,primarily through transdenominational venues that rallyaround mere Christianity."

I'mnot aboard that cruise line, because I'm not exactly sure where it's dockingnext. But I'll be in church on Sunday. Hmmm. A churchman. Now there's auseful label.

MAS

On Singing in Church, Or, Why My Wife Is Justified in Occasionally Feeding Me Unhealthy Food

2011-09-18T13:47:00.000-04:00

My wife Heather is a superb cook. Her ability to blend economy,nutrition, and taste is the stuff of legends. But sometimes the family rebels.Sometimes we want taste above all else, and we will happily jettison economyand nutrition to get it. And my dear and faithful wife obliges us. EverySunday, she makes us hamburgers—big ones with white bread hamburger bunscovered with mayonnaise, topped with cheese, ketchup and a thick slice of onion.On the side we have French fries. Other than the onion slice, there are novegetables served at this meal.

If she were single, Heather would never do this. To beginwith, she doesn’t like the taste of white bread or onions. But more than this,she inwardly cringes at the unhealthy abundance of red meat, the lack of fruits andvegetables, and especially the mayonnaise, which from the standpoint ofnutrition is a horrible substance in every way.

So what has this to do with theology? Well, the other day Iwas reading an intriguing essay by my esteemed friend Kevin Bauder. In it, heargues that there are two features of a hymn/song that will result in himrefraining from singing in the Church—bad theology and an unsuitable tune. Theemphasis was on the latter. I read it with a curious blend of agreement and hesitation.

I agree with the concern that church music be marked by suitabletunes. In fact, I would say that I agree strongly. I agree extremely strongly. I sympathizewith those who are asked weekly to sing texts that should inspire awe but areset to tunes that are “awesome.” Or asked to participate in the use of musicaldevices that have no function other than to mimic a popular style or simply tosound “cool.” It’s not just that these things are matters of taste. They arematters that touch on the health of the Church.

So what is my hesitation? Well, this is where my wife andthe hamburgers come in. She cooks me something that is not only outside the confinesof her personal taste, but also something that she strongly feels is unhealthy.But she does it because she has a covenant relationship that trumps theseconcerns. In just the same way every believer has a covenant relationship withthe church that is necessarily forwarded by the corporate singing of songs formutual edification.

Are there limits to this? Sure. If I insist that my wife buyher meat at the idol’s temple, she should decline. And if I insist that wehave hamburgers every night, she has every right to question my request or to eat something other than the rest of us eat. I get that. And at some point, issues of musicstyle can, in my opinion, sharply strain or even sever a member’s relationshipto his church.

That being said, however, the impulse to “not sing” shouldbe weighed very heavily against other obligations of church members andespecially of church leaders. Deciding "not to sing" is a serious decision indeed.

MAS

The Resurrection Centered Life?

2011-09-08T11:24:00.001-04:00

I know very little about Nicholas Batzig. I would know nothing were it not for the fact that Darryl Hart recently took Batzig to task for the latter's insightful blog post entitled "The Secret of Sanctification." Batzig's argument, in brief, is that the common exhortation to preach the cross for "power and pardon" is not completely accurate advice. The cross brings pardon, yes, but not power for godly living.This kind of power instead comes more properly through union with Christ in his resurrection (so Rom 6:1-14). I think Batzig is spot on in his critique.

Darryl Hart disagrees. He disagrees because union with Christ in the power of his resurrection does not give the believer absolute power over indwelling sin. The believer united with Christ in the power of his resurrection still sins, and asks with Paul, "Who shall deliver me from this body of sin?" Hart finds little solace for the sinning believer in recalling his union with Christ, but great solace in his justification. Hart summarizes, "I find much more comfort in the face of guilt to know that I no longer face condemnation."

Hart is right in one sense--of course there is comfort for the sinning believer in the grateful realization that he will no longer face condemnation. But that's not the question. The question is whether there is any power in justification. Justification is a forensic concept, not an experiential one. It changes my status but does not change me. By it I am declared righteous, not made righteous. Justification surely encourages me to to be holy, but it does not to empower me to be holy.

By being united with Christ in the power of his resurrection, on the other hand, the believer is regenerated and made a new creation capable of pleasing God. He has, in the Spirit-indwelt new man, the power to please God. Granted, the persistent remnants of sin are such that this is not an absolute power (the error of perfectionism). but it is a true and real empowerment to holiness nonetheless.

I really have no interest in coming up with a new "center." We have enough of these already: God-centered, Christ-centered, cross-centered, Bible-centered, etc. The title of my post is an irony. But I think Batzig is on to something. The Christian life is empowered not so much by the justification Christ secured for us on the cross, but by the union of regeneration that Christ secured for us in his resurrection. We live, in that sense, a resurrection-centered Christian life.

MAS

On Penn State Football and the Use of Thee and Thou in Contemporary Hymnody

2011-09-04T15:41:00.000-04:00

Perhaps I am alone in thinking this, but I find the heavy use of the word "you" in contemporary hymnody distracting at times. From time to time I have pondered this response of mine and have been less than satisfied with my reflections.

Is it the sheer abundance of the word "you" that distracts me? Perhaps. After all, when we use old English, we split the usage between "thou," "thee," "you," and "ye," whereas in contemporary English we use "you," "you," "you," and "you." OK, if that's my problem, I need to get used to it. But I'm not sure that's it, because switching from the KJV to the NIV did not spawn this reaction in me--just the music.
Is it the susceptibility of the "oooo" sound to crooning that distracts me? Well, I'll admit that I am bothered by people crooning about God. But I'm not sure that's the sum total of my distraction.

Then yesterday I was blissfully ramping up for a new college football season, and decided to download a bit of Penn State Nittany Lions Blue Band music onto my iPod to get into the right mood. I know the tunes very well, but don't know the words (I know the "roar, lions, roar" part, but most of the rest is a bit muddled). So I decided to follow links to the lyrics of four of the most popular songs. And I found something very interesting. Three of the four songs (all, I think, of 20th century vintage) were written with "thees" and "thous." This usage was especially prevalent in the "Penn State Alma Mater," a nostalgic piece reminiscing about the author's college days.

And so I set to thinking again about why use of such language "feels" right in some contemporary songs...even in secular tunes over which the King James Bible has absolutely no sway. And I was reminded of a book that I read a few years ago, Who Needs Classical Music: Cultural Choice and Musical Value, by Julian Johnson. One of the author's major premises is that, historically speaking, the two biggest reasons for music have been to (1) create distance and (2) foster reflection. That is clearly the effect of the use of archaic language in the "Penn State Alma Mater," and it it also a practical effect of such language in hymns as well. God does not, of course, explain why he wants the church to sing to each other, but this is at least as plausible an explanation as any other I've heard.

Could this explain my unease with the use of "you" in contemporary hymnody? Well it at least fits. I have long been used to hymns that create distance and foster reflection--not the distance of nostalgia (at least not primarily), but the distance of reverence, awe, dignity, and transcendence--sentiments that dominate many old hymns.

This is not a diatribe against new music. I am well aware that music has a horizontal dimension, and contemporary forms can communicate this dimension more effectively, at times, than older forms. I am suggesting, though, that the distance/reflection factor is something that contemporary forms do not tend to communicate well, and we do well to keep classic hymnody around for this purpose. I for one plan to listen to my latest John Rutter download regularly. More, regularly, even, than my new Penn State Blue Band music.

DBTS News

2011-08-27T09:07:00.001-04:00

We've just gotten off this week to the successful start of a new semester here at Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary. We are encouraged about what God is doing here. Ten hours of teaching will keep me comfortably busy doing what I most enjoy in life. A few items relative to the seminary that you might want to put on your calendar:

I'll be leading a new class on Monday nights this year--Evangelical Theology. If you live in the area, have an interest in ministry, and would like to check out the seminary experience, it's not too late to join us for the class that begins this Monday, August 29. For admissions information and further details, visit our admissions page here or call the seminary during business hours at 1-800-866-0111.

On September 6th, Logos Bible Software will be releasing Rolland McCune's A Systematic Theology of Biblical Christianity (3 vols.). Dr. McCune taught systematic theology at Detroit Baptist Seminary for nearly 30 years before retiring to complete the publication of this his magnum opus last year.

Finally, please join us for the 2011 Mid-America Conference on Preaching, held at the Inter-City Baptist Church in Allen Park, MI, on October 20-21. The conference theme this year will be "Church Planting and Renewal."

MAS

Total Depravity and the Gospel

2011-08-23T17:00:00.000-04:00

One of the ironies of the Keswick model of sanctification is that while its historical roots lie in Wesleyan Methodism and American Revivalism, many of its earliest proponents were Presbyterian. At first blush these groups may seem surprising bedfellows, but upon closer scrutiny, the alliance makes some sense.

Keswick theology was born when Asa Mahan convinced Charles Finney that the latter's first evangelistic tour had been successful despite the apparent lack of fruit: Finney had successfully preached justification by faith, but had failed to preach the corresponding truth of sanctification by faith. Rejuvenated by this realization, Finney retraced his steps with the message of sanctification by faith and revival broke out.

You see, in the minds of Finney and Mahan, since justification is a forensic truth, it has no efficient means of producing sanctification, and uninformed believers cannot be expected to grow in godliness. After all, the Gospel changes nothing except one's status: by it believers are declared righteous, but they remain just as totally depraved as ever. In order to experience Christian growth, a second event must occur: believers must let go and let God do what totally depraved people cannot do. This occurs when the believer "reckons" on his newfound status as a saint and in faith becomes a passive "channel" through which God can flow.

With the strong emphasis on total depravity, it is no surprise that some Reformed folk perked up and took notice. After all, total depravity is the "T" in TULIP. But to borrow a line from Tolkien, "they were all of them deceived." For while Reformed soteriology emphatically teaches that unbelievers are totally depraved (i.e., incapable of pleasing God), it does not teach that believers remain totally depraved. Justification is always accompanied by regeneration, and regenerate people are by definition no longer totally depraved: although perpetually dogged by the remnants of sin, the regenerate have been enabled by God to please him. The resultant growth in godliness is never perfect (at least in this life), but it is a real and necessary response of the new creature in Christ.

What, then, is the believer's impetus to progressive sanctification? Well, gratitude for God's justifying work is surely a great incentive. But is it the only incentive or the greatest one? I'm convinced that the answer to this question is "No." Christ's crosswork accomplished more for us than mere justification. It also accomplished regeneration--the impartation of a new nature; the creation of a new man; the partaking of the divine nature; the new birth. And while it is surely true that justification stands as a great inspiration to godliness, it is equally true that regeneration stands as a critical enablement of godliness.

Am I diminishing Christ or the Gospel by such statements? No indeed. What I'm saying is that truncating the work of Christ in the Gospel to mere justification is a dangerous exercise in reductionism with serious consequences.

MAS

Partakers of the Divine Nature

2011-08-15T09:56:00.000-04:00

If you're not aware of the tiff about the nature of sanctification that began earlier this year at Christianity Today and that continues between Kevin DeYoung and Tullian Tchividjian (see a helpful collocation of the debate here), it is well worth your while to find out about it. But if you read nothing else, read this recent editorial piece by Bill Evans. It is an outstanding critique of a the growing trend in evangelical circles to reduce sanctification to an overflow of the grace of justification.

The position taken by Hood, DeYoung, and now especially by Evans, that sanctification is causally unrelated to justification and involves great human effort, is easy to attack. No doubt the blogosphere will soon be filled afresh with charges of "legalism," "diminishing the Gospel," and "making too little of the cross of Christ," etc.

It is this last charge I wish to address, because I believe that it could be more legitimately laid at the feet of those making the charge. Because when Christ died on the cross, he did more than simply secure for us the grace of justification. That Christ did secure for us this grace is a glorious doctrine worthy of great attention. But it is not so great as to be worthy of our sole attention. When Christ died on the cross, he secured for us what the Reformers used to call a duplex beneficium, or the double benefit of justification and regeneration. The first is legal, the second practical. Or to put it another way, the first gives us a righteous standing, the second a holy nature.

It is the latter benefit that is in jeopardy of neglect in this discussion. Despite the significant emphasis in Scripture on the fact that the believer is a "new creation," a "new man," and, most startling of all, a "partaker in the divine nature" (2 Pet 1:4), and despite the endorsement by NT writers of self-implemented personal austerity measures in the pursuit of godliness (e.g., Rom 8:13; 1 Cor 9:27; Phil 3:13-14; Col 3:5; Heb 12:1-2; etc.), some seem to be arguing today that simple reflection on one's justification is an adequate strategy for progressing in godliness. Me genoito. It is surely true that gratitude for Christ's justifying work is a valid impetus to holiness, but without a systematic change in one's nature (which, after all, was totally depraved prior to salvation), sanctification will never occur.

We need justification. Most emphatically. But we need more than justification. And, thankfully, by extending to us his Spirit and making us partakers in the divine nature, Christ in God has given us everything necessary for life and godliness (2 Pet 1:3-4). And with that great reality in place, let us, "for this very reason, make every effort to add to our faith" the disciplines of a godly life (v. 5). The stakes are high here, brothers, for without the effort of sanctification, "no one will see the Lord" (Heb 12:14).

MAS

Jesus Is Coming Again

2011-08-04T10:18:00.000-04:00

My very first mental picture of the Antichrist had the face of Pope John Paul II. Although sometimes he looked a bit like Jimmy Carter. For a while his face was more obscure (after all, Reagan was a Republican and we all knew in those days that if the Antichrist was an American, he was surely a Democrat). Of course that funny mark on Gorbachev's forehead might have been a tantalizing clue...does anyone know what 666 looks like in Cyrillic characters?

Then the Soviet Union was crushed by a boulder made without hands and the ten toes of the European Union rose out of the ruins in 1993. Daniel prophesied something like that would happen, right? But now there are 27 toes, and 9 more toes in various stages of candidacy for membership. Oops.

Now we're in 2011, and the old theories have faded. The new craze is that Antichrist is a Muslim. And this time there's no doubt. He's the long-awaited Shiite Mahdi, a Muslim Messiah figure, and he might even be alive today. Technical details are available in recent book, or, if you prefer, a more popular prophetical fiction version is also available. And, sadly, someone in your church might very well be reading one of these books right now.

But, then again, maybe not, because eschatological interest is not particularly high right now. I have mixed feelings about this decline. Undoubtedly the interest during my youth was excessive--a product as much of fundamentalists' prevailing views of American culture as of their reading of Scripture (see an old but fascinating article on this by Stan Gundry). Now that our countercultural impulses have eased, eschatology has been largely bundled up and stashed in the back room of embarrassing historical Christian curiosities. And, sadly, the people in your church that are not reading about the Muslim Antichrist probably aren't reading much biblical prophecy either. It's sad because in some cases this lack of interest represents a satisfaction with the world as it is. It's sad because in some cases this lack of interest represents a measure of embarrassment about Christian eschatology. It's sad, worst of all, because in some cases this lack of interest represents the first misgivings about the Christian faith as a whole.

A recent re-reading of 2 Peter has given me a renewed commitment to be mindful of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. I highly recommend it. No, I'm not on the Muslim Antichrist bandwagon. And I didn't give away my life savings to put up billboards for Harold Camping. But I do believe that Jesus is coming again. And I pray that this belief will always shape the way that I live.

MAS

John Stott and the Changing Face of Keswick

2011-07-29T10:24:00.004-04:00

As is now well known, John R. W. Stott passed away this week. The blogosphere is filled with accolades (and a few well-placed but tasteful disclaimers) concerning his life, ministry, theology, and works. Among Stott's many achievements that impact my small world, though, perhaps none stands out more than his revolutionary and nearly single-handed correction of the so-called "Keswick" theology at the 1965 Keswick Convention.

For 90 years, the Keswick Convention had been perpetuating, with virtually no opposition, an understanding of Romans 6 that reduced sanctification to the believer's passive "reckoning" or faith-contemplation of his justification. Despite the 17 references to death, dying, and crucifixion in the first 14 verses of this chapter, it was rather incredibly understood that the old man had not really died. Rather, it had only been declared dead. Practically speaking, the old man was as strong as ever--so strong, in fact, that it was foolhardy to struggle against it. Rather, the believer was to "let go and let God" do the practical work of sanctification.

In 1965, Stott challenged the Keswick consensus through a series of "Bible readings" on Romans 5-8 (subsequently published as Men Made New: An Exposition of Romans 5–8 [London: Inter-Varsity Fellowship, 1966]). In these he argued that the former "self" (the unregenerate self who was "in Adam") is truly dead and has been replaced by the new self (the regenerate self in Christ). Nonetheless, the remnants of the flesh (what Stott denominated the old "nature") persist in the life of the believer (see esp. Men Made New, p. 45). These remnants, he argued, are to be aggressively battled by the believer as he strives to advance in his Christlikeness.

"Reckoning" oneself dead to sin is not, Stott argued, "pretending that our old nature has died when we know perfectly well it has not. Instead, we are to realize that our former self did die with Christ, thus putting an end to its career. We are to consider what in fact we are, namely dead to sin and alive to God" (Stott, Romans, p. 179). But, further, as Christians we are not only to contemplate this truth, but also to act on that truth, resisting sin and radically excising it from our lives so as to "become what we really are."

The furor raised by Stott's alternative (and in my opinion, his spot-on) interpretation was intense (for details, see Price and Randall, Transforming Keswick, 234–44), as is to be expected after 90 years of contrary teaching. But in the end, Stott's understanding prevailed, and the Keswick Conference gradually ceased to perpetuate the so-called "Keswick" theology. The "Keswick" theology still lives, of course, but thanks to Stott, not so much at Keswick as elsewhere.

MAS

...And Why Do Fundamentalists Think They Are Evangelical?

2011-07-18T10:14:00.000-04:00

This morning I opened my RSS feed to discover a fascinating web article by Darryl Hart entitled Why Do Reformed Think They Are Evangelical? The article asks, in brief, why the sharp line that once existed between Reformed and Evangelical is disappearing. It is no secret that, in the 1930s, J. Gresham Machen and Cornelius Van Til battled as much against evangelicalism as they did against liberalism. So what happened? Why has the former battle waned into obsolescence? Well, the consensus theory is that evangelicalism has evolved theologically from its Wesleyan and Finneyite roots to accommodate Reformed theology, and has thus become more palatable to Reformed folks.

Hart disagrees with the consensus. While theological evolution within evangelicalism may have been something of a contributor to rapprochement, he admits, this has not been the major contributor. Instead, a greater reason for rapprochement has been evolution on the Reformed side--not an evolution of theology, but an evolution of form. To be Reformed once meant that worship forms were (and in Dutch Reformed circles still are) sharply regulated both by principle and confession. Now, Hart laments, the forms have lost their role as uniting features in worship; instead, either "the Spirit" or "the Gospel" have assumed that role. Forms have been relegated to the junkpile of irrelevancy.

Now, to be sure, Fundamentalism has rarely been as deliberate as Reformed in formalizing elements of worship. Nonetheless, there has been for decades something of an unofficial distinction of form between Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism that contributed significantly to the wall that existed between them. This is becoming less and less the case as time passes. And I wonder, along with Hart, whether such a development is entirely positive.

MAS

Hebrew Unicode Characters R-T-L on Microsoft Word for Mac 2011

2011-07-14T14:20:00.006-04:00

Well, off from vacation and home to a new MacBook Pro. Very exciting. I was a Mac prior to 1998, but became a PC while working as librarian at DBTS (our library software wouldn't run on Mac at that time). But at long last I am back with Mac. Maybe the already aspects of the kingdom are more expansive than I had previously thought. :)

Anyway, one of the issues of which I was warned was that Microsoft Word for Mac would not support right-to-left Hebrew character input. But along with my new Mac I got Microsoft Word 2011, and I was surprised to find that R-T-L character input worked just fine using the Hebrew QWERTY keyboard. The only problem I encountered was that many of the keyboard strokes used to produce the various characters did not correspond to the unicode keystrokes with which I was familiar (and I'm not sure of all the implications of this anomaly). Nonetheless, after a bit of experimental poking about, I was able to find most of the basic characters and vowel points. I made the following chart of these for those of you who are interested. Please feel free to refine and expand this chart to make it more useful.

MAS

Go Take a Hike

2011-06-22T23:25:00.000-04:00

OK, I'm on vacation in Yellowstone, so this has nothing to do with theology. Unless it has to do with the perplexities of fallen anthropology. Yellowstone is an odd place. At all the spectacular sites, there are wall-to-wall people, mostly rude people. But if you wander 100 yards down a hiking trail, nearly all the people disappear as if by magic. The backcountry is spectacular, teeming with wildlife, and anyone who is willing to take a hike can find solitude, grandeur, and beauty that the vast majority here never find.

And so then I get back on the road that circles the park, and every few miles, the highway suddenly shuts down. Somebody saw a buffalo. Or a bear. Or a jackrabbit. Everyone stops in the middle of the road, jumps out of their cars, and starts snapping pictures, irrespective of the traffic jam or the danger (unbelievably, I watched a parent urge a six-year-old child to run toward a Grizzly Bear). It's almost impossible to get around the park because of these periodic traffic snarls.

And I can't help wanting to tell all these people, instead of blocking traffic, to go take a hike. Literally.

Dispensationalism Is Dead. Long Live Dispensationalism.

2011-06-03T13:58:00.001-04:00

In the latest issue of the Grace Evangelical Society's Grace in Focus, Grant Hawley writes an article excoriating John MacArthur as a key contributor to the decline of dispensationalism. MacArthur, it seems, is "hostile to normative dispensationalism," has "repeatedly and directly condemned many of the fundamentals of normative dispensationalism," has led "attacks on normative dispensationalism," and has "adamantly rejected many aspects of dispensationalism."

Specifically, MacArthur has criticized certain dispensationalists who deny the necessity of repentance and the embrace of Christ's lordship for salvation, and, consequently, has eschewed Keswick-type expressions of sanctification. MacArthur's attack on these "free grace" tenets, Hawley affirms, is tantamount to an attack on "normative" dispensationalism.

MacArthur is correct that the "lordship debate has had a devastating effect on dispensationalism." And it is also true that so-called "lordship" advocates have sometimes led in the condemnation of dispensationalism. But it does not follow therefrom that lordship salvation is sinking the dispensational boat. If the dispensational boat is sinking, it is because some of the occupants of that boat adhere to what MacArthur has called a "mongrel species of dispensationalism that ought to die."

And so it seems that "normative" dispensationalism is dying. Long live dispensationalism.

LASIK Update

2011-05-31T09:08:00.000-04:00

My apologies for my abrupt departure from blogdom a few months back and my failure to update. Back in March I underwent LASIK surgery and unfortunately became one of the minority statistics that continue to keep people afraid of LASIK surgery. After my surgery I went into a sort of priority mode in order to meet my basic commitments, and let the blog go. My recovery is by no means complete, but I've learned to better manage my schedule, and hope to come back to the blog on a limited basis.

For those interested in my eye report, here goes: After surgery to correct myopia of about 10 diopters in each eye, I emerged with double vision that did not correct for about four weeks. With concentration, I can now make my eyes see together (for an analogy, imagine crossing your eyes continuously in order to focus). This causes my eyes to tire quickly and limits my time reading or doing computer work. Reading glasses help some, but the disparity of the eyes makes even this difficult.

Happily, after I began slowly to overcome my double vision, I found I could see almost perfectly in bright sunlight. Anything less than bright sunlight, though, results in blurry vision. The doctor suggested that this may be due to faulty "blending." Briefly explained, the lens has been shaved to the right thickness in the very center of my pupil, but as one moves out from the center, inadequate provision was made for the curvature of the eyeball. As a result, when my pupils are dilated (i.e., when it is darker), a blur is introduced.

I'll be having more tests and hopefully some adjustment later this summer after my eyes have fully "settled." Until then, I still have something of an ocular limp. Thanks for the many who have offered prayers and voiced sympathy. Both are appreciated.

Whether this is my "thorn in the flesh to keep me from becoming conceited" I cannot know. However, I can echo Paul's consolation that God's grace is sufficient and that his power is most visible in weakness.

MAS

LASIK Leave of Absence

2011-03-03T09:37:00.000-05:00

Friends and Readers,

I recently had a LASIK procedure that went very poorly, leaving me (hopefully temporarily) almost completely unable to read. Until I can get some relief, I am cutting out all but the very most essential computer work. IOW, the Blog is out for now.

Any prayers are appreciated. Thnak you.

DBTS Senior Doctrinal Seminar

2011-02-22T08:39:00.001-05:00

Following the lead of one of my colleagues, I thought some might find it interesting to know about one of the classes I have opportunity to lead here at Detroit Baptist Seminary, viz., the Senior Doctrinal Seminar. This class is a new one developed just last year after a faculty curriculum evaluation meeting. During that meeting, it was determined that a key adjustment would be made to the graduation requirement in order to improve the effectiveness of the seminary curriculum. Previously, each graduating senior was obliged to prepare a whole doctrinal statement and appear for 90 minutes before a committee of the faculty, who peppered the candidate with questions in a manner much like a church-organized ordination council. We as a faculty found this exercise a helpful one: identifying new wrinkles, tensions, and points of confusion in theology; revealing deficiencies in our instruction; discovering the most promising graduates, etc. It also compelled students to craft out personal belief statements in preparation for ordination and, ideally, some kind of pastoral ministry. The drawback of this defense was that it offered no chance for students and faculty to dialogue at length about specific, individual, unanswered questions and points of confusion.

In the interest of addressing this deficiency, we created the Senior Doctrinal Seminar. The structure is simple. By Tuesday of every week, each candidate for graduation prepares a one-page statement on a major head of theology (bibliology, pneumatology, soteriology, and the like), and distributes his statement to the rest of the class. Then each Friday the graduating class (or a section thereof depending on class size) meets for two hours to discuss the statements. I usually lead out, asking a question about, say, some imprecisely worded sentence, an unusual proof text, a minority view, etc. Then the discussion begins. We ask one another to explain “stock” definitions and phrases borrowed from historical creeds. We offer each other refinements of key points of doctrine. We add precision in expressing the non-negotiables of theology. We strive for clarity, accuracy, and grace when characterizing orthodox views alternative to our own. We defend our views biblically, discovering, at times, where we are making straw defenses.

Above all, each student adjusts his statement as necessary: deleting, adding, or replacing proof texts; refining vocabulary and syntax for added precision; adding whole sections; curtailing defenses of “pet” doctrines that really aren’t all that important; even changing positions after gaining greater understanding.

While every once in a while there is a deer-in-the-headlights moment during the seminar, the class is, in the main, a surprisingly relaxed and enjoyable exercise with lively dialogue, candid clarifications, cordial disagreement (oh for more of this in the blogosphere!), humble corrections, and above all, a chance to be immediately immersed in our chief end: knowing, glorifying, and enjoying God forever.

A Note of Apology

2011-02-18T13:37:00.001-05:00

In the last day two friends have asked me privately to reconsider my reference to a “Gospel Carnival” in describing (I'm searching for a non-offensive label here) the Gospel Togetherness Movement within conservative evangelicalism.

I do sincerely apologize for any despite that this reference has brought to the Christian Gospel or upon my Lord Christ. I do not desire to trivialize or diminish either Christ or his crosswork. To the degree that I have done this or even have been perceived to have done this I am both dismayed and sorry.

I continue to have concerns about fingering the Gospel as an exclusive hub for Christian celebration and fellowship, and believe that there is Christian truth that is being neglected due to this trend. I was refreshed to rediscover some of those themes as I reflected on the Old Testament. And while I said as much, I did so in a visceral way that added unnecessary offense. I regret this.

Sine Qua Non and the Doxological Center

2011-02-15T08:03:00.001-05:00

Charles Ryrie has now been in the proverbial doghouse for almost 50 years since fingering a doxological center as one of the three sine qua non of dispensationalism. The response has been nothing short of vicious in some quarters, because, after all, Reformed theology is all about doxology (first question of the Catechism anyone?). But while It is likely that Ryrie’s abbreviated explanation of this point has lent to some of the vitriol, at the end of the day, I think he’s on to something: the unifying center of all God’s activity is not redemption. The Bible is more than heilsgeschichte. There’s more to God’s decree than saving his elect via the Christian Gospel. It’s bigger than that. It’s about God ruling his whole universe and extracting glory from all its parts.

While in theory Reformed theologians would agree with this assessment, in practice this does not always seem to follow. Which is part of the reason, I think, why there were such strong objections to my post of last week, where I suggested in passing that Christ and the Gospel are not themes of the OT. It was not enough for some readers that I identified in the OT a redemptive thread and a prophetic motif that takes Messianic shape (OK, maybe that adds up to a theme—fine, I won’t quibble any more over semantics if it prevents heart attacks). For some, though, calling these “a” theme is not enough—I must instead call these “the” theme of the Old Testament. Sorry—can’t go there, heart attack or no.

Why not? Because I see the Gospel as only a piece of God’s decree, not the whole. God extracts glory from his universe via the Gospel, to be sure. But he also extracts glory and satisfaction from his universe apart from the Gospel—from the heavens (Ps 19:1), the angels (Job 38:7; Ps 148:2), the pre-fall universe (Gen 1:31), and even the damned (Rom 9:22). All this leaves me uncomfortable with saying that it’s all about the Gospel.

Certainly the Gospel of God’s special grace in Christ is a big deal. You can’t enter the Kingdom of Christ without it. But there is also in God’s universal kingdom a common or civic aspect, detailed in the dominion mandate, formalized under Noah, and realized in part in the Jewish theocracy, that operates independently of and even prior to the theme of Gospel. And much of the Old Testament revolves around the theme of covenant faithfulness within whatever dispensational arrangement in which one found himself.

I’m not saying that one can be SAVED by covenant faithfulness (the error of the New Perspective, and perhaps also a few key early dispensationalists [Scofield Reference Bible, p. 1115 n. 2]). Salvation is secured only by trust in the redemptive promises of God that find their fulfillment in the person and work of Jesus Christ, who bore the sins of and extended his own righteousness to all in every age who will believe. Please don’t hear me say anything else.

What I AM saying is that there is more to God’s plan than merely saving people. And so I’m comfortable (with this explanation) agreeing with Ryrie that the underlying purpose of God in the world is not the Gospel, but God’s Glory.

A Country Drive in the Old Testament

2011-02-11T14:22:00.000-05:00

OK, so I'm preparing two new classes for seminary this semester: Old Testament Historical Books and Old Testament Theology. I'm still blissfilly doing theology and history (my first two loves), but restricting my focus to the Old Testament. And so while I still find myself still thinking about contemporary theological concerns, I'm running them through the grid of the Old Testament. And I've got this growing sense that something is awry. The buzz today is THE GOSPEL. We have gospel coalitions, we get together for the gospel, the catchwords of the day are "gospel-centered," "Cross-centered," "Christ-centered," and so on. And I get all that: the gospel IS a big deal. No argument here.

But since I've spent almost all my study time in the OT during the last two months, it's almost as though I've left the Gospel Carnival behind. Kind of like going for a drive in the country, but better. It's been very refreshing, but the funny thing is that, despite the fact that I have been spending considerably more time than normal in my Bible for the past two months, I've read virtually nothing about Christ, the Cross, or the Gospel.

Now some of you are probably shaking your heads right now and saying, "This guy doesn't know how to read his Bible--it's ALL about Christ if you know how to successfully navigate between the lines!" And I'm not blind to the redemptive thread that winds through the Bible. But the thing is, when I stop reading between the lines and just start reading the lines, Christ and the Gospel do not emerge as major OT themes. In fact, they're not themes at all.

And so I'm musing here. If robust faith and rigid separatism could flourish in the OT without reference to the themes of Christ and the Gospel, is it really possible to jettison everything else today and base fellowship strictly or even primarily upon fidelity to the Gospel? I wonder...

Upcoming Events at DBTS

2011-02-08T08:22:00.000-05:00

There are a couple of public events coming up at Detroit Baptist Seminary next month for any readers that might have interest in them.

The first is our annual Rice Lecture Series, a series that the seminary introduced six years ago as a means to supplementing the standard seminary education with discourses of academic interest, each by an expert in his given field. The 2011 series theme will be “Millions of Years and the Compromise of the Theologians,” and the lecturer will be Terry Mortenson, distinguished researcher and lecturer with Answers in Genesis. Last year I spent a week with Dr. Mortenson on an creation/flood study trip through the Grand Canyon and can attest personally both to his passion and to his erudition on this topic.

The lecture series will convene from 8:30 a.m. to Noon on Wednesday, March 2, 2011, and will be followed by a complementary luncheon and time for interaction. Our target audience is seminarians, college students, pastors, and other church leaders. There is no cost to attend the lectures or the luncheon. However, advance registration is requested. Please contact the Seminary by email at info@dbts.edu, or by phone at 313.381.0111, ext. 402. Additional information about the Rice Lectures and media resources from previous lecture series can be found on the seminary website.

There will also be a follow-up session during the normal seminary chapel slot on Thursday, March 3rd (10:30-11:20 a.m.), on the theme “Ape-men and the Compromise of the Theologians.”

The second seminary event is our Seminary Days, designed to introduce prospective students to the "normal" seminary experience. Those attending will attend regular classes, share meals with faculty and students, and see firsthand the ministries of Inter-City Baptist Church. The 2011 seminary days will meet on March 10-11 and March 17-18, with an option to extend your visit through the weekend to view some of our outreach efforts and also to worship with our church family for the Sunday services. The seminary will cover all expenses for this event, including transportation (with the exception of a $50 deposit for those wishing to fly). Additional information about Seminary Days can be found at the seminary website.

Christ in All the Scriptures?

2011-02-01T15:37:00.001-05:00

A little over a year ago I posted a critical muse about Christocentricism that, despite the minimal interaction, has proven the most heavily trafficked of all the entries I've ever posted. Apparently, it struck either a chord or a nerve. A year later and on the heels of an outstanding post on this topic by Rod Decker, while poking about in Luke 24, I stumbled again upon one of the key proof texts of the Christocentrists and decided to give it a closer look. What I found was interesting. Note the following two translations of verse 27:

esv: Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, [Jesus] interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.
niv: Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, [Jesus] explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

The esv rendering suggests that there are “things concerning Christ” in every Scripture. This interpretation is grammatically possible. The niv rendering, however, is also grammatically possible (and, incidentally, if one follows a major textual variant in this verse, grammatically necessary—see NA27). I also find the niv reading more theologically satisfying. In short, the niv reading acknowledges that there are many things about Christ in the OT Scriptures, but falls short of insinuating that Christ permeates the whole of the Old Testament.

It certainly will not do to deny that there are prophetic references to Christ in the OT (see, e.g., Luke 24:45; John 5:39; Acts 17:2; 18:28, etc.). But it is equally unwarranted to conclude from Luke 24:27 that every OT text speaks to/about Christ or even that the primary focus of the OT is Christ. As important as Christ is to the Christian message, it is too ambitious to say that the Bible is all about Christ. The Bible is instead all about God. To narrow this to a single member of the Godhead not only smacks of a sort of Unitarianism, but also leads inevitably to the transformation of exegesis into so much agenda-driven speculation under the guise of typology or old-fashioned allegory.

MAS

"I Am Committed to Protecting This Constitutional Right."

2011-01-24T09:47:00.001-05:00

He's said it before, of course, and in more graphic and explicit terms, this governor of ours who has been "sent by God to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right" (2 Pet 2:14). But on the anniversary of the most horrific decision in all American jurisprudence, he reminded us again of his flagrant commitment to violate this divine trust. No moral stimulation remains to fulfill the first and most basic function of human government: to perpetuate humanity by shedding the blood of those who shed blood (Gen 9:6-7). Even the lingering moral twitches of previous statements (e.g., let abortion be legal and rare) seem to have subsided.

And yet moral outrage seems to diminish year by year. Perhaps this year we are fixated on the recovery of the economy. Perhaps we are pleased with an impressive speech about six Americans who died senselessly in Arizona. Have we forgotten so quickly? Is there not a dark shadow over a speech mourning the death of six "innocents" gunned down in Arizona when during the course of that short speech some 77 children died throughout the country under the committed protection of the speech-maker? Have our sensibilities become so calloused?

We cherish our freedoms in America. We react viciously against those who threaten them. And yet freedom is never absolute. It must always submit to one law or another. The freedom of Americans to collectively select the law to which they submit is simultaneously their greatest boon and their greatest burden. May God help us as dual citizens of heaven and earth to "live as free men, without using our freedom as a cover-up for evil" (1 Pet 2:16).

MAS

Fundamentalism and Cultural Conservatism

2011-01-17T09:04:00.001-05:00

Fundamentalists have a reputation for being culturally conservative. I'll let others quibble over whether cultural conservatism is a sine qua non of fundamentalism. It's a worthy discussion, but that's not my point today. What I want to discuss today is the meaning of cultural conservatism. In my experience, when the label "cultural conservatism" is raised, the specter that most often comes to hearers' minds is the absurdity of conserving a peculiar culture, usually American culture from somewhere between the Great Depression and the immediate aftermath of World War II. That this vision of cultural conservatism has thrived in fundamentalist circles is an unfortunate reality: you can still visit the 1940s in many fundamentalist churches today. And that is a tragedy.

This vision of cultural conservatism, however, is not the kind of cultural conservatism that fundamentalism has always practiced. George Marsden makes this point clearly in his Fundamentalism and American Culture and especially his Reforming Fundamentalism. In many cases, he observes, early fundamentalist culture was more folksy and populist than their modernist rivals because, as a grass-roots movement, the fundamentalists had lost much of their high-culture machinery to the modernists (after all, when they lost the church builiding, they also lost the pipe organ--which in some cases was worth more than the building!). Marsden further observes that the early new evangelicals were sometimes more straight-laced and staid than their fundamentalist brothers precisely because they were pursuing acceptance among modernists who had retained a rather "high" culture.

The early fundamentalists did, however, develop a certain reserve about culture based on robust concerns about depravity and true worldliness. Where the new evangelicals had adopted something of a non-critical "Christ of culture" mindset that pragmatically assumed neutrality in culture for the sake of re-engaging it, the fundamentalists began to be more critical of culture. The early fundamentalist response, however, was not (and still is not) monolithic. Some adopted a simplistic "Christ against culture" stance, dug their heels into 1947, and resisted all cultural advance from that point forward. But others adopted something of a "Christ and Culture in Paradox" stance that viewed culture with measured distance, anticipating and abhorring what was evil in culture, but clinging to what was good. Now there were (and still are) practical similarities between the cultures reflected in these two visions of fundamentalist culture, but not identity.

What concerns me about the "conservative evangelical" tent is a tendency to abandon both kinds of cultural conservatism and to embrace a sort of non-critical cultural ambivalence reminiscent of the new evangelical model. In their haste to jettison the simplistic and unhealthy cultural conservatism of "Christ against Culture" fundamentalism, there has also developed among conservative evangelicals a certain repugnance for the critical cultural conservatism of "Christ and Culture in Paradox" fundamentalism. And I fear that the result of this tendency is the loss of some of the practical antithesis that the Gospel anticipates.

It is for this reason that I continue rather stubbornly to plead for cultural conservatism in the church today.
MAS

What About Futons? Revisiting US and THEM

2011-01-13T10:56:00.001-05:00

There has been a recent interchange of ideas here and here about the labels fundamentalism and conservative evangelicalism as a basis for separation. Riley has done us a service by explaining, based on a discussion of the one and the many, why we should continue to recognize these two categories despite our difficulty defining the terms. Just as it is difficult to come up with a sine qua non of "chairness," it is difficult to come up with a sine qua non of "fundamentalism" or "conservative evangelicalism." He concludes that, just as we cannot deny the existence of chairs due to our inability to define "chairness," we cannot deny the existence of "fundamentalists" or "conservative evangelicals" on account of our difficulty in defining the ideas represented by these respective labels.

The explanation that Riley offers, though, does not directly address the concern that Doran had raised a few hours earlier, viz., that while the distinguishable ideas of "fundamentalism" and "conservative evangelicalism" do exist, there is an expanding excluded middle that makes it impossible to use these categories as bulwarks for separation.

To answer Doran's concern, it seems that Riley needs to expand his metaphor, establishing not only the idea of "chairness" but also a foil, say, "bedness." We all know that chairs and beds exist as separate ideas, but when it comes down to defining the two ideas, we find that there is a fuzzy middle that exhibits characteristics of both. For instance, due to severe back troubles my dad sleeps in a recliner. Is that a chair or a bed? On the other hand, my younger son sleeps on the lower tier of a bunk bed that is actually a futon. Is that a chair or a bed? In both cases, the cluster of attributes that defines "bedness" and the cluster of attributes that defines "chairness" overlap--they are not mutually exclusive categories. Most of us have little angst over this problem because absolute demarcation of beds and chairs is not necessary. But with fundamentalism and conservative evangelicalism, more is at stake.

To summarize, then, it would seem that Riley is right in concluding that "fundamentalism" and "conservative evangelicalism" exist as separate ideas, just as "chairness" and "bedness" exist as separate ideas. Just as some beds are clearly not chairs and some chairs are clearly not beds, so also some fundamentalists are clearly not conservative evangelicals and vice versa. If this is true, then there is legitimate basis for suggesting some real demarcation between "us" and "them." But this still does not adequately address the observation raised by Doran that the presence of an excluded middle means that the categories of "fundamentalist" and "conservative evangelical" are not mutually exclusive ideas, and as such cannot serve as absolute standards of separation.

So the question, it seems, is this: What about the futons?

MAS

Fruitful Seminar on Ecclesiastical Socio-Political Action

2011-01-10T16:34:00.002-05:00

The blog has been quiet here the last week. I spent much of that time in Minneapolis leading a Ph.D. seminar at Central Seminary. In it we covered a historical range of responses of the Protestant church to socio-political concerns. Against the backdrop of the barbs traded between missional and anti-missional models, the readings we discussed proved refreshingly measured and informative. Below is the reading list:

Wright, William J. Martin Luther’s Understanding of God’s Two Kingdoms (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010).
VanDrunen, David. Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010).
Graham, Preston D. A Kingdom Not of This World (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2002).
Dole, Andrew C. Scheleiermacher on Religion and the Natural Order (Oxford: OUP, 2010).
Heslam, Peter S. Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).
Barth, Karl. Community, Church, and State (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1968).
Niebuhr, H. Richard. Christ and Culture (reprint, San Francisco: Harper, 2001).
Moore, Russell D. The Kingdom of Christ: The New Evangelical Perspective (Wheaton: Crossway, 2004).
Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford: OUP, 1980).
Guder, Darrel L., ed. Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).

At the risk of being reductionist, I see four basic theological reasons why the historical church in its various expressions has taken on an institutional social mandate:

Apologetical: Social action can be an effective means used by the Church to attract and/or awaken the irreligious.
Eschatological: Social action is a part of the life of the Kingdom in which the Church is presently participating.
Historical: Social action was integral to the mission of Christ and/or OT Israel and by extension is integral to the mission of the Church.
Exegetical: The Scriptures instruct the institutional Church to pursue a socio-political agenda.

There are other reasons that are less theological nature (pragmatism, peer pressure, external expectations, general neighborliness, etc.), but these four seem to stand out as the major theological impetus for all major models of ecclesiastical social action. Anyone care to interact on this thesis?

MAS

Top Ten Books for 2010

2010-12-30T09:26:00.003-05:00

I've read about eight of these lists in the past week, and I'm amused by the great variety of titles included on these lists...and the titles excluded. So here's the list of ten books that most piqued the interest of yours truly, in view of his unique blend of theological concerns, interests, foibles, aberrations, etc. (IOW, it's just like all the other lists, but this one's MINE).

#1: David VanDrunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms. Every few years a Eureka book comes along that puts a large amount of seemingly unrelated bits of theology together in a way that really makes sense. This book was one of those for me, connecting a swath of data on apologetics, ecclesiology, culture, and even dispensationalism (the latter, undoubtedly, to the author’s great chagrin).

#2: John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Word of God. Finally, a comprehensive, seminary-level textbook on bibliology—and a really good one, too.

#3: Andrew A. Snelling, Earth’s Catastrophic Past. This one’s dated 2009, but I didn’t get it until 2010, so I’m letting this one in. It’s too important to ignore. A massive, two-volume summary update of flood geology by the premier creation geologist of our time. I’m hopeful that this work, published on the fiftieth anniversary of Whitcomb’s landmark work, The Genesis Flood, will have an impact as great as the earlier work.

#4: Fred Zaspel, The Theology of B. B. Warfield: A Systematic Summary. Why didn’t someone have this idea sooner? The systematic theology that B. B. Warfield never published, almost a century after the fact, culled painstakingly from mountains of Warfield’s published and unpublished materials.

#5: Rolland D. McCune, A Systematic Theology of Biblical Christianity, volume 3. Dr. McCune’s magnum opus is now complete following this volume on the doctrines of salvation, ecclesiology, and eschatology. Perhaps the best volume of this highly recommendable system of theology.

#6: John D. Currid and David P. Barrett, The Crossway ESV Bible Atlas. OK, so I had some criticisms of this book’s opening chapter a few months back. That doesn’t detract greatly from its overall value. This is an outstanding atlas that leads a very competitive pack of Bible atlases published in the last two years.

#7: Wayne Grudem, Politics According to the Bible. An outstanding contribution connecting exegesis and theology with politics. It’s very conservative, self-consciously Christian, and a lot less abrasive than Sean Hannity. Not in complete harmony with my #1 pick, but that’s part of what makes it enjoyable to read.

#8: Michael Vlach, Has the Church Replaced Israel? A decisive defense of dispensationalism against the replacement theology common in Covenant Theology. An adaptation of his dissertation for a more popular audience.

#9: John S. and Paul D. Feinberg, Ethics for a Brave New World, 2nd ed. The best available book on Christian ethics, now substantially expanded and updated. I haven’t gotten through this one yet, but so far I’m impressed.

#10: Biblical and Theological Essays: Selections from Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal, 1996-2000. Shameless Confession: I had about six volumes vying for the #10 spot and I picked this one because it doubles as a bit of advertising. If you aren’t familiar with our journal, here’s a nice “best of” collection from the first five years. Many of these early issues are out of print.

Literal Interpretation in the Advent Narratives, Part Three--Fulfillment

2010-12-22T14:40:00.004-05:00

In the previous post I suggested that the most hermeneutically amenable solution to the harmonization of Hosea 11:1 and Matthew 2:15 is to regard Matthew's use of Hosea as analogical in nature. As such, Matthew is not trying to "interpret" Hosea 11:1 so much as he is drawing a comparison between two events: Christ's emergence from Egypt is LIKE Israel's exodus from Egypt.

That the analogical usage of classic literature is common in everyday parlance can scarcely be denied. We do this all the time, often unwittingly (it is estimated that as many as 9000 idioms from Shakespeare are still used today, most of the time without any realization of that fact). This is not to suggest that we are interpreting these bits of classic literature in all of their context (or, even more bizarrely, that we are treating this classic literature as prophetic in nature). The Scripture writers did the same (see, e.g., Matt 27:46; John 2:17; arg. Acts 2:16ff).

The sticking point here is the fact that Matthew describes Hosea's words as fulfilled by Christ--and an analogical reference does not seem to us to qualify as fulfillment. Fulfillment in ordinary English usage means the realization of a prediction/promise/expectation. Historical statements cannot ordinarily be "fulfilled" by using them analogically. For instance, while we might growl the words "Bah, Humbug" to some maudlin sentimentality at Christmas time, we would not follow this up with the explanation, "This is to fulfill what was prophesied by Scrooge." Likewise, a chastened person might confess, "Woe is me," but we would never conclude that he is "fulfilling" Isaiah 6:5. We simply don't use the term fulfill this way.

But English usage is no gauge of usage in biblical Greek. And we find that the underlying Greek term for fulfillment (the pleroō word group) has a broad semantic range: its meaning includes the common idea of prophetic realization, but also the lesser idea of completion, and even the more basic idea of literal filling (e.g., a net filled with fish). With this in view, it seems plausible to insert the idea of analogical fulfillment into Matthew's usage:

Matthew 2:17-18 does not complete a prediction made in Jeremiah 31 (if it does, it gets the details terribly wrong!). Instead, the point seems to be that the kind of grief experienced by the mothers in Ramah was "felt in full" by the mothers of Bethlehem (so Dyer, "Biblical Meaning of Fulfillment," p. 57).
Matthew 2:15 likewise does not complete a prediction made in Hosea 11. Instead, Matthew compares two historical situations and points out that the Mary/Joseph/Jesus incident both resembles and improves on the Exodus, bringing to a climax the exodus motif that threads its way through the Scriptures (see Dyer, Silva, Moo).

Such explanations may not comport well with our narrow use of the term fulfill. But they do fit into the range of biblical usage, and are preferred for their care in preserving the received laws of language.

MAS

Literal Interpretation in the Advent Narratives, Part Two--Exploring the Options

2010-12-21T15:54:00.003-05:00

Having established the parameters of literal interpretation, we turn now to a concrete example of this problem in the Advent narrative: the use of Hosea 11:1 in Matthew 2:15:

Hosea 11:1--When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.

Matthew 2:15--So Joseph got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: "Out of Egypt I called my son."

The tension here is obvious. Hosea is relating the history of the nation of Israel, whom God rescued from the hand of Pharaoh. The verse appears in one of the minor prophets, but it is not predictive prophecy in the ordinary, self-consciously forward-looking sense. And yet Matthew argues that Hosea's statement is fulfilled when Joseph emerges from Egypt with the toddler Jesus. How do we explain this? Well, there are at least four options:

Perhaps Hosea actually did mean this to be a prophecy and Matthew's keen exegetical eye caught what the rest of us missed. It is a prophecy that Matthew interpreted literally.

Perhaps the divine author intended a prophecy of which the human author was ignorant, then specially informed Matthew of this latent intent by the miracle of inspiration.

Perhaps God arranged the Exodus event as a historical type (of which Hosea was ignorant) the greater meaning of which Christ "filled up" in Matthew 2.

Perhaps Matthew simply noted (under inspiration, of course) an interesting parallel in history and made an analogical reference to it.

The first of these options is perhaps the easiest to harmonize with literal interpretation, but it is far-fetched, and I know of no one that holds this view.

The second option comports least with literal interpretation, either by (a) flat-out rejecting it or (b) by special pleading (i.e., the Bible is exceptional because it has two authors; further, Matthew could ignore normal hermeneutics because he was inspired). While this arguably solves the tension, the implications of this model are frightful. What other latent meanings hover above the text? Why do I need the Bible at all if it is merely a hinweis to revelation? And, more ominously, how can I be assured that the kind of latent connotations that controvert the literal meaning of the OT will not someday controvert the Christian Scriptures? The parameters of interpretation evaporate and hermeneutical nihilism commences. In time, the whole of God's special revelation could be legitimately controverted by such a hermeneutic.

The third option improves on the second and offers what is perhaps the most popular of the four. It gives a plausible understanding of fulfillment and thus offers a bit of hermeneutical relief. But there are still (to me anyway) three problems: (1) Hosea never intended what Matthew says he intended. (2) Hosea never expected someone to come along and "fill up" his words any more than you or I do when we use words. (3) Further, the vocabulary and syntax of Hosea's words cannot be construed by any ordinary interpretive technique to mean what Matthew says they mean. If Matthew intended to exegete and interpret Hosea, then he betrayed Hosea. Badly. He banished Hosea from his own words.

Excursus: I do not by this statement intend to eliminate the idea of types. God does place in the stream of progressive revelation certain incongruities that almost immediately left the original readers with a realization that there is something bigger in view than the immediate--the seed motif, the king motif, the sacrificial system, etc. Hosea's prophecy does not seem to fit here.

This brings us to the fourth option--that Matthew did not intend properly to exegete and interpret Hosea at all. He was not discovering a latent prophecy or even a type in Hosea's words, but was simply making an analogical observation: "THIS reminds me of THAT." This option seems most faithful to the intentions and integrity of the original writer, Hosea. What is missing, though, is a credible defense of the use of fulfillment language in this scenario. In the third and final part of this miniseries, I will address this question. After Christmas. Enjoy the holiday.

MAS

Literal Fulfillment in the Advent Narratives, Part One--Literalism

2010-12-21T10:26:00.005-05:00

The cluster of appeals to the OT in the Advent narratives of the Gospels offers a peculiar challenge to the idea of a "literal" hermeneutic. It is extremely difficult if not impossible to compare the claims of Matthew 2:15, 2:17-18, and 2:23 (or even, arguably, 1:23) with their OT foundations and assert that Matthew has interpreted these texts literally.

The term literal has, ironically, great variance of meaning within the literature. So before I go further in this series, let me explain what I include in the term when I use it.

The univocal nature of language (a set of words has only one meaning in any one context).
The jurisdiction of authorial intent (a text can never mean what it never meant).
The textually based locus of meaning (words not only point to meaning, they contain meaning).

Note that I do not mean that language can be reduced to connotatively static words that must be interpreted flatly without regard to figures of speech or the strictures of the analogy of faith. In fact, it is quite possible that the literal reading may not always be the most plain reading. But the three points above are non-negotiable axioms of language without which language itself fails.

I hold to these axioms not because I am a dispensationalist (though I think that this is their necessary consequence), but more properly because I am a presuppositionalist. That is to say that I must assume these principles even to articulate them--failture to do so would lead inevitably to hermeneutical nihilism. And as a reader, you must assume them to in order to understand and interact with me. Of course, we can surely discuss examples in which one or more of these points seem to fail (and I hope to do this). But in order for such discussion to occur, we must (whether consciously or unconsciously) agree to these principles as axiomatic to the mechanics of our discussion proper. And while we might imagine an alternative reality in which these principles are not true, we can only do so by special pleading--we cannot live with the implications of a reality that holistically negates any of these points.

The question here, then, is not whether these axioms are true, but whether we can by special pleading suspend them under certain circumstances. That is to say, is it possible that the uniquenesses of the Bible (e.g., the dual authorship of its OT prophecies or the inspired nature of its NT interpretation) allow us to posit special rules for the Bible that are different from the ordinary use of language?

Next time we'll look at a concrete example and put some flesh on this question.

MAS

John Calvin Did Not Publish with Logos

2010-12-13T09:02:00.004-05:00

I've been grading a stack of end-of-semester research papers, and I've got a beef with Logos right now. According to the papers I just read, Calvin published his Institutes of the Christian Religion in Washington with Logos in 1996. The Master's Seminary Journal is a corporate work written by the Master's Seminary and published by Logos. And most amazingly of all, the Westminster Confession of Faith was written by Morton Smith and published in 1996 (by Logos of course).

OK, I'll grant that careless students bear some of the onus for this. Most of the onus. But I still have to wonder--why is it that Logos inserts egregiously innaccurate and incomplete documentation with frighteningly poor formatting on everything that one copies and pastes from its libraries?

To be fair, the necessary information for footnotes and bibliographies is usually available from Logos versions if a writer will take the time to look for the data. So not all is lost. But anyway, here is my advice to writers citing from Logos:

As soon as you cite something from Logos, immediately delete the footnote Logos supplies. It is always hideously wrong, usually consisting of an odd mixture of bibliographic and footnote form and an unpredictable hodgepodge of incomplete and inaccurate data.
Remember that most of what Logos makes available today does not consist of original publication, but of previously published material. As such, Logos materials in most cases should be treated as reprint editions. This means that the writer should do as much as is possible to reconstruct original publication data (INCLUDING PAGE NUMBERS) so that readers can consult and verify sources.
Use common sense when documenting. Morton Smith did not write the Westminster Confession in 1996. C'mon, think a little.
Remember that using Logos does not give a pass to the writer that allows him to ignore specialized formatting associated with journal articles, dictionary entries, classical sources, etc.
Realize that the purpose of footnotes is to make documentation available to as wide a readership as possible, not just an elite group in possession of proprietary software.

Don't get me wrong. I think Logos is an enormously helpful tool that has brought a virtual library into the homes of pastors, students, and researchers who might otherwise do more minimal research. I am pleased to say that Logos has led to to quantitatively more research (and, BTW, I use it all the time). But at times it has also resulted in writers (1) who abandon brick-and-mortar libraries and thus do qualitatively more selective research and (2) who suppress documentation and banish readers from their role as critical respondents. Logos is not at fault for (1), but I wonder if they share a part of the culpability for (2).

Conclusion: Use Logos. Use Logos critically. Use adequate documetnation when using Logos. Use materials other than Logos.

MAS

Nor Let Me Ever Stray From Thee Aside

2010-12-10T15:01:00.002-05:00

These are the last words I heard sung from the mouth of trusted mentor and friend--just before he turned his back on his wife, family, and ministry in pursuit of a more fulfilling life. That was 15 years ago. I just found out that he died suddenly from a massive heart attack.

I am grieving today, but find myself praying the words of that song with greater earnestness today:

While life's dark maze I tread,

and griefs around me spread,

be thou my guide.

Bid darkness turn to day,

wipe sorrow's tears away,

nor let me ever stray from thee aside.

MAS

Another Conference...

2010-12-09T15:27:00.003-05:00

On January 7-8 of next year, the Preserving the Truth Conference: A Symposium on Biblical Separation, will be held at First Baptist Church of Troy Michigan. Two of the current faculty at Detroit Baptist Seminary (Dave Doran and Bruce Compton) will be presenting, and also two graduates (Michael Riley and Matt Postiff). I believe that this conference will help to populate an under-represented bloc in a crowded conference circuit--the bloc situated between a fundamentalism that is culturally conservative and self-consciously separatist but theologically weak, and an evangelicalism that is theologically conservative but culturally lax and insufficiently concerned with ecclesiastical separation.

The organizers of this conference are convinced that cultural conservatism, robust theology, and careful separatism can and ought to co-exist. They futher believe that centering on the cardinal issues of the gospel need not result in the shrugging off of peripheral issues such as young earth creationism, cessationism, conservative worship, and dispensationalism as expendable to the life of the church.

I heartily recommend the conference and trust that as many of you as can will attend.

MAS

Something Light...on the Use of Adjectives

2010-12-02T13:26:00.003-05:00

I just read a humorous statement in an article about a local church hosting a skateboarding event. I have no real comment to make about the event, just an observation about the peculiar use of an adjective in the article: "Mark Strong, owner of Degenerate Skateboards in Melvindale and a judge for the competition," the article reads, complains that, too often, "skaters get a bad rap.”

HMMM. Degenerate Skateboards in Melvindale.

Degenerate (definition, MW 11th Collegiate Dictionary): "Having sunk to a lower and usually corrupt and vicious state; one degraded from the normal moral standard."

At this point, is anyone still confused about why skaters "get a bad rap"?

Oh, and another one. Does anyone other than me get a distasteful mental image when they hear ice cream and chocolate cake advertised as decadent?

Decadent (definition, MW 11th Collegiate Dictionary): "Marked by decay or decline." Yes, there is a second definition, "marked by self-indulgence," but this is more appropriately used of people who eat too much cake and ice cream, not the food itself.

Yes, I realize that language evolves and all that. But some evoultion needs to slow down a bit.

Just sayin'.

On the Greatest of Vices and Virtues: Thanksgiving

2010-11-22T13:46:00.003-05:00

When one thinks of the more egregious sins in our world today (a dubious exercise to be sure) we tend to think of sins like murder, sexual sins, idolatry, and the like. Very few, I think, would place the sin of ingratitude very high on this list. The Apostle Paul, however, does not share our tendency to regard thanklessness as only mildly objectionable: in fact, ingratitude figures prominently among Paul’s many concerns. Not only does it appear on one of Paul’s sin lists (2 Tim 3:2), but it is paired with idolatry as one of the capital sins of mankind (Rom 1:21).

We should not be surprised by this. If the greatest commandment is to love God supremely (and it is: Matt 22:37–38), then the greatest sin is loving supremely gods of our own choosing (so Rom 1:21–32). And standing at the head Paul’s sad appraisal of humanity in Romans 1 is the sin of ingratitude: “They did not give thanks to him.” Paul realizes that before a man can construct alternative gods, he must first deconstruct the God that is unavoidably plain to him—the God who is there. And how does man do this? Well, Paul says, man refuses to be thankful. He does not acknowledge that God is that perfect and infinite Spirit in whom all things have their source, support and end; the God that gives to all men life and breath and everything. And thus ingratitude takes its ignoble place in Scripture as the dark vestibule to idolatry and all that is evil. How awful it is to linger in that vestibule!

In God’s common grace we Americans observe tomorrow the holiday of Thanksgiving. And we will all dutifully and rightly thank God for his provision. But there is so much more for which to thank him. Do not settle for mere token thanks for a bit of turkey and stuffing. Thank him lavishly for all he is and does on this most reflective of occasions.

MAS

A Few Thoughts About ETS

2010-11-21T22:37:00.003-05:00

I had the privilege last week of attending the national meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in Atlanta--my first time. In all it was a positive experience, seeing a great number of old acquaintances, networking with colleagues about possible publishing ventures, book shopping, and of course the sessions themselves (in that order). The following are a few random thoughts I had while there:

While some parameters are non-negotiable, there is a definite need for forums where believers with differences that fall short of heresy can come together to talk with one another instead of at and about one another. I don't think that this forum can be the local church, and yet the church profits immensely from such discussion forums. ETS is one oustanding such forum. Academic institutions are another. While my commitment to separation remains strong, I am convinced that we need to make room for such forums.
People are not often in person what they seem to be in blogs and books. This works two ways. Sometimes I am disappointed when a favorite author or blogger turns out to be arrogant, unkempt, or otherwise unpleasant. But I also find that people who are a bit acerbic when they write are actually very pleasant in person. Happily, there are more in the latter category.
Not everyone who disagrees with me is out to subvert Christianity or undermine the faith. Most seminarians and pastors eventually discover this, but some don't, so I think it's worth observing. Note that this does not mean that sincerity cancels out error. But it does mean that not everyone who disagrees with me is my enemy.
Having a robust biblical theology does not necessarily translate into having a robust systematic theology. N. T. Wright is representative here. Wright has a mastery of the storyline of the Bible that is most impressive. And yet I am troubled that the exegesis that leads to his "new perspective" on Paul is glaringly neglectful of key theological themes like, say, total depravity and perseverance. I was also disappointed that no one seemed to take note of this deficiency in the discussions.
Those who are most elusive and evasive when they speak seem to be the first to get bent out of shape when people make inferences about what they really mean. Two cases in point:

--N.T. Wright, who affirms that final justification is "in accordance with works" and "on the basis of a whole life lived," was nonetheless quite put out that he has been accused of holding to justification based on works. Is anybody else scratching their heads over this one?

--Bruce Waltke, when asked point blank whether he believes in a literal Adam, replied that he was obliged by his covenant theology to hold to at least a representative Adam...and then is aghast when people doubt his commitment to inerrancy. Hmmm.

I could say much more, but these random thoughts will have to suffice for the present. I look forward to interacting on them.

MAS

Totally Unrelated...Well, Mostly

2010-11-10T08:13:00.006-05:00

Meet Luke, our new Puggle (a deliberately crossbred pug with a beagle). We've been looking for a dog for several weeks (more accurately, our youngest son has been looking for one for several years now--we simply joined his quest). The process has been frustrating at times, mostly because of the seeming failure of most breeders and animal shelter reps to distinguish between creatures made in God's image and creatures not made in God's image.

Note that we did not adopt Luke, we bought him and now own him. He is not afforded the status of child, but rather that of an animal. As a subject of my divinely instituted domain, his continuance in our home is provisional on my good pleasure alone (the shelter people really don't like that one). And when he dies, he will not "pass into eternity" or "go to a better place" but will simply cease to exist. Glad to finally get that off my chest.

Of course, having said all that, I truly do plan to have regard for the life of my beast in accordance with biblical expectation. Because, really, isn't he kinda cute?

MAS

“Don’t Sweat the Dispensational Stuff—Eschatology Doesn’t Matter Anyway”

2010-11-02T16:50:00.002-04:00

…or so the argument goes. More formally, the argument can be expressed as a proper syllogism:

Major Premise: Dispensationalism is primarily concerned with eschatology.
Minor Premise: Eschatology is an insignificant issue in the life of a church.

Conclusion: Dispensationalism an insignificant issue in the life of a church.

Of course, the conclusion of a syllogism is only as strong as its premises. And in this case, the major premise, I believe is in serious doubt (we could quibble about the minor premise, too, but that’s not my primary concern in this post).

American dispensationalism did not emerge, as it is sometimes assumed, from the semi-cultic recesses of irregular sectarianism. James Hall Brookes, the acknowledged father of American dispensationalism was a recognized Presbyterian pastor in St. Louis, a border city during and after the American Civil War. The denominational debacles of that period are well-documented, with Northern and Southern expressions of the major denominations emerging. Presbyterianism was no exception. The tension was particularly acute in border communities, where churches were populated by people on both sides of debates over slavery, states rights, reconstruction, congressional representation, etc. And churches, which Brookes understood to be strictly spiritual communions, were shattered time and again over political and cultural concerns extraneous to the church’s mission.

The issues at hand were not, so be sure, biblically neutral issues. Issues of ethics and morality were at stake. But as Brookes was keen to observe, the lines of demarcation were not drawn primarily along ethical/moral lines, but on geographical, political, socioeconomic, and cultural lines. Brookes was convinced that such lines of demarcation were inappropriate in the church. There was once a day, Brookes reasoned, in which civil and cultic concerns were amalgamated, but such a theocratic arrangement, such as marked Israel under the Mosaic economy, no longer existed. Rather, the church had been established by God as a strictly spiritual institution with no political mandate, no social mandate, and no cultural mandate.

As a result of Brookes’s disillusionment with what he thus perceived to be a faulty ecclesiology in the partisan denominationalism of his day, he stepped back from the denominational norm and organized his church around a mission that was sharply distinct from the mission of Israel. In short, Brookes adopted dispensationalism because of a distinction between Israel and the church, and specifically, a distinction between the respective missions of Israel and the Church.

That eschatology became a major feature of American dispensationalism cannot, of course, be denied. But to suggest that dispensationalism exists merely to defend pretribulational premillennialism is neither historically nor theologically true. And so, to rewrite the syllogism from Brookes’s point of view, one might well argue that

Major Premise: Dispensationalism is primarily concerned with ecclesiology, esp. the mission of the church.
Minor Premise: The mission of the church is a significant issue in the life of a church.

Conclusion: Dispensationalism is a significant issue in the life of the church.

MAS

MACP 2010

2010-10-27T09:09:00.002-04:00

The session recordings and notes from the 2010 Mid-America Conference on Preaching held here at Detroit Baptist Seminary are available here. I was very pleased with the conference overall, and found Dave Doran's plenary sessions to be focused and profitable--a reasoned and careful overview/critique of the missional church model.

For my part I contributed a presentation with notes) on a modified (dispensational) form of two-kingdom theology as an alternative to the missional model in delineating the response of the believer individually and the church institutionally to social concerns.

Feel free to interact. I plan to address in the next couple of weeks a few spin-off posts addressing some less-than-fully-explored concerns raised in my session.

MAS

As the Father has sent me so send I you.

2010-10-07T09:55:00.002-04:00

In doing research on the missional church I am stunned by the glib way that missional proponents use John 20:21 as their guiding text: "As the Father has sent me, I am sending you." The verse is rarely explained or set into context, just offered as a tacit proof text that the mission of the church is coextensive with the mission of God. Three quick observations:

Exegetically, this is an enormous amount of freight to pack into the word "as." Clearly a point of comparison is being made, but the comparison is far from clear. Most likely the similarity is that of the action only. God sent Christ; God sent the apostles. To conclude that this tiny word "as" must necessarily include in it comprehensive identity of the mission of Christ with the mission of the people of God seems a real stretch. And to conclude (as some do) that this is an extension of functional Trinitarianism frankly reeks of heresy.
Practically, it seems obvious that the missional understanding cannot hold. The church is not making substitutionary atonement (!); not demonstrating divine lordship over wind, waves, disease, and death; not offering a Kingdom (certainly, at least, not in the sense that Christ was offering it--as King). The distinction of the parties being sent alone seems adequate to topple the missional understanding.
Historically, for all the strenuous denials by proponents that the missional model is in no way related to the social gospel, I find an overwhelmingly curious resemblance of the missional use of John 20:21 to Charles Sheldon's use of 2 Peter 2:21 as supplying the mission of all believers to follow "in his steps."

There is much to criticize in the missional model. Its glib use of proof texts is a primary one.

MAS

Musical Interlude

2010-09-23T13:29:00.005-04:00

I've been neglectful of my blog as I prepare for two upcoming conferences, the Fall Conference & Pastors' Day at Central Baptist Seminary in Plymouth, Minnesota (Oct 11-12) and the Mid-America Conference on Preaching here at Detroit Baptist Seminary (Oct 21-22). But I've found a little time to carve out time to report on an interesting read that I'm enjoying right now: Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value by Julian Johnson.

It's a fascinating read in its own right but also because of its informing role in worship debates. Johnson begins with a very forceful "rejection of the supposed neutrality of music implied by an approach that deals with music only as an empty sign for other things," an approach that is not only "inadequate," but "perverse"--a matter of "ethics." It is no more a shoulder-shrugging matter of taste than the statement that "women are less intelligent than men." Yep, he actually says that on p. 11.

This premise is, of course, at the center of the worship debate, so it is interesting to see a secular writer argue this way. But what follows is where it gets interesting. Johnson argues that prior to the nineteenth century, music functioned primarily as an art form designed to create distance and foster reflection. The immediate might be in view, but never, ironically, immediately. Music served to promote a distant or detached contemplation of the immediate. The classical tradition, Johnson claims, continues this understanding.

Since the commercialization of music in the nineteenth century, music's value as an art has diminished. It has become a commodity. Its function has become more immediate and social. It has no standard for evaluation except the personal tastes of a million self-absorbed individuals. Johnson is quick to point out that this modern idea is not really true; instead it is just a popular perception. But laying aside his critique for the present, I find this a fascinating appraisal. If he's right, then music written in the era of classical hymnody was designed primarily as a vehicle for reflection, affection, and transcendence, and its excellence based on its success in achieving these. Gospel and contemporary music is designed as a vehicle of demonstration, emotion, and immanence, and its excellence based on its success in achieving these.

All this must, of course, be taken as so much generalization. But if it is even slightly true, is it any wonder that we have worship wars?

MAS

On Churches Burning Stuff

2010-09-09T05:56:00.003-04:00

Well, it's unanimous: Terry Jones and his Dove World Outreach Center are wrong to stage a Koran burning on 9/11. And I agree with the majority...to a point. But here's the thing that bothers me. Back when I was a kid, I remember churches doing stuff like this regularly--except that then they were burning new age materials, romance novels, rock music, and playing cards. And the response of the broad church and community was mild amusement. So what's the big deal today? What makes Koran-burning different?

It could be that the media-burnings in 1985 were more in line with Acts 19. Maybe. True, the call back then was for Christians to root out false teaching, smut, and questionable entertainment from their own homes. But let's be honest--the real reason for the public burning was to publically declare war on the agents of sin: Bantam Books, Hoyle, and RCA Records.

It could be that we are concerned today about the effect of such a public display on our missionaries and, consequently, on the advance of the gospel. I'm there. I've got a lot of good friends out there in harm's way, and I do understand the effects that a Koran-burning could have on them.

But at the end of the day, I'm convinced that the ultimate difference between burning romance novels in 1985 and burning the Koran today, and the thing that gets the Attorney General, the Secretary of State, and others involved, is this: Americans are afraid of Islam. We were not afraid in 1985 that Bantam Books was going to scuttle the American economy or muster an army to start killing us. We weren't afraid that Ozzy Osbourne was going to graduate from biting heads off of bats to removing heads from the American population. But we are afraid of Islam. And that's why the majority are opposed to what Terry Jones and his Dove World Outreach Center are planning.

Now make no mistake. I think that Jones's response is naive. It's counter-productive. It lacks all biblical warrant. But at the end of the day, the thing that really bothers me is not that someone is burning copies of the Koran. In fact, I'd like to see America stiffen its collective spine to push back at the vicious threat of radical Islam. No, what bothers me is that a church is burning copies of the Koran. Jones and his "church" have slipped into a political/cultural arena that is outside the purview of the church. And when the church tries to overstep its God-given purview, it always does so poorly, and impugns the name of Christ.

That's my concern with churches burning stuff.

MAS

Did God Die on the Cross?

2010-08-31T09:35:00.002-04:00

In the past month I've been asked a peculiar question some three times: "Did God die when Jesus died on the cross?" Why this question is peaking right now is elusive to me (and maybe it's just a coincidence), but it is apparently a point of some debate, and worthy of reflection. It also seems to be a good occasion for highlighting the inadequacy of biblical theology in addressing such thorny questions.

It is a real disappointment to me that many of the major systematic theologies do not address this concern (Grudem is a notable exception to this generalization--see below). I'm further disappointed that some of the more prominent explanations I have found are in fact hesitant to harmonize the raw biblical data, and are satisfied instead to relegate the problem to the box of biblical enigmas. Note, for instance, the following:

John MacArthur, in a Q/A session at his church (and, yes, I do make allowance for the fact that this is an old comment made extemporaneously), answered the question whether God died on the cross by saying, "We have to say yes. Because Jesus died on the cross and Jesus was God. And, death, basically, means what? Separation from God. Was Jesus separated from God? 'My God, My God, why hast thou what? Forsaken me?' He was separated from God. He died. And, the Bible says He died, over and over, and over, and over, and over, doesn’t it? He died. He died. He died, and He was Jesus Christ. You cannot separate Jesus Christ’s humanness from His deity. You cannot cut Him up. He was Jesus Christ, the God-man and He died. So, yes, God died on the cross. Now, how you separate one member of the Trinity from the rest, I don't know, but I do not really worry about it because if God expected me to know it, He would have told me, or given me the ability to think it through, and I haven't. All I know is, He did die on the cross. He was separated from the Father, and, yet, one with the Father, and I don't understand that, and I am not going to be worried about not understanding it."
D. A. Carson opines similarly in his commentary on Matthew (p. 579): "It is better to take the words [of Matt 27:46] at face value: Jesus is conscious of being abandoned by his Father. For one who knew the intimacy of Matthew 11:27, such abandonment must have been agony and for the same reason it is inadequate to hypothesize that Jesus felt abandoned but was not truly abandoned.... If we ask in what ontological sense the Father and the Son are here divided, the answer must be that we do not know because we are not told."

Now I certainly respect the fact that these outstanding thinkers are unwilling to speculate on issues that they have not investigated thoroughly. That's a mark of humility. But at the same time, I wonder whether the best course of action for the church is to lay out Scriptures that seem to be in conflict with the whole counsel of God and make no attempt at resolution. Our theology must correspond at all times with the Bible, to be sure, but it must also cohere internally. And when incoherence arises, we cannot let the incoherence lie. Instead, we must press for resolution, asking and answering questions such as

How can we harmonize the death of Christ with the fact that as immortal God, Christ necessarily possessed "indestructible life" (Heb 7:16)?
How could the immutable perichoresis of the Trinity (John 14:10-11) survive ontological separation without God ceasing to be what he eternally is?
How can God in Christ be said to lay down and especially to take up his life (John 2:19, 10:17-18) if, in fact, he is dead?
On the other hand, how can Christ's death atone for the many without the impeccability and infinitude that his Godness supplies?
What exactly would death look like for God? Annihilation? Loss of consciousness as God? a Trinitarian breach of identity?

The answers to such questions are not easy. But we must answer them if (in this case) we are to keep from confounding the two natures of Christ and allowing his humanity to overwhelm his deity. Christ as God was independent; Christ as man was hungry and tired. Christ as God was omniscient; Christ as man grew in wisdom and even late in his ministry lacked intuitive knowledge of certain facts; Christ as God cannot be tempted; Christ as man was tempted most sorely; and Christ as God is immortal, while Christ as man could and did die. His person remained undivided and his natures remained unconfounded.

The details of this arrangement are surely difficult, and on occasions we need to say, "I don't understand." But offering interpretations that are hopelessly conflicted and then opining that "this can't be understood" seems reckless and antithetical to the whole point of revelation. It's the kind of "stuff" that tends to result in heresy. Much more satisfying and prudent is Wayne Grudem's assessment:

In his human nature, Jesus died (Luke 23:46; 1 Cor. 15:3). But with respect to his divine nature, he did not die, but was able to raise himself from the dead (John 2:19, 10:17-18; Heb.7:16).... It is not correct to say that Jesus' divine nature died, or could die, if "die" means a cessation of activity, a cessation of consciousness, or a diminution of power. Nevertheless, by virtue of union with Jesus’ human nature, his divine nature somehow tasted something of what it was like to go through death. The person of Christ experienced death. Moreover it seems that Jesus' divine nature had somehow to participate in the bearing of wrath against sin that was due to us (though Scripture nowhere explicitly affirms this). Therefore, even though Jesus' divine nature did not actually die, Jesus went through the experience of death as a whole person, and both human and divine natures somehow shared in that experience.

MAS

May God Be "With" You, Part 2

2010-08-24T15:41:00.002-04:00

Having opined in the last post that prayers for God to "be with" people are often little more than cliché prayer talk attended, if at all, by dubious or even spurious theology, we turn now to the proper expectation of God "being with" his people. It can be appropriate to pray for God to "be with" us, so long as we pray, as Paul says, with understanding.

(1) We made the case in the previous post that God's presence uniformly "fills heaven and earth" (Jer 23:24), extending even to the netherworld (Ps 139:8-9). [Aside: R. C. Sproul makes a sound case that the greatest horror of hell is not God's absence, but his presence--see his The Truth of the Cross (Orlando: Reformation Trust, 2007), pp. 157-158.] But there is a sense in which God is "in heaven" (Matt 6:9) in a way he is not on earth. He is "with" and "in" believers in a way that he is not with and in unbelievers (John 14:17). How can this be? The answer lies in the peculiar manifestation of his presence. God's presence is manifested gloriously in heaven (Isaiah 6:1-7), but is shrouded elsewhere. His sanctifying paraclesis is manifest in believers but absent in unbelievers. And it would seem valid to suggest that this manifestation of the Spirit may be intensified in believers--not so that they have a mystical "sense of the divine," but so that they exhibit more intensely the effects of his sanctifying work.

(2) More specifically, the Scripture writers speak of God "being with" believers in terms of a heightened awareness of God's presence. A timely recollection of God's gracious and righteous presence may motivate a believer (Matt 28:20) or comfort him (Ps 139). Meditation on God's continual observation of our day-to-day affairs can motivate proper industry (Col 3:22). Reminders of God's providential presence in effecting his own decree can impel ministry (Acts 18:10). And so forth. Such realizations of the divine presence need not be described in terms of mystical or existential ecstasy (though the affections surely may be stirred by such knowledge), but in rather ordinary, cognitive terms. I know God is there, and this is eminently satisfying. Not surprisingly, we find prayers to this end contained in Scripture (e.g., Rom 15:33; 2 Thess 3:16).

(3) God's being "with" believers, particularly in the OT arrangement, seems to bespeak God's blessing in tacit approval of obedience. God is "with" believers granting them success. Multiplied statements such as "Do X and I will be with you" or "He did X and the Lord was with him" reflect this understanding. Such statements are more prominent in the OT economy because the obedience/blessing rubric is covenantal, and thus a matter of divine promise and obligation. This does not mean, however, that similar requests for God to "be with" someone today are out of order. God, we find, is "with" those who think and act in obedience to God (Phil 4:9) and draws near to those who draw near to him (Jas 4:8)--not in a literal or mystical sense, but by bestowing his gracious favor in response to obedience. Prayers to this effect, while more common in the OT (Exod 18:19; 1 Chron 22:11, 16; Amos 5:14), are surely appropriate today.

(4) Sometimes God's being "with" believers in the biblical record reflects God's exertion of supernatural influence so that they are able to lead the theocratic nation (1 Sam 18:12), perform miracles (Acts 10:38), or to act as conduits of divine revelation. Requests for God to "be with" us in this sense must be tempered by one's general understanding of revelatory and other miraculous gifts today.

To conclude, then, God's "being with" believers, when used properly, is a rich theological idea of considerable merit. May God give us the grace to purge our prayers of vacuous prayers for God to "be with" his people, and instead to pray such prayers with Scripture-informed understanding.

MAS

May the Lord Be “With” You, Part 1

2010-08-23T16:52:00.003-04:00

Last Sunday at church my pastor insightfully fingered the all-to-common tendency for believers to mindlessly add color to prayers by asking God to “be with” someone. We all know it would be improper to lead out in small group prayer by saying, “God’s here’s my prayer list: Frank, Jennifer, Andrea, Jimmy. Amen.” So we spruce it up: “Lord, please be with Frank in the hospital tonight. And Lord, be especially near to Jennifer at the funeral tomorrow. Also, be with Andrea in her car as she travels to Florida tomorrow. And little Jimmy—please be with him too, wherever he is. Amen.” And somehow we imagine that by letting God know we are personally privy to each situation and adding a plea for God’s “withness,” our prayers have become acceptable. Oh, me.

Now this is not to say that prayers for God to “be with” or “be near” people are uniformly evil. After all, such prayers are common in Bible (see, e.g., 1 Kings 1:37; Rom 15:33; 2 Thess 3:16; etc.). Further, God’s promises to be “with” or “near” people are described in Scripture as highly motivational and encouraging (Ps 73:23, 28; 91:15; Isa 43:2; etc.).

So is it ever right to ask God to be “with” or “near” people today? Certainly it will not do to make such a request mindlessly. Sad to say, my pastor was dead on when he discerned that we often mean little or nothing by such requests. They’re just prayer filler—and that’s a major problem. So if we are to make this request it must be laced with proper understanding. And here lies the crux of the problem. What does it mean for God to “be with” people, and how should we expect God to answer such requests?

The answer is not short, so I’ll start today with what it doesn’t mean. More later on what it does.

First, it goes without saying that divine proximity is constant. God fills all of his universe with the whole of his being. We can’t expect him to answer our prayers by appearing in some location where he is currently absent. Or by increasing his presence to more completely fill a room or a human heart. Don’t laugh. I think some people actually think that.

Second, we should not expect God to make an immediate, personal manifestation of himself (whether sensory or extra-sensory) in answer to prayers for his nearness. I recently stumbled across a report of an experimental “God helmet” that stimulates a religious experience by applying magnets to the brain, creating the illusion of a “presence” in the room. Weird. Really Weird. And yet I’m not sure that this “God helmet” is all that far removed from the expectation that some have when they pray for God to be “near.” In fact, there is nothing in Scripture to suggest that God’s nearness is a mystically “felt” presence that resembles the chemical effects of magnets, alcohol, hallucinogens, or yoga. And no, God is not in the little flashing lights on the back of your eyelids when you squeeze your eyes too tightly in prayer; nor is he in the corresponding lightheadedness you feel. That’s the merger of physiology and an active imagination.

But it must mean something for God to "be with" us. Next post: What we can we expect God to do in response for our requests for him to “be with” us?

MAS

Faith As Disposition

2010-08-13T08:32:00.002-04:00

A chronic tension in the debate over the role of faith to regeneration in the theological ordo salutis is the issue of chronology. Despite the insistence from both sides of the debate that the issue is one of logical rather than temporal succession, many hearers just don't get it because they view regeneration and faith as parallel events: God gives life [event 1] and I say a prayer [event 2]. And if one of these events is causally prior to the other, that event cannot possibly escape being chronologically prior. One event cannot cause another event unless it precedes it temporally.

The debate can, I believe, be advanced by the realization that while regeneration is pure event, faith is not. Certainly faith issues in events (I call on God to save me, I get baptized, I attend church, etc.), but it is more fundamentally a disposition. The Christian is a believer who has faith as a fundamental attribute of his very nature, and as a result necessarily does acts of faith.

It is this realization more than any other (together with a reading of John 1:12-13, 1 Corinthians 2:14-16, and the whole of 1 John) that tipped me into the camp that sees regeneration as logically causitive of faith. Act follows from disposition and disposition from nature, thus a new nature is necessary to faith. In regeneration God makes a new creature, or more to the point, he makes a believer.

In this scenario the temporal gap disappears. God doesn't create a new man (event) who calls out to him in faith a nano-second later (event). Nor, conversely, do a person say a prayer (event), to which God responds by giving life (event). Instead, an event produces a disposition: God creates a believer.

MAS

Your Boasting Is Evil...Or Is It?

2010-08-12T09:06:00.004-04:00

Rick Warren has gotten some negative press time since he twittered last night, “I challenge any church in America to match the spiritual maturity, godliness & commitment of any 500 members of Saddleback.” He's apparently had some second thoughts about that comment, because he has since removed it. I'll give due credit to him for that. But it brings up a question: Is it ever OK to boast?

It is easy to say that pride is always wrong--after all, God hates pride (Prov 8:13), pride leads to destruction and disgrace (Prov 11:2; 16:18), and God resists the proud (Jas 4:6). But the biblical witness does not seem to treat the idea of pride with uniform condemnation. God boasts in his people (Ps 47:5); Paul regularly boasts in the churches and his converts (2 Cor 7:4, 14; 1 Thess 2:19); the churches boast in their leaders (2 Cor 1:14; 5:12); we are encouraged to take pride in our work (Gal 6:4-5); and boasting in one's family is also mentioned in a favorable light (Prov 17:6). So what gives?

First of all, it must be noted that there is no single Greek or Hebrew term for pride. There are some terms that are consistently used negatively and reflect in the English translations with more negative English terms like "arrogance," "haughtiness," or "conceit." Others can be used positively, and reflect in the English translations with more positive English terms like "glory," "rejoicing," "satisfaction," "exultation," "dignity," or as "taking pride" in something. The Greek kauxaomai word family (59 NT instances), particularly, is often used positively, with about a 2 to 1 ratio of positive to negative uses (it's hard to be specific, because Paul's sarcastic boasting in 2 Corinthians makes the count a bit tricky).

There also seem to be contextual factors that color NT usage. Boasting in something evil is, of course, wrong. So is taking personal glory for things rightly attributable to another (and esp. to God). But most critical to the issue at hand (Paul's boasting vs. Rick's boasting) is the matter of comparative or competitive boasting. This seems to be the watershed. One may be rightly proud of his work, his family, his church, or his pastor, but crosses a line when this pride results in comparison and elevation (and corresponding denigration). I am particularly drawn to Galatians 6:4-5 in this regard--a passage that I have commended to my two sons because it captures this balance well with respect to one's personal work ethic, a.k.a., "taking pride" in one's work:

NASB: But each one must examine his own work, and then he will have reason for boasting in regard to himself alone, and not in regard to another. For each one will bear his own load.

NIV: Each one should test his own actions. Then he can take pride in himself, without comparing himself to somebody else, for each one should carry his own load.

NLT: Pay careful attention to your own work, for then you will get the satisfaction of a job well done, and you won't need to compare yourself to anyone else. For we are each responsible for our own conduct.

So is it wrong to boast? Yes and no. The Bible is filled with examples of proper boasting, but also warns against improper boasting. And it is very easy to cross that line.

MAS

Crossway ESV Bible Atlas and Noah's Flood

2010-08-06T15:02:00.003-04:00

OK, so I stopped blogging, but I needed to rant about something. Not a good way to go about blogging, but anyway...

I just unwrapped a copy of the new ESV Bible Atlas (Crossway, 2010) and after scanning the manditory dust jacket blurbs, introductions, and table of contents, I decided to give the first chapter a quick read. The chapter, entitled "Before Abraham," is an 11-page survey of historical and archaeological data covering the historical period from Creation to Abraham. Makes sense to start a Bible atlas here.

But amazingly, after a half page of introduction and a glossy inset about the location of the Garden of Eden, the Bible is summarily set aside until reference is made to the table of the nations in Genesis 10. Now this might make sense if there is nothing in Genesis 4-9 to inform cartography. But in fact the single most significant cartographic event in earth history occurs in those chapters: Noah's Flood. But there is no mention of Flood. Or of Noah (Gilgamesh gets a nod, but not Noah). In fact, assuming that the Scripture index is comprehensive, there is no reference to Genesis 4-9 in the entire volume.

I've been uneasy for some time about how the ESV and esp. the ESV Study Bible snub certain features of my theology (esp. dispensationalism, cessationism, and young earth creationism), but the sheer overtness of this one caught me by surprise.

How is it possible to fill eleven 9x12 pages on the history and archaeology of the pre-Abrahamic world and not mention Noah's Flood? Anyone?

Yes, But What About Leprechauns?

2010-03-04T09:12:00.007-05:00

With another holiday coming around, the Christian blogosphere braces for another round of debates about the pagan trappings associated with many of our holidays. The debate has many versions: the Christmas tree version, the Easter Bunny version, the Jack-o-Lantern version. I'm sure I missed some. But the question is pretty basic: can a Christian participate in a practice that has traces of paganism interwoven into the fabric of its history?

Perhaps I'm naive, but it seems to me that Paul gives us a pretty helpful place to start in 1 Corinthians 8-10. Here the question is whether eating meat offered to idols constitutes participation in the idolatry interwoven in the history of the meat. And Paul's answer is a very emphatic "That depends." He supplies three scenarios: (1) eating meat in the pagan temple, (2) eating this meat far away from the temple precincts with people who think that eating meat sacrificed to idols promotes idolatry, and (3) eating this meat far away from the temple precincts with people who don't think that eating meat sacrificed to idols promotes idolatry. Here's Paul's response:

(1) In the first situation, the cultural practice of eating meat is so unavoidably and inextricably tied to idolatrous values that the practice itself cannot possibly avoid promoting idolatry. In this case, the practice is wrong (1 Cor 8:10–13; 10:14–22).

(2) In the second scenario, the cultural practice of eating meat is perceived to be an endorsement of idolatrous values--so much so that it will potentially cause another to embrace those wicked values (1 Cor 10:28–29) and so to reject Christ (or tumble into apostasy a la Rom 14:19-21). In this case the practice is dangerous and potentially destructive, and is thus for all practical purposes wrong.

(3) In the third scenario, the cultural practice of eating meat is substantially detached from idolatrous values. In this case Paul actually encourages the practice for the sake of the gospel (1 Cor 10:25-27 cf., I think, 1 Cor 9:22-23).

The Bible doesn't give explicit instructions about Christmas trees or Easter Bunnies or Jack-o-Lanterns or Leprechauns. But it does give us everything necessary for life and godliness. And in this case, it seems plausible to substitute for "eating meat" any of these cultural practices in order to discern God's moral expectations.

MAS

Phil Johnson on Miracles

2010-02-08T08:19:00.005-05:00

I've been pretty delinquent on my blog of late, but I'm reviving it to link to an outstanding post by Phil Johnson distinguishing miracle from providence. Probably more incisive even than this distinction, though, is his careful distinction of miracle from superstition:

Superstition is irrational awe or fear of the unknown, resulting credulity regarding the supernatural. In this case, people's superstition was purposely manipulated and intensified by the preacher's deliberate blurring of any distinction between God's supernatural intervention by miracles and His providential control over everything that happens.

A miracle is a particular kind of sign—an unmistakable display of supernatural power calculated to confront unbelief and provoke awe—with the purpose of authenticating an agent of divine revelation. True miracles are not merely arbitrary displays of God's power; they are manifestly supernatural and are themselves a form of revelation.

My mentor in systematic theology, Rolland McCune, used to lament in class that the mission field has ruined many a good cessationist. This used to bother me. Couldn't it be that God acts miraculously in regions of the world where people are more apt to welcome miracles as miracles? Maybe. But I've grown very dubious. Instead, I'm becoming more and more convinced that the difference is not in what God is doing, but in the worldview that interprets what God is doing.

Americans, and especially late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Americans, were so steeped in rationalism that the category of miracle all but disappeared—even from the Bible. Science filled all the "gaps." This sentiment has eased a bit, perhaps, in the last few decades, but certainly has not disappeared.

In third-world contexts where rationalism never "took," however, science does not fill the gaps. God does. Or perhaps I should say the gods do. It is easy for missionaries (and others), upon leaving their rationalist world behind, to discover a certain superiority in this more primitive outlook. After all, it is extremely refreshing to teach about creation, the flood, the virgin birth, and the resurrection (etc.) and find no resistance at all to the miraculous element in these biblical events. But lurking in this ready acceptance is not always simple biblicism. Sometimes this ready acceptance reflects an older, but equally serious problem—superstitionism. The superstitious worldview does not reject miracles; instead, it multiplies them, seeing miracles where there are none. And it is here that Phil makes perhaps his best point:

It's not necessary to invent a "miraculous" explanation for every extraordinary turn of events in order to give God due credit for accomplishing His will in human affairs. In fact, it downgrades the biblical concept of miracles to imagine that everything unusual qualifies as a "miracle."

Tightening the standards for miracle to include only those undeniable, unmistakable events that are "manifestly supernatural" is not a signal of weak faith. As Phil notes, The faith that sees the hand of God in the natural outworking of divine providence (and understands that God is sovereign over every detail of everything that happens) is not a lesser faith than the kind of belief that can only see God at work when He intervenes in spectacular, supernatural, and miraculous ways. Nor is this tightened definition of miracle fundamentally a capitulation to deism. Instead, it is an attempt to faithfully reflect a robust biblical supernaturalism that remains sensitive to protecting the category of miracle from theological dilution.

Thanks, Phil, for an outstanding post.

MAS

"Do Not Suppose That I Have Come to Bring Peace to the Earth": On the Suppression of the Gospel at Christmas

2009-12-16T08:09:00.004-05:00

One of the most troubling mis-translations in the history of English Bible translation (at least in terms of its popular acceptance and impact) is the King James rendering of Luke 2:14 as "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men." Despite the fact that nearly every modern translation has corrected this unfortunate translation, properly narrowing the scope of Christ's ministry to bringing peace "to people on whom his favor rests," the universally conciliatory rendering found in the KJV is etched on the minds of millions of the English-speaking world. Christmas, it is concluded, is primarily about tranquility and harmony everywhere.

Lest I be unduly critical of the KJV, I must concede that this problem is not limited to the modern English-speaking world. It seems, in fact, that this idea stretches all the way back to the first century. On at least two occasions we find Christ himself correcting this very misconception:

Matthew 10:34--Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.

and

Luke 12:51--Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division.

What is my point? My point is that the Christmas holiday, which has come to be understood by the world at large as a time for suppressing religious differences and pursuing peace at all costs, is actually one uniquely suited for gently but firmly pushing the antithesis of the Christian worldview among its opponents. For earnestly reminding the unbeliever that he is enjoying God's gifts without acknowledging his person. For compassionately informing the unbeliever, in Isaiah's words, that "there is no peace for the wicked."

Hopefully I've added enough adverbs in the previous to prove that I am not understanding Christ to say that we should be pulling swords in the advance of the Gospel. But if swords are drawn against us as we give out the Gospel, we need not imagine that we have somehow failed. Indeed, this may well be an indication that we have succeeded. Because Christmas, like the Gospel, brings peace only to those on whom his favor rests. All other peace is imaginary. In a very real sense, Christmas should be as offensive as the Gospel itself, because Christmas is the Gospel.

MAS

How My New IPod Is Salvaging Christmas

2009-12-14T08:07:00.002-05:00

Pop Quiz: Where can you go to find an ecumenical hodgepodge of postmillennial liberal theology, liberation theology, veneration of Mary, strange doctrines of angels, and just about every known 4th-5th-century Christological heresy?

A. A meeting of the World Council of Churches
B. The annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature
C. The Church Fathers
D. The CD collection of Christmas Music in my living room
E. All of the Above.

Answer: E. All of the Above

My wife and I got ourselves a new IPod for Christmas--our first. I know, I know, you're all thinking two things: (1) Wow, is he ever behind the times! and (2) It's not Christmas yet! Unfortunately, I can't do much about the first problem, but I'll explain the latter. Our favorite music of the year is Christmas music, so we graciously allowed ourselves an exemption from the usual rigidity of the "wait until Christmas morning" routine in order to fill the home with the sounds of the season. I had no idea how much of a delight it would be--not just because of the pure, crisp sounds that accompany the absence of any media (tapes, CDs, etc.), but also because of our newfound ability to be selective in the songs we hear from a given album.

Christmas has become, unfortunately, the most ecumenical and syncretistic of all holidays, and nowhere is this trend more glaring than in Christmas music (and I'm just talking about the self-consciously religious variety). The pooled efforts of all the "Christian" denominations and sects, while successfully producing some of the most beautiful of all music, has also given us some very bad theology. Worse, this bad theology has been carefully preserved in a popular form of sacrosanct existentialist traditionalism that one opposes only at great self-peril. (I can already hear the ad hominem cries of "YOU GRINCH, YOU!!" in the comment section.)

At any rate, I'd like to encourage all who might be reading this today to exercise theological discernment in using this IPod function, and, for those of you who select music in your churches, to persevere in the painstaking but valuable exercise of eliminating verse 2, or verses 3 and 5, or maybe even whole songs from your traditional repertoire, and then replacing them from a very large pool of less familiar, but more orthodox pieces.

Let's work hard this year to close the loophole of theological ecumenism that survives in the form of traditional Christmas music.

MAS

Christocentrism--A Critical Muse

2009-11-17T14:31:00.005-05:00

I just finished reading an interesting article by Dane Ortlund, "Christocentrism: An Asymmetrical Trinitarianism?" in the new issue of Themelios that came out today. Ortlund's thesis is that

Christocentrism can happily co-exist with orthodox trinitarianism because (1) it is only through Christ that we know of the Trinity, and (2) the Trinity itself is Christ-centered. As we view the Trinity through Christ and Christ through the Trinity, we find orthodox trinitarianism and Christocentrism not only compatible but mutually reinforcing.

The article is extremely well researched and by-and-large contains little that is particularly objectionable. It's impossible to argue with Ortlund's observations that Christ is the revelatory gateway to the Godhead and, in the NT at least, the most "glorified" member of the Trinity. Christ is also the source of our salvation, the head of the Church, and the exemplary model for the believer's sanctification.

Despite the preceding, I remain a bit unsettled about the idea of elevating any one member of the Trinity over the others. Further, I wonder whether the specific choice of Christ as the center always says good things about the state of one's religious expression. After all, there have been many "Christ-centered" figures in the history of the Church, and they are not a monolithic lot.

The following is not so much a critique of Ortlund so much as it is a cautionary supplement that suggests reasons to pause before embracing all manifestations of Christocentrism as valid.

Theologically, Christocentrism can sometimes (though certainly not always) point to an unhealthy emphasis of God as immanent over God as transcendent. Christ is the immanent member of the Trinity--the one who discloses God, mediates between God and man, and makes us partakers of the divine nature. But there is also a great and terrible and awful God, made known most vividly in the pre-Christian era, that must not be forgotten.
Soteriologically, Christocentrism or Crucicentrism can sometimes (though certainly not always) point to an unhealthy emphasis of redemption as the centerpiece of God's plan for the universe. While redemption certainly plays a significant role in God's plan for the universe, it is not all that God is doing.
Anthropologically, and related to the preceding, Christocentrism can sometimes (though certainly not always) point to a latent anthropocentrism. That is, it can at times focus on what God is doing for me and for my fellow man in all of his immanence and redemptive energy to the exclusion of what God is and does irrespective of his creatures.
Hermeneutically, Christocentrism can sometimes (though certainly not always) point to a faulty hermeneutic. Frankly speaking, the Old Testament is not about Christ. It is about God's people being rightly related to their holy God. Certainly, we find anticipation in the Old Testament period about something greater, but it is a great anachronistic leap to move from this latent anticipation to the conclusion that the Old Testament is about Christ.

My point, I again stress, is not to denounce Ortlund's article as peculiarily flawed. He makes some sage observations that are worth our attention. I'd like to think that its function in this essay is more as a catalyst for additional thought than as a whipping boy for criticism. And certainly I have no interest in diminishing Christ in any way (me genoito!). But at the same time I think that there is room for some pause before embracing every Christocentric impulse that we encounter.

MAS

Choose Your Seminary Wisely

2009-10-21T08:39:00.003-04:00

This morning I awoke to read an informative but a bit disturbing blog entry by Jonathan Leeman, over at 9Marks, entitled "Beware Your Seminary Professors." The post was a sad one to read--not for its inaccuracy, but for the very fact that it had to be written. In it we are warned, among other things, of

professors chosen for their skills at research and writing rather than for their character.
professors chosen for their exemplary performance in the classroom rather than their involvement in the church.
professors infatuated with discovering something new rather than with mastering biblical orthodoxy.
professors who are not qualified to be elders and bear no resemblance to elders.
professors who are accountable to no one, and especially not to the church.
professors who extend Christain recognition to apostates.
professors totally unconcerned with the spiritual maturity of their students.
professors who are ambivalent about the gospel.

I am very concerned about all of these unfortunate realities, but rather than warn young men about the deficient professors that they have, I'd like to suggest that a more preemptive suggestion--don't choose a seminary with professors like these!

MAS

My Father's World

2009-10-12T09:52:00.007-04:00

Heav'n above is softer blue,
Earth around is sweeter green;
Something lives in every hue
Christless eyes have never seen.

Birds with gladder songs o'erflow,
Flowers with deeper beauties shine,
Since I know, as now I know,
I am His, and He is mine.

I used to think that this hymn text, written by one George W. Robinson, was much more existential fluff than substance. Is the Christian's sky really more blue? His garden greener? Isn't common grace,...well, common?

But the more I've studied apologetics, the more sense this song makes. When an unbeliever enjoys nature he does so illicitly and with little comprehension of why he is doing so. He is, as Greg Bahnsen says, "borrowing capital" from the Christian worldview and incorporating it into his own sorry model. He is snatching one of God's perfect gifts and consuming it greedily without any regard for the giver.

The believer, on the other hand, takes God's gifts gratefully from the hand of God and recognizes the giver in the gift. All that he receives from God makes perfect sense, because our gracious God provides all the necessary preconditions for intelligibility in any event, circumstance, discipline, or pursuit.

When I take my boys hunting, the fall colors are no more brilliant for us than for anyone else, but the awareness of God above allows us to see something in every hue that Christless eyes have truly never seen. For, as another hymnwriter has opined,

This is my Father's world, and to my listening ears
all nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres.
This is my Father's world: I rest me in the thought
of rocks and trees, of skies and seas;
his hand the wonders wrought.

This is my Father's world. The birds their carols raise;
the morning light, the lily white, declare their maker's praise.
This is my Father's world: he shines in all that's fair;
in the rustling grass I hear him pass;
he speaks to me everywhere.

And most especially--

This is my Father's world. O let me ne'er forget
that though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.
This is my Father's world. The battle is not done;
Jesus who died shall be satisfied,
and earth and heav'n be one.

MAS

Ryken and Functional Equivalency

2009-09-30T13:12:00.010-04:00

The blog world is abuzz today with rave reviews of Leland Ryken’s new book, Understanding English Bible Translation: The Case for an Essentially Literal Approach, and I must cede to formal equivalence theorists their day in the sun. Of course, if you’ve paid attention to my blog you’ll recognize from my choice of translations that I’m not completely convinced of the thesis of Ryken’s book. My position seems a bit out-of-vogue in today’s milieu, what with the fiasco of the TNIV and Zondervan’s public humiliation on the gender issue. I’ll frankly concede my disappointment with the avant-garde path that the NIV has taken in the past few years, and am hopeful that its chastened translators will return to the task of accurate translation rather than political expediency.

That being said, I remain convinced of the propriety of the functional equivalence theory of translation--not because it is simpler or easier to read (though it is), but because I have become convinced that this theory has the potential to produce the very most accurate translations. And as an inerrantist, I am extremely interested in accurate translation.

A few years back Rod Decker published an article on this topic that confirmed me in this understanding, and I’d like to take a few moments to point out a few of his arguments (mixed together with a few of my own):

(1) Functional equivalence most successfully accounts for idioms (not that formal equivalency has no answer to this problem, but their answer is simply to say this is an exception).

(2) Functional equivalence most successfully accounts for the extremes of highly paratactic languages (long strings of independent clauses connected by “and,” such as is common in Hebrew) and highly hypotactic languages (long strings of dependent clauses connected by a huge variety of logical connecting devices, such as is common in Greek). This discovery satisfactorily addressed (for me at least) my last lingering concern with functional equivalence (viz., that functional equivalency translations do not translate all the words), though I freely admit that a number of very great minds are not so convinced as I.

(3) Functional equivalence most successfully accounts for the problem of non-SVO languages (subject-verb-object) without producing translations that sound faintly like Yoda from Star Wars narrating the Bible.

(4) Functional equivalence most successfully accounts for the problem of non-corresponding vocabulary sets between transmitter and receiver languages without opting for obscure terms that average readers do not recognize.

(5) Functional equivalence, in summary, most successfully accounts for the principle that the basic unit of propositional thought is not properly the word, but the clause.

My point here today is not to criticize formal equivalency in Bible translation. Throughout my professional career I have made it a strict point never to criticize any translation of the Bible, no matter how humorous, wooden, or Jonathan-Edwards-sounding a given reading may be. Every translation of the Bible is the Word of God, and I treat every one with due reverence as such.

Nor do I have any devices about ridding the church of formal equivalence. As some have pointed out, those who know Greek and Hebrew can often "see" the original languages bleeding through formal equivalency translations, making it easier to reconstruct the original an interpret it. For this reason I use and promote formal equivalency translations regularly and with great profit.

Nor do I have any tension using and preaching from a formal equivalence translation in the many churches where I attend and fill pulpits. I am deeply indebted to countless such churches and church leaders who use formal equivalence translations and I am far from suggesting that church life is damaged by their usage.

But I do think that one can construct a legitimate, valid defense of functional equivalency today despite the growing aggregate of arguments against it. And I hope that this post contributes to it.

MAS

The Importance of a Literal Reading of Genesis 1-11 Illustrated

2009-09-22T15:42:00.005-04:00

By now it's old news, but in view of my post last week on a literal reading of Genesis 1-11 as a critical watershed for conservative evangelicalism, I can't help but point to Tremper Longman's recent comments that all but deny a historical Adam. This is a stunning commentary on the trajectory of evangelical abuses of Genesis 1-11.

Longman's smiling professionalism is very reassuring. Kind of like that pleasant snake who chatted with Eve in the Garden of Eden. Oh, wait. That's just a myth. Strike that last comment.

For a good rejoinder to Longman's heretical suggestion check out this site.

MAS

A Fundamentalist raison d'être, part 7: Summary and Conclusion

2009-09-21T08:23:00.004-04:00

I am a fundamentalist. I say this without hesitation, but also with a realization that such an affirmation conveys many ideas (fair and foul) to society at large. I find this is true of nearly all the "labels" to which I ascribe--Baptist, dispensational, Calvinist, and even Christian, to name a few. Despite the abuse each label has received both from without and within, however, I am not ready to jettison these labels, because each represents an idea that is worth saving.

Fundamentalism is not fundamentally a reactionary movement, but a movement that stands ready to defend something, namely the core doctrines surrounding the intersection of Christ and the Scriptures with the world--the Gospel. This defense has taken several material forms that correspond variously to the kinds of attacks levelled against it throughout the history of fundamentalism--from the outright assaults of liberalist modernism to the more subtle compromises of the "new" evangelicalism.

Now, it seems, many of the children of the new evangelicalism are abandoning their parents for dead and returning home to embrace their fundamentalist cousins. Some suggest that any hesitancy to return the embrace is akin to the disgruntled son refusing to embrace the prodigal (Luke 15), a troubling suggestion with which I regularly wrestle, and a suggestion with which every fundamentalist ought to so wrestle. But as I emerge from my self-struggle, I find myself beset with the nagging thought that this particular prodigal still retains some affinity for the "distant country" to which he fled so many years ago--and he's brought home a packet of corn husks to share.

Specifically, I'm still concerned that the prevaling conservative evangelical view of the kingdom and its continuing attraction to non-Christian culture will pollute the gospel. And I'm still concerned that its accommodation of continuing tongues and prophecies and ambivalence toward aberrant interpretations of Genesis 1-11 will dillute the gospel by asking the Bible to share its exclusive authority with existential and uniformitarian sources of authority.

I am not saying that the "new" fundamentals of 21st-century fundamentalism are a "not-yet" view of the Kingdom, cultural conservatism, cessationism, and young earth creationism. What I am saying is that these four heads correspond to blind spots of conservative evangelicalism, and represent peculiar areas where the gospel is most vulnerable. They represent, in short, a fundamentalist raison d'être, a continuing reason to exist in an increasingly conservative evangelical world.

MAS

A Fundamentalist raison d'être, part 6: Young Earth Creationism

2009-09-16T08:15:00.004-04:00

In his fascinating 1986 work Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America James Turner traces the rise of agnosticism/atheism in late-18th to early-20th century America, and assigns much of the blame to Christians accommodating science as an independently authoritative discipline. His thesis appears on p. xiii:

"In trying to adapt their religious beliefs to socioeconomic change, to new moral challenges, to novel problems of knowledge, to the tightening standards of science, the defenders of God slowly strangled Him.”

Specifically, he points to the Princeton School as leaders in compromising the role of Christian theology as queen of the sciences. Little by little, he argues, they surrendered bits and pieces of the plain truth of Genesis 1-11 in an effort to accommodate uniformitarian science, abandoning the flood and adopting geological evolution and even biological evolution. But then in Dayton, Tennessee, to the guffaws of the scientific world, they finally took a stand, resisting human evolution in a heroic bid to save Adam (and with him the Second Adam).

And only then did Christianity realize that, due to their inconsistency and compromise, they had lost their distinctive voice in the world. Theology had been dethroned as the queen of the sciences. Agnosticism and atheism had taken firm root. All because "the defenders of God had slowly strangled him."

One would think that the fundamentalism that emerged from the ensuing malaise would have immediately addressed the problem, but it was not until the 1960 release of Whitcomb and Morris's The Genesis Flood that young earth creationism finally recovered its voice. Happily, much of fundamentalism saw the biblical demands set out in this and succeeding books and adopted young earth creationism. But not all have. And certainly conservative evengelicalism has not. To be sure, this is not a unanimous verdict, and I commend those conservative evangelicals who endure the scorn of their comrades and hold to young earth creationism. But young earth creationism clearly has not emerged among conservative evangelicals as a core doctrine.

I must admit great perplexity at this. The fundamentalist community has little to gain and much to lose by merging with those who are, however unintentionally, slowly strangling God.

MAS

A Fundamentalist raison d'être, part 5b: Cessationism and Non-Verbal Revelation

2009-09-14T08:38:00.005-04:00

A few years ago Dan Wallace wrote a Christianity Today article that later emerged as the introductory contribution of the 2005 book Who's Afraid of the Holy Spirit? The story line is heart-wrenching and difficult to read, telling of Wallace's 8-year-old son and his bout with a horrific form of cancer. It is the point of the story, however, that most arrested me as a reader. Wallace's faith was deeply shaken by the event—and it was his cessationist environment that was the culprit:

Through this experience I found that the Bible was not adequate. I needed God in a personal way—not as an object of my study, but as friend, guide, comforter. I needed an existential experience of the Holy One. Quite frankly, I found that the Bible was not the answer. I found the Scriptures to be helpful—even authoritatively helpful—as a guide. But without my feeling God, the Bible gave me little solace. In the midst of this “summer from hell,” I began to examine what had become of my faith. I found a longing to get closer to God, but found myself unable to do so through my normal means: exegesis, scripture reading, more exegesis. I believe that I had depersonalized God so much that when I really needed him I didn’t know how to relate. I looked for God, but found many community-wide restrictions in my cessationist environment.

Interestingly, Wallace still describes himself as a cessationist, even a "hard-line" cessationist, but concludes,

I am increasingly convinced that although God does not communicate in a way that opposes the scriptures, he often communicates in a non-verbal manner to his children.… To deny that God speaks verbally to us today apart from the scriptures is not to deny that he communicates to us apart from the scriptures.

I'd like to suggest that this "soft" non-cessationist sentiment is something that needs to be rejected as emphatically as the full-blown, prophetic, tongues-speaking variety. Why?

Claims to private revelation seem to be precisely what God was trying to suppress when he gave us the inspired Scriptures (2 Pet 1:19-21). God's normative instructions for the church today are public (i.e., the Bible), not private.
Non-verbal "impressions" in some senses are even more sinister than verbal ones since they must be privately "interpreted" by wholly non-objective means to be of any value to the (highly-impressionable) recipient. As such they tend, in truly post-modern fashion, to transfer authority away from fixed, objective truth to the transient whim of the recipient. Scripture clearly tells us that in the absence of propositional commentary, people tend to assign to "events" interpretations that are consistent with their own biases and personal worldviews (Matt 12:24; John 9:2-3; Luke 13:4; Acts 14:11; 28:4ff).
Private, non-verbal revelations cannot be tested or verified for accuracy by the Christian community, yet are treated with "thus saith the Lord" reliability, giving the recipient (a) the illusion of certainty and (b) reason to ignore reasoned and even biblical objections and counsel. (Who, after all, can dare to argue with what GOD told you to do?)
Private, non-verbal revelations seem to be little more than the long shadow of Kant (or perhaps the longer shadow of Plato) that continues to cast its pall over Christianity--a pall that sees the Word of God not as the revelation of God, but a Hinweis to a wholly-other god truly known only by existential encounter.
The need for private, non-verbal revelations seems implicitly to deny the sufficiency of Scripture (2 Pet 1:3; 2 Tim 3:17). This is not to say that the Spirit cannot do something in the believer "above the text" (i.e., illumination) but this is not revelatory, per se, but providential in turning the believer's will to embrace and apply what already stands revealed.
The quest for private, non-verbal revelations seems to blur the line so carefully fixed in Deuteronomy 29:29 between what is revealed (God's moral will) and what is not revealed (God's secret will) and creates the amorphous middle of God's "perfect" will (an idea drawn from a rather poorly exegeted phrase in Romans 12).

I must concede, of course, that fundamentalism has no peculiar claim to high ground on which to stand on this issue. My fundamentalist life has been laced with those whom God "burdened," "led," and "spoke to the heart," sometimes concerning very specific actions and important life decisions. So when I say that cessationism is part of the raison d'être for fundamentalism, I do so with the uncomfortable realization that we have a great deal of tension to address within our own movement before addressing problems without. To turn a phrase offered by Sam Waldron, "There has been a real tendency to devotionalize and spiritualize the Bible in a way that was made to order and set a lot of people up, when a [conservative evangelical] charismatic came with his views, to not see all that much difference between charismatic subjectivism and the prevailing [fundamentalist] subjectivism." He's right.

Despite the tentacles of this "soft" non-cessationist praxis already entrenched in our movement, though, I believe that a rigorous defense of cessationism (and corresponding extirpation of continuationism) commends itself as a valid and meaningful raison d'être for fundamentalism.

MAS

A Fundamentalist raison d'être, part 5a: Cessationism and Sola Scriptura

2009-09-11T08:42:00.005-04:00

On March 7th of this year, David Wilkerson, a seasoned “prophet” from New York City, issued a warning that is particularly eerie in view of today's date: “An earth-shattering calamity is about to happen…. It will engulf the whole [New York City] megaplex, including areas of New Jersey and Connecticut. Major cities all across America will experience riots and blazing fires.” Most of those who were aware of his “prophecy” reacted to it with more amusement than alarm, a decision that in the passing of time proves to have been an apt one.

A few bloggers, though, responded to Wilkerson’s doomsaying remarks in an effort to calm the panicked naïve among their readership. It seems that the previously simple task of answering this kind of alarmism, however, has been rendered increasingly complex by a recent uptick in sympathy for prophecy and tongues in conservative evangelicalism today. Simple denunciation of such prophetic foolishness is apparently no longer acceptable in today’s “open but cautious” evangelical milieu. Instead it would seem that one is now obliged to give Wilkerson a studied hearing and remain cautiously open to the possibility that his prophecy just might be accurate.

John Piper, for instance, denounced Wilkerson's comments, but in a strikingly anemic way: “Wilkerson’s prophecy,” he reassures us, “does not resonate with my spirit…. God might have said this. But it doesn’t smell authentic to me.” All I can say after reading this is that I’m glad I live in Michigan.

Piper goes on to speak of the governing authority of Scripture, so I don’t want to be more critical than is due, but the comment arrested me. If, in fact, God is bombarding the church today with authoritative prophecies and coded messages (i.e., tongues), this cannot help but mute or at best distill one's claim to two critical fundamentals of the faith, namely, biblical sufficiency and biblical authority (sola scriptura). It seems to me to go without saying that if the church needs additional revelations, then the Bible does not give everything we need for life and godliness (2 Pet 1:3) and does not thoroughly equip us for every good work (2 Tim 3:17). Further, if the theological landscape becomes littered with an endless corpus of private and normative revelatory material, it becomes increasingly difficult to see how sola scriptura can be successfully maintained (for a detailed unfolding of this idea see Sam Waldron’s excellent book To Be Continued? Are the Miraculous Gifts for Today? which I recommend highly).

I am not suggesting here that Piper (or Grudem or Carson or Mahaney or anybody in particular) has explicitly denied these cardinal doctrines. Such would be an unfair assessment. But I would say that this accommodation and embrace of continuationism by such prominent evangelical figures, coupled with an increasing suppression of differences on “non-essential” doctrines in the interest of standing “together for the gospel,” represents a troubling and potentially disastrous fissure in conservative evangelicalism that needs to be exposed as ultimately destructive to the fundamentals of the Christian faith.

MAS

A Fundamentalist raison d'être, part 4: Transition and Apology

2009-09-09T09:26:00.004-04:00

The next two parts in this apologetic series (a defense of the continuing viability of fundamentalism in the face of an increasingly conservative evangelicalism) reflect a slight shift in emphasis--a shift away from historical fundamentalist concerns that I see as in jeopardy of being lost, and a shift to more contemporary threats to orthodoxy to which conservative evangelicalism as a whole seems rather ambivalent.

Some will no doubt cry foul at this point because I have ceased defending historic fundamentalism and have, to some readers at least, begun grasping wildly at my own pet non-essentials in an effort to preserve my particular slice of fundamentalist identity. I'm prone to self-deception, so maybe such naysaying is accurate. I'm not sure, though, that this is the case. The "fundamentals" around which the movement coalesced both in its first life (the fight against modernist liberalism) and its second life (the fight against the new evangelicalism) do not represent a comprehensive list. One looks in vain, for instance, for the fundamental doctrine of the justification by faith or the doctrine of the Trinity as major emphases in the two lives of fundamentalism. Why? Because these doctrines were not under peculiar attack in the day, and so were not defended as rigorously as other doctrines. The fundamentalist waged war on the fields where error was camping and defended the citadels that were under attack. But this does not mean that fundamentalism is obliged to remain static and refrain from battling elsewhere (as some seem to suggest).

The theological landscape is changing, and so must the polemic. Modernist liberalism is a crippled old man, dying as much from self-inflicted wounds as by any inflicted by its foes. And a new favorite pastime in evangelicalism today seems to be the renunciation and abandonment of the New Evangelicalism for dead. But the fact that fundamentalism's traditional enemies lie dead or dying does not demand that fundamentalism lie down and die with them (again, as some seem to suggest). What has arisen to dethrone modernism is not fundamentalism, but post-modernism. And what has arisen to dethrone new evangelicalism is not not fundamentalism, either.

It is an unfortunate reality that fundamentalism has often been defined by what it stands against rather than what it stands for, thus leaving the impression that once its enemies fall, it no longer has a raison d'être. But in fact there is something we stand for and thus a perpetual raison d'être. So as new threats emerge to threaten orthodoxy, even in incipient form, we as fundamentalists must adapt our arguments to meet them.

I am convinced that at least two doctrines deemed non-essential by the conservative evangelical majority are more essential than at first meets the eye, viz., cessationism and young earth creationism, which will be the topics of my next two posts. Ambivalence to these blind spots, in my mind, does not serve Christian unity, but rather functions to erode biblical authority. And that is something fundamentalism most definitely stands for.

MAS

Work and Worship

2009-09-07T07:40:00.002-04:00

Since it’s a holiday, I thought the day might offer opportunity to talk theologically about its occasion—labor. I know, I know, Labor Day is a celebration of organized labor, but from my vantage, writing a theology of organized labor would not be a very edifying exercise. If you’re looking for something on organized labor, take the time to read Matthew 20:1–16 and extrapolate from it to discover my take on organized labor. I’ll resist the urge to say more.

The liberal mind for decades attempted to convince that there is no distinction between work and worship, or as Carlyle told us, that “work is worship”—a sentiment that served to glorify industry at the expense of worship. This sentiment has been preserved by some, but increasingly rejected by others. The trend now, it would seem, has shifted away from the “work is worship” motif to a mindset that work and worship operate in totally separate realms—work is detached not only from worship, but from religion itself.

The result of such a shift is that the work is reduced to (1) something that must be endured as a necessary evil (a sort of prison house of the soul to be escaped not by death, but by retirement) and/or (2) something that may be neglected or avoided as somehow ancillary to the Christian life. And as the Church has done with almost comic regularity throughout her long history, we are slowly abandoning Aristotle only to embrace Plato, failing to realize that the Bible endorses neither.

Instead, the Bible informs us that people (and most specifically, men) find their greatest dignity in their work. It is a primary responsibility of man before God and was so before the entrance of sin into the world (Gen 1:28). And while sin has made work more difficult than it ought to be, work remains not only a responsibility, but a bona fide gift from God (Eccl 3:13) and a true source of pleasure (Eccl 5:18). Lest there be any question of the connection of work and worship, however, Paul reminds us that the diligence with which we do our work directly corresponds to the success of the gospel (1 Thess 4:12) and the health of the church (Eph 4:28).

Work is not worship. It is a manifestation of our religion, yes, but it is no substitute for worship. Instead, the expression of religion has two faces—worship and work, cultus and culture, sacred and secular, ora et labora. Neither may rightly be neglected.

So as we celebrate this Labor Day (ironically, perhaps, by not laboring), let us take the time to thank God for this gift and pleasure from his hand, and resolve to work very hard, not just for our own sustenance and profit, but “as to the Lord,…for it is the Lord Christ we are serving” (Col 3:23–24).

MAS

Friday Free-for-All

2009-09-04T16:08:00.002-04:00

I got a bit behind at the end of this week, so no substantive post today. I did come across a website yesterday, though, that I thought was good all at once for a good laugh, a shake of the head, and a bit of theological reflection. Click here to buy Rapture insurance for Fido.

Yep, it's a bona fide website. Have a good Weekend.

MAS

[HT Bill Combs]

A Fundamentalist raison d'être, part 3: Culture

2009-09-02T08:22:00.004-04:00

A few days ago Doug Wilson made an interesting observation here about fundamentalism:

American fundamentalism made a series of strategic mistakes in its battles with liberalism in the early twentieth century. In the first rank of these mistakes was the retreat from a full-orbed world and life view, where everything is understood to be under the authority of Jesus Christ. They held to the fundamentals of the faith, true enough, but retreated with them into a truncated personal space.

I’m the first to admit that fundamentalism has made its fair share of mistakes over the years, and I readily concede that Wilson has correctly identified an area where some fundamentalists erred in overreacting to the abuses of their opponents. But I’m not convinced that the historic fundamentalist response was as flawed as Wilson suggests.

(1) First, I do not believe that Wilson’s generalized assessment of fundamentalism is entirely accurate—or even generally accurate. The fundamentalists did, as we have noted, abandon the “kingdom-now” motif as a significant factor in determining the mission of the church, departing from both modernist liberalism and Reformed postmillennialism. But this does not amount to surrendering Christ’s authority in every area of life. It simply means that fundamentalism, as a general whole, abandoned the “Christ transforming culture” paradigm of Reformed postmillennialism and also the “Christ of culture” paradigm of modernist liberalism. Specifically, they rejected the idea that the church’s mission is to capture every area of culture/society and subdue it for Christ or, worse, to operate in a fantasy world where this has already occurred.

(2) This radical shift in viewing the church’s responsibility toward culture was not an ancillary “mistake” that fundamentalists made, but a significant piece of the fundamentalist agenda. Wilson's willingness to embrace a version of fundamentalism without this “mistake” is not possible—this “mistake” is essential to what historic fundamentalism was.

(3) Wilson is correct, though, that some fundamentalists swung the pendulum too far and adopted an isolationist “Christ against culture” mindset that reduced some expressions of fundamentalism to hermetically sealed islands of cultural dissent. I concede that fundamentalist taxa that are neither in the world nor of it are indeed a terrible mistake—a casualty of careless overreaction.

(4) I’m convinced that the majority expression of fundamentalism was somewhere in the middle, adopting a variation of Neibuhr’s “Christ and culture in paradox” paradigm. Now this category is very broad, encompassing traditional Lutheranism, neo-orthodoxy, and even (as I suggested last Friday) some expressions of Reformed confessionalism such as the burgeoning “two-kingdom-theology” folks. That’s why I say fundamentalism represents a variation of this paradigm. But the fundamentalists are on to something here, and this should not be abandoned.

All this leads, then, to my conclusion that part of the continuing fundamentalist raison d’être is the perpetuation of this final view of culture—one that (1) takes seriously the radical depravity of the world and resists the powerful and pragmatic urge to assume the world's cultural expressions to be good or "neutral" and (2) takes seriously the incorrigibility of culture and recognizes the futility of salvaging it—except, perhaps as an incidental, localized, and temporary consequence of evangelism.

MAS

A Fundamentalist raison d'être, part 2c: The Kingdom--Damage Control

2009-08-31T08:49:00.004-04:00

Whenever a statement is made (as I did in my last post) that the institutional church has no social mandate, naysayers come out of the woodwork. Specters of socially withdrawn, miserly, and even hateful Christians instantly come to some minds, and perhaps some damage control is in order. Note the following clarifications:

Individual Christians still have a mandate to be neighborly--not only to "one another" (i.e., to other believers) but also to those outside the church (Galatians 6:10). In fact, this neighborliness should be of a quantity and quality that it stands out in the community (Matt 5:16).
The injunction to neighborliness can extend incidentally to the institutional church. In a day when most American churches have established a permanent presence in the community (i.e., a church building), it seems that the church inherits with this presence some basic responsibility for neighborliness. A church that gives a gift certificate for a local restaurant to a desperate family or clears the snow from the sidewalk of the 92-year old lady next door has not abandoned the faith; on the contrary, it has exhibited the faith.
There also seems to be no sustainable objection to the church institutionally organizing some neighborly "event" as a means to establishing goodwill and gathering an audience for the gospel--an open house, a dinner, a musical presentation, etc. After all, no unbeliever wants to hear the gospel, so it would seem that the same Christian conduct that "makes the teaching about God our Savior attractive" on an individual level, creating goodwill unto a willing hearing of the gospel (Titus 2:10), can rightly extend to the institutional level.

What I am saying is that the institutional church must resist adopting a programmatic social agenda as an end. The church has no responsibility to rescue babies from abortion (though its members may do so), no responsibility to build hospitals (though its members may do so), no responsibility to provide medical or dental services (though doctors and dentists within its membership may do so), etc. Further, the church must constantly guard itself lest social measures for gaining a hearing for the gospel (1) distract the church from its more primary social responsibility of benevolence toward its own membership (1 Tim 5:18; Gal 6:10), (2) displace individual responsibility in evangelism (the overwhelming emphasis of evangelism in the NT), (3) become regarded as means not only of gaining a hearing for the gospel but also of creating faith (1 Cor 1-2), (4) become so programmatic that the intention of gaining a hearing for the gospel is diminished or lost entirely, or (5) become so costly that the explicit mission of the church is jeopardized.

Finally, in view of the extraordinary pressure exerted by culture for the church to become a social organization, it behooves us who are in church leadership to regularly remind the church that their responsibility to "those without" is not to transform their culture, but to evangelize them. May God help us to that end.

MAS

A Fundamentalist raison d'être, part 2b: The Kingdom

2009-08-28T13:14:00.002-04:00

This morning I awoke to a much-anticipated and appreciated reply to my previous post—one that really furthers this discussion and provides a very helpful segue to today’s post. You can go back to read everything that Tim Scott (a good friend and very gifted Ph.D. student at SBTS) wrote, but I'll try to sum up Tim’s question along three lines:

· Do you think fundamentalists would have separated from new evangelicals if the only issue between the two was the present aspect of the kingdom and its corresponding social implications?

· Is it possible for someone to hold to the "already, not yet" idea and not be a new evangelical?

· If the answer to the first question is "no" and the second "yes," is it really fair to make the kingdom the watershed issue between fundamentalists and new evangelicals?

In answer to these questions, I’m going to offer (1) a bit more historical analysis, (2) a surprising concession, and (3) a clarification to my earlier post that hopefully answers Tim’s questions. It’s going to be pretty long today. Sorry.

(1) It is pretty well established that one of several theological impulses that created the monster of liberal modernism was postmillennialism. The church at large was ushering in the kingdom (Christ transforming culture) and perhaps even had ushered in the kingdom already (Christ of culture). As a result, practically every bit of benevolence, charity, and social betterment was interpreted as “kingdom work,” and there was a gigantic groundswell of such activity.

Then World War I came, and liberal modernism reeled. The carnage was so awful that all thoughts that the millennial kingdom had arrived were cancelled, and the thought that we were ushering in the kingdom were dealt such a severe blow as to be rendered laughable. The star of dispensational fundamentalism, on the other hand, began to rise. Their theology allowed them to take in stride the devastation of WWI. Their kingdom was not yet, and so they expected the devil’s ship to sink—no sense polishing the handrails!

But culture at large did not understand these theological nuances. All they knew was that some Christians had begun to lose their zeal to fulfill the (perceived) primary role of dispensing benevolence. And just as the crowds dispersed when Jesus stopped doing miracles, so also cultural goodwill toward the church began to wane.

A divergence arose as various fundamentalists began to examine this chain of events disparately (which is why I call this a watershed—a place where the water began streaming two separate directions). Some fundamentalists accepted the new circumstances as normal and expected; others, on the other hand, lamented the loss of both cultural influence and opportunities for evangelism, and thought something needed to be done. Carl Henry and George Ladd, for instance, lamented the decline of social disengagement, and found a primary cause of this disengagement to be (in their minds) a defective view of the kingdom. If the kingdom problem could be solved, they reasoned, the church’s influence in society could be restored. C. H. Dodd’s realized eschatology provided an alternative understanding of the kingdom that most “new” evangelicals embraced.

Now, the fundamentalist/new evangelical breach was more complex than just this one issue. There were multiple informing issues, and the breach was not a clean one that be reduced to a single issue (and I think that such reductionism has proved deleterious to the fundamentalist cause). But I think the issue of the role of the kingdom in church life was significant enough to call a watershed issue. I'd even go so far as to hazard, in answer to Tim’s first question, that this issue alone would have led to a separation of fundamentalist from new evangelical thought—perhaps not so sharp a separation as occurred, but a separation nonetheless.

(2) I promised a concession and here it is. As I mentioned on my previous post there are pockets of conservative evangelicalism and Reformed confessionalism have taken some serious steps away from Henry's new evangelical agenda, and I find this a promising development. One such development in Reformed confessionalism is “Two Kingdom” theology (read a recent opinion piece on the movement here and keep an eye peeled for this soon-to-be-released book length treatise on the topic. Briefly, two-kingdom theology is an idea borrowed from Lutheranism that sees the Christian as living in two kingdoms—God’s universal kingdom and the kingdom of the elect. The Christian has dual citizenship and must hold these roles in paradox—he must live as a citizen of his culture and as a citizen of the church (Mennonites and other counter-cultural groups have taken this idea and use it to withdraw from the former in lieu of the latter, but this is a miscarriage of Luther’s idea).

What is critical to note here is that two kingdom theology adopts a very narrow mission for the church. While Christians as citizens of society can and should be kind and should engage in deeds of charity and benevolence, the church qua church has little or no socio-political mandate. Further, the Christian’s neighborliness is not to be regarded as “kingdom work,” but rather Christians living properly as citizens of society.

Very few proponents of this model in Reformed confessionalism are fundamentalist or dispensational—most are not even premillennial. But in many ways I feel a greater solidarity as a fundamentalist with their views on kingdom and culture than I do with most historic premillennialists (hence again the kingdom implications rather than millennial systems as my raison d’être). Now, please don’t take this as a blanket endorsement—I still have differences with my two-kingdom theology brothers. But narrowly speaking, on this issue alone, I think that the Reformed two-kingdom theology position raises fewer red flags to me than does the position of some of my conservative evangelicals brothers, many of whom are premillennial and even dispensational.

(3) So on to one of Tim’s specific questions: “Is it possible for someone to hold to the ‘already, not yet’ idea and not be a new evangelical?” Yes. In light of the preceding I’d go so far as to say that someone can be a full-bore amillennialist and not be a new evangelical. But to the degree that someone uses the “already, not yet” idea as a basis for radically expanding the church's mission beyond her Great Commission, he has to that degree embraced a central tenet of historic new evangelicalism.

I say all this with full acceptance that the new evangelicalism is no longer as it was—even that it has died. But before it died it had children. And those children still bear some genetic distinctions from their fundamentalist cousins. There has been a lot of intermarriage of late and the lines are being blurred and a new family, conservative evangelicalism, is emerging. Some of the historic differences are cosmetic and well worth setting aside. But I contend that that there are still a few fundamentalist themes worth maintaining as the rising tide of conservative evangelicalism threatens to fully integrate us. And one distinction worth maintaining (a fundamentalist raison d’être or reason to keep existing) is fundamentalism’s historical resistance to appeals to Christ's kingdom as a basis for radically expanding the church's mission beyond her Great Commission.

MAS

A Fundamentalist raison d'être, part 2a: The Kingdom

2009-08-26T08:34:00.004-04:00

A few weeks ago Mark Dever raised a few eyebrows when he announced here that "you are in sin if you lead your congregation to have a statement of faith that requires a particular millennial view." The claim was pretty incendiary and perhaps involved a bit of hyperbole--I don't know. Had he said that requiring a particular millennial position as a criterion of church membership was unwise, I'd have ignored the comment and even agreed to some of its rationale. But he didn't say this. He said it was a sin for a church to include it in its statement of faith. This divisive statement on church unity is emblematic of the push to heal the breach between conservative evangelicalism and fundamentalism--and one that ignores the roots of the breach.

One of the early hints of the withdrawal of the new evangelicalism from fundamentalism was, of course, Carl F. H. Henry's Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. I bought a copy of this little tome a few years back and read it through in about an hour (it's not very long). Henry's argument is that the fundamentalism of his day had lost its social conscience, in large part due to neglect of the "already" aspect of the kingdom.

The modernism of the early 20th century was dominated by a postmillennial vision of church life that saw the great physical/material kingdom promises of the OT finding fulfillment through the church's supervision and benevolent dispensation. Gone was the church's evangelistic mandate, swept away by humanitarian "kingdom" interests. Fundamentalism reacted against this and thereby incurred the disapproval of a world that had come to demand open-handed liberality from the church as her primary function. Henry sought to temper this backlash and regain world approval by restoring at least some of this social mission to the church.

Henry explicitly disclaimed that this was a problem of one's millennial view (he allowed for broad accord between postmillennialists, amillennialists, "historic" premillennialists, and even dispensational premillennialists, and mentions over and again that his personal position--historic premillennialism--was minimally relevant to his argument). All four positions, he argued, could find room for the already/not-yet view of the kingdom that was annexing the theological world of Henry's day. As the last six decades have unfolded, Henry has proved correct on this point at least (dispensational premillennialism has proved the most resistant of the four to already/not-yet models, but certainly not impervious to them). That's why I decided to finger the kingdom as the watershed issue rather than one's millennial position.

One of the hallmarks of fundamentalism is a view of the church's external mission as evangelistic, and that the expansion of this mission has historically been one of its most devastating vices. And while pockets of conservative evangelicalism and Reformed confessionalism have taken some serious steps away from Henry's "new" evangelical agenda (more about this on Friday), I do not think that this is a signal for fundamentalism to reciprocate with compromise in the interests of mutual rapprochement.

Is it a sin to put a particular millennial position in a church's doctrinal statement? I don't think so, but it's a question worthy of debate. It is a sin, though, to appeal to Christ's kingdom as a basis for radically expanding the church's mission beyond her Great Commission.

MAS

A Fundamentalist raison d'être, part 1

2009-08-24T08:21:00.004-04:00

In the description of this blog my readers will find that they are reading a blog from a Baptist, Calvinist, dispensational, and separatist perspective. I used the word separatist because I know the term fundamentalist is something of a misunderstood and incendiary term, and one that has become so polymorphous as to be virtually meaningless. I have no problem with the latter term as long as I can define it, but have opted for a term that captures the central theme of historical fundamentalism--fundamentalism separates from apostasy and forms of Christianity falsely so called.

It is no secret, however, that fundamentalism became more than this. Most significantly, when the "new" evangelicalism (as they preferred their movement be called) retreated from the fundamentalist hard line in the 1940s and 1950s, fundamentalism became defined by its differences with this more tolerant form of orthodoxy. The lightning rod for the growing division eventually emerged in the person of Billy Graham, whose 1957 shunning of fundamentalist churches for the more attractive lure of mainline denominational ecumenical evangelism rendered a chasm between the two movements that proved too deep to heal.

The "new" evangelicalism has so evolved since that time that it is scarcely identifiable today. It has aged and died with its founders. The new evangelicalism had many children, though, and in the features of these offspring--the evangelical left, the evangelical right, the evangelical center, etc.--one can still see the ghost of the parents. The children are not the parents, of course, and should not suffer for their sins (Deut 24:16); nonetheless, palpable genetic disorders sometimes linger in children.

Happily, the enormously popular movement called conservative evangelicalism has abandoned some of the new evangelical agenda. Specifically, many of these are beginning to concede the failure of the new evangelical experiment, recovering the soiled doctrine of inerrancy and denouncing the Graham strategy as too gravely compromising. This is not to say that the Graham problem is gone (see here and here), but it has at least been muted. And since fundamentalists have so long fixated on the problem of ecumenical evangelism, this welcome development has, for many, paved the way for complete rapprochement.

While I concede that fundamentalism has itself devolved into a menagerie of silly separations (over, e.g., Bible versions, blue jeans, and Santa Claus), I'm not prepared to reduce the essence of fundamentalism to separation over the single issue of ecumenism. This may be its central theme, but it is not its only theme. And while the breach centers on gospel issues, the breach is more complex than Billy Grahamism. Billy Graham happened because the new evangelicalism wanted him to happen, and his absence cannot nullify the factors that produced him.

It is in view of these factors that I am starting a series on the raison d'être of fundamentalism--a reason for her continued existence--in view of her growing familiarity and familiality with conservative evangelicalism. Specifically, I'd like to touch on serious differences that remain: differences that cannot and should not be plowed under in a headlong rush to reconciliation.

MAS

But They Disagree! Norming Systems of Theology

2009-08-21T08:20:00.004-04:00

Over the course of the last two weeks I have gotten several private email responses to my blog entries from people (1) who don't have the time or desire to dissent publically, (2) who don't think they have anything worthy to say, or (3) who simply don't want to "go on record." All three concerns are ones over which I agonize every time I write an entry. And perhaps if I and my fellow bloggers thought more about these concerns, we'd have a happier blogosphere. So I appreciate these silent participants and the questions with which they challenge me.

One question that several private e-mailers have raised has divulged a gap in my arguments heretofore that I want to address today--If theology is all about harmonizing the whole biblical record, then why do systematicians disagree? And the follow up, If two coherent harmonizations of the same biblical material emerge, what is the "trump card" or (for those offended by card-playing allusions) the deciding norm?

The answer at its simplest level is that Scripture is the norma normans non normata--the norming norm that cannot be normed. This is the answer of the Reformers and mine as well. But as we've noted, sometimes we have two models, each deeply and earnestly committed to the authority of Scripture, that are at odds. It's not enough in these situations to simply shout, "I'm more biblical than you are." As a dispensationalist I think that dispensationalism is the most "biblical" model. Many people earnestly committed to biblical authority disagree. As a Calvinist I think that the Calvinistic model of soteriology is the most biblical. Again, many people earnestly committed to biblical authority disagree. The arguments cannot be settled by the the smug trump card, "I'm a biblicist" (and the corresponding insinutation that no one else is). The fact is that all parties involved in both of these issues are committed to biblical authority--to Scripture as the norma normans non normata. They are all "biblicists" by this definition. Thus the "biblicist" label becomes meaningless. The term must be laid aside and a new question asked--which biblicist model is the right one? Who decides and on what grounds?

I have found Cornelius Van Til's theory of truth introduced in the first few pages of his Survey of Christian Epistemology to be perhaps the best response to this dilemma. Truth for Van Til is ultimately that which corresponds to what God would say about a given set of data, thus giving credence to a rigidly foundational, correspondence view of truth. Nonetheless, when disagreement arises over what God has said about a given set of data, the answer becomes more complex. Some take a simplistic view of correspondence and insist that the answer is always to take the very most plain reading of Scripture and then put on noise-cancelling headsets to drown out all dissent. But it seems prudent in such situations to entertain the second aspect of Van Til's definition of truth--coherence. Red flags will go up instantly in some minds because the ghost of Kant's free-floating, non-foundationalist, truth-is-in-the-observer theory seems to lurk here. And Van Til is not unmindful of this. That's why he insists that both features are simultaneously necessary to render a theory true.

Thus, for instance, when the most straightforward reading of, say, Hebrews 6:4-6 or James 2:24 is at odds with the whole witness of Scripture, the answer is not to throw up one's hands and cry antinomy, but to re-examine the texts to see whether a more obscure reading might yet pass hermeneutical muster while harmonizing with the whole of Scripture.

So what, then, is the "trump card" for evaluating systems? Very simply, Scripture. On this we all must agree. But it is not just correspondence with what its texts say, but also coherence with what the text says. This is how the norma normans non normata works.

Will this magically decide every issue? No. Systematic theologians will still disagree with one another, just like exegetes and commentators will continue to disagree with one another. What neither can do, though, is decide that the other can't contribute to the decision-making process.

MAS

Systematic Theology as Peculiar Harmonizations

2009-08-19T08:50:00.002-04:00

One of my favorite nuggets from the syllabus of theology prepared by my esteemed mentor of theology, Rolland McCune, is that "linguistic exegesis fails if it does not explicate the correct and harmonious theology of a passage or book." By this provocative statement he communicates that the exegete is a failure if his interpretations cannot be "fit" into the big picture of his theological system.

McCune expands this assessment in the first volume of his recent Systematic Theology of Biblical Christianity with a lengthy and even more provocative paragraph from Moises Silva (Trinity Journal 15 [1994]: 26):

The old advice that biblical students should try as much as possible to approach a text without a prior idea as to what it means (and that therefore commentaries should be read after, not before, the exegesis) does have the advantage of encouraging independent thinking; besides, it reminds us that our primary aim is indeed to discover the historical meaning and that we are always in danger of imposing our meaning on the text. Nevertheless, the advice is fundamentally flawed, because it is untrue to the very process of learning. I would suggest rather that a student who comes to a biblical passage with, say, a dispensationalist background, should attempt to make sense of the text assuming that dispensationalism is correct. I would go so far as to say that, upon encountering a detail that does not seem to fit the dispensationalist scheme, the student should try to "make it fit." The purpose, of course, is not to mishandle the text, but to become self-conscious about what we all do anyway. The result should be increased sensitivity to those features of the text that disturb our interpretive framework and thus a greater readiness to modify that framework.

I think the assessments above are fundamentally correct. Along with Kaiser and Silva, we cannot afford to believe that the contributions of the various biblical authors are incompatible and that "the attempt to treat them as a unity can result only in distorting the text" (Introduction to Biblical Hermeneutics, p. 259). Certainly I must have the humility to consider the possibility that my system is incorrect and adjust it accordingly. But I must also have the humility to consider the possibility that it is my exegesis instead that needs to be adjusted.

MAS

A Timely Illustration

2009-08-17T11:05:00.004-04:00

Today boasts no new post, but a link to an enormously interesting discussion over on Euangelion that illustrates some of the material on biblical and systematic theology posted here last week. Proponents of three positions on the extent of the atonement (Calvinist, Amyraldian, and Arminian) each make a case for their position in 250-300 words.

Two points of specific interest:

(1) Both Helm and Witherington (Calvinist and Arminian, respectively) admit that the heart of their arguments cannot rest entirely (or even primarily) on proof texts, as though lists of Bible verses could be amassed by both sides and a winner declared based on list length. Instead, the determination rests on the coherence of one's position with the whole of Scriptural witness.

(2) Meanwhile, Jensen (Amyraldian) begins tellingly with the statement, "I refuse to be more consistent than the Bible," allowing, apparently, for exegetical inconsistencies in his harmonization of biblical texts.

One could say more, but I found the illustration a very apt one.

MAS

Biblical Theology's Role in System-Building, Part 2

2009-08-14T08:40:00.004-04:00

In the last post we walked through a very truncated history of "biblical theology" and found that, in Warfield's words, "the discipline of 'Biblical Theology' came to us indeed wrapped in the swaddling-clothes of rationalism, and it was rocked in the cradle of the Hegelian recasting of Christianity; it did not present at first, therefore, a very engaging countenance, and seemed to find for a time its chief pleasure in setting the prophets and apostles by the ears." Despite this accurate assessment, Warfield was eventually dissuaded from his antipathy toward biblical theology by Geerhardus Vos, who went on to greatly popularize an anti-modernist version of the discipline.

Vos's vision for the discipline was to plot the biblical-historical plotline of Scripture, to emphasize the progress of revelation, and to display the unity of the record even in the presence of diversity. One can object but little to his goals and even its implementation (as a dispensationalist I find the covenantal thread a bit annoying, but even so, the vast bulk of his work was unobjectionable). But a lingering question that emerges is this: Do we really need biblical theology as a distinct discipline?

Certainly we need the emphases that Vos's brand of biblical theology brought to the exegesis and systematization of Scripture: the authority of Scripture, the progress of revelation, the analogy of antecedent Scripture, recognition of the subtleties of vocabulary, syntax, and emphasis of various biblical writers, etc. But these emphases had been part and parcel of exegesis and theology for centuries before the discipline of biblical theology was invented. Further, the fact that biblical theology comes to us as a refurbished product of modernism at least raises the possibility that the discipline has not been fully purged of it historical tensions.

Some will hear me say that theology need not be biblical. This is not the case. My point is to suggest that the idea of biblical theology as a distinct discipline is in need of criticism. Note the following concerns I have:

Biblical theology often purports to be a pure discipline free from the encumbrances of theological bias. But this utopian illusion cannot be sustained. Vos built his biblical theology around the threadline of the covenant. Ladd used the threadline of the kingdom. McClain used the kingdom, too, but in a totally different way. In short, biblical theology is never presuppositionless, but is always guided, however subtly, by theological agenda.
Biblical theology, for all its dependence on biblical authority, tends to deal with texts in isolation before integrating them with the whole. For the modernist this meant the Bible was filled with contradictions and errors. For the evangelical, a softer word--antinomy--is supplied for contradiction. But a swift glance at the definition of this term in Webster's leads one to the uncomfortable conclusion that the terms are virtual synonyms. In brief, biblical theology can still create doubts concerning the unity and inerrancy of Scripture, just as it did for many generations prior to Vos's evangelicalization of the discipline.
Biblical theology, with its emphasis on Pauline, Petrine, Johannine, Lukan, and other theologies, tends to fragment the NT record. While the various NT contributors each have distinct vocabularies, styles, and emphases, biblical theology does little to remind us that Paul, Peter, John, and Luke are in perfect theological agreement. They harmonize! And attempts to isolate them from each other, I think, tends often to be more harmful than helpful.
Biblical theology, in its attempt to do theology irrespective of historical labels/categories and philosophical concerns, proves particularly vulnerable to "old" heresies and also to theological novelties--problems easily avoided when we stand on the shoulders of our theological forbears.

Conclusion: While I am deeply convinced of the importance of many of the emphases that biblical theology raises, I am less convinced of the importance of biblical theology as a distinct step in the theological process. In fact, I find at times that it is more detrimental than it is helpful.

MAS

Biblical Theology's Role in System-Building, Part 1

2009-08-12T10:05:00.014-04:00

The comments from previous discussions have delved a bit into the realm of “biblical theology,” a topic to which I’d like to turn. There is a great deal of resurgent interest in biblical theology in evangelical publication right now (see, e.g., here and here and here). This comes as unqualified good news to many. But is biblical theology a monolithic endeavor? Are contributions by, say, Geerhardus Vos, Brevard Childs, George Ladd, and Roy Zuck all trying to accomplish the same thing? And are their materials equally profitable in informing systematic theology? Anyone familiar with the broadly divergent conclusions drawn by these respective contributors is obliged to answer “No.”

Why the diversity? Do they have different Bibles? Different purposes? Different methods? While any of these differences might be fingered, probably the greatest difference is in the realm or presuppositions and preunderstandings. Far from being the pure, presuppositionless tabula rasa of unadulterated exegesis, biblical theology is always informed by the theologian’s agenda. The following is a brief history of the concept of biblical theology prior to the rise of modern evangelicalism. Its purpose is to inform but also to pave the way for criticism. For some, of course, criticizing biblical theology is akin to kicking babies—how could a Christian ever do this?! But hopefully it will be demonstrated that eschewing systematic theology and retreating to a purer “biblical theology” has not always been advantageous in the life of the church:

The idea of biblical theology can be traced to the Protestant reaction against Romanist dogma during the period of the Reformation. In brief, the Reformation was a call to restore Scripture to its place of singular authority above all unbiblical systems, such as that represented by Romanism. Biblical theology in this sense was nothing other than the principle of sola scriptura.
The term “biblical theology” first appears in the seventeenth-century anti-credal writings of pietists such as W. J. Christmann and J. P. Spener. For these, biblical theology was a reaction against Protestant creeds and ecclesiastical confessions and a reversion to an individualist reading of the Bible unencumbered by ecclesiastical concerns. While pietism supplied some correctives to scholastic theology, the lack of checks by the majority also opened the door for many strange and even heretical readings that are well documented.
The formal development of biblical theology began in 1787 with J. P. Gabler’s inaugural at the University of Altdorf. Gabler, a modernist, held to an evolutionary view of the development of the Jewish religion, and maintained that, especially in the OT, the Bible was an errant anthology of conflicting accounts that together reflected the mythical roots of the Jewish faith. While Gabler himself thought that a single, synthetic theology might yet be discovered, his followers demurred, and biblical theology disintegrated into a fragmentation of the biblical record and total abandonment of biblical authority. Biblical theology had successfully proved that the Bible was unequivocally untrue. So thorough was the collapse of biblical theology that when approached about the possibility of a department of biblical theology at Princeton, Warfield responded,

The discipline of “Biblical Theology” came to us indeed wrapped in the swaddling-clothes of rationalism, and it was rocked in the cradle of the Hegelian recasting of Christianity; it did not present at first, therefore, a very engaging countenance, and seemed to find for a time its chief pleasure in setting the prophets and apostles by the ears (Selected Shorter Works, 2.12).

Warfield went on to say that he had relented of this absolute assessment, paving the way for the appointment of Geerhardus Vos to chair the department at Princeton; however, his response is telling. Before this time, evangelical versions of biblical theology were all but non-existent. Biblical theology was liberalism.

A crisis in biblical theology arose in the middle of the 20th century at the troubled intersection of modernism and neo-orthodoxy. Neo-orthodox theology was mindful of the problems discovered by modernist biblical theology, but restored the valuue of the Bible by affirming that errors were acceptable within the scope of the Bible's purpose. The Bible was not to be viewed as an precise historical accounting, but as a human accounting of Israel’s encounter with God—the myth that stands at the foundation of the Judeo-Christian religion. Discrepancies may well exist in the biblical record, but this "crisis" is diffused when the Bible is recognized for what it is—a canonical foundation for faith. Barth and Childs rescued biblical theology from the modernists, but at the high price of inerrancy.

Conclusion: The reader can readily see that "biblical theology" is not the pure discipline that some regard it to be. And, unfortunately, the evangelical versions of biblical theology to which we will turn for our next post remain vulnerable to the same deficiencies that mark historical versions of biblical theology. For the next post (Lord willing) we will look at this problem and, having done so, give a suitably cautious assessment of the proper role of biblical theology in crafting out systems of theology.

The Bible Plus Logic? Part 2

2009-08-10T08:21:00.005-04:00

Comment 2 of the previous post is a perfect example of how a misunderstanding of systematic theology leads to ambivalence toward the discipline, and offers a segue into my next post:

It's not that there is no value to Systematic Theology, it is that so much authority is invested in the logic side of it. Logic is the human construct of Systematic and is therefore subject to human frailties. It doesn't carry the same weight as the Bible (and it shouldn't).While systems can inform our understanding they shouldn't be vested with 'thus saith the Lord' by their proponents.

Systematic theology in this reply is the addition of frail human logic to the Bible, and is thus subject to failure. By comparison the Bible is inerrant. While systematic theology might have some value, it's much like vegetable gardening--it adds a little bit of garnish at dinner time, but really isn't worth the time and effort unless you really enjoy the hobby (no offense intended toward my vegetable gardening readers).

I'm convinced this assessment is misguided. Note the following restatement of the post above, with some key substitutions:

It's not that there is no value to exegetical/biblical theology, it is that so much authority is invested in the hermeneutics side of it. Hermeneutics is the human construct of exegetical/biblical theology and is therefore subject to human frailties. It doesn't carry the same weight as the Bible (and it shouldn't).While exegesis and biblical theology can inform our understanding they shouldn't be vested with 'thus saith the Lord' by their proponents.

In reply, note the following:

Contrary to the claims above (one actual, the other an imaginary parallel), the laws of language and logic are not human constructs, but elements of the imago dei with which all humans are born. Our assessment and use of these tools adds a human element, but the tools themselves are not human constructs.
The Bible comes to us in the form of innately consistent and carefully crafted propositions that the which the exegete and theologian discern from the text to produce truth claims that should both (a) correspond to individual texts and (b) cohere with the whole text. The biblical theologian is satisfied to stop with the former; the systematic theologian does not rest until both demands are met. [The discerning reader will recognize my dependency on Cornelius Van Til's epistemology at this point, which can be accessed here and here.]
Due to the noetic effects of sin, humans misidentify and misuse the laws of both language and logic, leading to misinterpretations, misintegrations, and misapplications of Scripture. Exegetes inevitably make linguistic errors and theologians inevitably make logical errors--errors that lead to aberrant systems by which Scripture is further analyzed (that's right, whether acknowledged or suppressed, whether rational or irrational, everyone has a system).
In order to identify and correct the errors in their systems, the theologian must constantly acknowledge sola scriptura and employ exegesis as a check to his theology, and the exegete must constantly acknowledge the analogia scriptura and employ theology as a check to his exegesis.

The claims of the exegete and the claims of the theologian must always be recognized as human applications of the laws of logic and language. Neither has a claim to absolute authority and both are equally vulnerable to error. And yet they are mutually necessary disciplines. The best exegete is the best theologian and the best theologian is the best exegete. Indeed, the best way to think God's thoughts after him is to so amalgamate these two disciplines that they become one.

The Bible Plus Logic?

2009-08-07T08:44:00.007-04:00

Occasionally I encounter a new seminarian who is ambivalent or even opposed to the study of systematic theology. Upon inquiry, the reason often emerges in the form of an adage that the student has picked up somewhere his pre-seminary training, viz., that systematic theology is "the Bible plus logic.” And since human logic can’t be trusted, the tongue-in-cheek title of a recent Michael Horton article seems apropos: Who needs systematic theology when we have the Bible? For my first series of posts, I would like to take the time to challenge this line of thinking. We need the Bible and we need systematic theology.

We need the Bible because of the truth of sola scriptura, that is, because the Bible stands as the only independent, self-validating source of theology. In short, we need the Bible because of the singular and absolute authority of the Bible.

We need systematic theology because of the truth of the analogia scriptura, that is, because the Bible stands as a perfectly self-consistent and infallible source of theology. In short, we need systematic theology because of the unity and inerrancy of the Bible.

What, then, of the claim that systematic theology should be held at arm's length because it is "the Bible plus logic"? Well, two comments for now:

Systematic theology does not add logic to the Bible. Rather, it discovers and tenaciously defends the logical unity inherent in God's inscripturated Word. It is not satisfied with appeals to antinomy and supralogical mystery, but seeks to unravel and understand the Bible in all of its perfect self-consistency.

The alternative to systematic theology is not a pure, unadulterated biblical theology, but rather the Bible minus logic. By being satisfied with antinomy and mystery, the exegete deceives himself into thinking he adheres to no system when in actuality he is embracing a system that either (a) allows for error in the Bible or (b) denies the sufficiency of Scripture to communicate divine truth effectively and accurately.

I conclude with John Piper, “One can only pity the poor souls who, for fear of finding out too much, never approach the sacred mountains but stand off and chirp ironically about how one should preserve and appreciate mystery.”

Introductory Post

2009-08-06T09:30:00.002-04:00

…and so begins my foray into the blogosphere. I feel a bit like Hans Brinker when he began ice skating—the pond is crowded with experienced skaters and I fear that I’ll be bumped around. But perchance the other skaters will graciously grant a bit of room for me to find my balance.

I like theology. I like a lot of things, but especially theology. Back in 1990, when I began my B.A. studies at Northland Baptist Bible College, I took a college entrance survey that asked, “What are your educational goals?” I wrote, “I want to get a Th.D. and teach systematic theology on a college or seminary level.” God graciously allowed me to realize both goals. But while the classroom and the library are marvelous places to hone one’s theology, like my Kershaw knife, theology must be unsheathed and used to realize its potential. So at the risk of causing injury to myself (and even to others), I invite any who will read to join with me in incising the thoughts and intentions of the heart and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.