More About This Blog

I have more thoughts related to my earlier musings on what to do with this blog. As I am someone who intends to go to seminary in the not-too-distant future and hopes to be the main preaching elder at a church someday, it would seem obvious that this space would be a good place for me to develop my skills in biblical exposition and sermonizing. After all, that's what lots of pastors and aspiring pastors do with their blogs. Pick a text, and write on it. To some folks, it might seem odd that I would choose to write on they might consider lesser subjects than the Bible.

I don't think so. I'm very wary of doing that sort of thing to any great degree, for several closely related reasons. First is the simple fact that I feel deeply inadequate to such a task, and I think it would be pretty arrogant for me to act as though I had any standing from which to try to teach people from or about God's word. It may be that I have a gift for that; having my church help me figure that out is perhaps the primary thing I'm doing these days. But the church, not the Web, is the appropriate forum for that.

Which brings me to the second reason, which is that I think it's generally a mistake to try and have a preaching/teaching ministry outside the context of the local church. No disrespect to those men whom God has used through TV, radio, books, and blogs to bless and strengthen the faith of those to whom they never actually preach, but I think that the natural accountability structures of the church are intended by God to help guide and bound our handling of His holy Word. Many of the pastors, Christian authors, and theologians I respect most are those whose primary ministry is to a church they pastor, and their wider audience is in some sense secondary to their role as a teaching elder. I, therefore, have no interest in building a virtual ministry composed of people I'll never see, break bread with, serve, or look out on from a pulpit.

God's Word is sharper than a two-edged sword, and without the moderating and disciplining influence of the church, its teaching, and its leaders, we Bible-believing evangelicals run a dangerously high risk of profaning the Scriptures we claim to hold in high regard and dividing joints and marrow that we shouldn't. God has indeed given us the gift of the Holy Spirit's divine aid in reading and understanding the Scriptures, but it's important to note that gift is given to the church, to groups of people--not to every armchair theologian who assumes he's more infallible than the Pope.

Prime examples of how our use of Scripture can go wrong can be found on scores of vitriolic theological debates that go on all over the blogosphere and the Web regarding any remotely controversial topic--the New Perspective on Paul, worship, Calvinism, male headship, paedo- vs. credo-baptism, etc., etc. The comments sections on some blog posts I've read have been astonishingly full of ad hominem attacks, uses of Scripture that would make the Apostle Paul scratch his head in confusion, and pretentious posturing in the name of calling out heresy. I suspect many people act and talk behind the privacy of a comment-posting screen name in ways they would never dream of behaving in the "real world."

Now, this mustn't be carried too far. I'm not saying I won't ever study the Scriptures on my own, or talk theology with friends, or write on biblical or theological topics here on this blog, or comment on the writings of others who do. What I am saying is that the primary arena in which I intend to do most of my teaching of and learning from Scripture is the one that God has instituted: the church. Not a blog. So, while I may continue to post sermons I occasionally prepare for my own congregation, I won't start writing them just to be posted here. Publishing something in this space tacitly asserts that I think I have something true and worthwhile to say, and that you, my faceless reader behind pixels and transistors and miles of wires, should listen. While I can't help but think about and write about things related to God and His Word, I'm going to do all I can to keep from ever seeing myself as having a virtual ministry, and from providing you with an excuse to ignore or take less seriously the preaching and teaching of your own elders at your own church.

The Examined Life

A sermon preached on April 23, 2006, in the evening service at Capitol Hill Baptist Church

Lamentations 3:40 – “Let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the Lord.”

About two and a half millennia ago, while on trial for his life before the citizens of Athens, charged with atheism and corrupting the city’s youth, the Greek philosopher Socrates offered a defense of the life he had lived. His actions and his words, the things that had gotten him in trouble, he said were the product of his philosophical, contemplative way of life, of his pursuit of the truth. From this defense comes what may be his most famous statement: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” He showed that he truly believed that statement, as he chose to have a death sentence carried out on him rather than go into exile or change his way of life.
Well, what do you think? Is Socrates right? Is self-examination the key to the good life, the only kind of life that is worth living? It certainly doesn’t seem that most people in our society today live as though this were the case. Among the things that we often turn to for meaning, fulfillment, and a happy life—money, possessions, pleasure, work, whatever—contemplation and self-examination probably doesn’t rate very high on the list. In some ways, one might say our society isn't altogether different from the one with which Socrates clashed so many years ago.
Well, our text tonight has something to say to all of this. If you have your Bibles with you, please turn with me to the book of Lamentations, chapter 3. Lamentations is in the Old Testament, one of the books we call the Major Prophets, a little more than halfway through the Bible. It is right after Isaiah and Jeremiah. If you’re using one of the pew Bibles provided there, you can find it on page 862. We’re going to focus on verse 40 tonight, but I’ll start reading in verse 37.

“Who can speak and have it happen if the Lord has not decreed it? Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that both calamities and good things come? Why should any living man complain when punished for his sins? Let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the Lord.”

Lamentations is divided into five chapters, each one a poem describing and grieving over the suffering of the people of Israel. Their capital city, Jerusalem, had been captured and sacked by the Babylonian army. The devastation was almost incomprehensible, and they faced the prospect of exile and slavery. Any people would find it difficult to cope with the near-total ruin of their society, but what made it particularly difficult for Israel to deal with was that they were God’s chosen people, the ones He had elected specially to display His glory to the world. Lamentations was written in part as an expression of lament, but also to help the people deal with their suffering by pointing them to God’s sovereignty, His justice, and His mercy. Chapter 3 in particular tells us that: 1) God is sovereign over our suffering; 2) suffering at God’s hands is the punishment our sins deserve; 3) we still can have hope because God is merciful; and 4) if we repent of our sins and return to God, He will forgive us and restore us.
Look at verse 40 again: “Let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the Lord.” I want to briefly look at two things this passage isn’t saying, then meditate on what this kind of self-examination looks like and think through some ways we can apply it and practice it in our lives.
First, this isn’t an exhortation to simple philosophical contemplation and abstract thought. The ancient Greek philosophers like Socrates are remembered as some of the first ones to try and transcend the mundane activities of daily life and the material world around us to try and think about higher truths and deeper questions regarding ultimate reality. How did the universe come into existence? What is most really real, and how does it affect the world around us? What does the good life look like? How can we know anything? As useful and important as philosophical reasoning is, mere contemplation isn’t what Lamentations is calling us to. The kind of examination this verse urges is spiritual examination of ourselves. It’s a deeply personal, introspective look at the depths of our own hearts, of our motivations, our affections, our actions and words. Taken literally, these words are very expressive—‘let us uncover our ways, and search.’ God wants us to strip off the cover of pretenses and posturing and make an inquiry into the character of our ways. One of the most feared phrases in this city is “appoint an independent commission to look into the matter.” Nobody wants to be the object of a audit or an inquiry that will brush by all the PR and façade of honesty and make a thorough examination of the documents and emails and recordings that will tell the truth about whether they have acted according to the law. This is the kind of test and examination that God wants us to subject our own lives to, because it’s the kind of scrutiny that He will subject us all to. If we don’t examine our lives according to the standards God gives us in His word, we will be sorry when we come to the day when we have to give an account of them.
Second, notice that this verse isn’t just exhorting us to moral resolution, to finding out where we’ve gone wrong and resolving to do better, as though we could get back to the point of being OK with God if we just figure out how we’ve wronged Him and stop doing those things. Contemplation and self-examination alone will get us nowhere with God. No, friends, the idea that we can please God and get Him to stop making us suffer if we just figure out the right things to do and say is not what Lamentations is teaching us. It is nowhere in the Bible. It is nowhere in Christianity. The message of Christianity, the truth that God tells us in His Word, is just the opposite. You see, we believe that each one of us is made by God, His image, and that we were made to glorify Him by loving Him and obeying Him. But we haven’t done that. We’ve all lived our lives as if God wasn’t really God and didn’t really deserve to be the focus of our lives. We’ve lied about Him. This is what the Bible calls sin, and makes us the object of His perfectly just wrath. God would have been right to punish us for all eternity in return for our rebellion against Him, but He hasn’t done that. He sent His only son, Jesus, to live a perfect life and to die on the cross, satisfying God’s wrath and paying the penalty for the sins of all those who would ever repent and put their trust in Him. It’s only through Jesus’ work on the Cross that we can ever be reconciled to God and experience anything other than His anger.
If you read all of Lamentations 3, it’s perfectly clear that the author understands this. Whatever sufferings we experience in this life are just a pale reflection of the punishment that our sins deserve, and the only hope that we have is to cast ourselves on God’s own mercy. When he says, then, “Let us…return to the Lord,” he understands that Israel’s sufferings are meant to point them to God, and to cause them to depend on God’s incredible kindness and mercy.
This, then is what it means for us to examine our ways, and test them—to realize the truth about our them. Hold your life up to the light of God’s holiness, and see how you have failed to live as He calls you to. Realize that your ways are evil, and they deserve nothing but punishment from God, the One you have offended by them. Confess your sins to God, and confess your need for His forgiveness. Cast yourself upon His mercy, and trust only in His provision for your sins in Christ’s work on the Cross. Though He deals with sin severely, He still kindly invites us to be freely pardoned.
So Socrates was right, in a sense—the unexamined life really isn’t worth living, because as Mark pointed out this morning, the only way to have the good life, the kind of life that is worth living, is to realize the truth about ourselves and our sins. Ultimately, we see both in Lamentations and in 2 Corinthians that the purpose self-examination—the purpose of the life worth living—is to glorify God. The reason we should be so careful in looking at ourselves is so that it will cause us to look even more at the Savior. Mark has often recounted Spurgeon’s statement that “he who thinks little of sin will think little of a Savior.” Well, the converse is true: the more careful we are in examining ourselves and understanding the truth about our sins, the more we will treasure the mercies of God and glory in His provision for us in Christ.
How, then, can we go about developing a habit of self-examination? What are some practical ways we can cultivate the skill of testing and proving our thoughts and our actions? This would be a great thing for us to think about all the rest of this week, but here are a few thoughts to get us started:
First, and most importantly, know God. Be a student of God’s word, and seek to understand more and more of who God is, and who we are to be as His creatures made in His image. The more we understand God’s law, the better we will understand how we fail to obey—and the more we will delight in Christ.
Second, walk out of the main sermon time on Sunday morning each week thinking about how your life the previous week looks in light of what the sermon has taught you about God. This is, at least in part, why we don’t call for a public response at the end of our services here—because we think it’s important that those who have just spent an hour listening to God’s word focus on quietly examining our own hearts and applying it to our lives. Use the moment of silence after the benediction to do that. The measure of the effectiveness of a sermon is not whether it moves anyone to a particular public response, but whether it illuminates for us the reality of our state before God and results in deeper trust in Him.
Another thing you can do to help examine yourself: Keep a list of everything you do for a day. Be as specific as possible. Then sit down with that list later, maybe in your quiet time, and use it to examine your motivations. Ask yourself, “Why did I do that? What was my motivation for spending an hour reading that?” See how closely your motives and priorities line up with the Bible’s description of a Christian. This exercise might be especially useful for a weekend, or another day when you’re out of your normal routine or have more free time than usual.
One noteworthy thing about this verse is that it has a distinctly corporate emphasis: “Let us examine our ways…and let us return to the Lord.” The author of Lamentations knew that just as Israel’s sin against God was corporate, so their repentance would have to involve the whole nation, as well. As God’s people gathered in a body here, it would be good for us to think about how we can put this verse into practice together, corporately.
First, be attentive to the regular preaching of the Word. Examining ourselves and being equipped to do so are fundamental to what we intend to be doing together in our main gathering on Sunday morning each week. We also do this in a particularly specific way each time we observe the Lord’s Supper, when we use the church covenant to examine ourselves and our relationships with one another.
Second, cultivate relationships where you can spend time examining yourselves together and pointing out areas of sin. This is part of what we commit to doing in the church covenant when we join the congregation: “We will…exercise an affectionate care and watchfulness over each other and faithfully admonish and entreat one another as occasion may require.” Find someone who knows you well, and have them help you search out blind spots in your life, places where you may be self-deceived or may not be able to see areas of sin. If there’s nobody in the congregation who knows you that well, work on cultivating that kind of open, honest relationship with someone. As you’re praying for your fellow church members using the membership directory, pray that they would be diligent in examining themselves and repenting of sin, and that they would be moved by thinking about their sin to greater and greater dependence on Christ.
Well, brothers and sisters, God in His mercy has not given us the punishment our sins deserve. He has blessed us with spiritual riches and treasures beyond anything this world can provide. Let us be diligent in examining ourselves to see whether we really are motivated by genuine love for God and desire to glorify Christ. Let us test and scrutinize each other to see where we fail to be an accurate picture of God. And let us especially, in the week ahead, pray that our self-examination would cause us to delight more and more in the Author and the Perfector of our salvation.

More on Elders and Baptists

My friend Randa asks a good question in the comments on my last post. Where do I find in scripture that elder leadership should be in a congregational context? Where does the Bible teach that the whole church ultimately has responsibility for issues of discipline and doctrine? I thought the answer was worth a blog post in its own right, as it's a bit more lengthy than would suit a comment.

I draw a distinction between normal leadership and ultimate authority. God has indeed given elders to his church to lead and shepherd the flock. Those who are Godly men, apt to teach, especially those who normally have the responsibility of publicly teaching the Word of God, are to be the ones who lead, shape and guide the church in its normal life. Church members, in turn, have an obligation to submit to and obey the leaders God has given them, so long as they don't teach or practice contra the Scriptures.

That said, however, the congregation--the church as a whole--still bears responsibility before God for what goes on in the church. This matters in three principal areas: doctrine, discipline, and, by inference, membership.

First, the church as a whole is responsible for ensuring that the Gospel is clearly preached and that heresy and false doctrine are kept out. Hence, Paul's taking the members of the church in Galatia to task for having allowed false teachers to creep in and spread a false gospel. The whole letter is written to the church as a whole, not to some group within the congregation--not just the men, not just the elders, not just the pastor. The implication is clear: the whole body has responsibility to see that disease does not gain a foothold.

This carries over to the area of discipline, as well. In 1 Corinthians 5, Paul screams at the entire church for allowing the immoral man to continue as a member of the body. He tells them how to deal with such sin in the assembly: cast the offending member out! Whether it took an action of the whole membership or not to effect the punishment, Paul clearly is speaking to the whole congregation when he tells the Corinthians they've done wrong in failing to admonish their brother properly.

Here it may be helpful to raise the old distinction between formative and corrective discipline. The kind of discipline we see in 1 Cor. 5, Matt. 18, and 2 Thess. 3 is corrective discipline. It takes affect when a member of the church has sinned or offended a brother, and it is aimed at restoring him, by his repentance, to fellowship and "walking orderly." This corrective discipline is, as we saw above, the responsibility of the whole church. But by far the most common type of discipline that takes place in the life of the church is formative discipline. This is the training and spurring on to spiritual growth that comes by preaching, teaching, and iron-sharpening fellowship amongst the members of the church. Formative discipline, as well, is the responsibility of the whole church, though the elders will naturally take the lead in it. All the members of the church have responsibility before God for their fellow members, to know them and build them up by conversation, teaching, and fellowship in the Gospel.

This implies a third area for which the congregation has responsibility: church membership. in 2 Corinthians 2, Paul refers to a sinner who had been disciplined by the church, telling the members of the church to forgive him. He says, "The punishment inflicted on him by the majority [of the church] is sufficient for him." Whether this refers to the man from 1 Corinthians 5 or another who had been disciplined and removed from fellowship, it's clear that the previous action had been done by a vote of the whole congregation. That's why he speaks of "the majority." If members of the church are removed by a vote of the congregation, this implies that there's a clearly defined membership, and that the congregation is the body that takes members in as well as seeing them out.

For more on this topic, see 9marks.org, Phil Newton's book Elders In Congregational Life: Rediscovering The Biblical Model For Church Leadership , and Biblical Foundations for Baptist Churches: A Contemporary Ecclesiology by John Hammett. For a look at what Baptists from the sixteenth to the twentieth century have had to say, check out Polity; Biblical Arguments on How to Conduct Church Life (A Collection of Historic Baptist Documents) by Mark Dever.

Baptists and Elders

Another essay from my recently-completed internship at Capitol Hill Baptist Church


In today’s evangelical world, it seems most people don’t give a lot of thought to how the Bible says that the church should be governed and led. For those in established denominations, those conversations are several hundred years in the past. For those in non-denominational churches, the assumption seems to be that whatever works or is most effective is generally what should be done. As Mark Dever makes clear in the last chapter of Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, however, God has in fact given us a pattern for church leadership in His Word, the Bible. Those of us who value the Bible and intend to submit to its rule in all of faith and life would do well to understand and follow the Biblical model of church leadership.

First of all, leadership within the church is to be understood in a congregational context. That is, the congregation as a whole has final responsibility and authority for the most important and clear things in the life of the body, such as matters of doctrine and discipline. Within this congregational context, however, we are to submit to the leadership of a plurality of godly men—elders—who demonstrate good and godly character, knowledge of God’s Word, ability to teach, and concern for the good of the whole church. These men should have spiritual gifts that they are dedicated to using to build up the congregation. They exercise various roles in relation to the church—bosses, examples, suppliers, and servants. Biblical church leadership reflects God’s character as it shows a model of Christians submitting to the authority God has in himself and the authority he has delegated to church leaders on earth.

So, if your church doesn’t have elders who lead in this way, is that really such a bad thing? What’s the problem with, for example, the way most Baptist churches are structured with a pastor (the sole elder, in a sense) and deacons which serve with a mix of spiritual leadership and meeting physical needs? Are there any good reasons for a church to undertake the challenging task of changing its leadership structure? As a matter of fact, there are several real and potential problems with such a structure, not all of which are listed here.

First, and most importantly, it simply isn’t the model that Jesus has ordained for His church in the Bible. If we believe in the inerrancy, authority, and sufficiency of Scripture, we have a duty to follow its dictates in every area where it speaks to our lives and our churches. Polity—church government and leadership—is one area where the Bible does clearly tell us what to do, and we should obey. Remember that because of the congregational nature of the church, obeying the Bible as a congregation is something for which we all are responsible, and for which we are all to blame if we don’t.

Second, when men—like a board of deacons—who are not recognized by the congregation as elders have a share in the leading of the congregation, there can be an unhelpful confusion regarding who actually is in charge. On one hand, the pastor, who has the responsibility of preaching God’s word as an elder, should naturally be seen as one who should be looked to and obeyed as a leader. On the other hand, God never intended that a single man should bear the whole burden of leading a congregation, and a pastor who is appropriately humbled by God’s word will naturally turn to others—such as deacons—to help him with that burden.

Third, there can be an unhelpful confusion regarding the role that deacons are to play in the church. The New Testament is fairly clear—and Baptists historically understood—that deacons are not the ones who are to be in charge of the teaching and leadership of the church. They aren’t required to be skilled in understanding and teaching the Word of God as elders are, and they have another role that is clearly outlined in the Bible. They are to serve the physical and organizational needs of the church, taking the burden of “waiting tables” off of those whose duty it really is to devote themselves to prayer and the ministry of the Word.

Fourth, when the pastor and the deacons both have a degree of spiritual leadership, it can sometimes produce a tension—at worst, an outright struggle—between them over the leadership of the church. While this is certainly possible with elders as well, it is less likely where the pastor understands himself to be—and is understood by the congregation as—only one of several elders, each with an equal share of the burden of ministry, and each with a duty to respect and submit to the others.

Fifth, when there is not a plurality of elders in the local church, the pastor almost always finds himself with an impossible load, as the entire burden of the ministry is on his shoulders. He is particularly vulnerable to criticism for initiatives he might take to lead the church in new directions. If the church is larger than even just a few dozen members, it can be nearly impossible for the pastor to know the congregation well enough to care for them spiritually as an under-shepherd of the flock should.

So, for obedience to the Bible, for clarity on who’s in charge, for clarity regarding the role of deacons, for unanimity in leadership, and for the relief of the pastor, consider leading your church to adopt a plurality of elders. These are just a few reasons, and there are many more. Making that sort of move may be difficult, and so it should be approached deliberately, with great wisdom and much faithful teaching of the congregation. If done wisely, however, regaining the Biblical model of plural eldership can have great fruit for your church and for the whole Bride of Christ.

Review: Evangelicalism Divided, by Iain Murray

The term “evangelical” is in a questionable position these days, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Many Reformed Protestants, Emergent Church folks, and others are reluctant to use the term to describe themselves, despite coming from ecclesiastical traditions that have historically had that label. Others take pride in using the term, finding it useful to locate themselves in the Protestant world, identifying themselves with supporters of a number of political, social, and cultural causes. Nonetheless, many (if not most) of those who use the term have a hard time defining just what an evangelical is. One case in point is a recent forum on evangelical involvement in foreign affairs where a panelist, head of a Texas evangelical association, was unable to provide any useful or satisfactory definition of evangelicalism.

Part of this inability to pin down what an evangelical is stems from the movement’s convoluted history over the last half-century, as its leading figures in Britain and the United States came to be deeply divided over what evangelicals are about and how they relate to other groups within professing Christianity. It is this history that Iain Murray chronicles in Evangelicalism Divided: A Record of Crucial Change in the Years 1950 to 2000.

Murray begins by “Setting the Scene” as he describes the development of liberal Protestant theology in the nineteenth century under the influence of Friedrich Schleiermacher, and the response in the latter part of that century and the first half of the twentieth of Protestants who retained traditional Protestant belief in doctrines such as the authority and inspiration of the Bible, the deity of Christ, the substitutionary Atonement, and the like. Chapters two and three describe how Billy Graham, the most prominent evangelical in the 1950s, acted as a catalyst for change within evangelicalism by seeking greater unity and cooperation in his crusades with liberal churches and clergymen, minimizing doctrinal differences for the sake of working together in evangelistic efforts. Graham also progressively became less and less dedicated to distinctive evangelical doctrine as he became a greater public figure and began to have dialogue with presidents and other public figures.
Chapters four and five describe how evangelical Anglicans like John Stott and Jim Packer, in the fifties through the seventies, sought greater unity with non-evangelical Anglicans, again at the expense of doctrinal distinctives that are evangelicals’ heritage of the Reformation. Chapter six outlines Murray’s opinion of the Gospel- and doctrine-preserving tack that evangelicals ought to have taken, neither withdrawing from interaction with other Christians nor giving away the biblical faith. In chapter seven, he describes how evangelical academics, seeking greater intellectual respectability by taking a new approach to biblical studies, ended up traveling the same path as liberals and softening their stand on the inerrancy and inspiration of Scripture. Chapter eight describes evangelical attempts at dialogue with Roman Catholics, including the controversial Evangelicals and Catholics Together statements of the 1990s. Chapter nine is Murray’s warning that evangelicals need to be wary of the danger of the devil’s schemes against the Church and the true faith. Chapter ten describes evangelicals’ need for a robust, Biblically faithful ecclesiology. In chapter eleven, Murray ends with several conclusions from the preceding material, warnings for evangelicals in the twenty-first century.

Murray does a good job in these pages of hitting the high points of evangelicalism’s foibles and mistakes in the last half-century, as he provides both the historical account of how a large segment of the evangelical world failed to remain a robust witness to the true faith and, at the same time, substantial theological analysis of the problems with various stances that evangelical leaders have taken. One slight frustration I have with the book, however (and it is about the only negative), has to do with the organization of the material. As one progresses from chapter to chapter through the book, it seems to have little internal coherence and gives the impression that the several chapters could nearly as well stand alone as separate essays. It is all relevant material, it just seems to transition abruptly from topic to topic.

That said, this is a tremendously valuable resource for any evangelical scholar, pastor, or elder. Murray’s theological analysis is penetrating, and it does a good job of explaining recent evangelical mistakes in a way that should help us be on guard against reproducing them in our churches and para-church relationships. There are a number of instructive things to take from this reading, a couple of which I’ll mention here.

Murray quotes a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, who “believed that there was a continuing absence of any ‘developed evangelical ecclesiology.’” Unfortunately, Runcie’s analysis all too accurately describes most evangelicals today. Most don’t give appropriate consideration to the doctrine of the church, and it greatly hurts the work of the Kingdom. If evangelicals are to be faithful to the biblical vision of the church, they will need to give more considered thought to ecclesiology, and let their practice be shaped by the Biblical vision of the church. 9Marks and other like-minded ministries are a great step in the right direction in this area.

Pastors should also take from this saga the importance of teaching and preaching sound doctrine in our churches. From churches that gone liberal to the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement to the growth of praise’n’worship-centric services to the Emergent Church, the idea that the essence of Christianity is about feeling and experience rather than a message to be believed is common throughout the evangelical and post-evangelical world. It was heretical and antithetic to the essence of Biblical Christianity when Schleiermacher articulated it in the eighteenth century, and it is dangerous and antichristian today. Only if evangelicals recover the proper place of sound doctrine will their churches be biblically faithful and healthy.

One point that I particularly appreciated was Murray’s insistence that we must be aware of and on guard against the machinations of the devil against true biblical Christianity. He says that evangelicals have too often fell prey to the misconception that materialism, secular philosophy, or pagan religions are the greatest threats to the church. According to Scripture, he says, the greatest enemies of God’s people are those within and those who are the agents of Satan. Like those Murray describes, I am not naturally prone to seeing demons lurking around corners and Piercing the Darkness-esque spiritual warfare behind every conflict. If it were not for my simple faith in the Bible’s testimony about the Devil and his plan to destroy the church, I wouldn’t even believe he exists.

Finally, I understand more than I did before reading this book the importance of making clear the difference between the church and the world in my preaching. Perhaps the greatest problem with evangelicals’ accommodations of liberalism and Romanism is their failure to answer the question “What is a Christian?” Preaching what it means to really and truly follow Jesus as He commanded us is one of the most important themes that, if preached consistently, will serve the salvation of souls and the health of the church. If evangelicals begin to understand and then preach what it means to be a believer in Jesus, perhaps the damage that has been done in the last half-century will begin to be reversed.

Ephesians 3:14-21: Two Perspectives

Christians have always understood prayer to be an important and powerful part of the Christian life. From the early days of the church to medieval monks to modern-day para-church “prayer ministries,” one can see evidence of Christians’ devotedness to prayer. Perhaps the best way that we can learn to pray better—which should be a focus of our discipleship—is to look at the prayers found in the Bible. Two sermons, one by Don Carson and the other by Roy Clements, look at Paul’s prayer for Christians in Ephesians 3:14-21, and they both basically do a good job of expositing the prayer.

Dr. Carson’s introduction is focused on setting up this passage, which is a prayer of Paul’s, as an example of how we can have our prayers reformed by studying the prayers of Scripture. The structure of Dr. Carson’s sermon is very clear and easy to follow. This is hardly surprising for anyone who knows Dr. Carson, or who has read much of his writing or heard him speak. His mind is amazingly sharp, and he excels at writing clearly, yet deeply. This sermon is no exception. He has three main points, really. He looks at each of the two main prayers that Paul prays for the Ephesians, and then at the bases for them. Looking at the first prayer, that God would strengthen them with power through His spirit in their inner being (vv. 14-17), he examines the nature of the power. He sees that Paul is praying they would be holy, that they would have the mind of Christ, that they would see the world through God’s eyes. For the second prayer, that they would have power to grasp the limitless dimensions of the love of God (vv. 17-19), he points out that it they are already rooted and established in love, and that he prays not that they would love God, but that they would grasp and experience the love of God. Finally, Dr. Carson explains that the basis for these two prayers is the will of God Himself. Paul is praying in accord with what he knows to be God’s will for these Ephesians, and for all Christians. This provides an example for us.

Dr. Clements’ introduction is similar. His sermon is part of a series looking at the lives of people in the Bible who prayed, for the purpose of informing and growing our ability to pray as well. His structure is also fairly clear, which is helped by his announcing the points of his outline up front. Paul, he says, is here concerned for the spiritual health of the Christians for whom he’s praying. He wants them to experience spiritual strength so that they will resist sin and temptation, and there are two aspects to this strength that he prays they will have. First, he prays that they will have the strength of an inward experience of Christ’s presence (vv. 14-17). This illustrates that Christianity is not just a list of moral duties, or a system of ritual, or a creed. It transforms a person at the deepest core of his being. It’s not just about God’s doing something for us, but also that He does something in us. Second, Paul prays that they would have the strength of an unshakeable experience of Christ’s love (vv. 17-19). Here Dr. Clements meditates on the immense, unfathomable dimensions of Christ’s love, and focuses the end of it in a Gospel presentation where he pleas for non-Christians to have their creaturely purpose fulfilled in knowing Christ’s love.

Both of these sermons are clear, faithful expositions of the text. Both of them have good application to the lives of those in the congregation. Dr. Carson’s sermon doesn’t include a clear, explicit Gospel presentation or any address to non-Christians. This is perhaps not surprising, since it was delivered not in a church but in a meeting of the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union. Dr. Clements, on the other hand, makes the Gospel very clear, and in fact focuses the last several minutes of his sermon on what seems to be mainly an address to unbelievers.

Of the two, Dr. Carson’s sermon seems better to achieve what it sets out to do in the introduction. His purpose in looking at this passage is to help the believers there at CICCU to have their prayers reformed by looking at how Paul prays. Dr. Clements’, while that seems to be the purpose for the sermon series, doesn’t have a lot of specific application specifically to prayer in the life of the Christian. The point of his sermon seems more to be a meditation on Christ’s love and transforming power.

Dr. Carson’s meditation on praying God’s will for people is inspiring and convicting. He says that we should pray things that we see in Scripture, especially when we intercede for others. In this way, we can have absolute confidence that God will answer the prayers. He gives a very moving illustration of an instance where he prayed things from Scripture for a friend who was ill, and saw some of the things he prayed for her clearly answered. Even when answers aren’t that clear, however, he says we can still have confidence that the prayers will be answered if we pray in accordance with His will that we see revealed in His word. Have begun to learn to pray this way in the evening services and staff prayer times at CHBC, and I hope to grow in this discipline.

Both of these sermons are good expositions of the text. Each of them would be profitable for a Christian to hear and would help him or her to meditate on the passage in question. Dr. Carson’s is perhaps a bit more so, but each is well worth listening to.

Review: Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church by Don Carson

Augustine of Hippo, in his essay De Mendacio (“On Lying”), wrote, “When regard for truth has been broken down or even slightly weakened, all things will remain doubtful.” In that essay, as will appear by the title, Augustine illustrated the nature of lying and its evil effects, apparently addressing a problem that was widespread among Christians, and perhaps even pastors, at the time. In the intellectual framework in which many pastors today operate, however, lying is scarcely possible, because truth has ceased to be a meaningful category. As Augustine opined that evil was but the perversion of good, so lying is the perversion of truth—but if truth is denied, there is nothing to pervert. Such is the state of many people’s understanding of religion today, including many Evangelicals influenced by postmodern thought, some of whom are identified with a movement known as the Emerging (or Emergent) Church.

Don Carson, author and professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, has recently published a new book evaluating this movement, entitled Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church. In the 230-page volume he defines and describes the movement, evaluates its contributions to evangelical Christianity, examines its theological views and reliance on postmodern philosophical underpinnings, and brings relevant Scriptures to bear in criticizing the movement and explicating some of its weaknesses.

In Chapter 1, Dr. Carson profiles the movement, broad and multifaceted as it is. The Emerging Church, he explains, is a movement of church leaders and writers working from an essentially postmodern viewpoint, protesting along three main fronts: against traditional conservative evangelicalism, against modernism (as they understand it), and against the seeker-sensitive, megachurch phenomenon. In Chapter 2, Dr. Carson outlines some of the strengths of the movement’s strengths: in reading the times, in pushing for authenticity, in recognizing our own social and cultural location, in evangelizing outsiders, and in embracing other traditions. Chapter 3 is Dr. Carson’s critique of some of the problems with the Emergent movement’s analysis of contemporary culture, including a reductionistic understanding of modernism and lack of nuance in its evaluation of postmodernism. In Chapter 4 he outlines the main strengths and weaknesses of postmodernism, particularly postmodern epistemology. Chapter 5 speaks to the Emergent Church’s failure to critically evaluate postmodernism, and Chapter 6 examines two books by leading authors in the movement, Brian McLaren and Steve Chalke. Dr. Carson concludes the book in chapters 7 and 8 by looking at what Scripture has to say on matters of truth and experience, knowledge, and evaluation of other religions.

As will not surprise anyone familiar with Dr. Carson’s work, Becoming Conversant with the Emergent Church is methodical, precise, delightfully clear, and painstakingly well researched and –documented. It is also balanced, nuanced, and Scripturally based in a way that is a refreshing joy after reading someone like Brian McLaren, who exhibits none of the above characteristics. Dr. Carson’s extraordinary skill in handling Scripture and his enormous intellect are clear from the first chapter on, yet he engages difficult philosophical and theological concepts in a way that is clear and easy to follow. Quite honestly, it is difficult to see how a thoughtful evangelical Christian could fail to be persuaded by Dr. Carson’s analysis. If this book does not deal a death blow to the Emergent Church movement, it will only be because of willful ignorance or lack of widespread circulation.

Perhaps the most helpful part of the entire book is Dr. Carson’s critique of postmodern thought and his presentation of the problems with it from a Scriptural perspective. Though modernism and postmodernism go in different enough directions for the term “postmodern” still to be useful, he shows that they are both based on the same epistemological starting point: the finite self (the “I”). Modernism posits objective, empirically knowable truth apart from any Divine revelation.
Postmodernism, pointing out that every observer looks at “truth” from a different perspective, eventually concludes that objective truth and certain knowledge are illusions, meaningless categories.

Dr. Carson sees in postmodernism’s critique of modernism a false dichotomy: since exhaustive, omniscient knowledge is impossible for finite beings, at best we can glimpse only a small perspective on something without any way of knowing how our perspective relates to the whole—the objective “truth.” This antithesis is both false and manipulative, for it fails to describe how humans naturally speak of knowing and truth. When someone claims that a certain fact or proposition is true, he is not claiming to know, omnisciently, all the truth about that thing. Yet it is still useful to use the categories, for humans are capable of knowing the truth of things adequately, if not exhaustively. All human knowledge, in fact, is a subset of God’s knowledge, and we are able to know truth as He reveals it to us.

Dr. Carson teases out the absurdity in postmodernists’ conclusions: no statement can be objectively, universally true, but they need universal truth in order for this assertion to hold true. Dr. Carson goes on to show how McLaren, as one example, consistently refuses to answer questions of truth and error in his writings, a tendency which seems to be endemic to the movement. This is the most important thread that runs throughout the book. Postmodernism’s claims are absurd and self-refuting, yet most Emerging Church leaders rely on them uncritically and refuse to engage the overwhelming numbers of Scriptural passages that speak of truth as something that we can know, and in fact have a duty to know and believe.

Dr. Carson’s evaluation of A Generous Orthodoxy is, on the whole, very good. He goes through most of Mr. McLaren’s chapters progressively, explaining his arguments and shredding them with charity, logic, and Scripture. His main criticisms deal with Mr. McLaren’s distortion of facts, evidence, arguments and Scripture, and his consistent refusal to answer any sort of difficult questions. Interestingly, a major criticism that Dr. Carson does not use, yet which begs to be raised, is the problem with Mr. McLaren’s divorcing the message of the Gospel from the mission that he understands to be so central to the Christian faith.

Overall, this book is extremely well-done. Though Dr. Carson would surely say it is not intended to be a thorough refutation of postmodernism, for the average reader it serves as a supremely useful primer on the subject from a Biblical perspective. Dr. Carson’s criticisms of the Emergent Church are fair and balanced, but deep and packed with the weight of Scripture. This book will, Lord willing, be a tremendous step toward correcting the errors in the Emergent movement and restoring wayward churches to an orthodoxy that is truly generous and orthodox.