Auctor

More About This Blog

2006-05-12T20:32:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-25T18:30:00.000-07:00

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

2006-01-12T08:46:00.000-08:00

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

2006-01-05T11:28:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-08T08:39:00.000-08:00

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

2005-11-15T08:47:00.000-08:00

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

2005-11-12T17:31:00.000-08:00

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.

Review: A Generous Orthodoxy, by Brian McLaren

2005-11-04T11:00:00.001-08:00

What is orthodoxy? What is the essence of “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints¹” for which we are to contend? Through much of church history Christians have understood “orthodox” to mean (as the word itself would suggest) right thinking—belief in a body of essential doctrine that the Bible reveals as the central message of Christianity. For some today, however, this definition does not suffice. Whether because of a postmodern aversion to doctrinal propositions or because of a desire not to be “divisive,” many today are redefining the essence of following Jesus as a mission, rather than a message. Brian McLaren is perhaps the most visible example of this. His book, “A Generous Orthodoxy,” seeks to paint a new vision for what orthodoxy ought to be in a postmodern world.

Mr. McLaren begins in Chapter 0 with an extended disclaimer, wherein he appears to apologize for any misstatements, overstatements, inaccuracies, hyperbole, or hasty generalizations. His excuse is that he has no formal theological training, and is not necessarily trying to be perfectly clear, but rather is trying to be provocative and contribute to a conversation about the nature of Christianity.

In Part One of the book, Mr. McLaren explains “Why I Am a Christian.” He recounts “Seven Jesuses I have known,” each representing a different strain of Christianity with which he has come into contact—Conservative Protestantism, Pentecostalism, Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Liberal Protestantism, Anabaptists, and Liberation Theology. Each has a different understanding of the chief problem with humanity, and a different understanding of how Jesus solves that problem, and Mr. McLaren thinks that each of them should be welcomed for their valuable contributions to a generous orthodoxy. In Chapter 2 he talks about who he understands Jesus to be, in Chapter 3 he argues that following Jesus doesn’t necessarily mean being a Christian, and in Chapter 4 he explains how and from what Jesus saves humans.

Part Two is Mr. McLaren’s description of “The Kind of Christian I Am.” As he explains, he is missional, which means that he understands the point of Christianity to be a mission of proclaiming salvation for the whole world. He is evangelical, which means passionate toward God, the Bible, and the Christian mission, but doesn’t mean identification with the Religious Right or narrow-minded fundamentalist Evangelicals. He is Post/Protestant, which doesn’t mean so much identification with Christians who define themselves by protest against Rome, but means pro-testifying, positively, about what we are for, rather than what we are against. He is Liberal/Conservative, which means joining the best of both streams and moving beyond division. He is Mystical/Poetic, which means recognizing the limits of systematic, propositional ways of understanding and communicating truth. There are several more attributes which would take more space to summarize than would be helpful—Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, (Ana)baptist/Anglican, Methodist, catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-Yet-Hopeful, Emergent, and Unfinished. Essentially, Mr. McLaren prefers to take what he sees as the best and most generous parts of these various traditions and unite them in moving forward on a mission that celebrates the various ways that Christians understand their faith.

The attitude with which Mr. McLaren approaches this work is admirable, in many ways. He is genuinely concerned with promoting a Christianity that is not selfish and narrow-minded, but displays the magnificent, lavish, prodigal love of God. Mr. McLaren understands that an otherworldly pietism that causes you to ignore your neighbors just shows that you don’t understand very well what it means to follow Jesus. His compassion for the last, lost, least (modeled, he understands, by the Savior) and his passion for reaching them with the good news of Jesus Christ are great things, and many evangelicals today could benefit from a dose of them.
His concern for understanding and adapting to the culture in which we live is also commendable, to a certain extent. He understands, rightly, that some of what many Christians have treated as essential parts of the Christian faith are in reality just cultural expressions and trappings that are particular to our modern, Western context. To the extent that Western culture is changing and modernist expressions of Christianity are no longer helpful or appropriate for reaching men and women with the Gospel today, we should be willing to change what may be legitimately changed for the sake of the Gospel.

Mr. McLaren’s analyses of problems with some corners of Evangelical Protestantism also ring true, at least at times throughout the book. He is apparently from a very conservative fundamentalist upbringing, and there are surely legitimate criticisms to be leveled against that tradition. More broadly, he recognizes, for instance, that evangelicals’ emphasis on the Bible and faithfulness to Scripture has on occasion fueled a concern to prove themselves right and others wrong, for the sake of feeding selfish desires for self-promotion and sinful boasting.

However, the way he levels these criticisms, and the solutions he proposes for them, should be of grave concern (and here I turn to my problems with Mr. McLaren’s book). If these concerns and other legitimate problems are cracks that have on occasion appeared in the edifice of traditional conservative Protestantism, Mr. McLaren seems to think that the whole building is nothing but cracks and should be pulled down forthwith. One theme that runs throughout A Generous Orthodoxy is that absolutism, the tendency to make any sort of sweeping truth claims, is narrow-minded, exclusivist, and bad.² Yet he displays a tendency to make statements about those he criticizes that are not only sweeping and lack nuance, but in many cases are positively deceptive.

Examples of hasty generalizing are numerous enough to give a careful reader pause. For example, his critique of the modern missionary movement is that it adopted (albeit unintentionally) a colonial outlook characterized by “white supremacy, Eurocentrism, jingoism, and chauvinism.³” While this may indeed have been true of some missionaries and missions organizations in the last two centuries, counter-examples are so numerous as to make this charge inaccurate at best, and deceptive at worst. In another example, he recounts a story of “Christian” conquistadors under Pizarro committing atrocities in the name of Christianity, and portrays it as in some way characteristic of Christianity in the centuries before his humble, generous, postmodern orthodoxy came along.⁴

Examples of argumentation that is downright deceptive are also numerous. He does wonders with definitions. In discussing his choice of the word “orthodoxy” for the book, he says, “For most people, orthodoxy means right thinking or right opinions, or in other words, ‘what we think,’ as opposed to ‘what they think.’” I am quite sure that nobody who claims to be orthodox would define “right thinking” in such an egocentric manner with no regard for Scripture or tradition. In another example, his definition of fundamentalist as it has traditionally been used in the last several decades is that it includes “a foundationalist epistemology, assenting to something like a dictation theory of biblical inspiration, upholding a sectarian and elitist approach to non-Fundamentalist Christians, and identifying judgmentalism and anger as fruits of the Holy Spirit.” Even if some would agree with the first two items (and they are surely a tiny minority), asserting that they go hand-in-hand with the last two seems like just the sort of mean-spirited argumentation for which he vilifies fundamentalist/evangelical/conservative Protestants.

Mr. McLaren, as noted above, has a tendency to see small or localize problems as representative of entire sectors of Christianity. In so doing, he shows a disturbing propensity to caricature these sectors, setting up straw men that are easy to knock down with the rod of generosity. His description of the modern missionary movement referenced above is a prime example, and it illustrates well how he handles modernism, evangelicalism, fundamentalism, conservative Protestantism, and confessional Christianity in general.

Another troubling thing about this book has to do with the way Mr. McLaren sets it up in his introduction and Chapter O. In an attempt to be humble and avoid any claim of having gotten it all right (and, it seems in an attempt to preempt criticism), he has what is essentially an extended disclaimer. He plays the ignorance card, saying that he has never had any formal theological training and just “snuck into pastoral ministry accidentally through the back doors of the English department and church planting, and whose graduate education consisted of learning how to read—a skill most people feel they have mastered by about the third grade.”⁵ He anticipates many criticisms that readers may level. He acknowledges that the book is full of “overstatement, hyperbole, and generalizations,”⁶ and the only explanation or excuse he offers is that he has gone out of his way to be “provocative, mischievous, and unclear, reflecting my belief that clarity is sometimes overrated, and that shock, obscurity, playfulness, and intrigue” are often more helpful than clarity.⁷

In all this, I cannot help but feel that he has tried to anticipate, and so deflate, any potential criticisms that readers might have after reading the book. I get the feeling that if he read my paper, he would not contest any of the things I have to say about his “generous orthodoxy.” He would just smile, nod, and move on. I am, no doubt, one of the narrow-minded, mean, exclusivist, ungenerous Fundamentalist-Evangelicals that he understands to be the problem with Christianity today. I am certain that I have not, in fact, missed his point, and that instead I fundamentally disagree with his conclusions. I feel the only criticism that might be effective would be on the level of an epistemological analysis that I am not competent to offer. All I can do is know what in his book I find problematic and be prepared to explain my concerns to others who might be willing to listen.

And this brings me to my gravest concern with A Generous Orthodoxy. I fear that in his emphasis on “missional” Christianity, he distorts the Gospel and makes it unclear. Mr. McLaren believes that the essence and foundation of Christianity is following Jesus in a journey of love, faith, and acceptance that embraces the entire world. To be a missional Christian is to “join Jesus in expressing God’s love for the whole world, to follow Jesus in his mission of saving love for the whole world.”

It must be emphasized that this mission is not fundamentally about proclaiming a message, at least not one that is eternal and unchanging, and certainly not one that talks of sin and redemption or of heaven and hell. The core of Christianity is not about believing the message of the Gospel, that man is inherently sinful and in rebellion against God, estranged from God and under His just condemnation. It is not about believing that in his perfect life, death, and resurrection Jesus purchased redemption, reconciliation to God, and eternal life for all those who repent of their sins and believe in Christ. It is not about that. That message, and thinking that it is the essence of what Jesus is about, is narrow-minded, exclusivist, and antithetical to the love of God.

Mr. McLaren doesn’t prefer to talk about the “hell question.” Rather, he wants to talk about the benefits of the Gospel for everyone, for the whole world, here and now. He is interested in a Gospel that is universally good news for Christians and non-Christians alike. He is interested in a gospel that is universally efficacious for the whole earth before death in history. This gospel frees the oppressed, provides for the poor, treats minorities with respect, and values the environment—whether everyone participates in following Jesus or not.

Now, we can affirm (from the Bible) that indeed the whole creation groans in travail, and that all things are reconciled in Christ. The story of God’s working in history is one of the restoration of creation—which has been bent to degraded and wretched ends—to its intended direction, use, and purpose—the glory of God. This includes all the fullness of created humanity’s rich experience in the world, but this is all achieved by the atoning work of Christ on the Cross that provides redemption for sins. Any “gospel” that marginalizes heaven and hell and fails to require repentance and faith in Jesus atoning work is no Gospel at all. There is no salvation apart from faith in Jesus Christ, which faith is truly what it means to be one of His followers.

The apostle Paul said that if he or even an angel from heaven should preach another gospel than the one he had previously preached—the message of a God who will judge the earth in righteousness, the message of repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the message of forgiveness of sins—he should be accursed. Brian McLaren is no angel from heaven, and it grieves me that such an incoherent, deceptive, Gospel-obscuring book should gain the acceptance that it seems to have in many evangelical circles. I pray that people who are skilled at handling the Word of God and understanding the perils of such stuff will gain a voice and be clear in showing others the dangers of this “orthodoxy” that will generously lead people straight to destruction.

Footnotes___________________________
¹ Jude 3.

² Don Carson notes that these tendencies are characteristic of many in the Emergent movement because of their subscription to a postmodern epistemology. See Becoming Conversant with the Emergent Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005).

³ McLaren, Generous Orthodoxy, 253.

⁴ Ibid., 270-272.

⁵ Ibid., 34.

⁶ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid., 36. One is reminded of the work of Jacques Derrida, the French post-structuralist literary theorist, who used similar tactics in his writings (though McLaren might protest the comparison).

Review: A Generous Orthodoxy, by Brian McLaren

2005-11-04T11:00:00.000-08:00

What is orthodoxy? What is the essence of “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3) for which we are to contend? Through much of church history Christians have understood “orthodox” to mean (as the word itself would suggest) right thinking—belief in a body of essential doctrine that the Bible reveals as the central message of Christianity. For some today, however, this definition does not suffice. Whether because of a postmodern aversion to doctrinal propositions or because of a desire not to be “divisive,” many today are redefining the essence of following Jesus as a mission, rather than a message. Brian McLaren is perhaps the most visible example of this. His book, “A Generous Orthodoxy,” seeks to paint a new vision for what orthodoxy ought to be in a postmodern world.

Mr. McLaren begins in Chapter 0 with an extended disclaimer, wherein he appears to apologize for any misstatements, overstatements, inaccuracies, hyperbole, or hasty generalizations. His excuse is that he has no formal theological training, and is not necessarily trying to be perfectly clear, but rather is trying to be provocative and contribute to a conversation about the nature of Christianity.

In Part One of the book, Mr. McLaren explains “Why I Am a Christian.” He recounts “Seven Jesuses I have known,” each representing a different strain of Christianity with which he has come into contact—Conservative Protestantism, Pentecostalism, Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Liberal Protestantism, Anabaptists, and Liberation Theology. Each has a different understanding of the chief problem with humanity, and a different understanding of how Jesus solves that problem, and Mr. McLaren thinks that each of them should be welcomed for their valuable contributions to a generous orthodoxy. In Chapter 2 he talks about who he understands Jesus to be, in Chapter 3 he argues that following Jesus doesn’t necessarily mean being a Christian, and in Chapter 4 he explains how and from what Jesus saves humans.

Part Two is Mr. McLaren’s description of “The Kind of Christian I Am.” As he explains, he is missional, which means that he understands the point of Christianity to be a mission of proclaiming salvation for the whole world. He is evangelical, which means passionate toward God, the Bible, and the Christian mission, but doesn’t mean identification with the Religious Right or narrow-minded fundamentalist Evangelicals. He is Post/Protestant, which doesn’t mean so much identification with Christians who define themselves by protest against Rome, but means pro-testifying, positively, about what we are for, rather than what we are against. He is Liberal/Conservative, which means joining the best of both streams and moving beyond division. He is Mystical/Poetic, which means recognizing the limits of systematic, propositional ways of understanding and communicating truth. There are several more attributes which would take more space to summarize than would be helpful—Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, (Ana)baptist/Anglican, Methodist, catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-Yet-Hopeful, Emergent, and Unfinished. Essentially, Mr. McLaren prefers to take what he sees as the best and most generous parts of these various traditions and unite them in moving forward on a mission that celebrates the various ways that Christians understand their faith.

The attitude with which Mr. McLaren approaches this work is admirable, in many ways. He is genuinely concerned with promoting a Christianity that is not selfish and narrow-minded, but displays the magnificent, lavish, prodigal love of God. Mr. McLaren understands that an otherworldly pietism that causes you to ignore your neighbors just shows that you don’t understand very well what it means to follow Jesus. His compassion for the last, lost, least (modeled, he understands, by the Savior) and his passion for reaching them with the good news of Jesus Christ are great things, and many evangelicals today could benefit from a dose of them.
His concern for understanding and adapting to the culture in which we live is also commendable, to a certain extent. He understands, rightly, that some of what many Christians have treated as essential parts of the Christian faith are in reality just cultural expressions and trappings that are particular to our modern, Western context. To the extent that Western culture is changing and modernist expressions of Christianity are no longer helpful or appropriate for reaching men and women with the Gospel today, we should be willing to change what may be legitimately changed for the sake of the Gospel.

Mr. McLaren’s analyses of problems with some corners of Evangelical Protestantism also ring true, at least at times throughout the book. He is apparently from a very conservative fundamentalist upbringing, and there are surely legitimate criticisms to be leveled against that tradition. More broadly, he recognizes, for instance, that evangelicals’ emphasis on the Bible and faithfulness to Scripture has on occasion fueled a concern to prove themselves right and others wrong, for the sake of feeding selfish desires for self-promotion and sinful boasting.

However, the way he levels these criticisms, and the solutions he proposes for them, should be of grave concern (and here I turn to my problems with Mr. McLaren’s book). If these concerns and other legitimate problems are cracks that have on occasion appeared in the edifice of traditional conservative Protestantism, Mr. McLaren seems to think that the whole building is nothing but cracks and should be pulled down forthwith. One theme that runs throughout A Generous Orthodoxy is that absolutism, the tendency to make any sort of sweeping truth claims, is narrow-minded, exclusivist, and bad.2 Yet he displays a tendency to make statements about those he criticizes that are not only sweeping and lack nuance, but in many cases are positively deceptive.

Examples of hasty generalizing are numerous enough to give a careful reader pause. For example, his critique of the modern missionary movement is that it adopted (albeit unintentionally) a colonial outlook characterized by “white supremacy, Eurocentrism, jingoism, and chauvinism.” While this may indeed have been true of some missionaries and missions organizations in the last two centuries, counter-examples are so numerous as to make this charge inaccurate at best, and deceptive at worst. In another example, he recounts a story of “Christian” conquistadors under Pizarro committing atrocities in the name of Christianity, and portrays it as in some way characteristic of Christianity in the centuries before his humble, generous, postmodern orthodoxy came along.

Examples of argumentation that is downright deceptive are also numerous. He does wonders with definitions. In discussing his choice of the word “orthodoxy” for the book, he says, “For most people, orthodoxy means right thinking or right opinions, or in other words, ‘what we think,’ as opposed to ‘what they think.’” I am quite sure that nobody who claims to be orthodox would define “right thinking” in such an egocentric manner with no regard for Scripture or tradition. In another example, his definition of fundamentalist as it has traditionally been used in the last several decades is that it includes “a foundationalist epistemology, assenting to something like a dictation theory of biblical inspiration, upholding a sectarian and elitist approach to non-Fundamentalist Christians, and identifying judgmentalism and anger as fruits of the Holy Spirit.” Even if some would agree with the first two items (and they are surely a tiny minority), asserting that they go hand-in-hand with the last two seems like just the sort of mean-spirited argumentation for which he vilifies fundamentalist/evangelical/conservative Protestants.

Mr. McLaren, as noted above, has a tendency to see small or localize problems as representative of entire sectors of Christianity. In so doing, he shows a disturbing propensity to caricature these sectors, setting up straw men that are easy to knock down with the rod of generosity. His description of the modern missionary movement referenced above is a prime example, and it illustrates well how he handles modernism, evangelicalism, fundamentalism, conservative Protestantism, and confessional Christianity in general.

Another troubling thing about this book has to do with the way Mr. McLaren sets it up in his introduction and Chapter O. In an attempt to be humble and avoid any claim of having gotten it all right (and, it seems in an attempt to preempt criticism), he has what is essentially an extended disclaimer. He plays the ignorance card, saying that he has never had any formal theological training and just “snuck into pastoral ministry accidentally through the back doors of the English department and church planting, and whose graduate education consisted of learning how to read—a skill most people feel they have mastered by about the third grade.” He anticipates many criticisms that readers may level. He acknowledges that the book is full of “overstatement, hyperbole, and generalizations,” and the only explanation or excuse he offers is that he has gone out of his way to be “provocative, mischievous, and unclear, reflecting my belief that clarity is sometimes overrated, and that shock, obscurity, playfulness, and intrigue” are often more helpful than clarity.

In all this, I cannot help but feel that he has tried to anticipate, and so deflate, any potential criticisms that readers might have after reading the book. I get the feeling that if he read my paper, he would not contest any of the things I have to say about his “generous orthodoxy.” He would just smile, nod, and move on. I am, no doubt, one of the narrow-minded, mean, exclusivist, ungenerous Fundamentalist-Evangelicals that he understands to be the problem with Christianity today. I am certain that I have not, in fact, missed his point, and that instead I fundamentally disagree with his conclusions. I feel the only criticism that might be effective would be on the level of an epistemological analysis that I am not competent to offer. All I can do is know what in his book I find problematic and be prepared to explain my concerns to others who might be willing to listen.

And this brings me to my gravest concern with A Generous Orthodoxy. I fear that in his emphasis on “missional” Christianity, he distorts the Gospel and makes it unclear. Mr. McLaren believes that the essence and foundation of Christianity is following Jesus in a journey of love, faith, and acceptance that embraces the entire world. To be a missional Christian is to “join Jesus in expressing God’s love for the whole world, to follow Jesus in his mission of saving love for the whole world.”

It must be emphasized that this mission is not fundamentally about proclaiming a message, at least not one that is eternal and unchanging, and certainly not one that talks of sin and redemption or of heaven and hell. The core of Christianity is not about believing the message of the Gospel, that man is inherently sinful and in rebellion against God, estranged from God and under His just condemnation. It is not about believing that in his perfect life, death, and resurrection Jesus purchased redemption, reconciliation to God, and eternal life for all those who repent of their sins and believe in Christ. It is not about that. That message, and thinking that it is the essence of what Jesus is about, is narrow-minded, exclusivist, and antithetical to the love of God.

Mr. McLaren doesn’t prefer to talk about the “hell question.” Rather, he wants to talk about the benefits of the Gospel for everyone, for the whole world, here and now. He is interested in a Gospel that is universally good news for Christians and non-Christians alike. He is interested in a gospel that is universally efficacious for the whole earth before death in history. This gospel frees the oppressed, provides for the poor, treats minorities with respect, and values the environment—whether everyone participates in following Jesus or not.

Now, we can affirm (from the Bible) that indeed the whole creation groans in travail, and that all things are reconciled in Christ. The story of God’s working in history is one of the restoration of creation—which has been bent to degraded and wretched ends—to its intended direction, use, and purpose—the glory of God. This includes all the fullness of created humanity’s rich experience in the world, but this is all achieved by the atoning work of Christ on the Cross that provides redemption for sins. Any “gospel” that marginalizes heaven and hell and fails to require repentance and faith in Jesus atoning work is no Gospel at all. There is no salvation apart from faith in Jesus Christ, which faith is truly what it means to be one of His followers.

The apostle Paul said that if he or even an angel from heaven should preach another gospel than the one he had previously preached—the message of a God who will judge the earth in righteousness, the message of repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the message of forgiveness of sins—he should be accursed. Brian McLaren is no angel from heaven, and it grieves me that such an incoherent, deceptive, Gospel-obscuring book should gain the acceptance that it seems to have in many evangelical circles. I pray that people who are skilled at handling the Word of God and understanding the perils of such stuff will gain a voice and be clear in showing others the dangers of this “orthodoxy” that will generously lead people straight to destruction.

Luke 15:11-32: Two Perspectives

2005-10-24T18:55:00.000-07:00

The love with which God has loved his children through Christ is amazing, magnanimous, and over-generous. It is prodigal. He demonstrated that love most fully on the Cross, but Jesus also illustrated that love in his parables, particularly his story of the Lost Son. In Luke 15:11-32, Jesus responds to the criticisms of the Pharisees for his eating with sinners by telling three stories of seekers who rejoice when they find a lost thing they were looking for. The third, and most pointed, is the parable often called the Prodigal Son. Dr. Roy Clements, former pastor of Eden Baptist Church in Cambridge, and Dr. Philip Ryken, pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, each exposit this text well, for they both understand that the story is at least as much a lesson about the elder son as about the prodigal son.

Clements’ sermon is relatively simple in its organization. He begins with a n observation that relationships normally break down in two ways. In what he calls “the big row,” the relationship is severed drastically, by an argument or some catastrophic event that propels the two parties away from each other. Conversely, in “the big freeze,” the relationship just slowly and quietly fades away, as the affections grow cold and what once was love fades to indifferent acquaintance. Both are equally disastrous, but in fact it is easier for the prodigal son to be restored after the big row than for the elder son (and the Pharisees, and religious hypocrites today) to be restored from the big freeze. Clements, finally, has two major areas of application. We should consider the overwhelming, costly, self-giving love of the Father’s free grace, and we must see the terrible danger of spiritual pride, “the mackintosh that grace just cannot get through.”

Ryken’s sermon is similarly structured, though rather than using relational terms for his homiletical framework, he uses the concept of lostness. His main points are two: that we should realize how lost the prodigal son is, and that we should also realize how lost the elder brother is. Regarding the prodigal son, he has three sub-points. First, the brother was lost before he ever left home, since he was impatient for his father’s death, wanting only the material benefits his father could give him. Second, he was lost when he ran away, since he fundamentally wanted freedom to sin. Third, he was still lost even when he decided to return home, for he was thinking as a servant rather than as a son. The elder brother was also lost, as he had likewise rejected his sonship.

Exegetically, these brothers both do fine work. They each do a good job of referencing the context of the story, showing how the parable is Jesus’ response to the criticism of the Pharisees. Each pastor gets to the basic point of the parable, which is focused not so much on the rebellion and repentance of the prodigal son as on the welcoming love of the Father and the resentfulness of the elder son. Both Clements and Ryken draw the comparison between the hypocrisy of the elder son in his pretension of virtue and the hypocrisy of the Pharisees in their works-based righteousness. What Ryken draws out that Clements doesn’t however, is that Jesus is drawing a contrast with the parable—as well as the two it follows—between the joy of the loving Father at finding and receiving lost sinners, and the cynical refusal of the Pharisees to share that joy regarding the sinners Jesus ate with.

Homiletically, both sermons were a minor disappointment. While they each, especially Clements, have a conversational manner that is easy to listen to, neither of them were particularly clear with the outline of their sermons. The points listed above were there, I think, but none of them were particularly clear. Clements’ were more like recurring themes than concrete points around which the sermon was organized. Ryken’s points were a bit clearer, but they sort of applied only to a portion of the sermon, rather than serving as an outline for the entire talk.

Nonetheless, both of these men seem to be gifted preachers dedicated to expositional preaching. They both do an able job of opening God’s Word up for God’s people. They both apply it well, asking piercing questions that force the listener to examine his own life for traces of the pride and hypocrisy that characterized the elder brother. Both of these sermons are fine meditations that show evident laboring in the Gospel.

Review: Reformation of the Church by Iain Murray (part 3 of 12)

2005-10-06T19:29:00.000-07:00

This post is the third of what will ultimately be twelve essays interacting with Iain Murray's book The Reformation of the Church.
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In Section III of The Reformation of the Church, Iain Murray begins the examination of “The Need for Reformation” with three excerpted articles, one on the many abuses in the Church of England in the sixteenth century and two on the relation of the state to the church. Thomas Wilcox, in “The Necessity of Reformation”, written to Parliament in 1572, lays out various ways in which the English church still resembled too much the Roman church and failed to reflect the standards of Scripture. Among the abuses he attacks are absenteeism, scarcity of preaching, lack of a plurality of elders, corruption of the office of deacons, and failure of “ecclesiastical discipline.” William Ames, writing in 1631, continues a dialogue “Concerning a National Church” by responding to an essay by Dr. John Burgess. In the excerpt, Ames argues that a state-run hierarchy ruling local churches is found nowhere in Scripture, and that unity among particular churches is found primarily in common confession, not in organizational rule. Finally, Charles Hodge, writing in 1863, surveys various ways in which state and church related to one another throughout history, showing that the separation of church and state that has characterized the United States is both biblical and a historical innovation.

Wilcox’s thoughts on needed reform in the Church of England are significant in light of recent discussions because they essentially represent an application of the regulative principle beyond worship (formal services, that is) to the rest of church life and polity.[Blogger's note: This refers to discussions among myself and my fellow interns.] He goes on for several pages elaborating on the stark contrast between the Anglican church, with all its extant ceremony and extra-scriptural offices and practices, and the early church of the Apostolic age, when the church simply observed the ordinances of Christ in what John Cotton later called “their native puritie and simplicitie.”

Wilcox’s boldness in so frankly laying out all the ways the church needed reform is both breathtaking and inspiring. In a time when disagreeing with the civil and ecclesiastical authorities could have dire consequences, it took great courage and commitment to the rule of the Word of God to declare, “we in England are so far off from having a Church rightly reformed, according to the prescript of God’s Word, that as yet we are not come to the outward face of the same.” Though Hodge’s assertion that the Reformation in England was effected by the civil power rather than the clergy or the people, surely men like Wilcox must have played a large role in pushing the English church beyond mere separation from Rome and towards true Scriptural reform.

Ames’ thoughts “Concerning a National Church” seem to represent an important development both for the modern idea of the separation of church and state and also for the autonomy of the local congregation. Ames is not writing as a Congregationalist, and in fact his argument leaves open ample room for organic bottom-up organization such as Presbyterianism, over against the top-down hierarchical episcopacy. However, some of his statements such as, “I never read either in Scripture or in any orthodox writer, of a visible particular Church,” reflect a growing awareness in the Reformation world of the rule of Scripture for church government, which formed the basis for congregationalism to be recovered by some of the English Puritans.

Corporate Worship and the People of God

2005-10-06T19:22:00.000-07:00

For millennia, worship of God has been the fundamental act that characterizes His people. From the Old Testament distinction between the pagans who worship false gods and the Israelites who worship the true God to the New Testament division between the church and the world, worship has always defined the people of God, for it is fundamentally what God’s people are all about. Since the Reformation dispensed with the idea that the practice and pronouncement of the Church are inherently infallible, Christians have asked what worship is, and how Christians should go about doing it. They have answered these questions in many different ways. Ligon Duncan, in his two chapters in Give Praise to God, Don Carson, in his chapter in Worship By the Book, Terry Johnson, in Reformed Worship, and David Peterson, in Engaging with God, all address the topic in slightly different, yet helpful, ways.

Duncan is primarily concerned with laying out the Regulative Principle, the guideline that Reformed churches have traditionally used in shaping their worship. In contrast to what has been called the normative principle, characteristic of Lutherans and Anglicans, which asserts that Christians are free to use any practices in worship that God does not explicitly forbid in His Word, the Regulative Principle asserts that the church may only do in worship what God has specifically commanded us to do. Duncan frames his chapters around the question “Does God care how we worship?” He answers, from the Scriptures with a resounding affirmative, laying out reasons why this is so, theological reasons for absolute Biblical faithfulness in worship, and a discussion of what a Reformed worship service should look like, touching on the distinctions between elements, forms, and circumstances of worship. Duncan’s work is tremendously helpful in understanding what the Regulative Principle is and its biblical-theological groundings.

If Duncan is primarily concerned with how worship should be practiced by the church corporately, Carson’s aim is a more fundamental question of what worship is. He notes that while our English word “worship” has been used of other activities and attitudes between humans, it takes on a very different definition when used of the activity directed at the true God by His people. He provides a “definition” a paragraph long that will not be reproduced here, but that Carson seems to think necessary in covering all of the essential points for a true understanding of Christian worship. This definition is, of course, because of its thoroughness and Biblical basis, prescriptive as well as descriptive. It tells us not only what worship is, but why we do it, how we should do it, and the character of the One to whom we direct it.

Johnson, like Duncan, is also focused somewhat on the Regulative Principle, but he seems to approach it more from the position of a pastor understanding what should be done in his church than that of a theologian investigating the question more academically (Duncan, however, surely agrees with Johnson’s position, as he edited the series in which Johnson’s booklet appears). He also goes beyond the Regulative Principle itself to address the attitude and spirit with which we engage in worship. Johnson takes Jesus’ words in John 4 as a framework for tracing out basic Scriptural justification for the Regulative Principle and how it looks in the church: “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth.” Under “truth,” Johnson establishes that Scripture must regulate worship. Considering “spirit,” he shows how true worship is more a matter of the heart and spiritual state than of external forms and practices.

Peterson has quite a different take on worship. The thesis of his book, which traces worship throughout the progressive revelation of Scripture, is that in the New Covenant worship is no longer the activity of God’s people in particular places at particular times, but rather is characteristic of all of life. The New Testament understands that everything we do is to be done to the glory of God, and that every action a believer takes says something about God and His character. Corporate meetings of the church, then are not particularly for worship any more than they are for breathing, but rather are intended for edification, encouragement, and teaching of the believers.

Peterson’s exegesis is provocative, and rather helpful in understanding the place of worship in the whole sweep of redemptive history. If the Reformed tradition has at times been guilty of seeing too great a continuity between the Old and New covenants, Peterson’s thoughts help us learn to look at the subject from a proper, post-cross, perspective. His assertions about the whole-life character of worship raise at least two specific questions about worship and the church that are worth pursuing. First, is it proper to speak of “worship” as being the fundamental reason we gather as a body on Sunday morning, and if not, then why do we gather? Second, is there any basis for a different standard of guidance for corporate worship than for all of life?

As regards the first question, I believe it is proper to think of our public gatherings as intended first and foremost to worship, praise, and glorify God together. This is based mainly on a teleological understanding of creation and redemption. The reason that humans exist, indeed the reason that all of creation exists, is worship. We are created by God specifically for the purpose of glorifying Him by living in fellowship with Him, obeying Him, and loving Him. Even after the fall, this is still the purpose of redemption. God elected to save a people for himself so that they would be reconciled to fellowship with Him and give Him praise, so that He would be glorified. This is what it means to be a child of God, and more importantly to the present discussion, this is what it means to be the people of God. He redeemed us not to remain individuals, but to be united as His people with the sole task of bringing Him glory together. When we gather on Sunday morning to worship God, we are fulfilling the purpose for which we are being saved, and we experience a foretaste of the ultimate assembly of all God’s people, when we will be devoted for all eternity to singing His praises.

So then, if corporate worship is indeed the reason we gather as a church, then we are faced with another question: what is unique about corporate worship? What sets it apart from the worship that we as believers engage in with our whole lives? Particularly, why is it that we are held to a higher standard (the Regulative Principle) when we praise God corporately than in the rest of life? Are we bound in our private or family devotions only to those actions positively commanded in Scripture?

Terry Johnson provides an answer. Explaining how the Reformed doctrine of the church flows into the Regulative Principle, he notes we have “sharply limited the church’s authority and power to those specifically delegated to it by Christ. Its authority is extensive yet is ‘ministerial and declarative.’” The church may require of its members no more than what God requires in Scripture. Since Christians are commanded to be at the weekly public worship services of the church, we may only do those things that God requires of His people.

Worship is, as the back of Peterson’s book notes, “of immense concern to the church,” and especially to pastors, elders, and leaders in the church who are in charge of leading their congregation in the worship of the living God, in spirit and in truth. There is much more in these readings that I have not plumbed, and that will continue to shape my thinking about worship for a long time to come. Learning better to worship God and more deeply to engage with him is a life-long process, and one that I trust will bring greater joy and delight the more I pursue it.

Review: Reformation of the Church by Iain Murray (part 2 of 12)

2005-09-28T14:23:00.000-07:00

This post is the second of what will ultimately be twelve essays interacting with Iain Murray's book The Reformation of the Church.
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The second section of Iain Murray’s The Reformation of the Church is titled “The Rule for Reformation—The Word of God.” Martin Luther argues, over against the Roman doctrine of the infallibility of the Church and the Pope, that all human men are sinners subject to error, and that therefore their writings must be submitted to the judgment of Scripture. William Cunningham lays out the Regulative Principle established by the reformers—the doctrine that all the Church’s practices in worship must be positively found Scripture, and he goes on to apply it to the matter of church government, arguing that the Scriptures set out a particular form of government to which we must hold. John Hooper, writing during the Vestment Controversy in England in the 1550s, gives four criteria which must be met for something to be considered a “thing indifferent,” and concludes that the wearing of special priestly garments does not meet the criteria and is therefore prohibited by Scripture. John a Lasco delves into the vestments issue more deeply, showing how their use is prohibited by the abolition of the Aaronic priesthood in Christ. Finally, an excerpt from the Geneva Service Book of 1556 gives several scriptural proofs for the Regulative principle.

It has been said that the formal principle of the Reformation was the authority of Scripture alone. It is the authority and sufficiency of Scripture for faith and practice with which these selections are concerned. The more I reflect on sola scriptura and read the writings of these men who were so dedicated to being ruthlessly subjected to the dictates of the Bible, the more I come to understand how fundamental God’s Word is to the Church.

From Scripture itself, we see that God’s people are always created by God’s Word—from his creating word recorded in Genesis, to his covenanting word to Abraham that called a people out of the world to Himself, to his re-creating Word, Jesus Christ, who regenerates God’s people and justifies them. God’s word also sustains and sanctifies his people, providing the spiritual nourishment needed to transform them by the renewing of their minds and conforming them into the image of His Son. It is entirely natural then, that God’s Word should be the power that drives the reformation of His people. Studying the Reformers’ dedication to Scripture makes me delight all the more in God’s goodness in giving us His word and strengthens my desire to know it and teach it.

I found Hooper’s treatment of the Regulative Principle and its relationship to “things indifferent” thought-provoking. He defines things indifferent as things that “bring no profit when done or used, but no harm when not done or used.” Interestingly, though it seems natural to assume these things are not to be found in Scripture, Hooper says just the opposite. Things indifferent “must have their origin and foundation in the Word of God,” else they may not be used in the Church. This understanding seems almost contradictory, for why would God institute something in the Bible if it brings no profit? Hooper gives no example of a thing indifferent that meets the conditions he sets forth—the only specific thing discussed is the use of vestments, which he finds prohibited by the abrogation of the Aaronic priesthood. Perhaps this confusion is because Hooper’s manuscript is incomplete, but while I think he does an admirable job of debunking the use of vestments, I must confess I don’t understand his treatment of “things indifferent.”

Lastly, I found the brief selection from the Geneva Service Book very instructive. After hearing the Regulative Principle asserted in the first few readings (and in other sources), it was helpful to see specific instances from Scripture and church history where it was applied.

Review: Reformation of the Church by Iain Murray (part 1 of 12)

2005-09-26T19:52:00.000-07:00

This post is the first of what will ultimately be twelve essays interacting with Iain Murray's book The Reformation of the Church.
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In his introduction to The Reformation of the Church: a collection of Reformed and Puritan documents on Church issues, Iain Murray lays out his reasons for publishing this volume of collected works. He outlines how questions of the internal life of the Church were being discussed widely in England at the time of the volume’s publication, driven largely by an ecumenical movement that raised these topics in an attempt to “burst the bands” of denominationalism (p. 7). Murray points out that the Reformers and Puritans wrote extensively on the Church, and that their works had virtually disappeared from the conversation by the early twentieth century. This volume is intended to remedy that deficiency, providing the perspective of the men who perhaps more than anyone else in history had to consider the nature of the Church as they dealt with the world-shaking implications of the recovery of the gospel of justification by faith alone.

It is quite appropriate that Murray chose to contribute to the conversation about the Church by recovering the writings of the Reformers. At a time when the Archbishop of Canterbury explicitly denies the sufficiency of Scripture for “the proper conduct of life and the ordering of the church, [p. 8]” nothing could be more appropriate than the testimony of men whose lives, works, and, for many, their martyrdom, were driven by the conviction that Scripture was indeed sufficient—and supremely authoritative—for shaping the character of the Church.

One might question the effectiveness of the volume as a contribution to the target discussion. After all, how much influence could it have with those who explicitly deny the authority or sufficiency of scripture or both, when Murray himself states that “the documents provided in this book…will be of help only to those who are prepared to bring everything to the judgment of Scripture [p. 9]?” Upon further reflection, however, perhaps it indeed contributes much to the great conversation about the Body of Christ. Clearly this conversation is much wider than mid-twentieth century debates about ecumenism, and input from the Reformers and Puritans should be useful to practically every Christian, whether clergy or layman, who wants to think carefully and biblically about the Church.

In Section I of the book, entitled “The Nature of the Church,” Murray presents excerpts from works by John Calvin and a number of English reformers who were martyred for their faith, many during the reign of Mary Tudor in the 1550s. The selections focus on arguing that the Roman Catholic Church is not the true church and on laying out the distinguishing marks of a true and faithful visible church. The authors differ slightly on the second point—all of them who deal with it include faithful preaching of God’s Word and right administration of the sacraments, while Nicholas Ridley adds charity and “faithful observing of ecclesiastical discipline [p. 19].”

Ever since the Reformation, evangelical Protestants have referred to these practices as the marks of a true church. Are these the only necessary and sufficient marks, or were they asserted over against Roman Catholic error? That is, apart from the context of the reformation, if we were asked to list the scriptural marks of a true church today, would we come up with these three (preaching, sacrament, discipline), and would there be any others?

The logic of the Reformers’ argument, becomes clear when one considers the role that each of these practices serves in the Church. God’s Word creates His people, and His self-revelation in the Bible is the only way we are able to know Him and his salvation in Christ. Preaching, therefore, creates, sustains, and perfects God’s people The ordinances, in turn mark out the boundaries of God’s people. Baptism witnesses the conversion of a believer and his entrance into the fellowship of the church, and the Lord’s Supper displays the continued fellowship of believers with one another in the unity of Christ. Church discipline maintains the purity of God’s people, guiding believers to continued repentance and cutting off from fellowship those who evidence their unbelief by refusing to repent.

To a Reformed evangelical in the twenty-first century, the arguments that these Reformers draw out of Scripture seem natural, basic, even obvious. At the time, however, they would have been astoundingly controversial for their distinct contradiction of Roman Catholic doctrine. In a time when contradicting Rome was rather hazardous to one’s health, one can hardly help admiring these men for their deep commitment to God’s Word. They clearly feared God, rather than men, and we would do well to learn from their faithful example.

Habakkuk 1:1-11: Two Perspectives

2005-09-22T08:31:00.000-07:00

For as long as sin and its effect have been at work in the world, people have looked around them at the evil and misery they see, and asked the question “Why?” The people of God have often asked it of Him, and a similar one: “How long will you tolerate this?” This is precisely the question that the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk raises at the beginning of the book that bears his name. Two sermons, one by Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, and the other by Andrew Davis of First Baptist Church, Durham, NC, each look at Habakkuk 1:1-11 and seek to explain and apply it to the congregation. Each deals with the text, each applies the 2600-year-old story to modern life, and each presents the Gospel. One of them, however, explains the text in relation to the rest of the message of the Bible, and for this reason it is a better sermon.

Driscoll’s sermon, to begin, is somewhat unusual in that while it is an hour long, approximately forty minutes of it is taken up with what is essentially an introduction. He briefly explains Habakkuk’s attitude and his first question in vv. 2-4, and then spends over half an hour trying to paint a picture for the congregation, trying to get them to understand and identify with Habakkuk’s perspective. As Habakkuk saw the suffering and injustice in his world (as Driscoll says it), he wants the congregation to consider the suffering and injustice in their own. So he relates numerous anecdotes: a widow blaming God for taking her husband and thrusting hardship upon her, stories of disorder and chaos and frustration in his own life the previous week, suffering and violence on the TV news, abusive and indolent fathers, corrupt police, greedy lawyers, power-mongering politicians and judges, arsonist firefighters, laws that discourage marriage, organ-transplant surgeries gone wrong, con artists who scam the elderly, magazines and advertisements and sex-ed programs encouraging children and adolescents to perversion and immorality, and more.

Finally, Driscoll comes to considering the passage, and he has three main points. The first, from vv. 1-4, is “Habbakuk’s Complaint.” Habakkuk cries out to God in prayer because he is wearied and sickened by the evil he sees around him. Driscoll encourages the congregation to consider that “this world stinks,” and join Habakkuk in going to God. Point two, from vv. 5-11, is “God’s Castigation.” God responds to Habakkuk’s prayer, saying that He too is frustrated and angered by the sins of people, and that he is going to respond by sending the Babylonian army to destroy them. Driscoll spends several minutes explaining the fearsome character of the Babylonians presented in these verses, translating the description into modern terms so his audience can understand them. Finally, his third point is “Christ’s Cross.” Driscoll here explains the gospel: just as God called his people to repentance through Habakkuk, so too he calls us to repentance through the preaching of His word. Jesus Christ died on the cross as a substitute, paying the penalty for the sins of all His people.

Davis’ sermon, by contrast is at the same time much shorter (32 minutes) and much more closely exegetical. He begins with a short recounting of the historic triumphalism that characterized Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then goes on to set forth some of the questions that the horrors of the twentieth century raised. Is there any meaning to history? Is God holy? Is he sovereign? Is he good? The book of Habakkuk, Davis explains, contains “Modern Words from an Ancient Scroll.”

Davis also has three main points. First, from vv.2-4, “Why Does a Just God Tolerate Injustice?” He briefly recounts the history of Israel—God’s promises to Abraham, her righteous heritage as God’s chosen people, Israel’s continual rebellion and sin, most recently that of kings Manasseh and Jehoiakim. Habakkuk considers the depravity of the Israelites, and asks God how long he will tolerate their rebellion. Second, God delivers his response, “The Babylonians Are Coming!” God sovereignly replies, saying he is going to raise up the Babylonians, a fearsome and wicked people, to punish Judah for her sins. Finally, from this passage we see “Five Lessons On History.” History is under God’s control, it follows His divine plan, it follows his divine timetable, it is bound up with the Kingdom of God and fulfilled in Christ, and justice is always done in the end.

There is a distinct difference in tone between these two sermons that reflects the different perspectives of their authors and the churches in which they were preached. Driscoll’s sermon is hip, funny, at times irreverent, and relevant. Oddly, in his forty-minute intro that he says is intended to paint a picture of suffering, there is as much wit and humor as soberness and grief. This surely detracts from the effect he says he is trying to produce, and leads one to wonder if he isn’t just as interested in entertaining his audience as enlightening his congregation. In the sermon overall, Driscoll’s language indicates that Habakkuk’s message is as much about the bad things that happen today as the evil that he saw in his own time. Davis’ tone, by contrast, is far different. He is far more focused on God’s word than current events, as he doesn’t reference them after the third minute of the sermon. Where Driscoll uses current events and hip language to interpret Scripture, Davis uses Scripture to interpret itself.

There is also a fundamental difference in the way these two pastors treat the problem that Habakkuk is complaining of. Driscoll sees Habakkuk looking around him and seeing sin and evil in the world, and he’s sick of it, so he asks God how long he’s going to let him (and perhaps other good people) suffer. Davis, on the other hand, sees that the problem is not just evil in general, but sin. And more importantly, the sin of God’s own people. The people of Judah were his own chosen people, called by His name, but they were rebelling against God. In their wickedness, they were defaming God’s name and lying about His character. Habakkuk, from this perspective, is not just being noisily uncomfortable, he’s concerned about the character and the glory of God Himself. He wonders why God tolerates this wickedness because he knows that God is holy and just, and forestalling the display of his judgment doesn’t make sense.

This leads to the most fundamental and important difference between these two sermons. While Driscoll considers the message of this text in virtual isolation from the rest of the Bible (and mostly in isolation from the rest of the book), Davis carefully, masterfully, places it in the scope and sequence of redemptive history. While Driscoll adequately explains how this passage illustrates the justice of God and how it points to Christ, Davis shows how God’s justice, as well as his holiness, love, sovereignty, and mercy, is played out in history as God works out his plan to save a people to Himself through Christ. Because Davis’ perspective is so much more comprehensive, he is able to show how the first eleven verses of Habakkuk contain a richness of truths about God and His character, about history, about the Kingdom of God, and about what it means to be one of His people.

That Davis has a better knowledge of Scripture seems clear, and it affects the message. Driscoll’s sermon, while I would take issue with his tone and method, does an adequate job of explicating the text and a good job of presenting the Gospel. For this reason, it might make a good evangelistic address. In the church, however, preaching to the people of God, Davis’ is certainly preferable for the depth of insight and commitment to Scripture that it displays.

Review: The Bruised Reed by Richard Sibbes

2005-09-19T20:37:00.000-07:00

Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the second person of the Trinity, is presented in Scripture as an inescapably fearful figure. The vision of Him that John records at the beginning of Revelation left John on his face as though dead, and considering Christ as the great Judge who will destroy His enemies at the last day has caused many more men to be utterly abased and driven to despair. But, strangely, gloriously, Jesus is also the Comforter, the Wonderful Counselor and Good Shepherd who is wondrously tender with His sheep. It is this tender, comforting side of Christ’s nature that Richard Sibbes is primarily concerned with meditating on in The Bruised Reed, and it is indeed a wonderful meditation.

Sibbes’ text is from Isaiah 42:

Behold my servant, whom I uphold; mine elect, in whom my soul delighteth; I have put my spirit upon him: he shall bring forth judgment to the Gentiles. He shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street. A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth.

From this passage, and especially verse three, Sibbes elaborates beautifully on the person and offices of Christ as the Servant of God who treats His people with the utmost care as He sustains and purifies them, bringing forth “judgment unto truth.” The bruised reed, Sibbes says, represents a man who is in misery because of his sin and is despondent but for the hope he has in Christ. Christ will handle this person, bruised by his sin, gently, until through the misery he is purged of sin. Likewise, the smoking flax stands for a Christian in whom, though the flame of the Holy Spirit is kindled, it is weak, and the fumes of sin’s effects make him miserable. In the same way, Christ will not quench this believer, but will fan into flame the spark that he possesses until it grows and burns away all sinful impurities and he becomes a bright light shining forth the glory of God. As Jesus is so gently shepherding us, he is bringing forth the judgment of His gracious kingdom in us and through us, and one he will have brought it forth to victory and His kingdom will be consummated.

Everyone who struggles with sin—and that means every true believer—should find this book tremendously encouraging and comforting. There are times when each of us is in misery because of his own sin and its cancerous effects in our lives. In these times, we need more than anything else what Sibbes provides: a meditation on Christ and His work in our lives. Focusing on Christ, not on ourselves, is key to finding comfort and assurance when we feel particularly “bruised.”

Perhaps the only criticism that may justly be offered against The Bruised Reed is that it is not as narrowly exegetical as he seems to be at first blush, or as one would normally expect from a sermon. Sibbes lays out a wealth of comfort, encouragement, inspiration, and truth in these pages, but it is not always clear that it all comes from the Isaiah text. A great deal of the significance Sibbes finds in the images in this passage seem to be related to the meaning of the text primarily in an allegorical way, rather than literally or typologically. For example, his image of sparks (from the flax) by nature flying upwards as a symbol of the “Spirit of grace carry[ing] the soul heaven-ward and sett[ing] before us holy and heavenly aims,” does not seem to be the originally intended meaning of the passage. Additionally, some of the other passages he cites throughout the text don’t seem to closely support the point he intends them to make. For example, he uses 1 Corinthians 3:17, making a point about a Christian being “a sacred thing,” when the context of the passage clearly indicates that it refers to the corporate body of the church, not to individual Christians.

For all this inexact application and occasional stretching the meaning of the text (and it is really a minor problem), the book is still packed chock-full of wonderful nuggets of truth that I will be meditating on for some time to come. One of the more helpful is a point that he makes throughout the book, speaking to the man who is so painfully aware of his sin that it makes him miserable, and causes him to question whether there really is any true faith and repentance in him. He says,
Fire, where it is present, is in some degree active. So the least measure of grace works, as springing from the Spirit of God, who, from his operations, is compared to fire. Even in sins, when there seems nothing active but corruption, there is a contrary principle, which breaks the force of sin, so that it is not boundlessly sinful, as in those that are carnal.

Even when sin is so hideously present that it seems to obscure all else—when the fire cannot be seen because of all the smoke—still we can find comfort in that the awareness of sin and conviction is itself an evidence of grace. Were there no Spirit within us—no fire—we would feel no conviction and misery—no smoke. So then, in some ways misery because of sin is something for which to thank God, because in it we know that He has given us new life and is busy refining us into the image of Christ, painful though the process may be.

Review: The Worship of the American Puritans by Horton Davies

2005-09-14T12:10:00.000-07:00

In The Worship of the American Puritans, Horton Davies provides an in-depth study of the theology and practice of the Puritans in New England in the seventeenth century that is useful as a historical study, as an aid for any Christian who wants better to understand the background for many Reformed worship practices today, and as a glimpse of the wholehearted devotion of a people perhaps more dedicated to Godliness than any other in American history. As he examines their religious calendar, sermons, singing, prayers, administration of the sacraments, marriages, funerals, ordinations, and even their architecture, several themes or beliefs emerge that pervaded Puritan life and shaped every area of their public worship. Among these are their belief in divine sovereignty and predestination, their concern for “visible sainthood” and maintaining a pure church, and their application of the regulative principle which resulted in a relentless determination to subject everything they did in worship to the rule of Scripture.

Davies seems to make much of what he regards as a paradox in Puritan theology. On one hand, they were rigorous Calvinists, with a firm belief in man’s natural depravity and the complete sovereignty of God in electing men to salvation. On the other hand, their extreme emphasis on holy living made it seem as though good works were an essential part of salvation. Furthermore, very few Puritans seem to have had much assurance of their salvation, as they often subjected themselves to intense soul-searching, wondering if their professed faith were true and they were indeed among the elect. To Davies, the very idea of a covenanting Calvinist—one who commits to live a life of visible sainthood in the community of believers—is somewhat paradoxical.

However, the paradox is explained if one looks at the Puritans’ beliefs from the standpoint of the Reformation commitment to fully submitting to Scripture. The Puritans believed in election and personal holiness simply because they saw both taught in Scripture. They understood that God has chosen to save a people to the praise of His glory, and that being saved by God entailed growing to be more like Christ. Since the purpose of salvation was God’s glory, they understood that salvation produced good works—not the other way around, as so often seems to make sense from a sinful human perspective.

The Puritans’ struggles with assurance, however, are somewhat troubling. They believed, rightly, that only God knew finally who the elect were, but they seem to have gone beyond proper humility into persistent unbelief in this area. That is, they seem to have fallen, often, into focusing so much on their own works as evidences of election and true faith that they ended up undermining Calvinism’s emphasis on the objective work of Christ in salvation, over against human action.

Undermining of assurance is common in the evangelical world today. It is often based on poor theology and a bad understanding of the Gospel. When salvation is based on a prayer prayed, an aisle walked, or a card signed, it’s easy and common for the professing Christian, as he continues to struggle with sin, to question whether or not he really meant it. Even those who properly understand what it means to be a Christian, however, are not immune to assurance-sapping doubt. Even those who understand that continuing Christ-likeness rather than a decision is the evidence of true belief can despair of being truly elect in the face of their own sin. We must understand that all the demands, promises, and callings of a disciple are fully and finally fulfilled in Christ. In our quest for assurance, we must look first at Christ and His work before looking at our own lives. We must have Christ’s perfect obedience and His mediation as the lens through which we look at our own imperfect obedience. We can and should find assurance of our election, but we must find it in Christ, not in our own obedience or works or faith or visible sainthood. The Puritans, at least as Davies presents them, didn’t seem to understand this well.

Another thorny area of Puritan theology, as Davies’ work shows, is the nexus of their doctrine of visible sainthood, their Congregationalist ecclesiology, their understanding of covenant, and their theology of the sacraments. Davies points out that while Calvin believed a true church to exist wherever the right preaching of the word, proper administration of the sacraments, and proper discipline were practiced, the Puritans took it a step further in their understanding that the church was to be made up of visible saints—those who demonstrated their discipleship by public repentance and evidence of conversion. This concern for visible sainthood seems to be a product of their Congregationalist understanding of the local nature of the church. This understanding also led them to form their churches by covenanting together in commitment to rightly displaying the character of God by discipling one another and pursuing personal and corporate holiness.

This nexus of beliefs became problematic in connection with their understanding of the sacraments. Specifically, retaining the practice of infant baptism led to depreciation of the sacraments, impure church membership, and eventually the infamous Half-Way Covenant. They understood that visible sainthood and a discernable conversion experience were prerequisite to participation in the Lord’s Supper, but because membership in the church was gained by being baptized as an infant, after only a few decades the Puritans’ churches were full of unregenerate people who had to be excluded from communion and whose children were not eligible for baptism because their parents displayed no evidence of regeneration. This flawed ecclesiology and covenant theology is perhaps the most instructive negative example to be gained from the Puritans.

The Reformation of the Church

2005-09-13T11:22:00.000-07:00

The Protestant Reformation was a world-shaking event. It changed the structure of society wherever its doctrines took root, and the recovery of the Gospel which was its central focus brought millions of people out of spiritual darkness and into the light of Christ. The doctrine of justification by faith alone, which Luther called “the article by which the Church stands or falls”, was at the center of the radically different Protestant understanding of what it meant to be a Christian. Three important areas of thought were particularly affected by sola fide: the understanding of the church, the pastor and his role, and the sacraments.

First, the Reformation turned upside down the doctrine of the church. In medieval Roman Catholicism (and in the Roman church to this day), the church was understood to be the visible structure of priests, bishops, cardinals, monks, nuns, and other ordained officials who all owed allegiance to the Pope, the Bishop of Rome and the Vicar of Christ. The Nicean attributes of the church—one, holy, catholic, and apostolic—were abused by Catholic theologians foundational to the claim that Rome’s visible structure was the only true church and that salvation could only be found in obedience to Rome and her dispensation of the sacraments.

The Reformation changed all this. The Reformers came to understand that ultimately, the bride of Christ is made up not of bishops and cardinals, but of those who truly repent of their sins and believe in Jesus Christ. Their understanding that the Roman church was corrupt and fundamentally apostate from the Gospel was revolutionary, for it showed them that a true church was distinguished by faithfulness to the Gospel, not allegiance to the Pope.

The Reformation also began to change how the church understood its relation to the world. The Roman Catholic Church had proclaimed its sovereignty over all merely human governments, and for much of the Middle Ages it did indeed control the political life of much of Europe. After the reformation, however, the Augustinian understanding of the distinction between spiritual, heavenly power and earthly power came to be understood once more. In England and elsewhere, the situation was in fact reversed and the secular monarch was considered to be the head of the national church as well. It would be some time later that congregationalism would lead to the disestablishment of religion and the modern understanding of a separate church and state.

The Reformation also resulted in a more biblical understanding of the pastor and his role in the church. In the Roman Catholic Church, the priest was believed to have important supernatural or magical powers, and he was a crucial part of mediating the grace of God to laymen. In the Eucharist, it was held, the priest re-sacrificed Christ by transubstantiating the elements of bread and wine into Christ’s actual body and blood. The priest was also supposed to have the power to grant absolution after hearing confession and assigning penance.

In the Reformation, the role of the priest shifted from performing the Eucharist to the preaching of God’s Word. Since Protestants no longer believed that the sacraments had salvific power, they understood that the priest couldn’t forgive sin or directly administer the grace of God the way Catholics believed he could. Rather, they understood that since salvation comes through faith alone and that faith comes by hearing the Word of God, the priest’s—now the pastor’s—most important duty was preaching the life-giving Word to the people.

This new focus on preaching meant that the standards for being a clergyman in a Reformed church were far different than those for being a priest in the Catholic Church. Though Rome may have had stricter official requirements, many Catholic priests were scarcely literate, since the mere recitation of the liturgy required little education and virtually no knowledge of the Scriptures. In contrast, to be ordained as a minister of the Word of God required thorough knowledge of the Bible and true theology, and substantial training in preaching and exegesis. Pastors were also expected to be examples of personal holiness and devotion to God, which was a stark contrast from the extreme moral degradation of the medieval Catholic clergy.
Finally, the Reformation had important implications for Protestants’ understanding of the nature of the sacraments. Whereas Rome had seven sacraments (baptism, confirmation, communion, confession, marriage, holy orders, and last rites), the Reformers rejected all but baptism and the Lord’s Supper, as these were the only ones instituted by Jesus in the New Testament. Though faithful administration of these were considered to be a mark of a true church, they were no longer considered essential for salvation. God’s grace in Christ’s atonement, they understood, was applied to the believer solely through faith, not by performance of any works.

The Protestant view of the Lord’s Supper differed from the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist primarily in their rejection of transubstantiation, though Protestant views varied. Luther continued to believe in the real physical presence of Christ’s body in the elements of the supper, though he understood this to be brought about by the faith of the communicant and not by the magical powers of a priest. Calvin and Zwingli denied Christ’s physical presence in the supper, understanding that Jesus’ physical body was at the right hand of God the Father in Heaven and instead teaching that Christ was spiritually present in the Supper and that the believing communicant fed on Christ in his heart.

The Reformers also rejected Rome’s belief that baptism regenerated the individual (usually an infant) to whom it was given. Though the Anabaptists in the Radical Reformation adopted believers’ baptism immediately, they were marginalized and persecuted throughout most of Protestant Europe. The Magisterial Reformers retained belief in infant baptism and articulated a new doctrine of covenant theology that understood baptism to be the sign of covenant membership and parallel to circumcision in the Old Testament. In the seventeenth century some Reformed Protestants began to embrace believers’ baptism, and Baptists eventually became one of the three major Reformed factions in England, with the Presbyterians and episcopalian Anglicans.

These three areas—the church, the role of pastors, and the sacraments—were perhaps the most notable of the doctrinal changes of the Reformation. They were tremendously important for the way the new Protestant churches developed and how they came to understand the Christian faith. They are perfect examples of the significance of the Reformers’ recovery of the gospel of justification by faith alone, and they are a wonderful picture of how Christ works to reform and perfect His Church.

Fundamentalism

2005-09-11T12:51:00.000-07:00

In 1922 in New York City, Harry Fosdick preached a sermon entitled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” At the time, Protestants were embroiled in a debate between liberal theology that had been on the rise for at least half a century and Fundamentalist theology, so named for its emphasis on “fundamentals of the faith” such as the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible, the virgin birth, divinity, resurrection, and second coming of Christ, and the substitutionary atonement. In his sermon Fosdick rails against the supposed intolerance of the Fundamentalists, arguing that Christians on both ends of the spectrum should be tolerant of each others’ views and avoid breaking fellowship with those of different opinions on these matters.

Though Fosdick has many good things to say, and his seeming zeal for spreading the Gospel is admirable, he ultimately is guilty of a dangerously errant view of the Scriptures, the Christian faith, and the place of tolerance in the Church. First, he has a poor understanding of the doctrine of Scripture and the nature of God’s Word. Fosdick accuses Fundamentalists of believing that the entirety of the Bible was “inerrantly dictated by God to men.” While there may have been a very small minority of Fundamentalists who held to this view in Fosdick’s day, it has never been the dominant or orthodox understanding of the mode of God’s inspiration of the Scriptures. This is simply a caricature by Fosdick that has little to do with the true Protestant doctrine of the plenary verbal inspiration of the Bible.

Fosdick’s counter-argument and his own understanding of Scripture contain both important elements of truth and significant problems. He compares the supposed Fundamentalist view to Islam’s doctrine that the Koran was written infallibly in heaven before being to given to Mohammed. He points out that this view of the origins of the Koran have stultified the culture of Muslim areas in enslavement to ideas like polygamy, slavery, God as an Oriental monarch, and the use of force on unbelievers. All of these things, he points out, are present in the Bible, but “are not final; they are always being superseded; revelation is progressive.” He says that the Bible is “the record of the progressive unfolding of the character of God to his people from early primitive days until the great unveiling in Christ.”

All of this is exactly right, but Fosdick demonstrates a poor understanding of Biblical Theology and the true nature of revelation. The two major acts of God with reference to man—redemption and revelation—go hand in hand, but they are not the same thing. Redemption has to do with the acts of God in space and time to save a people to himself throughout the generations of human history. Revelation has to do with the self-disclosure of God to men and follows the objective acts of God in redemptive history. The Bible is the written form of God’s self-revelation, and that revelation is indeed progressive. It starts with the relatively basic ways God dealt with the patriarchs, moves through the Law given to Moses and the age of the prophets, and finds its full and final expression, its glorious consummation, in Christ. God’s work of redemption goes on today in a subject-central way as he saves individuals to Himself, but Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension mark the completion of His objective acts of redemption, and the completion of His special revelation.¹ Fosdick, with a bad understanding of this, wrongly sees the Bible primarily as a source of inspiration and private, spiritual importance that essentially has different meaning for the modern Christian than for the pre-modern believer.

His view of Scripture also reveals something of what he believes about God. As a Christian, he clearly does not believe that the Koran is in fact the inspired word of God. He believes it to be a work of purely human invention and believes that the (wrong) treatment of it as God’s word is responsible for the calcification of the Muslim world in a medieval culture. He applies the same reasoning to the Bible, implying that if the Fundamentalists won and the Bible were treated the same way, it would have a similar result. It seems, then that Fosdick sees the Bible (like the Koran) not as the breathed-out word of an eternal, omniscient, timeless God. If he did, he might understand that the Word is equally applicable to all ages regardless of when it was written, and whether it was actually dictated or less directly inspired. Taken to its logical end, Fosdick’s line of thinking seems to end with an essentially Deistic view of God.

Fosdick also has a poor understanding of the role of tolerance among Christians and in the Church. He lambastes the Fundamentalists for excluding liberals from Christian fellowship, saying that anyone is entitled to their opinions and asserting that a liberal like himself would never be so intolerant. He clearly thinks the Fundamentalists are wrong in their beliefs, but his attitude seems to be that the Fundamentalists should be tolerant even if they are in fact right. In so doing—and even in his own “tolerant” attitude—he completely neglects the duty of pastors and elders of the church to preserve true doctrine and maintain the true teaching of the faith once for all delivered to the saints. It is one thing to be “tolerant” of an individual who believes unbiblical and unorthodox doctrines—all Christians should indeed be tolerant of such a person, if tolerance includes welcoming them into the church and teaching them the true Gospel and right doctrine. The elders of the Church, however, neglect their calling and will be called to account before God if they allow false doctrine to spread in the church, especially if they allow it to be taught publicly.

Finally, Fosdick’s beliefs about the proper relationship of religion and science in the modern world are fundamentally flawed, though they are typical of the spirit of modernism that has plagued Christianity for more than two centuries. Fosdick is right when he says that “all truth comes from one God and is his revelation,” and in his assertion that believers must “see this [modern scientific] knowledge in terms of the Christian faith and to see the Christian faith in terms of this new knowledge.” He references the medieval controversy between the Roman Catholic Church, with its established Ptolemeian view of an earth-centered universe, and Galileo Galilei who advocated the Copernican sun-centered understanding of the solar system. Fosdick compares liberals to Galileo as the one trying to “blend the new knowledge and the old faith in a new combination,” and puts the Fundamentalists in the place of the cruel, dogmatic, repressive Church of Rome. This controversy, however, lies at the beginning of the modern spirit that places scientific “knowledge” and human reason above faith in the revealed word of God, relegating revelation only to the realm of private, internal, spiritual values rather than the source of all true knowledge.

The titular question Fosdick raises in this sermon is difficult to answer. It would seem that to some extent the answer is negative, as the spirit of modernism pervades much of today’s evangelical world. Many Christians today do indeed view the Bible as only having importance for their feeble, privatized religion that is relevant only one day per week. On the other hand, the orthodox faith is alive and well in many churches where biblical doctrine is still taught. Christ, after all, has promised to build and preserve His church, and He will guard her from false teaching. To the extent that “fundamentalism” is part of the faith once for all delivered to the saints (a dubious assertion, but one for another essay), then, the answer is, yes. Not only shall the fundamentalists win, they must win, for they are the true followers of the Lord Jesus Christ who believe His true Gospel.

¹See Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2000), 5-8.

Review: When People Are Big and God Is Small by Edward Welch

2005-07-23T14:04:00.000-07:00

Edward Welch’s book When People Are Big and God Is Small: Overcoming Peer Pressure, Codependency, and the Fear of Man is an insightful, convicting, and thoroughly biblical treatment of a problem that affects every person and is of particular relevance for pastors and other Christians who are regularly involved in spiritual counseling. Welch does an excellent job of debunking many common unbiblical ideas about so-called “psychological issues” using a biblical perspective and showing that at the root of all self-esteem issues and relational difficulties lies one common problem: sin.
Welch describes a common issue that manifests itself in many ways, but generally involves a feeling of a lack of personal or relational fulfillment, a craving of love and attention from other people, and profound emotional trauma that results from rejection or stress in relationships. The common thread is that people affected by this problem—often called “codependency” or sometimes “peer pressure”—are all controlled by other people in their lives and emotions.
The example of “Janet” is typical of the more profound manifestations of this problem that usually cause someone to seek counseling for their problems. Janet, abused by her father and brother as a child, continued as an adult to suffer wildly fluctuating emotions towards them. Sometimes she craved the loving, dependent relationship she never had with them as a child, but sometimes she hated them and wished for them to suffer for their actions against her. Regardless, her father and brother continue to have a tremendous amount of influence over Janet’s life. Most counselors would diagnose Janet’s problem as emotional and psychological scarring from the abuse and lack of love she experienced as a child.
Welch, however, uses biblical insight to form a different, and more incisive, diagnosis. Janet’s problem, and that of others like her, is sin in her own heart that is magnified and exacerbated by sin and temptation the world around her—specifically, sin that the Bible calls the “fear of man.” This is, essentially, a form of idolatry wherein other humans are greater in our estimation than God and more profoundly impact our lives than He does.
My initial reaction to Welch’s description of the fear of man was to deny that it plays a role in my life, or at least not a serious one. After all, my story is nothing like Janet’s. I don’t have a problem with low “self-esteem.” I’m not dependent on other people. I know the love of Christ, and I don’t need love or affirmation from anyone else to feel complete. I couldn’t maintain this attitude for more than a few pages of the book, however.
One of the most helpful and insightful things about this book is Welch’s keen demonstration that the fear of man is a problem that is universal in scope. Indeed, failing to fear the Lord properly has been at the root of humanity’s sinful condition since Adam’s initial transgression in the Garden. The Scriptures are full of exhortations to fear the Lord, and equally full of condemnation and penalties for those who do not. Proverbs especially has much to say on this matter: the fear of the Lord is “the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10), it is “a fountain of life” (Pr. 14:27), it is better than charm and beauty (Pr. 31:30), and it keeps a man safe when the fear of man proves to be a snare (Pr. 29:25). The Israelites were repeatedly warned and disciplined by God because they forgot the fear of the Lord, did evil in His sight, and turned to the worship of false gods.
This reveals the nature of the fear of man: it is a deficiency of worship. When others rise in our estimation to the point that they control our lives and we are more concerned with what they think than with pleasing God, we are failing to give God his proper place in our lives—failing to worship Him as we ought. This is nothing less than rebellion against God. Those who suffer from “codependency” are often treated as victims by psychologists who attempt to treat them, and they are given the impression that their problems are the result of wrongs visited upon them, not of things they themselves have done. Welch’s analysis shows that in most cases the opposite is in fact the case. Though part of Janet’s problem was a result of having been sinned against by her father and brother, the root problem was her own sinful failure to fear God as she should. Far from being a victim, the one who suffers from the fear of man is a rebel against his Creator and in need of forgiveness and redemption, not therapy. His problem is spiritual, not psychological.
The fear of man, I find, is not lacking in my own life. I am grateful for the conscience-provoking effect of Welch’s perceptive insights, as it has opened up a new area of self-examination and exposed a pattern of sin of which I hadn’t previously been perfectly aware. How often do I tell a little white lie or let the truth go unspoken, distorting reality to make myself look better or cover my own sin and shame? How often do I avoid interacting with brothers and sisters in Christ, fearing they might ask me uncomfortable questions about my hidden sins? How often do I dress, act, and speak with feeding my ego and gaining others’ esteem in mind, rather than glorifying God? All too often.
The most profound insight I received from Welch’s book—though he doesn’t dwell on it explicitly—is the absolute centrality of the gospel in human affairs. The impression Welch gives that there is no such category as psychological problems may be a bit simplistic, but he is right that dependence on others is more fundamentally a spiritual concern. Indeed, it but a symptom of the spiritual problem that all face: estrangement from God. The fear of man that Welch addresses is a good illustration of what Francis Schaeffer described as three alienations resulting from the Fall. Because man is alienated from God and rebels against Him, his relationship with others is distorted and he’s alienated from creation around him. Because the twisted relationship with other people can’t make up for the lack of communion with God, man is finally alienated from himself, feeling depressed, unfulfilled, and unable to have meaningful relationships.
If the diagnosis is sin, then the prescription is the Gospel. Only the redemption available through the person and work of Christ can set right the alienation Janet experiences. Only Christ can provide a way for us to learn to fear God rather than man. Only Jesus, who perfectly loved, reverenced, and worshiped his Father, can heal the emotional scars that the world, the flesh, and the devil inflict on us and cause us to delight in Him, the God who perfectly fills us.
For the Christian who still struggles with the fear of man, the prescription is still the same: Christ. I often make the mistake of trying to fear God with my own power, and because I still bear the taint of sin I always fail. Christians must remember that just as Christ creates, redeems, sustains, and will one day perfect us, he enables us to begin to fear God, he continues to grow us in the fear of God, and one day he will perfect us in that fear. To whatever extent we are able truly to fear God and rightly order our relationships with others, it is all of grace.
This book leaves me pondering two things: how the fear of man affects me in ways I haven’t yet discerned, and how I can grow in the fear of God and learn to love others. One answer to both, I am sure, is prayer. I pray that God will continue to convict me of how I make idols of others and let my desire for their approval make me fail to honor Him as I should. I pray, too, that He will continue to enlarge my desire to know and love and fear Him. I pray that He will give me a hunger for His word and shape me by showing me more of His holiness and majesty.
I consider how I can learn to love others more, as Welch points out, “Regarding other people, our problem is that we need them (for ourselves) more than we love them (for the glory of God.). The task God sets for us is to need them less and love them more.” The way that immediately comes to mind, and perhaps the area in which I have been most negligent, is simply to point them to Christ and help them to dwell on the richness of the Gospel. When I need others, I want them to focus on me and make much of me. When I love them, I want them to focus on Christ and make much of Him. I can help my fellow Christians do this by asking them, in turn, to help me by asking me the hard, uncomfortable questions about my sin and joining with me in mutual discipling relationships. I can love others by serving them, helping to meet their needs and point them to Christ, the greatest servant of all.

Christ's Lordship and Christian Education

2005-05-02T08:08:00.000-07:00

Patrick Henry College, for all the long years of its existence [Note: PHC was founded in 2000], and especially in recent months, has been at a point of institutional crisis—a crisis, you might say, of self-definition. What, we ask, is PHC supposed to be? What is its purpose, its role, and its goal as an educational institution? What does the “ideal” PHC student look like, and how do we go about producing him?

We can begin to formulate an answer to all of these questions, and some related questions that have not yet been raised, by thinking about what Wheaton College President Duane Litfin has called the challenge of the Christian college: to see more fully Whom we serve. If we begin to think together about what it means to be distinctively Christian, and just who this Christ whom we serve, it will put our thoughts about what PHC is and should be in the proper perspective. So, now, for a few minutes, let’s think first about who Christ is to us, and then apply those considerations to our experience here at PHC.

Consider the phrase “distinctively Christian education.” This shows up in the literature of scores or hundreds of self-defined Christian colleges, but what does it mean? What are we saying when we talk about a college or educational program being Christ-centered? I think this phrase has become something of a cliché, something we don’t really understand because we’re so familiar with it. When we say that an education is Christ-centered, do we really mean that it is focused upon the second person of the Trinity? Do we really just mean God-centered, or is there some real sense in which a Christian liberal arts education is specifically Son-centered?

It may surprise some of you to realize that this does actually mean what it says. The distinctively Christian education—as opposed to a merely theistic one—understands that Christ, the Son of God and the Second Person of the Godhead, is the unifying key to all that humans can know or understand, and that there is nothing that can be properly understood or thought through apart from Him. Christianity is unique among the world’s religions and philosophical systems because it posits a person, not a principle, a force, or an idea as the unifying and cohering element of all that exists. He is, to put it in Biblical terms, the Lord of all creation, the Lord of Glory.

Many evangelical Christians today don’t think of Jesus as anything more than their personal Lord and Savior. For each individual Christian, the confession Jesus is Lord of my Life is the ultimate issue, the final consideration that we all must face. But the lordship of Christ over our hearts and lives is not the only aspect of Christ’s lordship that we must consider, and it is not where we must begin. If you have your Bibles with you, turn with me to Colossians 1, and we’ll read verses 15-23.

15He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities--all things were created through him and for him. 17And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. 19For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. 21And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, 22he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, 23if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation[g] under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.

Martin Marty has called this passage “a fundamental charter for church-related higher education,” and we’ll see what this has to do with a Christian college in a moment. First, though, let’s look at what this passage has to say about the lordship of Christ.
First, Jesus is the Creator of all things. Now, I know what some of you are thinking—isn’t God the Father the Creator? This is what the great creeds of the church affirm—We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, Maker of heaven and Earth, of all that is, visible and invisible. Yet Scripture also clearly teaches that it was the Son by Whom and through Whom all things were created. John 1 says, “1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was in the beginning with God. 3All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.” Hebrews 1 says, “in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.”

Second, Jesus is the Sustainer of all things. Look at verse 17 of Colossians 1 again: just as Jesus as Creator is “before all things,” so also “in Him all things hold together.” Hebrews 1:3 says “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.” From the orbits of the largest heavenly bodies to the smallest biological processes, from the greatest worldwide political events to the most mundane everyday human interactions, everything that exists and everything that happens is as it is because God the Son has said it will be so and continues to make it so. The entire created order is contingent upon Him at every point and at every moment.

Third, Jesus is the Goal of all things. Look at verse 16. Not only were all things created by Him, they were created for him. All of creation is unto Him, toward Him. In Hebrews 1 again we see that the Father “appointed [Him] the heir of all things.” Christ Himself, His divine person and His glory are what all things exist to serve and fulfill. He is the hope of all things, the end of all things, the destination and destiny of all things, and all things find their fulfillment in Him.

Fourth, Jesus is the Redeemer of all things. In verse 20 here we see that God was pleased “through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.” All of creation was affected by the Fall, and part of the glorious hope of the Cross is that not only has Christ redeemed His people, He has and will redeem everything, all of creation.

Fifth, Jesus is the Head of the Church. In this passage, we see Christ is before all things, and He is the goal of all things. He is the Alpha and the Omega, and the beginning and end of everything that is points directly to Him. Paul’s placement of the phrase “he is the head of the body, the church,” here in the central portion of the passage, between beginning and end, is important. In the present days, in the time between the Son’s creation of the world and the consummation of His redemption of the world, His lordship, His character, and His sustaining work are most clearly seen in His body, the Church. We’ll come back to this in a moment.

These are just a few of the things that the Scripture has to say about Christ’s lordship. He is also the King, he is our Prophet and Priest, he is the suffering servant, he is our teacher and reconciler, and we could go on and on. I hope that these few observations have helped you begin to better understand the amazing implications of the confession “Christ is Lord.” He is preeminent in the created order. He is “the true Light, which, coming into the world, enlightens every man.” (John 1:9) He is the Way, the Truth, the Life, and no one can come to the Fat
her except through Him, because He is the unique interface, the central point where the universe and the Godhead meet. He is the Father’s appointed mediator for dealing with the world: its formation, its sustenance, its redemption, and its restoration.

With this more fully-orbed Christology, we see why Christ-centeredness is not only an appropriate characteristic for a seminary or Bible college education, but for all Christian education—that is, all education of and by Christians. To be distinctively Christian, in fact, is to be focused on Christ. PHC’s “Christian Philosophy of Education” says, “God is the source of all truth, be it spiritual, moral, philosophical, or scientific. For this reason, we seek to educate students in God's truth throughout the entire curriculum. Christian faith and genuine learning cannot be separated; neither is our Christian faith a mere addendum to the liberal learning process. Instead, our Christian faith precedes and informs all that we at Patrick Henry College study, teach, and learn.” This is good, but it doesn’t go far enough. Our faith is not simply in the god of a theistic Judeo-Christian tradition, it is in the person and work of the God-man, Jesus Christ. We don’t simply want to know God’s truth, we seek to know the Truth who is God, the divine Logos who is the Word of God and whose word creates and sustains all things. Our aim, ultimately, must not be to educate students “with timeless biblical values and fidelity to the spirit of the American founding,” but to flesh out and proclaim the lordship of Jesus Christ himself.

The role of the Christian university is just this: to elaborate upon, investigate, and proclaim the universal lordship of Christ in all of the disciplines—in history, philosophy, politics, literature, languages, sciences, business, medicine, law, art, and all the rest. If PHC wants to be distinctively Christian, it will mean following this course and pursuing Christ in every discipline. Dr. Bonicelli, what does it mean that Jesus Christ is the key to understanding diplomacy and international relations? Dr. Gruenke, how are we to understand the fact that Christ is at the very center of the study of biology? Dr. Hake, how is Christ the most fundamental consideration in semiotics and linguistics? Dr. Sanders, how is Christ Himself essential to the study of history?

These are just a few of the questions that are raised when we pursue genuinely Christ-centered scholarship. Answering these questions is the responsibility of both students and professors, so as you continue to pursue your studies, take the initiative yourself to think through how whatever topic you’re studying points to Christ.

“This is all well and good for Christian colleges in general,” you say, “but Patrick Henry College is not just any old Christian college. We’re special. What does the lordship of Christ mean for us, considering our special mission to lead the nation and shape the culture?” I’m glad you asked, I’ll tell you what it has to do with it.

As Christians, we must remember that our allegiance is to Christ, and not to the things of this world. Furthermore, as those who bear His name and are His redeemed people, we must be careful to make sure that our goals are His goals, and, just as importantly, that His methods are our methods.

Jesus was faced with a culture war in his day. Israel was losing the culture war to paganism. The Greco-Roman culture of the first century was ascending, and Israel was oppressed and in chaos. All around Jesus were voices saying "Here's how to fight and win the culture war, so that Israel - not Rome, not the pagans- will be the winners."

The Pharisees had a program. Jesus rejected it. The Zealots had a program. Jesus rejected it as well. The Essenes had a program. Jesus rejected that. The Sadducees had a program, and Jesus rejected that. There were cynics who did nothing. Jesus didn't join them. What did he do? Read the Gospels, especially the early chapters, and take notes. Here's how Jesus fought the culture war of his time:

He established a Counter Culture: God's Kingdom available now, directly, in and through Jesus, lived out through discipleship and the church.

He proclaimed the Kingdom of God, now, present in power. The Kingdom was centered around Jesus, himself; not around a political program. He proclaimed and enacted that Kingdom in his ministry, never making any compromises on which was the Kingdom that demanded the most loyalty. While others had Kingdom schemes and Kingdom politics, Jesus said the Kingdom had arrived in himself.

Jesus saw this as a compelling vision of a culture within a world of cultures. The church was God's project, his field, his temple, his body. He saw the Kingdom of God in gatherings of two and three, not in marching armies. His attention to the last, least, lost, little and even the dead showed that the power of God's Kingdom was present in surprising new ways. His Kingdom was not of this world, yet it was in the world it was not of. It was not a Kingdom with worldly objectives or methods, but it was a Kingdom with wisdom even the wisest of the age couldn't understand. The greatest of Israel's teachers couldn't see it without being born again.*

This same rabbi whose entire life was a story of humiliation and service is the same Lord of Glory that Paul says is the firstborn of all creation. He has determined to glorify himself in creation by redeeming the world and establishing his Kingdom, and the way he has chosen to do it is through the work of the church—the spread of the gospel and the making of disciples.

Now, what is our goal here at Patrick Henry College? Yes, it is to “lead the nation and shape the culture,” but to what end? Why is it that we want to lead, and what are we trying to shape the culture into? Do we seek power and influence for their own sake? Are we just trying to keep the fires of sin and evil in check until we’re all Raptured out of here and don’t have to worry about it anymore? Or do we embrace a vision of a more powerful, long-lasting cultural change? Is our desire to “reclaim American for Christ” part of a more Biblical desire to see the Kingdom of God more fully realized here on earth, awaiting the glorious day of its completion when our Lord Christ returns in glory?

Because we follow Christ and confess him as Lord, we must conform our plans, schemes, and strategies to His. Christ proclaimed himself, not a political agenda, as the coming of the Kingdom of God, and we in turn must seek cultural renewal through him and his Body. While it is good and right for us to be faithful citizens and even to participate as Christians in the political process, we must never put our hope for a Godly culture in any political solution. The Kingdom that knows no compromise will never be achieved with the methods of a kingdom that is all about compromise. I have focused my application on politics, because that often seems to be PHC’s focus, but I encourage you to consider how these thoughts apply to your own studies, if you are not a government major.

Just as we must enlarge our vision of how we should seek cultural change, we must enlarge our vision of whom this change will come to. The Kingdom of God is our greatest hope for renewing the culture of America, but this Kingdom is no respecter of national boundaries. One of the reasons Christ’s message was so controversial for his Jewish hearers was that when they expected a solution for Israel’s problems, he responded with a solution that was for the cultural ills of the whole world. We follow the Son of God, and we must shift our thinking around the idea that just as his Kingdom is far larger than America, so must our aims be too. With this perspective, we cannot fail. Christ has promised to build his Church and consummate his Kingdom. Even if America becomes utterly secular (God forbid), we will be successful in our aims because our eyes are on the Savior.

Well, we should conclude. As Christians, the lordship of Jesus Christ is the primary claim on our lives, and the basis for all that we know and do. As an educational institution, our primary focus is at the same time far simpler and far greater than producing successful leaders. It is to cultivate a distinctively Christian scholarship that is dedicated to seeking out and proclaiming Christ’s lordship in every discipline. It is to build a community of people dedicated to Christ who are devoted to his Body, the Church. Our aim, as Christian scholars, is that the world and all that is in it submit to the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, the Creator, Sustainer, Goal, Redeemer, and Lord of all things.

*From an essay by Michael Spencer
The thoughts that went into this message are based partially on Duane Litfin's book, Conceiving the Christian College.

How to Read the Bible

2005-05-01T20:19:00.000-07:00

[This essay first published in Notes on the Times, the journal of the Alexis de Tocqueville Society.]

How do you read the Bible? That may seem like an odd question. What do you think the Bible is? What is it for? Is it a collection of stories with a moral point? Is it a book of doctrine, the basis for a systematic articulation of what you believe? Is it a book of solutions to the problems you face from day to day? Or is it far more than all of these?

Most of us are familiar with all the Sunday School stories of the Old Testament. We’ve all heard the stories of biblical “heroes” like Joseph, Joshua, Gideon, Esther, David, Daniel, Shadrach, Meschach, Abednego, and many others. All too often, however, these scriptural accounts are treated simply as stories, and the application drawn from them usually has something to do with how we’re supposed to follow the example of these brave people and be courageous, steadfast, faithful, and the like. The closest thing to a theme that most evangelicals see in these stories is “How to do great things for God.” This misses the point. The Bible is far, far more than a collection of stories. It is the record of what God has really done in history. There is one grand theme running throughout all of Scripture, and the point of the stories of the Old Testament can’t be properly grasped unless we understand the theme and read them with it in mind.

The way to understand the theme that ties all Scripture together is what many theologians call the redemptive-historical perspective. Put simply, the entire Bible is God’s revelation of the story of His work throughout history to redeem a people to himself from sinful humanity, for the sake of His own glory. The point, the end, the focus of all of Scripture—Old Testament as well as New—is Christ. This means that every time we open the Bible and read a passage, we should ask ourselves how it fits in to this one grand theme. It is the point of all of Scripture, and, no less importantly, every part of Scripture.

To make clear how this affects our understanding of Bible stories, let’s look at a few, first as they’re normally interpreted, and then from a redemptive-historical perspective. First, consider the story of Gideon in Judges 6-8. A common reading of this passage portrays Gideon as a hero who did great things for God. Preachers and teachers who miss the point of this story make Gideon out to be a courageous man of God whom God used because of his faithfulness and strength. Look at the passage again, though—Gideon was a sniveling coward who tried crazy games with fleeces and dew to get out of obeying God. Gideon’s story points to Christ in that, just as God used the weakness of Gideon’s character to accomplish an amazing thing, God accomplished the greatest thing of all through the greatest weakness of all—the suffering and death of Christ on the cross.

This wrongheaded reading leads to other problems in interpreting the passage. When interpreting the divine drinking game that God uses in 7:1-8 to whittle Gideon’s force of ten thousand down to three hundred, many teachers will explain this by telling a story about how the men who lapped with their hands to their mouths were the best warriors, men who were alert and looking around, as if they were some sort of über-Marines. This entirely misses the point, and it is an interpretation that isn’t at all supported by the text. The point of the drinking game was to select not a certain kind of men, but a certain number. God was using this apparently arbitrary method to make sure, by using a ridiculously small force to gain victory, that there was no way the Israelites could boast in their own strength or take credit for the victory. Look at the tactics Gideon uses—you don’t need über-Marines to bang pots and wave torches.

A second example is the story of Esther. Like Gideon, the common evangelical reading of the book of Esther makes much of Esther’s character, her courage in going to the king, and her faithfulness in responding to Mordecai’s charge. This also makes for problematic application. We read the words “Who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?” and, trying to understand what the passage means for us, we conclude that we too have been placed in our position at Patrick Henry College “for such a time as this,” that is, to be raised up as Christian leaders in America and return our culture to Biblical principles. More generally, the common evangelical reading of this passage looks at Esther’s struggle with her fear of the king, Mordecai’s admonishment of her, and her subsequent conviction and resolution in chapter 4, and, asking what application we might draw from the passage, conclude that we should follow Esther’s example by trusting God, fearing Him rather than men, and seeking out and following fearlessly His will for our lives.

Again, this reading misses the point of the passage and the entire book of Esther. When we read Scripture, we must take care that any lessons, conclusions, and applications we draw come from and are supported by the text itself. Therefore, while individual verses can certainly be instructive and provide a wealth of insight, every verse and passage must be considered in its overall context. The reader must ask questions such as “What is the overall argument or point of this book of the Bible? How does this passage fit into and support the whole? How does this book fit into the overall biblical story of God’s amazing work in history? Knowing that Christ is the apex of the Biblical story, how does this passage and this book point to Christ?”

Calvin Seerveld, in his How to Read the Bible to Hear God Speak, describes the redemptive-historical method of reading Scripture this way:

[This] approach begins by listening for the specific story at hand, the way mother and dad would read it to you at bedtime, while you keep your ears peaked for literary accents of the piece that carrry in-between-the-line overtones and nudge you toward the most significant points of revelation. Then you search out the history-making context of what went on and watch it take shape in the light of the whole Bible. Finally you wrestle yourself to stillness and listen, hear what the Word is telling, overwhelming you, of God’s marvelous dealings with humankind in God’s creation, headed for glorious completion.

This redemptive-historical reading that sees the whole story of the Bible while studying individual passages should transform your understanding of the stories of Gideon and Esther, as well as your reading of the rest of Scripture. While it might be appropriate to see examples for our lives in the character of these two people, the overwhelming emphasis in both of these passages is not on the protagonists, but on God. These are two of many passes in both Old and New Testament describing how God used miserable, sinful, weak, culturally marginalized people like a cowardly farmer from the lowest caste in society and a female slave to work His will in history.

The immediate point of both of these stories is God’s mighty acts to preserve His chosen people against their enemies. The longer-range point of these stories is Christ, for Christ is the Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer, and King of His people. Before the foundation of the world God set His plan to choose, redeem, and preserve a people to Himself, that they might be a light to the nations and the instrument of His salvation of the whole world. He did this for His own glory, and he tells us in His Word how he has done it, continues to do it, and will persist in doing it until the day when the Kingdom of God is consummated in Christ and all the world sings His praise. This is the point of all Scripture, and keeping it in mind is how we read the Bible rightly—redemptive-historically.

Christian Unity

2005-04-14T01:52:00.000-07:00

The Nicene Creed says "I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church." What does the one here mean? What is the unity of the church supposed to look like? As a Baptist, I have been raised with a firmly congregationalist understanding that unity in the church is spiritual unity. Congregationalists usually speak of "the invisible Church" and "visible churches." One of the main themes in Christianity today is unity--unity of structure, unity of purpose and mission, and, to a much lesser degree, unity of doctrine. If the Church really is one, what does its unity mean?

First, we must affirm that the church really is unified, by definition. The Church (a Baptist would say the invisible Church) is the totality of all the redeemed saints throughout history and across the world. Their unity transcends time and place, for despite the chasms between ages and cultures, they are united as the holy Bride and Body of Christ.

We must also affirm that this unity, though spiritual, is real. The modern mind would say that spiritual unity represents the ideal, or the theory of Christian unity, but the mere presence of scores of denominations indicates that the theory isn't reflected by practical reality. This is nothing but modern shortsightedness. The unity of the Church in Christ is the most real unity possible. The blood of Christ, not social association or even common confession, makes any visible unity possible and meaningful. Though invisible, the veracity of this unity will be made plain for all to see at the end of days, when all the saints are resurrected from the dead and brought together at the marriage feast of their Bridegroom, the Lamb of God.

Is this real-though-spiritual unity the end of the story? Or is the Church called to display visible unity as a witness to the spiritual reality of its members' new identity in Christ?

The New Testament (to say nothing of the Old) consistently says that outward actions and character reflect inner spiritual realities. This is a theme of the epistles of Peter and Paul. For example, in 1 Peter the apostle writes to a group of Christians wondering how they ought to act--whether, since they were facing persecution, they were doing something wrong. In reply, Peter doesn't start by telling them what to do, but by reminding them who they are. He argues from their identity as God's elect, redeemed in Christ, to how they ought to live. This is characteristic of much of the New Testament.

One might argue, then, that this pattern applies to the unity of the Church as well. Spiritual identity and unity ought to manifest visible, outward unity. The Church should display unity in her devotion to Christ as a witness to the world, ultimately for the glory of her Lord.

One passage that might seem to back up this idea is Christ's great High Priestly prayer in Gethsemane in John 17. In verses 20-26 Jesus prays for the Church, and the main thing he prays for them is that they would be one.
Now, Christ may be praying, in keeping with his prayer "Thy will be done," recorded in Luke 22:42, that God would fulfill and accomplish His purposes by spiritually uniting Christ's disciples and all future believers through the atoning work He was about to perform on the Cross and His subsequent resurrection and establishment of His Church. As such, it may be that Christ's prayer here is simply an affirmation of the future reality of the spiritual unity of believers in Christ.

This reading, however, doesn't seem to do justice to the plain meaning of the text. The meaning of Christ's prayer, understood simply, seems to be that believers would be visibly, actively unified. He is praying that they would display God's glory and the power of Christ's work by acting, living, loving, worshiping, believing, and obeying as one.

This visible unity isn't such a big deal when it's just the Disciples, Mary, Mary Magdalene, and the few others who were devoted to Christ in the days leading up to and following His death, burial, and resurrection. In the context of the post-ascension, post-Pentecost Church, however, the idea of unity is staggering. When thousands are being added to the Jerusalem church on a daily or weekly basis, and when the Gospel is going out from Jerusalem to Judea, Samaria, and the Gentile world, visible unity of all believers in Christ is truly an amazing testimony to the power of the Gospel and life- and world-transforming impact of the Kingdom of God.

If visible unity is to be a characteristic of the true Church, what should it look like? The answer of the historical Church has been organizational unity, the accountability of individual Christians and local congregations to higher authorities like popes, bishops, synods, or presbyteries. This has been the case, it seems, from the earliest years of the post-apostolic Church, and I have a hard time believing that the Church was in error on this point for over 1500 years.

If, however, there is a biblical form of church government (and I believe there is), and if it is congregationalism (for which I see some evidence in the New Testament), then visible unity would look very different from the organizational unity that has been emphasized through most of Church history. It would look more like the modern-day Southern Baptist Convention or other Baptist associations: independent local congregations cooperating for the spread of the Gospel, doctrinal articulation and confession, and some degree of accountability. On the other hand, the great Presbyterian theologian Charles Hodge saw, in the tendency of congregationalists and independents to form associations, the result of an inward drive for visible, tangible, organizational unity that stems from the very nature of the Church.

To sum up, though Christians are really and truly unified spiritually in Christ, I think that the Church is also called to display a visible, outward unity as a testimony to her spiritual state and a witness to the nations. I just don't know what that visible unity should look like.

Neo-Calvinism and Cultural Engagement

2004-12-23T01:26:00.000-08:00

I am indebted to Gideon Strauss for a sizeable and ever-growing number of things. The most important, however, is the philosophical-theological system known as Neo-Calvinism. It has its origins in aDutch Reformed tradition of which Abraham Kuyper is perhaps the most famous, and is essentially a Reformed Protestant way of thinking about how to apply sound doctrine beyond the church to the rest of life and culture. Derek Melleby has written a good introduction to Neo-Calvinism on his blog, in which he writes, "Neo-Calvinism is not just reformed, it is reformational. Where as reformed theology tends to emphasis the reformation and purity of the Church, reformational theology, while based on solid doctrine, uses this doctrinal basis to be about the reformation of all areas of life."

I find this sort of thought very interesting, for Christian engagement in and transformation of culture is one issue in which I am tremendously interested. I am not alone, for I am a student at Patrick Henry College an institution intended "to prepare Christian men and women who will lead our nation and shape our culture with timeless biblical values and fidelity to the spirit of the American founding." I will wait until another post to outline my concerns with the "spirit of the American founding" and the problems with the thinking that appeals to it on par with bilblical principles. I am not opposed to the idea of shaping culture with biblical principles, but I think I understand the meaning and importance of this very differently from those who founded PHC.

The college's founders, like many evangelical Christians today, have an idea that Christians should engage in culture, but not much of an idea why it should be done, and a rather unhealthy view of how. Somehow, if Christians are elected to Congress and the Presidency and appointed to the Supreme Court, and if some Christian filmmakers make some good films with a "Christian worldview," culture will magically change for the better. I am skeptical. Ironically, the Arminian-dispensational-premillenial-fundamentalist theology that characterizes most such people offers little support for a coherent strategy of cultural engagement.

I am convinced that meaningful cultural change will not come about primarily through Christians gaining political power and embarking on a course of banning gay marriage and returning prayer to schoolrooms. Nor will it happen if Christians produce more movies "with a biblical worldview" (whatever that means). Culture has been defined as the habits, norms, values, and mores which characterize and shape the interactions of a people. As such--because culture is made up of people--it is plagued by the problem of sin that is the fundamental post-Fall characteristic of humans and their interactions. Therefore, the only way to "change culture for Christ" is to change the hearts of the people who make up the culture. This means that the work of the church--the spread of the Gospel and the discipleship of its converts--is fundamental to meaningful transformation of culture. It is sadly ironic that evangelicals whose churches are splitting and whose families are falling apart want political power so stridently.

I realize, however, that simple evangelism and making converts to Christianity is not sufficient to build or transform a rich, complex, meaningful culture. Neo-Calvinists, I think, have an idea of how one goes from believing the Gospel to living it out, an idea of how sound theology is acted out in eating, drinking, playing, working, building, relaxing, creating, raising children, loving, making money, and developing all areas of life. To be honest, I don't know enough about Neo-Calvinism to make a judgement whether it's a good philosophy for going about cultural engagement, but I intend to find out. Insofar as it is grounded in and guided by sound doctrine, it is far better than the cultural plan (or lack thereof) guiding most modern evangelicals.

In this essay, Cornelius Pronk criticizes Neo-Calvinism on the basis that its emphasis on common grace over particular grace leads to "worldliness, superficiality and pride." Again, I haven't read enough to know whether this is a fair representation of Neo-Calvinist thought. If it's true that Neo-Calvinists find the reason for cultural engagement solely in common grace, to the exclusion of the redemptive work of God through Christ in history (which I don't think they do, given their narrative way of reading Scripture), then I must join the criticism and restate my conviction that cultural engagement must be grounded in the Gospel properly understood.

However, I think that much may justly be made of common grace. Because God gives things like rain, sunshine, food, shelter, health and prosperity to all men, and because the task of building culture was given to man at creation, any culture has many good things that do not result from the particular, redeeming grace of the Gospel. Some of the best music ever written was composed by men who were probably not Christians. Most of the best films ever created were the result of the creativity of men who were not Christians. Becoming a Christian does nothing to increase one's artistic or athletic skill. Christians, contrary to the "worldview" thinking of many evangelicals, can be productive and creative in ways that have nothing to do with their Christianity, but are nonetheless good. It seems that a great deal of cultural involvement, by Christians or anyone else, can be good because of common grace. If we want our involvement to be purposeful, effective, and meaningful (one could say teleological, or ends-based), then it must start with transforming the hearts of the people by the Gospel.

I intend to learn more about Neo-Calvinism, and if I come to any more conclusions about it, I shall post them here.

Review of Taming the Prince, by Harvey Mansfield

2004-09-26T20:14:00.000-07:00

Taming the Prince, by Harvey Mansfield, is a startling book. Most Americans, if they can muddle through Mansfield’s dense and often obscure arguments, will be unsettled by his conclusions. Tying it to Machiavelli, he portrays the American presidency as an office that is only good as far as necessary to salve public opinion, and whose powers extend far beyond those allotted to him by Article Two of the Constitution. His project is to examine the development of this ambivalence. While this portrait is in large part true, Mansfield is perhaps not as thoroughly Machiavellian as he might seem, for he finally leaves open the possibility that the Machiavellian executive has been turned on its head and bent to the service of virtue.

The central problem in politics which any regime must address is the common disposition Mansfield dubs human recalcitrance. This term refers to man’s natural resistance to being ruled by law. Men understand the need for law to apply generally to all men, but resist its particular application to themselves. Law, since it must be universal to be acceptable, cannot be reasonable enough to be exact and govern all individual cases. Upholding the law necessitates someone to execute the law and apply it to particular circumstances.

Aristotle presents one solution to this problem, one that doesn’t include an executive in any modern sense of the word. Aristotle understands that the goal of politics is virtue, the perfection of the good life. To this end, his ideal constitution is the kingship over all of the most virtuous man. This king is able to transcend the law and apply it as needed, without destroying it. Knowing that kingship of the most virtuous man is impracticable, his solution is a mixed regime in which the deliberative function is foremost, and the “offices” carry out or execute the decisions of the deliberative body which is sovereign.

The Aristotelian primacy of virtue in politics becomes a problem with the advent of Christianity. The pope and the Church claim a monopoly on virtue by way of divine mandate, and thence extend a claim to all political power. Their authority is unchallengeable since it is (they claim) directly backed up by God, and the result is “pious cruelty” that goes farther than necessary. Pope and emperor fight one another for political power.

Machiavelli responds to this problem by discounting virtue as the standard of politics, and he sets up a new political telos: necessity. In the service of necessity, Machiavelli’s prince uses any means available to him, however cruel. By getting men to fear him, he coerces men beyond their recalcitrance into obedience. Necessity is the only standard, and the only check, for the prince’s actions. The prince and his tyranny exist wholly outside the law, so that he may execute the law.

This doctrine of the executive, Mansfield says, has gone through a process of evolution that has formalized and legalized it. Hobbes abstracted Machiavelli’s executing prince into a concept of executive power which could be wielded by the sovereign state. Locke takes this executive power and weaves it into the constitution, legalizing it so that the necessity of tyranny is constitutionalized. Montesquieu further moderates the executive by separating the judiciary function from the executive. Finally, the American Constitution republicanizes the executive by making him elected by the people to a limited term of office.

So we have the modern American president, and we come to a frightening realization: His power is more than it seems. Formally, he is subordinate to the legislature, tasked with carrying out Congress’s will. Informally, however, his “executive power” is bounded only by necessity and has a character of its own. He has tremendous influence through the status of his office, and many presidents have exploited this to great effect. In this ambivalence he resembles the Machiavellian prince who tyrannized through the force of necessity while convincing the people he executes on their behalf.

All is not lost, however. America is not really ruled by a masked despot. To be sure, his informal and personal powers are considerable, probably more extensive than most Americans realize. However, one must remember that the executive has come a long way since Machiavelli discovered it, and the process Mansfield outlines has tamed the prince considerably.

The genius of the Founders, it seems, is that they took Machiavelli’s domesticated executive and turned him to the service of both necessity and virtue. By making him part of a constitution of separated and mutually checked powers which combines elements of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, they evoked Aristotle’s mixed regime and returned to virtue as the telos of politics. For Mansfield, the formalities and responsibilities of the Constitution point toward virtue, as they moderate tyranny on one hand and the soul-destroying excesses of democratic individualism on the other. The constitutional checks on the executive prevent him becoming cruel and tyrannical in executing the law, enabling him to be good while remaining strong and capable of dealing with crises of necessity.

The fact that the executive still has teeth in his informal powers means that there is always a danger of returning to tyranny. When the people cease to understand and value virtue in the leaders they elect, instead valuing “charisma,” they open themselves to being tyrannized by the soft words and hard hand of the demagogue. This is America’s present state.

Mansfield believes, and argues elsewhere, that virtue is possible if we will celebrate and cherish the Constitution and everything that goes with it—including the ambivalent, secretly powerful executive. If the American people are to value virtue once again, what will be necessary? Two possibilities come to mind. First, concern for virtue may be inculcated through education, as Aristotle argues toward the end of the Nicomachean Ethics. Alternatively, the people may come to value virtue when they themselves become virtuous, when they are regenerated through the work of the Gospel and truly understand the telos of the good life.

Civil Religion vs. Biblical Christianity

2004-09-03T22:02:00.000-07:00

Several centuries ago, Saint Augustine wrote a monumental work on the difference between what he called the City of God and the City of Man. Augustine makes the case that though Christians on earth live in a saeculum senescens, a passing world of men, societies, and empires that will not last. Though we live in the city of man, we are aliens in the land, and our true citizenship is in the City of God.

Many modern evangelicals have forgotten this distinction, as one of my friends Will Inboden points out in the latest issue of Modern Reformation. Since the founding of the American republic, Christians in the US, especially evangelical Protestants, have subscribed to a politico-theological faith that Will calls "civil religion." In this civil religion, there is a tendency to see America as having a special role in redemptive history, and Americans as God's chosen people in the world today. Much is made of America's "Christian heritage," and is reestablishment is the aim of their cultural and especially political energy--paradoxically so, as this aim is often at odds with their eschatology. Faithfulness to Christ is often--sometimes explicitly, more often implicitly--equated with supporting a particular political agenda, like abolishing abortion, preventing gay marriage, or even a specific tax policy.

Christians need to think more biblically on the distinction between faith and politics, between the City of God and the City of Man, between the sacred and the secular. We are God's chosen people as followers of Christ and citizens of the heavenly kingdom, not as Americans. God's people are called out of every tribe, tongue, race, and people of the earth, and the visible, institutional expression of his dealing with men is the Church, not any particular nation-state.

This understanding will have a significan impact on our politics. Once Christians understand that God is not a Republican (or a Democrat), that political leaders are not also spiritual leaders, and that political ends of any kind are tangential to the Christian life, their politics and their lives will be transformed. Political positions can then be based on prudent, wise understanding of social and governmental realities. They can then have a politics informed by and shaped by Scripture, not the dictates of civil religion and poorly grounded religious philosophy. Most importantly, by abandoning civil religion, today's Christians will gain a new appreciation for the role of the Church in the Christian life and direct their energies to its ministry, worship, ordinances, discipline, and doctrine.

Review: The Village

2004-08-17T18:14:00.000-07:00

M. Night Shyamalan's fourth film, The Village, follows somewhat predictably, if enjoyably, on his last three. With him again from Signs is Joaquin Phoenix (Signs, Gladiator), along with Ron Howard's daughter Bryce Dallas Howard in her debut and Adrien Brody (The Pianist).

Point

What I found most appealing in this film was its picture of a quaint, tight-knit agrarian society where family, community, and something approaching traditional morality are the cornerstones of a simple, happy, attractive way of life. The village is all most of its inhabitants have ever known, and so they are content with life in the town. No doubt this contentment is also fostered by fear of the creatures in the woods and the tales of an depraved society beyond. Indeed, it takes a very alien perspective to realize the extent of the corruption and decadence in our modern American culture. Living in a manner such that ties to family, community, and the land are so vital produces a strong sense of belonging that is all too absent from the lives of most Americans today.

Shyamalan incorporates more than one twist and suspense-building effect into this story, some of which work better than others. One of the more subtle, and effective, is that until the end of the film we've no idea when or where this story takes place. It could be pretty much any time between the mid-19th century and the present, and anywhere in North America, Europe, or perhaps beyond. When the answer is finally revealed, it sharpens the contrast mentioned above between the ugly modern world and the simple life of the village which is beautiful for its simplicity.

Another unexpected twist is that Phoenix's character, Lucius isn't the hero of the film. His Fiancée, Ivy (Howard), overcomes her blindness in saving Lucius and, in a a way, the entire village. Howard plays the part with stunning grace and depth, mesmerizing the audience with the beauty of her character's inner strength. The romance between Lucius and Ivy is satisfying and appealing, picturing by the understated strength and beauty that flows from the shared values and perspective held by the entire community.

Counter-Point

As noted before, Shyamalan uses a number of surprises and twists to move the plot along. Unfortunately, after The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs, the audience expects them and so they don't pack the punch we felt, for example, upon learning Bruce Willis was a ghost in The Sixth Sense. As in Signs, actually seeing the monsters cuts down significantly on their scariness. Furthermore, the revelation of the creatures' true nature comes so early that the rest of the film stumbles its way to a close that neither packs a suspense-movie punch nor draws smoothly to a satisfying end.

The kind of peaceful, loving, tight-knit community Shyamalan portrays in the village only makes sense if it's based on a set of shared values, and such values only seem to make sense if they're based on divine revelation and a shared religion that binds the townspeople together and animates their love for one another. The village lacks a church or a pastor, or indeed any kind of distinctly religious component, and the effect is that of an 18th-century Puritan New England town without God or any knowledge of him. It's unlikely these values could be established, let alone sustained, in such an environment.

All in all, The Village is a passable addition to Shyamalan's repertoire, though it doesn't sparkle like some of his other films. Twists and surprise endings won't work for him any longer, though, unless he comes up with something very innovative for his next film. Personally, I'd like to see him branch out and try something other than another suspense film. This one has several appealing points, but the genre is a limited one and Shyamalan risks becoming too predictable.

I give it a 5 out of 10.

The Iraq War--update

2004-08-10T20:35:00.000-07:00

This is my response to a friend's critique of one of my earlier posts.

To Eric's first point, that there were and are no WMDs in Iraq, no quarrel. The administration was just plain wrong in insisting Saddam had them. In 20/20 hindsight, this was a bad justification for going to war, though at the time it was arguably a reasonable conclusion to make.

Eric's second assertion, that the alleged Iraq-Al Qaeda links are hogwash, has more serious problems. What is hogwash is the assertion that the Weekly Standard is the only source still making the case for such links. The Wall Street Journal is one of several others. The idea that this allegation is based on a simple logical fallacy is bunk. There is substantial evidence of direct ties between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. For instance, evidence Saddam gave at least $300,000 to Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda's main man in Iraq. For instance, evidence that an Iraqi intel agent named Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani met with Mohammed Atta in Prague, just a few months before Atta helped lead the 9/11 attacks against the United States (evidence of which meeting the Czech government possessed, as well). For instance, evidence one of Saddam's Fedayeen named Shakir had contact info for, met with, and aided Al-Qaeda operatives numerous times, and was connected to the '98 embassy bombings, the '00 U.S.S. Coleattack, and the 9/11 attacks. In short, the evidence of a link is there, and it points toward a substantial relationship between Saddam's regime and Al-Qaeda. It could be interpreted as inconsequential, but, in the interest of national security, is that a responsible way to interpret potential threats? In my own opinion, the only reason we don't have more and better proof of a link is simply the wretched state of U.S. human intelligence assets in the Middle East (which Eric knows about as well as I.)

So much for the only two things Eric thinks had anything to do with why we went to war. But why does he say there were "only two 'real' reasons why people felt justified with going into Iraq?" I don't see much basis for that claim. In any case, my earlier post was about the administration's reasons for the war, not the average under-informed and over-opinionated American Joe Six-pack. The point of my original post was that the administration's pre-war claims, with the exception of WMD, have largely proven to be true.

What I didn't say, and where I have slightly more agreement with Eric, is whether those reasons actually were enough to justify war. On that question, the jury is still out in my mind. It may be that Saddam would have just continued to be the nuisance he'd been the last decade and a half. I'm generally suspicious of nation-building, and making Iraq free, while maybe a good thing, isn't America's primary responsibility and isn't a good reason to put American lives and assets at risk. Why we haven't been consistent in invading other state sponsors of terrorism (like Iran) is a question that lacks a satisfactory answer. On the other hand, taking Saddam out had to have been a big warning to those other state sponsors of terrorism. A lot of people, including the Brits, think it's what made Qaddafi's Libya give up its WMD program and forge new ties with the West.

Strategic policy can't be short-sighted. The Middle East is a big thorn in side of the United States and (to a lesser extent) the rest of the Western world. There are millions of people in the Middle East who violently hate us. In some places they run the country, in others they're just a sizeable minority. Nonetheless, it is in the interest of the United States to deal directly with direct threats to our national security (like Al-Qaeda and its sponsors), and to work in other ways to put peaceful, non-radical people in power elsewhere. Post-Saddam Iraq should be a significant ally, an important first step to peace and stability throughout the region. Qaddafi is opening up. A lot of people in Iran don't support the anti-West, WMD-seeking Islamo-fascist clerical regime, and it may only be a matter of time before they unseat it and a more friendly government comes to power. For those whose job it is to protect the national security of the U.S. and build alliances, it's hard to see those developments as anything but positive.

Joe Wilson and the War's Justification

2004-07-14T21:06:00.000-07:00

Though you wouldn't know it from media coverage and the hysterics of Kerry and other opponents of the Bush administration, justification for the war in Iraq is steadily being affirmed. Now it's true, the administration's decision to go to war was motivated in part by a belief based on faulty intelligence. With Secretary of State Powell's speech before the UN, this assertion--that Saddam possessed stockpiles of WMDs--was one of the simplest and most oft-cited reasons for military action. The coalition hasn't found any such stockpiles in the last year, belying that claim (though it's worth remembering that absence of evidence doesn't necessarily constitute evidence of absence). Opponents of the Bush administration have had a field day with this apparent error, charging President Bush and his advisers with everything from naïve, bumbling incompetence to malicious deception and outright lying.

Former Ambassador Joe Wilson has been at the center of this flap, charging Bush with lying (in his 2003 State of the Union address) about Saddam Hussein's attempts to acquire uranium from Niger as part of a nuclear-weapons program. Last year, it was revealed that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA employee, and Wilson charged the White House with leaking her identity in retaliation for his criticism. Now, according to last week's report by the Senate intelligence committee, it's Wilson who has been telling lies. He lied when he said it wasn't his wife's for the CIA to send him to Niger to investigate the supposed uranium deal--she got him the job. He lied, or at least deceived, when he reported Saddam had not sought uranium from Niger--there's ample evidence that the assertion was true, as the British have maintained all along. He was dead wrong when he accused the President of lying in the State of the Union address--"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" was a completely accurate statement. Wilson, it seems, was incompetent partisan who had no business doing the investigating in Niger, and he overlooked or ignored large amounts of evidence which contradicted what he wanted to find. Conveniently, he never wrote a report of his findings. It's not even clear, in fact, that Ms. Plame was a CIA officer working under cover, and that whoever disclosed her identity did anything illegal or improper at all.

Now, let's review the reasons cited by the administration for using military force to remove Saddam from Iraq:

Saddam has consistently violated multiple UNSC resolutions requiring specific action by Iraq and authorizing all Member States to enforce the resolutions and restore peace and security in the area. He has violated resolutions regarding WMDs, weapons inspections, and no-fly zones. True.
Saddam has produced and used WMDs in the past, even against his own people. True.
Saddam currently maintains stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. False.
Saddam has failed to comply with the UN's requirement that he prove he's destroyed his WMDs and dismantled WMD production. He has consistently interfered with UN inspectors' attempts to verify compliance. True.
Saddam has sought and/or is seeking a nuclear weapons program. True.
Saddam has committed innumerable acts of oppression against the Iraqi people, including oppression of women, torture, execution of dissidents and political opponents, and denying basic human rights and freedoms. True.
Saddam and his regime have consistently supported international terrorism throughout the Middle East and elsewhere. There is evidence of ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Saddam publicly approved of the September 11, 2001 attacks by Al Qaeda against the United States. True.

The list goes on. The point here is that only one one of the several reasons offered for the war have been shown to be false. That mistake was a significant one, and President Bush will be associated with it for a long time, but it was a genuine mistake, not a deception. That Saddam didn't have stockpiles of WMDs doesn't change the fact that he was an enemy of the US and a credible threat to its security. Nor does it change the fact that he was a tyrant, a butcher, a perpetrator of atrocities, and a threat to the stability of the entire region. These were the reasons that the US set out to remove him, and they've largely been validated.

Now that the war is over, the question whether the war was justified is somewhat moot. The US has committed to building a secure, prosperous, free Iraq, and we must see the task through to the end. Some realists, non-interventionists, and just war proponents may have felt that the threat posed by Iraq and the nation-building cause weren't enough to justify the war. Maybe they're right. I don't, as a rule, agree with nation-building, and I'm still not sure whether the threat was direct enough to justify invasion (because I don't know where that line is). The time for that debate is gone now. A free and prosperous Iraq is a good goal, and anything less than the fiercest pursuit of that goal would be a moral failure and likely fatal to freedom and security in the Middle East and therefore the rest of the world.

More on this:
Senate Intelligence Committee Report
The White House's Reasons for the War
A Decade of Defiance
Cliff May on Joe Wilson
Bill Buckley: Should We Have Gone To War?

Review: King Arthur

2004-07-10T10:30:00.000-07:00

What do you get when you take a legend, a myth, a magical tale--and remove most of the elements that make it mythical? You end up with a story that fails to sparkle, a historical account that isn't. It's pretty well impossible to separate man from myth in the legend of King Arthur, as the new Antoine Fuqua movie shows.

The plot premise is somewhat interesting, and might have made a decent movie if the protagonist weren't supposed to be Arthur. In this account, he's a native Briton raised as a Roman, leading a band of knights from Sarmatia who are indentured to Rome. Arthur (Clive Owen), through a series of events, becomes disillusioned with the Church and Roman Empire which is pulling out of Britain. He joins the native pagans led by Guinevere (Kiera Knightley) and Merlin (Stephen Dillane) in fighting off the invading Saxon hordes, and in the process several of his knights and beloved friends are killed.

The film suffers from acting that's mediocre, at best. Owen may be good behind the wheel of a BMW, but he's rather wooden when faced with a substantive role. Even this might not be a fatal flaw, though, if it weren't for the paucity of dialogue. Battle scenes are nice, but they can't carry a movie. And Owen isn't nearly a good enough actor to carry a man-of-few-words part off. The lack of dialogue also prevents the relationship between Arthur and his knights from developing as it should. Thus, we don't feel the emotional impact when Arthur and the men part ways, or when Lancelot and others are killed in the final battle.

The romance element of the story doesn't feel right, either. The Lancelot-Guinevere affair, which adds so much tension and tragedy to traditional Arthurian accounts, is reduced to a few lingering exchanges between them. The fact that Arthur and Guinevere aren't married until the end, after Lancelot is dead, doesn't help matters.

In the quest to create a "historical" Arthur, the creators have cut out most of what makes the story so endearing--and so enduring. We don't get a sense that this man was of such stature that he could inspire a legend spanning 15 centuries. All in all, the film is just a mediocre piece of historical fiction that claims the name of the king to get recognition and pull in viewers.

I give it a 4 out of 10.