PHIL JOHNSON's Shepherd's conference lecture continued
"Definition
So with that as background, let me attempt to give you something that approximates a definition of this movement--this thing--that we all agree resists any kind of precise definition.
Some important disclaimers. I hope you won't be surprised or dismayed when people who are devoted to the emergent subculture point out that my description of their movement is an oversimplification. They are also going to complain that some of the things I criticize don't apply in every exhaustive detail to every person or every congregation in their movement.
Remember: I know that, and I have already acknowledged it. But I still think there's great value in giving you a description of the broad contours of the movement, and that is what I am going to try to do.
Some in the movement will complain that I haven't read enough of their literature; I haven't interacted enough with the right emergent bloggers; or I haven't visited enough of their gatherings to be a competent critic of their ideas.
All I can say in response is that I have read as much literature from the movement's key writers as I can get my hands on; I have interacted directly with people in the emerging movement as much as my time and schedule will permit; I have already put many of my criticisms of the movement in the public arena repeatedly, and I have invited (and received) lots of feedback from people who are devoted to the movement. I have done my best to be fair and complete. And I assure you that I will continue to study the movement.
But I don't agree with the notion that in order to be a reasonable and credible analyst of a movement like this, you have to remain neutral indefinitely and never become a critic. There is simply too much in the movement that warrants criticism.
As I said, I just want to be candid and clear for you. I wish time allowed me to be as nuanced as I would normally like to be. On the other hand, I think a tendency to over-nuance and over-qualify everything has already spoiled some otherwise potentially helpful critiques of this movement.
A definition (of sorts) in four parts. So allow me to give you a broad-brushed description of the "emerging church movement," mainly for the benefit of those who are still having a hard time getting their minds around the concept of what this thing is. This won't be the kind of pithy definition you can take down in a single sentence, so don't even bother trying. But I will try to keep it brief enough to be manageable.
So here's my definition:
1. The "emerging church" is a convenient name for a broad-based and growing assortment of similar or related movements that have flourished in the past half-decade--mostly on the fringe of the evangelical movement. "Emerging" congregations in one way or another tend to be keenly attuned to the postmodern shift in art, literature, and public discourse.
(Incidentally, Postmodernism itself is not easy to define, but in general it refers to a tendency to discount values like dogmatism, authority, absolutism, assurance, certainty, and large, commanding, exclusive worldviews--which postmodernists like to label metanarratives. Postmodern values would include things like diversity, inclusiveness, relativism, subjectivity, tolerance, ambiguity, pragmatism, and above all, a view of "humility" that is characterized by lots of qualms and reservations and uncertainties and disclaimers about whether anything we hold in our belief system is really true or not. Those are the very same values that are usually held in high esteem in the "emerging church movement.")
By the way, I think its a mistake to see the emerging subculture as nothing more than the next generation's version of the "seeker sensitive" church. It is that, but only in a certain sense. In some ways, the "emerging church" is a reaction against and a departure from the shallow, mass-movement professional showmanship of the slick megachurches like Willow Creek and Saddleback. Emergent types tend to value authenticity over professionalism. Many of their churches--perhaps a majority of their churches--are home churches or otherwise small-group gatherings that are informal and unorganized almost to an extreme.
Understand: this is a very diverse movement. Some in the movement might even say they are wary of postmodern influences, while others are advocating that Christians ought to embrace postmodernism enthusiastically. But, either way, they would all pretty much be keenly aware that postmodernism has molded the way contemporary people think, the way public discourse is carried on, the way public opinion is shaped, and the way judgments are usually made about truth-claims. Therefore, they argue, the church must adjust its message accordingly. And normally, in practice, this means some level of accommodation to postmodern preferences.
2. Now, here is another vital aspect of what distinguishes "emerging church movement": Most congregations in the movement would describe themselves as missional, by which they mean they stress the importance of evangelistic outreach by involving themselves in the lives of unbelievers in the community outside the narrow circle of the church. They point out that the way believers live is one of the most potent and persuasive aspects of our testimony to unbelievers--if not the single most important thing of all.
There's nothing essentially wrong with that idea, of course, as long as we also communicate the truth of the gospel clearly and distinctly with words. The problem arises when you factor in the postmodern tendency to distrust or despise every kind of clarity, certainty, or authoritative truth-claim. It has often meant, in practice, that the emphasis on "missional living" results in an evangelistic strategy where gospel preaching is downplayed or deliberately omitted. (And I'll probably have more to say about that if time permits.)
3. Here's another (similar) feature of the "emerging church movement": Emergent-style churches show a preference for "narrative theology" as opposed to systematic doctrine. The story of the gospel is ultimately more important than the theology of it. The simple narrative of salvation history must not get lost in the careful parsing of theological words and ideas.
Obviously, There's an important germ of truth in that idea, too. The four gospels do tell us about the life of Christ in narrative format. They are collections of anecdotes and incidents from His life, not systematic doctrinal treatises about soteriology, or hamartiology, or any of the other-ologies by which we tend to categorize our theology.
People in the "emerging church movement" place a lot of stress on that fact, and in my assessment they tend to go quickly overboard. The fact that so much of Scripture is narrative doesn't alter the fact that much of it is also didactic--and vice versa. Here, I think their obsession with postmodernism has got the better of some of our emergent friends, and they have simply reacted against rationalism by running to the opposite imbalance.
4. In this same vein, people in the emerging church movement often don't hold the idea of propositional truth in very high regard. And this one of the key points many of them want to make: A proposition, by definition, is a premise that is either true or false. There is no third choice. (That is one of the most basic laws of logic, known as the law of the excluded middle.)
Postmodernists simply don't like handling ideas with that kind of clarity. So there's a tendency among emergent types to denigrate or devalue the very idea of propositional truth, logic, and rationality.
I contend that you cannot teach truth at all apart from propositions of some sort. Boil any truth-claim down to its pure essence, and what you have is a proposition. You cannot even tell stories without propositions, so if you were serious about dispensing with propositions altogether, you would have to forfeit narrative theology, too.
Now again, I think there is a germ of truth underlying this aspect of postmodernist thinking. Truth is more than merely a collection of propositional statements. Most of understand that there is a vast and important difference between knowing Christ and knowing facts about Christ.
On the other hand, knowing Christ in a true and saving way must necessarily involve knowing true facts about Him. You don't really know Him at all in any biblical sense if you don't know the basic facts about His deity, His death, His resurrection, and essential parts of the story like those. So there is a sense in which the propositional aspect of the truth about Christ is vital. Al Mohler says it this way: "while truth is always more than propositional, it is never less."
By the way, the suggestion that we try to deal with truth in non-propositional form is not anything new with the "emerging church movement." It's an idea that was floated as one of the key tenets of neo-orthodoxy at least 65 years ago or more.
I would argue that the assault on propositional truth ultimately entails the abandonment of logic completely. It is an irrational idea. Francis Schaeffer said the same thing. He regarded neo-orthodoxy's attack on propositional truth as the theological equivalent of suicide. He said when we abandon rationality in that way, we have crossed "the line of despair." We might as well abandon the quest for truth itself. And in effect, that is the result of the postmodernist perspective.
5. Here's a final element in my abbreviated description of the emerging Christian subculture: Most insiders like to portray their movement as an answer to the influence of philosophical modernism; a departure from modernism; something wholly distinct from modernism. As you know, modernism has assaulted the church for some 150 years, at least. It has always, consistently been hostile to evangelical truth.
Some actually believe the "emerging church movement" is so much the polar opposite of modernism that when you criticize their movement, they will accuse you of blithely and unthinkingly buying into the errors of "modern" thinking. They will often label you a "modernist." And among other things, they will accuse you of parroting a brand of philosophical foundationalism that owes more to Rene Descartes and Cartesian foundationalism than it owes to the Scriptures. Lots of naive people have been drawn into the movement by sophisticated-sounding philosophical arguments like those.
That claim is based on the assumption that postmodernism itself represents a correction of the philosophical errors of modernism, rather than just a further step in a wrong direction.
How any Christian can uncritically adopt that view of carnal, worldly, humanistic philosophy is an utter mystery to me. It ought to be obvious to people in the church that postmodernism poses at least as much a threat to the truth and the clarity of the gospel as every other humanistic philosophy that has preceded it in the long parade of human foolishness that has brought us to the postmodern moment in which we are living.
Postmodernism is just the latest, and possibly the worst, in a relentless procession of bad ideas that ought to have conditioned the church to despise and distrust the folly of human wisdom (which, by the way, is what Scripture commands us to do).
Modernism at its very core and inception was an overt attempt to subvert and defeat the truth of Scripture with humanistic rationalism. Modernism failed, and failed miserably.
Postmodernism is not really a significant departure from modernism; it is just a similar attempt to subvert and defeat the truth of Scripture by glorifying irrationality, and by portraying all truth as hopelessly paradoxical, ambiguous, unclear, uncertain, unimportant, or otherwise unworthy of all the concern and attention philosophers have given to the idea. Postmodernism abandons the hope of finding any absolute or incontrovertible truth, and instead, the postmodernist looks for amusement by playing with words and language, and by questioning every assumption and challenging every truth-claim.
That's no answer to modernism; it is a further step in the same wrong direction.
So my assessment of the "emerging church movement" is that far from being the antithesis of modernism, this sort of "evangelical postmodernism" is really ultimately nothing more than Modernism 2.0.
I have been trying to highlight that point for the past six months or more on my blog by posting excerpt after excerpt from Charles Spurgeon's criticisms of 19th-century modernism. (All that material is still online if you want to review it. Just do a Google search for three words: Spurgeon, modern, and postmodern. That will be enough to get you started.) It is very eye-opening to see that every one of the arguments and biblical points Spurgeon made against the so-called "evangelical modernists" of his day can (without any modification whatsoever) be applied against the "evangelical postmodernists" of our day.
Far from being antithetical, the two movements are ultimately just one and the same. The "emerging church movement" is this generation's version of what our grandparents knew as modernism--updated in some ways, but ultimately, it's essentially the same. Postmodernists today are using the same arguments and the same strategies that the modernists of the Victorian era employed. The results will be exactly the same, too.
You can begin to understand, I hope, why I insist that this topic demands to be dealt with with the utmost candor and clarity, rather than with evasions and equivocations. And I make no apology for that.
The "movement" is not monolithic
Before we move on, I want to reemphasize something important and elaborate on it just a bit: What I just gave you was a quick, broad-brush description of the "emerging church movement." There are lots of nuances and differences within the movement. Not everyone in the movement is saying exactly the same thing.
I already indicated, for example, that attitudes toward postmodernism vary within in the movement. Practically everyone in the movement will insist that they do not uncritically embrace every aspect of postmodernism, and that they are only trying to adapt their language and worship style in order to reach postmodern people. Listen to what emergent leaders say about postmodernism, for example, and you will see that they don't all agree among themselves completely about what's good and what's dangerous about postmodernism. Even Brian McLaren, who used to speak of postmodernism in glowing terms, lately seems to be trying to avoid references to the subject and now occasionally even denies that he himself is a full-on postmodernist.
So there are vast differences in style and opinion within the "emerging church movement"; the movement itsef is in flux and I want to acknowledge that.
For example, the British flavor of evangelical postmodernism tends to be somewhat less superficial than its American cousin. British emergents are normally more concerned about substance as opposed to style. They would tend to stress the missional aspects of the movement and see their philosophical and doctrinal differences with mainstream evangelicalism as secondary. One of the outstanding British figures in the "emerging church movement," Andrew Jones, recently wrote an appeal to American emergents, urging them to get their act together.
I'm not suggesting that the "emerging church movement" in Britain is ultimately any more doctrinally sound or any less postmodern than the American version. It's not. But it is, perhaps, a little more serious.
Then you have Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill in Seattle, who this time last year might have been singled out as the quintessential "emerging church" leader. But last spring he wrote a letter to other pastors in his branch of the movement in which he said, "Let me agree that much of the church today is incredibly frustrating. Personally, when I hear so many young guys denying substitutionary atonement and the like after drinking from the emerging church toilet I turn green and my clothes don't fit."
Since then, Driscoll has spoken out several more times against the doctrinal ambiguity of the "emerging church movement," and it is clear that he rejects the movement's hostile attitude toward doctrine and propositional truth. Driscoll even appears to have stopped referring to himself as "emergent," and he and the movement currently seem to have something of a love/hate relationship going.
Assuming Mark Driscoll is still (more or less) part of the movement, he would definitely represent the "conservative" wing. (He has recently published tributes at his blog to Robert Schuller and Bono, the rock musician, so the word conservative would apply to him only in a relative sense.)
That reminds me of a couple of other things I wanted to mention but can't really take time to elaborate on. This may help you more than anything I have said so far to understand the flavor of the "emerging church movement": Bono--the Irish rocker and politico of U2 fame--seems to be the unofficial icon of the movement. If you've been tuned into pop-culture at any time over the past two decades and know anything about Bono, that might help you to grasp something about the look and feel of the movement. (My favorite fact about Bono is that he named one of his sons "Elijah Bob Patricus Guggi-Q.")
Anyway, Emergent types seem to quote Bono all the time. I would say that he sometimes seems to be the chief theologian of the "emerging church movement," but in all fairness, that honor belongs more to John R. Franke and Stan Grenz. Grenz, sadly, died at a fairly young age about a year ago when an aneurism burst in his brain. But he and Franke are the two academic theologians who have done more than anyone else to blend postmodernism and theology into a kind of quasi-evangelical doctrine.
Again, I can't elaborate on this at length in our short time frame, and I don't want to take anything away from the scholarship and writing style of either John Franke or Stan Grenz, because intellectually, both of them were blessed with more brilliant minds than mine. But I am disturbed by the accommodations both men made to postmodernism, and I think the fruit of their work is manifestly disastrous.
However, if you want to begin to understand how anyone might try to write a theological justification for the irrational agglomeration of unorthodox ideas that is circulating in the "emerging church movement", read the book these two men jointly authored, titled Beyond Foundationalism, subtitled "Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context," published by Westminster John Knox Press just five years ago.
Becoming cognizant of emergent
Now, if you men represent a typical cross-section of conservative evangelical pastors, in all likelihood, most of you had probably never even heard of the "emerging church movement" eighteen months ago. The issue more or less began to come to the forefront of discussion and debate in the evangelical movement after a cover article on the emerging church phenomenon in Christianity Today in November of 2004.
Since then, critics of the movement have multiplied, and the movement has become the focus of intense debate and controversy. Most of the critics are deeply and legitimately concerned about the overall direction of the movement and its long-term influence on the rest of the church. Over the past six months, this has probably become the dominant issue in the agenda for evangelical discussion and debate--in an era when the evangelical movement was already troubled by (and not quite sure what to do with) issues like "Open Theism," "The New Perspective on Paul," and various other relatively recent controversies.
It would be easy, actually, to critique the emerging church movement by reviewing some of Brian McLaren's books, starting with A Generous Orthodoxy. The problem with that approach is that McLaren clearly does not speak for everyone in the "emerging church movement." Whenever critics try to analyze the movement by examining what McLaren has written, people within the movement simply dismiss the criticisms by suggesting that whatever McLaren says is his own opinion, and it doesn't necessarily reflect the movement itself.
That's partly true and partly a deliberate evasion. The emerging subculture clearly fosters an environment where theological mavericks like McLaren are pretty much encouraged to throw whatever bizarre and even heretical notions they like on the table for discussion. So I do think Brian McLaren is fair game, and because he is such a large figure in the movement, I can't really ignore him.
On the other hand, it's also true that although McLaren has had a profound influence in the shaping of the emerging church, he doesn't necessarily speak for everyone identified with the movement. To critique Brian McLaren is to critique Brian McLaren. It doesn't necessarily go to the heart of the movement itself. So I'm going to say a few words about Brian McLaren and then move on to other issues.
About McLaren . . .
I gave a fairly lengthy review of one of Brian McLaren's books (A New Kind of Christian) in the seminar on I did on postmodernism last year, so you can read that transcript or listen to the recording if you want to understand more of my objections to McLaren.
I will also say that McLaren's book A Generous Orthodoxy is one of the absolute worst books I have ever read from Zondervan (and that's saying quite a lot). Frankly, I think it raises grave doubts about whether Brian McLaren is really "orthodox" in any sense of the word. He borrows a lot from neo-orthodoxy--and that, I think, is probably the only sense in which he is entitled to apply the term "orthodox" to himself. He does claim to accept both the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene creed, but he also makes it clear that he doesn't ultimately put much stock in the actual propositions that are affirmed in those or any other creeds, and he spends most of the book arguing against the idea that our defense of the Christian faith requires us to defend any of our actual doctrines.
Most of all, Brian Mclaren is hostile to the idea that we can claim any degree of certainty about any point of truth. This is, by the way, not an obscure idea in Brian McLaren's works. This is one of the key points he labors to make almost any time he gets a platform to speak. He makes it clear over and over in all his books and lectures that he despises every hint of certainty or assurance. He thinks it is inherently arrogant and unspiritual to speak dogmatically about any point of spiritual truth.
And nothing epitomizes cocksure arrogance more in Brian McLaren's mind than radio preachers. He says it makes him angry to listen to Christian radio and hear preachers who seem so sure that the doctrines they believe and teach are really true. Authentic "humility," in Brian McLaren's opinion, must start with a refusal to insist on the absolute truth of any given proposition. And (other than his absolute contempt for overconfidence) he's not really even absolutely sure about the things he himself writes about.
McLaren portrays faith and certainty as opposing concepts. He says prefers the idea of confidence rather than "certainty," but he carefully qualifies himself to make clear that he will only tolerate a relative kind of confidence. He himself is not "absolutely certain" about anything.
I should add that McLaren wants it made clear that he is not saying no absolutes exist. He's only saying that if they exist, we can't know them with any kind of absolute certainty. And therefore, he says, we should never proclaim anything unequivocally. And he himself generally follows that rule (except when he is railing on the certainty with which radio preachers tend to speak.)
Brian McLaren says, "Certainty is overrated . . . History teaches us that a lot of people thought they were certain and we found out they weren't." In a different interview, he said, "When we talk about the word 'faith' and the word 'certainty,' we've got a whole lot of problems there. What do we mean by 'certainty'? . . . Certainty can be dangerous. What we need is a proper confidence that's always seeking the truth and that's seeking to live in the way God wants us to live, but that also has the proper degree of self-critical and self-questioning passion."
McLaren himself is not sure about whether it's proper to speak of homosexuality as "sin." He recently published an article where he recounted how someone asked him where his church stood on the issue of homosexuality, and his answer was a lengthy apologetic for his own ambivalence on the issue. Here are his exact words:
Frankly, many of us don't know what we should think about homosexuality. We've heard all sides but no position has yet won our confidence so that we can say "it seems good to the Holy Spirit and us." That alienates us from both the liberals and conservatives who seem to know exactly what we should think.
Then he added this:
Perhaps we need a five-year moratorium on making pronouncements. In the meantime, we'll practice prayerful Christian dialogue, listening respectfully, disagreeing agreeably. When decisions need to be made, they'll be admittedly provisional. We'll keep our ears attuned to scholars in biblical studies, theology, ethics, psychology, genetics, sociology, and related fields. Then in five years, if we have clarity, we'll speak; if not, we'll set another five years for ongoing reflection.
That, frankly, is Brian McLaren's approach to everything. He has been pressed on several occasions to name any doctrines or truths that he feels are sufficiently clear to be proclaimed dogmatically or preached with conviction, and he has made it absolutely clear that conviction and the full assurance of faith are things he holds in high contempt.
He even has the audacity to ask for a universal moratorium on preaching about the sin of sodomy. Apparently, he thinks the rest of us should be silent about the matter until he makes up his own mind about it. (And he clearly even hints that he might never actually form a settled opinion on the matter. In fact, I can already tell you that if he follows his own epistemological convictions, he won't. He can't.)
So when Brian McLaren claims adherence to the ancient ecumenical creeds, that claim, by Brian McLaren's own admission, is dubious. He's not really sure about anything he believes.
By any historic evangelical standard, McLaren's religion is not authentic Christianity at all. And it does frankly raise major questions about the whole "emerging church movement" when he is given so much credence by people in that movement.
He is in almost every way an exact replica of Harry Emerson Fosdick, adapted to suit the 21st-century zeitgeist. Most of you will understand exactly what I mean by that.
Enough about McLaren.
My three main concerns
What else could possibly be wrong with the "emerging church movement"? (I'm not going to try for an exhaustive list. I wish you could see the stack of books I had to read over the past year as I prepared for this seminar. It's literally a two-and-a-half-foot-high stack, and fully half of them are recent products of the Zondervan imprint called Emergent-YS, indicating the involvement of Emergent (Brian McLaren's organization) and Youth Specialties, an organization that for years published the infamous evangelical satire magazine Wittenburg Door. Youth Specialties is also well known for publishing books of activities--outrageous games and grotesque or messy contests--for youth groups. Their literature has been a major influence in evangelical youth work for almost three decades now, and if you have ever been in youth ministry, you are probably familiar with them. These days, they are one of the main cheerleaders for the Emergent idea.)
I have friends who have suggested that the emerging church idea is the predictable fruit of churches that tailor their youth ministries to whatever style is currently fashionable, hold alternative church services for the youth in a separate building ("the youth building") and never incorporate them into the actual life of the church itself. They've grown into adulthood while their styles and preferences were catered to in a special "church" service all their own. The actual church service was something they weren't expected to like. Many of them were never really exposed to worship in the context of the actual church, with real adults. They were deliberately entertained instead, and thus they were conditioned to think that way. They grew old, but they never grew up, and now even as adults, they want to continue to play at church, but outside the mainstream of the historic church. (My friend characterized the emerging church worship style as "Church services for the ADHD generation." Read the Christianity Today account of Emergent's national convention and you will understand why he said that.)
And while that is not the background of everyone in the emerging subculture, I'm sure there area lot of people who fit that profile, including some of the key leaders in the movement. You'll see what I mean if you read the Christianity Today article on the emerging church in the November 2004 issue.
Anyway, I could probably come up with a very long list of issues that concern me about the "emerging church movement," but since we have so little time to pursue this, I have decided to boil it down and give you a short list of my top three current concerns about the "emerging church movement." We can cover these very quickly, because I think you'll understand my rationale for these concerns just based on what I have already said.
So here are the three things that disturb me most about the general drift of the movement:
1. It fosters contempt for authority. The New Testament idea of church government is not anarchy. It's not even democracy or mobocracy. The church is certainly not supposed to be the sort of populist organization where everyone has an equal voice in everything that happens.
The contempt for structure in the "emerging church movement" is a thinly-veiled aversion to authority. You will see that if you simply examine the angry comments that were posted at the Emergent-US blog when it was announced that the new organization would have a "director." Blogs and discussion forums associated with the movement were assaulted with complaints and angry criticisms. One member of the movement said, "A director?!! Nobody's going to direct me! That's why I left the traditional church." Another guy wrote: "I think we are going in a horribly dangerous direction. We aren't becoming a 'conversation,' we're becoming an institution. A 'National Director?' for a conversation? Give me a break . . .. I have a feeling we're going down the Anakin Skywalker path here, folks."
The whole movement's approach to Scripture is another major reflection of the widespread tendency within the movement, to show contempt for every kind of authority in the church. Brian McLaren insists that Scripture does not actually claim authority for itself. It claims to be profitable, he says, but not "authoritative."
As a matter of fact, the whole movement seems devoted to dialectical approach to truth. This, I think, explains the movement's aversion to the idea of preaching and its preference for the idea of "conversation." There's an underlying assumption that this is the best way to arrive at the truth: You have a thesis, and then an antithesis, and the truth is supposed to lie in a synthesis of those two contradictory ideas. That synthesis becomes the new thesis. It's answered by a new antithesis, and the synthesis of those ideas becomes the new thought. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. It's a never-ending cycle.
That's the perspective of truth and epistemology proposed by the German philosopher Hegel: the dialectical method. All truth is ultimately determined that way. So it's fluid; never absolute. Truth changes all the time.
The dialectical method may indeed be a fairly accurate description of how public opinion develops. But we ought to know as Christians: That's no way to discover truth. Right?
Scot Mcknight (who is an apologist for a number of the movements that are currently trying to expand the whole concept of evangelical Christianity) has written a sympathetic analysis of the "emerging church movement" that is worth reading if you want a decent description of the movement from a sympathetic perspective.
Scot McKnight says this: "[People in the "emerging church movement"] want to open up questions. They're asking questions about how we should understand our relationship to scripture: Is it inerrant? Is it true? And many of the emergent people are saying that [Scripture may not be absolute and authoritative and inerrant, but] it is the "senior partner" in the conversation." McKnight calls that "a healthy category." I don't think it is. I think it's just more evidence of how the "emerging church movement" fosters a contempt for authority.
Here's a second major concern I have:
2. It breeds doubt about the perspicuity of Scripture. You understand the principle of perspicuity? It speaks of the clarity--the "understandability"--of the Bible. The Westminster Confession of Faith says it like this: "All things in scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of scripture or other, [so] that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them." Perspicuity. The Bible is not too hard for us to understand.
The entire postmodern epistemology (their view of how we acquire knowledge of the truth) deliberately glorifies uncertainty. I already gave you some quotations about this from Brian McLaren, but you can read almost any writer in the movement and you will find this theme is relentlessly pressed.
The article in Christianity Today last year about the emerging church, for example, is a classic example of this. One of the central themes running through that article is the message that people in the "emerging church movement" have abandoned certainty, assurance, and strong convictions. They aren't dogmatic about what they believe, because they aren't really sure of what they believe.
The obvious implication here is that Scripture just isn't clear enough for us to say what it means with any kind of confidence.
In fact, that's more than an implication of the article. It's pretty much what these folks are expressly saying. Listen to this paragraph about the husband-and-wife pastoral team of one of the leading emergent-style churches in the country. This is about Rob and Karen Bell, who founded Mars Hill in Grand Rapids:
They found themselves increasingly uncomfortable with church. "Life in the church had become so small," Kristen says. "It had worked for me for a long time. Then it stopped working." The Bells started questioning their assumptions about the Bible itself-"discovering the Bible as a human product," as Rob puts it, rather than the product of divine fiat. "The Bible is still in the center for us," Rob says, "but it's a different kind of center. We want to embrace mystery, rather than conquer it."
"I grew up thinking that we've figured out the Bible," Kristen says, "that we knew what it means. Now I have no idea what most of it means. And yet I feel like life is big again-like life used to be black and white, and now it's in color."
Ultimately, the emerging church message begins to sound like an echo of the voice of Satan in the garden: "Hath God said?"
This is a huge issue--in some ways the pivotal issue. The overwhelming message coming from the "emerging church movement" often sounds like a flat denial of the clarity and perspicuity of Scripture. That is a denial of one of the basic tenets of biblical Christianity, Protestant history, and evangelical conviction.
Yes, parts of Scripture are "hard to be understood." The apostle Peter acknowledges that in 2 Peter 3:16. But the essential message is simple and clear. The wayfaring man, though he be a fool, doesn't have to be confused by it, according to Isaiah 35:8. God has made Himself plain enough that there is much more than merely mystery to the Christian faith.
Quickly, here's a third thing that disturbs me about the "emerging church movement":
3. It sows confusion about the mission of the church. I'll just sum up my final point with this one observation: The "missional" emphasis in the "emerging church movement" seems to be entirely focused on an effort to adapt the church to the culture, with very little stress on the church's duty to proclaim a message of repentance and faith in Christ that calls men and women to forsake the world.
In other words, the "emerging church movement" seems to be all about the conversion of the church, rather than the conversion of the sinner.
In fact, I found little or no emphasis on conversion in any of more than a dozen books I read about the "emerging church movement". (Sometimes, emerging church writers adopt the language of postmodern narcissism and talk about "recovery," but that's as close as they usually get to discussing conversion.) It is simply not a major theme of discussion in the emerging conversation.
This is a glaring flaw in a movement that calls itself "missional."
The true mission of the church is embodied in the gospel message and the Great Commission. It is truth that demands to be proclaimed with clarity, and authority and conviction, and if you refuse to do that, even if you insist you are being "missional," you are not fulfilling the mission of the church at all.
Those are some of my main concerns about the "emerging church movement." Can I make one of those absolute statements that make postmodernists grind their teeth? There is absolutely no sense in which I would commend this movement to you, encourage you to join the so-called "conversation," or wade through the mounds of trendy literature in search of valuable helps and insights that might help your church.
Spiritually speaking, that literature points down a dead-end street into a blind alley on the bad side of town. I am convinced that this movement is going to be a serious detriment to the testimony of the church as a whole, a source of great confusion for many Christians, and another in a long series of movements that will surely undermine the work of the gospel rather than advance it. And I have no doubt whatsoever that those predictions will be proven correct within the next 10-20 years, if not sooner.
What about those "valid points"?
At the beginning I said I think some valid points have been made by people in the "emerging church movement," and some of you might be thinking everything I've said since then makes that compliment ring rather hollow. That's good, because I didn't want you to get the idea that if I commended something that has been said by someone in the "emerging church movement," I'm endorsing the movement.
But in closing, I will say that I do think some of the points that have been made by people in the "emerging church movement" are good and valuable, and worthy of heeding.
For one thing, they are right to reject the professionalism and big-business approach to ministry that has been popularized by most of the influential megachurches.
They are right to point out that millions of American evangelicals live lives of gross hypocrisy and narcissism, ignoring the needs of the poor while indulging themselves with entertainments and luxuries while the church struggles, and many pastors live barely above the poverty level (if that), and our Christian brothers and sisters struggle in many parts of the world because they don't even have clean water or basic medical care. We have the resources, and yet we are too prone to spend them on ourselves. I often think American evangelicals will have a lot to answer for when we are called to give account for our stewardship.
They are right when they complain about the way the evangelical movement has sold its birthright for a mess of Republican Party porridge. I obviously don't agree with those who think a commitment to left-wing politics would be the right remedy. But I do think the evangelical movement should cut its ties with all political parties, get out of party politics completely,and get back to the business of preaching the gospel.
And they are right when they suggest we have not done enough to reach the outcasts and counter-cultural people in our society. I think their approach to reaching those segments of society is all wrong and largely counterproductive, but to adapt a phrase from D. L. Moody: I like the way some of them are trying to reach those people a lot better than I like the way many evangelicals simply ignore the task of evangelism.
Let me say that we can and should heed all those things without buying into the agenda of the "emerging church movement"--and certainly without abandoning the task of preaching the gospel with clarity and conviction. I hope we can take that challenge to heart, and minister accordingly, and look to Christ as the only true and trustworthy pattern for church ministry.
It's not really that complex an issue, when you see it in that light."
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Johnson on the Emerging Church (Pt 2)
P Johnson continued.... "On top of that, this is a movement that hates formal structure, so it has been resistant to any kind of definition or careful boundaries that would make its shape easy to discern or describe. It's a movement that is purposely foggy and amorphous, fluid and diverse--and most in the movement want to keep it that way.
That ambiguity is a major aspect of the emerging subculture's love affair with all things postmodern. The lack of clarity and the absence of any clear consensus in the movement is also the main strategy for self-defense against critics. No matter what you criticize within the movement, practically the first response you are going to hear is that "not everyone in the movement holds that opinion." And in most cases, that's probably true. It's a movement that loves ambiguity and diversity and despises clarity and organization.
Nonetheless, last year Brian Mclaren and a few other leading emergent figures banded together to form an actual organization called, simply, "Emergent"--also known as "Emergent Village," or (as you find it on their website) "Emergent-US." So the terminology becomes even more difficult.
Emergent--the organization, is actually different from the "emerging church movement." Until last summer, you could use the word emergent as a kind of shorthand term to signify the phenomenon itself, but now that's the name of an actual organization. And at times there even seems to be a bit of tension between Emergent, the organization, and the "emerging church movement."
According to a June 8 news release from the organization, Tony Jones was appointed "National Director" of Emergent. Others within the emerging church movement practically saw that as a betrayal of the spirit of what they stand for. So a week later, the organization issued an update on their weblog in the form of a memo to the rest of the emerging church movement. The memo said this:
Some of you read the last post regarding the recent appointment of Tony Jones as "National Director." Before the official press release was sent out the decision was made to instead use the title "National Coordinator." This felt more in keeping with both the spirit of Emergent and the overall purpose of the role.
Here you begin to see why "the emerging church movement" is next-to-impossible to define. But I hope you can also begin to get a flavor for what makes the so-called "emerging church" different from the historic churches of the past. What we have here is a large and growing subculture on the fringe of the evangelical movement that has been profoundly influenced by postmodern ways of thinking, discourse, and attitudes.
I dealt with "postmodernism" in a seminar here at the Shepherds' Conference last year and the year before, so I don't want to cover the same ground again. If you feel you are totally in the dark about postmodernism and what it looks like, you can get a CD of that message or download the transcript of it from the Internet. I'm pretty sure it's freely available somewhere on line.
It includes a partial critique of one of Brian McLaren's books, A New Kind of Christian, because that book is essentially a plea for Christians to embrace postmodernism and adapt to the postmodern way of thinking--not to fear and resist it. We need to conform our perspective and our style of discourse to the postmodern fashion, McLaren says, in order to reach a postmodern generation.
That is, I believe, the central idea that drives the emerging church movement--although many in the movement might balk at the label postmodern, and (in all fairness) many people in the movement would also want to add several paragraphs of qualifications and clarifications to make it clear that their own assessment of postmodernism would not necessarily be completely positive.
But there's no question that the movement is self-consciously and purposefully trying to accommodate or adapt to or otherwise indulge the postmodern climate of the age we live in. And that is why some of the essential features of faith and assurance that you and I might think are absolutely essential to communicating the gospel clearly and in a strong, biblical way are sometimes actually held in contempt by people in the emerging subculture. I'm speaking of features such as authority, strong convictions, doctrinal precision, clear definitions, and candor. All of those things run counter to the values prized by postmodernists.
So naturally, one of Tony Jones's first duties as "coordinator" for the Emergent organization was to write a long weblog entry explaining why the group found it necessary to have a "coordinator" and a board of "directors" and an actual staff and organization and a real, tangible hierarchy.
It honestly did not surprise me that he would feel obliged to write such a justification for the organization's existence (or that many in the movement were demanding that kind of explanation), because for the most part, the emerging church movement (like the postmodern culture it imitates) is highly suspicious of (or even contemptuous of) things like organizational charts, or structured definition, or even the idea of authority itself. Obviously, all of those things are necessary in any kind of formal organization. But if you understand postmodernism, it makes perfect sense why postmodernists would nevertheless resist the clarity and authority that comes with any kind of formal organization.
All of that is to say that the word movement is also not quite right, and even most insiders don't like the implications of the word movement. But for lack of better terminology, I'm going to continue to refer to the "emerging church movement," and I hope that for clarity's sake and for time's sake you will indulge me in that shorthand usage of three terms that really don't quite fit. (If it's a comfort to anyone in the movement, every time the expression "emerging church movement" appears in the notes I am using, I have put it in quotation marks.)
I have to say, by the way, that one of the really fun things about watching the "emerging church movement" is keeping a score card of how quickly every discussion melts down into a dispute about words and terminology. Many in the movement are recent college grads who learned the postmodernist technique of deconstruction as their primary method of interpreting language and ideas. That's what postmodernist lit teachers have been teaching for 15 years or so now. Emergent types have learned the technique well, and they use it to good effect."
That ambiguity is a major aspect of the emerging subculture's love affair with all things postmodern. The lack of clarity and the absence of any clear consensus in the movement is also the main strategy for self-defense against critics. No matter what you criticize within the movement, practically the first response you are going to hear is that "not everyone in the movement holds that opinion." And in most cases, that's probably true. It's a movement that loves ambiguity and diversity and despises clarity and organization.
Nonetheless, last year Brian Mclaren and a few other leading emergent figures banded together to form an actual organization called, simply, "Emergent"--also known as "Emergent Village," or (as you find it on their website) "Emergent-US." So the terminology becomes even more difficult.
Emergent--the organization, is actually different from the "emerging church movement." Until last summer, you could use the word emergent as a kind of shorthand term to signify the phenomenon itself, but now that's the name of an actual organization. And at times there even seems to be a bit of tension between Emergent, the organization, and the "emerging church movement."
According to a June 8 news release from the organization, Tony Jones was appointed "National Director" of Emergent. Others within the emerging church movement practically saw that as a betrayal of the spirit of what they stand for. So a week later, the organization issued an update on their weblog in the form of a memo to the rest of the emerging church movement. The memo said this:
Some of you read the last post regarding the recent appointment of Tony Jones as "National Director." Before the official press release was sent out the decision was made to instead use the title "National Coordinator." This felt more in keeping with both the spirit of Emergent and the overall purpose of the role.
Here you begin to see why "the emerging church movement" is next-to-impossible to define. But I hope you can also begin to get a flavor for what makes the so-called "emerging church" different from the historic churches of the past. What we have here is a large and growing subculture on the fringe of the evangelical movement that has been profoundly influenced by postmodern ways of thinking, discourse, and attitudes.
I dealt with "postmodernism" in a seminar here at the Shepherds' Conference last year and the year before, so I don't want to cover the same ground again. If you feel you are totally in the dark about postmodernism and what it looks like, you can get a CD of that message or download the transcript of it from the Internet. I'm pretty sure it's freely available somewhere on line.
It includes a partial critique of one of Brian McLaren's books, A New Kind of Christian, because that book is essentially a plea for Christians to embrace postmodernism and adapt to the postmodern way of thinking--not to fear and resist it. We need to conform our perspective and our style of discourse to the postmodern fashion, McLaren says, in order to reach a postmodern generation.
That is, I believe, the central idea that drives the emerging church movement--although many in the movement might balk at the label postmodern, and (in all fairness) many people in the movement would also want to add several paragraphs of qualifications and clarifications to make it clear that their own assessment of postmodernism would not necessarily be completely positive.
But there's no question that the movement is self-consciously and purposefully trying to accommodate or adapt to or otherwise indulge the postmodern climate of the age we live in. And that is why some of the essential features of faith and assurance that you and I might think are absolutely essential to communicating the gospel clearly and in a strong, biblical way are sometimes actually held in contempt by people in the emerging subculture. I'm speaking of features such as authority, strong convictions, doctrinal precision, clear definitions, and candor. All of those things run counter to the values prized by postmodernists.
So naturally, one of Tony Jones's first duties as "coordinator" for the Emergent organization was to write a long weblog entry explaining why the group found it necessary to have a "coordinator" and a board of "directors" and an actual staff and organization and a real, tangible hierarchy.
It honestly did not surprise me that he would feel obliged to write such a justification for the organization's existence (or that many in the movement were demanding that kind of explanation), because for the most part, the emerging church movement (like the postmodern culture it imitates) is highly suspicious of (or even contemptuous of) things like organizational charts, or structured definition, or even the idea of authority itself. Obviously, all of those things are necessary in any kind of formal organization. But if you understand postmodernism, it makes perfect sense why postmodernists would nevertheless resist the clarity and authority that comes with any kind of formal organization.
All of that is to say that the word movement is also not quite right, and even most insiders don't like the implications of the word movement. But for lack of better terminology, I'm going to continue to refer to the "emerging church movement," and I hope that for clarity's sake and for time's sake you will indulge me in that shorthand usage of three terms that really don't quite fit. (If it's a comfort to anyone in the movement, every time the expression "emerging church movement" appears in the notes I am using, I have put it in quotation marks.)
I have to say, by the way, that one of the really fun things about watching the "emerging church movement" is keeping a score card of how quickly every discussion melts down into a dispute about words and terminology. Many in the movement are recent college grads who learned the postmodernist technique of deconstruction as their primary method of interpreting language and ideas. That's what postmodernist lit teachers have been teaching for 15 years or so now. Emergent types have learned the technique well, and they use it to good effect."
Friday, March 24, 2006
Johnson on the Emerging Church (Pt 1)
Absolutely Not!
A critical look at the emerging church movement
by Phil Johnson
2006 Shepherds' Conference
Grace Community Church, Sun Valley, CA
I've been assigned the impossible task of explaining and critiquing the emerging church movement in one 75-minute session. It will save some time if I start by being totally candid with you:
I don't suppose anyone who knows me expects me to be very positive about the emerging church movement. I'd love to stand up here and spend the first half hour or so listing features of the emerging church that I think are admirable. I do think there are actually a few valid and important points being made by people in the movement, and I'll get to them, but I'd rather not start there, if you don't mind.
(By the way, I realize it would be very stylish if I took the other approach. If I gave you an ambiguous review and a totally dispassionate analysis, so that when I finished you couldn't actually be sure whether I think the emerging movement is a good thing or not, that would fit perfectly with the postmodern paradigm favored by emergent types. And I'm sure a lot of them would congratulate me for it. But that would not reflect my own honest perspective, and I'd prefer just to be totally frank with you. So that's what I'm going to do.)
My goal in this hour is not to persuade people who are already sold on the emergent idea that it's a bad idea. My aim is to help conservative pastors of established churches who are committed to biblical principles by making you aware of some of the things that are going on in the so-called emerging church movement. And I hope to explain why I believe it is worth the struggle to resist these trends. Because you will invariably be confronted with pressure to embrace some of the philosophy and style of the emergent movement in your own ministries. And judging from what I know of church history--especially recent church history--it will be a difficult struggle for some pastors to resist.
About the Nomenclature . . .
Before I start to describe the emerging church movement and outline some of its main characteristics, I want to mention that there's been quite a lot of debate about what name we ought to use when we speak of this movement. For the sake of this seminar, I'm pretty much just going to refer to it as "the emerging church movement," in keeping with popular usage. I couldn't think of anything else to call it without inventing some circumlocution that would only confuse matters. So I'll refer to it as the "emerging church movement," but I want to add a long disclaimer here to acknowledge that none of those three words actually fits the thing we are describing very well.
Emerging. In the first place, I object to the implications of the word emerging. This movement is not some beautiful new butterfly coming out of a cocoon. Although people in this movement sometimes claim to represent the next great step forward after the failure of modernism, my assessment would be that what we are really seeing here is the collective dying gasp of every major modernist idea evangelicals and fundamentalists have stood against for the past century and a half.
Virtually all the literature, style, and philosophy associated with the emerging subculture are shot through with conspicuous elements of worldliness, man-centered worship, the narcissism of youth, liberal and neo-orthodox theology, and the silly, ages-old campaign to be "contemporary" at all costs.
And I hope you realize that very few of this movement's most obvious features are truly inventive. The philosophy and even some of the novelties of style are really not that much different from what was happening during my junior high school years in the youth group of the liberal Methodist church I grew up in. We had the candles and contemporary music and every kind of religious paraphernalia you can imagine--but not the gospel. Methodist church leaders, who had abandoned the gospel years before desperately sought a way to make the church seem "relevant" to a younger generation in its own language. There has always been some segment of the church or another that is desperate to keep up with the shifting fads of culture and looking for novel ways to adapt Christianity to the spirit of the age. That has been true at least since Victorian times. Spurgeon wrote against it.
Although that philosophy been tried repeatedly in various forms, it has never genuinely contributed anything to the growth or effectiveness of the church. If the pattern of history holds true, my prediction is that the emerging church movement will be dead and irrelevant even before the current generation gives way to the next generation. That's what inevitably happens to movements that are tailored to the tastes of a specific generation. At most, they have about a 15--or 25-year lifespan. So in my judgment, the term emerging will almost certainly prove to be a major misnomer in the long term--and quite possibly even in the short term.
Church. Second, questions have also been raised from within the movement itself about whether it's really appropriate to speak of "the emerging church." Brian McLaren is without question the leading American figure and most prolific writer in the movement. He said last summer that he now prefers to speak of the emerging "conversation."
That would actually be fine with me, because in some ways the movement isn't very churchlike in its attitude toward structure and authority. (I'm tempted to propose nomenclature of my own: "the emerging free-for-all," because that actually seems to fit what is happening in the movement even better than the idea of a "conversation.") But I think it's worth noting that the best-known spokesperson in this movement has indicated that even he thinks the word church really doesn't fit the movement very well.
Movement. That's not all. In some important ways the emerging subculture is not really even a movement in the classic sense. There are no clear leaders or universally-recognized spokespersons who would be affirmed by everyone associated with the emerging church. The closest to a dominant figure would be Brian McLaren, and he is so controversial and so prone to making disturbing statements that many who have adopted the emerging style or otherwise identified with the emergent movement say they don't want their ministries or opinions to be evaluated by what he says. And I don't blame them.
On top of that, this is a movement that hates formal structure, so it has been resistant to any kind of definition or careful boundaries that would make its shape easy to discern or describe. It's a movement that is purposely foggy and amorphous, fluid and diverse--and most in the movement want to keep it that way.
That ambiguity is a major aspect of the emerging subculture's love affair with all things postmodern. The lack of clarity and the absence of any clear consensus in the movement is also the main strategy for self-defense against critics. No matter what you criticize within the movement, practically the first response you are going to hear is that "not everyone in the movement holds that opinion." And in most cases, that's probably true. It's a movement that loves ambiguity and diversity and despises clarity and organization.
Nonetheless, last year Brian Mclaren and a few other leading emergent figures banded together to form an actual organization called, simply, "Emergent"--also known as "Emergent Village," or (as you find it on their website) "Emergent-US." So the terminology becomes even more difficult.
Emergent--the organization, is actually different from the "emerging church movement." Until last summer, you could use the word emergent as a kind of shorthand term to signify the phenomenon itself, but now that's the name of an actual organization. And at times there even seems to be a bit of tension between Emergent, the organization, and the "emerging church movement."
A critical look at the emerging church movement
by Phil Johnson
2006 Shepherds' Conference
Grace Community Church, Sun Valley, CA
I've been assigned the impossible task of explaining and critiquing the emerging church movement in one 75-minute session. It will save some time if I start by being totally candid with you:
I don't suppose anyone who knows me expects me to be very positive about the emerging church movement. I'd love to stand up here and spend the first half hour or so listing features of the emerging church that I think are admirable. I do think there are actually a few valid and important points being made by people in the movement, and I'll get to them, but I'd rather not start there, if you don't mind.
(By the way, I realize it would be very stylish if I took the other approach. If I gave you an ambiguous review and a totally dispassionate analysis, so that when I finished you couldn't actually be sure whether I think the emerging movement is a good thing or not, that would fit perfectly with the postmodern paradigm favored by emergent types. And I'm sure a lot of them would congratulate me for it. But that would not reflect my own honest perspective, and I'd prefer just to be totally frank with you. So that's what I'm going to do.)
My goal in this hour is not to persuade people who are already sold on the emergent idea that it's a bad idea. My aim is to help conservative pastors of established churches who are committed to biblical principles by making you aware of some of the things that are going on in the so-called emerging church movement. And I hope to explain why I believe it is worth the struggle to resist these trends. Because you will invariably be confronted with pressure to embrace some of the philosophy and style of the emergent movement in your own ministries. And judging from what I know of church history--especially recent church history--it will be a difficult struggle for some pastors to resist.
About the Nomenclature . . .
Before I start to describe the emerging church movement and outline some of its main characteristics, I want to mention that there's been quite a lot of debate about what name we ought to use when we speak of this movement. For the sake of this seminar, I'm pretty much just going to refer to it as "the emerging church movement," in keeping with popular usage. I couldn't think of anything else to call it without inventing some circumlocution that would only confuse matters. So I'll refer to it as the "emerging church movement," but I want to add a long disclaimer here to acknowledge that none of those three words actually fits the thing we are describing very well.
Emerging. In the first place, I object to the implications of the word emerging. This movement is not some beautiful new butterfly coming out of a cocoon. Although people in this movement sometimes claim to represent the next great step forward after the failure of modernism, my assessment would be that what we are really seeing here is the collective dying gasp of every major modernist idea evangelicals and fundamentalists have stood against for the past century and a half.
Virtually all the literature, style, and philosophy associated with the emerging subculture are shot through with conspicuous elements of worldliness, man-centered worship, the narcissism of youth, liberal and neo-orthodox theology, and the silly, ages-old campaign to be "contemporary" at all costs.
And I hope you realize that very few of this movement's most obvious features are truly inventive. The philosophy and even some of the novelties of style are really not that much different from what was happening during my junior high school years in the youth group of the liberal Methodist church I grew up in. We had the candles and contemporary music and every kind of religious paraphernalia you can imagine--but not the gospel. Methodist church leaders, who had abandoned the gospel years before desperately sought a way to make the church seem "relevant" to a younger generation in its own language. There has always been some segment of the church or another that is desperate to keep up with the shifting fads of culture and looking for novel ways to adapt Christianity to the spirit of the age. That has been true at least since Victorian times. Spurgeon wrote against it.
Although that philosophy been tried repeatedly in various forms, it has never genuinely contributed anything to the growth or effectiveness of the church. If the pattern of history holds true, my prediction is that the emerging church movement will be dead and irrelevant even before the current generation gives way to the next generation. That's what inevitably happens to movements that are tailored to the tastes of a specific generation. At most, they have about a 15--or 25-year lifespan. So in my judgment, the term emerging will almost certainly prove to be a major misnomer in the long term--and quite possibly even in the short term.
Church. Second, questions have also been raised from within the movement itself about whether it's really appropriate to speak of "the emerging church." Brian McLaren is without question the leading American figure and most prolific writer in the movement. He said last summer that he now prefers to speak of the emerging "conversation."
That would actually be fine with me, because in some ways the movement isn't very churchlike in its attitude toward structure and authority. (I'm tempted to propose nomenclature of my own: "the emerging free-for-all," because that actually seems to fit what is happening in the movement even better than the idea of a "conversation.") But I think it's worth noting that the best-known spokesperson in this movement has indicated that even he thinks the word church really doesn't fit the movement very well.
Movement. That's not all. In some important ways the emerging subculture is not really even a movement in the classic sense. There are no clear leaders or universally-recognized spokespersons who would be affirmed by everyone associated with the emerging church. The closest to a dominant figure would be Brian McLaren, and he is so controversial and so prone to making disturbing statements that many who have adopted the emerging style or otherwise identified with the emergent movement say they don't want their ministries or opinions to be evaluated by what he says. And I don't blame them.
On top of that, this is a movement that hates formal structure, so it has been resistant to any kind of definition or careful boundaries that would make its shape easy to discern or describe. It's a movement that is purposely foggy and amorphous, fluid and diverse--and most in the movement want to keep it that way.
That ambiguity is a major aspect of the emerging subculture's love affair with all things postmodern. The lack of clarity and the absence of any clear consensus in the movement is also the main strategy for self-defense against critics. No matter what you criticize within the movement, practically the first response you are going to hear is that "not everyone in the movement holds that opinion." And in most cases, that's probably true. It's a movement that loves ambiguity and diversity and despises clarity and organization.
Nonetheless, last year Brian Mclaren and a few other leading emergent figures banded together to form an actual organization called, simply, "Emergent"--also known as "Emergent Village," or (as you find it on their website) "Emergent-US." So the terminology becomes even more difficult.
Emergent--the organization, is actually different from the "emerging church movement." Until last summer, you could use the word emergent as a kind of shorthand term to signify the phenomenon itself, but now that's the name of an actual organization. And at times there even seems to be a bit of tension between Emergent, the organization, and the "emerging church movement."
Thursday, March 23, 2006
Lies (PT 2)
KABUL, Afghanistan — Senior Muslim clerics said Thursday that an Afghan man who converted from Islam to Christianity must be executed and if the government caves into Western pressure and frees him they will incite people to "pull him into pieces."
The trial of Abdul Rahman has fired passions in this conservative Muslim nation and highlighted a conflict of values between Afghanistan and its Western backers.
"Rejecting Islam is insulting God. We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die," said cleric Abdul Raoulf, who is considered a moderate and was jailed three times for opposing the Taliban before the hardline regime was ousted in 2001.
Rahman, a 41-year old former medical aid worker, faces the death penalty under Afghanistan's Islamic laws for becoming a Christian. His trial, which began last week, has caused an international outcry. U.S. President George W. Bush has said he is "deeply troubled" by the case and expects the country to "honor the universal principle of freedom."
German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters that she received assurances from Afghan President Hamid Karzai in a telephone call that Rahman would not be sentenced to death.
The trial of Abdul Rahman has fired passions in this conservative Muslim nation and highlighted a conflict of values between Afghanistan and its Western backers.
"Rejecting Islam is insulting God. We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die," said cleric Abdul Raoulf, who is considered a moderate and was jailed three times for opposing the Taliban before the hardline regime was ousted in 2001.
Rahman, a 41-year old former medical aid worker, faces the death penalty under Afghanistan's Islamic laws for becoming a Christian. His trial, which began last week, has caused an international outcry. U.S. President George W. Bush has said he is "deeply troubled" by the case and expects the country to "honor the universal principle of freedom."
German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters that she received assurances from Afghan President Hamid Karzai in a telephone call that Rahman would not be sentenced to death.
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Don't believe the lies
Don't believe the lies. The Muslim faith is not like biblical Christianity. These are not peace loving people who believe in freedom of religion. Jesus Christ is not at all like Muhammad.
I understand people (in the name of Christ) have gone against New Testament doctrine and have done horrible things. They've put a bad name on Christianity (the Crusades, etc).
Read the Koran for yourself. This type of thing (that is described below) is happening all throughout the Islamic world! Gospel-spreading missionaries are being killed left and right. Praise God for these faithful missionaries who are willing to die as martyrs for the sake of spreading a message (the good news). Christian missionaries are not terrorists they are simply seed sowers. Do not get me wrong though...these people are the mission field not our enemies.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,188728,00.html
KABUL, Afghanistan — An Afghan man facing a possible death penalty for converting from Islam to Christianity may be mentally unfit to stand trial, a state prosecutor said Wednesday.
Abdul Rahman, 41, has been charged with rejecting Islam, a crime under this country's Islamic laws. His trial started last week and he confessed to becoming a Christian 16 years ago. If convicted, he could be executed.
Western diplomat in Kabul and a human rights advocate — both of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter — said the government was desperately searching for a way to drop the case because of the reaction it has caused.
The United States, Britain and other countries that have troops in Afghanistan have voiced concern about Rahman's fate.
The Bush administration Tuesday issued a subdued appeal to Kabul to let Rahman practice his faith in safety. German Roman Catholic Cardinal Karl Lehmann said the trial sent an "alarming signal" about freedom of worship in Afghanistan.
The case is believed to be the first of its kind in Afghanistan and highlights a struggle between religious conservatives and reformists over what shape Islam should take there four years after the ouster of the fundamentalist Taliban regime.
Afghanistan's constitution is based on Shariah law, which is interpreted by many Muslims to require that any Muslim who rejects Islam be sentenced to death. The state-sponsored Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission has called for Rahman to be punished, arguing he clearly violated Islamic law.
The case has received widespread attention in Afghanistan where many people are demanding Rahman be severely punished.
"For 30 years, we have fought religious wars in this country and there is no way we are going to allow an Afghan to insult us by becoming Christian," said Mohammed Jan, 38, who lives opposite Rahman's father, Abdul Manan, in Kabul. "This has brought so much shame."
Rahman is believed to have converted from Islam to Christianity while working as a medical aid worker for an international Christian group helping Afghan refugees in the Pakistani city of Peshawar.
He then moved to Germany for nine years before returning to Kabul in 2002, after the ouster of the hard-line Taliban regime.
Police arrested him last month after discovering him in possession of a Bible during questioning over a dispute for custody of his two daughters. Prosecutors have offered to drop the charges if Rahman converts back to Islam, but he has refused.
But prosecutor Sarinwal Zamari said questions have been raised about his mental fitness.
"We think he could be mad. He is not a normal person. He doesn't talk like a normal person," he told The Associated Press.
Moayuddin Baluch, a religious adviser to President Hamid Karzai, said Rahman would undergo a psychological examination.
"Doctors must examine him," he said. "If he is mentally unfit, definitely Islam has no claim to punish him. He must be forgiven. The case must be dropped."
It was not immediately clear when he would be examined or when the trial would resume. Authorities have barred attempts by the AP to see Rahman and he is not believed to have a lawyer.
I understand people (in the name of Christ) have gone against New Testament doctrine and have done horrible things. They've put a bad name on Christianity (the Crusades, etc).
Read the Koran for yourself. This type of thing (that is described below) is happening all throughout the Islamic world! Gospel-spreading missionaries are being killed left and right. Praise God for these faithful missionaries who are willing to die as martyrs for the sake of spreading a message (the good news). Christian missionaries are not terrorists they are simply seed sowers. Do not get me wrong though...these people are the mission field not our enemies.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,188728,00.html
KABUL, Afghanistan — An Afghan man facing a possible death penalty for converting from Islam to Christianity may be mentally unfit to stand trial, a state prosecutor said Wednesday.
Abdul Rahman, 41, has been charged with rejecting Islam, a crime under this country's Islamic laws. His trial started last week and he confessed to becoming a Christian 16 years ago. If convicted, he could be executed.
Western diplomat in Kabul and a human rights advocate — both of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter — said the government was desperately searching for a way to drop the case because of the reaction it has caused.
The United States, Britain and other countries that have troops in Afghanistan have voiced concern about Rahman's fate.
The Bush administration Tuesday issued a subdued appeal to Kabul to let Rahman practice his faith in safety. German Roman Catholic Cardinal Karl Lehmann said the trial sent an "alarming signal" about freedom of worship in Afghanistan.
The case is believed to be the first of its kind in Afghanistan and highlights a struggle between religious conservatives and reformists over what shape Islam should take there four years after the ouster of the fundamentalist Taliban regime.
Afghanistan's constitution is based on Shariah law, which is interpreted by many Muslims to require that any Muslim who rejects Islam be sentenced to death. The state-sponsored Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission has called for Rahman to be punished, arguing he clearly violated Islamic law.
The case has received widespread attention in Afghanistan where many people are demanding Rahman be severely punished.
"For 30 years, we have fought religious wars in this country and there is no way we are going to allow an Afghan to insult us by becoming Christian," said Mohammed Jan, 38, who lives opposite Rahman's father, Abdul Manan, in Kabul. "This has brought so much shame."
Rahman is believed to have converted from Islam to Christianity while working as a medical aid worker for an international Christian group helping Afghan refugees in the Pakistani city of Peshawar.
He then moved to Germany for nine years before returning to Kabul in 2002, after the ouster of the hard-line Taliban regime.
Police arrested him last month after discovering him in possession of a Bible during questioning over a dispute for custody of his two daughters. Prosecutors have offered to drop the charges if Rahman converts back to Islam, but he has refused.
But prosecutor Sarinwal Zamari said questions have been raised about his mental fitness.
"We think he could be mad. He is not a normal person. He doesn't talk like a normal person," he told The Associated Press.
Moayuddin Baluch, a religious adviser to President Hamid Karzai, said Rahman would undergo a psychological examination.
"Doctors must examine him," he said. "If he is mentally unfit, definitely Islam has no claim to punish him. He must be forgiven. The case must be dropped."
It was not immediately clear when he would be examined or when the trial would resume. Authorities have barred attempts by the AP to see Rahman and he is not believed to have a lawyer.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Expository Preaching
True expository preaching.
By Caleb Kolstad (and Dr. Philip Ryken)
Many churches claim to be doing “biblical exposition” these days; sadly very few are really doing it. In light of 2 Timothy 4:1-5 this should not totally shock us. I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom: preach he word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires; and will turn away their ears from the truth, and will turn aside to myths. But you, be sober in all things, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.
I am thankful for Pastor Flatt’s commitment to Word of God through his expository preaching ministry here at First Baptist Church. He has been faithfully laboring in the Word for 30+ years. Dr. Philip Ryken recently wrote an excellent article helping us understand what genuine biblical exposition really is. How beautiful are the feet of those who bring us the good news (Romans 10:15).
"Preaching the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments is the divinely-appointed means of bringing sinners to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ and building believers up in the gospel. How can they hear without someone preaching to them? (Rom. 10:14). At a time when people will not tolerate sound teaching, but would prefer to hear something that reaffirms their own selfish desires, we are charged with this perennial imperative: "Preach the Word" (2 Tim. 4:2). Although our preaching is weak in itself, we believe it has the power to transform people's lives by the life-changing work of God the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 2:3-5).
By expository preaching we mean preaching that is driven by Scripture and derived from its divine authority, so that God's Word is declared to God's people. It is not preaching that merely begins with a biblical text and then proceeds to communicate the preacher's own spiritual ideas or the values of contemporary culture. Expository preaching carefully and thoroughly communicates what the Bible actually teaches, exploring its context, explaining its meaning, expounding its doctrine in connection to the person and work of Jesus Christ, and applying its gospel to the spiritual needs of those who listen, exalting the glory of God. Because God's Word is supremely "useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness" (2 Tim. 3:16), expository preaching is of its very nature practical." (Taken from www.reformation21.org)
By Caleb Kolstad (and Dr. Philip Ryken)
Many churches claim to be doing “biblical exposition” these days; sadly very few are really doing it. In light of 2 Timothy 4:1-5 this should not totally shock us. I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom: preach he word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires; and will turn away their ears from the truth, and will turn aside to myths. But you, be sober in all things, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.
I am thankful for Pastor Flatt’s commitment to Word of God through his expository preaching ministry here at First Baptist Church. He has been faithfully laboring in the Word for 30+ years. Dr. Philip Ryken recently wrote an excellent article helping us understand what genuine biblical exposition really is. How beautiful are the feet of those who bring us the good news (Romans 10:15).
"Preaching the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments is the divinely-appointed means of bringing sinners to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ and building believers up in the gospel. How can they hear without someone preaching to them? (Rom. 10:14). At a time when people will not tolerate sound teaching, but would prefer to hear something that reaffirms their own selfish desires, we are charged with this perennial imperative: "Preach the Word" (2 Tim. 4:2). Although our preaching is weak in itself, we believe it has the power to transform people's lives by the life-changing work of God the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 2:3-5).
By expository preaching we mean preaching that is driven by Scripture and derived from its divine authority, so that God's Word is declared to God's people. It is not preaching that merely begins with a biblical text and then proceeds to communicate the preacher's own spiritual ideas or the values of contemporary culture. Expository preaching carefully and thoroughly communicates what the Bible actually teaches, exploring its context, explaining its meaning, expounding its doctrine in connection to the person and work of Jesus Christ, and applying its gospel to the spiritual needs of those who listen, exalting the glory of God. Because God's Word is supremely "useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness" (2 Tim. 3:16), expository preaching is of its very nature practical." (Taken from www.reformation21.org)
Sunday, March 19, 2006
11 Mondays Counseling Training
I am currently taking 11 Monday's at Faith Baptist Church (FBC) in Lafeyette, IN. This is run by Pastor Steve Viars and the FBC pastoral staff. I have learned quite a bit thus far. It is great sitting in on "live counseling" sessions. Counseling is such an important part of pastoral ministry.
Faith is def. a counseling church. If you want to see a church fully committed to biblical counseling FBC is the place. Grace Community (in Sun Valley, CA) is a preaching/teaching church while Faith is a big time counseling community. The counseling center allows many opportunities for evangelism and discipleship. I think they said they have a waiting list right now with 50 people on it. They utilize tons of lay people to assist in counseling. That's another thing FBC does well.
I was surprised that Faith sells books by Rick Warren and Bill Hybels in there church book store. Their book store is primarily stocked w/counseling resources... Pastor Mark Dutton used Purpose Driven Life for one of his HW assignments which again was surprising to me.
FBC is going to build a multi-million dollar Recreation Center. I guess they got a grant or loan from the community to help pay for this Rec Center. FBC also wants to start a church based seminary.
More to come,
CK
Faith is def. a counseling church. If you want to see a church fully committed to biblical counseling FBC is the place. Grace Community (in Sun Valley, CA) is a preaching/teaching church while Faith is a big time counseling community. The counseling center allows many opportunities for evangelism and discipleship. I think they said they have a waiting list right now with 50 people on it. They utilize tons of lay people to assist in counseling. That's another thing FBC does well.
I was surprised that Faith sells books by Rick Warren and Bill Hybels in there church book store. Their book store is primarily stocked w/counseling resources... Pastor Mark Dutton used Purpose Driven Life for one of his HW assignments which again was surprising to me.
FBC is going to build a multi-million dollar Recreation Center. I guess they got a grant or loan from the community to help pay for this Rec Center. FBC also wants to start a church based seminary.
More to come,
CK
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Ligon Duncan on Grace Community Church
I spent 13 years at the church where Pastor MacArthur preaches week in and week out (www.gracechurch.org). My time at Grace Community Church was great! I learned so much about biblical ministry during my time there. I was able to serve in a variety of capacities during my tenure there as well. The church is not perfect but it is truly exemplory in many different facets. I was interested to hear Ligon Duncan's recent thoughts (see below).
"* A number of you asked to whom I was referring in my last post when I mentioned CHBC and CLC and GCC and BBC as examples of strong Reformed churches with excellent evangelistic track records. Well, CHBC is none other than Capitol Hill Baptist Church - pastored by the finest preacher-theologian-evangelist of our time, Mark Dever. CLC is Covenant Life Church, where Josh Harris is now pastoring, and where C.J. Mahaney so ably served. SGM, or Sovereign Grace Ministries is a good example of a family of churches that are superb at the practice of evangelism and emphatic in embrace of the doctrines of grace. Grace Community Church is GCC - what more need I say?! And BBC is Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, where John Piper serves. These congregations take a back-seat to no one when it comes to church health, zeal for the lost, effective witness, commitment to the great commission and joyful embrace of reformed theology."
Dr. J. Ligon Duncan III, a native of Greenville, South Carolina, was born and reared in the home of an eighth generation Southern Presbyterian Ruling Elder. A 1983 graduate of Furman University, he received an MDiv from Covenant Theological Seminary and studied Systematic Theology at the Free Church of Scotland College under Professor Donald Macleod. He earned the PhD from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1995.
He served on the staff of The Covenant Presbyterian Church of St. Louis from 1984-1987, and supplied pulpits in churches of the Presbyterian Association of England, Church of Scotland, and Free Church of Scotland while in Britain from 1987-1990. In 1990 he was ordained in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and joined the faculty of Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS), Jackson, Mississippi where he was Chairman of the Department of Systematic Theology, and the John R. Richardson Professor of Theology. At RTS he was responsible for teaching courses such as Systematic Theology, Ethics, Apologetics, History of Philosophy and Christian Thought, Covenant Theology, Patristics, Evangelism, and Theology of the Westminster Standards. He became the Senior Minister of First Presbyterian, Jackson in 1996.
.
"* A number of you asked to whom I was referring in my last post when I mentioned CHBC and CLC and GCC and BBC as examples of strong Reformed churches with excellent evangelistic track records. Well, CHBC is none other than Capitol Hill Baptist Church - pastored by the finest preacher-theologian-evangelist of our time, Mark Dever. CLC is Covenant Life Church, where Josh Harris is now pastoring, and where C.J. Mahaney so ably served. SGM, or Sovereign Grace Ministries is a good example of a family of churches that are superb at the practice of evangelism and emphatic in embrace of the doctrines of grace. Grace Community Church is GCC - what more need I say?! And BBC is Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, where John Piper serves. These congregations take a back-seat to no one when it comes to church health, zeal for the lost, effective witness, commitment to the great commission and joyful embrace of reformed theology."
Dr. J. Ligon Duncan III, a native of Greenville, South Carolina, was born and reared in the home of an eighth generation Southern Presbyterian Ruling Elder. A 1983 graduate of Furman University, he received an MDiv from Covenant Theological Seminary and studied Systematic Theology at the Free Church of Scotland College under Professor Donald Macleod. He earned the PhD from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1995.
He served on the staff of The Covenant Presbyterian Church of St. Louis from 1984-1987, and supplied pulpits in churches of the Presbyterian Association of England, Church of Scotland, and Free Church of Scotland while in Britain from 1987-1990. In 1990 he was ordained in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and joined the faculty of Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS), Jackson, Mississippi where he was Chairman of the Department of Systematic Theology, and the John R. Richardson Professor of Theology. At RTS he was responsible for teaching courses such as Systematic Theology, Ethics, Apologetics, History of Philosophy and Christian Thought, Covenant Theology, Patristics, Evangelism, and Theology of the Westminster Standards. He became the Senior Minister of First Presbyterian, Jackson in 1996.
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Tuesday, March 07, 2006
A teacher's interview
My friend Mike Johnson shared this with me,
"After being interviewed by the school administration, the eager teaching prospect said: "Let me see if I've got this right. You want me to go into that room with all those kids, and fill their every waking moment with a love for learning, and I'm supposed to instill a sense of pride in their ethnicity, modify their disruptive behavior, observe them for signs of abuse and even censor their T-shirt messages and dress habits. You want me to wage a war on drugs and sexually transmitted diseases, check their backpacks for weapons of mass destruction, and raise their self esteem. You want me to teach them patriotism, good citizenship, sportsmanship, fair play, how to register to vote, how to balance a checkbook, and how to apply for a job. I am to check their heads for lice, maintain a safe environment, recognize signs of anti-social behavior, make sure all students pass the state exams, even those who don't come to school regularly or complete any of their assignments. Plus, I am to make sure that all of the students with handicaps get an equal education regardless of the extent of their mental or physical handicap. I am to communicate regularly with the parents by letter, telephone, newsletter and report card. All of this I am to do with just a piece of chalk, a computer, a few books, a bulletin board, and a big smile AND on a starting salary that qualifies my family for food stamps! You want me to do all of this and yet you expect me . . . NOT TO PRAY ????"
"After being interviewed by the school administration, the eager teaching prospect said: "Let me see if I've got this right. You want me to go into that room with all those kids, and fill their every waking moment with a love for learning, and I'm supposed to instill a sense of pride in their ethnicity, modify their disruptive behavior, observe them for signs of abuse and even censor their T-shirt messages and dress habits. You want me to wage a war on drugs and sexually transmitted diseases, check their backpacks for weapons of mass destruction, and raise their self esteem. You want me to teach them patriotism, good citizenship, sportsmanship, fair play, how to register to vote, how to balance a checkbook, and how to apply for a job. I am to check their heads for lice, maintain a safe environment, recognize signs of anti-social behavior, make sure all students pass the state exams, even those who don't come to school regularly or complete any of their assignments. Plus, I am to make sure that all of the students with handicaps get an equal education regardless of the extent of their mental or physical handicap. I am to communicate regularly with the parents by letter, telephone, newsletter and report card. All of this I am to do with just a piece of chalk, a computer, a few books, a bulletin board, and a big smile AND on a starting salary that qualifies my family for food stamps! You want me to do all of this and yet you expect me . . . NOT TO PRAY ????"
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
The Listener’s Responsibility in Hearing an Expository Sermon
The Listener’s Responsibility in Hearing an Expository Sermon
By Lance Quinn
Pastor-Teacher, The Bible Church of Little Rock
This article first appeared as the Epilogue in Rediscovering Expository Preaching edited by John MacArthur, Jr. ( ©1992, Word, Inc.), and is used by permission. An updated, revised edition of this book, entitled Preaching: How to Preach Biblically (Thomas Nelson Publishing) is scheduled for release in July.
What responsibilities do Christians have to expository preaching?
In an age when shallow preaching is common, both shallow hearing and personal application are also common. Jay Adams has observed,
Too many laymen speak about the preaching event as if it were a one-way street, as if the responsibility for what transpires when the Bible is proclaimed rests solely on the shoulders of the preacher. But that’s not so! Effective communication demands competence from all parties.
Understanding expository preaching would not be complete without a word about the listener’s responsibilities in the expository process. Everything culminates in the hearers. The science and art of producing an expository sermon are empty efforts if no one hears and assimilates the message. Three vital principles will aid the listener who wishes to gain the most from an expository message. They are at the same time his responsibilities as well as his privileges.
ANTICIPATION
The listener must be prepared to receive the preacher’s message. Some components of anticipation to enhance the listening experience are basic and obvious, though often overlooked.
Be Personally Ready
The basic outlook of the listener must be to identify himself as the target of the message. The whole purpose of sitting in the listener’s seat is exposure to the message for the purpose of personal confrontation, information, conviction, motivation, and transformation. The hearer’s thoughts should not be concerns about how well the preacher is doing, how clever or interesting he is, or how well structured his sermon is. The listener is not there to admire or criticize a piece of oratorical art, but to be spoken to personally by God’s representative. The object of the preaching event is a change in thinking, attitude, and behavior. The hearer must prepare himself with this anticipation.
Be Physically Ready
A basic key to good listening is being in good physical condition. This depends on adequate rest, well-balanced meals, and proper exercise. Each of these varies with different individuals, but all are essential to being alert and ready to comprehend what is spoken.
People do not listen well when they are tired or hungry. Their minds drift to other things because of improper care of their bodies. On the other hand, being awake and attentive is essential for one to hear God’s message in a refreshing and dynamic way. The way one spends Saturday evening and Sunday morning, for example, will directly affect the expository exchange between expositor and listener.
Just before Jesus was betrayed, He asked His disciples to stand watch while He prayed in anticipation of the cross. Apparently they were not physically ready to comply, because Jesus “came to the disciples and found them sleeping, and said to Peter, ‘So, you men could not keep watch with Me for one hour? Keep watching and praying, that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’” (Matt. 26:40-41). After leaving them to pray two more times, Jesus again “found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy” (Matt. 26:43). He commented, “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest?” (Matt. 26:45). In a somewhat different situation, a listener does well to be alert and to watch also as he prepares to hear God’s Word.
Be Prayerfully Ready
Expository preaching can be defined as a spiritual event through which Almighty God Himself speaks His Word to the hearts of men and women so that they might know and understand His will and obey it. So prayer is an essential element in readying one’s heart to hear what God wants to communicate through His appointed messenger.
Two distinct, yet inseparable, objects summarize the format for preparatory prayer: Pray for the preacher as he communicates God’s message, and pray for the ability to comprehend what God communicates, as the psalmist prayed: “Deal bountifully with Thy servant, / That I may live and keep Thy Word. Open my eyes, that I may behold / Wonderful things from Thy law” (Ps. 119:17-18).
Scripture implores Christians to pray for their preachers. For Paul, faithful prayer by believers for those who proclaim God’s Word boldly was foundational (cf. Rom. 15:30-32; 1 Thess. 5:25; 2 Thess. 3:1; Eph. 6:19; Col. 4:2-4). Spring concurs with this:
If a people are looking for rich sermons from their minister, their prayers must supply him with the needed material; if they seek for faithful sermons, their prayers must urge him, by a full and uncompromising manifestation of the truth, to commend himself to every man’s conscience in the sight of God (see 2 Corinthians 4:2). If God’s people are going to expect powerful and successful sermons, their prayers must make him a blessing to the souls of men!
The Puritan John Angell James declared,
Prayer is a means of assisting the minister which is within the reach of all. They who can do nothing more, can pray. The sick, who cannot encourage their minister by their presence in the sanctuary, can bear him upon their hearts in their lonely chamber; the poor who cannot add to his temporal comfort by monetary donations, can supplicate their God “to supply all his needs according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4:19): the timid, who cannot approach to offer him the tribute of their gratitude, can pour their praises into the ear of Jehovah, and entreat him still to encourage the soul of His servant: the ignorant, who cannot hope to add one idea to the stock of his knowledge, can place him before the fountain of celestial radiance: even the dying, who can no longer busy themselves as in former times for his interests, can gather up their remaining strength, and employ it in the way of prayer for their pastor.
To receive the message from God’s messenger with greatest benefit, believers must pray for their pastor’s ability to impart it.
ATTENTION
Expository preaching is and always has been God’s chief tool for producing growth in grace. Therefore, it deserves the closest attention. Though every Christian should read, study, and meditate on Scripture, God uses Bible exposition for the optimal enhancement of his spiritual growth. It is not overstating the case that preaching should be the chief means of dispensing strengthening grace in a believer’s life. Spiritual advancement, then, will hinge on how determined one is to assemble with other Christians when God’s Word is faithfully proclaimed (cf. Heb. 10:25). Adams says,
Preaching is one of God’s chief means of sowing seed and helping fruit grow: it is a way of watering and fertilizing the crop. But you must break up the hard clods that have formed in your soul over the week, turn under the weeds, and prepare the good soil to receive the good seed.
The Puritan Jeremiah Burroughs has written,
In the hearing of God’s Word we profess our dependence upon God, for the knowing of His mind, and the way toeternal life . . . . Remember that you come to tender up your homage to God, to sit at God’s feet, and there to profess your submission to Him. That is one end of your coming to hear sermons.
God has called, equipped, and gifted godly pastors and teachers to preach His Word faithfully. Because He has done this, we need to fulfill our responsibility in gathering to hear what He says through his servants.
Attitudes
Confessing all known sin removes hindrances and opens one’s heart to hearing the truth (cf. 1 Peter 2:1-2). Exposure to the inspired “sword” of the Word (cf. Heb. 4:12) allows the Spirit of God to bring conviction of sin and to demand true repentance. Repentance will inevitably bring an increased desire to hear more of God’s truth and will promote more spiritual growth. Growth, then, is contingent on how much a believer allows God to teach him through His herald.
Adams writes, “Like disobedient children, people do not want to listen. Even believers, habituated in ways of disobedience, have great difficulty listening to God. . . . It has been easier for sinners to blame preachers than to admit their own reluctance to listen.”
Moses told the children of Israel in his day about the required readiness: “God says to us today, ‘Take to heart all the words with which I am warning you today, which you shall command your sons to observe carefully, even all the words of this law. For it is not an idle word for you; indeed it is your life’” (Deut. 32:46-47). Failure to measureup to this requirement as a hearer leads inevitably to shallow listening.
Actions
It is not enough to talk about wanting to hear the preached Word; we must implement these desires regularly. Nothing substitutes for regular attendance in the weekly services of a local church. Though the writer of Hebrews was emphasizing the mutual encouragement of believers among themselves, he also warned them not to forsake their corporate gathering for worship and preaching: “Let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more, as you see the day drawing near” (Heb. 10:24-25).
APPLICATION
Many contemporary critics decry expository preaching as lacking relevance and clear personal application. This kind of criticism reflects a misunderstanding of or disbelief in the inherent power of the Word of God. Since the expositor’s first concern is to clarify the meaning of the text, it may be granted that expository preaching is not driven by the same kind of obsession with illustrations and applicational formulas that characterize most topical and textual preaching. The expositor depends on the power of the text itself when rightly explained, and is assured that application of the truth in a personal and individual way is ultimately the responsibility of the listener, in concert with the Holy Spirit, of course.
Leith comments, “Calvin sought to make the biblical message clear so that under the power of the Holy Spirit it could make hearers alive to God’s presence.” How much better it is to allow God the Holy Spirit to shape and mold us into Christ’s image, rather than limiting the application of Scripture to human ingenuity! Adams suggests that the listener “constantly seek to discover God’s message in the verse or verses from which it was preached, going so far as to summarize it in one sentence. . . . Unless you can do this, it is doubtful whether you got the message.” If a listener cannot grasp the principles taught by the text of the sermon, he will fail to understand their application to his own life. If he does understand them, he will be unable to escape their specific application made by the Spirit to his own life.
When Jesus declared to His disciples, “He who has ears, let him hear” (cf. also Revelation 2-3), He was setting forth a general principle. Leith has written, “For Calvin as for Luther (‘Lectures on Hebrews’) ‘The ears alone are the organ of the Christian man.’ Hearing the Word of God makes one worthy of the name Christian.” Those who have their ears trained to hear the Word of God must take the responsibility of understanding the truth taught and applying it to their lives.
SUMMARY
What is the listener’s responsibility to expository preaching? He must prepare with the right anticipation, give undivided attention, and under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, apply what he learns from Scripture to his own life. Only by these means can he maximize the spiritual benefits to himself and others with whom he will share the truth.
By Lance Quinn
Pastor-Teacher, The Bible Church of Little Rock
This article first appeared as the Epilogue in Rediscovering Expository Preaching edited by John MacArthur, Jr. ( ©1992, Word, Inc.), and is used by permission. An updated, revised edition of this book, entitled Preaching: How to Preach Biblically (Thomas Nelson Publishing) is scheduled for release in July.
What responsibilities do Christians have to expository preaching?
In an age when shallow preaching is common, both shallow hearing and personal application are also common. Jay Adams has observed,
Too many laymen speak about the preaching event as if it were a one-way street, as if the responsibility for what transpires when the Bible is proclaimed rests solely on the shoulders of the preacher. But that’s not so! Effective communication demands competence from all parties.
Understanding expository preaching would not be complete without a word about the listener’s responsibilities in the expository process. Everything culminates in the hearers. The science and art of producing an expository sermon are empty efforts if no one hears and assimilates the message. Three vital principles will aid the listener who wishes to gain the most from an expository message. They are at the same time his responsibilities as well as his privileges.
ANTICIPATION
The listener must be prepared to receive the preacher’s message. Some components of anticipation to enhance the listening experience are basic and obvious, though often overlooked.
Be Personally Ready
The basic outlook of the listener must be to identify himself as the target of the message. The whole purpose of sitting in the listener’s seat is exposure to the message for the purpose of personal confrontation, information, conviction, motivation, and transformation. The hearer’s thoughts should not be concerns about how well the preacher is doing, how clever or interesting he is, or how well structured his sermon is. The listener is not there to admire or criticize a piece of oratorical art, but to be spoken to personally by God’s representative. The object of the preaching event is a change in thinking, attitude, and behavior. The hearer must prepare himself with this anticipation.
Be Physically Ready
A basic key to good listening is being in good physical condition. This depends on adequate rest, well-balanced meals, and proper exercise. Each of these varies with different individuals, but all are essential to being alert and ready to comprehend what is spoken.
People do not listen well when they are tired or hungry. Their minds drift to other things because of improper care of their bodies. On the other hand, being awake and attentive is essential for one to hear God’s message in a refreshing and dynamic way. The way one spends Saturday evening and Sunday morning, for example, will directly affect the expository exchange between expositor and listener.
Just before Jesus was betrayed, He asked His disciples to stand watch while He prayed in anticipation of the cross. Apparently they were not physically ready to comply, because Jesus “came to the disciples and found them sleeping, and said to Peter, ‘So, you men could not keep watch with Me for one hour? Keep watching and praying, that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’” (Matt. 26:40-41). After leaving them to pray two more times, Jesus again “found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy” (Matt. 26:43). He commented, “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest?” (Matt. 26:45). In a somewhat different situation, a listener does well to be alert and to watch also as he prepares to hear God’s Word.
Be Prayerfully Ready
Expository preaching can be defined as a spiritual event through which Almighty God Himself speaks His Word to the hearts of men and women so that they might know and understand His will and obey it. So prayer is an essential element in readying one’s heart to hear what God wants to communicate through His appointed messenger.
Two distinct, yet inseparable, objects summarize the format for preparatory prayer: Pray for the preacher as he communicates God’s message, and pray for the ability to comprehend what God communicates, as the psalmist prayed: “Deal bountifully with Thy servant, / That I may live and keep Thy Word. Open my eyes, that I may behold / Wonderful things from Thy law” (Ps. 119:17-18).
Scripture implores Christians to pray for their preachers. For Paul, faithful prayer by believers for those who proclaim God’s Word boldly was foundational (cf. Rom. 15:30-32; 1 Thess. 5:25; 2 Thess. 3:1; Eph. 6:19; Col. 4:2-4). Spring concurs with this:
If a people are looking for rich sermons from their minister, their prayers must supply him with the needed material; if they seek for faithful sermons, their prayers must urge him, by a full and uncompromising manifestation of the truth, to commend himself to every man’s conscience in the sight of God (see 2 Corinthians 4:2). If God’s people are going to expect powerful and successful sermons, their prayers must make him a blessing to the souls of men!
The Puritan John Angell James declared,
Prayer is a means of assisting the minister which is within the reach of all. They who can do nothing more, can pray. The sick, who cannot encourage their minister by their presence in the sanctuary, can bear him upon their hearts in their lonely chamber; the poor who cannot add to his temporal comfort by monetary donations, can supplicate their God “to supply all his needs according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4:19): the timid, who cannot approach to offer him the tribute of their gratitude, can pour their praises into the ear of Jehovah, and entreat him still to encourage the soul of His servant: the ignorant, who cannot hope to add one idea to the stock of his knowledge, can place him before the fountain of celestial radiance: even the dying, who can no longer busy themselves as in former times for his interests, can gather up their remaining strength, and employ it in the way of prayer for their pastor.
To receive the message from God’s messenger with greatest benefit, believers must pray for their pastor’s ability to impart it.
ATTENTION
Expository preaching is and always has been God’s chief tool for producing growth in grace. Therefore, it deserves the closest attention. Though every Christian should read, study, and meditate on Scripture, God uses Bible exposition for the optimal enhancement of his spiritual growth. It is not overstating the case that preaching should be the chief means of dispensing strengthening grace in a believer’s life. Spiritual advancement, then, will hinge on how determined one is to assemble with other Christians when God’s Word is faithfully proclaimed (cf. Heb. 10:25). Adams says,
Preaching is one of God’s chief means of sowing seed and helping fruit grow: it is a way of watering and fertilizing the crop. But you must break up the hard clods that have formed in your soul over the week, turn under the weeds, and prepare the good soil to receive the good seed.
The Puritan Jeremiah Burroughs has written,
In the hearing of God’s Word we profess our dependence upon God, for the knowing of His mind, and the way toeternal life . . . . Remember that you come to tender up your homage to God, to sit at God’s feet, and there to profess your submission to Him. That is one end of your coming to hear sermons.
God has called, equipped, and gifted godly pastors and teachers to preach His Word faithfully. Because He has done this, we need to fulfill our responsibility in gathering to hear what He says through his servants.
Attitudes
Confessing all known sin removes hindrances and opens one’s heart to hearing the truth (cf. 1 Peter 2:1-2). Exposure to the inspired “sword” of the Word (cf. Heb. 4:12) allows the Spirit of God to bring conviction of sin and to demand true repentance. Repentance will inevitably bring an increased desire to hear more of God’s truth and will promote more spiritual growth. Growth, then, is contingent on how much a believer allows God to teach him through His herald.
Adams writes, “Like disobedient children, people do not want to listen. Even believers, habituated in ways of disobedience, have great difficulty listening to God. . . . It has been easier for sinners to blame preachers than to admit their own reluctance to listen.”
Moses told the children of Israel in his day about the required readiness: “God says to us today, ‘Take to heart all the words with which I am warning you today, which you shall command your sons to observe carefully, even all the words of this law. For it is not an idle word for you; indeed it is your life’” (Deut. 32:46-47). Failure to measureup to this requirement as a hearer leads inevitably to shallow listening.
Actions
It is not enough to talk about wanting to hear the preached Word; we must implement these desires regularly. Nothing substitutes for regular attendance in the weekly services of a local church. Though the writer of Hebrews was emphasizing the mutual encouragement of believers among themselves, he also warned them not to forsake their corporate gathering for worship and preaching: “Let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more, as you see the day drawing near” (Heb. 10:24-25).
APPLICATION
Many contemporary critics decry expository preaching as lacking relevance and clear personal application. This kind of criticism reflects a misunderstanding of or disbelief in the inherent power of the Word of God. Since the expositor’s first concern is to clarify the meaning of the text, it may be granted that expository preaching is not driven by the same kind of obsession with illustrations and applicational formulas that characterize most topical and textual preaching. The expositor depends on the power of the text itself when rightly explained, and is assured that application of the truth in a personal and individual way is ultimately the responsibility of the listener, in concert with the Holy Spirit, of course.
Leith comments, “Calvin sought to make the biblical message clear so that under the power of the Holy Spirit it could make hearers alive to God’s presence.” How much better it is to allow God the Holy Spirit to shape and mold us into Christ’s image, rather than limiting the application of Scripture to human ingenuity! Adams suggests that the listener “constantly seek to discover God’s message in the verse or verses from which it was preached, going so far as to summarize it in one sentence. . . . Unless you can do this, it is doubtful whether you got the message.” If a listener cannot grasp the principles taught by the text of the sermon, he will fail to understand their application to his own life. If he does understand them, he will be unable to escape their specific application made by the Spirit to his own life.
When Jesus declared to His disciples, “He who has ears, let him hear” (cf. also Revelation 2-3), He was setting forth a general principle. Leith has written, “For Calvin as for Luther (‘Lectures on Hebrews’) ‘The ears alone are the organ of the Christian man.’ Hearing the Word of God makes one worthy of the name Christian.” Those who have their ears trained to hear the Word of God must take the responsibility of understanding the truth taught and applying it to their lives.
SUMMARY
What is the listener’s responsibility to expository preaching? He must prepare with the right anticipation, give undivided attention, and under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, apply what he learns from Scripture to his own life. Only by these means can he maximize the spiritual benefits to himself and others with whom he will share the truth.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
MacArthur on the Emerging Church
My friend Nate Busenitz recently posted these comments at http://faithandpractice.blogspot.com/
"Why was John MacArthur so hard-hitting? And was it valid?
To answer that we have to look at what Brian McLaren is saying. So I put together a brief summary from his book A Generous Orthodoxy. (For the lengthy version of this list from which I’ve drawn these points, along with page numbers and additional explanation, click here.)
Here is a list of McLaren's views in A Generous Orthodoxy:
- McLaren downplays “doctrinal distinctives” as more-or-less worthless. Outside of the essentials of the Apostle’s Creed, which McLaren affirms, other theological arguments (and the divisions caused by such arguments) are in McLaren’s words “nauseating.”
- He encourages all segments of broader Christianity (from Othrodox, to Catholic, to Protestant, and so on) to stop fighting and start celebrating what they have in common. He also contends that Christians should not show disdain for other world religions (such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, etc.) but should dialogue with them as collaborators.
- His approach is heavily influenced by a postmodern mindset, which is postevangelical, postconservative, and postliberal. He claims that his approach lies beyond absolutism and relativism, and is not found in absolutes but in conversation and interchange.
- McLaren openly admits that his book is not objective, but instead is most harsh towards conservative Protestants (especially Calvinistic Fundamentalists), and most open to groups like Roman Catholics.
- McLaren accuses conservative Protestants of having dethroned Jesus as Lord, and instead promoted the Apostle Paul to the head and teacher of the church. Moreover, according to McLaren, conservative Protestants are guilty of viewing Paul through the eyes of Luther and Calvin, which is why Paul is interpreted to sound so much like a lawyer.
- McLaren accuses conservative Protestant “evangelists” of overemphasizing hell, overemphasizing eternity, and making the gospel sound more like the consumer-driven products of “every company and political party.”
- McLaren compares doctrinal distinctives such as the five points of Calvinsim to cigarettes, because he considers their use to be habit-forming and hazardous.
- He denounces the idea of God’s sovereignty (in terms of God being “all-powerful” and “all-controlling”) because, to use McLaren's words, it reduces human beings to “plastic chessmen.”
- McLaren faults conservative Protestants with viewing the Bible as a modern-day answer book (like an encyclopedia) and for using it simply to fight those with those whom they disagree. He also finds it sadly ironic that such groups would use non-biblical words (like inerrancy and infallibility) to refer to the authority of the Bible.
- McLaren disagrees with the typical sermonizing that passes for preaching in today’s churches. Instead, he argues for something with a lot more drama, artistry, and spontaneity than long speeches that develop expository prose.
- McLaren also downplays any type of systematic theology (referring negatively to systematic theologies as modern cathedrals). Instead, he promotes a narrative theology (specifically that of James McLendon) in which ethics, doctrine (as seen in practice), and mission are emphasized.
- McLaren’s approach to “orthodoxy” is an “emerging” approach characterized by doctrinal humility (as opposed to doctrinal certainty), a willingness to question any theological tradition (especially the Reformed “tradition”), and a worldview that sees life and theology as an unfolding story or journey.
- McLaren concludes A Generous Orthodoxy by embracing and promoting the doctrinal uncertainty and ambiguity that characterizes the emerging approach. He finds joy in the ultimate uncertainty of beauty.
In summary, then, McLaren represents almost everything that Dr. MacArthur and The Master’s Seminary stand against.
So was Dr. MacArthur’s hard-hitting criticism valid?
In my opinion, absolutely (to use a term McLaren would decry).
Why? Well, not only does Dr. MacArthur have a right, as a seminary president, to come out strong against those whom he feels threaten the fundamentals upon which his institution is based. But also because, in this case, I believe his concerns were both biblical and accurate."
"Why was John MacArthur so hard-hitting? And was it valid?
To answer that we have to look at what Brian McLaren is saying. So I put together a brief summary from his book A Generous Orthodoxy. (For the lengthy version of this list from which I’ve drawn these points, along with page numbers and additional explanation, click here.)
Here is a list of McLaren's views in A Generous Orthodoxy:
- McLaren downplays “doctrinal distinctives” as more-or-less worthless. Outside of the essentials of the Apostle’s Creed, which McLaren affirms, other theological arguments (and the divisions caused by such arguments) are in McLaren’s words “nauseating.”
- He encourages all segments of broader Christianity (from Othrodox, to Catholic, to Protestant, and so on) to stop fighting and start celebrating what they have in common. He also contends that Christians should not show disdain for other world religions (such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, etc.) but should dialogue with them as collaborators.
- His approach is heavily influenced by a postmodern mindset, which is postevangelical, postconservative, and postliberal. He claims that his approach lies beyond absolutism and relativism, and is not found in absolutes but in conversation and interchange.
- McLaren openly admits that his book is not objective, but instead is most harsh towards conservative Protestants (especially Calvinistic Fundamentalists), and most open to groups like Roman Catholics.
- McLaren accuses conservative Protestants of having dethroned Jesus as Lord, and instead promoted the Apostle Paul to the head and teacher of the church. Moreover, according to McLaren, conservative Protestants are guilty of viewing Paul through the eyes of Luther and Calvin, which is why Paul is interpreted to sound so much like a lawyer.
- McLaren accuses conservative Protestant “evangelists” of overemphasizing hell, overemphasizing eternity, and making the gospel sound more like the consumer-driven products of “every company and political party.”
- McLaren compares doctrinal distinctives such as the five points of Calvinsim to cigarettes, because he considers their use to be habit-forming and hazardous.
- He denounces the idea of God’s sovereignty (in terms of God being “all-powerful” and “all-controlling”) because, to use McLaren's words, it reduces human beings to “plastic chessmen.”
- McLaren faults conservative Protestants with viewing the Bible as a modern-day answer book (like an encyclopedia) and for using it simply to fight those with those whom they disagree. He also finds it sadly ironic that such groups would use non-biblical words (like inerrancy and infallibility) to refer to the authority of the Bible.
- McLaren disagrees with the typical sermonizing that passes for preaching in today’s churches. Instead, he argues for something with a lot more drama, artistry, and spontaneity than long speeches that develop expository prose.
- McLaren also downplays any type of systematic theology (referring negatively to systematic theologies as modern cathedrals). Instead, he promotes a narrative theology (specifically that of James McLendon) in which ethics, doctrine (as seen in practice), and mission are emphasized.
- McLaren’s approach to “orthodoxy” is an “emerging” approach characterized by doctrinal humility (as opposed to doctrinal certainty), a willingness to question any theological tradition (especially the Reformed “tradition”), and a worldview that sees life and theology as an unfolding story or journey.
- McLaren concludes A Generous Orthodoxy by embracing and promoting the doctrinal uncertainty and ambiguity that characterizes the emerging approach. He finds joy in the ultimate uncertainty of beauty.
In summary, then, McLaren represents almost everything that Dr. MacArthur and The Master’s Seminary stand against.
So was Dr. MacArthur’s hard-hitting criticism valid?
In my opinion, absolutely (to use a term McLaren would decry).
Why? Well, not only does Dr. MacArthur have a right, as a seminary president, to come out strong against those whom he feels threaten the fundamentals upon which his institution is based. But also because, in this case, I believe his concerns were both biblical and accurate."
Monday, February 13, 2006
Applying what you know SO well
This past weekend while preparing a future sermon on Jude 5 i came across a great quote by Pastor Matthew Henry. This comment reflects Jude's thought in a fresh way (Jude 1:5 "Now I desire to remind you, though you know all things once for all, that the Lord, after saving a people out of the land of Egypt, subsequently destroyed those who did not believe").
Henry writes, "Preaching is not designed to teach us something new in every sermon, somewhat that we knew nothing of before; but to put us in remembrance, to call to mind things forgotten, to affect our passions, and engage and fix our resolutions, that our lives may be answerable to our faith. Though you know these things, yet you still need to know them better. There are many things which we have known which yet we have unhappily forgotten. Is it of no use or service to be put afresh in remembrance of them?"
Jude asks his audience to dig into their memory banks to recall some important lessons. Mature Christians do this very thing all the time. Most of the people at my current church have probably heard a sermon on just about every Scripture passage in the N.T. They know what I'm going to say before i say it.
May we remember this point and apply it to our ministries: Even mature Christians (yes pastors included) need to be reminded of the truths they know so well. Forgetfulness sometimes leads to non-application. All of us have memorized a passage in Holy Scripture only to find ourselves needing to re-memorize it a few years down the road (for some of us a few weeks down the road is more like it). It's part of our human fallibility. In some ways it keeps us dependent on the Holy Spirit and on the Holy Bible...
Jude begs his readers to apply the truth they know so well. Their knowledge is fully adequate. Thus, remember and apply these things.
Those of you, who like me, have grown up in the Church need to take this point to heart. You know the Scripture inside and out, but are you faithfully living them out? Are you applying what you know so well?
It's similar to the inspired words found in 2 Peter 1:12-14, Therefore, I shall always be ready to remind you of these things, even though you already know them, and have been established in the truth which is present with you. And I consider it right, as long as I am in this earthly dwelling, to stir you up by way of reminder, knowing that the laying aside of my earthly dwelling is imminent, as also our Lord Jesus Christ has made clear to me.
My lunch break is almost over-
Take care,
CK
Henry writes, "Preaching is not designed to teach us something new in every sermon, somewhat that we knew nothing of before; but to put us in remembrance, to call to mind things forgotten, to affect our passions, and engage and fix our resolutions, that our lives may be answerable to our faith. Though you know these things, yet you still need to know them better. There are many things which we have known which yet we have unhappily forgotten. Is it of no use or service to be put afresh in remembrance of them?"
Jude asks his audience to dig into their memory banks to recall some important lessons. Mature Christians do this very thing all the time. Most of the people at my current church have probably heard a sermon on just about every Scripture passage in the N.T. They know what I'm going to say before i say it.
May we remember this point and apply it to our ministries: Even mature Christians (yes pastors included) need to be reminded of the truths they know so well. Forgetfulness sometimes leads to non-application. All of us have memorized a passage in Holy Scripture only to find ourselves needing to re-memorize it a few years down the road (for some of us a few weeks down the road is more like it). It's part of our human fallibility. In some ways it keeps us dependent on the Holy Spirit and on the Holy Bible...
Jude begs his readers to apply the truth they know so well. Their knowledge is fully adequate. Thus, remember and apply these things.
Those of you, who like me, have grown up in the Church need to take this point to heart. You know the Scripture inside and out, but are you faithfully living them out? Are you applying what you know so well?
It's similar to the inspired words found in 2 Peter 1:12-14, Therefore, I shall always be ready to remind you of these things, even though you already know them, and have been established in the truth which is present with you. And I consider it right, as long as I am in this earthly dwelling, to stir you up by way of reminder, knowing that the laying aside of my earthly dwelling is imminent, as also our Lord Jesus Christ has made clear to me.
My lunch break is almost over-
Take care,
CK
Monday, February 06, 2006
Titus 1:6 (pt 3)
Faithful Children
There are those who strongly disagree with the arguments presented above for a variety of reasons. The key exegetical issue is the meaning of pista. As mentioned earlier, scholars debate whether this word should be translated in this context as “believing” or “faithful/obedient.” This word’s range of usage throughout Paul’s writings proves that either meaning is a possibility. The word can clearly mean “faithful,” as it does several times in the pastoral epistles, including once with a noun in 2 Timothy 2:2. Barrick adds, “When pistos modifies a noun it is always “faithful” or ‘trustworthy/credible.’ When it is independent (an adjective employed as a substantive) it means ‘believing one’ or ‘believer.’” In this context pistos is clearly modifying a noun (teknon) and therefore is best translated “faithful children.”
According to the Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament, “pistis occurs 67x in the NT, though in only 16 of these instances with the meaning faithful in the sense of believing. The majority of occurrences thus follow the meaning predominant in non-Christian usage: faithful in the sense of dependable.”
Paul’s focus in Titus 1:6 seems to be on the conduct of the child not on his/her personal faith or belief in the gospel. Those children accused of dissipation and/or bad conduct would prove that they were either unfaithful or unbelieving (perhaps both). Because of this, one must look closely to the parallelism of 1 Timothy 3:4-5. There Paul says, an elder “must be one who manages his own household well, keeping his children under control with all dignity (but if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how will he take care of the church of God?” Knight shows that is likely that "teknon ekon pista," here in Titus 1:6 is virtually equivalent to te,kna e;conta evn u`potagh/ in 1 Timothy 3:4. He then concludes, “If this is so, then pista here (in Titus 1:6) means “faithful” in the sense of “submissive” or “obedient,” as a servant or steward is regarded as pistos when he carries out the requests of his master (Matthew 24:45f.; 25:21, 23; Luke 12:42f.; 1 Cor. 4:2; cf. Thayer, Lexicon; Cremer, Lexicon).” In these two texts Paul says that having faithful children is important because it reveal a man’s ability (or inability) to manage his home. A good look at a potential elder’s home life will help determine if he is able to provide faithful leadership at church as well as at home.
Theologically, can parents be accountable for their children’s belief or lack of belief in Christ? Strauch wisely points out that,
"Those who interpret this qualification to mean that an elder must have believing, Christian children place an impossible burden upon a father. Even the best Christian fathers cannot guarantee that their children will believe. Salvation is a supernatural act of God. God, not good parents (although they are certainly used of God), ultimately brings salvation (John 1:12, 13)."
Scripture nowhere teaches that a parent can determine the saving faith of their child. A father can only faithful instruct and teach his children in the ways of the Lord, but he can not decide his child’s eternal destiny. A father can (and should) model what genuine Christianity looks and acts like. Ultimately though a child’s acceptance (or belief) in the gospel is determined by the Holy Spirit’s work and the Father’s eternal choice (Eph 1).
In a lesser sense this is also true concerning a child’s life of obedience (faithfulness). Some children are determined to live a rebellious life regardless of there parents faithfulness. Without question the home is training ground for Christian leaders. But commentators like Thomas Lea go way too far when they conclude, “This additional requirement that the elder be capable of influencing his own children to become Christians demonstrates Paul’s conviction that effective spiritual leadership in the home suggests the probability of effective spiritual leadership in the church.” Both belief and faithfulness then ultimately are dependent on God’s sovereign grace! Titus 1:6 (when more accurately understood) teaches that those candidates who have wild and disobedient children are disqualified.
Concluding Remarks
It is possible that when Paul wrote, teknon ekon pista, he could have meant “children who believe.” The word pista was used by Paul in the Pastoral Epistles to mean both “believing” and “faithful.” The parallelism of 1 Timothy 3:4-5 seems to settle and help determine the best meaning of pistos in Titus 1:6 (“faithful”).
Biblical theology does not demand pistos be translated either way. God could require either qualification (“believing” children or “faithful” children) and still be fair and just. Good theological arguments can be made by both sides of the debate so to this author those arguments do not prove much.
Certainly there is an amount of accountability parents have in how they raise their children (Proverbs 22:6). In some sense, parents need to take ownership of there children’s behavior. Christian parents should try their best to live out and preach the gospel of Jesus to their kids on a daily basis. Ultimately though, a father can only lead his children to the water Source (John 4:10-28), but he can not make them drink from it.
I conclude echoing the words of George Knight, “This proposed understanding of the passage goes contrary to a consistent pattern in recent English translations (RSV, NEB, TEV: 'believers'; similarly NASB, NIV), but the considerations cited above seem compelling.”
There are those who strongly disagree with the arguments presented above for a variety of reasons. The key exegetical issue is the meaning of pista. As mentioned earlier, scholars debate whether this word should be translated in this context as “believing” or “faithful/obedient.” This word’s range of usage throughout Paul’s writings proves that either meaning is a possibility. The word can clearly mean “faithful,” as it does several times in the pastoral epistles, including once with a noun in 2 Timothy 2:2. Barrick adds, “When pistos modifies a noun it is always “faithful” or ‘trustworthy/credible.’ When it is independent (an adjective employed as a substantive) it means ‘believing one’ or ‘believer.’” In this context pistos is clearly modifying a noun (teknon) and therefore is best translated “faithful children.”
According to the Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament, “pistis occurs 67x in the NT, though in only 16 of these instances with the meaning faithful in the sense of believing. The majority of occurrences thus follow the meaning predominant in non-Christian usage: faithful in the sense of dependable.”
Paul’s focus in Titus 1:6 seems to be on the conduct of the child not on his/her personal faith or belief in the gospel. Those children accused of dissipation and/or bad conduct would prove that they were either unfaithful or unbelieving (perhaps both). Because of this, one must look closely to the parallelism of 1 Timothy 3:4-5. There Paul says, an elder “must be one who manages his own household well, keeping his children under control with all dignity (but if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how will he take care of the church of God?” Knight shows that is likely that "teknon ekon pista," here in Titus 1:6 is virtually equivalent to te,kna e;conta evn u`potagh/ in 1 Timothy 3:4. He then concludes, “If this is so, then pista here (in Titus 1:6) means “faithful” in the sense of “submissive” or “obedient,” as a servant or steward is regarded as pistos when he carries out the requests of his master (Matthew 24:45f.; 25:21, 23; Luke 12:42f.; 1 Cor. 4:2; cf. Thayer, Lexicon; Cremer, Lexicon).” In these two texts Paul says that having faithful children is important because it reveal a man’s ability (or inability) to manage his home. A good look at a potential elder’s home life will help determine if he is able to provide faithful leadership at church as well as at home.
Theologically, can parents be accountable for their children’s belief or lack of belief in Christ? Strauch wisely points out that,
"Those who interpret this qualification to mean that an elder must have believing, Christian children place an impossible burden upon a father. Even the best Christian fathers cannot guarantee that their children will believe. Salvation is a supernatural act of God. God, not good parents (although they are certainly used of God), ultimately brings salvation (John 1:12, 13)."
Scripture nowhere teaches that a parent can determine the saving faith of their child. A father can only faithful instruct and teach his children in the ways of the Lord, but he can not decide his child’s eternal destiny. A father can (and should) model what genuine Christianity looks and acts like. Ultimately though a child’s acceptance (or belief) in the gospel is determined by the Holy Spirit’s work and the Father’s eternal choice (Eph 1).
In a lesser sense this is also true concerning a child’s life of obedience (faithfulness). Some children are determined to live a rebellious life regardless of there parents faithfulness. Without question the home is training ground for Christian leaders. But commentators like Thomas Lea go way too far when they conclude, “This additional requirement that the elder be capable of influencing his own children to become Christians demonstrates Paul’s conviction that effective spiritual leadership in the home suggests the probability of effective spiritual leadership in the church.” Both belief and faithfulness then ultimately are dependent on God’s sovereign grace! Titus 1:6 (when more accurately understood) teaches that those candidates who have wild and disobedient children are disqualified.
Concluding Remarks
It is possible that when Paul wrote, teknon ekon pista, he could have meant “children who believe.” The word pista was used by Paul in the Pastoral Epistles to mean both “believing” and “faithful.” The parallelism of 1 Timothy 3:4-5 seems to settle and help determine the best meaning of pistos in Titus 1:6 (“faithful”).
Biblical theology does not demand pistos be translated either way. God could require either qualification (“believing” children or “faithful” children) and still be fair and just. Good theological arguments can be made by both sides of the debate so to this author those arguments do not prove much.
Certainly there is an amount of accountability parents have in how they raise their children (Proverbs 22:6). In some sense, parents need to take ownership of there children’s behavior. Christian parents should try their best to live out and preach the gospel of Jesus to their kids on a daily basis. Ultimately though, a father can only lead his children to the water Source (John 4:10-28), but he can not make them drink from it.
I conclude echoing the words of George Knight, “This proposed understanding of the passage goes contrary to a consistent pattern in recent English translations (RSV, NEB, TEV: 'believers'; similarly NASB, NIV), but the considerations cited above seem compelling.”
Friday, February 03, 2006
Titus 1:6 continued by C Kolstad
Procedure
This post will focus in on only one of the major qualifications for an elder; namely what does Paul mean by the phrase, “having children who believe?”
The following 2 major positions will be carefully evaluated:
1. Paul means that an elder must lead all of his children to Lord, thus all of his family must be “saved” (believing) in order for him to serve as an elder.
2. Paul means that an elder must demonstrate reasonable control over his children, thus all of his family must be “faithful” (obedient) in order for him serve as an elder.
The Controversy
The major disagreement between biblical scholars is whether or not the Greek words, te,kna e;cwn pista, should be translated “children who believe” or if phrase should be rendered “faithful children.” In other words, was Paul saying that in order for a man to serve as an elder his children must be saved; or was he saying that in order to lead an elder must have obedient and respectful children? Is this a contrast between believing and unbelieving children or is it a contrast between obedient (controlled) and rebellious (uncontrolled) children? This is a major issue because one’s interpretation of this passage could possible disqualify many pastors and elders from the office of overseer. Good exegesis and proper hermeneutics must be employed in order to avoid the emotional basis that normally goes into this debate.
Children Who Believe
Robert Saucy holds that the personal belief (faith) and the conduct (life) of an elder’s family should be carefully evaluated to determine if a man is qualified to be an elder. He writes, “His children must be under his control in all dignity to qualify him to lead in church affairs (1 Timothy 3:4-5). They should (also) share the faith of their father and adorn that faith with godly lives (Titus 1:6).” In other words, a perspective elder needs to have brought all his family to the Lord in order to serve in this office.
How exactly does a child’s decision to follow Christ and the pattern of his/her life reflect the leadership of a potential elder? According to MacArthur a man who cannot lead his own family morally and spiritually is not qualified to lead an entire congregation. A qualified elder will shepherd his family in such a way that they will become an example for all people to see and to model. “If you want to know if he is able to lead the unsaved to faith in Christ and to help them grow in obedience and holiness, simply examine the effectiveness of his efforts with his own children.” Those who can not faithfully shepherd and lead there own children to the Lord are not best qualified in leading others to the Lord. One must consider if this line of thinking is consistent theologically; Can (or should) parents be accountable for their children’s belief or unbelief in Christ? Does the genuine salvation of an elder’s child prove he is a faithful spiritual leader at home? Conversely, are those elder’s who have unbelieving children unfaithful spiritual leaders at home?
Those who believe Paul is referring to believing children take the word pista to mean “believing”. This term is what is translated as “believing” in most translations and in its basic form is an adjectival word. In some cases, the word can mean believer or believing one, that is, faithful to God. MacArthur notes, “It is significant that, except for this sometimes disputed text (Titus 1:6), it always is used of people whom the context clearly identifies as believers (e.g., Matthew 25:21, 23; Acts 16:15; 1 Cor. 4:2, 17; Eph 6:21; Col 1:7; 4:7; Rev. 2:10, 13; 17:14).” MacArthur would argue that only the passive form of pistos should be interpreted “faithful”, while actively it means “to believe” as most Bible translations render Titus 1:6.
In seeking to apply this verse the Council of Carthage stated that all bishops, elders, and deacons would not be ordained to office until they first made all in their own households members of the Catholic Church. Hendrickson plainly puts it this way, “A man whose children are still pagans or behave as pagans must not be appointed elder (Eph. 5:18).”
J. Harold Greenlee points out that this does not mean elders must have children, only if the do that they must be saved. One could assume the majority of candidates would be married and Paul may have even preferred married men because of their experience in shepherding and leading a family unit (1 Timothy 3:5). This of course did not disqualify a married man with no children or even a single man.
If Titus 1:6 is to be understood as believing children, does this verse apply only to those children still under the authority of the home? Does Titus 1:6 also pertain to adult children who have grown up and no longer live under their parent’s authority? John MacArthur distinguishes Titus 1:6 and 1 Timothy 3:4 by indicating that the former observes older children while the latter looks at young children in the home. Paul refers to Titus (a grown man), as his “true child” (te,kna) in the faith (Titus 1:4). If this is the case then this passage may indeed extend to older children outside the home. In the Greek, the term, te,kna, can refer to a child of any age and not just a younger child.
It would appear the following reference to dissipation and rebellion (avswti,aj h' avnupo,takta) would better characterize an older child. The Greek word (avswti,aj) is used of the prodigal son in Luke 15:13. It carries the idea of profligacy and even of rioting (as the KJV translates this word). The word avnupo,takta carries many negative connotations including insubordination and personal rebellion. In this context the word clearly portrays the idea of a child rebelling against his parental authority. This behavior would be more consistent with that of a older, unbelieving child.
Ellicott summarizes all this claiming Christian elders “were not to have heathen, Judaizing, or merely nominally-believing children.” Many bible scholars and commentators believe that te,kna e;cwn pista, should be carefully translated “children who believe.” Those candidates who have (older) unbelieving children are considered disqualified.
This post will focus in on only one of the major qualifications for an elder; namely what does Paul mean by the phrase, “having children who believe?”
The following 2 major positions will be carefully evaluated:
1. Paul means that an elder must lead all of his children to Lord, thus all of his family must be “saved” (believing) in order for him to serve as an elder.
2. Paul means that an elder must demonstrate reasonable control over his children, thus all of his family must be “faithful” (obedient) in order for him serve as an elder.
The Controversy
The major disagreement between biblical scholars is whether or not the Greek words, te,kna e;cwn pista, should be translated “children who believe” or if phrase should be rendered “faithful children.” In other words, was Paul saying that in order for a man to serve as an elder his children must be saved; or was he saying that in order to lead an elder must have obedient and respectful children? Is this a contrast between believing and unbelieving children or is it a contrast between obedient (controlled) and rebellious (uncontrolled) children? This is a major issue because one’s interpretation of this passage could possible disqualify many pastors and elders from the office of overseer. Good exegesis and proper hermeneutics must be employed in order to avoid the emotional basis that normally goes into this debate.
Children Who Believe
Robert Saucy holds that the personal belief (faith) and the conduct (life) of an elder’s family should be carefully evaluated to determine if a man is qualified to be an elder. He writes, “His children must be under his control in all dignity to qualify him to lead in church affairs (1 Timothy 3:4-5). They should (also) share the faith of their father and adorn that faith with godly lives (Titus 1:6).” In other words, a perspective elder needs to have brought all his family to the Lord in order to serve in this office.
How exactly does a child’s decision to follow Christ and the pattern of his/her life reflect the leadership of a potential elder? According to MacArthur a man who cannot lead his own family morally and spiritually is not qualified to lead an entire congregation. A qualified elder will shepherd his family in such a way that they will become an example for all people to see and to model. “If you want to know if he is able to lead the unsaved to faith in Christ and to help them grow in obedience and holiness, simply examine the effectiveness of his efforts with his own children.” Those who can not faithfully shepherd and lead there own children to the Lord are not best qualified in leading others to the Lord. One must consider if this line of thinking is consistent theologically; Can (or should) parents be accountable for their children’s belief or unbelief in Christ? Does the genuine salvation of an elder’s child prove he is a faithful spiritual leader at home? Conversely, are those elder’s who have unbelieving children unfaithful spiritual leaders at home?
Those who believe Paul is referring to believing children take the word pista to mean “believing”. This term is what is translated as “believing” in most translations and in its basic form is an adjectival word. In some cases, the word can mean believer or believing one, that is, faithful to God. MacArthur notes, “It is significant that, except for this sometimes disputed text (Titus 1:6), it always is used of people whom the context clearly identifies as believers (e.g., Matthew 25:21, 23; Acts 16:15; 1 Cor. 4:2, 17; Eph 6:21; Col 1:7; 4:7; Rev. 2:10, 13; 17:14).” MacArthur would argue that only the passive form of pistos should be interpreted “faithful”, while actively it means “to believe” as most Bible translations render Titus 1:6.
In seeking to apply this verse the Council of Carthage stated that all bishops, elders, and deacons would not be ordained to office until they first made all in their own households members of the Catholic Church. Hendrickson plainly puts it this way, “A man whose children are still pagans or behave as pagans must not be appointed elder (Eph. 5:18).”
J. Harold Greenlee points out that this does not mean elders must have children, only if the do that they must be saved. One could assume the majority of candidates would be married and Paul may have even preferred married men because of their experience in shepherding and leading a family unit (1 Timothy 3:5). This of course did not disqualify a married man with no children or even a single man.
If Titus 1:6 is to be understood as believing children, does this verse apply only to those children still under the authority of the home? Does Titus 1:6 also pertain to adult children who have grown up and no longer live under their parent’s authority? John MacArthur distinguishes Titus 1:6 and 1 Timothy 3:4 by indicating that the former observes older children while the latter looks at young children in the home. Paul refers to Titus (a grown man), as his “true child” (te,kna) in the faith (Titus 1:4). If this is the case then this passage may indeed extend to older children outside the home. In the Greek, the term, te,kna, can refer to a child of any age and not just a younger child.
It would appear the following reference to dissipation and rebellion (avswti,aj h' avnupo,takta) would better characterize an older child. The Greek word (avswti,aj) is used of the prodigal son in Luke 15:13. It carries the idea of profligacy and even of rioting (as the KJV translates this word). The word avnupo,takta carries many negative connotations including insubordination and personal rebellion. In this context the word clearly portrays the idea of a child rebelling against his parental authority. This behavior would be more consistent with that of a older, unbelieving child.
Ellicott summarizes all this claiming Christian elders “were not to have heathen, Judaizing, or merely nominally-believing children.” Many bible scholars and commentators believe that te,kna e;cwn pista, should be carefully translated “children who believe.” Those candidates who have (older) unbelieving children are considered disqualified.
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
Acts 29/the Emerging church/and John Piper
Please go to the following website for the entire article by Carla
http://emergentno.blogspot.com/
2006 DG Conference Speakers
Sometime in the last couple of weeks, a friend mentioned to me who this years Desiring God conference speakers would be. I made a mental note of it and set it aside.
I've had a bit of time to give this some thought since then.
This year's theme is "Above All Earthly Powers: The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World". Of course this is an interesting and very timely topic, considering the broad scope of tolerance, to acceptance that postmodernism (in various flavors) has found it's way into local churches.
Here are the speakers & their topics:
David Wells: "The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World"
D.A. Carson: "The Supremacy of Christ and Love in a Postmodern World"
Timothy Keller: "The Supremacy of Christ and the Gospel in a Postmodern World"
Mark Driscoll: "The Supremacy of Christ and the Church in a Postmodern World"
Voddie Baucham: "The Supremacy of Christ and Truth in a Postmodern World"
John Piper: "The Supremacy of Christ and Joy in a Postmodern World"
This is an unusual group of men to me, for a variety of reasons. Two of them I know through their works to be quite staunch on sound Biblical doctrine. That would be Wells and Carson. One I've never read anything from, and that would be Baucham. One has stirred more than a little controversy lately with his position on baptism and church membership, and that of course would be Pastor John Piper.
This of course leaves Driscoll and Keller.
Mark Driscoll has created quite a stir in not only the blogosphere lately, but also the evangelical world as well. Why? Well, he's come out a bit louder these days about how he's no longer "emergent", and in so doing he's also levelled quite a scathing response to EMC figurehead Brian McLaren, regarding McLaren't position on homosexuality. (read that "rant" here)
Christianity Today's Leadership blog called Out of Ur introduces Driscoll's comment this way "As one of the 50 most influential pastors in America" and an outspoken critic of the emergent movement, we thought others would like to read Driscoll's comments."
Before I address Driscoll's statement to McLaren, let's go into a little background on Driscoll.
The reference to the 50 most influential pastors in America comes from the July 2005 Church Report that lists Driscoll and Mars Hill at #23. Andrew Jones aka "Tall Skinny Kiwi" commented at his blog on this: "Great to see some emerging church pastors there (Mark Driscoll, Rob Bell, Erwin McManus - congrats you guys!!!!!!!)" (source).
For the entire article go to http://emergentno.blogspot.com/ Jan 31st post.
http://emergentno.blogspot.com/
2006 DG Conference Speakers
Sometime in the last couple of weeks, a friend mentioned to me who this years Desiring God conference speakers would be. I made a mental note of it and set it aside.
I've had a bit of time to give this some thought since then.
This year's theme is "Above All Earthly Powers: The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World". Of course this is an interesting and very timely topic, considering the broad scope of tolerance, to acceptance that postmodernism (in various flavors) has found it's way into local churches.
Here are the speakers & their topics:
David Wells: "The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World"
D.A. Carson: "The Supremacy of Christ and Love in a Postmodern World"
Timothy Keller: "The Supremacy of Christ and the Gospel in a Postmodern World"
Mark Driscoll: "The Supremacy of Christ and the Church in a Postmodern World"
Voddie Baucham: "The Supremacy of Christ and Truth in a Postmodern World"
John Piper: "The Supremacy of Christ and Joy in a Postmodern World"
This is an unusual group of men to me, for a variety of reasons. Two of them I know through their works to be quite staunch on sound Biblical doctrine. That would be Wells and Carson. One I've never read anything from, and that would be Baucham. One has stirred more than a little controversy lately with his position on baptism and church membership, and that of course would be Pastor John Piper.
This of course leaves Driscoll and Keller.
Mark Driscoll has created quite a stir in not only the blogosphere lately, but also the evangelical world as well. Why? Well, he's come out a bit louder these days about how he's no longer "emergent", and in so doing he's also levelled quite a scathing response to EMC figurehead Brian McLaren, regarding McLaren't position on homosexuality. (read that "rant" here)
Christianity Today's Leadership blog called Out of Ur introduces Driscoll's comment this way "As one of the 50 most influential pastors in America" and an outspoken critic of the emergent movement, we thought others would like to read Driscoll's comments."
Before I address Driscoll's statement to McLaren, let's go into a little background on Driscoll.
The reference to the 50 most influential pastors in America comes from the July 2005 Church Report that lists Driscoll and Mars Hill at #23. Andrew Jones aka "Tall Skinny Kiwi" commented at his blog on this: "Great to see some emerging church pastors there (Mark Driscoll, Rob Bell, Erwin McManus - congrats you guys!!!!!!!)" (source).
For the entire article go to http://emergentno.blogspot.com/ Jan 31st post.
Driscoll and McLaren (CT)
From Christianity Today go to link below
http://blog.christianitytoday.com/outofur/archives/2006/01/brian_mclaren_o_2.html
Brian McLaren on the Homosexual Question 3: A Prologue and Rant by Mark Driscoll
Hundreds of readers have posted comments about Brian McLaren's article on forming a pastoral response to the "homosexual question." One such reader was Pastor Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. As "one of the 50 most influential pastors in America" and an outspoken critic of the emergent movement, we thought others would like to read Driscoll's comments.
Well, it seems that Brian McLaren and the Emergent crowd are emerging into homo-evangelicals.
Before I begin my rant, let me first defend myself. First, the guy who was among the first to share the gospel with me was a gay guy who was a friend. Second, I planted a church in my 20s in one of America’s least churched cities where the gay pride parade is much bigger than the march for Jesus. Third, my church is filled with people struggling with same sex attraction and gay couples do attend and we tell them about the transforming power of Jesus. Fourth, I am not a religious right wingnut. In fact, when James Dobson came to town to hold the anti-gay rally, we took a lot of heat for being among the biggest churches in the state, the largest evangelical church in our city, and not promoting the event in our church because we felt it would come off as unloving to the gay community. The men who hosted the event are all godly men and good friends and I’ve taken a few blows for not standing with them on this issue. Fifth, I am myself a devoted heterosexual male lesbian who has been in a monogamous marriage with my high school sweetheart since I was 21 and personally know the pain of being a marginalized sexual minority as a male lesbian.
And now the rant.
For me, the concern started when McLaren in the February 7, 2005 issue of Time Magazine said, “Asked at a conference last spring what he thought about gay marriage, Brian McLaren replied, ‘You know what, the thing that breaks my heart is that there's no way I can answer it without hurting someone on either side.’” Sadly, by failing to answer, McLaren was unwilling to say what the Bible says and in so doing really hurt God’s feelings and broke his heart.
Then, Brian’s Tonto Doug Pagitt, an old acquaintance of mine, wrote the following in a book he and I both contributed to called Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches edited by Robert Webber and due out this spring:
“The question of humanity is inexorably link to sexuality and gender. Issues of sexuality can be among the most complex and convoluted we need to deal with. It seems to me that the theology of our history does not deal sufficiently with these issues for our day. I do not mean this a critique, but as an acknowledgement that our times are different. I do not mean that we are a more or less sexual culture, but one that knows more about the genetic, social and cultural issues surrounding sexuality and gender than any previous culture. Christianity will be impotent to lead a conversation on sexuality and gender if we do not boldly integrate our current understandings of humanity with our theology. This will require us to not only draw new conclusions about sexuality but will force to consider new ways of being sexual.”
And on January 23rd McLaren wrote an article for Leadership that is posted on this blog. In it he argues that because the religious right is mean to gays we should not make any decision on the gay issue for 5-10 years.
As the pastor of a church of nearly 5000 in one of America’s least churched cities filled with young horny people this really bummed me out. Just this week a young man who claims to be a Christian and knows his Bible pretty well asked if he could have anal sex with lots of young men because he liked the orgasms. Had I known McLaren was issuing a Brokeback injunction I would have scheduled an appointment with him somewhere between 2011-2016.
Lastly, for the next 5-10 years you are hereby required to white out 1 Peter 3:15 which says “But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect” from your Bible until further notice from McLaren because the religious right forget the gentleness and respect part and the religious left forgot the answer the question part. Subsequently, a task force will be commissioned to have a conversation about all of this at a labyrinth to be named later. Once consensus is reached a finger painting will be commissioned on the Emergent web site as the official doctrinal position.
In conclusion, this is all just gay.
-Pastor Mark Driscoll
[AN EDITORIAL NOTE FROM UrL: As some have noted, one sentence has been edited from Mark Driscoll's post above. As the moderator of the discussions on this blog, I will, from time to time, edit comments and posts to keep the conversation focused and on topic. It was clear from comments rolling in that the sentence in question was causing the conversation to veer away from Brian McLaren and the "homosexuality question." This is why it was removed.]
http://blog.christianitytoday.com/outofur/archives/2006/01/brian_mclaren_o_2.html
Brian McLaren on the Homosexual Question 3: A Prologue and Rant by Mark Driscoll
Hundreds of readers have posted comments about Brian McLaren's article on forming a pastoral response to the "homosexual question." One such reader was Pastor Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. As "one of the 50 most influential pastors in America" and an outspoken critic of the emergent movement, we thought others would like to read Driscoll's comments.
Well, it seems that Brian McLaren and the Emergent crowd are emerging into homo-evangelicals.
Before I begin my rant, let me first defend myself. First, the guy who was among the first to share the gospel with me was a gay guy who was a friend. Second, I planted a church in my 20s in one of America’s least churched cities where the gay pride parade is much bigger than the march for Jesus. Third, my church is filled with people struggling with same sex attraction and gay couples do attend and we tell them about the transforming power of Jesus. Fourth, I am not a religious right wingnut. In fact, when James Dobson came to town to hold the anti-gay rally, we took a lot of heat for being among the biggest churches in the state, the largest evangelical church in our city, and not promoting the event in our church because we felt it would come off as unloving to the gay community. The men who hosted the event are all godly men and good friends and I’ve taken a few blows for not standing with them on this issue. Fifth, I am myself a devoted heterosexual male lesbian who has been in a monogamous marriage with my high school sweetheart since I was 21 and personally know the pain of being a marginalized sexual minority as a male lesbian.
And now the rant.
For me, the concern started when McLaren in the February 7, 2005 issue of Time Magazine said, “Asked at a conference last spring what he thought about gay marriage, Brian McLaren replied, ‘You know what, the thing that breaks my heart is that there's no way I can answer it without hurting someone on either side.’” Sadly, by failing to answer, McLaren was unwilling to say what the Bible says and in so doing really hurt God’s feelings and broke his heart.
Then, Brian’s Tonto Doug Pagitt, an old acquaintance of mine, wrote the following in a book he and I both contributed to called Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches edited by Robert Webber and due out this spring:
“The question of humanity is inexorably link to sexuality and gender. Issues of sexuality can be among the most complex and convoluted we need to deal with. It seems to me that the theology of our history does not deal sufficiently with these issues for our day. I do not mean this a critique, but as an acknowledgement that our times are different. I do not mean that we are a more or less sexual culture, but one that knows more about the genetic, social and cultural issues surrounding sexuality and gender than any previous culture. Christianity will be impotent to lead a conversation on sexuality and gender if we do not boldly integrate our current understandings of humanity with our theology. This will require us to not only draw new conclusions about sexuality but will force to consider new ways of being sexual.”
And on January 23rd McLaren wrote an article for Leadership that is posted on this blog. In it he argues that because the religious right is mean to gays we should not make any decision on the gay issue for 5-10 years.
As the pastor of a church of nearly 5000 in one of America’s least churched cities filled with young horny people this really bummed me out. Just this week a young man who claims to be a Christian and knows his Bible pretty well asked if he could have anal sex with lots of young men because he liked the orgasms. Had I known McLaren was issuing a Brokeback injunction I would have scheduled an appointment with him somewhere between 2011-2016.
Lastly, for the next 5-10 years you are hereby required to white out 1 Peter 3:15 which says “But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect” from your Bible until further notice from McLaren because the religious right forget the gentleness and respect part and the religious left forgot the answer the question part. Subsequently, a task force will be commissioned to have a conversation about all of this at a labyrinth to be named later. Once consensus is reached a finger painting will be commissioned on the Emergent web site as the official doctrinal position.
In conclusion, this is all just gay.
-Pastor Mark Driscoll
[AN EDITORIAL NOTE FROM UrL: As some have noted, one sentence has been edited from Mark Driscoll's post above. As the moderator of the discussions on this blog, I will, from time to time, edit comments and posts to keep the conversation focused and on topic. It was clear from comments rolling in that the sentence in question was causing the conversation to veer away from Brian McLaren and the "homosexuality question." This is why it was removed.]
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Believing children or faithful children? Titus 1:6
INTRODUCTION
The Bible contains all the necessary blueprints for successful church ministry to take place. God instructed the local infant church (starting in Acts 2 forward) primarily through the ministry of the Apostles. The Apostle’s were moved by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:19-21) to write portions of the New Testament which remain the churches’ standard and measuring rod to this day. Ephesians 2:19-20 states, “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God’s household, having been built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the corner stone.” Clearly, it was the Apostles doctrine which established much of the infant churches’ theology and ecclesiology (Acts 2:42). Jesus Christ (as Lord of the church) delegated His divine authority to the Apostles who in turn carried out His will.
The Importance of Biblical Leadership
At the beginning and the end of the Apostle Paul’s ministry, he personally appointed (or instructed others to appoint) a plurality of elders to shepherd the churches he founded or established (Titus 1:5ff; Acts 14:23). Paul was concerned that qualified, godly, male leaders would continue to shepherd, teach, and lead the church after his departure and death.
In what is most likely the earliest of the New Testament Epistles (James, AD 45-48), James exhorts those who are sick to call upon the elders of the church to come and pray for them (James 5:14-15). From this text one concludes, that Godly church leaders (elders) had been appointed and set apart even as early as AD 45.
When writing to the churches scattered all throughout the Roman provinces (1 Peter 1:1), Peter exhorts the elders to pastor the flock of God (1 Peter 5:1). According to Alexander Strauch, “This indicates that Peter knew that the elder structure of government was standard practice in these churches.” The New Testament reveals that the pastoral oversight of many of the first churches was committed to a plurality of elders (Acts 13:1; 15:35; 1 Corinthians 16:15,16; Hebrews 13:7, 17, 24). These elders were to model and carry out the teachings of Christ and the Apostles.
Because the Apostles themselves did not physically appoint every single church leader, they often wrote letters to these churches instructing them as to the criteria they were to use when appointing these “elders.” This is most clearly seen in two key passages: 1 Timothy 3:1-7 and Titus 1:5-9. Both texts identify the biblical qualifications of an elder.
In 1 Timothy 3 the single, overarching qualification is that the prospective elder be “above reproach.” He can not be accused of anything that is sinful. This does not mean that this man never sins (otherwise no one would be qualified, 1 John 1:10), rather his life is to be characterized by holiness and the pursuit there of. MacArthur adds, “An elder must be above reproach in his marital life, his social life, his family life, his business life, and his spiritual life.” The qualifications of an elder goes beyond moral characteristics. An elder must be also be a gifted teacher (able to refute false doctrine and to proclaim divine truth), and he must be demonstrably skilled as a manager (at work and at home).
In Titus 1 Paul gives Titus specific instructions regarding church leadership and the establishment of elders. As with 1 Timothy 3 there are 15 qualifications given; five are identical and 6 others are very similar. Paul wants the elders to not only be above reproach with those within the church but also to have an impeccable reputation with those outside the church. He writes in Titus 1:5-9;
For this reason I left you in Crete, that you might set in order what remains, and appoint elders in every city as I directed you, namely, if any man be above reproach, the husband of one wife, having children who believe, not accused of dissipation or rebellion. For the overseer must be above reproach as God’s steward, not self-willed, not quick tempered, not addicted to wine, not pugnacious, not found of sordid gain, but hospitable, loving what is good, sensible, just, devout, self-controlled, holding fast the faithful word which is in accordance with the teaching that he may be able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict.
Alexander Strauch wisely notes, “When directing Titus in how to organize churches on the island of Crete, Paul reminds Titus to appoint only morally and spiritually qualified men to be elders. By stating elder qualifications in a letter, Paul establishes a public list to guide the local church in its choice of elders and to empower it to hold its elders accountable.”
TO BE CONTINUED
The Bible contains all the necessary blueprints for successful church ministry to take place. God instructed the local infant church (starting in Acts 2 forward) primarily through the ministry of the Apostles. The Apostle’s were moved by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:19-21) to write portions of the New Testament which remain the churches’ standard and measuring rod to this day. Ephesians 2:19-20 states, “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God’s household, having been built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the corner stone.” Clearly, it was the Apostles doctrine which established much of the infant churches’ theology and ecclesiology (Acts 2:42). Jesus Christ (as Lord of the church) delegated His divine authority to the Apostles who in turn carried out His will.
The Importance of Biblical Leadership
At the beginning and the end of the Apostle Paul’s ministry, he personally appointed (or instructed others to appoint) a plurality of elders to shepherd the churches he founded or established (Titus 1:5ff; Acts 14:23). Paul was concerned that qualified, godly, male leaders would continue to shepherd, teach, and lead the church after his departure and death.
In what is most likely the earliest of the New Testament Epistles (James, AD 45-48), James exhorts those who are sick to call upon the elders of the church to come and pray for them (James 5:14-15). From this text one concludes, that Godly church leaders (elders) had been appointed and set apart even as early as AD 45.
When writing to the churches scattered all throughout the Roman provinces (1 Peter 1:1), Peter exhorts the elders to pastor the flock of God (1 Peter 5:1). According to Alexander Strauch, “This indicates that Peter knew that the elder structure of government was standard practice in these churches.” The New Testament reveals that the pastoral oversight of many of the first churches was committed to a plurality of elders (Acts 13:1; 15:35; 1 Corinthians 16:15,16; Hebrews 13:7, 17, 24). These elders were to model and carry out the teachings of Christ and the Apostles.
Because the Apostles themselves did not physically appoint every single church leader, they often wrote letters to these churches instructing them as to the criteria they were to use when appointing these “elders.” This is most clearly seen in two key passages: 1 Timothy 3:1-7 and Titus 1:5-9. Both texts identify the biblical qualifications of an elder.
In 1 Timothy 3 the single, overarching qualification is that the prospective elder be “above reproach.” He can not be accused of anything that is sinful. This does not mean that this man never sins (otherwise no one would be qualified, 1 John 1:10), rather his life is to be characterized by holiness and the pursuit there of. MacArthur adds, “An elder must be above reproach in his marital life, his social life, his family life, his business life, and his spiritual life.” The qualifications of an elder goes beyond moral characteristics. An elder must be also be a gifted teacher (able to refute false doctrine and to proclaim divine truth), and he must be demonstrably skilled as a manager (at work and at home).
In Titus 1 Paul gives Titus specific instructions regarding church leadership and the establishment of elders. As with 1 Timothy 3 there are 15 qualifications given; five are identical and 6 others are very similar. Paul wants the elders to not only be above reproach with those within the church but also to have an impeccable reputation with those outside the church. He writes in Titus 1:5-9;
For this reason I left you in Crete, that you might set in order what remains, and appoint elders in every city as I directed you, namely, if any man be above reproach, the husband of one wife, having children who believe, not accused of dissipation or rebellion. For the overseer must be above reproach as God’s steward, not self-willed, not quick tempered, not addicted to wine, not pugnacious, not found of sordid gain, but hospitable, loving what is good, sensible, just, devout, self-controlled, holding fast the faithful word which is in accordance with the teaching that he may be able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict.
Alexander Strauch wisely notes, “When directing Titus in how to organize churches on the island of Crete, Paul reminds Titus to appoint only morally and spiritually qualified men to be elders. By stating elder qualifications in a letter, Paul establishes a public list to guide the local church in its choice of elders and to empower it to hold its elders accountable.”
TO BE CONTINUED
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Kolstad Update 1/06
Life has been very busy here. I've been told it only gets faster and faster with age/responsibilities. With a lil baby girl on the way i am sure life will never be the same. :) My wife and I are so excited about the prospect of becoming new parents. Our dear friend Jane Park bought us CDs by Tedd Trip on parenting that we have been enjoying. Andrea turned 30 during our recent Teen Ski Retreat in Michigan. Kevin Hall came and brought the Word for us. All in all it was a great trip/retreat.
I can not believe we have been at First Baptist Church for 8 months already. Time flies when you are having fun. I have learned alot since being here. Currently i am overseeing children's, teen, and outreach ministries. We are putting on a Upward B-ball program right now. We have about 255 kids in the league. I love every chance i get to preach during Pastor Flatt's absence. Those sermons can be accessed at www.fbccarmel.com (sermon archive)
My family visited us over Christmas break. It was great to spend quality time with Mom, Dad, Jordan and Rebekah. The famo still lives in Bremerton, WA.
2006 should be a great year. I look forward to growing in Christ and getting more plugged in at FBC. I will be attending some counseling classes at Faith Baptist in March. I also plan on attending the Together for the Gospel conference in April. I hope to be apart of our church missions trip to Utah in July.
I can't believe i'll turn 26 in April. Well this was sort of random but that's ok. Just an update for those interested (all 5 of you). :)
Have a great 06
CK
I can not believe we have been at First Baptist Church for 8 months already. Time flies when you are having fun. I have learned alot since being here. Currently i am overseeing children's, teen, and outreach ministries. We are putting on a Upward B-ball program right now. We have about 255 kids in the league. I love every chance i get to preach during Pastor Flatt's absence. Those sermons can be accessed at www.fbccarmel.com (sermon archive)
My family visited us over Christmas break. It was great to spend quality time with Mom, Dad, Jordan and Rebekah. The famo still lives in Bremerton, WA.
2006 should be a great year. I look forward to growing in Christ and getting more plugged in at FBC. I will be attending some counseling classes at Faith Baptist in March. I also plan on attending the Together for the Gospel conference in April. I hope to be apart of our church missions trip to Utah in July.
I can't believe i'll turn 26 in April. Well this was sort of random but that's ok. Just an update for those interested (all 5 of you). :)
Have a great 06
CK
Friday, January 27, 2006
Biblical Contentment
It was not too long ago that I was having a counseling session with a gentleman who was going through some hard times and as result was struggling with contentment. He commented to me that part of his problem was that he “did not have the gift of contentment.”
Initially I was taken back by the statement because I was unaware of any Biblical text that taught there was such a thing as a “gift” of contentment. After I quickly regathered my thoughts, I kindly took this gentleman to the book of Philippians. Specifically I drew his attention to the 11th verse of chapter 4.
In this chapter, the Apostle makes an amazing statement to the church at Philippi. Paul wrote, “Not that I speak from want, for I have learned to be content in whatever circumstance I am.”
I explained to the man that the Apostle Paul wrote this verse while he was in prison. Paul’s entire life was characterized by continuous trials and difficulties (12 Cor. 11:23-28) yet he was still able to write that he had “learned to be content.” How was Paul able to come to this point in his own Christian life? How did he learn the art of contentment?
One of the major problems with this specific man (that I counseled) was that he did not have a correct understanding of biblical contentment. Biblical contentment is not something that is given by God as a spiritual gift or inherited through physical birth. Rather contentment is something that is, as Paul put it, “learned.”
God often allows trials into our lives to teach us the value of the “Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment.”
Contentment is only gained through a proper biblical understanding of trials coupled with a experiential knowledge of them. You see in God’s masterful and sovereign plan He orchestrates our lives to teach us many fundamental spiritual lessons. One of those lessons is the Christian virtue of contentment.
I know of no better example of this in the Old Testament then the narrative record in Genesis that details the history of Joseph. Joseph’s life story is given to us in Genesis 37-50. I want us to briefly look at the life of Joseph and observe how he (like the apostle Paul) “learned” contentment in the midst of his own personal suffering.
Hopefully his life example will inspire you to embrace your own personal life struggles and thus teach you how to be content “in whatever circumstance” God places you in.
The story of Joseph is one of the most familiar in all of the Old Testament. The life of Joseph illustrates how God’s providential hand orchestrated Joseph’s life circumstances to preserve the nation of Israel. One of the foundational elements to contentment is learning to embrace God’s providence even during life’s lowly valleys.
Joseph’s life is really broken up into three stages: Joseph goes from a favored Son, to a lowly Slave, and is finally exalted to a blessed Sultan. I want you to take note of God’s providence during all three stages of his life.
Initially I was taken back by the statement because I was unaware of any Biblical text that taught there was such a thing as a “gift” of contentment. After I quickly regathered my thoughts, I kindly took this gentleman to the book of Philippians. Specifically I drew his attention to the 11th verse of chapter 4.
In this chapter, the Apostle makes an amazing statement to the church at Philippi. Paul wrote, “Not that I speak from want, for I have learned to be content in whatever circumstance I am.”
I explained to the man that the Apostle Paul wrote this verse while he was in prison. Paul’s entire life was characterized by continuous trials and difficulties (12 Cor. 11:23-28) yet he was still able to write that he had “learned to be content.” How was Paul able to come to this point in his own Christian life? How did he learn the art of contentment?
One of the major problems with this specific man (that I counseled) was that he did not have a correct understanding of biblical contentment. Biblical contentment is not something that is given by God as a spiritual gift or inherited through physical birth. Rather contentment is something that is, as Paul put it, “learned.”
God often allows trials into our lives to teach us the value of the “Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment.”
Contentment is only gained through a proper biblical understanding of trials coupled with a experiential knowledge of them. You see in God’s masterful and sovereign plan He orchestrates our lives to teach us many fundamental spiritual lessons. One of those lessons is the Christian virtue of contentment.
I know of no better example of this in the Old Testament then the narrative record in Genesis that details the history of Joseph. Joseph’s life story is given to us in Genesis 37-50. I want us to briefly look at the life of Joseph and observe how he (like the apostle Paul) “learned” contentment in the midst of his own personal suffering.
Hopefully his life example will inspire you to embrace your own personal life struggles and thus teach you how to be content “in whatever circumstance” God places you in.
The story of Joseph is one of the most familiar in all of the Old Testament. The life of Joseph illustrates how God’s providential hand orchestrated Joseph’s life circumstances to preserve the nation of Israel. One of the foundational elements to contentment is learning to embrace God’s providence even during life’s lowly valleys.
Joseph’s life is really broken up into three stages: Joseph goes from a favored Son, to a lowly Slave, and is finally exalted to a blessed Sultan. I want you to take note of God’s providence during all three stages of his life.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Amill support
If you want to read some good article from the Amill perspective click below...
http://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/articles/topic/eschatology.html#amil
http://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/articles/topic/eschatology.html#amil
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
11 reasons (continued) J MacArthur
PREMILL VS AMILL DISCUSSION
-->This is not an issue to divide Believers.
MacArthur and Sproul are very good (personal) friends.
There are many examples of biblical friendships between men who strongly disagree over eschatology.
The Together for the Gospel conference is a perfect example of how we should relate towards one another concerning these secondary matters.
Eschatology is a “secondary” Biblical issue because the heart of the gospel is not at stake.
This is an issue (none the less) which needs to be interpreted through the grid of Scripture. All of must strive for biblical exegesis (i.e. a truly biblical theology).
NOTE--> The Bible can not teach both Premillennialism and Amillennialism.
There are some mistaken notions of Premillennialism (and Amill. too).
Friends, a Few Additional Thoughts:
Read OT passages like Ezekiel 40-48; etc. And NT passages like Rom 9-11, Revelation 20.
Roman Catholic eschatology is Amillennial.
Luther did not reform completely from all of R.C. theology (baptism, eschatology, communion, etc).
If you use a consistent (normal) hermeneutic you come up with Premillennialism; even some Amillennialist state this (note what Floyd Hamilton, L Boetner, and O.T. Allis say all of whom are covenantal theologians).
Historical grammatical hermeneutics need to be used throughout all genres.
The promise in Gen 17:6 (of Kings) was literally fulfilled; Dan 2, 7, 8 predictions were also literally fulfilled. Spiritualizing prophetic literature is foolish!
Habakkuk predicted the Babylonian captivity and it was fulfilled literally. The promise in Gen 49 (tribe of Judah) was fulfilled literally as were all the OT prophetic passages.
The future for Israel will be fulfilled literally as well!
Israel is only temporarily set aside as Romans 9-11 clearly teaches!
3 more areas to consider:
1. The Earthly reign of Messiah (It is an EARTHLY Reign)
READ…… Rev 5:10; 11:15-18; 20:3, 8.
2. The Future Restoration of Israel (Jer 30:3, 11, 22; 31:35-37; Zech 12-13)
3. The Promises of the Davidic Kingdom (Psalm 89; Jer 33; 2 Sam 7; Is 7:14; Luke 1; Acts 1:8).
-->This is not an issue to divide Believers.
MacArthur and Sproul are very good (personal) friends.
There are many examples of biblical friendships between men who strongly disagree over eschatology.
The Together for the Gospel conference is a perfect example of how we should relate towards one another concerning these secondary matters.
Eschatology is a “secondary” Biblical issue because the heart of the gospel is not at stake.
This is an issue (none the less) which needs to be interpreted through the grid of Scripture. All of must strive for biblical exegesis (i.e. a truly biblical theology).
NOTE--> The Bible can not teach both Premillennialism and Amillennialism.
There are some mistaken notions of Premillennialism (and Amill. too).
Friends, a Few Additional Thoughts:
Read OT passages like Ezekiel 40-48; etc. And NT passages like Rom 9-11, Revelation 20.
Roman Catholic eschatology is Amillennial.
Luther did not reform completely from all of R.C. theology (baptism, eschatology, communion, etc).
If you use a consistent (normal) hermeneutic you come up with Premillennialism; even some Amillennialist state this (note what Floyd Hamilton, L Boetner, and O.T. Allis say all of whom are covenantal theologians).
Historical grammatical hermeneutics need to be used throughout all genres.
The promise in Gen 17:6 (of Kings) was literally fulfilled; Dan 2, 7, 8 predictions were also literally fulfilled. Spiritualizing prophetic literature is foolish!
Habakkuk predicted the Babylonian captivity and it was fulfilled literally. The promise in Gen 49 (tribe of Judah) was fulfilled literally as were all the OT prophetic passages.
The future for Israel will be fulfilled literally as well!
Israel is only temporarily set aside as Romans 9-11 clearly teaches!
3 more areas to consider:
1. The Earthly reign of Messiah (It is an EARTHLY Reign)
READ…… Rev 5:10; 11:15-18; 20:3, 8.
2. The Future Restoration of Israel (Jer 30:3, 11, 22; 31:35-37; Zech 12-13)
3. The Promises of the Davidic Kingdom (Psalm 89; Jer 33; 2 Sam 7; Is 7:14; Luke 1; Acts 1:8).
11 Reasons Why I am not Amill (By: J MacArthur)
11 Reasons why I am not a Amillennialist
By John MacArthur
1. They have a historical grammatical hermeneutic but when they get to the Prophetic sections they substitute some other hermeneutic. In essence, they have a double hermeneutic!
2. They eliminate a future for ethnic Israel
3. They confuse national Israel with the Church.
4. They deny God’s promise to restore God’s people to the land and the Abrahamic Covenant was unconditional and unilateral
5. They deny Christ’s Davidic kingdom as promised in the Old Testament!
6. They believe Satan is bound now (in the Church Age; See Rev 20).
7. They artificially impose “continuity” on Scripture that allows for no “discontinuity”.
They build this on three covenants that are not found (fully) in the Bible: covenant of redemption; covenant of grace; and the covenant of works.
There is a Noahic covenant, an Abrahamic covenant, a Davidic covenant, a Mosaic Covenant, and a New Covenant but not those three covenantal covenants.
8. They erroneously defend there system by spiritualizing the Old Testament and some prophetic passages.
9. They claim that the curses of Duet 28 and elsewhere were for Israel and the blessings are for the Church.
10. They deny that the present existence of the Israelites in their land has any significance for the future. (i.e. John Stott)
Even some secular scholars would agree, “The preservation of the Jews is the greatest ethnic miracle in the world!”
11. They deny the literal rendering of “1000 years” found in Rev 20 (used 6x).
By John MacArthur
1. They have a historical grammatical hermeneutic but when they get to the Prophetic sections they substitute some other hermeneutic. In essence, they have a double hermeneutic!
2. They eliminate a future for ethnic Israel
3. They confuse national Israel with the Church.
4. They deny God’s promise to restore God’s people to the land and the Abrahamic Covenant was unconditional and unilateral
5. They deny Christ’s Davidic kingdom as promised in the Old Testament!
6. They believe Satan is bound now (in the Church Age; See Rev 20).
7. They artificially impose “continuity” on Scripture that allows for no “discontinuity”.
They build this on three covenants that are not found (fully) in the Bible: covenant of redemption; covenant of grace; and the covenant of works.
There is a Noahic covenant, an Abrahamic covenant, a Davidic covenant, a Mosaic Covenant, and a New Covenant but not those three covenantal covenants.
8. They erroneously defend there system by spiritualizing the Old Testament and some prophetic passages.
9. They claim that the curses of Duet 28 and elsewhere were for Israel and the blessings are for the Church.
10. They deny that the present existence of the Israelites in their land has any significance for the future. (i.e. John Stott)
Even some secular scholars would agree, “The preservation of the Jews is the greatest ethnic miracle in the world!”
11. They deny the literal rendering of “1000 years” found in Rev 20 (used 6x).
Thursday, January 12, 2006
The Prodigal
These are great lyrics!!!!
Casting Crowns Lyrics
"Prodigal"
Living on my own, thinking for myself
Castles in the sand, temporary wealth
Walls are falling down, storms are closing in
Tears have filled my eyes, here I am again
And I've held out as long as I can
Now I'm letting go and holding out my hand
Daddy, here I am again
Will You take me back tonight
I went and made the world my friend
And it left me high and dry
I drag Your name back through the mud
That You first found me in
Not worthy to be called Your son
Is this to be my end
Daddy, here I am
Here I am again
Curse this morning sun
Drags me in to one more day
Of reaping what I've sown
Of living with my shame
Welcome to my world
And the life that I have made
Where one day you're a prince
The next day you're a slave
Casting Crowns Lyrics
"Prodigal"
Living on my own, thinking for myself
Castles in the sand, temporary wealth
Walls are falling down, storms are closing in
Tears have filled my eyes, here I am again
And I've held out as long as I can
Now I'm letting go and holding out my hand
Daddy, here I am again
Will You take me back tonight
I went and made the world my friend
And it left me high and dry
I drag Your name back through the mud
That You first found me in
Not worthy to be called Your son
Is this to be my end
Daddy, here I am
Here I am again
Curse this morning sun
Drags me in to one more day
Of reaping what I've sown
Of living with my shame
Welcome to my world
And the life that I have made
Where one day you're a prince
The next day you're a slave
Saturday, January 07, 2006
New Blog site http://paullamey.blogspot.com/
I have joined a new PREACHING blog site with a few pastors scattered throughout the US.
Check it out sometime @
http://paullamey.blogspot.com/
Hope you enjoy it!
Caleb
Check it out sometime @
http://paullamey.blogspot.com/
Hope you enjoy it!
Caleb
What to Preach
One of the biggest problems many preachers face is deciding what book or topic they should preach on next. Obviously for the expository preacher this problem occurs less frequently. The expositor has no other choice but to preach through the next passage of Holy Scripture. This is the joy and the challenge of expository preaching.
But how does an expositor determine which book of the Bible they ought to preach through next? When is it time to start a brief topical series instead of another lengthy in-depth fifty part series through Nahum?
I recently came across a comment written by John Calvin that in some ways helps solve this problem. Calvin wrote, “We hence learn that a good and faithful pastor ought wisely to consider what the present state of the Church requires, so as to accommodate his doctrine to its wants.” Dr. Calvin is not advocating Rick Warren ministry (preach to the “felt needs”). He is simply saying a good pastor will discern the real spiritual needs of his sheep and respond appropriately.
Some preachers are so disconnected from their flock that they could never apply this pastoral advice. I know this is a temptation I often face. I get so into the Word that I am tempted to neglect my other pastoral responsibilities (administration, counseling, discipleship, evangelism, etc). This is the advantage of being a complete pastor-teacher/shepherd/elder. I have found the better I know my congregation (my flock) the easier it is to apply Calvin’s principle.
If your church needs help in ecclesiology why not preach through the Pastoral Epistles? If your church is struggling with joy and unity take your congregation through Philippians. If your church is apathetic in evangelism teach through the book of Acts. If your church body is ready to embrace the doctrines of grace why not begin a series on Ephesians? If your church has become self-centered begin a series on the “one-anothers.”
The more you love your sheep and the better you know their spiritual needs the more effective preaching ministry you will have. I believe that is what John Calvin was simply trying to say. “We hence learn that a good and faithful pastor ought wisely to consider what the present state of the Church requires, so as to accommodate his doctrine to its wants.”
That’s some excellent practical pastoral preaching advice from one of the church’s greatest theologians. Who says Calvinists can’t be practical?
By Caleb Kolstad
But how does an expositor determine which book of the Bible they ought to preach through next? When is it time to start a brief topical series instead of another lengthy in-depth fifty part series through Nahum?
I recently came across a comment written by John Calvin that in some ways helps solve this problem. Calvin wrote, “We hence learn that a good and faithful pastor ought wisely to consider what the present state of the Church requires, so as to accommodate his doctrine to its wants.” Dr. Calvin is not advocating Rick Warren ministry (preach to the “felt needs”). He is simply saying a good pastor will discern the real spiritual needs of his sheep and respond appropriately.
Some preachers are so disconnected from their flock that they could never apply this pastoral advice. I know this is a temptation I often face. I get so into the Word that I am tempted to neglect my other pastoral responsibilities (administration, counseling, discipleship, evangelism, etc). This is the advantage of being a complete pastor-teacher/shepherd/elder. I have found the better I know my congregation (my flock) the easier it is to apply Calvin’s principle.
If your church needs help in ecclesiology why not preach through the Pastoral Epistles? If your church is struggling with joy and unity take your congregation through Philippians. If your church is apathetic in evangelism teach through the book of Acts. If your church body is ready to embrace the doctrines of grace why not begin a series on Ephesians? If your church has become self-centered begin a series on the “one-anothers.”
The more you love your sheep and the better you know their spiritual needs the more effective preaching ministry you will have. I believe that is what John Calvin was simply trying to say. “We hence learn that a good and faithful pastor ought wisely to consider what the present state of the Church requires, so as to accommodate his doctrine to its wants.”
That’s some excellent practical pastoral preaching advice from one of the church’s greatest theologians. Who says Calvinists can’t be practical?
By Caleb Kolstad
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