God: Three in One - Another Article for my Local Paper

[This is the full text of an article that I recently wrote for our local paper.]

We will look at the Apostle's Creed in more detail this week in our series on the Heidelberg Catechism. From a close look at the outline of the creed, we can see the doctrine of the Trinity clearly displayed.


Question and answer 24 read, “How are these articles divided? Into three parts: God the Father and our creation; God the Son and our deliverance; and God the Holy Spirit and our sanctification.”

The catechism introduces us to the three Persons of the Trinity and their role in our salvation when we have true faith. Almighty God, the Father of all Christians, creates us and sends the Son and the Spirit. God the Son, Jesus Christ, delivers us from our sin and misery by His life and death. In addition, God the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, empowers us for the Christian life and makes us holy.

Question and answer 25 clearly state the nature of the Trinity, “Since there is only one divine being (Deut. 6:4; 1 Cor. 8:4, 6), why do you speak of three: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Because that is how God has revealed himself in his Word: (Matt. 3:16-17; 28:18-19; Luke 4:18 (Isa. 61:1); John 14:26; 15:26; 2 Cor. 13:14; Gal. 4:6; Tit. 3:5-6) these three distinct persons are one, true, eternal God.”

In the words of another famous catechism, “God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.” Does that sound like anyone you have ever met? There is only one Being like this, and it is awesome to think about Him.

Why should we expect Him to be just like us, having one person in one being? Should we not expect Him to be so much more? God is, as C. S. Lewis put it, “beyond personality.”

There is nothing like God, and there are no good examples that help explain this doctrine. As I know from trying to explain the Trinity to my eight-year-old daughter, it is very hard to describe. That is why the catechism carefully states the doctrine and does not try to explain it.

God is one in Being or Essence, but three in Person. His being is what He is. His person is who He is. He is not one in being and three in being; that explanation would be nonsense. It would be like saying it is raining outside and not raining outside at the same time. He is not one in person and three in person; that would be nonsense too.

God is one in one way and three in another, one in being and three in person. It is like saying it is raining outside in one place and not raining outside in another place across town. That description is not nonsense. It seems strange, but it can be true.

It is fitting that we begin our journey through the Apostle’s Creed with this doctrine because it humbles us and makes us see the limits of our own thinking. Next week, we will begin to explore what the doctrine of God the Father means to us.

2012 Bible Reading Plan

Having accomplished much of what I had planned to do in 2011, I have now turned to the Bible reading plan I will use in 2012. I hope to get back on track with a regular, through-the-Bible reading plan. My sporadic reading of the Bible in 2011 left me unsatisfied.




My plans are to tackle Reading God's Story: A Chronological Daily Bible arranged and authored by George Guthrie. The organization of the Scripture text in this book’s format intrigues me. It claims to have a memorable format organized by acts and scenes like an unfolding play.



It will be interesting to see how this organization plays out, and especially what the over-arching theme of the “play” will be. I may abandon it if the theme does not prove to be the story of Jesus.



I also wish Reading God's Story was available in something other than the Holman Christian Standard Bible translation. It will also be interesting to see how this translation compares to the ESV that I normally use for detailed study and close reading.



I am reading through The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name by Sally Lloyd-Jones with my eight-year-old daughter. This book has reinforced my thinking on the story of Jesus Christ as the main theme of the Bible. I hope to read through The Jesus Storybook Bible with her several times this year.



Please see last year’s post at this link to find other reading plans that are available on the web. God bless the time you spend in His Word in 2012.

True Faith: Another Article for My Local Paper

[This is the full text of an article I was able to publish in the local paper.]


I hope you have been following Soli Deo Gloria’s series on the Heidelberg Catechism. The Heidelberg Catechism is a collection of questions and answers written in 1563 and used to instruct children and adults in the faith.




As we continue the articles, we approach Lord’s Day 7, which contains four questions and answers. These four questions and answers reference 27 passages of the Bible in the original catechism.



Question and Answer 20 reads, “Are all people then saved through Christ just as they were lost through Adam? No. Only those are saved who through true faith are grafted into Christ and accept all his benefits.”



We must hold this truth near and dear to our hearts. Some teachers say that people can be saved without conscious faith in Christ, or even without direct knowledge of what Christ did in His perfect life and sacrificial death. It is an awful sin to fail to tell someone the gospel because we incorrectly assume he is saved based on the way he lives his life. We must call others to “true faith.”



Question and Answer 21 define the “true faith” mentioned in 21, “What is true faith? True faith is not only a sure knowledge by which I hold as true all that God has revealed to us in Scripture; it is also a wholehearted trust, which the Holy Spirit creates in me by the gospel, that God has freely granted, not only to others but to me also, forgiveness of sins, eternal righteousness, and salvation. These are gifts of sheer grace, granted solely by Christ’s merit.”



“True faith” is a “sure knowledge.” It holds the facts the Bible teaches to be certainly true, including facts about how to live one’s life. “True faith” goes beyond mere head knowledge, however. It moves into the area of “wholehearted trust.” Belief in certain facts is not enough; one must trust that “God has freely granted…forgiveness of sins, eternal righteousness and salvation” not just to people in general, but “to me” in particular.


“True faith” is to depend on Christ alone, to depend on what He earned for us in His perfect life and sacrificial death. It is to trust in Christ “solely.” That is, to trust what He did without trusting in anything or anyone else; not my good works, not my baptism, not the Lord’s Supper, and certainly not some aisle that I walked down or some insincere prayer that I said.


“True faith” is to acknowledge that only God’s grace can save me. Grace is completely unearned favor. Grace can be explained with an acrostic: G-R-A-C-E, God’s Riches at Christ’s Expense. It can be explained in Latin, “De Favor Dei Propter Christum,” the favor of God on account of Christ.


“True faith” and all it entails are “gifts of sheer grace.” Faith is a free gift of God’s grace alone, and it is not dependent on my own reasoning that helped me make a good decision. Faith is something that the Holy Spirit “creates in me.”


Question and answer 22 says, “What then must a Christian believe? All that is promised us in the gospel, a summary of which is taught us in the articles of our universal and undisputed Christian faith.”


The Heidelberg Catechism will have none of the modern Christian notion that only a few minimal facts must be known and believed in order to be saved. A person must understand the Christian faith and trust in what it reveals before they can be a Christian.

People express these facts in many ways, but The Apostle's Creed is probably the oldest short statement of them. The catechism gives that creed as the answer to question twenty-three.


Question and answer 23 read, “What are these articles?


I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit
and born of the virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to hell.
The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended to heaven
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.
From there he will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic [ or universal] church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.”

The next set of questions and answers in the catechism will explain the words of the Apostle’s Creed in more detail. Please continue to read these Soli Deo Gloria articles because there are several parts of the creed that many have misunderstood.

Merry Christmas Star Trek Style

One of the most underrated benefits Christ brought to us during His earthly life is communication of God’s character and intentions.


Some quotes from Jesus:

“… I do nothing on my own authority, but speak just as the Father taught me.” John 8:28

“I speak of what I have seen with my Father…” John 8:38

“For I have not spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment—what to say and what to speak.” John 12:49

“Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. “ John 14:10

Christ came to tell us some important things.  Now for a story.

I sat downstairs in the University of Tennessee’s Student Center in a little café called “The Rafters.” I often went there to study. I find it easier to study with a lot of commotion around me. I don’t know why, I just do.

I could not help but overhear a lively conversation going on at the table next to mine. Several students were rather loudly discussing how space aliens might be able to communicate with us. It seemed funny to me that the science-fiction crazed undergraduates were spending so much time on the topic. Anything to avoid studying the calculus books that lay open on their table, I guess.

One student proclaimed to the others that the best way would be to do as the Federation had done in several episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation: make themselves look like the alien species in order to walk among them, learn their customs, and discover a way to accurately and easily communicate.

(I know many consider Star Trek examples to be in poor taste, but it is my blog and I will do what I want to. Besides, I am here quoting a bunch of undergraduates, and many of us know from our undergrad. years just how weird some of those conversations can get.)

I could not help but recall some of the things I had recently heard about Jesus, how He came to tell us of what God had done, what God would do, what God was like, and what God requires of us. I turned around and joined the conversation.

“What if God wanted to communicate with us? How would He do it?” I asked. Two of the five students rater loudly exclaimed that they did not believe God existed. The others just sat there, trying to determine why this strange person was butting in on their friendly talk with such a strange series of questions.

“But what if God existed and wanted to communicate with us?” I pressed. Some of the students almost mockingly chimed in with the standard voice from above or writing on the clouds.

“What if God used the same basic approach that the Federation used as you were just discussing? What if He became a man like us? Someone who looked like an ‘ordinary Joe’ and walked and talked like a common place human?” I was starting to enjoy this.

One guy spoke up,”That just might work.” This encouraged me to press on. I asked, “How would he prove to us that he was God in the flesh?” The same guy got a strange, excited look on his face. “By doing things only God could do,” he exclaimed.

I asked if I could join them at the table and was invited to come over. I began to talk to them about their church and religious backgrounds. I found that the group had by and larger rejected the Christianity they had grown up hearing about. I also learned that most of that Christianity was of a liberal, ‘warm and fuzzy’ variety that was almost antithetical to the fundamentalist Christianity of my raising.

Most seemed genuinely surprised as I explained to them that orthodox Christianity had taught for hundreds of years that God had done precisely that. God had become a man in the Person of Jesus Christ in order to communicate with us. The eternal Second Person of the Trinity had assumed human form.

In the Person of Christ, God had done things only God could do. He worked miracles, not the ‘touchy feely,’ Guideposts sort of miracles, but acts that worked completely contrary to nature. We discussed a few of those stories from their youth.

It turned into a 45-minute discussion of the basics of the Christian faith, from Christ’s birth to His perfect life lived for us, to His infinite suffering on our behalf on the cross. After three or four more conversations, one of those five people professed his faith in Christ. The last I heard of him, he had surrendered to the call to full time Christian ministry. This is one of my happier stories from my graduate school days.

So, I wish a merry Christmas to you and yours. May the joy that comes from Christ’s words flood your heart and soul.

And, “Live long and prosper.”

Presbyterian

I have just read a post over at Kevin DeYoung’s blog that I find interesting. He laments some of the things that have bothered me most about the “Young, Restless, and Reformed” (YRR) movement. He takes careful aim at the one item that has bothered me most of late: the fact that many in this movement seem to downplay denominational ties. DeYoung writes:

…it’s better to live in a specific ecclesiastical room instead of in the hallway of evangelicalism…We need to learn to be good churchmen, investing time in the committees, assemblies, and machinery of the church. We need to publicly celebrate and defend important doctrinal distinctives (e.g., baptism, the millennium, liturgical norms) even as we love and respect those who disagree. We should delight in our own histories and confessions, while still rejoicing that our different vehicles are ultimately powered by the same engines of the Christian faith–justification, the authority of Scripture, substitutionary atonement, and the glory of our sovereign God.

I have found myself comfortable in the Presbyterian church, specifically the Presbyterian Church in America. I define Presbyterian as one who believes and follows the Westminster Standards.

Why did I settle here? I have always had a degree of respect for the Westminster Confession, from the first day I read it. Even when I disagreed with their answers, I liked the questions that they asked.

I have read the Bible through several times. I have read the Standards and their Scripture proofs many times over. The Standards make more sense of the Bible than anything I have ever read. I have respect for many for the other reformed confessions and catechisms, but I choose to make Westminster my own.

Does this mean that I will not participate with some of the inter-denominational efforts? Of course not. I have benefited greatly from The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Together for the Gospel, The White Horse Inn, and especially Ligonier Ministries.

I do not want to do without those ministries, but I do not rely upon then for expositional Bible teaching, the administration of the sacraments, and church discipline. For those things, I turn to my local PCA congregation. I cannot do without those things.

I hope that everyone within the YRR movement takes the step to join a church and actively participate in its life. Of course, I hope they join the PCA (That is the correct church after all.). But at least display colors and stand on a detailed confession (Please, not a confession that can be written upon a single sheet of double-spaced, 8.5 by 11 piece of paper. Get a real confession.).

Will I ever change denominations again? Possibly. I will follow the Bible’s teaching wherever it leads me. The Bible is my ultimate authority. Here I stand; I can do no other. But, I don’t think I’ll ever move again.

Join a particular church and submit to its authority. Support a particular denomination and follow its direction.

I pray YRR people will make the right choices.

Plantinga on Evolution in Christianity Today

A recent Christianity Today article gives this quote from Alvin Plantinga:

…if you are a naturalist and think that we have come to be by evolutionary processes, then you will think that the main purpose of our cognitive processes, our mental faculties, is survival and reproductive fitness, not the production of true belief. Evolution doesn't give a rip about whether your beliefs are true. It only cares whether or not your actions are adaptive, whether they contribute to your fitness. From the point of view of evolution together with naturalism, you wouldn't expect that our faculties would be really adjusted to truth or aimed at truth. They would just be aimed at fitness.

But if this is true, if our minds are aimed at mere survival, not at truth, then it's not probable that our minds should be reliable—that is, produce an appropriate preponderance of true over false beliefs; and if that is so, then one who believes both naturalism and evolution should reject the thought that our minds are reliable. But that's a crippling position to be in. Nietzsche is among the people who have suggested this problem. Some contemporary philosophers—Thomas Nagel, for example—have voiced the same worry, and so did Darwin himself.

This is not the first time Plantinga has addressed evolution in Christianity Today. Other articles can be found here.

What I find most interesting about Plantinga’s argument is the way it reduces evolutionary naturalism to it logical end: the deconstruction of the human intellect.

Evolutionary naturalism is the belief that a natural process not guided by any outside personal force produced life in all its complexity. Naturalism is worth attacking on several fronts (see articles here, here and here), but Plantinga may have the best approach.

Without God we are truly lost.


(Other takes on the relevant arguments can be found here and here.)

The Canons of Dort

I believe that the Canons of Dort are true. This is a statement that came out the Synod of Dort, held from 1618-1619. The Canons of Dort outline the system of theology known today as the “five points of Calvinism.” The problem I have with most “five-point Calvinists” is that the Canons of Dort contain much more than five points. Many explanations of the TULIP (total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace and the perseverance of the saints) are gross simplifications of the Canons of Dort.


[This is especially true of explanations given by those who oppose Calvinism. It is easier to knock down a straw man than it is to knock down a real man, and so it is easier to criticize an oversimplified Calvinism that the more robust form.]

Some of those who teach the “five points” leave out some of the quotes below:

This death of God's Son is the only and entirely complete sacrifice and satisfaction for sins; it is of infinite value and worth, more than sufficient to atone for the sins of the whole world… This death is of such great value and worth for the reason that the person who suffered it is--as was necessary to be our Savior--not only a true and perfectly holy man, but also the only begotten Son of God, of the same eternal and infinite essence with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Another reason is that this death was accompanied by the experience of God's anger and curse, which we by our sins had fully deserved… Moreover, it is the promise of the gospel that whoever believes in Christ crucified shall not perish but have eternal life… all who are called through the gospel are called seriously.

There is nothing lacking in the payment Christ made for sin. Therefore, when a person tells you that you can be assured of heaven if you repent of your sins and have faith in Christ, he is making a real offer on God’s behalf. There is nothing outside you that keeps you from repenting. If you turn from your sins and trust Christ’s sacrifice to pay for them, you can be saved (John 3:16). It is, in this sense, your choice, and it is a real choice.

This promise, together with the command to repent and believe, ought to be announced and declared without differentiation or discrimination to all nations and people, to whom God in his good pleasure sends the gospel.

We do not look for evidence of seeking or evidence of a changed heart before we share the gospel. Everywhere we go we should share the good news of the kingdom (Mathew 28:18-20), and we should make special trips to as many places as possible (Acts 1:8).

…many who have been called through the gospel do not repent or believe in Christ but perish in unbelief is not because the sacrifice of Christ offered on the cross is deficient or insufficient, but because they themselves are at fault…But all who genuinely believe and are delivered and saved by Christ's death from their sins and from destruction receive this favor solely from God's grace--which he owes to no one--given to them in Christ from eternity… Therefore, all people are conceived in sin and are born children of wrath, unfit for any saving good, inclined to evil, dead in their sins, and slaves to sin; without the grace of the regenerating Holy Spirit they are neither willing nor able to return to God, to reform their distorted nature, or even to dispose themselves to such reform…There is, to be sure, a certain light of nature remaining in man after the fall, by virtue of which he retains some notions about God, natural things, and the difference between what is moral and immoral, and demonstrates a certain eagerness for virtue and for good outward behavior. But this light of nature is far from enabling man to come to a saving knowledge of God and conversion to him--so far, in fact, that man does not use it rightly even in matters of nature and society. Instead, in various ways he completely distorts this light, whatever its precise character, and suppresses it in unrighteousness. In doing so he renders himself without excuse before God.

God elects, but men are responsible. All of us would reject God’s command to repent and believe if God did not do a special work in our hearts. We need new hearts to repent, but when we do not repent, we are doing exactly what we want to do. We do what we want to do, and we are responsible for our choice.

What, therefore, neither the light of nature nor the law can do, God accomplishes by the power of the Holy Spirit, through the Word or the ministry of reconciliation. This is the gospel about the Messiah, through which it has pleased God to save believers, in both the Old and the New Testament.

God’s saves the elect through the preaching of the word (Romans 10:14-15). The Holy Spirit does not act to give men new hearts without this preaching.

In this life believers cannot fully understand the way [God’s giving of a new heart] occurs… this divine grace of [God’s giving of a new heart] does not act in people as if they were blocks and stones; nor does it abolish the will and its properties or coerce a reluctant will by force, but spiritually revives, heals, reforms, and--in a manner at once pleasing and powerful--bends it back.

The Canons of Dort allow for a doctrine of persuasive action. God does in some sense persuade men to embrace the truth. God does not coerce the will from outside a person. How this is done cannot be fully understood in this life.

...a ready and sincere obedience of the Spirit now begins to prevail where before the rebellion and resistance of the flesh were completely dominant. It is in this that the true and spiritual restoration and freedom of our will consists. Thus, if the marvelous Maker of every good thing were not dealing with us, man would have no hope of getting up from his fall by his free choice, by which he plunged himself into ruin when still standing upright.

God gives some people a new heart. Those people repent of their sins and believe the gospel. Those people also do good works as naturally as sparks fly upward. They are not perfect, but there is a change of heart that results in a new, better life (James 2:14-26).

This is not an exhaustive list of the finer points of the Synod of Dort, but it is a start. I encourage you to study and approve this great statement of faith.

The five points of Calvinism communicate truth, but that truth is incomplete without a careful explanation. All who discuss Calvinism, friend and foe alike, should remember this.