Fear and Trembling

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I am currently reading a book by Tony Jones called The New Christians: Dispatches From The Emergent Frontier (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008). I understand what Jones is reacting to, and I share many of his concerns, but some of his “dispatches” give me a splitting headache when I think about them. Take for example Dispatch 13, delivered after a brief discussion of Stanley Fish: Emergents believe that truth, like God, cannot be definitively articulated by finite human beings (p. 153). So, Tony, is that a definitive truth? It seems that you cannot escape a truth claim even when you claim to have no truth claims. The notion is self-defeating (or self-refuting ). If Dispatch 13 is false, then there is some truth. If Dispatch 13 is true, then it proves itself to be false, because it is a definitively true statement. He states the notion another way on page 154: "…“truth” is not the hinge on which the biblical narrative turns." There’s only one response to that from some...

I have spent many hours contemplating the relationship between faith and works. I have found it difficult to establish this relationship in my mind. Christ often speaks in such a way as to warn us that works are the basis of our judgment before Him (e. g. Matthew 16:24-26 and Matthew 25 ). Jesus also speaks of the fact that we are justified by faith ( Luke 18:9-14 , John 5:24 , 6:47 ). I have found one illustration to be helpful to me, and I have come to the place where I accept the truth behind the illustration completely. I am taking this example from a series of lectures by John H. Gerstner on sale from Ligonier Ministries here . Another example of Gerstner’s writing on this subject is here . The relationship between faith and works in church history can be summarized by three equations: FAITH + WORKS = SALVATION FAITH – WORKS = SALVATION FAITH = SALVATION + WORKS I’ll take these in turn. FAITH + WORKS = SALVATION This is a summary of the traditional Roman Catholic approach. ...

Matt Chandler over at the Resurgence has an interesting post here . He uses the Ned Flanders character from the Simpson’s show as an embodiment of the things he is troubled by in evangelicalism / fundamentalism. As a guy that was raised in a fundamentalist church, I identified with much of he post. Here’s an excerpt: …For years before I began to pastor a church I knew just what the problem was in American evangelical culture, and it wasn't sin, it was church people, it was Ned and his friends. The "frozen chosen" I think I have heard them called. They were old, tired, non missional, unmoved by the gospel, and thought the Left Behind movies were a great idea. They had driven our precious Lord's bride into the ground and deserved at least to be mocked in our young, hip, missional conversations and sermons and maybe even killed in some sort of Old Testament fashion… It's a strange thing to wake up and find out you are the very thing you hated and rebelled against t...

This is a first of several posts on Mark Dever’s new book, The Gospel and Personal Evangelism . I found this book to be clearly written, easy to understand, and extremely helpful. He addresses several key issues with respect to evangelism’s how and why. One of the best quotes follows. “None of us ever has a complete understanding of the gospel, but we must have a clear idea of the basics of our message, and we must be clear in our expression of them. If there is a likely misunderstanding, we should address it. We should speak in such a way as to be understood. Contextualization is the big theological word for this.” – Mark Dever in The Gospel and Personal Evangelism , Crossway Books: Wheaton, Illinois, 2007, p. 63. (Emphasis his.) Emergent “Contextualization” is one of those hot-button words these days, and the idea figures greatly in debates over the emergent church conversation . It’s really not as complicated as many think; it’s just common sense. Different people from diff...

"If there is no bad news there cannot be any good news. The good news is deliverance from the bad news. We are all born on the road to destruction. The good news is that we can be delivered from it. If you do not believe you are on the way to hell, how can you be interested in the good news of deliverance from it? Look at “salvation” today. It is freedom from life’s frustrations. We are saved from our narrowness and anxieties. We learn to live with doubts and fears. We take pills to relieve our pressures. That’s our gospel.” - John H. Gerstner Gerstner has been helpful to me because of his direct, hard to miss-understand, way of speaking. I wish he was still around to rub our noses in the truth. See his work on inerrancy , justification by faith alone , dispensationalism , and Jonathan Edwards .

Certainty is a noun describing what is “established as true or sure” ( The New American Webster Handy College Dictionary ). Large segments of our society see this freedom from doubt as the height of arrogance. We are constantly told, especially with respect to religion, that we cannot know the truth, communicate the truth, or expect others to follow the truth we know. It is refreshing to find a book like The Truth War by John MacArthur (Nashville, TN: Nelson Books, 2007). This book is really a short commentary on the book of Jude. MacArthur is an able polemicist, and his writing is at its best when he forcefully conveys a point. He begins by expounding on the ground of truth, how we can know anything at all: Of course, God and truth are inseparable. Every thought about the essence of truth – what makes it “true,” and how we can possibly know anything for sure, quickly moves us back to God … it is not particularly surprising when someone who repudiates God rejects truth as well. ...

John Piper is finishing a book: The Future of Justification: A Response to N.T. Wright. Expected publish date is in November. The last chapter of the book is posted here . I look forward with interest.

I still follow with trepidation the discussions of penal substitutionary atonement coming from the emergent church conversation. This is my attempt to establish a working theory after my last bit of polemics . For a theory to be valid, it must take into account all of the particular facts the Bible gives us. It gives us facts, arranged in prepositional sentences. It uses words to communicate. Everyone who has ever told me that words were inadequate because of my own particular biases and culture has used words to tell me that. Their argument seems difficult for a small town boy from West Tennessee to follow. Now that we have established logic in a back-handed fashion, let’s move on to the traditional understandings of a penal substitutionary atonement. Most of the theologians I have ever read talk of the active and passive obedience of Christ. His active obedience, detailed in the gospels, involved following all of the particular requirements of the law. It enables Christ to expiate o...

I have trouble following the conversation in the blogosphere of late regarding “penal substitution.” N. T. Wright especially confuses me. It may well be that some of what I am about to write is due to this inability to understand. I do not attempt to explain my terms here. If you want my attempt to communicate the gospel simply, please see my other posts here and here . Penal substitutionary atonement is the fact that Christ took the credit for our sins, suffered God’s wrath for them, and earned righteousness that can be credited to us. The atonement cannot be described without explaining the idea that Christ died for our sins, and that very idea conveys most of the content of penal substitution. How could anyone possibly think that those of us who hold penal substitution as the proper understanding of the facts of the atonement ignore the gospels, the Old Testament, or any other part of Scripture? Christ told us that He was the theme of the Bible in Luke 24:27 (cf. 24:13-35) . Did H...

Many contemporary believers do not feel the need to have a rational basis for their Christian faith. For example, Robert Webber’s comment in Ancient-Future Faith (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1999, p. 185): …Christianity is not provable outside itself through the scientific method. One must come to the Christian faith believing that it is true and embrace it as such without any dependence on data outside the faith. Christianity requires trust, a believing embrace, a willingness to step inside its story apart from any dependence on historical, scientific, or rational persuasion. So, according to Webber, Christianity requires a blind leap of faith for entrance. I always think of the Indiana Jones movie where he must jump across a chasm not knowing whether there is anything to catch him as he falls. When he jumps, he falls onto a bridge that was hidden from view by exquisite camouflage. Is that kind of leap the requirement, or are there reasons to believe what we believe? Let’s l...

I’ve spent the last few days reading a book from some in the Emergent Church conversation. I’ll identify and comment on this book over the next few weeks, but I did want to record a strong negative impression I have on my first skim of the book. I am becoming convinced that, no matter how strongly they say otherwise, many who identify themselves with emergent deny that propositional truth can be expressed and communicated with words. Of course, they are using words and sentences to explain their views while they are saying words and sentences don't work. This makes their assertions questionable upfront. But the implications of this line of thinking are massive. The gospel is by definition good news. If it’s good news, then it is news. News is made up of facts. Facts are propositions, where we link nouns and verbs with objects to convey information about reality. I hope we are not working ourselves into a mental condition such that we are becoming so mentally allergic to proposition...

Another day, another issue in a long line of issues. First I have to struggle through predestination a few years ago. It’s hard for a Southern Baptist to deal with this one. Next it’s an approach to apologetics that I had not heard of before, pre-suppositional. Norman Geisler and R. C. Sproul , my two favorite authors in college, didn’t take that approach. Still quite sure I don’t accept it myself, so I’ll stick with classical. Next it's theonomy. At least that was easy to decide against; Baptist heritage is nice sometimes. Now it’s a new hermeneutic, a new way of interpreting the Bible. Now I'm supposed to think that any interpretation of the Scripture is just my own interpretation. I’m supposed to buy that anytime I think that I have determined what the Bible actually says, I am as far from what the text says as possible. I’m supposed to get an interpretation of any given passage from what amounts to group consensus on the issue. It sounds like truth by perspective. That’s e...

A new book I’ve started on this past week has this quote: “…the vast majority of ‘Christians’ that I have encountered arbitrarily dismiss this generation as ‘lost’ or, worse, unworthy of their time and attention … From what I see in the Gospels, Jesus preached to society from within the culture of his day, not from above it as the Pharisees did. In my opinion, the majority of churches today are more concerned with converting one cultural image into their own cultural image, with the implication that theirs is ‘Christian’ (where no one drinks alcohol or listens to secular music and everyone dresses in business attire), while those cultures which differ from their view are not ... this is definitely pharisaical. Unfortunately, I find this sums up the majority of the church world all too well.” – Crash, a Christian who owns tattoo parlors, is immersed in the culture of his community; the quote above is from The Radical Reformission by Mark Driscoll I have been reading and thoroughly enjo...

This is my final installment on Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis. This time I wanted to address the approach to truth I see hovering in the background of this book. Bell writes: When you hear people say they are just going to tell you what the Bible means, its not true. They are telling you what they think it means. They are giving you their opinions about the Bible … / The problem is, it is not true. / I’m actually giving you my opinion, my interpretation of what it says. And the more I insist that I am giving you the objective truth of what it really says, the less objective I am actually being. It sounds as if Bell has decided that we can no longer find the one true meaning of a passage of Scripture because we all have different perspectives on the passage. We all bring “baggage” and “agendas” with us that cloud our interpretation. This is a massive change in the way we interpret the Bible (hermeneutics). It has debilitating consequences. It is based on a philosophical perspective ...

I’m still reading Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell. I wanted to address another comment this week, quoted below. For the next several hundred years, there was a lot of discussion in the Christian community about which books were considered Scripture and which books weren’t. But it wasn’t until the 300s that what we know as the sixty-six books of the Bible were actually agreed upon as the Bible. This is part of the problem with continually insisting that one of the absolutes of the Christian faith must be a belief that “Scripture alone” is our guide. It sounds nice, but it is not true. In reaction to abuses by the church, a group of believers during a time called the Reformation claimed that we only need the authority of the Bible. But the problem is that we got the Bible from the church voting on what the Bible even is. So when I affirm the Bible as God’s Word, in the same breath I have to affirm that when those people voted, God was somehow present, guiding them to do what they did. When peop...

Partly out of a new found interest in the Emergent Church Conversation, I have spent much time of late studying, thinking and praying about the relationship of The Bible and church tradition. I find many of the perspectives in the Emergent Conversation to be troubling. The novel ideas and teachings tend toward, or even cross the line into, false teaching. This is done in two primary ways. Tradition is sometimes seen as authoritative above or beyond the Bible. Or, traditional interpretations of the Bible are ignored in favor of new insights developed by a group of believers during a discussion. I select The Bible as the sole authority for faith and life because I believe it contains the teachings of the Apostles. It expresses them in truth, with no mixture of error. It is logical. Christ, the Son of God, promised the Holy Spirit to the Apostle’s to bring His teaching to remembrance (John 14:26). The apostles’ teaching was written down, either by them or by those close to them (Luke 1:1-...

I am reading a new book this week: Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell. I find it an interesting read, with many perspectives I share (more on that later). There are a few aspects of the thoughts expressed that bother me, however. I address the first one in this post. It has to do with what the Bible is about. Rob says: …this is why the Bible loses its power for so many communities. They fall into the trap of thinking that the Bible is just about things that happened a long time ago. / But the Bible is about today. / These stories are our stories. They are alive and active and teaching us about our lives in our world, today. These words express a very dangerous perspective on salvation, our right standing before God. Let me clarify. The Bible is clear on its intent (Luke 1:4, John 21:24, Luke 24:25-26). The intent is for us to know certain facts about things that happened in the past and their bearing on us today. There is a reason for this. Our salvation; our right standing before God, eternal ...