Dismembering the Church

My church recently had a “membership” drive. The goal was to get people to sign up to the church roll, then stand up in front of the congregation and proclaim their membership through what they called a “church covenant”.

I’ve been in my local church for 12 years. I didn’t sign. I won’t.

It’s not because my fellow Christians do not know I’m one of them; they do. And I trust it’s not because I’m passive, uncommitted or uninvolved with church life. I’m in there serving, and I doubt there’s anyone in my congregation who couldn’t tell you that. (If there is, that will be corrected the next time they give me the pulpit, which they do fairly frequently.) And it’s not because they have found I am caught up in some particular sin or wickedness. No one has accused me of that — though I’d admit to being your garden variety hypocrite, in the sense that I continually fall short of the level of holiness God deserves from me. But no one so far has called me “hard hearted” or accused me of some crime.

Days of Confusion

“God is not a God of confusion but of peace.”

“The Lord your God will give them over to you and throw them into great confusion.”

If you pull up the word confusion [mᵊhûmâ, also translated “panic”] in an online concordance, you will quickly discover all but one of the twelve Old Testament references attribute confusion to God. The example I’ve cited above, in which Moses promises the children of Israel victory over their enemies provided they remain faithful to YHWH, is only one of many.

A Word of Warning

Even 99-44/100% is not enough

Jonathan Noyes and Greg Koukl at Stand to Reason got together recently to produce an excellent post on the subject of the inerrancy of scripture. It’s lengthy, but well worth the time it takes to work through. Full credit to the apologists for doing their job. It’s severely needed these days, especially among the younger generation in our churches.

But in setting out why inerrancy matters and what the scripture claims about itself, Noyes and Koukl include a word of warning about the inerrancy argument that I think is worth taking to heart: they believe the Lord never intended us to debate inerrancy with the skeptics of our generation.

Anonymous Asks (362)

“Does the Bible teach that you should ‘be yourself’?”

I can think of at least one example in scripture of a person who was better off being himself than trying to be something he was not. Saul clothed David with his own armor to fight Goliath, but David was unwilling to rely on protection he had never personally tested in battle. He left the best armor in the kingdom behind and used a sling and stones instead of a sword.

We all know the results of that encounter. David being David got the job done.

The Commentariat Speaks (33)

A Bible student on Reddit inquires, “Why does the Apostle Paul write in such long sentences?”

This reader is obviously paying attention when he gets into the word of God, and good for him. My brother and I were discussing this issue only a few weeks back, as it’s something we too have noticed over the years. Some of Paul’s sentences are absolutely legendary. They go on for days.

No King in Israel (15)

The practice of “putting out a fleece” is not widespread among evangelicals these days, at least as far as I know. You’re probably familiar with the phrase though. We might call it the superstitious interpretation of events as divine guidance in an area where God has already revealed his will.

So you ask for a specific bit of circumstantial evidence, and if the thing you have prayed for happens, you interpret it as God’s direction to move forward with your plans. “Lord, if it rains tomorrow, then I will know you want me to go to Bible College even though my parents want me to go to university.” “Lord, if the phone rings in the next five minutes, I’ll know I should leave my husband.” That sort of thing.

This chapter is where some Christians get the mistaken notion that the fleece trick might actually work. It worked for Gideon.

Too Hot to Handle: The Future Church

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

We’ve written here on many occasions about current trends within Christendom and what they say about North American Christians. Last week, for instance, we did a piece on giving by millennials. But I wouldn’t say we do an inordinate amount of speculating about the future, because while we can see from scripture where both the world and the people of God are ultimately headed, it’s difficult (if not impossible) to plot exactly where we are on that timeline.

Tom: Still, Carey Nieuwhof is willing to go out on a limb and tell us where he thinks the Church is headed in the next few years in his article “10 Predictions About The Future Church”.

What did you think of Carey’s musings, Immanuel Can?

Tolerating Evil: Moral Relativism and the Slippery Pole to Hell

This is the third in my series on relativism.

I began by pointing out the two types of relativism, epistemic and moral, and showed that epistemic relativism is irrational. After that, I did a post showing that whether we are thinking of science or religious belief, we really know things only probabilistically … and that this is okay — that high-certainty belief is much better than low-certainty belief, and that in any case, being a Christian means knowing God both as an evidentiary probability and as a relational Person, which means with pretty great certainty; better, even, than a scientist can offer. So it is true that truth exists, and it is true that we can know that truth exists.

So far, so good.

The Religious Flesh

“It is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring. For this is what the promise said: ‘About this time next year I will return, and Sarah shall have a son.’ ”

There is a good reason fruit is often used as a metaphor for children, both in the Bible and elsewhere. You don’t need to be a geneticist to observe that the fruit of a tree carries in it the nature of the tree on which it grows, and expresses that nature to the world in the next generation. Or at least it should. Real-world results with human beings vary, as we have all observed.

Turnabout being fair play, perhaps you will excuse me using children as a metaphor for fruit. Well, metaphorical fruit at least.

Always Struggling

“… always struggling on your behalf in his prayers, that you may stand mature and fully assured in all the will of God.”

Our New Testament preserves four letters Paul wrote during his first Roman imprisonment. From these epistles and from the last chapter of the book of Acts, we learn that in Rome the authorities allowed him to stay “by himself” under guard for two years in what was probably a rented dwelling, awaiting trial. There, he was able to receive visitors and preach and teach unhindered.

During this period he had both “fellow prisoners” and “fellow workers”. Epaphras was one of the former.

Anonymous Asks (361)

“Does marriage hinder your relationship with God?”

Hmm, I suspect somebody has been reading 1 Corinthians 7. “Those who marry will have worldly troubles.” “The married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided.” “The married woman is anxious about worldly things, how to please her husband.” “I want you to be free from anxieties.”

If the apostle Paul is correct — and several decades of observation strongly suggest to me that he is — then, yes, it’s certainly possible that any given marriage can become an impediment to one’s service for the Lord, peppering life with distractions and putting you in the position of trying to serve two masters, which we know is impossible. I don’t believe it has to, but it can.

Milking a Metaphor

I wrapped up Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections the day before yesterday, and I should probably comment on its final few chapters while they are still fresh in my mind.

This book has been a stimulating read from many different angles. The posts it has generated vary as wildly in subject matter — eschatology, authenticity, assurance, the witness of the Holy Spirit and the distinction between natural and moral perfections — as they vary in my level of agreement with Edwards’ observations and assertions.

I’m fine with that. A good, solid, biblical disagreement concentrates the mind better than indifferent assent.

No King in Israel (14)

The angel of the Lord called Gideon a mighty man of valor. Considering that he said it to a man hiding from the Midianites in a winepress, perhaps he meant it tongue in cheek. Then again, many centuries later he would make Simon the coward into a rock and Saul the persecutor of Christians into the foremost teacher and prophet in Christian history. The Lord’s choices invariably appear counterintuitive by human standards.

But even mighty men of valor are not invulnerable. Many have fallen before their time. The key to Gideon’s success was this: the Lord sent him, and the Lord promised to be with him. That’s all God’s servants ever need.

Too Hot to Handle: Religious Freedom, Limited

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

The Independent reports that Belgium’s Walloon region is the latest territory to ban kosher and halal meats. Denmark, Switzerland and New Zealand all got there first, in each case turning a deaf ear to the protests of Jewish and Islamic minorities.

Tom: That’s fine with me. We’ve already established in the U.S. and Canada that there are reasonable limits on religious freedoms, though these have been applied more frequently (and certainly more visibly) against Christians than against religious minorities recently.

Relativism: Facts, Foolishness and Faith

“Philip found Nathanael and said to him, ‘We have found him of whom Moses in the Law and also the Prophets wrote — Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.’ Nathanael said to him, ‘Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?’ Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’ ”

In my last post, I talked about relativism. I pointed out that there are two kinds — epistemic relativism and moral relativism — and that they need separate treatment, because they deal with very different issues. Then I started with epistemic relativism, the doubting of the existence of any facts, and showed how it is completely irrational.

The New Testament Church

Thanks to the minor miracle of digitization, I have been listening to a series of 40-plus year old sermons my father preached to a congregation that had just moved into its own building, and in which there were at least a dozen recent converts to the faith. Also present were no small number of believers whose church experiences had been defined by the traditions of several different denominational backgrounds.

A disparate bunch indeed.

All Heat No Light

Sometimes the difference between making yourself clearly understood and leaving yourself open to wild misinterpretation can be measured in minutes.

Picture this. You’re on social media last week checking out the feeds of a couple of evangelicals you follow, and you come across this exchange:

Do you assume Doug Wilson is urging Americans to go to war with Iran in solidarity with Israel? Maybe.

Anonymous Asks (360)

“Should Bible translations use gender-inclusive language?”

It’s axiomatic that God has poured out his love to both sexes. He sent his Son into the world to die for men and women alike. Women were prominent in serving and caring for the Lord Jesus. They were prominent at the cross, when many of the Lord’s male disciples ran away. They were certainly visible and active at the tomb of the Lord Jesus, and were first to declare he had risen from the dead.

Still, the Bible is written in the language of its time, and the pronouns and nouns in our English translations do not always reflect the theological realities behind them.

Natural and Moral

I usually blow through books like the west wind. Not so with Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections, which I began back in February of this year, and which I continue to labor with. Four months later, I’m not even halfway through it. For me, that’s an appalling performance.

That confessed, I simply can’t go any faster. I keep running into ideas I have to stop, meditate on, and (often) write about. Here’s another I think is worthwhile.

A Sharp Distinction

Edwards draws a sharp distinction between what he calls God’s “natural perfections” and his “moral perfections”. In the former category, he includes power, knowledge, eternity and immutability, among others; in the latter, justice, righteousness, truth, goodness, grace, and the like, which he sums up in the word “holiness”. He then observes that unregenerate men and women may be able to appreciate the former divine perfections but not the latter. He concludes that a love for the divine due to its moral beauty and sweetness is the starting point and source of all holy emotions.

No King in Israel (13)

How would you feel if you had just seen God and escaped alive?

The modern believer has difficulty putting himself in the sandals of an oppressed Israelite whose family worshiped Baal, and whose only impressions of the God of Israel came from oral history: of his nation’s deliverance from Egyptian slavery, its sojourn in the wilderness and its miraculous conquest of Canaan. Gideon had stories of wonderful deeds recounted by the elders of his people. Meanwhile, Christians thousands of years later are habituated to platform messages in which the word “Abba” is alleged to give us license to crawl into Daddy’s lap for a good cuddle.

Ugh. It’s a frivolous and childish view of God, and it’s not the least bit like what Gideon experienced when the angel of the Lord appeared to him.