One problem

One of the problems we see, even in our churches, is people pursuing spirituality without Jesus. This is entirely backward. We should pursue Jesus and whatever spirituality follows will be enough.

Frail

Frail children of dust, and feeble as frail,
in thee do we trust, nor find thee to fail;
thy mercies how tender, how firm to the end,
our Maker, Defender, Redeemer, and Friend.

Resources available for those who want them

I have downloaded and listened to (most of) the audio listed below. It's all in MP3 format, so if you live close by me, let me know and I can loan you a copy on a USB “thumb drive” that you can copy to your computer, and from there to your iPod or other device, or even burn onto a CD. Note: These were all given away by their various sources (church, conference, whatever), so there is no copyright issue with my giving them away to you.

• A series of 69 sermons:
• Introduction to the Bible
• Introduction to the Old Testament
• Introduction to the New Testament
• A sermon on each of the 66 books of the Bible.
These sermons (not lectures) were preached over several years by Mark Dever, the pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC.
• The addresses from a conference held in 2006 called Together for the Gospel. Speakers: Mark Dever, Ligon Duncan, C.J. Mahaney, Al Mohler, R.C. Sproul, John MacArthur, John Piper.
• Together for the Gospel conference held in 2008. Same speakers as above, plus Thabiti Anyabwile.

By the time you have asked for it, there may be additional resources on the thumb drive. If it's there, you can copy it!

Legalism

Legalism is seeking to achieve forgiveness from God and acceptance by God through obedience to God.

— C.J. Mahaney

Sermons

In my roaming around the internet for lo! these several years, I have, at times, strayed out of the Southern Baptist fields and found things. One of the things I have found is advice on how to evaluate a sermon. So below are two different methods.

First from a Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod pastor comes his three step evaluation criteria. Apply the steps in this order:

1. Is Jesus mentioned?
2. Is Jesus the subject or the object of the verbs?
3. What are the verbs?

The point is that the content of the sermon should be that the Gospel is what Jesus did, not what we do.

The second, one-step, criterion comes from a Methodist bishop. His is probably logically equivalent to the Lutheran's, but is a great deal more succinct. It goes like this:

• Did Jesus have to die for this to make any kind of sense?

A Relationship with Jesus Christ

“Christianity is not a religion, it's a relationship.” How many times have you heard that? Besides having a dubious perspective on James 1:26-27, this statement is demonstrably incomplete. Every sentient being in the universe has a relationship with every other sentient being in the universe. If nothing else, they have a relationship called “strangers.”

But when someone says some variant of what I quoted above, they mean a human has a relationship with God through the finished work of Christ. Abraham, though he didn't know Jesus by name, had the promise of God concerning his “Seed”, and in believing God, he was called a friend of God. That was their relationship.

But friendship isn't the only relationship people can have with God: “Creation” is an action by a Creator that establishes a relationship between a Creator with some other being.

“But,” you're protesting, “I mean a personal relationship, not an object relationship.” Fair enough. You may not believe it, but the Bible declares that every human, lost or saved, has a relationship with God. You probably agree that saved people have a relationship of love, as child to Father, as slave to Redeemer, as lost to Finder (see Luke 15).

But I'm guessing you don't think about the relationship of the lost to the Father, Son and Spirit. But they have one. The Bible's word for this relationship is "enmity," the relationship between enemies.

• Romans 5:10
• Romans 11:28
• Philippians 3:18

The lost are enemies of Jesus Christ. When stated that way, it's a bit of a shock. But it has the benefit of being true.

So how can anyone be saved? People can be saved because God loves his enemies.

Re: The Shack

Before you read The Shack, watch this.

Updated May 21, 2008

And read this. Here's a quote to whet your appetite:

The way to avoid being [someone who claims to love God, but whose life shows little evidence of the transformation] is not to avoid theology, but to love and to embrace and to pursue it. Those men and women who live most like Christ are not the ones who know the least about Him, but the ones who know Him best. We wish to be Christians who know God deeply and intimately. And to know Him in that way we turn first to the Bible.

God's will among men

Before the Civil War, before his presidency, Abraham Lincoln was known to be a scoffer toward Christianity. I have read elsewhere that when Lincoln went to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to deliver his most famous address, his commitment to Christ was cemented. It was about the time he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, over a year before the Gettysburg Address, that a change began to come over him. Below is a brief meditation by Lincoln, written around the time of the Proclamation. I am posting it here because it reveals a maturity in thinking about the will of God that is rarely heard.

The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party; and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect his purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true; that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power on the minds of the now contestants, he could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun, he could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.

Friendly Fire or Faithful Wounds?

Phil Johnson (from now on, I'll call him Phil), Pyromaniac, has completed a blog series on “contextualization.” To read what I'm talking about so this makes some kind of sense, go here and start reading from the bottom for the first post; to read the comment threads click on the dates; to comment on Pyromaniacs you have to have a Blogger/Google login (but you can read the blog and the comments without registering and you can comment here without registering, though it would be kind if you did so).

I want to comment on the series and its motivations and its implications. I waited until the series was complete before starting — it wasn't intentional, but it turned out to be better, since I've now followed Phil's entire train of thought.

There is an interesting difference between the text of the series proper and the comment threads — including Phil's own comments — that ensued. Please understand that I do not believe for a second Phil has any personal animosity in this; his concern is and ever was for the Gospel.

1. The motivation: I surmise from the timing that Phil started this series as a result of a sermon (about an hour long) and a speech (about an hour and a half long) given by Mark Driscoll (I'll call him Mark from now on), both freely available for download or in the Mars Hill podcast, founding pastor and usual preacher at Mars Hill Church in Seattle (not to be confused with that other Mars Hill). If you only have time for one, pick the speech. In both, Mark makes much of the word “contextualization,” by which he means translating the Gospel into terms that are understandable in the culture in which it is being proclaimed.
2. The problem: As Phil sees it, some have bent “contextualization” in a church planting context or missionary context into a shape that means “syncretism,” the adopting of pagan practices and beliefs as Christian. There are some for whom this is undeniably true, e.g., Doug Pagett or Rob Bell.
3. The implication (or the inference Phil seems to want us to draw): Mark should be avoided because he uses a word others use to mean something different. Further, since Mark's church participates in “worldly practices” as a church (this is the subject of previous blog posts and/or comments), even his detailed declarations of orthodoxy (right Biblical belief) are suspect.
4. The method: Phil begins the discussion by deconstructing (!) the word “contextualize”.
5. More method: Phil disputes the claim by the postmoderns that Paul the apostle in Acts 17 “affirmed” the culture in Athens in any way. Rather, Paul's strategy was to declare the Gospel as a contradiction of their culture and beliefs by “[unpacking] the meaning of Christ's death and resurrection and proclaim it with clarity”.

Analysis

1. There are several things Phil is right about.
1. Phil rightly protests the fact that the definition of “contextualize” is in general difficult to pin down.
2. Deconstruction can be a useful tool in “tearing down strongholds” of unbelief.
3. Using a word that is so wide open to interpretation that it has to be explained every time you say it to know which of the variegated meanings you intend is burdensome on both the speaker and the listener. In deconstructing “contextualize,” Phil is pointing out that many of the folks who are saying it are putting themselves in the position of Humpty Dumpty in Through The Looking Glass: (‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that's all.’).
4. Some of the people saying “contextualization” have bad theology and mean bad things when they use this particular word. The same thing could be said of those who abuse a word like “love.” As the old song says, “We say we love Coca-Cola, and we love mother's hot apple pie.” (Is anyone old enough to recognize that reference?)
5. Much of what goes on in the culture around us is questionable at best. Television, movies, music are all unreliable sources of belief. Or reliable sources of unbelief.
6. No one objects to translating the Gospel into understandable terms so people within a culture are able to understand it. (Phil said this in one of the comment threads.)
2. There are, however, several assumptions that lie under what Phil has said, and it is useful to bring them to the surface for examination .
1. Anyone who uses a word for which the definition across the spectrum of those who use it is fluid or even nebulous is automatically suspect, a kind of “guilt by vocabulary.”

   Evaluation:Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's hard to get it back in. For all of Phil's protest over “contextualize” as a word (along with its conjugates), he continues to use words like “charity” in an in-house manner that won't be understood by those who only think of “charity” in terms the IRS will understand.

2. In protesting that the culture is opposed to the Gospel (which is true of every secular culture) Phil has implicitly embraced the notion that there is such a thing as a “Christian culture.”

   Evaluation: There's no problem with that statement as such. There are, however, two questions we must frequently ask ourselves:

   1. What part of what has grown up in our churches, what part of our culture, is extra-Biblical?
   2. What part of the Christian culture is therefore disposable?

   To ask these questions at once and in an operational and slightly more provocative, way: How has the offense ceased to be the Gospel and started being merely the Christian culture?

   And, to drive on to the next logical question, what does this say about our attitude about the sufficiency of Scripture?

3. Phil's series and the comments of many might be construed by some as friendly fire, i.e., the shooting of one's compatriots and allies. However, I believe Phil is engaged in polemics, the way you argue with your friends over some principle or doctrine you disagree about. I think Phil would get more yardage of substance (to mix metaphors) out of his disagreement with Mark over continuationalism. But in the present discussion, Phil is really talking more about others in the debate, and Mark gets drawn in via guilt by vocabulary (he said, repeating himself).

Thoughts, anyone?

Be Thou my Shield and hiding Place,
That, sheltered by Thy side,
I may my fierce accuser face,
And tell him Thou hast died!

— John Newton