Tag: Theology

Properly Trinitarian

I once heard a pastor say that the key area to check when searching for a church to join was that church’s position on Jesus Christ. I think his reasoning was that consistently throughout history, but particularly in our age, if a church falters, it falters first over the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Point taken, but when I heard it, it struck me as a little wobbly. There are lots of churches which hold a perfectly acceptable understanding of Jesus Christ, but which I think are still a little less than they could be because of a weakly expressed understanding of the Father and the Holy Spirit.

It seems to me that the goal of a church should be what I would call “properly trinitarian.” That is, the life and teaching of the church should reflect the actual relationships within the Trinity. All three Persons of the Godhead are equal, and so they should get equal press from the pulpit and on our minds and lips. Nevertheless, there is a hierarchy of precedence within the trinity, and we ought to seek to reflect that precedence in the way we honor and submit to God.

Humility

One of the blessings we’ve had of late has been to be a part of a home group whose leader truly cares pastorally for his little flock. He’s also a reader, which has been to my advantage, because there are a lot of books in the tradition of my church that I’ve never read before and right now I don’t have the cash to buy them, or the room to store them if I did. And so my deacon has become my librarian.

Recently he had lent me his copy of CJ Mahaney’s book Humility: True Greatness (which I highly recommend to everybody) and was asking me if I could share any thoughts on what I had read with our group. I sent him a few notes on what I might say to the group, but there was one thing that I didn’t find convenient to mention there, so I thought I might share it here:

In reading CJ’s book, it occurred to me that much of what I practice in the name of humility isn’t really humility at all, but self-effacement, which is not the same thing. I still think of myself more highly than I ought – in fact, more highly of myself than of you. But I hide my pride, and glory in the fact that I may have impressed you simultaneously with how humble I appear to be.

The Main Thing

As Peter Lord has said, “the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” And the main thing is Jesus Christ. He is the capstone and the cornerstone; he is the keystone and the touchstone, and every lodestone points to him. He is the rock which followed the children of Israel into the wilderness, and as they came into the promised land, the stone that Joshua raised was Jesus Christ.

He is the pattern by which this world was made, and in the end, all things will be summed up in Him. He is hope of our salvation, and his cross is the only source of our sanctification. He is the gate by which all must enter, and none who enter by any other gate have any hope of eternal life. He is the head into which the church is maturing, and when Samuel set up a stone called Ebenezer, saying “here only by your help have we come,” on that stone was also written, “Jesus Christ.”

Corollaries

* Prayer is more important than Bible reading.
* Prayer is clumsy and ineffective without a sufficient Biblical foundation.

One of my difficulties in prayer the last 7 years or so has been that my theology was changing.

When I was in high school and earlier, I was pretty proficient in prayer. That is to say, I found it relatively easy to pray – frequently, in private or in public, and for relatively sustained periods. But going into ministry school, college, and even seminary, it became increasingly more difficult to pray, because I had a hard time agreeing with the sort of things I was used to saying when I prayed. I would start to pray something and realize I didn’t really think that was the way it worked. To give an example, I might have prayed something highly metaphorical, along the lines of “Lord, I pray that you would pour out your Holy Spirit in my workplace, that your river would flood in and overwhelm them, so that they are consumed by your fire!” And in the middle I would get stuck by the mixed metaphor. Moreover, it would occur to me that I really hadn’t said anything more significant than “Lord, please do something about this,” which of course left me with a very short prayer. It began to occur to me that I really didn’t know what I was talking about and that I therefore really didn’t have anything to say.

As I’ve been becoming more “essentially reformed” in my perspective, my sense of not knowing what I’m talking about has been lifting. I was helped especially last year by teaching Ephesians in my New Testament class. Ephesians has just the sort of big picture perspective that I needed to get into my mind. And that perspective has helped dramatically in my prayer life, as Valerie can attest. But now I have a new problem:

I can again pray now for nearly hours on end, but despite my best efforts, I can really only pray Ephesians.

Evaluating the Baptist proper rituals standard

###The Controversy###
There is a bit of a controversy going on right now, coming mostly from the Baptists, about baptism. I believe the conversation begins with a sermon series by John Piper, though I first learnt of it via Fide-o. Other comments by Jason Robertson (Fide-o) here. John Halton gives us a take from the Lutheran perspective here and here.

Excluding the silliness of those who don’t take baptism and communion very seriously, the argument as I understand it boils down to a plain reassertion of the traditional Baptist position on baptism. Baptists hold to a particular form of baptism: It must be done by immersion; it must be done upon (that is, immediately after) confession of faith. So it rules out sprinkling, and the baptizing of infants. But the tricky part is the position that *only* credal baptism by immersion is acceptable. For Baptists, properly, there are no sacraments, only ordinances (those things which Christ has ordered us to do) – baptism and communion. So the value of doing of those things is not their direct spiritual impact, but the value of obedience. If you didn’t do it the Baptist way, it’s not just a little whoopsie.

This is where Baptists prove that they are still anabaptists – re-baptizers: The argument goes that if you didn’t follow the prescribed ritual, it isn’t that you didn’t do it wrong. You never did it at all. Sprinkled? Unknowingly “christened” in your infancy? It wasn’t obedience; it wasn’t baptism. You’re unbaptized. And unbaptized people can’t take communion. You are officially excommunicated.

And here I got a little theological education. I had been under the impression that to excommunicate was to say, in effect, that the excommunicated was not a Christian. After all, the scripture says to treat such a person as if they were unsaved. Evangelize them, but don’t offer communion. But Frank Turk informs me that you can still be a Christian even while excommunicated. Even though we should treat you like you’re not.

###The Standards###
Regardless, the traditional Baptist position on baptism boils down to these two tenants:

  1. Baptism must follow a specific set of rules in order to be done **right**.
  2. If it wasn’t done **right**, it wasn’t done **at all**.

The first point usually get’s all the attention, but it wouldn’t carry water without the second coming right behind it. Hence John’s Lutheran response: “I *am* baptized! So there!” And yet, you hear constantly all the arguments for the first point, but never even a hint as to how to evaluate the second. Where does it say that if it wasn’t done right, it wasn’t done at all? I don’t know.

I think I have come up with an interesting criteria for evaluating the doctrine on baptism that if it wasn’t done right it wasn’t done at all: by comparing it to other similar rituals and seeing what happens if a similar rule is applied. I have two such in mind: communion and weddings. Continue reading “Evaluating the Baptist proper rituals standard”

Doug Wilson on Roman Catholicism

  1. If the daughter of one of your parishioners desired to marry a committed Roman
    Catholic, would she be marrying “in the Lord?”     She would be marrying inside the
    covenant. She would also be marrying unwisely and sinfully.
  2. John Calvin recognized a distinction between the individual and the institution;
    would you say that the Roman Catholic Church is a true church? (elaborate).     In
    the same way that an adulterous husband is a “true” husband, I would say that Rome is
    a “true” church. But in the same way that this same husband is being untrue, I would
    say that Rome is being untrue. Rome is still covenantally bound to Jesus Christ, and
    consequently she needs to stop cheating on Him. And incidentally, to acknowledge that
    a lying, cheating husband is still legally married is not to approve of the lying and
    cheating.
  3. Would you list some areas of deficiency within the Roman Catholic Church? Let me state it more strongly. These are not areas of deficiency—they are areas of
    covenantal rebellion. I would include on this list the idolatry of the Mass, Mariolatry, the
    worship of images, the papacy, their system of works/righteousness, purgatory, and
    much more.

This is strong language, I know, but I found it particularly helpful in dealing with the dilemma that Roman Catholicism is to Protestants. On the one hand, I think it is impossible to say with a former pastor of mine that the RCC is a “false religion.” A false religion knows nothing of Jesus Christ, or faith, or repentance. A false religion can’t sign on to the apostle’s creed, let alone the Nicene creed. yet the RCC happily does all of these and goes on to beckon protestants to return come in out of the rain. At the same time, Roman Catholicism partakes in all these creepy systems that seem to be totally at odds with the glorious lightness of the gospel. What do you call this thing? Covenantal rebellion might just be a good fit.

Catch-all

This is sort of a catch-all of observations on being unemployed. I suppose I could tie it all together into a cohesive essay, but the effort would take a few hours, and those two hours are intimidating enough at the moment to persuade me not even to begin. Thus:

We’ve pretty much decided at this point to move to Knoxville. The reason being that I’m not finding any work here, and that in Knoxville, at least, we can mooch off of relatives rather than testing the eviction laws in the state of North Carolina. The “pretty much” part means that there is still the option of something unexpected happening in the Charlotte area. We’re being strictly mercenary about the whole thing. We go where the money goes. But frankly, in the greater Charlotte metropolitan area, the money has already gone. I think it has something to do with the fact that Charlotte is primarily a banking town. Nearly every company I’ve done any serious research on has been in a perpetual hiring freeze/attrition mode. Quite literally nobody is hiring.

Actually, when looking from outside our situation, the “nobody is hiring meme” is quite humorous. Continue reading “Catch-all”

Mystic

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m a mystic. But I’ve discovered that word makes some people, particularly non-charismatic evangelicals, nervous, so let me explain. By “mystic” I mean a person whose devotional life is characterized by intensely affecting spiritual experiences. These experiences may be in the realm of simple theological insight, or they may take more literary forms. At times they may cross over into the realm of prophecy; that is, dreams, visions, words, and phrases laden with theological context.

From a natural perspective, mysticism can come from two sources. It can be personal, or social: On the social spectrum, mysticism can be presented as something to aspire to. Some Christian traditions – the Pentecostals, the Orthodox, some revivalist traditions – present mysticism in such a way that it seems to be the only way to have a properly Christian devotional life. At the other extreme, some traditions, particularly the Reformed and Protestants as a whole, seem to perceive mysticism at best as something useless, at worst as something suspiciously unchristian, smacking of Papism, adding to scripture, even beckoning the demonic. On the personal spectrum, a person could be naturally predisposed to have certain kinds of experiences, or they could find themselves completely unable to do so, or they could be somewhere in between. (Please note that, for the sake of simplicity, I’m lumping what a person thinks about these things in with the social scale.)

The difficulty, of course, comes when a person’s natural predisposition doesn’t align very well with the tradition they find themselves in. Continue reading “Mystic”

So I Shouldn’t Hear Voices?

Alexander Jordan and I have been having a discussion about how to know God’s will for your life, in which he has been proving himself to be pleasant, helpful, humble, and above all, thorough, while I have shown myself to be reactionary and emotional, responding to the feeling I get about the whole idea, rather than the actual arguments in his posts.

In my defense, I have only to say that he has been the blogger, carefully planning his series, and I have been the commenter, responding in the moment. He also seems to have the advantage of a great deal more time in which to structure highly advanced explanations of his position while I am limited to responding quickly in slap-dash fashion. Nevertheless, I wanted to bring the discussion to the attention of my readers and see if I could get some opinion.

Jordan has been describing his view of knowing God’s will as contra writers like John Eldridge, which puts me at a bit of a disadvantage, because I’ve only read a little of John Eldridge, and usually I tend to agree with the general vicinity of where he’s going, but very little with how he gets there. So there’s a danger, I think, on both our parts, of shooting past each other. This is especially true since I have already confessed to not reading Jordan’s posts as thoroughly as I ought. Nevertheless, here’s what I believe is the position he’s advocating: Continue reading “So I Shouldn’t Hear Voices?”

A Single Line

that caught my attention:

“If death is to be approached as martyrdom” he says, in the context of dying of old age, as if that were an assumption that everyone had already thought of. We proceed from there:

If death is to be approached as martyrdom, i.e., as an opportunity to witness to our faith, what do services do we require or request of our healthcare especially at end-of-life? how can that goal be realized in the greater Chrisitian community, i.e., the Church. For example, individuals lifetime spending on healthcare is concentrated to an astounding degree on the final decade of life. Is that a Christian response to healthcare?

One could say that this single perspective could change your whole view on medicine at the end of life…