Different Fruit

I'm finishing prepping for our Thursday evening service (verse-by-verse through the Old Testament), and I ran across this gem from Jon Courson in his commentary on Deuteronomy 20:19-20

When the Israelites went to battle, their axes were not to fly indiscriminately. That is, they were not to cut down any fruit-bearing tree. This is a good word for us because in our battle against principalities and powers, against the devil, our Adversary, if we’re not careful, we can cut down trees that bear fruit, other believers, denominations, or churches who might have an entirely different flavor than ours, but from which we can be nourished. Wise is the believer who says, “Lord, help me to see what I can glean from that group, what I can learn from those people.”

So much of what I’ve learned has been from trees that, in my own fleshly tendency, I would have chopped down. Wouldn’t it be something if all the energy we expend analyzing ministry and criticizing Christians was harnessed against the real enemy? Yes, there’s a war to wage, a battle to fight. And some trees are apostate indeed. But others have fruit that we can glean, through which we can grow, from which we can gain strength for the battle against the enemy of our souls.

Courson, J. (2005). Jon Courson's application commentary : Volume one : Genesis-Job (596). Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson.

The French Connection

Notice, in this article, the difference between the Pro-Israeli demonstration and the Pro-“Palestinian” one.

Villify ‘Em All!

Right off the bat, let me state I’m no huge Gary De Mar fan.  He’s pretty solid as long as he stays on the topic of history – specifically American history as viewed through a Biblical lens – but he has a tendency to veer off into tirades about eschatology, pontificating on the merits of postmillennialism and preterism.

He’s perfectly entitled to so so; postmil and (non-Hymanaean) preterism are both theologically orthodox positions.  And I suppose I’d get more out of his stuff if he’d come up with newer, better arguments; but he doesn’t, and I just don’t want to read the same hackneyed platitudes over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again and again and again and again…and again…

Look, Gary, I get it.  Margaret Macdonald invented the entire rapture thing out of whole cloth, Edward Irving was a boob, Darby was a flake, Paul really didn’t mean what he sure did seem to think he meant when he talked about us not being appointed to wrath which is to come…etc.

Gotcha.

Move along, or come up with something else – something which isn’t so easily answered and which hasn’t already been dealt with a googolplex times over.

Sheesh.  It’s enough to make me think postmil preterists don’t have much else to offer the discussion.

But that having been said, so long as Gary refrains from knocking over pretrib straw men, hastily righting them, and then gleefully knocking them over once more, he’s actually got some good stuff to say.

Enter today’s article, Scapegoating Christians: The New Nazism. In it he uses John Sack’s very disturbing book An Eye For An Eye to point out the somewhat obvious parallels between the progressive and programmatic dehumanization and eventual destruction of political enemies in totalitarian states (like Nazi Germany or Communist Russia) and the hauntingly similar process already at work to marginalize and disenfranchise Christians in today’s America:

The final tactic is to disenfranchise the opposition by keeping them from making a living or holding positions of authority in government, law, and education. The Communists understood the strategic necessity of policing every open gate to the institutions where ideas can get out to the masses without the sanction of the State. Leon Trotsky stated the following in 1936: “The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced with a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.” If a person does not follow the Party line, he cannot get a Party job. As government increases its power and reach, there will be more government jobs that Christians will not be permitted to hold if religious ideology becomes a prerequisite for employment.

Guillermo Gonzalez, who received his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Washington and did his post-doctoral research at the University of Texas, Austin, and the University of Washington, received fellowships, grants, and awards from NASA, the University of Washington, Sigma XI, and the National Science Foundation, authored nearly 70 peer-reviewed scientific articles, and has had his work has been cited over 1500 times in the scientific literature, was denied tenure (also see here and here) by Iowa State University because he had the audacity as a scientist to question naturalistic evolution. He is not alone.

It’s an interesting read.

Semi-Pelagians Unite!

Sorry for the blogpost title. Some of our more Reformed fellows (e.g., Mark "Blankety-blank" Driscoll) like to equate Arminianism with Semi-Pelagianism - which is exactly equivalent with equating their Calvinism with fatalistic determinism.

So of course, I couldn't resist.

Anyway.

In what can only be described as a tremendous inversion of normal reality, Christianity Today actually published a good and edifying article.

You can imagine how long it took for me to recover; I think the shock of it all nearly did me in.

Again: anyway.

Roger Olson wrote a great article, Don't Hate Me Because I'm Arminian which I think bears reading and re-reading.

My blog-friend Vee clued me in to this article in her blogpost; it was her quote from the article which convinced me when I read it to carefully read & consider the fuller article:

Powell was concerned about my rather firm Arminian beliefs. One day he took me aside and said, “Roger, you should know that Arminianism has usually led to liberal theology.” Like many Reformed theologians, he believed that an Arminian emphasis on free will grants too much power to humanity and therefore contains a humanistic impulse. While I appreciated his implicit admonition, I knew from my own experience that this was not entirely true. Ever since, I have strived to prove that Arminian theology and an evangelical cutting edge can be combined comfortably.

[…]A turning point in my spiritual and theological pilgrimage occurred at a funeral. Aunt Margaret’s Christian Reformed pastor in Kanawha, Iowa, preached one of the most evangelical sermons I had ever heard. He challenged all present to give their lives to Jesus Christ just as Margaret had. Cognitive dissonance finally broke out into complete rebellion against the anti-Calvinist polemics I had heard from Pentecostal leaders and teachers. While I could not agree with all five points of the Calvinist TULIP—especially unconditional election, limited atonement, and irresistible grace—I knew that the tent of authentic evangelical Christianity was bigger and broader than I had been led to believe. That conviction strengthened as I drank deeply at the wells of evangelical Reformed theology throughout my seminary and university studies.

Even as I retained my Arminian beliefs, my evangelical mind expanded and deepened as I read Reformed theologians such as G. C. Berkouwer, Bernard Ramm, Donald Bloesch, J. I. Packer, and Francis Schaeffer. They showed me new dimensions of the doctrines of God and of salvation that had been missing or obscured in the Arminianism of my youth and early theological education: the mysterious, holy otherness of God; God’s majestic sovereignty over nature and history; humanity’s utter helplessness to achieve any goodness or even decide to accept the benefits of Christ’s suffering and death apart from grace.

I have since learned that these themes are not absent from classical Arminian theology, but I had to learn them from Reformed evangelicals. I emerged from my theological studies convinced that my Arminian theology, though basically correct, lacked depth and that it could be enriched by the heritage of Reformed Christianity. I also emerged convinced that Reformed theology—especially in its most consistent forms—lacked the marvelous note of God’s universal love for his human creatures so evident in the best of my own Arminian tradition. I was convinced that the evangelical community needs both George Whitefield and John Wesley, and that their heirs need one another to achieve the beauty of balance.

Oh, gooooooooooood...

Music Maunday

In an effort to continue to be hep-cat-yo-dog-g*money relevant like the Emerging/Emergents say I should be, I think it's time that I roll out my very first über-pretentious "look at me, I'm cultural" Music Monday.

This band combines subtle undertones which weave a delightful genash of plethoboronic supertensions inundated with just a hint of thyme and blah blah blah blah insert pointless relevant cultural commentary on the music here yadda yadda yadda -

- er, ah...sorry.

Ahem.

I saw this over on Dr. James White's Pros Apologian blog, and thought it was rip-roariously hilarious.

Enjoy...

 

Majority Church

I ran across this blogpost early this morning, and totally had to share it.

We (small churches) are the majority.  Why not call our churches “majority churches?” 

Hi, my name is Chuck and I pastor a majority church.

Sounds great, doesn’t it?  All of a sudden we’re not ecclesiastical outcasts anymore.  No more ducking at the pastors’ conference when you see Reverend I. M. Abigdeal coming.  Nope, you hold your head up, stick  out your hand, and say, “Rev, sorry you megachurch guys are in the minority.  What’s the matter, why aren’t you serving a majority church, like I am?”

I love it.

Signed: Mike Macon, majority church pastor.

Chris Elrod Signs Off

Chris Elrod signs off in his latest/last blogpost.

We can only pray that he eventually returns to the blogosphere.  His insights and posts were some of the most refreshing, real, unpretentious, and downright visceral I've ever read.

The Text

I am an unrepentant, unapologetic Fundamentalist.

Now, when I say that, I realize that we have to clarify terms; the word "fundamentalist" has become a pejorative in modern usage, somewhat due to the bellicose demeanor of those who self-identify with fundamentalism today, but more largely I believe due to the overall hostility of the world (and those within the church who are more world-friendly than is undoubtedly healthy) towards the very idea of Biblical fidelity.

I don't mean I that I am a fundamentalist in either of those two caricatured ways.

What I do mean is that I am a fundamentalist according to the original denotation of the word.

At the turn of the previous century, in response to the rising tide of Modernism in the church (Modernism is the father of Postmodernism, which in turn is really just Modernism with a new hairdo, spiffy spectacles, and a hep-cat-yo-dog-g-money way of presenting itself; see 1, 2, 3), a group of Biblically conservative scholars from a wide cross-section of current Christendom pooled their impressive intellectual prowess and issued a series of articles dealing with the fundamentals of the Christian faith once for all delivered to the saints, which in 1909 were printed in a daunting twelve volume set of books, and then re-issued in 1917 into a more concise four volume set, finally being re-edited and re-issued in 1958 in a one-volume book (this is the one that Warren Wiersbe was involved in).  That series of articles, when published in their respective editions, were collectively titled The Fundamentals, and it is from this seminal work that the conservatives who opposed the creeping unbelief of the Modernist movement took their name - Fundamentalists.

It is perhaps a very odd irony that those who tend to loudly self-identify with fundamentalism today would not much appreciate either the articles or (and perhaps more especially) the authors themselves; modern "fundamentalists" are almost universally KJV-Only cessationist Arminian Baptists, and though most of those are gracious and honestly convinced, some very prominent voices in modern "fundamentalism" are quite...belligerent.  And are not only very leery of anybody who's not a KJV-Only cessationist Arminian Baptist, but aren't too sure even of others who share the same cognomen.  It turns out that not only were a significant portion of the contributors not Baptists, but several were "baby-sprinkling" Presbyterians and Methodists, and even Anglicans!!!  (Note this article's defense of KJV-Onlyism includes the "baby sprinkling" canard as an argument against modern translations...and conveniently ignores the fact that the KJV translators were Anglicans themselves.  Turns out KJV-Onlyists are as impervious to contravening facts as are most Emergents that I've read...).

But it is in the very context of those original articles and the incipient Fundamentalist movement that these articles energized that I lay claim to the title.

I am a Fundamentalist.

I believe that the sixty-six Books of the Bible are the perspicacious, confluent, plenary, verbal, inspired Word of the Living God.  I believe it is, with the indwelling and illuminating of the Holy Spirit, self-interpreting and self-revealing. I believe that it is not to be reconstructed, deconstructed, or redacted in any fashion - only to be read, meditated upon, and obeyed.  It judges us - we do not judge it.  All things, all things entirely, are to be viewed, understood, and interpreted through it's infallible lens, not the converse.  We may not (indeed; we do not) fully understand it - unsurprising, considering its nature and origin.  But we do not come to it in a heart of doubt and unbelief; we come to it with a heart of humble submission, understanding that it is the infallible voice of the Shepherd.

Because of this, I believe in the Trinitarian nature of the Godhead, in the fallenness of man, in the creation of the universe by God ex nihilo, in the Virgin Birth, in Jesus' sinless life, in His death in my stead as an innocent, vicarious, propitiatory sacrifice, in His physical resurrection from the grave, in His bodily ascent to the right hand of the Father, in His eventual (and, secondarily, I believe soon) return to judge the living and the dead, in my own eventual bodily resurrection, in a conscious intermediate state between physical death and eventual resurrection, and in the eternal state.

I believe that the best possible hermeneutic (method for interpreting the Text) is through the grammatico-historical exegesis of that Text.

Given all that, the question of what is the Text in the first place becomes somewhat important.

You cannot be a reader of the Bible for long before you encounter the initially unsettling reality that what comprises the Biblical Text is a subject of some debate.  There are thousands of extant manuscripts and fragments of manuscripts of the New Testament Text from ancient times...but no two agree 100% in every particular.

There are many ways that this is understood, explained, and dealt with.  But one consequence of this is the rise of what has been called Textual Criticism.  That's not saying that dudes sit around and criticize the Bible (though doubtlessly some do); instead, TC is the science of taking the vast corpus of extant New Testament manuscripts, exhaustively studying them, and collating from the available evidence the original readings of the autographs.  This has become an entire science in itself, and like any field of research, there are many competing views and factions.

All methods of Textual Criticism use all available extant manucript evidence, but handle the corpus differently.

The ascendant TC position today is eclecticism.  In eclecticism, certain manuscrips are deemed "better" and "more pure," and are thus "weighted" differently than others.  It is from the eclectic text that most modern translations of the Bible derive, like the NASB, NIV, HCSB, ESV, and NLT.

Another position, by no means as prominent, is known as the Majority Text position.  This is the collational theory that I personally subscribe to; a brief explanation of the MT position can be found here.

Like any of the other Textual Criticism position, however, the MT has...issues.  It happens to have less than the others and has more explanatory power, in my opinion, but it's not without its soft underbelly.  So when I read this article by Dr. James White explaining the Byzantine-Priority position, I was fascinated.  After I dig into this further, I may need to adjust my views...

I love learning.

My Boy...

Measuring Success

Chris Elrod hits a homer here.