And the reason why a natural man is not always perpetually in the pursuit of some one lust, night and day, is because he hath many to serve, every one crying to be satisfied; thence he is carried on with great variety, but still in general he lies towards the satisfaction of self. John Owen, Mortification of Sin in Believers, in The Works of John Owen, vol. 6 (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1967), 24.

Those of us who have walked long in the church are often horrified at the eruptions of sin within the church both among the laity and clergy. We look across at the orderliness and often even kindness of the world with jealousy and frustration. 

Our generation is not alone in this experience. The Apostle Paul and the church throughout history cries out, “there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans” (1 Cor. 5:1). Too often we can say the same of greed, backbiting, gossiping, and pettiness.

(This article was originally published on SharperIron.org)

There came to him some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection, and they asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, having a wife but no children, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first took a wife, and died without children. And the second and the third took her, and likewise all seven left no children and died. Afterward the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had her as wife” (Luke 20:27-33).

In the Jewish world of Jesus’ day, the Sadducees were the most skeptical. Their understanding of the Old Testament focused on the “literal” or normal meaning of the words and prioritized the first five books as more authoritative then the rest of the Old Testament.

Their method of interpreting the Bible led them to “deny that there is a resurrection” (Luke 20:27) and reject angels and spirits (Acts 23:8). We are informed by the Pharisee and Jewish historian Josephus (c. 37-c. 100) that they rejected the “belief of the immortal duration of the soul, and the punishments and rewards in Hades,” and the sovereignty of God (The Wars of the Jews, 2.8.14).

(This article was originally published on SharperIron.org)

Two of Jesus’ disciples were walking along the road to Emmaus on the first resurrection Sunday, and they were distraught: “Jesus of Nazareth who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God” was dead (ESV, Luke 24:19). They “had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (v. 21), but now he was dead. Their grief touches us even across the years.

A stranger appears and walks besides them and berates them by saying, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets had spoken!” (Luke 25:26). And then Luke describes what the stranger, who was Jesus, said to them, “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.”

Jesus on the Emmaus road did not add to Scripture. He did not give them a new revelation like what we have from John in the book of Revelation, but rather he explained or interpreted the Scriptures to prove that the Old Testament requires that it be “necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory” (v. 26).

(This article was originally published on SharperIron.org)

As far as I can tell the Roman Catholic Church now teaches that the most likely way to go to hell is to believe Roman Catholic doctrine. Allow me to support this from a series of quotes from the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC).

The CCC teaches that Protestants who disbelieve the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church are likely saved:

CCC-818: However, one cannot charge with the sin of the separation those who at present are born into these communities [that resulted from such separation] and in them are brought up in the faith of Christ … . All who have been justified by faith in Baptism are incorporated into Christ. (Brackets in original.)

CCC-819: Christ’s Spirit uses these Churches and ecclesial communities as means of salvation, whose power derives from the fullness of grace and truth that Christ has entrusted to the Catholic Church.

(This article was originally published on SharperIron.org)

Among Roman Catholics, Vatican II, and thus the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), is interpreted across a spectrum from essential rejection to continuity with the past to rupture.

Essential rejection is the position of extremely traditional Catholics who remain in communion with the Pope but who continue to give or take the Mass in the wafer alone and who gravitate toward the Latin Mass. Their interpretation of CCC has the greatest continuity with pre-Vatican II statements and tends to minimize the discontinuity.

Continuity with the past is the mainstream interpretation of serious Catholics. “Serious” does not include politicos who claim Augustine supported abortion or who have purchased multiple annulments. Pope Benedict XVI, now emeritus, appears to me to be a very conservative proponent of the continuity view, and he is the mind behind the current universal Catechism. This view is represented by Catholic voices like the magazine First Things.

(This article was originally published on SharperIron.org)

It was a warm spring day in DC, and my Catholic friend explained with great earnestness that if I were to be ordained prior to converting to Catholicism, then I might be able to be a priest and keep my wife and kids. Dispensations can be obtained.

My heart and mind toyed with the thoughts: the great creaking beauty of the medieval liturgy, the pageantry and fancy dress, the history, architecture, the universities, libraries, philosophy, and Latin. The specter of the Mass rose before me. Worshiping bread and the wine, bowing and kissing statues of saints excused with the thinnest of theological distinctions, Pilipino adherents nailing themselves to crosses. No, this is not the Way.

And I said, “The problem is that one of us is a blasphemer. Either I blaspheme Christ by not worshiping him at every available Mass, or you commit an act of idolatry by worshiping bread and wine. There is no middle ground. In heaven if allowed or required I will kiss and pray to Mary; in heaven I will adore the body of Christ, but until heaven or when Christ returns I will trust the Bible and my conscience.”

(This article was originally published on SharperIron.org)

My intent in this article is to show from the Catechism of the Catholic Church a radically different understanding of nature and grace than what is taught by the Bible and held by Protestants. The Catholic view of grace and nature, along its view of Christ-Church interconnectedness, leads to a different gospel than found in the Bible. Lord willing, next week we will consider the Christ-church issue.

Our three main sources are the Bible, Allison’s Roman Catholic Theology and Practice: An Evangelical Assessment, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC).

We are entering into the Byzantine substructures of Roman Catholic theology. And while I am attempting to make sure each article in the series can stand alone, the reader will be greatly assisted by reading the first article in this series.

(This article was originally published on SharperIron.org)

A few years ago, I stopped by a friend’s church in Washington, D.C. to walk to lunch with him. He had just finished a gut-wrenching meeting where a recent church member explained he had converted to Roman Catholicism without informing the pastors of the church.

The church member’s main justification for the conversion was the intellectual dearth among Protestants and particularly Baptists. And he held this out as the force that drove him to cross the Tiber.

My friend valiantly attempted to share the gospel with the young man from God’s Word and to pull him back to the true faith. But the deed was done, and the excuse was that Baptists lack intellectual and academic validity. And this excuse was given to a pastor with a doctorate in church history from Cambridge.

One has sinned, Another has made satisfaction. The sinner does not make satisfaction; the Satisfier does not sin. This is an astounding doctrine. 

Lectures on Isaiah Chapters 40-66 in Luther’s Works, vol. 17 (St. Louis, Concordia Publishing House, 1972), 99.

There is much to be said both for and against Luther (1483-1546), but he speaks to us of Jesus and he treasures the only gospel. 

We have sinned against an infinite God. Infinite in power. Eternal in wisdom. A burning fire of holiness; if the universe was sacrificed to appease the wrath of God (Isa. 40:14-18), it would be as nothing. The eternal duration of hell is merely the just approximation of our infinite debt. Eternal punishment in the scales of justice is merely just. It is the least possible and the only possible punishment.

Oscar Wilde [1854-1900] said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (reprint, 2004; New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1908), 50. 

Above we have a clever quote; it sparkles with Chesterton’s wit and smashes with his blunt force; the statement is pregnant with great truth and some terrible lies. 

Oscar Wilde was an early public homosexual and defender of pedophilia on the Greek model (post-pubescent boys). He died young in part because of the punishment for his use of rent-boys, the notoriety of his crime, and in part through an artistic listlessness. He was also a brilliant writer and wit, but neither as clever nor wholesome as Chesterton. 

Rather than exposing the repugnant nature of Chesterton’s rhetoric and theology, I’d like to make the statement exhaustively true with some additions and changes:

The active immutability of God, the ever-living and eternally unchanging interpenetration of the divine persons, translates into the divine willingness, without a shadow of turning, to make us partakers of that gloriously inalterable and living incorruptibility. We are most fortunate that in the incarnation God is not engaged in a work of self-realization but in the redemptive working-out of his eternal glory: incarnation is, in its immutable purpose, God with us and for us. Such doctrine, I would hope, will never be viewed as “subevangelical.” Our piety must not falter before the first paradox, the involvement of immutable God, because on the first rest the second, the transformation of death into life, of corruptibility into incorruptibility. 

Richard A. Muller, “Incarnation, Immutability, and the Case for Classical Theism, Westminster Theological Journal, 45 (1983), 40.

Richard Muller is here responding to an essay by Clark Pinnock, “The Need for a Scriptural, and therefore Neo-Classical Theism.” Pinnock’s argument is that the traditional conception of God as immutability, atemporal, and so forth are pagan philosophical imports.

For many Bible-believing Christians there is a ring of truth to Pinnock’s statements. The God of systematic theology can appear a cold and distance deity. He may, especially when the vocabulary is unfamiliar, poorly defined, and not applied to worship seem dead. 

Allegory, largely typological, pervades both the Old and the New Testaments. The events in the Old Testament are ‘types’ or ‘figures’ of events in the New Testament. In The Song of Solomon, for instance, Solomon is a ‘type’ of Christ and the Queen of Sheba represents the Church: later explained by Matthew (12:42). The Paschal Lamb was a ‘type’ of Christ.

Scriptural allegory was mostly based on a vision of the universe. There were two worlds: the spiritual and the physical. These corresponded because they had been made by God. The visible world was a revelation of the invisible, but the revelation could only be brought about by divine action. Thus, interpretation of this kind of allegory was theological. 

J. A. Cuddon, s.v. allegory, in Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (London: Penguin Group, 1998), 22.

The above quote has some flaws, but the source is not a biased ‘Christian’ but a rather an important writer and scholar. Considering the worldview of the writers of both the Old and New Testament, he concludes that typology is a necessary hermeneutical device for understanding the authors. 

Let’s see if we can prove portions of his definition from Scripture. 

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

CXXXIX

The expense of the spirit in a waste of shame

                       Is lust in action; and till action, lust

Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,

                       Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;

Enjoyed no sooner, but despised straight;

                       Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,

On purpose laid to make the maker mad;

                       Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;

A bliss in proof,--and proved, a very woe;

                       Before, a joy proposed; behind a dream:

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

                       To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.  

Comment:

I doubt that Shakespeare was born again, though I would be delighted if he knew and walked with Christ. Even so, there are two great benefits to this poem:

The first is a biblically informed, beautiful, and accurate meditation on the destructive nature of the passions and the conscience’s knowledge of lust. Each of us is aware that we want things that we ought not to want. 

These desires are liars from the moment we contemplate them; they are the foundation of all lies, murder, and cause wholesome shame. Civilization and all of its benefits are undermined by the pursuit of them, and they endanger all human relationships. 

Definition of Fear: “fear bears on two things, namely, the evil from which someone flees through fear, and whatever seems to be the source of that evil” (215).

Worldly fear: “sometimes it happens that the evil from which someone recoils is contrary to a bodily or temporal good which a person sometimes loves inordinately and recoils from having it injured or destroyed by a mere man. This is human or worldly fear and is not from the Holy Spirit. Indeed, the Lord forbids such fear: do not fear those who kill the body (Matt 10:28).”

Fear of punishment: “There is a second type of fear which recoils from an evil contrary to created nature, namely, the evil of being punished, and shrinks from having this evil inflicted by a spiritual cause, namely, by God. Such fear is praiseworthy in at least one respect, namely, that it fears God. . . But insofar as such fear does not recoil from an evil opposed to one’s spiritual good, namely, sin, but only punishment, it is not praiseworthy. It has this short coming not from the Holy Spirit, but from man’s guilt.” (215-17).

(This article was originally published on SharperIron.org)

Aphorism 8: All applications must include the sure knowledge that we can’t separate perfectly because we are still sinners living in the regime of sin and death. Thus part of the grace we extend to others must include the possibility that we ourselves are too narrow or too loose.

In seminary, a friend of mine from the Midwest told me that his father, who was a fundamentalist pastor, received a letter from a brother in Christ practicing strict separation. The letter informed him that he was being separated from. It was polite and earnest, established the chain of separation between the author and the recipient, and closed pleading that he separate from the closest of the offending parties. The only odd thing about the letter was that my friend’s father had no idea who the author was. They had never met.

My memory of the conversation is that the fellow writing the letter was practicing 5th degree separation, but the memory is hazy, so perhaps it was only 3rd or 4th. But if we were to imagine a chain of 5th degree separation, it would look something like this: the Roman Catholic Church (1st), J. I. Packer who signed Evangelicals and Catholics Together (2nd), prominent evangelical pastor who disagrees with Packer but does not separate from him (3rd), me who also disagrees with Packer, but who will not separate from him or my former pastor who is a friend of Packer’s (4th), anyone who remains in fellowship with me (5th).

(This article was originally published on SharperIron.org)

Aphorism 7: Our patterns of application of separation today must include the grace we allow the godly of the past.

Gurnall’s work is peerless and priceless; every line is full of wisdom; every sentence suggestive. This “Complete Armour” is beyond all others a preacher’s book: I should think that more discourses have been suggested by it than by any other uninspired volume. I have often resorted to it when my own fire has been burning low, and I have seldom failed to find a glowing coal upon Gurnall’s hearth. (Charles Haddon Spurgeon, 1834-1892, quoted in The Christian in Complete Armour abridgment and modernization printed by The Banner of Truth Trust)

I am in full agreement with Spurgeon. The Christian in Complete Armour is a spiritual delight and treasure trove. Much of my preaching and illustrating from Scripture relies heavily on Gurnall’s example and even remembering his sermons warms my heart to Christ.

Let’s consider a little background on William Gurnall (1616-1679). He signed the Act of Uniformity in 1662, which imposed The Book of Common Prayer, required episcopal ordination, and made the crypto-Catholic Charles II the “only supreme governor” of the Anglican Church. At least 2,000 ministers refused to sign the act and lost their churches. Men like Bunyan, Owen, Howe, and Baxter were persecuted because of the act.

(This article was originally published on SharperIron.org)

Aphorism 6: Our patterns of application of separation need to include people to the left and the right on the group boundary markers—our “friends” and those who make us uncomfortable. Grace on believers who are like us or provide advantages to us but no or little grace on believers who are different is a sin (James 2:1; Luke 6:32-33).

Seven years ago, I became the pastor of a church that had a history of practicing second-degree separation. My exposure to the defense of such doctrine and the organizations enforcing it had been rather limited. And so I began reading, watching, and asking questions. Many of the conversations that I’ve had were decidedly cordial—some less so.

Allow me to share how one conversation about separatism with a representatives of a mission board went:

(This article was originally published on SharperIron.org)

Aphorism 5: No one knows when Jesus is coming back or how long it will be before Jesus comes back, and so application of separation passages cannot be dependent on how close or far the return of Christ is.

The words are startlingly clear—“the Pope of Rome … is that antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the church against Christ, and all that is called God; whom the Lord shall destroy with the brightness of His coming.” This statement is found in The London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689 (26.4) as well as in unmodified versions of the Westminster Confession of Faith (25.6). Currently most modern Presbyterians and Baptists using these confessions have changed the wording or do not enforce this section. However, some stalwarts still remain.

Let’s unfold the exegesis a bit. There are about a dozen passages of Scripture in play, and application has been made. The “man of sin [has been] revealed, the son of perdition” (2 Thess. 2:3, KJV). The “falling away” has occurred and the person bearing the title “the Pope of Rome” is the end time’s figure of the final antichrist (cf. 1 John 2:18). Of the 7 billion people on the planet currently, only one man or his successor can be the antichrist. There is now no possibility of salvation for some future pope, because he is the antichrist. And there is no point in continued exploration of the meaning of Daniel, Matthew 24, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and Revelation on this issue.

(This article was originally published on SharperIron.org)

Aphorism 4: None of the commands of Scripture contradict the other commands when rightly understood, and to be correctly applied and interpreted all of the commands of Scripture must work together.

Eight hundred feet below the surface of the water, in a cramped nuclear submarine armed with ballistic missiles, my friend and newly minted lieutenant felt like he was faced with an impossible decision. On Sunday morning would he meet and worship with the dozen or so sailors on the boat that professed Christ but belonged to compromised groups (American Baptist, United Methodist, etc.) or quietly pray by himself in his bunk? Would he “be separate” (ESV, 2 Cor. 6:17) or neglect “to meet together” (Heb. 10:25)? Would he “[b]ear one another’s burdens” (Gal. 6:2) or would he “[p]urge the evil person” (1 Cor. 5:13)?

My friend had grown up under the teaching of Axioms of Separation which required separation from disobedient brethren. And disobedient brethren were by definition anyone who did not separate from other disobedient brethren. Thus the conundrum. How does one obey the commands to separate and the commands to be unified?

(This article was originally published on SharperIron.org)

Aphorism 3: Applications of the commands of separation must take into account Jesus’ and Paul’s application of these same commands as recorded in the Gospels, Acts, and the epistles.

Was Jesus a separatist? Given that Jesus acted according to some of the same commands He requires His church to obey, the answer must be yes.

Let consider some of the examples: “Purge the evil person from among you” (ESV). This phrase is from the LXX and is used six times in Deuteronomy (17:7, 19:19, 21:21, 22:21, 22:24, 24:27).The Apostle Paul uses this phrase and demands obedience to it of the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 5:12. The Greek verb behind “purge” is only used here in the New Testament, “suggesting Paul’s intentional and explicit use of the formula from Deuteronomy” (Beale and Carson, Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, 709).

(This article was originally published on SharperIron.org)

Aphorism 2: All applications of the commands of Scripture are based on a particular context outside the Bible. Therefore unless the context is identical to what was intended by the Bible, an application cannot be as normative as Scripture itself.

Allow me to share an explicit command of Scripture, repeated five times in the New Testament which is patently ignored at least in literal obedience by almost all churches in the United States: “Greet one another with the kiss of love” (ESV, 1 Peter 5:14; cf. 1 Thess. 5:26, 2 Cor. 13:12, 1 Cor. 16:20, Rom. 16:16).

I hope you obey this command of Scripture by greeting all Christians in a culturally appropriate way. But my guess is that your church does not practice a literal kiss of love but replaces it with a handshake, shoulder squeeze, or hug. We look through the culturally decided symbolism of a kiss and replace it with our culture’s symbolic synonym of a warm greeting.

Obedience to the command is then based on our cultural context. The trans-contextual aspect is that we must greet all Christians in a friendly way. We must obey the command or we are sinning.

(This article is published on SharperIron.org)

Some time ago I had a long talk and walk with an older, godly, academic separatist about the history of separatism. By separatist, I mean someone who separates not only from apostasy but also separates from those who do not separate from apostasy. (I am being vague on the timing and details as the conversation was a friendly courtesy to me.)

About an hour or so into our talk, I played my rhetorical trump card—the original word for Pharisee means separatist. It cut him deep. And for first time we moved from theory to life. I looked into the eyes of a godly, thoughtful man and recognized the truth of what he next said with tears welling up in his eyes, “I am not trying to be a Pharisee; I am just trying to serve Jesus.”

I backpedalled a bit and tried to draw out the sting of my words. We recovered the emotional balance of the conversation and moved on. Yet the Holy Spirit has used the conversation and the moment of deeply hurting a servant of my Lord as a helpful reminder to speak and write carefully on this issue.

When I became a pastor about 7 years ago, I held to a rejection of all holidays in the Sunday morning service. And I came to this conclusion from three, I hope, godly influences: the first was to not wield a coercive authority over a tender and biblically informed conscience in obedience to Scripture (Rom. 14:21) at a required meeting of the church. The second was responding to open idolatry in evangelical church services that I had attended, and the inability of the pastors of these churches to comprehend that what they were doing was idolatrous. The third was a desire to conform my practice to the Spirit inspired practice of the godly throughout history.

The difficulty or the tension that I see in this now is: first, that as an elder my authority to select the text is coercive. I force the members and attenders at my church to celebrate the nativity of Christ when the text requires it or the resurrection, or accession. This authority was given to me by God to be used in wisdom. I think it would be a sin for me to spend 20 years preaching on say Esther though it is in my authority as an elder to do so. My authority in this regard includes preaching topical sermons on Sunday morning or selecting particular texts for the health of the congregation based on events outside of the church.

The point that I am reaching towards is that Andover Baptist, our church, has a church calendar. Outside events, my vacation—scheduled by the way around historical church or secular holidays and providentially my birthday—illnesses, theological events, and the like, all influence what is preached on. Often times while the text is selected sequentially the application is driven by current events as well.

Luke 20:27-33—There came to him some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection, and they asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, having a wife but no children, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first took a wife, and died without children. And the second and the third took her, and likewise all seven left no children and died. Afterward the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had her as wife.”

In the Jewish world of Jesus’ day, the Sadducees were the most skeptical. Their understanding of the Old Testament focused on the “literal” or normal meaning of the words (cf. The Problem of Literalism: Spinoza) and prioritized the first five books as more authoritative then the rest of the Old Testament.

Their method of interpreting the Bible lead them to “deny that there is a resurrection” (Luke 20:27) and reject angels and spirits (Acts 23:8). We are informed by the Pharisee and Jewish historian Josephus (c. 37- c. 100) that they rejected the “belief of the immortal duration of the soul, and the punishments and rewards in Hades,” and the sovereignty of God (The Wars of the Jews, 2.8.14).

Christians speak much of the armor of God: the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shoes of the gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit (Eph. 6:13-15). The armor of  God prepares us “to withstand in the evil day” (v. 13) and  “extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one” (v. 16).

Yet Christians forget that the Bible teaches that Satan has “armor in which he trusted” (Luke 11:22). Satan has a faith or a system of beliefs which protects from God. And he shares these beliefs with his spiritual children. Satan’s defense mechanisms range from bold proclamation of atheism (Psalm 10:4), to magical spells (Isa. 47:9), to misinterpreting the Bible for a sinful earthly advantage (Mark 10:7-13) and self-righteousness (Luke 18:10-13) before God. For his followers, for instance the Pharisees, it includes spiritual disciplines like prayer (Matt. 6:5) and fasting (v. 16), and reading and applying the Bible (Mark 12:24; Matt. 9:13).

The belt of lies, the breastplate of wickedness, shield of disbelief, and a heart of stone all defend Satan and his followers from comprehending their doom and repenting. Satan’s armor functions as an explanation of spiritual and earthly events that defends against the witness of nature, the conscience, the Spirit, and God’s Word.

"But neither to the good angels do these things, except as far as God commands, nor do the evil ones do them wrongfully, except as far as He righteously permits. For the malignity of the wicked one makes his own will wrongful; but the power to do so, he receives rightfully, whether for his own punishment, or, in the case of others, for the punishment of the wicked, or for the praise of the good." Augustine, On the Trinity, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, vol. 3, ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997), pg 61, 3.8.13.

If God punishes willing sin with sin and purifies the saved through suffering, God is then just in empowering and maintaining the conditions whereby sin can exist so that willing sin can be punished and the saved purified. In both the case of the sinner and the righteous something good is happening, because the wicked are being punished by sinning and the righteous are purified by being sinned against.

God’s justice requires that he only empower or maintain that which is good and empowering sinners to sin is their punishment and is therefore just. By empowering we (Augustine and I) don’t mean direct action but energizing or maintaining the conditions whereby Satan or a wicked person can act. God establishes the good by grace (unmerited Divine intervention for good) and allows evil by withdrawing grace. God softens the heart with grace and justly hardens the heart by withdrawing grace.

The folk wisdom proverb, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” requires us first to identify the difference between the baby and the bathwater. So let’s begin by considering how to separate the baby and bathwater in childrearing books.

Every book I mentioned has some really helpful things: Tedd Tripp’s aiming for the heart in discipline is manna from heaven; Baby Wise teaches that infants need a structure besides their wants, MacArthur and Beeke’s commonsense applications are often helpful. The problem is placing their wisdom into your situation and recognizing the limits of their suggestions and interpretation.

The Bathwater in Shepherding a Child’s Heart

Let’s start with an example from Tedd Tripp under his terrible-sounding category of emotional privation. As far as I can ascertain, “emotional privation” is the isolation and temporary withdraw of communication, fellowship, and comfort by an authority figure until repentance occurs. Tripp describes it in a family this way:

[The parents] place their misbehaving daughter in a chair alone in the middle of the living room for a specified period of time. As long as the child is being punished in the chair, no one in the family may speak to her or have any contact with her. She is isolated from the family. . . This approach is not only cruel, but ineffective in addressing the heart biblically. This young girl is not learning to understand her behavior biblically. . . . What she is learning is to avoid the emotional privation of being on the chair. Her heart is being trained, but not to know and love God. She is being trained to respond to the crippling fear of emotional privation (65).

One of the sticks that Christians tend to whack each other with is the biblical club. One group of Christians defines their understanding of parenting as biblical parenting. By necessity then, everyone who disagrees with them is practicing “un-biblical” parenting. Rhetorically this tends to work out in language that denigrates anything anyone tries that does not agree with the biblical “principles” discovered or promoted by so and so. Perhaps, you thought rewarding your children for good behavior was similar to God rewarding his people? Depends on who you ask. One author might call that bribery or manipulation. Another might call it godly wisdom.

Mind the Gap in Charity

Part of the problem arises from two sorts of being “unbiblical”: The first way is that the Bible must be bridged from its original language and situation to our context.  We don’t speak Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek. We don’t live in Corinth or Bethlehem. Our language, cultural patterns, habits of mind and so forth are not identical to the original writers or recipients of the Bible. Modesty in Corinth in about 60 A.D. has overlap with Baltimore in 2012, but they are not identical. I am unbiblical in that I am wearing kakis rather than a toga, but biblical in that I am attempting to please God.

Let me illustrate this from yesterday and today: Richard Baxter (1615-1691) saw the susceptibility to sin in terms of body temperature. We tend to see susceptibility in terms of genetic predispositions. In as much as neither Baxter nor we use the current thought patterns to excuse sin or violate the Bible, we aren’t sinning. Yet we are both thinking and applying God’s words using thought patterns that are somewhat foreign to the Bible and to situations to a degree different then found in the biblical record.

The “unbiblical” nature of application means that we all must have the proper humility when speaking to other Christians about applications of Scripture. Applications can’t be as normative as God’s Word unless the biblical situation and current application are identical.  Biblical principles on child rearing can never become the Bible.

Most of the modern parenting books that I’ve come across have at least a tone of anxiousness if not hysteria. Many of the Christian parents I’ve meet are anxious as well—and that includes me in my worst moments. The general consensus of modern writers is that things are getting worse in the church and in the wider culture.

The fear and trembling may have some legitimacy: a bunch of historical events including technology, secularism, and capitalism, means that godly folk wisdom and beneficial cultural structures have faded away while at the same time our exposures to possible “wisdoms” has increased. So instead of just attempting to correct the mistakes and sins of our parents and potentially our childhood pastor and follow them in what was godly, we must analyze and respond to Rousseau, Dr. Spock, Oprah, Gothard, Trip, MacArthur, and Plowman. Modernity has dislocated us. Capitalism has created the childrearing juggernaut of books and videos, and we are suddenly having serious conversations about “nipple confusion” among infants and facing the fact that spanking is now illegal in places.  It is scary and it seems unmanageable.

The second grounds for fear is that we are responsible to teach our children the gospel, to do our best to make sure they survive childhood, and to train them to become productive citizens. It’s a big and scary job.

And this brings us to the sin issue: part of our fear and trembling is over the fact that we don’t trust God and we aren’t listening to him. God’s word says in Ecclesiastes 7:10, “Say not, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.” Modern life has its problems, but fundamentally it’s no worse or no better than the past. There were and are advantages and disadvantages to both.

Several weeks ago, I went into a good Christian book store—in fact one of the most trustworthy that I am aware of in the nation—and I asked for their best books on parenting. Here’s what I got.

• Ginger Plowman, “Don’t Make Me Count to Three!” A Mom’s Look at Heart-Oriented Discipline
• John MacArthur, What the Bible Says about Parenting: God’s Plan for Rearing Your Child
• Bruce A. Ray, Withhold Not Correction
• Joel R. Beeke, Parenting by God’s Promises: How to Raise Children in the Covenant of Grace
• C. H. Spurgeon, Spiritual Parenting—Updated Edition

And they recommended, but I already had:

• Tedd Trip, Shepherding a Child’s Heart
• Elyse M. Fitzpatrick and Jessica Thompson, Give Them Grace
• J. C. Ryle, The Duties of Parents

All of these books are by Christians. I expect to see every one of the authors in glory and perhaps all of them are or were more productive servants of Christ than I will ever be. Several of them say things that I find wrongheaded and a few mishandle God’s Word badly. For the rest of this series when material is quoted, I will often not give a citation; the point of this blog is not beat anyone up. But I do want us to think carefully about what is being taught in these books.

An Adventure in Parenting by Christians Books

Let me begin with a testimony. Prior to becoming a parent, I had read two parenting books: On Becoming Baby Wise and Shepherding a Child’s Heart. They were both popular 11 years ago when Kimberly, my wife, was pregnant with our first child.

Love in English is flexible. As a noun it can refer to a tennis score, several positive sexual meanings, a beloved, and a positive emotion towards some object. The verb form is much the same. There is also a host of synonyms and near synonyms for love that share the general meaning or have a degree of overlap: charity, delight, affection, loyalty, fondness, devotion, attraction, and so forth. It’s much the same in the Greek text of the Bible; both the Septuagint and the New Testament use a variety of words with a range of meaning limited by the context to express the idea of love. The basic issue is that love is a positive emotion towards something.

Sometimes among Christians, we conceptualize love with the Greek terms of agape (self-giving love), philia (friend love), and eros (sexual love). These may be somewhat helpful distinctions in conversations with other Christians, but it breaks down very quickly in doctrine, practice, and meaning. From a merely lexical perspective, John uses the Greek agape love and philia love to describe God the Father’s love for Jesus (John 3:35; John 5:20): the intended meaning of both agape and philia is identical. Paul requires that self-giving among married couples include erotic love (1 Cor. 7:2-3), but eros does not appear in the Septuagint or the New Testament. Further, we find agape love for both Christian and non-Christian love for instance in Luke 6:32, “If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.” Love is then varied and diverse. Stand alone Greek words representing Christian or non-Christian love are no help to us, because love must be enframed.

Having cleared away the issue of Christian talk about love, we must now deal with the issue of the human experience of love.  We can love something for use—a good steak which is destroyed by love; we can love something for enjoyment without diminishing it, but with benefits to us—Bach’s Oboe Concerto in D minor, a sunset, God.  And then there is a love of enjoyment and use combined together—drawing out the beauty of wood grain on a board for a table top and the physical changes and threats attendant to carrying, delivering, and nurturing a child. The wood and our spouse, and ourselves are transformed—increased and decreased—by love.

John Lennon’s lyrics “All you need is love. Love is all you need,” are either the truest words ever penned or the most perverse. They are either criminally trivial or deeply profound. The significance of the lyrics is not found in the letters of the word love but by what is intended by love. And Lennon understood this to the degree that he rejected patriotism as love of a nation, tyranny as the love of detrimental power and embraced the love of non-violence and art. Even entertainers at least suspect that we are saved and we are damned by love.

Our salvation or reprobation and love are clearly linked in Scripture; “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8).  He is not merely love and yet he is love. Further, man is created in the image of God and so in some sense man is love, though again not merely love. The great summary of the duty of man is to love God with all our being, and to love our neighbor as ourself. We cannot move away from God without a love, and we cannot turn to God without love. Thus both theology proper (the study of God) and anthropology (the study of man) are dependent on what love is or is not. A definitional misstep on the issue of love damages both our worship and our ethics; the greater the error the less true our worship and the more confused and detrimental our relationships. False love when “fully grown brings forth death” (James 1:15).

God is love, and because God is the greatest possible being (Heb. 6:13, 16-18), God must love perfectly: further God is “blessed forever” (Rom. 9:5, 2 Cor. 2:11), and so God has always loved and been fulfilled or blessed in that love “before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24). To love requires an object of love. The infinitely perfect object of God’s love is himself in the mutual admiration of the Trinity.  The Father loves and so begets the Son, the Son in turn loves the Father and both the Father and Son are conscious of this mutual love, leading to the spiration of the Holy Spirit.

For these several months we have discussed the problem of literalism, which is essentially that there are two almost opposite uses of the idea of literalism. For Augustine literalism meant attempting to understand the intent of the author and the historical reality expressed in the text. For Spinoza literalism meant attacking the very possibility of revelation. We also discussed that the “rationalizing” of religion around a philosophical or scientific consensus was an ancient project reinvigorated by Spinoza’s work. Having considered all of these pieces, let’s draw them all together to consider how the church should respond to the current state of affairs.

I have an obscure book called Spinoza Dictionary, published by a small press called the Philosophical Library. It’s not a terribly interesting book, but it has a short foreword by Albert Einstein. Here we learn that Einstein “read the Spinoza Dictionary with great care” and that he had obviously read Spinoza’s canon with greater care. He makes a gentle jibe reminding the astute reader to read Spinoza’s works, establishes himself as an interpreter of Spinoza, and mocks sin and the soul and closes. Perhaps, one of the greatest scientific minds in history flashes his philosophical membership card, hides it a way with a smile, and goes back to his physics.

The other day as I sat on the train returning from Washington, DC, the man behind me was loudly counseling his reluctant friend over a cell phone about the need to despoil his new girlfriend. The basic argument was that human beings are essentially animals, and as animals we have sexual needs; if these sexual needs are not fulfilled, we can break down in rage. If the girlfriend refused to submit to his needs, then she was unnatural or likely cheating on him. And thus, we find materialistic philosophy or Epicureanism disseminated throughout our culture at all levels.

Note: If you haven’t read the first four articles in this series, please do so. We are in the midst of a cumulative argument about literalism within biblical hermeneutics and the best way to understand and practice interpreting the Bible.

I have attempted to lay out the argument that Spinoza’s literalism is incompatible with Christianity, but this leads us to the difficulty that a large group of Christians promote a system of hermeneutics which has the appearance of being identical to the Epicurean belief policy.  Their definition of literalism, “interpretation that gives to every word the same meaning it would have in normal usage, whether employed in writing, speaking or thinking” [Charles Ryrie, Dispensationalism: Revised and Updated (Chicago: Moody Press, 2007), 91], sounds very much like Spinoza’s.

The above quote comes from Charles Ryrie, an august proponent of a doctrinal system called Dispensationalism. He holds two secular academic degrees, including a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh. He is a sophisticated and academic defender who has written a Dispensational systematic theology—Basic Theology. Obviously, godly Dispensationalists are not Epicureans, and it would be a gross injustice to call them such—especially, given their contribution in maintaining the gospel against encroaching modernity in the last century.  Let’s see if we can’t clarify the situation.

Dispensationalism as a system is a relative newcomer to theology, dating from about the 1840s with some of its unique components beginning to appear on the historical horizons in the mid-1700s. (By theology, I mean a systematic understanding of the biblical canon.) It is different from Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed theology in that its proponents are united around an understanding of the end times, but not around their understanding of salvation, and polity.

“But we should depart as little as possible from the literal sense. . . . If we do not find it signifying anything else in normal linguistic usage, that is how we must interpret the expression, however much it may conflict with reason. . . . For, as we have already shown, we are not permitted to adjust meaning of Scripture to the dictates of our reason or our preconceived opinions; all explanations of the Bible must be sought from the Bible alone.” Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 10.

I once started a sermon with the above quote. The regular church members nodded their heads in assent and approval until I informed them that the quote was written by one of the most vicious modern enemies of Christianity, Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677). He used literal sense as a devastating weapon against even the possibility of revealed religion. And he did so as a theist.

We live in world enframed by Spinoza’s system of interpretation and his materialistic philosophy. Men such as Dawkins (a biologist) and Ehrman (a biblical text critic) use his interpretive method without thought or apology. Even within the church, this system of materialism influences our minds in such a way that we accept the vocabulary of this theory of interpretation without thought.

In our last article, we established that Augustine rejected the possibility of the Bible containing myth, any attempt to interpret nature independently of the Bible, and any attempt to interpret the Bible based solely on nature. He came to these conclusions because the Bible claims to be a revealed account of God and man. As the modern church is beset by both enemies and intended friends pressing natural and mythological accounts of God upon us, it is extremely important that we understand Augustine’s “historical literalism.” The importance of this is heightened by the modern problem of literalism and the rhetorical weight of the term literal among modern Christians.

Let us, return to Augustine’s understanding of literalism:

I have started here to discuss Sacred Scripture according to the plain meaning of the historical facts, not according to future events which they foreshadow. The Literal Meaning of Genesis, vol. 1, in Ancient Christian Writers, vol. 41, trans. John Hammond Taylor (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1982) 39, 1.17.34.

He believed that the Bible’s meaning was “the precise meaning [the author] intended to express (On Christian Doctrine, 1.36.40). The Bible then teaches historical facts when the author represents them as such. And he accepts the book of Genesis as providing such facts. To understand what the Bible teaches about reality is to have its literal meaning. He rejects the possibility of Genesis being mythical, but what he does not reject is that it takes effort to understand what the historical or literal significance of the text is.

Originally, I had intended to consider Spinoza’s caustic literalism, but events and more study suggest that we should begin in chronological order with our friend Augustine’s “historical literalism.” Given the overarching theme of our series, we will have to develop a bit of context to better understand the sophistication and relevance of his view to our wider discussion. So, let’s begin by considering the interpretive systems that Augustine rejected; what we shall discover is that Augustine anticipated the “modern” attempt to reinterpret the Bible as salvageable myth

In The City of God, Augustine demolished the arguments of both contemporary pagans and philosophers that the fall of Rome was caused by the introduction of Christianity into the Roman Empire. The traditionalists argued that the popularity of Christianity had led to the abandonment of the old gods, and these gods then withdrew their protection from the Roman people, leading to the victory of the Goths.

Augustine attacked the pagan apologetic by arguing that the worship of the pagan gods was sub-rational and beneath the dignity of both Divinity and man.  His main pagan source for the critique was the work of a historian and philosopher by the name of Marcus Varreo (116-27 B.C.). Varreo had attempted to rationalize the Roman religious traditions, histories, and practices into a coherent system that would serve both the philosophers and the civil religious needs of the Roman people. And he did this by developing a threefold distinction for the source of theology or the accounts of the gods.

For the purpose of illustration, let me state something confusing: Spinoza is a biblical literalist and so are Ryrie and Augustine.  It’s also true that Spinoza is not a literalist and neither are Ryrie and Augustine.

Let’s introduce ourselves to the cast of theologians. Augustine (354-430 AD) was a theologian in North Africa and perhaps the most influential of the Church Fathers. His theological reflections were the foundation of the Reformation. Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677 AD) was a Dutch philosopher who attacked both Jewish and Christian orthodoxy through a hermeneutical system. And Charles Ryrie is an elder statesman for Dispensationalism.  Dispensationalism is a view of the end times requiring almost absolute separation between Israel and the Church and is widely held by conservative Christians in the U.S.

These three men each held to a form of biblical literalism, and they illustrate for us what I am calling the problem of literalism. Literalism in our context is a belief policy about how to read the Bible. So Spinoza thought the Bible should be read literally as did Augustine and Ryrie, but each meant something quite different.

Allow me to share with you three passages of Scripture which I find astounding: The Creation account in Genesis 1-2, the “I AM” statement in Exodus 3, and John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

These three passages of Scripture fascinate me because they seem misplaced. They shouldn’t be there. A fisherman with simplistic Greek, attempting to maintain a religion among slaves and Jewish exiles, should not have spoken of the Logos. And an itinerant Jewish rabbi by the name of Jesus, shouldn’t have said anything like, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58).

Exodus 3 is shocking as well. “I AM the I AM” is perhaps the most philosophically sublime statement in history, and it comes to us in a narrative about an exiled member of the Egyptian royal family working as a shepherd for the priest of Midan talking to a burning bush in the desert. Plato refers to God as “the Being,” which is a more than responsible translation of the Hebrew and identical to the Septuagint’s translation and Revelation 1:8. And if you don’t find it shocking, read a bit of Heidegger as he tries to work around Being-in-itself.