...or maybe not.
A few extracts from Luther's dismantling of Erasmus on free will:
There is a long trail of contextualized theologies, written over the last half century, in which the external dimension virtually replaces the internal, cultural aspects eclipse biblical norms, and the result has been the kind of compromise, trendiness, and manipulation which ends up promoting worldly agendas, be they political, social, ideological, or personal, in place of biblical truth. This has been a sorry tale. And somewhere in the making of each of its works the fatal step was taken to allow the culture to say what God's story should sound like rather than insisting that theology is not theology if it is not listening to God telling his own story in his own way.
There surely ought to be little difficulty in determining what Christianity is...Unquestionably, Christianity is a redemptive religion, having as its fundamental presupposition the fact of sin, felt both as guilt and as pollution, and offering as its central good, from which all other goods proceed, salvation from sin through an historical expiation wrought by the God-man Jesus Christ. The essence of Christianity has always been to its adherents the sinner's experience of reconciliation with God through the propitiatory sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
Here are two extracts from Bavinck on objections to penal substitution:
Come, Holy Ghost, God and Lord!
Be all Thy graces now outpoured
On each believer’s mind and heart;
Thy fervent love to them impart.
Lord, by the brightness of Thy light
Thou in the faith dost men unite
Of every land and every tongue;
This to Thy praise, O Lord, our God, be sung.
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
Thou holy Light, Guide divine,
Oh, cause the Word of Life to shine!
Teach us to know our God aright
And call Him Father with delight.
From every error keep us free;
Let none but Christ our Master be
That we in living faith abide,
In Him, our Lord, with all our might confide.
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
Thou holy Fire, Comfort true,
Grant us the will Thy work to do
And in Thy service to abide;
Let trials turn us not aside.
Lord, by Thy power prepare each heart
And to our weakness strength impart
That bravely here we may contend,
Through life and death to Thee, our Lord, ascend.
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
Martin Luther
It is said that the triumph of a dictatorship is not when it has to censor its subjects, but when its subjects are willing to censor themselves. This happens to the church when it accepts the ideology of a dictatorship above its confession of Jesus as Lord. But the form of the dictatorship need not be represented by a nation state. It can also be found in the way that the thought forms of the age exert control over their subjects. When this happens the gospel becomes a lost message. It no longer sounds distinctive but resonates with the sound of the culture. This does not necessarily mean that people are kept from hearing about Jesus, the good news, the Bible, or the cross. The words themselves may remain, but their content is altered by, and adapted to, the dominant cultural world-view. And the frightening thing is that this can be done willingly and with the best of motives. In seeking to communicate the gospel to the culture it is possible for the church to be assimilated by the mindset of that culture.
The first priority of the church is not mission but confession. Any emphasis on being missional that is not already clear on what it means to be confessional will misrepresent the person and work of Christ and hinder the work of the church. And without a true confession there is no authentic mission. The liberal theologians and preachers of the 19th and early 20th centuries did not intend to destroy the church. Many of them felt compelled to adopt new theological positions because of the impact of new scientific knowledge. And many of them were seeking to reach their generation with the gospel, or what they considered to be the gospel.
One writer has argued that there are facets or layers to the gospel that deal with sin and guilt and others that deal with hope, the future, justice, compassion, individuals, humanity and politics, and that we should select appropriate facets suited to and depending on our particular culture. How are these facets and layers related to Jesus? He goes on to say:
All of these versions, facets, and layers center in Jesus Christ. If Christianity has anything to say at all, if it has a message worth repeating at all, then at the core is Christ. And not just a facet of Christ or an idea about Christ, not just a theory about Christ's birth or death or resurrection or teaching or deity, but Christ himself, Christ the person, Christ the figure who came to us in the story we call the gospel.
How can we speak of Christ apart from what we know about him? The Christ we are meant to know and who saves us is never an “uninterpreted Christ.” He is either rightly interpreted or wrongly interpreted. How can he be the object of saving faith unless we know things about who he is and what he accomplished? A false faith would be faith placed in a wrongly interpreted Christ. Isn't that Paul's point about the super apostles in 2 Corinthians 11? They preached “another Jesus.”
By a rightly “interpreted Christ” I mean that the Christ of the Bible and the apostles' proclamation is never separated for faith from what God has said about him (his person and his work). Take away God's interpretation of Christ from our experience of him and you are left with either a mystical Christ, of whom we know nothing and whose name serves merely as a religious word, or a false Christ (and there are many in history who have fitted this description). Detach right ideas from Christ and his work and you are left either with nothing, or with a false Christ. There is no uninterpreted Christ. We need God's explanation of him in order for us to call on him.
Precisely because the story in the canonical gospels explain and interpret Christ it makes no sense to speak of Christ himself apart from “facets,” “ideas,” or “theories.” Not that these are interpretations that we are free to create, evaluate, or embrace as we see fit according to our culture or location in history. When the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 records the apostolic testimony about the gospel that was universally proclaimed and believed, he stresses that this is the authorized interpretation of Christ. He gives the facts. That Christ died, was buried and was raised on the third day. He gives the meaning of those facts. That Christ died for our sins, and that without his resurrection from the dead we would still be in our sins. And he tells us where that meaning is authoritatively interpreted for us . Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.
There simply is no other Jesus than this one. And since that is the case what we may say about him in the gospel is non-negotiable. It cannot and must not change. It is certainly not amenable to the whims of human thought and cultural change.
The entrapment of the gospel by the culture is not a relatively new phenomena in the history of the church. It is much older than the capitulation of confessional churches that went on during the Enlightenment. In one form or another it has been a perennial problem.When the church faces the pressure of open, external persecution it is something like the unsubtle attack made in The War of the Worlds. There is the direct contrast of the world and the church, and the active destruction of the church by physical attack. But the church also faces an internal pressure that is often hidden. This is the pressure of theological compromise. The attack upon the church from within, by heretics who reconfigure and redefine the faith, is like The Invasion of the Body-Snatchers.
This point was made by Tertullian, “Heresies, at the present time, will no less rend the church by their perversion of doctrine, than will Antichrist persecute her at that day by the cruelty of his attacks, except that persecution makes martyrs, (but) heresy only apostates.”1 Heresy is the takeover of the gospel by an alien world-view. A foreign element subverts, regulates, and determines a new shape to Christian belief. But this does not happen openly, it happens under the guise of orthodoxy. As G. P. Fisher put it:
When Christianity is brought into contact with modes of thought and tenets originating elsewhere, either of two effects may follow. It may assimilate them, discarding whatever is at variance with the gospel, or the tables may be turned and the foreign elements may prevail. In the latter case there ensues a perversion of Christianity, an amalgamation with it of ideas discordant with its nature. The product then is a heresy. But to fill out the conception, it seems necessary that error should be aggressive and should give rise to an effort to build up a party, and thus to divide the Church. In the Apostles' use of the term, “heresy” contains a factious element.2
We see this impulse at work within the New Testament. It is the root cause of the Corinthian error about the resurrection. Paul counters this local manifestation of error by showing its implications for the resurrection of Christ, the integrity of gospel proclamation, and the future judgment of believers. Interestingly he also counters it by asserting the catholicity of belief in the resurrection. We are led to infer from this that the fact and explanation of the resurrection of Christ and his people was under duress from an interpretation of the resurrection that had not originated from the apostolic preaching. It was, therefore, attributable to an alien world-view. And as long as some in the Corinthian church viewed the resurrection through the framework of this alien world-view they would not believe, confess, or teach it truthfully.
Another example from the Corinthian church is the preaching of the super apostles. Paul makes it quite clear that although their vocabulary was orthodox, after all they spoke of Jesus, the gospel, and the Spirit, the content of those words had been radically changed. Paul writes “For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough” (2 Corinthians 1:4). The signs remained (Jesus, Spirit, gospel) but the things signified were not the same as in the apostolic gospel.
Irenaeus, in his monumental work Against Heresies, warned about the danger of being “carried off” by false teachers because “their language resembles ours while their sentiments are very different.”3 And Tertullian, again, attributes this subversion of Christian doctrine to the influence of pagan philosophy, “The same subject-matter is discussed over and over again by the heretics and the philosophers; the same arguments are involved.” 4
Furthermore we find the same connection between heresy and pagan philosophy being made by Hippolytus of Rome:
For from philosophers the heresiarchs deriving starting-points, (and) like cobblers patching together, according to their own particular interpretation, the blunders of the ancients, have advanced them as novelties to those that are capable of being deceived.5
It now seems to us that the tenets of both all the Greeks and barbarians have been sufficiently explained by us, and that nothing has remained unrefuted either of the points about which philosophy has been busied, or of the allegations advanced by the heretics. And from these very explanations the condemnation of the heretics is obvious, for having either purloined their doctrines, or derived contributions to them from some of those tenets elaborately worked out by the Greeks, and for having advanced (these opinions) as if they originated from God.6
From Paul's warning about being taken captive by “philosophy and empty deceit” (Colossians 2:8), through Tertullian's argument that “heresies are themselves instigated by philosophy,”7and the words of Hippolytus, it is fair to say that Christianity has had a desperately uneasy relationship with philosophy.
Doubtless it is the case that the language of the ecumenical creeds is indebted to language borrowed from Greek culture. For the sake of clarity and precision this was done. However, that is far different from the approach that took concepts derived from pagan philosophy and dressed them up in biblical language. Philosophy terminology has been made into a servant in expressing biblical doctrines, but it has always become a tyrannical master when it has intruded upon the content of Christian faith.8 Leithart has made some valuable observations on this point:
...it would be a distortion to say that classical theism is Hellenism in Christian garb...The simple fact that the Church fathers formulated the doctrine of the Trinity shows that Greek philosophy did not function as a straight-jacket that theologians were unable to escape. If Greek philosophy had exercised veto power, we would be Arians.9
When the presuppositions of the culture control the embodiment of the gospel the decision has already been made to reconfigure what the gospel really means. This is the perennial danger for the church.
1Tertullian, Prescription Against Heresies, Chapter IV.
2Quoted in B. B. Warfield, “Heresy & Concession,” The Presbyterian Messenger, May 7, 1896, p. 672
3Alexander Roberts & W. H. Rambaut (trans.), Ante-Nicene Christian Library, vol. 5: The Writings of Irenaeus, (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1868), p. 2.
4Ibid., Chapter VII.
5Hippolytus, Refutation of all Heresies, Book 5 Chapter 1.
6Ibid., Book 9 Chapter 26.
7Ibid., Chapter VII.
8This is perhaps particularly misunderstood in the Post-Reformation period. For the distinction of “scholasticism” as a method and not a way of determining theological content see Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: vol. 1, Prolegomena to Theology, (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), pp. 34-7.
9Peter J. Leithart, “Trinity, Time and Open Theism,” in Douglas Wilson (ed.), Bound Only Once: The Failure of Open Theism, (Moscow: Canon Press, 2001), p. 126.
Men must interpret to the best of their ability each particular part of Scripture separately, and then combine all that the Scriptures teach upon every subject into a consistent whole, and then adjust their teachings upon different subjects in mutual consistency as parts of a harmonious system. 
How does bad theology spread? Why do once gospel believing people, churches, organisations, and movements move away from the truth?
You sometimes hear the accusation that there is a version of penal substitution around today that is somewhat extreme. The implication being that this is an ultra-conservative departure from a more historic understanding of substitutionary atonement. John Knox would have raised his eyebrows at such a notion.Scots Confession (1560), chapter 9
That our Lord Jesus offered himself a voluntary sacrifice unto his Father for us, that he suffered contradiction of sinners, that he was wounded and plagued for our transgressions, that he, the clean innocent Lamb of God, was condemned in the presence of an earthly judge, that we should be absolved before the judgment seat of our God; that he suffered not only the cruel death of the cross, which was accursed by the sentence of God; but also that he suffered for a season the wrath of his Father which sinners had deserved. But yet we avow that he remained the only, well beloved, and blessed Son of his Father even in the midst of his anguish and torment which he suffered in body and soul to make full atonement for the sins of his people. From this we confess and avow that there remains no other sacrifice for sin; if any affirm so, we do not hesitate to say that they are blasphemers against Christ's death and the everlasting atonement thereby purchased for us.
Cleave, serve, worship, trust...From the first article of the Scots Confession (1560):
We confess and acknowledge one God alone, to whom alone we must cleave, whom alone we must serve, whom only we must worship, and in whom alone we put our trust. Who is eternal, infinite, immeasurable, incomprehensible, omnipotent, invisible; one in substance and yet distinct in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. By whom we confess and believe all things in heaven and earth, visible and invisible to have been created, to be retained in their being, and to be ruled and guided by his inscrutable providence for such end as his eternal wisdom, goodness, and justice have appointed, and to the manifestation of his own glory.
There will be more interviews to come in the next few weeks on handling truth and error in the ministry. My thanks to Geoff Thomas, Derek Thomas, Scott Clark, Carl Trueman and Michael Horton for their insights and wisdom.
