From every error keep us free let none but Christ our Master be

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

The Triumph of a Dictatorship: Reflections on the cultural subversion of the gospel

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 19^th and early 20^th 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.

Not just a theory: Reflections on Christ, culture and 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 Perennial Danger for the Church: Reflections on Heresy, Culture and the Gospel

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.

Against starting from scratch

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.

Every student of the Bible must do this; and all make it obvious that they do it, by the terms they use in their prayers and religious discourse, whether they admit or deny the propriety of human creeds and confessions. If they refuse the assistance afforded by the statements of doctrine slowly elaborated and defined by the Church, they must make out their own creed by their own unaided wisdom.

The real question is not, as often pretended, between the Word of God and the creed of man, but between the tried and proved faith of the collective body of God's people, and the private judgment and the unassisted wisdom of the repudiator of creeds.

A. A. Hodge, The Westminster Confession: A Commentary, p.2-3

Don't take the gospel for granted

How does bad theology spread? Why do once gospel believing people, churches, organisations, and movements move away from the truth?

John Owen pondered this as he observed the spread of the "leprosy of Socinianism" (that historic collection of errors, some of which have resurfaced in contemporary evangelicalism. See this earlier post on the subject):

The vanity of the minds of men, their weariness of sound doctrine, which they will endure no longer, whatever they embrace, have given it admission, either in part or in whole, among multitudes who once professed the faith of the gospel.

And this was the case even though Owen knew that these errors had appeared, and been dealt with, on the earlier pages of church history. Owen places these errors under two heads:

1. The denial of the Trinity

2. Pelagianism

Here is what he says about the second head:

But as to the latter branch of their profession...it hath diffused itself among multitudes of persons who were some time of another persuasion, and have yet engagements on them so to be.

All that unreasonable advancement of reason in matters of religion which we have amongst us; the new notions men have of the satisfaction of Christ, pretending to the acknowledgment of it, indeed destructive unto it; the noisome conception of the little use of the person of Christ in religion beyond the revelation and confirmation of the gospel; doctrines of the possibility, yea, facility of yielding acceptable obedience unto all evangelical commands without the aids of effectual grace, of the powers and incorruption of our nature, of justification by and upon our own obedience, of the suitableness of all gospel mysteries to unrenewed reason or an unsanctified mind, of regeneration as consisting only in the reformation of our lives; with a rejection of all internal real efficacy in converting grace; with the denial of any influences of grace from Jesus Christ unto the holiness of truth.

And many other opinions wherewith men even pride themselves, to the contempt of the doctrine received and established in the reformed churches of old,--are borrowed out of the storehouses of their imaginations, shall I say, or raked out of their dunghill.

And whither the infection may diffuse itself I know not. The resurrection of the same bodies substantially, the subsistence and acting of the soul in its separate state and condition, the eternity of hell torments, the nature of Christ's sacerdotal office as distinguished from his regal, begin to be either questioned or very faintly defended amongst many.

John Owen, Works Volume VII, The Nature and Causes of Apostasy, p. 77-8

It seems to me that in Owen's analysis the infection of Socinianism was spreading because the immune system among the churches was weak. There was a weakened view of the necessity of grace, or the comprehensive need of grace. This was true of the great objective work of Christ, his satisfaction for sin, and the great subjective work of God in regeneration.

Behind the diminishing of God's grace in the gospel emerged the inflation and reassertion of human ability.

Evangelicalism without the theology of the reformation churches will always revert to Pelagianism. Only the grace of God in the gospel can suppress and kill this tendency.

The beloved Son cursed for sinners

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.

The Non-Negotiable Demands of God

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.

Watch your life and doctrine closely: my rationale for interviews

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.

I personally find interviews very stimulating. They give you a feel for the person behind the pulpit and the books. They are also able to flesh out "right" answers with experience. The latter can show us something of the trials and costliness of pastoral ministry.

Here is something of my rationale for conducting these interviews:

I hope that these interviews will serve three aims for three groups of people.

The first group consists of those considering, training for, and actually engaged in pastoral ministry.

The second group consists of those who weekly hear, reflect on, and seek to put into practice the teaching ministry of the first group. It is the Church that supplies men for the ministry, and (not to be neglected) financially sustains this work.

The third, and smallest group, consists of those entrusted with teaching, training, mentoring, pastoring, and correcting the first group for the sake of the life and health of the second group. This third group consists of those who teach the teachers at seminaries and theological colleges.

My aims for this series of interviews are:

1. To provide a window on the personal context of dealing with theological error.

2. To encourage serious biblical thinking on the nature and danger of heresy in the context of proclaiming and teaching the whole counsel of God.

3. To learn lessons from the Bible, the creeds, the Reformed confessions, and Church history to help foster reflection and action on the challenges, threats, and opportunities of our own times.

I hope then that the interviews will do far more than inform. My hope is that they will promote a personal watchfulness, humility, love for the truth, discernment, wisdom, historical awareness and steadfastness.

The Usefulness of Heretics to the Church

In chapter one of his book on Paul and the New Perspective, Stephen Westerholm argues the case for Augustine being included in the debate over the right interpretation of the apostle's writings:

Augustine had his own spectacles, to be sure, furnished in part by his struggles with heretics. The latter, like other perversions of the good in Augustine's universe, inevitably served useful purposes: they compelled the church to "investigate [its articles of faith] more accurately, to understand them more clearly, and to proclaim them more earnestly" (De civ. Dei 16.2.).

Westerholm, Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The "Lutheran" Paul and His Critics, p.3

Heretics are useful because:

1. They compel the Church to Investigate the faith more accurately

2. They compel the Church to Understand the faith more clearly

3. They compel the Church to Proclaim the faith more earnestly

Resisting and Receiving Justification by Faith Alone

Understanding and believing justification by faith alone is more than assenting to a doctrine. It is more than right conclusions from word studies, more than exegesis, more than hermeneutics, more than biblical and systematic theology. Believing it for oneself, teaching it to the church, and proclaiming it in the world are no mere intellectual matters. If we understand it aright we will feel ourselves as sinners in the presence of the Holy God with no covering for our sin, shame, and guilt. We will see that our only refuge is Jesus Christ, his blood and righteousness, freely offered to us in the gospel. Our free acceptance by God will not be in ourselves but in him alone.

Our hearts resist submitting to the righteousness of God in Christ. Justification by faith alone is not an easy doctrine to maintain. It never will be.

James Buchanan gave an good indication why this is the case:

Luther knew human nature too well to suppose that the truth could be preserved in its purity without a constant conflict with error; and he predicted more than once the gradual declension even of the Protestant Churches from this fundamental article of faith. He knew that men would grow indifferent to it, in proportion as they became less impressed with a sense of sin, and less alive to the claims of the Law and Justice of God.

He was soon taught by observation of what was passing around him, as well as by his own inward experience, that there are, in the heart of every fallen man, two great tendencies,--pointing apparently in opposite directions, but equally at variance with the doctrine which he taught,--the one, a tendency to Legalism, or self-righteous confidence; the other, a tendency to Licence, and Antinomian error.

Between these two extreme tendencies, the true doctrine of Justification has often been, as Tertullian said, 'like Christ crucified between two thieves:' and all the errors which have arisen on that subject in the Church, may be ascribed to the one or the other, more or less fully developed.

James Buchanan, The Doctrine of Justification, p. 153-4

The Gospel is worth fighting for

No-one should take pleasure in theological conflict for the sake of it. In a sense it is always to be regretted. But that is a far different thing to say than to claim it is unnecessary, or to suggest that engaging in it is ungodly.

One can understand the desire to shrink back from conflict. There is the fear that conflict is bad press for the church in the eyes of an onlooking world, a world it must be remembered that the church is seeking to win by its word and conduct.

Yet there is something amiss in what seems to be a right and proper motivation to avoid polemics, especially polemics that are open to public view. What is amiss is the absolute necessity of maintaining the truth of the gospel. This will always be worth fighting for. And this is exactly what animated Paul in his public exchanges and public write up of them in Galatia, "We did not give in to them for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might remain with you" (Galatians 2:5).

Not to engage in this fight is unthinkable. For the glory of God, and the eternal good of souls, this battle must be fought.

Here are some extracts from the much maligned but steadfastly faithful J. Gresham Machen:

Tertullian fought a mighty battle against Marcion; Athanasius fought against the Arians; Augustine fought against Pelagius; and as for Luther, he fought a brave battle against kings and princes and popes for the liberty of the people of God.

Luther was a great fighter; and we love him for it. So was Calvin; so were John Knox and all the rest. It is impossible to be a good soldier of Jesus Christ and not fight.

J. Gresham Machen, an extract from his last sermon at Princeton Seminary Chapel, March 10th 1929

Let us not fear the opposition of men; every great movement in the Church from Paul down to modern times has been criticized on the ground that it promoted censoriousness and intolerance and disputing. Of course the gospel of Christ, in a world of sin and doubt, will cause disputing; and if it does not cause disputing and arouse bitter opposition, that is a fairly sure sign that it is not being faithfully proclaimed.

J. Gresham Machen

Quoted in David Calhoun, Princeton Seminary: The Majestic Testimony 1869-1929, p.364

Coming Soon: Sin in High Places, an interview with Carl Trueman

Starting from Monday I will be posting an interview with Carl R. Trueman, professor of Historical Theology and Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia.

Atonement: Lost Words, Lost Meaning, Lost Salvation

Below is a quote from B. B. Warfield worthy of deep reflection:

You see, that what we are doing today as we look out upon our current religious modes of speech, is assisting at the death bed of a word. It is sad to witness the death of any worthy thing,--even of a worthy word. And worthy words do die, like any other worthy thing--if we do not take good care of them.

And these good words are still dying all around us. There is that good word "Evangelical." It is certainly moribund, if not already dead. Nobody any longer seems to know what it means.

I think that you will agree with me that it is a sad thing to see words like these [redeemer and redemption] die like this. And I hope you will determine that, God helping you, you will not let them die thus, if any care on your part can preserve them in life and vigor.

But the dying of the words is not the saddest thing which we see here. The saddest thing is the dying out of the hearts of men of the things for which the words stand.

The real thing for you to settle in your minds, therefore, is whether Christ is truly a Redeemer to you, and whether you find an actual Redemption in Him,--or are you ready to deny the Master who bought you, and to count His blood an unholy thing?

B. B. Warfield, from the opening address delivered in Miller Chapel, Princeton Theological Seminary, September 17th 1915

An "A" for orthodoxy and a "D" for orthopraxy?

Here is a short extract from a forthcoming chapter:

G. K. Chesterton once wrote that “heresy always affects morality, if it is heretical enough.” It is true to say that any form of error, and not just heresy, will show itself in some form of deficiency or delinquency in the life of the church and the Christian. If we follow the logic of Paul in the pastoral epistles we should expect false theologies to produce ungodly behavior. But there is a subtle danger with Chesterton's observation. The danger is that we will form in our minds a narrow and set idea of what that immorality could look like. And, based on that assumption, we will then expect those who are theologically compromised to be immoral only in that particular way. Yet in the history of the church there have been those who clearly and definitely embraced and taught error who were known for their personal moral integrity. In fact men as notorious as Pelagius and Faustus Socinus were respected in just this way. You would expect the opposite to be true wouldn't you? But there is more to it than a simple, straightforward, personal moral failure.

In recent writing on orthopraxy there has been a stress on the outworking of orthodoxy in terms of changed Christian behavior along the lines of the fruit of the Spirit. Sometimes this has been married with an affirmation that this kind of orthopraxy is in fact what orthodoxy is really all about. What has been neglected, in my estimation, is the stress on orthopraxy at the very point where it connects to orthodoxy. This is the kind of orthopraxy that values guarding the good deposit, of being found trustworthy with the mysteries of God, of rightly handling the word of truth, of keeping the faith, of holding firm to the trustworthy word as taught. These things are also included in biblical orthopraxy. So much so that a failure here may have eternal consequences for preacher and listener alike. It is a failure that is exacerbated when those guilty of it continue to exhibit this kind of ungodliness. A refusal to be corrected, and to hold on to views that deviate from the gospel, is itself a form of immorality and ungodliness. If we do not hold firmly to the gospel then we will have a chronically misshaped orthopraxy at a vital point. And, it should be said, it is a failure that will only be corrected by repentance.

Atonement: God's nature, will, and penal substitution

Debates about the atonement are never far removed from theology proper. Penal substitution is not only exegetically founded but is also doctrinally intelligible within a particular set of beliefs. These beliefs include the attributes of the justice and holiness of God, their relationship to the divine nature and will, and the existence and of sins committed by rational creatures.

And, perhaps it is unnecessary to say this, but the God who has revealed truths to us about his justice, holiness, nature, and will, has also revealed truth about the nature and extent of our depravity (which we see and feel the effects of every day but need revelation from God to rightly comprehend) and the remedy for that sin in the cross of Christ.

This is one reason why those who wanted to play down Steve Chalke & Alan Mann's aversion to penal substitution in The Lost Message of Jesus missed the point when they said that a) this wasn't even a book about penal substitution, and/or b) that debates about penal substitution are not really big issues for Christians today. But there is much more at stake in these debates than a particular view of substitutionary atonement. What is also at stake is our understanding of the doctrine of God. And in this regard, for the record, evangelicals should be as concerned with where The Lost Message of Jesus positioned itself on God's attributes and the doctrine of sin as they are about the book's presentation of penal substitutionary atonement.

Back in the 1650s many of these issues were undergoing discussion and debate in England. The chief detractors of penal substitution were the Socinians (who incidentally were also open theists and anti-trinitarians). John Owen made a telling contribution to this debate with his A Dissertation on Divine Justice (1652). He understood full well that objections to "penal satisfaction" were connected to particular views of God's justice and will in relation to sin and its punishment. Owen considered that the Socinians placed all their hopes of "overturning the doctrine of the satisfaction of Christ in opposing this justice."

The issue at hand in this debate was summed up in the following question (read it out loud if the first reading of it is heavy going):

Whether it be natural to God, or an essential attribute of the divine nature, --that is to say, such that, the existence of sin being admitted, God must necessarily exercise it, because it supposes in him a constant and immutable will to punish sin, so that while he acts consistently with his nature he cannot do otherwise than punish and avenge it,--or whether it be a free act of the divine will, which he may exercise at pleasure?

Owen said that his opponents denied:

That there is any such attribute in God as requires satisfaction for sins, which he is willing to forgive, but maintain that he is entirely free to "yield up his claim of right," as they phrase it, at pleasure; that divine justice ought, by no means, to be reckoned among the causes of Christ's death.

This issue hasn't gone away. For example consider the following from a contemporary Christian author:

“The traditional understanding says that God asks of us something that God is incapable of Himself. God asks us to forgive people. But God is incapable of forgiving. God can’t forgive unless He punishes somebody in place of the person He was going to forgive. God doesn’t say things to you—Forgive your wife, and then go kick the dog to vent your anger. God asks you to actually forgive. And there’s a certain sense that, a common understanding of the atonement presents a God who is incapable of forgiving. Unless He kicks somebody else.”

Now aside of the fact that the quotation above obliterates the Creator/creature distinction by confusing what is appropriate for God as God to do with what he requires of his creatures (an argument that will not pass Paul's reasoning about these matters in Romans 12:14-13:4) what view of God's nature is being presented here? Must God punish sin or does he merely choose to do so?

If there is no necessity on God's part to punish sin, since he is free to forgive sins by an act of the will, why was Jesus Christ his beloved Son crucified at all? Why didn't God merely forgive sins by his word on the basis of the response of faith and repentance? If you grant that he could have done that, what view of the cross would you then hold to?

Is God "incapable of forgiving" without the sin-bearing death of a substitute because being bound by his own divine nature he must punish sin, or not ? When God speaks we presume that he must speak the truth (being bound by his nature as the God who cannot lie) but when he exercises justice is there is no necessity that he must punish sin (there being nothing in his nature that necessitates that he must punish sin)?

Owen drew out the implications of these two positions:

Between their sentiments and ours on this point there is the widest difference; for we affirm the justice by which God punishes sin to be the very essential rectitude of deity itself, exercised in the punishment of sins, according to the rule of wisdom, and which is in itself no more free than the divine essence.

In the end the view we take of atonement cannot be divorced from our doctrine of the divine nature and attributes.

Word Association: Doctrine

I need some responses to these two questions:

1. What does your average evangelical church member think of when they hear the word "doctrine"?

2. What do you think of when you hear the word "doctrine"?

On Adaptation

D. G. Hart has this interesting comment in his biography of J. Gresham Machen:

The hallmark of liberalism was a conscious adaptation of religious ideas to modern culture and the affirmation that God was immanent in human history and was establishing a righteous kingdom through social progress.

D. G. Hart, Defending the Faith, p. 103

When you hear the call today to change the message of the gospel because the culture has changed it makes you wonder how this can be different to what the liberal theologians proposed. I guess it isn't all that different at all.

Evangelicalism: We don't confess the faith like they used to

The thought that evangelicalism could through time resemble liberalism once seemed far fetched to me. How could a movement so opposed to the rise of unbelief that settled in the churches as liberal theology, ever embrace methods and ideas that it once stood against.

My incredulity toward this possibility was due to a confusion between the particular expression of unbelief (anti-supernaturalism) and the general inclination of heart and mind that gives deference to the mood and mindset of the culture above that of Scripture.

This is a situation that is faced by every generation in the Church. The battle over liberalism was not fought once and the results confined to the pages of history. No it is a battle that is fought over and over again. And it is being fought today as we choose whether to accommodate the gospel according to Scripture to the culture, or whether we will count the cost and be faithful to the Word of God.

Speaking of the doctrinal crisis in evangelicalism Sinclair Ferguson has recently written that:

The knowledge of the person and work of Christ, clear thinking about the nature of justification and its grounds, and its relationship to and differences from sanctification--the issues to which earlier generations had given so much attention--were now regarded as of marginal practical relevance...Somewhat unnervingly, the results in every recent poll of what evangelicals believe (or don't believe) suggest that a turning to the self and a de-centering of the Trinity has become pervasive in the subculture that was thought to be immune to liberalism.

When this is the ethos of the evangelical church, it is in no fit state to deal with any new wind of teaching.

Sinclair B. Ferguson, "Introduction: the Justification Crisis," in K. Scot Oliphint (ed.) Justified in Christ: God's Plan for us in Justification, p. 4

Sinclair Ferguson's eighteen page introduction is available as a pdf. file download, and the book to buy, at the Westminster Bookstore.

The "rare bird" of Pelagianism and the begging of the question by the new perspective

Rather than appearing in its pure and simple form, Pelagianism has been far more prevalent in church history when it has been mixed in with a bit of grace.

Cornelis Venema, of Mid-America Reformed Seminary, in his recent book dealing with the New Perspective, argues that E. P. Sanders portrayal of Second-Temple Judaism has strong affinities with semi-Pelagianism:

The glaring weakness of Sanders' case...is that he does not consider whether 'covenantal nomism' could accommodate a form of religious teaching that regards salvation and acceptance with God as being based on grace plus good works.

Covenantal nomism is a sufficiently elastic pattern for the religion of Second-Temple Judaism that it could express a kind of a semi-Pelagian view of the relation between God and his people.

That Second-Temple Judaism was not full-blown Pelagianism is not surprising. In the course of history, Pelagianism is a 'rare bird' in the aviary of Jewish and Christian theology. Few have argued that salvation does not require the initiative of God's grace but is simply based on human moral achievement.

Where Pelagianism has appeared, therefore, it has commonly been condemned by the major branches of the Christian church. Semi-Pelagian views, however, are quite often found in the history of Christian theology. Though these views may speak of God's gracious initiative in salvation, they also insist that human salvation does not end with a good beginning.

According to semi-Pelagianism, those who find favour and acceptance with God are those who freely co-operate with his grace and complement it by a life of good works that merits further grace and final salvation.

Cornelis Venema, The Gospel of Free Acceptance in Christ: An assessment of the Reformation and the New Perspective on Paul, p. 156-7