Entries Tagged 'Issues' ↓

In a relatively recent (but undated) press release, Central Baptist Theological Seminary announced that discussions of a proposed merger between Central and Faith Baptist Theological Seminary have ceased. Instead, some kind of cooperation between the two institutions will be pursued “short of a merger”.

Below the press release, links are provided to several ‘ethos statements’, also undated. They provide an interesting glimpse into the state of mind CBTS considers to be its “distinguishing character, sentiment, moral nature, or guiding beliefs”. *

In reading these documents, some observations come to mind. First, comparing the “Ethos Statement on Salvation & Sanctification” and the “Ethos Statement on Hermeneutics & Eschatology” with the “Ethos Statement on Fundamentalism & Evangelicalism”, a curious difference is immediately noticeable. The first two documents are full of phrases like this: “Some of us believe that…” contrasted with “while others believe…” or “while others understand…” The third document contains no expressions like this at all. One has to wonder how much these first two documents really distinguish the character or guiding beliefs of the institution. Some believe one thing, others believe another. Doesn’t sound like a statement of certainty to me. It seems that the third document, the “Ethos Statement on Fundamentalism & Evangelicalism” is more definitive than the first two.

Second, regarding the “Ethos Statement on Fundamentalism & Evangelicalism” specifically, my first impression is that it represents something new. It isn’t the way fundamentalists have typically expressed themselves in the last 60 years, but it does seem to be a summary statement of new views of fundamentalism that some have been advocating in recent years. Yet, this statement is perhaps less definitive than it appears because there remain several important unanswered questions.

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In an interview with Peter Hitchens (brother of Christopher), Hugh Hewitt brings up the subject of marriage. Peter Hitchens’ comment is very interesting.

HH: As we speak, marriage is up, it’s a knockout punch that is being aimed at marriage in California.

PH: Yes.

HH: The consequences of that, do you have any opinion?

PH: Well, I think it’s immensely serious, and it’s also rative of a fight, because those who fight it on the grounds on which the left have chosen to make it a battle, can very easily be portrayed as bigots and intolerant and cruel, because it’s always an issue of allegedly giving something to somebody, and why are you against giving something to somebody? Are you a cruel person? Are you a nasty person? Are you a vindictive person? And it’s turned into that development. And this is partly, of course, because the battle over divorce, which both in your country and in mine, was made so ridiculously easy in the 1960s. The battle over divorce has already been conceded, and therefore marriage among heterosexuals is so weakened, that this assault on it is not seen for what it is, namely a further blow at what I regard is the constitution of private life, that the marriage contract is the basis on which private life can be lived. And the moment the state becomes more important, and the moment big corporations become more powerful than the marriage bond, then private life is over, and we’re all slaves. And this is the difficulty. You need to find, and the conservative movement on both sides, I think, need to find a language in which to fight this war without it being easy for the other side to portray them as bigots.

(Quote comes about 2/3 of the way through the interview)

Most of my readers are probably aware that this is a present battle for the essential building blocks of human society.

Recently, I conducted the ceremony for my sister and her husband. Two comments highlight how much on the front lines of the battle real Christian marriage is.

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The Baptist Church in Horse Fair, Stony Stratford, Bucks, England in the year 1790 covenanted together:

To maintain and hold fast the important and fundamental truths of revelation. These we apprehend to be such as respect the natural and moral character of Jehovah, and the various relations He stands in to His rational creatures; the original purity but present depravity of human nature; the total moral inability and yet absolute inexcusableness of man as a guilty sinner before God; the perpetuity of a divine law, and the equity of its awful sanction; the infinite dignity of the Son of God in His original character as a divine Person, possessed of all the perfections of Deity, and His all-sufficiency for the office of Mediator between God and man, in consequence of the union of the divine and human natures in one person; the acceptance of our persons with, and the enjoyment of all good from God, through His mediation; the proper divinity and blessed agency of the Holy Spirit in our regeneration, sanctification, and consolation; in one word, that our full salvation, from its first cause to its final consummation, is a display of sovereign goodness accomplishing the glorious purposes of Him, who worketh all things according to the Council of His own will, and known unto whom is the end from the beginning.

It is quite interesting to me that this church in 1790 uses the terms "fundamental truths". Also of interest are the specific list of doctrines noted as such. It seems that the ideas of fundamentalism are not such a new thing as some suppose.

* Quoted from Baptist Confessions, Covenants and Catechisms, Timothy and Denise George, eds., p. 188, emphasis mine.

Bob Bixby is at it again. In his article, among other things, he says this:

Go to an FBF meeting and look at their leaders beginning with the president and do a study of their adult children. (The last one I attended in 2009 it was obvious that most of the attendees were old enough to have adult children.) You will find that the second-generation of Fundamentalism results very frequently, if they are graced by God, in abandonment of their fathers’ ideology while retaining true fundamentals (thankfully) or, sadly, a whole-hearted plunge into antinomianism.

To which I responded with this:

Don Johnson, on August 19, 2010 at 12:07 pm Said:

Bob, your shot at fundamentalists and their children is really unkind. Do you think that fundamentalists are the only ones who have problems with their adult children? Do you think adult children is what Jesus meant when he said you can judge a tree by its fruit?

Your ranting once again vents spleen and speaks more about you than about those you attack.

Maranatha!
Don Johnson
Jeremiah 33.3

Immediately afterward, another commenter added this:

Hope said on Legalism is the Slippery Slope

August 19, 2010 at 1:41 pm

In response to Bob Bixby on August 19, 2010 at 10:50 am:

The man who today forbids what God allows, tomorrow will allow what God forbids. ~ R.B. Kuiper I want to push back. A Fundamental Baptist pastor has alerted his people to the dangers of Bob Bixby, saying that I am a New Evangelical and have opened the door to compromise and worldliness. I think a [...]

Amen to what Don said!

You will look in vain for this comment. Apparently Bob doesn’t want you to see it. Bob replied to me:

Bob Bixby, on August 19, 2010 at 2:08 pm Said:

Don, in the interest of Christian civility I deleted my longer response and will stick to this:

You are the one that is inconsiderately derailing the conversation by your ad hominem argument. You know as well as I do that biblically these teachers are open to scrutiny and, yes, it is right to look at a man’s adult children to consider the long-term effect of his teaching. It is not an wild attack to raise the question when some scholars even believe (though I do not think I can fully agree) that a man is potentially disqualified from ministry if his adult children are not believers. My point is that my invitation to check these men out is not outside of the God-given parameters.

Please do not post on my blog again. Your modus operandi with me is never discussion but an immediate attempt to discolor the whole thing so that people miss the point because you actually have no substantive argument in response. This is typical of fundamentalism.

To this comment, I offered these words:

Bob, do you think that Jesus meant adult children when he said, "by their fruit ye shall know them"?

As for your request, you are free to delete anything I write. It does seem somewhat contrary to the spirit of the blogosphere which you have espoused in the past. I am not anonymous, your site is not moderated, and I don’t think I have said anything untrue.

And you haven’t dealt with the heart of my question.

BTW, if it is right to attack a man for his adult children, then you will have a field day with many of your evangelical friends.

Maranatha!
Don Johnson
Jeremiah 33.3

You won’t find this comment either. I don’t know how long it was up, but Bob soon deleted it.

You may make your own conclusions, but my opinion is that it is at best unkind of Bob to make personal attacks in trying to make his point, however dubious. Please note, I am not concerned with Bob’s opinion of me, or anything he has said of me. I am referring to the personal attacks he is making in his post, attempting to demean fundamentalism by mud-slinging against some of those with whom he disagrees.

The fact is, I have often agreed with Bob in the past on various points and have commended him for those points, both on his blog and in private correspondence. I do think Bob is often intemperate in his speech and I don’t mind saying so. He cheapens his own arguments by such intemperance.

Now, is Bob correct about some of the problems that he says are in fundamentalism? Certainly. There are problems of all sorts, including abusive pastors, legalistic churches, shallow preaching and the like. Are there none in fundamentalism addressing these problems, or tying to hold to a higher standard? Of course not. There are a lot of good men who try to model biblical ministry within fundamentalism.

But really, read Bob’s post again. His first paragraph tells you what it is all about. Someone called him a New Evangelical. So Bob reacts with a diatribe against all fundamentalism. Why the vehemence, Bob? Why not the grace to turn the other cheek? What does it matter what others say, are you answerable to them? And why do you so easily and willingly resort to personal attacks in trying to defend yourself?

P.S. In my comments section, a reminder that I won’t tolerate abusive speech or those who simply want to distract with sneers and jibes. You know who you are.

One of the books I read this spring is Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist and Churchman by John R. Muether. My son gave me this book about a year or more ago and I decided it was high time I read it. This is the first biography of Van Til that I have read. A friend who also read it said that it was a good book to fill in some background that other books missed. He recommended reading some of the other books in addition to this one.

While I will put this post in the ‘book reviews’ category, this article isn’t really a book review. I do recommend this book and think it will be worth your while to read if you are interested in Van Til at all.

One of the things that I learned from this book is that Van Til was definitely a separatist. But he wasn’t your fundamentalist type of separatist. He had his own branch of separatism, making himself distinct from both evangelicalism and fundamentalism.

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I’d like to take up an argument my friend Kent makes in support of his view of Bible preservation. I do so with some trepidation as I am not wanting to get into a wide-ranging debate on the whole topic, it is just this particular argument that I want to address with a few comments.

It comes up by way of a guest post on Kent’s blog by David Sutton, but the subject is one Kent himself has written about as well. The most recent blog is called, “Perfect Tense Preservation”.

First, I’ll try to state the argument succinctly. Kent (or others) can correct me if I am wrong in my understanding of the argument:

it is written

The argument uses the words of the Lord Jesus in responding to Satan as an argument for the perfect preservation of the Scriptures.

The argument is based on the Lord’s use of the perfect tense in the phrase, ‘it is written’. The perfect tense, we are told, refers to past action with ongoing results in the present (to the person speaking).

Since the Lord referred to God’s Word by using the Greek word gegraptai, ‘it is written’ or ‘it hath been written’ (YLT), the argument goes that this proves the words initially written by Moses and quoted by Jesus were continually in existence from the time of Moses to the time of Christ in a perfectly preserved written form. Further, the word assumes, according to the argument, that the words will be preserved into the future since the ongoing effect of the perfect tense is such that when the future becomes the present, the effect is maintained.

In TSKT, I made the point that what Jesus quoted from Deuteronomy was written down by Moses and continued written down some 1400 years later when Jesus referred to those passages. Thus, if Jesus claimed those words were still written down in His day, then we should understand that we still have them written down in our day.

Well, I have some questions about this.

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Previous articles: On Godliness; On Worldliness Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

In this series, we are coming to an understanding of godliness as a lifestyle demonstrating fear or reverence for God by actions of respect towards men. These ideas are behind our definition:

Godliness is a manner of life dominated by reverence for God displayed in respect for others that is visible to outside observers and is not confused with worldliness.

In our last article, we were working on an understanding of worldly desires (as mentioned in Titus 2.12). Here is how we concluded last time:

Worldly desires are lusts, passions, affections set on worldly things. Let’s recall our definition of ‘worldly’:

Worldly – Something is worldly when it belongs to the affairs of life on this earth, especially as opposed to the life of the spirit or of heaven.

If our hearts are set on the things of this world, to the crowding out of spiritual thinking that is always mindful of heaven and God’s viewpoint of things, we are worldly in our desires. Such a heart-set makes a Christian lifestyle impossible. Our actions flow out of our hearts.

We are going to turn to 2 Jn 2.15-17 and to an examination of the ‘things in the world’ that the passage talks about. As we do, let’s start with a working definition of the ‘worldly lusts’ or ‘worldly desires’ we were talking about last time.

Worldly lusts are desires for worldly things without regard for God or God’s perspective.

If this definition is going to have any value for us, we will need to understand what those worldly things are. This is where 1 John comes in.

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One of my correspondents challenged me on this subject after the latest rough and tumble debate at SI. My correspondent said to me

You are not charitable with the CE’s IMHO.  You do hold them to a higher standard than our fellow Fundamentalists.

My correspondent cites some situations where fundamentalists shared platforms with dubious characters and one where a fundamentalist made a judgement in a church discipline situation that appears to have been at least unwise, if current available information is accurate. I have advocated a ‘wait and see’ position in the latter case. In the platform fellowship cases, I have not had a lot to say, although I have said some things.

My correspondent concludes:

Taking a wait and see is fine, but not when you are so hard on the CE’s.  You are not consistent in this area in my opinion.

Until we take out the beams in our eyes, we will not honor and glorify God!

I promised my correspondent a response here at oxgoad, so this is it.

The fact is that I am hard on Conservative Evangelicals. They aren’t conservative enough for me and they still have most of the errors of New Evangelicalism as part of their philosophy and modus operandi. They are very little different from the original New Evangelicals (although some differences can be discerned).

And the fact is that I tend to take a wait and see approach to the errors (real or alleged) of fundamentalists because on the important questions, fundamentalists get the answers right. I might add that I take a wait and see attitude toward fundamentalists of various sorts, including those I criticize most. Some of my other correspondents are ready to virtually tar and feather some of the more leftish fundamentalists. I am not ready to do that yet. These correspondents might think I am too soft.

Why the difference and what does it reveal?

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There is some discussion of the differences between conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists and whether we should maintain those differences and, if so, how rigidly we should maintain them.

At least, their purports to be a discussion, but after four weeks nothing of substance has really been discussed.

In some discussions of the topic over the last few years at various online locations, some have alleged that my opposition to closer ties with conservative evangelicals is theological. In other words, since many prominent conservative evangelicals are Together for Calvinism, my opposition is rooted in my non-Calvinistic theology.

Well…

I ran across something this week that puts the lie to that theory. I thought it would enlighten some for me to share it with you.

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If you would like to catch up, here are the previous posts in this series:

the meaning of godliness

toward an understanding of worldliness – part 1, part 2

To continue…

In reading my material over again, I find that my understanding has grown and I will need to correct something I said in part 2. I’ll do that in context below and let you know when I do it.

Our study of this topic brought us to Titus 2.11-12 one of the most useful passages in the NT for the purpose:

NAU  Titus 2:11 For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, 12 instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously and godly in the present age,

The grace of God instructs us:

1. To deny ungodliness and worldly desires
2. To live sensibly, righteously and godly in the present age

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