Theology Central
Theology Central exists as a place of conversation and information for faculty and friends of Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Posts include seminary news, information, and opinion pieces about ministry, theology, and scholarship.Accreditation Under Fire
In the United States, accreditation for colleges and universities is not run by the government, but by private agencies. The various accrediting agencies are approved by the Council on Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), which in turn is authorized but not governed by the Department of Education. The problem is that the government pours something like 180 billion dollars into educational institutions every year. Many people would like the government to have closer oversight of the accreditation process.
The New York Times recently ran an editorial calling for this kind of governmental oversight. The editorial states, “Incredibly, [the government] cannot dictate the standards or benchmarks by which these accrediting organizations judge whether a school is financially or academically sound.” The editorial continues,
The system is clearly in need of repair. A bill pending in the Senate would be a start. It proposes several changes in the law, most important a provision that would require the Education Department to write standards dealing with graduation rates, job placement rates, loan repayment rates and other criteria that accrediting organizations would have to apply when evaluating colleges.
In other words, since the government is now successfully running airport security and the health care system, the Times would like to see that same efficiency and expertise brought to bear on higher education. Not surprisingly, CHEA sees the matter differently. Judith Eaton, president of CHEA, responded to the Times editorial in a letter:
Accreditation has been integral to the creation of a higher education enterprise that is, worldwide, unparalleled in its success in terms of access and quality. What would be incredible — and a colossal mistake — is to wrest authority for academic judgment from accreditation and the academic community and place it in the hands of government officials.
In the United States, expenditures on education account for about 5.5 percent of the gross domestic product. That is a huge part of the economy. Does anybody really think we’ll be better off if the government takes this over, too?
Horror Fiction?
C. R. Wiley asks, “Is Horror Fiction Immoral?” The answer is a bit surprising.
“The horror genre may be the most morally-structured popular literary form we have.”
Well, maybe.
College Salaries Comparison
The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a nifty tool that lets you find out what professors make at your favorite university or college–including your favorite Bible college. It also lets you compare their salaries with those of professors in other institutions. Just enter the name of your school and find out how little the teachers get paid!
Examples: in 2014, the average professor at Cedarville University was paid over $71,00. The average professor at both Bob Jones University and Maranatha Baptist University was paid just north of $45,000. The average professor at Northwestern University was paid almost $187,000. But then, the cost of living is higher in Chicago.
Note : while a few seminaries are listed, the tool doesn’t always work for seminaries–unless they are attached to a college or university.
Why Is Hell Eternal?
Here’s what Paul Washer says:
The punishment of hell is eternal, because throughout eternity the wicked continue in their rebellion without repentance. We must not assume that the wicked repent on the day of judgment or even after a short stay in hell. Rather their hatred of God, hardness of heart, and shameless rebellion continue throughout eternity. They were cast into hell as haters of God, and haters of God they remain. Eternal rebellion demands eternal punishment.
Washer, Paul. The Truth About Man – Biblical study of the Doctrine of Man (Kindle Locations 2271-2274). HeartCry Missionary Society. Kindle Edition.
Student Loan Debt
According to a report by the Institute for College Access and Success, the 2015 graduates of public and private universities came out of school with an average student debt of just over $30,000. You can download a PDF of the report here.
Can Churches Avoid Politics?
Andrew T. Walker of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Commission on Ethics and Religious Liberty says no in an essay entitled “The Impossibility of the Apolitical Church.”
I have to be very clear about something: The church that insists on calling itself “apolitical” or relegates “the gospel” to a message of pious sanctimony unbothered by earthly affairs has a tragic misunderstanding of what “politics” really is, and how the church’s very essence is fervently political in nature.
A Lost Cause
Barton Swain on the use of the generic masculine:
My general attitude is to wish the whole problem away and just use masculine pronouns. The obsession over gendered pronouns is part of a general tendency in recent decades to treat social and political questions as fundamentally about signs and symbols rather than actual men and women. I do not believe that using “he” or “him” to refer to “everyone” or “a writer” or “a physician” in any way implies that men are superior to women, or that the language of power, whatever that is, is somehow intrinsically masculine. I think the whole silly controversy arises from the conflation of reality and signifier.
That ship has sailed.
God’s Presence in Hell
Here’s Paul Washer on hell:
In modern Evangelical thinking, hell is often described as a place of torment outside of the presence of God. It is often said that heaven is heaven because of the presence of God, and hell is hell because of His absence. Although this statement has an element of truth, it is extremely misleading. It is not the absence of God that makes hell a place of torment, but the absence of His favorable presence. In fact, hell is hell because God is there in the fullness of His justice and wrath.
Washer, Paul. The Truth About Man – Biblical study of the Doctrine of Man (Kindle Locations 2205-2208). HeartCry Missionary Society. Kindle Edition.
Hymns for Kids?
Jonathan Ainger at Ponder Anew lists “20 Hymns Your Kids Should Know.” He also has some good advice about teaching your children to sing hymns.
I grieve for this and subsequent generations of churched children growing up without any awareness of the rich inheritance of hymns, without ever, many not even once, having the opportunity to sing hymns in a congregation, and without internalizing songs of faith that will stick with them and serve them well throughout their faith journey.
For what it’s worth, his list is great.
Defense of the Religious Right in … Wait! … the New York Times?
Yup. By Ross Douthat.
America needs a religious right. Maybe not the religious right it has; certainly not the religious right of Carson and Falwell Jr. But the Trump era has revealed what you get when you leach the Christianity out of conservatism: A right-of-center politics that cares less about marriage and abortion, just as some liberals would wish, but one that’s ultimately far more divisive than the evangelical politics of George W. Bush.
Spurgeon’s Depression
You’ve heard about it. Thanks to Adrian Warnock, you can now read about it. How many pastors could say what Spurgeon said?
Lower they cannot sink who are already in the nethermost depths. Misery itself is the guardian of the miserable. All things combined to keep me, for a season, in the darkness where neither sun nor moon appeared.
Ryan Reeves on What Luther Intended
Ryan Reeves teaches at Gordon-Conwell. I love his little videos on church history. Here he answers the question, “Did Luther Intend the Reformation?“
Active and Passive Obedience
Justin Taylor offers a discussion of the active and passive obedience of Christ. It’s worth a read.
Though some critics of Reformed theology critique the distinction as extrabiblical, I think the New Testament clearly teaches both aspects: the lifelong passive obedience of Christ (his penalty-bearing work of suffering and humiliation) and the lifelong active obedience of Christ (his will-of-God-obeying work) culminate in the cross. Those who trust in him and are united to him do not just have his active obedience credited to their account; nor do they just have his passive obedience credited to their account. The Bible doesn’t divide his obedience up in this way. Rather, believers are recognized as righteous through the imputation of the whole obedience of Christ (the reckoning of Christ’s complete work to our account).
While I am dispensational and not Reformed, I would nevertheless affirm the importance of Christ’s active obedience for the justification of the believer. While Gentile Christians were never under the demands of the Law of Moses, and while the Law of Moses must not be imagined as a mechanism for sanctification, all humans always have been under God’s moral requirements–His Moral Law. Christ perfectly fulfilled these requirements, and is the one human ever to have the right to appear before God in His Own righteousness. That righteousness is credited to us when we believe.
Evangelicals Much More Accepting of Immorality
A recent poll by PRRI shows that American evangelicals have changed dramatically in their view of whether immorality affects an individual’s ability to serve in public office. Here’s a synopsis:
No group has shifted their position more dramatically than white evangelical Protestants. More than seven in ten (72%) white evangelical Protestants say an elected official can behave ethically even if they have committed transgressions in their personal life—a 42-point jump from 2011, when only 30 % of white evangelical Protestants said the same. Roughly six in ten white mainline Protestants (60%) and Catholics (58%) also believe elected officials can behave honestly and ethically in their public roles regardless of their personal behavior. In 2011, only about four in ten white mainline Protestants (38%) and Catholics (42%) held this view. Notably, religiously unaffiliated Americans have remained constant in their views; six in ten (60%) believe elected officials who behave immorally in their personal lives can still perform their duties with integrity, compared to 63% in 2011.
When Bill Clinton was running, immorality mattered to evangelicals. When Donald Trump is running, immorality doesn’t.
There’s a word for this.
Hypocrisy.
There is no reason to suppose that a candidate who violates a marriage oath will uphold an oath of office.
E. D. Hirsch Objects to “Common Core”
Dispensationalists know E. D. Hirsch best for his work in hermeneutics, where he is a major contributor. Most of the world, however, knows him better for his book Cultural Literacy, in which he argued for the importance of background knowledge as an important key to learning. While Hirsch is personally a liberal, his views on education have become important to many conservatives. They were also important to the people who developed the so-called “Common Core” being used in schools across the country.
Now Hirsch has published a book in which he is sharply critical of the common core. A long-form article at Education Week explores Hirsch’s work and his objections. It’s worth a read.
He calls the reading standards “empty” and “deeply flawed” because they teach all-purpose reading-comprehension strategies rather than facts and information. An entire chapter of his new book is devoted to what he refers to as “the tribulations of the common core.”
Frontline on Convergence
One of the best periodicals coming out of Fundamentalism these days is Frontline Magazine, the official publication of the Fundamental Baptist Fellowship, International. The current issue is devoted to discussing “convergence,” by which the editors mean the apparent convergence between some versions of fundamentalism and some versions of conservative evangelicalism. The editors do not see convergence as an entirely good thing.
If you think of yourself as a fundamentalist, or if you’re interested in fundamentalism, you ought to be reading Frontline. It is one of the most important voices within fundamentalism today.
The Split Between Stott and Lloyd-Jones
You need to know this bit of history because of the important ecclesiological issues that were at stake. Thanks to Justin Taylor, you can.
[Stott’s and his allies’] arguments took three forms:
(1) Historically, they argued that the constitutional basis of the Church of England was Protestant and Reformed, seen in the Reformation formularies like the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion and the Book of Common Prayer. So evangelicals held the legal “title deeds” to the Church of England, and the liberals and catholics should get out, not them.
(2) Biblically, they argued that many New Testament churches were doctrinally confused or morally compromised, like the church in Corinth which was muddled about the resurrection, or the church in Sardis which numbered only “a few” godly people (Revelation 3:4). But believers in those churches are told to hold fast to the gospel, and to fight against false teachers, not to leave the church and set up a new one.
(3) Pragmatically, Stott and his friends argued that the Church of England provided many gospel opportunities for evangelicals, and that it would be a dereliction of duty to hand over their pulpits to unbelieving clergy. What then would become of their congregations?
Neo-Kuyperianism vs the Two Kingdom Theory
Here is an older blog post by Kevin DeYoung, but still well worth reading. It nicely summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of two major Reformed approaches to culture. Baptists incline toward the two-kingdom theory, but occasionally a bit of Neo-Kuyperianism shows up.
It should be noted that two-kingdom theorists don’t necessarily take culture any less seriously than Neo-Kuyperians; indeed, they sometimes take it more seriously.
If you haven’t thought about the difference before, DeYoung’s short post will give you a nice introduction.
Paganism and the Charismatic Movement
John MacArthur comments:
In much of the world, the Charismatic Movement indiscriminately absorbs the pagan ideas of local false religions into its theology. For example, in Africa, a traditional obsession with witchdoctors, demonic spirits, and ancestor worship has been largely assimilated by Pentecostal churches there. The resulting hybrid calls itself “Christian” but is actually rooted in tribal paganism.
MacArthur, John F. Strange Fire: The Danger of Offending the Holy Spirit with Counterfeit Worship (p. 264).
Dignity and Degradation
Can we restore dignity to our degraded times? So asks Bruce Frohnen at The Imaginative Conservative.
The very notion of infidelity as a wrong seems outdated today. Presidential candidates of both parties dismiss the thing-in-itself as meaningless or, at most, a private concern. Its only relevance, for the political classes, seems to be related to its implications, in specific cases, to one’s “attitude toward women.” And even here outrage seems more a matter of political calculation than moral sense. People have natural drives, so they must act on them. The only question is how best we can manipulate the public’s perception of the circumstances of our opponent’s activities. Moral outrage, being the product of mere conditioning, on this view, should be used, especially against those people of faith who retain the capacity to disapprove the thing-in-itself. Moral outrage is for liars and for suckers.
APPLICATION & AID