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Erecting the Right Fences in the Right Places, Part Five: Why Primary Doctrines Are Worth Fighting For
In chapter four of Finding the Right Hills to Die On, Gavin Ortlund makes the case that primary doctrines are worth fighting for. The first part of the chapter is a discussion of how to distinguish primary (fundamental) doctrines from doctrines of lesser importance. He also discusses the difference between types of fundamental doctrines, specifically, those that must be known for salvation and those that must not be denied. He further differetiates confused learners from false teachers. Finally, he distinguishes profession from belief, recognizing that some people who formally deny fundamental doctrines may nevertheless be trusting Christ for salvation, however inconsistently. On all these points I have expressed general agreement with Ortlund and I am glad to see him making them.
During the second part of the chapter, Ortlund applies his principles to two specific doctrines, treating them more-or-less as case studies. One is the doctrine of the virgin birth of Christ. The other is the doctrine of justification by faith alone.
In his discussion of the virgin birth, Ortlund appeals to J. Gresham Machen for a further distinction concerning fundamentals. There is a difference, he says, between affirming the virgin birth as true and affirming that the virgin birth is a fundamental. In other words, Christians must answer two questions with respect to every doctrine. The first question is whether the doctrine is true, i.e., whether they believe it. The second is the question of how important the doctrine is.
In his interaction with people like J. Ross Stevenson and Charles Erdman, Machen encountered Christians who genuinely believed in the virgin birth but who were willing to maintain ties of organizational fellowship with others who denied it. Such Christians believed that the virgin birth was true, but they did not believe that it was fundamental to Christian identity and fellowship. Because Machen did see the virgin birth as fundamental, he denounced people like Stevenson and Erdman as “indifferentists,” accusing them of being indifferent to the role of the virgin birth in defining the boundary of Christianity. Machen saw indifferentism as such a serious error that because of it he left Princeton Seminary to found Westminster Seminary, he left the denominational Presbyterian mission board to found the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, and he was expelled from the ministry of the Presbyterian Church in the USA to found the Presbyterian Church of America (later the Orthodox Presbyterian Church). For Machen, how one weighed the fundamentals was itself a condition of Christian fellowship.
Ortlund does not mention this history. Instead, he extrapolates three principles that he believes are implicit in Machen’s treatment of the virgin birth. First, doctrines become fundamental as they relate more directly to biblical authority (85–86). Second, fundamental doctrines are “bound up with larger worldview conflicts between historic Christianity and current heresies or fads” (86). Third, fundamental doctrines are so closely connected to the gospel that “if they are denied, the gospel itself is ruptured” (87). I suggest that while all three of these principles are correct, the first two really find their grounding in the third, which, if properly expressed, will encompass them.
Here I must express a minor disappointment. This would have been the ideal place for Ortlund to talk about what should be done with those who affirm the gospel but who extend Christian fellowship to those who deny it. He appears to have read quite a bit of Machen, and this was perhaps the key issue that Machen had to face. I am still hoping that Ortlund will get around to addressing it. I wish that he had done so here.
In addition to the virgin birth of Christ, Ortlund also takes justification by faith as an example of an essential doctrine. Indeed, he names this doctrine as a “quintessential first-rank issue,” but then almost immediately begins to qualify this statement (88). He notes that justification was not clearly distinguished from sanctification until the Reformation. He points to instances in which Protestants have quibbled over aspects of the doctrine. He suggests that the doctrine of justification involves multiple components, not all of which are equally important. In the end, he tries to establish a range of latitude for the expression of justification by faith.
One component of justification is the doctrine of imputation. Ortlund notes that gospel-believers have disagreed as to whether the active obedience of Christ was necessary for justification, or whether Christ’s passive obedience is sufficient. So far, so good; it is possible to argue that the active obedience of Christ, while important, is not fundamental.
But then Orlund points to the New Perspective on Paul and the 1999 Joint Declaration of Evangelicals and Catholics Together. He seems to think that these viewpoints represent differences that do not interfere with “mere justification” (88). In doing so, however, he overlooks the fact that Roman Catholicism still anathematizes justification through faith alone, and that the New Perspective so redefines justification as to make it into a different conversation altogether. You can believe the Council of Trent or you can believe the gospel, but you can’t consistently believe them both at the same time. You can believe E. P. Sanders or you can believe the gospel, but you can’t consistently believe them both at the same time (though it may be possible so to attenuate New Perspective thought that it might permit a both-and approach).
In the long run, however, Ortlund knows that justification by faith alone has to be important because the writers of the New Testament were willing to fight over it (90). Here he goes directly to Galatians 1:8–9, which (I agree) is a critical text for this conversation. In that text, the apostle Paul calls down damnation upon those who preach “gospels” that incorporate elements of works into justification. What is interesting, however, is the logic behind Paul’s argument: a supposed gospel cannot be true if it contradicts an essential element of the true gospel. It becomes a different, false gospel, and those who preach it are subject to condemnation.
So Ortlund thinks that fundamental doctrines are worth fighting for. Good for him! I still wonder, however, what shape he thinks that fight should take. For Machen, the fight included proclaiming the true doctrine, and I’m sure that Ortlund would approve. Machen’s defense, however, also included exposing those who taught the false doctrine and eventually severing Chrisitan fellowship with them. In fact, for Machen, fighting for first-order doctrines included severing fellowship with Christians who believed right doctrine but who would not sever fellowship with those who taught false gospels. I am still waiting to learn whether Ortlund would go that far.
This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.
O God, Look Down from Heav’n and See
Martin Luther (1483–1546); tr. W. Reynolds, R. Massie, and E. Cronenwett
O God! look down from heav’n and see
A sight that well may move Thee!
Thy saints, how few! How wretchedly
Forsaken we who love Thee!
Thy Word no more shall have its right:
And faith itself is vanished quite
From all this generation.
Fictions they teach with cunning art,
And lies of man’s invention;
Not ‘stablished in God’s Word, their heart
Is full of strange dissension;
One chooses this, another that,
And while divisions they create,
They cant of love and union.
May God root out all heresy
And of false teachers rid us,
Who proudly say: “And who is he
That shall our speech forbid us?
We have the might and right alone,
And what we say must stand; we own
None as our lord and master.”
Wherefore, saith God, I will arise!
My poor they are oppressing;
I hear their crying and their sighs,
Their wrongs shall have redressing;
My Word, endued with saving might,
Shall suddenly the wicked smite,
And be my poor ones’ comfort.
As silver sev’n times furnace-tried,
Is found for it the purer,
So doth the Word, whate’re betide,
But prove itself the surer;
The cross reveals its worth aright,
‘Tis then we see its strength and light
Shine far in earth’s dark places.
O God, keep Thou it pure and free
From this vile generation,
And let us too be kept by Thee
From their abomination;
The wicked walk about in ease,
When loose, ungodly men like these
Are in the land exalted.
Understanding the Kingdom of God–Episode 042 with Roy Beacham & Jeff Brown, Part 1
In today’s episode, we discuss the kingdom of God with Roy Beacham and Jeff Brown. We talk about how Scripture teaches on the kingdom of God from cover to cover. Be sure not to miss this episode!
Spotify Link: Season 2, Episode 42
Host: Micah Tanis, Director of Communications
Guests: Dr. Roy Beacham, Senior Professor of Old Testament & Dr. Jeff Brown, Adjunct Faculty, Missions
Topic: The Kingdom of God
Book Suggestion: Alva McClain, The Greatness of the Kingdom
Transcript:
Micah Tanis: Welcome to the Central Seminary podcast. We are delighted to have you with us today as we discuss Biblical and theological issues relating to life and ministry. This podcast is a ministry of Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Plymouth, Minnesota. To learn more about Central Seminary, visit our website at www.centralseminary.edu. My name is Micah, and I will be your host.
Thanks for joining us today on the Central Seminary Podcast.
Today we have two guests with us. We have Dr. Roy Beacham, one of our professors here at Central. And we have missionary Dr. Jeff Brown with us to talk about the topic of understanding the kingdom.
MT: It’s often that we can think about the kingdom, whether that’s from the Old Testament perspective, a New Testament perspective. Are those different? How are they joined together? So, as we have Dr. Beacham and Dr. Brown, they’re going to introduce themselves and just give a little of their background. One of the angles that we’re going to think about, the kingdom is from for us in presenting the truth of the Kingdom from the Word of God, how do we present that maybe from an academic in the classroom or in the pew? How do we think about it from a pastoral perspective to going through the regular instruction of Scripture, thinking about the Kingdom and reminding people of the wonderful truth of the kingdom?
So, I’m going to ask Dr. Beacham if you could go first just to introduce yourself with the connection of who you’re sitting across from today. Dr. Jeff Brown as I’m understanding, there’s a lot of neat connections between you guys, a lot of history. So, if you could just tell our listeners just a little bit of that background that you have with Dr. Brown and yourself.
RB: Okay. I, of course, have taught in the seminary for a long time, 40 some years. I’d have to do the math. And I’m not a math person, but I began seminary in the fall of 1973, graduated from Pillsbury College, moved up to the cities, and as I moved up and began classes that semester, I met another new student by the name of Jeff Brown, and we became fast friends. We have stories that we could tell for the entire podcast, some of which probably should never be aired. But it was. It’s just been a pleasure to know Jeff for years. He’s probably the best friend that I have who knows me more than anyone except my wife. And we just had a great time together as students. And over the years in our fellowship. One of the funny things about our relationship is as we were going through seminary, it was my goal to be a missionary, probably on a foreign filled field. And it was Jeff’s goal to be a seminary professor. And now for 47 years I’ve been a seminary professor, and for 40 some years he’s been admissions. So, it’s great. God has amazing ways to direct our lives.
MT: Dr. Brown Missionary Germany. Understand that you’re a missionary. How long were you in Germany? 31 years. 31 years?
JB: Yeah. I was a pastor. Yes. Seven years in Michigan? So, when I came, I had gone to a secular school ball State University in Indiana. I had studied biology, and the Lord called me to preach in the end of my year, in my senior year at at Ball State. And I came up here to Central Seminary and Roy is talked about how we met each other rather quickly. And it’s always been what’s the word from the proverbs? Iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens the countenance of his friend and that’s how it’s been. I’ve always looked forward to being with Roy. He was always just a just a edge ahead of me. Talk about academics or anything else. He got married before I did and you name it. Roy has been ahead of me. So, it’s been great to be friends for all these years.
MT: One of the things we like to ask our guests is what’s a current book that you’re reading that that maybe it’s completely off the topic of the kingdom. We’ll ask a little bit later thinking about a book that is relative to the kingdom. But what’s a book that you’ve been reading that’s been an encouragement to you? You just like to let our listeners know about
Dr. Beacham. What’s that book that you’ve been reading?
RB: Something I’m not sure it’s been an encouragement to me, but that’s been of interest to me. I also teach a course and dispensation exam, which is kind of tied to the question of the kingdom, but written rather recently by a man named Hummel, right now his first name escapes me, but he’s a historian and the book was titled The Rise and Fall of Dispensation, he believes that apparently dispensation is and has fallen as a teacher of the course. I don’t agree with that. So obviously there’s much in the book that I don’t agree with, but it was very interesting to read. I try to keep up on that topic as well and that’s one of the most recent works that I finished. So, thinking about a favorite book,
Dr. Brown, what’s something you’ve been reading recently?
JB: Well, I’m the type of person that never reads just one book at a time. I’ve been. I’ve been pleased in recent years to get to know a number of people who are just like me. So, I don’t feel I’m that odd. One of the books that I am reading, I get there because I am so interested in personal evangelism. When you do personal evangelism, then you are by necessity involved in apologetics. And I always think of, well, what about somebody who’s never been to seminary? What kind of apologetics do they do? And a lot of times when you are in that area, you’re thinking about, okay, if I’m just talking with somebody on the street or I’m sitting down in his house just talking to him, how I’m going to unload some heavy theological book. I want to know how I can just talk to somebody. That’s what Jesus did. He had an apologetic and he’d just talk to people. And so, I came across one that is called tactics by a man named Gregory Koukl. You can see him on YouTube. He has all kinds of presentations, and he’s been at this for a long time because he was in my generation is in my generation, and he was on a secular campus, came to Christ there. So, from those days, he’s been involved in personal evangelism. Well, this is his book on apologetics. And you basically say you need to learn how to ask questions. You don’t have to be a theologian. You just need to learn how to ask questions and think with the person. And it’s a great book. I wish that he would get to evangelism quicker to the gospel, but nevertheless, I’m learning a great deal from this book.
JB: A second book that I’m reading at the present I’ve just launched into it is called The Pauline Corpus of Early Christianity or in Early Christianity, by Benjamin Leard from Liberty University. And I am really looking forward to that, talking about how the Pauline Corpus of the books of the Bible came together. And then I never like to just stick with theology. Okay, I think you get to be well, anyway, let’s leave it there.
JB: And so, I’m reading a biography of Nathan Bedford Forest by Jack Hirst, and in recent years he has become a boogeyman. But I don’t think he was had his positives and his negatives. And he was one of the original leaders of the Ku Klux Klan. What people don’t realize is that went for about two years in his life and then he was asked to come to Congress. They asked him to help out with what they wanted to get done in the country, and he renounced it. He got out of it. He realized it was the wrong thing. He got saved late in life, and after he got saved, he renounced racism and taught people against it. And as a matter of fact, the black people of Memphis looked to him on different occasions. For help is a is very an interesting book.
MT: When you guys started talking about this topic of the Kingdom, it was immediately observable to see your guys’ excitement to know. And that knowing that from a student in Dr. Beacham’s classes taking Kingdom of God class and knowing the excitement of being taught it and also even the books that that we would be assigned.
MT: One of those books was Alan McLean’s The Greatness of the Kingdom. So obviously a in a connection to encourage us as students with the with the greatness of the kingdom. That’s really the question that’s going to drive our time together today is thinking about the greatness of the kingdom. And I want to ask you guys, just as we begin what got you interested in the topic of the kingdom, that it has been a significant part of your ministry and that desire to instruct in the Word of God and help people understand the kingdom.
How did you get interested in the topic of the kingdom?
Jeff, we’ll start with you.
JB: All right. I think it’d be similar with Roy. I had a course from Dr. Roland McCune, and it was called “The Greatness of the Kingdom.” We used Dr. McClain’s book, and we just went through that book, and then he brought in all kinds of other things. I’ve got all kinds of notes in my book of the Greatness of the Kingdom. They’re all from that time that we were in the course together, of all the courses I took, and I had just fabulous courses here at Central, that is one of them was Remain one of my very favorites. I have read a few books, a few books many times through. That’s one that’s The Greatness of the Kingdom. I read that three times through as a big book. and ever since then I’ve wanted to communicate. those ideas to whatever congregation I was involved in, and I’ve wanted to understand it more and more. And of course, it is an important factor when we talk about politics today, government today, it has to do with all of that. And so there was my interest.
RB: Dr. McCune taught the course. We all sat there in awe just reading through McClain marking up, McClain taking rabbit trails off of McCune, listening to Doctor McClain, who was a fabulous teacher. It became my great privilege as I became a professor at Central to take over that course and to teach that course. And for many years I as well walked students through the book. I felt, just as Jeff did, that this was probably the best course that I had at Central, mainly because it tied the whole Bible together. I mean, the book, McClain’s book goes from Genesis to Revelation in discussing the Kingdom of God, and this book put the Bible together in a in a metanarrative. That was something I’d never thought about before. It was just fantastic.
RB: And I’ve loved teaching it since then, and I’ve had many students tell me that it’s been their favorite course as well, not because of the teacher, but because of the material.
MT: That’s exciting for me. Just asking as a student; that excitement I heard that through the classes and could catch it. But understanding that and that’s only been my experience of opening up the greatness of the kingdom and seeing that as a system from cover to cover as we’re thinking about the kingdom.
MT: One thing that you guys both mentioned was the greatness of the kingdom, the opportunity to think cover to cover from Scripture. And so that was the first question I wanted to ask as we come to that is how soon do we see the development of the kingdom here in Scripture with the pages in Genesis? Roy, I’ll start with you.
RB: A few years ago, I’d been teaching Kingdom for quite a long time, and I don’t remember why this dawned on me. I should have thought of it a long time before that, but it was interesting to me to think about the Kingdom from Genesis to Revelation, and there is a great jumping off point right in the chapter one of the Christian account of Genesis. But it dawned on me too, as I looked at the entire corpus of Scripture and particularly the Old Testament, that if you look at the beginning of the Book of Exodus, so think of the exodus from Egypt around 1445 B.C. Let’s round that off to 1500. So, I could do the math. If the world was created around 4000 B.C., according to Usher’s calculations from the genealogies, if there are gaps in the genealogies, conservative young Earth creationists say maybe it was created at 6000, maybe 8000 B.C., but let’s just go with 4000 B.C. The Book of Genesis covers from 4000 B.C. to 1445. You have, you know, 2500 years crammed into the Book of Genesis. And then from Exodus to Malachi, you have the Kingdom of God in history. You have Israel coming out of Egypt, becoming God’s kingdom on Earth. And so, I mean, it became pretty obvious to me. It was already obvious to me. But God, God’s revelation focuses on the kingdom because the vast majority of the Old Testament, from Exodus to through Malachi, with the possible exception of Jacob, is all about the kingdom. This is kind of an overstatement, but the only reason the Book of Genesis is there is to get us to the exodus to the kingdom. Now, again, that’s an overstatement. You have Abraham, in fact, in Chapter 12, and Abraham is around 1800, let’s say 2000. So, you have 2000 years of history, Earth history, crammed into the first 11 chapters of Genesis to get us to Abraham, who is the father of Israel, the nation that God made into the kingdom. And so, on that level, I would say we see that the kingdom is very important in Scripture, particularly to the Old Testament. Jeff can tell us how it all begins in Genesis chapter one. Well, one thing that we find in Genesis one is that as God creates human beings, he tells them to be fruitful and multiply and to rule the Earth. And we can talk about what that rule means. I don’t think we have time right now, but that was man’s original responsibility was to rule for God on Earth. He was the Viceroy of God on earth. Didn’t last very long. Sin came in. He put himself under the direction of Satan. And so, then the rest of the story after that is how God brings this into being, that there is His kingdom, which is in existence from the very beginning, everywhere. It’s everywhere and it’s everywhere now, but that it actually comes to Earth. We have to wait until Israel, and I appreciate what Roy just said. And let me add one more feature to all of that. You have, what, 1680 years. If you go by a literal calculation of the genealogy, what is about 1680, something like that. And you have from the time of Moses to as we said about that to Malachi, you’ve got, what, a little over a thousand years right. It’s a lot more time before the flood, right? Why doesn’t God say more about that? And I think there’s good reason. He was totally disappointed to the point that he said, I repent that I have made, man. It disappointed him in, you know, in a way that we can hardly describe. If you had a man who was an older man and he had a son and his son went wayward and he never straightened out, and you were sitting down with him and you wanted to ask him about his son. He probably wouldn’t talk long about that son. And that’s how I look at that. That may be something needs a whole lot more tweaking, but or argument, I don’t know, but that’s how I see it.
MT: Yeah. As you mentioned there, in thinking through that development, just even of Genesis, what’s going on there and something you mentioned in the beginning of talking about the evangelistic fervor that you seek to have with taking the truth of Scripture and then bring him down to that everyday level. Many of the things you even just reiterated there about Genesis is the understanding the gospel, what, what, how man has fallen and then how the story. So how has your even understanding of the kingdom thrust you forward into evangelism? How does that the message of the Gospel come through in how you even teach people about the kingdom and then that leads to the evangelism opportunities?
JB: Well, I would say, first of all, when I’m trying to reach somebody for Christ, I normally and if I have enough time, I will take them and buy enough time is 15 minutes. Okay. I will take them then to Genesis and briefly explain that and how we became sinners. So that’s where you that’s where you start. All right. And you also realize that we have a problem with Satan. He’s involved in all of this. He is fighting against God’s kingdom. I may not use the word kingdom. Sure. I don’t want to make it too complicated for people, but there it is. And you begin right there. And of course, if you’re presenting an evangelism, you take them to the cross. Jesus, the King of Kings. I may not say king of kings, but that’s where it is, isn’t it? Yes. And then he is going to come back to rule. So, in a nutshell, that’s where it all happens. I think it’s a little bit difficult to be able to convince people about receiving Christ being saved if they don’t realize they are sinners and where that came from.
MT: Yes. Excellent. When you are presenting as we think as we think about the evangelistic opportunities in thinking about the kingdom, when you have somebody that then understands comes to know by faith in Christ and is continuing to study their Bible, and maybe even you have some stories of this point where people are looking through their Bible and asking those questions. I’m seeing this word kingdom. I’m seeing the nation of Israel. And how do I think through that, especially with current events that there is on the globe, Israel is a country. How do you think about that? So, this is moving it a little bit for from maybe the pastoral into the academic realm, but how do you help people to think about the kingdom when you are just introducing it to them, that concept of the kingdom? And then what? How do you begin to develop that concept of Israel, not to just leave them in the Old Testament, but then to give them that full picture from cover to cover of how the kingdom is in God’s hands and not something that just in Israel is in the Old Testament, but yet God is still holding that. So how do you develop the concept of the kingdom for somebody who is developing the understanding of Scripture?
JB: Well, I think Roy can answer this even better than I do. So, when I’m done, ask him. Yes, but that’s a big thing. Yeah. And so, I wouldn’t get at that right away. I would tell the person just briefly just I would briefly outline what’s going to happen and Jesus is coming back and that he is going to rule. But there are other things in the Bible that tell us about why governments succeed and why they fail, and that is connected with God’s kingdom, because he is the king and governments have to decide, are we going to follow him and his truth or are we going to follow our own hearts? One will succeed, the other will fail dismally. So, if we get to talking about that and you asked about Israel, just a brief answer on that. I will tell people the Kingdom of God is always connected with Israel. If you understand what’s happening in Israel, then you’ll understand better what’s happening with God’s kingdom, and I’ll give the rest to Roy. Yeah.
MT: Dr. Beacham How do we think about that topic in when it can be politically charged or in thinking through that the essence of what is Israel and how do we connect to that?
RB: Okay. Well, let me let me back up and throw a monkey wrench into the works, because I think a lot of people who are listening to the podcast probably don’t understand the word kingdom the way Dr. Brown and I are talking about it. Most people today, I believe, think of the kingdom as some ethereal spiritual realm that we enter when we when we get saved, accept and be born again. We shall not enter the Kingdom of God. So, we are born again. We do enter the kingdom. We’re all in the kingdom. Let’s all you know, worship God in the kingdom, in the spiritual kingdom that itself, this idea of a spiritual realm, where the kingdom is some ethereal, you know, experience tied to soteriology, there’s a huge misconception there that would take a great deal of time to talk about. Maybe we’ll get into that a little bit. But the point of a true definition of the kingdom is that that God established he made man in his image, or some would say as his image an image. God said, let us make man in our image. Or I’d like to translate that perhaps as our image. An image in the Old Testament is of visible representation of an invisible deity. God rules over his creation all of the time, but he made Adam to be his representative, to let us make man as our image and let him rule over the fish. And to see the fall over he is to rule, as Jeff said, and failed in that. So eventually, throughout in history, God called Abraham out of all of the day, all of the peoples of the earth. He said, I’m going to make of you a great nation. He took Abraham’s ethnic descendants into Egypt, consolidated them, brought them out to Mount Sinai at the Exodus, as we discussed earlier. And he gave them the Mosaic covenant he made of this ethnic group, a nation, a kingdom. So now Israel is God’s representative nation on earth. They are to emulate what God living is like, what God faith is like, what God economy is like, what God’s sociology is like, what God worship is like there to show the world what God’s kingdom looks like. It’s a visible physical thing as represented by the nation of Israel. Israel also fails in her responsibility, but God has a plan for the nations. Read the book of Daniel Nebuchadnezzar’s vision with the head of gold, chest of silver. And so forth, which ends in the stone without hands. The image. All the nations of the earth are defeated and destroyed by God’s kingdom. When Christ comes, He will establish His kingdom. Daniel sees the same kind of vision in Chapter seven. So, God is ruling over everything all the time. But He chose Israel to be His representative people on earth and the prophets speak much about how God is going to use how He used Israel in the past, how God is going to use Israel in the future.
One of the big topics is how do we interpret the prophets?
And both Dr. Brown and I would say we interpret them at face value. We take them for what they mean, what they say, and that is that there is a future, a literal future reestablishment of Israel as God’s kingdom in the end times. That’s the kingdom we’re talking about. How does anyone ever enter that kingdom by being born again? You’re not entering some ethereal, physical or ethereal spiritual realm at this moment, but you will someday inherit the kingdom as spoken of in the Epistles.
So, it’s a very tangible thing. Israel, as Jeff said, is at the very center. If God is using national Israel in his plan for this world and his plan for the future. So, picking up even on that national idea that using that word nation, the understanding that the prophets speaking literally and speaking, many of them spoke about that understanding of the nations that forget God,
MT: Jeff, I want to come to you just to ask him and how do we how do we think through that? The nations that forget God is that that’s something that we should be mindful of, even as we read the prophets and what they are speaking about. How do we process that?
JB: Well, in the first place, if you’re reading the Prophets, you need to understand God is speaking to Israel. At times He is speaking to other nations. Read in the book of Amos that he speaks very plainly why he’s going to judge them for specifics. In the nation around Israel. He talks to Babylon through Jeremiah, I believe, and says that he’s going to they’re going to have total rule and even the beasts of the of the earth are going to be under the rule of Babylon. So, God is very much at work in the in the nations. So the nations that forget God and it’s basically all of them, right? Yeah. And he’s talking not just about Israel, okay? It’s plural. It’s the nations that forget God and. And you read about it in. History. And from the time of Christ, so many nations were introduced to the gospel. They were introduced to the Word of God. They were introduced to concepts of Christianity, and they had development. As a result of that. They had some very positive development. As a result of that, a Germany was one of those places that had tremendous Christian development, I would say. All right, where the early Christian No, where a lot of bad things going on. Yes. But we see the Reformation taking place there. We see what happened in all of Europe, really the rise of modern science, the rise of technology. I don’t have time to go into it, but where did they get all those ideas? Modern technology, a lot of it came from the monks. Okay. And that those were centers of learning. They were Christian centers of learning. Even if not all those guys were saved. They were Christian centers of learning. They wanted to lighten the burden of man who was made in the image of God. Where in the world that the wheelbarrow come from? We don’t think about that or use it. It came from the monks. Nobody else came up with that idea. And they came up with that idea because they wanted to lighten the burden of the average person made in the image of God. They cared because God cared.
Now, let’s talk about what happened in nations forgetting God and Germany, where I spent so much time, is just what in German, we say rather by spiel. It is the example in up to our day, the example of forgetting God. And they turned away. They followed someone on as their Messiah. Practically not everyone, but the majority of the people they joined in, or they tolerated. Or they went along with it, even if they didn’t believe that was a godless society that was turning away from God. And Hitler had the goal to kill all the Jews, at least all that he could reach. And secondly, when he was done with that, I read this in a book by Dr. Richard Weichert, who is just an impeccable scholar. He has a book on Hitler’s religion, and he was determined when the Jews were eliminated that the Christians were next in line. He was going to eliminate all Christians. And what happened? Well, we all know what happened. There were terribly punished, terribly punished. And they were they were laid low. And afterward they were ashamed. And for many people in Germany for decades afterward, they were so ashamed that they didn’t even want to talk about it. That’s what God will do if a nation forgets him. so as, as we’ve seen Christianity impacting cultures what are ways that that has had development in ideas whether in science or historical understanding just of how people have seen the world, maybe how they see themselves?
MT: How has this development of the Kingdom of God actually thrust forward a right understanding of how we see ourselves as human beings in this world?
JB: Let me say a couple of things. One, when we talk about men caring for other human beings, men and women caring for others, nothing has brought that forward in the world quite like the Christian faith has done. The Christian faith took it from both the old and the New Testaments. But when we talk about healing, when we talk about medicine, when did hospitals come into being? They came into being in the early three hundreds or mid three hundreds A.D. And it was because of Christians that hospitals came into being. How did modern medicine come into being? That came into being the father of modern medicine is called is noted as Thomas side and ham side and hammer seed and ham. I can’t remember how you pronounce that in England in the late 1600s and he wanted to magnify the Lord Jesus Christ. And because of how the Bible talks about human beings, he felt, this is what we need to do. We need to seek healing for them. And so, he investigated in a scientific way, and he was wanting to do this for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ. That was the impact of Christianity upon health, upon medicine. And I’ll add one more. Modern science, if you read the book, and not many people do, but some of us do, called Science in the Modern World, written now almost 100 years ago by Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead was no Christian at all, but he said, I have to admit that it came. Science got started, modern science got started through the rational God of Christianity. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have any basis for investigating because you have to have a rational God to have rational nature. And let me add one more thing to it. I read a book in my doctoral studies by a man named Stanley Yockey, who was both a theologian in the Roman Catholic Church and also had his Ph.D. in astrophysics and in his book, Science and Creation. He spends enormous time showing how nearly every civilization had a cyclical view of nature. It had a beginning; it had a development. It reached its high peak, and then it had its downturn and decline until it ended. And what happened after that? It all started over again. All right. This was the view of history. You can read it as you study cultures all over the world. Basically, everyone had it like this. And he said, when you have this view of history and this view of the world, there is no motivation to push onward. If, however, and there was only one nation that did not have that view, Israel, Israel believed everything was created in a particular time. History goes in a lineal view or lineal way. What did we get that you learned it, Dr. Beach, and learned it. I learned it. Everybody learns that history in a lineal presentation. Okay, we can follow it. Where did that come from? Came from the Jews. Jews got it from the Bible. And the Jews passed it on to the Christians. And the Christians spread it all over Europe. All right. You can have science because you can. You can look back to the past and figure out how did this event get caused from this lineal view. Yeah, that’s where it came from. Yeah, I think we if we talk about history, I’d like to give the rest of it over to Dr. Beacham.
RB: Well, as you think about Israel’s view of history again, I would revert to the book of Daniel. The Book of Daniel has the most amazing, specific discussions of what God is doing in history. One of his particular visions down to the very day specific event hundreds of years later. But going back to the vision of Nebuchadnezzar and chapter two, where You have the head of gold, which is Babylon, the chest of silver, which is Medo-Persia. Then you have the belly and thighs of bronze, which is Greece. And then the feet of iron clay, which is Rome. There’s a progression of four major empires just mentioned Babylon. Ruling over everything. Nebuchadnezzar was it was told him that vision that you, Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, you are the head of gold. You are ruling over the entire creation. Now, that’s called in scripture very specifically, more than once, the times of the Gentiles, God has said Israel will say they have gone into captivity. Now the Gentiles are running things until God restores the kingdom to Israel, which is what Jesus offered in the gospels. But that’s another discussion. The point we’re making here is that God is a God of history. He is ruling over everything all the time, though man fails or Israel fails or the church will fail. God is ruling over everything all of the time He puts up since he takes donations, puts up leaders, takes down leaders, and history is moving toward an end point. That end point is the return of Jesus Christ to establish his kingdom, His rule on earth over Israel, who will rule over all of the other nations.
If you read the prophets literally for what they say, and Jesus Christ will rule for a thousand years until the end of time, He will put down all rebellion. He will put down all nations who have opposed him. He will put down all peoples and essentially what he does at the end of the thousand years is he brings the earth back to the original created order where God saw everything that he is made of. Behold, that was good. And when Jesus brings the entire created order back to the beginning, then at the end of his rule, his kingdom, he turns the kingdom over to the father.
Paul tells Secret the ends where God will destroy this world. He will make a new heaven and a new earth. And all of those who have come to faith in the Messiah, Jesus, faith in God and have a relationship with Him. God will dwell with them on the New Earth forever and ever. That’s where history is going. And we’re told that very explicitly in Scripture over and over again. If we read it for what it says, excellent.
MT: I think as we are encouraged in the truthfulness of the Kingdom of God, we can often be sidetracked by the evidences of this world that seem to show that God is not in control. How do we think about our current day events? Those things are going on. You just gave us the biblical understanding of how God and what God has still in plan for us as we look as maybe watching the news looking around us today. What are those either evidences of the Kingdom of God? How do how do we look at that and not say and there’s no way or even just speaking it apologetically to the person that say, there’s no way God’s in control. Look at look at all these things that are happening. How can we give an encouragement to the people understanding that God is still in control of all these events and they’re unfolding in a way that He has perfectly planned? And I know that’s a faith element and I’m answering the question in that way. But how do we present that in in looking at what’s going on in that apologetic way to see that God is still in control?
JB: Well, there’s a lot of things that we can say. And I’m and I’m going to look to Roy in a minute because I’ll just I’ll just say just say a little. Yes, it does involve faith, but it’s also God gave us eyes, gave us ears. He gave us a sense of smell, a sense of taste so that we could understand and test what is going on. God made us that way. All right. And so, you see, you observe. You’re not just coming up with ideas. You watch. If you know the Lord and if you know his word, then you see things are happening. I have a presentation. I’ll come to that later. But I have a presentation on the Kingdom of God from Genesis, from the creation, I call it from Creation to Eternity. And I talk about what God has done. Of course, I use the Scripture going through all of history. And I had a teenager come up to me after two sessions of that, 2 hours of it, any.
And he said to me, “I really want to thank you, because before I came in here, I had real questions about whether God was even working in the world.” Today, this young man is planning on a matter of fact, he started studying for the ministry, so part of it is just being willing to take in what the Bible says and then you can get it.
Okay. But all right. We’re talking about apologetics. Okay. And how do we talk to an unsaved person? There are plenty of things. Now, ultimately, if a person is agnostic enough, they can say it’s all chance, if they’re agnostic enough. All right. But you cannot cross the street believing in chance, right. So, I will give one illustration that I’m sure you can come up with a lot more of a of a whole broad presentation God at work in the world. And I’d like to come back to Germany, where I spent so much time when the when the main persons were judged in the Nuremberg trials, the first round there were 12 who were accused of crimes against humanity. One of them was gone. They couldn’t find him. He was accused and he was convicted. One of them during a committed suicide the night before. And so, on the day of the execution, there were ten. And one of the men who was who was hung was the guy name you will use Trisha. And Trisha was involved in propaganda and doing all he could to make the Jews look bad, to make the Germans detest the Jews, to hate the Jews. And when it came time for him to have he was a Roman Catholic by on paper at least, to have someone come as a counselor and say last words with him or last rites. He said, I don’t want to talk to anybody. And then he started into a rant, and it was how all of you here are going to fall under the under the arm of communism, and they’ll destroy all of you and it’ll be the worst thing you ever did. And he just went on and on. And then all at once, he stopped Julius Trisha because he wanted to destroy the Jews, studied and studied Jewish culture, including the Bible, to a fair extent. And when he stopped, he then said Purim 1946. Those were his last words. Why was he saying that? Because there were ten sons of Heymann, who were trying to he was trying to destroy all of the Jews. There were ten. And they are listed in a if you’re in a read, a Jewish scroll, not the Hebrew Bibles that we use here, okay? But in the Jewish scroll, those are in big letters. And it’s the only book like that. The only scroll like that in in the Jewish Bible. All right, all those ten sons of hangman, they were executed on the day Purim. The ten men in Nürnberg were executed on the day of Purim. You’ll strike. Recognize that the Americans, the Russians had no intention of doing that on the day of Purim. It just happened. And everything that took place, they got executed on that day. They were not concerned about the Book of Esther, but it turned out exactly like that. Yes, God is active in history, and he is looking over his people. Israel
MT: I’ll ask Dr. Beacham, just give us a final word, just as we think about the greatness of the kingdom and the comfort that it is to us as believers in these days, going forward, just as we’ve had the biblical truth we see with that evidence in our eyes, what are those comforting thoughts that we have as an encouragement in these days ahead that we can think that God is still in control and His kingdom is at hand as we as we pray for his kingdom to come?
RB: Well, again, let me just reiterate that we need to think about the kingdom, not in some esoteric spiritual way, but as something that God had used in history of Israel that God is going to reestablish in the future. It’s a literal, tangible coming time of the rule of Christ over Israel is all over the nations. And the epistles to the church actually tell us how we as church people, not we are not Israel, we are the church, but God is using the church now during the time of the Gentiles in gathering many Gentiles to rule with him in that kingdom.
“Here’s what the Epistles tell us. We as believers in the church are citizens of this future kingdom That is our homeland, that is our inheritance. That’s what we look forward to.”
We are citizens of the coming kingdom. We should be living kingdom lives. We should not be living as the people in this world. We should be living differently. We’re strangers, foreigners, pilgrims. We’re passing through. We’re ambassadors, as Jeff has said, to share the gospel of the coming kingdom, salvation and entrance to the Kingdom. We’re ambassadors of the kingdom. We are kingdom citizens. We have a kingdom message. We should be living kingdom lives and we should be living every day of our lives in anticipation of this coming kingdom.
Certainly, I’m concerned about affairs in America, certainly I’m concerned about upcoming elections and all of those things. But God is in control of this one. God is going to accomplish His purpose. I am a citizen of his kingdom. I need to live that way. I need to share that truth, and I need to look forward to that coming kingdom. And I do. The older I get, the more anxious I am. Even so come Lord Jesus. Amen.
MT: Thinking of God’s involvement on that big scale. But even something that we ask on this podcast is thinking on a personal level that work of God in your life, whether that’s in your personal family, your ministry, or things that you’re seeing. Now. What I want to ask you, you both, just as we close this time.
What is a work of God that you’ve seen recently in your life that you just want to give a word of thanks to God in that way that he is working in and among you?
Jeff, what’s the way that God is working in your either family or ministry or work of God that you’ve seen recently?
JB: When I returned from Germany and we now live in South Carolina, ended my ministry there, it was time I was really physically done in. I was mentally done and perhaps spiritually done in, I don’t know for sure of a spiritually done then, but physically and mentally I was done in. It took me a good while to recover. My wife can say better. I’m always optimistic on things, but she can tell you how long it took for me to recover. But it was almost a year that that I had felt still done in, and I thought God was all done with me as a preacher. And so, I began to think in terms of, well, I’m not going to do this anymore. And God convicted me, and I prayed, and I said, Lord, you give me a chance to preach. I will preach, I will serve you. I’m no longer a missionary in Germany, but however you want to use me, you can use me. And within about a week and a half, I had an invitation to preach. And so, I immediately said, yes, this I know this is God’s answer. Yeah. And we’ve had ministry. We are in the in the Cornerstone Baptist Church in Greenville, South Carolina. That is our new church home. And they have put us into more and more ministry there, both Linda and me. And we’ve appreciated it and we have thrived in it. And God has used us to reach others for Christ. Linda with a what is it called child evangelism Ministry. She has she led a young boy to Christ last year. And I was able to lead my neighbor to Christ in the past four months. And so, God’s not done with me. And I just I just had a I was a keynote speaker for a seminar of pastors in Wisconsin, and there were about 70 pastors and their wives there. And the topic was discipleship. And I guess God isn’t done with me yet. So, I think that’s the best way, the best example I could give. Yeah. God, does it work? Wonderful.
What is a work of God that you’ve seen recently in your life that you just want to give a word of thanks to God in that way that he is working in and among you?
RB: Jeff and I are kind of in the same because we went to seminary together. We’re in the same stage of life. We are two months apart. Yes, exactly two months apart. So, in any case, I so semi-retired, but I still have the opportunity to teach one class a semester at the seminary, which scratches the edge of teaching. I love all of those classes. I look forward to them every year. I did retire from 19 years of work with the Plymouth Police Department as a chaplain, though I still meet occasionally with many of those officers and with the retired officers of the department who I knew when I did serve there. So, I have many opportunities with them that I could talk a lot about. But I think personally, you know, as we age, as our bodies fall apart, as the world gets more difficult to live in, as we have children and grandchildren and their lives become complicated, it’s just interesting to me to see how God works.
“Even in our trials, our hardships, the turmoil and the traumas that arise. But he’s driving us closer and closer to him. And as I said, the older I get, the more I look forward to the world that is really to be. But until then, we are learning to trust and learning to walk by faith in deeper ways than we ever could. We are still learning, and we are still growing and it’s just a wonderful, wonderful thing to walk with the Lord every day and see what he’s doing personally.”
MT: Amen. Thank you both for being on our podcast today and thank you for listening to the Central Seminary podcast.
Our mission at Central Seminary is to assist New Testament churches in equipping spiritual leaders for Christ-exalting Biblical ministry. Since its founding in 1956, Central Seminary has sought to provide serious students of God’s Word with robust theological education as they prepare for ministry. We have many graduates around the world who are serving in countless ways to spread the Gospel and proclaim the name of Jesus Christ! Find out more at our website, centralseminary.edu.
Next Podcast Episode: Teaching the Kingdom of God: Part 2 with Roy Beacham & Jeff Brown
Erecting the Right Fences in the Right Places, Part Five: Why Primary Doctrines Are Worth Fighting For
Gavin Ortlund has written Finding the Right Hills to Die On to work out a theory of doctrinal triage. While I have expressed reservations over the analogy to triage, I am all in favor of every thoughtful attempt to weigh doctrines for their importance. Like Ortlund, I recognize that some doctrines are primary in the sense that they are fundamental or essential to the being of Christianity. His concern in the present chapter is to articulate a way of identifying those doctrines, to distinguish them from doctrines of lesser importance, and to encourage what I can only describe as an attitude of militancy with respect to these most important doctrines.
The task that Ortlund sets for himself is nothing new. Each generation of Christians has recognized that some doctrines are essential. In times of controversy such as the Reformation, identifying the most critical doctrines has taken a special focus. Interestingly, the most thoughtful theologians have consistently denied the possibility of developing an exhaustive list of fundamental doctrines. We articulate doctrines in the face of denials and aberrations, and new denials and aberrations are still taking place. We discover that doctrines are fundamental only when heresies drive us to examine and articulate them. Consequently, we do not yet know what all the fundamentals are.
Fundamental teachings have been articulated at different points in doctrinal history. Trinitarian fundamentals were defined first, followed by fundamentals related to the person and natures of Christ. Certain aspects of human nature were discovered to be fundamental during the Pelagian controversy. The doctrine of justification was not fully articulated until the time of the Reformation. Biblical inerrancy received definition during the century beginning in about 1880. Exhaustive divine foreknowledge only began to receive full attention after the incursions of Open Theism in the 1990s, and I suspect that more remains to be said about this doctrine.
In an important sense we are still discovering new fundamentals. I am not suggesting that the doctrines themselves are new. What is new is that the denial of the doctrines leads to a subsequent focus upon and articulation of them. Every fundamental doctrine has a defining point in history. Before that point, Christians do believe the doctrine, but they believe it in a loose, imprecise, and even inchoate way. After the defining point, precision becomes a requirement for orthodoxy.
So how does one identify a fundamental doctrine? Ortlund examines a couple of schemes that he says “are a bit long” (79). Nevertheless, he eventually lands on three criteria that have commonly been articulated in the wake of the Reformation. I’ll summarize them in my language. One identifies fundamental doctrines (1) by their clarity within Scripture, (2) by their centrality to the gospel, and (3) by the catholicity by which they have been received among the true people of God. To these three Ortlund adds a fourth criterion, which he calls “the doctrine’s effect upon the church today” (79).
Every fundamental doctrine—or, in the case of complex doctrines like the Trinity, every component of the doctrine—must be revealed with clarity somewhere in Scripture. Every fundamental doctrine must be so integral to the gospel that the denial of the doctrine implies the denial of the gospel itself. Every fundamental doctrine must have been believed, at least implicitly, by true Christians in all generations.
The third test is the stickiest, for two reasons. First, it involves an element of circularity. Fundamental doctrines are believed by all true Christians, but we recognize people as true Christians because they believe the fundamental doctrines. Second, before the doctrine reaches a historic defining point it may be very loosely expressed, and some of those expressions may become unacceptable after the defining point. For example, the relationship of Christ to the Father was not formally defined until the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, and even Athanasius expressed himself in ways that would later become unacceptable. Nevertheless, Christians had been worshipping Jesus Christ as God all along. The fundamental doctrine was believed, even if it was not defined.
During his discussion, Ortlund addresses each of the foregoing considerations in one way or another. He also recognizes three other important distinctions. One is the distinction between doctrines that must be explicitly known and believed for salvation versus doctrines that may not be known but must not be denied. In other words, while all the fundamentals are essential to the gospel, some are not essential to sharing the plan of salvation. A new believer will not know all the fundamentals. A growing believer may even be confused about some fundamentals. Yet all the fundamentals are implicit in saving faith, and to deny them knowingly is to deny the gospel itself.
The second distinction is between a learner and a teacher. In the process of learning the faith, some believers may temporarily fail to grasp the significance of some fundamental doctrines. Some learners may even develop wrong beliefs, and they may hold those beliefs until the importance of the truth is made clear to them. Because such believers are learners, they do only minimal (if any) damage to the faith. The same cannot be said of teachers. Those who put themselves forward as teachers have an obligation to know the faith and to teach it correctly. They are more culpable for error, and they profoundly damage the gospel if they teach falsehoods with respect to fundamental doctrines. As Ortlund puts it, “We must distinguish between confused sheep and active wolves” (81).
The third distinction that Ortlund recognizes is the distinction between profession and belief. Human beings have a massive capacity for inconsistency. In our inconsistency, we may deny speculatively some truths upon which we really rely in ordinary life. In Christian terms, this means that people might deny fundamentals theoretically while nevertheless trusting Christ for salvation.
The upshot is that, except in the most extreme cases, we are not equipped to evaluate whether people are saved, even when they deny important doctrines. We must adopt a double attitude toward such people. In deciding whether to fellowship with them, we must base our choices upon what they say they believe. In doing so, however, we do not usually make any judgment about whether they are headed for heaven or hell. That involves a question of heart beliefs that we cannot readily observe.
Ortlund touches on all the foregoing issues. While we express ourselves in slightly different ways, I believe that we largely agree on these points. In the second half of his chapter, he applies these principles to two particular doctrinal issues. In doing so, he raises other questions that deserve consideration. I want to address those issues in the next discussion.
This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.
How Precious Is the Book Divine
John Fawcett (1740–1817)
How precious is the book divine,
by inspiration given;
bright as a lamp its doctrines shine,
to guide our souls to heav’n.
It sweetly cheers our drooping hearts,
in this dark vale of tears;
life, light, and joy it still imparts
and quells our rising fears.
This lamp, through all the tedious night
of life, shall guide our way,
till we behold the clearer light
of an eternal day.
How To Think About Israel
The following essay was written in 2015, during Barak Obama’s presidency. It originally addressed specific events in the relationship between the United States and Israel. Recent events indicate that the core ideas of the essay are still germane. References to the events of 2015 have been removed, but the essay is otherwise substantially identical.
* * *
Given the controversy in the Middle East, Christians sometimes wonder how they should think about Israel. The problem is especially acute for dispensationalists, who believe that national Israel is still a chosen people of God and will someday be restored to God’s favor. Several observations might help Christian people to adopt a correct attitude toward Israel.
First, the modern state of Israel is not equivalent to the national Israel of the Bible. Most of the world’s Jewish population is still scattered in the Diaspora. In fact, about as many Jewish people live in the United States as live in the state of Israel (perhaps more—getting a count of the Jewish population in America has been controversial). Israel was not regathered to the land (in any prophetic sense) in 1948 or at any time since. Furthermore, about a quarter of the Israeli population is not Jewish.
Second, as a corollary of the foregoing, the modern state of Israel is not in a position to claim promises made to the biblical nation of Israel. It is not in any sense inheriting the “land” provisions of the Abrahamic covenant. In fact, no part of biblical, national Israel can claim those promises at this moment. The apostle Paul depicts biblical Israel as presently experiencing a dual relationship with God during the present age. Concerning the gospel, God has permitted national Israel to fall into a position of enmity for the sake of the church. Concerning their election, however, God still loves national Israel for the sake of the patriarchs (Rom. 11:28). While occupying the status of “beloved enemy,” biblical Israel is temporarily under the judgment and not the blessing of God. The modern state of Israel can certainly point to its territory as a historic homeland, but it has no right to claim the land by divine title.
Third, no aspect of biblical prophecy depends for its fulfillment upon the existence of the state of Israel. Specifically, the Rapture is not contingent upon Israel being in the land. If the Arabs were to succeed in pushing Israel into the Mediterranean, not one biblical prophecy would be altered. Those who believe in a pretribulational Rapture could still believe in a pretribulational Rapture, complete with a doctrine of imminency.
Fourth, while the modern state of Israel is not identical with the biblical nation of Israel, those Jews who are presently in the land do constitute a part of ethnic Israel as it exists today. Furthermore, even though national Israel is presently and temporarily under God’s judgment (the Diaspora has not been revoked), God cares about His people while they are being judged. In the Old Testament, God used Gentile nations to judge Israel, but He held those nations accountable for what they did. As instruments of judgment, they had a choice about how they would treat Jewish people. God blessed those who treated Jewish people well, and He visited calamity upon those who persecuted Israel. In other words, Gentiles will always find it in their interest to treat Jewish people with respect and to provide protection when they come under attack. This respect and protection should have been extended to the Jewish population of Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. It should be extended to the Jewish population of the United States and other countries today. And it certainly could be extended to the state of Israel.
Fifth, the modern state of Israel was not imposed by the aggression of one nation against another. Rather, it was carved out of a decaying section of a disintegrating Ottoman Empire by powers that had defeated the Ottomans in just war. It was created to provide a home for a displaced and decimated people, only a fragment of whom survived Hitler’s death camps. Those who survived had endured the confiscation of their homes and their wealth. Many were interred in refugee camps. No wonder they flocked to Israel when the opportunity presented itself. The state of Israel has every right to exist and every right to survive.
Sixth, modern Israel is a sovereign state with the rights and privileges of any present-day nation. These rights and privileges include self-determination and self-protection. They also include the right to form alliances or treaties, and modern Israel has chosen to do just that with the United States. As a purely pragmatic matter, Israel is the only reliable ally that the United States has in the Middle East. The interest of America is served at multiple levels by helping to secure the peace and prosperity of Israel.
Seventh, Arabs, including those who consider themselves Palestinian, also have rights. Furthermore, God has a future for other Middle Eastern nations besides Israel. A day is coming when both Egypt and Iraq will stand beside Israel as peoples of God (Isa. 19:19ff). Christians must not allow their genuine respect for Jewish people or their loyalty to the state of Israel to blind them to the real rights of the surrounding nations or of the Arab population within Israel.
Eighth, no nation is without fault, including the state of Israel. Neither Christians nor Americans are obligated to defend every choice and every action taken by the Israelis. The United States has sometimes been wrong in its own policies—so has Israel. The United States has sometimes blundered and committed evil deeds—so has Israel. Both Israelis and Americans ought to work to correct past wrongs and to prevent future ones. Deciding what those wrongs are, however, and determining how they are best corrected requires mature and responsible deliberation, not political grandstanding or visceral reactions. Such decisions cannot be made justly or effectively at gunpoint.
The Christian attitude toward modern Israel ought to be one of committed but tempered support. Under all circumstances, Christians ought to be found blessing the sons of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—never cursing them. Realism requires us to recognize that Israel will commit injustices, but occasional injustices should not lead us to abandon our closest ally in the Middle East.
Postscript
When this article was written in 2015, Israel was not enduring invasion by a foreign power. At present, Christians should expect the United States to respond in at least two minimal ways. First, the U.S. has no business trying to restrain Israel’s right to defend itself. Israel should be given a free hand in protecting its citizens from foreign invasion. Second, the U.S. must provide no aid or comfort to the powers that have invaded Israel, including so-called “humanitarian aid.” Sending aid relieves the terroristic authorities in Gaza of the need to care for their own people, and “humanitarian aid” will almost certainly be expropriated to support the campaign against Israel.
This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.
The Promise of My Father’s Love
Isaac Watts (1674–1748)
The promise of my Father’s love
Shall stand for ever good:
He said, and gave his soul to death,
And seal’d the grace with blood.
To this dear cov’nant of thy word
I set my worthless name;
I seal th’engagement to my Lord,
And make my humble claim.
Thy light, and strength, and pard’ning grace,
And glory shall be mine;
My life and soul, my heart and flesh,
And all my pow’rs are thine.
I call that legacy my own,
Which Jesus did bequeath;
‘Twas purchas’d with a dying groan,
And ratifi’d in death.
Sweet is the mem’ry of his name,
Who bless’d us in his will,
And to his testament of love,
Made his own life the seal.
Central Baptist Theological Seminary Announces Recipient of the Dale Goetz Christian Leadership Scholarship
Central Seminary is proud to announce the recipient of the Dale Goetz Christian Leadership Scholarship. The scholarship is awarded at our Fall Conference to an upperclassman in the MDiv program who best exemplifies the qualities of Christian leadership. This year’s recipient is Tim Bonebright, the current pastor of Goodland Bible Church in Goodland, KS.
The scholarship is named after Chaplain Dale Goetz, who received his MDiv from Central Seminary in 2000. After serving as a pastor in White, SD, Chaplain Goetz became a chaplain and in God’s bitter providence he was killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan in 2010, the first Army chaplain to die in combat since Vietnam.
At Central Seminary, we are grateful for all our donors who fund scholarships that help reduce tuition costs for our students. The Dale Goetz Christian Leadership Scholarship is particularly significant as it honors the memory of a courageous and selfless Christian leader.
Erecting the Right Fences in the Right Places, Part Four: Ortlund’s Journey on Secondary and Tertiary Doctrines
Gavin Ortlund has written a book, Finding the Right Hills to Die On, that aims to develop a theory of doctrinal triage. He opens his third chapter by reviewing his strategy in the first two: “It is generally safe to locate yourself between two extremes. That is essentially what I have done in the [previous] two chapters.” This strategy is going to demand evaluation. First, however, a description of the present chapter is in order.
Most of the chapter describes Ortlund’s personal spiritual journey. Reared in Presbyterian circles, he attended an Evangelical Free church for at least a while. As a student at Covenant Seminary in Saint Louis, he abandoned his belief in infant baptism for a commitment to believer baptism. He was subsequently immersed, joining a Baptist church. While Ortlund accepted believer baptism, however, he also concluded that immersion was unnecessary. Furthermore, he remained unconvinced that baptism was essential to either church membership or participation at the Lord’s table.
At present, Ortlund holds an amillennial view of the kingdom of God and of Christ’s return. He combines this with a preterist understanding of the tribulation. He rejects young-earth creationism, though he does not say which version of old-earth creationism, progressive creationism, or theistic evolution he holds. He has taken ordination in the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference, which, he notes, accepts a variety of views on the millennium, women in ministry, and spiritual (by which he presumably means miraculous) gifts.
Ortlund recognizes that each of his theological choices has deprived him of some circle of fellowship. The combination has placed him nearly in a theological no-man’s-land. It is so unique as to be idiosyncratic. The result is that he finds himself outside many circles of fellowship at many levels.
The experience has not been easy. He claims that it has led him to reflect extensively on the question of when doctrines should divide. In other words, his experience of severed fellowships is what has led Ortlund to consider whether evangelicals have evaluated doctrinal importance in the right ways. He expresses the core of his concern in a paragraph that will (I am guessing) become pivotal for the book.
But through it all, I have become deeply convinced that in the church we need to do a better job at navigating theological disagreements. Unfortunately, it is common for Christians to divide from one another over relatively insignificant matters. In the worst cases, Christians part ways, often uncharitably, over the most petty and ignorant disagreements. In the other direction, many Christians wink at serious theological error, as if doctrine were unimportant. A balanced attitude about theology is much rarer. We desperately need to cultivate the skills and wisdom to do theological triage so that even when a doctrinal division becomes necessary, it is done with minimal collateral damage to the kingdom of God. [70]
This statement is rather a sweeping indictment. It is remarkable, not so much for what Ortlund says about “the worst cases,” or even about what “many Christians” do, but about what he says is “common for Christians,” and that is to “divide from one another over relatively insignificant matters.”
But this assessment puts the cart before the horse. Ortlund has not yet established that the matters over which Christians commonly divide are relatively insignificant. He has provided a listing of issues over which he has found his own fellowship to be truncated, but he has failed to address several issues. He has not shown which levels of fellowship are affected by these differences. He has not justified the claim that they are insignificant. Furthermore, he has not established his competence to make such an evaluation.
My goal in raising this point is not to attack Ortlund personally. I like him and respect him. But I have to ask—why should we accept Ortlund’s word that the mode of baptism is insignificant? Or the timing and nature of God’s mediatorial kingdom? Or the nature and timing of God’s creative work? Or, if these are not the doctrines that he means to dismiss as insignificant, then which ones does he?
Of course, Ortlund may get around to answering these questions. After all, most of his book still lies ahead. For the moment, however, the pivot statement of his book (“it is common for Christians to divide from one another over relatively insignificant matters”) stands as an unsubstantiated assertion. It is not so much a measured opinion as an expression of prejudice.
I grant that prejudices, if they are trained well, can sometimes provide a hedge against error. The question is whether Ortlund’s prejudices are trained well for weighing doctrines. Here, his experiences count against him. They are the theological equivalent of the kid who wanders through a buffet and picks up a taco, an egg roll, a pile of French fries, and a slice of kringle, but who then balks when his parents express concern over a balanced diet. “It is balanced,” he says, “Just look at how many cuisines I’m including.”
Ortlund’s personal doctrinal menu includes samples from multiple theologies, but his mix-and-match approach gives him no particular authority to spank the majority of Christians for dividing “from one another over relatively insignificant matters.” It provides his readers with little assurance that Ortlund knows how to identify a “balanced attitude.” Furthermore, Ortlund hampers his argument with his opening gambit: “It is generally safe to locate yourself between two extremes.”
I call foul over this statement. The fact is that we cannot judge what is extreme until we know where the truth is. We do not discover truth by averaging out the errors, let alone the extremes. By triangulating from the extremes we allow our enemies to define our position for us. Instead, we must begin with the truth, after which we can discover what is extreme by measuring its distance from the truth that we know.
When it comes to theology, beginning with the truth consists of two elements. The first element is to find the correct, biblical answer to any given theological question. The second element is to judge the overall importance of the question itself. It is possible to fall into error with respect to either of these elements. One error is to hold the wrong doctrine. The other error is to hold the right doctrine in the wrong proportions. Either error can be serious.
It should be borne in mind that the above observations are a stream-of-consciousness commentary. I am responding specifically to what Gavin Ortlund has said in this particular chapter. Maybe he will respond to my specific concerns in subsequent chapters. I hope that he does, because in most ways I am on his side. I think that developing a calculus of doctrinal importance is critical for Christian wellbeing. I think that a similar calculus needs to be developed for levels of Christian fellowship, and that Christians must find reasonable ways to integrate these two grids. The fact that Ortlund takes these questions seriously is encouraging, and I would genuinely like to see him succeed in articulating an answer.
This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.
How Great the Wisdom
Benjamin Beddome (1717–1795)
How great the wisdom, power, and grace,
Which in redemption shine!
The heavenly host with joy confess
The work is all divine.
Before His feet they cast their crowns,
Those crowns which Jesus gave,
And with ten thousand thousand tongues,
Proclaim His power to save.
They tell the triumphs of His cross,
The suffering which He bore;
How low He stooped, how high He rose,
And rose to stoop no more.
With them let us our voices raise,
And still the song renew;
Salvation well deserves the praise
Of men and angels too.
Erecting the Right Fences in the Right Places, Part Three: The Danger of Doctrinal Minimalism
Upon turning to chapter two of Gavin Ortlund’s book, Finding the Right Hills to Die On, one encounters this opening sentence: “Doctrinal separatism is a real problem” (45). On its own, this statement stands without qualification or limitation. Nevertheless, Ortlund soon begins to hedge. The rest of the chapter turns into an extended argument that doctrinal minimalism is as severe a problem as doctrinal separatism. Ortlund even declares, “Ultimately, doctrinal division cannot be avoided” (46).
Before explaining this volte face, Ortlund returns to the subject of essential versus secondary doctrines. He suggests that this binary distinction is inadequate for his discussion. Rather, he believes that doctrines must be evaluated at four levels of importance: essential, urgent, important, and indifferent. He further clarifies that each of these levels may be significant for something in the Christian faith, even though Christians ought not to divide over indifferent doctrines.
It turns out that, for all Ortlund’s heartburn over doctrinal separatism, the real burden of the second chapter is to defend the value of the middle levels of doctrine (47). Ortlund wants to show that some doctrines, while not essential to the gospel, are important and even urgent. He offers four reasons why some nonessentials cannot be placed in the category of indifferent doctrines.
His first reason is that “nonessential doctrines are significant to Scripture” (48). Citing Scottish theologian Thomas Woodrow, Ortlund recognizes that even non-fundamentals may be essential to some aspect of Christianity (49). Indeed, most of the detail that the Bible communicates is not directly essential to the gospel. Christians sometimes disagree about what the Bible teaches in those areas. Nevertheless, the teachings may be valuable (51).
Ortlund next argues that nonessential doctrines may be important for church history (51). Some Christians of the past have sacrificed much—even their lives—to uphold doctrines that are important but not directly essential to the gospel. Ortlund observes that genuine unity cannot be achieved “by a nonchalant posture toward theology that trivializes or bypasses the issues that have caused separation in the first place” (53).
According to Ortlund, the third reason nonessential doctrines are important is because they are significant to the Christian life (53). Here Ortlund observes that what Christians believe, even in nonessential areas, can affect how they live. For example, he says that his understanding of divine sovereignty affects how he prays. Obversely, some doctrines (e.g., Christ’s heavenly intercession) may turn out to be part of the gospel, even though they are not essential to receiving the gospel. Such doctrines should not simply be brushed aside (54). Ortlund insists that not every difference needs to lead to a truncation of fellowship. For example, those who hold Calvinistic and Zwinglian understandings of the Lord’s Table can still serve on the same church staff (53).
As part of this discussion, Ortlund explores J. Gresham Machen’s claim that Christian fellowship may persist in the face of doctrinal differences of opinion (55). Ortlund considers Machen a good model for doing theological triage. Apparently, he even accepts Machen’s observation that being overly particular about doctrine is better than being too indifferent (56).
Ortlund’s final reason for seeing nonessential doctrines as important is that they may be significant to the essential doctrines (56). He asserts that some nonessentials picture the gospel, some protect the gospel, and some pertain to the gospel. This is so because doctrines interconnect, and none is “hermetically sealed off from the rest of the Christian faith” (57). Consequently, downplaying nonessential doctrines sometimes softens the effect and importance of essential ones (58).
While Ortlund insists that “a pugnacious, mean-spirited attitude toward theological controversy is antithetical to the gospel,” he equally rejects an unwillingness to engage in doctrinal conflict. He points out that the apostle Paul was willing to anathematize angels who departed from the gospel (58). Both the glory of God and the wellbeing of the church depend upon theology being rightly done (59). Thus, Ortlund acknowledges that at times one must defend nonessential doctrines.
* * *
In his discussion of doctrinal minimalism, Gavin Ortlund says little with which historic, separatist fundamentalists can disagree. They might apply some principles differently. They might wish for greater refinement of some concepts, such as Ortlund’s four levels of doctrinal importance. Still, Ortlund offers at least a minimal case for distinguishing the importance of doctrines that are not directly definitive for the gospel. He appears to acknowledge that differences over at least some of these matters may affect fellowship between genuine believers. What Ortlund has not provided at this point is a mechanism either for determining the level of importance for a given doctrine or for determining its effect upon various levels of fellowship.
Ortlund is right to appeal to Machen as a model. His appropriation of Machen, however, could be more thorough. Machen rejected the possibility of any level of fellowship with those who deny the gospel. He affirmed the reality of at least minimal fellowship between all those who believe the gospel. He also insisted upon the necessity of limiting fellowship at various levels, depending upon the degree of shared doctrinal commitment between believers.
Machen advocated complete separation from those who denied fundamental doctrines. This stance marked him as a fundamentalist, but he was never only that. He was also committed to a particular system of faith, and he yearned for full fellowship with those who embraced and implemented that system. Once he was separated from religious liberals, he labored to erect a church that was exclusively devoted to that system. Simultaneously, he managed to maintain certain levels of fellowship with true Christians outside that system. Furthermore, he articulated a robust theory of ecclesiastical fellowship, grounded in both Scripture and history, that explained each of these choices.
For Machen, religious liberals were enemies of the gospel. Next to them were “indifferentists,” gospel believers who extended Christian fellowship to gospel deniers. Machen admitted that indifferentists were Christians, but he saw them as traitors to the faith. Indifferentists did not deny the content of the fundamentals, but they denied their importance. One wonders how Machen’s convictions would fit into Ortlund’s system. To this point, at least, Ortlund has not provided the conceptual tools for evaluating the significance of indifferentism. He has not indicated where this error would fall in his theological triage. Perhaps he will answer this question in later chapters.
In the meanwhile, it is worth remembering what John says about those who allow a platform and recognition for apostate teachers. According to John, such indifferentists receive a share in the evil that the false teachers do (2 John 10–11). This cannot be a matter that Bible believers see as incidental.
This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.
Head of Thy Church Triumphant
Charles Wesley (1707–1788)
Head of Thy Church triumphant,
We joyfully adore Thee;
Till Thou appear, Thy members here
Shall sing like those in glory:
We lift our hearts and voices
With blest anticipation,
And cry aloud, and give to God
The praise of our salvation.
While in affliction’s furnace,
And passing through the fire,
Thy love we praise which knows our days,
And ever brings us nigher:
We lift our hands exulting
In Thine almighty favor;
The love Divine which made us Thine,
Shall keep us Thine for ever.
Thou dost conduct Thy people
Through torrents of temptation;
Nor will we fear, while Thou art near,
The fire of tribulation:
The world, with sin and Satan,
In vain our march opposes;
Through Thee we shall break through them all,
And sing the song of Moses.
By faith we see the glory
To which Thou shalt restore us,
The cross despise for that high prize
Which Thou hast set before us;
And if Thou count us worthy,
We each, as dying Stephen,
Shall see Thee stand at God’s right hand
To take us up to heaven.
Erecting the Right Fences in the Right Places, Part Two: The Danger of Doctrinal Sectarianism
Gavin Ortlund’s book, Finding the Right Hills to Die On, divides into two sections. The first asks, “Why theological triage?” The second chapter in the book begins to answer that question by warning against “doctrinal sectarianism.” Doctrinal sectarianism means “any attitude, belief, or practice that contributes to unnecessary division in the body of Christ” (28). This definition matches what Christians have usually called schism, which even we fundamentalists recognize as a sin.
Ortlund lists five reasons why doctrinal sectarianism is a danger. The first is that it reflects a failure to distinguish “different kinds” of doctrine (28). He offers several biblical evidences for recognizing levels of doctrinal importance. Some sins are more heinous than others (Jer 16:12; Ezek 23:11). Some matters are weightier than others (Matt 23:23). Different sins carry differing degrees of punishment (Matt 10:15; Luke 12:47–48; John 19:11). The Old Testament distinguishes unintentional from highhanded sins (Num 15:23-31). Not all sins lead to death (1 John 5:16–17). Paul labels the gospel as “of first importance” (1 Cor 15:3). Paul also gives Christians latitude to disagree on some things (Phil 3:15). The apostle commands Christians not to quarrel over opinions (Rom 14:1). Paul himself was sent to preach the gospel and not to baptize (1 Cor 1:17).
This section, which is the best argued in the chapter, agrees with what fundamentalists believe: biblical teachings differ in levels of importance. The fundamentals are boundary doctrines that distinguish Christianity from non-Christianity. Within that boundary, teachings differ in importance. While I fully agree with this notion, some of Ortlund’s evidences are less persuasive. Philippians 3:15 hardly constitutes permission to reject apostolic teaching, and Romans 14:1 is not about biblical doctrines at all, but about extra-biblical opinions.
Ortlund’s second section warns that unnecessary division harms the unity of the church. He again emphasizes the difference between fundamental and non-fundamental teachings, drawing historical support from Francis Turretin and John Calvin. Echoing Calvin, he reasons that, “churches will not survive apart from a willingness to tolerate errors on lesser matters” (32).
The question for Ortlund is which errors should be tolerated at which levels of fellowship. His treatment does not adequately account for the difference between teachings that are essential to the being of a church versus those that are essential to its wellbeing. Even non-gospel differences, if they are important enough, may mean that genuine unity is best promoted by separate organization (as when Presbyterians organize their own churches rather than submitting to Baptist practice). Believer baptism may not be fundamental to the gospel, but Baptists believe it is essential to Christian obedience.
In his third section, Ortlund asserts that the church’s mission depends upon its unity. He grounds Christian unity in the cross-work of Christ and the nature of God (33–34). He cites several texts, focusing particularly upon John 17:21. He argues that believers are called to display the kind of unity Jesus had with His Father, and that this kind of unity is essential to the advance of the gospel (35). Importantly, Ortlund recognizes the existence of “different expressions of Christian unity” requiring different degrees of doctrinal agreement (34, 38). Still, he insists that unnecessary doctrinal division damages the mission of the church (36).
Few would disagree that unnecessary division is damaging. The problem lies in deciding which divisions are unnecessary. More importantly, I wish that Ortlund’s argument dealt more with the difference between inner unity and outer unity. Even the bitterest outward divisions cannot damage the inner unity for which Jesus prayed. Perhaps Ortlund missed the fact that John 17:21 is a prayer to the Father, not a command to the church. If the Father has answered it, then the church does not have to. If the Father has not, then the church cannot. But He has, and all believers during the present age are permanently and irrevocably united in one body. That is the unity that Jesus saw as an essential precondition of the world believing that the Father sent the Son. This inner unity, which is grounded in the gospel, is fundamental and cannot be shaken. It must not be confused with outer unity, which reflects it, and which believers are called upon to preserve (Eph 4:2–6).
Ortlund’s fourth section cautions that quarreling about unimportant doctrines harms the godliness of the church. He cites several texts in which Paul warns against obsessing over “speculative topics” (38–39). Ortlund draws the lesson that Christians should prioritize “the gospel and a . . . burden for godliness” (40). He warns believers against an overly-strict and critical spirit, which stifles love and associates believers with Satan (40–41). Since a loveless spirit comes from Satan, Christians must subject doctrinal zeal to the test of love (42).
Ortlund is right: we need to be warned against mistaking our speculations for biblical teachings. We also need to be warned against disagreeing in a bitter and factious way. Those warnings, however, did not stop Paul from confronting Peter to the face, nor did they preclude the New Testament writers from offering strong rebukes to other believers (e.g., 2 Cor 11:20). As Ortlund notes, Jesus even addressed Peter as Satan. A discussion about unity is out of balance when it leaves scant room for vigorous disputation over deeply held differences, let alone for reproof and rebuke.
In his concluding section, Ortlund warns that Christians should find our identity in Christ rather than in theological distinctives. He recognizes that Christians disagree about some things, but these disagreements do not authorize self-justification, annoyance, contempt, condescension, or undue suspicion (42). We should not major on our differences, because “Jesus alone is worthy of our ultimate commitment, and all other doctrines find their proper place in relation to him” (43).
Here, Ortlund is making an either-or out of what ought to be a both-and. All Bible doctrines do find their proper place in relation to Christ. Exactly because they are related to Him, we must take them seriously. We are not free to dismiss any of Jesus’ teachings, whether delivered by Him personally or through His apostles. All doctrine is important. Even when it is not fundamental, it is still vital for a full-orbed Christianity. We are not free to ignore any of it.
For myself, I am happy to name all those who believe the gospel as my brothers and sisters in Christ. I embrace them in the Lord Jesus, whatever our lesser differences, and I delight in every evidence of God’s grace in their lives. At the same time, I recognize that our differences within the faith represent areas that we do not hold in common. We literally do not have fellowship in those areas. When those areas are at stake, our outward cooperation will be hindered. We are always united at the most fundamental level. We will sometimes be separated at levels where we do not hold the faith in common. Among believers, fellowship and separation are not always either-or, but sometimes both-and.
This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.
Behold, How Good a Thing
Charles Wesley (1707–1788)
Behold, how good a thing
It is to dwell in peace;
How pleasing to our King
This fruit of righteousness;
When brethren in the faith agree–
How joyful is such unity!
Where unity is found,
The sweet anointing grace
Extends to all around,
And consecrates the place;
To every waiting soul it comes,
And fills it with divine perfumes.
Grace, every morning new,
And every night we feel
The soft, refreshing dew
That falls on Hermon’s hill!
On Zion it doth sweetly fall:
The grace of one descends on all.
E’en now our Lord doth pour
The blessing from above,
A kindly, gracious shower
Of heart-reviving love,
The former and the latter rain,
The love of God and love of man.
In Him when brethren join,
And follow after peace,
The fellowship divine
He promises to bless:
His choicest graces to bestow,
Where two or three are met below.
The riches of His grace
In fellowship are given
To Zion’s chosen race,
The citizens of heaven;
He fills them with His choicest store,
He gives them life for evermore.
Erecting the Right Fences in the Right Places, Part One: Introduction
In 2020 Gavin Ortlund published Finding the Right Hills to Die On: The Case for Theological Triage. The book explores the relationship between Christian fellowship and the various levels of importance that characterize Christian doctrine and practice. I believe that in this work Ortlund is wrestling with an important issue. I wish to test his argument for both its soundness and workability.
What I propose to do is to take Ortlund’s work chapter by chapter, devoting a short, evaluative essay to each. I plan to summarize his argument as I understand it, and then to offer my evaluation. As will become evident, my perspective lies somewhere within what I’ll call mainstream fundamentalism, by which I mean fundamentalism as it has most faithfully implemented its key insights in the face of ongoing developments. My hope is that interaction with Ortlund might bring clarity to some of the issues he addresses while at the same time helping fundamentalists to examine their own ideas and behaviors.
In his introductory chapter, Ortlund argues for the importance of theological triage. The language of triage comes from trauma medicine, in which providers must make choices about devoting scarce resources to the most urgent but treatable conditions during an emergency. By borrowing this expression, Ortlund is implying that Christianity faces an emergency. He underlines this point: “if souls were not perishing, if our culture were not seeming to escalate into a whirlwind of confusion and outrage, if the church did not have so many languishing needs—I suppose, if these were not the conditions we faced, we could do away with theological triage and work on every doctrine all at once” (18).
Faced with the necessity of triage, Ortlund ranks doctrines and practices according to four levels of importance: those that are essential to the gospel, those that are urgent for the health and practice of the church, those that are important to Christian theology, and those that are unimportant either to gospel witness or to ministry collaboration. The first rank doctrines are (as Ortlund elsewhere acknowledges) the fundamentals that distinguish Christians from non-Christians. The second rank doctrines may “cause Christians to separate at the level of local church, denomination, and/or ministry.” The third rank doctrines do not “justify separation or division among Christians,” apparently ever at any level. The fourth rank doctrines constitute matters that are indifferent and not theologically important (19 for all the above).
Ortlund acknowledges that not all doctrines or practices will fit his scheme neatly, but he advances it as a general framework for understanding (20). He then describes several imaginary situations in which Christians might have to make choices about their involvement in Christian activities. For the moment I will ignore these imaginary situations in the interest of offering an initial response to Ortlund’s proposal for theological triage.
First, and most importantly, Ortlund is correct that Christian doctrines and practices occupy multiple levels of importance. Of course, the most important distinction is between those of the first level (fundamentals) and those at all the other levels (non-fundamentals). This distinction has been recognized from very early in Christian thought.
How do fundamentalists respond to the distinction between fundamental and non-fundamental doctrines? The clue is in the name. The whole idea of fundamentalism is predicated upon that distinction.
Fundamentalists agree that acknowledgement of the fundamentals is essential to the existence of Christianity. The problem is that no Christian ever stops at mere confession of the fundamentals. The fundamentals are a foundation, but they are not a house. Confessing only the fundamentals is like trying to live in a foundation when no house has been erected upon it. The superstructure of the Christian faith requires acknowledgement of more than the fundamentals.
The fundamentals are essential to the bare existence of a hypothetical Christianity, but they are woefully inadequate for the full obedience of real-world Christians. Full obedience—obedience to the whole counsel of God—requires much more. More is essential to the whole counsel of God than is essential to the gospel. It is over the exact content of this “more” that Christians disagree. In view of these disagreements it is not possible for each Christian to fellowship with every other Christian at every level.
For fellowship is experienced at various levels as well. What these levels are is a subject for a different conversation. For the moment it is enough to note that Ortlund, in subsequent chapters, does recognize that different levels of fellowship require different levels of doctrinal and practical agreement. Consequently, Christians must integrate at least two considerations: levels of doctrine, including practice, and levels of fellowship. How to overlay these two grids upon one another is a topic worthy of discussion and study.
In that discussion, I am not sure that the image of triage will prove particularly helpful. Health care providers implement triage in emergency situations. For example, a provider may choose to delay treating a broken leg in favor of treating a sucking chest wound. Resources go to alleviate the immediate threat. Does that image help us to understand Christianity, though? Do we really want to leave people lying around with broken legs?
To map the triage model onto Christianity is to say that the church has no normal existence, but that it lives in a perpetual state of emergency. Ortlund cites certain circumstances to prove that we are in an emergency, but these are mostly just the normal environment in which the church operates. We are surrounded by unsaved souls, hostile cultures, and “languishing needs” (whatever that means). Yet the apostles faced these same circumstances, and they still found ways to proclaim all the counsel of God. They did not leave people lying around with theological broken legs.
Of course, emergencies do arise, such as the intrusion of religious liberalism a century and a half ago. That was an emergency. Christian institutions were being pirated by theological brigands. This pressure produced a natural tendency to downplay non-fundamentals in favor of a united front against the enemy. Even then, however, leading figures such as the Baptist Oliver Van Osdel and the Presbyterian J. Gresham Machen insisted that they stood for more than the fundamentals, and they rejected the label fundamentalist when it implied any watering down of their other doctrinal distinctives.
Scripture never seems to speak in terms of triage. It does speak in terms of full equipment (1 Tim 3:17). To be fully equipped, Christians must certainly master the fundamentals, but they must also master the more advanced teachings of the faith. There is more to the faith than the fundamentals, and all of it is essential to some level of obedience. Is it possible that all of it could also be essential to various levels of fellowship? How well Ortlund will answer that question remains to be seen.
This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.
Happy the Church, Thou Sacred Place
Isaac Watts (1674–1748)
Happy the church, thou sacred place;
The seat of thy Creator’s grace;
Thy holy courts are his abode,
Thou earthly palace of our God.
Thy walls are strength, and at thy gates
A guard of heavenly warriors waits;
Nor shall thy deep foundations move,
Fixed on his counsels and his love.
Thy foes in vain designs engage;
Against his throne in vain they rage;
Like rising waves with angry roar,
That dash and die upon the shore.
Then let our souls in Zion dwell,
Nor fear the wrath of men or hell;
His arms embrace this happy ground,
Like brazen bulwarks built around.
God is our Shield, and God our Sun;
Swift as the fleeting moments run;
On us he sheds new beams of grace,
And we reflect his brightest praise.
Canonicity and the New Testament
Recognizing the canonicity of the Old Testament writings is relatively easy. We can accept the evaluations made by Israel about which writings are authoritative. These evaluations have been endorsed by Jesus and the apostles. Israel has handed the Church an intact canon for the Old Testament.
Similarly, we can follow the example of Jesus and the apostles in their usage of the apocryphal books. They were surely aware of these documents, which (among other things) narrate important aspects of Israel’s history. Nevertheless, the Jews of Jesus’ day did not accept these writings as Scripture. Jesus never cited or used them at all. Aside from a possible allusion or two, the apostles never referenced them and certainly did not endorse them as authoritative. No Christian body formally recognized any apocryphal books as canonical before the sixteenth century.
Recognizing the canonicity of the New Testament books requires a different approach. While there is some mutual recognition among the apostles of the authority of each other’s writings (e.g. 2 Pet 3:15–16), the apostolic church never provided an authoritative list of authoritative writings. The apostles themselves were aware of the problem of forged documents written under their names (2 Thess 2:2). Also, other non-apostolic books were being circulated among the churches (e.g., the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles). By the second century, heretics such as the Gnostics had begun to produce documents for which they claimed authority (the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Thomas, etc.). The proliferation of writings forced Christian leaders and thinkers to ask which documents were genuinely inspired. Furthermore, persecution underlined the importance of knowing which books were worth giving one’s life for and which were not.
Over time, Christians came to use at least four tests to determine whether a writing qualified as canonical. The first of these was the test of apostolicity. To be recognized as inspired, a document had to have been written by an apostle or by someone with a close connection to the apostolic community. Most of the books that became the New Testament were written directly by apostles. The few exceptions (Mark, Luke, James, Jude) were written by people close to the apostles. Mark is supposed to have used Peter as a direct source. Luke was a close associate of Paul, and he evidently had access to Mary’s testimony. James and Jude were both half-brothers of Jesus, and both were seen as prominent within the early Christian church.
The test of apostolicity was simplified by the fact that the apostles had written to several churches that still possessed their writings. During the early third century, Tertullian claimed that the authentic writings of the apostles could be found in places like Corinth, Philippi, Ephesus, and Rome (Prescription Against Heretics 36). He meant that these churches held either the original documents written by the apostles or at least that they had unmodified copies.
These churches and others had been founded by the apostles themselves. The existence of such churches made possible a second test. Before being recognized as authoritative, any document had to be demonstrably consistent with apostolic teaching. This is the argument that Irenaeus advanced against the Gnostics during the late second century.
Irenaeus argued that the apostolic churches were well known (Against Heresies 3.3–4). In these churches, the apostles themselves trained the first pastors, and those pastors trained their successors. The chain of pastors could be traced link by link (Irenaeus did trace it for the church at Rome). Irenaeus further argued that in his time, all the pastors in all the apostolic churches were still unified in their teaching. He reasoned that this unity of teaching could not have been contrived; it must preserve accurately the teaching of the apostles. This unity contrasted with the traditions of the Gnostics, whose teachings contradicted not only the apostolic churches but also each other. If one wanted to identify authoritative writings, all that one had to do was to compare a particular document to the universal teaching of the apostolic churches. A writing that contradicted apostolic doctrine must be rejected.
Of course, Irenaeus’s approach would become weaker with each passing generation. He failed to appreciate how quickly the teaching of the apostolic churches themselves could become corrupted. Nevertheless, during the second century the presence of a live tradition among the apostolic churches provided an important brake on the adoption and canonization of heretical books.
The first two tests of canonicity are (1) apostolicity and (2) consistency with apostolic doctrine. The third test is use: before being recognized as Scripture, a book must have been received, recognized, circulated, and used within the apostolic churches. Of course, this test also implied that those churches preserved the book.
Paul apparently wrote some epistles that were not preserved, circulated, or widely used. He seems to have written four Corinthian letters in total. He probably also wrote a separate epistle to the Laodiceans (Col 4:16). None of these was preserved or widely circulated. This failure does not mean that some book of Scripture was lost. Rather, these books were lost because they were not inspired Scripture in the first place. If, say, 3 Corinthians were discovered next week, Christians would not be obligated to add it to the New Testament—though they would doubtless find it interesting.
Some writings took longer for the churches to recognize and circulate than others. The anonymous book of Hebrews is an example. James and Jude, 2 Peter, and 2 and 3 John were others. Questions were also raised about the book of Revelation. In time, however, the churches circulated and used these documents, and they were recognized as authoritative works. Other books such as the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas were used occasionally but never widely recognized as authoritative.
These three tests of canonicity (apostolicity, consistency, and recognition) have all been completed in the past. While the results could in theory be revisited at any time, in practice no one now is in a position to dispute the results. The canon is closed, and the Bible has a back cover.
Still, one more test of canonicity remains. John Calvin refers to this test as the “witness of the Holy Spirit.” Calvin said,
The testimony of the Spirit is more excellent than all reason. For as God alone is a fit witness of himself in his Word, so also the Word will not find acceptance in men’s hearts before it is sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit. The same Spirit, therefore, who has spoken through the mouths of the prophets must penetrate into our hearts to persuade us that they faithfully proclaimed what had been divinely commanded. (Institutes 1.7.4. Battles translation)
This final test should not be ignored. While it is not a proof for unbelievers, it is a real source of assurance for believers. We need have no doubt that the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments are indeed the true and only Word of God today.
This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.
For the Apostles’ Glorious Company
William Walsham How (1823–1897)
For the Apostles’ glorious company,
Who, bearing fort the Cross o’er land and sea,
Shook all the mighty world, we sing to Thee,
Alleluia.
For the Evangelists, by whose blest word,
Like fourfold streams, the garden of the Lord
Is fair and fruitful, be Thy name adored.
Alleluia.
For Martyrs, who, with rapture-kindled eye,
Saw the bright crown descending from the sky,
And died to grasp it, Thee we glorify.
Alleluia.
Canonicity, the Old Testament, and the Apocrypha
When Protestants talk about the Bible they mean the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments. To these, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy add several other apocryphal or deuterocanonical books, plus additions to multiple biblical books. Even more apocryphal books exist, but they are not recognized as Scripture by any branch of professing Christianity.
Obviously, at some point choices had to be made about which writings would be recognized as Scripture and which would not. The process of recognizing some books and rejecting others is known as canonization, and the collection of recognized books is known as the canon. No doctrine of Scripture is complete without a discussion of canonization and canonicity.
The word canon was originally the name for a particular kind of straight reed. People would cut this reed to length and use it as a measuring rod. Eventually the word became a metaphor for any standard of measurement. Then it was applied to the collection of things that measured up to the standard. When we talk about the canon of Scripture, we are talking about the collection of writings that measure up to the standard of being recognized as the word of God. To say that a document is canonical is to say that it is God’s word and consequently that it is authoritative for faith and practice.
What is the standard for canonicity? The short answer is inspiration. A writing is canonical if and only if it has been inspired by the Holy Spirit. Properly speaking, human beings can never declare a writing to be canonical. Even the declarations of church councils do not make a document canonical. All they can do is to recognize its canonicity. Its canonicity depends entirely upon whether it has been inspired.
Consequently, discussions about canonicity are really discussions about inspiration. To know which writings are canonical, we must simply discover which writings have been inspired by the Holy Spirit. How can we do that? This question will have different answers depending upon which testament we are asking about.
We in the Church have received the Old Testament canon directly from Israel. We know very little about how Israel decided which writings to recognize. Perhaps Ezra was involved, but even if that is true, Ezra is already described as a “scribe of the words of the commandments of the LORD, and of his statutes to Israel” and a “scribe of the law” (Ezra 7:11–12), so the writings of Moses must already have been recognized. From the attitude of the Samaritans we can guess that questions were raised as to whether the Pentateuch was more authoritative than other documents.
In any event, by the time of the New Testament, Israel seems fully to have accepted the present canonical books of the Old Testament. Jesus and the apostles quoted widely from every section of the Old Testament and from nearly every individual book. They used all parts of the Old Testament as authoritative Scripture. These were the documents that Paul had in mind when he wrote that “All scripture is given by inspiration of God” (2 Tim 3:16).
The same cannot be said for the apocryphal books. Certainly Jesus and the apostles knew about these writings, which were produced during the intertestamental period. Several of the apocryphal writings were included with the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament that was produced in Alexandria. The Jews of Jesus’ day were well acquainted with these books. Most saw the books as profitable, though not authoritative.
Nevertheless, Jesus and the apostles never quoted or alluded to any apocryphal book in any authoritative way. Indeed, with the possible exception of Jude’s quotation of a prophecy from Enoch (Jude 14–15; see 1 Enoch 1:9), they never cited any apocryphal book at all. Even Jude was not necessarily quoting 1 Enoch. What he quoted was a genuine prophecy from the historical Enoch that also shows up in 1 Enoch. In other words, the New Testament provides no warrant at all for viewing any apocryphal book as inspired. The New Testament writers did not recognize any of the apocrypha as canonical, and without their stamp of approval, neither should we.
The post-apostolic church was also hesitant about these books. Various church fathers knew about them and referenced them from time to time, but no consensus developed that they should be included with Scripture. When Jerome translated his Latin Vulgate during the late Fourth Century, he refused at first to include apocryphal books. Even when he finally agreed to insert some of them, he kept them in a separate category of “ecclesiastical” and not canonical books.
Jerome’s view became the consensus position for a thousand years. Certain apocryphal books were recognized as useful for their spiritual, moral, devotional, or historical value, but they were not considered to be canonical as Scripture. In fact, no part of the apocrypha was ever declared formally to be canonical until the post-Reformation Council of Trent (1546). Later, the Eastern Orthodox Church declared some of the apocryphal books to be canonical at the Synod of Jerusalem (1672).
Bible believers may still benefit from some apocryphal writings as historical or devotional materials. The testimony of Jesus and the apostles as well as the mainstream of church history, however, weighs against their being recognized as Scripture. The New Testament endorses the authority and inspiration of the Old Testament, so it must be recognized as canonical. The New Testament never endorses the authority and inspiration of any apocryphal book. They must not be recognized as either inspired or canonical.
This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.
Thy Word Is Like a Garden, Lord
Edwin Hodder (1837–1904)
Thy Word is like a garden, Lord,
With flowers bright and fair;
And every one who seeks may pluck
A lovely cluster there.
Thy Word is like a deep, deep mine;
And jewels rich and rare
Are hidden in its mighty depths
For every searcher there.
Thy Word is like a starry host:
A thousand rays of light
Are seen to guide the traveler,
And make his pathway bright.
Thy Word is like an armory,
Where soldiers may repair,
And find, for life’s long battle day,
All needful weapons there.
O may I love thy precious Word,
May I explore the mine,
May I its fragrant flowers glean,
May light upon me shine.
O may I find my armor there,
Thy Word my trusty sword;
I’ll learn to fight with every foe
The battle of the Lord.
Notes at the Beginning of the School Year
Perhaps I should begin by saying that I am not speaking for Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Only our president, Matt Morrell, has the right to do that. My goal is not to articulate policy or to represent the institution.
What I am doing is reflecting upon the difference that I see between the Central Seminary of today and the Central Seminary to which I came over twenty-five years ago. The differences are significant. They are shaping the direction of our school. And, for the most part, they are unavoidable.
To be clear, the differences are not theological. The board, administration, and faculty at Central Seminary still hold the same principles and distinctives that we always have. We are Baptists without apology. We are fundamentalists and separatists. We are cessationists with respect to the miraculous gifts. We are young-earth, solar-day creationists. We are complementarians. We are dispensationalists, committed to both premillennialism and pretribulationism. We teach expository preaching and progressive sanctification. These statements apply to all of us. None of that has changed and I hope that none of it ever will.
Nevertheless, we are changing. I see those changes reflected in three primary areas. These are accreditation, demographics, and delivery.
When I became a professor at the beginning of 1998, Central Seminary was not accredited. One of the reasons I was brought in was because the school wanted to go after accreditation, and my degrees would help to secure it. For the next six or seven years we examined different options, finally deciding to work toward accreditation with the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools (TRACS). Once we started the process, we took three or four years to achieve accredited status. It was a major undertaking, and one in which we had to create many processes and procedures for the institution.
Seven or eight years ago, we decided to work with the Association of Theological Schools (ATS). We acknowledge our indebtedness to TRACS, but ATS is the standard accrediting body for theological seminaries, and degrees accredited by ATS are more widely recognized. We are now coming up on our first reaffirmation with ATS. When we have completed our self-study and been reaffirmed, we should not have to do another for a decade. Among other things, that means that this accreditation cycle is the last I am likely to see.
Central Seminary is a stronger institution because of accreditation, but that is not the only way in which we have changed. Another change involves the demographics of our students. The student population of 2023 looks very different when compared to the student population of 1998.
My first classes at Central Seminary were populated mainly by young graduates of Bible colleges or other Christian institutions. Most of our students came from Northland, Maranatha, and Pillsbury. We had several from other Christian schools, and always a handful from secular colleges and universities. They would move to Minneapolis, settle here for three or four years, and become active in area churches (especially Fourth Baptist Church).
Over the intervening years, several of our kindred colleges and seminaries have closed their doors: Pillsbury, Northland, and Clearwater, among others. Other colleges have started their own seminaries and chosen not to allow us on their campuses to talk to their students. Fewer young men are preparing for ministry than was once the case. The stream of young, recent college graduates has nearly dried up.
It has been replaced by a stream of older students, most of whom are already engaged in some form of ministry. They bring their experience with them into the classroom, enriching the conversation for all who are involved. But they do not bring their families to live in the Twin Cities. They stay in their pastorates and on their mission fields—and we like that.
Even though our current students tend to be more experienced in life and ministry, they do not have the background in Baptist dispensationalism that we used to assume of our incoming classes. When I began to teach at Central Seminary, I had to expose my students to divergent points of view. Now they come with divergent points of view and I have to work to expose them to Baptist dispensationalism.
The altered demographics of our student population stem partly from the third change at Central Seminary. We have now made almost a complete shift to distance education. This was a shift that I resisted during my years as president of the seminary, partly because the only way to do it well was to invest in very expensive and dedicated Polycom equipment. With the advent of Zoom, however, distance education has become relatively cheap and easy.
We do only synchronous education. What that means is that we operate virtual classrooms where students actually converse with the professor and each other during class sessions. We began experimenting with this form of delivery several years ago, and it proved both effective and popular. When COVID came along, that disease forced our entire operation onto Zoom for the duration. It changed the entire education industry. Students can still sit in our physical classrooms, but they usually choose not to.
In one way, it’s eerie to experience empty hallways and classrooms. When we teach, however, our computer screens are now filled with faces of students from around the world. I have just begun teaching a course on Christology and Soteriology, and I believe that a majority of my students live in Africa. It is an astounding opportunity.
Ten years ago, none of us could foresee what Central Seminary would look like today. We have been led here—and in some ways driven here—by circumstances that were purely providential. We had no control over sister institutions closing. We had no control over COVID. We had to accept what God gave us.
Those changes, however, have been good for us. They have forced us to rethink what really matters. They have brought us a growing student population and an increasing donor base. We find ourselves wondering what other changes God may have in store for us as we assist local churches in equipping spiritual leaders for Christ-exalting, biblical ministry.
This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.
Psalm 31
New Version of the Psalms of David (1696), Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady
My hope, my steadfast trust,
I on Thy help repose;
That Thou, my God, art good and just,
My soul with comfort knows.
Whate’er events betide,
Thy wisdom times them all;
Then, Lord, Thy servant safely hide
From those that seek his fall.
The brightness of Thy face
To me, O Lord, disclose;
And as Thy mercies still increase,
Preserve me from my foes.
How great Thy mercies are
To such as fear Thy name,
Which Thou, for those that trust Thy care,
Dost to the world proclaim!
O all ye saints, the Lord
With eager love pursue;
Who to the just will help afford,
And give the proud their due.
Ye that on God rely,
Courageously proceed;
For He will still your hearts supply
With strength in time of need.
A Pastor’s Reading Plan
[This essay was originally published on April 15, 2016.]
So you’re a pastor. You might be interested to know that the Schleitheim Confession, an early Anabaptist creed, specified that the first duty of the pastoral office “shall be to read.” The Anabaptists were right. Nearly everything a pastor does in shepherding the flock—preaching, instructing, encouraging, admonishing, counseling—depends upon his growth through reading. That remains as true today as it was in 1527.
As a pastor, you need to have a profound grasp of the Scriptures. That kind of grasp comes only by repeated and detailed reading. A man who is not reading the Bible habitually is not equipped to pastor effectively. In fact, you ought to be reading the Bible at least two ways at once. One way is to read through the entire biblical text fairly rapidly, covering chapters each day. The other way is to study particular texts in detail, probably coordinated with your weekly preaching.
But you ought to read more than the Bible. You need to read materials that directly provide you with information and skills for ministry. You also need to read works that will improve you as a human being, helping you to become more thoughtful, knowledgeable, and interesting.
Most pastors know that they ought to read, but they don’t know what an effective reading program looks like. They need a method or plan that will help to guide them. I want to focus on just one part of that method, namely, a plan for reading books.
You should have goals in reading, just as you should in every area of ministry. Tracking progress toward a goal can help you to balance reading with other pastoral duties. An average pastor with a college and seminary education can comfortably complete about one ordinary book every week. By “ordinary book” I mean a book written in non-technical, discursive prose, with average page and print size, running about 250 pages. Some books can be read faster, some slower. Some books are longer, some shorter. Some pastors sprint through books like cheetahs after antelope, while others just lope along. But every pastor should be able to read a book per week.
If that seems challenging, then a few tips might help. First, force yourself to read rapidly. You can almost certainly read more quickly than you already do, and rapid reading is a skill that can be learned. Second, set aside blocs of time for reading. As a pastor, I would do much of my reading on Mondays, and then take a different day off when I felt less drained. Third, always have a book with you to read in odd moments. You can read in the airport until your flight boards. You can read at the mall while you’re waiting for your wife to come out of the shoe store. You can read while you’re stopped by a train crossing the road. Fourth, choose to read instead of getting trapped in time sinks like television, social media, or computer games. Fifth, join a reading group. Start one if you need to.
What should you read? Since you work directly with Scripture, a good bit of your reading will obviously focus upon biblical studies. You will read commentaries as part of your sermon preparation. You should also read works dealing with biblical history, Bible backgrounds, archaeology, biblical theology, and critical issues.
Furthermore, you should read systematic theology regularly. Ernest Pickering used to recommend that pastors read fifty pages of theology every week. That would only be ten pages a day. Three or four years of this kind of reading will help a young pastor prepare for his ordination council, particularly if he keeps his doctrinal statement open on his computer screen while he reads.
Works of philosophy should also be part of your regular reading—especially if the word philosophy is understood rather broadly. Philosophy includes not only metaphysics, epistemology, and logic (though pastors should have more than a passing acquaintance with these disciplines), but also esthetics (the study of the nature of beauty and, more broadly, art) and ethics. These days it arguably includes hermeneutics. Philosophy of religion and its cousin, apologetics, also comes under this rubric.
A grasp of history is important for many reasons, and especially for understanding how Christianity has developed and spread. Of course you should read history, and not only church history. Political history, social history, intellectual history, and biography should be a regular part of your reading cycle.
Some of your reading ought to help you improve your gifts for ministry. In seminary you probably read lots of books on administration, counseling, preaching, evangelism, and other areas of pastoral labor. You ought to keep on reading those books as long as you hope to become more skillful.
As a pastor, you are a communicator. In your preaching and teaching you should aim not only to impart information but also to shape affection. To reach the affections you must pass through the gate of imagination. You must be a sufficiently competent student of the imagination to distinguish legitimate from manipulative appeals. Consequently, you will be well served to study works of imagination, which means that you ought to read a certain amount of poetry and belletristic literature. You should pay special attention to those who have used storytelling to communicate Christian ideas and sensibilities. Authors like MacDonald, Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien deserve whole shelves in your library.
Do not neglect your own devotional life in your reading. Some works you should read, not because they help you to know more about God, but because they help you to love God better. As a pastor, part of your job is to confront, correct, and encourage others. You also need to be confronting, correcting, and encouraging yourself, and the right kind of reading will help you do that.
Finally, you ought to read widely. Part of your planned reading ought to include books that fit none of the above categories. You should read books of math and science, books on sailing and aviation, books about hunting, art criticism, home repair, and automotive maintenance. You should aim to be able to converse intelligently on as many topics as possible.
How will you stay on track with such a variety of reading? You will almost certainly need to keep a log of what you have read. You can list your reading in a notebook or journal, keeping track of the number of books and pages you are reading. You should also keep track of the categories from which your reading comes. If you see that you are neglecting a category, you’ll know that you need to do your next reading there.
I’m always surprised when I meet pastors who read only a book or two each year. I wonder what their congregations must be hearing from their pulpits. So, you’re a pastor? Read.
This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.
There is no Frigate like a Book
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry–
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll–
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul–
1 Thessalonians 5 and the Rapture
When answering a doctrinal question, competent theologians try to take account of everything the Bible says about that question. They will not, however, treat every relevant text equally. Some texts are more critical to a correct answer than others. Clear texts are more critical than ambiguous texts. Didactic texts are more critical than narrative texts. Importantly, texts that aim to answer the specific question are more critical than texts that simply touch on the subject incidentally.
All these factors come to bear upon 1 Thessalonians 5:1–11 when discussing the timing of the rapture. This is a text in which the apostle Paul deliberately aims to answer questions about Christians’ relationship to an eschatological event known as the day of the Lord (1–2). Paul is here borrowing language from Old Testament prophecies about an extended future event during which God will pour out His wrath upon human sin by sending temporal, earthly judgments (see Isa 13:9–11; Zeph 1:13–16). While the day of the Lord also likely includes elements of blessing (Zeph 3:14–15), God’s temporal wrath precedes the blessings so that the arrival of that day must always be dreaded as a calamity (Amos 5:18–20).
Paul summarizes the calamitous nature of the day of the Lord by stating that it will arrive like a thief in the night (1 Thess 5:2). The point of his analogy is that the arrival of that day will be both unexpected and catastrophic. He explains these points in the next verse: when people believe that they have peace and safety, the day of the Lord will overtake them like labor overtakes a woman giving birth (3). Babies do not schedule in advance the hour and day upon which they will arrive, and they never arrive without pain.
Nevertheless, Paul assures the Thessalonian believers that the day of the Lord will not overtake them as a thief (4). Why not? Because they are not in darkness. In other words, they are not in the night. How is that relevant? By definition, a thief in the night does not arrive during the day. People who are in the day do not have to fear a thief in the night.
Paul is emphatic: believers are children of light and children of the day (5). They are not of the night or of darkness. The implied conclusion is that the thief in the night cannot touch them.
Since believers are children of the day (therefore, 5:6), then they must not sleep like the children of darkness. Instead, they should stay alert and keep their wits about them. The sleep of 5:6 is obviously not the same kind of sleep that Paul referenced in the previous chapter (4:13, 15). There, sleep was a metaphor for physical death (4:16). The word for sleeping was koimao, but in chapter 5 Paul uses the word katheudo. More importantly, the context clearly indicates that the sleep of chapter 5 contrasts with alertness and sobriety, and it is aligned with drunkenness (7). In chapter 5, Paul uses sleep as a metaphor for spiritual sluggishness and insensitivity. These practices characterize people who are children of night. Since Christians are children of day, they must not display these night-time characteristics. Instead, they should evidence sobriety as they don their daytime armor (8).
For Paul, imperatives typically grow out of the indicatives. Believers are children of the light (indicative), so they ought to live soberly and alertly (imperative). Then Paul strengthens the imperative by an appeal to another indicative: God has not appointed believers to wrath (including temporal, day-of-the-Lord wrath), but to deliverance (9). This statement reveals the reason why believers need not fear the thief in the night. God has already delivered them from the day of the Lord, and He has done it “by our Lord Jesus Christ.”
In context, Paul is discussing God’s temporal wrath, demonstrated in the day of the Lord. All believers of all ages are delivered from God’s eternal wrath (condemnation in hell). Not all believers from all ages, however, have been or will be delivered from God’s temporal wrath. Some believers have in the past had to pass through temporal wrath that God sent upon unbelievers. Furthermore, those who come to faith during the Tribulation will still have to endure the remainder of its judgments. In 1 Thessalonians 5, however, the promise of deliverance appears to be made specifically to church saints.
And the promise is absolute. It applies to all church saints, whether they are spiritually alert (“whether we wake”) or sluggish (“or sleep”). Church saints have complete exemption from every manifestation of divine wrath, whether eternal or temporal. According to 5:9–10 this exemption or deliverance is grounded in the cross-work of Christ. In other words, it is a matter of gospel truth that church saints cannot enter the day of the Lord because they have been delivered from the temporal wrath of that day.
Of course, there are still questions among genuine Bible believers about when during the Tribulation the temporal wrath of God begins. Some believe that it begins with the opening of the very first seal, others that it begins at the halfway point, still others that it begins sometime during the second half of the Tribulation, while others think that it does not begin until the very end of the Tribulation. Theories of the rapture will correspond to each of these views. This particular passage does not answer the question of when God’s temporal wrath will begin. What is clear is that whenever that will be, church saints must be raptured first.
This passage does disallow one view of the rapture. It categorically excludes a partial rapture in which obedient saints are taken to heaven while carnal believers are left to endure God’s wrath during the Tribulation. According to 5:9–10, the theory of a partial rapture constitutes a denial of the gospel. It is the one option that is genuinely heretical.
It is possible to establish when God’s wrath begins from other scriptures, but that is not the point of the present discussion. The point is that whenever God’s temporal wrath is set to begin, He has promised to deliver believers first. Furthermore, He has promised to deliver all of us, whether we wake or sleep. A partial rapture is not possible. This promise is both a comfort and a ground of exhortation as we think of the great eschatological events to come.
This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.
Hark! A Thrilling Voice Is Sounding
Edward Caswell (1814–1878)
Hark! A thrilling voice is sounding!
“Christ is near,” we hear it say.
“Cast away the works of darkness,
all you children of the day!”
See, the Lamb, so long expected,
comes with pardon down from heav’n.
Let us haste, with tears of sorrow,
one and all, to be forgiv’n;
So, when next he comes in glory
and the world is wrapped in fear,
he will shield us with his mercy
and with words of love draw near.
Honor, glory, might, dominion
to the Father and the Son
with the everlasting Spirit
while eternal ages run!
Transitions in Ministry
I’ll be retiring this week.
Partly.
From one of my jobs.
Let me explain.
The vocation at which I earn my living is as a professor at Central Baptist Theological Seminary, but besides my teaching I have been pursuing three smaller callings. One is writing. One is pastoring. One is chaplaincy in the United States Air Force Auxiliary, the Civil Air Patrol.
When these callings come into conflict, the writing is what tends to get pushed into the background. It’s been that way for the past several years. This summer, however, I have devoted significant time to two projects. One is a revision of my book on finding God’s will, which will soon be re-released under the title Can I Know God’s Will? The other is a collaborative work honoring Charles A. Hauser, Jr., co-edited with Bruce Compton, and entitled Dispensationalism Revisited. It, too, should be appearing in print soon. Both books are being published by Central Seminary Press.
For the past two- and one-half years, I have also been serving as interim pastor at Bible Baptist Church in East Bethel, Minnesota. Bible Baptist is a small congregation in a semi-rural area. It has a building located on a major US highway and lies in the growth corridor for the Twin Cities. During the time that I have been serving as interim pastor, this ministry has taken more and more of my focus and attention. The church is unable to support a full-time pastor, and finding someone who will accept the pastorate on those terms has been difficult. The pulpit committee has asked me repeatedly to candidate for the position, and with the blessing of Central Seminary I have eventually agreed. The church will vote this Sunday whether to call me.
At Central Seminary, we are coming up on an accreditation self-study. Consequently, all of us will be carrying extra responsibilities. It’s also my turn to teach a course in the Doctor of Ministry program (which I also administer). Teaching that course will add another layer of activity to what looks like an already full academic year.
That leaves chaplaincy. I began serving the Air Force Auxiliary (the Civil Air Patrol) as visiting clergy during the mid-1990s. At the time I was pastoring in Texas and I was looking for a way to be involved with people in the community. I soon joined the organization and jumped through the hoops to become recognized by the Department of Defense as a military chaplain. Before long I had the privilege of baptizing my squadron commander and his wife, who then became members of the church I was pastoring. Civil Air Patrol has been the main way that I have found opportunities to minister to unsaved people.
Through the years, however, the demands of the position have intensified. I have found more and more of my time going toward training and qualifications, with the result that less time is available for personal ministry. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that my work in Civil Air Patrol no longer integrates neatly with my other ministry activities.
On top of that, I’m getting older. In a few weeks I’ll pass 68 years of age, and I find that the edge of my stamina is beginning to dull. I can still throw myself into normal day-to-day activity, but anything out of the ordinary (like an illness) sets me back far more severely than it used to. This summer included such an illness.
Let me say in passing that I now understand why God put opiates in the world. This summer’s illness produced a cough that grew worse and worse for more than a month. At some point I even broke a rib from hacking so hard. I finally asked my doctor to give me some industrial strength cough medicine, which of course involved codeine. Within ten minutes of the first (deliberately tiny) dose, I began to experience relief. That was the point at which healing began. All told, I never took more than a few small doses, but the medication helped enough to put me on the road to recovery.
Somewhere during that process, I recognized that I was not physically capable of sustaining all my commitments. I love Central Seminary. I love writing. I love pastoring. I love chaplaincy. Something, however, was going to have to give. In the end, I decided that it had to be the chaplaincy, and I notified the proper authorities of my intention to retire.
This past week I fulfilled my final responsibilities as a Civil Air Patrol chaplain. All that remains is a final send-off, to be administered this coming Tuesday. As I understand it, when I walk out of the squadron meeting Tuesday night, I will no longer be Chaplain Bauder.
I hate to give it up. It’s a responsibility that I have tried to fulfill in one way or another for nearly thirty years. Chaplaincy has been useful and meaningful work, and it has created opportunities to bring the gospel into people’s lives.
Going forward, however, I believe that what is more important is to pour my life into the students of Central Seminary and the members of Bible Baptist Church. It would also be nice to complete the second volume of the history of Baptist fundamentalism, as well as to publish several shorter works that are in process right now. So I am retiring from one position, not to work less, but because I can’t work any harder, and so I have to choose my work more deliberately.
This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.
The Christian Child
Reginald Heber (1783–1826)
By cool Siloam’s shady rill
how sweet the lily grows!
How sweet the breath beneath the hill
of Sharon’s dewy rose!
Lo! such the child whose early feet
the paths of peace have trod,
whose secret heart with influence sweet
is upward drawn to God.
By cool Siloam’s shady rill
the lily must decay,
the rose that blooms beneath the hill
must shortly fade away;
And soon, too soon, the wintry hour
of life’s maturer age
will shake the soul with sorrow’s power
and stormy passion’s rage.
O thou, whose infant feet were found
within thy Father’s shrine,
whose years, with changeless virtue crowned,
were all alike divine,
Dependent on thy bounteous breath
we seek thy grace alone,
through every stage of life, and death,
to keep us still thine own.
The Agent of Illumination
Unsaved people in their natural state do not receive or welcome the things of God (1 Cor 2:14). Divine truth seems foolish to them because it is spiritually discerned. While they can exegete texts and can grasp what the Bible says, they cannot appreciate its relevance or know its significance because they reject the Bible’s frame of reference. The truth that they grasp is useless to them since they do not know it as it ought to be known.
In the opening chapters of 1 Corinthians, Paul dwells at length on the contrast between the wisdom of the unsaved world (which is ultimately foolish) and the (ultimately wise) foolishness of God (1:18–31). He states that he explicitly repudiated displays of human wisdom in his presentation of the divine truth (2:1–5). Instead, he affirmed the wisdom of God, the rejection of which led the rulers of this world to crucify the Lord of glory (2:6–8). The divine wisdom focuses upon the crucified Christ (1:17–18; 2:2). This hidden wisdom (i.e., Christ crucified) is what God has ordained before the world to the glory of His people (2:7).
At this point in his discourse, Paul writes one of the most frequently misunderstood statements in all of Scripture: “But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (2:9). This verse is commonly understood to be talking about the glories of heaven, as if heaven were such a wonderful place that we cannot even imagine it ahead of time. While it is certainly true that we cannot imagine how blessed heaven will be, that idea is completely foreign to this context.
Rather, Paul has been talking about God’s hidden wisdom. It is wisdom that has been rejected by the wise and powerful of this world. It cannot be discerned through natural observation or invented through natural imagination. Nevertheless, God formed His plan according to this eternal wisdom, which comes to a focal point in the cross work of Christ. What God prepared for those who love Him is not merely heaven, but all of salvation and everything that God had to do to secure it.
If this wisdom cannot be known through natural observation or invented through natural imagination, then how could anyone ever receive it? Paul answers this question in only one way: God revealed it. Revelation may be defined as the disclosure by God to humans of truth that they did not know and could not otherwise have known. Paul’s point is that natural observation and imagination cannot arrive at true knowledge of the things that God has prepared for His people, but God has Himself revealed them (2:10).
Furthermore, He revealed these things through His Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the agent of divine revelation (cf. 2 Pet 1:20–21). The Spirit can be the revealer because He searches and knows the deep things of God (1 Cor 2:10).
Paul illustrates his point by appealing to the analogy of the human spirit (2:11). Each of us has a self-conscious awareness that knows things about us to which no one else has access. Our spirit knows our inner states, our thoughts, our imaginations, and our dispositions, none of which is available for inspection by other human beings. By analogy, God’s Holy Spirit knows exhaustively all of God’s hidden workings. This complete knowledge of God and His ways is what enables the Spirit to act as the agent of revelation.
Furthermore, this same Spirit who knows the things of God has been given to us (2:12). God’s purpose in giving us His Spirit is at least partly so that we might know the hidden things that God has prepared for us. In other words, the Spirit has not only revealed what God is doing, but He also helps us to understand that revelation. The rest of the context illustrates how that understanding works.
Paul next references “the things we speak” (2:13). This is a reference to divine revelation, which was communicated by the Spirit through the apostles and prophets. The apostle denies that knowledge of these things came through human wisdom. As the Holy Spirit communicated these things, He did so by comparing spirituals with spirituals—probably meaning that spiritual communication is required for spiritual truth.
Paul is not suggesting that the Holy Spirit invented a new language for revealing spiritual truth. Nor is he denying that unbelievers—people who do not have the Spirit—can understand the words and propositions in which spiritual truth is communicated. Nevertheless, something in their understanding is disabled so that spiritual truth seems like foolishness to them (2:14). They cannot know it and they do not welcome it.
On the other hand, those who love God have been given His Spirit. Because they have the Spirit, they are capable of discerning all things (2:15). That is to say, they welcome spiritual truth and it makes sense to them. They perceive how it affects their lives. According to a parallel passage, they are “able to discern both good and evil” (Heb 5:14).
Students of Scripture debate the meaning of “he that is spiritual” in 1 Corinthians 2:14. Some apply this language to all believers, since all believers have been given the Spirit. Others apply the language only to those believers who have yielded themselves to the Spirit and who wish to obey Him. Still others apply it only to believers who have been brought to maturity by the Spirit. What all three of these perspectives agree upon is that the ability to receive and apply Scripture rightly depends upon the Holy Spirit. He was the agent of revelation, and He continues to be the agent of spiritual understanding. He is the one who takes the words of revelation and helps the believer to appreciate their significance.
This, then, is illumination. It is the work of the Holy Spirit in enabling believers to grasp and welcome the significance of divine revelation. Illumination does not replace the discipline of study. It is not a shortcut that eliminates the need for careful interpretation of the text. Illumination is indispensable, however, in knowing what to do with the text and in perceiving its relevance to one’s own life.
The Holy Spirit must begin a work of illumination before any unbeliever will ever understand and receive the gospel. The Spirit must continue to perform this work for all believers as they wrestle with the text of Scripture. While He does not interpret the Bible for us, He does help us to understand the significance of the text. He shows us the difference that it ought to make in our lives. Illumination is that work of the Holy Spirit by means of which He helps believers to understand the significance of revelation as they incorporate it into their lives.
This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.
Eternal Spirit! We Confess
Isaac Watts (1674–1748)
Eternal Spirit! we confess
And sing the wonders of Thy grace;
Thy power conveys our blessings down
From God the Father and the Son.
Enlightened by Thy heavenly ray,
Our shades and darkness turn to day;
Thine inward teachings make us know
Our danger and our refuge too.
Thy glorious power works within,
And breaks the chains of reigning sin.
Doth our imperious lusts subdue,
And forms our wretched hearts anew.
The troubled conscience knows Thy voice,
Thy cheering words awake our joys;
Thy words allay the stormy wind,
And calm the surges of the mind.
The Need for Illumination
Of the various doctrines related to Scripture (revelation, inspiration, canonicity, etc.), perhaps the most misunderstood is the doctrine of illumination. Most Bible believers agree that illumination is a work of the Holy Spirit in helping people (particularly believers) to understand Scripture. In many cases, however, illumination is taken to be a shortcut to understanding the Bible. People imagine that the Holy Spirit somehow communicates the meaning of the text directly to the reader’s mind, so that the reader does not need to do the hard work of studying the Bible. Whatever sense (or, often, nonsense) enters the reader’s mind after looking at a passage is taken to be its true meaning, taught by the Holy Spirit. For such a reader, what the text means is whatever it means “to me.”
The Bible contains passages that are hard to understand (2 Pet 3:16). A faithful pastor may spend weeks or even months preparing to preach one of these passages. He might translate the verses, parse the verbs, locate the nouns, look up word meanings and chase their parallel usages, study the grammar, create both sentence and exegetical diagrams, and consult multiple translations and commentaries. He may labor to discover the best way of communicating the actual meaning of the text to his listeners. At the end of his sermon, he is as likely as not to be greeted at the door by some dear saint who will say, “Pastor, thank you for your sermon, but the Holy Spirit has told me that this verse means….” Whatever comes next will almost certainly not be what the verse really says.
Yet the doctrine of illumination must mean something. The question is not only what illumination is, but also why it is necessary and how it works. The reason it is necessary is because, in the first place, “the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor 2:14). In other words, at some level the unsaved do not receive or welcome (the verb is dechomai) spiritual truth.
The problem is not that an unsaved person is unable to read the Bible and to understand it at the verbal level. When it comes to interpreting the text, unsaved students of the Bible are just about as skilled as believing students. In fact, some of them may be skilled enough to write useful commentaries on the text.
The problem is not with grasping the Bible’s verbal meaning. The problem is that, to the unsaved person, to the person who is living life outside the biblical frame of reference, the teachings of the Bible simply seem preposterous (“they are foolishness unto him”). To such a person, the Bible’s instruction appears to have no relevance. It seems like moral nonsense. According to Paul, unsaved people have no capacity to know spiritual things, which would include the way of salvation.
This incapacity for grasping the significance of spiritual truth is hardwired into unsaved people (or the “natural man,” as Paul calls them). It is not that people become disabled from welcoming spiritual truth; on the contrary, this is the state into which they are born. It is the direct result of the fall—theologians refer to this disability as the noetic effect of the fall. Unless God does something to open their unsaved minds, people will never see the significance of spiritual truth, including the gospel. They will never perceive its significance for their lives. And if they do not grasp that, then they cannot believe it.
This disability is compounded by the fact that “the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them” (2 Cor 4:4). In addition to the natural blindness caused by sin, Satan has imposed an additional layer of spiritual blindness. This blindness specifically affects people’s ability to understand the gospel. If they do not understand the gospel, however, then what further spiritual truth can they ever understand?
Again, this lack of understanding does not mean that the unsaved are incapable of hearing and grasping the gospel message. Rather, the message, even if understood at the verbal level, seems absurd to them. What makes sense to them is not the biblical God, sin, salvation, and Christ, but a different kind of God, a different kind of sin problem, a different kind of salvation, and a different kind of savior. This inability to credit the true gospel is the reason that unbelieving people have created so many false gospels.
Thus, unsaved people (the “natural man”) are hindered by two kinds of spiritual blindness. One is their own natural blindness, which is the direct result of the fall. This natural blindness covers all spiritual things. It is compounded by another blindness, one caused by Satan, and it is a blindness specifically toward the gospel. This double blindness is one reason people cannot save themselves. Furthermore, it is the reason they will not allow God to save them on His terms.
God has made spiritual truth, including the gospel, clear in His Word. As long as this truth does not match the world in which unsaved people imagine themselves to live, however, they do not and will not welcome it. They will find some alternative belief to be much more credible. The alternative will seem more plausible: it will make better sense to them.
If any people are ever going to be saved, God needs to do something to open their spiritually blind eyes. He has to do something to shine a light into the darkness of unsaved minds. He has to grant illumination, and illumination is the work of the Holy Spirit.
How does illumination work? And what does it mean? Scripture answers those questions. We shall turn to those answers in the next essay.
This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.
Come Down, O Love Divine
Bianco da Siena (1350–1434); tr. Richard Frederick Littledale (1833–1890)
Come down, O Love divine,
seek Thou this soul of mine,
and visit it with Thine own ardor glowing;
O Comforter, draw near,
within my heart appear,
and kindle it, Thy holy flame bestowing.
O let it freely burn,
till earthly passions turn
to dust and ashes in its heat consuming;
and let Thy glorious light
shine ever on my sight,
and clothe me round, the while my path illuming.
Let holy charity
mine outward vesture be,
and lowliness become mine inner clothing:
true lowliness of heart,
which takes the humbler part,
and o’er its own shortcomings weeps with loathing.
And so the yearning strong,
with which the soul will long,
shall far outpass the pow’r of human telling;
no soul can guess its grace,
till he become the place
wherein the Holy Spirit makes His dwelling.
Correcting Falsehood
In a sermon preached in 1855, Charles Haddon Spurgeon quoted what he referred to as an old proverb: “A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on.” The substance of this proverb can be traced at least as far back as Jonathan Swift in 1710.
Besides, as the vilest writer has his readers, so the greatest liar has his believers; and it often happens, that if a lie be believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it; for that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late, the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect…like a physician who has found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead. [Examiner 15, 9 Nov 1710, 2; I have modernized the spellings.]
The point of this proverb is that new falsehoods spread rapidly, while answers take time to prepare and to disseminate. Often, by the time a thorough answer has been given, people have already accepted the substance of the lie. It has become part of their mental and emotional furniture.
This is the exact situation in which biblically minded Christians minister at the quarter mark of the 21st century. The lies are being propagated through intellectual systems like post-colonialism and critical theory. They advance under labels like Social Justice, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity. They have resulted in widespread public perception that the most sinister evils are structural rather than individual; that same-sex erotic activity must be affirmed and that the Bible’s teaching on this subject is either irrelevant or misunderstood; that it is possible for two people of the same sex to marry each other; that sex and gender are merely social constructs that exist along a spectrum (or even a matrix) and can be altered; that both erotic desire and gender are fundamental aspects of personal identity; and that the foregoing are so vital to human rights that all people must be made to recognize them through force of law.
These lies seem new, but they are really combinations of older lies that have been patched together in new ways. They were told first by artists, then by philosophers, then by educators, and then by propagandists. Eventually they reached ordinary people. By the time they burst out into public, they seemed to have gained irresistible momentum. They have swept across the West and around the world like an anti-intellectual and anti-moral tsunami.
Meanwhile, the truth has been pulling its boots on. Of course, one can always simply restate the truth in the face of lies. Christian defenders of the truth, however, have discovered that restatement is more persuasive when it takes account of the particular ways in which the lies have been told. Consequently, for the past several years, defenders of biblical truths have had to expend more time than they wished studying writers like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard. They have had to wrestle with ideas from third- and fourth-wave feminism, gender studies, and identity theory.
Meanwhile, the lies have become so popular that many evangelicals have accepted them and have even become invested in them. Pseudo-biblical defenses of these lies have multiplied. Consequently, biblical defenders of truth have also had to revisit biblical hermeneutics and theological anthropology. They are doing this work primarily in the academy through papers presented at learned societies, articles published in scholarly journals, and books that tackle difficult ideas.
In other words, the truth has just about got its boots on. The question is how to get it before the people of God, most of whom do not attend learned societies or read scholarly journals where these matters are being discussed. This 21st century question has a 1st century answer, and the answer is pastors. Christ has appointed shepherds within His flock, and these shepherds must bring the teachings of God’s Word to bear upon the lies that are being told.
Central Seminary intends to play a role in preparing pastors to answer the most current set of lies. One way in which we are doing this is through our Doctor of Ministry program. The program offers two emphases: public ministry and biblical counseling. Both emphases share two core courses. One is on “Identity and Idolatry,” and it is taught by Dr. Brett Williams. The other, taught by Dr. Kevin T. Bauder, is on “Creation, Sex, and Gender.” Together, these courses get to the heart of the lies that are harassing God’s people today.
Registration and pre-studies for the course in “Creation, Sex, and Gender” will open on Monday, July 24. The face-to-face class session will meet November 14–17 and can be attended virtually using the seminary’s Zoom classrooms. Each student must also complete a final project by February 10. While students in this course do not study the Frankfurt school or the deconstructionists, they will examine fully the arguments in the current debates over same-sex erotic activity and contemporary gender confusion.
We are serious about trying to help pastors with this course. If you have been thinking about enrolling in a DMin but you have not to this point, then we are willing to absorb the cost of tuition for this course as your introduction to our program. If you are enrolled in somebody else’s DMin program, we are willing to work with your institution toward transferring this course into your program. The point is that we want to expose as many qualified pastors as possible to the content of this course.
There are certain stipulations. To register for “Creation, Sex, and Gender,” you must be orthodox in your theology—you must affirm the fundamentals. You must also affirm the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, the Danvers Statement (which summarizes biblical complementarianism), and the Nashville Statement on biblical sexuality. If you take the course for credit, you must enroll in Central Seminary’s DMin program, or you must be enrolled in some other DMin program.
While we do not normally allow non-students in our DMin courses, we may possibly make some exceptions for “Creation, Sex, and Gender.” Assuming that you can affirm the above statements, and that you are currently engaged in vocational ministry, you should contact me directly to express your interest. If you are accepted into the course, you will pay a reduced fee. Priority will be granted to those individuals who have greater ministry experience or who already hold advanced degrees. If non-students are admitted into the course, they will be expected to complete all reading and to participate in all discussion, but they will not be obligated to complete the final project.
The lies are still speeding around the world. If you are a truth-telling pastor, it’s time to put your boots on.
This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.
Hatred of Sin
William Cowper (1731–1800)
Holy Lord God! I love thy truth,
Nor dare thy least commandment slight;
Yet pierced by sin, the serpent’s tooth,
I mourn the anguish of the bite.
But, though the poison lurks within,
Hope bids me still with patience wait;
Till death shall set me free from sin,
Free from the only thing I hate.
Had I a throne above the rest,
Where angels and archangels dwell,
One sin, unslain, within my breast,
Would make that heaven as dark as hell.
The prisoner, sent to breathe fresh air,
And bless’d with liberty again,
Would mourn, were he condemn’d to wear
One link of all his former chain.
But, oh! no foe invades the bliss,
When glory crowns the Christian’s head;
One view of Jesus as he is
Will strike all sin for ever dead.
I, Not the Lord
The Bible’s claim for itself is that all Scripture is God-breathed (2 Tim 3:16–17) and that Scripture originated in men of God being carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Pet 1:20–21). These words imply that inspiration extends to the words of Scripture (verbal inspiration) as well as to Scripture in all its parts (plenary inspiration) as originally written. Whatever the Bible affirms, God affirms, and God can neither deceive nor make mistakes. Consequently, Scripture is inerrant.
The objection has been raised, however, that some verses in the Bible disavow their own inspiration. One of these passages is supposed to be 1 Corinthians 7:10, 12. The contrast between these two verses is noteworthy. In verse 10, Paul states that the commandment that he is about to issue does not come from him, but from the Lord. In verse 12, however, he specifically says that in the following verses he is speaking, but not the Lord. Is Paul suggesting that part of his message is divinely inspired, but part of it is just his own good advice? Is he disavowing the inspiration of what he writes from verse 12 onward?
The answer to this question lies in the overall context of Paul’s argument. The believers at Corinth had evidently written to Paul, asking for his instruction about certain matters. Before answering their questions, Paul took advantage of the opportunity to offer a series of admonitions and instructions concerning issues that he saw within the Corinthian congregation. Only at 1 Corinthians 7:1 did he begin to respond to the questions from the church.
The first of those questions involved the value of singleness and the mutual duties between husbands and wives within the marriage relationship (7:1–9). The second question involved the permissibility of divorce and marital separation, particularly in a situation where a believer was married to an unbelieving spouse. The question that Paul was answering probably did not envision believers deliberately marrying unbelievers, but more likely addressed the problems that would arise when one marriage partner came to Christ but the other did not.
Paul’s answer to this question is divided into two parts. The first part lays out general instruction concerning divorces and separations (7:10–11). The second part addresses specifically the question of how a believer who is in a mixed marriage should behave (7:12–16).
For the first part of his answer (dealing with divorce and separation), Paul did not really say anything new. He surely recognized that the Scriptures already addressed this situation in unambiguous terms. The Old Testament clearly declared that God hates divorce (Mal 2:16). Furthermore, this was a question that Jesus had personally answered on multiple occasions during His earthly ministry (Matt 5:21; 19:3–9; Mark 10:2–12; Luke 16:18). According to Jesus, even the Old Testament procedure for divorce (Deut 24:1–4) was only a concession to the hardness of human hearts.
When introducing this teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ, Paul used the formula, “I command, yet not I, but the Lord” (7:10). What he was doing was drawing attention to the fact that divorce and remarriage in general was already a matter of settled teaching. Paul did not have to command anything new. All he had to do was to point to the teachings of Jesus, “the Lord.” These teachings were sufficient to decide the issue. Leaving aside the possibility of exceptions (as in Matthew’s version of Jesus’ teaching, “except for sexual immorality”), the general rule could be summarized as “no divorce, no remarriage.”
Nevertheless, the general teaching of Jesus on divorce and separation did not fully anticipate the situation in which the Corinthians now found themselves. In at least some instances, one spouse in a marriage had believed on Christ, while the other had not. Furthermore, in at least some of these cases, the unbelieving spouse was overtly hostile to the gospel, perhaps to the point of forbidding the believer to fulfill Christian duties. This was the real question for the Corinthians. This was the real problem that they needed to solve.
Here Paul could not quote a specific teaching that Jesus (“the Lord”) had offered during His earthly ministry. But that did not prevent Paul from articulating an answer. On the contrary, he offered a very specific answer, the gist of which was that the believing spouse must remain with the unbeliever as long as the unbeliever was willing to allow it (7:12–13). In this way the believer could have a sanctifying influence both upon the unbeliever and upon any children born to the union (7:14, 16). Nevertheless, if the unbeliever abandoned the believing spouse, the believer was not obligated to pursue the unbeliever (7:15).
In these verses Paul was speaking new truth into a new situation. In doing so, he made it clear that his message was not part of Jesus’s earthly teaching but was being delivered from Paul in his apostolic capacity (7:12). Even though the answer was not directly from Jesus, it was nevertheless authoritative. Paul was issuing commands, and he expected his readers to obey what he wrote.
In other words, the apostle Paul was putting his own teaching on the same level of authority as the teaching of Jesus. In effect he was saying, “Here is what Jesus taught; now do this. And here is what I teach; do this too.” Far from minimizing the authority of his words, Paul is maximizing that authority.
Paul’s answer in 1 Corinthians 7:12–16 stands as part of Scripture. Even though it is not based on the earthly words of Jesus, it is nevertheless God-breathed. When Paul wrote it, he was being carried along by the Holy Spirit. Verse 12 does not disavow the inspiration of the text. All it does is to distinguish the earthly words of Jesus from the words of the apostles who were His representatives. Clearly, however, the scriptural words of the apostles are as divinely inspired and authoritative as the words of Jesus Himself.
This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.
Author of Good, To Thee We Come
James Merrick (1720–1769)
Author of Good, to thee we come;
Thy ever wakeful eye
Alone can all our wants discern,
Thy hand alone supply.
O let thy fear within us dwell,
Thy love our footsteps guide;
That love shall vainer love expel;
That fear, all fears beside.
And since, by error’s force subdued,
Too oft the stubborn will
Mistaken shuns the latent good,
And grasps the specious ill;
Not to our wish, but to our want,
Do thou thy gifts apply;
Unask’d, what good thou knowest, grant;
What ill, tho’ ask’d, deny.
The IFCA International
Have you ever attended a conference with a large number of people and you were hardly acquainted with anyone there? That was my experience when I visited my first IFCA International annual convention in 2018. On the opening night following the first general preaching session, the IFCA invites everyone to a reception. While hundreds of people were milling around renewing old acquaintances and enjoying the dessert and coffee, I received a warm greeting from the Executive Director himself, Les Lofquist, who served in that role for 20 years. Les has now retired and joined the faculty at Shepherds Theological Seminary, but his warm greeting that evening gave me a glimpse into the kind of fundamentalism the IFCA believes and practices. His welcoming stance was not an aberration among the conference-goers. As I ate meals with folks, manned the Central Seminary booth, and gathered together for the general sessions and breakout seminars, I made many friendships which have continued and grown in subsequent years.
Representatives from Central Seminary attend many regional and national conferences. We do this 1) to introduce our seminary to those who were previously unaware of our existence, 2) to foster relationships with believers who share our same doctrinal commitments and values, and 3) to renew friendships with alumni and supporters.
Since that first 2018 meeting I have represented Central Seminary at the annual IFCA International convention, held this summer in Covington, KY. Besides the three benefits mentioned for attending such a conference—institutional exposure, relationship development, and friendship renewal—I myself have received spiritual encouragement and refreshment from the general session addresses and breakout seminars.
IFCA International was founded in 1930 in Cicero, IL, as the Independent Fundamental Churches of America (IFCA) and later changed its name to IFCA International in 1996 to reflect its worldwide focus. Though baptistic in its doctrine, the fellowship actually had its roots in a group of pastors and churches who were opposed to the apostasy in their non-Baptist churches. In 1923 this group formed the American Conference of Undenominational Churches; 7 years later the ACUC joined a group of disaffected Congregational pastors from the Chicago area (led by Pastor Billy McCarrell) to form the Independent Fundamental Churches of America. McCarrell was elected as the first Executive Secretary of this association. Its primary characteristics included independency (individuals and churches could not belong to a denomination) and fundamentalism (members must adhere to biblical fundamentalism).
Ninety-four annual meetings later, the IFCA has a membership comprised of nearly 1,000 churches in the US and 3,000 churches outside the US; they also have 1,000 individual members. A few parachurch organizations including 6 Bible colleges, 11 home mission societies, 9 church planting agencies, and 8 foreign mission agencies are officially affiliated as well. Not incidentally, the IFCA also serves as an endorsing agency for military chaplains.
The doctrinal statement, which all members must affirm annually, includes orthodox statements of all the major doctrines of the Christian faith. It also contains strong affirmations of separation from apostasy and worldliness, of complementarianism, cessationism, dispensationalism, and the biblical view of marriage “between one man and one woman (as genetically defined)” (ifca.org/page/what-we-believe). Furthermore, the statement disapproves of ecumenism, ecumenical evangelism, neo-orthodoxy, and new evangelicalism.
In order to learn a little more of the ethos of the IFCA, it is helpful to note that its three main characteristics include an emphasis on fundamental doctrine, evangelistic zeal, and missionary vision (ifca.org/page/who-we-are). I found these qualities on display in both the theme of this year’s conference (“Fight the Good Fight: Reclaiming Biblical Fundamentalism”) and the exhibitors approved to represent their ministries.
Regarding the conference theme, all of the general session speakers addressed issues related to biblical fundamentalism. I found their approach to this important subject refreshing and reasonable. For example, the opening sermon (based on 2 Corinthians 10:1–5) was delivered by the Executive Director of the IFCA, Richard Bargas; it expressed five aspects of biblical fundamentalism, which he distinguished from “cultural” fundamentalism. These qualities include the following actions and attitudes: 1) responds with the virtues of Christ, meekness and forbearance; 2) knows who the enemy is—Satan; 3) knows how to wage war by using divine power to destroy strongholds; 4) fights with the Lord’s power and not our own; and 5) stands in the confidence of Christ. Another speaker, Dave Deets, cited our own Kevin Bauder from a February Nick of Time essay, as he described the kind of fundamentalism we should embrace.
Besides Central Seminary, there were 37 other exhibitors present at the event, and they included many familiar colleges and seminaries such as Appalachian Bible College, Bob Jones University, Calvary University, Southern California Seminary, and Shepherds Theological Seminary. Several mission agencies and evangelism ministries had displays, including Biblical Ministries Worldwide, Child Evangelism Fellowship, Friends of Israel, Slavic Gospel Association, and a number of IFCA-affiliated church planting groups. Each of these exhibitors shared the same three characteristics as the IFCA, and I could see why the conference organizers were happy to support our presence at the annual convention.
While I am not writing to endorse the IFCA as an association our readers should join (after all, I am not a member myself), I think it is helpful for fundamentalists to be aware of organizations that support the doctrines and ethos they would approve. IFCA International is certainly one of those organizations. Their doctrinal position, opportunities for ministry partnerships, encouragement at both the regional and national levels (note: all IFCA members are part of one of the 32 geographic regionals across the country), and theologically-informed resources provide good examples of the benefits IFCA members enjoy. To expand on this last element, the IFCA produces a 50-page printed magazine, The Voice (6 issues annually), for each of its members, and they also publish Chera Fellowship, a 10-page quarterly magazine for widows and widowers. Both of these magazines are available for free on the IFCA website (ifca.org/page/publications). One can also benefit from two blogs and a bi-weekly podcast, Advancing the Cause.
Just as Dr. Bauder concluded his recent essay on the FBFI, I “can’t think of a single unpleasant thing about [this meeting].” The preaching was encouraging, the atmosphere joyful, and the friendships uplifting. And what other conference could provide me with the opportunity to play Candyland, Uno, and Chutes & Ladders with one of our Central students’ children (the Bonebright kids were wonderful!)? I am already looking forward to attending next year’s convention in Arkansas, and I hope to see the children again too.
This essay is by Jon Pratt, Vice President of Academics and Professor of New Testament at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.
Come, and Let Us Sweetly Join
Charles Wesley (1707–1788)
Come, and let us sweetly join,
Christ to praise in hymns divine!
Give we all, with one accord,
Glory to our common Lord;
Hands, and hearts, and voices raise;
Sing as in the ancient days;
Antedate the joys above,
Celebrate the feast of love.
Strive we, in affection strive:
Let the purer flame revive,
Such as in the martyrs glowed,
Dying champions for their God:
We like them may live and love;
Called we are their joys to prove:
Saved with them from future wrath;
Partners of like precious faith.
Sing we then in Jesus’ name,
Now as yesterday the same;
One in ev’ry time and place,
Full for all of truth and grace:
We for Christ our master stand,
Lights in a benighted land;
We our dying Lord confess;
We are Jesus’ witnesses.
Witnesses that Christ hath died;
We with him are crucified:
Christ hath burst the bands of death;
We his quick’ning Spirit breathe;
Christ is now gone up on high;
Thither all our wishes fly:
Sits at God’s right-hand above;
There with him we reign in love.
APPLICATION & AID