Biblical theology

It’s important! When actual counseling situations arise - as they have - and you need to explain what Jesus means when he’ll separate the wheat from the tares or goats from the sheep, what system of biblical narrative could you offer in that moment? The one that makes arbitrary xyz fruit the underpinning of one’s standing with God? Or the one that stresses preaching the truth of the gospel to believer and nonbeliever with equal, unyielding emphasis?

These are the implications of one’s biblical theology. Or a new believer wants to know the significance and purpose of the sacraments, i.e., baptism and the Lord’s supper. Your understanding of the covenants, the continuity or newness of them, will let them know how each sacrament edifies the believer and community of believers. Extremely practical stuff.

Don’t stop at systematic theology. Know the Bible as one huge chunk: how is the gospel (the coming kingdom of God) heralded throughout the ages? Doing so, at the very least, will edify your private worship of God as one whose sovereign hand cannot be hindered in blessing his people. And the best thing you can do for your church is increase your private worship.

Specifically, you can start at any number of systematic buckets (end-times, sacraments, covenants) and compare each biblical theologies’ (covenantal or dispensational) treatment against the Bible’s own hermeneutic (hinted in John 5:39, Luke 24:27). Personally, the hermeneutical lens I prescribe to is the one that magnifies the Father’s sovereignty, Christ’s sufficiency, and the spirit’s consistent, unthwarted execution of a masterful redemptive plan.

Takeaways from Romans #2

• We are to preach the gospel to believers. All the time. (Romans 1:12,15). We learn this is the case from 1 Corinthians 15:1-2 ("where we stand") and 1 John 2:19 ("they went from us"). Let’s not comfort backsliders with validation of a past promise but warning that they might have believed in vain.
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• The world teaches us to deal with shame by hiding it, avoiding situations that would bring it out. God, instead, brings our shame to the for forefront, despises it, and frees us from it. Romans 1:16-17 brought Martin Luther into paradise.

Takeaways from Romans #1

• When you take a risk based on someone’s promise or protection, you magnify his trustworthiness (Romans 1:5,8). Prove your faith to the world and trust God for all your needs.
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• Thank God for the people in my life. If I cannot, I have made the grace of Christ a trifling thing, or worse yet, an enemy (Romans 1:8)
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• Thank God for God in my life. Amen.
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• You are not ruining a prayer by adding “if it is your will.” This is not lack of faith, this is faith (Romans 1:10).
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• By ministering to people, you are doing myself a favor because you need them and their faith to bless you (Romans 1:11-12)
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• I am obligated (a debtor) to people (Romans 1:14) because I stole glory from God (Romans 1:23) but his gift of salvation makes it so I must share God’s glory to people.

Private bible interpretation

One of the gems of reformation doctrine is the enabling of an individual to interpret scripture without a church cardinalship breathing down your neck or supervising your every step. “Sola fide” came out of a presumed “sola scriptura,” in that Martin Luther referred to the authority of scripture over all other man-made doctrine.

The fine print for us now is recognizing that the original authors had a specific context, intent, style and audience. We would do well, with our privilege to read and study scripture, to study it accurately. Peter writes in his second epistle how there is such a thing:

And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. (2 Peter 1:19-21)

A couple chapters later, the author confirms that there are indeed right and wrong interpretations for scripture, regardless of whether the reader initially understands (here referencing Paul’s epistles):

There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability. (2 Peter 3:16-17)

These verses on interpretation, thankfully, do not leave much room for interpretation. Before we quickly pull out John 3:16, Jeremiah 29:11, or Philippians 4:13 to apply to a situation, let’s take some time to contextualize the author’s intent within that whole passage according to the audience’s situation. This is crucial in grasping God’s revealed will for us. In addition, be wary when pastors pull out shotgun verses on a topical sermon to back up an argument without regard to the history behind the verse.

Jesus Loves the Predestined Children

Lyrics credit to @sa_mantou :
Jesus loves predestined children, all predestined of the world
you and you, not you not you
T-U-L-I-P is true
Jesus loves predestined children of the world

Why did the chicken cross the road?

• Greg Boyd: It’s a possibility that the chicken crossed the road.
• Rick Warren: The chicken was purpose driven.
• Mark Driscoll: The chicken crossed because of the rooster’s leadership.
• Pelagius: Because the chicken was able to.
• John Piper: God decreed the event to maximize his glory.
• Irenaeus: The glory of God is the chicken fully alive.
• C.S. Lewis: If a chicken finds itself with a desire that nothing on this side can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that it was created for the other side.
• Billy Graham: The chicken was surrendering all.
• Pluralist: The chicken took one of many equally valid roads.
• Universalist: All chickens cross the road.
• Annihilationist: The chicken was hit by a car and ceased to exist.
• Fred Phelps: God hates chickens.
• Martin Luther: The chicken was leaving Rome.
• Tim LaHaye: The chicken didn’t want to be left behind.
• Harold Camping: Don’t count your chickens until they’ve hatched.
• James White: I reject chicken centered eisegesis.
• John Wesley: The chicken’s heart was strangely warmed.
• Thomas: I won’t believe the chicken crossed unless I see it with my own eyes.
• Philip: The chicken teleported to the other side.
• Rob Bell: The chicken. Crossed the road. To get. Cool glasses.
• Joel Osteen: The chicken crossed the road to maximize his personal fulfillment so that he could be all that God created him to be.
• Creflo Dollar: God told the chicken that if he clucked, “That land across the road is mine!,” he could claim it. He crossed the road to take possession.
• Roger Olson: The chicken recognizes no clear evangelical boundaries.
• Peter: What chicken? What road? Never knew a chicken!! (rooster crows)
• Ezekiel: God revived those chicken bones and then they crossed the road.
• Paul: The chicken went to sleep and fell out the window only to be able to cross the road
• TD Jakes: A manifestation of the Chicken crossed the road for his blessings.
• Jim Wallis: The poor chicken was fleeing fundamentalists.
• Gary Demar: The chicken was fleeing the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. That’s it.
• Jim Wallis: The chicken is an organizer for Occupy Barnyard.
• Emergent: For this chicken, its not the destination that’s important. Its the journey itself.
• Christian Pacifist: This is clearly an act of barnyard aggression that is condemned in the Sermon on the Mount.
• N.T. Wright: This act of the chicken, which would be unthinkable in British barnyards, reeks of that American individualism that is destructive to community.
• Al Mohler: When a chicken begins to think theologically, he has no other alternative but to come over to the Calvinist side.
• Freud: This whole exercise is obviously driven by chicken envy

The first issue of Lamp Post is out today!

Be sure to pick up a copy today and let me know what you think of my article - thanks! :)

The Great Debate: Does God Exist?

In 1985, a debate was set up between Dr. Greg Bahnsen and Dr. Gordan Stein. It was at this debate that the transcendental argument was unveiled to the general public (Van Tillian apologetic). The packed audience was largely convinced that the Christian Dr. Bahnsen had won, as Dr. Stein had no intelligible comeback to the claim that his idea of logic was completely borrowed from Christian presuppositions:

The transcendental argument for the existence of God, then, which Dr. Stein has yet to touch, and which I don’t believe he can surmount, is that without the existence of God, it is impossible to prove anything.

I am maintaining that the proof of the Christian worldview is that the denial of it leads to irrationality. An atheist universe cannot account for the laws of logic. However, we still hear [Dr. Stein] saying that laws of logic are a matter of consensus and are just this way.

That is to say, I don’t have to prove that the laws of logic exist, or that they are justified, it’s just this way. Now, how would you like it if I would have conducted the debate in that fashion this evening? God exists because it’s just that way. You just can’t avoid it.

You see, that’s not debate. That’s not argument. And it is not rational. And, therefore, we have interestingly an illustration in our very debate tonight that atheists cannot sustain a rational approach to this question. What are the laws of logic, Dr. Stein? And how are they justified? You still have to answer that question from a materialist standpoint. From a Christian standpoint, we have an answer, obviously, that they reflect the thinking of God. They argue, if you will, a reflection of the way God thinks and expects us to think.

But if you don’t take that approach and want to justify the laws of logic in some “a priori” fashion, that is, apart from experience, sometimes he suggests that when he says these things are self-verifying, then we can ask why the laws of logic are universal, unchanging, and invariant truths? Why they, in fact, apply repeatedly in the realm of contingent experience.

We have to ask, why is it that they apply repeatedly in a contingent realm of experience? Why, in a world that is random, not subject to a personal order, as I believe, Christian God, why is it that the laws of logic continue to have that success generating feature about them?

Once, again, we have to come back to this really unacceptable idea that they are conventional. If they are conventional, then, of course, there ought to be just numerous approaches to scholarship everywhere, different approaches to history, to science, and so forth, because people just adopt different laws of logic. The laws of logic are not treated as conventions. To say that they are merely conventions is to simply say that I haven’t got an answer.

Now, if you want to justify logical truths along a “a posteriori” lines, that is, rather than arguing that they are self-evident, and arguing that there is evidence for them that we can find in experience or by observation — that approach was used, by the way, by John Stuart Mill— people will say we gain confidence in the laws of logic through repeated experience, and that experience is generalized. In some weaker moments, I think Dr. Stein was trying to say that.

Of course, some of the suggested logical truths, it turns out, are so complex or so unusual that it is difficult to believe anyone has perceived their instances in experience. But even if we restrict our attention to the other more simple laws of logic, it should be seen that if their truth cannot be decided independently of experience, then they actually become contingent. That is, if people cannot justify the laws of logic independent of experience, then you can only say they apply as far as I know in the past experience that I’ve had. They are contingent, they lose their necessity, universality and invariance. Why should a law of logic, which is verified in one domain of experience, by the way, be taken as true for unexperienced domains as well? Why should we universalize or generalize about the laws of logic, especially in a materialistic universe not subject to the control of a personal God?

Now, it turns out if the “a priori” and the “a posteriori” lines of justification for logical truths are unconvincing, as I’m suggesting briefly they both are, perhaps we could say they are linguistic conventions about certain symbols. Certain philosophers have suggested that. The laws of logic would not be taken as inexorably dictated, but rather we impose them— we impose their necessity on our language. They become, therefore, somewhat like rules of grammar. As John Dewey pointed out so persuasively earlier in the century, laws of grammar, you see, are just culturally relative. If the laws of logic are like grammar, then the laws of logic are culturally relative, too.

Why then are not contradictory systems deemed equally rational? If the laws of logic can be made culturally relative, then we can win the debate by simply stipulating a law of logic that says anybody who argues in this way has got a tautology on his hands, and, therefore, it is true. Why are arbitrary conventions like the logical truths so useful if they are only conventional? Why are they so useful in dealing with problems in the world of experience?

You see, we must ask whether the atheist has a rational basis for his claim.Atheists love to talk about laws of science, laws of logic, they speak as though there are certain moral absolutes for which Christians were just a few minutes ago being indicted because they didn’t live up to them. But who is the atheist to tell us about laws? In a materialist universe there are no laws. Much less, laws of morality that anybody has to live up to.

When we consider that the lectures and essays that are written by logicians and others are not likely filled with just uninterrupted series of tautologies, we can examine those propositions which logicians are most concerned to convey. For instance, logicians will say things like, “A proposition has the opposite truth value from its negation.” Now, when we look at those kind of propositions, we have to ask the general question, what type of evidence do people have for that kind of teaching? Is it the same sort of evidence that is utilized by the biologist, by the mathematician, the lawyer, the mechanic, by your beautician? What is it that justifies a law of logic, or even belief that there is such a thing? What is a law of logic, after all? There is no agreement on that question. If we had universal agreement, perhaps it would be silly to ask the question.

It isn’t absurd to ask the question that I’m asking about logic. You see, logicians are having a great deal of difficulty deciding on the nature of their claims. Anybody who reads the philosophy of logic must be impressed with that today.

Some say that the laws of logic are inferences comprised of judgments made up of concepts. Others say that they are arguments comprised of propositions made up of terms. Others say they are proof comprised of sentences made up of names. Others would simply say they are electrochemical processes in the brain. In the end, what you think the laws of logic are will determine the nature of evidence that you will suggest for them.

Now, in an atheist universe, what are the laws of logic? How can they be universal, abstract, invariant, and how does an atheist justify the use of them? Are they merely conventions imposed on our experience, or are they something that reflect absolute truth?

Dr. Stein tonight has wanted to use the laws of logic. I want to suggest to you one more time that Dr. Stein, in so doing, is borrowing my worldview. He is using the Christian approach to the world so that there can be such laws of logic, scientific inference, or what have you, but then he wants to deny the very foundation of it.

Different views of atonement... they exist...

One should actually consider themselves blessed if they simply assume the Bible teaches Jesus taking the wrath of the Father on himself on our behalf. It has come to my attention that there is an increasing (re)interest in the view that this view of atonement, that is, penal substitution, is not a Biblical view.

It’s true that before the Reformation the fledgling church primarily viewed the events at Calvary as some sort of ransom paid to the devil to buy us back (versus the more contemporary Evangelical emphasis on Christ paying the debt owed to God incurred by our moral disobedience). This “ransom view” of atonement has been formulated by Gustaf Aulen for the modern context titled “Christus Victor,” or Christ the Victor, typically emphasized by more liberal or charismatic groups. The view underscores the power of Christ over the devil, the destructive effects of sin, and overall redemption within the fallen world - things I’m all gungho about.

However, it becomes worrisome when one denies the reconciliation that took place on the cross (2 Corinthians 5:18-19, Romans 3:24-25, Hebrews 2:17-18, Galatians 3:13, Matthew 26:28, John 10:11-15). For every proof text I supply, there’ll be some argument in opposition, so I simply urge readers to investigate these views and come to a conclusion themselves. I have a bias for J.I. Packer’s argument for penal substitution, so I recommend that reading.

On listening to sermons

I think another mark of sanctification is getting excited when the truth is preached faithfully and, well, truthfully during a sermon. No matter how dry the sermon might be delivered, something inside you screams “Amen!” when dat scripture is getting explained correctly. Because at some point during your walk, you realize there are false teachers out there, and quite a few of them! So we praise the LORD that we are given ears to hear him and no one else (John 10:4-5). 1 Corinthians 13:6 cannot have it any other way.

Gems of Van Til

Dude, this Wikipedia page on Cornelius Van Til is so edifying whatttt. Started reading up on him after Josep sent me his apologetics material. I will now paraphrase the Wikipedia article… oh 21st century educational standards, thou art so low.

1. “How do you argue with someone who has a different worldview?” Van Til concluded that there is no neutral ground on which Christians and non-Christians could agree, where the approach in philosophical issues epistemologically differs too greatly in interpretation between the camps (one holding the Bible as an authority, one dismissive of it). This was very contrary to the apologetics methods of his contemporaries.
2. Going further, he reduced the non-Christians worldview into absurdity. They contradict their own presuppositions. How can you say you say murder is wrong when you don’t credit an absolute truth?
3. The trinity is essential in Christian philosophy. It solves the problem of universals. John Frame: Pure unity with no particularity is a blank, and pure particularity with no unity is chaos. Blank and chaos are meaningless in themselves and impossible to relate to one another. As such, unbelieving worldviews always reduce to unintelligible nonsense. This is, essentially, Van Til’s critique of secular philosophy (and its influence on Christian philosophy).

Boss.

from the confessions of our faith

So here’s a truth that hits home for all of us. We all die. It is irreversible. You can only act like it doesn’t matter to you for so long. From the Heidelberg Catechism, we know the purpose of death for the believer:

42. Q. Since Christ has died for us, why do we still have to die?

A. Our death is not a payment for our sins, but it puts an end to sin and is an entrance into eternal life.[1]

[1] John 5:24; Phil. 1:21-23; I Thess. 5:9, 10.

This hinges on a belief that Christ died for you so that you may be satisfied. You cannot deny your times of emptiness. Whether it manifests in desperate need for attention or exceeding disappointment at failures made by ourselves or friends, our hearts without Jesus are unsatisfied.

God does not force the decision. It is entirely your choice to accept this free gift or not.