our-debt-to-heresy-may-june-2001

BERGER ON CAFETERIA – PLAN THEOLOGIES ❘ SPROUL ON MODERN PELAGIANISM

MODERN REFORMATION

OUR DEBT TO HERESY: Mapping Boundaries

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OUR DEBT TO HERESY: MAPPING BOUNDARIES

13 The Fine Art of Wine Making In Matthew 16, our Lord warns: “Take heed, beware the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of the Sadducees.”

What are we to make of this yeast? by C. FitzSimons Allison

18 Why the Jesus We Want May Not Be the Jesus We Need To understand why a theologian must be uneasy about the W.W.J.D excitement, you have to think for a moment about the history of this idea and its implications. by Gerald Bray

22 The Pelagian Captivity of the Church The fifth century church rightly condemned the teaching of the British monk Pelagius. Today, though, he would be completely welcomed in American Evangelicalism. by R. C. Sproul Plus: How Does the Will Function in Salvation?

30 A Vulnerable God Apart from Christ?

Open Theism’s Challenge to the Classical Doctrine of God In the face of contemporary evangelical challenges, we must ask again: Is the traditional Christian view of God the product of Greek philosophy, or of a close reading of Scripture? by Michael Horton

39 Why the Meaning of Heresy Changes in Pluralistic Contexts For premoderns, heresy was a possibility, though usually a remote one. For people today, modernity creates a new situation in which picking and choosing among different beliefs becomes an imperative. by Peter L. Berger COVER PHOTO BY PHOTODISC

In This Issue page 2 | Letters page 3 | Open Exchange page 5 | Ex Auditu page 6 | Speaking of page 9 Between the Times page 10 | Resource Center page 24 | Free Space with Tom Oden page 41 Reviews page 43 | On My Mind page 48 M AY / J U N E 2 0 0 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 1

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Editor-in-Chief Michael Horton

Why Rules Matter

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MODERN REFORMATION

Executive Editor D. G. Hart

o rules, just right”—that’s the slogan for a steakhouse chain that connotes

Managing Editor Irene H. DeLong

the kind of freedom necessary for a good time. Instead of having to sit

Alliance Council Gerald Bray ❘ Mark E. Dever J. Ligon Duncan, III ❘ W. Robert Godfrey

up straight, use a napkin, and select the proper fork, this particular

restaurant apparently allows patrons to dine without constraint. Of course, these dining freedoms are not total. A rare steak will have to be bloody in the middle, diners must wear shirts, and insulting other customers will not be tolerated. In other words, even licentious environments need rules for the experience to be “just right.”

As much as freedom appears to be essential to happiness, many of the leisure activities we enjoy become pleasurable by virtue of their governing rules. Sports are an obvious example. Without bases, a baseball game would be impossible to score. In fact, rules make the pleasure of competition possible. The same goes for brainier enjoyments such as reading or music. If authors use words in ways different from standard dictionary definitions, or if composers depart from certain musical conventions, the possibility of reading or playing with comprehension becomes impossible.

The Christian faith is not a form of art, much less a kind of sport. But the point about the need for rules applies as much in religion as it does in amusement or recreation. At one level it is simply a question of definition. For Christianity to be intelligible its meaning cannot be plastic, as if it can mean whatever anyone wants it to mean. But the value of rules in matters of faith is much greater than the desirability of intellectual coherence. And this is where the topic of this issue of the magazine becomes relevant. Some teachings or convictions that claim to be Christian deviate so much from the rule of faith that they gain the label of heresy.

The word, “heresy” or “heretic,” has largely negative connotations, and rightly so.

Heresy is such a serious departure from the faith that it deserves condemnation. But the negative connotations Next Issue also sometimes extend Living in Exile: to anyone who brands a Tourists, Seekers particular idea heretical and Pilgrims or a certain person a

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heretic. Such condemnations evoke images of intolerance at best and witch-hunts at worst. Christians are supposed to be loving, the logic goes, and labeling someone or something as beyond the pale does not conform to the rule of charity. Ironically, even the demand for love can foster its own form of condemnation, thus showing the inherent need for rules.

A more positive view of the enterprise involved in defining heresy does exist, however. The point of looking for heretical teachings is not for the sake of promoting intolerance but to protect the Gospel. In fact, throughout the history of Christianity the views that have most often been defined as heretical have been ones that clearly threatened God’s power to save or sinners’ need for salvation. In such cases, a particular understanding of human nature or the deity of Christ, for instance, so compromised the larger message of the Bible as to become a form of belief different from the Christian faith.

As negative as the process of defining heresy seems, it has in fact made the Christian church stronger. As such, believers who stand in continuity with the central doctrinal tradition of the faith owe a tremendous debt to heresy. In its battle with defections from the faith, the church has emerged stronger, with a richer appreciation of the greatness of God and the wonder of his salvation. Seen from this light, heresy is not a category that generates pride and name calling, though of course it may. Instead, becoming familiar with the heresies that have afflicted the church should yield sober instruction about the central truths of the Gospel and what happens to sinful men and women if the Gospel is not true.

John D. Hannah ❘ Michael Horton Rosemary Jensen ❘ Ken Jones John Nunes ❘ J. A. O. Preus Rod Rosenbladt ❘ R. C. Sproul Mark R. Talbot ❘ Gene E. Veith, Jr. Paul F. M. Zahl Department Editors Lisa Davis, Open Exchange Brian Lee, Ex Auditu Benjamin Sasse, Between the Times Mark R. Talbot, Reviews Staff ❘ Editors Ann Henderson Hart, Assistant Editor Diana S. Frazier, Contributing Editor Alyson S. Platt, Copy Editor Lori A. Cook, Layout and Design Celeste McGhee, Proofreader Kathryn Baldino, Production Assistant John J. McClure, Marketing Assistant Contributing Scholars Charles P. Arand ❘ S. M. Baugh Jonathan Chao ❘ William M. Cwirla Marva J. Dawn ❘ Don Eberly Timothy George ❘ Douglas S. Groothuis Allen C. Guelzo ❘ Carl F. H. Henry Lee Irons ❘ Arthur A. Just Robert Kolb ❘ Donald Matzat Timothy M. Monsma ❘ John W. Montgomery John Muether ❘ Kenneth A. Myers Tom J. Nettles ❘ Leonard R. Payton Lawrence R. Rast ❘ Kim Riddlebarger Rick Ritchie ❘ David P. Scaer Rachel S. Stahle ❘ David VanDrunen Cornelis Van Dam ❘ David F. Wells Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals © 2001 All rights reserved. The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals exists to call the church, amidst our dying culture, to repent of its worldliness, to recover and confess the truth of God’s Word as did the Reformers, and to see that truth embodied in doctrine, worship and life.

For more information, call or write us at: Modern Reformation 1716 Spruce Street Philadelphia, PA 19103 (215) 546-3696 ModRef@Alliance Net.org www.AllianceNet.org ISSN-1076-7169

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things.” Then who or what does? Where, then, is any final authority for anything? …Sirs, if we do not cling to the principle that every single problem or question we might have can be answered either in explicit word or implicit principle from the Scriptures, we have no authority of life except human reason and/or Church tradition. And this plunges us back into the clutches of the Papacy.

Dr. J. D. Watson Meeker, Colorado

Catechetical Concerns Please allow me to refer Michael Horton to a good book containing a proper view of the Sabbath.

The book is titled The Law of Perfect Freedom, published

by Moody Press in 1993. The author in that book astutely takes the position that the Sabbath has been abrogated relying on Romans, Galatians, Colossians, Hebrews, plus Luther and Calvin.

However, in Michael Horton’s January/February MR article taking a Sabbatarian position, he conveniently makes no references whatsoever to Romans, Galatians, Colossians, Hebrews, nor Luther and Calvin. He apparently prefers instead the likes of Wendell Berry and Dorothy C. Bass.

So much for the reformation roots and biblical insight of Luther and Calvin this time.

(Need I say that the author of the book previously mentioned, that opposes Michael Horton’s present Sabbath views, is none other than Michael Horton?)

Robert J. Corcoran Crystal River, Florida

I cannot adequately express how grieved I became as I read my first issue of MR (January/February). As a pastor, and director of a related Bible-defense ministry, I have committed my entire life to defending Biblical authority, only to read an article like that one that undermines it.

The author—who I feel is very condescending in what comes across as an acid tone towards what he calls “fundamentalists”—says that we should not treat the Bible as “a command manual” or “merely as an answer to our personal problems.” Then what is it? He also says “the Bible does not address all

As a child of the 60s—and thus a product of television—I was struck by how much of Douglas Groothuis’s and other articles in the January/February edition of MR resonated with my own experiences. As a young boy I had a moment of media related enlightenment when my mind recoiled back out of the magic box (TV) for the first time, and I realized that I had been engaged in a “suspension of belief.” Regrettably I immediately returned my mind to the confines of that tiny box.

In my 20’s, I decided to engage in a “media fast,” just to see what I might discover. I watched no TV for some months. Over the years as I have repeated this fast, I always come away with the conviction that TV was a debilitating “waster“ of my soul….

Thanks to MR for working to strengthen this conviction in a world—and (sadly) a Church—that assumes and argues for the stupefying opposite.

David Ball Longmont, Colorado

Me, Myself, and MR It seems that MR recently acquired multiple personality syndrome. The September/October issue dealing with the Two Kingdoms houses four consecutive articles espousing a “dual kingdom” perspective—and then finishes the issue, without a hint of incongruity, repudiating it in the article by Timothy Monsma.

Calvin and confessional Reformed theology opposes the Dutch theory of Ridderbos, which Monsma praises. Ridderbos advances the “monistic kingdom” concept, which exerts its reign in “every sphere of life,” or “the whole world,” by way of an “all encompassing redemption.” Professor Monsma affirms Kuyper’s program of “re-Christianizing culture” since “every square inch belongs to Christ.”…He places all the various “callings” in life

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under the rubric of kingdom and therein concludes that “there is no longer a profane area of human life…outside the sphere of the influence of the kingdom of God.” The Dutch vision blankets the world with “the kingdom,” and thus relieves the tension of dual citizenship and melts away the sacred/secular distinction in our callings in this world.

Contrary to Ridderbos’s claims, this does not represent but repudiates Calvin’s view. Please consider the following sections in Calvin’s Institutes: 2.15.3, 2.25.4, 2.2.13, 3.19.15, 4.20.1, 4.2.4, 2.15.5, 4.20.2.

Man is under a two-fold government for Calvin.

Contrary to what the Dutch theologians claim for him, Calvin did not espouse the narrower (church) and wider (world) dimensions of the kingdom of Christ. Calvin identified the present form of the kingdom only with the knowledge of God in the soul, by the Spirit, within the Church and not the world. Yes, Calvin believed in the “already and not yet.” But he clearly resisted, and dare I say spoke with revulsion of the meltdown between the two kingdoms as the Dutch theologians developed in opposition to him and Confessional Reformed theology.

Monsma states that the Reformers separated “church and kingdom”. Not true! They separated “kingdom and world”, creating the dual kingdom concept, and identified “church and kingdom”. Monsma grounds his understanding of the relationship between church and kingdom in Old Testament theocratic life. He states, “If we are clear on the difference between the Israelite nation and the Qahal (the assembly for worship), we will also understand the difference between kingdom and church.”

There is a massive problem with this model. It is in many ways the heart of the issue. It is the point that, despite their programmatic differences, ties the Dominion theology together with the Dutch theology. The promised land of the inheritance, our citizenship, is in heaven, not on the earth! (Eph. 2:12; Phil. 3:20; I Pet. 1:4; thus citizenship in two kingdoms). Israel’s life on earth was carried out in the promised land of the inheritance. The church’s life on earth is carried out away from the land of our inheritance. We are aliens in this world, they were not! Therefore, leaving the Qahal in Israel meant laboring in the holy land of the kingdom. Leaving the Qahal in the church of the New Covenant means laboring in the profane land of the world. Consequently, “holiness” and “kingdom” as applied to Israel’s cult and culture in the theocratic/typological kingdom, become divested of their Biblical content when applied to this world in the present era.

Everything gets sacralized in this program. No wonder Ridderbos dislikes “sacred-profane” categories and expresses discontent with the Reformed Confessions’ handling of kingdom as lacking

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“comprehensiveness”. (Again, cf. “The Church and the Kingdom of God”). As Meredith Kline has written to correct the theonomists, “What we are talking about here is not something illusively subtle or profound, but big and plain and simple…written large across the pages of the Bible so that covenant children can read and readily understand it”.

All this theologizing wouldn’t be worth a fig if it weren’t for the fact that “ideas have consequences”.

And in this case the little gear turns a big wheel.

The question of “What is the mission of the church?” gets two different answers here. For Ridderbos it is to train people in “kingdomizing” the world through their various callings, while working out the vast ramifications of “the kingdom” in every sphere of life with its attendant problems. Gordon Spykman, the neo-Kuyperian, speaking of “all sorts of cultural discipleships” calls this a “truly staggering agenda.” I think “crushing” is more fitting as one considers whose backs get strapped with this “agenda” (Luke 11:46). This is the formula for creating the issue-driven church with its attendant Pharisee-isms bent on “capturing the culture for Christ.” Such a model not only disperses the energies of the church in its panacea of “kingdom activities” but also tragically detracts from its true mission—preaching the Gospel.

What Michael Horton (rightly) dismisses as “triumphalism and alienating our pagan neighbors” at the end of his mini-essay on Augustine’s two cities, Monsma re-admits with his essay drawn from the monistic kingdom model of Ridderbos. I would urge MR to lay down on the therapeutic couch of Dr. Calvin and be healed of this schizophrenia and be made whole in the singularity of its commitment to the two kingdoms perspective of the historic Reformed Confessions.

Rev. David Inks Everett, Washington

Join the Conversation!

Modern Reformation Letters to the Editor 1716 Spruce Street Philadelphia, PA 19103 215.735.5133 fax ModRef@AllianceNet.org Letters under 200 words are more likely to be printed than longer letters.

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by Jon Richards

Rediscovering Common Grace

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n his article “The Common Good and Common Grace” (September/October 2000), Don Eberly pointed out that the relationship between Christians and politics is getting worse every year. I couldn’t agree more.

Interested in contributing to Open Exchange?

Send your name, address, and essay topic to: Open Exchange c/o Modern Reformation Magazine 1716 Spruce Street Philadelphia, PA 19103 or contact us by e-mail at OpenExchange @AllianceNet.org

The Christian Coalition and others associated with the Religious Right have probably done more harm than good in the national and local public arenas. They often miss the important issues of conservative Christians by focusing on a oneminute prayer in school or the Ten Commandments on the wall, while hitting others right on the money, such as partial-birth abortion and the ultimate roots of school shootings.

Focusing more on the heart and what controls it, not behavior in society, should be emphasized in any debate or speech. Total Depravity should not be just a reformed theological term reserved for intellectual like-minded Christians within church walls.

I see hope when I see people like Chuck Colson or Al Mohler on “Larry King Live,” but they sometimes don’t follow Apologetics 101: “Question the question’s presupposition in your answer.” Instead, they fall into the questioner’s worldview bias.

An organization such as the Christian Coalition, which tries to speak for “all” Christians, fails to speak for many if not the majority of conservative Christians. They need to come visit church groups and organizations.

Other groups, such as Jay Sekulow’s American Center for Law & Justice, do carry the torch for most of us in working with local school districts, state courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court, and appear to be more effective.

Yet, however horribly some espouse the Christian worldview on “Larry King”—many times missing the true biblical perspective by light

years—always remember Paul’s words to the Philippians (1:15-18): It is true that some preach Christ out of envy and rivalry, but others out of goodwill. The latter do so in love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel. The former preach Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely, supposing that they can stir up trouble for me while I am in chains. But what does it matter? The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice. Yes, and I will continue to rejoice.

We, the true evangelicals, reformed or not, can do better. As Eberly wrote, “social reform requires Christians and Christian language.” Social reform can come from secular conservative groups, but ones that speak for Christians should be held accountable.

Until hearts are changed, common grace—not Romans 1 warnings—is our hope and prayer. And it starts in churches, homes, and extracurricular school organizations. The training of future professors, teachers, journalists, and politicians against deconstructionism, for example, could do much to change the course of some of the root problems in our culture.

Jon Richards is a U.S. EPA nuclear engineer in Duluth, Georgia, and a part-time student at Reformed Theological Seminary.

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Hebrews 2:3

So Great a Salvation

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New Testament. There it was: the Gospel reduced to a the letter: “How shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?” Readers are quick read.

The February 7, 2000 familiar with the others. Chapter 3 warns about an evil, unbelieving heart that issue of Christianity Today contained a feature where the falls away from the living God. In chapter 6 the editors challenged several author says of those who have been enlightened, evangelical leaders to put the who have tasted of the heavenly gift, and who have Gospel in three hundred From subsequently fallen away—of such as these is words or less. The results JOHN MUETHER renewal unto life impossible. If we go on sinning were predictable, but what is willfully after receiving the knowledge of truth, interesting is less what they there is then no sacrifice for sins, only judgment, said than why they said it. according to 10:26. And then there is the example The question is not how to Librarian, of Esau, for whom there was no place for say the Gospel in brief but Reformed Theological repentance. All of these warnings seek to keep why to say it in brief. This Seminary Orlando, FL impulse is not new. Dwight readers true to the Gospel and devoted to Christ, L. Moody once boasted that and to prevent apostasy from the faith. he could write the Gospel on Yet there is something different about the first warning. Here the writer warns us not about the a dime. On hearing that claim, Abraham Kuyper denial of the Gospel—he will get to that later—but marveled, “not even God could do that. He rather indifference toward it. Not only does the needed a very big book.”

Today, brevity seems to be an obsession. rejection of the Gospel warrant judgment but so does its neglect. Moreover, it is not the neglect of the American evangelicals are activists and not Gospel that is in view here, but more specifically, contemplatives. Eager to be doers of the Word, by the neglect of its greatness. This is, the writer goes on their habits they sometimes suggest that they to explain, the failure of the slow to learn, of the would not be caught dead being readers or students immature, and of the childish. In other words, what of the Word. Thus, they have reinvented the old the writer is fearing in this verse is not the open game show, “State that Gospel.” I can do it in 300 apostasy that is condemned elsewhere in Hebrews, words; I can in 200 words…. Next we might expect but a practical or functional apostasy. What is to find Borders bookstores stocking The Gospel for practical apostasy, and what does it look like?

Dummies.

In a pastor’s library recently, I did a double take, Is it possible that our text in Hebrews is because I spied an old acquaintance. Lying visibly addressing this impulse? Is the infatuation with the on its side on a shelf was a yellow-and-black striped Bible in brief and the Gospel in miniature—is this pamphlet that I had gotten to know all too well dumbing down of the Word of God a neglect of during my student days. What I saw was a copy of the greatness of our salvation? Calvin writes that Cliff Notes. But this particular copy prompted a the value of our salvation must not be triple take, and I had to stare at it for a while to underestimated: “God wishes His gifts to be valued believe what I was seeing. It was Cliff Notes to the by us at their proper worth. The more precious he words of Hebrews 2:3 constitute the first of several warnings by the author of

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they are, the baser is our ingratitude if they do not have their proper value for us. In accordance with the greatness of Christ, so will be the severity of God’s vengeance on all despisers of the Gospel.”1 The antithesis is expressed in verse 1: this Gospel merits our “careful attention.”

It must not be truncated or reduced. It is the suffering and death of Christ. It is what all of the prophets foretold. Its author is Christ himself. We are, the writer will go on to inform us, the ones who have tasted of the new order in Christ (6:5).

We have inhabited the world to come (2:5). This new order, this new world, this is nothing less than our salvation. It finds expression later in the book as coming to Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. The believer’s salvation is great indeed.

The author is driving his readers toward earnest devotion to the revelation of Christ, to a fuller appreciation of the riches of grace in Christ. His fear is that we will grow indifferent, detaching ourselves from its fullness. Not an overt renunciation but the succumbing to subtle pressures—lest we drift away. Drifting away. C. S. Lewis once remarked: “If you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?”2 What Prompts Us to Drift?

Why do we trivialize the things of God? Reformational believers dare not think that they are immune from this neglect, this drifting away.

All Christians are vulnerable to this peril.

Perhaps it is born from the desire to be efficient, to achieve an economy of words. Or maybe we want to emphasize what we have in common with other Christians and not our differences. J. Gresham Machen knew this temptation. Here is how he lampooned what he called the “modern ecclesiastical efficiency expert”: There are entirely too many denominations in this country, says the modern ecclesiastical efficiency expert.

Obviously, many of them have to be merged. But the trouble is, they have different creeds. Here is one church, for example, that has a clearly Calvinistic creed; here is another whose creed is just as clearly Arminian, let us say, and anti-Calvinistic.

How in the world are we going to get them together?

Why obviously, says the ecclesiastical efficiency expert, the thing to do is to tone down that Calvinistic creed;

just smooth off its sharp edges, until Arminians will be able to accept it. Or else we can do something better still. We can write an entirely new creed that will contain only what Arminianism and Calvinism have in common, so that it can serve as the basis for some proposed new “United Church.”…Such are the methods of modern church unionism.3 Another motivation is evangelism. Effective evangelism keeps the message simple, and sticks to the basics. This too is not new. About a hundred years ago, the northern Presbyterian church revised the Westminster Confession in order to direct more focus on the love of God, with hopes of launching a greater emphasis on evangelism among Presbyterians. Geerhardus Vos spoke with great foresight regarding the pernicious consequences of these changes. He wrote of the virtues of what he called the “old theology.”

“When orthodox reigned supreme, it [was]…broad-minded and well-balanced in its appreciation of the infinite complexity and richness of the life of God.”4 On the contrary, “current preaching on the love of God” was responsible, he claimed, “for that universal weakening of the sense of sin, and the consequent decline of interest in the doctrines of atonement and justification, even in orthodox and evangelical circles.”5 Vos wrote those words early in the twentieth century; how sadly accurate they were by century’s end.

Perhaps still others might seek to streamline the Gospel in the interest of humility. After all, doesn’t Deuteronomy 29:29 provide this instruction? “The secret things belong unto the LORD our God, but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children, that we may do all the words of his law.” It is fashionable to focus on the first half of this verse, which teaches a humility and caution in approaching the things of God. To be sure, we must not be too curious. We must be wise unto sobriety and not busy ourselves with unprofitable questions. But the first half of Deuteronomy 29:29 without the charge of the second half rings of a false humility.

It is false because it is unaccompanied by the zeal and the faithfulness to which we are called in handling those things God has revealed.

Let me make myself clear: Humility is a good thing. Evangelism is a good thing. Efficiency can be a good thing. But when these virtues are twisted and perverted and repackaged by our culture, do they not run the risk of reducing the greatness of our salvation? Might they not provoke a practical

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apostasy and prompt us to drift away? Consider what a dirty word “theology” is today, even among Reformational Christians. For too many people, theology is like underwear—you need it, so you are glad you have it on, but you sure hope that it doesn’t show.

J. Gresham Machen used to ask, “Isn’t the Reformed faith grand?” Listening to contemporary voices, the answer seems to be “no.” We produce documents designed to get the maximum number

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With Woolley the Church today must recover this zeal. We must abound in the task called before us. We must fully appreciate the message of salvation first spoken through the Lord. Let us stop putting the Gospel in fewer and fewer words and instead put it in greater and greater words. We must become as frustrated as the hymn writer, “What language can I borrow, to thank thee dearest friend.”6 Progress will be made when the Church puts away Moody’s dime and picks up Calvin’s Institutes.

et’s stop putting the Gospel in fewer and fewer words and instead put it in greater and greater words. We must become as frustrated as the hymn-writer, “What language can I borrow, to thank thee dearest friend?”

of signers to affirm a minimum number of propositions, documents that inevitably soften the edges of our faith. Gone is the severity of Dort or the hard predestination of Westminster. As these coalitions grow, what shrinks is the greatness of the Gospel that they are able to articulate and define.

Eventually, it fits on Moody’s dime.

More than fifty years ago, theologian Paul Woolley saw this very threat in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC), then a young church.

In 1944 Woolley wrote an article in the Presbyterian Guardian called, “Discontent!” The church was in the thick of a doctrinal controversy, an intense battle for the identity and direction of the OPC. There were, Woolley suggested, two forms of discontent that were infiltrating the church. One was a malignant discontent, frustrated that the church was too small. Rapid growth was a national sport, Woolley observed, and many felt that the young church did not have enough members or enough money or enough influence. It did not read about itself in the newspaper. Inefficiently run, thought some; obsessed with esoteric theological debate; indifferent to the task of evangelism. That was malignant discontent.

But Woolley also saw signs in the church of what he called healthy discontent. There were others who lamented the church’s declining enthusiasm for the Reformed faith, and a lack of completeness or thoroughness in its presentation.

There was much room for progress here. Woolley urged the focus on this healthy discontent, so that the church would discover in the propagation and defense of the Reformed faith its first love. Only then would the church become a useful instrument of God’s grace. The church may remain small, but it would stand for something very big.

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True faith, Hebrews tells us, will result in gratitude, holiness, and perseverance.

A persevering faith is a mature faith. God grant that his people will persevere in their devotedness to the things they have heard. After all, how shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?

John Muether (M.A.R., Westminster Theological Seminary) is the librarian at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando.

Speaking of...

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e need intimate knowledge of the past.

Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

C. S. Lewis, “Learning in War-Time,” in The Weight of Glory.

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t is, therefore, a stupendous folly for preachers to refuse to subscribe to the Confessions of the Christian congregation on the ground that that would unduly restrict their doctrinal freedom. They reveal by such an attitude that they do not know the first thing about the regulations God made as to what should be preached in the Christian Church. And the theological professors who claim “academic freedom” as their privilege are in worse condemnation. They are to train the future teachers of the Church and do not know the prime qualifications of the Christian teacher! He is not qualified for a theological professorship who claims “academic freedom” in the name of “theological science” contrary to Christ’s clear statement that the truth is learned and known only by continuing in His Word.

Franz Pieper, Dogmatics.

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aul is in the habit of linking together Jesus Christ and God the Father so frequently: he wants to teach us the Christian religion, which does not begin at the very top, as all other religions do, but at the very bottom…. [If] you would think or treat of your salvation, you must stop speculating about the majesty of God; you must forget all thoughts of good works, tradition, philosophy, and even the divine Law. Hasten to the stable and the lap of the mother and apprehend this infant Son of the Virgin. Look at Him being born, nursed, and growing up, walking among men, teaching, dying, returning from the dead, and being exalted above all the heavens, in possession of power over all. In this way you can cause the sun to dispel the clouds and can avoid all fear.

Martin Luther, Commentary of Galatians.

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Whose Short Attention Span? anyhistoricChristian beliefs seem fairly unbelievable: a marriage that—at least for a time—had no nagging (Adam and Eve); a geriatric couple becoming fertile (Abraham and Sarah); a virgin woman conceiving the Son of God; this God-Man living most of his days in obscurity and then being executed by the authorities; common speech about this Man and his death comprehended as “the wonders of God” by listeners who had never learned the language of the speakers; and on it goes. Given this long record of mundane events being employed by God for miraculous purposes, perhaps we should not be surprised by the claim that the Holy Spirit continues to use the apparently boring means of human speech and the consumption of bread and wine to effect the supernatural ends of creating and sustaining faith.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, but we are. This

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claim—that heaven’s gates are unlocked when otherwise powerless men stand up to announce who Jesus is and how all of redemptive history past, present, and future relates to him—is startling indeed. Letters to MR testify to the unbelievability of this belief.

For we can count on one hand the number of days between the arrival in your mailboxes of an issue of MR touching on preaching, and the arrival in our mailboxes of the first letter from a church growth pastor charging us with overly intellectual sensibilities. The second charge is that Reformational pastors are unconcerned with what the younger generations want or need. Some of these letters ask meaningful questions, such as the target length of sermons; others raise more dubious concerns uncritically borrowed from marketing consultants.

Ironically, a new study of evangelical expectations

about preaching suggests that it may be these letterwriting church growth pastors, rather than the redemptive-historical preachers they criticize, who are out of touch with what the young actually want.

(Disclaimer: Obviously the editors of MR believe that preaching must be governed by what Scripture commands, rather than by what surveytakers claim to desire.

Nonetheless, as a matter of interest, it is worth considering whether those who urge the dumbing down of preaching and teaching actually even understand what listeners regard as “relevant.”)

In a recent survey of over two thousand evangelicals and their pastors conducted by Your Church magazine, a subsidiary of Christianity Today Incorporated, response after response indicated that laypeople do not yearn for the shorter, less substantive, more anecdotal sermons that their pastors assume they want.

Some of the study’s highlights:

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• 60% of pastors think their preaching should include more “dramatic techniques”; only 17% of their parishioners agree.

• 37% of pastors want to wander outside the pulpit more; only 14% of those watching hope for that.

• 63% of pastors plan to include more multimedia; only 20% of laity think this would be helpful.

Number of Southern Baptist "members" the Convention cannot even locate, according to Paige Patterson, President of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Patterson suggests that the SBC's 15,000,000-plus member number needs to be reduced in the name of honesty and church discipline.

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• Pastors are only 1/3 as likely as their listeners to think that their sermons should be longer; and they are twice as likely as their listeners to think the sermon should be shorter. Most laity express no concerns about average American evangelical sermon length—which this study pegs at 31 minutes, and which Barna puts at closer to 35 minutes.

• Pastors are twice as likely as laypeople to think more references to pop culture would be helpful, and they value active gesturing nearly four times more than their flocks do.

Perhaps most surprisingly, the data suggest that the generation over fifty-five years of age seems to want the shortest sermons, and the so-called “Generation X” appears to want the longest sermons. Reflecting on the implication that the teenagers and twenty-somethings might have longer attention spans than their parents and grandparents, one Your Church writer concludes: “Perhaps the effects of our fast-paced,

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media-oriented culture are not as severe as supposed.”

A different conclusion might be in order: Wearied by the hyperbolic claims of the marketing world, perhaps many from the younger generations come to church not for more shallow claims of instant fulfillment, but for something different, for something real. They yearn not for another witty, multimedia-aided story drawn from the pastor’s experiences, but for the humble announcement of how they might find themselves in the story of the fertile geriatric couple and that executed God-Man. The Mirror Opposite of What? or a century now, confessional Christians in the mainline Presbyterian Church (formerly divided between North and South, though in recent decades reunited as the Presbyterian Church USA) have debated how to respond to the widespread liberalism in their denomination. J.

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ÍAt its General Assembly this May, the Church of Scotland will consider a committee report suggesting that 500 congregations should be closed. Given that the ecclesiastical body currently has only 1,700 total congregations, this drastic proposal suggests just how dire things are in the land of John Knox. The Church of Scotland today reports only 660,000

Gresham Machen helped found the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) as a split off the northern church in the 1930s, and the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) was founded over similar southern concerns in the 1970s. Others in the Reformed community, holding out hope for the reform of the PC(USA), have chosen to stay and fight.

The voices of this latter movement have long been amplified by the publications of the “Presbyterian Lay Committee.” In recent years, though, related organizations have proliferated in the PC(USA), with the establishment of groups such as “Knox Fellowship,” “Presbyterian Elders in Prayer,” “Presbyterians for Faith, Family, and Ministry,” and “Voices of Orthodox Women.”

These organizations coordinate their activities through the “Presbyterian Renewal Network.”

Some PC(USA) officials are worried about the growth of these more confessionally interested groups, and

members, a decline of fifty percent in recent decades.

Problems are not as severe in the more theologically conservative, but much smaller, Free Church of Scotland. ÍThe National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) recently decided to sever its ties with the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), due to the NAE’s ongoing cooperative

Voices of Orthodox Women Robert Bullock, editor of The Presbyterian Outlook, in March called for meetings between some of these organizations and their “mirror opposite[s] on the [theological] spectrum.” As one example, he proposed that “Voices of Orthodox Women” (VOW) agree to a dialogue with “Voices of Sophia”—one of the radical feminist groups famous for the “ReImagining God” conference.

According to VOW president Sylvia Dooling, Bullock completely misunderstands the purpose of VOW and other Presbyterian Renewal Network groups. VOW was not “formed in reaction to any other independent group,” but rather to promote “the

discussions with the National Council of Churches (NCC). By a February vote of 80 to 0, NRB members concluded that the NAE—which was founded in 1942 partly to oppose the liberalism of NCC—has changed direction under the leadership of new president Kevin Mannoia. ÍThe Second Annual Conference on Reformed

doctrines and practices of historic, biblical and confessional orthodoxy against those of an encroaching culture.”

Pointing to the state of the PC(USA), and the naïve assumption that the theology of Voices of Sophia is the “mirror opposite” only of VOW rather than of the entire “historical church,” Dooling suggests that these meetings could not possibly accomplish what Bullock hopes.

Many people continue to “think that the absence of conflict is the same thing as peace,” she notes. “But, in fact, in the state in which we find ourselves, the waters should not be calm. Our differences are serious, and they require serious solutions. In fact, the only solution that I know of is for all of us, humbly and obediently, to return to the Lord who has sovereignly called us to himself in Christ.”

For further information on this and related PC(USA) organizations, see www.vow.org and www.presbyrenewal.org.

Liturgy (see MR, November/December 2000) will be held June 19, 2001, in conjunction with the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA).

Organizers invite both ministers and ruling elders to attend. For more information, contact Rev. Jeffrey Meyers at (314) 842-9329, or jeffmeyers@earthlink.net.

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OUR DEBT TO HERESY | Mapping Boundaries

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n early caution against heresy can be found in our Lord’s warning to his disciples: “Take heed, beware the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of the Sadducees” (Matt. 16:6). The disciples were confused and thought Jesus was rebuking them because they had brought no bread.

He had to explain to them that he was speaking of the “teaching” of both the Pharisees and the Sadducees. If he meant “teaching” why did he say “yeast” (or “leaven”)? The teachings of the Sadducees and the Pharisees were so pervasive, contagious, unseen, and malignant that some other word had to be chosen to carry this dangerous connotation.

Consider the age-old art of wine making. People are often unaware of the role of yeast in making wine. Enormous effort must go into protecting the product from the invasion of destructive yeasts that would corrupt and ruin the fermenting process.

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Protection Against Heresy imilarly, great care (“Take heed, beware…) must be taken to safeguard the Good News of the Gospel from the prevailing and pervasive presence of the yeast of the Pharisee and of the Sadducee. One of the simple ways of pre-

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BY C. FITZSIMONS ALLISON

serving wine as it is being fermented is to allow the expanding air to flow through a tube in the stopper to let air into a jar of water. This bubbling jar of water is an air lock that keeps corrupting yeasts from entering the process.

How do we protect ourselves from the yeasts of the Sadducees and Pharisees? As the air lock protects the wine, so creeds and confessions protect the faith. They are not the whole faith, but they are necessary summaries of the faith that help to preserve it. Too often conservative traditions have mistakenly given people the air lock water to drink rather than the rich wine. On the other hand, failure to appreciate the role and function of creeds and confessions leaves the Gospel vulnerable to the distortions of each age and the “itching ears” of each generation.

What are some contemporary examples of the yeasts of the Sadducees and Pharisees?

The Yeast of the Sadducees e don’t know a great deal about the Sadducees, but we do know that they did not believe in resurrection. In neoorthodox theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous phrase concerning modern secularism, they believed that “this-world-is-all-there-is-ism.” There are more complex and sophisticated definitions but all include this aspect.1 Our secular culture, that is now saturated with Sadducean yeast, amid a general disregard for the function of air locks, leaves us with no protection from the very contaminating air about which our Lord warns us.

What are the results of our infection by this yeast of secularism? Although there are many, space allows that we treat only two.

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The Idolatry of Proximate Hopes f there is no resurrection, there is no Alpha and Omega.

The limits of human meaning are confined to this w o r l d .

Wonderful and commendable goals and hopes turn tyrannical and demonic when there is no transcendent judgment on them or on the means used to implement them.

“Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” is a motto of exemplary hope from the French Revolution. But when the goddess of Reason replaced the Christian crucifix, the streets soon ran red with blood in the Reign of Terror.

Look at the Third Reich, whose hope could not be appreciated except by a Europe whose nations without a rule had warred with each other over centuries like children in The Lord of the Flies. The only hope of peace seemed to be something like the First Reich (Rule) of the Roman Empire and the

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Second Reich of the Holy Roman Empire (in theory at least). Here was the promise of that rarest of European experiences, peace, by a rule, a Third Reich. With no transcendent judgment on such a hope, or the means of realizing the hope, more than 20 million Europeans were slaughtered by this infection of Sadducean yeast.

The same is true in Communism. “Every man receive according to his need and every man give according to his ability” was a most commendable hope that infected the intelligentsia of the world for half a century. It was no mild infection. Hope for this utopia on earth, wrought by force, became a god. Joseph Stalin admitted to Winston Churchill that merely one purge had exterminated 15 million people. Stephane Courtois’s Le Livre Noir Du Communisme makes an impressive case for the fact that Communism’s evil far exceeded even that of the Nazis. Martin Malia’s review in the Times Literary Supplement makes a telling observation showing that such idolatrous hopes lack popular acknowledgement.

Any realistic accounting of Communist crime would effectively shut the door on utopia; and too many good souls in our unjust world cannot abandon hope for an end to inequality. And so, all comradequesters after historical truth should gird their loins for a very long march indeed before communism is accorded its fair share of absolute evil.2 Being created in the image of God means an undying thirst for justice but a justice not of this world alone. Without the judgment and mercy of God, justice results in the idolatry of utopias and its concomitant evils. This Sadducee yeast is one of the great hazards of our time.

Among the more astute and creative figures of twentieth-century intelligentsia was Arthur Koestler. Although he affirmed no transcendent justice, he nevertheless diagnosed much of his generation’s hope in his book The God That Failed. He knew that the commitment that sent him to risk his life in the Spanish Civil War, that he did not regret, was nevertheless, a “god” and one that failed. The underlying dynamic, of good things becoming dangerous or evil, is called “idolatry” in Scripture.

Our modern world is dangerously naïve about idolatry, living under the false assumption that idolatry is merely the habit of primitive people.

On the contrary, Gerhard Forde, professor from Luther Seminary, shows that seeking to construct an image of God more amenable to our expectations and desires, a common contemporary prac-

tice, “is no different from making a god of wood or stone or bronze: it is simply idolatry, and it is born of unbelief.”3 Andre Malraux, war hero, scholar, novelist, and French intellectual, writes under the influence of the Sadducean yeast: What is unique about man is not that he has been cast at random among the profusion of the stars and the galaxies, but in this prison, he can fashion such images of himself that they have the power to deny his nothingness.

To “fashion images” of ourselves is precisely what Scripture means by idolatry. The reformers were right when they insisted that the heart of humanity “is a veritable idol factory.”4 All ideals, hopes, and goals in history are contingent, imperfect, and proximate. Without hope of the resurrection and the transcendent justice, judgment, and mercy of God upon all historical claims, historical hopes will inevitably and ineluctably become idolatrous and the results evil and malignant.

The second result of the Sadducee yeast infection follows.

Power Replaces Truth lasdair MacIntyre’s Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry traces the postmodern development roots of Deconstruction to the demise of rationalism and the seminal thought of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s views are indicated in his reply to the question “What then is truth?”:

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A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, a sum in short, of human relations which, rhetorically and poetically intensified, ornamented and transformed, come to be thought of, after long usage by a people, as fixed, binding, and canonical. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions, worn out metaphors now impotent to stir the senses, coins which have lost their faces and are considered now as metal rather than currency.5 When truth is no longer the currency of the realm, all appeals to truth, honor, justice, moral, or aesthetic values are just rhetoric masking the will to power. It is not merely the courts that have reduced the struggle for justice to competition in power but the universities of Western civilization that are also in danger of reducing the search for truth to a similar struggle for power.

The protagonists in this important debate about

meaning and truth in a post-Christian culture (Alistair MacIntyre, Paul DeMan, Jacques Derrida, Anthony Thiselton, and John Milbank) have made contributions that are insufficiently accessible to the general reading public for the danger to our civilization to be appreciated.

Historian George Marsden puts the matter quite simply: “Without theism…the only effective arbiter of contested moral claims is power.” Theism assumes a transcendent interaction in history. It gives humans a hope that guides and judges all proximate historical hopes in the midst of defeats and victories, sin and grace, evil and benevolence.

Without such a God, Ivan Karamazov is right: “If God is dead, anything is permissible.”

If there is no resurrection justice, the only inhibition is the prospect of getting caught. The nineteenth-century jurist, Lord Moulton, observed: “The measure of a civilization is the degree of obedience to the unenforceable.” In place of moral, religious, or truth claims, power becomes the final arbiter and the Sadducee yeast infects civilization itself. Truth is replaced by power.

The Yeast of the Pharisees he Pharisees agreed with Jesus regarding the resurrection. They warned Jesus of a plot by Herod against his life (Luke 13:31), they invited Jesus to meals in spite of their dietary scruples (Luke 7:36–50, 14:1), some even believed in him (John 3:1, 7:45–53, 9:13–38), and they were instrumental in ensuring the survival of Jesus’ followers (Acts 5:34; 23:6–9). Yet Jesus is much harsher on them than on the Sadducees. Why? The most significant picture of the Pharisee in Scripture is perhaps the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector in the temple. The Pharisee thanks God that he is not like other men: extortionists, unjust, and adulterers. He fasts twice a week and gives tithes of all that he receives. This is surely commendable and it would seem to be a view to be encouraged. Any rector of a church without Pharisees on the stewardship committee, the altar guild, church school, and vestry, is in deep trouble. Does not the culture of today applaud the Pharisee and infer that Jesus taught some singularly bad hygiene in backing the tax-collector, the very illustration of a masochist, beating his chest, not even lifting up his eyes and calling himself— God forbid—a sinner? The object of Pharisee religion is to escape condemnation, to feel self-justified. For New Testament Pharisees this escape was by endeavors of righteous acts. With contemporary Pharisees, escape is by seeking self-esteem.

There can scarcely be a more pervasive dogma of the secular world than the religion of self-

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esteem. It seems to be the very aim of pedagogy, psychology, and religiosity. A recent accounting placed American students over all those of other industrial nations in feeling good about themselves but way down the list in actual competence in math, sciences, languages, and verbal skills.

Richard Erickson, a Seattle psychologist, has written an article in The Journal of Pastoral Care entitled “Psychology of Self-Esteem: Promise or Peril?” in which he shows that it is not promise but peril.

He is not unaware of the value of self-esteem in effective living, but the basic difficulty with the cult of self-esteem is that it attempts to substitute “disclosure and acceptance” for “repentance and forgiveness.” He insists that The popularizers lack a psychology or theology to encompass unremitting or irreversible failure, pain, loss, or suffering. “Tough times never last, but tough people do,” declares Robert Schuller, whose attempt to relate the Cross to psychology of self-esteem was all but incoherent to me.6 Charles Sykes’s book, A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character, quotes Aaron Waldavsky, that by current standards 374 percent of the population can consider themselves oppressed minorities. The loss of responsibility consequent upon the self-esteem cult and the current victimology provides the yeast to justify anyone who can claim victimhood.

The sad price paid for this escape from responsibility is that when one is not held responsible, one begins to be unable to respond. This yeast

Church has called Pelagianism: the confidence that humans are free (in the sense of “able”) to do what they ought (see R. C. Sproul’s article in this issue). Unlike Luther in his book Bondage of the Will, Erasmus assumed freedom in the initial situation in Freedom of the Will. Luther knew that our initial situation, before grace, is bondage, not freedom (“For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” [Rom. 7:19]). It is helpful to consider the passage in John 8:31–36 and ask the question: why did they lie? Jesus then said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham, and have never been in bondage to any one. How is it that you say, ‘You will be made free’?” Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, every one who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not continue in the house for ever; the son continues for ever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.7

Did they not remember “bricks without straw,” the slavery in Egypt, the Passover, the Red Sea, the event celebrated each year? And they answered “…we have never been in bondage to any man.”

Why did they lie? Did their hostility to Jesus distort their memories? No, the text explicitly tells us they were “Jews who had believed in him.”

They lied for the same reason we lie about freedom. This side of Eden, we humans still believe we are free if our wills are fulfilled. Inasmuch as we are not When people have no hope of resurrection, when the limits of meaning sinless, our wills lead us into further bondage, not freedom.

Most of us have the wisdom are confined to this world, wonderful and commendable goals turn tyrannical to know that if others were and demonic. given the complete power of their wills, through money, politics, or the conferred infects one’s very dignity and identity. A culture authority of an office, it would tend to their corrupinfected with the Pharisee yeast, a system which tion. It’s more difficult to perceive it in oneself. produces the justifying indolence of victimhood, Lord Acton’s oft-quoted dictum, “Power tends to produces the self-indulgent compulsive seeker after corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” is self-esteem. The heavy price paid for this current wisdom about will and power. (Too often the word form of Pharisaism is the abolition of mercy, the “tends” is omitted. Inasmuch as some victory over sin obsolescence of forgiveness, the reduction of jus- has been granted, to that extent power is beneficial.) tice, and the nurture of self-indulgence. The result Like the Jews in the text, we believe we are free if we is a religion of desperate attempts at self-satisfac- can choose what we want. But as we are yet sinful, tion. This compulsion to escape responsibility is a choices merely tend to lead to further bondage. heavy burden to bear.

This recognition, of the Pharisees’ infected conOne aspect of this heavy burden is what the fidence in his own will’s power to be free, led St.

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Augustine to his famous claim that “it is better not to be able to sin than to be able not to sin.”8 Augustine’s important point can be better understood by looking at three stages. “Not able not to sin” is a tragic compulsion that is obviously bondage. “Able not to sin” is obviously a more desirable condition but implies a necessity of restraint and control. “Not able to sin” is a condition not of external compulsion, but of a changed will (metanoia) where love leaves no room in the will to hate, to destroy, or to replace God. Obviously, in our earthly pilgrimage, mixtures of these conditions will always exist, but the Pharisaic yeast, with its false confidence in human willpower, reduces Christianity from a religion of true freedom to a religion of control. Their picture of Jesus is a teeth-gritting sinlessness. Adoptionism is the historical illustration of this infection where the Father accepts Jesus at his baptism because he had succeeded in overcoming sin and, according to seventeenth-century Socinianism, was rewarded with a delegated divinity as a result. The Gospel is thus reduced to “Go, be like Jesus.” He controlled and conquered sin, he is now a mere example of what we should (and can) do. Thus, Christianity is reduced to scolding, exhortation, rebuke, and threats.

This pervasive infection in the Church stems from the perennial seduction of the serpent, “And ye shall be as gods.” The false belief, that we are free in the initial situation, stems not from ignorance but from sin, from the lie that we are naturally free. We were created to be free, but our present condition is bondage. Only by the grace of God, not by our fallen wills, can we be made free.

Episcopal Bishop James Pike, in his best years of effective orthodoxy regarding Justification, the Incarnation, and the Trinity, had built his faith on top of this lie. In A Time for Christian Candor the infection breaks through: “A necessary corollary is not only is man free to do good and constructive things but he is also free to do evil and destructive things”9 (italics mine). Paul, Augustine, and Luther knew that doing “evil and destructive things” is not freedom but bondage. It is the lie of the Pharisees, the Pelagians, Erasmus, and historical and contemporary adoptionists.

This lie worked through Pike’s system so that by page 124 he could write “…the doctrine of the Trinity has in fact been a barrier with well educated and less educated alike. And it is not central to the Christian faith.”10 This infection is not merely an academic matter.

It has produced the cruel half-truth lie called the free-will defense in relation to the problem of evil.

It is true that some suffering is brought about by

our own behavior. (A doctor once observed that much of what he operates on is caused by what we put in our mouths.) Yet there is plenty of suffering that is not caused by anything we have done (see Luke 13:1–5). Consider when Jesus was asked, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:1–3). It was not that this man or his parents sinned, but it is the yeast of the Pharisee that gives each of us in each generation the belief that our “freedom” has caused our suffering.

It is a cruel theodicy (explanation of evil) but one that is almost innate, given the lie concerning freedom. There are too many random, innocent, and impersonal aspects of evil to explain suffering on the Pharisee’s lie regarding freedom.

This yeast of the Pharisee works its way through the logic of doctrine and destroys the air locks that guard the wine as we’ve seen in the case of Bishop Pike. This yeast reduces the Good News to mere exhortation, scolding, and fussing, the tragic inference so many have of Christianity. It also is a cruel condemnation to those who falsely attribute their condition to their misuse of “freedom.”

Jesus’ dire warning to his disciples is directed to us also. “Take heed, Beware the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of the Sadducees.” The urgent function of creeds and confessions as contemporary air locks is essential. However, nothing is more effective for healing our malignant infections than the Good News of what God’s love has accomplished in his Son, Jesus Christ. ■

C. FitzSimons Allison is the retired Bishop of South Carolina (Episcopal Church).

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OUR DEBT TO HERESY | Mapping Boundaries

Why the Jesus We Want May Not Be the Jesus We Need must confess that when I first saw the initials “W. W. J. D.”, I thought they referred to a country music radio station. I was quite surprised to discover not only that they really stood for “What would Jesus do?” but also that these initials were fast becoming a kind of cultic item in the popular Christian market.

From billboards to bracelets, W. W. J. D. is staring out at a potentially curious public, demanding that those who

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see it should both decipher the initials and (more importantly) answer the question and apply it to their own lives.

The underlying assumption is that what Jesus did is what he expects us to do, so that by finding the right answer to this question, we shall discover how we should live our lives today.

First of all, let it be said that the intention behind what amounts to a popular advertising campaign is wellintentioned and entirely laudable. All of us should

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want to do the right thing, and for Christians there is no higher authority in this matter than Jesus Christ himself. To live a life pleasing to him is, and ought to be, what we all try to do. So why would anybody want to question W. W. J. D.?

Deconstructing W. W. J. D. o understand why a theologian would be uneasy when seeing these intriguing initials, you have to think for a moment about the implications of this advice. First of all, to ask what Jesus would do in any given circumstance today is to speculate beyond what the New Testament tells us. How would Jesus vote, for example, in a modern election? “Rendering unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” is still good advice when it comes to paying taxes and obeying the government, but it is not enough to tell us whether our particular Caesar ought to go on ruling for another four years or not! Most of the Jews to whom Jesus gave that advice would certainly have turned their Caesar out of office if they had had the chance, but we cannot infer from the New Testament that Jesus agreed with them, or that he had any opinion on the subject, one way or the other. So what would Jesus do today? The answer is that we simply do not know! And just think—if Jesus were to turn up at a social event in your church and start turning the coffee and Coke into wine, what would happen to him? In most places, he would probably be thrown out for bringing alcohol onto church premises and encouraging other people to consume it. Is this what we should be trying to do?

Clearly, “what would Jesus do?” is a selective question, designed to produce answers at the level of moral principle, not actual practice. But what is wrong with trying to imitate the details of Jesus’ behavior? To get the right answer to this question, we have to think seriously about who Jesus is.

Underlying the W. W. J. D. philosophy is the belief that Jesus was, in effect, the first Christian. If we believe that, then it follows naturally that our behavior as Christians ought to imitate his as far as possible, perhaps even to the point of making up answers to questions (such as who to vote for) that he did not specifically address in the Gospels. But if you stop to think about it, you will soon realize that Jesus was not the first Christian—in fact, Jesus was not a Christian at all, nor could he be one.

Why not? Jesus was not a Christian because a Christian is a sinner saved by grace through faith in him. Jesus was sinless and did not need to be saved by anybody—not even by himself. In one sense he was a man just like us, but in another sense he was quite different, because he was not a sinner. (Some

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people think that this is a contradiction in terms, but we have to remember that God did not create human beings as sinful—sin is something that our first ancestors chose, and the trap which they fell into has been passed on to us. It is, therefore, quite possible for a sinless human being to exist, as long as he escapes that particular trap. Jesus did, because although he was a man, he was also God at the same time, and, therefore, able to avoid the consequences of Adam and Eve’s sin.)

The Heresy of Adoptionism ou may not have given this much thought before, but the belief that Jesus was the first Christian, and that, therefore, the difference between him and us is one of degree rather than one of kind, goes back to ancient times, when it was known as the heresy of adoptionism. This heresy was apparently taught by Paul of Samosata, who was a bishop of Antioch, and it was condemned at a synod held in that city in AD 268. The basic belief was that Jesus was an ordinary human being whom God adopted as his Son, probably at the moment of his baptism, when a voice from heaven proclaimed that fact. The inference is that since all Christians become adopted children of God at their baptism, Jesus was just demonstrating a new way of relating to God, which we all share. Later on, adoptionism was refined to the point where it was said that the fetus in Mary’s womb was endued with the Holy Spirit, so that her child was adopted even before birth. Although this refinement— which we now call “Nestorianism,” after Patriarch Nestorius (381–451), who was supposed to have believed it—was a good deal more subtle than what Paul of Samosata is supposed to have believed, the overall effect is the same: Jesus is still just a man filled with the grace of God and not really God in human flesh.

The problem with adoptionism, as with every plausible heresy, is that it contains an important measure of truth. We are indeed called to be children of God by adoption, and Jesus told us to pray as he prayed, “Abba, Father.” To be able to use these words of the Lord’s prayer is a privilege given to Christians simply because of this, and we must never underestimate just how important it is.

We have a relationship with God in Christ, which goes beyond what was given to the Jews, and is qualitatively different from anything offered by any other religion.

But if it is true that we are children of God by adoption, it is also true that Jesus is the Son of God by nature, not because he was a good man whom God chose for that position. The Bible, which speaks of our adoption as sons, also says that Jesus

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is the “only-begotten” Son of the Father (John 1:14), uniquely full of grace and truth. He lived on earth as a man, but everything he said and did has to be understood within the context of his spiritual mission. He did not come to earth in order to teach us how to live—the Ten Commandments and everything that went with them were doing that already, even if they were misunderstood by the Jewish leaders of the time. What he came to do was something that the Old Testament law

The problem with adoptionism, as with every plausible heresy, is that it contains an important measure of truth. could not achieve. This was to pay the price of our sins and to open up for us the way to eternal life in heaven. No mere human being could do this, because every descendant of Adam and Eve is a sinner, prevented from escaping the punishment of death, which God has decreed for all those who go against his will. But Jesus, because he was God as well as man, was not bound by the limitations of human sinfulness. He was able to take our sins upon himself without being overcome by them.

He was even able to die, without being defeated by death. Because he came back from the dead, you and I can have the gift of eternal life. We are not thereby spared physical death, but we are given the assurance that that is not the end, because in and through Christ we shall live forever with God in heaven.

The Real Purpose of Jesus’ Life he implications of this for understanding the earthly life of Jesus, and the way in which it relates to our own lives, are enormous. First of all, everything Jesus did on earth was designed to proclaim his impending sacrifice, death, and resurrection. His miracles, for example, were signs of the coming kingdom, and only made sense within that context. The miracle at Cana, for example, proclaims the fact that there will soon be another wedding feast, the wedding feast of the Lamb, at which time the old wine of the law of sin and death will give way to the new wine of eternal life through Christ’s blood, shed for us. The raising of Lazarus points to the upcoming resurrection of all believers, and so it goes on. A great deal of what Jesus did would be unacceptable in any other context—cleansing the temple by violent means, cursing the fig tree, sending demons into a herd of pigs, etc. Even when there are apparent similarities to what can happen to us, it is often the underly-

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ing differences that are more significant. Take, for example, the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness. Everybody is tempted and, on the surface, this story is one that seems to make Jesus quite human—one of us, in fact. But look a little closer and you will see that the essence of temptation is that we are tempted to do things that are within our power. I would not be tempted to turn stones into bread, for example, because I am incapable of doing it. But the point of the story as told by Matthew is that Jesus could easily have done it if he had wanted to—and the reason for that is that he was God. So even at the point of temptation, Jesus’ experiences are fundamentally different from ours, however similar they may appear to be on the surface.

Secondly, if you and I are meant to imitate Jesus’ behavior, the logical conclusion is that we somehow have the same mission as he had. There are plenty of people who think this, but this is because for them Jesus is (or was) just a great religious teacher, who was put to death for doing good.

Many of these people are prepared to accept that similar things might well happen to us if we are serious about following Jesus: The world finds goodness as hard to live with today as it did back then. It is an attractive vision to some, because it justifies a life of heroic self-sacrifice in combating evil, but it is not the Christian Gospel. Jesus did not die by accident, or even because he annoyed the authorities. He died because that was what he came to earth to do—and for a very specific purpose: salvation from sin. Can we put ourselves in his shoes and do what he did?

There are three reasons why we cannot. First, and most fundamental, we are sinners, as he was not, and cannot escape from that condition.

Second, even if we can do some of the things Jesus did, we would have to save ourselves before we could save anyone else, which Jesus did not have to do. Third, to try to save ourselves is to deny his power to save us. What can we do for ourselves that he had not already done? This is the essence of salvation by grace through faith—God has done something for us which we are unable to do for ourselves, and no amount of effort on our part can add to this in any way. There is a world of difference between thinking of Jesus as a good man to whom bad things unfortunately happened, and seeing him as God become man in order to give us the gift of eternal life. We can thank God that he sent his Son from heaven, and did not simply find a man on earth to adopt as the first Christian.

Orthodox Christology he essence of the biblical doctrine of Christ, or what theologians call “orthodox Christology,” is that the Word of God became flesh, and that we human beings beheld his glory in that flesh—not underneath it, or in spite of it, but in it. We saw God at work, not with but as a human being. What Jesus did is only comprehensible if we take the trouble to understand who Jesus was—and still is. And when we do that, we shall find that it is in the very places where he is most like us that we perceive just how different from us he really is. With him we are dealing not with a brilliant rabbi or a gifted faith healer—we are dealing directly with God himself.

The heresies that have sprung up in the history of the Church have almost all tried to deny this one way or another. W. W. J. D. is a modern form of adoptionism, well-meant (as its ancient counterparts probably also were) but fundamentally flawed. The real question we should be asking is not What would Jesus do?, but What has Jesus done? And then, What does Jesus want me to do?

And the answer to that second question is to be found not in his actions, which were done on our behalf, but in his teaching, which was intended for our instruction.

When we grasp that, we shall understand why it is inadequate for us to ask what Jesus would have done in our circumstances. Whatever that might have been, its purpose would have been to save you and me from our sins. But our actions have a different purpose. We are not out to save the world, or even ourselves, but to bear witness to the one who has done that for us. It is a lesser task, which is just as well, since we are lesser beings than he is. But at the same time, it is a vitally important task, because it demonstrates the power of Christ at work in our lives today. The Gospel message can still work miracles nearly 2000 years after it was first proclaimed, but they are miracles that reinforce, and do not reinvent, the good news of salvation brought by the Son of God who became man. The next time you see W. W. J. D., put W. M. T. (want me to) between the J and the D. That way you will turn a good intention into equally good theology, and end up with a much better understanding of what your own Christian life is all about. ■

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vangelicals spend enormous sums of money on higher education.

But the diffusion of

resources among hundreds of

colleges and seminaries means that almost none can begin to afford a research faculty, theological or otherwise. The problem is compounded by the syndrome of the reinvented wheel.

Democratic authority figures such as Bill Bright, Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, and Jim Bakker all assume that no education that has gone before is capable of meeting the demands of the hour.

Despite the absence of any formal educational credentials, each man presumes to establish a genuinely Christian university. Small wonder that evangelical thinking, which once was razor-sharp and genuinely profound, now seems dull, rusty, even banal.

— Nathan Hatch, “Challenging or Reflecting the Culture,” in George Marsden, Evangelicalism and Modern America.

Gerald Bray (Litt. D., University of Pris-Sorbonne) is Anglican Professor of Divinity, Beeson Divinity School, Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama. His writings include Tudor Church Reform: The Henrician Canons of 1535 and the Reformation Legum Ecclesiasticarum (University of Rochester Press, 2000).

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OUR DEBT TO HERESY | Mapping Boundaries

The

Pelagian Captivity of the Church hortly after the Reformation began, in the first few years after Martin Luther posted the Ninety-Five Theses on the church door at Wittenberg, he issued some short booklets on a variety of subjects. One of the most provocative was titled The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. In this book Luther was looking back to that period of Old Testament history when Jerusalem was destroyed by the invading armies of Babylon and the elite of the people were carried off into captivity. Luther in the sixteenth century took the image of the historic Babylonian captivity and reapplied it to his era and talked about the new Babylonian captivity of the Church. He was speaking of Rome as

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the modern Babylon that held the Gospel hostage with its rejection of the biblical understanding of justification.

You can understand how fierce the controversy was, how polemical this title would be in that period by saying that the Church had not simply erred or strayed, but had fallen—that it’s actually now Babylonian; it is now in pagan captivity.

I’ve often wondered if Luther were alive today and came to our culture and looked, not at the liberal church community, but at evangelical churches, what would he have to say?

Of course I can’t answer that question with any kind of definitive authority, but my guess is this: If Martin Luther lived today and picked up his pen to write, the book he would write in our time would be

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entitled The Pelagian Captivity of the Evangelical Church.

Luther saw the doctrine of justification as fueled by a deeper theological problem. He writes about this extensively in The Bondage of the Will. When we look at the Reformation and we see the solas of the Reformation—sola Scriptura, sola fide, solus Christus, soli Deo gloria, sola gratia—Luther was convinced that the real issue of the Reformation was the issue of grace; and that underlying the doctrine of sola fide, justification by faith alone, was the prior commitment to sola gratia, the concept of justification by grace alone.

In the Fleming Revell edition of The Bondage of the Will, the translators, J. I. Packer and O. R. Johnston, included a somewhat provocative historical and theological introduction to the book itself.

This is from the end of that introduction: These things need to be pondered by Protestants today. With what right may we call ourselves children of the Reformation?

Much modern Protestantism would be neither owned nor even recognised by the pioneer Reformers. The Bondage of the Will fairly sets before us what they believed about the salvation of lost mankind. In the light of it, we are forced to ask whether Protestant Christendom has not tragically sold its birthright between Luther’s day and our own.

Has not Protestantism today become more Erasmian than Lutheran? Do we not too often try to minimise and gloss over doctrinal differences for the sake of inter-party peace?

Are we innocent of the doctrinal indifferentism with which Luther charged Erasmus? Do we still believe that doctrine matters?1 Historically, it’s a simple matter of fact that Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and all the leading Protestant theologians of the first epoch of the Reformation stood on precisely the same ground here. On other points they had their differences. In asserting the helplessness of man in sin and the sovereignty of God in grace, they were entirely at one. To all of them these doctrines were the very lifeblood of the Christian faith. A modern editor of Luther’s works says this: Whoever puts this book down without having realized that Evangelical theology stands or falls with the doctrine of the bondage of the will has read it in vain. The doctrine of free justification by faith alone, which became the storm center of so much controversy during the Reformation period, is often regarded as the heart of the Reformers’ theology but this is not accurate. The truth is that their thinking was really centered upon

the contention of Paul, echoed by Augustine and others, that the sinner’s entire salvation is by free and sovereign grace only, and that the doctrine of justification by faith was important to them because it safeguarded the principle of sovereign grace. The sovereignty of grace found expression in their thinking at a more profound level still in the doctrine of monergistic regeneration.2 That is to say, that the faith that receives Christ for justification is itself the free gift of a sovereign God. The principle of soli fide is not rightly understood until it is seen as anchored in the broader principle of sola gratia. What is the source of faith? Is it the God-given means whereby the God-given justification is received, or is it a condition of justification which is left to man to fulfill? Do you hear the difference? Let me put it in simple terms. I heard an evangelist recently say, “If God takes a thousand steps to reach out to you for your redemption, still in the final analysis, you must take the decisive step to be saved.” Consider the statement that has been made by America’s most beloved and leading evangelical of the twentieth century, Billy Graham, who says with great passion, “God does ninety-nine percent of it but you still must do that last one percent.”

What Is Pelagianism? ow, let’s return briefly to my title, “The Pelagian Captivity of the Church.” What are we talking about?

Pelagius was a monk who lived in Britain in the fifth century. He was a contemporary of the greatest theologian of the first millennium of Church history if not of all time, Aurelius Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in North Africa. We have heard of St. Augustine, of his great works in theology, of his City of God, of his Confessions, and so on, which remain Christian classics.

Augustine, in addition to being a titanic theologian and a prodigious intellect, was also a man of deep spirituality and prayer. In one of his famous prayers, Augustine made a seemingly harmless and innocuous statement in the prayer to God in which he says: “O God, command what you wouldst, and grant what thou dost command.” Now, would that give you apoplexy—to hear a prayer like that? Well it certainly set Pelagius, this British monk, into orbit. When he heard that, he protested vociferously, even appealing to Rome to have this ghastly prayer censured from the pen of Augustine. Here’s why. He said, “Are you saying, Augustine, that God has the inherent right to command anything that he so desires from his creatures? Nobody is going to dispute that. God inherently, as the creator of heav-

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In Print May/June Book Recommendations The Cruelty of Heresy: An Affirmation of Christian Orthodoxy C. FitzSimons Allison Ancient heresies have modern expressions that influence our churches and culture, creating cruel dilemmas for today’s Christian in the form of error, sin, and various distortions on orthodox faith. The Cruelty of Heresy captures the drama and relevance of the Councils of the fourth and fifth centuries and shows how the remarkable achievements of these early struggles provide valuable guidelines for believers today.

B-AL-1 PAPERBACK, $15.00 What’s That Supposed to Mean?: Using the Catechism in the 21st Century James A. Lucas This volume contains 52 devotional sermons on Luther’s Small Catechism that will prove valuable to pastors, teachers, and serious students of the catechism.

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Dorothy L. Sayers You’ve heard the cry too often: “Away with doctrine! Just preach that simple, uncomplicated religion that Jesus taught.” With commanding logic and devastating humor, Sayers shows how such naïve “religion” is dangerous: It betrays Christ and falsifies his teachings.

B-SAYE-1 PAPERBACK, $11.00 Paul: An Outline of His Theology Herman Ridderbos This is an English translation of the monumental study of the theology of the Apostle Paul by the Dutch theologian and biblical scholar, Herman Ridderbos.

B-RIDD-1 PAPERBACK, $30.00 Creeds, Councils and Christ Gerald Bray A key question every theologian has to consider is, “How reliable a picture of Jesus Christ do we get from the Bible and the early Church writings?” Through scrupulous research Gerald Bray has pieced together the evidence that indicates that the early Church knew exactly who Jesus was and were careful not to embellish their reports and writings about him.

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On Tape From the Alliance Archives Made In America: The Shaping of Modern Evangelicalism Michael Horton Is American Christianity more American than it is Christian?

How have the secular ideals of consumerism and pragmatism shaped evangelical thinking and practice? In this six-tape series, Michael Horton gives us insight into the shaping of modern American evangelicalism.

C-MA-S 6 TAPES IN AN ALBUM, $33.00 Megashift Debate White Horse Inn “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” vs. “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” This is the shape of the “Megashift” debate. Michael Horton, W. Robert Godfrey, and Robert Strimple defend the classical model, and Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, and Robert Webber set forth the “New Model.” Listeners will gain a better understanding of how and why doctrines such as the substitutionary atonement, original sin, and imputation are being modified, distorted, and even rejected in contemporary theology.

C-MS-S 16 TAPES IN 2 ALBUMS, $86.00 Great Debates in Church History White Horse Inn In this radio series, discussion focuses on how leaders in Christian history left their mark on the evangelical church.

Theological issues spanning many centuries caused church friction when certain men stood firmly upon their convictions, and the resulting debates were instrumental in bringing the church to its present state. White Horse Inn host Michael Horton talks with pastors and scholars about the debates of Athanasius and Arius, Augustine and Pelagius, Anselm and Abelard, Luther and Erasmus, and Machen and Fosdick.

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Lord, have mercy!

Philadelphia Conference on Reformation Theology 2001 Lord, have mercy! That is the cry of every sinner ever saved.

A God of mercy! That is what the Gospel proclaims, and God’s mercy is central to every aspect of Christian salvation. If one thing is needed in our shallow, man-centered age it is a fresh view of our great God. Knowing his mercy invites us to a closer, deeper relationship with him. It encourages us to study God and to make him the center of our lives. Furthermore, God’s mercy is what makes Christianity good news at every stage: in God’s sovereign election, in the forgiveness of our sin, in the call to practical godliness, and in the future entrance of God’s people into glory. Speakers: R. C. Sproul, Eric Alexander, Ligon Duncan, and Philip Ryken address this topic in our 28th annual conference series.

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Becoming People of the Word in a Culture of Images White Horse Inn Catechesis, the process of orally instructing someone in the doctrines of God’s Word, is an obligation both for the Church and for Christian households. A prudent path to understanding Scripture is using the “maps” of the orthodox creeds and catechisms. These aids to understanding are not substitutes for the biblical texts; rather, they are guides compiled by the community of faith, highlighting main themes and alerting us to common errors. These churchly statements are not infallible, but they are surely priceless summaries. Join White Horse Inn host Michael Horton and the radio team as they discuss some guidelines for becoming people of the Word in the midst of a culture of images.

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en and earth, has the right to impose obligations on his creatures and say, ‘Thou shalt do this, and thou shalt not do that.’ ‘Command whatever thou would’—it’s a perfectly legitimate prayer.”

It’s the second part of the prayer that Pelagius abhorred—when Augustine said, “and grant what thou dost command.” He said, “What are you talking about? If God is just, if God is righteous and God is holy, and God commands of the creature to do something, certainly that creature must have the power within himself, the moral ability within himself, to perform it or God would never require it in the first place.” Now that makes sense, doesn’t it?

What Pelagius was saying is that moral responsibility always and everywhere implies moral capability or, simply, moral ability. So why would we have to pray, “God grant me, give me the gift of being able to do what you command me to do”? Pelagius saw in this statement a shadow being cast over the integrity of God himself, who would hold people responsible for doing something they cannot do.

So in the ensuing debate, Augustine made it clear that in creation, God commanded nothing from Adam or Eve that they were incapable of performing. But once transgression entered and mankind became fallen, God’s law was not repealed nor did God adjust his holy requirements downward to accommodate the weakened, fallen condition of his creation. God did punish his creation by visiting upon them the judgment of original sin, so that everyone after Adam and Eve who was born into this world was born already dead in sin. Original sin is not the first sin. It’s the result of the first sin; it refers to our inherent corruption, by which we are born in sin, and in sin did our mothers conceive us. We are not born in a neutral state of innocence, but we are born in a sinful, fallen condition. Virtually every church in the historic World Council of Churches at some point in their history and in their creedal development articulates some doctrine of original sin. So clear is that to the biblical revelation that it would take a repudiation of the biblical view of mankind to deny original sin altogether.

This is precisely what was at issue in the battle between Augustine and Pelagius in the fifth century.

Pelagius said there is no such thing as original sin.

Adam’s sin affected Adam and only Adam. There is no transmission or transfer of guilt or fallenness or corruption to the progeny of Adam and Eve. Everyone is born in the same state of innocence in which Adam was created. And, he said, for a person to live a life of obedience to God, a life of moral perfection, is possible without any help from Jesus or without any help from the grace of God. Pelagius said that grace—and here’s the key distinction— facilitates righteousness. What does “facilitate” mean?

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It helps, it makes it more facile, it makes it easier, but you don’t have to have it. You can be perfect without it. Pelagius further stated that it is not only theoretically possible for some folks to live a perfect life without any assistance from divine grace, but there are in fact people who do it. Augustine said, “No, no, no, no . . . we are infected by sin by nature, to the very depths and core of our being—so much so that no human being has the moral power to incline themselves to cooperate with the grace of God. The human will, as a result of original sin, still has the power to choose, but it is in bondage to its evil desires and inclinations. The condition of fallen humanity is one that Augustine would describe as the inability to not sin. In simple English, what Augustine was saying is that in the Fall, man loses his moral ability to do the things of God and he is held captive by his own evil inclinations.

In the fifth century the Church condemned Pelagius as a heretic. Pelagianism was condemned at the Council of Orange, and it was condemned again at the Council of Florence, the Council of Carthage, and also, ironically, at the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century in the first three anathemas of the Canons of the Sixth Session. So, consistently throughout Church history, the Church has roundly and soundly condemned Pelagianism—because Pelagianism denies the fallenness of our nature; it denies the doctrine of original sin.

Now what is called semi-Pelagianism, as the prefix “semi” suggests, was a somewhat middle ground between full-orbed Augustinianism and full-orbed Pelagianism. Semi-Pelagianism said this: yes, there was a fall; yes, there is such a thing as original sin; yes, the constituent nature of humanity has been changed by this state of corruption and all parts of our humanity have been significantly weakened by the fall, so much so that without the assistance of divine grace nobody can possibly be redeemed, so that grace is not only helpful but it’s absolutely necessary for salvation. While we are so fallen that we can’t be saved without grace, we are not so fallen that we don’t have the ability to accept or reject the grace when it’s offered to us. The will is weakened but is not enslaved. There remains in the core of our being an island of righteousness that remains untouched by the fall. It’s out of that little island of righteousness, that little parcel of goodness that is still intact in the soul or in the will that is the determinative difference between heaven and hell. It’s that little island that must be exercised when God does his thousand steps of reaching out to us, but in the final analysis it’s that one step that we take that determines whether we go to heaven or hell— whether we exercise that little righteousness that is in the core of our being or whether we don’t. That

little island Augustine wouldn’t even recognize as an atoll in the South Pacific. He said it’s a mythical island, that the will is enslaved, and that man is dead in his sin and trespasses.

Ironically, the Church condemned semiPelagianism as vehemently as it had condemned original Pelagianism. Yet by the time you get to the sixteenth century and you read the Catholic understanding of what happens in salvation the Church basically repudiated what Augustine taught and Aquinas taught as well. The Church concluded that there still remains this freedom that is intact in the human will and that man must cooperate with— and assent to—the prevenient grace that is offered to them by God. If we exercise that will, if we exercise a cooperation with whatever powers we have left, we will be saved. And so in the sixteenth century the Church reembraced semi-Pelagianism.

At the time of the Reformation, all the reformers agreed on one point: the moral inability of fallen human beings to incline themselves to the things of God; that all people, in order to be saved, are totally dependent, not ninety-nine percent, but one hundred percent dependent upon the monergistic work of regeneration in order to come to faith, and that faith itself is a gift of God. It’s not that we are offered salvation and that we will be born again if we choose to believe. But we can’t even believe until God in his grace and in his mercy first changes the disposition of our souls through his sovereign work of regeneration. In other words, what the reformers all agreed with was, unless a man is born again, he can’t even see the kingdom of God, let alone enter it.

Like Jesus says in the sixth chapter of John, “No man can come to me unless it is given to him of the Father”—that the necessary condition for anybody’s faith and anybody’s salvation is regeneration.

Evangelicals and Faith odern Evangelicalism almost uniformly and universally teaches that in order for a person to be born again, he must first exercise faith. You have to choose to be born again. Isn’t that what you hear? In a George Barna poll, more than seventy percent of “professing evangelical Christians” in America expressed the belief that man is basically good. And more than eighty percent articulated the view that God helps those who help themselves. These positions—or let me say it negatively—neither of these positions is semi-Pelagian.

They’re both Pelagian. To say that we’re basically good is the Pelagian view. I would be willing to assume that in at least thirty percent of the people who are reading this issue, and probably more, if we really examine their thinking in depth, we would find hearts that are beating Pelagianism. We’re over-

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whelmed with it. We’re surrounded by it. We’re immersed in it. We hear it every day. We hear it every day in the secular culture. And not only do we hear it every day in the secular culture, we hear it every day on Christian television and on Christian radio.

In the nineteenth century, there was a preacher who became very popular in America, who wrote a book on theology, coming out of his own training in law, in which he made no bones about his Pelagianism. He rejected not only Augustinianism, but he also rejected semi-Pelagianism and stood clearly on the subject of unvarnished Pelagianism, saying in no uncertain terms, without any ambiguity, that there was no Fall and that there is no such thing as original sin. This man went on to attack viciously the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement of Christ, and in addition to that, to repudiate as clearly and as loudly as he could the doctrine of justification by faith alone by the imputation of the righteousness of Christ. This man’s basic thesis was, we don’t need the imputation of the righteousness of Christ because we have the capacity in and of ourselves to become righteous. His name: Charles Finney, one of America’s most revered evangelists.

Now, if Luther was correct in saying that sola fide is the article upon which the Church stands or falls, if what the reformers were saying is that justification by faith alone is an essential truth of Christianity, who also argued that the substitutionary atonement is an essential truth of Christianity; if they’re correct in their assessment that those doctrines are essential truths of Christianity, the only conclusion we can come to is that Charles Finney was not a Christian.

I read his writings—and I say, “I don’t see how any Christian person could write this.” And yet, he is in the Hall of Fame of Evangelical Christianity in America. He is the patron saint of twentieth-century Evangelicalism. And he is not semi-Pelagian; he is unvarnished in his Pelagianism.

The Island of Righteousness ne thing is clear: that you can be purely Pelagian and be completely welcome in the evangelical movement today. It’s not simply that the camel sticks his nose into the tent; he doesn’t just come in the tent—he kicks the owner of the tent out. Modern Evangelicalism today looks with suspicion at Reformed theology, which has become sort of the third-class citizen of Evangelicalism. Now you say, “Wait a minute, R. C. Let’s not tar everybody with the extreme brush of Pelagianism, because, after all, Billy Graham and the rest of these people are saying there was a Fall; you’ve got to have grace; there is such a thing as original sin; and semi-Pelagians do not agree with Pelagius’ facile and sanguine view of unfallen human

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nature.” And that’s true. No question about it. But it’s that little island of righteousness where man still has the ability, in and of himself, to turn, to change, to incline, to dispose, to embrace the offer of grace that reveals why historically semi-Pelagianism is not called semi-Augustinianism, but semi-Pelagianism.

It never really escapes the core idea of the bondage of the soul, the captivity of the human heart to sin—that it’s not simply infected by a disease that may be fatal if left untreated, but it is mortal.

I heard an evangelist use two analogies to describe what happens in our redemption. He said sin has such a stronghold on us, a stranglehold, that it’s like a person who can’t swim, who falls overboard in a raging sea, and he’s going under for the third time and only the tops of his fingers are still above the water; and unless someone intervenes to rescue him, he has no hope of survival, his death is certain. And unless God throws him a life preserver, he can’t possibly be rescued. And not only must God throw him a life preserver in the general vicinity of where he is, but that life preserver has to hit him right where his fingers are still extended out of the water, and hit him so that he can grasp hold of it. It has to be perfectly pitched. But still that man will drown unless he takes his fingers and curls them around the life preserver and God will rescue him. But unless that tiny little human action is done, he will surely perish.

The other analogy is this: A man is desperately ill, sick unto death, lying in his hospital bed with a disease that is fatal. There is no way he can be cured unless somebody from outside comes up with a cure, a medicine that will take care of this fatal disease. And God has the cure and walks into the room with the medicine. But the man is so weak he can’t even help himself to the medicine; God has to pour it on the spoon. The man is so sick he’s almost comatose. He can’t even open his mouth, and God has to lean over and open up his mouth for him. God has to bring the spoon to the man’s lips, but the man still has to swallow it.

Now, if we’re going to use analogies, let’s be accurate. The man isn’t going under for the third time; he is stone cold dead at the bottom of the ocean. That’s where you once were when you were dead in sin and trespasses and walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air. And while you were dead hath God quickened you together with Christ. God dove to the bottom of the sea and took that drowned corpse and breathed into it the breath of his life and raised you from the dead. And it’s not that you were dying in a hospital bed of a certain illness, but rather, when you were born you were born D.O.A. That’s what the Bible says: that we are morally stillborn.

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Do we have a will? Yes, of course we have a will.

Calvin said, if you mean by a free will a faculty of choosing by which you have the power within yourself to choose what you desire, then we all have free will. If you mean by free will the ability for fallen human beings to incline themselves and exercise that will to choose the things of God without the prior monergistic work of regeneration then, said Calvin, free will is far too grandiose a term to apply to a human being.

The semi-Pelagian doctrine of free will prevalent in the evangelical world today is a pagan view that denies the captivity of the human heart to sin. It underestimates the stranglehold that sin has upon us.

None of us wants to see things as bad as they really are. The biblical doctrine of human corruption is grim. We don’t hear the Apostle Paul say, “You know, it’s sad that we have such a thing as sin in the world; nobody’s perfect. But be of good cheer. We’re basically good.” Do you see that even a cursory reading of Scripture denies this?

Now back to Luther. What is the source and status of faith? Is it the God-given means whereby the God-given justification is received? Or is it a condition of justification which is left to us to fulfill? Is your faith at work? Is it the one work that God leaves for you to do? I had a discussion with some folks in Grand Rapids, Michigan, recently. I was speaking on sola gratia, and one fellow was upset. He said, “Are you trying to tell me that in the final analysis it’s God who either does or doesn’t sovereignly regenerate a heart?”

And I said, “Yes,” and he was very upset about that.

I said, “Let me ask you this: are you a Christian?”

He said, “Yes.” I said, “Do you have friends who aren’t Christians?”

He said, “Well, of course.”

I said, “Why are you a Christian and your friends aren’t? Is it because you’re more righteous than they are?” He wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t going to say, “Of course it’s because I’m more righteous. I did the right thing and my friend didn’t.” He knew where I was going with that question.

And he said, “Oh, no, no, no.”

I said, “Tell me why. Is it because you’re smarter than your friend?”

And he said, “No.” But he would not agree that the final, decisive issue was the grace of God. He wouldn’t come to that. And after we discussed this for fifteen minutes, he said, “OK! I’ll say it. I’m a Christian because I did the right thing, I made the right response, and my friend didn’t.”

What was this person trusting in for his salvation? Not in his works in general, but in the one

work that he performed. And he was a Protestant, an evangelical. But his view of salvation was no different from the Roman view.

God’s Sovereignty in Salvation his is the issue: Is it a part of God’s gift of salvation, or is it in our own contribution to salvation? Is our salvation wholly of God or does it ultimately depend on something that we do for ourselves? Those who say the latter, that it ultimately depends on something we do for ourselves, thereby deny humanity’s utter helplessness in sin and affirm that a form of semi-Pelagianism is true after all. It is no wonder then that later Reformed theology condemned Arminianism as being, in principle, both a return to Rome because, in effect, it turned faith into a meritorious work, and a betrayal of the Reformation because it denied the sovereignty of God in saving sinners, which was the deepest religious and theological principle of the reformers’ thought. Arminianism was indeed, in Reformed eyes, a renunciation of New Testament Christianity in favor of New Testament Judaism.

For to rely on oneself for faith is no different in principle than to rely on oneself for works, and the one is as un-Christian and anti-Christian as the other. In the light of what Luther says to Erasmus there is no doubt that he would have endorsed this judgment.

And yet this view is the overwhelming majority report today in professing evangelical circles. And as long as semi-Pelagianism—which is simply a thinly veiled version of real Pelagianism at its core—as long as it prevails in the Church, I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I know, however, what will not happen: there will not be a new Reformation. Until we humble ourselves and understand that no man is an island and that no man has an island of righteousness, that we are utterly dependent upon the unmixed grace of God for our salvation, we will not begin to rest upon grace and rejoice in the greatness of God’s sovereignty, and we will not be rid of the pagan influence of humanism that exalts and puts man at the center of religion. Until that happens there will not be a new Reformation, because at the heart of Reformation teaching is the central place of the worship and gratitude given to God and God alone. Soli Deo gloria, to God alone, the glory. ■

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ne of the conditions that we hear, a necessary condition for justification is faith. Right? And faith involves an active embracing, and trusting in Christ—and in Christ alone. In that sense it involves some action of the will. It involves some step of embracing Christ. Now we’re not saying—Luther isn’t saying, Augustine isn’t saying—that the human will is not involved in salvation. When I have faith in Christ, I am the one who is trusting, I am the one who is believing, I am the one who is choosing him, and I am choosing him freely.

That’s not an issue. We all agree on that.

The question is, What has to happen before that person will choose Christ, will embrace Christ? When I say I have to embrace Christ in order to be saved—I have to have faith in order to be saved, I have to ask the next question: How do I get the faith? Can I choose to believe out of my dead, sinful nature? Or must I be spiritually raised from the dead and be given eyes to see and a heart to respond positively before I ever will respond positively? What Reformed theology says, what Augustine was saying, is that we are by nature spiritually dead. God can offer us salvation until kingdom come—but he does more than offer it. He resurrects our souls from the dead. He does a divine and supernatural work in us called regeneration. He quickens us, and every mother knows that “quickening” is the sense of the presence of life in the womb. It is the Holy Spirit who changes the disposition of our souls, which prior to this work has no desire for Christ. We’re still choosing. When we’re dead in sin, we’re still alive to sin, and we’re making choices all the time.

But the choices are always according to what we want. That’s what freedom is. That’s why Augustine, in a confusing way, said that man still has a liberium arbitrium; he still has a free will. But what he lacks is libertas (liberty); he’s still free to do what he wants. That’s his condemnation. We still choose sin because that’s what we want.

The freedom we lack is the ability, in and of ourselves, to change our hearts that are enslaved to these wicked desires; only God can surgically repair that captivity. In other words, we are in bondage to our own desires, which are wicked, until God changes the disposition of our hearts. Once he does that, he is releasing the will from its prison. And we’re no longer now in bondage. Now we have the desire for Christ, and we freely choose Christ, but not until God—and only God—liberates us.

R. C. Sproul is a member of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals and Chairman of Ligonier Ministries in Orlando, Florida.

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A Vulnerable God S

everal provocatively titled books published by evangelical houses in recent years advance the position frequently called “open theism.” Huntington College professor John Sanders has written The God Who Risks: A Theology of Providence (InterVarsity Press, 1998), Baptist pastor and Bethel College professor Gregory Boyd has written a book titled God of the Possible: A Biblical

Introduction to the Open View of God (Baker Books, 2000), and Clark Pinnock has edited the collection titled The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God (InterVarsity Press, 1994). Veteran theologian Clark Pinnock has been a pioneer of this new trend in evangelical theology.

So what’s all the fuss about?

Advocates of open theism charge the traditional understanding of God (i.e., classical theism) with being so heavily funded by Greek philosophy that it ran roughshod over key biblical passages. This, they argue, explains at least in part why Christian theology has tended toward a view of God as absolutely transcendent, “wholly other,” separate from the world. Part of that nonbiblical inheritance includes cherished dogmas, such as belief in God’s omnipotence (all-mighty-ness), omniscience (all-knowing-ness), aseity (independence and selfexistence), and simplicity (God’s unity of essence and attributes and thus the view that one attribute

cannot be placed over all others). Open theism “expresses two basic convictions: love is the most important quality we attribute to God, and love is more than care and commitment; it involves being sensitive and responsive as well.”1 Once the Greek ideas are abandoned, open theism suggests, we can read the Bible with fresh eyes and behold a dynamic relationship between God and creation, a relationship in which God is in a certain sense dependent on human beings for his happiness and a successful conclusion of world history.

Reformed and Arminian Views on Classical Theism pen theists acknowledge, “Both Calvinist and Arminian supporters of traditional theism appeal to prophecy to refute the notion that the future is open [i.e., largely unknown] for God.”2 How can God be God while allowing humans their own autonomy or space for

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Apart from Christ? freedom? Reformed theology had a different conception of freedom itself: creaturely freedom does not require autonomy or limitation of God’s freedom in order to make space for the creature’s. “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), so divine freedom is precisely that space in which creaturely freedom is possible. In Reformed understandings, God’s freedom is not a threat to human freedom, but its prerequisite.

Arminianism’s solution has traditionally been to turn at that point to the doctrine of God’s omniscience: because God knows everything that will happen, he can order history responsively. Open theists, however, argue that this traditional Arminian answer doesn’t work—for the same reason, ironically, that Calvinists have never thought it worked: If God knows the future exhaustively, and God’s knowledge can never be wrong, then it follows that the items of that future knowledge are just as certainly determined as in the traditional account.3 Open theism, therefore, concludes that God can make educated guesses about the future free actions of creatures, and can know what he will do (often in response to human action), but he cannot exhaustively know the future free decisions and

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actions of creatures. To state it plainly, “This also means that not even God knows the future in all its details.”4 Advocates of this position routinely insist that they affirm divine omniscience in their own way. But since the word, both in terms of etymology and usage, means “knowing everything,” it is hard to imagine an omniscience that is ignorant of most of the things that actually happen until they are performed.

Open theists complain that traditional Christian theology fails to recognize the heavy biblical emphasis on the interdependence of God and the world. We are repeatedly directed in Scripture to incontrovertible examples of divine

theologian Adolph Harnack argued, “Dogma in its conception and development is a work of the Greek spirit on the soil of the Gospel.”7 Although one cannot simply dismiss open theists as liberals, there are many affinities with modern liberalism: love as the divine attribute that trumps all others, a weak doctrine of sin, and the seriousness of the human predicament—and, therefore, a corresponding weakness in its understanding of redemption and the future judgment.

The Hellenism-versus-Hebrew paradigm has allowed modern theology to avoid all sorts of classical theological formulations. Harnack’s well-worn development of this thesis has dominated old liberalism and, to a large extent, even neo-orthodoxy. Over Representing the broad consensus, Francis Turretin observes that philosophy can the last few decades, evangelical pietism has fostered this tell us when we’re presenting a bad argument, but it cannot provide the content of antidoctrinal approach within both liberal and conservawhat is to be believed. tive theological circles.

There is only one problem with it: There is no historical repentance, change, surprise, and other evidences basis for this ingenious account. Among others, of a “dynamic relationship.” Why would tradition- James Barr (not exactly a friend of orthodoxy) has al theology insist on turning this warm, ever-mov- exploded this thesis.8 Still, it offers a simple way of ing, risk-taking God of the Scriptures into the pas- challenging ancient formulations in the name of sionless, static, and transcendent God of the Bible. While self-consciously evangelical, Hellenized Christianity? In this article I will briefly advocates of open theism risk applying the same address this question: Is the traditional Christian misguided scorched-earth policy toward the histoview of God the product of Greek (Hellenistic) ry of Christian reflection. It is our contention, in fact, that open theism is itself tightly governed by philosophy or of the close scrutiny of Scripture? dogmatic criteria that are far more determined by A New Criticism? post-Kantian metaphysics than by Scripture. The ohn Sanders writes, “In what follows I will fingerprints of modern thought (Pinnock himself document the manner in which I believe the cites the emphasis on autonomy, historical change, Greek metaphysical system ‘boxed up’ the a therapeutic orientation) pervade the defenses of God described in the Bible and the tremendous open theism. impact this had in shaping the Christian understandings of the nature of God, prayer, salvation The Reformed Method and Scripture and the incarnation.”5 There is some irony in aving now provided a general summary of charging the classical Christian doctrine of God the methodological challenge, let us turn with philosophical speculation and then complainbriefly to the dominant Reformed ing that, for instance, Reformed theology doesn’t method with respect to this whole question of go far enough in this direction: “Regarding the God’s character. Francis Turretin speaks for the tratopic of providence, such thinkers sometimes dis- dition when he plainly states, miss attempts to elucidate the relationship between divine sovereignty and human responsibility, But when God is set forth as the object of claiming that it is simply a ‘mystery beyond human theology, he is not to be regarded simply as understanding.’ The subject simply transcends God in himself…, but as revealed.… Nor is human reason. (Thus books such as this one [The he to be considered exclusively under the God Who Risks] are considered a waste of time.)”6 relation of deity (according to the opinion of Open theism cannot be reduced to liberalism, Thomas Aquinas and many Scholastics after but its adherents do buy a lot of radical assumphim, for in this manner the knowledge of tions that fueled liberal criticisms of nearly every him could not be saving but deadly to sinsignificant Christian formulation. Leading liberal ners), but as he is our God (i.e., covenanted

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in Christ as he has revealed himself to us in his word.9 For the Reformed, talk about God is restricted to Scripture and that which “by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture.”10 Francis Turretin observes that philosophy can tell us when we’re presenting a bad argument, but it cannot provide the content of that which is to be believed. It serves a ministerial rather than a magisterial function and must not be allowed a position alongside Scripture in providing normative direction for Christian faith and practice.

Scripture alone is the basis for all Christian reflection and action. But this, of course, does not say everything that needs to be said. In fact, it is merely the beginning.

With the ecclesiastical consensus, Reformed scholasticism accepted the view that talk about God was analogical, even in Scripture, where it is not only talk about God, but talk from God. In every analogy (warrior, king, father, good, angry, etc.), God is more unlike than like the human analogue. Does that leave us drowning in relativism?

How can we know that God really is good if not even Scripture gives us access to God’s inner being?

The answer given by the Reformed has been that these analogies (hence, the “analogical” mode of God’s self-revelation) are selected by God himself as sufficient approximations for weak creatures to understand for their salvation and godliness.

Calvin’s well-known description of Scripture as an example of divine accommodation to human weakness and as, therefore, similar to a nanny who speaks “baby-talk” to an infant, challenges all attempts to make even of Scripture itself an exact mirror of the being of God. Only Jesus Christ is “the exact representation of [God’s] being,” and this univocal core was and remains himself veiled in our humanity. We know what we need to know for salvation and worship, not everything that we wish to know or might be led by our curiosity to inquire. In common with Lutheran theology, Reformed theology emphasizes that God reveals himself by hiding himself. As apologist Cornelius Van Til put it, It is an adaptation by God to the limitations of the human creature. Man’s systematic interpretation of the revelation of God is never more than an approximation of the system of truth revealed in Scripture, and this system of truth as revealed in Scripture is itself anthropomorphic. But being anthropomorphic does not make it untrue. The

Confessions of the Church pretend to be nothing more than frankly approximated statements of the inherently anthropomorphic revelation of God.11 It was Socinianism and the Remonstrant or Arminian schools that stood over against Reformed dogmaticians in raising reason and speculative deductions above clear statements of Scripture. The antispeculative and antirationalistic impulse of Reformed theology can be seen more recently in theologian Herman Bavinck’s assertion that “God’s being in the abstract is nowhere discussed” in Scripture.12 Only by staying with Scripture has orthodoxy in the modern period been able to resist somewhat the pendulum of modern thought as it swings between hyper-transcendence (God as practically uninvolved in the world) and hyper-immanence (God as practically identical with the world).

Contrary to the claims of classical theology presented by open theists, the great tradition derives its biblical view of God from Scripture.

Divine Eternity ccording to traditional Christian teaching, God is not only without a beginning and end; there is no “before,” “during” and “after” for him, as there is for us. When ascribing eternity to God, we do not pretend to know what that really is. God’s hidden being (to which we do not have access) and God’s covenantal involvement in temporal history (to which we do, because of Scripture) are two mysterious realities that must be affirmed even when we don’t have all the answers.

Against open theism, we argue that God does not experience time as human beings do and that time is a creation of God, not something to which even God himself is subject.

In Genesis 21:33 Abraham “called on the name of the LORD, the Everlasting God” (El Olam). In Isaiah 57:15, God identifies himself as “the High and Lofty One who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place.” It is precisely because God dwells in eternity—that is, transcends time—that he can indwell time freely, so that the psalmist can praise God as “our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, you are God” (Ps. 90:1–2). Again we see God’s transcendence as the presupposition of his immanence rather than its antithesis: “You turn man to destruction, and say, ‘Return, O children of men.’

For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, and like a watch in the night”

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(vv. 3–4). Even if this text did not support God’s timelessness, it prohibits open theism’s view that God experiences time just as we do: nobody I know experiences a thousand years as if yesterday.

Just as God revealed himself as the Everlasting God in Genesis, so he closes Revelation—this time as the incarnate and risen Son, with the announcement, “‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End,’ says the Lord, ‘who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty’” (Rev. 1:8). This “I am” statement recorded here by John is unmistakably related to the “I Am” statements in

clearer in the Gospels, where we have to deal not with a burning bush but God incarnate: “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself.” (John 5:26). No creature has life in himself, but God does. God’s existence is not merely quantitatively different from ours, but qualitatively different.

God changes creaturely reality as one changes one’s clothes, but does not himself change (Ps. 102:26). Only in this light can God be seen as a Rock for his people, a stable, reliable defense (Ps. 31:3). God alone is “the fountain [source] of life.”

Everything exists for God, although God exists only for himself: “The LORD has made We know what we need to know for salvation and worship, not everything that we all for himself, yes, even the wicked for the day of doom” (Prov. 16:4). God is the potwish to know or might be led by our curiosity to inquire. ter, and we are the clay (Isa. 64:8), underscoring God’s agency as the one who acts John’s Gospel, as both are anchored in the original but is not acted upon, and this metaphor is drawn revelation of God’s Name: “I AM WHO I AM” (Ex. also in Jeremiah 18:5 and Romans 9.

3:14). It would therefore be difficult to see how God acts according to his own counsel, we read “Alpha and Omega, First and Last” could be less throughout the prophets, and Jesus rejoices that than the one revealed in the burning bush, the one God has revealed the truth to the simple rather who causes the burning but is not himself con- than to the wise simply because “it seemed good in sumed. It is only in the false dilemma of, oddly your sight” (Matt. 11:26). No clearer testimony enough, pagan Greek thought, that one is faced could be found than in Paul’s speech on Mars Hill, with the choice between hyper-transcendence and where he encountered Epicureans and Stoics and, hyper-immanence. But in Scripture, the God who anticipating the better church fathers in their use transcends time and space is nevertheless of philosophy against the philosophers, explained omnipresent in both. God is, in fact, more the identity of the unknown God from a working involved in time and space than his creatures, more knowledge of their own systems: “God, who made infinitely present in all times and places just as he the world and everything in it, since he is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made transcends them. with hands. Nor is he served by human hands, as Divine Independence though he needed anything, since he gives to all f God is affected by creatures, the ultimate or life, breath, and all things . . . for in him we live first cause of God’s love and grace would be in and move and have our being, as also some of your the creature. It would not be a free act, but one own poets have said, ‘For we are also his offspring’” in which God is overcome. At stake is the inde- (Acts 17:24–28). It is this God who, needing pendence and freedom of God, which would leave nothing from us, “has determined [our] preapsalvation ultimately in the hands of creatures. But pointed times and the boundaries of [our] is this just a deduction based on theological preju- dwellings” (v. 26). dices? How does one handle, then, the texts in On the basis of such texts, it is the doctrine of Scripture that represent God as being affected by historic Christianity, defended in Reformed orthohis creation? Is there exegetical support for divine doxy, that God sustains the world, just as he creatindependence? ed it, out of superabundance rather than lack. It is We have already seen from the revelation of the precisely because God is independent, self-exisDivine Name to Moses that God represents him- tent, and undetermined in any way by his creatures self as self-existent. To confirm this definition, that his creation of and interaction with them is so God attends its revelation with his presence in the marvelous. God’s relationship to the world is burning bush. Here is a bush that burns but is not always that of a Creator who freely condescends, consumed, gives off heat and light, but is not itself not that of a cocreator who is dependent on the affected by heat and light. This becomes even creature for his own happiness.

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Divine Immutability (Changelessness) alvin basically followed Luther’s distinction between the hidden and revealed God. “His discussion of the being of God, exactly as in Luther, is conditioned by a fundamental rejection of speculation about ‘God in himself’ (Deus apud se). In his revelation, God is ‘God toward us’ (Deus erga nos).”13 It is not as if the charge of Stoicism is new: the Reformed scholastics met it in their debate with the Socinians (forerunners of the Unitarians). Turretin writes, “The necessity of the immutability we ascribe to God does not infer Stoic fate. It is only an extrinsic necessity and from the hypothesis of the divine will, without interference with the liberty and contingency of things, as will be proved hereafter when we come to the decrees.”14 Orthodoxy maintains that God not only does not change but that he cannot change, and this pertains to both essence and will. In dispute is not whether God changes his revealed plans in relation to creation, nor whether he issues conditional threats and promises in certain cases, executed in response to human agency. The point at issue is whether God changes either his eternal being or hidden decree.

One cannot prove that God changes his mind from texts that present God as responding to creatures, since no one doubts that God has issued conditional threats and promises. One should not confuse these, however, with God’s fixed counsel, which remains a mystery to creatures. The current challenge is more serious than Socinianism’s and Arminianism’s denial of an immutable will, as open theism attributes change also to God’s essence.

Some of the texts that could be cited for classical position are the following.

Psalm 33 emphasizes not only the dependence of creation on God, but God’s unchanging counsel: “The LORD brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he makes the plans of the people of no effect. The counsel of the LORD stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations” (vv. 10–11).

Numerous references from the psalter could be cited along similar lines.

And then there is the familiar Malachi 3:6: “For I am the LORD, I do not change.” Surely we cannot dismiss God’s own explicit self-description as “metaphysical speculation” that derives from Stoicism and neoplatonism. Again we see that what is at stake here is not the mere accuracy of our dogmatic formulations, but the certainty of God’s promise and the reliability of his plan. This verse reads in full: “For I am the LORD, I do not change; therefore you are not consumed, O sons of Jacob” [italics added].

God’s unchanging decree is not a burden for

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Israel, but it is reassurance that God is the one who is doing the heavy lifting in the relationship.

God’s unchangeable counsel is clearly indicated in Hebrews 6, where we are told that God had no one higher than himself by whom to swear in his promise of the covenant of grace to Abraham.

“Thus God, determining to show more abundantly to the heirs of promise the immutability of his counsel, confirmed it by an oath, that by two immutable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we might have strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold of the hope set before us” (Heb. 6:17–18). James 1:17 offers similar consolation by grounding immutability in God’s very nature: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of change.”

A further point merits our brief attention and that is the relation between immutability and incarnation. If ever there were an instance of God changing, it would seem that the Incarnation of the Word is just such an event.

Open theism’s appeal to the Incarnation to support openness makes a lot of metaphysical assumptions that we don’t have space to discuss here. Furthermore, the agenda proposed by “post-conservative” evangelicals, according to Roger Olson, includes an openness to nonChalcedonian formulations.15 This is not surprising, given the way in which Chalcedon relates divine immutability and christology. That ecumenical creed declares that Christians apprehend the Son in two natures (duo physesin) “without confusing the two natures,” pointing out that by assuming a human nature God the Son is not thereby changed in his deity.16 The Reformed have embraced the terminology of Athanasius and the ecumenical councils in arguing that the eternal Son assumed a human nature without in any way being transformed from deity to humanity. The two natures of Christ cannot be separated, but they must be distinguished.

The classical doctrine of God and christology that orthodoxy inherited from the Church fathers is surprising not for its accommodation to pagan philosophy but for its ingenious use of philosophical vocabularies for exploding pagan thought. At its best, then, this tradition takes its cue from John’s prologue. Any Stoic would have recognized John’s logos language and any Stoic would have been offended by the purpose put to it by the evangelist, just as he or she would have been at Paul’s exploitation of Stoicism on Mars Hill.

According to Scripture, Jesus Christ has been the mediator-redeemer ever since he was entrusted

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Divine Omniscience aking human autonomy as its starting point, open theism must give up even Arminian belief in divine foreknowledge, as we have seen. In terms of method, there is scarcely a better example of imposing on Scripture a theological system, itself constrained by a central thesis (viz., human autonomy).

In Scripture it is simply taken for granted that YHWH is “perfect in knowledge” (Job 37:16). David taught Solomon to trust and follow God; “for the LORD searches all hearts and understands all the intent of the thoughts” (1 Chron. 28:9). The psalmist acknowledges, “You understand my thought afar off. You comprehend my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.

For there is not a word on my tongue, but behold, O LORD, you know it altogether” (Ps. 139:1–6).

God knows what human beings will say before [B]ut nevertheless that He is not a stagnant they say it and, in fact, foreknows their secret ocean, but an ever living, ever thinking, ever intentions. When David discovered Saul’s plot, he acting, and ever suiting his action to the exiasked God, “’Will Saul come down, as your servant gencies of his creatures, and to the accomhas heard? O LORD God of Israel, I pray, tell your plishment of his infinitely wise designs. servant.’ And the LORD said, ‘He will come down.’

Whether we can harmonize these facts or Then David said, ‘Will the men of Keilah deliver not, is a matter of minor importance. We are me and my men into the hand of Saul?’ And the constantly called upon to believe that things LORD said, ‘They will deliver you’” (1 Sam. are, without being able to tell how they are, 23:9–12). or even how they can be. Theologians, in Indeed, all of predictive prophecy is challenged their attempts to state, in philosophical lanby open theism, a corollary that its advocates ask us guage, the doctrine of the Bible on the simply to accept. But we must realize what is at unchangeableness of God, are apt to constake here in terms of the doctrine of salvation. As found immutability with immobility. In with the other attributes, divine omniscience denying that God can change, they seem to appears predominantly in the context of God’s deny that He can act.17 redemptive acts. “Declaring the end from the beginning” All challenges to orthodoxy present a tremendous opportunity, first to rediscover (Isa. 46:10) is the presupposition of predictive prophecy, but how can one declare the the richness of scriptural teaching, but then also the church’s past pronouncements end from the beginning apart against error. from foreknowledge of the creature’s intentions, decisions and actions?

Open theism argues that predictive prophecy is We are tempted to say more but must restrain our something akin to a hunch, an educated guess, curiosity. “We must abide by the teachings of about how things will go. But Scripture speaks of Scripture, and refuse to subordinate their authority God’s purpose and eternal counsel being fixed forand the intuitive convictions of our moral and reli- ever according to his own pleasure. When Jesus gious nature to the arbitrary definitions of any said to the Twelve, “Assuredly, I say to you, one of philosophical system.”18 In fact, Reformed theolo- you will betray me” (Matt. 26:21), was he offering gy—emphasizing as it does the history of redemp- a hypothesis? John’s Gospel reports, more specifition as the covenant unfolds, underscores the truth cally, “He spoke of Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, that God is actus purus—pure act, always on the for it was he who would betray him, being one of move, creating, upholding, and acting. Divine the twelve” (John 6:70). If Jesus in his humiliation immutability is essential for genuine confidence in foreknew Judas’ apostasy and Peter’s betrayal, how the Gospel, as we have seen from the texts cited. is it possible to assert that God in himself does not with a people. “He indeed was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you, who through him believe in God” (1 Pet. 1:20). God’s eternal, unchangeable counsel was being carried out through the one who was simultaneously immutable God and mutable man. If this is granted, then the incarnation did not even change God’s purposes, since he had purposed the redemption of the elect from before the foundation of the world. To suggest that the Incarnation represents a change in the being of the Son is to deny the historic Christian doctrine that the Son assumed a human nature rather than changing in any way his divine nature.

Christians maintain that God is immutable, says theologian Charles Hodge:

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possess such foreknowledge? And if these are exceptions, how can God hold Judas and Peter responsible, given the philosophical premises for denying divine foreknowledge in the first place?

Scripture does not simply say that God works all of his intentions after the counsel of his own will, but that he works “all things after the counsel of his own will” (Eph. 1:11). Can God be said to work “all things after the counsel of his own will” and yet lack foreknowledge of all things? Once more, divine omniscience reminds us of the grandeur of God, but its greatest contribution is to the weakness of our faith. “For if our heart condemns us,” says John, “God is greater than our heart, and knows all things” (1 John 3:20).

As with God’s omnipresence, there is nowhere to hide from God’s knowledge, no realm of autonomous human existence. “Known to God from eternity are all his works” (Acts 15:18). Yes, but what about all of our works, the actions of free creatures? Peter’s Pentecost sermon recorded in Acts 2 provides an answer: “Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested by God to you by miracles, wonders, and signs which God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves also know—him, being delivered by the predetermined purpose and foreknowledge of God, you have taken by lawless hands, have crucified, and put to death” (vv. 22–24). Two things are affirmed here: the culpability of those who did what they freely determined, and the prior determination of God that it would occur.

Where Scripture points us to Christ and his redemption at this point, open theism points us to rationalistic speculations about “two poles” in God. Otto Weber summarizes Reformed thinking on this essential methodological issue: It is not upon the basis of some construction that we know God as he himself, that is, that in his freedom and aseity he is our God, that he is the One who loves in his sovereignty.

We know this solely in the encounter with Jesus Christ…. Aside from Christ, we would end up with Pantheism, in which we made out of “God-for-us” a “God” which was in natural continuity with every existing thing and thus was ultimately the being of all being. Or we would have dualism in that we understood God’s freedom, his being-inhimself as being apart from us, and thus ultimately we would arrive at a world which in essence was godless.19 In Christ, both love and freedom exist together, without separation or confusion. This is how we

know God. This is the Reformation’s most significant philosophical break with late medieval theology.

Divine Impassibility—Does God Suffer? mong the classical attributes, the doctrine of divine impassibility appears to be the least supportable. In fact, it is not even a topic, much less a locus, in representative Reformed systems, but it has become the Rubicon separating classical theism and its rivals. After all, if God’s happiness depends in any sense on creatures, each of the preceding attributes falls like dominoes. While the arguments of open theists are largely determined by the false antitheses of classical and modern pagan thought (pagan transcendence/pagan immanence), perhaps there is a reason to revise and clarify our own position. Part of the confusion even in our own circles, I would argue, has to do with the term “impassibility.”

Literally, it means “without suffering,” not—as it appears to English speakers, “without passions.”

The Westminster Confession perhaps muddies the waters on this fine point by listing among God’s attributes “without parts or passions.” Reformed theology has never taken its stand on the view that God is not passionate, but that God does not suffer. In the latter case, he would be a victim of the creaturely world. The same texts to which one would turn for support of God’s independence would be appropriate for our defense of God’s immunity to being negatively altered in his being by the creation.

It is this immunity that separates him from the idols of the nations, as we have seen particularly in the prophetic writings. Guided by therapeutic language, open theism revels in God’s “vulnerability,” which is another word for “weakness.” But is that really good news? God feels my pain but can’t really do anything for it? “‘To whom then will you liken me, or to whom shall I be equal?’ says the Holy One…Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel: ‘My way is hidden from the LORD, and my just claim is passed over by my God’? Have you not known? Have you not heard? The everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, neither faints nor is weary. His understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the weak, and those who have no might he increases strength” (Isa. 40:27–29). It is precisely because he is not subject to creaturely weakness that God can give power to the weak. It is he who upholds even the Messiah in his earthly ministry of weakness.

Because God is in no sense a victim or a cosufferer, he is the only agent capable of actually rescuing those who do suffer and even those who, in fact,

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inflict suffering on others. Only then does it become significant that the God who transcends suffering actually did become a cosufferer without setting aside his immutable and unaffected nature or absorbing it into his humanity. What is the significance of the Incarnation if God was already a cosufferer with creation and this cosuffering in itself had salvific effect? It is significant that the writer to the Hebrews defends God’s compassion and sympathy for human beings not by denying God’s inner satisfaction and Shalom, but by singling out the God-Man: “He can have compassion on those who are ignorant and going astray, since he himself is also subject to weakness” (Heb. 5:2).

The everlasting rest awaiting us is God’s own rest— not a rest from activity, but from the battle with evil, sin and suffering. What is left is not a lack of passion, but the fullness of passionate joy.

In summary, open theism operates with a flawed method. Like the anthropomorphites who attributed (and some still do attribute) arms, legs, and even feathers to God because of the language used in Scripture, the literalistic approach of open theism is not content to accept accommodated analogies but must have direct access to God’s inner being. To accomplish this, speculation about that inner being of God tends to push God’s fullest revelation of himself in Jesus Christ to the side. It confuses God’s hidden nature and will with his revealed nature and will, as if changes in God’s covenantal dealings with creatures are equivalent to changes in God’s eternal plan or being. This debate, as all challenges to orthodoxy, is a tremendous opportunity for us once more to rediscover for ourselves the richness of scriptural teaching. At the same time, it commits us to the studied rejection of any error, especially one inspired by the modern quest for autonomy, that would obscure the glory of God or the certainty of the promises which are “‘yes’ and ‘amen’ in Christ.” ■ Michael Horton (Ph.D., Wycliffe Hall, Oxford and the University of Coventry) is associate professor of historical theology and apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary in California, and chairs the Council of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

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he God who calleth things that are not as though they were had spoken. Abraham, father of a multitude, for that was now his

name, believed that God who had announced that out of the dead womb of Sarah and the dead glands of Abraham he was going to bring a child that would be born of the miracle power of God. That is why this child, Isaac, is so sharply contrasted with Ishmael.

This wild

child of the desert was a child of natural generation; Isaac was a child of supernatural generation.

Abram begat Ishmael in the power of his manhood; Abraham begat Isaac in the power of the resurrection that God worked [in his loins].

This is why the New Testament tells us that Ishmael, as a type, corresponds to Mt. Sinai; Ishmael is the natural fruit of the law. And Isaac, it is said, corresponds to Jerusalem, the place of the grace of God. Sinai and Calvary—these are the two mountains that show the workings of God. On the one, stone of the tables of the law; on the other, the wood of the cross of Jesus Christ. On the one, the finger of God writing in justice; on the other, the blood of God, seeping from his wounds of love. Justice versus mercy. Wrath versus grace. Hatred of sin versus the love of the sinner. Law versus grace.

Isaac versus Ishmael.

Isaac is . . . proof that God can bring life out of death.

— Donald G. Barnhouse, Sermon on Romans 4:17

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OUR DEBT TO HERESY | Mapping Boundaries

Why the Meaning of Heresy Changes in Pluralistic Contexts he impact of modernity on religion is commonly seen in terms of the process of secularization, which can be described simply as one in which religion loses its hold on the level both of institutions and of human consciousness. This is not the place to review the by-now immense literature on the causes, character, and historical course of secularization. But one point should be made here: At the very least, there is a close connection between secularization and the pluralization of plausibility structures. Nor are the reasons for this hard to understand. A religious worldview, just like any other body of interpretations of reality, is dependent upon social support. The more unified and reliable this support is, the more these interpretations of reality will be firmly established in consciousness.

The typical premodern society creates conditions under which religion has, for the individual, the quality of objective certainty; modern society, by contrast, undermines this certainty, de-objectifies it by

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robbing it of its taken-for-granted status, ipso facto subjectivizes religion. And this change, of course, is directly related to the transition from fate to choice: The premodern individual was linked to his gods in the same inexorable destiny that dominated most of the rest of his existence; modern man is faced with the necessity of choosing between gods, a plurality of which are socially available to him. If the typical condition of premodern man is one of religious certainty, it follows that that of modern man is one of religious doubt. Needless to say, this difference is not absolute. There were premodern individuals who struggled with religious doubt, as there are people today with unshaken religious convictions. The difference is one of, so to speak, frequency distributions.

The frequency of religious uncertainty in the modern situation, however, is so drastically greater that it is valid to embody it within a notion of typicality.

Whatever other causes there may be for modern secularization, it should be clear that the pluralizing process has had secularising effects in and of itself.

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The English word “heresy” comes from the Greek verb hairein, which means “to choose.” A hairesis originally meant, quite simply, the taking of a choice. A derived meaning is that of an opinion.

In the New Testament, as in the Pauline epistles, the word already has a specifically religious connotation—that of a faction or party within a wider religious community; the rallying principle of such a faction or party is the particular religious opinion that its members have chosen. Thus, in Galatians 5:20 the Apostle Paul lists “party spirit” (hairesis) along with such evils as strife, selfishness, envy, and drunkenness among the “works of the flesh.” In the later development of Christian ecclesiastical institutions, of course, the term acquired much more specific theological and legal meanings. Its etymology remains sharply illuminating.

For this notion of heresy to have any meaning at all, there was presupposed the authority of a religious tradition. Only with regard to such authority could one take a heretical attitude. The heretic denied this authority, refused to accept the tradition in toto. Instead, he picked and chose from the contents of the tradition, and from these pickings and choosings constructed his own deviant opinion. One may suppose that this possibility of heresy has always existed in human communities, as one may suppose that there have always been rebels and innovators. And, surely, those who represented the authority of a tradition must always have been troubled by the possibility. Yet the social context of this phenomenon has changed radically with the coming of modernity: In premodern situations there is a world of religious certainty, occasionally ruptured by heretical deviation. By contrast, the modern situation is a world of religious uncertainty, occasionally staved off by more or less precarious constructions of religious affirmation. Indeed, one could out this change even more sharply: For premodern man, heresy is a possibility—usually a rather remote one; for modern man, heresy typically becomes a necessity. Or again, modernity creates a new situation in which picking and choosing becomes an imperative.

Now, suddenly, heresy no longer stands out against a clear background of authoritative tradition. The background has become dim or even disappeared. As long as that background was still there, individuals had the possibility of not picking and choosing—they could simply surrender to the taken-for-granted consensus that surrounded them on all sides, and that is what most individuals did.

But now this possibility itself becomes dim or disappears: How can one surrender to a consensus that is socially unavailable? Any affirmation must first create the consensus, even if this can only be done in some quasi-sectarian community. In other

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words, individuals now must pick and choose.

Having done so, it is very difficult to forget the fact. There remains the memory of the deliberate construction of a community of consent, and with this a haunting sense of the constructedness of that which the community affirms. Inevitably, the affirmations will be fragile and this fragility will not be very far from consciousness….

The orthodox defines himself as living in a tradition; it is of the very nature of tradition to be taken for granted; this taken-for-grantedness, however, is continually falsified by the experience of living in a modern society. The orthodox must then present to himself as fate what he knows empirically to be a choice. This is a difficult feat.

It goes far to explain the attraction of such movements as that of Lubavitcher Hassidism, which constructs an artificial shtetl for its followers. The difference from the old shtetl is, quite simply, this: All the individual has to do to get out of his alleged Jewish destiny is to walk out and take the subway.

Outside, waiting, is the emporium of lifestyles, identities, and religious preferences that constitutes American pluralism. It is hard to believe that this empirical fact can be altogether pushed out of the consciousness by an individual reared in America, even if his conversion to a neotraditional existence has been intensely fervent. That existence, consequently, has a fragility that is totally alien to a genuinely traditional community.

The weight of the peculiarly American phrase “religious preference” may now have become apparent. It contains within itself the whole crisis into which pluralism has plunged religion. It points to a built-in condition of cognitive dissonance—and to the heretical imperative as a root phenomenon of modernity.

To sum up the argument thus far: Modernity multiplies choices and concomitantly reduces the scope of what it experiences as destiny. In the matter of religion, as indeed in other areas of human life and thought, this means that the modern individual is faced not just with the opportunity but with the necessity to make choices as to his beliefs.

This fact constitutes the heretical imperative in the contemporary situation. Thus, heresy, once the occupation of marginal and eccentric types, has become a much more general condition; indeed, heresy has become universalized. ■

From The Heretical Imperative by Peter L. Berger, copyright © 1979 by Peter L. Berger. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

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Interview with Tom Oden

Tom Oden on Paleo-Orthodoxy MR: Summarize for our readers your own movement from liberalism to evangelical Christianity.

TOM ODEN

Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Theology Drew University

TO: Once blown by every wind of doctrine and preoccupied with therapeutic fads and the ethos of hypertoleration, I came by grace to grasp the distinctive theological method of orthodoxy. I became fascinated with the hermeneutics of orthodoxy, the dynamics of apostolic tradition transmission, and with the received canons of consensual Christian teaching. Hypertolerationists began to notice that I was suffering fools a little less gladly.

Before meeting with the ancient Christian writers, I was seeking to live out my life mostly in accountability to contemporary academic peers and vulnerable institutions. Now a keen awareness of final judgment gives me an entirely different frame of reference for accountability.

The dogmatic liberal cocoon I am now squeezing myself out of is not a fabrication or projection. It is not a fantasy that I once was, in fact, a quixotic quasiMarxist, and before that a militant pacifist, and a psychotherapeutic camp-follower, a sober existentialist, and a zealous defender of women’s liberation for more than a decade after reading Betty Friedan in 1964. I have served my time in all those liberation armies.

That period of my life has an extensive record of activity and writing. It really did happen. I really do now repent. I am sorry for my misdeeds, my tenacious theological sins. I now reluctantly am convinced that my youthful form of bureaucratic ecumenism was anti-ecumenical, viewed from the standpoint of the ancient ecumenical tradition. I am not now demonizing these ideologies so much as recognizing the demonic in my own history, my own self. I have followed the curious steps of my once Communist then later conservative Jewish mentor Will Herberg in recognizing a fair amount of self-delusion and demonic deception in ideologies that once appeared seductive.

MR: What factors were involved in this change?

TO: A simple hermeneutical reversal: Before the mid-seventies I had been steadily asking questions on the hidden premise of four key value assumptions of modern consciousness: hedonic self-actualization, autonomous individualism, reductive naturalism, and moral relativism.

Now my questions about decaying modernity are being decisively shaped by the counter-premises of ancient consensual classic Christian exegetes.

Redemptive sacrifice; knowing through a worshiping community; theocentric reordering of values; absolute respect for absolute truth.

The history of Christianity is a history of exegesis whose best interpretations are offered by those who sought most simply to give voice to the already coherent mind of the believing community that preceded them in response to apostolic teaching. This is a profoundly socially grounded process within the worshiping community.

Before meeting these ancient Christian exegetes, I was prone to try to squeeze the biblical text into my modern presuppositions. I was apt to use the sacred text instrumentally, sporadically, and eisegetically to bolster and justify previously held modern ideological commitments.

After entering this great conversation with the classic exegetes, I learned to listen to the Scripture text from within the premises of the believing community. Now the Bible is framing human questions more deeply that I ever before could have imagined.

The consensual exegetes are no secret: Athanasius, Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, Chrysostom in the East, and Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great in the West. All were widely respected in the formation of ancient ecumenism.

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MR: In an issue of Christianity Today largely devoted to this debate over “open theism,” you issued what appeared to be the strongest warning. Despite close friendships with many of these writers, you were even willing to speak of “heresy.”

What’s at stake here and why are the stakes so high?

TO: On June 5, 1998, I wrote to William Hasker of Huntingdon College: “I have just read John Piper’s memorandum entitled ‘Thomas Oden’s Charge of Heresy Concerning the Denial of God’s Foreknowledge.’ What he is proposing is far beyond my intention in writing in the Christian Century. My intent was to argue that ‘The fantasy that God is ignorant of the future is a heresy that must be rejected on scriptural grounds.’ My intent was not to make charges concerning a particular highly complex situation I know nothing about, nor to become the instrument of those who might make such charges. I have written against church trials due to their tendency to become divisive and self-righteous and counterproductive. I know next to nothing about the controversy between Piper and Professor Boyd at Bethel College. I remain committed to irenic theology and the peace of the church. I regret that I have been brought into a conflict that requires patient dialogue and caring conversation. It is with charity that such conversation should proceed, as I tried to argue in that article: ‘If ‘reformists’ insist on keeping the boundaries of heresy open, however, they must be resisted with charity.’ That does not mean that ‘anything goes,’ but that the debate on divine foreknowledge as with other controverted questions ought to take place with civility, charity, and empathy.”

MR: Open theists often represent their position and themselves as Arminian. This is really an age-old contest between Arminians and Calvinists, we are told. Do you agree? Or is this beyond Arminianism?

TO: In writing The Transforming Power of Grace, I have attempted to set forth a mediating position between Dort and the Arminians. Before being simply categorized as “Arminian,” without further qualification, I would respectfully like serious colleagues in dialogue to recall or read that more nuanced argument.

It is true that many of the “open theists” identify themselves as Arminian. Understanding this identification can in part be viewed as a social location argument. For the institutional location of many of these spokespersons is somewhere in the WesleyanHoliness spectrum, or moving toward that direction. My own view is the mediating position I stated in The Transforming Power of Grace. I do not quarrel with those who for whatever reason identify themselves as Arminian, but for reasons clearly spelled

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out in that book, I do not prefer to be stereotyped in 17th and 18th century categories that bifurcate the more wholesome witness of the ancient church and the ancient ecumenical tradition.

MR: In its heyday, process theology was one of the trends you embraced. Could you pick out one or two glaring similarities and differences?

TO: No, I was never a very reliable process theologian. I could see from the outset its temptation to pantheism under the guise of panentheism, its inordinate indebtedness to the Enlightenment hegemony, its resistance to revelation, its easy coptation by faddism, its weak doctrine of Scripture. For these reasons, former colleagues such as Schubert M. Ogden and Don Browning and now colleagues like Catherine Keller have never thought of me, and rightly so, as a process theologian.

MR: Has the Bible been subverted by Greek philosophy in the traditional reading of God’s attributes?

TO: In my view the patristic writers subverted Greek philosophy. They occasionally used its rhetoric and categories, but never were the main patristic writers, with a few exceptions, subverted by Greek philosophy. This notion of the Bible being subverted by Greek philosophy is indebted to a very tendentious historical method that we see still asserted by the heir of Adolf von Harnack. In chapters two and three of The Living God I have presented a careful discussion of the traditional reading of God’s attributes, and for anyone interested in taking this reading seriously into consideration, I would recommend reviewing that argument, which is far beyond the scope of this interview. The locus classicus arguments are cited in those sections on “God’s Way of Knowing: Omniscience” and “Divine Foreknowledge.” Part Four of The Transforming Power of Grace, “On Predestination and the Permission of Recalcitrance” has two sections: “The Mystery of Foreknowing and Electing Grace,” and “Election Made Sure Through Faith.” There is nothing new in these arguments. The sources for these arguments are standard classical Christian sources. This is the mediating position I spoke of earlier, which is not simply “my own thinking” but more so what I understand to be consensually received in ancient ecumenical conciliar and patristic teaching.

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| Getting the Gospel Right: The Tie that Binds Evangelicals Together

How Can a Sinner Be Saved?

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his book is a sequel to R. C. Sproul’s Faith Alone: The Evangelical Doctrine of Justification

in 1999.

Those unfamiliar with this (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1995), which examined and critiqued the 1994 docu- ongoing dialogue may pick up this book expecting to ment entitled Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium. find something quite different from what it offers. It is Getting the Gospel Right has three parts. not an exposition of the Gospel structured around The first two chapters document the biblical exposition. Rather, it is a book that not recent dialogue between evangelicals only gives its readers a comprehensive grasp of the and Catholics. Chapter 1 expresses contemporary evangelical and Catholic dialogue Sproul’s deep concern for how but that also takes its readers on a guided tour “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” through the major theological disputes that (ECT) tended to cut the ties that had prompted the Reformation and the confessional bound evangelicals together before they resolutions that flowed from it. set out on a quest for unity with Roman The two documents stemming from the diaCatholics. The depth of his concern logues of ECT have largely bypassed evangelical about this unity emerges in chapter 2. laypeople. Consequently, Sproul’s book can Here he shows that the evangel—the inform those readers who have given little attenGospel that is the bond unifying evan- tion to the issue. Together, Faith Alone and Getting the gelicals—is at stake in this dialogue. Gospel Right narrow the knowledge gap for those After succinctly reviewing the etymolo- who have not kept pace with the ECT dialogue gy of the word “evangelical” and the history of the and the important issues it addresses. However, Getting the reformers’ recovery of the Gospel, Sproul identifies many may find Getting the Gospel Right to be ponderGospel Right: the crisis that the continuing dialogue brings. Sola ous, perhaps pedantic, in the sense of its involving The Tie that fide is at stake. Sproul believes this dialogue jeop- extraordinary attention to detail. The exacting and Binds ardizes the evangelical principle of justification by precise discussion may tax some readers’ patience.

But perseverance will reveal why many evangelical Evangelicals grace through faith alone.

Parts II and III unpack Sproul’s burden. Part II is leaders have been troubled by the recent evangeliTogether an exposé and critique of a second document writ- cal–Catholic rapprochement. Sproul is not resentten by the same group of evangelicals and ful of the idea of rapprochement itself. He is conby R. C. Sproul Catholics, the 1997 document entitled The “Gift of cerned, first, about the nature of the unity of faith Baker Book House, 1999.

Salvation” (GOS). Part III comments on an evan- that ECT and GOS achieved between evangelicals $16.99, 207 pages gelical response to GOS, namely, The Gospel of Jesus and Catholics. It leaves several “weighty theologiChrist: An Evangelical Celebration. Dispute over GOS cal matters” unresolved, including: (1) baptismal prompted members of the Alliance of Confessing regeneration; (2) the Eucharist; (3) sacramental Evangelicals (publisher of Modern Reformation) to grace; (4) the language of justification; and (5) voice concern. By way of response, some support- merit, reward, purgatory, and indulgences. ers and some rejecters of GOS began to dialogue, Second, and more significantly, the GOS does not which led to the drafting of The Gospel of Jesus Christ include the language of imputation.

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The GOS seeks to respond to the criticism of ECT, particularly from evangelicals, that ECT lacked any clear affirmation of justification by faith alone (sola fide). In the book’s second part, Sproul quotes the entire GOS document and comments on each paragraph. With keen and penetrating surgical precision, he shows that GOS still is deficient on this central doctrine. It particularly troubles him that The GOS’s affirmations and denials still leave room for Catholics to retain their church dogma concerning justification and yet endorse GOS. For example, he believes it does not expressly deny the possibility that humans can accrue merits before God, both works of satisfaction (condign merit) and works “fitting” for God to reward (congruous merit). At stake, of course, is not only the sufficiency of Christ’s satisfaction but also the forensic nature of justification and the ground or basis upon which God declares a sinner righteous.

The core of Sproul’s concern with GOS is the conspicuous absence of an affirmation of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness as the sole basis of our justification before God. With an incisiveness reminiscent of Martin Luther’s, Sproul argues that the reformers’ principal objection to Rome’s doctrine of justification concerned the ground of justification. Rome insisted that justification is based upon the infused righteousness of Christ, whereas the reformers contended that justification is grounded in Christ’s imputed righteousness. Thus, as Sproul reads GOS, the document’s failure to address whether the righteousness of Christ is infused or imputed means that it falls short at the same point as ECT, for apart from imputation justification is not sola fide. Yet Sproul’s exposition of The Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Evangelical Celebration in Part III reveals that his concern over sola fide goes beyond just affirming the forensic nature of justification and imputed righteousness.

In that part, Sproul insists that a proper articulation of the biblical Gospel extends beyond affirming that Jesus Christ’s righteousness satisfies both God’s justice and law, as the reformers held. Like the seventeenth-century Reformed theologians who discussed the subject of imputation in greater detail, Sproul also contends that the evangel binding evangelicals together necessarily affirms both Christ’s passive and active obedience. Christ’s passive obedience involved God imputing our sins to him and then Jesus passively enduring the punishment for them. This, Sproul argues, was necessary to satisfy God’s justice and the curse. However, in order for God to bless us by declaring us righteous, Christ had to merit the blessing, which he did by rendering perfect obedience to the law. So, Sproul

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argues, by his passive suffering Christ became our curse and by his active life of obedience under and to the law he became our righteousness. This precise definition of sola fide, of forensic justification, and of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness in terms of his active and passive obedience, is Sproul’s central burden in Getting the Gospel Right.

If we truly believe that we are to be “reformed and always reforming,” then we must recognize that each generation of believers will need to reaffirm the great truths of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Thus, we should receive theological challenges to the Gospel as God’s providential gift to the church to prompt us to be watchful and thoughtful in how we articulate the faith “once for all entrusted to the saints.” We must simultaneously conserve the truth of the Gospel (be “reformed”) and rigorously assess whether we have properly understood and expressed the Gospel of Jesus Christ (be “always reforming”). R. C. Sproul’s book is to be commended and welcomed because it contributes toward this sacred task of calling evangelicals to conserve the Reformed confessional statements and challenging contemporary expressions of the Gospel.

In Getting the Gospel Right, Sproul only addresses the dialogue that has been taking place between evangelicals and Catholics. Understandably, therefore, his book only hints at a number of in-house discussions among evangelical scholars that may be equally significant.

Prompted in part by ECT but mostly by two decades of seminars and published papers and books on Paul’s view of the Mosaic Law, evangelical exegetes and theologians continue to discuss Sproul’s principal concerns. These discussions show that not all evangelicals concur with Sproul’s clear position on Roman Catholic doctrine and also that some evangelicals, while concurring with neither ECT or GOS, wonder whether historic Protestantism, as faithfully articulated in Getting the Gospel Right, requires further revision in the light of continuing examination of some crucial biblical expressions and concepts. A few examples must suffice.

Paul’s expression, “the righteousness of God,” used several times in Romans, continues to beg for the kind of inquiry Martin Luther gave it long ago.

Does it mean “a righteousness from God” (Rom. 1:17, NIV) or “God’s righteousness” (as it does unambiguously in Romans 3:5, NIV)? How we read this phrase has implications for how we will articulate Paul’s understanding of the Gospel. Another contested expression of Paul’s is “the faith of Jesus Christ” (Rom. 3:22, KJV), found repeatedly in Romans and Galatians. Again, exegetes who cher-

ish and conserve the principal features of the Reformation disagree about its meaning. Many insist that it means “faith in Jesus Christ,” but others believe that it speaks of “Jesus Christ’s faithfulness” as the ground of our justification (comparable to Paul’s mention of Jesus Christ’s obedience in Rom. 5:19). Also on the table of exegetical discussion is whether justification is to be considered just one biblical metaphor among many—one depicting a forensic aspect of God’s salvation even as other biblical metaphors picture other aspects of salvation. Does the multiform richness of biblical imagery portraying God’s salvation become obscured if systematic theology focuses on the forensic metaphor as paramount? And what about the already and not yet dimensions of salvation?

Evangelicals properly believe that justification is already ours by faith (Rom. 5:1). Yet several Scriptures seem to orient justification to the future (e.g., Matt 12:36–37; Gal. 5:5). How should we integrate these texts with those that depict justification as already ours by faith? Finally, some biblical theologians wonder whether the seventeenthcentury formulation of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness in terms of his active and passive obedience is expressly to be found in Scripture or is only to be inferred from it.

Biblical scholars who desire to conserve the reformers’ insights are thus striving to advance our understanding of the Gospel by continuing to examine the Scriptures. To this end, many of them have offered fresh proposals concerning these issues. Thus, it would be wrong to conclude that Getting the Gospel Right is the final word for our generation’s task of “always reforming.” And surely Sproul does not intend to terminate evangelical inquiry into the nature of the Gospel or the quest to clearly and thoughtfully articulate his principal concerns: the nature of sola fide, of justification, and of imputation. Getting the Gospel Right is provocative but not definitive. It outlines the issues and concerns for evangelical discussion well without closing that discussion. Rather, it establishes that faithfulness to the evangel must preserve sola fide, forensic justification, and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness as central features of the Gospel even as we continue our ongoing task of “reforming” what we confess in the light of the Scriptures.

Ardel B. Caneday Associate Professor of Biblical Studies Northwestern College Saint Paul, Minnesota

SHORT NOTICES How Now Shall We Live?

by Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey Tyndale House, 1999 $19.99 (paper), 592 pages Those who worried about Charles Colson’s diplomacy with Catholics in “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” can at least appreciate the cultural outline and apologetical aid he and Nancy Pearcey here offer. For they have written a book that is clearly influenced by the Reformed tradition of Abraham Kuyper, which is both its strength and its weakness.

Their book offers a critique of contemporary secular thought, coupled with a “cultural apologetic” for Christianity. They argue that the biblical “worldview” corresponds with reality, as individuals and society must actually live in it, in a way that competing worldviews do not. Conversely, the various secular substitutions for Christianity—from Darwinism and Marxism to the New Age and sexual liberation movements—have all been colossal failures.

The book offers a lucid explanation and application of worldview criticism. It shows how secular ideologies are essentially religious in that they set forth some doctrine of creation (the nature of reality and how it came to be), the fall (why we have the problems we have), redemption (how we are to be saved), and restoration (how we should then live).

Colson and Pearcey apply this template in illuminating ways. We see, for example, how Carl Sagan, for all of his naturalism, was reduced to hoping for redemption from extraterrestrial life forms, who, he believed, would give us earthlings information as to how to solve our problems “of food shortages, population growth, energy supplies, dwindling resources, pollution, and war.” The sex guru Wilhelm Reich articulated what was, in effect, a gospel of sex, calling the orgasm “man’s only salvation, leading to the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.” The whole train of social engineers, utopians, and ideologues, which has afflicted the world for the last few centuries, comes across as childishly naive, achieving not an earthly paradise after all, but ruin and misery and despair.

Christianity, in contrast, offers a worldview that human beings can actually live by, and its doctrines of creation, fall, and redemption have enormous cultural implications. The authors give interesting accounts of the new “intelligent design” theories, which bolster the view that the universe is not random after all. Anecdotes from Mr. Colson’s prison ministry show that Christ’s redemption does transform lives, sometimes in dramatic ways. There are other examples of Christians exerting a positive

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influence on the secular world.

The book is highly popularized, with lots of semifictional stories to dramatize its arguments.

These make it less than academic, but the targeted audience is general churchgoers, who will think they are learning a lot.

But the book itself contains not just a worldview but a theological view. The authors cite Kuyper approvingly when they say that “the dominating principle of Christian truth is not soteriological (i.e., justification by faith) but rather cosmological (i.e., the sovereignty of the triune God over the whole cosmos, in all its spheres and kingdoms, visible and invisible).” Christians, they say, “are to fulfill both the great commission and the cultural commission. We are commanded both to preach the Good News and to bring all things into submission to God’s order.”

The reformers insisted that justification by faith is the article of Christian doctrine by which the Church stands or falls. If cosmology—or cultural activism or bringing things into submission to God’s sovereignty—becomes more dominant, then human works take center stage over Christ’s work.

We are soon back to a religion of Law rather than one of Gospel, to a this-worldly, cultural, even political religion, as opposed to Christ’s Kingdom of Heaven.

If God is truly sovereign, then he reigns already.

True, human beings are rebelling against his secular Kingdom, as well as against his spiritual Kingdom; and they are paying the costs, as this book shows. But Christ did not die to effect cultural reform. He died to redeem us for a Kingdom that, unlike the best of earthly cultures, will never pass away.

Kuyper was not only a theologian but a statesman who—as the editor of a political newspaper, head of a national political party, representative to the Dutch parliament, and Dutch Prime Minister—led The Netherlands, about one hundred years ago, into a number of social reforms, all motivated by his Christian worldview. Yet one of my friends who recently returned from The Netherlands told me that the place where Kuyper once lived is now occupied by one of the drug houses that the Dutch have legalized, just as they have legalized prostitution and euthanasia. Even Christian empires pass away.

Certainly Christians are to be active in their cultural vocations—and this book shows what that can look like—but these vocations must never become confused with or exalted over the Good News of their justification by Christ.

This book shows that Mr. Colson is still influenced by a particular Reformed tradition. But if, as

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Kuyper says, justification is secondary to the cultural mandate, it suddenly becomes clear how Mr. Colson and other evangelicals could make peace with Rome over the doctrine of justification in pursuit of the seemingly more important goal of Christianizing the culture.

Yet the most powerful parts of this book are the accounts of people delivered from legalistic cults, abortionists whose hearts are changed, and— marking the genuine achievements of Mr. Colson’s prison ministry—hardened criminals whose lives have been transformed by the forgiveness of Christ. In other words, the most powerful parts of this book have to do precisely with the effects in human lives of emphasizing the truth that sinful human beings are justified by faith.

Gene Edward Veith Professor of Humanities Concordia University Mequon, Wisconsin

Still Sovereign: Contemporary Perspectives on Election, Foreknowledge, and Grace

by Thomas R. Schreiner and Bruce A. Ware, eds.

Baker Books, 2000 $19.99 (paper), 356 pages This is an abridged edition of Schreiner and Ware’s The Grace of God, the Bondage of the Will (Baker Books, 1995). That earlier work was in some sense a response to two books edited by Clark Pinnock, Grace Unlimited (Minneapolis: Bethany, 1975) and The Grace of God, the Will of Man: A Case for Arminianism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1989). The earlier book, which is now out-of-print, came in two volumes with four parts: Biblical Analyses, Pastoral Reflections, Historical Perspectives, and Theological/Philosophical Issues. This abridgement has three parts: Biblical Analyses, Theological Issues, and Pastoral Reflections. All of the biblical analyses from the earlier edition are retained as are all of the pastoral reflections. What is missing are three philosophical essays and four historical perspectives.

Even in this abridgement, this is still the best collection of essays available on its subject. The topic is even more timely, given the growing popularity of open theism. Now we need, more than anything else, careful biblical analysis; so Schreiner and Ware have made the right choices in what to

keep. These essays make the case for God’s “full omniscience, omnipotence, splendor, greatness, supremacy, rulership, and unqualified lordship” even as they stress that this does not rule out human responsibility. “The bondage of the will…does not mean that fallen humans possess no will or are incapable in any absolute sense to exercise that will. Rather, it means that whenever and wherever they do use their will, they are bound to use it for sinful purposes. They are, then, ‘bound’ to sin, though the choice of which sin is theirs to make.”

If you or someone you know is tempted to think that open theism is making a cogent biblical case, this book should go a long way toward showing that classical Christian theism is still the more biblical option.

Sanders, “Historical Considerations,” The Openness of God, op.cit., 60. 6John Sanders, The God Who Risks (Wheaton, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 35. 7Adolph Harnack, History of Dogma, translated from third German edition by Neil Buchanan, vol. 1 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1902), 17. 8James Barr, “The Old Testament and the New Crisis of Biblical Authority,” Interpretation (January 1971), vol. XXV, no.

1, 24–40. He writes,

The purging of this Greek thought and rethinking in Hebrew categories would, it was supposed, revivify the whole corpus of Christian thinking and enable its content to be made relevant for the modern world; for—it was, rather vaguely, supposed—the Hebrew way of thinking had much in common with modern trends in science, in psychology, and in history; and it was the presence of Greek elements in traditional Christianity which had caused blockages of communication.

Mark R. Talbot Associate Professor of Philosophy Wheaton College Wheaton, IL

Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, vol. 1 (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian

9

and Reformed, 1992), 16.

Westminster Confession of Faith, I.6, The Book of

10

Confessions (Louisville: PCUSA General Assembly, 1991). 11Cornelius Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1969), 41.

Herman Bavinck, The Doctrine of God, translated and edited by William Hendriksen

12

(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1977), 114. 13Otto Weber, Foundations of Dogmatics, vol. 1, translated by Darrell L. Guder (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1981),

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405.

Turretin, op.cit., 206.

14

Roger Olson, “Post-Conservative Evangelicals,”

15

Christian Century (May 3, 1995), 480-484. 16The Definition of Chalcedon, from Creeds of the Churches, 3rd ed., edited by John E. Leith (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982), 36.

Ex Auditu by John Muether John Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews (Grand Rapids: Baker,

1

Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1946), 390-

17

1.. 18Ibid., 392. 19Otto Weber, op.cit., 422.

1979), 53. 2 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 124. 3J. Gresham Machen, “The Creeds and Doctrinal Advance,” in God Transcendent (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1982), 160-61. 4Geerhardus Vos, Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation: The Shorter Writings of Geerhardus Vos, edited by Richard B. Gaffin, Jr. (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1980), 425. 5Ibid., 426. 6From the hymn, “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded.”

The Fine Art of Wine Making by FitzSimons Allison See Craig M. Gay, The Way of the (Modern) World, or Why It’s Tempting To Live As If God Doesn’t

1

Exist (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans; Carlisle, Cumbria: Paternoster Press, 1998), 13–14, 18–24. 2Martin Malia, Times Literary Supplement (March 27, 1998). 3Gerhard Forde, Speaking the Christian God (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1992), 114. 4See, e.g., Calvin’s Institutes, Book I. 5Alisdair C. MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1990). 6Robert Erickson, “Psychology of SelfEsteem: Promise or Peril”? in The Journal of Pastoral Care (Spring 1987). 7Martin Luther, Bondage of the Will, trans. J. I. Packer and O. R. Johnston (London: J. Clarke, 1957). 8St. Augustine, “Posse non peccare or non posse peccare,” City of God, Bk. XXII, Chap. XXX. 9James Pike, A Time for Christian Candor (New York: Harper and Row, 1964). 10Ibid., 124.

The Pelagian Captivity of the Church by R. C. Sproul J. I. Packer and O. R. Johnston, “Introduction” to The Bondage of the Will (Old Tappan, NJ:

1

Fleming Revell, 1957), 59–60. 2Ibid.

A Vulnerable God Apart from Christ by Michael Horton Richard Rice, “Biblical Support for a New Perspective,” The Openness of God, ed. Clark

1

Pinnock et.al. (Wheaton, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 15. 2Richard Rice, op.cit., 51.

For instance, Richard Rice makes this a central assumption in his concise volume, God’s

3

Foreknowledge and Man’s Free Will (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany, 1985). 4Ibid., 10. 5John

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Contending for the Faith

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eading Iain Murray’s latest book, Evangelicalism Divided: A Record involved of Crucialno Change longer in believe that we must confess Jesus’ name to be saved. the Years 1950 to 2000 (Banner of Truth, 2000), drives home the need for The usdetails to remain of Murray’s story are important. But what is the underlying error? willing “to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the Scripture saints” (Jude tells 3).us that “faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching Murray chronicles how certain well-intentioned of Christ” (Rom. 10:17). These evangelicals were efforts to widen Evangelicalism’s influence in both right to want to get the widest possible audience England and America have tended to result in the for their message since its proclamation is the loss of a clear Gospel witness. Names aren’t means by which God does his work in our world. important here since I’m not trying to assign blame. But the Evangelical message either is or isn’t God’s What is important is assessing a bad strategy. revelation. If it is, then it must be proclaimed as About the mid-century, lots of evangelicals became such so that those who hear it know that they are worried about their lack of impact. Murray focuses on being confronted with a choice—will they accept the strategy adopted by one American evangelistic that this is what God himself, through his faithful organization and one segment of the Evangelical party messengers, is proclaiming to them?

MARK R. TALBOT Acts makes it clear that proclaiming this in the Anglican church. Both decided to get a wider hearing by making some peace with nonevangelicals. message faithfully is inevitably divisive. Indeed, it Associate Professor The price of this peace was that the evangelicals had is supposed to be. For the proclamation of this of Philosophy to quit stressing their differences with Christianity’s message is the means by which God calls those he Wheaton College other branches. They had to be friendly and collegial. has saved out of humanity’s sinful mass (see Acts They had to concede that theirs was just one more 2:40; 11:19–21; 13:38–48). It plays a necessary outlook on the issues. As one key Evangelical player part in how God goes about setting apart those who explained it at a conference in 1965, times were such are his own (see Acts 8:26–39; 18:9–11; 26:15–20).

Contending for the faith once delivered—laying it that all theological convictions were being regarded as relative, but evangelicals could have their say as long out in enough detail for its claims to be clear (see Acts as it was clear that they understood they were just 17:1–4, 17; 20:25–27), arguing for its truth (see Acts contributing their insight.

6:8–10; 19:8), opposing those who gainsay it (see Acts The goal was clearly “cooperation without 7:51–53; 18:5–6; 20:28–31) and warning and pleading compromise.” The evangelicals involved didn’t with those who will listen (see Acts 2:40; 20:31)—is an intend to give up their basic convictions; they just essential part of proclaiming the Gospel. It clarifies the wanted to find a way to speak those convictions to boundaries of true and saving faith. Consequently, any a wider audience. If making this kind of peace was strategy that requires or encourages us to back away the price for getting that opportunity, then wasn’t it from necessary controversy is ultimately unfaithful. worth paying? The results could be left up to God. Contending for the faith is not easy or pleasant. It is Murray shows that the real price was much higher. often done at great personal cost (see Acts 5:40; It was that it became impossible to contend for the 7:57–60; 13:49–50; 16:22–24). Yet if we are unwilling Gospel. From the start, the strategy required that the to be contentious when true faithfulness requires it, nonevangelicals’ assessment of themselves as real then we are unwilling to be the instruments by which Christians remain publicly uncontested. As time has God does his saving work. passed, it has led to a retreat from more and more biblical doctrines. In fact, some of the evangelicals

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