Not only our liberty but our duty...

"One thing is clear to us, we cannot be expected to meet in any union which comprehends those whose teachings on fundamental points is exactly the reverse of that which we hold dear. Cost what it may, to separate ourselves from those who separate themselves from the truth of God is not alone our liberty but our duty.”



“Separation from such as connive at fundamental error, or withhold the ‘Bread of life’ from perishing souls, is not schism, but only what truth, and conscience, and God require of all who would be found faithful.”

- Charles Spurgeon

Guarding the flock IS loving the flock

From Martin Downes:

One aspect of the demands of love is the guarding of the sheep from the danger of error. Heresy has a siren's voice and the devil uses its sweet sound to lure the Church away from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. A false Christ, who can never be the proper object of our affections, can never make the new Eve fruitful in the world (2 Cor. 11:24). That is why heresy is destructive, it cannot produce spiritual fruit, there is no power in it to bring a new creation.

Pastors, elders, the demands of love require you to protect the Church from heresies, even when people will call you unloving for criticizing the views of others. To do so, in our age, may well be called unloving, for our age has confused tolerance with love, but the insult is ill judged.

Protecting the Church from error is a loving act, and, therefore, it must be done with the appropriate affections. We are not to love a fight, we are to fight because we are motivated by love.

Read the entire post HERE.

Encouraging God's People Through Exposing Error

"Now a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria, came to Ephesus. He was an eloquent man, competent in the Scriptures. He had been instructed in the way of the Lord. And being fervent in spirit, he spoke and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus, though he knew only the baptism of John. He began to speak boldly in the synagogue, but when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him and explained to him the way of God more accurately. And when he wished to cross to Achaia, the brothers encouraged him and wrote to the disciples to welcome him. When he arrived, he greatly helped those who through grace had believed, for he powerfully refuted the Jews in public, showing by the Scriptures that the Christ was Jesus."
- Acts 18:24-28

There are times when polemics are necessary. This of course is often unpopular in the church because it feels "mean" to modern sensibilities. "Let's just say what we believe," it is reasoned. "There's no need to point out another's error." It would be nice I suppose if we never needed to identify errors. It would be nice if there were no errors to refute. But one of the ways the apostles served God's people was through polemic - speaking out against specific errors. Indeed, much of the Bible itself is polemic.

In our own day, when competing truth claims often sit side-by-side, it has become essential for sermons, statements of faith, and the like to contain both affirmations and denials.

Does the Bible Err?

* I have changed the original title of this post because, upon further reflection I decided it was a bit snotty.


One of the important functions of the pastor is to identify error. The church is constantly confronted with preaching, teaching, and literature that leads many of God's people into error. One book that has garnered much attention in recent days is Kenton Sparks' God's Word in Human Words. I do not know Dr. Sparks (Professor of Biblical Studies at Eastern University) but I am sure he is a fine man. His book however should trouble anyone who believes the Bible to be the Word of God.





Andy Naselli has posted some helpful thoughts on Dr. Sparks' book.

Sparks uncritically accepts critical views and is overconfident in his conclusions while severely criticizing evangelicals like D. A. Carson, Robert Yarbrough, Kevin Vanhoozer, and James Hoffmeier. Sparks takes the debate beyond Peter Enns’s Inspiration and Incarnation. The book’s subtitle should not include the word “evangelical”: God’s Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation
of Critical Biblical Scholarship.

More reviews of this book are forthcoming. (For example, look for one by Robert Yarbrough in the next issue of Themelios.) Here are a couple of others already published:

1. The enthusiastic RBL review by Arthur Boulet, an M.A. student at Westminster Theological Seminary and an ardent supporter of Peter Enns, is sad. A sharp friend of mine who is working on a PhD elsewhere emailed me this after reading it: “This
review makes me want to cry. May God grant grace.”

2. The review by Kevin Bauder is a breath of fresh air in comparison.

Updates:

1. S. M. Baugh reviewed Sparks’s book for Reformation21 in August 2008.

2. Gary L. W. Johnson comments on Sparks’s book in the introduction to Reforming or Conforming: Post-Conservative Evangelicals and the Emerging Church (ed. Gary L. W. Johnson and Ronald L. Gleason; Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), 23n21:

Sparks in particular paints contemporary defenders of inerrancy in very unflattering colors. Old Testament scholars such as R. K. Harrison, Gleason Archer, and E. J. Young are accused of sticking their heads in the sand to avoid dealing with the real issues raised by critical Old Testament scholars (133ff ) while New Testament scholars such as D. A. Carson and Douglas Moo are said to be guilty of deliberately dodging the issues of New Testament critics (167). Even greater disdain is heaped on Carl Henry, who had the misfortune of simply being a theologian and not a biblical scholar (138). However, the most reprehensible aspect of Sparks’s work is the facile labeling of all defenders of inerrancy as Cartesian foundationalists. Sparks declares Cornelius Van Til, and his presuppositional apologetics, to be Cartesian because Van Til underscored the importance of certainty, which to Sparks’s way of thinking automatically makes one a Cartesian (45). If that is the case, then we must place not only the Reformers and the church fathers in that category, but Christ and the apostles as well! Van Til was no Cartesian. His apologetical approach was rooted in classic Reformed theology, especially in the Dutch tradition of Kuyper and Bavinck, stretching back to the noted Dutch Protestant scholastic Peter Van Mastricht (1630–1706), who was an outspoken critic of all things Cartesian. As Richard Muller notes, “Mastricht’s consequent stress on the necessity of revelation for Christian theology (theology defined as ‘living before God in and through Christ’ or as the wisdom leading to that end) led to an adamant resistance to Cartesian thought with its method of radical doubt and its insistence on the primacy of autonomy of the mind in all matters of judgment.” Richard Muller, “Giving Direction to Theology: The Scholastic Dimension,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 28 (June 1985), 185.

Read Andy's entire post HERE.





The theory of the seminarian in one generation will become the theory of the church in the next.