Doubting Darwin

Eric Metaxas recently interviewed Dr. Stephen Meyer on his Socrates In The City. Dr. Meyer is the author of the excellent Darwin's Doubts.

Defending the Faith

Mortification of Spin

Check out the latest edition of Mortification of Spin: Bully Pulpit.

Carl Trueman, Todd Pruitt, and Aimee Byrd are back at it, and doing what they do best: tear down your preconceived notions and build up Gospel truths in their place. This time they take on Christmas, and discuss the utter amazing truth of Jesus' incarnation. The trio try their best to cover this hugely important topic in a short amount of time. How do we understand the connection between Jesus' humanity and his deity? What are some good resources in helping to understand this doctrine? What's Carl's favorite Christmas song?

 

For your edification...

For decades, Ligonier Ministries has been producing excellent resources for that space between Seminary and Sunday School. Their latest is an upgrade to their RefNet site. It's called RefNet 2.0 and functions as a "24 hour Christian internet radio."

My Top Books From This Year

Over at Ref21 I have posted my favorite books from this year.

A Sign of the Apocalypse?

Carl Trueman and Scott McKnight agree on something!

Actually, I was not surprised. Dr. McKnight has written an excellent piece on Christian publishing and recent peculiar events concerning a certain evangelebrity.

It's good to be a Presbyterian

Mark Jones, author if the recently published Antinomianism, has written a helpful article entitled "Why You Should Be a Presbyterian." If you are a Presbyterian you ought to read it to be reminded of the distinctives of Presbyterianism. If you are not a Presbyterian, then read with care. Your mind may change.

Jones writes:

What mechanism is in place to protect and build up the unity of the visible church if congregationalism is accepted? False teaching destroys unity, but the mechanism for dealing with false teaching under congregational ecclesiology is left to the congregation itself. Particular congregations need the protection of other congregations, just as pastors need the protection and (sometimes) discipline of other pastors. It's good that my congregation can appeal to my presbytery if my teaching becomes suspect and the elders and I refuse to see my problem. That other elders can have authority over matters of doctrine in our church is our strength, not a weakness—for they may provide a more objective assessment of the problem in question (Prov. 11:14).

Moreover, in many congregational churches it's entirely possible for the Calvinistic minister to leave, only to be replaced by an Arminian one. Presbyterians have mechanisms for preventing such a drastic shift. I've learned a lot from my congregational friend Hunter Powell (the leading scholar of Puritan ecclesiology today), such as how much the Congregationalists needed the state to regulate true religion in the hope of achieving ecclesiastical unity. With today's separation of church and state, however, congregationalists have no such recourse for establishing wider church unity. And so one of the flaws of congregational ecclesiology is its crass independency and inability to regulate true religion on wide scale. Presbyterianism has a better mechanism in place to deal with false religion and establish true religion (such as the Westminster Confession of Faith).

Guy Waters observes, "Presbyterianism is essential to the well-being (bene esse) but not to the essence (esse) of the church. Non-acceptance of Presbyterianism is, therefore, no barrier to receiving a non-Presbyterian person as a Christian, or a non-Presbyterian church as a true branch of the church, provided that he in fact holds fast the only Head of the church, Jesus Christ." Thus, in the PCA we welcome any who are Christians as a regular member in our church, even if they are an anti-paedobaptist. If someone belongs to Christ we have no grounds for barring him or her from visible communion in Christ's body. Our desire for unity—objectified in our terms for membership—is our glory and Christ's glory (John 17:20-22), and this glory is best realized in the form of government known as Presbyterianism.

Read the entire article HERE.

Is God's law relevant to Christians?

From J.I. Packer's introduction to Antinomianism by Mark Jones:

Antinomians among the Reformed have always seen themselves as reacting in the name of free grace against a hangover of legalistic, works-based bondage in personal discipleship. Characteristically, they have affirmed, not that the Mosaic law, under which Jesus lived and which was basic to his own moral teaching, does not after all state God's true standards for human living, but that it and its sanctions have no direct relevance to us once we have closed with Christ. Distinctive to Reformed theology from its birth has been its insistence that salvation, both relationally in justification and transformationally in sanctification, is ours entirely by virture of our grace-given union with Christ in his death and resurrection -- a union that God the Holy Spirit creates and sustains. Within this biblical framework, the key error of antinomianism in all its forms has been to treat our union with Christ as involving in effect some degree of personal absorption into Christ, such that the law as a voice from God no longer speaks to us or of us directly. From this starting point, the phalanx of antinomian teachers has spread out, celebrating different aspects of the assured confidence and joy in Christ that this supposedly biblical move of muzzling the law is thought to have opened for us.

Sunday's Sermon

On Sunday I preached from John 1:1-14. The message is entitled "The Word Became Flesh" and can be listened to HERE.

Reformed University Fellowship

Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) is coming to James Madison University. For years, many have prayed for RUF to come to JMU, Virginia's second largest university. Now it appears that the Lord is answering those prayers. In 2014 Reformed University Fellowship will be coming to JMU. At Covenant Presbyterian Church we are especially enthusiastic about this since JMU is such a significant part of our community. We look forward to the many students who will be discipled through this excellent ministry.

RUF will have a special place in the heart of Covenant Presbyterian not only for our proximity to JMU but because the director will be our own Joe Slater. Joe is an ordained Teaching Elder in the PCA and a pastor at Covenant Presbyterian Church. Although the Cov Pres staff hate that we will not be seeing Joe on a daily basis, we nevertheless are thrilled about his coming leadership at the JMU RUF! If you have a child considering JMU or are a student at JMU, you will want to find out more.

You can learn more about RUF, contact Joe Slater, and find opportunities to help HERE.

Christmas Reading

If I am a good boy, I am counting on Santa bringing me the following two books for Christmas:

From Heaven He Came And Sought Her

“This book is formidable and persuasive. Those familiar with the terrain will recognize that the editors know exactly the key issues and figures in this debate. And none of the authors who follow disappoint. The tone is calm and courteous, the scholarship rigorous and relentless, the argument clear and compelling. This penetrating discussion takes into account the major modern academic criticisms of definite atonement (Barth, the Torrances, Armstrong, Kendall, and others) as well as more popular critiques (Clifford, Driscoll and Breshears). An impressive team of scholars adorns this subject and aims to help Christians toward a deeper gratitude to God for his grace, a greater assurance of salvation, a sweeter fellowship with Christ, stronger affections in their worship of him, more love for people and superior courage and sacrifice in witness and service, and indeed to propel us into the global work of missions with compassion and confidence.”
– J. Ligon Duncan, Chancellor and John E. Richards Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary, Jackson, MS

Living By Revealed Truth: The Life and Pastoral Theology of Charles Haddon Spurgeon

"What Nettles makes plain is that for Spurgeon, all theology is pastoral theology. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It should be widely distributed by all who love the gospel of God's grace that Spurgeon preached. Every pastor, ministerial student and those who work to train men for the ministry should carefully learn from the life and labors of Charles Haddon Spurgeon as Tom Nettles elucidates them. Nearly everyone who knows of Spurgeon admires him for his great accomplishments. Nettles helps us understand the theological underpinnings of those accomplishments. In doing so, the author, like his subject, has served the church well.
– Tom Ascol, Pastor, Grace Baptist Church, Cape Coral, Florida

On Plagiarism and Celebrity

In light of recent events, Neil Cole has offered some helpful thoughts on an evangelical culture that values celebrity. He writes:

We have a church celebrity culture that actually encourages plagiarism and often refuses to admit it. Entire books are written by ghostwriters who are never mentioned. While this is seemingly acceptable in our current Christian climate, one must ask if it should be. If your name is on the front cover (and often your smiling face), and you didn't write the book but someone else did, you have questionable integrity. Honesty is not possible when you take credit for a book someone else wrote. No matter how good the content, such a book should be held suspect. This has gone on for decades now and as long as the contract is clear and the check is written all is fine...or is it? I've heard of personal stories from a ghostwriter's childhood that have been used by an author who then changed names to fit his own background and published the story as if he had the experience. This is not merely plagiarism, it is straight up lying; even if the ghostwriter is paid what the contract stipulated. Can we buy a life story for publication? Is that what we have come to? Why are some pressured to this point?

To build one's success as a Christian celebrity on lies is folly and will not be fruitful in the end. In fact fame itself is fickle and can be gone in a moment. It demands all your attention immediately just to keep your Klout score up and your blog traffic coming. The race to collect twitter followers and Facebook friends is cruel and never satisfied. When your book sells well and is featured in Barnes and Noble there is always another book that sold better and is featured at Walmart or Costco...upping the ante. When you are invited to speak at a big conference, you feel good until you realize someone else is speaking in the prime slot and you're just the warm-up act. No matter how far up you climb the ladder of fame there is always somebody's backside your are looking up at. Fame is a race that doesn't have a finish line, it just has lots of people running and falling back––and eventually out––while younger energetic people jump onto the track...until they too fall behind. No one wins in this race. That is a lot of pressure to put on someone who is already busy running a church, and many are trying to do just that.

Read the entire post HERE.

Too Big To Fail?

On the latest edition of Mortification of Spin: Bully Pulpit (our 15 minute bi-weekly podcast) Carl Trueman, Aimee Byrd, and yours truly weigh in on some current goings on in the evangelical sub-culture. Specifically we discuss the possibility that the neo-Reformed movement has failed to uphold standards of ethics and accountability for its big shots.

Sunday's Sermon

On Sunday I wrapped up our series through Ruth with part five. It is entitled "There Is A Redeemer" and may be listened to HERE.

I Blame His Church

The evangelical circus may be making an addition to their increasingly grotesque sideshow. Apparently, the world needs another reality show. Ed Young Jr. of Fellowship Church in Grapevine, TX is in talks with a major network to bring his big life to the small screen.

While Ed Young Jr. is a grown man and fully responsible for his decisions, I nevertheless blame his church for this latest publicity stunt. You may remember that Ed and his wife Lisa have made headlines in recent years for things like the week long sex challenge they gave their church, the 24 hour bed-in on the roof of Fellowship Church, and the controversy surrounding their lavish lifestyle. All of this would be a bit more understandable if Fellowship Church were an independent word/faith congregation a' la Kenneth Copeland. But Fellowship Church is a member of the Southern Baptist Convention.

 I understand that things happen gradually, but didn't any of the controversies (24 hour bed-in on the church's roof, the mansion by the lake, the partnerships with prosperity preachers, the million dollar condo in Miami, the private jet, the unaccountable board) merit a rebuke from his congregation? Ed Young did not become Ed Young Inc. without the permission of his church.

I offer the following observations in hopes that other churches will not follow Fellowship Church's example:

1. Fellowship Church should not have allowed their pastor to embrace prosperity preachers.
Fellowship Church should have done something when Pastor Ed embraced prosperity preachers like T.D. Jakes and the Houstons of Hillsong Church. These relationships seem to have only emboldened Ed to further his embrace of certain aspects of prosperity teaching.

2. Fellowship Church should not have allowed their pastor to appoint his own board of directors.
Fellowship Church has a strange and dangerous system of government. The men to whom Pastor Ed reports, the men who set his salary, are appointed by him. They are mega-church pastors from other churches living in different states. Ed should never have exploited his church in such a self-serving way. But Fellowship Church should never have allowed it.

3. Fellowship Church should not have made their pastor wealthy.
To be sure, church's are called to take care of those elders who labor in preaching and teaching. My own denomination admonishes churches to care for their pastor's financial needs so that he is not distracted from his calling by the cares of the world. But providing responsibly for a pastor so that he can afford a home and send his children to college is not the same as burdening his soul with an excess of material wealth. Scripture makes it clear that wealth, while not inherently sinful, does present a particular form of temptation that many cannot not find tolerable. Riches are dangerous for the pastor. Just as too little money can burden him, so too will great wealth. There is also the pastoral consideration of a church making its pastor wealthier than 95% of his congregation. We pastors are sinful creatures and we need our brothers and sisters to help us. Riches are a great temptation to any human soul. A church should not tempt their pastor to sin by paying him too little or too much.

4. Fellowship Church should not have allowed their pastor to become an exhibitionist.
One of the justifications Pastor Ed is offering for the proposed reality show is, "I don't mind showing anybody anything." Frankly, this mystifies me. There ought to be all manner of things in our lives that we don't want broadcast into millions of homes. I'm not suggesting that pastors should have hidden lives of shame. God forbid! But what happened to the idea of modesty? Is there any value in privacy anymore? I suppose in our celebrity saturated culture exhibitionism is simply the job description for the reality TV wannabe. But a pastor ought to have more wisdom than this.

So is it fair of me to blame Fellowship Church for its pastor's behavior? I believe so. They made a bargain that they now have to live with. They agreed to allow their pastor to be a celebrity (perhaps encouraged it) so long as he treated them like spectators in his own show.

I close with a description of a typical Sunday at one of Fellowship Church's new satellite locations (a Southern Baptist congregation):

Church happens inside a theater with plush leather stadium seats. As approximately 50 congregants trickle in — hipster dads with Sunday-morning stubble and retro eyeglasses, women in designer jeans with their hair pulled into ponytails — an extended remix of Justin Timberlake’s “Suit & Tie” thumps through the sound system. (The church embraces secular music.) The house music fades. A band in front begins a set of contemporary songs, some with vaguely spiritual lyrics. The leader of this morning’s service is 32-year-old Landon Pickering, whose title at Fellowship is global youth pastor. He is also the pastor at this branch and at the church’s downtown Dallas location. Pickering (he goes by “l_pick” on Instagram) welcomes the crowd with enthusiasm. They hand it back. Pickering has movie-star looks, tatts on his arms and speaks in a sort of urban dialect. He is also dating his boss’s eldest daughter, LeeBeth Young, 27, who works in communications and video for the church and is on hand this morning to help out.

The screen darkens. A video with better special effects than most Syfy channel shows begins. It depicts a set of bones magically being enveloped in tendons, then flesh, then skin, until a whole man — naked and ripped, but shown in chaste tight shots — stands upright. Music swells. Cross-dissolve. Ed Young is now on-screen, live, at the Grapevine church, flanked by two medical-supply skeletons. The hashtag for today’s sermon and the handles of Ed’s Twitter and Instagram accounts remain posted in the screen’s lower corner. Want to accept Christ into your life at the end of the service? Hit #32898 on your smartphone and ushers will assist. Young wears a black hoodie with shiny zippers, snug rust-colored pants and chunky lace-up black boots. Later that morning, for the 11:30 service at the mother church, he will don a new outfit: blue oxford button-down, plaid vest, jeans cuffed at the ankles and wingtips with no socks. (One of Young’s side projects is a blog he started, called pastorfashion.com.) Ahead of his arrival? An elaborate production number interpreting “Radioactive,” an end-times anthem and hit song by Las Vegas rock band Imagine Dragons. A young woman on-stage sings the apocalyptic tune while laser lights slice through a thickening mist from a fog machine. Behind her, three jumbo screens flash disturbing images of gas masks. At stagefront, two breakdancers in yellow biohazard suits contort and gyrate, and simulate drum-beating on large toxic-waste barrels.

This could get interesting...

The latest Mortification of Spin is now online and it may get a bit bumpy. Carl and I talk to Frank and Dan of Pyromaniacs about such things as cessationism and the sufficiency of God's Word.

How sufficient is God's Word? Do the charismatic gifts have a place in the church today? Carl Trueman and Todd Pruitt are joined via satellite by the Pyromaniacs themselves - Dan Phillips and Frank Turk. The group discusses the cessationism of the charismatic gifts. God has given us all we need in his own, true, infallible word. Listen to the Mortification of Spin to hear their insights on this hotly debated topic.

Sunday's Sermon

On Sunday I preached part 5 in our series through Ruth. It is entitled "The Purposes of God and the Plans of Man" and can be listened to HERE.

Who is watching the Watchmen?

Carl Trueman offers some necessary food for thought related to a recent dustup on the Janet Mefford show. For those of you who do not know, Janet Mefford recently interviewed Mark Driscoll on her syndicated radio program and it got a bit heated. Miss Mefford took Driscoll to task over large passages in his new book that she identifies as plagiarized from Dr. Peter Jones. I don't know if it is true or not. I do know that Janet Mefford is no dummy and she was quite specific with her charges. And while I was cringing when I first listened to the program, it was later revealed that Driscoll's people requested that Miss Mefford interview him about his new book. That changed everything in my mind. However, there are some who have come to Pastor Driscoll's defense. And this, Trueman argues, raises some serious concerns about the lack of accountability among the celebrities of evangelicalism.

The Mefferd-Driscoll controversy points to another aspect of celebrity culture: celebrities are routinely allowed to behave in ways which would not be tolerated in ordinary mortals.  For example, being drunk on the job and hurling abuse at an employer would make one unemployable in the real world.  Not for Charlie Sheen. A conviction for rape would be enough to have you characterized as a monster in the real world who had forfeited the right to sympathetic media exposure.   Not for Mike Tyson or Roman Polanski (just ask that champion of women's rights, Whoopi Goldberg).   In short, normal rules do not apply to celebrities in the same way as they do to others. 

The same is true in the celebritydrome of the evangelical subculture.   Driscoll is a classic case in point. For example, he has claimed that God gives him explicit images of the sexual sins of other people.  He has embraced prosperity teacher and denier of the Trinity, T. D. Jakes, as a brother. He has written an explicit book on sex. Most recently, he engaged in a cringe-inducing publicity stunt unworthy of a spoiled teenager. For most of us, any one of these things would have ended in church discipline and (in the Jakes' case) removal from office.  Yet in all of this, the fan base and those with a vested interest in capitalizing on his success grant him free pass after free pass. 

Read the entire post HERE.

"Word of God kinda"

From Doug Wilson:

Last night I recorded a discussion with Adrian Warnock on cessationism. It will be available this coming Saturday — Premier Christian radio site will stream live on Saturday at 9:30am ET or 2:30pm UK.

As I hope the discussion will make clear, I know and understand that responsible continuationists affirm the doctrine of sola Scriptura. What I do not yet know, despite repeated questioning, is why they do.

My trouble is this. I have no category in my mind for prophecy lite, or Word of God kinda, or deutero-God-said.

If Henry Smith says, “God said x, y, and z to me,” that claim is either true or false. If it true, then what is the distinction in authoritative status between what God said to Henry Smith and what God said to Jeremiah? What possible basis could I have for taking one of them less seriously?

It is a serious question, and while I believe we had a robust and charitable discussion, I don’t believe it was addressed.

These are precisely my questions when I hear people claim, "God said to me," or "I felt God telling me..." Is Scripture not clear and sufficient? Has God promised to add to his authoritative and unerring word, a less authoritative, unclear, and possibly erring word?

You may want to read my thoughts on Sarah Young's Jesus Calling.

Talking up the Church Fathers

The latest edition of Mortification of Spin: Bully Pulpit is now online. Carl and I discuss the continuing relevance of men such as Athanasius and Augustine.