Great Christian Biographies with John Piper: J. Gresham Machen 3

Honest, Guileless Speech and the Abuse of Language

Number one, these are called on my paper here, hints at lessons we might learn from Machen. Number one is a call for honest, open, clear, straightforward, guileless use of language. Very few things anger me more than Christian slipperiness.

I hate it. I really hate it. And I think God hates it. And I think Paul wrote against it when he said, we speak before God with guileless, open speech in 2 Corinthians. We don't peddle the Word of God.

We don't flatter with our tongue. Paul hated duplicity. I think even more than he hated false doctrine. It alerts us to the fact that it exists. Now, this may be taking Coles to Newcastle to say this to you.

I don't know. But I try to say it a lot to my church to alert them to the way moral language is prostituted today for special interest groups. Here's an example. There's a quote from Christianity Today quoting Gregory King, who is the spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign Fund, the largest homosexual advocacy group.

Quote, I personally think that most lesbian and gay Americans support traditional family American values, which he then defined as tolerance, concern, support, and a sense of community. Now, here's a man on behalf of the homosexual community taking the phrase traditional family values and saying, yes, of course.

This is a classic illustration of what is being done with language, what was done by the modernists in Machen's day, what is done with the word infallible in many of our schools today. You take traditional family values and you say, we believe that.

And then you find four words that the choice of words is incredibly astute. Tolerance, if you disagree with that, you're intolerant. Concern, if you disagree with that, you're callous. Support, if you disagree with that, you are oppressive.

Community, if you disagree with that, you are a hate monger. But definitions, tolerance of what? All things, the standards, people like me? Probably not. Concern, concern for what? Expressed in what way?

Support, support for what? Behavior that is destructive to personhood? What do you mean? Oh, you don't do definitions today. We don't do definitions. That's not what language is for. Language is useful.

This is politically useful to talk this way. Community, by what standards? Under what unification? Oh, we don't talk like that. It's useful. We're getting our agenda across. We're winning. If we can use language to win, we don't need definitions.

Now, you must be aware of that today. You must alert your people. This preaches, brothers. This preaches. Boy, when I talk on these things, political correctness, it is dead silent in this room. They love to hear this thing analyzed.

They hear it every day. They read it in the newspapers. They like it when somebody can say, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, I see. The oh, yeah thing on Sunday morning is one of your best powers. Suspense in preaching is one of the most useful tools to hold up a problem.

Everybody feels the problem. To hold them for 20 minutes and solve it. That's what people are longing for. When you talk about preaching doctrine, this is another point down here somewhere. When you talk about preaching doctrine, you say, oh, dead, boring.

Dorothy Sayers must have been off the wall then. The dogma is the drama. People want doctrine. They want things explained. But they don't want it like this and preachy tones and no passion and no zeal and no illustrations and no thoughtfulness and no order and no clear language.

They've had enough of that stuff. But they want you to solve their problems, their intellectual problems, and how the Bible fits with the world. And what is the active obedience of Jesus? And what is the sovereignty of God?

And is the atonement limited? And that is not boring. It is not boring. You make it boring if it's boring. God is the most exciting reality in the universe. We are not always excited. Ted, that's our problem, not God's problem.

He is infinitely exciting, infinitely glorious, infinitely he never bores anybody. If people are bored, they are blind. And we are what you just must link in to this glorious sovereign God. If you want to hold your people.

The Need for Doctrine, Order, and Clear Preaching

How did I get on that with language? Number two was to alert people to the utter doctrinelessness of our day. And the utilitarian way of thinking is with us, with a vengeance. Third, here's an interesting one.

The importance of founding and maintaining institutions. He did two. The Princeton theology was carried by three institutions, Princeton Seminary, Princeton Theological Review, and Charles Hodges Systematic Theology.

Now, I'm a charismatic at heart. I'm even a theological charismatic. I believe in life. I believe in all the spiritual gifts. I believe institutionalism kills. But I am thinking these days where I would be without the institution of Bill and Ruth Piper, my parents, the institution of Wheaton College, the institution of Fuller Seminary, and the institution of the writings of C .S. Lewis.

Who would John Piper be? It is inconceivable to me. This church is an institution. The danger of institutions is that they hold you in from going to the neighborhoods and become friends in themselves.

But if you could try to imagine life without institutions and say, the preservation of all that's precious will go from person to person, hands raised, heartfelt, it ain't going to happen. It just ain't going to happen.

Precious things are preserved over decades and centuries in large measure by books, charters, coalitions, churches, universities, denominations, committed around shared values. Now, I don't know what that says to you, where you are.

To me, it caused me to create a conference. Here's a conference. It's six years old. It's becoming an institution. Different people come each year. But I have a vision. I have a vision of God. I have a vision of church life and worship and the centrality of God over all things.

And I said, look, if people will come when I send out an invitation and get a speaker like us to come, I'll pour some work into it. And this embodies something. You men will be influenced a little bit.

Even if you don't like it, you'll be influenced a little bit. And so where you are, you can create little institutions. Little institutions like the family, which is most important, and there are big institutions like the American government and others.

So institutions are really, really crucial. The next one is the danger of indifferentism. I think I've said enough about that probably. I probably hit hard enough the value of a God-centered vision of all reality.

When Warfield got a hold of Machen and enabled him to see that once you see that God is supreme over all, that Calvinism is the most full expression of that, total supremacy over all things, what that does in my life is enable me to say something significant about everything.

Does that sound presumptuous? Almost does, doesn't it? You could stand, we could just take an hour right now, and you could stand up and say anything you wanted. Just pick anything. Open the dictionary.

Flop and pick out a word and tell me. Talk about it. I could talk about it. I mean, even if I didn't know what it meant, I could talk about it because I could talk about my ignorance. I could talk about the word, and maybe it reminds me of another word.

When God relates to everything, and you bring everything in relationship to God, everything relates to everything. That's the glory of the sovereignty of God. You know, when people think about Calvinism, they think, hmm, five points, and number five is a real problem.

When I think about Calvinism, I think mainly about the supremacy of God to God, and then the supremacy of God in the world, and the supremacy of God in the church, and in the soul, and in eternity. And when that's the dominant thing in your life, everything relates to everything.

And then you preach interesting. I mean, you open a text, oh, what can I say about that? I mean, when I look at a text, my big problem every Saturday is what not to say. What should I leave out this Sunday?

I mean, the connections in the Bible of every verse to every verse, and every verse to my wife, and my children, and this church, and the poor, and homosexuality, and divorce, everything relates to everything.

And people love it. People want coherence. People love to see things brought together because that's the way it is. That's reality. You're putting people in touch with reality. Number eight, or whatever it is here, is the pain of criticism.

He was bitterly criticized by his own colleagues. Names were used of Machen. And my denomination, Beth's Young Conference, is a non-combative, ironic denomination to a fault, I believe, although I chose it largely for that reason.

I don't want to be a pugilist, but I don't want to put such a premium on being ironic that you become an indifferentist. That's the danger. But I lost my train of thought here. Oh, that kind of person doesn't like to be criticized.

And therefore, they don't like to say anything that's going to ruffle feathers because that hurts. It hurts to be criticized. One criticism at that door after I preach will not compensate for 10 compliments.

I said that backwards. 10 compliments won't compensate for one criticism. My emotional makeup, boom, I'm on the floor. Criticism takes 20, 30, 40 compliments to get me off the floor again. That's the way we're structured.

Therefore, people won't do it. They think that they can become so kind, so loving, so meek, so soft-spoken, so we, us, that they won't get criticized. It won't work. I read in First Things, Germaine Greer called Mother Teresa a religious imperialist.

At my convent school, she said, the pious nuns who always spoke softly and inclined their heads with small, patient smiles were ones to fear. They became the mother's superiors. Mother Teresa is not content with running a convent.

She runs an order of Mother Teresa clones, which operates worldwide. In anyone less holy, this would be seen as an obscene ego trip. Mother Teresa epitomizes, for me, the blinkered charitableness upon which we pride ourselves and for which we expect reward in this world and the next.

There's very little on earth that I hate more than that. Well, I mean, if Mother Teresa is going to get it, forget it, guys. You just forget it. You're going to get it. And therefore, we just have to go ahead and say it like it is.

Pre-Evangelism and Preparing Culture for the Gospel

I have one more, but it's too long, so I'm going to stop, I think. If you want to ask a question about it, you can. I'll tell you what it is. Namely, pre-evangelism, preparing culture to receive the gospel.

But it's my cutting edge. I don't know if I agree with it, but I'm going to stop here and let you ask questions. And you can ask about anything under the sun for the next 15 to 20 minutes. Dan. With the extended PCUSA, I don't think the BGC is in anywhere near the trouble they were at that time.

The vote last summer out in Colorado Springs on the resolution concerning ministering to homosexuals was, to me, a great signal of faithfulness. For those of you who don't know, there's about 900 people there.

And a motion was brought to the floor to, I think, express a compassionate and yet full of conviction statement about homosexuality and pass it with two dissenting votes out of 900 people. That's unheard of, I think, today.

So I feel encouraged at the grassroots. That's who's there. I have less encouragement about the college, although I believe it's in the hands of very strong and committed evangelical non-indifferentists.

And I just think we need to be prayerful and supportive. We had a Bethel Sunday last Sunday, and I held up programs. I called the people to support and pray and had a Bethel prof preach. And I don't want to be quick to jump ship on an institution.

That's the biggest struggle I have. Did Machen jump ship at the right time with Princeton? Did he do right? Voss didn't go. Armstrong didn't go. And others stayed. I don't know what to say about the wider.

We got PCUSA people here, and they are far better equipped to say it. And I think that church is a lost cause, as far as I can tell. But that's a philosophy of separatism that is very unrepresentative of a lot of evangelicals.

I mean, I have precious friends who believe they're going to stay there. They're going to fight from the inside. Obviously, where Ben is, I presume, and others. But when they had the General Assembly here in the Twin Cities a couple of years ago, and oh, man, it's really hard.

We have become so callous to the wild-eyed things that mainline Protestants say today that I don't even know if we could judge the way Machen would judge about the time of leaving. John? That definition, because we have a gay church, Church of the Lakes, who would agree with your definition of evangelicalism.

The definition, we are people who define ourselves by the gospel of Jesus Christ, is inadequate to make any distinctions today in view of the abuse of language, I think. I mean, those words, gospel of Jesus Christ, are words that virtually every professing Christian of every liberal and modernist stripe would agree with.

So I don't think Oz meant, I don't think he meant that that would be the sentence in the covenant. You're going to have to respond to this tonight. But if Oz meant that we can gather an evangelical rallying point with that sentence, I need more help to agree with that, because I don't know of any liberals and modernists and people who have forsaken the lifestyle of the Bible who would not agree with that, the Westminster Confession of Faith.

That's too simple. In this book, I'm going to put my hands right on it. Here it is. He won't argue over people who disagree with him on the timing of the Lord's return. He doesn't want to fight over the mode and efficacy of the sacraments.

He does not want to fight over the nature of the Christian ministry, congregationalism versus Episcopalism versus Presbyterianism. He does not want to fight Arminianism, mainly. That's number four. And he does not want to fight Rome, mainly.

He said, the gulf is indeed profound between us and Rome. But profound as it is, it seems almost trifling. It seems almost trifling compared to the abyss which stands between us and many ministers of our own church.

The Church of Rome may represent a perversion of the Christian religion, but naturalistic liberalism is not Christianity at all. So his breadth was very broad in whom he was willing to call brother. But he would use words like defective or perverted.

See, my guess is half of you are, I don't know what the percentage, how many in here are, would you be honest, do not, I mean, endorse pedo-baptism? Raise your hand. There's a lot of you. Come on, raise your hand.

How many of you endorse your Presbyterian? Do endorse. How many of you believe in practicing infant baptism? Raise your hand. OK, so 40 or 50. See, now, I would call that view not un-Christian, but defective.

It's a defective, it's one of those little, it's one of those little sprouts under the big tree of baptistic reformed faith. I think one of the biggest challenges we have is to decide what issues we're going to rally, we're going to make issues of coming together or not coming together.

And then it's so complex, because when you say coming together, what do you mean coming together for what? I pray with the weirdest people in this city. I pray with almost anybody. But whenever a group gets together to plan a prayer event, I'm the one who pulls out the Lausanne Covenant and says, you know, I think we need some doctrinal agreement.

Here's a good one. And they always say, oh, fine, that's good. It's called indifferentism. But at least I feel like I've got to put the word on the table, because I don't think it's going to work in the long run to try to pull people together on the basis of prayer or other experiences.

I think whoever you just quoted there would probably also add, wouldn't he, and as long as I'm not kicked out. And I'll stay as long as it is officially orthodox, and they don't kick me out. Now, OK, they kicked Mason out.

I wish I knew what would have happened. They didn't kick him out of Princeton. That was a different kind of decision. He left Princeton seven years before he left the PCUSA. And he was kicked out of the PCUSA, and he fought with all his might to stay in the PCUSA.

Now, whether he would have stayed long term, I don't know. But he argued his case vehemently that he was not in disagreement with the Constitution nor the Confession, and he was defeated. In fact, they wouldn't let him make his whole case.

They wanted him out so bad. So I would say the trajectory of Mason's career, denominationally, was that he was going to fight this thing in the denomination as long as he could. I don't know how long that would have lasted.

I sure respect that view, that if there is official denominational affirmation of biblical faith, that one can have integrity in staying, unless staying communicates endorsement and support through maybe too many unofficial ways that would compromise the testimony.

And I suppose the possibility that you couldn't say for sure when that happens, but I can imagine for him, it was, I will not give money to support Pearl Buck and others. And they said, that's like not coming to the Lord's table and kicked him out.

Now, they might not have said that, and so I think in many denominations, it's possible not to contribute to the denomination. I don't know if that's true, but that would be one compromise, I suppose, that you might want to avoid.

It may be that if you're in the community where that church is known for what it stands for, and what you are communicating to your whole community is the endorsement of rejection of biblical truth, practically, then you might say, this is too destructive to the witness of the church.

There's another fellowship that would be more consistent. I've never been in that situation, and so I haven't had to face it. I had two very precious friends, Tom Provence on the one hand and Larry Allen on the other, who made two very different decisions.

Tom stayed, died of cancer a couple of years ago, and Larry went out into the PCA. And so I just have had a lot of respect for people who have gone both directions, but I guess my own sympathies lie with those who are drawing the line closer to the truth.

When you have a document in front of you, like the Westminster Confession, 95 of which I love, maybe 98, when you have that in front of you, and you say, this is who we are, and you know they're lying through the teeth.

It's just, mm. Go ahead. Most people live. Most people in the grassroots, what he just pointed out was, he grew up in a church, in the Presbyterian church, with a pastor who believed the words, the meaning, the reality of the event, and didn't even know there was such a problem as modernism until he got to seminary.

And that's where most people live in most denominations, is that what you are immediately, week in and week out, connected with is what matters most to you. And the question was then, do you throw over that tradition and say, that didn't count, or I don't want to preserve that, maybe?

That's what you're asking, and I am not going to. Now, in the Southern Baptist Church, there's this little group of Reformed pastors that get together each year. I forget what it's called, but a couple hundred or 300.

And that sort of thing happens in denominations that are, if they're not liberal, are either just doctrinally non-committal. It's happened in our little fellowship, because people aren't trumpeting great truth.

When the Baptist General Conference gets together, the note that is struck is not a doctrinal commitment that is glorious, and that holds it together. The note that is struck is church growth, by and large.

We're planning 52 churches, and that's great. But if some of us in the conference say, well, I'm really glad we're planning churches, and that's better than some denominations who aren't, but that's not what sustains me and makes my fire bright, I'm going to have to find a little group of guys, or a big group, and say, let's get together and talk about God.

And you form a little group, and I'm sure there are groups like that probably in the PCUS. I don't know what they're called, but I'm sure there are. And so that's one way of sustaining the faithfulness of the witness within a denomination.

I know in the Methodist Church, there are renewal movements like that, where you get together and hundreds of pastors say, here's who we really are, and we exist as a kind of counter-testimony to the powers that be out there, without leaving the church.

Maybe one more. Well, I wish I knew. I wish he'd lived another 20 years. Wow. What a loss. But what comes to my mind is he chose to fight the battle against anti-supernatural liberalism, not against the varieties of evangelicalism.

That was his choice. It set him off somewhat from the fundamentalists. When the OP was founded, now my history is not as good as some of yours here. But within a year, it split again, because Carl McIntyre and Oliver Buswell and I forget who the others were, they wanted the new Presbyterian Church to have a teetotalistic statement, and they wanted it to have a premillennial sense to it, I think, and a few other things.

And Machen dug in his heels and said, we will be defined as broad, reformed faith. So he saw the battle so significantly in terms of those outside and inside that he seemed to reduce. Now, my sense today, maybe I'm too much in the grip of a domino theory, but I asked what Clark Pinnock, who I think has gone off the deep end so far, I don't know what to call him anymore.

But he asked the question one time at Bethel Seminary, where do liberals come from? And he said, they come from you. They don't grow on trees. They come from evangelicals. They grow out of evangelicals.

And so I've, ever since 15 years ago, when I heard that, I've just thought, how does that happen? How is it that Jerry Shepard, Assemblies of God, with whom I went to seminary and was one of my closest friends, teaches up in Toronto now in Old Testament, endorses things, I mean, that he would have considered utterly unthinkable 20 years ago at Fuller.

How did that happen? OK, should I blame it on Yale and Union, where he went? Was it a family situation? His marriage broke down? Is that part of it? So I care about that question, which means I look around the feminist issue, the homosexual issue, Arminian issues, and I ask, are there any roots here of liberals in the making of the real sort?

And so when I edited this book on feminism, evangelical feminism, and wrote the last chapter on the way forward, are we together, and tried to write a really hopeful chapter there. Brothers, sisters, I'm not looking at the evangelical feminists to say us and them in terms of Christianity or even evangelicalism, but I see the hermeneutical seeds of the rejection of the Bible.

I see continuity between that issue and the homosexual issue and then the rejection of the authority of the scripture entirely. I see people who say, if the Bible says I have to be that way, I'm not going to be that way.

I'll reject the Bible before I'll not be a feminist or before I'll not be endorsing Homosexuality Act. So my response is that even though Machen might have drawn his lines there and only written and spoken concerning what's happening among the anti-supernaturalistic thoroughgoing liberals, for myself, I wonder if we might not serve the church and save rescue people by finding out what are the origins of that.

In what kind of home do they grow up? What did parents do right for Machen and do wrong for Jerry? Or was it the parents? Was it Christian school? Should I found a Christian school at this church because I watch my son Benjamin at the public school.

There's no way I can combat the utter disrespectfulness that is bred into young people at Roosevelt High School. So I'm asking questions on the inside as well as the outside. That's just some of what comes to my mind.

Dean told me we have till 3 .30 according to the schedule. So what I find is that if you present the sovereignty of God as the most glorious, life-sustaining, tragedy enduring, soul-saving, evangelism-producing, prayer-empowering message, people like it.

They like it. They don't know that it carries five points with it. But once they begin, I mean, just the history of this church. I mean, I've been here 12 and 1⁄2 years now. And I came, didn't mention the word Calvinism for six years, five years.

But I preached the sovereignty of God from the very outset, from the scriptures, not from Calvin. I've never read the Institutes. From Romans and Galatians and Isaiah. And they liked it. It gives hope to people when they're dying, when their kids are leaving, and when motorboats run over their legs.

It gives hope to people. And then when you explain joyfully there's a connection between whether Christ really saved sinners or only made them savable, they like that too. Because you've prepared them with the glory of the sovereignty of God.

So I think all hangs on whether you believe it's joyful. The reason so many little reformed churches don't grow and don't attract is because it doesn't look joyful. It looks like a club.

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