Current Issues In Evangelicalism (part 2)

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Mad, Bad, Dangerous To Know (part 3) - The Life Of Martin Luther

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I want to talk now about a series of priorities for the Church that I see as antithetical to tendencies within the
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Church that are going on at the moment. First thing
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I want to point towards is the need for the Church to have a proper doctrine of God.
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One of the things that I found most striking when you read the Scriptures is how central the identity of God is to the way people think and behave, and therefore it should be central to the way that the
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Church is organized. Preaching at the moment in the mornings through the book of Job, Job is fascinating because it can be read in a number of ways, all of which
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I think are legitimate. It's a multifaceted text, if you like. But one of the areas which comes up again and again is the issue of the doctrine of God.
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And Job and his comforters are continually debating the nature of God.
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And one of the things that comes through very clearly in the book of Job is ultimately that God is mysterious.
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Job's comforters are convinced that his suffering, his problems, are the result of some sin or some lack in himself.
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Job on the other hand, he's convinced that that is not the case, and of course to that extent he's correct, because those of us reading the book know that there has been this strange heavenly court scene where the accuser or perhaps even
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Satan himself has stood before the Lord and has made the accusation that Job only worships
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God because of what Job gets out of being religious. And the Lord has allowed
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Satan, the accuser, to inflict great suffering on Job to the point where Job is almost dead, but the
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Lord is not allowing him to die. And Job defends himself to his comforters by saying, you know, it isn't the fact that I've sinned, but demanding still that he should be able to make his case before God and ultimately that God should give him an answer as to why he suffered.
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And if you read through to the end of the book of Job, one of the fascinating things about the book of Job is although Job has not suffered for his sin, the
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Lord ultimately does not tell Job why he has suffered, why he's suffering.
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There is this great emphasis in the book of Job on the transcendence of God.
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The problem with Job's three comforters is that they each articulate a view of God's transcendence which they then domesticate with their own view that, well,
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God punishes sinners. And although God is transcendent and mysterious, Job, the fact that you're suffering allows us to understand, allows us to extrapolate from that and say, well,
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God is paying you back in some way. In other words, God is transcendent for them one minute and domesticated the next.
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For Job, God is transcendent, but he still demands that God should give a reckoning of himself before Job.
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And of course, at the end, God comes in and challenges Job and says, you know, were you there when
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I created the heavens and the earth? Were you there, Job? Why should I have to answer to you for anything?
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One of the things I think we've lost in the contemporary American conservative evangelical church is a proper doctrine of God, the awesomeness of God.
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I think there are a number of pieces of evidence that this is the case.
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I think in some quarters an overwhelming emphasis upon God as Father. Now, don't get me wrong.
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The Bible clearly teaches that God is Father, but the Bible also teaches that God is a consuming fire as well.
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Maybe this will provoke a little bit of controversy, but if I can allude here to a statement that I find very helpful by Cardinal Newman, John Henry Newman made the statement somewhere that every heresy is an aspect of the truth pushed so far that it ignores all other truths.
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And I think the emphasis upon the fatherhood of God in some conservative circles has led ultimately to a rather casual attitude to God.
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One of the points I made this week while I was lecturing the seminary on Luther was that for Luther, law and gospel are both important and both to be held together.
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The way that gospel is being bandied around in some circles is almost like a
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Protestant indulgence these days. That gospel is being used before the law ever gets a look in, and yet the
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Bible teaches that God is transcendently holy. And Luther makes the point in his later writings, and I think it's an interesting tale of Luther reception, most of the evangelicals who like Luther tend to read the stuff that he wrote between say 1518 and 1525, the
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Luther of 1528, 1529 onwards is constantly complaining about the fact that there are preachers who don't emphasize the holiness of God and the transcendence of God anymore, but jump straight to the gospel.
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So the first priority I would see for the church is a return to a biblically balanced doctrine of God, and that requires us to regain our understanding of God as holy and as a consuming fire.
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There is a creeping antinomianism in the church that I think is problematic.
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The Christian life is not simply about coming to understand one's justification more and more, which is a term, a phrase that I see forms of that phrase popping up left, right and centre these days.
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The Christian life also involves growth in holiness, I think, rooted in our justification but involving sanctification.
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And there is sentimentalism creeping into the church dressed up as Pauline Protestantism.
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Just because you use the language of law and gospel doesn't mean that your doctrine of God isn't a highly sentimental one, and a
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God that is just a loving heavenly father and not a consuming fire is just a sentimental figment.
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So the first point I would make is we need to regain a proper doctrine of God. I was told there is a clock over there, it's a compulsive nervous habit
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I have to take my watch off, place it on the left of the pulpit and then fiddle with it in an annoying way whenever I'm speaking.
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My wife and two sons are always criticising me for it, I've tried to stop it. Since they pointed it out
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I'm now acutely aware of it, I just can't stop doing it. There I go, you see,
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I'm instinctively moving in just to fiddle with my watch. I did it again.
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I need to keep my one arm behind my back. I think we need, the next point, we need a true confessionalism versus a truncated confessionalism.
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One of the things that I think is encouraging over the last few years is the growth in interest, certainly in the language of confessionalism among conservative evangelical churches and a rediscovery of the old confessions.
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It's heartwarming to hear that the church here uses a modified version of the 1689 confession.
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The only thing that would have been more encouraging would be to know that you use the Westminster standards, but I will pray for your continued sanctification on that front.
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True confessionalism is important for a number of reasons. One, I think it's very counter -cultural.
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True confessionalism, if your church has one of the historic confessions as part of its doctrinal identity, it is acknowledging that it did not invent
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Christianity. What I love about historic confessions is they were written ages ago.
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The fact they were written by a bunch of dead white guys commends them to me. The race of these people is irrelevant.
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Their deadness is a real positive, I think, because it means that this is stuff that has stood the test of time.
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So, although it's not an absolute dead knockdown argument for the truth of something, the fact that it's been believed for a long time,
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I think what Paul talks about in his pastoral epistles is holding fast to a form of sound words.
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Creeds and confessions are forms of sound words. We live in a culture, I've already alluded to this on a number of occasions, we live in a culture that primarily despises the past.
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There are many good reasons for despising the past. In many ways, the past was worse than today. Scientifically, that's the case.
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Who wants to live in a world without antibiotics? Who wants to live in a world without analgesics or anesthetics?
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Who wants to live in a world without flush toilets? There are all kinds of great things that science has developed that makes the world a much nicer place.
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Who wants to live in a world without many of the domestic helps we have these days?
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I was laughing with my wife, I was reading the new biography of E .F. Kevin last night and I was reading to my wife how when he was small, he and his sisters had to do the washing up and that was how my wife and I, you know, just 40 odd years ago, grew up.
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We had to do the washing up each night. These days, you know, you're lucky you get your kids to stack the dishwasher.
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You know, kids don't wash up these days, but who wants to wash up? It was boring and tedious and I hated it.
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You don't want to go back to those times, so there are many reasons for prioritizing the present and the future.
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What we have to be careful of, though, is that we don't allow those selective areas of our culture where, frankly, yes, the present and the future are or will be better than the past to become the normative pattern for how we look at everything.
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When that creeps over into the church, what happens is that classical, tried and tested ways of doing things get thrown out because of technical mindsets, gripped to our imagination and we think that, well, we all know the past is inferior.
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We have to look for bigger and better and technically sharper ways of doing things.
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So I love the old creeds and confessions because I think they capture something of the
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Pauline Gospel and that is that we did not invent the
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Gospel last Sunday. It has been preserved and passed on from generation to generation.
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Yes, there has been development and expansion in our doctrinal understanding of what Scripture says, but it is development that is continuous with the past and not a repudiation of the past.
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So the first thing that I like about creeds and confessions is I think the very fact that you have one captures something of the
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Gospel, the historical rootedness of the Gospel. I also am very much a sort of English Puritan in my view of liturgy, though I have moderated a little bit over the years to the extent that at the church where I am pastor, sometimes we will say the
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Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed together. Not because we think it is on the same level as Scripture, but because we think it teaches what
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Scripture teaches. And I love the fact that when corporately we say those words together, it is an act of counter -cultural protest, not a counter -cultural protest,
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I mean, chain yourself to the railings in the city, recite the Apostles' Creed on a Sunday, express your solidarity with Christians throughout the centuries and across the world today in taking the same words upon your lips.
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So one of the important reasons for becoming confessional, for having a confession, for using confessions, for teaching confessions, is it is counter -cultural.
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It highlights the importance of the past and as a result, of course, it relativises the importance of the present.
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Nobody ever owns Christianity, they merely look after it for the next generation.
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Secondly, and I mentioned this earlier, I think the proper use of creeds and confessions establishes a proper distinction between office holders and members.
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And I know churches vary on this, but for me, Romans 10 is very precious. Whoever declares it with their mouth that Jesus is
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Lord and believes in their heart that God raised Him from the dead will be saved. Paul sets the bar for credible profession of Christianity really pretty low there.
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You've got to have a basic grasp of the Gospel and you have to publicly live a life, if you like, that's consistent with that.
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And one of the things that I love about the denomination to which I belong is we really don't ask for much more than that for membership.
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But if you want to be an office bearer, wow, we have one of the stricter forms of subscription even within conservative
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American Presbyterianism. Typically, in American Presbyterianism, you can take what they call exceptions to the
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Westminster standards. In other words, when you're examined by the presbytery for licensure and then for ordination, you're able to tell the presbytery which bits of the confession you disagree with.
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And then the presbytery votes on whether those disagreements are legitimate, whether you can still be a
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Gospel minister and hold those objections. In the OPC, we don't allow exceptions.
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We do allow what we call kind of scruples and that means you can sort of disagree with the application. And certainly, when
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I was licensed and then ordained, I did something that I've heard numerous students do before and since and that is
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I say, you know, larger catechism 116 onwards when it talks about the Lord's Day. I just think it's over scrupulous in its application.
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Nobody can honor the Lord's Day as the larger catechism demands. You can't fall asleep on a
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Sunday afternoon and be honoring the Lord's Day as the Westminster larger catechism demands.
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So it's good to say I scruple with the application, being honest and upfront with your
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Christian brothers at that point. But the point is, if you want to be an office bearer in the denomination, you have to hold to the doctrine that the denomination holds to.
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That's because we want to know what's being taught in our pulpits and we also want to know the model to which the people are to aspire.
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You don't have to subscribe the Westminster Confession to become a member, but if you're an office bearer, you have to project that as normative.
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And that's also important because I think one of the things that I've become more and more aware of over the years as I teach church history with an accent on historical theology, certainly in my ancient church and medieval church courses at Westminster, is that Christian doctrine possesses a certain ineradicable complexity.
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That means that if you want to hold to the doctrine of the Trinity in a stable way, you actually have to ultimately hold to a whole load of other stuff as well.
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You may not appreciate that as a new Christian believer. You may just believe, well, I believe God is three and God is one.
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I can't tie it together in my mind, but I'm happy to believe that. But that has all kinds of implications for other beliefs, and those implications and those other beliefs need to be safeguarded by the church too in order that the major doctrine, the doctrine of the
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Trinity, the doctrine of the Incarnation, the doctrines of God's transcendence and holiness can be safeguarded.
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If you have a ten -point doctrinal basis as the doctrinal basis of your church, then within a generation or two, you'll have heterodoxy.
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You cannot maintain Christian orthodoxy at a low level of complexity as a church.
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It just doesn't happen, and history testifies to the fact it doesn't happen.
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So I'm a big believer that we need a distinction between office bearers and members because we do not want to burden members with more than they can bear.
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We have a lad, I suppose in the old days we'd probably have said he was a simple lad, coming to our church these days on a
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Sunday morning. I'm never going to be able to talk about Gregory of Nazianzus with this lad. He's just never going to get it.
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But does that mean that he can't confess with his mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in his heart that God raised him from the dead?
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Of course not. Of course he can do that. I want him to be able to be a member of my church, but I also know that it would be bad if he was ever an office bearer in the church.
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Delightful Christian he may be, with no marks against his character whatsoever.
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But he can never hold office because he'd never be able to defend the faith at the level it needs to be defended at by an office bearer.
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I also think creeds and confessions are important because, and this connects to the one
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I just made, they represent the pedagogical ambitions and aspirations of the church. If you have a ten point doctrinal basis,
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I don't think you're ever going to be able to convince your people that that eleventh point is important. Because if it was important, the elders and office bearers would all have to believe it.
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People aren't stupid. My wife and I teach the three to four year olds in our church.
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You'd think that was light lifting, three to four year olds. No, it's not. A, they don't care how many initials you've got after your name or how many books you've published.
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They don't respect you. You have to earn their respect. Secondly, they're not cynical.
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They're not like teenagers. So they're actually engaged. And thirdly, they have this unfailing ability to ask the most incredibly profound questions and know when you're trying to pull the wool over their eyes with your answers.
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I always remember the little girl coming up to me and asking, you know, who made God? That's a classic four year old question, but it's also very profound.
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I mean, that's a tough question to answer. It's a hard question to answer to a thirty five year old, to a four year old.
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You've got to think really hard, because things you hear from somebody in authority age four, they may stick with you for a lifetime.
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You've got to make sure you answer that question very, very carefully. I can't even remember why
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I got onto that. It represents the pedagogical ambitions and aspirations of the church.
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What you think is important for people to have an opinion on. We have people in our church who don't agree with my view on baptism.
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You may have people in your church who don't agree with yours, but I'm glad they have an opinion on it.
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I would hate to have people in my church who had no opinion on baptism. I love that bit in Machen's Christianity and Liberalism, where he talks about the debate between Zwingli and Luther.
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We'll talk about this a little bit tomorrow, but in 1529, Zwingli and Luther. Zwingli, the great reformer of Zurich, and Luther, showing my own prejudices, the even greater reformer of Wittenberg, disagree and fall out over the issue of whether Jesus is really present in the
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Lord's Supper. For many evangelicals today, this is an impossible disagreement to understand.
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Why would Luther make such a big deal of it? Well, Machen says it's a tragedy that Luther and Zwingli fell out in 1529 at Marburg.
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He said, an absolute tragedy. But it would have been a bigger tragedy if they had agreed to differ because they didn't think it was that important.
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That, I thought, was a very profound comment. This is just a personal bias,
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I suppose. I do get kind of tired with the number of things that we're expected to agree to differ on these days. By and large, it's not the church or the churches telling us we've got to agree to differ.
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It's the guys who head up parachurch organizations who tell us we've got to agree to differ on these things.
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Parachurch organizations should never set the agenda for the church. They should be handmaidens.
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I work. Westminster is a parachurch organization. But we don't set the agenda for the church.
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We're to serve the church. They also,
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I think, and this is important, because particularly given the focus on celebrity and strong personalities, particularly in American culture, confessions delimit the power of the church and her offices.
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Now, that's counterintuitive in many ways because often, certainly what
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I get from students at Westminster is they have this idea that the confession is this great big stick that people in power can use to beat people who aren't in power.
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You know, the elders, the presbytery, the General Assembly, just kind of can use this as a sort of baseball bat to crack people's skulls with.
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I think it's the opposite. I think if your church has a good creed or good confession, it actually prevents abuse of power.
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It delimits the power of the ministry. If you have a church which has no creed but the
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Bible, just think of this. And there are some around where the minister would say, I have no creed but the Bible. And one week that minister's teaching
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Trinitarianism, and that's fine because everybody knows it's orthodox. The next week you're standing up in the pulpit and he's teaching
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Unitarianism. How do you get him? How do you remove him from the pulpit?
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To remove a minister from a pulpit, whether you're a congregation or a Presbyterian, ultimately the principle comes down to the same.
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You have to have some kind of ecclesiastical legal procedure to do it. And to do that, you need to have some kind of ecclesiastical legal document to do it with.
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If you don't have a confession, then your confession is functionally what the minister decides it is every
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Sunday. Or your confession is functionally what the congregation decide they will or will not tolerate on any given
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Sunday. If I stand up in my church when I go back home and I start preaching that God does not know the future, my people can take me down straight away.
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I'll be out of that pulpit so fast because we have a confession which we say summarizes the teaching of Scripture and delimits the power of the minister.
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I have no right to teach contrary to a confession that I have taken vows to as summarizing what
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I understand to be the teaching of Scripture on the cardinal points of the faith. If you're in a church with a minimal doctrinal basis, then you have minimal power over what goes on in the pulpit.
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You have minimal ability to stop your church degenerating into a personality cult or, even less qualified, simply a cult.
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Churches need confessions to delimit the power of office bearers.
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And that's why I get the heebie -jeebies when I look at some of these very big megachurch organizations where you have very powerful single individuals at the top and very minimal doctrinal confessions to hold them to account by.
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Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying here that Presbyterianism never goes wrong or good confessional congregationalism never goes wrong.
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History demonstrates that it does because it's ultimately applied by people who go wrong.
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But I would hazard a guess and say it goes wrong less often than the alternatives. And that's because it reflects more closely what
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Paul is laying out in the pastoral epistles. Good men in charge, holding fast to a form of sound words.
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Confession, a form of sound words. So confessions, then, very, very important.
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Thirdly, I think we need a clear grasp of the Gospel over against creeping pragmatism.
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What is it that really marks out liberalism? Most evangelicals, if you ask them, well, what is the hallmark of liberalism, would say anti -supernaturalism.
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Liberalism is a denial of the supernatural accounts within the Gospel and the
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Bible. And certainly it can be that. I would say at a more fundamental level, though, liberalism is pragmatism.
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Liberalism is not a denial of the supernatural historical facts of the Gospel. It is a denial of their significance.
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That's what really marks out liberalism. For a man like Schleiermacher, the great father of liberalism in the late 18th, early 19th century,
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Schleiermacher, the resurrection, he's a bit sort of ambiguous and non -committal on the resurrection.
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For Schleiermacher, it's not that the resurrection didn't happen. It's that even if it did happen, it's of no earthly significance.
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And this creeps in to conservative churches all the time, in a most extreme form.
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I think you look at a guy like Joel Osteen, for example. Does Joel Osteen deny the
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Trinity? Does he deny the Incarnation? Does he deny the resurrection? I don't know.
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Possibly not. I've heard him a few times on television, and I've never heard anything that I would say, oh, he's really denying a cardinal historical truth of the faith there.
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He simply denies its biblical significance. That's what it seems to me. The biblical significance of these things never comes through.
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And it's alive and well in conservative circles as well. Just look at the book lists of many of the
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Christian publishers today. One of my favorites is the
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Eden Plan Diet. T .D. Jakes, by the way, has produced a diet book. T .D.
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Jakes is not the greatest advert for his own diet, I would say. But the
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Eden Plan Diet, it's published by a reputable evangelical publisher.
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And if you read, I've not read it. Fortunately, I'm not yet at the point where I need diet books, thankfully.
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But if you read the blurb on Amazon about it, it's all about the Bible helping you to resist sinful urges at church, pot lunches, and this kind of thing.
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What it's done is reduce the gospel to something that helps improve your way of life now.
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Don't get me wrong. Diet can be good things. Having a healthy diet is a good thing. I'm not sure that having a bad diet is a sin.
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We don't discipline people in my church relative to their body mass index, for example. I was going to say, maybe bad dental care would be a sin, but then guys like me coming from Britain would find ourselves under permanent discipline,
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I'm sure, in our churches. It's not that having a good diet isn't a good thing.
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To me, it's just, what has it got to do with the gospel? What has it got to do with the gospel? And yet these are reputable publishers that publish these things.
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I think the church needs to grasp the fact, or needs to reflect all the time on what difference does the fact that Jesus became a historical figure, really lived, really died, really rose from the dead, really ascended, and really intercedes for us in his
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Father's right hand now. What difference does that make to the way we preach? If that doesn't make a difference to the way we preach, then we're preaching liberalism.
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You can believe all of that stuff. One of the fascinating things about Luther and the Pope is, they had the same confession.
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They both believed the... You ask Luther, well, what's your confession? He'd say, well, look at my catechism. It's the
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Apostles' Creed. That's what I believe. I'm sure if you'd said to Pope Leo or Adrian VI, what do you believe?
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He'd have said, the Apostles' Creed. That's my confession. The difference, of course, is it made no difference to the
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Pope. He believed it like he believed 2 plus 2 equals 4. But it didn't impact the way he preached or thought about the gospel.
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For Luther, it made all the difference in the world. The gospel could not be an Aesop's fable and do the same thing.
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The gospel could not just be a great description of a super life and do the same thing.
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When people use the phrase, the gospel is not a doctrine, it is a way of life, they're doing exactly what
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Newman was so suspicious of. They're taking a truth and they're excluding all the other truths.
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Yeah, sure, the gospel is a way... I mean, I've been talking in the first lecture about the gospel.
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The men to guard the gospel are to exhibit a certain way of life. But it's a way of life that flows from the gospel being a doctrine or a teaching, a declaration.
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We live in pragmatic times. The preoccupation, I think, with technique, even in conservative circles, points towards an underlying pragmatism.
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Preoccupation with meeting needs comes in. As long as those needs are biblically defined,
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I don't object to that. But even in some of the great growth in Christian counseling books over the last 10 years,
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I remember being in a meeting where we were talking and somebody said, you know, my child this morning leant over the table and knocked the salt over.
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What do you think a Christian response to that should be? And I want to say, a
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Christian response to that would be just use your common sense. Tell the kid not to lean and knock the salt over.
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I remember one of my sons being at a Bible talk where he was told by... and this is within the
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OPC. The Sunday school teacher telling him that if he didn't clean his teeth, then his parents were to tell him that his teeth had been given to him to glorify
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God and therefore he should clean them. And I said, that's kind of true, but I'm not going to check the dental hygiene of all the people in my church and discipline them if I'm doing that.
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Clean your teeth because your breath will stink and it will be very antisocial if you don't. The problem is that you can have this pragmatism creeping in, even for the best of reasons.
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We need to recover a clear grasp of the Gospel as a declaration of what
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God has done in Jesus Christ. Yes, that has implications for how we should then live, but the
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Gospel is not in itself the embodiment of how we should live.
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Fourthly, I think we need a renewed understanding of the ministry.
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I think here the distinction between special and common grace is absolutely critical. One of the things
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I think you can be sure of is that either your theology will drive your vision of ministry or your vision of ministry will end up driving your theology.
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You may not realize that, but that will be the case. That is why I think when, again, this is one of those things that we're all supposed to agree to differ on, when we're told that we can agree on the
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Gospel but disagree on methods, that can be problematic in some contexts because your understanding of the
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Gospel should shape your understanding of the ministry. Where you think God's grace, special grace, is to be found will determine what you think is the scope and the instruments of your ministry.
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Martin Luther, a great example of this, Martin Luther thought that God could only be found as gracious in the flesh of the
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Lord Jesus Christ, specifically in the crucified flesh of the Lord Jesus Christ. We'll talk about this a little bit more tomorrow.
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And therefore, his task as minister was to point people to the crucified flesh of the
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Lord Jesus Christ. The great, if you could suspend whatever views you may have on representations of Christ just for a moment, there is the picture that most beautifully sums up Luther's vision of ministry is the painting that Lucas Cranach did of him preaching.
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Luther standing in a pulpit with his hand extended, pointing to a crucifix on which the broken body of the
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Lord Jesus Christ hangs. It summarizes beautifully what Luther thought of as the task of the minister.
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The task of the minister was to point the people towards God's grace. That raises the question, of course, of where is
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God's grace to be found? That raises in an acute form the issue of special and common grace.
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How you think common grace and special grace connect will shape how you think of the ministry.
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For Luther, here and now on the earth between the death and resurrection of Christ and the return of Christ, there are only two places where the
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Lord Jesus Christ is found. In the declaration of the word and in the administration of the sacraments attached to the declaration of the word.
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And so Luther's view of the ministry methodologically and in terms of its competence was completely restricted to those two things.
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Declaration of the word, administration of the sacraments. Now declaration of the word for Luther wasn't always just preaching.
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It could be one -on -one. It could be small group stuff. But that's what the minister's job was.
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I hope I don't tread on any toes here. I don't want to cause more controversy.
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I think I've got it three times now. Effortless. Three times I've got it effortlessly. First one was a bit contrived, but the last two have been legit,
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I think. It's fascinating to me the growth of the number of titles for pastors that are in the conservative church today.
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You've got pastors of everything these days, or almost everything. Pastors of the arts, pastors of music, pastors of this, that and the other.
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That will ultimately represent, I think, a confusion of where common grace ends and special grace begins.
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If you think that God can be found just in hearing a piece of music, God can be savingly found in just hearing a piece of piano music played without any words, you can have a pastor of music.
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It makes sense. But if God is only found to be gracious in the declaration of the gospel, then your minister will focus solely on the declaration of the gospel.
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Publicly, and I'm not disparaging one -on -one pastoral ministry here because I think one -to -one declaration of the gospel is also a place where Christ is found.
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But there is a certain amount of anarchy coming in with our understanding of ministry.
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Just look at the plethora of ministerial titles there are out there.
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So a proper understanding of the scope of the ministry based on a proper understanding of grace.
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A word -centered ministry, I think this is my fifth point, flows from that.
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And again, we come back to my point earlier that I don't think Paul thinks that the problems that really beset the church are ultimately technical in nature.
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If you think that the primary problem for the church is communication, then you will, of course, get rid of preaching.
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Samuel Johnson, way back in the 18th century, says, you know, people have got a strange opinion these days that they think they can get information better from a lecture than from a book.
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He said, I always find it better to read than to listen to lectures. People have known for hundreds of years that having somebody stand up front and warble on for half an hour, 45 minutes, or an hour is not a great way of communicating information.
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If you think that the problem of the church is communication, then you'll get rid of preaching fairly quickly.
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Has it ever puzzled you, though, that passage in Scripture when Jesus is teaching in parables, and his disciples ask him, why are you teaching in parables?
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And Jesus gives an answer, that if I was dean, I hope I say this with all reverence, but if somebody had given
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Jesus' answer to me when I was dean of Westminster, I'd have had to have fired them, or at least put them on a probationary warning, because Jesus' answer when he's asked by the disciples, why do you teach in parables, is, well, it's so that people won't understand what
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I'm saying. That's a fascinating answer, isn't it? So they'll be always listening, and never actually hearing.
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They won't actually know what I'm talking about. Well, that's madness. And it's a great text, actually, to get hold of, when people say to you, well,
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Jesus was a great moral teacher. You'll say, no, Jesus was a hopeless teacher, because he deliberately taught in a way that nobody would understand what he was saying.
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That's bad pedagogy. It's because, of course, Christ's preaching is not ultimately about communication.
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Christ's preaching is ultimately about exposing the sinfulness of the human heart. And if you've not read the work of my dear
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Westminster colleague, Greg Beal, on idolatry, I think the book is called,
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We Become What We Worship. He's picking up on the idea of Psalm 115, that you make these idols, and then ultimately you become just like idols.
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Greg reads those passages, rightly, I think, against the background of the commissioning of Isaiah.
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Remember when Isaiah's commissioned, the Lord says to him, I'm going to send you to teach these people, but they're not going to understand a word you say.
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And the point is, you're going to go and expose their idolatry. They're going to be as deaf and as blind as the idols, and you're going to expose that.
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You're going to teach them, and they're not going to get what you're saying. And that's going to make their idolatry absolutely obvious.
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Don't get me wrong, I'm not denigrating the fact that preachers should be good communicators. But preaching is not a great mode of communication.
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The reason we preach, I think, is that God is primarily a speaking
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God, and the Word of God is the mode of God's presence.
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You look in the Old Testament. How is God present with his people? When he speaks. Amos threatens a famine, a famine of the
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Word of God. God is going to be absent. Luther says, all of the previous blows are as nothing compared to this one, because this is the point at which
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God actually withdraws completely from his people. There is no Word of God. Think of the
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Shunammite, this lovely lady who's built this annex to her house so that Elisha can always have a place to stay when he comes through town.
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She has this miraculous child as a result of that, and at some point in his...
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Well, the text is a little bit difficult to understand, but at some point when he's old enough to be out with his father, but still small enough to sit on his parents' lap, at some point the child dies.
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And the woman goes to Elisha, she goes to the prophet, and she says to the prophet, you know, I didn't ask for a child.
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I told you I was perfectly satisfied with the husband, but you gave me the child, and now the child's been taken away. And Elisha, if you remember, he gives his staff to his servant, and he says, run, you know, as fast as the winds can carry you, run and lay my staff on the child's face, and all be well.
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And the servant heads off, and the woman won't leave the prophet. And she says, no, no, you've got to come with me.
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We have a saying in Britain, you know, I want to talk to the organ grinder. I don't want to bother with the monkey.
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You know, the organ grinders used to have those things, and the monkey would dance, and the organ grinder would grind. And the idea was, I want to talk to the guy in charge.
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I don't want to talk to sort of the hired help. She wants the organ grinder to deal with this.
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She doesn't want the monkey. Why? Because Elisha's the man through whom the Word of God comes, through whom
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God is therefore present in a special, powerful, saving way.
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One of the great things the Reformers do is they make the connection between Old Testament prophets,
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New Testament apostles, and post -biblical preachers.
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When preachers preach, Second Helvetic Confession, we believe that when a man who is properly appointed preaches, it is the very
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Word of God. The Latin is very strong. Not that they thought the preacher's word was the same as the
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Bible, but God was speaking through the preacher.
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And so the point about preaching is not that it's the best means of communication. The point is, it is the
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God -appointed means of God being present and confronting His people. When God speaks,
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He's present. And, of course, Mark 1, you have that moment where the heavens are torn asunder, the
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Holy Spirit descends in the form of a dove, and God the Father speaks. And Mark is clearly seeing that as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy.
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And some of the intertestamental Jewish glosses on the Old Testament prophecy said that God would be absent from His people until the heavens were torn open.
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So when Mark chooses the word tore, schizo, I tear, tore open at that point, he's saying the prophecy is being fulfilled.
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God's present with His people. How do we know that? His voice. He speaks.
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He's back. So we need, I think, an understanding of a word -centered ministry.
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That has implications for training for the ministry. One of the things I think that seminaries generally don't do well is train men to preach.
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Part of the problem is the hours in the class that have to be properly spent on biblical languages and other things take away from pulpit experience, partly because, of course, preaching in a classroom is not like preaching in a church.
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And partly, of course, you've got to be careful that churches don't just get experimented on by incompetent student preachers.
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What is the right context for somebody to learn to preach? It's a tough one, isn't it, because you don't want congregations to suffer through bad or accidentally heretical preaching from a student.
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But you want students to become experienced pulpit people before they take their first course.
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So I throw that. That is a tough problem. If any of you have got a solution, tell me about it. And don't tell anybody else.
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Then I can claim it as my own and revolutionize seminary training. So word -centered ministry,
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I think, is vitally important. And that should also shape, I think, and make us very skeptical of those whose role models for preaching are ultimately technical role models.
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Stand -up comedians, they're not the best role models for preaching. Old Testament prophets are. Stand -up comedy has, and this is not a judgment on humor in the pulpit.
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I think humor is a good pedagogical stool. In sermons in particular, it needs to be used very carefully in a very limited way.
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It's not a judgment against humor, but it is a judgment against cocksure conversationalism. That's not an appropriate means of preaching the truth.
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Prophetic word, that's what preaching is. The Old Testament prophets, they're the best model for preaching.
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And finally, my last, I think it's my sixth point. We need to recover an understanding of what it means to be the church.
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We live in an anti -institutional, anti -hierarchical age. And I think this is probably tougher for Americans than it is for people elsewhere in the world for the reasons
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I outlined at the start of my first lecture. And this is not a criticism, it's merely an observation. Americans are strong individualists.
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They rightly, for many reasons, suspect hierarchies. They are rightly suspicious of people in authority throwing their weight around and crushing the little guy.
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Those are many of the things that have made America great and have served the civic sphere very well.
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Unfortunately, they don't work so well in the church sphere. The church in the New Testament is clearly hierarchical.
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Paul excommunicates people. Paul tells churches to excommunicate people.
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There is a hierarchy. We need to recover what it means to be a church. And I think that means we need to recover church discipline.
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I have a saying at Westminster, and I've always thought this throughout my academic career, that the quality of a degree is determined by the best person who fails.
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Quality of a degree is not determined by the genius who gets the top marks. It's that person who so nearly passes but doesn't.
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Where you set that boundary is critical to the quality of the degree. So, when
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I arrived at Westminster, one of my colleagues, who is now retired, at examinations, he used to have a saying. He said, well, we passed worst.
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I remember saying, when I became head of the church history department, I said, from now on, the saying is going to be, we failed better.
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I think a recovery of the concept of the church as a hierarchical, disciplined body is important.
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There are possibly insurmountable obstacles to this. Most obviously, the automobile, the motor car.
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17th century Scotland, there's a super book, a scholarly book written by a lady called Margot Todd, called
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The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland. It's got a section on church discipline, which can be pretty terrifying in 17th century
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Scotland. You know, first offence, you'd have to sit under the pulpit on a, you've probably got one just here, yeah, a really narrow ledge.
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You could do it here. You get the offender to sit on a really narrow ledge, so it's kind of uncomfortable, and they have to look out at the people, and everyone's sitting there thinking, well, what have they got up to?
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It's kind of humiliating. If that doesn't work, next degree of discipline, they have to stand just outside the church, but at the door, so that everybody files in and out, and sees them, and wonders what they've done.
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And they can hear the word preached, but they're kind of symbolically excluded from the body. And for the third degree of discipline, you would be manacled to the wall of the church, outside the graveyard, so that you'd be hanging manacles there as people walked past.
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Those were the days, you know, when you could really deal with your congregants in a decisive way.
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It had teeth, of course, because people had to live in the village. It's theoretically possible that if you refused church discipline, you might have starved to death, because people might have refused to sell you food.
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Now, of course, what happens is, if you're disciplined in one church, you can jump in your car, and you can drive and keep driving.
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The guy I used to meet with each week at the church, when I was in a church in England, this was nearly 20 years ago now, we used to meet to pray each week.
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Years later, after I'd left the church to move over here, I made contact with the church again, and found out that he'd left his wife, and run off with another woman, in a terrible, adulterous situation.
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But he's still going to church. He's going to church in the Brethren Assembly, virtually across the road. Stunning. We have to try to find some way of recovering church discipline.
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The odds may be almost insurmountable, but church discipline is absolutely vital.
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There's some good stuff written on it from a Presbyterian context. I'm guessing many of you are congregational. I would strongly recommend that you read the stuff that Mark Dever and the guys at Nine Marks have produced on church discipline and church membership, from the point of view of a congregational polity.
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I don't know of anybody else, I'm not omniscient, there may be somebody out there, but I don't know of anybody else who's addressing this issue in quite such a comprehensive and practical way as Mark Dever and the
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Nine Marks guys. So the recovery of the church as a disciplined institution, and again, to return to the point that I started with in many ways, that goes back to the top.
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Discipline starts at the top. Discipline starts by who's the best person in your church that you wouldn't allow to hold office.
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That's where you set the bar for office bearing. Where do you set the bar for membership? So, various practical issues then,
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I think, for the church today. We need to recover a profound doctrine of God as holy and transcendent.
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We pay lip service to that, but too often we do what Job and his comforters did. We domesticate.
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We say God is transcendent, but oh, by the way, he pretty much conforms to the way I think about him. We need to recover a true confessionalism.
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We need to understand the distinction between office bearers and members. We need to recover true discipline.
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We need to recover a grasp of the gospel as a declaration about what
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Christ has done that then has implications. We need to recover an understanding of the ministry as focused on the means of grace and connected to that.
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We need to understand that preaching is more than just communication. It is a prophetic word that is brought to the church, and we need to recover a hierarchical and disciplined view of the church.
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Tomorrow, I'm back on home territory. For those who return tomorrow, I'm doing what I love to do best, and that's I'm simply telling you a story.
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I'm a historian. I have the best job in the world. I'm paid to tell people stories. The story I love telling most is the story of Martin Luther.
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So, if you're able to come back tomorrow, I would love to tell you the story of Martin Luther. But thank you so much for listening very patiently this evening.