Current Issues in Evangelicalism (Part 3)

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the apostle

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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her

King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio. My name is

Mike Abendroth. Special treat today, part three. Today is the third installment of Dr.

Carl Truman at Bethlehem Bible Church for a Friday night conference, specifically talking to leaders.

I asked Carl to address some current issues in evangelicalism, and he went right to 1

Timothy 3 and the qualifications for leaders. Creed is all messed up. What do you need?

You need the right kind of godly leaders. And so today is part three. Carl Truman at the church, at Bethlehem Bible Church, talking about leadership in his own style.

Don't forget, No Compromise will soon no longer be on VNE 760, so listen to the podcast, websites,

Facebook, just type in nocompromiseradio .com and you'll be fine. Today, part three, Carl Truman talking to leaders.

Carl's a professor at Westminster Seminary and very, very insightful writer at reformation21 .org.

Well, it's a great pleasure to be back up here to speak again. I promised to avoid controversy while I'm speaking, so I managed to sneak that in early.

I want to talk now about a series of priorities for the church that I see as antithetical to tendencies within the church that are going on at the moment.

First thing I want to point towards is the need for the church to have a proper doctrine of God.

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 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

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, and Job and his comforters are continually debating the nature of God, and one of the things that comes through very clearly in the book of Job is ultimately that God is mysterious.

Job's comforters are convinced that his suffering, his problems, are the result of some sin or some lack in himself.

Job, on the other hand, keeps demanding, 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

Satan himself, has stood before the Lord and has made the accusation that Job only worships

God because of what Job gets out of being religious, and the Lord has allowed

Satan, the accuser, to inflict great suffering on Job to the point where Job is almost dead, but the

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, 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

Lord ultimately does not tell Job why he has suffered, why he's suffering.

There is this great emphasis in the book of Job on the transcendence of God.

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,

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,

God is paying you back in some way. In other words, God is transcendent for them one minute and domesticated the next.

For Job, God is transcendent, but he still demands that God should give a reckoning of himself before Job, and of course, at the end,

God comes in and challenges Job and says, you know, were you there when I created the heavens and the earth?

Were you there, Job? Why should I have to answer to you for anything? 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.

I think there are a number of pieces of evidence that this is the case.

I think in some quarters, an overwhelming emphasis upon God as Father. Now, don't get me wrong.

The Bible clearly teaches that God is Father, but the Bible also teaches that God is a consuming fire as well.

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.

And I think the emphasis upon the fatherhood of God in some conservative circles has led ultimately to a rather casual attitude to God.

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.

The way that gospel is being bandied around in some circles is almost like a

Protestant indulgence these days, that gospel is being used before the law ever gets a look in.

And yet the 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 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.

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.

There is a creeping antinomianism in the church that I think is problematic.

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 center these days.

The Christian life also involves growth in holiness, I think. Rooted in our justification, but involving sanctification.

And there is sentimentalism creeping into the church, dressed up as Pauline Protestantism.

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 God that is just a loving heavenly father and not a consuming fire is just a sentimental figment.

So the first point I would make is we need to regain a proper doctrine of God. I was told that there is a clock over there.

It's a compulsive nervous habit 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.

My wife and two sons are always criticizing me for it. I've tried to stop it. Since they pointed it out,

I'm now acutely aware of it. I just can't stop doing it. There I go, you see,

I'm instinctively moving in just to fiddle with my watch. I did it again.

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.

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.

It's really, it's heartwarming to hear that the church here uses a modified version of the 1689 confession.

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.

True confessionalism is important for a number of reasons. One, I think it's very countercultural.

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

Christianity. What I love about historic confessions is they were written ages ago.

The fact they were written by a bunch of dead white guys commends them to me. The race of these people is irrelevant.

Their deadness is a real positive, I think, because it means that this is stuff that has stood the test of time.

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,

I think what Paul talks about in his pastoral epistles is holding fast to a form of sound words.

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.

There are many good reasons for despising the past. In many ways, the past was worse than today. Scientifically, that's the case.

Who wants to live in a world without antibiotics? Who wants to live in a world without analgesics or anesthetics?

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.

Who wants to live in a world without many of the domestic helps we have these days?

I was laughing with my wife, I was reading the new biography of EF 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, just 40 odd years ago, grew up. We had to do the washing up each night.

These days, you're lucky you get your kids to stack the dishwasher. Kids don't wash up these days, but who wants to wash up?

It was boring and tedious and I hated it. You don't want to go back to those times.

So there are many reasons for prioritizing the present and the future. 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.

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 our imagination.

And we think that, well, we all know the past is inferior. We have to look for bigger and better and technically sharper ways of doing things.

So I love the old creeds and confessions because I think they capture something of the

Pauline gospel, and that is that we did not invent the gospel last

Sunday. It has been preserved and passed on from generation to generation. 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.

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 gospel, the historical rootedness of the gospel.

I also am very much a sort of English Puritan in my view of liturgy, though I've moderated a little bit over the years to the extent that at the church where I'm pastor, sometimes we will say the

Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed together, not because we think it's on the same level as scripture, but because we think it teaches what scripture teaches.

And I love the fact that when corporately we say those words together, it's an act of counter -cultural protest, not a counter -cultural protest.

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.

So one of the important reasons for becoming confessional, for having a confession, for using confessions, for teaching confessions, is it's counter -cultural.

It highlights the importance of the past. And as a result, of course, it relativizes the importance of the present.

Nobody ever owns Christianity. They merely look after it for the next generation.

Secondly, and I mentioned this earlier, I think the proper use of creeds and confessions establishes a proper distinction between office holders and members.

And I know churches vary on this, but for me, Romans 10 is very precious. Whoever declares it with their mouth that Jesus is

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.

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.

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.

But if you want to be an office bearer, wow, we have one of the stricter forms of subscription even within conservative

American Presbyterianism. Typically, in American Presbyterianism, you can take what they call exceptions to the

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.

And then the presbytery votes on whether those disagreements are legitimate, whether you can still be a gospel minister and hold those objections.

In the OPC, we don't allow exceptions. We do allow what we call kind of scruples and that means you can sort of disagree with the application.

And certainly when I was licensed and then ordained, I did something that I've heard numerous students do before and since and that is

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.

Nobody can honour the Lord's Day as the larger catechism demands. You can't fall asleep on a

Sunday afternoon and be honouring the Lord's Day as the Westminster larger catechism demands.

So it's good to say I scruple with the application. You're being honest and upfront with your

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You may not appreciate that as a new Christian believer. You may just believe, well, I believe God is three and God is one.

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

Trinity, the doctrine of the Incarnation, the doctrines of God's transcendence and holiness can be safeguarded.

If you have a 10 -point doctrinal basis as the doctrinal basis of your church, then within a generation or two, you'll have heterodoxy.

You cannot maintain Christian orthodoxy at a low level of complexity as a church.

It just doesn't happen. And history testifies to the fact it doesn't happen.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

Delightful Christian he may be with no marks against his character whatsoever.

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.

I also think creeds and confessions are important because, and this connects to the one

I just made, they represent the pedagogical ambitions and aspirations of the church. If you have a 10 point doctrinal basis,

I don't think you're ever going to be able to convince your people that that 11th point is important. Because if it was important, the elders and office bearers would all have to believe it.

People aren't stupid. My wife and I teach the three to four year olds in our church.

You'd think that was likely to happen. Delight 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.

They don't respect you. You have to earn their respect. Secondly, they're not cynical.

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.

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. I mean, that's a tough question to answer. It's a hard question to answer to a 35 year old, to a four year old.

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.

You've got to make sure you answer that question very, very carefully. I can't even remember why

I got onto that. It represents the pedagogical ambitions and aspirations of the church.

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.

You may have people in your church who don't agree with yours. But I'm glad they have an opinion on it.

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.

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

Lord's Supper. And for many evangelicals today, this is an impossible disagreement to understand.

Why would Luther make such a big deal of it? Well, Machen is, he says, you know, it's a tragedy that Luther and Zwingli fell out in 1529 at Marburg.

He said, an absolute tragedy, he said. But it would have been a bigger tragedy if they had agreed to differ because they didn't think it was that important.

That, I thought, was a very profound comment. And I get kind of, this is just a personal bias,

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 church is telling us we've got to agree to differ.

It's the guys who head up parachurch organizations who tell us we've got to agree to differ on these things.

Parachurch organizations should never set the agenda for the church. They should be handmaidens.

And I work, Westminster is a parachurch organization. But we don't set the agenda for the church.

We're to serve the church. They also,

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 officers.

Now, that's counterintuitive in many ways because often, certainly what

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.

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.

I think it's the opposite. I think if your church has a good creed or good confession, it actually prevents abuse of power.

It delimits the power of the ministry. If you have a church which has no creed but the Bible, just think of this, you know, and there are some around where the minister would say,

I have no creed but the Bible. And one week that minister's teaching Trinitarianism and that's fine because everybody knows it's orthodox.

The next minute, the next week, you're standing up in the pulpit and he's teaching Unitarianism. How do you get him?

How do you remove him from the pulpit? To remove a minister from a pulpit, whether you're a congregation or a

Presbyterian, ultimately the principle comes down to the same. 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. If you don't have a confession, then your confession is functionally what the minister decides it is every

Sunday. Or your confession is functionally what the congregation decide they will or will not tolerate on any given

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