Jonathan Leeman Interview

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 Paul said, but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you. 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.

Reading and Recommending Jonathan Leeman’s Book

Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. This is Mike Abendroth, and I'm your host. The slogan of the show is pretty simple, always biblical, always provocative, always in that order. Each day of the week, we try to pick something a little bit differently to do, and today is Wednesday, and so we're gonna look at books.

We picked two different kinds of books here, some books that are no good, that you should not read. After all, Titus 1 says that elders should encourage and teach sound doctrine and refute those who contradict sound doctrine.

And so Wednesdays, we either pick good books or bad books. So today, we don't have a burner. We're not gonna burn a book today. Figuratively, we're going to try to encourage you to read this book, The Church and the Surprising Offense of God's Love by Jonathan Lehman.

Jonathan, welcome to the show today. Thank you for having me, Mike. The subtitle of the book is Reintroducing the Doctrines of Church Membership and Discipline. Jonathan, give us an overview, a sweeping overview of what the book is about, why you wrote it, and why you think it's important for the local church and the universal church here in the U .S. especially.

God's Love, the Son, and the Church

Yeah, thank you. Well, it's about two things, which I try to show are really one thing.

It's about church membership and discipline, but it's also about the nature of God's love. And what I try to demonstrate and help the reader understand is that our understanding, our view of God's love is gonna very much affect how we gather together as believers in local congregations, assemblies.

And if we have one view of God's love, we're not gonna pay very much attention to church membership. If we have another view of God's love, we will. And I think a biblical view would have us paying attention.

And a biblical view of church membership itself, of course, is gonna have us pay attention to what God intends for us in the local assembly.

Well, Jonathan, I loved it that you started off the book discussing basically what the world thinks of love. By the way, I like the little Huey Lewis quotes.

I did that for my own entertainment. Anybody else would enjoy that, but I did that for me.

I think our musical taste might be different, but I like it that you throw in a little pop culture here. The power of love. But you know, the world defines love a certain way. And of course, we can't define love based on our own subjective internal definitions or by what the world says.

Give us an overview of what is the love of God. It sounds strange today, because that seems to be the only attribute of God that the Christian church professes. But biblically, Jonathan, tell me about the love of God.

Yeah, sure.

I think from the fall on, we all define love to center on ourselves. So Adam and Eve have pushed God off the throne, put themselves on it, and they're gonna define everything in the universe according to what's advantageous to them, including the idea of love.

I know that you love me if you let me be me. If you let me be free. If you let me be all that I can be. If you give me what I need, I know that you love me. Whereas a biblical view, in this instance a right view, of love is centered on God.

Some ways, this is the starting point of it all, where Jesus is baptized, and God says, this is my love. All the church's love should focus on this beloved, the Father's love. Insofar as, from the beloved Son, anything I can call it love if I want, but it's no idea of love in general.

We're talking to Jonathan Lehman. The church and the surprising offense of God's love in his new book published by Crossway Publishers. Jonathan, I liked it that you included D .A. Carson's five definitions of love, and how complicated love can be.

When I read the book, I appreciated that. You don't have to give me all five, but help the reader or help the listener understand the different aspects of God's love that stem from the love for the Son, and God's love for the Son.

Yeah, great question.

I mean, I think our default assumption, even as Christians, evangelical Christians, is that there's just kind of God's universal love, and that's it. He loves everybody. John 3, 16, for God's love of the world, to give his only begotten Son, right?

So you have God loves everyone, and that's true. There is a universal component to God's love, D .A. Carson says, but he also says God's love is a more complicated thing than that. There's multiple tracks.

There's his inner Trinitarian love, that I already talked about, and his love for the Beloved Son and the Sons. I love the Father and do everything he's commanded me to do. So you have universal love, you have an Trinitarian love, and then you also have the kind of exclusive love that he shows to Israel, and then in the New Testament for the Church, that special covenantal love.

So when we talk about God's love, we gotta be aware of those different tracks.

Would you think it'd be fair to say that God has generally two kinds of love? A love of a creator, God loves people because he's created them, but then there's a different kind of distinguishing love for his people, for the elect.

Would that be fair to say?

I think so. I would root it all ultimately in love of his own glory. I would root both of those, what you kind of called those two kinds. I would root those in an even deeper love that he has for his own glory.

But yeah, as it works itself out in creation and redemption, you see a general love that he has for all creation. He's not willing that any should perish. But then yeah, there's a special love for his people Israel, and then a special love for the church.

Jonathan, I find it striking that what people do in themselves and like of themselves, like in themselves, they don't want God to exhibit those same qualities. For instance, my wife's name's Kim, and there's a lady at the church named Janet.

And if I walk up to my wife and say, I love you, I did this the other day, I love you. And then behind my wife sat this lady named Janet, who's a member of the church. And then I said hello to her. And I said, I love you.

I said the same thing, but I meant two different things, and both of those people knew exactly what I meant. So why is it, I guess it's gonna be pride and sin is gonna be the answer, but why is it so hard for people today, even Christians, to accept this kind of love?

They do it in themselves, they do it themselves, but they don't want God to have a distinguishing kind of love.

Yeah, that's a great question. I think because it puts authority and it puts control into God's hands. Whereas when you say God's love is universal, and that's it, that's all we're talking about. He loves everyone equally.

Well, that keeps control, as it were, a little bit in my hands. Whereas when you tell me that, no, he's going to love his bride, the church, uniquely, well, all of a sudden I see that love is according to God's decision.

I don't like that idea, at least in my sinful humanity, in which I wanna be king. The idea that God loves according to his own decision? Well, no, he needs to love me exactly as I want him to love me, right?

Right, and so what if somebody comes up to you and says God loves, and you talk about this in your book, God loves everyone unconditionally. Is there a conditional love? Is there only unconditional love?

Tell the readers, tell the listeners what you told the readers.

Conditional Love and the Call to Obedience

Yeah, what's really striking is if you look at the history of Christian theologians, they'll talk about this unconditional love, but in the very next sentence, they'll talk about how God calls us to obedience.

Well, think about that for a second. If he's loving us unconditionally, why is he calling us to obedience? I mean, why do I need to be obedient if he loves me unconditionally, right? I think a better phrase is to say that God loves us contra, this isn't my phrase, this is David Powleson's phrase, he loves us contra, conditionally.

So it preserves that merciful, gracious idea that we get an unconditional love that we like so much, which is biblical. This idea that he loves me contrary to my sin, contrary to what I deserve, contrary to what justice requires, he loves me mercifully, yes, but he calls me to change, and he calls me to become more like his son.

So the idea of unconditional love gets at some things which are biblical, but it also, I think, confuses the subject, and therefore, a better phrase might be.

Yeah, I love that quote and love the idea. Jonathan, as you were writing the book, it seems like you were taking us down a path, and that path is let's talk about love, then let's talk about the definitions of love, how love has to be defined biblically, and there's more to love than just a relationship.

You talk about how God is our authority in relationship, and then you move towards church membership. Tell me why you were walking down that path, and you just didn't start off with,.

Here's a discussion about church membership. Sure, because I don't think in our culture we're very capable of even having, in some ways, a conversation about church membership and discipline without clearing some of the brush.

I see, so right. God, I'm glad you said that. Keep going. Yeah, without digging ourselves out of a hole, to use another metaphor, and specifically our conceptions about God's love and our conceptions about authority.

And in our culture today, I think we pit authority and love against one another, and I think that's a satanic lie. I think that's a lie that Satan showed up with in Genesis 3, that, hey, if you wanna experience love, you don't need to submit to this guy because his authority is against you.

We do that in our culture especially. We've done that since the fall. We do that especially in our culture. We pit authority and love against one another. So to talk about church membership and discipline, which is fundamentally about, in some ways, love and authority, submitting myself to the discipleship and oversight of this local assembly, in order to talk about that, we gotta clear the brush of these misunderstandings about love and authority and how the two work together and how God intends for them to work together.

So there's a lot of foreground work that needs to be done, I think.

When you went to Crossway and said, this is what I'd like to do, and here's the format of the book, did they, I guess they encouraged that kind of approach versus discouraging that approach?

Yeah, I think they're very excited about it. I think something that people like about the format of the book, and I've heard people respond to it, they like the fact that we're, that the discussion is structured around the concept of love.

Because that's, you know, one reader, one reviewer said, you know, I sat down to pick up a book of 300 and plus pages on membership and discipline, and I asked myself, do I really wanna read this many pages on membership and discipline?

You know, it's, I'm sympathetic with that. But it, when you demonstrate how, look, this is a larger discussion than just these kind of polity questions, and I think the polity questions are important, but when you demonstrate, look, they nest within this larger construct of God's love, and yeah, I think people find that interesting.

Well, I thought it was also interesting, Jonathan,.

Why Literature and Culture Matter for Theology

You're a great writer, and you would weave in English literature, for instance, the Scarlet Letter. Is that just because that's part of you and part of your background, or what was your reason to do that?

Besides, for me, finding it interesting as I would read it.

Three reasons. Number one, yes, it's part of my background, and it's just, it's how I think. Number two, I just, kind of, again, for my own enjoyment in writing the book, I don't like putting Huey Lewis quotes.

There are some things that I would enjoy doing, and I don't know, a reader can like it or not. But thirdly, and I think most significantly, is I think, and this is the real reason, really, literature expresses and gives articulation to our culture in a way that even statistics don't.

The quick, easy way to demonstrate what our culture is like and what it's believing is to show statistics, and those are very helpful to a point, but I think when you look at the literature of a culture, you're getting the face of what we call the enemy.

And so in a book like Scarlet Letter...

Well, we're talking to Jonathan Lehman, writer of The Church and the Surprising Offense of God's Love, a wonderful book that I encourage all our listeners to read. Pick up a copy. You can get a copy from the link on our website, or you can go to Amazon or Westminster.

I'm sure there's lots of different ways to get that book. Horton gave you the recommendation, and he said, what happens when you bring together one of the most misunderstood subjects, love, and one of the most ignored practices, church membership and discipline, in the church today, a book like this one?

And he sees the link between what you believe about God, how it translates or spills over into the methodology of the local church, and I think that's why this book is so critical and so excellent, because we don't just have the methodology.

We see the right view of God leads to proper church practice. That's intentional, right?

Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, I think our tendency as evangelicals is to say, hey, look, the Gospel is central. Everything else is unimportant. Things like church polity, it's unimportant. The important thing is we all agree on the Gospel.

Well, I want to agree with that prioritization. Gospel is most important. The nature of God's love is most important. But God in Scripture has wisely given us secondary theological issues, like church membership and discipline, or tertiary, or however you want to rate it, to protect the primary things.

So I might use the analogy, what's more important, structures or the people inside of the structures? Well, it's the people who are most important, right? Well, what about in a thunderstorm? Well, those structures become pretty important all of a sudden to protect the people from the storm raging outside.

And the Bible gives us both the central things and the secondary things, the Gospel and the structures that we put around the Gospel, which is the protection and defense of the believers of the local church and its membership and discipline.

So we need to talk about both.

Church Membership and the New Testament Pattern

All right, changing subjects just for a moment, as regarding the book still, Jonathan, Dever wrote the preface and he said that you have encouraged, amused, and amazed him, but he also said you have exasperated him.

What does Mark Dever mean by you have exasperated him?

Are you digging for dirt here, Mike?

Oh, this is radio, always biblical, always provocative, always in that order.

Mark, I showed up at Mark's church in 1996, professing the Gospel, understanding how to articulate it, but very much pursuing the world and loving the world. And I don't think probably a Christian. I joined the church because I said, here's the Gospel, I explained it.

And then over the ensuing four or five years, there was just a transformative journey, a very powerful transformation of my life as I sat under this man's mantle. And so you can just imagine in those four or five years, four years of discipleship, how he saw the good, the bad, and the ugly of me personally.

So I think he was just sort of reflecting on some of our history together when he made that comment. And honestly, in many ways, what's driving my own experience as a nominal Christian, be to quickly place the rubber stamp of affirmation and approval on you, but then who don't keep you accountable in a private sense, professing, and who didn't practice discipline in any form.

Seeing the devastation in my own life and in the lives of many of the friends I went to high school with is part of what.

Well, thank you for that. Interestingly, Jonathan, as I was reading through, when I saw that quote, I thought, I have to listen to this, because I see that if this man can exasperate Mark Dever, he's got to have something to say.

Let's get into, I want to talk about two more subjects in the next eight minutes or so, and that is church membership and then discipline as we work kind of logically through here, or sequentially in your book.

If someone says to you, I don't think church membership is in the Bible, they're trying to show you really silently that they are not into commitment, how do you go about proving that the Bible teaches church membership is central to the life of a Christian, or can you prove it?

Yeah.

On the one hand, I want to concede the point and say it's more of an implication in Scripture, in the same way I say the Trinity is. You're not going to find the word Trinity. Triune God. Anything like that in Scripture, but if you put all Scripture together, it's just blazingly clear.

Our God is three persons and one God. Just can't get away from it. And I would say church membership is exactly of the same order. Put all the data together and it's blazingly clear. If you want to look for actual Scriptures, I'd start by maybe taking you to a text like Matthew 18 or 1 Corinthians 5, where Jesus and then Paul talk about being removed from the church, removed from a body, an assembly.

And so the question is, well, what are they being removed from? I mean, if I'm just showing up on Sundays, I mean, you're not really removing me. You know, I'm just, maybe I'm not coming anymore. Who knows what?

No, there's a formal identification that these believers have made, first as Jesus is talking about, and then as Paul is talking to the church in Corinth, that these people are being removed from. So you can kind of go out at the proof text route like that.

I think the larger story in Scripture is how there's always an inside and outside of God's people. Garden of Eden, there's an inside and there's an outside. Noah's Ark, people of God in the wilderness, people of God in Israel, there's an inside and there's an outside.

And the church, there's an inside and outside. If you don't believe me, go to 2 Corinthians 6, where Paul says very clearly, come out from them, be separate. Do not be yoked together. I mean, he's not just talking about not dating, you know, non-Christian girls, formally identified with unbelievers, not allowing them into your assembly.

I think it speaks more to the people who say, prove to me church membership, than it does to the Bible. Like you said, the Bible just assumes that church membership, being identified with the local church, was just part and parcel for the course.

And I like what you said, it was a good, provocative thing on page 266. Think again about the couple that cohabits, but does not join their lives together through the covenant of marriage. They don't want to identify their names with one another.

She doesn't want his, he doesn't want hers. They don't want to commit to distinguishing one another as their lifelong one and only. They don't want to give public record of their oneness, because there really is no oneness.

They certainly don't want to be called to account by one another or others. Did you get any flack for writing that?

No, well, I don't know what people were thinking, but.

Well, I'm just thinking, you know, that is one of those statements where it's like this couple that lives together, and they want all the benefits, but they don't want to have that formal covenant and commitment, and that's how a lot of people treat the local church.

Well, that idea is not original to me. I just think of Josh Harris's book, excellent little book, called Stop Dating the Church. You know, there's that very same idea. You know, quit messing around, commit yourself.

That's right, which is an excellent book. I like also, Jonathan, when you said, and I never thought about this way before, new believers, brand new Christians. They've been taken out of darkness, placed into light.

They've been born again. They never object, do they, to take a new membership class? Yeah, no, that's exactly right. Why is that?

Well, it's people who have been around the block, and they think they know what the Bible says on this, and they don't want to be bound by the local church, and they have opinions, whereas our brand new believers coming in, and they're like sponges, and they're anxious to learn, and you just take them to the scriptures, and you point these things out to them, and they happily embrace them.

I think we who have been in the church a little bit longer can sometimes have more, to put it nicely, we're a little bit more decided in what we think, maybe a little less teachable, maybe a little less terribly.

Yeah, I think it's also worth noting that it's really only in the last few decades that people have begun to object to the concept of church membership. As you travel throughout church history, there's something that people have never questioned.

Well, now give us 200 years of radical autonomy and individualism, let that affect us in the way we think, and that's gonna start to affect how we view church membership, whereas people throughout Christian history.

Just haven't had this problem. That's so true. Moving now to church discipline. Tell me the story about Jesse James. I'd never heard the story before, and I thought, what a great way to start a chapter.

Church Discipline, Accountability, and Leaving Well

Oh, yeah, I actually discovered that on a blog. I thought it was fascinating. Jesse James, the famous bank robber in Missouri, 1860s, was a member of a church in Missouri, and he had started to become known for his bank robbing, and the church apparently got together.

Apparently, this was in the church minutes, and I even called the church and talked to some people there. He started doing these bank robbings. It was showing up in the newspapers. The church got together and deliberated, and they thought, if we discipline him, he's gonna come and burn the church down.

And so the minutes record that two deacons were assigned to go talk to him, but then the deacons, the minutes don't record whether or not they actually went. Instead, the minutes record, in the subsequent membership meeting, he showed up and removed him.

He didn't wanna make things awkward for the church, and kindly removed himself, to which they happily consented and said, that's fine.

We're not gonna argue with you. You quote from Jesse in the book by Stiles, he believed himself to be unworthy. Yeah. And so here you have the unbelieving pagan who's got more sense about the purity of the church than you do the church itself.

Yeah, that's kind of the irony of the story, isn't it? It is. We've got about two minutes left.

When you make the comment, Jonathan, we join a church by the consent of the church and we leave by the consent of the church. Mount Olive Baptist should not have accepted Jesse James' resignation.

What'd you mean by that? Well, I mean, I think a common device for sinners when they're confronted with their sin is to deny it, and if they're a part of a member of a church, they'll often say, well, look, if you're gonna discipline me, I'm just gonna resign.

And, well, no, Jesus is smarter than that. And that wasn't Jesus' plan. The point is that when we covenant together with a local assembly, it's not just me showing up and saying, I'm now a part of you.

The church says, yes, we affirm your profession of faith. And just like in marriage, which you come together by the consent of two individuals, I think we join a church by the consent of the two parties.

And so as a marriage, and when there's a divorce that happens, both states require the consent of both parties. I think in the same way, leaving a church requires the consent. And so people cannot avoid church discipline.

I mean, it's a larger argument here that we really need. The short answer is try to get out of jail free by avoiding church discipline.

Absolutely, I agree. Well, Jonathan, the time has flown by. We didn't even work up to church discipline, really. I guess we'll have to do that another time. Give me the Nine Marks website for those who are interested in reading some of the articles that you have edited.

Is it NineMarks .org? That's it, number nine, M-A-R-K-S .org.

Great, and I would commend everyone to read the book, The Church and the Surprising Offense of God's Love, Reintroducing the Doctrines of Church Membership and Discipline by Jonathan Lehman. Crossway Books, excellent publisher.

Jonathan, thank you for your time today.

Thank you, Mike. God bless you. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible-teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God's Word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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