R. Scott Clark Interview (June 3, 2015)

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.
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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
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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.�
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In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn�t for you.
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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
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Divine Trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King. Here�s our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.
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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth. And as you know, Wednesdays we have preachers, pastors, theologians, authors, and I love
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Wednesdays because you get to be introduced as a listening audience to other ministries.
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And you think about how generous the Lord is, and He uses people, men and women, for gospel ministry and evangelism and all kinds of things.
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And so today on the phone with us, we have Dr. R. Scott Clark. Dr. Clark, welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry.
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Hi, Mike. Thank you very much for having me. Well, Dr. Clark, before we get into a lot of the details theologically, tell me a little bit about Nebraska.
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Is there no place like Nebraska? Nebraska is a wonderful place. You know, if you're from Oregon, the
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Pacific Northwest, you know, it might take a little time to appreciate the beauties.
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I'd say the beauty in Nebraska is subtle as opposed to sort of overwhelming the way it might be in the
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Pacific Northwest. But it's home for me. It's where I was raised. I'm a big fan of Nebraska football.
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Go Big Red. I love the people. I love the culture, the food. Those are my people.
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So it's a wonderful place. You know, growing up, the slogan was, and it still is, there's no place like Nebraska.
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And for those of us who are from there, that's true. It's a difficult place to live in some respects because the weather can be pretty challenging.
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In the winter, it's cold, and in the summer, it's hot. But fall and spring are beautiful times, and I have a lot of fond memories, and we go back there on a regular basis.
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So it's not just in the past. We tried to make sure that our kids had some experience, some sense of where mom and dad grew up.
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Well, I'm also from Nebraska, and I went to University of Nebraska at Lincoln as well.
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And I want you to know, Scott, that my brother Pat, and I know you know Pat pretty well,
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Pat had a key to Warren Buffett's house all the way through high school.
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Did you know that? No, I did not know that. Was he mowing the lawn or something, or what? Well, our mother knew
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Warren and had a key there to get in, and my mom also knew his wife and his girlfriend.
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Those were two different people at the time. And so, anyway, Pat had keys, and sometimes he'd go over and run errands and stuff like that for Warren, and so Warren has always been nice to our family.
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I grew up, or at least spent several years, in the Dundee neighborhood. So I know where Mr.
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Buffett lives, I know that neighborhood, and it's still a beautiful neighborhood. In fact, it still looks almost exactly the way it did in the 1960s when we lived there.
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With the Dundee Theater right down the street. Dundee Theater, Dundee Elementary is where I learned to read and write.
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Well, Dr. Clark, one of the reasons I have you on No Compromise Radio Ministry is because I'm trying to befriend you, because I don't want to be on the receiving end of critique theologically, because you are very precise and biblical, and so I just want you to know there's a method to my madness here today.
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No, I would never critique you. Alright, well if I needed it, I would accept it.
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Dr. Clark is a professor at Westminster Seminary, California in Escondido, and I have in front of me,
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Dr. Clark, maybe the favorite thing in my mind that you've done, and that is Covenant Justification and Pastoral Ministry, subtitled
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Essays by the Faculty of Westminster Seminary, California. You edited the book, but my favorite chapter is in fact the chapter you did on Do This and Live, Christ's Act of Obedience as the
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Ground of Justification. Tell us why that's, well, first of all, tell us what it is, and then why it's an important topic in evangelicalism today.
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Well, the doctrine of the Imputation of Act of Obedience is the doctrine that says everything that Jesus did, he did not for himself, but for us.
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And everything he did for us, all his obedience, all of his life, is credited to all those who believe, so that it is, as the
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Heidelberg Catechism says, it is as if we ourselves had done everything that Jesus did.
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So we don't make a distinction between Jesus' active and passive obedience.
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We don't say that what Jesus did leading up to the cross was for himself, but what he did on the cross is for us.
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Rather, we say that he suffered, as we say in Heidelberg 37, all of his life, and all that suffering is credited to us.
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And the benefit of this doctrine is that we stand before God completely righteous.
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Not partly righteous. It's not as if Jesus has wiped the slate clean, and now it's up to us to make sure that we keep what we were given, or to improve on it, or add to it, or whatever anybody wants to say.
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No. We are utterly and completely justified, which of course is what the Apostle Paul says, having therefore been justified, having therefore been declared by God to be as righteous as Jesus Christ on the basis of the crediting, the reckoning, the imputing of everything he did to us, received through faith alone.
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And that is the majority view among the Reformed, and arguably it is the view taught by the
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Reformed confessions as well. Now, Dr. Clark, when I read something like Jude 24, now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, would there be any other way to present sinners in front of the thrice -holy
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God without the work of Christ that he did for us? How could we stand before such a
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God? Well, this is the problem, you know, that those who deny the imputation of active obedience have a tendency to change the standard.
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If the standard is, as you say, God's thrice -holiness, if the standard is unbreakable, immutable law, and this of course is what
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God's Word says, Paul in Galatians quotes Deuteronomy 27 -26, cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything which is written in the book of the law.
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And Paul understands that to teach that God's law is not a curve, right?
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God doesn't grade on a curve. It's not like he looks at the whole map and says, well, this is what's possible, and here we'll say, you know, you meet the test, even though it's not perfect.
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No, the standard is perfect, you know, perfection. Either you hit the standard or you don't.
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That's why God said to Adam, you know, in the day you eat the rock, you shall surely die. It's not in the day in which you do your best, right?
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But God didn't say to Adam, you do your best, and I'll credit you with perfection on the basis of your best efforts or your intentions.
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And so, as you say, Jude says that we'll be presented to God on the basis of Christ's righteousness imputed to us, and therefore, that's a day that we anticipate with joy, and that's a day in which we expect to experience not fear and terror and dread, but joy, because we will be with our
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Father in Jesus Christ and received just as he received his only and eternally begotten
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Son who became incarnate for us. Well, Dr. Clark, why do you think so many people, especially in light of this, and it's such an important doctrine, people love
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N .T. Wright and want to promote him, and even in your chapter you say N .T. Wright rejects the imputation of active obedience on the ground that it gives the impression of a legal transaction, a cold piece of business, almost a trick of thought performed by a
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God who is logical and correct, but hardly one we would want to worship. I mean, I'm thinking
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I can stand in the presence of God, and the countenance that he has on his face, as it were, is one of pleasure, and of you're my son, or for the ladies, you're my daughter.
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I don't find anything cold about it at all. What's your analysis of N .T.
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Wright at this point? It's very common these days to set up a distinction, a false distinction, between relationship and law.
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And so the first thing we have to do is reject the premise. We need to criticize the premise and understand what's being assumed.
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The assumption is either we have a relationship or we have a law. And I say to you, that's not how the world works.
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That's certainly not what Scripture assumes, and it's not how the world works. I have a relationship, a very intimate relationship, with my wife.
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We have two children. We've been married for 33 years. Now, that relationship is also codified in law.
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We have a legal relationship, but that doesn't make our relationship any less personal, any less intimate.
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And so if you just think about what the assumption is behind what
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Wright and others are saying, if you just think about that assumption for a little bit, it begins to fall apart as incoherent.
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Because of course, the Apostle Paul uses this metaphor of Christ and His Church, or the metaphor of marriage, as a way of describing the relationship between Christ and His Church.
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And so, clearly, there is a legal basis for that relationship, but there's also a deeply personal, intimate character to that relationship.
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And so we have to criticize and reject the premise on which Wright and others are operating.
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Dr. Clark has a podcast called The Heidelcast, and I would encourage our listeners to listen to that.
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And, Dr. Clark, lately you've talked about of nice and men, playing off of mice and men, and how we have to be nice and make nice.
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And you know what? I see you just weren't making nice there, because folks say if you even criticize anything, you're not nice.
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Give us your analysis of evangelical ethos of niceness. Well, you and I both know quite a lot,
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I think, from personal experience about niceness, because we're from Nebraska, and of course, the state has an advertising campaign called
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Nebraska Nice. That's correct! Those people are nice.
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We are nice. We are raised to be nice people. We're raised to get along, we're raised to be kind, we're raised to treat people well, and the worst thing that can be said about someone where we're from is that so -and -so is not nice.
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That's a damning criticism that could potentially ruin someone socially or professionally, depending on the circumstances.
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And so, it's a serious issue. And my contention is that American Christianity, particularly
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American evangelicalism, is deeply influenced by this ethos of niceness.
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Now, as I said in the first episode of the series of Nice and Men, I personally very much like aspects of niceness.
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It's great to be able to stop and talk to someone that you've never met before for 20 minutes, talk about families and pets and all kinds of things.
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What do you put on your lawn, or how are your crops, what kind of a yield did you get, and what kind of pre -emergent did you put down, all of those sorts of things.
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That's a great thing. It's a kind of civil life that attracts me very much.
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On the other hand, the dark side of that, as it's been appropriated by evangelicalism and as it shapes evangelicalism, is it makes it difficult for us to deal with serious issues.
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And I see this all the time, where there are serious problems that have developed in late modern evangelical theology, piety, and practice, and yet we're not really allowed to say anything about it or to deal with it or to address it, because to do so would be considered not nice.
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And my thesis is, my argument is, ultimately, we are committed to Christian virtues, the theological virtues—faith, hope, and love—that
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Paul lays out for us in 1 Corinthians 13, and those virtues trump evangelical niceness, so that we're required to hold to, affirm, and defend the faith, and we're also required to believe the faith personally, and we need to hope for what
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God would have us hope for, and we need to love the way that God would have us love.
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And so the Apostle Paul was willing to risk public approval, he was willing to be not nice and confront the
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Apostle Peter when the latter had, by his conduct, denied the gospel.
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And I think that's a model that we need to follow. So, for example, in the doctrine of God, there was a movement called
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Open Theism that says that not only does God not know the future, but He cannot know the future, such that it is open to Him, not just to us, and He is contingent—that is, dependent—on our free choices.
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Not just that God has voluntarily willed to suspend, as it were, His will on ours, but that in the nature of things,
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God is not really Almighty. You know, in the Apostles' Creed, we say,
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I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth. And Open Theism said, well,
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He's not really Almighty. We now need to say, I believe in God the Father contingent—right ?—dependent
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on human creatures. And this was a very serious error in the doctrine of God, and I don't think it's too much to say, heresy against the teaching of Scripture and the
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Catholic faith is confessed in the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, etc. And yet, people were very reluctant to speak up about this.
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Now, there was some controversy, but it's died down now, and people are adopting these views and taking them up as if they were orthodox, so that, for example, when
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Clark Pinnock died, who was a leading proponent of this doctrine of God, I noted that, listen, before the evangelicals canonized him as a saint, please remember that he was advocating not only
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Open Theism, but also the Mormon doctrine that God is bodily, which is one of the most ancient heresies against the
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Christian faith, which was rejected in the second century. It's called the anthropomorphite heresy, that God literally in himself has hands, feet, eyes, ears, and that those are not just ways of speaking, but that he literally has those things.
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Clark Pinnock, in his volume, Most Moved Mover, actually suggested that, well, the Mormons have a point, and that we should take this seriously.
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So these are gross errors against the teaching—the clear, received teaching of Holy Scripture and against the
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Holy Catholic faith. And yet, when one points those out, one is criticized as being not nice.
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And I'm saying, love requires us to hold people accountable and to treat them as image -bearers made in the image of God, rather than to be nice and just to paper over serious problems.
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You're listening to No Compromise Radio today with Dr. Scott Clark, out at Westminster Seminary, Escondido.
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Dr. Clark, I was in the small room up here in Danvers Mass in,
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I believe, 1999 at an ETS conference when Clark Pinnock proposed his Open Theology view, at least initially.
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And I know we can't get into people's minds and understand their motivations, but what kind of explanation do you have for a guy like that?
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I mean, I often think if someone says, well, I'm changing my theology about hell, it's because it's a relational issue.
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I've got a loved one, and they don't believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, so I have to try to evacuate hell a certain way, or they prayed the prayer, but they're not following Christ, so now
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I have a different view. How should we watch out for things like that in our own lives so we don't fall off into this kind of grievous error?
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Because when I sat there and listened to Clark Pinnock, I thought, he's the smartest man in the room, but that's not the real issue.
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Well, that's right. We're not, the question is not one of intelligence. The question is really one of faithfulness, of fidelity to the
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Word of God, and particularly the Word of God as it has been received by the churches.
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And so, I think they, you know, I don't know why Pinnock did what he did. I have some theories, but I don't have a lot of facts.
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What I do know is that Pinnock operated on a theological method that ultimately placed the human intellect at least parallel to, if not above,
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Holy Scripture. And so, and that's known as rationalism. And when
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Pinnock believed in predestination, he did so as a rationalist. But ultimately, his intellect is the boss.
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And so, whatever Clark could or couldn't understand, ultimately, he got to decide what it is that Scripture could or could not teach.
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And he wasn't particularly bound by the teaching of Scripture as it's been received by the churches.
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And so, he adopted a method, a theological method, that was essentially identical to that of an earlier group of people called the
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Socinians. And the Socinians said, if it doesn't make sense to me, I'm not obligated to believe it.
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And on that basis, they did away with the Atonement, they did away with the two natures of Christ, they did away with the doctrine of the
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Trinity. And what they said is, well, I love Jesus, you love Jesus, and that's all that really matters, and all this other stuff is secondary.
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Even though we're now talking about two different Jesuses, one that is God the Son incarnate, true
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God and true man, and another that is not. And that methodology has remarkably deep roots in contemporary late -modern evangelicalism, so that Pinnock became, effectively, in his theology, a
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Socinian. And a few people recognized that and did point that out, but it wasn't widely recognized, because Pinnock said, listen,
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I'm just following the Bible, right? And I'm just reading the Bible, and so that way of talking about Scripture and about doing theology is very influential in contemporary late -modern evangelicalism.
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And I think people were somewhat reluctant to respond to him, because they share his basic theological method.
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It's called Biblicism. I and my Bible alone. Now, the Bible is the
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Word of God, and it norms all other norms. And one of the watchwords of the Reformation is
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Sola Scriptura, that the Bible is the sole, unique, final authority for faith and life.
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But we don't read that Bible alone, and we don't read it as if no one has ever read it. And we don't read it where the human intellect is the boss over what it can and cannot say.
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And that is why Christians have always said there are great mysteries in the faith. God is one in three persons.
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Jesus is one person with two natures. Even if I can't explain that comprehensively, I believe it on the authority of Holy Scripture.
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So ultimately, while he was talking about Scripture, really he was operating on the basis of his own rational intellect or rationalism.
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And I think that's how that happened. And I think evangelicalism is, to a certain degree, infected with this
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Biblicism that talks about Scripture, but really puts the human intellect in charge of everything.
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Dr. Clark, I feel like I'm just listening to a heidelcast. And so for a moment there, I wasn't thinking about the next question
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I should ask you. I was thinking about the
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Depeche Mode, my own personal Jesus song, but I don't know if they played that back in Nebraska. I was a punk rock disc jockey at KZUM in Lincoln, Nebraska for a short time.
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So now I guess I'm back on radio promoting a different agenda. I remember that station.
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A friend of mine and I, we were supposed to do a show on Saturday morning there. And whoever it was that unlocked the station wasn't there.
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And so we found an unopened, an unlocked window. We pried it open, we crawled in, and we did our show.
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When the station, in the very early days, was downtown in an old white house, somewhere on K Street, I think.
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Yeah, that's exactly right. In the house, and you know, in one of the bedrooms was the station, excuse me, was the, you know, a couple turntables, and you would play the song.
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So yeah, I remember that. Well, we've only got a couple minutes left. What's your favorite thing to teach new students when they come to the seminary?
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Heidelberg Catechism, without question. I'm just an old catechism teacher. That's all I am. Now, we only have, you know, like two minutes, but when
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I said to Pat, my brother, I'm going to talk to Dr. Clark just here momentarily. What should
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I ask him? And he said, ask him about Intinction. Well, in case the listener isn't familiar,
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Intinction is a growing practice in, at least in Presbyterian and Reformed circles, and I don't know how widely it's spreading outside of that, but I assume it may be.
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And this is the practice of, rather than handing people the cup and the bread, as was the old
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Protestant practice and the practice of our Lord and the practice of the ancient Christian Church, now people are dipping the bread in the wine—that's
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Intinction—and then people are receiving this bread that's been dipped into the wine.
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And so I've been complaining about it because people are adopting this practice, not because they think it's true or because it's ancient, even, or because it's biblical, but simply because they want to save five minutes in communion.
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And in fact, just to test this, we had Communion Sunday, and I admit,
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I looked at my watch and I looked to see when did it—you know, at the moment at which we began to administer the bread, you know, how long did it take?
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And it took six minutes. So when I say five minutes, I'm pretty close. But people are abandoning, in a sense, or modifying, perhaps is more accurate, the two elements—bread and wine—and taking a half step towards, you know, getting rid of the cup by practicing
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Intinction. So it's really a symbol for a growing, sort of creeping pragmatism in the Church.
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Well, Dr. Clark, thank you today for being on No Compromise Radio. I want to have our listeners be able to go to heidelblog .net
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and they can read what you write. We've got the Heidelcast. They can do that as well.
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And you're also very active in the Twitter universe, at rscottclark for twittering.
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I thank you so much for being on No Compromise Radio for your ministry, and there is no place like Nebraska.
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Go Big Red. Thank you, Mike. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.
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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.
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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.
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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.