Know What the Bible Is

I had a good day today down in Maesycwmmer in Wales meeting with some welsh brethren. Good to see fellow blogger Guy Davies among them.

We were there to hear Richard Gaffin give three lectures on Biblical and Systematic theology, Christ in the Old Testament, and The Resurrection in the Theology of Paul.  All excellent and I may make some more detailed comments at a later date.

Amongst the many things learned today, it was good to be reminded what Scripture is. It is the record of the history of revelation where it describes what God has done and it explains why he did it. It really is the drama of redemption.

I mention this because it struck me with some force that failure to understand what the Bible is, especially with reference to the OT, makes it impossible to interpret it properly. The OT  is not part of a systematic theology manual, delivered to us in a higglety-pigglety state which we have to sort out into a system, as though God had not quite got round to it.

Nor is the OT  a repository of moral examples to follow or avoid, with a few prophecies that relate directly to Christ buried away. This simply leads to a form of nugget-hunting which is at the same time baffling and unsatisfying.

It is important to note that neither of these approaches bear any resemblance to the way Jesus and the apostles looked on the OT.

I’ll write more later.

Website Wisdom

I bet, like me, through one thing and another you have found yourself at a church website which makes you say out loud, “Oh, no… no”. Or at least cringe. Pale pastel background, comic sans font, text across the whole width of page, pictures that are so huge they take ages to load, early 90s clip-art graphics – a combination of any of these will do.

I am convinced that many churches have a website because someone else said they should. Their heart is not in it. But like it or not, increasingly the first point of contact for people looking for a church is through an online search engine. We need to face the fact that, great though the church may be in many respects, people most likely won’t come if all they know about us us a crummy website.

I say this as a pastor of a start-up church for which >90% of its physical visitors to a Sunday service first encountered our website. We could have set up a web presence for virtually nothing (and I have done in the past) but we decided this time to spend a few hundred pounds on it. That is not a great amount by any means – we could have spent thousands -  and our website is not the greatest – there is plenty of room for development and improvement, but it has been worth it. There is more to be done and it is a developing field, so it is worth someone in one’s church keeping on top of it.

Anyway, to the point: Drew Goodmanson has recently done some research on church websites and there are some useful pointers in his Christianity Today article. You can get a pdf of it from here: Website Wisdom – Goodmanson.

Calvin’s Doctrine of Union with Christ

Back in March this year I gave a paper to the Reformed Ministers’ Fraternal in Dudley, entitled as above. I have just found out about Google’s knol facility, so I have put a copy of it here.

Of course, I would welcome interaction and critique.

Wright, Helm and Imputation

I have a lot of time for Paul Helm’s writing at Helm’s Deep. Recently, I have been following his analysis of N T Wright’s recent offering on the doctrine of justification (Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision). I have not read the book myself so I am not qualified to comment on it directly. However, Helm comes up with a curious conclusion that Wright’s doctrine is surprisingly close to the traditional Reformed understanding of justification by faith, while at the same time Wright himself denies it!

The root of the problem seems to be that Wright has simply not understood what the Reformed understanding actually was, and is, of imputation of righteousness. And Helm has helped me understand something about Wright’s treatment in What St Paul Really Said (which I have read) that puzzled me somewhat. There, Wright says

If we use the language of the law court, it makes no sense whatever to say that the judge imputes, imparts bequeaths, conveys or otherwise transfers his righteousness to either the plaintiff or the defendant. Righteousness is not an object, a substance or a gas which can be passed across the courtroom. (p.98)

At the time I read this, I thought, “he is just denying the imputation of a righteousness from God”. However, I realise now, thanks to Helm,  he was not. He was denying a particular definition of imputation that involves treating the righteousness as “an object, a substance or a gas” to be “passed across the courtroom”, which of course is nothing like the Reformed understanding. It seems obvious now, but I missed it then.

Helm seems to show that because of this failure to understand historical theology, Wright is really attacking a straw man. From my vantage point, this really does seem like a stonker of a blooper.

You can read Paul Helm’s articles here, here, here and here.

Tom Holland and the New Perspective

When I was at WEST (then, it was called ETCW) one lecturer whose classes I greatly enjoyed as a student was Tom Holland. I always found Tom engaging and motivating as he taught. Sadly, I was not able to learn enough from him through one thing and another.

I liked his willingness to interact with Dunn, Wright and the New Perspectives guys. There were some queezy moments – a bit like walking Striding Edge and looking down – as one thought, “where are we? where is he going with this?” However, it is clear he is on to something as he seeks to show, on the one hand, the strength of the reformational understanding of justification by faith, and, on the other, the weakness of the underlying methodology of NPP advocates.

The latter is examined by Holland in a lecture given at GPTS, Greenville this month. It can be found here. I strongly recommend it.

Laughing at Sin

I think this is one of the most bizarre things I have heard in a sermon. In the first five minutes, the audience completely misses the gravity of what John Piper is saying and laughs at almost every line. Even when Piper seeks to call them back, they still laugh!

This link, and the comments, express pretty well what happens when an audience expects a sermon to be loaded with entertaining elements and so interprets serious statements as humour.

Sit back, listen, and feel the sense of disbelief…

(HT: Miscellanies)

Important for Preachers to Remember…

...everyone preaches a disastrous clunker once in a while; and many actually preach them with remarkable and impressive regularity.
- Carl Trueman

What the New Atheists Don’t See

Theodore Dalrymple has written this article about the so-called New Atheists. It really is a remarkable piece:

What the New Atheists Don’t See by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Autumn 2007.

(HT to someone I can’t remember!)

Online Church?

Since I became aware of the “reformed” stream of the emergent church movement, I have been following serveral bloggers from this stream with interest. One of them is Drew Goodmanson. He is an interesting guy because he is also in the front line of thinking about the impact of social media on church. (In fact, he runs a web business.)

Yesterday he reported a conference he was at where some were promoting the idea of planting an online-only church. The thought prompted the question for Drew:

What are we called to be as a Biblical community? And can this be done with technology?

This seems to be a hot running issue and I suspect that a large number of web-savvy people (esp. the young) think that the answer is simply a matter of working it through to a solution on the grounds that the web is simply another cultural medium.

I beg to differ. I wrote a quick response which I thought I would post below. It merely outlines my thoughts on it, but here it is…

—

Drew,
Thanks for this interesting, and, I guess, somewhat disturbing post.

I agree with you that there can be community online. My problem is that thinking is subtly changing from church –> fellowship –> community as though these things are synonyms. I find it amazing that anyone can hope to plant an online-only “church”!

Here’s why: I am a reformational guy and when I think about “church” I begin to think about the marks of the church, which were recovered at the Reformation. These are

1. preaching of the gospel,
2. right administration of the sacraments, and
3. church discipline.

So it seems to me that if we want a genuine biblical church (that’s what we want, isn’t it?) we need to ask how these can happen through the online medium. We might argue that online video can deliver the first of these adequately (though I have my doubts).

However, can baptism be done? taking of the Lord’s Supper where we “discern the Lord’s body”? The mind boggles!

Finally, how is discipline carried out online? In fact, how can one possibly have any idea that an online avatar is professing genuine faith without any kind of face to face contact? This is a basic starting point for exercising discipline. Even if one has a method, how can one effectively help with dealing with sin, especially if one is at the stage of getting an individual to see that there is a sin to repent of? I don’t think any of this can be done without life-on-life involvement.

As you can see, I am a bit of a skeptic!

Christ is Coming

Nehemiah 11 is an awkward chapter. It comes after the walls of Jerusalem have been rebuilt, and the great covenant renewal service has taken place in chapters 8-10. But after this high point it seems to hit a brick wall (ha!). The bulk of chapter 11 consists of a list of names of people who settled in Jerusalem after the return from exile. What’s that all about? Why is it there?

It is tricky, and it is tempting to skip over it and move on to more ‘meaty’ devotional and exemplary stuff. However, Paul’s words to Timothy ought to cause us to be cautious about skipping over anything in the Bible:

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.
- 2 Tim 3:16 (NIV)

The “all” requires us to ask the question of any part of Scripture: “Why is that there?” It demands an answer.

Well, here is my stab for Nehemiah 11. The chapter emphasises family leaders (4-9), priests (10-14), Levites (15-18), and sundry people in a support role for a functioning temple (gatekeepers, temple servants, singers) who were to in habit the still run-down interior of the walls (see Neh 7:4). Who were these people?

The priests were descendants of Aaron, a Levite, whose task was to perform the acts of worship in the tabernacle and temple. (Zechariah was one of them – see Luke 1:8.) Other Levites acted as their assistants. The Levites had no land. The Lord was their portion.

What this tells us is that chapter 11 is about how the people took seriously the reformation that was stimulated by the reading of the Law in chapters 8-10. With renewed zeal, they read the Bible and wanted to do what it said. In particular they wanted to ensure that the people of God would continue to worship in the ways that God had prescribed. So, in these chapters we see revival (heart) and reformation (practice). This meant that the ‘holy city’ must be a secure place for the functioning temple.

This of course reminds us that this is always God’s desire: that his people assemble and worship him. It was the motive for the Exodus (Ex 4:23) and now for the return from Exile. It will be in glory too.

Not only that, but it must be done in God’s way. God sets the parameters for how worship should be conducted.

It is easy to see why in Nehemiah it should be ‘just so’. The symbolism is pregnant with redemptive historical meaning. The temple? Immanuel (God is with us). The sacrifices? Christ our sacrifice. The Law? Christ the perfect, sinless Man. etc.

The whole chapter shouts, “Christ is coming! Prepare!”

Comments?