Category Archives: Theology

Dr. Mohler By Faith Alone

Posted on by jbyas

This week Dr. Al Mohler, the President of a Southern Baptist Seminary, reminds us that the Roman Catholic Church is a false church that teaches a false gospel.

His reason?

“First and foremost, evangelicals must affirm that the doctrine of justification by faith alone is an essential, because that is the very definition of the gospel itself, and there is nothing more core, central and essential than the gospel. The reformers were absolutely right in saying that any understanding of justification – even the understanding that justification is by faith and something else — is another gospel, is anathema to the gospel of Jesus Christ,” Mohler said. “The only way of understanding salvation by grace alone through faith alone is defining justification as the Scripture defines it, and that is justification by faith alone.”

Please tell me if I’m missing something here (I mean that sincerely) but the logic seems to be this:

The core of the gospel is justification by faith alone.
If you don’t believe that then you are believing a “false gospel.”

Is that what he’s saying? If so, I have a question about this logic. Isn’t the insistence that I must believe in the doctrine of “justification by faith alone” to be a faithful Christian a contradiction?

It sounds to me like Mohler is doing the exact thing he is accusing Catholics of doing. Isn’t he basically saying that “Justification is by faith alone AND your belief that justification is by faith alone”? In that case, neither the Catholics nor Mohler are saying that justification is by faith alone.

So, to sum up:

If the Catholic Church says the core of the gospel is faith + works, it’s heresy.

If Mohler says the core of the gospel is faith + correct beliefs about faith, it’s orthodoxy.

Got it.

From “The” to “My”

Posted on by jbyas

Just like every kid growing up in the 90s, I was taught by my parents, church, and school, that I could change the world when I grew up. And so when I grew up and became a pastor, I tried my hardest. And I thought that “changing the world” was what the gospel was about.

But the more I tried to change the world, the more my world suffered. The more my mind and heart were focused on the problems in the world and how I could solve them all, single-handedly of course (with God all things are possible), the less impact I had in my family, friendships, and local community. And so, I eventually decided that for me to be faithful to the good news of Jesus I had to give up on my dream of changing the world and adopt the harsh reality of changing myself and my world.

Back in 2008 I wrote a series of lectures to be used in a seminary course on Pastoral Ministry and this process from “the” to “my” was obviously at the forefront of my thoughts as I wrote. For instance, part of the first lecture reads:

“In the American context, many pastors confuse the call of God to do “great things” with the wider culture’s obsession with celebrity. It is common to hail as hero the pastor who takes up the martyr’s cross and sacrifices his family, friends, and neighbors for the sake of writing his magnum opus that will change the face of Christianity or for the sake of going on the speaking circuit. These tasks are not necessarily bad if the pastor is able to do it out of a sincere love for Christ and if this devotion to Christ is evident by service to neighbor (which includes our family, it will do well to remember). But oftentimes what s/he has really sacrificed is the Christ mandated call to love neighbor as self for his/her own desires of celebrity and recognition or a subjective belief that God has truly called them to this or that particular task. The common sentiment to “do great things for God” can easily become a call to “do great things for myself using God.” That is to say, many will at some point use God as a scapegoat and as justification for their lust for power and celebrity in a twisted version of “don’t blame me, the devil made me do it.” Whether conscious or unconscious, it is never right for the pastor to blame his neglect of family, friends, and local community on God’s call.

I would perhaps not state it so emphatically today, but it has become more evident to me that if the Gospel is about incarnation and about giving up positions of power to be with those who have no power, then the most useful I can be to the Kingdom of God is to incarnate myself in my local community rather than trying to establish my “platform” as a Christian celebrity. If we truly believe that the Kingdom of God is upside down then we should aspire to be the unknown servant, not the keynote speaker. We should aspire to be the unnoticed servant, not the celebrated author. But I don’t. We don’t.

May I continue to learn what it means to be incarnational, to imitate the one who both lived and died as a nobody. To stop trying to be the Savior of the world and to be present with those in my world.

“Cowardice wants only to concern itself with the really important,big things, not in order to carry something out wholeheartedly but to be flattered by doing something that is noble and great. Yet hiding behind the exalted is nothing but an excuse for not conquering all the little things…”

– Soren Kierkegaard

Barthian Ruminations

Posted on by jbyas

As our Schleiermacher Reading Group at WTS is currently reading through Barth’s Church Dogmatics section on Scripture, I have found myself having tremendous sympathies with his views on Scripture. Now, this is pretty scary and uncharted territory for me since I have it ingrained in me to consider Barth a hermeneutical and Christological heretic even though he opposed the theological liberals of his time (who I was also taught to consider heretical).

But I think that just as many of my fears about critical scholarship were unfounded so were my fears about Barth. For instance, he states:

“The demand that the Bible should be read and understood and expounded historically is, therefore, obviously justified and can never be taken too seriously. The Bible itself posits this demand: even where it appeals expressly to divine commissionings and promptings, in its actual compostion it is eerywhere a human word, and this human word is obviously intended to be taken seriously and read and understood and expounded as such. To do anything else would be to miss the reality of the Bible and therefore the Bible itself as the witness of revelation. The demand for a “historical” understnading of the Bible necessarily means, in content, that we have to take it for what it undoubtedly is and is meant to be: the human speech uttered by specific men at speciic times in a specific situation, in a specific language and with a specific intention. It emans that the understanding of it has honestly and unreservedly been on which is guided by all these considerations…To the extent that it [the concrete humanity of Scripture] is ignored, it has not been read at all.“

What I love about this quotation is that it gets at the heart of what makes the Bible so uncomfortable for both theological conservatives and theological liberals: its historical situatedness. For theological liberals history is unimportant because it cannot be trusted to be accurate, so we tear off the husk of situatedness and grasp the kernel of moral truth behind the history.
For theological conservatives history is too concrete and not “transcendent” or “ontological” enough, so we tear off the husk of situatedness and grasp the kernel of “what the divine author really meant.” We often read the text as though we want to always be getting behind the history rather than seeing the revelation itself as historical. I am not sure as to the implications of this but I do know that it gels much better with what we actually find in Scripture, that it was written by specific individuals, for specific individuals, for specific circumstances. We should probably then be spending our time figuring out how this fact affects our hermeneutic rather than expending all of our energy brushing this fact under the proverbial rug.

God is the cause of Global Warming

Posted on by jbyas

I completely disagree with my friend Art who says that Satan and evildoers (like liberals, popes, people who don’t believe in the rapture, et al.) are the cause of global warming. Although he does present some good evidence (click here to see his post), I have stumbled upon some counter-evidence that it’s actually God and not Satan.

God is the cause of Global Warming

Posted on by jbyas

I completely disagree with my friend Art who says that Satan and evildoers (like liberals, popes, people who don’t believe in the rapture, et al.) are the cause of global warming. Although he does present some good evidence (click here to see his post), I have stumbled upon some counter-evidence that it’s actually God and not Satan.

WTS

Posted on by jbyas

My first post on the controversy at WTS. I have not been in the right mind before to post something I wouldn’t regret, but I think I have calmed a little bit.

The Board of Westminster Theological Seminary had an emergency board meeting to discuss the orthodoxy and issues surrounding Pete Enns’ book Inspiration and Incarnation.

After the meeting the following announcement was sent to the board, faculty, and students of Westminster:

March 27, 2008
Thank you very much for your prayers for the special meeting of the Board of Trustees that was held on March 26 to address the disunity of the faculty regarding the theological issues related to Dr. Peter Enns’ book, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. After a full day of deliberation, the Board of Trustees took the following action by decisive vote:

“That for the good of the Seminary (Faculty Manual II.4.C.4) Professor Peter Enns be suspended at the close of this school year, that is May 23, 2008 (Constitution Article III, Section 15), and that the Institutional Personnel Committee (IPC) recommend the appropriate process for the Board to consider whether Professor Enns should be terminated from his employment at the Seminary. Further that the IPC present their recommendations to the Board at its meeting in May 2008.”

In order to provide the entire Westminster community with a more complete understanding of the Board’s decision and to offer an opportunity for questions and dialogue, the Chairman and Secretary of the Board will join the President on campus for a special chapel on Tuesday, April 1 at 10:30 am. Students and staff are encouraged to attend and participate. Following that special chapel, they will hold a separate meeting with the faculty.Our concern is to honor the Lord Jesus Christ and assure a faithful witness for Westminster for years to come. To that end, please pray for everyone involved during the next two months.

Jack White

Chairman of the Board

Peter Enns has shaped and formed my theology in ways that I will be forever grateful. I feel that WTS is losing an extremely important asset to their theological relevancy in the academic world. Please be praying for everyone involved.

WTS

Posted on by jbyas

My first post on the controversy at WTS. I have not been in the right mind before to post something I wouldn’t regret, but I think I have calmed a little bit.

The Board of Westminster Theological Seminary had an emergency board meeting to discuss the orthodoxy and issues surrounding Pete Enns’ book Inspiration and Incarnation.

After the meeting the following announcement was sent to the board, faculty, and students of Westminster:

March 27, 2008
Thank you very much for your prayers for the special meeting of the Board of Trustees that was held on March 26 to address the disunity of the faculty regarding the theological issues related to Dr. Peter Enns’ book, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. After a full day of deliberation, the Board of Trustees took the following action by decisive vote:

“That for the good of the Seminary (Faculty Manual II.4.C.4) Professor Peter Enns be suspended at the close of this school year, that is May 23, 2008 (Constitution Article III, Section 15), and that the Institutional Personnel Committee (IPC) recommend the appropriate process for the Board to consider whether Professor Enns should be terminated from his employment at the Seminary. Further that the IPC present their recommendations to the Board at its meeting in May 2008.”

In order to provide the entire Westminster community with a more complete understanding of the Board’s decision and to offer an opportunity for questions and dialogue, the Chairman and Secretary of the Board will join the President on campus for a special chapel on Tuesday, April 1 at 10:30 am. Students and staff are encouraged to attend and participate. Following that special chapel, they will hold a separate meeting with the faculty.Our concern is to honor the Lord Jesus Christ and assure a faithful witness for Westminster for years to come. To that end, please pray for everyone involved during the next two months.

Jack White

Chairman of the Board

Peter Enns has shaped and formed my theology in ways that I will be forever grateful. I feel that WTS is losing an extremely important asset to their theological relevancy in the academic world. Please be praying for everyone involved.

Progressive Revelation – "Rein In My Overstatement" Edition

Posted on by jbyas
I just re-read my last post and if I wasn’t me I would have gotten the impression that I am affirming that Scripture contradicts itself. Now, for obvious orthodox reasons, I would probably want to shy away from that, even if that is where what Levenson says eventually leads. But how do I navigate this tension? Underlying all of this is my return to Calvin and Pete Enns’ explication of the same notion in Inspiration & Incarnation:

“For who even of slight intelligence does not understand that as nurses commonly do with infants, God is wont in a measure to “lisp” in speaking to us? Thus such forms of speaking do not so much express clearly what God is like as accommodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity. To do this he must descend far beneath his loftiness.“

-John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book I:13:1.

So then God in the Scriptures “lisps” to us, that is, comes down to our level of thinking. Now, Pete shows persuasively that this includes cultural context. God reveals himself in Scripture in a thoroughly historical way, including cultural context. So then my main question in relation to progressive revelation and even in dealing with how the OT can be normative for us today is,

“What if “our level of thinking” is wrong?” What does it mean for God to “meet us where we are” or more appropriately, for God to “meet the Israelites where they were,” if that place is a place of error (in the case of Israel’s acceptance of the existence of a pantheon of gods following their fellow ANEers) or a place of myth (in the case of primordial history)?

What are the implications if we say that God ‘lisps’ to Israel and develops them through their history (of redemption as found in Scripture) to bring them to a place of true understanding of God?

This may bring up some sticky hermeneutical or normativity issues but I also think it helps me to understand more the ‘suprising’ revelation of Christ. He is in fact the capstone to this true development we find in history as recorded in the Scriptures. Any thoughts?

Progressive Revelation – Extreme Edition

Posted on by jbyas

As I have been reading a lot of Jon Levenson one issue that he non-chalantly brings up continually is the progressive nature of revelation. For many in the Westminster camp, this is great, until you really understand what he is trying to say.

In the Vosian view of progressive revelation, as many have taken him, there is an unfolding of revelation where the revelation revealed later in history builds upon and never contradicts or is in tension with previous revelation. This is the view of most Systematicians. Is this because Systematics as is usually defined precludes any notion of true historical dynamic? Does Systematics necessarily flatten history? That’s a post for another day I guess…

As it has been explained to me, Vos’ view, as interpreted by some faculty, describes the Hebrew Bible as a fully furnished room with no lights on. Everything is there, but it doesn’t get revealed to us all at once. Certain pieces of furniture are left in the dark while others are ‘progressively’ being lit up so that we can see them. After reading Levenson, I realize that this position precludes any notion of true theological development.

One of the basic premises of Levenson’s Sinai & Zion is that the Zion tradition inherits the Sinai tradition. Sometimes these traditions are in-step and sometimes they flatly contradict each other.

Within Levenson’s Creation & the Persistance of Evil Israel develops historically from a nation of henotheism to a nation of monotheism, as evidenced from within the text itself.

Within Levenson’s Resurrection & the Restoration of Israel Daniel 12:1-3 betrays a more developed notion of individual resurrection than the rest of the Hebrew Bible.

Now I haven’t yet completely thought through the implications of this way of thinking, but Levenson’s arguments on these issues are quite persuasive. It does in fact seem to me that early in Israel’s history as we have it in the text they would have affirmed the existence of other gods. This is actually quite obvious if we would start to realize that we’ve been taught to gloss over these pericopes and assume that when the text says, “You shall have no other gods before me,” we should read, “Of course, there are no other gods, they are only idols, so obviously you should have no idols before me.”

My point though is not to argue these points, I might do that in another post, my only point is that I think Vos is right. And I haven’t read enough of Vos to see how far he takes his idea of progressive revelation, but from what I hear, I think I am becoming more Vosian than Vos…

The Difference Of Perspective

Posted on by jbyas

December of last year I was required to read a book by Gerhard Hasel called Old Testament Theology: Basic Issues in the Current Debate and I was its most vocal critic. Not of course for any substantial theological or philosophical reason, but because I just didn’t like the book. I thought it was dry, over-detailed and to be honest, I just wasn’t really interested in the topic.

However, when this semester rolled around I was required to read it again, something I was not at all interested in doing. But after my initial class with Pete I have really learned to love the deep contours of Old Testament Theology. I devoured Hasel after that in about 4 days and I loved every minute of it. For me it was a matter of perspective. Pete showed me how these issues really affected how I viewed my Scriptures and how important it was for me if I was going on in my studies to know them and know them well. It was very interesting for me how my attitude towards the book could change so quickly and dramatically, but I am glad it did.

So far this semester, this class has been by far my favorite (although also my most time-consuming).

The book itself is used most helpfully as a historical resource into basic theological history of OTT. Hasel does offer his own input on the situation but I didn’t find them that helpful. This book really is a great introduction into the ‘current issues’ in OTT.