Grace to You Against Mega-Church Pragmatism?

[This is another post by guest writer Kevin Regal, who also frequently comments under the moniker OFelixCulpa]

John MacArthur is a very good expositor. I am thankful for his decades-long work of producing and distributing excellent bible teaching. I don’t want to take away from that in any way.  More narrowly, I’m glad that Grace to You and MacArthur are critical of the mega-church and multi-site-church nonsense that seems now to be sweeping through conservative Evangelicalism.

But I wish one thing were different. I really wish they were on better footing to criticize.

Today I read a post by Travis Allen of Grace to You (“Embracing and Shunning”) about just that. He began by listing several essentials of faithful church ministry and asserting that

The modern love affair with pragmatism leads to compromise on every point. Every. Single. Point.

Well…I agree, but there is a very pronounced lack of clarity on what actually composes pragmatism and why it should be avoided. Perhaps it’s just my personality, but quick, rhetorical criticism of something–even something that truly is bad–is not enough to get me climbing aboard the bandwagon.  What can I say?  I’m such a suspicious person.

Understanding Calvinism = Tears

I like John Piper. I really do. And I want to like him more, but he isn’t helping me do that. Piper has said a lot of great things over the years, and I have no doubt that God has used him to strengthen the faith of many people. I don’t want to take away from any of that. But every time I try to further appreciate John Piper’s work, I run across stuff like the following. Seriously, it keeps happening.

According to John Piper’s disciple, Justin Taylor:

John Piper once said something to the effect that if you’ve become a Calvinist and you haven’t shed any tears in the process, you probably don’t understand Calvinism in the first place.

The Problems with the Pope’s Authority and the Inadequacy of the Protestant Response

Recently a friend of mine asked my opinion about a written conversation he had with a Roman Catholic convert. In the conversation the convert explained that, for him, the most convincing point of Roman Catholic doctrine was the doctrine of Petrine succession.

For those not familiar with this Catholic doctrine, it essentially states that according to Matthew 16 and other biblical passages we can see that Peter — and Peter alone — was given the keys to the kingdom of heaven. According to church tradition, Peter was later the bishop at Rome. The claim of Petrine succession, then, is that whoever subsequently occupies Peter’s office in Rome possesses the keys to the kingdom. I’m sure you can see where this is going: the pope is the current occupant of Peter’s office at Rome and he alone possesses the keys to the kingdom.

Christian not Bohemian: A Response to John MacArthur’s “Beer, Bohemianism, and True Christian Liberty”

[What follows is a joint response I wrote with my friend Uri Brito to John MacArthur's insistence on Christian teetotalism].

The authors generally appreciate the work of John MacArthur. John Fraiser is a Lutheran minister and Uri Brito is a Reformed minister. We are thankful for MacArthur’s commitment to the Scriptures and his love for the gospel of grace. Early on in our studies, MacArthur was certainly one wave that carried us into the rich world of 16th century Reformation. Yet, we must not be blinded to assume the Reformation did not offer a cultural way of thinking and living. We have embraced the larger Reformational world not simply because of its Soteriology—which we affirm—but because of the richness it provides to both mind and body. The Reformation means embracing the biblical vision of a new humanity engaging a re-created world in and through Jesus Christ.

Part of this larger Reformed picture is unmistakably missing in John MacArthur’s recent attack on the Young, Restless, and Reformed (henceforth, YRR). MacArthur’s analysis leads him to conclude that “It’s clear that beer-loving passion is a prominent badge of identity for many in the YRR movement.”[1] Now, neither of us belong to the YRR movement. So MacArthur isn’t directly addressing us and we have no interest in protecting the movement itself. Normally we wouldn’t even take the time to respond MacArthur’s argument, but sometimes you must bend to answer the absurd, if only because others take the absurd so seriously. Indeed a great many people have already answered him, but we wish to add our voices to the company of those Christians who think that alcohol should not merely be tolerated but commended, celebrated, and cherished among the people of God. We sense that MacArthur’s overall tone is a direct attack on broader Reformational groups, such as Lutherans and Calvinists.

In addressing MacArthur and his concerns, we wish to organize our response in the following manner: (a) The Lutheran and Reformed Historical Argument for the Use of Alcohol, (b) Arguments for Alcohol in Biblical Culture, (c) The Sociology of Abstinence, and (d) The Use and Abuse of Alcohol.

Why I Walked Away from Evangelicalism (part 2 of 2)

[This is the second part of guest-blogger Kevin Regal's explanation of why he left Evangelicalism and what he found to be a better alternative.]

In part one of this post, I described how my loyalty to Evangelicalism led me on a long and difficult search for a church which both takes real Christianity seriously and would also accept people who are (as I am, I’m ashamed to say) flawed even to the point of being rather dislikeable.  In this part, I will try to explain a few of the problems that I find so troublesome and which have forced me to reconsider my loyalty to Evangelicalism.  I will then finish the story.

Why I Walked Away from Evangelicalism (part 1 of 2)

[This post comes from occasional guest blogger, Kevin Regal. Kevin is a friend of mine with a disenchanted past in Evangelicalism. In this series of posts, he explains his past in Evangelicalism, why he left, and where he is going.]

Nearly four years ago now, John published a post titled “Why I Became a Lutheran“. In that post John gave seven positive characteristics of Lutheranism as justification for his decision. My response at the time was that I mostly agreed with—and even applauded—every one of them with the exception of sacramental theology. I reasoned that the good things which he attributed to Lutheranism (with the one exception) were not excluded by Baptist theology, so a person would not necessarily have to turn to Lutheranism to find them. Sacramental theology was (and probably always will be) the issue of substantive disagreement between the two camps. I felt that John should state his rejection of the Baptist denomination in terms of things about Baptist theology with which he had bona fide disagreement.

A Philosophy Joke

A young man, having asked a young lady on a date, was naturally nervous. He decided to consult his father concerning what he should do to fill those moments of awkward silence.

His father, ready with an answer, said: “Son, when it comes to conversation, all there is to talk about comes down to the three Fs: Food, Family, and Filosophy. Just remember the three Fs and you should have plenty to talk about.”

The night of the date came and so did the inevitable moment of awkward silence. Recalling his father’s advice, the young man decided to ask a question about food.
“Mary, do you like asparagus?”
“No,” she replied. “I don’t really care for it.”

With his question about food not having provided enough material for conversation, he turned to ask her a question about family.
“Mary, do you have a brother?”
“No,” she replied. “I don’t have a brother.”

Still determined to kick-start a conversation, he asked her another question.
“Mary, if you had a brother, would he like asparagus?”

And that, dear reader, is philosophy.

Evangelicals and Their “Legacies”

It seems (for whatever reason) that I’m into “nutshelling” things these days. Here’s my attempt to concisely sum up my greatest problem with Evangelicalism.

What bothers me most is that so many Evangelical leaders – and by extension their followers – are infinitely more concerned about leaving their mark on the world than Christ’s, all the while using the name of Christ to do it. In fact, being an Evangelical leader – now more than ever – means you have built your very own personal empire, and being an Evangelical member means taking pride in being a part of one.

Don’t think so? Try this…

Go tell an Evangelical pastor that a small or medium-sized church is fine, that Jesus hasn’t called him to gather the most number of people he can under one roof, and that his pursuit is idolatry. You’ll get one or several possible responses.

1) You’ll get a blank stare because he simply has no category for what you’re saying.

2) He’ll get angry and blather on with some crap about how you’re trying to put God in a box, or how you aren’t dreaming big enough, or maybe you’re just jealous. How dare you stand in the way of what God is doing.

3) He’ll deny that he’s party to any of the stuff you accused him of. In fact, he’ll probably tell you he’s not trying to build a big church, and that his methods just happen to be the same as Rick Warren’s.  He just really likes wearing Hawaiian shirts and listening to a “praise band” each week. It’s got nothing to do with building a personal empire. He never expected to build a big church. He just wanted to be faithful to God, and it sorted of happened that all of these people flocked there. No design of his, just a happy accident from his point of view.

He wasn’t trying to make an idol; he just threw in the gold and out came the calf.

What you won’t hear is an admission that Evangelicalism has a real idolatry problem, and that many of them are using Christ as a front to gain followers for themselves.

Lutheranism in a Nutshell

If you want your ideological movement to really take off, one great way to do it is to boil it down for popular consumption. Now if you’re an ideological purist (which I tend to be), you know that there’s a danger in doing this because in the boiling-down process its easy for the ideas to be misrepresented. But this doesn’t have to happen, and if it’s done well, it can be very effective (Consider where Calvinism might be if someone hadn’t come up with the whole TULIP thing. Stroke of genius, that was). 

Lutheranism in a Nutshell

Because I am a convert to the Lutheran faith, I am often asked by evangelicals who don’t know much about it (which happens to be most of them) to explain what the Lutheran faith is, and what makes it different from, say, the baptist faith. I’ve found that people are easily confused about what they don’t already know. So I’ve found that I have to boil it down. It’s not easy to do. Take almost any subject and you’ll find that narrowing it down to the essentials while also communicating in an understandable way is exceedingly difficult. So in about the barest possible way, I want to state what the Lutheran faith is in a nutshell — a very, very tiny nutshell. The following five points are an adaptation of John Halton‘s excellent attempt to spell out the core of the Lutheran faith.

Science and Faith: What’s Wrong with the Comparison?

This post is a continuation of some of my thoughts on science and the Christian faith. Recently, I responded to a common objection posed by secular critics: the claim that humanity needs science and not theology. I concluded that without orthodox Christian theology we wouldn’t have science as it has come to us, and without it we won’t have the benefits of science very long into the future. 

That’s what needs to be said to secularists. But there’s also something that needs to be said to many in the Christian community as well. 

Christians are busy scrambling over questions of the relation between science and faith. While there are things worth saying about the relation of Christian faith and science, I think the discussion is set up wrongly from the beginning, and, consequently, the problem is made more difficult than it really needs to be. How so? The debate is not really between science and the Christian worldview. The reason is simple. Science isn’t a worldview. It’s not even really a “thing” itself. It is how we collectively refer to a diverse group of fields which each study some particular part of the natural order in order to understand its regularity and its processes. But the study of the regularity and processes of the natural order is not itself a particular worldview. There are, of course, worldviews that do conflict with the Christian worldview, but those worldviews aren’t entailed by science either. And if the Christian worldview has to explain its relation with science, so do the followers of these other worldviews. Simply put, worldviews are philosophies not sciences. So whatever challenge the Christian faith faces with respect to science, it is not a challenge from science itself but a challenge from alternative worldviews — many which think that science is somehow particularly on their side.

Inerrancy in Church History According to Kenton Sparks

Kenton Sparks is an Evangelical scholar who has made waves in evangelical scholarship with his book God’s Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship. Sparks says little to nothing that is new in biblical scholarship. What makes him unique is that he is part of a growing group of voices within Evangelicalism who plainly admit that Scripture has errors – an uncommon conclusion among those who regard themselves to be Evangelicals. Not just “discrepancies” — errors. More specifically, historical errors, false scientific claims, and ethical contradictions. One of the repeated concerns about Sparks’ claims is that the view of Scripture that he promotes is an aberration in church history. How is that for millennia, these obvious errors went unnoticed by the church, only to be uncovered now by the insight of liberal scholarship? Has the church really gotten the doctrine of Scripture so wrong for so long? Often liberals dismiss this question by appealing to key figures in church history — particularly those of the Reformation — who nobly declared in their day that the church had been so wrong for so long. The argument usually goes something like this: “Jesus was called a heretic. Luther was called a heretic. Galileo was called a heretic. Yet, each won out by holding onto the truth. Luther was accused of saying that everyone before him was wrong but that didn’t stop him. Why should it stop anyone today? You can’t object to changes in doctrine when you follow the Reformation which broke with the doctrines of the past.”

Which Would You Rather Do Without: Science or Theology?

I recently read an article in The Guardian  by Terry Sanderson who claimed:

I look at it this way. If science disappeared from human memory, we would soon be living in caves again. If theology disappeared from human memory, no one would notice. Theology is a completely and utterly useless pursuit. It is self-indulgence of the first order.

This kind of assertion is, no doubt, convincing to many. It’s easy to see the benefits of science: modern medicine, improvements in transportation and communication. The list could go on. Theology, on the other hand, seems far less consequential to modern life, if not outright irrelevant. I suspect that if you were to survey westerners, the percentage of people who would choose science over theology would be in the high nineties. The numbers would likely be quite similar among Christians as well. But this survey wouldn’t reveal that science is better for society than theology. It would only reveal an ignorant perception about science that is popular in western culture. This perception, however, betrays a misunderstanding of both science and theology. The dichotomy created by Sanderson is a false one. The choice between science or theology isn’t a real choice. We wouldn’t have science without theology, and we won’t continue to have the benefits of science long without it.

Inerrancy and Inspiration

[This post comes to us from guest blogger Michael Neal. Michael is a good friend of mine with a sharp mind and a willingness to rethink the common answers to common problems. Long-time readers of this blog with a sharp memory may recall that the second post that appeared on Chaos and Old Night addressed the issue of inerrancy. Michael's post addresses many of the same issues but from a different perspective. It's worth considering. Michael's post has been cross-posted here from a new contributor blog, Intellectual Currency, where you can also read more about Michael. Add it to your RSS feed or your blogroll. It promises to be an exciting discussion for thinking Christians.]

INTRODUCTION

Is God guilty of lying if He is responsible for the production of the Scriptures and the Scriptures contain errors? This seems to be the major question that arises when I discuss inerrancy with many Evangelicals. In those discussions it is assumed, almost without question, that God would be guilty of lying if the Scriptures contained errors. This claim rests on an assumption about the nature and extent of inspiration (i.e. it assumes verbal plenary inspiration or something like it). I want to explore the conditions under which there could be errors in Scripture and God’s perfect moral character remain in tact.