Really

After coming back from vacation, Doug Wilson said:

It would be far better to say that Jesus came to solve all our worldly problems. The difference is that He does not do it the same way we do, which is to say, ineffectively. He really will save the world, and all our tinpot messiahs won't. Salvation is only through Jesus, but it really is salvation that will be manifested in this world. Related to this, salvation from our worldly problems won't come from conservative armies or from liberal nannies.

Which, of course, is exactly right.

Shack Attack version 2.0

Tim Challies has self-published a PDF revision of his review of the Shack.

Very frankly, it is one of his best pieces ever. I highly recommend anyone reading the Shack or thinking about reading the Shack or has had the Shack recommended to them download that PDF (that's what your right-click button is for), read that, and then read the book to see if Challies has treated it fairly.

Excellent format. Great resources listed in the back. Tough on what ought to be treated with toughness.

On a related note ...

A lot of people have said to me that the Shack is a harmless book of fiction which has edified them or given them a fresh look at their spirituality. A lot of people.

When I start asking them questions about the book and the things I found troubling with it, they all have a very unanimous answer which comes in various forms. They all say, in words to this effect, "doctrine isn't everything; sometimes it's OK just to enjoy something for what it is."

You know: I play video games. I admit it. I am currently addicted to Team Fortress 2, in spite of its apparent datedness. And when I'm spawned as a Fatty in order to "move little cart" and mow down the opposing players with my chain gun, I'm not thinking about doctrine. I admit it: I have moments when I'm not thinking about doctrine.

But here's the thing: I can promise you that the disconnect from TF2 to my Sunday School class is entirely mutual. In the same way that my doctrine regarding God's covenants with Israel does not effect whether I will heal opposing players when I'm a Medic in TF2, I can promise you that whether or not I dominated my friend Josh this week does not effect my ability to teach right doctrine in Sunday School.

My practice my be, um, unsanctified (we can talk about that if you want to try to get me there), but what I teach to others doesn't get scuttled by my enjoyment of TF2.

Let me suggest that it is at least suspicious that a book wants to call itself Christian fiction but, in fact, dismisses or diminishes almost every single foundational principle of the Christian faith. It is possible to "enjoy" such a thing, I am sure. The results of "enjoying" it, it seems to me, are a little more invasive than enjoying a couple of rounds of Goldmine.

So I recommend Tim's review to enhance your enjoyment of the Shack. If you find that affirmation troubling, tell me why in the meta.

Open Mike: Shane Claiborne

At TeamPyro, Phil linked to this story about Cedarville University, and also to this story from Christianity Today about Shane Claiborne getting called off because of "some bloggers" objecting to Claiborne's lecturing (or whatever it is that Emergents do, since I am sure they wouldn't commit that level of rhetorical violence against their fellow humans).

I'm interested in this quote from Claiborne about the goings-on:

aiborne said he was "disappointed that the institution itself at Cedarville was not secure enough to stand up to these vigilante voices."

He also said he wanted to talk to his critics. "Unfortunately, it's difficult to communicate with folks who will not talk to you, who only talk around you, as in this case," he said. "There's too much constructive work to do for the kingdom for us to spend our energies constantly reacting to every destructive voice, especially those who do not honor Jesus' admonition to speak directly to one another in love (Matthew 18)."

And before we unleash the hounds here, let me say a few things.

First of all, I admit that I do not know or understand what is going on at Cedarville, and in some ways I don't really care. I'm not an alum, I'm not a donor, and those who are ought to take an active (not passive) role in being part of the trajectory of that university and its objectives as an educational institution. The rest of us don't have a stake in it.

I mean: they're not a church, right? They're a private university with a Christian heritage -- a hertitage, btw, which is not very well-defined by their website. Their site paints them broadly as a place where Christian social action takes place or is advocated, but for example I couldn't find a direct link to the history of the university which would spell out its ties to a specific church or denomination or confessional statement. So in not being a church, we don't have a stake in its goings-on.


Now, what do I mean by that? Should we not comment at all? No -- I'm blogging about it, folks: I think thinking about it and commenting on it are totally-valid ways to spend a few hours. What I think is a little randy is for people who never attended the University, and don't have any direct ties to the University, to start campaigning for or against some perceived threat to the University.

You know: they have a board of trustees; they are over seen by multiple academic certification organizations. If they are doing wrong, the truth will out.

Which brings us back to Shane Claiborne. His complaint, as I read it, is that "vigilantes" stopped him from speaking at CU and that the worst reason for this is that "it's difficult to communicate with folks who will not talk to you, who only talk around you, as in this case." And the most-keen of you will, of course, recognize his "Like Ministry" plea against making his own case with them or against them.

My opinion is that it's wrong to call these folks "vigilantes". "Busy-bodies"? Yes -- that seems good. "Babblers whose talk will spread like gangrene"? I've heard that one before someplace, and it seems a little, um, dramatic, but OK -- that one might cut both ways here. But factually I can tell you that if Ingrid is one of the culprits who drove off Claiborne, I am certain she is willing to openly discuss any issue she is complaining about.

And that said, I'm opening the meta here for a discussion of what just happened at CU and what the problem is with "watch-bloggers".

Go get it.

Mars Hillbillies

Somebody who is apparently an ex Mars Hill member posted some comments in the meta, linking me to their network of Mars Hill dissenters. As I read through their blogs, it seems to me that somehow, a pocket of fundamentalist soul comp hillbillies have somehow sprouted up in Seattle, WA.

Here's what I mean by that: in many churches, people take the baptist foundational principle of "soul competency" before God too far, and think that because God holds them responsible for their confession and life of faith that they are some kind of personal pastor who them has a right to rule every decision of the church. That's false for a lot of reasons -- like the fact that the Bible clearly states qualifications of elders, and it is the elders who ought to lead (if not rule) the church, and it makes distinctions between mature and immature believers, and so on.

It's a hillbilly mentality somehow transposed into spiritual terms.

Now, on its face that sounds like a harsh criticism of the critics of Mars Hill. But that's also not very good thinking. MHC is, as they say, the least-churched city in America -- which is apparently an excuse for some pretty gritty homiletics. But if that's true, then the elders of Mars Hill have to take responsibility for the kind of believers they are reaching and making into what kind of disciples. Just because the women don't wear head coverings and the men don't churn their own butter doesn't mean that they are not being taught to be any different than people who live in the woods, homeschool (no offense Carla and the rest of you regular readers; this is a Driscoll idiom, so be tough) and think that the only church good enough for them is a house church over which only they themselves have a final say.

I think there's some bad blood from the dissenters at MHC, but as I read their blogs, I think they haven't been discipled very well. That speaks to me loudly through their complaints about how Elder rule works out in real life. I think that ought to be the concern of that church.

And that's all I'm going to say about that. If you're a Mars Hillbilly looking to air dirty laundry on Mark Driscoll, don't bring it here.

Piper, Prayer, POW!

Or why don’t I just say, then, that prayer is communicating with God? Well, because that sounds like I’m talking to him and he is talking to me. But that is not what prayer is. God talking to me is never called prayer in the Bible. When God communicates something to us, we call it revelation or illumination. It is not prayer. And we get into a big, unbiblical muddle if we use the word prayer for what God speaks to us.

Read the whole thing.

Wednesday Shill-fest

At TeamPyro I posted the Challies interview for his new book, but I wanted to cover the real news this week today and shill for what is plausibly the source of covetousness and idolatry in my life: the new MacBook Air.

Even at two grand, it's completely break-out. I might make my wife buy me one instead of buying a new car.

One good catholic

There may be more. You should read about this one.

gingerbread man

This weekend as we were building up to the big thing tomorrow, my wife pulled out a bag of gingerbread mix (listen: if you add the eggs and milk and whatever, it's home made) and my kids started cheering. They love the gingerbread stuff -- the house, the people, the tree.

"So you're going to make the gingerbread this year?" I asked her, trying not to imply anything.

"Nobody'll care after we frost it," she said, trying not to concede anything, and I realized I had the headline for my Darrin Patrick post.

Now, don't get me wrong, OK? I liked all of his 3 talks at Covenant Seminary, and especially liked his talk which he called "the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" of the emergent church. But after listening to part 3 there, I sorta felt like he thought that if he layered on enough rhetorical frosting, nobody would care that he was really telling the radical edges of the ECM that they were preaching a different gospel, and that they needed to get over others pointing that out because that's the only way to resolve the differences.

I mean: that's how he pretty much ended that talk, and I was sort of blown away by how frank he was about it. And if you listened to only, say, the last 10 minutes of the talk (prior to the Q&A portion), you probably will get a very different impression of what he intimates about that movement than if you sit through all the "good" part, and even through the "bad" part. His description of the "ugly" is spot-on, even if it's covered in all kinds of other things to sweeten it up.

There where were moments in part 3 where I had to pull out a pen and scribble down a note or two. For example, it was a little sheepish (trying to avoid saying "coy") to use Justin Taylor as a cover for the "bad" segment of the talk. Sure: JT was plainly the source of that segment, and good on Pastor Darrin for citing his source. But it seemed to me that he was trying to avoid being the bad guy by pretty much reading what JT wrote on the subject of the ECM word for word.

Another moment was when Pastor Patrick followed a rabbit about what it means to preach to the culture -- you'll find it in the section where he says he wants to be preaching to "dudes", among other "cultures".

Here's what I don't disagree with: I think we have to context our churches in a way that the people to whom we are reaching out will give us a listen. You know: I'm the guy with the comic book blog, right? I don't think Fuller-brush door-to-door evangelism is useful today, and I think it is more useful to find social forms which people today can relate to in order to present the Gospel to them there.

But here's my problem with where I think Darrin's talk leads to: I think it leads to a place where we forget that the Gospel is (sing it with me) the solution to culture. That is: it's fine to get to the "dudes" and the "DINCs" and the farmers and so on by having some kind of way of talking with them and to them. It's another altogether when we avoid, because it is hard, the fact that the Gospel is supposed to reconcile races and cultures and all kinds of men not just to Christ but to each other -- that is, that all kinds of men are (not will be) reconciled to each other because they are reconciled to Christ.

I think that's the fundamental challenge to the current iteration of "missional" thinking -- failing to make reconciliation a real issue for people. It seems to me -- and people are welcome to knock this one down if they can -- that making "dude" churches (as one example) overlooks the fact in Scripture that "dudes" need older people to have a complete body of Christ, and vice versa. It's not enough just to say that your church is part of the greater, invisible church.

So that said, I enjoyed Darrin Patrick's impression of the gingerbread man. You may have a different opinion, and you now have the full-fledged version of haloscan into which to express it.

And have a napkin -- you have some frosting on your lip.

shepherd in the field

Our buddy johnMark interviewed these church plant pastors, and it's worth reading. Don't go out and get a tat for your new favorite doctrine, but think about supporting gospel workers among the poorest of the poor.

Because Mars Hill never does anything but entertain ...

... they provide a web site formerly known as "zhubert" which is now called Re:Greek. Because Greek plus the NASB plus the ESV is only a sideshow.

For VoxPop visitors, that's sarcasm up above. Reading this blog once is like coming into the middle of a soap opera -- you can't even tell who all the characters are in one episode, but if you stick around the right ones will grow on you.

The Main Event

You most faithful readers know that ultimately, I'm a fan of Mark Driscoll. Fan -- can't help it. Somebody has said that there isn't a "Billy Graham" for 21st century Christianity, and I totally disagree -- I think Driscoll is in the running to be such a thing, if I can say that and not cause a complete melt-down of the blogosphere and everything that's holy.

I just got wind of this because I was poking around at his church website, but Pastor Mark is conducting a poll to find out what he ought to preach on in January, and I just scanned the top-50 contenders for topics, and I think it's pure gold.

Now, some of you are going to have a lot of negative things to say about this technique -- like it's a little cheeky of Driscoll to ask the internet, which is frankly overpopulated with non-believers, to pick his sermon topics. But before you start cranking the handle of your organ and set the monkey to dancing, look at the list of questions.

If Driscoll preaches through this list of questions and gives the orthodox answers to these questions, he will have done more for Christian evangelism than anyone since Billy Graham because this is the ground in which we are conducting evangelism today.

Itchy Ears

My ears are itchin' to hear the audio from the Schafer lecture Darrin Patrick gave at Covenant two weeks ago. Anyone have a link or a copy of a podcast or something?

Smartest. Friends. Ever.

James Swan is officially the smartest guy on the internet, bar none. May his tribe increase.

Truth War Skirmish!

Well, welcome to the blog this week. Had a few throw-away posts this weekend, but I got redirected a few times to a post by a guy named Bob Robinson at Vangard Church regarding his review/evaluation of the Truth War by John MacArthur. I read it, read a review of the review, and after making a brief post on one of the referring blogs I chose to spend my morning today sorting out the original post for the sake of posting something substantive for the first time since my blog allegedly came back from "hiatus".

Here's the headline of the original blog post:

MacArthur Fits His Own Criteria for an Apostate

Now, before you fly off the handle, let's read the thesis statement of the post:

I’d like to juxtapose three statements by John MacArthur in order to show that, while MacArthur is quick to label other Christians “false teachers” and “apostate,” these labels can just as easily be leveled unfairly at MacArthur.

And to Robinson's credit, he does go through 3 quotes from Dr. MacArthur in an attempt to do what he says he's going to do. But let's make sure we understand what he's trying to do here to determine whether or not it deserves any redress: he's trying to prove that Dr. MacArthur's use of "apostate" is so ill-defined that it can be applied to Dr. MacArthur himself because it is such a broad category.

Here's the first quote Robinson gives, with exposition:

Statement #1:
“What we are called to defend is no less than ‘the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.’ Jude is speaking of apostolic doctrine (Acts 2:42) – objective Christian truth – the faith, as delivered from Jesus through the agency of the Holy Spirit by the apostles to the church … Jude speaks of ‘the faith’ as a complete body of truth already delivered – so there is no need to seek additional revelation or to embellish the substance of ‘the faith’ in any way. Our task is simply to interpret, understand, publish, and defend the truth God has once and for all delivered to the church. That is what the Truth War is ultimately all about.” (p. 75)

Let's make sure we have a handle on what Dr. MacArthur has said here before we read what Robinson interprets. Dr. MacArthur makes it clear that, on the one hand, new revelation and embellishments on the substance of faith are out of bounds, but interpretation, understanding, publishing, and defense of truth are all in-bounds. I have added emphasis in that text, above, to make that clear.

So what Dr. MacArthur has put in his scope are things which add to revelation (by which he means "Scripture" and the fullness of revelation in Christ), and things which embellish or exaggerate "the faith". What he has –not- decried are writings or teachings which interpret (that is: writings which make what is in the text more clear), understand (that is: teachings which draw in the larger picture of Scripture), publish (that is: the simple act of disseminating such teachings through print media), and defend (that is: teachings which draw out the contrasts between the faith and other ideas or philosophies in order to show why the faith is itself better).

Let's see where Robinson takes this:

So, MacArthur is saying that Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, Stan Grenz, John Franke, John Armstrong, Donald Miller, and Chris Seay are all guilty of embellishing the substance of the faith in some way. They are not being loyal to the faith “once for all delivered to the saints.”

Yes, I think this is exactly what he's saying, and the word Robinson uses here is exactly right: "embellishing". That is: they have gone beyond the bounds of the texts involved, and therefore have engaged in exaggeration thereby creating a caricature of the faith which is false. And like all caricatures, it might be funny of they weren't serious about making that creation into the faith itself.

Now watch what Robinson does here:

Let’s take this criterion and apply it to John MacArthur. MacArthur is a Dispensationalist, a form of theology that originated in the late 1800s with John Nelson Darby in England and in moved to the United States in the early 1900s when C. I. Scofield began teaching it. Don't miss this: Dispensationalism’s interpretation of the Bible is very novel, less than 150 years old. Dispensationalism insists that God deals with Israel and the Church differently through a dispensational grid and that this grid determines how we must interpret every passage of the Bible so that we can determine whether the passage is referring to Israel or the Church. It insists that the Church must be raptured away from the earth into its heavenly existence so that God can finish His plan for Israel in its earthly existence.

I repeat: This theology is new. It is not the same theological understanding that “was once for all delivered to the saints.” It grew out of a admittedly individualistic interpretation of the Bible (the Dispensationalists insisted that they were reading the Bible literally and letting the Bible alone determine their theology, with little regard for the history of interpretation).

I have two disclosures that I have to make before I go on. The first is that I'm not a fan of dispensationalism – it's a somewhat broad category of eschatology and hermeneutics that includes all kinds of people from John Macarthur to Tim LaHaye to Clarence Larkin, and you simply can't know what kind of thinker you're dealing with by the label "dispensationalist". I don't find it helpful, personally, to know if someone is a "dispensationalist" because it's a category which doesn't mean anything.

And let's be honest: people like Clarence Larkin are kooks. They might actually be "apostate" as Dr. MacArthur defines the term, but that's not the point of this post. I also think that bad forms of dispensationalism and premillenial enthusiasm have caused the American church in particular to exaggerate the priority of the individual in matters of faith -- but that's for another day. The point of this post is to take a look at what Robinson says about Dr. MacArthur's argument and see if it holds water. So no: I'm not a dispensationalist.

The second disclosure is that I'm not interested in reductionistic historical arguments. It's one thing to say that the systematic formulas of Ryrie and Scofield are "new", and it's another to overstate their newness for the sake of trying to make them fit inside an ideological box in order to call some book or some author's reasoning into question. You know: there's something "new" about translating the Bible using "dynamic" translation philosophy, and I doubt that Robinson would try to wedge that into the box of "apostate" – and I doubt that Dr. MacArthur would go there, either. The question is not how "new" something is, but whether or not its "newness" causes the truth to be somehow voided.

Let's be honest: one of the greatest systematic conundrums of the NT is whether or not God will ultimately deal with racial, hereditary Israel in a different way than He will with the rest of the world. To say the sorting out of this matter was somehow "done" by the end of the apostolic age is a little ambitious, and ignores a lot of things – like the anti-Semitism of the 4th and 5th centuries. And in that light, to call Ryrie's attempt to reconcile this issue in the 19th century "new" is, um, demonstrating a lot of gusto.

Here's the rub, however: we have to ask ourselves what's "new" about dispensationalism. Is it trying to renovate the cross to make it palatable for a culture, a worldview, a people, or a philosophy? Or is it "new" in the sense that the cross remains in tact and one view of the end times as a consequence of the way God reveals himself in history is being explored?

I think it's a big jump to say that interpreting the prophecy that God will save all Jews at some point in history as "all the Jews" is in the same league as interpreting the cross as a form of "cosmic child-abuse". That's the problem we face here – the scope of the claims, and the objective of the "newness".

Thus when we read what's next, we should have a pretty big problem:

So, using MacArthur’s criterion of whether someone is "seeking additional revelation or embellishing the substance of the faith in any way," Dispensationalists could be included. Now, I’m not saying that Dispensationalists should be included, just that MacArthur fits his own criterion for an apostate. Before he labels others as “false teachers” he had better know that, in doing so, he opens himself up to that same label.

If we apply definitions the way Robinson does here, the Trinity has to be called an innovative doctrine because the category "trinity" doesn’t occur by name in Scripture – yet I am sure that Robinson doesn’t have that kind of chutzpah. Just because one formulation of one doctrine is not given some name or specific systematic outline in the first generation of Christian writing, this doesn’t force the doctrine into the category Dr. MacArthur outlines – and Dr. MacArthur's paragraph here specifically defines why. A document teaching or explaining what Scripture says is not inherently apostate – even if the presentation is innovative.

What is at stake with the men specifically listed in this post by Robinson as identified by Dr. MacArthur as "apostate" is that they veer off the page of Scripture and into imaginative, speculative, and theological ditches which give us central themes of Scripture for some other ideological objective.

At this point, Robinson goes on to a second statement by Dr. MacArthur:

Statement #2:
“Every form of gnosticism starts with the notion that truth is a secret known only by a select few elevated, enlightened minds. (Hence the name, from gnosis, the Greek word for knowledge.) … Another dominant variety of gnosticism (know as Docetism) taught that all manifestations of Jesus’ human nature – including His physical body (and hence His crucifixion and resurrection) – were only illusions. God could not really have come to earth in the true material form of authentic human flesh, the Docetists said, because matter itself is evil.” (pp. 89, 92)

Who can argue with this, really? It's a historical set of definitions. I agree that this is what docetism and Gnosticism are.

Again, if we take this criterion and apply it to MacArthur’s theology, we see that he opens himself up to the same criticism. He talks about Gnostics in general and Docetists in particular, as if those in the Emerging Church are guilty of these heresies. However, it has been largely acknowledged that it is Dispensational theology that is the main culprit of gnosticism in the United States.

Wow. I mean – that's not a logical leap: that's a logical fall off the cliff – and the list of so-called evidences simply makes the case worse and not better.

* Dispensationalism stresses the hope of heaven over the hope of the redeemed earth.

That's not just "dispensationalism" which does this, btw – even post-millenial guys are in for the New Heavens and New Earth which are -far- -better- than what we have today. The question is not whether they will be better, but –how- they will be better. And in that paradigm, even the Dispensationalist says that the Earth is "redeemed" by Christ.

* Dispensationalism stresses the hope of a “rapture” over the hope of a resurrected physical life.

It's sort of breath-taking that someone is willing to say this out loud – because even the sort of weak-tea dispensationalism of a Tim LaHaye doesn't say that the rapture is the be-all and end-all of Christian life. The Resurrection is –still- the ultimate end of redemption, and it is a –physical- resurrection, not merely souls without bodies.

* Dispensationalism stresses the importance of saving people from the earthly existence and inviting them into a spiritual, heavenly existence.

That's almost laughable – especially in the context that Robinson is talking about MacArthur who wrote The Gospel According to Jesus and has opposed the ridiculous easy-believism of "Free Grace" guys like Zane Hodges. MacArthur is about an exclusively-eternal salvation? Document that in some way – especially in the context of his Dispensational leanings.

* MacArthur’s own books on Heaven are filled with hints toward gnostic ideas that matter itself is evil; that true “glory” is when we move out of the fleshly existence and into the spiritual existence.

This last one is interesting because it names "hints" rather than open statements and affirmations. Let me suggest something: frame MacArthur's work as a body of writings that hang together in some way and are related to each other, and these so-called hints will –all- evaporate. That can't be said about the guys Dr. MacArthur is criticizing in The Truth War.

So, before MacArthur accuses others of being “false teachers” and “apostates,” he had better know that he opens himself up to the same accusations.

See above. This is at best a strident accusation and at worst a completely-unsupported fiction which Robinson hasn’t substantiated at all.

Now, for critics who want to peck at this dismissal of Robinson's claims, let me offer you this: when it can be said that Dr. MacArthur advances a secret truth which is not available to all men that makes matter evil and the immaterial the only possible good, and that he preaches a Christ who was not a real man whose death was only a symbol or a metaphysical representation, then you can start barking up the tree of Gnosticism and/or Docetism.

Statement #3:
“Truth (the simple truth of the gospel, to be specific) is necessary for salvation … (Romans 10:13-14). Scripture is clear about this: there is no hope of salvation apart from hearing and believing the truth about Christ (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:21). That is why nothing is more destructive than false religion. Mere ignorance is devastating enough: ‘My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge’ (Hosea 4:6). But gospel-corrupting apostasy is the most sinister of all evils.” (pp. 119-120)

In light of MacArthur’s earlier warning against gnosticism, he had better be careful here. Remember that on page 89 of his book, MacArthur wrote, “Every form of gnosticism starts with the notion that truth is a secret known only by a select few elevated, enlightened minds. (Hence the name, from gnosis, the Greek word for knowledge.)”

What Robinson had better be wary of is a misrepresentation of Dr. MacArthur and the Gospel which he proclaims – because that's what's at issue here: whether the Gospel is proclaimed or if it is hidden. The Gospel is a public event, something (as it is said in the book of Acts) not done in a corner. And it is because of this aspect of the Gospel – the lifting up of Christ that all men may be drawn to Him – that there is –nothing- Gnostic about the Gospel MacArthur preaches.

But now watch what Robinson does in this next section:

One signature motif throughout MacArthur’s book is that he continually insists that what saves you is the knowledge of the truth. This, again, is a form of gnosticism: it teaches that Christians have a secret knowledge (gnosis) and that people are saved from this earthly existence by believing the knowledge that we can explain to them.
* For MacArthur, evangelism is explaining what he knows is the truth to others.
* For MacArthur, salvation is when someone accepts and knows this truth.
* Therefore, according to MacArthur, the key to Christian ministry is the proclamation of specific truths, so that people will hear these truths, accept these truths, in order that they too will be “in the know.”

This is a classic error on the part of novice critics of Christianity in general and critics of Baptists in particular. On the one hand, they confuse the categories of "proclamation" or "evangelism" with "apologetics" or "defense". On the other, they are seeking to press the philosophy of "gnosis" into service just because of the Biblical statement that we should "know" Christ.

"gnosis" is a secret knowledge which one gains by private means, sometimes referred to as an interior light or spark from God. What Dr. MacArthur advances, in the most obvious terms possible, is a knowledge of God obtained by public and special revelation on the part of God through Scripture and ultimately through Christ.

Only someone with no real understanding of either the Bible or Gnosticism could come to the conclusion that evangelical faith is appealing to a private center – but it would serve one well to compare that to some of the statements coming from guys like McLaren and Bell.

MacArthur is quick to point out that Jesus is truth incarnate, and that we need a personal relationship with Christ in order to be saved. THIS is the gospel. I wish he said this more often in the book.

How often does he have to say it in a lifetime of writing and preaching? Another pretty amateurish mistake on Robinson's part is trying to isolate MacArthur's criticism in this book for the fairly-encyclopedic body of writing he has turned out in 40 years of ministry.

If this were Dr. MacArthur's first book, or if he didn’t have a print and audio archive of what amounts to gigabytes of text and sermon audio, all of which in one way or another points to the fact of the incarnation of Christ as the fulfillment of Moses and the Prophets, Robinson's criticism would have some legs to stand on. Instead, it has to sit down and catch its breath.

However, the way he elevates “knowledge” as the key to salvation over and over again in this book opens him up to the accusation that he is the one that is hedging toward the apostasy of gnosticism, for it is not a secret knowledge of the truth that saves, it is a relationship with Christ that saves.

If MacArthur wants to point fingers at other teachers and accuse them of apostasy, MacArthur had better be ready for some of the same treatment in turn.

This is the basic problem with this book. MacArthur is seeking to label people "apostates" when they do not, in fact, fit the description. The proof is in that MacArthur himself fits his own description!

See above. I can frankly honor Robinson's good form as he structured his criticism here well – it's got good expositional form. It just doesn’t have any substantive expositional content, and falls down for lack of real substance.

UPDATED: For the record, I fixed some typos and clarified one statement, so your RSS feeders may have gotten a double copy of this post. Thanks to all alert readers who helped comb this out.

Correction of Errors

Some of you astute readers may remember this post and this post from 2005.

Given that Steve Camp and iMonk have had the audacity to speak in uncertain terms and agree that the man who can bench-press 300 lbs and still have great hair is also outside the fences when it comes to expressing the Gospel, it behooves me to issue a correction of my own previous posts.

To wit: as Camp noted, given the lite version of a statement of faith available for Lakewood, it's actually -worse- for the Osteens than if they didn't have a statement of faith at all. And as Mike Horton has made clear in his writings on this particular topic, it's just a different, chummier legalism to give self-help advice and say God is only love and not also a holy God who owes you nothing even when you do a good deed.

So if you run into my old posts on this subject, consider me corrected or perhaps convicted. iMonk's right about this: if Osteen's preaching is "good enough" for the church at large, we are completely lost. God have mercy on us, but we are not called to be winners: we are called to be the last, the scum, the ones poured out like a drink offering.

two scary news items

This one is scary because it demonstrates how desperate Putin is for friends. That's like watching a pack of dogs getting riled up to jump a deer.

This one is scary because it's not the Weekly World News. I think they're serious.

Note to Ingrid

Check out Archive.org before you get too far over losing your website contents. It looks like most of it is there.

Read This

I'll be working on the next installment of the Zens critique today (DV), but in the meantime, for those of you who are not daily readers of Doug Wilson, read this and think about it. You mean that somehow preaching by elders is what causes the church to be this way or that way?

Astonishing. I may need an aspirin or something ...

Amen.

Here's a podcast of Mark Driscoll talking to Ed Stetzer (warning: a direct link to MP3), which answers some important questions about who Mark Driscoll is that many people have asked. I was one of them.

His riff on his own sanctification is really important. I'm sure his sympathy for the spiritual disciplines will make some people angry or whatever. Just listen to it and think about it.

Wet one

Baptism alert.

All hands to battle stations.