Phil Johnson: "That's what I am—a Paleoevangelical"

I've been to two Shepherds' Conferences and listened to audio from a couple more. One of the consistent highlights for me is Phil Johnson's always-provocative workshop session. Well, this year's session, "What Is an Evangelical?", contained a special personal blessing. In the midst of his pronouncement of evangelicalism's certain doom, his assessment of fundamentalism*, and his sharp critique of neo-evangelicalism is tucked a little nugget of Phil. Here it is, unedited, no comment necessary:

Sometimes when I feel it's necessary to distance myself from the mixed multitude of the contemporary evangelical movement, I actually like to refer to myself as a Paleoevangelical. That's a label that's not likely to be commandeered anytime soon by some postmodernized, emergentized hack. No neo-orthodox church leader or Christianity Today editor would wear that label—"Paleoevangelical." That's what I am—a Paleoevangelical, and I'm firmly fixed in that position.

And a few non-sequential clips from later in the talk:

Those of us who are Paleoevangelicals, frankly, have no movement that we really belong to.

[D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones] was a classic Paleoevangelical without a neo-evangelical bone in his body.

The task for Paleoevangelicals like me is to remain faithful and to remember that the gospel—not the combined cloud of a large, politically-driven movement, but the gospel itself is the power of God unto salvation.

You'll probably enjoy the whole session, but you'll have to register for free here. After that, follow instructions to download audio files.




*Just "one complaint," but it's a stinging one.

On the January/February issue of the FBFI's Frontline Magazine

When this issue, emblazoned with the theme "Preaching the Gospel" arrived in the mail at my office, I couldn't have been more delighted, and I only became happier as I leafed through it. The recognition of the centrality of the gospel seems to be gaining momentum, and for that I am thankful.

I don't mean to imply in any way that the FBFI has ever thought the gospel is unimportant. I do have very clear reasons, which I intend to address later, to conclude that the leadership of the FBFI is not unanimous on the importance of the gospel to the life of believers. In other words, I believe that the gospel has everything to do with sanctification. I will argue without reservation, for example, that the gospel is the "epicenter" of sanctification. Not all would agree. But that is for another time.

For the present, I am thrilled to see fundamentalist leaders affirm the fundamental importance of preaching the gospel to believers. Here's an outstanding portion of Matt Recker's article:

It seems strange to say that a missing element in much preaching is Jesus Christ and His gospel of grace, but I believe it is so. Even in my own experience, I have found that I can preach on Christian living, worldliness, the decaying culture, church growth, or a host of other topics and gloss over the power of Christ's death, burial, and resurrection! God has convicted me and challenged me that preaching this gospel must be included as the ultimate motive for everything we do and the power behind all we can be for Him. [emphasis added]

Gospel preaching is essential for the justification of unbelievers but also for the sanctification of believers. Preaching that diminishes the gospel's power will result in hearers thinking that they can earn God's approval or find strength to be a good Christian, parent, or spouse in their own ability. The unsaved will be deceived into thinking that salvation is something they can earn; the saved will be misled to think they can live the Christian life through their own effort. Gospel-less preaching will leave hearers still feeling guilt and shame no matter how hard they "try to do right." It is a fatal error to leave out the gospel, for any attempt to achieve our salvation, either our justification or sanctification, by human obedience alone will lead only to glorifying self and not God. The gospel alone gives the unsaved grace to stand in God's righteousness, and the gospel alone removes the condemnation from our lives.

Those are the first two paragraphs of the lead article in this issue. I wish I could take the time to re-type the whole thing. I wish I could link to it. (The rest is just as good.) I wish I had time to read the rest of the issue tonight, because the remainder looks just as good.

I wish I hadn't recently heard a sermon preached (at a place for which I have deep affection) that blatantly denies what Recker writes.

What Makes These Times "Uniquely Precarious"?

It has been recently argued, "We are living in uniquely precarious times." I completely agree that this statement is true. I simply disagree with pretty much everything that comes after it.

But what does make these times uniquely precarious? In particular, what forces might be greater threats to the future of biblical, gospel Christianity than the resurgence of Reformed theology?

My spare copy of Polity will be shipped free of charge to the person who offers the best response. (Please explain briefly the rationale your answers.) You may enter more than once, and if we get to 25 valid proposals (I judge . . . probably arbitrarily), I'll send something special to the person with the 25th entry.

And speaking of Polity, if anyone who's at Maranatha's Conference on Baptist Fundamentalism this week can get an explanation for why the author of these lecture notes (PDF) seems to think Greg Wills is an indifferentist on the doctrine of the church, I'd be much obliged. It seems as though Wills is alleged to be saying the precise opposite of what he means. Here's the quote:

Many contemporary scholars believe that the New Testament is silent, or ambiguous at the very least, on the topic of church government. George Eldon Ladd, theologian and former professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, laments that, “It appears likely that there was no normative pattern of church government in the apostolic age, and that the organizational structure of the church is no essential element in the theology of the church” (A Theology of the New Testament, p. 534). “Baptists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries generally agreed. Church polity, they conceded, was not the most essential area of doctrine. But just because it was not central to salvation did not mean that it was not important. The doctrine of the church was as much revealed truth as the element of orthodox belief. For this reason Baptists sometimes disfellowshiped one another over disagreements in polity.” (Wills, Greg. “The Church: Baptists and Their Churches in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” Polity. Mark E. Dever, ed. Sheridan Books, 2001, 19.) Such opinions do not match those of our forefathers. [emphasis added]

Songs Amillennialists Sing

I sang this song tonight in chorus with quite a few Amillennialists at my church. Would that more churches sang songs that deny the return of Christ and the responsibility of believers to be prepared for it to the same degree that this one does.

Words: John Cennick (1718-1755), alt. by Charles Wesley (1707-1788)
Music: Traditional English, arr. Martin Madan (1726-1790), Public Domain

On Premillennialists and Our Canards

Usually, when fundamentalists make the kinds of arguments John MacArthur makes, I'm pretty happy. But when they follow the approach MacArthur took at the 2007 Shepherd's Conference, I'm not quite so excited.

In his talk, "Why Every Self-Respecting Calvinist Ought to Be a Premillennialist,"* MacArthur argued that unconditional election-preaching Calvinists, more than anyone, ought to hold fast to the reality that God keeps his promises. Amillennialists, he said, believe that God breaks his promises to ethnic Israel when he replaces ethnic Israel with a spiritual Israel, the Church. As an unabashed Premillennialist myself, I was quite disappointed by the talk, even though MacArthur made some pretty persuasive points from Scripture (at least to me). Here's why:

I have yet to cross paths with an Amillennialist who found MacArthur to have fairly represented his position. I have met dozens of Amillennialists, both Baptists and Presbyterians, who believe that all the promises made to ethnic Israelites will be fulfilled in one ethnic Israelite, Jesus Christ. Now, all people, Jew or Gentile, have access to the inheritance of those promises by their position "in Christ," which comes by grace through faith in him. Every single one of those Amillennialists I've met wholeheartedly affirms that Jesus Christ is literally, personally, going to return to this earth and destroy his enemies before he establishes the quite literal New Heavens and New Earth and casts the devil, his angels, and all who have rebelled against him into a quite literal eternal torment where they will drink all the dregs of the wrath of God. Not one of them thinks that God is going to break his promises to ethnic Israel by replacing ethnic Israel with the Church, because God keeps his promises to the True (literal, ethnic) Israelite.

Yesterday, in a letter that was sent to friends of Maranatha Baptist Bible College, Maranatha President Chuck Phelps wrote:

We are living in uniquely precarious times. Today there is a radical resurgence of Calvinistic, Reformed thought. A simple visit to a Christian bookseller or a careful listen to Christian radio reveals that dispensational, Baptist positions are becoming increasingly rare. Along with the Conference on Baptist Fundamentalism and the emergence of our seminary, we are doing all that we can in our classrooms and on the chapel platform to keep the students informed and challenged to stand ready for the coming of Christ. I’ve recently completed a brief series of messages for the chapel hour on prophetic themes (Chapel Sermons). I’d like to invite you to listen in as our student body is challenged to pray with John of old – “Even so come Lord Jesus!”

The clear implication of this paragraph is that Reformed theology needs to be opposed and repudiated because it undermines the preparation of believers for the coming of Christ. That's just one of the problems of the statement. Bob Bixby draws our attention to others.

As a Premillennialist myself (as well as a disappointed Maranatha alumnus), I would be quite happy to hear more sound historical and theological critiques of Amillennialism and positive constructions of Premillennialism. Unfortunately, this sort of rhetoric gives me no reason to expect any sort of credible assessment. For a Premillennialist to suggest that Amillennialists don't believe we should be prepared for Jesus' return is an indefensible and irresponsible canard. I'm increasingly convinced that the greatest threat to the perpetuation of Premillennialism is not a persuasively-articulated Amillennialism, but an incompetent Premillennialism that misrepresents its opponents.

I'll close with the final paragraph from that classic Reformed statement of faith, the Westminster Confession:

III. As Christ would have us to be certainly persuaded that there shall be a day of judgment, both to deter all men from sin, and for the greater consolation of the godly in their adversity: so will he have that day unknown to men, that they may shake off all carnal security, and be always watchful, because they know not at what hour the Lord will come; and may be ever prepared to say, Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly. Amen.

Amen. Maranatha!

*A direct link is not available without login. The session is available for download for free after registration here.

On "B.G."

In the last century a certain gentleman from a southern state rose to high levels of public prominence. His initials were . . . "B.G." An opportunist, this fellow leveraged severely compromising alliances into what he thought would be a great deal of good. Folks from far and wide—a vast diversity of constituencies—recognized his achievements and went to great lengths to honor him. It seems that many folks wanted to be associated with a guy like this who demonstrated tangible fruit for his labors and maybe even leveraged his influence to help them out along the way. Educational institutions, in particular, liked to name things after him. Apparently, lots of folks were willing to overlook the warts of his compromised alliances in order to give tribute to his achievements. Maybe that was repulsive compromise on their part. Or maybe it was a form of stewardship.

Yes, the story of Bibb Graves and the people who honored him is a fascinating one. You can read all about it here.

Or, did you think I was talking about someone else?

Taxation Without Representation: My Cup of Tea

From an editorial in today's WSJ

[T]he legislation [that awards DC a seat in the House of Representatives and another to whichever state is most due additional representation] runs afoul of the plain language of the Constitution, which provides that House members shall be chosen "by the People of the several States" and stipulates that the District of Columbia is not a state.

A half million other DC residents may feel differently from me, but I'll gladly live without representation if it means there won't be another Congressman in the back pocket of the special interest groups that just wrote this stimulus package. It's not as if anyone has a gun to his head making him live in DC. I mean, c'mon, no one could do that in DC. We have gun control legislation.

Benefits of Wrestling with Difficult Theological Concepts

A friend [you know who you are ;-) ] once tried to convince me that it was futile and counterproductive to try to press for understanding the limits of God's self-revelation, when God clearly hasn't told us all we need to resolve apparent tensions in the text. Though I recognize the dangers of pressing past the text into speculation, there is today all too common an impulse to set our aim far too low. That's why I'd rather associate myself with words like these from Ligon Duncan, spoken in reference to Romans 8:32:

Wrestling with the profoundest theological concepts teaches us to learn the limits of our own understanding. A sense of wonder--a sense of bafflement--is absolutely essential to authentic Christian experience, and there will always be times when we are confronted with the vision of our God set forth in his own divine self-revelation, and the depiction of his glorious plan that leaves us out of breath, and leaves us at the limit of our ability to articulate.

Quoted from Lecture 2 here.

Matt Olson on Worship

What a terrific week! About a dozen things made it unusually so, some of which I hope to write about in the next few days since they involve resources that may be useful to others.

But the one that delighted me so much I had to stop by the office at 8:30 on a chilly Saturday morning (laptop's in the shop) on my way somewhere else was Matt Olson's talk, "Worship As a Way of Life," at Northland's Heart Conference.

Olson's argument is that worship needs to be God-focused, Christ-centered, Word-based, and Spirit-enabled. Much of his argumentation is based on John 4, and while that text is difficult exegetically and not all will agree with where Olson lands, I believe his thesis is clearly consistent with the message of Scripture.

Those four characteristics of worship are a healthy but fairly common structure for talking about worship. If you want to think more about the point he's making, David Peterson's Engaging With God: A Biblical Theology of Worship
is a stellar biblical theology of worship. Olson cites it himself.

What makes Olson's talk provocative and, I hope, productive, is the flesh that he hung on the bones. There are so many powerful, provocative nuggets here that I'm not going to try to reproduce them all, but here are a few that grabbed me:

If we have a shallow or a warped view of God, it's impossible to have a right view of myself, and it's impossible to have a right view of everything around me.

I do think that music is an important discussion, but we're not ready to even start talking about music until we have a right view of God. How are you going to assess anything?

When we make our applications--when we go beyond what is written to dogmatize our opinions and dogmatize our traditions and dogmatize my applications with another person, I think we really get in trouble.

Let me be clear: he's not repudiating application; he's suggesting that we can get in a ditch on either side of application. One danger is that tradition can trump Scripture. The other danger is secularism, so that we think we can do whatever we want when God doesn't say anything specific. And finally . . .

God works from the inside out. If we don't get the inside, we don't get anything. If all we do at Northland Baptist Bible College with these students is have their behavior conformed to a standard, and they do not get a heart for God, we have failed.

You'll have to buy (yes, buy, sadly) the MP3 to hear what he says about fundamentalists who idolize excellence. It's longer than I have time to transcribe. But he's right. And if you buy Olson's MP3, grab Steve Pettit's too. The past two or three times I've heard him preach, he's displayed a passion to exalt God that I've seldom heard in anyone's preaching apart from John Piper and Frank Hamrick.

This American Life: Heretics

Here's a fascinating story with profound theological implications.