What Is Necessary for a Christian to Believe?
According to the Reformed understanding, all twelve articles are under the heading “gospel.” This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a narrow sense of the gospel (as sketched above), but it does mean that, when we answer the question of what must be believed, we do not stop at the narrow sense of gospel. We include in it the doctrine of the Trinity, a doctrine of God, a doctrine of creation and providence, of sin, of Christ, of salvation, of the church, sacraments, and last things.
Our doctrine of God is intimately connected to our understanding of man, salvation, church, and worship.
Modern evangelical answers to this question have focused on Christ to the exclusion of these other doctrines, but in Reformed theology they’re all connected. Our doctrine of God is intimately connected to our understanding of man, salvation, church, and worship. The Reformed faith, however, is biblical and catholic, i.e., we believe what the Scriptures teach about God, man, Christ, salvation, etc., as understood by the church in all times and places.
In contrast, for evangelicals, so long as one affirms a personal relationship with the risen Christ, everything else is negotiable. It is not even always certain what an evangelical means by “Christ.” Is she referring to the Christ of Scripture and history, confessed in the Creed, or to the Christ of subjective, mystical experience?
The Reformed answer to the question, “what must a Christian believe?” is not minimalist, but neither is it maximalist. We don’t ask Christians to believe everything possible. We ask them to believe all that is necessary. There are limits to what may be set as a condition of salvation. There is a hierarchy of beliefs. They aren’t all equally ultimate or necessary. There are fundamentalist groups that require adherents to believe that the King James Version of the English Bible is the only acceptable translation, but that’s not a necessary belief. The King James Version is a wonderful piece of work, but it’s just one translation among many.
The Geneva Bible pre-existed the KJV, the Tyndale translation pre-existed the Geneva Bible, and we’ve had many fine translations since 1611. Others would set the length of creation days as a necessary belief. One is certainly entitled to one’s opinion about the meaning of the “day” in Genesis 1 and 2, but historically the emphasis has been on the reality of the creation days and upon the truth that we are created and not the Creator.
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Pressing on Towards the Goal: A Biblical Approach to Fitness
While God is sovereign over every aspect of our lives—including the precise number of breaths we will take—He has created our bodies to generally perform better and for longer with a balanced diet and regular exercise. The better we take care of our bodies through diet and exercise (as well as things like sleep, hygiene, and proper preventative medical care), the longer they will generally last. We will therefore have more energy and ability to serve the Lord actively for far longer.
Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather train yourself for godliness; for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance. For to this end we toil and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe.
-1 Timothy 4:7-10, ESV
The new year is fast approaching, so the season for resolutions is upon us. Some of the most common involve losing weight and starting to exercise. As a result, what I call the “resolution rabble” overwhelms gyms across the country before dying off as most people lose motivation and quit. People similarly begin diets with great discipline but likewise lose motivation and go back to old habits. The shape stays a bit round and the pounds stay on. On the other side, diet and exercise can become an obsession, leading to faithful devotees to various exercise routines, products, diets, and practices. How should we look at this biblically? What does Scripture say about fitness and health that can guide us to actually accomplish those resolutions?
A Greater Purpose for Health and Fitness
Arguably the biggest reason health and fitness resolutions fail is a lack of vision and purpose. Why “get in shape”? Why lose weight? Without this, people quit at the first sign of adversity. As part of the futility resulting from the Fall (Genesis 3:18, Romans 8:20), diet and exercise both require effort for quite a while before seeing any results, which leads to frustration that could cause us to quit. Only a purpose much larger than ourselves and our pleasure can overcome the frustration of seemingly fruitless pain. Scripture clearly defines that purpose: “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). As the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism states, our primary purpose is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. That must be the motivation behind everything we do, including our approach to diet and exercise. We want to get in shape in order to glorify God. We want to lose the weight in order to glorify God. That is the purpose that can turn a resolution that is easily cast aside into a strong habit that produces real results.
Two Wrong Approaches
This naturally leads to two extremes that must be avoided. The first is to over-spiritualize diet and exercise. We can come to see particular diets, like the “Daniel Diet”, as paths to righteousness and their opposites as defiling the temple of the Holy Spirit. Scripture clearly teaches that since the Holy Spirit indwells believers, we are His temple, which is a major motivation to glorify God in how we treat our bodies: “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). Yet Jesus made it very clear that we do not desecrate that temple through what we eat or drink: “There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him” (Mark 7:15). He therefore declared all foods clean (Mark 7:19). Only in sexual immorality does a man sin against his own body (1 Corinthians 6:18) so only sexual immorality desecrates our bodies in which the Holy Spirit dwells.[1] Junk food, alcohol, and tobacco cannot do that, so diet and exercise are not the path to righteousness. The same can be said of any attempt to avoid sin through bodily severity:
If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations—“Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” (referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.
-Colossians 2:20-23, ESV
No matter how severely we treat our bodies, those habits will not stop the indulgence of the flesh. Remember, self-control is a fruit given by the Holy Spirit through the vehicle of faith, not by bodily deprivation. We must not over-spiritualize diet and exercise and therefore overemphasize the importance of our physical bodies.
The opposite error is to disregard diet and exercise entirely. I have heard people cite Proverbs 28:1 as an excuse for avoiding exercise: “The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are bold as a lion”. They also shun any semblance of dieting by pointing out that in the Mosaic Law the fat was holy to the LORD (Leviticus 3:16). They may not sinfully over-indulge in food, alcohol, and smoking, but they partake of these things enough to negatively affect their bodies. In rightly avoiding the error of over-spiritualizing the body, they under-spiritualize it. First, they are clearly committing the cardinal sin of bible study by taking these verses out of context. They ignore the many proverbs against laziness (Proverbs 6:6-11, 13:4, 19:24, 21:25) and gluttony (Proverbs 23:2,21, 25:16,27) and the ceremonial aspects of laws regarding fat. This, like the “cultural cop-out”, is an attempt to make the Bible say what we want in order to support our desires rather than subordinating our desires to the Bible.
Stewardship and Self-Control
Instead, the concept of stewardship is prevalent throughout Scripture. As we saw with tithing, all we have ultimately belongs to God. He entrusts it to us and then charges us to take care of it for His glory. That includes our bodies. In commanding husbands to follow the example of Christ with the Church by nourishing and cherishing their wives as their own bodies (Ephesians 5:28-29), he is assuming that we love our own bodies by nourishing and cherishing them. We must care for ourselves physically, but taking care of ourselves physically must not supersede our pursuit of godliness.
If you put these things before the brothers, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, being trained in the words of the faith and of the good doctrine that you have followed. Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather train yourself for godliness; for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance.
-1 Timothy 4:6-10, ESV
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Dehumanization is Just Another Way to Kill
Written by C. R. Carmichael |
Thursday, July 14, 2022
According to the latest information from the Pew Research Center, Christians suffer more than any other religious group from various governmental and societal hostilities around the world today. Because of this reality, we should have the empathy to be more mindful of our Gospel call to comfort others who are in any affliction (2 Corinthians 1:4), and to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves” (Romans 15:1).Have you noticed the ugly trend of certain ideologically-driven factions painting their opponents as less than human? Or the ruling elites and angry protesters calculating a person’s human worth based on their perceived usefulness to society?
Recent examples of this kind of behavior may surprise you. They include an abortion advocate who painted the words “Not Yet Human” on her exposed, very-pregnant belly; a prominent church leader tweeting out: “Whiteness is an unrelenting, demonic force of evil”; and a Rutgers professor who pronounced that white people are “committed to being villains” who need to be “taken out.”
Such vile attempts to strip away the intrinsic value of an individual or group in order to legitimize their social banishment or destruction is called “dehumanization,” and it is re-emerging as a potent force in our toxic culture these days.
Figuratively speaking, it is like trying to eliminate someone with the cold precision of a sniper’s bullet. Dehumanization, in both its passive and active forms, is attempting to erase a person. It attempts to erase a person’s purpose, erase their unique gifts, erase their value, erase their morality, and equate them with expendable animals to be caged, experimented on, or swiftly put down at the perpetrator’s discretion.
One might rightly ask how this immoral act can exist in our so-called enlightened age. You would think that the attempt to relegate a group of people to a subhuman or abstract category would be considered abhorrent in our modern society—especially after the travesties of American slavery, the Holocaust, or the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Surely the emphatic statement, “Never again!” has been the foundational declaration of a wiser, more compassionate world over the last century, has it not?
Yet here we are in the midst of a sweeping new “cancel culture” of hate.
Dehumanization Emerges From Spiritual Disease
If you go by a majority of prevalent “woke” attitudes in American society today, dehumanization is the preferred weapon of choice—especially in the Wild West of social media and rage-filled protests. White people, political conservatives and the unborn appear to be the popular new targets, and are now sharing space with historically-oppressed minority groups. Yet the hatred directed at them still reeks of the age-old spiritual diseases of racism, bigotry, and rebellion against God.
Needless to say, it is astonishing to find how easily these twisted, hateful attitudes have become the endorsed rhetoric of our time. The latest diatribes against another race or creed is no more acceptable than when they were spoken against the Jews in Nazi Germany or African-Americans in the Old South. And yet such similar malevolence against certain brothers and sisters of our society is often celebrated by our ruling elites and propagated by corporate mainstream media as a way to control the populace through division or to intimidate those who stand in the way of their influence and power.
Today’s virtual murderers, regardless of their particular ideology or political bent, utilize the evil process of dehumanization so they can justify their violent behavior towards their “enemies” in the hope of erasing their opposing ideas from view. As journalist Slavenka Drakulic once explained it, “When a person is reduced to an abstraction, one is free to hate him because the moral obstacle has already been abolished.” Or as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it: “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good.”
The problem with using dehumanization as a vehicle for righteous indignation, however, is that it doesn’t have a shred of moral integrity in its makeup. The Bible, the God-breathed standard for morality and ethics, doesn’t allow for this kind of evil among men. Why? Because the Bible has revealed to us this great truth: human beings were created in the image of God!
Dehumanization Disrespects The Image Of God
Indeed, from the beginning of the Biblical narrative, we are told that mankind is unique among creation because men and women, unlike the other living creatures on Earth, have been created in the likeness of God. “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).
This is why murder is considered so heinous. The shedding of human blood is a rebellious assault against the unique and sacred relationship between God and those who bear His image on earth (Genesis 9:6).
What an amazing thought to know that we all bear, in some profound way, the image of God regardless of race, creed or societal standing.
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A New and Rising Liberalism
Modern Liberalism is just as heretical as was the theological liberalism of the early 20th century. It is heresy to deny the necessity of sanctification for believers as much as to deny the authority of scripture. To deny that Christ truly transforms his people in this life is as much heresy as it is to deny that he came to save.
There’s a new liberalism making its way through our churches and transforming our denominations. No, this liberalism doesn’t deny the virgin birth or the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection. This liberalism is steeped in biblical exegesis and historic-Reformed categories. Today’s liberalism attempts to use the common creeds and confessions we know and love, and it emphasises the importance of using scripture to defend our ideas. This liberalism has a foothold in virtually every major Reformed seminary and denominational group. Like the liberalism that Machen fought, this liberalism isn’t simply an aberration away from biblical Christianity; it’s an entirely different religion. Using the same language, borrowing from the same history, often preached side by side with orthodoxy, this liberalism poses no less a serious threat to orthodox Christianity than did the liberalism of the early 20th century.
The theological liberalism of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy dealt primarily with doctrinal categories. The liberals of the early 20th century wanted to keep the form and trappings of Christianity while also stripping it of any doctrinal content that flew in the face of a rationalist view of science and the world. They wanted the moral authority of a religion without the dogmatic content of biblical Christianity. Today’s liberalism, however, is a different category all-together. Modern Liberalism accepts the validity of miracles, the virgin birth, the deity of Christ, the authority (at least in theory) of scripture, the resurrection, and the substitutionary nature of Christ’s atonement. Today’s liberalism isn’t theological; it’s ethical.
Today’s liberalism addresses not what we believe but how we act. Of course theology is always behind our ethics, but examining the doctrinal statement of today’s Modern Liberals will turn over little that’s concerning. It’s in their practice that the concerns are shown. The theological liberals of the early 20th century professed faith in a real Jesus while denying that he ever lived. They claimed to believe the whole of scripture yet consistently undercut every significant doctrine. So today, Modern Liberals profess faith in the same theology as orthodox Reformed Christianity, yet their practice is profoundly different to that of New Testament Christianity.
Good truths are being twisted. Those who emphasize God’s grace and Christ’s love to the neglect of a fully biblical emphasis on the absolute imperative of Christians to live a life of repentance and pursue holiness today demonstrate the theological component behind this rising Modern Liberalism. Those who teach only on justification and the love of God, those who openly deny or tacitly undercut the necessity of sanctification are fuelling the ethical dimension to today’s Modern Liberalism.
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