Written by Jeffrey A. Stivason |
Wednesday, January 4, 2023
How can we know the Christ who died for our sins, let alone anything about the world around us?  The Bible is our answer. The Bible is the word of God and it is authoritative, not because it has the best narrative that we might be able to squeeze into, but because it is true.

How is it possible for humans to interpret the world around us? I mean, interpret it properly. Let me put it differently. What is the pre-condition for the ability to interpret the world around us?  Well, a book might well be written on this subject, but I’ll make two brief points. First, God is all powerful and so He is in control of all things. He is what theologians call omnipotent and this has serious implications for our ability to know things. For example, Vern Poythress says, “The regularities that scientists describe are the regularities of God’s own commitments and his actions. By his word to Noah, he commits himself to govern the seasons.  By his word he governs snow, frost and hail. Scientists describe the regularities in God’s word governing the world.  So-called natural law is really the law of God or word of God, imperfectly and approximately described by human investigators” (In the Beginning was the Word, 67).  In other words, scientists simply describe what God is doing.
Second, God knows all things, He is omniscient. As a consequence, Kevin Vanhoozer writes, “[created] reality does not exist as brute, uninterpreted fact…it is already meaningful because it is interpreted by God” (First Theology, 322). In other words,  every fact is able to be interpreted because it is first known and interpreted by the God who gives all things meaning. In other words, there are no brute or uninterpreted facts because God is.
Now, all of this seems rather straight forward until you read someone like N. T. Wright.  I was struck afresh by his view of history. Consider this quote from his book New Testament and the People of God,
Suppose, for example, we try to make a small but central claim about Jesus. If we say ‘Christ died for our sins,’ it is not too difficult to see an obvious element of interpretation: ‘for our sins’ is a theological addendum to the otherwise ‘historical’ statement. But even if we say ‘Christ died,’ we have not escaped interpretation: we have chosen to refer to Jesus as ‘Christ,’ ascribing to him a Messiahship which neither his contemporaries nor ours would universally grant.  Very well: ‘Jesus died’.  But we still have not escaped ‘interpretation’, and indeed at this point it looms larger than ever: three people died outside Jerusalem that afternoon, and we have chosen to mention only one.  For that matter, thousands of Jews were crucified by the Romans in the vicinity of Jerusalem during the same century, and we have chosen to mention only one.  Our apparently bare historical remark is the product of a multi-faceted interpretive decision.  Nor is this unusual.  It is typical of all history (NTPG, 82-83).
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Abraham Kuyper didn’t like the depraved Dutch political system, and so, he did something about it….He started a new political party. He united different groups. He started newspapers, a college, and eventually became the Prime Minister. We can learn a lot from seeing somebody not just being a theorist but an actual doer.

“Christians should be known for what they are for rather than what they are against” is about as bad as other folk-Christianity sayings like “God helps those who help themselves.”
Sometime I think “winsome” is a get-out-of-jail free card that releases the Christian. Folks like Luther and Kuyper were intense, often a little rude and a bit bombastic, but everyone knew exactly where they stood. Having drawn their lines in the sand they brought about actual change because there was a clear call to action. Indeed, we all need to draw lines. Without a clear target we will miss every-time.
Friendship with the world is enmity with God (and, though you might not be a spiritual “adulterer” fornicating with the spirit of the age and wokeism, many of us are guilty of “innocent flirting” by allowing the woke masses to rub up against us, and instead of holding up our wedding rings we instead offer up a little smile and giggle with passive-approval).
Abraham Kuyper didn’t like the depraved Dutch political system, and so, he did something about it. Not only did he do something about it, but he was pro active. He started a new political party. He united different groups. He started newspapers, a college, and eventually became the Prime Minister. Kuyper was very clear with his program, in fact, he wrote a book that outlined in detail his program. I share a selection from it here because:
1. We can learn a lot from seeing somebody not just being a theorist but an actual doer.
2. We see that his situation was not much unlike our own.
3. He didn’t cave to the myth or “winsome” and failed to repeat the tired old phrase “Christians should be known for what they are for rather than what they are against.”
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The latest evidence regarding the Church of England came out on January 18th. Its bishops concluded a six-year process known as Living in Love and Faith, which sought to assess the church’s doctrine and practice regarding matters of human sexuality. They announced their refusal even to consider formally recognizing same-sex relationships as marriages next month. That’s the good news. However, they signaled two additional actions they will take. They said they would and have since issued an apology to persons in the LGBTQ community for when the church has “rejected and excluded them.” Moreover, they “will offer the fullest possible pastoral provision without changing the Church’s doctrine of Holy Matrimony for same-sex couples.” The plan to do so involves publishing “a range of draft prayers, known as Prayers of Love and Faith, which could be used voluntarily in churches for couples who have marked a significant stage of their relationship such as a civil marriage or civil partnership.”

“Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” So God declares in the opening verse of Jeremiah 23. In the 2019 Book of Common Prayer, the daily office gives this text as the Old Testament lesson for the evening of January 24. The chapter goes on to give a thorough rebuke of that day’s prophets and priests—those tasked with the spiritual care of God’s people. Though directly aimed at the Israelites, this passage of Scripture encapsulates well the contemporary state of the Church of England (as well the Scottish and American episcopal churches, among others).
The latest evidence regarding the Church of England came out on January 18th. Its bishops concluded a six-year process known as Living in Love and Faith, which sought to assess the church’s doctrine and practice regarding matters of human sexuality. They announced their refusal even to consider formally recognizing same-sex relationships as marriages next month. That’s the good news. However, they signaled two additional actions they will take. They said they would and have since issued an apology to persons in the LGBTQ community for when the church has “rejected and excluded them.” Moreover, they “will offer the fullest possible pastoral provision without changing the Church’s doctrine of Holy Matrimony for same-sex couples.” The plan to do so involves publishing “a range of draft prayers, known as Prayers of Love and Faith, which could be used voluntarily in churches for couples who have marked a significant stage of their relationship such as a civil marriage or civil partnership.”
In other words, the bishops announced the surrender of Biblical orthodoxy on matters of human sexuality. Their words amount to a near-total capitulation on every principle and practice in the debate except the technical definition of marriage and the accompanying church liturgy for it. But make no mistake, those exceptions will fall, too. For any principled, doctrinal ground on which these hold-outs stand has been torn from under them (Stephen Cottrell, Archbishop of York, assured Progressives that “This is not the end of that journey but we have reached a milestone and I hope that these prayers of love and faith can provide a way for us all to celebrate and affirm same-sex relationships.”)
The fact that this betrayal of orthodoxy comes from the bishops, the shepherds of Christ’s church in England, establishes their parallel with the men who failed God’s flock in ancient Israel. But the links do not end there, abounding throughout the rest of the text as well.
First, the book of Jeremiah diagnoses the central problem for Israel’s shepherds back then as a rejection of God’s Word. Speaking of the prophets, God asks, “For who among them has stood in the council of the Lord to see and to hear his word, or who has paid attention to his word and listened?” (23:18). The issue today, as then, is not merely one of knowledge but of obedience. Listening in this verse means more than hearing, which the preceding term “paying attention” would cover. To listen means to do in reaction to, to submit to Scriptural authority. Foley Beach, Archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America and Chair of the GAFCON Primates Council, rightly declared of the English bishops that, “Their actions…reject the authority of Scripture.” In that rejection, these actions clearly, brazenly violate the Church of England’s own foundation principles, encapsulated in the Thirty-Nine Articles’ declaration (Article 20) that, “it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written.” Nor may the church confuse and confound by trying to “expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another.” Yet both routes we see taken by the Church of England on this issue. In fact, they do the second in service of the first, giving unfaithful interpretations of the Bible in order to go against its requirements.
In so doing, these bishops continue to replace Scriptural authority (and church historical practice as well) with the new orthodoxy of the sexual revolution and other pieties of the contemporary Left. Yet this approach gets the relationship between society and the Bible backwards.  The Word of God does not conform to the trends of any society, whether its cultural mores, political agendas, or social fashions. Instead, in Jeremiah we read, “Is not my word like fire, declares the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?” (23:29). Fire cleanses and a hammer, in its breaking, also re-forms. Through the illumination of the Spirit, God’s Word cleanses our hearts of sinful dispositions and helps to mold us into the image of Christ.
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