The Bible
Written by David B. Garner |
Friday, February 24, 2023
Machen took comfort that the Bible is absolutely a “true account” because the One “whom the Christian worships is a God of truth.” If God is truth, then His Word—all of it—is truth. This doctrine of plenary inspiration (all of Scripture is the very Word of God) is the sure testimony of Scripture itself and of Jesus Himself. Scripture alone is the final seat of authority.
Though the Reformation battles over justification by faith alone were intense, it has been rightly noted that the fiercest battle with the Roman Catholic Church concerned authority. Underlying the questions concerning the pure gospel of grace lay a fundamental question: “Who says?” This authority question did not hide in the shadows. For generations, Rome had plainly positioned its voice as the final infallible arbiter of truth, deciding how the church should interpret the Bible and tradition and delivering the final word concerning faith and understanding. To Rome, the final and infallible voice belongs to the Magisterium (the authoritative teaching of the bishops and pope), with special distinction for the pope when he speaks ex cathedra (from the chair).
The Reformers voiced their own protest, and with divine reason. The church and her officers must not sit in judgment over Scripture. The church is a creatura verbi, a creation of the Word. So understood, the church and all its officers sit under the Word of God. But Rome had usurped authority that belongs to God’s Word alone, converting and perverting the church’s derivative authority into definitive authority. The Reformers, therefore, uniformly spurned Rome’s claims that tradition and the Bible speak with voices of equal authority, rejected its tiebreaking magisterial voice, and repudiated its claims to infallibility. The Bible alone (sola Scriptura) suitably holds the infallibility moniker and serves alone as supreme judge (Westminster Confession of Faith 1.10).
Rome’s assumption of magisterial authority is only one manifestation of mankind’s persistent refusal to bow the knee to God’s Word. In the early twentieth century in the United States, J. Gresham Machen faced a new and formidable Word-defying foe: theological liberalism. While this opponent bore a different face from the one before the Reformers, its voice was loud, its clout strong, and the stakes high. Machen knew what he was up against, and with a Luther-like resolve under the conscious authority of Scripture, he valiantly asked, “Shall we accept the Jesus of the New Testament as our Saviour, or shall we reject Him with the liberal Church?”
Theological liberalism was in the very air of post–World War I modernism. And the mainline church had inhaled. Scandalized by the Scopes “monkey” trial, fundamentalist Christianity had become a cultural laughingstock, a resource-rich target of mockery for the educated and sophisticated. Harry Emerson Fosdick’s famous 1922 sermon “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?,” while contending for a supreme law of tolerance, not so subtly asserted his perception that the doctrines of the historic Christian faith were inane. Fosdick pleaded for everyone just to get along.
But it was not that simple. How marvelously tolerant were Fosdick and his liberal companions.
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God in the Manger
Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, December 24, 2022
He came to be with the world despite our hatred of him, he came to dwell in you before you loved him. We love him because he first loved us (1 John 4). God arriving in a manger teaches us his character and his disposition. He is a God of gift. He gives. That’s what he does. The greatest gift he gives is himself.It’s approaching Christmas time. We’re beginning, perhaps, to hear Christmas sermons, depending on how your tradition structures these things.
In the Evangelical world someone somewhere is advising us to remember to include the cross in our preaching—don’t give them the cute and sentimentalised baby Jesus, remind them that the meaning of Christmas is found at Easter!
I can get on board as far as it goes, Christ came to Planet Earth as human flesh to die in the place of sinners. That is true. But I part ways slightly, because its not everything that’s true. What I mean by that is that the gospel cannot be narrowed down to “Christ died for sinners” as though that were everything there is to say. The good news is far too big to get all of it out in one sitting, anyway, so we always present an aspect—a flavour if you will—of the grand story of the cosmos.
If someone preaches God in the Manger rather than God on the Cross, they have still preached the gospel. God in the manger is the gospel.
Why? Because the scandalous, outright ludicrous, suggestion that the almighty maker of heaven and earth, the unmoved mover, the first word and speaker of the first word, the alpha and omega, the grand storyteller, the author of life, Goodness himself, Love himself, the simple and incomprehensible God who is pure act, the Sovereign Lord Yahweh—him—that he would chose to become a creature—
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Prayer Tips: For What Should We Pray?
Indeed, whatever God ordains is right because, not only will He not leave or forsake His people (Deut. 31:6, Heb. 13:5), He will also continually care for us as a Shepherd tends His flock (Ps. 23), and He will work all things for His greatest glory and our greatest good (Rom. 8:28). Therefore, we pray for the will of God to be accomplished, even as we bring our cares, needs, and concerns before Him.
Two of some of the biggest questions that many Christians ask relate to prayer. On one hand, Christians want to know how they should pray. On the other hand, they want to know what they should be praying for. According to the Westminster Larger Catechism, “Prayer is an offering up of our desires unto God, in the name of Christ, by the help of his Spirit; with confession of our sins, and thankful acknowledgment of his mercies” (WLC 178). So, the how of prayer, then, is to confess desires (and needs) to God the Father, in the name of the Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Simple enough, right? We even recognize that prayer will include confession of sins and thankfulness for God’s many benefits that He graciously bestows upon us. The question remains, however: What should the Christian be praying for? When the world falls into deeper sin, or that loved one still has not repented and trusted in Jesus Christ, or that child is sick, or that family has lost nearly everything, and words seem to fail, and thoughts do not come, what are we to pray for? Though the Holy Spirit does indeed offer groanings and utterings in these moments (Rom. 8:26), we still want something solid to express and pray.
The answer may come as a surprise due to its simplicity, but Jesus answered this question in the opening of the Lord’s Prayer, directing us to pray: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”[1]
First, our words should be directed toward the Father, and we should pray for His name to be hallowed (consecrated, blessed, honored). Above all else, we should desire for the Lord to direct our prayers in such a way to glorify Himself (1 Cor. 10:31).
Secondly, we are to pray for His Kingdom to come.
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Support for Conversion Therapy Bans Are Revealing the Divide between Two Different Christianities
The Gospel is not that God “accepts people as they are.” The Gospel involves radical repentance and change. The “progressive” Gospel involves no change, no curing of our sinful hearts, and no suppression of evil within us. Instead, we become as God.
One of the most influential books in the 20th Century Church was J Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism. Machen was prophetic in his analysis of the crisis facing the Church in the US in the first half of the century—some would argue that it was because of his (and others’) stance that the US Church did not go down the path of decline that Churches in most other Western countries did.
In his prophetic book he warned: “A terrible crisis unquestionably has arisen in the Church. In the ministry of evangelical churches are to be found hosts of those who reject the gospel of Christ. By the equivocal use of traditional phrases, by the representation of differences of opinion as though they were only differences about the interpretation of the Bible, entrance into the Church was secured for those who are hostile to the very foundations of the faith.”
These words came to mind as I listened to the latest debate on conversion therapy on Premier’s Unbelievable, between Jayne Ozanne, the chair of Ban Conversion Therapy, and Peter Lynas of the Evangelical Alliance. Ozanne is, like Steve Chalke, a former evangelical who has a significant voice in the Anglican church and beyond.
As I listened to the somewhat (one-sided) heated discussion, I realised that this was not just a disagreement between two different versions of Christianity, but a disagreement between two different Christianities—which is why there was no possibility of agreement.
Francis Schaeffer, another prophetic writer who saw what was coming down the road, argued in The God Who Is There, that a new theology conditioned by modernistic and post modernistic would infiltrate the Church and create chaos.
He said that this new theology would have certain advantages because “the undefined connotation words that the new theology uses are deeply rooted in our Western culture. This is much easier and more powerful than using new and untraditional words.”
Ozanne used Christian words, but within progressive ideology they have radically different meanings:
1. Love
Ozanne told us, “God is love, anything that harms a child or adult goes against that.” But she never defines what love is. It’s so easy to say ‘love is love’, but without definition, that statement is completely vacuous.
The Bible on the other hand makes it explicitly clear. 1 John 4:10 says, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”
Furthermore, our love is also clearly defined: “This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands. In fact, this is love for God: to keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome” (1 John 5:2-3).
When people reject the commands of God, they are being the opposite of loving.
2. Harm
Ozanne kept accusing Peter and the EA of causing harm. Helen Joyce in her book Trans lays out how accusations of harm are used by trans activists to emotionally bully people into accepting their agenda. It always ends up with accusing those who disagree with them of causing suicide. Yet there is no evidence that the teaching of Jesus is the cause of suicide.
But Ozanne went further: “There is no evidence of Jesus teaching something that is going to cause people harm.”
I would have thought that most modern people would regard telling people to pluck out their eye if it is going to cause them to sin; to let the dead bury their dead; to hate their own father and mother; and to cast people into Hell as somewhat harmful! Perhaps Ozanne should heed his warning in Matthew 18:6 about those who cause people to stumble?
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