Humble Orthodoxy

I love this statement of truth from the New Attitude (NA) website.

What is humble orthodoxy?
Humble orthodoxy is a commitment to believing, living, and representing the truth with humility. We believe that God's truth in Scripture should not be redefined or reinvented to suit our own preferences or culture. Our role is not to change truth but to let truth change us.

It's not a revolution. It's not a movement. It's a group of people in local churches, passionate about rediscovering truth and recommitting to it. We stand on the shoulders of those who have followed God before us. So this is what we offer to the conversation:

Forget reinvention. Embrace a humble orthodoxy.

What a refreshing answer to the post-modern drivel of our time. May God make us to stand firm on the faith delivered to us through the ages by the superintending hand of His Spirit.

Repentance: The Cure for Moral Leprosy

The following cutting is from Karios Journal:

As any athlete knows, pain is information, and useful information at that. As attractive as a world without pain might seem, the reality is far from desirable. The absence of pain is a serious pathology, characteristic of leprosy. The leper’s great curse is that he cannot feel pain, so, without realizing it, he puts his hand in the fire, and it becomes burnt beyond use. His feet become damaged and infected without his knowledge, and untreated, they are ruined.

The sense of guilt, like any other pain, is information. A complete loss of that faculty is the moral equivalent of leprosy. The conscience of the individual—and society—can be seared.

Writing about his work as a prison psychiatrist in England, Theodore Dalrymple notes the prisoners’ responses to their fate. Denial is universal, not of the crime itself, but of responsibility for their actions. On asking, “What are you in for?” Dalrymple often receives replies such as, “just ordinary burglaries,” “just an ordinary assault,” and even, “just a poxy little murder charge.”1 They believe that their actions are inconsequential and normal. Indeed, according to Dalrymple, criminals in contemporary Britain feel that they are victims of a great injustice when they are incarcerated for their crimes. They need understanding and help, not punishment.

Of course, self-justification is not limited to the criminal fraternity. Impatience with personal responsibility is now very much en vogue throughout society. It feeds on moral relativism and the utopian desire amongst the intellectual elite to rid life of unpleasant feelings altogether.

This is indeed a heady mix. If no action is absolutely wrong (apart perhaps from something that would interfere with another individual’s self-determination), and feelings of having done wrong are unpleasant, then the obvious solution is to treat guilt and shame as the problem rather than the behavior that led to it. Even where someone has violated the autonomy of another, two wrongs do not make a right; there is no point in adding to the total amount of suffering by making someone else feel bad: who is helped by that? Therapy, rather than punishment, is the appropriate solution. After all, a person’s behavior is the consequence of a very complex combination of genetic and environmental factors . . . Once a few such arguments have been piled up, personal moral guilt disappears in a puff of logic, and moral leprosy takes over.

Dr. Dalrymple reports that when he was eight, he stole a penny bar of chocolate from the corner store. When his mother found out,

[She] did not take the view that this was a transient episode of delinquency that would pass of its own accord . . . She did not think that my theft was a natural act of self-expression, or a revolt against the inequality between the power and wealth of children and that of adults, or indeed of anything other than my desire to have the chocolate without paying for it. She was right, of course. What I had done was morally wrong, and to impress the fact upon me she marched me round to Mrs. Marks, the owner of the store, where I confessed my sin and paid her tuppence by way of restitution. It was the end of my shoplifting career.2

Plain speaking is the servant of repentance and the healing it brings. Dalrymple’s mother cut through all the foolishness, calling sin “sin”—just the sort of thing good preachers do before moral leprosy and irreversible damage begin.

Footnotes:
1 Theodore Dalrymple, “How Criminologists Foster Crime,” City Journal Website, Autumn 1999, http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_4_oh_to_be.html (accessed, March 11, 2004).
2 Ibid.

Jesus Ossuaries?

"Jesus Ossuaries"?

Recently, the Discovery Channel has been working overtime to destroy their own credibility. The sensationalism of their expose on the so-called Jesus Ossuaries is a piece of shameless hype with not just little but zero scholar backing. For a brief article that buries the Discovery Channel's fake scholarship on the issue click on the link below

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/cgi-bin/p/psafe/psafe.cgi?

Does Baptism Save Us?

(Continuing Discussion from Sunday's message)

Short answer: No.

Question: Then what does 1 Peter 3:21 mean?

Long answer: The following is excerpted from Wayne Grudem's Introduction to Systematic Theology, chapter 49:

Finally, what about 1 Peter 3:21, where Peter says, “Baptism...now saves you”? Does this not give clear support to the Roman Catholic view that baptism itself brings saving grace to the recipient?15 No, for when Peter uses this phrase he continues in the same sentence to explain exactly what he means by it. He says that baptism saves you “not as a removal of dirt from the body” (that is, not as an outward, physical act which washes dirt from the body—that is not the part which saves you), “but as an appeal to God for a clear conscience” (that is, as an inward, spiritual transaction between God and the individual, a transaction symbolized by the outward ceremony of baptism). We could paraphrase Peter’s statement by saying, “Baptism now saves you—not the outward physical ceremony of baptism but the inward spiritual reality which baptism represents.” In this way, Peter guards against any view of baptism that would attribute automatic saving power to the physical ceremony itself.

Peter’s phrase, “an appeal to God for a clear conscience,” is another way of saying “a request for forgiveness of sins and a new heart.” When God gives a sinner a “clear conscience,” that person has the assurance that every sin has been forgiven and that he or she stands in a right relationship with God (Heb. 9:14 and 10:22 speak this way about the cleansing of one’s conscience through Christ). To be baptized rightly is to make such an “appeal” to God: it is to say, in effect, “Please, God, as I enter this baptism which will cleanse my body outwardly I am asking you to cleanse my heart inwardly, forgive my sins, and make me right before you.” Understood in this way, baptism is an appropriate symbol for the beginning of the Christian life.16

So 1 Peter 3:21 certainly does not teach that baptism saves people automatically or confers grace ex opere operato. It does not even teach that the act of baptism itself has saving power, but rather that salvation comes about through the inward exercise of faith that is represented by baptism (cf. Col. 2:12). In fact, Protestants who advocate believers' baptism might well see in 1 Peter 3:21 some support for their position: baptism, it might be argued, is appropriately administered to anyone who is old enough personally to make “an appeal to God for a clear conscience.”17

15 15. The next three paragraphs are adapted from Wayne Grudem, The First Epistle of Peter TNTC (Leicester: IVP, and Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), pp. 163–65, and are used by permission.
16 16. Some have argued that “pledge” is a better word than “appeal” in this verse. Thus, the NIV translates, “the pledge of a good conscience towards God.” The data from other examples of the word is slim with regard to both meanings, and no conclusions can be drawn from an examination of other uses of the word alone (see discussion in W. Grudem, 1 Peter p. 164).
But much more significant is the fact that the translation “pledge” introduces a theological problem. If baptism is a “pledge to God” to maintain a good conscience (or a pledge to live an obedient life, which flows from a good conscience), then the emphasis is no longer on dependence on God to give salvation, but is rather on dependence on one’s own effort or strength of resolve. And since this phrase in 1 Peter 3:21 is so clearly connected with the beginning of the Christian life and identified as the feature of baptism that “saves you,” the translation “pledge” seems to be inconsistent with the New Testament teaching on salvation by faith alone; it would be the only place where a promise to be righteous is said to be the thing that “saves you.” And since the lexical data are inconclusive for both senses (while suggesting that both senses are apparently possible), it is better to adopt the translation “appeal” as a sense much more in accord with the doctrinal teaching of the rest of the New Testament.
17 17. Col. 2:12 can be used in the same manner: Paul says that in baptism Christians were “raised with [Christ] through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead.” This presupposes that those who were baptized were exercising faith when they were baptized—that is, that they were old enough to believe.

"Side Issues" and "Gospel Issues"

Continuing the discussion from this weeks message:

As we read the Scripture, there are sometimes various questions that arise. Questions of interpretation, questions of meaning, questions of chronology, questions of applications, questions of principle, questions of history, etc.

On Sunday, I mentioned two types of questions, "side issue" questions and "gospel issue" questions. What's the difference?

A Gospel Issue = an issue in which the gospel itself is at stake.
A Side Issue = an issue in which the gospel itself is not at stake.

A side issue is not necessarily unimportant. On the contrary, it might be very important to a fully informed Christian life and worldview. It simply does not directly effect the gospel's integrity or clarity.

On Sunday, I tried to illustrate the difference by telling a story about a friend of mine who was brought to faith in Christ and later became a missionary, by someone who refused to let my friend get her derailed from the issue of Jesus and his death and resurrection and claim upon her life, by getting her to answer "side issue" questions prematurely. I gave as examples the classic kind of "smoke screen" questions that we often hear when we present the gospel to others (i.e., What about Noah, what about evolution, what about Jonah, what about the heathen in Africa, what about little babies who are born with disabilities? etc.)

These are all important issues, and they all deserve serious reflection and hard work in the text of Scripture to determine what God's word says about them. But they do not directly relate to the great summaries of the gospel that are given to us in the pages of the New Testament.

Two questions that I didn't deal with on Sunday were
1. Did Jesus go to hell and preach the gospel? (vs. 19)
2. Was there a guy named Noah who built an Ark in which only 8 persons survived a flood? (vs. 20)

I said on Sunday that those were side issue question. Important issues but not as important "gospel issues"--things that directly impact the gospel. There was a third question that I did not deal with very fully, that is the question raised by the phrasing in our English Bibles of verse 21, "Baptism, ... now saves you ..."

Today, all I want to do is give some resources for your own study and I will respond to questions that any might like to address in the comments section in the next few days/weeks.

The first resource is Wayne Grudem's commentary on 1 Peter in the Tyndale New Testament Commentaries series. Dr. Grudem has an excellent discussion on pages 161-165. Grudem also has an excellent and balance discusssion of alternative interpretations in chapter 49.

I will give a portion of it tomorrow.