Unless you reason outside the box of human reason, you can forget about understanding the Jesus of the Bible. Only those willing and able to break the constraints of common experience and human rationalism can hope to make any sense of Jesus’ life and ministry.

The birth narrative of Jesus demands that we think outside the box. We have no conceptual or experiential category for a woman conceiving a child without sperm from a man. But the biblical authors announce that Jesus was conceived in the womb of a virgin named Mary by a direct act of God. We are to understand that although fully human, Jesus had no earthly, biological father—a reality Mary found no easier to grasp than we do (Luke 1:31-35).

Another mental box the Jesus of the Bible explodes is our understanding of kingship. Beginning with nursery rhymes and children’s stories and then attaining higher levels of historical awareness, we learn to conceive of kings as people born in palaces, attended by servants, and consumers of every luxury afforded by their culture. Kings rule their realms and lead armies. They conquer and reign, or at least try to.   read more»

The press is full of reports about Baptist missionaries who have been arrested in Haiti. They are accused of—and, as of yesterday, formally charged with—attempting to abduct children illegally into the neighboring Dominican Republic, ostensibly with the purpose of eventually selling the children into adoption. The missionaries have been moved from lodging in a public building and sent to jail. Jail in Haiti. Jail in a Haiti that has been decimated by earthquakes.

I admit that my first reaction when I heard the story was, “Oh, no! Another black mark against Fundamentalists.” As it turns out, however, these missionaries were not from any Fundamentalist group. They were from Southern Baptist churches (albeit mainly from northern Southern Baptist churches). Still, they wear the names Baptist and missionary, and as far as most people are concerned, that has implications enough for the rest of us who are Baptists concerned with missions.

Naturally, the American press is playing up the story, focusing mainly on the two words Baptist and missionaries. To read the reports in the daily papers one would imagine the worst. Baptist missionaries have been arrested. Baptist missionaries were abducting children. Baptist missionaries have been charged and jailed. The natural assumption is that Baptist missionaries must be guilty.

The American public has reacted predictably. The press has offered its usual lurid report and the bulk of Americans assume that they have the facts and have been told the truth. The words child abduction stir up images of Amber Alerts and faces on milk cartons. Americans are all about images. If you can evoke the right images, you can get them to do anything.   read more»

A somewhat new conference occurs in Gilbert, Arizona later this month. I asked two of the organizers to share their thoughts on what the conference is all about.

What would you say to help folks understand the uniqueness of this conference?

Joel: I’m not sure that this conference is that unique. Just like the first time we met a few years ago, this is just a group of friends that are wanting to get together to think through some issues connected with the biblical concept of koinonia. Really, I have a primary goal and a secondary goal with our time together. The primary goal is focused on our own congregation here at SVBC. I’m wanting to bring in men from other ministries to talk about the issues related to “church to church” koinonia. These leaders that are speaking are leading ministries that are already on our “sister church list” as a congregation.

One of the things I’m concerned about is that we at SVBC do not become an island unto ourselves. Clearly the NT teaches that congregations are to have relationships with other congregations. But what are those relationships built on? In the past we’ve often said, “It is based on a shared movement.” That answer is increasingly deficient for a variety of reasons. I believe the answer must be we have co-ministry with those that we share koinonia with.   read more»

Reprinted with permission from Voice magazine (Jan/Feb 2010).

Recently I was visiting one of my elders’ friends to whom he has been witnessing for about thirty years. In a three hour time period we must have presented the gospel to his friend at least five times, in different ways. His friend just nodded and agreed but never made a decision to trust Christ as Savior. I was along for the ride this time, but this elder in my church faithfully does this every Thursday and has for years.

During our ride I got at least three phone calls from people requesting financial assistance from our church. I shared with them the different non-profit groups in our community that can help them. But, and how can I say this tenderly, I had to reject their request. We have several families in our church who have fallen on hard times because the economy in Michigan is terrible and if you lose your job, they are hard to find. Three families in our church were on the verge of losing their homes and so we took a special offering through the month of July to give those families a boost. Our small church gave $2,600 in addition to our normal giving.

Our church is involved in organizations like Right to Life and the local pregnancy center. We try to help our friends and neighbors as much as we can. But many people in the American church have started to think that those kind of activities are what make us relevant to the world in which we live. And that is not biblical.   read more»

Read Part 1.

The doctrine of perspicuity or clarity of Scripture can be stated this way: All things being accounted for, the Scriptures are understandable. The question is, however, what should be accounted for?

Luther grappled with the idea and admitted in The Bondage of the Will that the Scriptures were both clear and unclear. He, like many other reformers, attempted to balance the statements in the Scriptures themselves that tended to support the understandability of the Scriptures on the one hand and their difficulty on the other. Most significant among the passages that state the difficulty of the Scriptures is Peter’s declaration that in Paul’s epistles there “are some things hard to be understood” (2 Peter 3:16). The experience of reading and studying the Scriptures also proves that not all things in the Scriptures are readily understandable.

Seizing upon that statement and upon similar rationales, the religious establishment at the time of Luther declared that the Scriptures were inherently unclear and, hence, withheld them from the laity for fear that the lay people would misunderstand them. Granted, there “are some things hard to be understood” in the Scriptures, and they should be accounted for. They are, in essence, the type of difficulties Bible translators encounter. By virtue of the nature of the translation process, they are, for the most part, passed on to the readers of the translations.   read more»

Reprinted with permission from Faith Pulpit, March/April ‘09

What Is The New Spirituality?

The New Spirituality is a paradigm for devotion and spiritual formation that utilizes forms and approaches originating from the Bible and from traditions and sources other than the Bible. It emphasizes individual autonomy and focuses on experience rather than on indoctrination. It is rooted in mysticism and the occult but often wrapped in Christian terminology. The premise of The New Spirituality is pantheistic (God is all) and panentheistic (God is in all).¹

The New Spirituality goes by many names: The Spiritual Formation Movement, Contemplative Spirituality, and The Spiritual Disciplines, to list a few. High on the list of leaders of this movement are Richard Foster, a Quaker and former professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, and Brian McLaren, who is a leading theologian, or as he would say “anti-theologian,” in the Emerging Church movement.   read more»

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7.

Leadership in Transition

The proto-fundamentalist period (roughly 1870 to 1920) was a time of rapid change in American culture. When this period opened, the memory of the Civil War was still fresh. The Old West was being settled. Indian wars were being fought. Most armies equipped their troops with single-shot rifles (often muzzle-loaders) and cap-and-ball revolvers. Ironclad steamships were in their infancy. The ordinary modes of daily transportation still employed livestock. John Philip Sousa was just composing his first marches. Southerners, especially those of African descent, were migrating toward northern cities.

By 1920, Americans had a different war burned into their consciousness, a war of worldwide consequence. The Old West lived on only in Hollywood film. Weaponry in the recent war had included bolt-action rifles, automatic pistols, machine guns, tanks, lethal gas, and aerial bombs. Mammoth ocean liners and battleships had been constructed and (as with the Titanic, the Empress of Ireland, and the Lusitania) sunk. Scott Joplin had introduced a new “jass” musical idiom with his rags, slow drags, and two-steps, and by the 1920s it had become fully-developed jazz. Most households either owned or aspired to own an automobile, and air travel had become a reality. The children of former slaves had begun a kind of renaissance in Harlem.

The transition from 1870 to 1920 includes a significant generational shift. Nowhere is this shift more clearly seen than within proto-fundamentalism. The prominent leaders of the early years were mostly dead by or shortly after the turn of the century. A. J. Gordon died in 1895, James H. Brooks in 1897, D. L. Moody in 1899, George C. Needham in 1902, Nathaniel West in 1906, and A. T. Pierson in 1911. In most cases, their public ministries had ceased well before they died. Such men were the most vigorous organizers of early proto-fundamentalism, and their departure left a decided vacuum of leadership within the movement.   read more»

Of all of the theological issues that have arisen in the last couple of decades, the matter of what God is like has to be one of the most crucial. As A. W. Tozer has written, “[T]he most portentous fact about any man is…what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God” (A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, 7).

Of course, all orthodox Christians agree that God is a Trinity, three persons in one essence. But just how powerful is this God? Does He control all things, even the details of life? Does He even know all things past, present, and future? Some evangelicals seem to be unsure.

Other evangelical theologians are passionately arguing the negative: God is neither in full control of the world, nor does He even know the details of the future. According to these Open Theists,

God knows a great deal about what will happen….he knows everything that could happen and what he can do in response to each eventuality. And he knows the ultimate outcome to which he is guiding the course of history. All that God does not know is the content of future free decisions, and this is because decisions are not there to know until they occur. (Richard Rice, The Grace of God and the Will of Man, ed. Clark Pinnock, 134)   read more»