As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
’Tis by Thy strength the mountains stand,
God of eternal power;
The sea grows calm at Thy command,
And tempests cease to roar.
Thy morning light and evening shade
Successive comforts bring;
Thy plenteous fruits make harvest glad,
Thy flowers adorn the spring.
Last Sunday was amazing. While I’ve been attending fundamental Baptist churches since I was four years old, this was the first time I’d ever heard a pastor open Sunday School by saying, “Let’s begin by singing a psalm.” Not reading a psalm. Not singing a chorus. Singing a psalm.
The congregation did sing the psalm—actually, a recent paraphrase of Psalm 1. It was instructive. It was ordinate. It was edifying. And it was just the beginning of another wonderful Sunday with a little congregation near Houston that I’ve visited three times now.
The church has a young pastor who is laboring to bring biblical exposition, careful discipleship, and sober worship into a part of the world where these things are exceedingly rare. He is a man of God whose loves include the Scriptures, careful thinking, wide reading, and the people whom God has placed under his care. While the congregation is small, God is clearly doing a work there.
This young pastor is hardly unique. Over the past several years, God has allowed me to catch a glimpse of at least one part of the future. That future consists in the labors, vision, and priorities of young pastors in small churches scattered across the country.
They are not the product of a single church or school. They have received their formal training in places as scattered as Minneapolis, Detroit, Clearwater, Lansdale, Watertown, Dunbar, Greenville, Ankeny, and Chandler. Often they do not know of one another’s existence. Each, however, is laboring in the flock over which God has made him an overseer.
It is a periodic priority for the leaders of fundamentalism to attend to the mindset of their young folks. This essay is another contribution to that discussion, although I must acknowledge at the outset that it is based on a survey of no one but me. I therefore begin by defending the significance of these observations, despite the paltry sample size.
I grew up in some of the very best neighborhoods of fundamentalism. I’ve become convinced of this in recent years as I’ve found that, unlike many of my peers, I have precious little in my ecclesiastical upbringing to react against: neither scandal and abuse, nor outlandish authoritarianism, nor anti-intellectualism, nor pervasive mishandling of Scripture, and not even an intolerable measure of crisis-inducing revivalism. Friends whose experiences in fundamentalism have been nothing so benign as mine have decided that theological conviction—if not common decency—compels them to abandon the movement. But I am not of their disillusioned number.
Not only have I had few bad experiences in the movement of fundamentalism, but I’m still wholeheartedly committed to the idea of fundamentalism. The most important distinctive of fundamentalism remains its willingness “to do battle royal” for the fundamentals (recalling Laws’s definitive expression). Christian fellowship cannot exist with anyone who denies a fundamental of the faith. Those who extend such fellowship have erred, and not insignificantly. As the regular author of this publication insists, compromise on this point is scandalous, and those who advocate and perpetuate scandal are derelict of duty and patently untrustworthy. Separation is both theologically and historically justifiable.
In addition to boilerplate separatism, I also adhere to a litany of other common fundamentalist shibboleths: cessationism, young-earth creationism, dispensationalism, cultural conservatism. That last item merits special attention in establishing my traditional fundamentalist credentials, as it makes me something of a demographical oddity. (As I write this, I’m wearing a tie. Voluntarily.)
Read Part 1.
After graduating from college, I had the providential fortune to arrive at seminary just as William Fusco took up the presidency. In addition to the burden of leadership, Fusco was caring for an invalid and dying wife. Through the deep trial of his (and her) faith, the character of Christ shone with uncommon clarity. Without ever abandoning the key principles of his fundamentalism, Fusco consistently displayed a gentle spirit of kindness and personal sacrifice that I have rarely seen matched and have never seen surpassed. He was a man who overflowed with love of the Lord and love for people.
During my first year at seminary, I also met two professors whose teaching has marked me for life. The first, Charles Hauser, taught me more about dispensationalism and Christian living than anyone else. His most important contribution lay in his example. He modeled stability in the middle of trials, and his steadiness was as instructive to me as his classroom content.
The second, Myron Houghton, was George’s twin brother. Myron’s grasp of systematic theology exceeded anything that I had ever seen or thought possible. It seemed that he conversed with nearly every theological perspective, from multiple varieties of evangelicals to Roman Catholics to Adventists. He was constantly learning and constantly thinking. He significantly influenced my soteriology, but his real impact was on my ecclesiology. He made the case for ecclesiastical separation, including what is sometimes called “secondary separation.” Incidentally, it was substantially the same case that appears in Ernest R. Pickering’s book, Biblical Separation, of which Myron was later to become the editor. The key points of my understanding today do not depart from his ideas in any significant way.
My second year at seminary brought two more professors whose influence was both instant and profound. To this day, I consider Robert Delnay to be the best-rounded model for the life of the mind I have ever known. As a historian, he told a coherent story that provided a framework for understanding the current state of Christianity. As an exegete, he made the text of the Greek New Testament come alive for his students. As a homiletician, he taught a theory of rhetoric that could reach the affections without stooping to manipulate the appetites. From the beginning it was clear that he held the convictions of a fundamentalist, but he had a wonderfully sardonic and irreverent way of deflating the pompous self-appointed gatekeepers of the faith. Beyond all of this, he introduced a kind of spiritual urgency and intimacy with God that one can only label (as A. W. Tozer did) mysticism.
When I was a teenager, the most visible fundamentalists in America were Carl McIntire and Lester Roloff. McIntire was feuding with the American Council of Christian Churches, the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, several leaders within his own Bible Presbyterian Synod, and the federal government of the United States—virtually simultaneously. Lester Roloff was feuding with the state of Texas. I can remember him sending life-size cardboard cutout pictures of himself to our church in Iowa. He was trying hard to get enough public support to force the Texas regulators to back away from his ministry. The impression that I had of fundamentalist leaders was that they were hard-bitten, bellicose, and arrogant.
This impression had been reinforced through the years by the traveling preachers to whom I had been exposed. These men usually called themselves evangelists, but they were essentially hired guns whose job was to inflame the fears and the sense of shame of the faithful. They could be very personable, laughing and joking one moment, but then the next moment they would be screaming at you because the Communists were going to take over the United States before 1972 unless you went to the altar RIGHT NOW.
I would never have dreamed of criticizing any of these men. Were they not paragons of spiritual insight? Were they not models of Christian virtue? Who was I to call them into account?
Because of their influence, however, I was quite sure that I did not want to be a fundamentalist. Even after experiencing a call to vocational ministry and returning to a fundamentalist Bible college for training, I remained unpersuaded of the value of fundamentalism. During my early years as a college student, it seemed to me that the main activity of fundamentalism was to manufacture unreasonable ways of regulating personal conduct.
This was my frame of mind when I found myself in George Houghton’s summer module on the history of fundamentalism. I had signed up for the course only because nothing else was available to fill the hours. Within a week, Houghton completely reoriented my thinking.
Two stories have been lighting up the evangelical world over the past couple of weeks. Surprisingly, no one has bothered to connect the two. That is too bad, because they actually have a great deal to do with each other.
In the first story, Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, has touched off quite a controversy with a remark about presidential candidate Mitt Romney. According to published reports, Pastor Jeffress commented that Romney is “a good moral person,” but added that Mormonism has “always been considered a cult by the mainstream of Christianity.” Texas Governor Rick Perry quickly distanced himself from the remark, as did other Republican presidential hopefuls.
Pastor Jeffress’s remark, however, is not going to be ignored. The church that he pastors was at the center of the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention. It is one of the most influential congregations in the United States. His pastorate gives him a platform from which to make his voice heard—and this time, at least, he has been heard loudly, if not clearly.
One of his critics is Dr. Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary. SO strenuously did President Mouw object to Pastor Jeffress’s remarks that he authored a response published by CNN. Entitled, “My Take: This Evangelical Says Mormonism Isn’t a Cult,” President Mouw leaves little doubt about his thesis.
Mark,
Thank you for your interaction with a recent Nick of Time essay on your weblog. My piece was on the necessity of not singing some songs, and your response pointed out the covenantal nature of church membership. I don’t think that there is much real disagreement between us, and I was minded not to spend time on a reply. Evidently, however, your response has attracted a bit of attention around the internet, and I think it might be well to draw attention to the points at which we emphasize things differently.
I should say that I appreciate the concerns you are raising and understand the idea at their center. We live in an age when the covenantal nature of church membership is not taken nearly seriously enough. The last thing that I would want to do is to undermine it any further.
Still, I think that your concerns are unnecessary in this instance. Let me give three reasons why.
First, I think your analogy between eating and singing leads to an equivocation of the term “unhealthy.” In what sense does your wife think that hamburgers are unhealthy? Surely not in the sense that they are poison. Hamburgers are food. If you are starving, they can keep you alive. When she says that they are unhealthy, what she means is that they are not as good for you as some other food might be.
Some hymnody is unhealthy—or less healthy—in exactly this sense. It is not false. It is not overtly demeaning to God. It is simply second-rate (or third, or fourth, or fifth). For example, the better productions of the gospel song era probably fit into this classification. I will sing most of these songs, though I constantly find myself thinking of hymns that could have served the purpose better.
All knowledge begins with divine revelation. The great axiom of all rationality is that God is and that He has spoken. Unless our sensations and perceptions are rightly interpreted—unless they are fit into the correct framework of relationships—then they prove either unintelligible or misleading. In order to know, facts must be connected to other facts, to values, and to persons. Revelation gives us the framework, the great interpretive scheme within which all facts, values, and persons may be assigned their proper meaning.
Revelation does not point out to us all of the details of the world. It leaves plenty of room for the human impulse toward exploration and argumentation. Nor does it guarantee that, when we interpret facts within its framework, every interpretation will be correct. What it does is to provide a foundation upon which we can build and a set of parameters or boundaries upon which our understanding of reality must not encroach.
We cannot argue about axioms. That God is and that God has spoken are first truths. There is no proving them. Either we begin with a commitment to these truths or we begin falsely.
Nor do we need to argue about them. Through revelation, God has brought Himself near to us. He has made Himself both available and comprehensible. He has revealed, not merely propositions, but Himself. He has presented Himself to humanity in an obvious way (Rom. 1:19).
To be sure, God’s self-disclosure is not exhaustive. How could it ever be? God is an infinite person. His intricacy, wisdom, and glory are manifold and beyond comprehension. Even though He is utterly simple as to His being, the divine simplicity surpasses the ability of our minds to grasp. He is not merely more of the same thing that we are—a kind of Übermensch. He is something other than we are.
Yet in His self-disclosure, what He reveals is true. He made our minds knowing exactly how He would present Himself to us, and His self-presentation is designed so that our knowledge of Him will be genuine, even if partial. God never misleads us with respect to Himself.
To the question of whether moderns know more than their predecessors, Richard Weaver (one of the three fathers of modern conservatism) responded by noting that “everything depends on what we mean by knowledge.” Then he offered this observation: “[T]here is no knowledge at the level of sensation.” From the perspective of anyone who is not a modernist, Weaver has to be right.
Sensory stimulation alone conveys no knowledge. Sensation alone is meaningless. Sensations do not even register in the consciousness until they have been construed. The act of construal is an interpretive act in which a sensation is connected to other sensations within a web of meaning. Humans never know a thing simply as it is: they know the thing only as it has been interpreted.
The universe has a structure in which everything is related to everything else. If the mind were utterly tabula rasa, no amount of sensation could ever lead to knowledge. Knowledge requires correct interpretation, and correct interpretation requires an interior, mental structure that matches the outer structure of reality—if not in its details, at least in its outlines.
Only one Mind fully comprehends the structure of the universe. It comprehends, not because it has exhaustively studied the universe, but because it planned the universe. Its knowledge is not derivative and inferential, but immediate and intuitive. It never studies and never learns, but simply knows. That Mind is God’s mind.
Consequently, we can speak of reality existing at three levels. One is the external reality of the universe in which all objects and events are related to one another in causal, moral, and personal ways. That reality, however, is secondary and derivative. It exists only because of a prior reality that exists in the mind of God. What God thinks constitutes the pattern, what He creates (or allows to be done) becomes the copy.
Discussion