In The Nick of Time

Praise where praise is due! In recent days, two men, both pastors, have done us a favor by setting a public example of taking a stand in an unpopular arena. The first is Hershael York, pastor of the Buck Run Baptist Church of Frankfort, Kentucky. He was invited to deliver the invocation before the Kentucky legislature on the night in which Governor Steve Beshear would deliver his budget speech. Beshear is lobbying hard for legalizing gambling in the state, largely because Kentucky dollars are going to neighboring states that allow gambling. Beshear is another politician in a long line of pragmatists who think that the end justifies the means. York, in striking contrast, offered this prayer for the legislators:

Help us to admit that we cannot truly love our neighbor as ourselves and then scheme to get his money by enticing him with vain hope. May they not lead this state to share profits from an industry that preys on greed or desperation.

Help us to foster salaries and not slot machines, to build cars and enable jobs—not license casinos and seduce the simple into losing what they have. May their greatest concern not be that we get our share of the family’s losses, but that we foster a sense of hope and justice that creates opportunity and leads to success.

Bully for York for offering a courageous prayer in the face of such pressure. In doing so, he is standing in a long line of preachers and prophets who had the opportunity and courage to cry out against the iniquity of the day. Like Nathan the prophet rebuking King David, or John Knox shaking his finger in the face of the Queen, York besought God publicly for politicians to put righteousness ahead of expediency. Sadly, his prayer fell on the governor’s deaf ears, as the video linked above demonstrates: Beshear followed York’s invocation by continuing to angle for legalized gaming.

Truthfully, I’m not sure how many times I’ve attended Northland’s Heart Conference over the past decade. I’m sure it’s upwards of half-a-dozen. Sometimes I’ve gone as a speaker, sometimes as an exhibitor (representing Central Seminary), sometimes alone, and sometimes with companions. Rarely have I been able to stay for the entire conference—more frequently I’m there for a day or two. Never have I gone away feeling that my time has been wasted.

The key to understanding Heart Conference is in its name. It is not an ecclesiastical meeting. It is not a conference that focuses on current events and passes resolutions. It is not an assembly that is trying to change the world, not even the world of fundamentalism. It is a conference about the Christian’s personal relationship with God and growth in grace.

Heart Conference draws attendees from a variety of church fellowships throughout the United States. Most of the attendees, however, seem to come from the upper Midwest—Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakotas—with many from Michigan and Illinois. Of course, Wisconsin is probably best represented. The crowd includes many pastors and other Christian workers, but Heart Conference is not just for ministers. It is mainly intended to help ordinary church members.

This mix of individuals makes for some remarkable fellowship. One of the strengths of the event is that it provides an opportunity to meet and interact with many others of like precious faith. The informal atmosphere tends to lend itself to transparency. Pastors get to introduce their church members to other pastors and Christian leaders, or they get to unburden themselves to their peers about their current challenges in ministry. It is not uncommon to see small, private conversations of two or three in which counsel is being sought or intercession being offered.

In a recent blog post, self-admitted post-conservative evangelical theologian Roger Olson passed along an essay by a Baylor colleague, Mark Clawson, entitled “Neo-Fundamentalism.” Clawson compared and contrasted late 19th and early 20th century fundamentalism with the recent conservative evangelical luminaries like John Piper and Al Mohler, both of whom serve as exemplars of Clawson’s neo-fundamentalism.

Clawson suggests several reasons why it may be useful to delineate these men as neo-fundamentalists. Significantly, this comparison with the older movement, if carefully handled, can be useful “in predicting possible future developments and trajectories for the movement. It will be interesting to see, for instance, whether neo-fundamentalists will in fact follow the separatist path of their fundamentalist forbears—creating new institutions separate from the mainstream of evangelicalism, or whether they will find a way to remain within the evangelical movement even while critiquing it. If current trends hold, they may even become the dominant force within North American evangelicalism over the next decade and beyond.”

In response to Clawson, I suggest that it is naïve (at best) to think that fundamentalism is ever likely to die out and go away. Clawson never directly advances this particular thesis; he is simply comparing two movements and attempting to disparage the conservative evangelicals by associating them with others that deserve unbridled opprobrium. This is a common ploy among the theological left (and the right, for that matter): simply call your opponent a fundamentalist (or a liberal) and then dismiss his entire argument. In the recent Southern Baptist controversy, Al Mohler and his conservative colleagues have been regularly dubbed fundamentalists, though this is not a moniker they would ever take for themselves.

Dr. Warren Vanhetloo was one of the more influential individuals in fundamentalist higher education. He was the founding dean of both Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Minneapolis, Minnesota) and Calvary Baptist Theological Seminary (Lansdale, Pennsylvania). He was taken home to his Lord in the fall of 2010.

A couple of years ago, I sent an enquiry to “Dr. Van” about a matter of historical interest. He responded with a series of letters which chronicled much of his life and career. He knew that I was a historian and he knew that he would die before long. I believe that he meant these letters to be a final summation of certain aspects of his ministry.

Dr. Van’s writing tended to be stream-of-consciousness. Some of his observations were never intended for public consumption. Nevertheless, the parts of the narrative that address his life and ministry are both interesting and instructive. They give a glimpse into a bygone era of fundamentalism and evangelicalism, preserving some of the atmosphere of those days.

I have taken the liberty of editing some of this correspondence, grouping sections of text by chronology and topic. Of course, I have tried to correct misspellings and typographical errors. In a few cases, I have inserted or deleted a few words to smooth the text. The substance, however, and almost all of the wording are Dr. Vanhetloo’s own.

One word of caution: these were informal communications. They were not proofread by Dr. Van. As you read, please remember that any of us may be thinking one thing, but writing something else. I suspect that this has happened once or twice with Dr. Van’s narrative. For example, I am not sure whether he was saved and ministered in an ethnically “Armenian” church (as he writes) or in a theologically Arminian church.

Churches have no business addressing political questions. Their work is to proclaim the whole counsel of God. Christian individuals, however, are responsible to act upon moral and spiritual concerns before they address merely temporal ones. Matters of principle should take precedence over matters of preference. Therefore, part of the church’s business is to instruct the people of God in those moral principles that they must apply in their political decisions. In other words, while churches should not tell their members who to vote for, they should teach them how to vote.

In every political race, many issues will surface that are not moral in nature. Christians may certainly take account of these issues, but non-moral issues should never be allowed to take priority over moral ones. For example, a candidate’s religious beliefs and affiliation may be matters of interest, but they do not typically determine how well an elected official will govern. Christians might better vote for an unbeliever with just policies than to vote for a fellow-saint whose policies are naïve or misguided.

Governments have no moral duty to manage the economy (in fact, it is doubtful that they can ever do better than simply to get out of the way). Governments have no moral duty to create jobs. Governments have no moral duty to increase the wealth of their nations. Governments have no moral duty to supply the financial or medical needs of their citizens. Governments do not even have a moral duty to educate children.

Citizens may wish that their governments would do some or all of these things for them. Since these are (at best!) matters of convenience, however, they must not be the primary issues that Christians consider when they are deciding for whom to vote. Rather, such issues must take a very distant second place to genuinely biblical and moral concerns. The following are eight biblical concerns that Christian people should weigh as they consider their voting choices.

Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Both Offerer and Offering

One of the primary concerns of the writer to the Hebrews is the priesthood of Christ. The duty of a priest is to represent humans before God. In order to fulfill this responsibility effectively, the priest must be human himself. The priest must also be sinless. The only priest who has ever met these requirements is Jesus Christ, and He has met them perfectly.

Remarkably, Christ was not only the priest who offered sacrifice, but also the sacrifice that was offered. Not surprisingly, once the author of Hebrews has discussed the priesthood of Christ, he turns his attention to Christ as the offering for sins. In Hebrews 10, he examines Christ as the sin offering, drawing out the meaning of Jesus’ sacrifice by contrasting the person and ministry of Christ with the Levitical sacrifices of the Old Testament.

He begins by observing that the Old Testament offerings were shadows and not ultimate realities, and then notes that those sacrifices could never make the offerers perfect (1). In other words, the Old Testament sacrifices could never actually remove the guilt of sin. If they could have, the need to offer additional sacrifices would have been eliminated (2). If one’s sins have been completely forgiven, then one does not need any further sacrifice. Yet the Levitical sacrifices on the Day of Atonement were made every year, year after year (3). The necessity of repeating the sacrifices should have proved that the blood of animal sacrifices could not remove sins (4).

Read Part 1 and Part 2.

The Order of Melchizedek

The writer to the Hebrews was distressed by the spiritual immaturity of his readers. He wanted to discuss theology with them—specifically, the calling of Christ as a high priest after the order of Melchizedek (Heb. 5:10-14). He made it clear that the Hebrews had been saved long enough (“when for the time”) that they ought to have mastered this topic (“ye ought to be teachers”). Instead, he had to rehearse certain elementary teachings of biblical doctrine (“the first principles of the oracles of God”).

The writer’s disappointment with the immaturity of the Hebrew believers was what fueled the warning passage of chapter 6. Not until chapter 7 did he return to the theme that Christ is a high priest after the order of Melchizedek. When he finally got back to it, however, he penned one of the most difficult and detailed arguments in all of Scripture. This argument is highly instructive concerning the nature of Christ’s high priesthood.

Nothing in Hebrews 7 is really new. Everything in the chapter is inferred from three sources. The first source is the Genesis account of Melchizedek, a three-verse snippet of narrative (Gen. 14:18-20). The second source is a single verse (Ps. 110:4) from a Messianic psalm. The third source is a general knowledge of the history and culture of Israel. From these short sources, the writer constructs an elaborate discussion of the high priesthood of Christ after the order of Melchizedek. So detailed is the discussion that only the outlines can be explored here.

Read Part 1.

A Qualified High Priest

Suppose you knew that someone was hidden around a corner, but you could see the shadow. If you really wanted to know something about the person, you could learn a good bit by examining the shadow. The shadow would reveal the outline of the person, but the revelation would be limited. It would lack details and it would probably distort the form. One thing you would know, however. The head of the shadow would correspond to the head of the person, chest to chest, knees to knees, and wherever the feet of the shadow ended, the feet of the person would begin.

The Old Testament high priests functioned as shadows of Christ. They gave people a glimpse of an outline that they would never otherwise have seen, even though they distorted the particulars. How could the details not be obscure when finite and sinful men were used to foreshadow the priesthood of Jesus?

Hebrews 5 is structured like a shadow that leads to a person. The shadow—the Levitical high priests—appears in the first four verses. Point by point, the writer describes certain essentials of their priesthood. Beginning in verse five, however, the reality appears, and the reality is Jesus Christ. In a striking mirror image, the writer reverses the same points that he has already covered, using them to explain the priesthood of Jesus. Along the way, the writer teaches an important lesson about the incarnation.

The point at which the shadow switches to the reality occurs in verses 4 and 5. That comparison has to do with the authority for high priesthood. First, the writer reminds his readers of what they all knew, namely that no one takes the honor of high priesthood for himself. Only those who are called by God can be priests.

This article is republished from the archives (December, 2008).

The Seed of Abraham

The epistle to the Hebrews raises an interesting problem in 2:5-8. The writer opens with the observation that God did not subject the world to angels (5). In other words, angels were not given dominion over the created order. For proof he cites Psalm 8:4-6, which clearly declares that, though God has made the human race a little lower than the angels, He has crowned it with glory and honor and has placed everything under the feet of humans. Quite reasonably (for the author of Hebrews is an able reasoner), he infers that if everything was subjected to human dominion, then nothing in the created order was left outside human control (8).

The author notes a jarring discrepancy, however. While the psalmist declares that everything is under human dominion, experience teaches otherwise. Whereas nothing is supposed to be exempted from human control, what we observe is that many things are not subject to humans. This apparent contradiction requires explanation.

The explanation consists in two parts. First, the writer uses the expression, “not yet,” when he speaks of human dominion. While humans do not presently exercise the full rulership of creation, some day they will.

Second, the writer points to Jesus Christ, who is already crowned with glory and honor (9), the very dignity that Psalm 8 confers upon all humanity. Yet he notes that it was not always so. Surprisingly, he declares that for a little while, Jesus Himself was made lower than the angels. How can this startling declaration be true? In what respect was Jesus made lower than the angels? The writer gives a clear answer: for the suffering of death. No angel can die, not even a fallen one. By taking a mortal nature into Himself, God’s Son stooped to an experience that no angel will ever share.