Jared C. Wilson's Blog, page 67

SCOTUS Strikes DOMA: What’s The Church to Do?

This, from a bulletin insert resource (pdf) provided by the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the SBC, I find helpful:

Teach your congregation to avoid anger, outrage, or despair.

Jesus tells us marriage has existed as a male/female one-flesh union “from the beginning” (Matt. 19:8). This means marriage is resilient, regardless of what any culture does to minimize or redefine it.

Love your gay and lesbian neighbors.

They aren’t part of an evil conspiracy. They are, like, like all of us apart from Christ, seeking a way that seems best to them. Be kind, and respect all persons as image-bearers of God.



Preach and teach on the integrity of conjugal marriage.

Don’t assume your people understand the gospel foundations of marriage. Take this opportunity to point to the formation of healthy, gospel-shaped marriage cultures within your congregation.

Repent of the ways our congregational cultures have downgraded marriage.

If your church hasn’t addressed divorce, cohabitation, or fornication through proclamation and discipline, now is the time to repent and rework.

Make your marriage convictions clear in your confession of faith.

If your church assumes a definition of marriage, your confession of faith is now irrelevant. Defend your religious liberty by making your congregational convictions clear in your statement of faith.

Stop laissez-faire wedding policies.

Your church building is not a public space and your church ministers aren’t justices of the peace. Make clear that you will marry, and host weddings, only for those who have accountability to the people of Christ and to the Word of God.

And here are some good words from Ray Ortlund’s Twitter feed this morning: “The Supreme Court did not rule today that you and I cannot have Christ-honoring marriages. So let’s get after it! A prophetic statement we can make today: flaming hot lifelong heterosexual marriages to make the world stand in awe.”

Related:

What is Marriage, Then?

Church Facilities: Holiness and Hospitality

In Tight With the Boss of Existence

Oh, the gravity of Romans 8:31-39!

If none of what’s listed — and everything is listed! — can separate us from him, Christ must be the master of all it. He must be Lord over life and death and heaven and hell, sovereign Lord over all planets and molecules, galaxies and atoms, universes and particles.

This means:

When distressed by sickness, despair, depression, the painful words of friends, the hurtful words of a spouse or a child or a parent, when threatened by instability at work or in your home, when afraid of the future, when stressed out and anxious, when unsure and hyper-cautious, when laid low and beaten down, when nervous and frightened, when gossiped about and lied about and stabbed in the back, when feeling unforgiven and feeling hated and feeling used and thrown aside and pushed to the margins, when feeling taken advantage of or ignored or misunderstood or squashed, when tormented by your past and the sins you can’t shake, when dealing with addictions and destructive behaviors, when tempted by cheap pretenders to God’s throne, when lured away from the path, when you’ve fallen and when you’ve struggled and when you’re in too deep, in the midst of violence, persecution, oppression, feeling stranded and lonely, in a flood or a fire or a zombie apocalypse, your God reigns, and he reigns in you!

You can know and say that nothing can condemn you so long as you are in Christ Jesus — that in fact, if you are in Christ, you are as secure as Christ is.

So even when the accuser comes and throws your sins at you, they should flame up and fizzle out like crumbly meteors entering the atmosphere of Christ’s righteousness, and you can curse that devil and remind him that you are in tight with the boss of his existence, with the boss of very existence itself.

Not Simply a Promise, But a Happening

“Here was an amazing claim. John had announced an imminent visitation of God which would mean the fulfillment of the eschatological hope and the coming of the messianic age. Jesus proclaimed that this promise was actually being fulfilled. This is no apocalyptic Kingdom but a present salvation. Jesus did not promise his hearers a better future or assure that they would soon enter the Kingdom. Rather he boldly announced that the Kingdom (Herrschaft) of God had come to them. The presence of the Kingdom was ‘a happening, an event, the gracious action of God’ (Bornkamm). The promise was fulfilled in the action of Jesus: in his proclamation of good news to the poor, release to captives, restoring sight to the blind, freeing those who were oppressed. This was no new theology or new idea or new promise; it was a new event in history. ‘The wretched hear the good news, the prison doors are open, the oppressed breathe the air of freedom, blind pilgrims see the light, the day of salvation is here’.”

– George Eldon Ladd, The Presence of the Future (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 111-112.

The Gospel is the Food of Faith

“The new life in Christ, just like all natural life, must be nourished and strengthened. This is possible only in communion with Christ in the Holy Spirit and through the word of Scripture. Enlightened by the Spirit, believers gain a new knowledge of faith. The gospel is the food of faith and must be known to be nourishment. Salvation that is not known and enjoyed is no salvation. God saves by causing himself to be known and enjoyed in Christ.”

— Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, Volume 4: Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation(Grand Rapids, Mi.: Baker Academic, 2008), 96

The Challenge and the Calling of Evangelicalism for LGBT in a Post-Exodus World

Over at First Things, Wesley Hill reflects on the shutting down of “ex-gay” ministry Exodus International:

It doesn’t seem, at least at this stage, that Alan Chambers’ new, replacement organization for Exodus, which he described to Jeff Chu over at The Atlantic’s Sexes channel, will be much involved in the effort to help gay Christians recover the resources they need from the Christian tradition for healthy practices of celibacy and friendship. That’s not necessarily to say Chambers’ work won’t be worthwhile. But what we still need, and what I most want to be involved in myself, is pastoral ministry to those who say, “I experience ongoing, nearly exclusive same-sex attraction, I don’t expect ‘conversion’ to heterosexuality, I don’t expect to be married, but I want to live within the boundaries of the traditional Christian teaching on marriage and sexuality, and I want to flourish, not just survive. And I need help to do that.” There are a lot of us in that boat. We do need help. And there’s now a gap to be filled with—what, exactly? an organization? a regular conference? ministry houses? intentional communities? parish small groups? something more, at least, than what Exodus often was—to help meet that need.

Read the whole thing.

Confession as Idle, Lustful Babbling: 5 Errors

The greatest temptation in Christian communities is to avoid confession altogether, to maintain the facade, the uneasy stasis of staying right near the surface and never getting too deep, too real, too honest with each other. But on the other side, another temptation, perhaps not as great but just as real, is what often happens in place of real confession. We might call it “confession as performance.” Here’s an insightful piece from Bonhoeffer’s invaluable Life Together:

[A] danger concerns the confessant. For the salvation of his soul let him guard against ever making a pious work of his confession. If he does so, it will become the final, most abominable, vicious, and impure prostitution of the heart; the act becomes an idle, lustful babbling. Confession as a pious work is an invention of the devil. It is only God’s offer of grace, help, and forgiveness that could make us dare to enter the abyss of confession.

Again, let us not steer clear of real gospel confession with our brothers and sisters. The Bible commends it too much for us to safely avoid it. But Bonhoeffer has touched on something important here, something I’ve witnessed in a few small group settings. The safe space for confession can be taken advantage of, in a way. Here are some ways we might exploit and pervert the confessional act:

1. We treat the confession itself not as an act of repentance but mainly of catharsis. This is the employment of cheap grace. Basically, we’re not looking so much for the grace that frees and empowers us but the opportunity to “get something off our chests.” At least, until the next opportunity.

2. The confession becomes a self-indulgent “pity party” session. It is not about receiving the word of forgiveness in the gospel from our brethren and walking in that freedom but about occupying their ears to satisfy our need for attention and soaking up their consolation. It’s not the gospel’s embrace we really want, in other words, but some pats on the back.

3. We turn our confession into self-justification. We end up spending most of the time blaming our wrongs on all the people whose fault it really is. We use the time to confess others’ sins, not our own.

4. We treat confession secretly as sport. Mainly, we confess certain things to see what might scandalize our community or offend their sensibilities. We enjoy cultivating a prurient interest or creating a shock factor. This is relatively rare but still real.

5. We confess sins to look like good confessors. This is what Bonhoeffer is mainly addressing in the excerpt above.

Note: Some of these sins can only be self-diagnosed. Let us be more on guard of our own hearts’ tendencies toward these perversions of confession than on the watch for others’ tendencies toward them.

Sobering When Put This Way

What if we looked at 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 from the reverse angle? I think it helps us put so much of our pettiness and self-interest in stark perspective and shows love as that much more beautiful.

Impatience and unkindness is hatred.

Hate is envious and ego-centric.

Hate is arrogant and rude.

Hatred is insisting on one’s own way;

hatred is irritable or resentful;

it celebrates sin, and it mocks what is true.

Hate is whiny and thin-skinned,

thoroughly skeptical,

always pessimistic,

a born quitter.

But hatred ends . . .

Are the New Testament Condemnations of Homosexuality Simply References to Temple Prostitution?

You have likely heard the arguments, becoming more and more common among progressive Christians and others seeking to make same-sex romantic relationships compatible with the orthodox faith. It goes something like this: “Paul and the other NT writers were not condemning committed, consensual, monogamous” — to limit the typical qualifiers to just three — “homosexual relationships. The way the church has read these texts for 2,000 years is eisogesis. They are references to temple prostitution, pedophilia, or rape.”

Are they on to something? Have we had it wrong for so long?

Well, no. Scholar Robert Gagnon writes in response:

I know of no serious biblical scholar, even prohomosex biblical scholar, who argues that Paul had in mind only or primarily temple prostitution—not Nissinen, not Brooten, not Fredrickson, not Schoedel, not Bird, not Martin, etc. There are many reasons why this view has not found a welcome in serious biblical scholarship . . .

Paul’s views on homosexual behavior were profoundly influenced by the alleged existence of “seven thousand prostitutes, male and female” at the temple of Aphrodite in Corinth in Paul’s day. As it happens, the only ancient account that refers to cult prostitutes at the temple of Aphrodite in Corinth is a brief mention by Strabo in Geography 8.6.20c

And the temple of Aphrodite was so rich that it owned more than a thousand temple-slaves, prostitutes, whom both men and women had dedicated to the goddess. And therefore it was on account of these women that the city was crowded with people and grew rich. (Text and commentary in: Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, St. Paul’s Corinth: Texts and Archaeology [GNS 6; Wilmington: M. Glazier, 1983], 55-57)

Any critical New Testament scholar knows that Strabo’s comments (1) applied only to Greek Corinth in existence several centuries before the time of Paul, not the Roman Corinth of Paul’s day; (2) referred to “more than a thousand prostitutes,” not seven thousand; and (3) mentioned only female (heterosexual) prostitutes, not male (homosexual) prostitutes. Scholars agree that there was no massive business of female cult prostitutes—to say nothing of male homosexual cult prostitutes—operating out of the temple of Aphrodite in Paul’s day; and that there may not have been such a business even in earlier times (i.e., Strabo was confused). This is not particularly new information, which makes it all the more surprising that [pro-homosexuality scholar Jack] Rogers was taken in, apparently, by an ill-informed tour guide. For example, Hans Conzelmann made the following remarks in his major commentary on 1 Corinthians written some thirty years ago:

Incidentally, the often-peddled statement that Corinth was a seat of sacred prostitution (in the service of Aphrodite) is a fable. This realization also disposes of the inference that behind the Aphrodite of Corinth lurks the Phoenician Astarte. [Note 97:] The fable is based on Strabo, Geog. 8.378. . . . Strabo, however, is not speaking of the present, but of the city’s ancient golden period. . . . Incidentally, Strabo’s assertion is not even true of the ancient Corinth. (1 Corinthians [Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1975 [German original, 1969], 12)

This continues to be the view held by scholars. As Bruce Winter notes in a recent significant work on 1 Corinthians,

Strabo’s comments about 1,000 religious prostitutes of Aphrodite . . . are unmistakably about Greek and not Roman Corinth. As temple prostitution was not a Greek phenomenon, the veracity of his comments on this point have been rightly questioned. The size of the Roman temple of Aphrodite on the Acrocorinth ruled out such temple prostitution; and by that time she had become Venus—the venerated mother of the imperial family and the highly respected patroness of Corinth—and was no longer a sex symbol (After Paul Left Corinth: The Influence of Secular Ethics and Social Change [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001], 87-88; similarly, Murphy-O’Connor, St. Paul’s Corinth, 55-56)

The scholarly consensus that there was no homosexual prostitution at the Corinthian temple of Aphrodite in Paul’s day is enough, all by itself, to dispense with Rogers’s theory and show Rogers’s unreliability as an exegete of the biblical text . . .

In all the critiques of same-sex intercourse as “contrary to nature” that can be found in the ancient world, not a single one ever refers to the idolatrous or commercial dimension of same-sex intercourse. For example, the physician Soranus described the desire on the part of “soft men” to be penetrated (cf. 1 Cor 6:9) as “not from nature,” insofar as it “subjugated to obscene uses parts not so intended” and disregarded “the places of our body which divine providence destined for definite functions”(Chronic Diseases 4.9.131). Moreover, numerous cases of same-sex erotic relationships involving neither prostitution nor cultic activity can be documented for the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial periods . . .

The Old Testament—particularly Deuteronomy and the “Deuteronomistic History” (Joshua through 2 Kings)—does condemn “homosexual cult prostitutes” (the so-called qedeshim, “consecrated ones”). But even here, parallel figures in the ancient Near East—the assinnu, kurgarru, and kulu’u—were held in low regard not so much for their prostitution as for their compromise of masculine gender in allowing themselves to be penetrated as though women (The Bible and Homosexual Practice, 48-49). Even Phyllis Bird, a prohomosex Old Testament scholar who has done as much work as anyone on the qedeshim, acknowledges that the writers of Scripture emphasized not the cultic prostitution of these figures but rather their “repugnant associations with male homosexual activity . . .”

The term malakoi in 1 Cor 6:9—literally, “soft men”—was often used in the Greco-Roman world as a description of adult males who feminized their appearances in the hopes of attracting a male partner. Jewish and even some pagan moralists condemned them, not for their role in temple prostitution—most were not temple prostitutes—but for their attempted erasure of the masculine stamp given them in nature.

Read the whole piece, which lists 15 reasons to reject the common critical arguments, from the fellow who literally wrote the book on the subject.

Related, elsewhere:

Making Sense of the Scripture’s “Inconsistency” (Keller on why Christians appear to “pick and choose” which laws to obey)

CD Giveaway Contest – “Come Back Soon” by Tara-Leigh Cobble

Our friend Tara-Leigh Cobble has a new album out called Come Back Soon. I’d love to give away a copy to one blessed reader.

But you gotta work for your treats in my joint. So here’s the deal: Since the album is themed after the blessed hope, create your best artistic rendering of our Lord’s second coming using only crayons and tweet a pic of it to me on Twitter (@jaredcwilson). Make sure to include the words “Come Back Soon” in your tweet so I won’t miss it.*

The best entry — as judged by Miss Tara-Leigh herself — received by noon (EST) Thursday will win the album.

Hardly anybody ever jumps through these hoops, so if you enter, the odds are good you’ll win the goods.

*If you don’t have Twitter, you can email me your entry at jared AT gospeldrivenchurch DOT com

Jesus’ Call Was to Plant Churches

“Jesus’ essential call was to plant churches. Virtually all the great evangelistic challenges of the New Testament are basically calls to plant churches, not simply to share the faith. The ‘Great Commission’ (Matt. 28:18-20) is not just a call to ‘make disciples’ but to ‘baptize’. In Acts and elsewhere, it is clear that baptism means incorporation into a worshiping community with accountability and boundaries (cf. Acts 2:41-47). The only way to be truly sure you are increasing the number of Christians in a town is to increase the number of churches. Why? Much traditional evangelism aims to get a ‘decision’ for Christ. Experience, however, shows us that many of these ‘decisions’ disappear and never result in changed lives. Why? Many, many decisions are not really conversions, but often only the beginning of a journey of seeking God. (Other decisions are very definitely the moment of a ‘new birth,’ but this differs from person to person.) Only a person who is being ‘evangelized8 in the context of an on-going worshiping and shepherding community can be sure of finally coming home into vital, saving faith. This is why a leading missiologist like C. Peter Wagner can say, ‘Planting new churches is the most effective evangelistic methodology known under heaven.’”

– Tim Keller, “Why Plant Churches” (pdf)