Justin Taylor's Blog, page 348

Panel at Southern Seminary on Thursday

On Thursday, from 2:30-4:00 PM (Eastern), Southern Seminary will be livestreaming a panel discussion on Rob Bell's Love Wins. I look forward to talking with and learning from Drs. Mohler, Moore, and Burk. I'm sure audio and video will be available on the site at some point after the event.

Am I the Only One Struggling?

Russell Moore:

What in your life would you fear if anyone found out about it?

What would horrify you if it were exposed before your family, your friends, your acquaintances?

In gospel repentance and faith, we fearlessly expose ourselves to Judgment Day in the present. That's what the confession of sin is, a revealing of what Jesus already promises to reveal on the Day of Christ (Luke 8:17).

Our problem is that we often, like Adam before us, want to hide our temptations, and especially our sin, to cover it over to save face. Hiding, though, is exactly the opposite of what a Christian does when confronted with satanic designs. The darkness is where these evils latch onto us. Instead we can preemptively shine light on this, with God in prayer and in our authentic accountability to the Body of Christ, his church.

Our Christian reluctance to speak honestly about temptation is precisely why Christians like Felix often believe themselves to be unbelievers. All they see of other believers is this façade of smiling, peaceful Christ-followers. They assume then that the internal life of every other Christian is just a continual festival of hymns as opposed to their own internal life in which the hymns are interrupted with constant gossipy chatter, violent rage, and hard-core pornography.

This is exactly how the satanic powers want it. They want the prideful and oblivious to stay that way, until they fall and slink away in isolation, where they can be devoured.

Preaching the gospel to ourselves, though, reminds us continually that we are sinners and that we can stand only by the blood of Jesus. We can walk only by his Spirit prodding us on. We need one another, as parts of the same body together.

—Tempted and Tried: Temptation and the Triumph of Christ, p. 173.

How to See and Serve God in All Your Enjoyments

From "Satisfaction in God," a sermon preached by Cotton Mather (1663-1727):

Our continual apprehension of God may produce our continual satisfaction in God, under all His dispensations.

Whatever enjoyments are by God conferred upon us, where lies the relish, where the sweetness of them? Truly, we may come to relish our enjoyments, only so far as we have something of God in them. It was required in Psalm 37:4, "Delight thyself in the Lord." Yea, and what if we should have no delight but the Lord? Let us ponder with ourselves over our enjoyments: "In these enjoyments I see God, and by these enjoyments, I serve God!"

And now, let all our delight in, and all our value and fondness for our enjoyments, be only, or mainly, upon such a divine score as this. As far as any of our enjoyments lead us unto God, so far let us relish it, affect it, embrace it, and rejoice in it: "O taste, and feed upon God in all;" and ask for nothing, no, not for life itself, any further than as it may help us, in our seeing and our serving of our God.

HT: William B. Barcley, The Secret of Contentment (P&R, 2011).

Cf. Augustine: "He loves thee too little who loves anything together with Thee, which he loves not for thy sake." (Confessions, Book 10, Chapter XXIX)

No Time for Despair

J. Gresham Machen, writing in 1923:

The present is a time not for ease or pleasure, but for earnest and prayerful work. A terrible crisis unquestionably has arisen in the Church. In the ministry of evangelical churches are to be found hosts of those who reject the gospel of Christ. By the equivocal use of traditional phrases, by the representation of differences of opinion as though they were only differences about the interpretation of the Bible, entrance into the Church was secured for those who are hostile to the very foundations of the faith. And now there are some indications that the fiction of conformity to the past is to be thrown off, and the real meaning of what has been taking place is to be allowed to appear. The Church, it is now apparently supposed, has almost been educated up to the point where the shackles of the Bible can openly be cast away and the doctrine of the Cross of Christ can be relegated to the limbo of discarded subtleties.

Yet there is in the Christian life no room for despair. Only, our hopefulness should not be founded on the sand. It should be founded, not upon a blind ignorance of the danger, but solely upon the precious promises of God. Laymen, as well as ministers, should return, in these trying days, with new earnestness, to the study of the Word of God.

If the Word of God be heeded, the Christian battle will be fought both with love and with faithfulness. Party passions and personal animosities will be put away, but on the other hand, even angels from heaven will be rejected if they preach a gospel different from the blessed gospel of the Cross. Every man must decide upon which side he will stand. God grant that we may decide aright!

What the immediate future may bring we cannot presume to say. The final result indeed is clear. God has not deserted His Church; He has brought her through even darker hours than those which try our courage now, yet the darkest hour has always come before the dawn. We have today the entrance of paganism into the Church in the name of Christianity. But in the second century a similar battle was fought and won. From another point of view, modern liberalism is like the legalism of the middle ages, with its dependence upon the merit of man. And another Reformation in God's good time will come.

But meanwhile our souls are tried. We can only try to do our duty in humility and in sole reliance upon the Savior who bought us with His blood. The future is in God's hand, and we do not know the means that He will use in the accomplishment of His will.

—J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, (New Edition; Eerdmans, 2009 [orig., 1923), 150

Mohler on Love Wins: "We Have Read This Book Before"

Albert Mohler's review of Rob Bell's Love Wins is well worth reading. He situates Bell's book in the Protestant Liberal tradition, looks at Rob Bell's gifted creativity, and explains why the book is so tragically misleading.

Here is an excerpt:

Reading the book is a heart-breaking experience. We have read this book before. Not the exact words, and never so artfully presented, but the same book, the same argument, the same attempt to rescue Christianity from the Bible. . . .

Yes, we have read this book before. With Love Wins, Rob Bell moves solidly within the world of Protestant Liberalism. His message is a liberalism arriving late on the scene. Tragically, his message will confuse many believers as well as countless unbelievers.

We dare not retreat from all that the Bible says about hell. We must never confuse the Gospel, nor offer suggestions that there may be any way of salvation outside of conscious faith in Jesus Christ. We must never believe that we can do a public relations job on the Gospel or on the character of God. We must never be unclear and subversively suggestive about what the Bible teaches.

In the opening pages of Love Wins, Rob Bell assures his readers that "nothing in this book hasn't been taught, suggested, or celebrated by many before me." That is true enough. But the tragedy is that those who did teach, suggest, or celebrate such things were those with whom no friend of the Gospel should want company. In this new book, Rob Bell takes his stand with those who have tried to rescue Christianity from itself. This is a massive tragedy by any measure.

Rob Bell in the Theological Liberal Tradition

Mark Galli's Christianity Today review (2 out of 5 stars) seeks to situate Rob Bell's Love Wins in the tradition of Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Bultmann, and Tillich:

[Bell] correctly notes in the preface that many have taught what he teaches or hints at in the book. Names that come immediately to mind include Friedrich Schleiermacher, Albrecht Ritschl, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich. Schleiermacher was keen on mining our innate religious sensibilities (the things we've intuited are true) to ground Christian faith. Ritschl celebrated the kingdom ethics of Jesus. Bultmann argued that first-century metaphors and worldviews should be abandoned. Tillich wrote of faith as accepting our acceptance. All these themes run through Bell's book, sometimes in compelling ways. . . .

What novelist John Updike, in his poem "Seven Stanzas at Easter," said about the Resurrection applies to all the central teachings of the New Testament, as least as far as evangelicals are concerned:

Let us not mock God with metaphor,

analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;

making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the

faded credulity of earlier ages:

let us walk through the door.

Since the days of Schleiermacher, liberals have striven to make the gospel relevant to "the cultured despisers" of religion, a key phrase in the title of his groundbreaking book. Liberals are evangelists at heart; they do want people to follow Jesus. The problem is methods and conclusions. For liberals, the sensibilities of the age trump biblical revelation. Personal opinion outranks the consensus of the church. Fondness for metaphor and parable sabotage the particularity of the gospel.

You can read the whole review here for further analysis.

"Sorrowful, Yet Always Rejoicing"

"I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart."

—The Apostle Paul, Letter to the Romans (9:1)

"Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice."

—The Apostle Paul, Letter to the Philippians (4:4)

"[We are] sorrowful, yet always rejoicing."

—The Apostle Paul, Second Letter to the Corinthians (6:10)

An Interview with Mike Anderson

Here's a really encouraging interview with Mike Anderson.

You may not have heard of him, but if you've ever benefited from the Resurgence blog—fresh, excellent content for free, every day—then you've been the recipient of God's grace to you through Mike.

What Happens When You Emphasize God's Love in the Wrong Way?

Geerhardus Vos, writing in 1902:

Whatever may be charged against the intellectualism of the period when orthodoxy reigned supreme, it can claim credit at least for having been broad minded and well balanced in its appreciation of the infinite complexity and richness of the life of God. The music of that theology may not always please modern ears, because it seems lacking in sweetness; but it ranged over a wider scale and made better harmonies than the popular strains of today.

On the other hand, it is plain that where the religious interest is exclusively concentrated upon the will and entirely exhausts itself in attempts at solving the concrete, practical problems of life, no strong incentive will exist for reflecting upon any other aspect of the nature of God than His love, because all that is required of God is that He shall serve as the norm and warrant for Christian philanthropic effort.

It is a well-known fact that all heresy begins with a partial truth. So it is in the present case.

No one will deny that in the Scriptural disclosure of truth the divine love is set forth as a most fundamental principle, nor that the embodiment of this principle in our human will and action forms a prime ingredient of that subjective religion which the Word of God requires of us.

But it is quite possible to overemphasize this one side of truth and duty as to bring into neglect other exceedingly important principles and demands of Christianity. The result will be that, while no positive error is taught, yet the equilibrium both in consciousness and life is disturbed and a condition created in which the power of resistance to the inroads of spiritual disease is greatly reduced. There can be little doubt that in this manner the one-sidedness and exclusiveness with which the love of God has been preached to the present generation is largely responsible for that universal weakening of the sense of sin, and the consequent decline of interest in the doctrines of atonement and justification, which even in orthodox and evangelical circles we all see and deplore.

But this by no means reveals the full extent of the danger to which the tendency we are speaking of has exposed us. It is impossible for any practical displacement of the balance of truth to continue for a long time without endeavoring to perpetuate and justify itself by means of a corresponding reconstruction of the entire doctrinal system. Thus what may have been at first no more than a matter of relative emphasis inevitably tends to become a question of positive theoretical error, such as makes the return to normal conditions in practical religious life more difficult than before.

From Vos's essay, "The Scriptural Doctrine of the Love of God," The Presbyterian and Reformed Review 13 (1902): 1-37.

Only the Real God Can Satisfy the Longing of Our Soul

"Religion cannot be made joyful simply by looking on the bright side of God. For a one-sided God is not a real God, and it is the real God alone who can satisfy the longing of our soul. God is love, but is He only love? God is love, but is love God? "

—J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, (New Edition; Eerdmans, 2009 [orig., 1923), 113