The word and the Word: do not sunder what God has joined

by Dan Phillips

Ask a group of Biblically faithful Christians how God is known. Some will likely answer, "In Christ." Others, "Through the Bible." I had just such an array when I asked the other day, as we have been studying how God reaches out to us and how we must respond.

Well, which response is right?

Broadly, one could say that three answers have been given in the history of the Christian church. Taking "A" as representing "In Christ," and B as "Through the Bible," we can treat them thus:

A, not so much B. This would be broadly the view of Christianoid liberalism of all stripes. Like virtually all false teachers, they do want to be seen as on the Jesus bandwagon, so they would claim Him. "Christ, not doctrine" would be their rallying cry. It might be neo-orthodox shaped with a sprinkling of existential spice, but it would amount to this: "We must encounter the living Christ. The Word witnesses to this Christ, but it is just the words of men witnessing poorly and fallibly to the Christ. It is inadequate. All that matters is the soul's contact with the living Christ, a contact that can't be tied to dogma or reduced to doctrines."

This is useful, of course, because this "living Christ" usually fits in pretty well with wherever the professor wants to go. This "living Christ" gets down with the world just fine. He's for evolution, "a woman's right to choose," "marriage equality," "social justice," "empowering women"; He's green, He voted for Obama, He loves Huffington Post, He's not so sure about literal Adams and Jonahs and falling walls and man-swallowing fish. In other words, He pretty much hates and loves what the world hates and loves. The  professor need not deny himself, much less take up anything as distasteful as a cross.

Machen killed this monstrosity decades ago but, like Freddy Krueger, it just keeps coming back. Unlike Freddy, it does change its shirt from time to time. But it's always the same nonsense, under the skin.

Both A and B. Many orthodox Christians would sign onto this, and it's a vast improvement. It at least recognizes that Christ and the Word are not opposed to each other. In fact, I wouldn't quarrel too insistently with this answer, as long as its view of B matched B's witness to itself.

However, I think this isn't the best way to put it. It still envisions a parting between the two that doesn't do justice to the role Christ Himself (A) gives to the Word (B). That is better expressed as...

A, by sole means of B. Of course and always, the intent is to know Christ truly and intimately (Ephesians 3:17-19; Philippians 3:10). And this can happen only as we are born of the Spirit (John 3:1ff.), and the Lord opens our hearts (Acts 16:14). But by what means, through what instrumentality, is this accomplished?

As I've been studying closely with my church on Wednesday nights, God has always had but one means of making Himself known, from the first moments when there was sentient life: by His Word. This has always been the case. Adam's first recorded experience of God is of God speaking to him; and so it goes through redemptive history. The grand trans-covenantal paradigm of Abram is that his right standing before God came through his saying "Amen" to the word of God (Gen. 15:6 and context).

Nothing has changed in the coming of Christ. He preached, He preached and preached; He was known as "the teacher." His miracles showed that his preaching had power, but their meaning was known through His preaching. When people came for his miracles, He moved on so He could preach more, say more words about God and His Kingdom (Mark 1:33-38).

This is what He said would be the norm. The mark of someone who was a genuine disciple was that that person continued in His word (John 8:31-32). That person who experienced God and knew God personally would be the person who kept Christ's commands and word (John 14:21, 23). Christ's abiding in the person would flourish by means of His word abiding in him (compare John 15:4 and 7).

And so it continued after He ascended. When Peter was surrounded by inquiring unbelievers, he preached God's words to them and used those words to urge them to salvation (Acts 2). The saved — reconciled to eternal fellowship with God — were those who embraced his word (Acts 2:41). Again and again, Luke describes the spread of Christianity as the spread of the word of God (Acts 6:7; 12:24; 13:49). In fact, how would we today have fellowship with the Father and the Son? Through the words of God through the apostles (1 John 1:1-3).

This is but a brief sample. I could just put it like this. You say the really important thing is to know Christ. I say "amen." And then I ask, "Who is this 'Christ'? Where do we learn of Him? Where do we find out infallibly who He is, what He taught, what He did, what He offers and demands, how I can know Him, and how He wants me to live and think?"

You know the answer.

A, by sole means of B.

Don't sunder what God hath joined.

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Annas and the Cruel Narrowness of Broad-Church Liberalism

Your weekly dose of Spurgeon
posted by Phil Johnson

The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from The Spurgeon Archive. The following excerpt is from "Christ Before Annas," a sermon preached on a Thursday evening (26 October 1882), and first published posthumously in 1903. Spurgeon preached this sermon as part of a series he intended to have published under the title Our Lord's Passion and Death. The book was finally published in 1904, some twelve years after Spurgeon's death.

"They led him away to Annas first" (John 18:13).

ho was this man, to whose palace the Lord Jesus was first conducted? He was a man who had been high priest actually for a time, and had, for some fifty years, been regarded as high priest by the Jews, while members of his family, one after another, had in turns nominally held the office.

The high-priesthood had been degraded from its permanence to become little more than an annual office, and hence the evangelist significantly says of Caiaphas that "he was the high priest that same year." But Annas would seem to have been secretly regarded by the Jews as the real high priest, and respect to him in that capacity was the more easily offered because, according to Josephus, five of His sons, and his son-in-law, Caiaphas, had succeeded him in the sacred office. To him, then, it was due that the victim of the priests should be first taken; he shall have this mark of distinction: "they led him away to Annas first." The Sacrifice of God, the Lamb of his passover, the Scapegoat of the Lord's atonement, shall be brought before the priest, ere he be slain.

The house of Annas was united to that of Caiaphas, and it was proposed to detain the prisoner there till the Sanhedrim could be hastily convened for his trial. If he should be brought into the palace of Annas, the old man would be gratified by a sight of Jesus, and by conducting a preliminary examination, acting as deputy for his son-in-law. Without leaving his own house, he could thus indulge his malice, and have a finger in the business.

Priestly hate is ever deep and unrelenting. To-day, none are such enemies of Christ's holy gospel as those who delight in priestcraft, and it is not without prophetic meaning that our Lord must be led, as a prisoner, first to a priest's house: "they led him away to Annas first." Not in the soldiers' barracks, nor in the governor's hall, but in the high priest's palace must Jesus meet with his first captivity: there it is that a Christ in bonds seems not altogether out of place.

"See how the patient Jesus stands,
Insulted in His lowest case!
Sinners have bound the Almighty hand,
And spit in their Creator's face."

Annas bore a very promising name, for it signifies clement or merciful, yet he was the man to begin the work of ensnaring the Lord Jesus in his speech, if he could be ensnared. He examined him first in a semi-private manner, that, by cunning questions, he might extract from him some ground of accusation. Under pretence of mercy, he turned inquisitor, and put his victim to the question.

This priest, whose name was clemency, showed the usual tender mercies of the wicked, which are proverbially cruel. When Jesus is to be ill-treated in his servants, there is usually a presence of pity and compassion. Persecutors are grieved to feel forced to be harsh; their tender spirits are wounded by being compelled to say a word against the Lord's people! Fain would they love them if they would not be so obstinate! With sweet language, they inflict bitter wounds; their words are softer than butter, but inwardly they are drawn swords.

If I read aright the character of this man Annas, he was one of the Savior's bitterest enemies. He was a Sadducee. Is not this the "liberal" side? Do we not reckon Pharisees to be the straitest sect of the Jews? Why he should have been so bitter against the Savior, is pretty clear, since, if Pharisees, in their multiplication of ceremonies and self-righteousness, hate the Christ, so also do the Sadducees, in their unbelief and rejection of the great truths of revelation.

Here, Ritualism and Rationalism go hand in hand, and the free-thinker, with all His profession of liberality, usually displays none of it toward the followers of the truth. The Broad Church is usually narrow enough when the doctrine of the cross is under discussion.

Whether this Sadducee had an interest in the sales that were effected in the temple, and whether, as some suppose, he was greatly irritated, and touched in a very tender point, namely, in his pocket, when Jesus overthrew the tables of the money-changers, and the seats of them that sold doves, I cannot tell; but, certainly, for some reason or other, Annas was among the first of our Lord's persecutors, not only in order of time, but also in point of malice.

The wealthy latitudinarian has a fairest enmity to the gospel of Christ Jesus, and will be found second to none in hunting down the adherents of Christ.

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The Neo-Liberal Stealth Offensive

by Phil Johnson

I wrote this brief article last year for the 9Marks eJournal. We excerpted a few paragraphs on PyroManiacs at the time. Here's the complete article.

he gospel's most dangerous earthly adversaries are not raving atheists who stand outside the door shouting threats and insults. They are church leaders who cultivate a gentle, friendly, pious demeanor but hack away at the foundations of faith under the guise of keeping in step with a changing world.

No Christian should naively imagine that heresy is always conspicuous or that every purveyor of theological mischief will lay out his agenda in plain and honest terms. The enemy prefers to sow tares secretly for obvious reasons. Thus Scripture expressly warns us to be on guard against false teachers who creep into the church unnoticed (Jude 4); wolves who sneak into the flock wearing sheep's clothing (Matthew 7:15); and servants of Satan who disguise themselves as angels of light (2 Corinthians 11:13-15).

Theological liberalism is particularly dependent on the stealth offensive. A spiritually healthy church is simply not susceptible to the arrogant skepticism that underlies a liberal's rejection of biblical authority. A church that is sound in the faith won't abandon the gospel in order to embrace humanist values. Liber alism must therefore take root covertly and gain strength and influence gradually. The success or failure of the whole liberal agenda hinges on a patient public-relations cam­paign.

That is precisely how neo-liberals have managed to get a foothold in the contemporary evangelical movement. Consider how evangelicalism has changed in just a few short decades.

Classic Evangelicalism

Historic evangelicalism has two clear distinctives. One is a commitment to the inspiration and authority of Scripture. The other is a conviction that the gospel message is clear and non-negotiable.

Specifically, evangelicals understand the gospel as an announcement of what Christ has done to save sinners, redeem Adam's fallen race, and usher believers into His eternal kingdom. The gospel is not a mandate for sinners to save themselves, redeem humanity, recover human dignity, safeguard cultural diversity, preserve the environment, eliminate poverty, establish a kingdom for themselves, or champion whatever social concept of "salvation" might be popular at the moment. In fact, the gospel expressly teaches that sinners can be justified only through faith in Christ alone, and exclusively by His gracious work—not because of any merit they earn for themselves.

The Protestant Reformation clarified and illuminated those same two principles—sola Scriptura and sola fide. Indeed, they are sometimes known as the formal and material principles of the Reformation. But they weren't novel ideas someone dreamed up out of thin air in the sixteenth century. They are and always have been essential principles of biblical Christianity. In the long course of church history, those truths have frequently been clouded and confused, or mingled with (and sometimes overwhelmed by) bad teaching. Yet since the time of Christ and the apostles those truths have never been totally silenced. They are in fact the very backbone of New Testament doctrine.

Historic evangelicalism made much of that fact. From the dawn of the Reformation through the mid-20th century, no honest, authentic evangelical would ever have thought of questioning Scripture or modifying the gospel.

Contemporary Evangelicalism

With the advent of the seeker-sensitive movement, however, evangelicals began to be influenced by a new species of entrepreneurial leaders who marginalized those core doctrines by neglect. Most of them didn't overtly deny any essential biblical truths; but neither did they vigorously stress or defend anything other than their own methodology.

The results were predictable: Churches are now filled with formerly unchurched people who are still untaught and perhaps even unconverted. Multitudes of children raised on a treacly diet of seeker-sensitive religion grew up to associate the label evangelical with superficiality. Most of them couldn't tell you what the term originally meant, and they reject whatever vestigial evangelical boundaries or doctrinal distinctives their parents may have held onto. But they figure they are still entitled to call themselves evangelicals when it's convenient, and many have remained at the fringes of the visible movement, decrying how out of step the church is with their generation. That, after all, is exactly what they learned from their parents.

This is fertile soil for liberalism to burst into full flower, and that is precisely what is already happening. Evangelicals are blithely following a number of trends that advance the neo-liberal agenda. Unless a faithful remnant begins to recognize and resist the neo-liberal strategy, evangelical churches and institutions will eventually succumb to rank liberalism, just as most of the mainstream denominations did a century ago.

Four Liberal Trends Evangelicals Must Resist

To help you withstand the drift, here are four major trends today's crop of neo-liberal leaders are fostering and taking advantage of:

1. They recklessly follow the zeitgeist.

Theological liberals have always been diligent students of the spirit of the age. A century ago, they were known as "modernists" because post-enlightenment values were the pretext they used to advance the liberal agenda. They insisted that if the church refused to change with the times, Christianity itself would become irrelevant.

Naturally, "changing with the times" meant abridging the gospel message. Sophisticated modern minds would not accept the miracles and other supernatural elements of Scripture. That was OK, the modernists insisted, because the real heart of the Bible's message is the moral and ethical content anyway. Besides, they said, practical virtue is what the church ought to focus on. They considered it sheer folly for preachers to stress difficult doctrinal features that sounded primitive and offensive to modern ears—such as the wrath of God, blood atonement, and especially the doctrine of eternal punishment. Future generations would be lost to churches that held onto such beliefs and refused to accommodate modern thought, they solemnly warned. The situation was urgent.

(Of course they were dead wrong. Churches and denominations that embraced modernist ideas declined severely, and some died. Churches that stayed faithful to their evangelical convictions thrived.)

Postmodernism is the pretext neo-liberals nowadays use to argue that everything must change in the church. The world has changed its point of view once more, and the liberals are still complaining that the church is lagging behind, out of step, and increasingly irrelevant. Notice, however: although the neo-liberals' pretext departs from the modernism favored by their 19th-century counterparts, both the line of argument they use and their theological agenda remain exactly the same. The doctrines postmodern liberals relentlessly challenge are the same ones the modernists rejected: especially God's hatred of sin; penal-substitutionary atonement, and the doctrine of hell.

It's no secret that the world has always despised certain aspects of biblical truth. If it were a legitimate goal for the church to keep in step with the world, it might make sense to review and revise the message from time to time. But the church is forbidden to court the spirit of the age, and one of the main reasons the gospel is such a stumbling block is that it cannot be adapted to suit cultural preferences or alternative worldviews. Instead, it confronts them all.

Beware of church leaders who are more worried about being contemporary than they are about being doctrinally sound; more concerned with their methodology than they are with their message; more captivated by political correctness than they are by the truth. The church is not called to ape the world or make Christianity seem cool and likable, but to proclaim the gospel faithfully—including the parts the world usually scoffs at: sin, righteousness, and judgment (cf. John 16:8). Jesus expressly taught that if we are faithful in that task, the Holy Spirit will convict hearts and draw believers to Christ.

But speaking of wanting to be hip and fashionable, that's another major trend currently advancing the neo-liberal agenda:

2. They want the world's admiration at all costs.

There is of course nothing wrong with being winsome. As recipients of divine grace, if our lives properly manifest the Spirit's fruit, we should by definition have personal charisma (cf. Galatians 5:19-23). We also ought to maintain a good testimony before the world. In fact, to qualify as an elder, a man "must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace" (1 Timothy 3:7).

That of course speaks of a person's character—graciousness, compassion, and a reputation for integrity. It is not a prescription for the appeasement of worldly tastes or the endorsement of every earthly fashion. When we need to shave corners off the truth or compromise righteousness in order to gain the world's friendship, bearing the reproach of Christ is an infinitely better option. No true friend of God deliberately seeks the world's camaraderie (James 4:4).

But one of the common characteristics of liberalism is an obsession with gaining the world's approval and admiration no matter the cost.

We witnessed the germination of this attitude in the evangelical movement at least four decades ago, especially among contemporary church leaders who let neighborhood surveys and opinion polls determine the style and agenda of the church.

When a church gives in to that craving for worldly approval, they will inevitably subjugate the gospel to a more popular message. At first, they won't necessarily deny (or even challenge) core gospel truths such as the historical facts outlined in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4. But they will abbreviate, modify, or add to the message. The embellishments usually echo whatever happens to be politically correct at the moment—climate change, world hunger, the AIDS crisis, or whatever. Those things will be stressed and talked about repeatedly while the historic facts of Christ's death and resurrection, the great themes of gospel doctrine, and the actual text of Scripture itself will be largely ignored or treated as something to be taken for granted.

Feed any church a steady diet of that for a few years and they will have no means of defense when someone attacks the faith more directly. That's precisely what is happening today with various attacks on substitutionary atonement, the exclusivity of Christ, the authority and inerrancy of Scripture, and other essential Christian truths. All of those things were first downplayed in order to make the church's message sound more "positive." Now they are being subjected to a full-scale assault.

Such problems are exacerbated and the liberal craving for worldly esteem reaches a white-hot intensity in the academic realm. That brings up yet another feature of the neo-liberal agenda to watch out for:

3. Their "faith" comes with an air of intellectual superiority.

Liberals treat faith itself as an academic matter. Their whole system is essentially a wholesale rejection of simple, childlike belief. Their worldview foments an air of academic arrogance, setting human reason in the place of highest authority; treating the Bible with haughty condescension; and showing utter contempt for the kind of faith Christ blessed.

Consequently, liberals are and always have been obsessed with academic respectability. They want the world's esteem as scholars and intellectuals—no matter what they have to compromise to get it. They sometimes defend that motive by arguing that the secular academy's acceptance is essential to the Christian testimony.

Of course that is a quixotic quest. It is also a denial of the Bible's plain teaching. Believers cannot be faithful to Scripture and win general accolades from the wise men, scribes, and debaters of this age. The world hated Jesus, and He made it clear that His faithful disciples mustn't expect—or seek—the world's honor (John 15:18; Luke 6:22; cf. James 4:4). Paul, himself a true scholar in every sense, wrote this world's wisdom off as sheer foolishness: "Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God" (1 Corinthians 3:18-19).

True Christian scholarship is about integrity, not accolades. Liberalism covets the latter, and that explains why liberals are always drawn to ideas that are stylish and politically correct, yet they are resistant to virtually the all the hard truths of Christianity—starting with the authority Scripture claims for itself.

Be on guard against that tendency. Here's one more:

4. They despise doctrinal and biblical precision.

This may sound like an oxymoron, but while treating faith as an academic matter, liberals prefer an almost anti-intellectual, agnostic approach to dealing with the specific truth-claims of Scripture. They like their doctrine hazy and indistinct.



One maneuver neo-liberals have perfected in these postmodern times is an artful dodge when they dislike a particular doctrine but cannot afford to make a plain and open denial. Instead, they will claim that Scripture is simply too unclear on that point. We can't really be sure. The point is disputed by top scholars, and who are we to speak with too much certainty? Let's have a five-year moratorium on strong opinions.

Thus without denying (or affirming) anything in particular, and without even technically dismissing the matter under discussion as an unimportant point, the ruse effectively sets the truth aside. The skeptic's goal is thus accomplished without incurring any of the odium of skepticism.

Heavy doses of that flavor of postmodern, neo-liberal evasion have conditioned multitudes of church members to regard carefulness and precision in handling doctrine as both unimportant and potentially divisive. These days the person who shows evidence of doctrinal scruples is much more likely to be held in suspicion or disdain among evangelicals than the neo-liberals who have deliberately made the study of biblical doctrine seem so cloudy, confusing, and contentious.

In reality—and this is a lesson the church should have learned from both Scripture and church history—unity and harmony cannot exist in the church at all if there is not a common commitment to sound doctrine.

As long as these four trends and others like them continue to thrive within the evangelical movement, the threat posed by neo-liberalism looms large. Conservative evangelicals should not grow apathetic or take too much comfort in the apparent meltdown of Emergent Village and the liberal wing of postmodernized Christianity. Even if the Emergent ghetto does finally and completely give up the ghost, many of the leading figures and popular ideas from that movement will simply blend into mainstream evangelicalism (which is growing less mainstream and less evangelical all the time).

We must pay attention to the lessons of history and stand firm on the truth of Scripture—and we desperately need to be more aggressive than we have been so far in opposing these neo-liberal influences.

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What did Jesus (not) say about... how to understand the OT (full post)

by Dan Phillips

"You know where you really go wrong? You just read the Torah 'way too literally."

A reader wrote me saying he'd been troubled to see a Buddhist lecturer being hosted at a Methodist church. He wrote the pastor, expressing his concern and citing John 14:6. In his response, the Methodist pastor said something like "I don't take the Bible as literally as you."

One hears this quite a bit. We are cautioned against taking Genesis too literally, against taking the history of Israel too literally. Usually in these cases, "literally" is a code-word meaning "to be true." So the problem is that we take Genesis 1—3 to be true, to actually relate events that happened in space and time exactly as recorded.

Of course our grand concern should not be to take Scripture literally or non-literally. Insofar as we claim to be Christians, our goal must be to take Scripture as Christ took it. Otherwise, we might as well claim to be "SpongeBobians" as "Christians."

Jesus lodged a great many charges against the religious leaders of His day. He complained that their righteousness fell short of that of the Kingdom (Matthew 5:20), that they didn't practice what they preached (Matthew 23:3), that they made proselytes who were worse than they (Matthew 23:15), and a host of other accusations.

But did Jesus ever fault them for being too literal?

I'd say the opposite is the case. If anything, Jesus faulted them for not attending closely enough to the details Scripture.

For instance, He faulted them for failing to learn from David's history (Matthew 12:2-4) and from the practice of the priests (v. 5). He did not suggest that either was a myth or a cultic legend with a general meaning that bypassed the text. It was from the text that He derived the meaning.

Again and again Jesus clashed with the Pharisees' traditionalism. But His problem with this plague was not that it harped too closely on the letter of the Torah, but that it completely ignored it at will, as He illustrated at length in Matthew 15:1-9. Jesus in no way suggested that the Pharisees needed to loosen their grip on Scripture; rather, they needed to tighten it (vv. 3-4, 6, 9).

Jesus accuses the Sadducees of not having a sufficient grasp of Scripture: “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God" (Matthew 22:29). The He presses a seemingly minor point of syntax (v. 32) to demonstrate the resurrection (v. 31).

Then He rounds on the Pharisees, pressing a literal reading of the title of Psalm 110 to make a major point which would collapse otherwise (22:41-45). Jesus took "of David" to mean "of David," and not "David-like" or "from the Davidic school."

Or let's go right to the first bail-out point for Christianoids who want the world to think well of them: Genesis 1—3. Is there any hint that Jesus saw these chapters as metaphorical, poetic, mythological? Indeed no; the genre and canonical location clearly identify them as historical prose, and Jesus accepted this. Seamlessly combining Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, Jesus said

“Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female [ Genesis 1:27], and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’ [Genesis 2:24]? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” (Matthew 19:4-5)

As in everything, Jesus puts it down to a lack of faith. Jesus Himself was in no doubt that the entire OT was the very Word of God. What the Torah said, God said. Therefore, the problem of the Pharisees was not that they clung too tightly to Moses, but too loosely. Hear Him:

You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. ...Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me.  But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?" (John 5:39-40, 45-47)

Anyone backing away from the full truthfulness and authority of every word of the OT should have the honesty not to appeal to Jesus, for Jesus showed no such spirit. The only Jesus who ever really lived fully affirmed the OT as God's word. If we are going to propound some other view, we should say up-front that we reject Jesus' cosmology and feel free to disagree with Him where His thinking varies from ours. But then it seems to me that we need to take the next step and disassociate ourselves from any thought that we are believers in, or students and followers of, Jesus.

One may with integrity say he believes Jesus and owns Him as Lord, or he may fret at length about the horrid evils of taking the OT too literally.

He may not do both. Not with integrity.

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What did Jesus (not) say about... how to understand the OT

by Dan Phillips

"You know where you really go wrong? You just read the Torah 'way too literally."

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Dennis Prager nails it — and misses it, at the same time

by Dan Phillips

I am neither a Dennis Prager fan, nor am I a hater. He's a sharp guy, but there are only so many uses of the first-person singular pronoun that can be borne in any 5-10 minutes span, and Prager easily exceeds that limit every time I happen across his show or writings.

Yet Prager isolates and nails something very important in his recent essay, Nothing Sacred. His focus is political, but the point he makes is far broader, as he himself alludes. Prager is diagnosing and describing the mental malady of liberalism. Prager begins by quoting prominent liberals who were alarmed at the reading of the US Constitution in the House of Representatives, and he asks what it was that was so troubling to them.

Prager's response:

The answer is that for leftism — though not necessarily for every individual who considers himself a leftist — there are no sacred texts. The two major examples are the Constitution and the Bible. One cannot understand the Left without understanding this. The demotion of the sacred in general and of sacred texts specifically is at the center of leftist thinking.

Prager brings in the Bible, and we're going to leave politics (except as illustrative) and focus on the mindset of liberalism in its stance towards God's verbal self-revelation.

Prager absolutely correctly observes that "elevating any standard, any religion, any text to the level of the sacred means that it is above any individual," and thus is authoritative to that individual. Whether a politician being told he must rein in his cravings for power under the authority of the Constitution, or a man or woman being told that he is under the external, objective judgment of God's Word, the issue is at root the same.

And so, Prager says that to a leftist, "what is right and wrong is determined by every individual’s feelings, not by anything above the individual." Then Prager says that

This is a major reason why the Left, since Karl Marx, has been so opposed to Judeo-Christian religion. For Judaism and Christianity, God and the Bible are above the self. Indeed, Western civilization was built on the idea that the individual and society are morally accountable to God and to the moral demands of that book. That was the view, incidentally, of every one of the Founders, including deists such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.

Moreover,

Morality is then no longer a God-given objective fact; it becomes a human-created subjective opinion. And one no longer needs to consult an external source to know right and wrong, only one’s heart. We are then no longer accountable to God for transgressions, only to ourselves.

We could go on; it actually is a very thoughtful and well-written article. Also, we're blessed with so many sharp readers that I doubt you much need me to make the application you're all already making (and the ironies you're noting) in your own mind.

But hey, if I'm going to put my byline on it, I'd better write something beyond "what he said!", hadn't I? So here it is.

Prager's analysis is delightfully sharp and on-target, yet it falls short in ways that literally make all the difference in the world. Prager is himself an apostate Jew, by which I mean that he — while often and sincerely expressing admiration and affection for Christianity — is still among those who have rejected the Prophet like Moses, who came and spoke Yahweh's words. Prager is still among those whose stance toward Messiah is "We do not want this man to reign over us" (Luke 19:14).

And as I developed at greater length elsewhere, this means that Prager has had to deal loosely with Scripture himself. He could in no way be said to be under the authority of the Torah, as God spoke it; but rather Prager  is in some fashion under the rules and traditions of men (cf. Mark 7:1-13). The objective text of the Torah, in all its edgy and offensive power, is not Prager's philosophical nor moral pou sto.

Here is what the Torah would add to Prager's analysis. All of this started in the Garden, and we as a race are still stuck in exactly the same place. God had presented His worldview. It was comprehensive, exhaustive, and utterly authoritative. Everything Adam and Eve needed to know was included.

Yet Eve found herself in the one place in all the universe where she had no business being, listening to the one entity in all the universe to whom she had no business listening (Genesis 3:1ff.). Satan's fundamental proposition to Eve was a simple one: God's word is not necessarily binding on you; you must decide for yourself what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong. Thus you shall be as gods — or, possible, as God.

And so "God's ape" perverted God's design in a literally hellacious manner. Of course God's design from the start was that mankind be "as God," in a spiritual and moral resemblance knowable only through the holy and whole submission of faith. This was a pervert's likeness, a likeness that attempts (insanely!) to wrestle God's Godhood from Him, and claim it as my own.

And so each of us is at heart a "liberal" or a "leftist," in Prager's sense, in that each of us is born with a hot hatred for any external authority that challenges our own. That is why

God looks down from heaven
on the children of man
to see if there are any who understand,
who seek after God.

3 They have all fallen away;
together they have become corrupt;
there is none who does good,
not even one. (Psalm 53:2-3).

That is why the thoughts of man's heart are naturally only wicked all day (Genesis 6:5). That is why all of us naturally do what is right in our own eyes (Judges 17:6; 21:25). That is why we all suppress God's truth (Romans 1:18). That is why we have all gone aside, we do not seek God, we are bereft of that necessary foundation for all knowledge: the fear of God (Romans 3:9-18).

That all just scratches the surface. Sin has vitiated the way each of us looks at the universe. Prager's prescription doesn't go nearly far enough, because his diagnosis doesn't go nearly far enough — and because he leaves himself out. We don't need merely to be more respectful of the Constitution (though I think that would be good), or of the Bible.

What we need is a complete overhaul. We need a complete paradigm shift.

We need what the rejected "Prophet like Moses" tells Dennis Prager and you and me that we all need: we need

• to repent (Matthew 4:17); and
• to be born again (John 3:1ff.)

A teacher in Israel really should know this (John 3:9-10).

It appears Prager doesn't.

Do you?

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The [Post]modern Missional Strategy

Your weekly dose of Spurgeon
posted by Phil Johnson

The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from The Spurgeon Archive. The following excerpt is from the sermon ttitled "No Compromise," preached 7 October 1888 at the Metropolitan Tabernacle.

his is the suggestion of the present hour: if the world will not come to Jesus, shall Jesus tone down his teachings to the world? In other words, if the world will not rise to the church, shall not the church go down to the world? Instead of bidding men to be converted, and come out from among sinners, and be separate from them, let us join with the ungodly world, enter into union with it, and so pervade it with our influence by allowing it to influence us. Let us have a Christian world.

To this end let us revise our doctrines. Some are old-fashioned, grim, severe, unpopular; let us drop them out. Use the old phrases so as to please the obstinately orthodox, but give them new meanings so as to win philosophical infidels, who are prowling around. Pare off the edges of unpleasant truths, and moderate the dogmatic tone of infallible revelation: say that Abraham and Moses made mistakes, and that the books which have been so long had in reverence are full of errors. Undermine the old faith, and bring in the new doubt; for the times are altered, and the spirit of the age suggests the abandonment of everything that is too severely righteous, and too surely of God.

The deceitful adulteration of doctrine is attended by a falsification of experience. Men are now told that they were born good, or were made so by their infant baptism, and so that great sentence, "Ye must be born again," is deprived of its force. Repentance is ignored, faith is a drug in the market as compared with "honest doubt," and mourning for sin and communion with God are dispensed with, to make way for entertainments, and Socialism, and politics of varying shades. A new creature in Christ Jesus is looked upon as a sour invention of bigoted Puritans.

It is true, with the same breath they extol Oliver Cromwell; but then 1888 is not 1648. What was good and great three hundred years ago is mere cant to-day.

That is what "modern thought" is telling us; and under its guidance all religion is being toned down. Spiritual religion is despised, and a fashionable morality is set up in its place. Do yourself up tidily on Sunday; behave yourself; and above all, believe everything except what you read in the Bible, and you will be all right.

Be fashionable, and think with those who profess to be scientific—this is the first and great commandment of the modern school; and the second is like unto it—do not be singular, but be as worldly as your neighbours. Thus is Isaac going down into Padan-aram: thus is the church going down to the world.

Men seem to say—It is of no use going on in the old way, fetching out one here and another there from the great mass. We want a quicker way. To wait till people are born again, and become followers of Christ, is a long process: let us abolish the separation between the regenerate and unregenerate. Come into the church, all of you, converted or unconverted. You have good wishes and good resolutions; that will do: don't trouble about more. It is true you do not believe the gospel, but neither do we. You believe something or other. Come along; if you do not believe anything, no matter; your "honest doubt" is better by far than faith.

"But," say you, "nobody talks so." Possibly they do not use the same words, but this is the real meaning of the present-day religion; this is the drift of the times. I can justify the broadest statement I have made by the action or by the speech of certain ministers, who are treacherously betraying our holy religion under pretence of adapting it to this progressive age.

The new plan is to assimilate the church to the world, and so include a larger area within its bounds. By semi-dramatic performances they make houses of prayer to approximate to the theatre; they turn their services into musical displays, and their sermons into political harangues or philosophical essays—in fact, they exchange the temple for the theatre, and turn the ministers of God into actors, whose business it is to amuse men.

Is it not so, that the Lord's-day is becoming more and more a day of recreation or of idleness, and the Lord's house either a joss-house full of idols, or a political club, where there is more enthusiasm for a party than zeal for God? Ah me! the hedges are broken down, the walls are levelled, and to many there is henceforth, no church except as a portion of the world, no God except as an unknowable force by which the laws of nature work.

This, then, is the proposal. In order to win the world, the Lord Jesus must conform himself, his people, and his Word to the world. I will not dwell any longer on so loathsome a proposal.

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Cold-Blooded Liberal "Charity"

Your weekly dose of Spurgeon
posted by Phil Johnson




The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from The Spurgeon Archive. The following excerpt is from "Needless fears," a sermon preached on Thursday evening, 11 June 1874, at the Met Tab in London.





he very persons who talk most about being liberal in their views are generally the greatest persecutors. If I must have a religious enemy, let me have a professed and avowed bigot, but not one of your "free thinkers" or "broad churchmen" as they are called, for there is nobody who can hate as they do; and the lovers of liberal-mindedness who have no creed at all think it to be their special duty to be peculiarly contemptuous to those who have some degree of principle, and cannot twist and turn exactly as they can.

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A Word about Evan-jellyfish

Your weekly dose of Spurgeon
posted by Phil Johnson






The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from The Spurgeon Archive. The following excerpt is from "The Broken Fence," a sermon preached near the end of Spurgeon's ministry but first published in 1913, two decades after his death.



    religion which is all excitement, and has little instruction in it, may serve for transient use; but for permanent life-purposes there must be a knowledge of those great doctrines which are fundamental to the gospel system.

I tremble when I hear of a man's giving up, one by one, the vital principles of the gospel and boasting of his liberality.

I hear him say, "These are my views, but others have a right to their views also." That is a very proper expression in reference to mere "views," but we may not thus speak of truth itself as revealed by God. That is one and unalterable, and all are bound to receive it.

It is not your view of truth, for that is a dim thing; but the very truth itself which will save you if your faith embraces it.

I will readily yield my way of stating a doctrine, but not the doctrine itself. One man may put it in this way, and one in another; but the truth itself must never be given up.

The spirit of the Broad School robs us of everything like certainty. I should like to ask some great men of that order whether they believe that anything is taught in the Scriptures which it would be worth while for a person to die for, and whether the martyrs were not great fools for laying down their lives for mere opinions which might be right or might be wrong?

This broad-churchism is a breaking down of stone walls, and it will let in the devil and all his crew, and do infinite harm to the church of God, if it be not stopped. A loose state of belief does great damage to any man's mind.

We are not bigots, but we should be none the worse if we so lived that men called us so. I met a man the other day who was accused of bigotry, and I said, "Give me your hand, old fellow. I like to meet with bigots now and then, for the fine old creatures are getting scarce, and the stuff they are made of is so good that if there were more of it, we might see a few men among us again and fewer mollusks."

Lately we have seen few men with backbone; the most have been of the jelly-fish order. I have lived in times in which I should have said, "Be liberal, and shake off all narrowness ; but now I am obliged to alter my tone and cry, "Be steadfast in the truth."

The faith once delivered to the saints is now all the more attractive to me, because it is called narrow, for I am weary of that breadth which comes of broken hedges. There are fixed points of truth, and definite certainties of creed, and woe to you if you allow these stone walls to crumble down.

I fear me that the slothful are a numerous band, and that ages to come may have to deplore the laxity which has been applauded by this negligent generation.

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Angels of light

by Phil Johnson



he gospel's most dangerous earthly adversaries are not raving atheists who stand outside the door shouting threats and insults. They are church leaders who cultivate a gentle, friendly, pious demeanor but hack away at the foundations of faith under the guise of keeping in step with a changing world.

No Christian should naively imagine that heresy is always conspicuous or that every purveyor of theological mischief will lay out his agenda in plain and honest terms. The enemy prefers to sow tares secretly for obvious reasons. Thus Scripture expressly warns us to be on guard against false teachers who creep into the church unnoticed (Jude 4); wolves who sneak into the flock wearing sheep's clothing (Matthew 7:15); and servants of Satan who disguise themselves as angels of light (2 Corinthians 11:13-15).

Theological liberalism is particularly dependent on the stealth offensive. A spiritually healthy church is simply not susceptible to the arrogant skepticism that underlies a liberal's rejection of biblical authority. A church that is sound in the faith won't abandon the gospel in order to embrace humanist values. Liberalism must therefore take root covertly and gain strength and influence gradually. The success or failure of the whole liberal agenda hinges on a patient public-relations campaign.

That is precisely how neo-liberals have managed to get a foothold in the contemporary evangelical movement.



(Excerpted from an article published earlier this year in the 9Marks eJournal. Read the whole thing HERE.)

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Games Liberals Play

Your weekly dose of Spurgeon
posted by Phil Johnson



The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from The Spurgeon Archive. The following excerpt is from "Living Temples for the Living God," a sermon preached at the Metropolitan Tabernacle. The date was not recorded, but the sermon was published in 1872.


ow-a-days, if a man is very reverent towards the word of God, and very desirous to obey the Lord's commands in everything, people say, "He is very precise," and they shun him; or, with still more acrimony, they say, "He is very bigoted: he is not a man of liberal spirit;" and so they cast out his name as evil.

Bigotry, in modern parlance, you know, means giving heed to old truths in preference to novel theories; and a liberal spirit, now-a-days, means being liberal with everything except your own money—liberal with God's law, liberal with God's doctrine, liberal to believe that a lie is a truth, that black is white, and that white may occasionally be black. That is liberal sentiment in religion—the broad church school—from which may God continually deliver us.

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A Thumbnail History of Theological Liberalism

The Lie of "Liberal" Theology, Part 2
by Phil Johnson

ersons beset with the spirit of liberal religion invariably try to present themselves as cutting-edge visionaries. But liberalism is neither fresh nor progressive. Look at almost any era of church history and you will find the liberal spirit alive and well in some form or another. Even during Jesus' earthly ministry, He had to contend with the Sadducees, who denied virtually everything in the supernatural realm, including the existence of angels, the immortality of the human soul, and (of course) the resurrection of the dead (Acts 23:8). Some degree of Sadducean-style skepticism is a key element in all liberal religion.

Throughout the history of the church, practically every time there has been a major advance in clarity and understanding that brings some key gospel truth into clear focus, almost immediately some liberalizing tendency seeks to nullify the gain.

In the eleventh century, for example, Anselm of Canterbury untangled a millennium of confusion about the atonement in his landmark book Cur Deus Homo. Anselm demonstrated from Scripture that Christ's death was an offering to God—a full satisfaction rendered by Christ to God—rather than a payment to appease Satan or an act of martyrdom at the hands of wicked men. Anselm's work highlighted the simple but crucial truths that the atonement was the central reason God became a man, and that redemption is a gracious work of Christ to be received by faith alone. But no sooner had the truth of divine grace begun to regain its rightful place at the center of the gospel than Peter Abelard rose up and denied that Christ's death was any kind of payment or substitution at all. In Abelard's view, the cross was merely a radical example of self-sacrificial love, designed to win men's hearts and give them a pattern to follow. Abelard's explanation of the atonement (a classic expression of liberal thinking) thus made the work of redemption something the sinner must do for himself by mimicking Christ.

Nevertheless, Anselm's work paved the way for the Protestant Reformation 500 years later. But even the Reformation was immediately answered with a new liberalizing tendency, Socinianism. Named for Laelius Socinus (an inveterate skeptic who nevertheless retained a form of religion), Socinianism was a typically misguided liberal attempt to retain the moral essence of Christ's teaching while rejecting virtually every orthodox doctrine and supernatural element of the Christian faith, beginning with the authority of Scripture.

Socinianism was followed by a string of similar liberal movements. Most of them appeared in reaction to various revivals and expansions of gospel preaching. The Great Awakening in colonial America was followed by the rise of deism. The Second Great Awakening was severely marred by an upsurge of moralistic free-will theology and perfectionist dogmas. That in turn was exacerbated by a major movement toward Unitarianism in the early nineteenth century. Meanwhile, in Germany, Friedrich Schleiermacher was blending Enlightenment philosophies with Christian moral teachings, using higher criticism to justify skepticism about the Bible's supernatural claims. While evangelicalism was flourishing in churches and reaching out to homesteaders and pioneers on the American frontier, Schleiermacher was discovering ways to make liberal and Socinian concepts sound sophisticated for the academic community.

Sweeping grassroots evangelical revivals occurred in both England and America in the 1850s, and almost immediately a new backlash came: modernism began to invade churches.

Modernism managed to smuggle practically every classic expression of theological liberalism into evangelical circles under the guise of staying abreast of the times. A tsunami of ideas borrowed directly from Socinianism and its offspring overwhelmed the mainstream denominations and many schools of theology. Virtually every significant evangelical institution that embraced any degree of modernism soon abandoned evangelical principles. And practically all of them became empty shells of what they once were.

The legacy of such movements is clear—or it ought to be. No good has ever come from the liberalizing tendency. It is rooted in a way of thinking that is hostile to the authority of Scripture; it inevitably corrupts the simplicity of the gospel of grace; and it fosters skepticism and (in the worst cases) rank unbelief.

Don't forget to read this month's 9Marks eJournal

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