Gurnall on why many formerly orthodox people drift from truth

by Dan Phillips

The man could have been a Pyro!

 In giving counsel how to inflame the heart with a love for truth, William Gurnall wrote this:

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Too often, we've seen men who begin more or less Biblically orthodox, who then drift further and further from the safe haven of God's Word. William Gurnall suggests one reason why.

Likeness is the ground of love. A carnal heart cannot like truth, because it is not like to truth. Such a one may love truth, as he did Alexander, Regem non Alexandrum; ‘the king, not the person that was king:’ truth in its honour and dignity, when it can prefer him, but not naked truth itself.

How is it possible an earthly soul should love truth that is heavenly? An unholy heart, truth that is pure? O it is sad indeed, when men’s tenets and principles in their understandings do clash, and fight with the principles of their hearts and affections!

When men have orthodox judgment, and heterodox hearts, there must needs be little love to truth, because the judgment and will are so unequally yoked; truth in the conscience reproving and threatening lust in the heart, and that again controlling truth in the conscience. Thus, like a scolding couple, they may a while dwell together; but taking no content in one another, the wretch is easily persuaded to give truth a bill of divorce at last, and send her away, as Ahasuerus did Vashti, that he may espouse other principles, which will suit better with his corrupt heart, and not cross him in the way he is in.

This, this I am persuaded hath parted many and truth in these licentious days. They could not sin peaceably while they kept their judgments sound; truth ever and anon would be chiding them; and therefore, to match their judgments with their hearts, they have taken up principles suitable to their lusts. But, soul, if truth had such a power upon thee, to transform thee by the renewing of thy mind into its own likeness, that as the scion turns the stock into its own nature, so truth hath assimilated thee, and made thee bear fruit like itself, thou art the person that will never part with truth; before thou canst do this, thou must part with that new nature, which by it the Spirit of God hath begot in thee. There is now such a near union betwixt thee and truth, or rather thee and Christ, as can never be broke.

We see what a mighty power there goes along with God’s ordinance of marriage, that two persons, who possibly a month before never knew one another, yet their affections once knit by love, and their persons made one by marriage, they can now leave friends and parents for to enjoy each other; such a mighty power, and much greater, goes along with this mystical marriage between the soul and Christ, the soul and truth, that the same person, who, before conversion, would not have ventured the loss of a penny for Christ, or his truth, yet now, knit to Christ and his truth by a secret work of  the Spirit new forming him into the likeness thereof, he can bid adieu to the world, life, and all, for these.

As that martyr told him that asked whether he did not love his wife and children, and was not loth to part with them, ‘Yes,’ saith he, ‘I love them so dearly, that I would not part with any of them for all that the Duke of Brunswick is worth,’ whose subject he was; ‘but for Christ’s sake and his truth, farewell to them all.’

[William Gurnall and John Campbell, The Christian in Complete Armour (London: Thomas Tegg, 1845), 222–223. Broken into paragraphs]

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Our binary Bible

by Dan Phillips

When I was earning a Microsoft certification back in the late 90s, I had to study IP addresses, which took me into the world of binary numbers. In that world, everything is a 1, or it's a 0. There's no 2 and no 9, no 5 and no 3. Everything is represented by the 1 and the 0, and the place each holds.

The Bible is very binary, in a great many ways.

If you've read the Bible much, you can fill in this next part for yourself. In God's Word, you're either saved, or  you're lost; you're in the darkness, or you're in the light; you're a believer, or you're an unbeliever; you love God, or you hate Him; you're alive in Christ, or you're dead; you're preaching truth, or you're preaching error; you're forgiven, or you're in your sins; you're a slave of God, or you're a slave of sin; you're on the narrow way that leads to life, or you're on the broad path that leads to death; you're a sheep, or you're a goat; Christ knows you, or He doesn't; you're a saint, or you're an "ain't."

While it could be argued correctly that there are degrees of this and that, it isn't in grey areas that the Bible lives and thrives and does most of its business.

So doesn't it follow that, to the degree we're believers (and not unbelievers), to the degree that we're faithful (and not unfaithful), we will give ourselves to affirming and exploring and exploiting those sound words — and not turning aside to vain jangling and fruitless discussion?

If that's the case, then why are so many highly-respected, high-visibility, popular speakers and organs and sites and bloggers so adoringly fascinated with exploring and exploiting the blurs and the fuzz and the vapor around the edges?

Taken seriously, it seems that the Bible would produce knowledge, faith, confidence, assurance, certainty — and categorical boldness and insistence.

But these leaders seem obsessed with enabling and modeling and producing uncertainty, doubt, timidity, daintiness, nuance, overcaution, and (on many pivotal issues) murmury vagueness, or complete silence. When what we need to hear is a trumpet blast, all we get is a tremulous little kazoo-wheeze, or the vague sound of someone mumbling to himself.

Is that a good thing?

Or is it bad?

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The importance of "not"; or, Machen's zombies

by Dan Phillips

Listening to Moisés Silva's lectures on Galatians at Westminster sent me back to Galatians 1:1. I have long noted (as has everyone and his uncle) that Galatians is a "hot" letter, a letter that hits the ground running and is very aggressive, alarmed, and passionate in tone. The entire first chapter makes that impression with crystal clarity, and Paul really doesn't let up until he has thrown down the quill.

But here I single out the very first three words in the letter: Παῦλος ἀπόστολος οὐκ. To break them down, we have:

1. Παῦλος (Paulos) — his name, "Paul."
2. ἀπόστολος (apostolos) — his office, "an apostle," a plenipotentiary of Christ, speaking on His behalf and with His authority.
3. οὐκ (ouk) — "not."

Third word is "not." That didn't take long. No other letter starts like that.  "Paul, apostle —not..."

To open up the impact of this abrupt negation, I offer the podium at length to a guest writer. Sir, the floor is yours.

[The third word] is a word that is now regarded as highly objectionable, a word that Paul, if he had been what modern men would have desired him to be, never would have used. It is the small but weighty word "not." "Paul an apostle," he says, "not from men nor through a man, but...."

That word "not," we are today constantly being told, ought to be put out of the Christian's vocabulary. Our preaching, we are told, ought to be positive and not negative; we ought to present the truth, but ought not to attack error; we ought to avoid controversy and always seek peace.

With regard to such a program, it may be said at least that if we hold to it we might just as well close up our New Testaments; for the New Testament is a controversial book almost from beginning to end. That is of course true with regard to the Epistles of Paul. They, at least, are full of argument and controversy—no question, certainly, can be raised about that. Even the hymn to Christian love in the thirteenth chapter of I Corinthians is an integral part of a great controversial passage with regard to a false use of the spiritual gifts.That glorious hymn never would have been written if Paul had been averse to controversy and had sought peace at any price. But the same thing is true also of the words of Jesus. They too—I think we can say it reverently—are full of controversy. He presented His righteousness sharply over against the other righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees.

That is simply in accordance with a fundamental law of the human mind. All definition is by way of exclusion. You cannot say clearly what a thing is without contrasting it with what it is not.

When that fundamental law is violated, we find nothing but a fog. Have you ever listened to this boasted non-controversial preaching, this preaching that is positive and not negative, this teaching that tries to present truth without attacking error? What impression does it make upon your mind? We will tell you what impression it makes upon ours. It makes the impression of utter inanity. We are simply unable to make head or tail of it. It consists for the most part of words and nothing more. Certainly it is as far as possible removed from the sharp, clear warnings, and the clear and glorious promises, of Holy Writ.

No, there is one word which every true Christian must learn to use. It is the word "not" or the word "No." A Christian must certainly learn to say "No" in the field of conduct; there are some things that the world does, which he cannot do. But he must also learn to say "No" in the field of conviction. The world regards as foolishness the gospel upon which the Christian life is based, and the Christian who does not speak out against the denial of the gospel is certainly not faithful to his Lord.

...The Church of our day needs above all else men who can say "No"; for it is only men who can say "No," men who are brave enough to take a stand against sin and error in the Church—it is only such men who can really say "Yea and amen" to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We know not in detail what will take place when the great revival comes, the great revival for which we long, when the Spirit of God will sweep over the Church like a mighty flood. But one thing we do know—when that great day comes, the present feeble aversion to "controversy," the present cowardly unwillingness to take sides in the age-long issue between faith and unbelief in the Church—will at once be swept aside. There is not a trace of such an attitude in God's holy Word. That attitude is just Satan's way of trying to deceive the people of God; peace and indifferentist church-unionism and aversion to controversy, as they are found in the modern Church, are just the fine garments that cover the ancient enemy, unbelief.

May God send us men who are not deceived, men who will respond to the forces of unbelief and compromise now so largely dominant in the visible Church with a brave and unqualified "No"! Paul was such a man in his day. He said "No" in the very first word of this Epistle, after the bare name and title of the author; and that word gives the key to the whole Epistle that follows. The Epistle to the Galatians is a polemic, a fighting Epistle from beginning to end. What a fire it kindled at the time of the Reformation! May it kindle another fire in our day—not a fire that will destroy any fine or noble or Christian thing, but a fire of Christian love in hearts grown cold!

Timely words. This brother certainly understands the current scene here in 2011, doesn't he? Not only in some churches and movements, but in some would-be leaders and speakers and writers in various venues, wouldn't you say? We really should invite this guy to become a Pyro.

The trouble with that (as many of you recognized right away) is that the writer has been with the Lord for many decades. The "now" and "modern" time of which he wrote was the 1930s, for the writer was the great J. Gresham Machen, writing on pages 6-8 of his collected notes on Galatians. I quoted with only the addition of a bit of emphasis.

This is the great thing that even a bit of knowledge of history gives to anyone looking at the Emerg* crowd and all the wannabes and spin-offs and penumbrae. They present themselves as deep, nuanced, cutting-edge pioneers, when all they are for all the world are Machen's zombies. Machen (and his fellows) killed those errors dead eighty years ago; but here they are again, shambling about in search of fresh brains to devour.

I said "Machen's zombies," but should I perhaps say "Paul's zombies"? Hadn't the great apostle also killed the same errors dead two millennia earlier? He did. But as always there are dainty-souled men who consider themselves so much smarter than Machen, than Owen, than Calvin, than Augustine, than Paul; and, in the final analysis, so much smarter than God.

But are they really?

They are not.

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A brief word on Truth & Unity (illustrated)

by Frank Turk

I have three pictures for you today to think about.

Figure #1

Here's a picture we might call "Unity in Truth," right?  A simple Venn diagram which puts all aspects of "Unity" as a subset of "Truth," and I think it's easy, when you see "Unity" this way, you can (and must) believe that as long as you're talking about "Unity," you must be talking about "Truth."

There are some transparent problems with this.  For example, if you start talking about having spiritual solidarity with Muslims because all Unity is a subset of Truth, you are off the rails -- because you are denying some part of what is True in order to obtain Unity. This view of Unity and Truth doesn't actually work.

So let's try another one:

Figure #2

This one eliminates the problem that the first one had by illustrating that there are some aspects of "Unity" which are actually not part of "Truth" -- but it assumes that if you are talking about "Truth" you will automatically demonstrate "Unity."  That is, all Truth is in Unity, but some Unity is outside Truth.

Hey: this is the Internet, folks.  You don't have to go very far to find contrafactual evidence for that statement.  So let's toddle over to yet another attempt to diagram the relationship between "Truth" and "Unity" in order to have a reference point mentally for what we ought to be talking about when we say something like "Unity in Truth."

Figure #3

To which all the readers say, "Aha!"

On the one hand, we have the kind of Unity which is absent from the Truth; on the other hand, we see that some kinds of Truth have nothing to do with Unity; and on the third hand we see that there is a place where we find Unity and Truth together.  This is the one which should help us visualize the relationship between Truth and Unity.

But so what?  Why break out the Gadfly color scheme and make us think using something other than words on a Friday?  Well, here's what:

Figure #3A

This is what we need to talk about.  There are probably 10,000 applications of Figure 3 -- like how to think about the "Occupy" movement, for example -- but Figure 3A here now makes us think about US for a second in a way that isn't going to be self-congratulatory.  Because the first thing we have to realize or recognize is that the church, walking around today (as it has from the day after Pentecost) really looks more like this:

Figure #4

That is: while we would love it that the Church actually is the place where Truth creates Unity and Unity reinforces Truth, we actually have some places where we are unified over the wrong things, and we are clinging to kinds of Truth in a way that harms Unity, and we also have things we do which are neither in Truth nor in Unity -- and these are, by a lot, our worst moments.  This is what the LBCF means when it says, "The purest churches under heaven are subject to mixture and error; and some have so degenerated as to become no churches of Christ, but synagogues of Satan; nevertheless Christ always hath had, and ever shall have a kingdom in this world, to the end thereof, of such as believe in him, and make profession of his name."  The Church ought to be the place where Unity and Truth intersect, but because we are talking about people here and not a bag of dimes, it's not going to be a uniform thing from the standpoint of what is and isn't inside it.

So here's the thing: if this is the reality of how the church exists in fact (and I am open to reasonable arguments against this view), why is it that we make such a big thing out of the problem of, for example, inviting T.D. Jakes to a meeting of pastors and calling him a brother in Christ?  Can't we just sort of sweep him up in our confessional escape clause here and say it all comes out in the wash?

Or subsequent to that: can't we just let the Gospel Coalition work it out privately now that this thing has happened?  Is it really necessary to see the calculus which gets us from the statement of the problem to the resolution of the issues -- or can we just be satisfied without all the steps to hear them say, at various times and places, "oh yeah -- we talked it all over, and we're good.  #Brothers #AgreeToDisagree."

Here's my answer to both those question, and then you can have at it:

We can make a big thing of this because the church is actually tasked to be Figure #3 in spite of actually being Figure #4 -- in fact we must make a big thing of it, if we believe our Bibles as we say we do.  We make a big thing out of it because what the Confession warns us about is becoming this:

What we categorically do not want is to become so concerned with Unity that we are simply giving up on Truth for Unity.

Last thing today: this is the struggle which produced the confessions and the creeds.  This concern about how much truth needs to be present in our unity is what caused the Church (big "C") to make creeds and confessions so that the clarity of the Gospel -- the whole Gospel, and all its necessary consequences -- can be both proclaimed and received.  When we choose a path -- no matter who we are, no matter what else we have accomplished for Christ's sake in the course of out lives -- which abates the drift, above, we are doing it wrong.  We are part of the problem and not part of the solution.

That said, this weekend, you personally be in the Lord's house on the Lord's day with the Lord's people where there will be some admixture of falsehood in with the truth -- but at least you will not have forsaken the fellowship of the believers, as some have already done.

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(Less) tersely put: omniscience and certainty revisited

by Dan Phillips

In crafting my maiden-voyage post for this series, I had a number of things in mind. Some ended up reading my mind (poor souls) pretty well, while other nascent thoughts were left on the dusty shelves. To save you a click, here it was:

To profess certainty, non-Christians must feign omniscience.


Christians begin with the confession that they (1) do not possess omniscience, but (2) are by grace confidants of the only one who does possess it.


Thus Christians alone not only can be, but are obliged to be, humbly certain.

The first thought touches on what I might call the "Far Side of Neptune" argument.

Just think of all the "scientific" theories in all of human history that have died horrible deaths in the light of new discoveries. The positions were always held with great confidence right up to the moment they had to be abandoned...and sometimes even afterwards. One new fact, or one new set of facts, provoked a paradigm-shift, however eventual and reluctant.

So, how many facts are there, in the universe, total? More than ten? More than a trillion? More than ten decazillion, cubed? Of course, we could never even guess the number — let alone their nature — of all facts.

That being the case, who can say with certitude that one fact, existing only ten miles under the surface of the far side of Neptune, and only within an eight-inch radius, would not change everything we think we know about... any given subject? One can scoff, he can dismiss, he can bluff... but he can't answer that question. He cannot honestly say that he knows for a certainty, one way or the other, that some fact not yet in evidence would not constitute a transformative, revolutionary revelation.

Yet nobody lives with such uncertainties. Nobody speaks exclusively in the subjective mood. We love the indicative, even more than we should.

So we announce that (say) evolution is an undeniable fact, that the world is X-zillion years old, that homosexuality is not a chosen behavior, that the unborn are not human, that this or that is right or wrong. We speak as if from a perspective of not only omniscience, but omnisapience; as if we both possessed and understood all facts... even though neither is true.

Yet someone has to keep pointing out the emperor's illusory garb: unless the speaker has an infinite grasp of both the identity and the meaning/significance of every last fact in the universe, he has no right to speak with certainty.

Yet the unbeliever regularly does so speak. He does not possess omniscience. He merely feigns it. His intent is to cow opposition (and quiet his own conscience [Rom. 1:18ff.]) by a show of bravado. As we have seen, the tactic often works in the short run.

A second idea lurked under the surface: "Thus Christians alone not only can be, but are obliged to be, humbly certain." The Christian, insofar as he actually practices the faith he professes, necessarily affirms the inerrancy of Scripture as the very word of God. In so doing, he claims to possess a revelation from the only one who actually does know and understand absolutely everything that exists, since He is the Creator of absolutely everything that  exists.

Ironically, however, there are those who (A) claim to be Christian, but (B) choose to feign uncertainty on unpopular issues where the Bible is pretty clear.

Return to the subject of homosexuality. The Bible really is univocal on that particular behavior (e.g. Rom. 1:26-28; 1 Cor. 6:9-11). As it is on wifely submission (e.g. Eph. 5:22, 24). Or the exclusivity of Christ and His Gospel (Jn. 14:6; Acts 4:12). Or the reality of eternal conscious torment of the lost in Hell (Matt. 25:41, 46).

These are not murky penumbras, but clear doctrines. Not that a devoted opponent cannot fabricate some murk; it is axiomatic that great distance from the Word necessarily creates greater murkiness (Isa. 8:20). Any clear statement can be smudged... including this one. But the professed believer who adopts a pose of tentativeness on such issues is in the precise-reverse position of the unbeliever who adopts the pose of certitude.

Because (to allude to another terse post that could have been developed further), if God actually has spoken, everything changes.

In sum: the person who denies God's revelation is obliged to speak uncertainly about everything; the person who affirms God's revelation is obliged to speak certainly about some things (Amos 3:8; Acts 4:19-20; 5:29; 1 Cor. 9:16).

The strange thing is that one so often sees the exact reverse.

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How to think: two ways

by Dan Phillips

How can we figure out what to think about the big issues of spiritual import?

Well, we can ask a lot of questions, all centered around ourselves, or centered around other people. We can, for instance, ask how a concept makes us feel. We can ask whether it makes sense to us. We can test whether it fits the contours of our own personal thought. We can propose paradigms and syllogisms of our own crafting.

We can get into dialogue with others, and listen to them. We can hear their stories, and let those stories move us and mold and form our thinking. We can get a broader sample by reading bios, looking at polls, reading the mainstream media. We can embrace their questions and their rationales and their hierarchies, let them set the agenda for the endeavor.

We can sample this and that "faith-tradition," as broadly as we care to do. See what other men and women have done with it in the name of religion. If it important to us to be seen as (or to see ourselves as) cosmopolitan, we can search the world over 'till we think we find true love.

Then, once we've formed what feels right, what makes sense, what appeals, what best suits us — then, I say, we can launch, journey, and arrive.

Or.

Or we can be Christians.

While you're either looking for me to qualify that antithesis, or preparing to demand that I do so, let me just double-down by insisting that I mean exactly what I say. Thinking like a Christian, and thinking like anything else, are two fundamentally distinct processes. They are as different as night and day, and as irreconcilable as left and right.

There are fundamentally two ways to approach any concept, and only two. We can start with God and His Word, or we can start somewhere else; and the "somewhere else" usually boils down to ourselves. This is a philosophical methodology of ancient coinage.

My text here — one of many possible — is Proverbs 1:7.

The fear of Yahweh is the beginning of knowledge;
Wisdom and discipline, dense people belittle. (DJP)

"Beginning" here can mean several things. I bat this around in my book on Proverbs, and explain that I think it means beginning in the sense of starting-place. It is the starting-place not in that we check the box and move on, but in the sense that, if we don't start with the fear of Yahweh, we won't get anywhere in knowledge or wisdom. I liken it to the alphabet. You don't get anywhere with reading without knowing the alphabet; but, having started with the alphabet, you never discard it. You use it constantly, because it permeates all you do when you read.


So likewise the fear of Yahweh is the starting-place of knowledge, and of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10). We start there, or we get nowhere. And, having started there, we never leave it, because it permeates every thought and every chain of reasoning.


It would help to gain a more precise grip of what fear of Yahweh means, then. It has little to do with emotion, or with vapory notions of a mystical awe. Most frequently we find it in a pretty concrete sense in the OT. Kidner well says that is the fear of Yahweh is “that filial relationship which, in the most positive of senses, puts us securely in our place, and God in His” (on Nehemiah 9:32, in Ezra & Nehemiah [Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1979], 113).

The fear of Yahweh is a mindframe that reverses Genesis 3, in effect. Eve was motivated by self-concern. The repentant believer is motivated by God-concern (cf. Deuteronomy 6:5ff.). Eve decided to test God's Word by her judgment and experience. The repentant believer tests his judgment and experience by God's Word.

So when the first sort of person we discussed finds that he, or many people, are repulsed by a concept affirmed in the Bible, he's all aflutter to appease the crowd or himself. He is greatly moved by reports (or sensations) of being repulsed, turned off, devastated, psychologically crushed, terrified or traumatized by that Biblical tenet. He'll go to great lengths to quiet those negative feelings or reactions; if the Bible doesn't yield peaceably, so much the worse for it.

By stark contrast, the second sort views the lot and says, "So? What of it?" He has abdicated the throne, and he doesn't forget it. God is Lord of his thinking. His first question is not "How do I feel about this?" nor "How do others feel about this?" His first question is "What does God say about this?"

Perhaps another way of seeing it is in what moves, when push comes to shove. The first sort of person, confronted with uncongenial truths in the Bible, will ignore them, deny them, question them, fiddle with them, redefine them to oblivion, or otherwise sweep them under the rug. In his case, it is no questions: the truths are what must be moved.

The second sort, finding himself in the same situation, will confront his feelings and his prejudices and his ignorance. He will regard these as enemies to be repented of and dealt death to and disowned — not precious jewels to be adored and displayed.

It is, in a blunt word, the difference between a rebel and a slave.

Or, put another way, it is the difference between Heaven and Hell.

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Love and Truth: Together Forever

by Phil Johnson

The following blogpost is an excerpt adapted from an article I contributed to the current issue of Bible Study Magazine, the hard-copy periodical put out by Logos Bible Software. The full article contains an exposition of 2 John. This is just a teaser. Get the magazine.

t's not easy, especially nowadays, to keep love and truth together in a balanced way.

Our culture force-feeds us a postmodern notion of love. Tolerance, diversity, and broad-mindedness are its defining features.

Meanwhile, truth is generally held in high suspicion, if not treated with outright contempt. After all, if the very essence of love is to accept all points of view, how could it possibly be virtuous to believe that one idea is true to the exclusion of all others? Indeed, many in our culture regard emphatic truth-claims as inherently unloving. As a result, truth is regularly sacrificed in the name of love.

As Christians, we need to understand love from a biblical perspective. Authentic love "rejoices with the truth" (1 Corinthians 13:6). Love and truth are perfectly symbiotic, and each virtue is essential to the other. Love without truth has no character. Truth without love has no power.

In fact, when radically separated from one another, both virtues cease to be anything more than mere pretense. Love deprived of truth quickly deteriorates into sinful self-love. Truth divorced from love always breeds sanctimonious self-righteousness.

Nowhere in Scripture is the essential connection between these two cardinal virtues more clearly highlighted than in 2 John. Love and truth are the key words in the salutation of that brief 13-verse epistle, and the central theme throughout is the unbreakable interdependence between these two essential qualities of Christlikeness.

John is the perfect apostle to write on this theme. Jesus had nicknamed John and his brother James "Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder" (Mark 3:17)—doubtless because of their fiery zeal for the truth. At first, their passion was not always tempered with love, and we see a glimpse of that in Luke 9:54, when they wanted to call down fire from heaven upon a village of Samaritans who had rebuffed Christ.

In later years, however, John distinguished himself as the Apostle of Love, specially highlighting the theme of love in his gospel and in all three of his epistles.

And yet, as we see in all his epistles, he never lost his zeal for the truth. He did, however, learn to keep it wedded to a proper, Christlike love. And in his short second epistle, where he has some hard things to say in defense of the truth, he is careful to give first place to love. Before getting into the main issue (how to deal with supposed Christian teachers who deny essential truth) he accents once more the supreme importance of obedience to Jesus' command "that we love one another" (v. 5; cf. John 13:34-35).

Christians today desperately need to learn how to ground love properly in the truth. We must not succumb to pressure from our culture to spurn or bury the truth of Scripture under a false and foggy notion of love.

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The Reason Jesus was Born

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 "Jesus, the King of Truth," a sermon preached Thursday evening, 19 December 1872, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London.

hrist did not merely speak the truth, but he was truth. Had he been truth embodied in an angelic form, he had possessed small power over our hearts and lives; but perfect truth in a human form has royal power over renewed humanity. Truth embodied in flesh and blood has power over flesh and blood. Hence, for this purpose was he born.

So when ye hear the bells ringing out at Christmas, think of the reason why Jesus was born; dream not that he came to load your tables and fill your cups; but in your mirth look higher than all earth-born things. When you hear that in certain churches there are pompous celebrations and ecclesiastical displays, think not for this purpose was Jesus born.

No; but look within your hearts, and say, for this purpose was he born: that he might be a King, that he might rule through the truth in the souls of a people who are by grace made to love the truth of God.

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What did Jesus (not) say about... truth and love?

by Dan Phillips

"Doctrine doesn't matter. All that matters is that you love, love, love."

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The Beauty of Truth

. . . and a lesson about true worship

by Phil Johnson

"One thing I have asked from the Lord, that I shall seek: That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord and to meditate in His temple."—Psalm 27:4

hat did David have in mind when he spoke of "gaz[ing] upon the beauty of the Lord" in the Lord's Temple? Surely it was not any physical beauty embodied in the Tabernacle itself or its furnishings. Nor is it likely that David saw much loveliness in the Temple liturgy, which featured nonstop animal sacrifices that were anything but beautiful.

As a matter of fact, the Tabernacle where David worshiped was a temporary, makeshift arrangement on mount Moriah. In 2 Chronicles 1:3, we are told that the Tabernacle of Moses' time was kept at Gibeon. Presumably, most of the tabernacle's furnishings were kept in storage there, too—until a generation after David, when Solomon built a more glorious Temple. During David's reign, the tent that was situated on the future temple grounds in Jerusalem was just a temporary place David had prepared as a shelter for the ark of the covenant. There was nothing elaborate about it. In fact, David himself thought the temporary tabernacle was woefully inadequate, and he pleaded in vain with God to let him build a permanent, more elaborate, place of worship (2 Samuel 7:1-13).

So be sure you understand what David is saying in Psalm 27. The whole psalm is an expression of longing for his favorite place of sanctuary—"the house of the Lord." But it was not the structure, or the location per se, that gave him a place of sanctuary. And "the beauty of the Lord" that he wrote about could not have had anything to do with the tabernacle itself, its furnishings, or the bloody rituals involved in the offering of sacrifices.

But when David speaks of "the beauty of the Lord" in verse 4, he is talking about the glories of divine truth. That's obvious from the parallel phrases: "To behold the beauty of the Lord / And to meditate in His temple."

David's profound love for the beauty of revealed truth is evident everywhere in his poetry. In fact, the psalms themselves were inspired verses—God's Word in written form, reciting His attributes, rehearsing His faithfulness, exalting His glory. Those psalms constituted the music of Israel's worship. The very essence of worship for them was (and still ought to be for us) a celebration and recitation of God's truth. True worship is not the spewing forth of indiscriminate and unintelligible passion; it is and must always be anchored in truth, and a celebration of the magnificent beauty of God's self-revelation.

True worship is not the spewing forth of indiscriminate and unintelligible passion; it is and must always be anchored in truth.

Israel's worship was so much focused on truth revealed in verbal form that the important thing about the psalms themselves is not whatever musical accompaniment they were sung to, but the truth they conveyed. We know that the psalms were sung with great passion; after all, Psalm 150 outlines a whole orchestra of musical and percussion instruments that accompanied them. But it's significant that the tunes were not preserved for us. The words were.

For all the debates and arguments about musical styles in our corporate worship today, we should not lose sight of the fact that the real beauty of Israel's corporate worship was embodied in the truth the psalms conveyed, not in the musical style or the tunes.

In fact, in Hebrew poetry, it's the ideas that rhyme, not the sound of the words. That's why Hebrew poetry is full of parallelisms. The true beauty of the poetry is unveiled in the ideas the words express.

And Scripture was always at the heart of corporate worship in Israel. My favorite picture of Old Testament worship is Nehemiah 8, where the people of Jerusalem simply stood for hours as the priests read the Word of God. They weren't singing, swaying to the choir and orchestra, or indulging in any kind of pageantry. They were listening to (and being profoundly moved by) the Word of God as it was read and explained to them.

That is the same "beauty" David spoke of in this psalm. When in the final phrase of verse 4 he mentions "meditat[ing] in" (or, as some versions have it, "inquir[ing] at") the Lord's Temple, that is the clear implication. We see David's passion for the truth expressed again in the prayer section of the psalm—especially verse 11, where he prays, "Teach me Your way, O Lord." He wanted to learn more about God and immerse himself in the truth of God's Word.

That, after all, is where the beauty and glory of the Lord are most clearly unveiled for us.

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Unity Doesn't Require Uniformity, But It Does Require a Commitment to the Essentials of Christianity

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 "Peace at Home, and Prosperity Abroad," a message delivered on a Wednesday evening, 9 May 1860, to the London Missionary Society, at Whitefield's Tabernacle, Moorfields.

think we must look very carefully and very steadfastly to the soundness of that gospel which we proclaim and preach. Soundness, I say—and here possibly I may be touching upon a delicate subject, but what signifieth if that subject be of the utmost and highest importance?

There should be, I aver, in the declaration of the ministers of Christ, not uniformity, for that is not consistent with life, but unity—which is not only consistent with life, but which is one of the highest marks of a healthy existence.

I do not think the time will ever come when we shall all of us see eye to eye, and shall all use the same terms and phrases in setting forth doctrinal truths. I do not imagine there ever will be a period, unless it should be in that long-looked for millennium, when every brother thou be able to subscribe to every other brother's creed; when we shall be identical in our apprehensions, experiences, and expositions of the gospel in the fullest sense of the word. But I do maintain there should be, and there must be if our churches are to be healthy and sound, a constant adherence to the fundamental doctrines of divine truth.

I should be prepared to go a very long way for charity's sake, and admit that very much of the discussion which has existed even between Arminians and Calvinists has not been a discussion about vital truth, but about the terms in which that vital truth shall be stated. When I have read the conflict between that mighty man who made these walls echo with his voice. Mr. Whitfield, and that other mighty man equally useful in his day, Mr. Wesley, I have felt that they contended for the same truths, and that the vitality of Godliness was not mainly at issue in the controversy.

But, my brethren, if it should ever come to be a matter which casts doubts upon the divinity of Christ, or the personality of the Holy Ghost, if it should come to a matter of using gospel terms in a sense the most contrary to that which has ever been attached to them in any age of the truth; if it should ever come to the marring and spoiling of our ideas of Divine justice, and of that great atonement which is the basis of the whole gospel, as they have been delivered to us; then it is time my brethren once for all that the scabbard be thrown aside, that the sword be drawn. Against any who assails those precious vital truths which constitute the heart of our holy religion, we must contend even to the death.

It is not possible that an affirmative and negative can be two views of the same truth. We are continually told when one man contradicts another, that he does but see with other eyes. Nay, my brethren, the one man is blind, he does not see at all, the other sees, having the eyes of his understanding enlightened. There may be two views of truth, but two views of truth cannot be directly antagonistic. One must be the true view and the other the false view. No stretch of my imagination can ever allow me to anticipate the time can come when "yes" and "no" can lie comfortably down in the same bed. I cannot conceive by any means there ever can be a matrimonial alliance between positive and negative.

Think ye such things might exist! Verily there were giants at one time, when the sons of God saw the daughters of men; and we may live to see gigantic heresies, when God's own children may look upon the fair daughters of philosophy, and monster delusions shall stalk across the earth.

A want of union about truth too clearly proves that the body of the Church is not in a healthy state. No man's system can be said to be in a normal condition if that man prefers ashes to bread, and prefers ditch water to that which flows from the bubbling fountain. A man must be unhealthy or he would not use such garbage.

We must look to the preservation of the health of the Church.

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What did Jesus (not) say about... His teaching?

by Dan Phillips

"I think ______...."

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"Tolerance" vs. Truthfulness

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 an article titled "Ministers Sailing under False Colours," originally published the February 1870 Sword and Trowel:




ur forefathers were far less tolerant than we are, and it is to be feared that they were also more honest. It will be a sad discount upon our gain in the matter of charity if it turn out that we have been losers in the department of truthfulness.

There is no necessary connection between the two facts of growth in tolerance and decline in sincerity, but we are suspicious that they have occurred and are occurring at the same moment.

We freely accord to theological teachers a freedom of thought and utterance which in other ages could only be obtained by the more daring at serious risks, but we also allow an amount of untruthfulness in ministers, which former ages would have utterly abhorred. . . .

Our love to the most unlimited religious liberty incites us to all the sterner abhorrence of the license which like a parasite feeds thereon.

the plea of spiritual liberty, of late years certain teachers who have abjured the faith of the churches which employ them, have nevertheless endeavored, with more or less success, to retain their offices and their emoluments. . . .

Our complaint is . . . not that the men changed their views, and threw up their former creeds, but that having done so they did not at once quit the office of minister to the community whose faith they could no longer uphold; their fault is not that they differed, but that, differing, they sought an office of which the prime necessity is agreement.

All the elements of the lowest kind of knavery meet in the evil which we now denounce. Treachery is never more treacherous than when it leads a man to stab at a doctrine which he has solemnly engaged to uphold, and for the maintenance of which he receives a livelihood. . . .

It is frequently bewailed as a mournful circumstance that creeds were ever written; it is said, "Let the Bible alone be the creed of every church, and let preachers explain the Scriptures as they conscientiously think best." Here again we enter into no debate, but simply beg the objector to remember that there are creeds, that the churches have not given them up, that persons are not forced to be ministers of these churches, and therefore if they object to creeds they should not offer to become teachers of them; above all, they should not agree to teach what they do not believe.

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On creeds and those who eschew them

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 an article titled "The Baptist Union Censure," published as an introduction to the 1888 volume of The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit sermons. This was Spurgeon's response to a censure of him from the Baptist Union, at the height of the Down-Grade Controversy.

o say that "a creed comes between a man and his God" is to suppose that it is not true; for truth, however definitely stated, does not divide the believer from his Lord. So far as I am concerned, that which I believe I am not ashamed to state in the plainest possible language; and the truth I hold I embrace because I believe it to be the mind of God revealed in his infallible Word. How can it divide me from God who revealed it? It is one means of my communion with my Lord, that I receive his words as well as himself, and submit my understanding to what I see to be taught by him. Say what he may, I accept it because he says it, and therein pay him the humble worship of my inmost soul.

I am unable to sympathize with a man who says he has no creed; because I believe him to be in the wrong by his own showing. He ought to have a creed. What is equally certain, he has a creed—he must have one, even though he repudiates the notion. His very unbelief is, in a sense, a creed.

The objection to a creed is a very pleasant way of concealing objection to discipline, and a desire for latitudinarianism. What is wished for is a Union which will, like Noah's Ark, afford shelter both for the clean and for the unclean, for creeping things and winged fowls. Every Union, unless it is a mere fiction, must be based upon certain principles. How can we unite except upon some great common truths?

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Evangelical Bunko Artists

How I Learned the Hard Way that Pious Gullibility Is No Virtue
by Phil Johnson



y last temporary part-time job in college was proofreading at Moody Press. I was hired to work twelve hours a week for about four weeks in the summer of '76. I was getting my B. A. at the end of the short summer term, and after that I hoped to find work in some kind of local-church ministry for a year; then my plan was to enroll at Dallas Seminary the following fall.

But I loved the work at Moody Press so much that on the day before graduation I signed on to work there full time as an editorial assistant. That simple, unplanned, last-minute decision was the pivot on which my entire life and career have turned.

(Someday I'll blog a full account of how I was hired by Moody Press in the most unlikely of circumstances. I also have a hundred vivid memories of that summer and the following one that would make excellent blog-fodder. I lived in a brownstone walk-up two blocks from Wrigley, worked most nights in a downtown funeral home, ran the first Chicago marathon, sang in the Moody Church choir, and met and married Darlene. Those were the best of times.)


nyway, one of the first books I proofread for Moody was a biographical account of a young woman who said she had lived through a tragedy-filled childhood in utter poverty on a Kickapoo reservation, found Christ through a remarkable turn of providence, endured all kinds of persecution, but persevered to become a motivational speaker for evangelical women's groups.

Crying Wind was the name of both the book and the author. Within a year of its release, Crying Wind became Moody Press's best-selling book ever. It was an extremely well-told story, and a real tear-jerker. To read it was to establish a deeply sympathetic personal connection with the author.

I loved the book. Everyone did.

Crying Wind herself spent a day in the Moody Press office shortly after I finished checking her page proofs. She was there mainly to meet with our sales and marketing staff, but she went to lunch with the editorial team. In her book she had portrayed herself as shy and emotionally tender—easily intimidated. Our editorial staff was a sizable group of very strong personalities and sticklers for grammatical precision, not necessarily an easy group to warm up to all at once. Crying Wind had expressed misgivings about the unfamiliar big-city features of Chicago. So we were all keen to put her at ease.

At the time, she lived near Tulsa, literally in the neighborhood I came from. Growing up in Oklahoma, I had several Native-American friends and relatives, so I knew that she and I had a few things in common we could talk about. I had looked forward to meeting her.

Right away, many things about her surprised me. One was that I never would have guessed she had experienced all she described in her book. Nothing about her features, her verbal skills, or her mannerisms suggested that she was Native American or that she had grown up in abject poverty. For someone as deprived of education and as utterly isolated from Main-Street America as her book claimed, she was also amazingly conversant with pop culture. She looked and talked like a Wheaton College alum, which is not at all what I expected from her own description of life among the Kickapoo.

Having read her book, I was not surprised that she was a compelling story-teller. But what did surprise me about that was how many of the stories she told during lunch that day had the ring of familiarity. I had heard slightly different versions of at least three of her tales. For instance, she regaled us with the dead-cat-in-a-shopping bag story. I'd heard that story (with some slight differences) about a year earlier, but in Crying Wind's version it happened to someone she knew. That didn't trouble me a great deal, because I figured if it happened in Tulsa, I might have simply heard a third- or fourth-hand version. If Crying Wind personally knew the woman with the cat-in-the-bag, hers must be the canonical version of the tale.

I don't think the expression "urban myth" had been coined yet in 1977, but if I were going to describe her repertoire of stories today, I'd say it seemed like she culled them all from the pages of Snopes.com.

At the time I merely thought it a mind-blowing quirk of cosmic destiny that Crying Wind had so much personal involvement in so many amazing stories I'd already heard. At the time, I was young, naive, and no doubt willingly over-gullible. I wanted to believe her, and the almost supernatural serendipity of her tales merely increased the mystique of this amazing person.

Crying Wind—the book—became a runaway best seller. In fact, in less than two years it became (by far) the best-selling book Moody Press had ever published. Crying Wind wrote a sequel and by 1979 she was working on a third book. On the strength of her stories she had developed a thriving public ministry, speaking to large women's groups and churches. She always dressed in an authentic-looking native-American costume.

But by early 1979 a number of people were questioning Crying Wind's claims, including people from her own family. Moody Press investigated and soon learned that her entire story was fabricated. Crying Wind had no Native American ancestors. Her real name was Linda Davison Stafford. She had grown up and gone to high school in Woodland Park, Colorado, where she earned awards in creative writing.

Furthermore, many of the major plot points in her story bore an uncanny resemblance to another author's phony life story. If I recall correctly, in a 1979 Christianity Today article about the fraud, they published her photo from a high-school yearbook. She was clearly a product of white middle-class American culture, not at all what she had claimed.



To Moody Press's credit, they were the first to expose the fraud, and they immediately dropped Mrs. Stafford's books from their line, even though both volumes were still (at the time) atop the Christian best-seller lists. Warren Wiersbe (my pastor in those days and a good friend to me) wryly told me he thought Moody Press should simply change the book's title to Shooting Bull and keep it in their line as a fiction book.

He was joking, of course, but a few years later, Harvest House did virtually that. They picked up the book without changing a thing (not even the cover art), called it a "biographical novel," and re-released it. Crying Wind herself continued speaking to women's groups in her Indian costume. Most of them had heard all about the scandal, of course, but they wanted to believe her story. They wanted it to be true so badly that many of them convinced themselves that Moody Press (and others who had merely told the truth) were the real villains in the whole ordeal.

Crying Wind is not so well known today, but she is still speaking to evangelical groups under the pretense that her books tell "her life story as she remembers it."

Several Native American groups even list her books as valuable resources. The fraud she perpetrated, though definitively exposed and debunked more than thirty-one years ago, still lives on.

She's not alone. Over the past 40 years, the evangelical movement has given birth to dozens of flash-in-the-pan phonies, frauds, and bunko artists. John Todd, Mike Warnke, Alberto Rivera, Bob Larson, and Ted Haggard are a few names that come to mind. Todd and Rivera are both dead, but Jack Chick continues to publish their fraudulent claims as true. All the others, though now out of the mainstream, are still engaged in some form of public "ministry" today—still profiting off reputations woven with webs of lies.

This is relevant, of course, to the case of Ergun Caner, erstwhile Dean of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary. For most of the past decade, Caner has been making demonstrably false claims exaggerating his childhood involvement in Islamic fundamentalism, his early indoctrination in the politics of Jihad, and his post-conversion "debates" with Islamic clerics.

Liberty University investigated his claims, acknowledged that he had made "factual statements that are self-contradictory," demoted him from the presidency of their seminary, and issued a statement announcing that Caner has "apologized for the discrepancies and misstatements." But they kept him on their faculty, and the Liberty party-line seems to be that the investigation actually "exonerated" Caner.

Those who questioned Caner's honesty in the first place are clamoring for more precise answers to some very specific questions. Caner himself is saying nothing, and no less than Norman Geisler has issued a series of statements more or less in defense of Caner—basically suggesting that the whole controversy in the first place was a Muslim-Calvinist conspiracy to discredit Caner.

When I read Dr. Geisler's articles on the Caner scandal, it brought to mind a meeting I had with Dr. Geisler during the big Council on Biblical Inerrancy convention in San Diego in 1982. I was still working for Moody Press at the time, and Dr. Geisler was one of our authors. I needed to meet with him to discuss the cover design for Moody's re-release of A General Introduction to the Bible. That question was settled fairly quickly, and then we had a long discussion over dinner about the state of evangelicalism. The Crying Wind scandal came up in our conversation that evening, and Dr. Geisler expressed his dismay over the pious gullibility of evangelicals.

He was exactly right about that.

For the very same reason he is wrong about the Caner situation today.

However, the pathetic track record of evangelicals' consistent failure in dealing with frauds and bunko artists in our midst leads me to be pessimistic about any real resolution in the Caner scandal. The Liberty investigation most definitely did not "exonerate" Caner, but he remains on the Liberty faculty. Caner himself is stonewalling while a handful of his most outspoken supporters are doing their best to demonize his critics. If Liberty continues officially to offer sanctuary to Caner, he will eventually be able to weather the controversy without ever actually admitting any specific wrongdoing. Evangelicals—who have no stomach for protracted controversies and a 40-year habit of offering unconditional restoration to fallen leaders whether they truly repent or not—will soon turn against Caner's critics.

Of course, by this approach Caner, Liberty, and the little cadre of Arminian bloggers who are determined no-matter-what to defend Caner have already lost all credibility with those who love truth. That loss will most likely be permanent. Sadly, it is another major loss for American-style Evangelicalism, which has already made itself a laughingstock for all the wrong reasons.

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