All of the Remedies

by The late Frank Turk

After last week, the person reading this blog without an agenda (that is: without any built-in qualms against this blog) ought to be able to go and do likewise because they have been given all the rudimentary instructions the Bible gives someone who has the Gospel for dealing with something like racism.  But let's face it: not many come here under those terms.  Many come here looking for a reason to say, "yeah, but ..." or "no."

I'm here to help.

Let's imagine someone who has listened to the audio linked in this post, and then read all the fundamental non-biblical literature posted here and here to get a picture of what a semi-secular view of the problem is, and then waded through the muddled and simplistic things written here and here and here.  That person, after a week of rumination on these things, then says, "Frank, I just don't get it.  I mean: sure.  Theology, right.  But what is it that I am supposed to -do- if that's what I believe.  I mean: some other bloggers and authors have told me I should invite people to dinner rather than think about the problems of dignity or of competing consciousnesses  in the face of cruelty and dehumanization.  I completely understand how to invite somebody to dinner.  I do not understand all the big words you have used.  And to be honest: I think you don't either.  I think the problem is you hide behind the big words to avoid real people, and that I think it's a lot more helpful to tell me to invite people to dinner than it is to read W.E.B. DuBois from the turn of the last century and imagine that this is still the problem of black people today.  What's the actual 'to-do' item if all the things you have posted on and around your hiatus are true?"

My initial response to this way of approaching what I wrote is to think that this hypothetical person needs to graduate from the 6th grade.  From my perspective, I know a lot of 6th graders (all homeschooled, so that might be the problem and the solution) who could follow my instructions and get at least an "E" for effort.  However, because we live in an age when people demand instructions and then don't follow them anyway, I'll elaborate.

The first error my posts seek to foil is the error of saying, "If you are a White person you should ... but if you are a Black person, you should rather ..."  If there is a solution to racism, it is the same solution to both sides because while the problem may manifest different symptoms on both sides, at the end of the drama we should still be able to agree that what we really want is what MLK wanted -- "[that] little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."  For that to happen, whoever you are, you personally need to behave in such a way that shows you clearly want to be judged by your own character, and you must judge others only by their character and not (for example) by their job or their neighborhood.  If you cannot agree to this, you are not about to implement the Gospel solution -- you are about to implement someone else's solution.  The "to do" there is to do unto others as you would have them do to you.  I know it's a cliche and may sound trite, but it is still a red-letter Jesus saying.

The second error my posts seek to foil is the one where we think that somehow some opportunities are beneath us.  In a sane world, I should have to append that sentiment with the clause "or above us (as in, out of our reach)," but the problem we have is that we think the only opportunities worth striving for are the ones which cause us to be Oprah or Bill Gates -- and the truth is that there are ample opportunities still for those who are willing to start where everyone really starts in order to get someplace worth arriving toward.  For example, if you want a career in Logistics (note: a career, like most people have, not to own all trucks), you could start by driving a truck -- and making about $40K your first year.  Given that your living expenses driving a truck over the road are pretty low (you usually live in the truck), that's a pretty decent wage -- and after doing that for 5 years, you could have saved enough to go to college and get a degree in logistics -- after which you have 5 years experience and a degree and no debt.

My point being: nobody dreams of being a truck driver -- but in a world where people are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, there is not merely nothing wrong with being a truck driver: it is actually a credit for you to do that in order to achieve something greater.  If you refuse to take that route (or one like it) in order to get where you think you want to go, that is not the fault of other people: that is part of the content of your character.  Seeing opportunities in the short term as beneath you is your problem, not the problem of someone else who, for example, worked summers and nights to pay for his college degree, and then worked from the bottom toward the "up".  If you see an opportunity like that as beneath you, you are your own enemy.  The "to do" there is to do the things everyone is expected to do to move from being without any skills to being skilled labor who gets skilled labor wages. Do not think too highly of yourself, as it says someplace in an ancient letter.

The third error my posts seek to expose and desiccate is the problem of false guilt -- either the false guilty we seek to impose on others by counting them as an ingredient in a statistical pie or the false guilt one might be willing to accept in order to honor someone else's identity crisis.  There is only one kind of guilt: actual responsibility for a crime or for doing something bad or wrong.  Everything else masquerading as guilt is actually a lie told to gain an advantage over you.  Put another way, the method for dismantling the problem of double-consciousness is not to create the same for others.  The right solution is to see that the aboriginal problem is a falsehood imposed by others and unfortunately accepted by those who bear it -- and it must be rejected by both to kill it dead.  If that is the solution of one sort of double-consciousness, it is the solution for them all.  That is actually the high plane of dignity and discipline, the place where we are not degenerating into either physical violence or moral injustice.  And the funny part of this is that if we are doing this actively, we won't have to ask ourselves about who we have invited to dinner lately -- because those we are inviting are those we have met, travelling on the same path we expect to be travelling on.  The "to do" here turns out to be to put away bitterness, anger, wrath and malice.

That outcome can sound like some sort of attractional model of like-attracts-like, but it is not a merely-pragmatic and merely-convenient approach.  What has happened as we will have implemented all of the remedies -- among which, most importantly, is the Gospel -- we will find ourselves in love with things the world does not love, and attracted to people the world did not expect us to love, and in close friendship and unity with people who now share not just some socio-economic goals but an eternal goal.  The defeat of racism comes from defeating the root cause of sin in the world, and that doesn't start with a culture war: it starts with our personal war on sin when we are faced with our own hearts changed by the Gospel.

If that does not help you, you're looking for the wrong answers.  You're looking for an explanation in the wrong terms.

The comments are open.

Post Script: I have received  a note from a trusted source that this post in particular, but this series in general, has sounded angry.  For example, if someone cannot understand how to do what is explained in the previous post, saying their ability to give it the ol' college try is actually not up to par for the 6th grade in this post is insulting.

Here's my concession to that criticism: everyone isn't always wrong.  It's possible that there are many mature and serious people who have never thought about the implications of putting off the old self because one has been raised with Christ.  How many of them are Christians I leave for the reader to discern.

For the rest, I make no apologies for being angry at the kinds of objections these posts deal with, and the reasons for those objections.

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The Urgency of Our Evangelistic Duty

Your weekly dose of Spurgeon
posted by Phil Johnson

The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from The Spurgeon Archive. What follows is brief, but it's one of Spurgeon's most famous quotations. It comes from "The Wailing of Risca," a sermon preached Sunday Morning, 9 December 1860, at Exeter Hall, London.

h my brothers and sisters in Christ, if sinners will be damned, at least let them leap to hell over our bodies. And if they will perish, let them perish with our arms about their knees, imploring them to stay, and not madly to destroy themselves. If hell must be filled, at least let it be filled in the teeth of our exertions, and let not one go there unwarned and unprayed for.

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Something more Sleek and Functional

by Frank Turk

So I ask you: how much faith do you need, really, to be saved?

One answer the NT gives us is this: you don't really have to know anything to be saved. That is, you can the faith of a little child, and God will welcome you (cf. Mt 18:1-6, for the proof-texters and OGs everywhere). You can have a simple faith, a milk-drinking faith (cf. 1Cor 3), and be saved.

But there's another piece of the NT which frequently gets soft-soaked, and it's the answer which James gives: while a simple faith saves, it does not save only in the eternal sense. That is: it saves you to maturity:

the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

That is, your simple faith is also a living and breathing faith which grows you through trials to a "complete faith".

Many folks read this – rightly, btw – to mean "a right faith does works", and that's fine. That's a good application. But is it the only application? Is it the only one James intends here?

For example, when James says,

But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.

isn’t James saying that God's word is there so that we can take action upon it, and learn how to live in faith?

And glancing up this post a second, isn’t it also Paul's point in 1 Cor 3 that the Corinthians ought not to be forever babies in the faith, but that eventually they have to move on to the meat of the word? That is: their faith ought to make more of them, and be more to them than (as Paul implies) baby food.

So in that, there is a second answer to what you ought to know to have a saving faith: it ought to be true, and correct, insofar as you are mature and maturing in your faith.

Here's what I mean by that – by way of example. Let's think about math for a second. My son loves math (thank God – please Jesus make him a man who has a heart for God and people who is an accountant), and we are working the flash cards. He can add, he can subtract, and he's mastering "times". Which is great, if you ask me: he ought to learn how to do "times" as if it was written in his heart.

The other day, he asked me, "Daddy, do you do math at work?" And the answer, of course, is yes – I do a lot of math at work, a lot of it requiring advanced algebra. So I told him, "yes, son: I do a LOT of math at work."

"Can you show it to me?" he asked.

Well, sure I can show it to him – so I opened up my laptop, opened up some spreadsheets, and I showed him the greek-like formulas we have either borrowed or invented at work to discover things like how many dollars we are earning per hour given the rate of production vs. the standard work for a given work center. And then there's the statistical stuff I have to do verify and compare forecasts. And then there's the financial comparisons vs. plan and vs. last year. And so on.

(hey: wake up. The boring part's over)

So he said to me, "but where are the numbers?" See: in his understanding of math, you need two numbers to make an equation, and those two numbers yield a fixed answer – which, factually, is the right view of arithmetic, and ultimately the right view of how a formula yields an answer you can use.

So I tell him, "Son, we fill in the numbers when they come by. This kind of math shows us how to think about certain problems, and when a problem comes up, we change out the letters for numbers to get an answer."

"WHAT?!" he yelled, sort of laughing. "Daddy, you can't add up two letters!? You can't add 'A' plus 'B' and get 'C' – they're LETTERS!"

Well, really: he's right. Even in algebra II, the formula gets solved down to its simplest state, or most useful state, and you don't really get numbers at the end – you get formulas. But understanding that requires a leap from linear, arithmetic thinking to something more conceptual – something which is taking in the big picture of how adding 2 + 2, or making 3 "times" 4, works.

So my son can have a completely -correct- view of arithmetic, and be -unable- to grasp algebra yet. That doesn't make his view of math "false": it makes it incomplete. He's not a heretic to the math community: he's a student. His view is correct insofar as it is advanced, but it doesn’t account for all of math.

Now, if in 10 years my son and I sit down and he says to me, "Dad, open up your laptop for me – I want to see what you're doing at work," I'll be glad to oblige. My fatherly optimism will be that he's just completed Trig and he's about to show me how to simplify some of my 3-legged-dog formulas into something a little more sleek and functional.

But if we open up the laptop and when he looks at the spreadsheets he says to me, "You know what, Sir Dude? [he uses 'sir' out of respect because he was raised right] I still don't buy the algebra thing. I know what you call it – I just don't buy it. It doesn’t work. 2 + 2 = 4; A + B doesn't equal anything. All this stuff you say you've been doing for the last 10 years is just guff. And there's no way for you to prove to me that it does work."

At that point, we have crossed over from incomplete knowledge to something else – a knowledge which refuses to grow, refuses to receive more. It's willful ignorance.

In Biblical terms, it's what Paul called the "shipwreck of faith" – that is, when someone rejects "love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith." "Love" is certainly the product, but one of the components of that love is a "good conscience". In my example, my son can’t be said to have a good conscience – because he establishes what cannot be true apart from the facts which are plainly in evidence. In our faith life, we cannot be said to have a good conscience if we are unwilling to receive the facts of faith.

That's a big deal, for example, for Catholics – because the right-minded Catholic view is that Protestants who willfully refuse the teaching of the Church are unrepentant sinners. And if they are right about what kind of final authority the Church as an institution holds, they're right: you can't have a good conscience when you reject the truth.

But for Protestants – not merely evangelicals, but confessional Protestants – what Scripture teaches us is what we must accept as the truth about our faith. And as we advance out of spiritual immaturity to spiritual maturity, the burden upon us to accept and demonstrate the truth in Scripture becomes a greater responsibility. This is why the warning to teachers is such a serious thing; that's why the anathema against a different gospel – and the criteria for knowing what that is – is an anathema and not just a rebuke.

And for good measure, think about this: that's why John called the Pharisees who came to see him a brood of vipers, and why Jesus called the same men whitewashed tombs -- because the Gospel had not changed, but these men, who ought to have known better, did not know it when they saw it.

You don't need a perfect confession to save you, but you do need a faith which is perfecting you, not leading you into more error.

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Filthy Calvinists, and the people who love to hate them

by Frank Turk

Before the real antics begin today, our friends at Triablogue have digitally-published a book called The Infidel Delusion to respond to John Loftus' cadre of sad-faced clowns' most recent book, the Christian Delusion -- because it's the Christians, you see, who slavishly follow the thoughts and edicts of their mentors and heroes.

Anyway, Peter Pike's announcement for the book is worth the read as well, and there you can download the PDF for your reading pleasure. Bring a Lunch.

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The best way to ensure, by the providence of God, that I will have a full week at work is to promise to post something controversial which will require significant moderation and a lot of time disambiguating people regarding their own bum preconceptions.



So on Monday, I promised to write a blog post where hating on Calvinism would be on-topic. And here we are.

Back in February 2009, Challies made a post called A Portrayal of Calvinism in which he was reviewing two different books entitled Finding God in The Shack (ugh -- and he survived) where the authors of these books were taking pot-shots at Calvinism.



Before we get to the meat there, I just want to point something out: the real barking dogs of horrible theologically who want to still call themselves Christians always always always find it necessary to beat down on Calvinism in order to say, "see how much better my system of thinking about the Bible and Jesus and God and people is?" Why is that I wonder? Why is Calvinism the whipping boy for people who want to find God in the Shack, and the people who want to say God doesn't know the future, and the people who want to say all roads lead to the same God Almighty, and the ecumenicists, and the social gospelists, and so on?

Why is it that all these people hate Calvinism -- if it's such an obvious falsehood?

That's a thought to ponder if you want to fire up your vitriol in the comments -- in fact I insist: why do all the nut-jobs hate Calvinism most of all rather than, for example, the idea that God is the Eucharist, or that your soul will suffer in purgatory for your sin before you get to spend eternity with God and the Virgin Mary? Why is Calvinism the one they know they have to overcome?

OK -- back to Challies. In what may be the most strongly-worded statement Tim has ever made publicly, he had this to say about the way these books treated Calvinism:

My reaction when reading all of this was, if not anger, real frustration. I hate to think that thousands of people will read such an inaccurate, uninformed, fictitious view of Calvinism (and this by an author who has some credibility by virtue of his position as a Professor of Theology). Even where Rauser is correct, his words often lack the charitable nuance we might well hope for. But in so many ways he is really, really wrong. Not surprisingly, he does not quote any sources; I know of none that would support his statements.

You know: Challies was almost angry. That's saying a lot.



But people hate calvinists, right? I mean, let's do some benchmarking here. I dropped this into Google, and look at the results I got:

About 557,000 sites which are decidedly not Arminian, yes? But when we put the competition into Google, check it out:

Wow! Like DOUBLE the number of sites! Seriously -- if the problem is that there's quite a lot of venom going around, check the internet, because clearly someone out there is wrong.

So what's your beef? You hate Calvinism? Really? Let's hear your beef - in comments which are neither vulgar nor insulting, si vous plait - with only one limiting factor: one comment of complaint per customer, limited by Blogger's new-found character limit of about 4,000 characters.

Have at it. You loyal Calvinists need to buck up for this because it's going to be instructive one way or the other. Stay away from brawling and responding to taunts. You have heard this all before, and all I'm asking is that you spend you time today thinking about why people will be glad to dump on Calvinists in the first place.

I'll moderate at will. Enjoy.

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Best of centuri0n: Practical application

by Frank Turk

[This post when up 5 days before Christmas, 2006; it caused many people to be angered that I pointed out that living in a trailer park in Arkansas has a stigma attached to it. Listen: what I really mean was ... oh nevermind ...]


Let me tell you that you readers have greatly disappointed me this week – stats or not, I have to say that after last week's post and then Santa's stop by yesterday, I think we obviously still have some work to do on you via this blog.

The actual object of my disappointment is the trajectory we can plot between the points of two comments posted here – last week, in the demand for practical examples of loving your neighbor because that's what the Gospel yields, and this week the view rendered that somehow Dan and Santa wishing the members of TeamPyro a swell noel is somehow not substantive.

Listen: the latter is an example of the former. Yes: Dan and Santa do not usually have an open mutual admiration society here at the blog, but these are men with a Christian objective in mind – a Gospel objective. And in that, for them to offer encouragement to each other is an act of Godly and right-minded love. To overlook that is to demonstrate that it doesn't matter how often cent comes out and beats on the drum of “Christ died to make us new men right now”, and it doesn't matter if you read it: you have to “get it”, people.

You. Have to Get. It. You do. You.

If I was really in the right mood, we'd now tear into the parable of the good Samaritan. But I'm not in that mood. I'm in a Christmas mood even if Santa is not going to find that sweet, black Apple Intel for my stocking because he's got no sense of humor and this thing for Presbyterian baptism. So we're going to go instead to the book of Mark, and we're going to watch Jesus love somebody. Please forgive my vulgar use of the NIV here as I am composing off-line and the only Bible I have handy is my Zondervan Reformation Study Bible:

A man with leprosy came to [Jesus] and begged him on his knees, “If you are willing, you can make me clean.”

Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said, “Be clean!” Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cured.

Now, the more-blog-asphyxiated among you will expect that I will at this point expound on the healing of one man who asked for the help, and how God was expending His omnipotence in such a mundane way, and blah blah blah reformed wonkery blah blah blah.

Forget it. There's no way I'm going to make this that boring and not-about-you-and-me on the Wednesday before Christmas. Instead, I'm going to ask you to jump back with me for a second to Leviticus and read with me what it says about the person with leprosy. I'm going to switch over to the KJV because that's the language the Levitical law was written in, right?

Lev 13:44He is a leprous man, he is unclean: the priest shall pronounce him utterly unclean ...

45And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent, and his head bare, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip, and shall cry, Unclean, unclean.46All the days wherein the plague shall be in him he shall be defiled; he is unclean: he shall dwell alone; without the camp shall his habitation be.

Now, you see there? This person is not just in trouble ritually, but he's untouchable by other people – that is, for him to allow other people to touch him is a sin. There's no other thing a person can be where he or she is condemned to “dwell alone” and literally drive others away by crying out “UNCLEAN!” Literally, a leper was filthy by the practice of the Levitical law – unable to be clean. So the application of the Law for this person was, of course, that he was vile.

But Jesus touched this guy anyway – he touched him, and then he healed him. That is, he didn't just meet the ritual need. This Jesus – the one born in the stable, who slept in a feeding trough, but for whom the angels were singing, and whom the Angel said is the son of the most high God – touched a man who was ashamed to be touched. God came across the shame and the guilt to make this man whole.

Listen: if you want a lesson on how to love somebody, learn from this that the first boundary we have to cross to love other people is the boundary of how vile we think others are.This may shock many of you, but I live down the street from a trailer park. It doesn't have any vacancies as far as I can tell, so there's a problem over there: it's full of people. Now, regardless of where you live, that's not really a problem for them -- for many of them, owning a trailer is a step up from living in a rented quad-plex. Or an actual garbage dump. The trailer park is a problem for me.

Because people live there.

People who, btw, are not on any of the church rolls of the 60 churches in my backwater corner of the Earth. I know this because it's common knowledge in the local churches that “we” don't do evangelism there because “it doesn't make any difference”. And by we, folks, I mean “me”.

Somehow, I can write this giant pile of exhortation to you 5000 TeamPyro readers and my much more humble 500 Flame of Fire readers about the joy of the answer to God's wrath in Christmas, but I can't ride a bike over to the trailer park and find out if anyone there has ever heard of the man Christ Jesus.

Why? Because I am afraid to touch the lepers. That is, in my town, the people who live in the trailer park are the same socially as lepers, and to touch them is to touch something vile. It might get on me. I wish they'd say “UNCLEAN” as they shamble through WAL*MART because I'd cut them some space to avoid being mistaken as making eye contact with them. It would make me vile, and Leviticus notwithstanding, being socially vile will never do.

If you want an example of how to love, that's the example, folks: not filling a shoe box anonymously with some stuff for a kid who has a dad in prison (although, I admit, that's pretty good – it's a lot better than doing nothing), but finding that kid, or any of the people in your analogically-local trailer park, and doing something personally costly for them. Like being seen in public with them, and giving them a hug as if you mean it. You know: because you do it more than once to assuage your conscience at Christmas after charging up a bunch of junk that is bound for the next neighborhood garage sale, or after reading a crumby blog post – you love them into the Gospel and out of the leprosy of being a trailer park kid. To the Gospel, not warm fuzzies or some stupid therapudic transitional state, and out of leprosy, and not casually or inconsequentially, but at great cost.

If you want a practical example of how to love, find a person and do the thing for them which is Godly and right, which will shatter their view of how outcast and separated from others they are, and which you are most afraid to do. You do that, and keep doing it, and you are then a messenger for His name's sake.

Don't get snippy about substance if you can't do that. That's the meat and the bread and the glass of red wine of what the Gospel calls us to, and if you can't stomach it, be glad that Santa stops by to wish Dan and Phil and Pecadillo a happy Christmas. That's all you're ready for.

Happy Christmas and may God richly bless you so you can spend those blessing on others. Amen. You are dismissed.

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A Good-Natured Rant

by Frank Turk


With DJP trapped in a vacation of his own making in high-altitude parts-unknown, and Phil suffering through the urban delights of Houston (Eat at Papasitas, Phil!), you're left with me to carry the water for the week, and fortunately for all of us I have a giant stack of books to review in order to maintain my credibility as a blogger who lives up to his end of the bargain when someone sends in a PDF or promo copy for the sake of good will.

If you visit my blog, there are about a dozen books in the sidebar I have listed as "required reading" mostly because they are books I have enjoyed and benefitted from. There are some other books I need to add to that list, but the book I have in my hand today would probably serve most of you as a sort of survey of those books -- a survey of the landscape of the evangelical church.

Warren Cole Smith has published A Lover's Quarrel with The Evangelical Church, which is a sort of late-comer to the cottage industry of recounting the evangelical church's loss of its first love, as they say. Smith sees himself as an insider and longer-term traveller inside the conservative evangelical movement, and as such he has come to a lot of the same conclusions a lot of the rest of us have -- the church is facile, ahistorical, sentimental to the point of being trite and irrelevant, ironically market-driven in spite of its irrelevance, more concerned with gaining an audience rather than growing disciples, and so on. There's a chapter on each of those subjects, and you can really see the problems pretty vividly when he's done.

Which, of course, is fine. These are observations made by David F. Wells, Mark Noll, David F. Wells, Os Guinness, David F. Wells, D. A. Carson, David F. Wells, Mark Dever, Kevin DeYoung, and of course David F. Wells. maybe it's actually David Wells who has done all the legitimate leg-work here and everyone else has sort of cited him or referred to him.

In that, it may be unfair of me to make that my primary criticism of Warren's book: it's not really anything new. However, that criticism misses the numerous and copious end notes (sorry, Dan) he has provided to the reader to demonstrate that he has in fact done his homework and he is in fact not the first guy to bring all this up.

In a real way, all that work makes this conversationally-styled book perhaps all the more damning as it seeks to speak the truth in love to the English-speaking church: this has all actually been said before, and the problems are not really getting all that much better. At some point, the church has to stop reading books which tell us how charming we are or ought to be and instead hold up the mirror to ourselves and say plainly, "you didn't really mean to come out of the house looking like that now, did you?"

So here's the thing: I enjoyed this book. It's nice when a book can say something is deeply wrong with the church and still have confidence (even if it is a sub-textual confidence) in the Gospel in spite of the flaws of the people in churches today. I appreciated the non-apocalytic tone of the book -- it was urgent and serious when it needed to be, but not hardly a "this may be the last Christian generation" sort of jeremiad. It was sort of an old friend in a new pair of jeans and some loafers who came over to the house for a bit of a good-natured rant.

So I recommend it -- on a scale of 5, I'll round up and give it a 4, though students of David Wells will chide me for grade inflation.

I have a couple of other books to review tomorrow, so we'll pick up there, then.

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Grace appeared!

by Frank Turk

First thing today – I wanted to thank Dan for filling in while I was out of the country. You can’t get too much DJP, and someday years from now you’ll wish you had listened to me when I told you that.

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.

Declare these things; exhort and rebuke with all authority. Let no one disregard you.

Briefly today, back to Titus in order that we might finish with the Pastorals in 2009. I am tempted to give you 500 words on the use of the word “For” here, but I’m going to refrain from that to tell you this instead: this paragraph ought to make you weep, or want to weep.

If you live in this world at all – if you are actually in the world, even if you are not of the world (and you should not be of the world, but you must be in it)—you can see that people need saving. Often we go to the headlines to work this out to talk in some kind of meta-narrative way, but I can tell you that in my own life, the people around me need saving. The guy who quits his marriage to save his job needs saving from his self-contained and sinful values. The little guy who gets caught in a brush fire needs saving from a world in which the punishment for our sinfulness if death and suffering. The beer-gourmand needs saving from his beer, and the tea-totaler needs saving from his tea.

And most of all, for the readers on this blog, the religious people need saving from the high-fallutin’ idea that their systematics make them the court of final appeal for other Christians and the church. The Grace of God has appeared, people! And it’s bringing salvation to all people -- it’s good news for all the people.

You know: good news. It's a refuge from this world. It's the joy that set before us. And it's good news to people who are hurting and dying. This is why it should make you weep: because it is so lavish, and we are often so stingy with it when it comes down to really being faithful to our alleged ideals.

I know, I know: the meta is now going to break out in the mad dash to fortify election and God’s particular atonement of a peculiar people. Shut Up already. You’re not a hyper-calvinist (I hope), and you don’t believe that there is any person on this planet to whom the Gospel is not addressed, so stop splitting hairs when there are lost people who need to know that the grace of God has appeared.

And if you have read the rest of Titus so far, you’d see what Paul is saying here:

• The church must be set in order
• To do so, we need Elders
• Elders are mature men who have manifested the fruit of the spirit
• They do so in order to credibly preach the word of God
• They are credible because they live like they believe this stuff
• They must teach others to do so as well
• Because the Grace of God has come, to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.

Try that out. Live like that. Then, after your life has been used by God to save many through the Gospel, you can start your lectures on the limits of God’s grace. It will look different than the things you’re saying now.

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Can anything good come from Nazareth?

by Frank Turk

I have no idea if Phil is going to post today or not, and this post is a sort of stand-alone which I would normally post at my personal blog. However, I think it’s got enough chops to stand up here so I’m going to drop it off for your Friday reading enjoyment, and may the critics have their say.

For your information, I have bullet-pointed this post only because it's really a random list of thoughts I have had in the last two weeks or so, and I have somehow brought them together here. It is an unordered list.

• I have no idea how Dan and Phil feel about this, but I am completely creeped out by being one of the lesser luminaries (some might say "black hole") in the constellations in the evangelical horizon. I didn’t even realize it until we had to move this year and started looking for a new church – but the truth is, it turns out that I am pretty uncomfortable with being even mildly famous. When strangers treat me like they know me, I have to fight off an urge to flee.
  
  When I told this to my wife last night, she said, "that’s what you get for plastering your name and face all over the internet, dummy," which is exactly what she should have said.
• Now I say that last bit to say this bit: there’s something wrong with the celebrity culture of our American church. And this is a fairly nuanced complaint, I think, because what I am not saying is that we should have no heroes of the faith who are alive and well and living in our midsts. What I am saying is that when we see those people – whoever they are – as somehow iconic of our beliefs or our movement or our faith, we are doing the faith and ourselves an injustice.
  
  May we all have the opportunity to use our gifts for the goods works God intended them to be used for, amen? But let’s never forget that while it is a virtue to do those things which God has ordained beforehand, it is not a virtue to merely admire those who are doing what God has ordained and then nothing else. You are not a Paul-plus-James Christian if you merely enjoy the podcasts from all the T4G guys and all the Gospel Coalition guys. You are a Paul-plus-James Christian if you count trial as joy, and can say that you see that the aim of what the apostles taught is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.
  
  As my friend Ron Mooney says, you have to do the stuff. Celebrity culture inhibits you from doing the stuff.
• I’m not one of those guys who thinks you can find the Gospel in popular music, but the pagan poets before the band Nazareth said, "Love Hurts." The lesser poet J. Geils said, "Love Stinks". And I tell you that, believers and other readers, to point out something to you which you may not really understand:
  
  Even the most mundane and in fact profane people know that somehow "love" runs counter-intuitive to what we think we know about the world. Nazareth and J. Geils may have been singing about something we would in fact reject as "love", but the truth that if you actually love you will actually suffer is something we Christians should know best.
  
  And I say that in the context of sort of riffing on celebrity culture to say this: when we think we have believed the Gospel because we have gone to all the seminars and coalition meetings and what-not, we have completely missed the soteriological boat.
• Yes: I do mean the soteriological boat. More on that in a minute.
• Relating to my series on Titus and Timothy, let us meditate on something for a moment: when Paul tells Titus that he was sent to Crete to "set things right", Paul wasn’t telling Titus to establish a seminary or start holding conference calls about meta-issues concerning or afflicting the de facto institutions of the Christian church. Paul (as we shall see in a few weeks) was telling Titus to, in a manner of speaking, move into the trailer park or the apartment complex where these vile Cretans lived and establish elders there who will teach the Gospel there so that real people will be changed and love each other there.
  
  So the Gospel will save those people.
• So how does doing otherwise miss the soteriological boat? Why am I not here getting gassed up about the ecclesiological boat?
  
  It’s because soteriology comes before ecclesiology – I know you reformed eggheads know this in theory, but when I look at you (that is, at us – at me first and then at all of you) it’s like looking at somebody who gets dressed without ever checking the full-length mirror. I think you didn’t really mean to leave the house dressed like that.
  
  Later in the letter to Titus, Paul says (as Phil rightly pointed out in his plenary session as the Shepherd’s Conference) that the church should be about adorning the doctrine of God our Savior with good works. Instead, most often, we have one of three kinds of things which happen:
  
  [1] We have stupendous doctrine, mind-blowing doctrinal content, which we have defended so well that there is nobody left standing to hear it and therefore be saved by it. We have mowed down all the enemies of Christ rather than winning them out of their captivity.
  
  [2] We have no doctrine because of the fear of being type [1] churches, so we have pointless good-works churches which are nice community centers or political outposts for either the left or the right. We have there simply put ourselves in the chains of the enemies of Christ, but at least we’re happy there.
  
  [3] We have retreated from churches altogether because they are all type [1] or type [2] churches in spite of the fact that the Bible never once calls any church perfect, never tells the believer to live in a personal bomb shelter singing a sanctified version of Peter Gabriel’s "Here Come the Flood", and never says that churches will be fixed by abandoning them.
  
  But if we took our soteriology seriously – you know: that men do not save themselves but are in fact a danger to themselves spiritually, and that only God saves, and that God only saves by the word of Christ, and that nobody can know unless they hear and repent, and nobody can hear unless someone tells them – wouldn’t we have churches that knew at least as much about love as Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, Roy Orbison and Dan McCafferty?
• You know:

  Surely he has borne our griefs
  and carried our sorrows;
  yet we esteemed him stricken,
  smitten by God, and afflicted.
  But he was wounded for our transgressions;
  he was crushed for our iniquities;
  upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
  and with his stripes we are healed.
  All we like sheep have gone astray;
  we have turned—every one—to his own way;
  and the LORD has laid on him
  the iniquity of us all.

  And then this:

  Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.

  That's what we say we believe -- but can we love like that since we say we have been loved like that?
  
  Love hurts. Love scars. Love wounds, and marks any heart not tough or strong enough to take a lot of pain -- but love is like a cloud which holds a lot of rain.
  
  I prolly wouldn't give you a nickel for the rest of that song, but here's my point: we are not really Gospel-saved people if we aren't changed by the Gospel into people who know that love hurts but that we are commanded to love anyway. And not merely the bizarre intellectually-satisfied love which stands on one foot on the phrase "love chasteneth" (which is true but wickedly incomplete and insufficient), but has both feet planted on the bedrock that Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men, and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

It is a classic 3-pager in WORD at this point, so I’ll end with this: I admit that I am glad that somebody has read any of the bandwidth I have generated over the last 5 years, and if it benefitted you in any way, “SDG” as we say in the Truly reformed circles. But if what all that writing did was make another celebrity, I hope the servers crash and it all gets annihilated and nobody ever reads it again.



At some point, you – me, all of us – have to go out in the yard and befriend that kid whose parents don’t come home at night, or spends half the month in our neighborhood and half with his other parent’s neighbors, or take a plate of supper to the guy next door who’s alone, or whatever. I didn’t write all this stuff to help you grasp the nuances of systematic theology, or to become a name to be dropped. I wrote it so you would go do the stuff.

Now go do it. Start immediately, and if you can’t, start on the Lord’s Day in the Lord’s House with the Lord’s people. They are not any worse than the Galatians or the Colossians – most of them. Most of you aren’t either.

Me, on the other hand, ...

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