Theology? Ain't Nobody Got Time For That!

Over the weekend I saw numerous reports of the death of Myles Munroe. At first I thought they were talking about this guy:

...which is odd, since I thought he died before the 138th episode spectacular, but I digress. Myles Munroe was a prosperity shill and heretic extraordinaire; your soul would probably have been in better hands with the incompetent Simpsons psychiatrist.

One of the clips making the rounds in the wake of Munroe's death puts the heretical focus of his prosperity teaching on full display:



Pure evil. This is prosperity teaching showing its true wickedness: Christ is at best a bit player in your quest for kingdom authority and blessing. Reprehensible.

Now that we have that out there, let me ask: just how different is that from the ministry philosophy of many churches in America today? This isn't an issue just in the extreme fringe that comprises 99.44% of Charismania; a (milder?) form of this problem hits even ostensibly orthodox churches all around us.

Preaching about "felt needs" at the expense of doctrine. The Willow Creek model of saccharine bare-minimum (aiming down to the lowest denominator, and often overshooting) sermons on Sunday, withholding any imitation of doctrine for mid-week services for the super-spiritual. The Saddleback model wherein everything is about you finding your special purpose, where somehow the book of Daniel is about dieting.

Youth ministries where scripture, if taught at all, takes a backseat to games and fluff messages 'to help them get through school this week'. Churches that never preach anything but how to have a better life - better friendships, a better marriage, doing better at work, better sex, better sleep, better breathing, better fitness, better whatever.

If I remember correctly, I was once told not to bother teaching about the doctrine of providence because people don't care about that, they just want to know how they're going to make it through the week.

So yeah, this Munroe character was a reprehensible heretic, and his idea that we shouldn't tell people about Christ and the cross is poison from the deepest pits of hell. But don't be fooled into thinking he was alone, or that his heresy died with him. That same wicked attitude permeates the church all around us.

On Acts 29's blessed subtraction

If you're the type to follow the happenings of greater evangelicalism, you've no doubt heard that sorta-famous sorta-pastor Mark Driscoll received the boot of disfellowship to the hindquarters of his association with Acts 29, a church-planting parachurch group he helped start and until recently ran as its chief prophet-king or something. You might say Acts 29 engaged in blessed subtraction, and that he got run over by the bus, joining the mountain of bodies (by God's grace) - if you're the sort of person to make such jokes, and I most certainly am.

This story has been all over the Christian and pretend-Christian corner of the interwebs, so I won't rehash the whole thing. Here I'll just offer a few quick thoughts on the whole affair.

1) Before listening to Driscoll's horrendous "blessed subtraction" message again, I had forgotten it had been a speech to an Acts 29 conference. Am I a bad man for laughing?

2) It can't be easy to oust your group's founder, especially after sticking behind him for so long. As easy as it is to question the move - and we will - it still took some level of courage and/or conviction. On the other hand...

3) When Krusty the Klown announced his retirement, a reporter asked the pertinent question: "Why now? Why not twenty years ago?" Similarly, why was this move made now instead of five or ten years ago? What exactly has changed? Are these issues actually new, or are they just now too public to ignore?

4) To reiterate - there is very little new here. Nearly all of these issues have been knowable for years, for anyone who didn't actively try to not know. See for example here, here, and the multitude here. So again, what has changed? Why do Acts 29 and James MacDonald and Lifeway suddenly have to bail right now, when these sins and shortcomings have been obvious for around a decade?

5) Carl Trueman asks an important question: what did the major evangelical leaders who've been promoting Driscoll for a decade know and when did they know it? I would add, if they didn't know, what could explain that other than deliberate ignorance?

6) With all this happening in Driscoll's extracurriculars, don't forget he's still the sorta-pastor of a church with thousands of people. Having gone through a similar period a few years ago (when my pastor decided little things like "the Trinity" and "the gospel" are insignificant compared to "the Harvest brand" and his personal enrichment), I can tell you how easy it isn't. Disillusionment, confusion, "how could we have been so wrong?" - or the "how dare they attack our hero!" mentality of the personality cult. Pray for them, especially that they can break away and find an actual church.

7) As for Driscoll, he still has 'his' church, and now a bunch of extra fuel for his martyr complex. His two choices are to repent or double down (see Phillips' Axiom #2); early indications do not look good for repentance. I can't pretend to know how this will end, but without genuine repentance, more disaster is coming.

Repetitive Repetition: Sin Altars

Hosea 8:11 has a repetitive bit of repetition in the 11th verse of Hosea 8. It's actually kind of funny when you first read it:

"Because Ephraim has multiplied altars for sinning,
       they have become to him altars for sinning."

Well, yeah, duh. They built altars, they got altars. Nothing to see here, just kind of obvious, right?

Slow down a minute, and look a little deeper. How much work went into building an altar? The surface for the sacrifice took some work, like precisely cutting a large stone or doing some high-quality metalworking. But there was even more to it than that. Take a look at this picture from Beth Shan, where the Philistines hung the bodies of Saul and Jonathan.

The remains of the city are in the foreground. Notice that big hill in the background, the one that looks a little unusually tall and more than a little unnatural? That's because it is unnatural - it's an artificial, manmade hill. Tons of dirt and rock were hauled to this site by generations of people building it a few feet higher every year, until they had an artificial hill towering over their city - what you may know as a "high place".

Yes, that hill is where the people of Beth Shan would have had their altars, Asherah poles, and any other instruments of pagan worship. Similar high places were found in cities all throughout Israel. When they wanted to put an altar on a high place, they didn't just find the highest natural hill nearby. They continually built bigger hills to hold their new, fancy, forbidden altars.

So when Hosea says that Ephraim "multiplied altars for sinning", this is what he means. In pretty much every town of appreciable size, Israel spent years hauling in multitudes of tons of material (without modern earth-moving equipment!) to build these high places, grew grass and trees on them, made large, ornate altars of metal or stone, and hauled them to the top. And all of that was just the preparation for sinning!

Some sins were committed on a whim, of course. But these sins - these altars of sinning - required years of toil to lay the groundwork for sin. Many of these required years of scheming, transgenerational effort, incredible cooperation, and enormous expense - all to prepare a place where they could properly rebel against their Creator. These sins didn't just happen. They were planned and prepared for.

After all those preparations, all that time and effort and expense, what are the chances they would not indulge in the sin? They went through all that trouble to set the stage for sin, so of course they followed through, and the sin became for them an essential part of life.

Now track with me here. How are we doing the same thing? There are some sins that you just do - they're the instant reaction, the momentary lapse in judgment, the failure to do what's right, etc. And while those are plenty bad, there are sins that are so much more dangerous - the scheming sins. The ones you plot how you're going to do them, and how you'll hide it, and how far you're willing to push, and how you'll get away with it.

Addictions come to mind - hiding booze around the house, plotting how to get alone to watch porn, moving money around to hide it for gambling. Adultery is often like that as well - it's often said that nobody wakes up one morning and just decides to cheat; it's the culmination of a long process of increasingly bad decisions, dangerous thoughts, and nursing smaller sins to help them grow. Or think of plotting revenge, or scheming to defraud a client, or cheat on your taxes, or a host of others.

All sin is horrible. But these types of sin that require deliberate planning and focused effort - they're a whole 'nother level of deadly. If you have a pet sin like that, now is the time to put it to death. Get some friends to be like Hezekiah or Josiah for you. Don't just stop sacrificing there (for a while) - tear those high places down entirely.

Yesterday, Today, and Forever

So apparently Mark Driscoll recently went on a rant that was just silly, ignorant, and flat-out stupid. Frank Turk as usual does a masterful job of dissecting the absurdity. It's worth a read. Pack a lunch.

Now, out of that whole mess, there's one particular argument I'd like to take a closer look at. The discussion regards the issue of cessationism, the idea that miraculous spiritual gifts ceased with the end of the apostolic period. After effectively calling the vast multitudes of Christians throughout the ages who've held this position the same as atheists and deists, Driscoll backs it up with this:

"So within that God's not really speaking, God's not really working and the supernatural gifts are not in operation; Healing, revelation, speaking in tongues, those kinds of things they are over in the God-used-to box. Even though I was reading this book that said he was the same yesterday, today and forever."

The 'book' he read that said that is of course Hebrews, specifically 13:8. His argument seems to be that based on this verse, if God has ever done something some way, He must forever keep doing the same thing the same way.

The book of Hebrews has 303 verses. This attempt to use this verse is so spectacularly awful, you have to wonder if he's ever read any of the other 302.

Honestly, if you were going to make this argument, is there a worse book you could possibly use than Hebrews? OK, maybe Revelation might be up there with it, but Hebrews is about as bad as it can get for this position. It's hard to find a portion of the book which doesn't fight against this silly argument. Consider:

Hebrews 8:13 - "In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away." Though God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, he apparently had no problem replacing the obsolete old covenant with a new, better one.

Hebrews 7:11ff - Remember the Levitical priesthood? The unchanging God gladly replaced it with the superior Melchizedekian priesthood of Jesus.

Hebrews 10:1-18 - Based on Driscoll's argument, we should still be worthlessly sacrificing bulls and goats, and verses 9 and 18 are practically atheistic or deistic.

Hebrews 9:11ff - That old tabernacle and associated stuff? Gone. Buh bye. Replaced with the heavenly, better versions. But I thought God was the same yesterday, today, and forever...?

So yeah, the meat of the book is all about the old and obsolete being replaced with the new and better. What else do we find?

Hebrews 10:19-20 - "Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh..." Whoa, wait a second, what's all this "new and living way" stuff? I thought God was unchanging!

Hebrews 3:7-11 - "Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says..." What does he say? A long scripture quote! Interesting, isn't it? It's almost as if Driscoll's larger argument, that if you don't believe in perpetually ongoing fresh revelation you believe God is silent, is completely and utterly demolished by this single passage. But that would be a silly thought, that God speaks through scripture, AKA His Word.

Oh, how about one more? Let's look at the first couple verses of chapter 2, with my comments in brackets.

Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. For since the message declared by angels [the Mosaic law, Acts 7:53] proved to be reliable, and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? It [the gospel] was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard [the apostles], while God also bore witness [to what? the gospel proclamation of 'those who heard' Jesus!] by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will.

Folks, this is perhaps the #1 cessationist passage regarding the purpose of the miraculous gifts. It very explicitly ties them to the initial proclamation of the gospel by those who heard it directly from Jesus.

So this book, basically from beginning to end, is opposed to the point Driscoll tried to make from one poorly-applied verse. That leaves us with a couple options.

(1) He simply doesn't know any better. The pastor is so unfamiliar with this magnificent tome of Christology that he has no idea how contrary his point is to the central themes of the book.
(2) He knows better, but is fine with completely misusing scripture to make a minor rhetorical point.
(3) I'm so completely far off in my understanding of these fairly plain and straightforward passages from Hebrews that I should really just give up blogging, teaching, or even commenting on scripture until I get my mind right.
(4) ???? I dunno, help me out here.

I'm fairly sure it's not 3 - otherwise, I wouldn't have written this all. 1 and 2 are both simply ghastly options, completely unfitting for a pastor, and really could disqualify one from eldership at all. So someone please tell me it's 4, and figure out what that could possibly be. 'Coz I'm kinda stumped.

Agreement in Principle

Commenting on John 20:24-29, Don Carson offers this:

We must also reflect on the repeated little word "my". Thomas does not say, "Our Lord and our God," as if he were reciting some sort of liturgical slogan. His confession is intensely personal: "My Lord and my God!" It is never enough merely to confess the truth of something that is out there in the public arena. Even the Devil himself could affirm, however begrudgingly, that Jesus is both Lord and God. But a true child of God is making more than a public statement about a public truth. The Christian is not simply affirming that Jesus Christ is the Lord and God of the universe but that in the most intimate sense he is the Christian's Lord and God. The confession is intensely personal. If you cannot utter the words of this confession with similar deeply personal commitment, you have no part of Jesus and the salvation that flows from his death and resurrection. Your heart and mind must confess with wonder, "My Lord and my God!" (Scandalous, 163)

This morning in church, the sermon was on Exodus 4, where Moses agrees in principle that delivering Israel from slavery and back to the promised land is a good thing, but has no end of lame excuses for not wanting to be involved personally. The point was made: Beware of agreeing with God in general, but denying in reality.

Evangelism? Yeah, it's a great thing to do. How long has it been since I've actually done it? Umm.....
Knowing the Word? Of course it's a worthwhile pursuit. For someone else, right?
Forgiving? Forgiveness is a wonderful, blessed thing! Until I have something to forgive, that is.
Husbands loving their wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her? Oh, how much better of a place the world would be if more men did that! What, me? Well, I, uh...
Caring for the alien, the fatherless, and the widow? Yeah, I think the church should do something about that. Or the government should tax evil rich people to take care of that. Yeah, that'll do it.
Keeping myself from even a hint of sexual immorality? Oh, that would be great if that could happen! What, it's not supposed to really happen, is it?
World missions and loving our enemies? Great! Who, me?

And on and on we could go. There's a lot in scripture that we - I -might think is a great idea. But am I willing to actually own it and do it? It starts with submitting to Jesus as Lord and God, and continues through all the dozens of implications of his Lordship. Do I personally not just acknowledge that Jesus is Lord and Savior, but submit to his lordship and embrace his salvation? Am I genuinely saved, and do I live like it? How about you?