Fred Greco:

Which is more amazing: that so many theologians, churchmen and seminaries, Presbyteries still after years and several colloquia have failed to understand something that is so important that Wilkins et al have felt it necessary to continue to disturb the church over it, or that a half dozen internet theologians really understand the Reformed Confessions better than all these fathers and brothers?

This reminds me of something from a few months ago…

Rick Phillips writes:

Secondly, as for the “we are misunderstood” plea, this is the refuge of the disingenuous. If one cannot be understood by so large a group of interested people who have devoted so much time to read and interact, it is not likely the fault of the critics. The reality is that the FV side cultivates an obligue approach to theological language and construction that is designed to say one thing and mean another. “We are misunderstood and are being treated uncharitably” is a key tenet of their strategy. (By the way, in light of the FV response to the PCA’s FV/NPP study committee, their pleas for charity have also been exposed as a mere strategy.) Lastly, we do not accept men as in accord with our confessional standards merely because they say that they are. The whole point is that we must examine the doctrine they are teaching and see if it is in accord with our standards. On this basis, the FV and the NPP are rapidly gaining recognition in Reformed and evangelical denominations as out of accord with standards like the Westminster Confession of Faith.

Second point first: Yes when we are talking about PCA ministers in good standing with their presbyteries we do, if we are Presbyterian, accept men as in accord with our confessional standards. When these men are re-examined by their presbyteries in light of scandalous accusations (myself, Leithart, Wilkins) and are exonerated we should all the more do so. The fact that after four years of attempted influence of the jury pool we are only now finding one court case finally occurring, and only through the efforts of a small group of men is itself evidence that the accusations are overblown and preposterous. The make-up of the committee itself shows that Rick and everyone else knows that his targets are well within the bounds of orthodoxy. The president of Covenant Theological Seminary came to far different conclusion than Rick and his activist friends. The main difference I have with Dr. Chappell is that I think the majority of his paper was really devoted to the thought and effect of Norman Shepherd and others who have been labeled as the “FV movement” rather than really “the New Perspective on Paul.” But that makes his actual statements all the more relevant. On the other hand, if one wants purely a view of the New Perspective and Wright, one can listen to the New Perspective on Paul Symposium here:

Orientation to the Conversation and Views on Judaism

Part One by David Chapman

Paul

Part Two by Hans Bayer

Paul and the Old Testament

Part Three by Jack Collins

Justification and the New Perspective

Part Four by Robert Peterson

Not all of these men will agree with various aspects, but they don’t see some great threat and evil that must only be renounced. Listen to these men and compare what they say to Rick Phillips reaction. Quite a difference. Then there is Reggie Kidd He too seems to have a view of the New Perspective closer to that of Rich Lusk than that of Douglas Kelly. Bringing up Douglas Kelly’s piece raises another aspect to this question. I’m not refering to the content (though that was disappointingly and incredibly inaccurate–See Daniel Kirk’s paper and my brief reply to him and Rick), but to the fact that it came out of the blue with ready-made instruments for keeping ministerial candidates out of the PCA who didn’t agree with the Kelly-Duncan offical interpretation of Wright as threat. These questions had little or nothing to do with the Reformed doctrinal standards, but were designed to flag anyone who had read any decent recent Biblical scholarship. “Is the Gospel encapsulated in Romans 1:1-4 or in Romans 1:16-17 (or 3:21-28).” This was the level of discernment mandated when the whole issue of the New Perspective first came to light. There was never any “so large a group of interested people who have devoted so much time to read and interact.” There was a minority bent on making sure the next generation matched their extra-confessional convictions. And using all their influence to accomplish this.

And Greco continues the seemingly all-too-Presbyterian tradition. Peter Leithart is vindicated by his presbytery, all Greco’s targets in the PCA are members in good standing in their presbyteries, and he declares in the face of this that all defense of “FV” is merely “a half dozen internet theologians” who are discounted from the outset of ever being fathers and brothers. These fathers and brothers are family and those are outsiders and strangers. This has never been more than cheerleaders putting the nerds in their place for daring to think they might have something to contribute.

This post is, as Michael Spencer says, outstanding! A sample:

What is at issue is if God did something we can see and understand, and in understanding it we should respond. Peter in Acts 2 says, “You should know that Jesus is both Lord and Christ!” That is, Jesus has both the authority to judge and the power to save.

Now, what does Chan do with that? Does he say we are loverly? No – he says we deserve judgment and we get the testimony of the Cross – and we should know it that way. In spite of our sin, and because of our sin, God ponies up the Cross. God does. God takes the action.

I am sure it would be much more systematically-astute to say, “and now, if your lip is quivering at the idea that you are a sinner who deserves hell, but God has paid a price for sin which you see as just and loving, you must be one of the elect, so rejoice in your salvation.”

The problem, of course, is that Peter doesn’t say that at Pentecost! Peter says, “know that Jesus is Lord and Christ – now do something about it.” In our American culture, we say, “choose!” Joshua said, “choose this day whom you will serve” – not meaning that they were able but that they ought to be willing, they have an obligation.

Pastor Chan is saying, “do something about it!” He’s saying God has made a free and public offer of salvation – now do something about it. Take action. If today you hear His voice, harden not your hearts.

Naturally, I would quibble over the parsing of two titles, but the message is still accurate. Steve Camp was my favorite Christian musician in my youth. I remember he did a great job at my alma mater (in the face of amazingly bad local technology!). It would be consonant with my fond memories and high esteem of him if he and Frank could come to an understanding.

Frank’s post underscores for me how theologically dangerous the FV/NPP smear really is. It is nothing more than the application of the “free offer of the Gospel” to the covenant or the visible Church. You don’t have to know whether a fellow professing Christian is predestined to eternal life, or truly regenerate, to know that he can and should be exhorted to continue in the faith, to believe in God’s actions and promises to him in baptism, and to respond to God’s initiative in taking action.

I know your works, your love and faith and service and patient endurance, and that your latter works exceed the first. But I have this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols. I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her sexual immorality. Behold, I will throw her onto a sickbed, and those who commit adultery with her I will throw into great tribulation, unless they repent of her works, and I will strike her children dead. And all the churches will know that I am he who searches mind and heart, and I will give to each of you according to your works.

It is pretty standard (or was until the sudden nauseating slip we have undergone into a hypercalvinist alternative timeline) to affirm that the non-elect benefit from Christ’s atonement. Wouldn’t the time Jezebel was given to repent count as such a benefit?

And wouldn’t it be totally correct to say, “Jezebel, God has prospered you thus far because of his loving patience and Christ has died so that you would have the opportunity to repent.” Of course, at some level, God is also heightening her eventual punishment. But that doesn’t change the fact that the time given to her is a real grace. Paul is our model here:

Do you suppose, O man—you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself—that you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.

But Paul, obviously the day of wrath is a predestined result. So how can you say that the time and gifts tht are given are the riches of God’s kindness? Paul doesn’t seem that rigorous of a thinker, does he?

Or consider:

And he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came seeking fruit on it and found none. And he said to the vinedresser, ‘Look, for three years now I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and I find none. Cut it down. Why should it use up the ground?’ And he answered him, ‘Sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put on manure. Then if it should bear fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”

Is this or is this not a story about Jesus, Israel, and the Father? Don’t we see here that more time is given to Israel by Christ’s own intercession?

Yes, as members of the visible Church, Israel and Jezebel both received Jesus’ sincere intercession and, as a result, gained time to repent.

“Did I not choose you, the Twelve? And yet one of you is a devil.”

Imagine that Jesus had been ordained in the PCA. Would he be allowed to use the word elect as a verb the way he does in this sentence? Would he be guilty, if he were to do so, of contradicting the Westminster Confession by using a key theological term in a unconfessional way?

He affirms the invisible Church as an entity that “does not yet exist though it is surely foreordained by God.” He adds that “It seems better to speak of the ‘invisible’ church simply as the ‘eschatological church.’” It should be observed that this is not the Westminster definition of the invisible church, which “ consists of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, under Christ the Head therefore” (WCF XXV.1). What TE Wilkins sees as an eschatological fulfillment growing out of the visible church, the Confession sees as a past, present, and future reality in overlap with the visible church.

So an entity that is defined as including people who don’t yet exist nevertheless now exists? Sure, as a concept in God’s mind and a plan. But Wilkins affirms as much. He, not Rick, is the one using Westminster’s definition.

And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”

Did Jesus wish that people who were blind to the time of their visitation had eyes to know better and repent?

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!

Were there people who died in their sins who Jesus wished to repent and take shelter in Him?

Ok, I’ve seen this, floating around, and I have to ask some questions. Lets just lay aside any challenges from Scripture for a moment, OK?

First off, did anyone catch the reference to Psalm 40 in the description of the creation of Adam. What an ironic comparison. Bono sings (after David) about God lifting him up out of the miry clay to give God all credit. But the whole point of the song is that there is no comparison: creation happens to us without our permission but not the second creation. There is more than one direction to go with this. For one thing, I wonder if an affirmation of ultimate human autonomy will really allow for even creation to have been involuntary. In order to account for original sin, Origen had to invent pre-existence. I don’t think the principles promoted in this song can allow their promoters to do otherwise than to make us participants in our own creation. That’s my opinion, for what it is worth.

Secondly, can a firm belief in human autonomy really stand up with an affirmation that all nature is under God’s direct and minute control. Frankly, I thought the statements about the non-personal parts of creation sounded like only a Calvinist could craft them. So you have freedom, but your blood pressure, your local weather, and the nutritional content of your food are all in God’s hand? By this definition the “free” part of a man would be a rather minute part indeed. What about genetics. Is that part of God’s creation?

Third, look at the singers and their clothes and their style. Does anyone find in this a real believable presentation of human freedom? For easily 99.9% of the singers’ web audience, they could no more appreciate the music, feel comfortable in the clothes, or use the hand gestures and facial expressions as spontaneous displays of real emotion, than they could fly to the moon or breathe underwater. In a sense, I can see why they would need a massive doctrine of free will because they have to expect most people they meet to utterly reinvent themselves and everything they are. On the other hand, for exactly the same reason, I don’t find their claims for the doctrine to be all that convincing. People who dress and act in such a way to bring the words, “Stepford Wives” spontaneously to mind, are not going to be very persuasive in denying that human beings run on programming of some sort. Dating myself here: anyone remember Steve Taylor’s song, “I want to be a clone”? Clonliness is next to godliness, right? And if all the clones are given a message of free will then they will all support it.

Drew materialized screaming. He always did.

Dying hurt every single time he did it. In this last melee the Rev. Stockton had stepped out from behind a truncheon tree and doused him in spray from a flame thrower. The burning was fatal almost instantly, but still had been surprisingly slow in actually killing him. He had enough of one unscorched lung left to scream and scream and scream. The scream continued now as he reappeared whole-bodied in the middle of a shallow rocky brook with low overhanging branches.

His grey eyes darted quickly as his hand instinctively went to his holstered pistol. It wasn’t much but it was all he had, and he knew from experience that one could materialize anywhere. Usually you were reconstituted away from firefights, but you could never be sure. This time, it seemed, Drew was really lucky (“blessed,” he corrected himself). He had “landed” so far from any action that he could not even hear gunfire or explosions in the distance—truly a rare thing. He had better make the most of the break and stock up.

Pistol out, constantly looking for anything suspicious, Drew began to nimbly run, following in the shallow water of the brook. The water was cold on his “standard issue” boots. He had been transported from a desert and cactus zone to a late autumn/mild winter area. Here there were deciduous trees growing in thick together without many leaves and none that were green.
After only a couple of minutes he caught site of the red branches of a chaingun tree. Multibarreled, heavy rifles grew from steely thick branches and ammobelts draped as vines all across the metallic plant. In a few minutes of grunting, sweaty work Drew had pulled down a weapon and draped himself with plenty of ammunition. Each casing had “intellectual” stamped on it in small letters, but Drew had long since given up thinking about why such things were.

Instead he thought about Stockton. On earth they had been great friends. Stockton had even been his pastor for a couple of years when he was in college. And he had been a faithful correspondent over the next decades as Drew ran into a string a bad luck (I mean “providence,” he would correct himself) with regard to churches. When he had needed to get the congregation to deal with the corrupt three elders of the session, or a pastor’s preaching was deviant, Stockton had always been his mentor, his confidant, and his adviser. He had always been in touch both through private emails and several public internet bulletin boards (public to read but properly scrutinized regarding posting privileges).

And now? Away from earth on this strange planet Drew had been overjoyed to meet a familiar face. It was as if Stockton had been waiting for him. Drew almost smiled to himself, remembering the relief he felt wondering around a blasted landscape trying to make sense of a fruit tree bearing hefty pipe bombs. Stockton had been his first point of continuity, someone he knew from earth.

Of course, he thought grimly, as he picked an over-ripe hand grenade out of the shallow water from beneath an ordinance bush, that was before he discovered that he knew almost everyone who was here. If he didn’t recognize them by face, a few moments conversation (there had been much more discussion in the early days) had dredged up an email list or a chat room nickname, and he realized that he had spent hours with this one or that—either planning on how a certain preacher could be defrocked or discussing tactics to get yearly resolutions passed against something or other.

Dwelling on the past was a dangerous preoccupation. Drew almost walked into a pack of lopers. He was splashing through deeper place in the brook, wading around a curve that was overshadowed by forest thick with trees, when he saw that he was not thirty feet from them.

They were drinking noisily from the stream and this pack had no non-loper leader. Had they not been busy, or had their pastor still been in their good favor, Drew might have had to die within the hour of his first death (his record was four, three in the first fifteen minutes and one thirty-five minutes later, but normally he averaged about twice a day). Instead he was able to toss a grenade in the group and take out all but three who bounded away in panic, one bleeding profusely.

Long immune to considerations like blood and gore (which only lasted a few seconds before vanishing from sight), Drew was shocked to notice that one who ran away healthy seemed to have a small tail growing from his hindquarters. He was already running after the wounded one, a habit everyone picked up sooner or later when they began realizing that killcount was the only thing that could change. But even so he wondered almost idly, as he sprinted over a mound between two elms, if maybe people were changing after all out on this strange world. The lopers had always been the least human of the humans–vacant and missing the personality they had possessed on the home planet.

Or had they?

Drew’s own differences with Stockton had started with the lopers. He had a dozen or so that followed after him and obeyed his orders. He addressed them by their earth names, only a couple of which Drew had heard before. They were a couple he had known in college at his church. He hadn’t been in touch with them since that point, and only dimly remembered them. And now they barely spoke but grunted and simply followed whatever Stockton told them.

Drew had asked Stockton about these lopers. Apparently every one of them had been in Stockton’s congregation for years and years. Some since their childhood. He told Drew that, even though they hadn’t interacted much in the internet communities, they had been faithful and attentive at every conference he sponsored. Even if they didn’t always follow the flawless reasoning of the speakers, they always dutifully opposed the error for that year. Stockwell was not the only one on the planet with a pack of lopers. In almost every case the leader had been a pastor and the pack was a few members of his congregation on Tera

Catching up with the limping, bleeding Loper, Drew squeazed the trigger and aimed as best he could. As always with the chain gun, there were a couple seconds spent getting the gun barrels spinning around. The loper heard the noise and lurched to a stop, grabbing at the double-barreled shotgun hanging by its side. Or her side, rather. Drew could now tell the loper was an elderly woman.

Fortunately (thankfully, he corrected himself), she was also a slow woman. Before she had the barrels leveled at him, the chain gun began rattling away. With a shriek she collapsed in a spray of blood and bone fragments. Of course, he could only appreciate his handiwork momentarily before her body, with fragments and fluid, sparked golden and faded away.

But not before Drew had a good giggle. He couldn’t help it. Aside from the satisfaction of the win, he also had a shotgun.

It was odd, he thought to himself, that lopers were always older. Age was pretty meaningless on a planet that, by some strange force, kept de-materializing the dead and re-materializing them revivified. Yet, the lopers were almost always relatively elderly. Enough so that it would be easy to interpret their slowness as dementia. But he was pretty sure that wasn’t the source of their stupidity

TO BE CONTINUED

John preached, “Whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none” (3.11) so Jesus came and was baptized and eventually divided up his garments among those already clothed (23.34).