When I go to bed, the Devil is always waiting for me. When he begins to plague me, I give him this answer: “Devil, I must sleep. That’s God’s command, ‘Work by day. Sleep by night.’ So go away.” If that doesn’t work and he brings out a catalog of sins, I say, “Yes, old fellow, I know all about it. And I know some more you have overlooked. Here are a few extra. Put them down.” If he still won’t quit and presses me hard and accuses me as a sinner, I scorn him and say, “St. Satan, pray for me. Of course you have never done anything wrong in your life. You alone are holy. Go to God and get grace for yourself. If you want to get me all straightened out, I say, ‘Physician, heal thyself.’”
The apostle Paul’s requirement for elders to have faithful children is routinely set aside in the church by means of fanciful exegesis. The overseer must “manage his household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church?” (1 Tim. 3:4-5). Submissive how? Sitting in the pew quietly and not getting anyone pregnant is not enough. “If anyone is above reproach, the husband of one wife, and his children are believers and not open to he charge of debauchery or insubordination” (Titus 1:6). Clearly, the submission is to Christ. (more…)
From Matt Chandler’s Foreword to Larry Osborne’s recent book Sticky Teams:
I’d been trained for ministry by a group of brilliant, godly men who taught me hermeneutics, Christan history, how to decline and parse Greek words, Hebrew, systematic theology, courses in Pauline literature, the Old Testament prophets, and preaching. I devoured every bit of it and learned quickly that I had a knack for theology and preaching. . . . (more…)
Luther attacked the sacrament of ordination which is one manifestation of a false sacred/secular divide. How many pastors teach in such a way that nothing they ever affects or applies the way people behave at work? If a minister is a different sort of person altogether, saying “spiritual” things for a limited spiritual realm, then it makes sense that religion one compartment of a compartmentalized life. The faux sacrament of ordination is bad business, “designed to engender implacable discord whereby the clergy and the laity should be separated farther than heaven and earth, to the incredible injury of baptismal grace and to the confusion of evangelical fellowship. This is the source of that detestable tyranny over the laity by the clergy who, relying the external anointing of their hands, the tonsure and the vestments, no only exalt themselves above lay Christians, anointed by the Holy Spirit, but even regard them as dogs, unworthy to be included with them in the Church. ” Outside of Catholicism, these attitudes are still prevalent where ministers think they have spiritual exaltation, preferred benefits, or entitlement access, and titular dignity above other brothers and sisters. Ironically, Luther’s greatness came from minimizing his own. This sort of power give, rather than grab, is the mark of all reformers and reformations.
“If a woman wants to be a lawyer, she can go to law school, take the Bar Exam, send out resumes to employers, and practice law. If a woman wants to run for office, she can put her name in the hat, run a good election campaign, and win the race. If a woman wants to travel to Australia, she can buy airline tickets, pack her bags, and go. In other works, she can do something to accomplish her goals. But if she wants to get married, she’s told to sit like bump on log until the right Christina man finds her. I don’t think so.” Debbie Maken (Getting Serious About Getting Married)
Stories about “evangelical” churches embracing homosexuality hardly seem like news anymore, but still the headlines are still rolling. As the article linked states, Pastor Mark Tidd changed his views on homosexuality after counseling a couple whose daughter began identifying as a boy. Tidd couldn’t apply the “plain meaning” of Scripture to this case (which implies that the girl is confused, not God), and so concluded that “It’s not a sin to be gay or act in accordance with your nature.”
The temptation is to think that churches embracing postmodern sexuality are making drastic changes when they do so. They might have made drastic changes, but these almost certainly came long before embracing homosexuality. The fundamental break is the view of the Bible which says it’s absolutely a sin to act in accordance with your nature. Paul says we were all “sons of disobedience–among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind” (Eph. 2:2-4).
Every pastor who walks around with his eyes open would answer the question “What is more common in your congregation, heterosexual or homosexual sin?” with a resounding “hetero.” I believe it’s possible for the answer to be homo, but we are not there yet. So is it alright to tell men that they must be radically committed to their wives, that Solomon is right when tells his son to be “enraptured with her [his wife's] breasts always”? Or is that just the ancient “plain meaning” of Scripture no longer applicable?
Should men be required to repent of their insane desire for pornography, or is it alright to reply with pastor Tidd, “I just didn’t feel God would tell a person to deny a big part of who they are and to keep it a secret”?
Of course post-evangelicals like Tidd would never (read “this year”) say embracing homosexuality is a license for adultery or even fornication necessarily, but this is because people who’ve left the foundation of the Bible are blinded to the consequences of their ideas and actions.
Why is this the case? Is it because of the onslaught of homosexuality? Rarely if ever. These pastors have been lazy and cowardly in addressing the predominant hetero sexual sin their congregations for years, and when the culture begins visibly discipling their church, what is there to stand on? If you haven’t stood against the constant mangling of human beings in heterosexual relationships–lovingly listening, praying, counseling, rebuking, and teaching again for the umpteenth time, what are the chances that you’ll have any integrity left when homosexuality makes its case?
There is an attempt by those who compromise this way to scramble for the high ground, posing as those who listen and embrace when what they are really doing is abandoning those who need loving and firm help finding their true identity in Christ. Paul tells the Corinthians that many of used to be, among other things, homosexuals, and some of them likely religiously devoted to it in paganism. So the Christian church must never be “closed” or unkind to gays, just like it shouldn’t shun those who struggle with any other sin. But in order to deal with this issue that will confront every church that is openly evangelical and engaging the world, the elders must proactively address all sexual sin. As soon as this is neglected, the church has turned into a traditional values club which has no basis other than personal preference for opposing anything coming at it. Oddly, this puts these churches in the same boat with those accepting homosexuality. Strange bedfellows, indeed.
It has been said idealists are in love with humanity but never actual people. To love actual people would require one to interact with them, to take time to listen and probe with determination to help, and all of this takes more than clever thoughts and pristine philosophy. C. Fitzsimons Allison says
Concrete situations of diapers, debts, divorce, or listening to and being with someone in depression and despair, is the test of real love. Docetism is the religious way to escape having love tested in the flesh. All of us are tempted to audit life rather than to parrticipate fully and be tested by it.
Allison makes this comment in the context of discussing false doctrine in his The Cruelty of Heresy. Docetists maintained (and maintain) that Jesus only seemed to be a man but never really took on flesh and suffered as a man. God wouldn’t get so dirty, sweaty and bloody. The relationship of sin and heresy is symbiotic. One begets the other, and over the long run it’s impossible to cling to one without it spilling over. It’s not just idealists who keep themselves from getting their hands dirty, but all complainers. Complainers are easily distinguished from lovers because lovers have their hands dirty in the actual work, their own sweat and blood invested in the spouse, family, organization etc at hand, and the recipients of this sacrifice know it. They are the true realists who not only know the problems and weaknesses, but have taken on those problems themselves constructively for the sake of others. This is always costly which is why it always bears fruit.
Eugene Peterson on pastors as historians, from Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work.
Pastors are historians, not moralists. they learn their craft at the feet of the great theological historians of Sinai and from their direct descendants, the four Gospel writers, not by collecting aphorisms in the fields of the Roman Stoics. If pastors only carry moral sayings in their pockets and go through the parish sticking them, like gummed labels, on the victims of the week, there will be no good pastoral work; they must learn how to be gospel storytellers. After the manner of the storyteller of Ruth, they must become skilled in making a story of out of the details of a particular trouble, using the plot design and vocabulary that the have assimilated from, say, the Deuteronomist. The storytelling pastor differs from the moralizing pastor in the same way that a responsible physician differs from a clerk in a drugstore. When an ill person goes to a physician, the physician “takes a history” before offering a diagnosis and writing a prescription. The presumption is that everything that a person has experienced is relevant to the illness and must be taken into account if there is to be a healing. The clerk in the drugstore simply sells a patent medicine off the shelf–one thing for headaches, another for heartburn, another for indigestion–without regard for the particular details of a person’s pain. Biblical pastoral work “takes a history” and with that raw material creates a story of salvation, like the Ruth story fashioned out of famine, widowhood, barley harvest, levirite law, God’s steadfast love, providence and peace, the town of Bethlehem and the land of of Moab.
In the early chapters of 1 Corinthians, Paul says he came to them “in weakness and with much trembling.” He refused to employ the rhetorical methods of his day in order that his preaching would be “a demonstration of the Spirit’s power” (2:4). In his helpful book Basic Christian Leadership, John Stott comments on this passage:
I fear that these words would not be an accurate description of many contemporary evangelists. Weakness not their most obvious characteristic. No, seminary homiletics classes aim to inculcate self-confidence in nervous students. If Paul had enrolled in one of our seminaries today, he would have been regarded as very unpromising material. Since he was supposed to be a mature christian,we might even have rebuked him, saying “Paul, you’ve no business to feel nervous. Don’t you know what it means to be filled with the Spirit You ought to be strong, confident, bold! …
According to a second-century tradition he was unattractive, small, even ugly, with bald head, beetle brows, bandy legs and a hooked nose. Moreover, his critics said that his bodily presence was weak and his speech contemptible (10:10). So he was nothing much to look at or listen to. These disabilities would have disqualified him from succeeding as a sophist or rhetorician, or as a popular evangelist today.
All Christians should ask themselves: If Paul showed up preaching in your town or at your church, his eagle-beak nose and bad eyes and lack of rhetorical flourish, would you recognize the power and truth of his message? All preachers should weigh their methods against Paul’s. It’s clear that he made himself a servant to all and became all things to all men so that he might win some, but “all things” did not mean he compromised the message or the humble method of communicating the message.
N.T. Wright has come out, well, if not swinging, at least with his dukes up, and for this we can be thankful. He rightly notes that the recent move by the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church (TEC) in the United States to ordain homosexuals to all orders of the clergy does not stem from the consecration of Bishop Gene Robinson. He sees the floodgates opening in 1996 when a church court acquitted a bishop who had been ordaining active homosexuals.
From my vantage point, just because the floodgates are open, it doesn’t mean that water has to be pouring out. Say for instance you have a church that is happy with homosexuality, wants to see queer marriage accepted, serves communion to anyone with a pulse “spiritually” inclined, but has yet to allow the effeminate guy in the robe to celebrate an open homosexual lifestyle. Is Jesus, you know, the dude with a white robe dipped in blood and that sharp, shiny sword, any less upset than if homo ordination is on the loose? I think not. I’m not really arguing with Wright here, but without an effective process of discipline–along the non-complicated lines of Matthew 18–the floodgates are always open and it’s just a matter of time before the flood is upon us. If 1996 was the year the homo clergy toleration began, when did integrity, courage, and discipline go out the window? Long before that. This point must be understood by anyone who wants to keep a lampstand. Faithfulness (love, courage, boldness, integrity, and more) in little things prevents this sort of circus from ever getting off the ground. I think it was Luther who said that he who refuses to discipline can have a church, but not for long.
