We all feel that way

Yeah, that was a rough series.

Train a child up in the way she should go….

Time to put Yankee fans out of the misery that is their 2007 season.

Random Thoughts

Monday nights are weird without Jack Bauer saving the free world. So I watched a little “The New Adventures of Old Christine.” Remember Elaine from “Seinfeld”…she’s the main character. Really lame. CBS is just awful. At the same time, though, the episode was unsettling. For one reason or another Elaine’s (yeah I know that’s not her real name or her name on the show but she’ll always be Elaine) young son wants them both to go to church. She had a bad experience with church and because of that hates church yada yada yada (sorry I couldn’t resist) but at the end takes him and everything works out. Anyway, I bring this up only because of her reasons for not liking church. Reason #1: church people only like other church people. Reason #2: church people hate gays. Ouch. That’s the image that the church as a whole (and I am speaking in broad cultural terms) portrays to the unchurched. So as we emerge into our culture, these are the obstacles we need to overcome.

 

I also watched the Jesus Film tonight on TBN. Still love that movie after all these years. A classic.

 

Classes started at CBTS again last week…without me. On an unrelated note, my wife has been pointing out that I have fewer nervous twitches, my eyes aren’t blood-shot, and I squint less.

 

The release date on Waltke’s OT Theology got pushed back a month. Sad.

Save My Millennium, Dr. Ladd!

It’s been mocking me on my bookshelf for months now. It’s not shelved away with the others. Oh no. It’s been on the top. Along with Future Grace, The Justification of God, Salvation to the Ends of the Earth, Basics for Biblical Hebrew, and Steven King’s Faithful—all books I need to read as soon as possible. I shelved away it’s cousin A Theology of the New Testament—at 700 pages too much for this year. It’s been sitting there collecting dust daring me to read it. Not any more. It’s time to get down and dirty with eschatology. No helmets. No pads. No flags. No two-hand touch. Just some full contact inaugurated eschatology. Yeah—it’s time to read some Ladd.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Should John Piper Drop the Term “Baptist”?

Shameless of me, I know. Using Piper’s name up there to catch your eye. Then that annoying question—it’s got let-me-tell-you-how-to-run-your-church, nobody’s-got-it-right-but-me, I-have-all-the-answers written all over it. Seriously, though, this post has nothing to do with Piper. It was honestly just a dirty marketing ploy to get you mad so you would read this post. If you’ve been following the comments on the last post you’ll see that some of us are leaning towards going with credo-baptism only for our churches. Others, while still holding to credo, will happily admit paedobaptists into our membership. This post is about that second group. Should we, if we adopt Piper’s position, drop the term “Baptist” from our churches?

 

First of all, this isn’t just about labels. Well, it is, but it’s about much more than labels. In contrast, the fundamentalism issue was all about labels. A while ago fundamentalists from different stripes tossed around the idea of getting rid of the label “fundamentalism” since it is one of the most offensive terms in the English language. Basically, the thinking was, if I have to spend ten minutes explaining what I DON’T mean by a term, maybe I need a different term. I remember being at BJU when Bob Jones III declared from the chapel pulpit that they were going to drop the term in favor of a new one—and I wish I could remember what that new term was. Either way, it didn’t go over.

 

The “Baptist” label is a different story. One of the unfortunate blemishes on the historical record of the Reformation is the way Protestants at times treated fellow Protestants. Among those who came out of the bondage of the Roman church were those whose conviction about Baptism is our conviction—they believed baptism should be administered after the person professes his or her faith. The majority of the Protestants, however, remained paedobaptists, even though their understanding of the matter changed when they parted with Rome. These early Baptists suffered persecution, torture, and death at the hands of their Protestant “brothers.” They did exactly what we would hope to do if we were in their situation—after prayerfully considering Scripture, exclaiming “Hier steh ich; ich kann nicht anders; Gott helfe mir!” and then face martyrdom.

 

We are the heirs of these Baptists. I’m not necessarily saying they were right just because they died for what they believed. I am not even saying that their martyrdom should be taken into account in evaluating one’s own decision in this matter. Scripture should be the deciding factor, not what others believed Scripture to teach. I would not even go so far as to say that we somehow “owe” it to them to insist on believers baptism for all of our church members. All I am saying is that they died solely because of the label “Baptist.” If we end up taking an inclusive position on church membership, should we out of deference towards our brothers in Christ who were accused of being “Baptists” and were martyred because their conscience would not let them do otherwise, gladly forfeit that label that cost them their lives?

Baptism and Church Membership: This is OUR Issue

150 years ago there were Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Episcopalians, Brethren, and “others.” They got along sometimes. They fought sometimes. They usually stayed to themselves. Specifically the Landmark Baptists were convinced that they alone were the keepers of the one true way. Then along came Modernism. Good Baptists were fighting bad Baptists. Good Presbyterians were fighting bad Presbyterians. Good Methodists were fighting bad Methodists. I’m not sure about Episcopalians…but for arguments sake lets say they had a Modernist controversy too. All of a sudden the good Methodists realized, “Hey we have more in common with these Presbyterians than with our fellow Methodists.” So they met up at conferences and founded inter-denominational schools. Suddenly believers from various church traditions began realizing that the body is bigger than their tradition. Does that sound anything like what the young reformed movement is going through today? Well, it’s not. Not at all. There is a fundamental difference between that kind of inter-denominationalism and that of today.

 

We are evangelical. We are reformed. We join together for the gospel. Anyone who exalts the monergistic sovereign majesty of God’s grace in salvation is our brother, our co-labor, our friend. Our heroes are Piper, Sproul, Mahaney, Dever, Mohler, Ferguson, Ryken, and Duncan. The fraternity of these men is a microcosm of the fraternity we feel for each other. And that is what separates us from the inter-denominational movement of the early 20^th century. They went out from their churches, got together for conferences, and then went back to their own churches. We, on the other hand, are happy to have a PCA guy lead the worship in our SBC church that doesn’t use the name “Baptist” in its title.

 

With this new kind of inter-denominationalism comes an issue unique to us. What do we do about baptism and church membership? If I am in a leadership position in a paedobaptist church, do I insist that new members baptize their babies? If I am in a leadership position in a Baptist church, do I insist that a godly couple who was raised PCA get re-baptized before I allow them to join my church? As many of you know, Grudem, in his new Systematic Theology has moved away from a more lenient position to one that advises baptismal uniformity within a local congregation. And if you get mail from Desiring God you probably have read Piper’s response. Piper, once again, kicked my tail by pointing out that excluding believers from fellowship in a church is not a light matter at all. The debate will continue and must continue. This is not something we can ignore. This is OUR issue.

Getting to Christ Through a Canonical Approach

I finished Sailhamer’s Intro last week and have been digesting it for several days. I’ll do a full review later but for right now want to focus in on what I was hoping to find in reading this book: a way to preach Christ legitimately from the OT. I’m pretty happy with where Sailhamer took me, even though I feel like he pulled a Moses on me and took me all the way to the brink of the Promised Land and then stopped short of it. More on that below. The Canonical Approach, in a nut-shell, attempts to demonstrate that the final form of the OT Text in and of itself self-consciously lacks fulfillment and finds that fulfillment in Christ. I will attempt to unpack this definition below.

The first step is to state unequivocally and unapologetically that the Text of the OT as we have it today and reflects the original is fully inspired and inerrant. While this may seem superfluous to state, this will be our lifeline as we proceed into discussions about the Canon. If you feel queasy below and think you are smelling the stench of liberalism on me…look up to this paragraph. The Text of the OT is the very Word of God. It carries the full weight of His authority and purpose. What God wanted to communicate to His people He sovereignly accomplished in various ways to produce a Text that bears His stamp of approval.

Step two may make some of you uncomfortable. The fact that the final form of the OT Canon is inspired does not necessitate that it did not have several editors over decades or even centuries. Consider the Psalter. Psalm 90 was written by Moses so it would date around 1400 BC. Psalm 23 was penned by David about 400 years later. Psalm 137 is a lament of the exiles in Babylon which would take its compositional date into the 500s BC. What that means is that individual psalms were written over a period of 800 years. If we argue (and I do) that the Psalter in its present canonical state has a theological message that is more profound than its individual psalms, we have to argue that this theological message was not complete until the post-exilic period. This final, edited form of the Psalter bears the Pauline stamp “God-breathed” (2 Tim 3:16). What that means for our reading of the Psalms is significant. I certainly want to ask what David was trying to communicate with Psalm 23. However, I want to do much more than that. The theological message that got the “God-breathed” stamp of approval was the one that was created when an editor gathered a bunch of the psalms together and created the Psalter consisting of these 150 psalms. So rather than just asking what David is doing in Psalm 23, what I really want to know is what the post-exilic editor is doing in putting Psalm 23 in the Psalter at that place (number 23).

That shouldn’t have made very many people queasy—but if I move the discussion from the Psalter to the Pentateuch I may be getting into trouble. While most everybody would be comfortable saying that Moses did not personally compose the part in the Pentateuch where he dies, what if he did not personally compose the last two chapters of Deuteronomy? That is actually exactly what Sailhamer argues. While the events described in chapters 33 and 34 really did happen and Moses did say the things attributed to him in them, they were not part of the “original” Pentateuch. A post-exilic scribe added them to further his post-exilic theological goals. Let me re-emphasize what I mean with this. The historical events described actually did take place. Moses did pronounce the blessing attributed to him in these chapters. However, it was not recorded in the way we have it today until the post-exilic period. If you are interested in why Sailhamer thinks this way, feel free to read up on it in his Introduction to OT Theology or his Pentateuch as Narrative.  This scribal addition was done under the supervision and prompting of the Spirit of God and the product was a God-breathed Text.

 

Step three is where it starts getting really interesting. Step one argued that the final canonical form of the Text of the OT as we have it today is inspired Word of God. Step two argued that much of Scripture, including the Pentateuch, was not completed in its final canonical form until the post-exilic period. Now in step three we can finally examine the Pentateuch to see why all of this matters.

In Deuteronomy 18:15 Moses promises that in the future God will raise up a “prophet like me,” and when He does, Israel is to listen to him. In Deuteronomy 34:10 the post-exilic editor of the Pentateuch makes this comment: “No prophet has arisen again in Israel like Moses whom the LORD knew face to face.” Think about all the prophets since Moses—Samuel, Nathan, Elijah, Elisha, Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel—and the post-exilic editor knew every single one of them. Yet he still affirms that the future hope for Israel—the promise of Deuteronomy 18:15—is yet unfulfilled. What is even more significant is that at the time that this editor wrote, the office of prophet had died out. The prudent Israelite was no longer one who went to the prophet to receive instructions from the LORD first hand, but the exegete—one who meditates on the written Word day and night” (Ps 1). The wise man has replaced the prophet as the virtuous Israelite. Thus, there is no fulfillment of Deut 18:15 in sight at the point in time when the editor is writing. The OT Canon ends with a self-conscious awareness that there must be more to come.

 

Unfortunately Sailhamer stops at step three and does not take his readers into the Promised Land of step four. If you read the OT as a canonical composition that self-consciously realizes that it lacks fulfillment in and of itself, you can preach Christ as the fulfillment of the eschatological expectation of the OT Canon. Both Peter and Stephen identify Jesus as the fulfillment of Deuteronomy 18. He is the prophet like Moses. While the final editors of the OT Canon knew that something was missing, they were confident that there would be “grace in the end” (as Dr. Kai, my former OT Prof would say). Thus, they shaped the OT canon—from Genesis to Chronicles in their Hebrew Bible—with the eschatological theme of “grace in the end” in mind. Enter Jesus—the fulfillment of the eschatological expectations of the OT canon.