Monthly Archives: January 2018

Why Calvin Thought Church Discipline is Essential to the Health of the Church

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Article by Matthew Tuininga, From the 9Marks Journal (original source here):

Soon after John Calvin was appointed as a pastor of the Genevan church, having only recently arrived as a refugee fleeing persecution in his native France, one of his first actions was to petition the city government for the establishment of church discipline. It was a hard sell. In no other Reformed city had the civil magistrates given clergy such authority. The reformers Zwingli and Bullinger maintained that overseeing the moral lives of Christians was a task for the civil magistrate. Most Reformed theologians and magistrates associated ecclesiastical discipline with papal tyranny.

Calvin acknowledged that the Roman church had grievously abused discipline by wielding it tyrannically to accomplish all manner of church goals. To prevent this evil, he called the magistrates “to ordain and elect certain persons of good life and witness from among the faithful” to shepherd the people on behalf of the church as a whole. These elders, along with the pastors, would bind themselves to the procedure laid out by Jesus in Matthew 18, by which professing Christians were to be held accountable to one another in the life of Christian discipleship.

CALVIN AND HIS CONSISTORY

While the city council granted the pastors’ request in principle, it soon became evident that there was little agreement in practice. Calvin found himself banished from the city. Within three years, however, the city asked him to come back. Though he was reluctant, he agreed to return under the condition that church discipline be established. The city relented, though nearly 15 years of conflict remained before the consistory—the body of pastors and elders charged with the ministry of church discipline—could rest secure from political interference.

Calvin’s consistory disciplined members of the Genevan church for a wide range of sins including idolatry, violence, sexual immorality, marital problems, and interpersonal conflict. They disciplined men who abused their wives and children, sons who refused to care for their aging parents, landowners who exploited their tenants, doctors who failed to care properly for the sick, merchants who practiced price gouging or sought to prevent economic competition, and employers who exploited or mistreated their workers. While many people were brought before the consistory, temporarily barred from the Lord’s Supper, and required to express public repentance or reconciliation, very few were permanently excommunicated (i.e., banished from participation in the sacraments).

DISCIPLINE: AN EXTENSION OF THE WORD

Calvin viewed discipline as a necessary extension of the church’s ministry of word and sacrament. While he did not identify it as a mark of the church, he did insist that discipline is essential to the spiritual health of a church, without which a church cannot long endure.

Discipline was necessary to preserve the honor of God and the integrity of the Lord’s Supper, to protect the members of the church from being led astray by other members, and to call those who were straying to repentance.

DISCIPLINE & THE LORD’S SUPPER

At the heart of Calvin’s passion for the exercise of church discipline was his concern that the Lord’s Supper not devolve into a mere ceremony of hypocrisy. The Lord’s Supper is not simply a celebration of the forgiveness of sins, he argued, but a communion of brothers and sisters in “love, peace, and concord.” Calvin again: “None of the brethren can be injured, despised, rejected, abused, or in any way offended by us, without at the same time injuring, despising, and abusing Christ by the wrongs we do; that we cannot disagree with our brethren without at the same time disagreeing with Christ; that we cannot love Christ without loving him in the brethren; that we ought to take the same care of our brethren’s bodies as we take of our own; for they are members of our body; and that, as no part of our body is touched by any feeling of pain which is not spread among all the rest, so we ought not to allow a brother to be affected by any evil, without being touched with compassion for him” (Institutes, 4.17.38).

In short, when Christians celebrated the Lord’s Supper while exploiting, oppressing, or abusing one another, they made a mockery of it.

DISCIPLINE: SPIRITUAL, NOT POLITICAL

Calvin insisted that discipline is not an expression of political power but of spiritual power. It is not coercive but pastoral. To be sure, when wielded arbitrarily, church discipline devolved into mere tyranny. But Calvin insisted that a person could only be disciplined for conduct that was clearly and manifestly sinful according to Scripture, and only as long as the person refused to repent of that conduct.

Furthermore, where sin was so obvious, notorious, and persistent, the elders and pastors of a church exercising church discipline would merely be proclaiming the truth of God’s Word as it applied to an unrepentant individual. As such, like preaching, discipline was one of what Jesus called the keys of the kingdom of heaven, opening the kingdom to the repentant through the proclamation of the gospel and closing it to those who refused to repent.

As Calvin puts it: “The Lord testifies that such judgment by believers is nothing but the proclamation of his own sentence, and that whatever they have done on earth is ratified in heaven. For they have the word of God with which to condemn the perverse; they have the word with which to receive the repentant into grace. They cannot err or disagree with God’s judgment, for they judge solely according to God’s law, which is no uncertain or earthly opinion but God’s holy will and heavenly oracle” ( Institutes, 4.11.2).

DISCIPLINE & THE GOAL OF SALVATION

What was crucial for Calvin was that the ultimate purpose of discipline is not vengeance but salvation. He rejected the practices of ongoing penance or ritual humiliation, warning that “zeal for discipline” often leads to “pharisaical rigor” that “hurries on the miserable offender to ruin, instead of curing him” (his commentary on 2 Corinthians 2:11). As soon as a disciplined person repented, he or she was to be immediately welcomed into full communion.

When conducted graciously and according to Christ’s word, discipline ensured that the church did not proclaim a false and empty gospel of cheap grace but a gospel with power to draw human beings into genuine communion with God and one another. Calvin: “[E]xcommunication does not tend to drive men from the Lord’s flock but rather to bring them back when wandering and going astray” (Commentary on 2 Thessalonians 3:15).

For Calvin, discipline expressed the love of a father who does not allow his children to go astray to their own hurt or death but uses restraint and correction where necessary to ensure their flourishing. It’s necessary to the health and survival of a church because it ensures that the religion we practice is not the religion of hypocrisy but of grace that leads to righteousness and life.

For more: https://www.9marks.org/article/a-biblical-theology-of-church-discipline/

Rules For Sons

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Not sure who wrote this…

Rules For Sons:

1. Never shake a man’s hand sitting down.
2. There are plenty of ways to enter a pool. The stairs ain’t one.
3. The man at the grill is the closest thing we have to a king.
4. In a negotiation, never make the first offer.
5. Act like you’ve been there before. Especially in the end zone.
6. Request the late check-out.
7. When entrusted with a secret, keep it.
8. Hold your heroes to a higher standard.
9. Return a borrowed car with a full tank of gas.
10. Play with passion or not at all…
11. When shaking hands, grip firmly and look him in the eye.
12. Don’t let a wishbone grow where a backbone should be.
13. If you need music on the beach, you’re missing the point.
14. Carry two handkerchiefs. The one in your back pocket is for you. The one in your breast pocket is for her.
15. You marry the girl, you marry her whole family.
16. Be like a duck. Remain calm on the surface and paddle like crazy underneath.
17. Experience the serenity of traveling alone.
18. Never be afraid to ask out the best looking girl in the room.
19. Never turn down a breath mint.
20. In a game of HORSE, sometimes a simple free throw will get ’em.
21. A sport coat is worth 1000 words.
22. Try writing your own eulogy. Never stop revising.
23. Thank a veteran. And then make it up to him.
24. If you want to know what makes you unique, sit for a caricature.
25. Eat lunch with the new kid.
26. After writing an angry email, read it carefully. Then delete it.
27. Ask your mom to play. She won’t let you win. (Neither will I)
28. See it on the big screen.
29. Give credit. Take the blame.
30. Write down your dreams.
31. Always protect your siblings (and teammates).
32. Be confident and humble at the same time.
33. Always open her door.
34. Tell her she’s beautiful and mean it when she’s feeling her worst.
35. Say I’m sorry first.
36. If she means that much to you, “DUTCH” is not an option.
37. Respect is earned it is not a right.
38. If it’s worth it work at it or for it.
39. The only person you need to be better than is the person you were yesterday.
40. You may be outplayed but there is never an excuse to be outworked.
41. You will be challenged…..
42. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is the right thing……you won’t regret it.

Life Can Only Come From Life

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“Real science, which is a Believer’s true friend, just delivered ANOTHER MAJOR BLOW to the religious belief of Darwinian evolutionism! Until 2016, the inability for life to begin on its own had always been a thorn-in-the-side to Darwinism. Then Harvard biologist and Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak announced he’d proven RNA could replicate itself; thus life could have arisen from chemicals. Though hailed by Darwinists as their conquering hero, he’s now had to retract his claims, saying he was blinded by his BELIEFS. Meanwhile, the Law of Biogenesis holds that life can only come from life, leaving ‘In the beginning God created’ as the only viable explanation for our existence.” – Russ Miller

”Definitely embarrassing:” Nobel Laureate retracts non-reproducible paper in Nature journal

Historicity Of Jesus

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Atheist/agnostic professor of religious studies at UNC Dr. Bart Ehrman explains how there is no academic scholars in the Western world who doubts that Jesus existed:

“This is not an issue for scholars. There is no scholar in any college or university who teaches classics, ancient history, new testament, early christianity, who doubts that Jesus existed. He is abundantly attested in early sources. Early and independent sources indicate that Jesus certainly existed. Paul is an eyewitness to both Jesus’ disciple Peter and the brother of Jesus. Like, I’m sorry. Atheists have done themselves a disservice by jumping on the bandwagon of mythicism because it makes you look foolish to the outside world.”

Graeme Clarke is is the Emeritus Professor of Classical (Ancient) History and Archaeology at Australian National University:

“Frankly, I know of no ancient historian or biblical historian who would have a twinge of doubt about the existence of a Jesus Christ”

HT: Steven Bancarz

Three Trinitarian Controversies

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Article: Three Trinitarian Controversies Every Christian Should Know by Adriel Sanchez (original source here)

Adriel serves as pastor of North Park Presbyterian Church, a congregation in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). In addition to his pastoral responsibilities, he also serves the broader church as a contributor on the White Horse Inn radio program. He and his wife Ysabel live in San Diego with their three children.

It may surprise you to find out that, generally speaking, everyone in the “Trinitarian controversies” of the ancient church had some sort of doctrine of the Trinity. Worship of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit was so entrenched in the liturgical life of the church that even those who denied the true deity of Christ still found themselves praying and singing to him! That Christ existed, and was divine in some sense, was not the primary question early on.

Throughout the history of the church, Trinitarian controversy has centered on how the Persons of the Trinity relate to one another. Here are three controversies every Christian should be aware of:

1. The Arian Controversy
Arius was a priest in Alexandria during the fourth century. Because of his views, he was excommunicated from the Egyptian church around 320AD. Arius taught that God was absolutely transcendent, and that as such could not have any genuine intersection with the created world.

Although the Arians believed Jesus was divine in some sense, they didn’t understand him to be divine in the same sense as the Father, who alone was the eternal God. Arians confessed that “God has not always been a Father,” and that “once God was alone, and not yet a Father, but afterwards he became a Father.” In other words, God the Son didn’t always exist, and at some point, came into being, making God a Father. This conclusion denies what’s called the eternal generation of the Son, a Christian doctrine that emphasizes the fact that the second Person of the Trinity has always existed—even before his incarnation as Jesus of Nazareth.

According to Arian doctrine, Jesus is the most preeminent creature created by God, but he’s still just an exalted creature! This is not very different from what some sects teach today, like the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society or Jehovah’s Witnesses.

2. The Modalist Controversy
Modalism is a third century Trinitarian heresy often associated with Sabellius of Rome.

The Modalists did not properly distinguish between the Persons of the Trinity; they taught that the Father and the Son were the same Person. Unlike the Arians, they believed in the essential deity of Christ, but they did a bad job of distinguishing him from the Father. In this understanding of the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are simply different modes of the one God. The Father God of the Old Testament who revealed himself to the patriarchs is the same Person who took on flesh and suffered for mankind.

This failure to properly distinguish between the Persons of the Trinity involved Sabellius and his followers in another dangerous heresy called Patripassianism. This was the idea that the Father suffered on the cross with Jesus. The orthodox Christian view differed from this in that it taught that the Father and the Son participated in the Incarnation in distinct ways, and that only God the Son was incarnate, and suffered for sins.

Today, groups like the Oneness Pentecostal Church teach something similar to ancient Modalism.

3. The Filioque Controversy
Perhaps the most tragic of the Trinitarian controversies, the filioque controversy was at the heart of the split between Eastern and Western Christianity.

The word filioque is a Latin term that means “and the Son,” and it refers to an addition to the Nicene Creed in the section on the Holy Spirit. Originally the Creed stated, “And I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father.” Over time, the Western church began to include the word filioque after “Father,” so that the Creed stated “…proceeds from the Father and the Son.” This addition led to ecclesiastical debates about whether the inclusion of the filioque clause was in line with the apostolic faith.

In the Western church, men like St. Augustine taught that the Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son.

The differences on this issue between the church in the West and the East were never resolved, however, and ultimately played a part in the Great Schism of 1054 AD, when Cardinal Humbert of Silva condemned the Patriarch of Constantinople. To this day, the church in the East confesses the Nicene Creed without the filioque clause, while the Western church maintains it.

These three controversies don’t exhaust the Trinitarian disputes of the last two thousand years, but they give us a glimpse into how important this doctrine is for the health of the church. In order to rightly worship God, we need to properly describe how he has revealed himself! The orthodox taught that the Son was equal to the Father (unlike the Arians), but that he was also distinct from the Father (unlike the Modalists). They based their teachings on the Scriptures, and the apostolic faith they had received through the liturgical life of the church. We need to be committed to those same Scriptures, and the proper worship of God, so that we too might rightly adore the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Book Review: When Heaven Invades Earth, by Bill Johnson

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David Schrock is the pastor for preaching and theology at Occoquan Bible Church in Woodbridge, Virginia. Here is his book review of Bill Johnson’s book (and why he believes Johnson to be a heretic).

Here is a book by Richard Pinckney Moore “Divergent Theology: An Inquiry Into the Theological Characteristics of the Word of Faith Third Wave Movement and The New Apostolic Reformation” exposing more of the deception of the NAR and word of faith: https://www.9marks.org/review/book-review-when-heaven-invades-earth-by-bill-johnson/

What is the Gospel?

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Dr. Robert Godfrey (original source here)

Many Christians, churches, and organizations regularly use the word gospel to describe their convictions. Theological controversies have occurred and do occur over the meaning of the gospel and who preaches it faithfully. What does that familiar word gospel mean? The best way to answer that question is to turn to the Bible.

In the Greek New Testament, the noun euangelion (“gospel”) appears just over seventy times. Since, in one sense, the whole New Testament is about the gospel, we might have expected the word to have been used more frequently. Even more surprisingly, its use varies greatly among the authors of the New Testament books. Paul uses the word more than three times as often as all the other authors combined. Most of the other uses are found in Matthew and Mark, with very few, if any, in Luke, John, Peter, and James.

The word gospel most simply means “good news.” The word is not unique to the Christian message, but it was also used in the pagan world to refer to a good announcement. In the New Testament, it refers to the good news of Jesus the Savior. Often, it is used with the assumption that the reader knows what the word means.

As we look more closely at the ways in which gospel is used in the New Testament, several points come through strongly. First, we often find the phrase “the gospel of God.” This phrase stresses the source of the gospel as a gift from God. The gospel is of divine, not human, origin. Second, the character of the gospel is specified in several ways: the gospel is true (Gal. 2:5, 14; Col. 1:5), gracious (Acts 20:24), and glorious (2 Cor. 4:4; 1 Tim. 1:11). Third, we see two responses to the gospel. The primary response is faith (Acts 15:7; Eph. 1:13). But obedience is also a response (1 Peter 4:7; Rom. 1:5; 10:16; 16:26; 2 Thess. 1:8).

(Paul’s use of the idea of the obedience of faith in Romans has an element of irony as he responds to those who have accused him of antinomianism, being against the law.) Fourth, we see several results of the gospel. The gospel, of course, brings salvation (Rom. 1:16; Eph. 1:13). It also brings the kingdom (Matt. 4:23; 9:35, 24:14). It evokes hope in the people of God (Col. 1:23). The gospel is also a motivation to sanctification (Mark 8:35; 10:29; 2 Cor. 9:13; Eph. 6:15; Phil. 1:27). Continue reading →