I was just interviewed on a reformed podcast based in Canada yesterday and was asked to speak about being a pastor in the word of faith movement and the Biblical principles the Lord used to bring me out. You can find the interview at this link:
https://thegreatexchange.ca/podcast/ep228-word-and-faith-w-john-samson/
Are we to view our children as members of the covenant? Is baptism meant to replace circumcision in the new covenant? What about those verses in scripture where everyone in the house was baptized? Wouldn’t that include the children? These questions and more illustrate the long standing debate over infant vs credo baptism. On March 23rd 2015 James White and Gregg Strawbridge debated it at The Orlando Grace Church in Orlando Florida.
10:27 – Strawbridge Opening
23:23 – White Opening
35:51 – Strawbridge Rebuttal
46:18 – White Rebuttal
56:47 – Strawbridge Rebuttal
1:02:26 – White Rebuttal
1:09:37 – Strawbridge Rejoinder
1:17:00 – White Rejoinder
1:24:26 – Cross Examination – Strawbridge vs. White
1:35:00 – Cross Examination – White vs. Strawbridge
1:45:19 – Cross Examination – Strawbridge vs. White
1:55:42 – Cross Examination – White vs. Strawbridge
2:06:11 – Strawbridge Closing
2:11:37 – White Closing
2:16:50 – Audience Questions
by Dr. James Renihan (Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) President and Professor of Historical Theology at IRBS Theological Seminary, Mansfield, TX. His academic work has focused on the Second London Baptist Confession and its broader Puritan theological context. He has been published in many journals, and is the author of multiple books including Edification and Beauty, A Toolkit for Confessions, True Love, and Faith and Life for Baptists. (original source: http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2019/09/origins-of-the-creed.php )
If you were a Christian living in the great port city of Alexandria, Egypt in the year 320, your life would likely be full of excitement. Less than 10 years before, the great Emperor Constantine had defeated his enemies, ended Roman persecution of Christians, and granted Christianity the status of a favored religion. You no longer needed to fear arrest, torture or imprisonment simply for being a believer in Christ.
All across the city, the churches and the believers were emerging from the only life they had ever known–fear of opposition–and enjoying the fresh air of freedom. Alexandria was famous for its rich tradition of Christian thinkers; now more than ever, men were considering and expressing their faith. And so even if you were the humblest disciple in the city, you’d know something of the debates that soon began to swirl around the believing community. A highly-respected Presbyter–a mature, seasoned man who was an able preacher and popular pastor–was beginning to have a serious conflict with the city’s Bishop.
The disagreement was doctrinal, and had everything to do with the person and work of Jesus Christ. The presbyter, Arius, used his popularity and abilities to spread his doctrine through the Christian population. One of the methods used among the people was a series of short choruses, sung or chanted by young and old, expressing Arius’s particular doctrine. It was a brilliant method! The Scripture says that we are to teach one another in Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs–and this is what the followers of Arius did.
One of their choruses is strikingly illustrative of their doctrine and method. Being a Greek speaking city, the chorus was in Greek, and consisted of only five words, only 7 total syllables (a perfect chorus). The first word and the last are the same, while the second and third words rhyme: “ην ποτε ὁτε ουχ ην” (ēn pote hote oukh ēn). You can hear that it is lyrical and simple. One author says that it was chanted over and over, in church and daily in the streets of the city by those who believed its doctrine.
What does it mean? It’s somewhat difficult to render exactly into English, but it goes something like this: “There was when he was not.” Repeatedly, in church and in the city, the huge community of the followers of Arius chanted this and similar choruses to teach, promote and strengthen their view.
The “he” is Jesus Christ–“There was when Christ was not.” This small change in wording makes the chorus a little more startling, and perhaps easier for us to understand. In the doctrinal system of Arius and his followers, Jesus Christ, as great as he may be, is a created being, brought into existence by the power of the one true God. He is the firstborn of all creation–greater than all the rest for sure, but still–a created being–not deity. At some point in eternity, God created Jesus Christ. The chorus was a teaching tool, a piece of propaganda for Arius’s doctrine.
As this teaching grew and spread, it was opposed by the bishop of Alexandria–Alexander (!). He understood the seriousness of the teaching and its implications, and so he held a public inquiry into the matter. This resulted in the suspension of Arius from his ministry. But that was only the beginning of the trouble… a trouble which would last for another 70 years!
Arius had powerful friends outside of Alexandria. In 324, when Constantine became sole ruler of West and East, he sought to develop favorable relationships with Christian leaders from the east. Among them were Arius’s greatest supporters, who appealed to the Emperor to intervene and restore Arius to his position in the Alexandrian church. Feelings throughout the empire ran high. There was great debate, political maneuvering, and ecclesiastical disorder.
Seeing this, Constantine called a council, which would held at Nicaea in 325 under his personal control. With about 220 bishops in attendance, this has been called the first great council of the church. Through much debate, 218 of the bishops adopted a thoroughly orthodox creed, and Arianism–at least for the time–seemed to have been defeated.
There are two versions of this creed, a shorter and a longer. The Nicene Creed (proper) comes from the Council of Nicea in AD 325 and is the shorter version; a revised and expanded version (which is the more common creed today) comes from the Council of Constantinople in 381. The original form of the creed was intended to guard the deity to Christ; the second and expanded version speaks more directly to the person and work of the Holy Spirit.
This creed is deeply rooted in the text of Scripture. The authors were committed to the authority of Scripture, and sought to mine its depths and express its doctrine carefully. Here is the revised Creed as found in Schaff, Creeds of Christendom:
We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made; who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man; he was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried, and the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father; from thence he shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.
And in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spake by the prophets. In one holy catholic and apostolic Church; we acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.
The Nicene Creed is accepted by all branches of orthodox Christianity, and its doctrines are considered definitive. If any seemed to introduce a new doctrine, they were examined according to Scripture and the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed, and urged to conform to it.
Article by Gary Parrett and J. I. Packer – source: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/packer-why-your-church-family-needs-catechesis/
Historically, the church’s ministry of grounding new believers in the rudiments of Christianity has been known as catechesis. It is a ministry that has waxed and waned through the centuries. It flourished between the second and fifth centuries in the ancient church. Those who became Christians often moved into the faith from radically different backgrounds and worldviews. The churches rightly took such conversions seriously and sought to ensure that these life-revolutions were processed carefully, prayerfully, and intentionally, with thorough understanding at each stage.
With the tightening of the alignment between church and state in the West, combined with the effect of the Dark Ages, the ministry of catechesis floundered in large measure for much of the next millennium. The line between natural and spiritual birth virtually disappeared. According to the centuries-old practice, infants baptized into the church were, in theory, to be catechized later in the faith. But too often nothing of the sort occurred. As a consequence of such neglect, great numbers of persons who claimed to belong to Christ had little idea of what that might even mean.
The Reformers, led by heavyweights Martin Luther and John Calvin, sought with great resolve to reverse matters. Luther restored the office of catechist to the churches. And seizing on the providential invention of the printing press just decades before their time, Luther, Calvin, and others made every effort to print and distribute catechisms—small handbooks to instruct children and “the simple” in the essentials of Christian belief, prayer, worship, and behavior. Catechisms of greater depth were produced for Christian adults and leaders. Further, entire congregations were instructed through unapologetically catechetical preaching, regular catechizing of children in Sunday worship, and, in many cases, the renewed practice of congregational singing of psalms and hymns.
The conviction of the Reformers that such catechetical work must be primary is unmistakable. Writing in 1548 to the Lord Protector of England, Calvin declared: “Believe me, Monseigneur, the church of God will never be preserved without catechesis.” The church of Rome, responding to the growing influence of the Protestant catechisms, soon began to produce its own. The rigorous work of nurturing believers and converts in the faith once for all delivered to the saints—a didactic discipline largely lost for most of the previous millennium—had become normative again for both Catholics and Protestants.
It could well be argued that the spirit and power of healthy catechesis was hampered by the hostile tone that entered the picture as Protestants and Catholics began increasingly using their catechisms to hurl attacks at one another. Nevertheless, this rebirth of serious catechetical discipling was a momentous step forward for all concerned.
The critical role of catechesis in sustaining the church continued to be apparent to subsequent evangelical trailblazers of the English-speaking world. Richard Baxter, John Owen, Charles Spurgeon, and countless other pastors and leaders saw catechesis as one of their most obvious and basic pastoral duties. If they could not wholeheartedly embrace and use an existing catechism for such instruction, they would adapt or edit one or would simply write their own. A pastor’s chief task, it was widely understood, was to be the teacher of the flock.
Recent Abandonment
Today, however, things are quite different, for a host of reasons. The church in the West has largely abandoned serious catechesis as a normative practice. Among the more surprising factors that have contributed to this decline are the unintended consequences of the great Sunday school movement. This lay-driven phenomenon swept across North America in the 1800s and came to dominate educational efforts in most evangelical churches through the 20th century. It effectively replaced pastor-catechists with relatively untrained lay workers, and substituted an instilling of familiarity (or shall we say, perhaps, overfamiliarity) with Bible stories for any form of grounding in the basic beliefs, practices, and ethics of the faith.
Thus for most contemporary evangelicals, the entire idea of catechesis is largely an alien concept. The very word itself—catechesis, or any of its associated terms, including catechism—is greeted with suspicion by most evangelicals today. (“Wait, isn’t that a Roman Catholic thing?”) Ironically, as noted above, it was the Reformers who impelled the church of Rome to once again take catechesis seriously. In recent decades, while the Catholic Church has renewed its catechetical labors with vigor, most evangelicals have not likewise returned to their own catechetical roots.
We hope to contribute to a much-needed evangelical course correction in these matters. We are persuaded that Calvin had it right and that we are already seeing the sad, even tragic, consequences of allowing the church to continue uncatechized in any significant sense. We are persuaded, further, that something can and must be done to help Protestant churches steer a wiser course.
What we are after is to encourage our fellow evangelicals to seriously consider the wisdom of building believers the old-fashioned way—by taking up the practice of catechesis.
Article by Tom Ascol – original source: https://founders.org/2014/09/16/does-church-membership-matter/
One of the most frequent questions that I get from professing Christians is, “Why do I have to be a member of a church?” Over the course of the years the character of that question has increasingly shifted from honest inquiry to incredulous accusation. In fact I am no longer surprised when believers get angry at me for insisting that sincere discipleship requires church membership. Low and erroneous views of the church are so rampant even among conservative, Bible believing Christians that any congregation that does not exercise extreme care in receiving members is sure to find itself a large percentage of mere “paper members” whose names appear on the roll but whose bodies are largely absent from most gatherings and fellowship and ministry initiatives.
Baptists in former days saw the issue quite differently. Membership mattered to the early Baptist churches in England and America in the 17th and 18th centuries. In fact, it would have been inconceivable for those early Baptists to regard membership in a local congregation as optional or incidental.
Imagine if the following convictions about the church were commonplace today among professing Christians:
In exercising the authority entrusted to him, the Lord Jesus, through the ministry of his Word, by his Spirit, calls to himself out of the world those who are given to him by his Father. They are called so that they will live before him in all the ways of obedience that he prescribes for them in his Word. Those who are called he commands to live together in local societies, or churches, for their mutual edification and the fitting conduct of public worship that he requires of them while they are in the world.
The members of these churches are saints by calling, visibly displaying and demonstrating in and by their profession and life their obedience to the call of Christ. They willingly agree to live together according to Christ’s instructions, giving themselves to the Lord and to one another by the will of God, with the stated purpose of following the ordinances of the Gospel.
What would a congregation be like if all the members believed this and all the leaders helped the membership live according to these convictions? It would be a beautiful thing. It would be a community of believers whose lives together demonstrate the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Their living would commend their preaching.
That was at the heart of the original vision of church life among early Baptists. The paragraphs quoted above come from chapter 26 of a modern version of the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith. Because it summarizes biblical teachings on key issues a good confession of faith is an excellent teaching tool for a church. Prospective members can be asked to read it, or at least to read key sections of it, so that they will understand how the church they want to join view issues like polity, membership, worship, evangelism, marriage, scriptural authority, etc. Those who do join a church that has a confession of faith can refer back to it to be encouraged to think biblically about such issues as questions arise.
I am convinced that church life would be significantly upgraded in spiritual vitality if confessions of faith were once again properly regarded and widely used to commend and proclaim basic commitments to biblical teachings.
Article: 3 Ways to Explain the Incarnation to Muslim Peoples by Greg Handley, his wife Rachel, and their four children have lived among the Muslim peoples of Central Asia for the past five years. They meet weekly with local believers who will be celebrating the true meaning of the incarnation this Christmas, by God’s grace. (original source – https://www.imb.org/2016/12/16/how-to-explain-the-incarnation-to-muslims/ )
The first “Christmas” evoked polarizing responses: magi from the East came to worship the Messiah while Herod trembled at the thought of his kingdom falling. Mary treasured the whole experience while Joseph wrestled through the shameful implications of marrying a miraculously pregnant woman. Angels declared good news of the promised Savior while this same news unsettled others. A treasure to some, a threat to others—this event, so great and world-shaking, allowed for no middle ground.
This polarization continues in our day, particularly among religions that give an account of Jesus. Islam suppresses the incarnation by teaching against it. According to Islam, God could never become man. An average Muslim has heard so many false ideas concerning what Christians believe about Jesus’s birth that the incarnation’s true implications aren’t discernible to them.
As you discuss the gospel with Muslims, it’s good to understand the threat the incarnation poses for them. To even consider whether God became a man would bring Muslims shame due to their “betrayal” of their religious community and cause them to fear the implications of differing from that community. The character of Allah, the teachings of the Qur’an, and their religious moorings are rendered suspect if God really did dwell among us in the person of Jesus.
Some well-meaning Christians attempt to soften this blow by minimizing the doctrine of the incarnation, but this is neither loving nor right. Faithfulness to God and being good friends to Muslims requires us to keep the edges of this truth while patiently remaining alongside questioners as they wrestle with the massive implications of the manger. During these discussions, your Muslim friends will need to have three facets of the incarnation clarified.
Muslims are taught that Christians believe God had some type of physical relationship with Mary to have a son. After all, isn’t that the normal way sons enter the world? But Christians don’t believe this, as that would negate the virgin birth and impugn the very character of God. I’ve found that if you ask a Muslim how he believes Mary began carrying the baby Jesus, surprisingly you arrive on some common ground. We both can agree that the process transcended physical norms and was, therefore, miraculous. We may differ on the details, but we can build upon the commonality of the miraculous origin of Jesus’s birth.
God can’t have a son in an Islamic worldview. He is too distant, too holy. It’s physically impossible and theologically inconceivable. Some Christians also struggle with what exactly we mean when we say Jesus is God’s Son. After all, the Bible uses the “son” language in a variety of ways. Sometimes it’s functional: a son does the deeds or has the role of his father (Matt. 5:9). Sometimes the son language designates a special representative of God or unique relationship with God (Ex. 4:22).
But it’s also used in a greater way, designating the very person of God himself. Muslims think Christians believe Jesus became the Son at his birth. But Christians believe the Son existed before the world and stepped into the world, receiving the name Jesus while on earth. Christians believe the Son is coexistent with the Father. If a selfie existed of the unchanging God, he would be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This one-in-three-persons being is who God is. God didn’t have a son two thousand years ago. The Son is God and has been with God since before the world came into being (John 1:1–3, 14).
Muslims believe Jesus is a prophet who spoke truthfully, so opening the Bible and reading Jesus’s words together is the best thing to do to bring clarity here. “Have you read what Jesus said about himself?” is a good question to ask to transition into Scripture. Jesus claimed to exist before Abraham (John 8:53–59), and for this, the Jewish leaders wanted to stone him. When one of Jesus’s disciples requested that Jesus show them God the Father, Jesus’s answer was clear: he himself is the physical embodiment of the Father on earth. There was no need for more revelation or another prophet to come after Jesus for us to know the Father (John 14:8–11, 8:19). Jesus even claimed to have the same authority as God to give life and to judge (John 5:19–23). Jesus didn’t teach people as the former prophets had by saying “God says this or that.” He began his statements with “I say,” assuming the very authority of God himself.
In light of these claims, we’re faced with a choice: submit to his claims as a true prophet or pick up stones to suppress his claims. This will inevitably lead to the discussion of whether the Bible has been changed. I’ve found the best proof for the Bible’s unchanging nature is the book itself. If you can open the Bible with Muslims, then you are exposing them to Scripture with self-authenticating power.
The manger brings joy to a Christian’s heart because it speaks of a God willing to embrace sacrifice in order to save sinners. This is good news, but this doesn’t line up with the god of the Qur’an. At its core Islam rejects the God who became man, thus denying he died on the cross and was raised to new life. In the absence of a Savior, we are left to save ourselves, which is just what Muslims believe. This isn’t liberating good news. We must connect the dots between Jesus’s coming, his suffering, and his victory over death. This is the news that must be heard in order to be saved (Rom. 10:9–13).
As we bring clarity to their misconceptions, Muslims need to see us embodying the way of Jesus if they are going to forsake their whole identity for a new path. We can’t change hearts, but we can show them the evidence of our changed hearts. Seeing God’s love in Scripture alongside Christians whose lives embody its power has the potential to make this news, once a threat, their greatest treasure.
Genesis 15:17 When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. 18 On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram…
The following is a transcript from a teaching entitled “Narrative Preaching” by Dr. R.C. Sproul at the 2004 Ligonier Pastors’ Conference:
I’ve always said, if I was in jail, solitary confinement, and could only have one book, the book I would want would be the Bible. If I could have only one book of the Bible with me in prison, the book I would choose is Hebrews. People are usually surprised to hear me say that. They assume I am going to say ‘Romans,’ but I say ‘I already got that. I don’t need to have a copy of it.’ But there’s so much in Hebrews that develops both the Old and the New Testament and brings it together that that’s what I would like to have in my cell.
But if I could only have one verse, I would have the verse – the smoking torch and burning furnace moving through the pieces. Why? Because in this drama, the ultimate theophany of God as He manifests Himself is fire, the pillar of smoke, the burning bush, the consuming flame, this is God moving through the pieces… this is God entering into a covenant with His creature, and as the author of Hebrews said, ‘Because God could swear by nothing higher, He swore by Himself’ because graphically, dramatically, symbolically, what God is doing for Abraham when Abraham says ‘how can I know for sure You’re going to do it?’ God runs the gauntlet. God goes between these pieces and He’s saying to Abraham, ‘Abraham, if I ever break My word to you, may I be torn asunder, just as you have torn asunder the parts of these animals. May the immortal become mortal, the immutable have a mutation, may the eternal stop living! Abraham, I can’t swear on my mother’s grave, I can’t swear by the stars or the moons.. these are all part of the created order. The highest promise I can give to you is ‘I swear by Myself, by My own deity, by My very Being… that before I would lie to you, I would give up My own Divine essence.’
You wonder why I would have that (verse)… is that relevant today? Does that have 21st century application? It does to me. Because every time I worry and I am doubting and struggling because people break promises, I break promises, and I live in a world filled with covenant breakers… that I am brought back to the God who swore by Himself, who has never broken His word.