Category: Authors
All of the author’s on this site have a few things in common – they are evangelical; have a High view of God; believe in the literal bodily resurrection and future return of the Lord Jesus Christ; adhere to the inerrancy, authority, and sufficiency of the Scriptures; hold to the vicarious and substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ; hold to the solas of the reformation – sola gratia; sola fide; sola scriptura; solus Christus; and soli deo gloria; and love the Church for whom Christ died. Almost all of them adhere to the “Doctrines of Grace”
TIM KELLER ON CHRISTMAS AND SUFFERING
When September 11th happened and New Yorkers started to suffer, you heard two voices. You heard the conventional moralistic voices saying, “When I see you suffer, it tells me about a judging God. You must not be living right, and so God is judging you.” When they see suffering they see a judgmental God. The secular voice said, “When I see people suffering I see God is missing.” When they see suffering, they see an absent, indifferent God.
WHAT CHRISTMAS DOES FOR SUFFERING
But when we see Jesus Christ dying on the cross through an act of violence and injustice, what kind of God do we see then? A condemning God? No, we see a God of love paying for sin. Do we see a missing God? Absolutely not! We see a God who is not remote but involved. We sometimes wonder why God doesn’t just end suffering, but we know that whatever the reason, it isn’t one of indifference or remoteness. God so hates suffering and evil that he was willing to come into it and become enmeshed in it. Dorothy Sayers wrote:
For whatever reason, God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—he [God] had the honesty and the courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace, and thought it was worthwhile.
The gift of Christmas gives you a resource—a comfort and consolation—for dealing with suffering, because in it we see God’s willingness to enter this world of suffering to suffer with us and for us. No other religion—whether secularism, Greco-Roman paganism, Eastern religion, Judaism, or Islam—believes God became breakable or suffered or had a body. Eastern religion believes the physical is illusion. Greco-Romans believe the physical is bad. Judaism and Islam don’t believe God would do such a thing as live in the flesh. But Christmas teaches that God is concerned not only with the spiritual, because he is not just a spirit anymore. He has a body. He knows what it’s like to be poor, to be a refugee, to face persecution and hunger, to be beaten and stabbed. He knows what it is like to be dead. Therefore, when we put together the incarnation and the resurrection, we see that God is not just concerned about the spirit, but he also cares about the body. He created the spirit and the body, and he will redeem the spirit and the body.
Christmas shows us that God is not just concerned about spiritual problems but physical problems too. So we can talk about redeeming people from guilt and unbelief, as well as creating safe streets and affordable housing for the poor, in the same breath. because Jesus himself is not just a spirit but also has a body, the gift of Christmas is a passion for justice. There are a lot of people in this world who have a passion for justice and a compassion for the poor but have absolutely no assurance that justice will one day triumph. They just believe that if we work hard enough long enough, we’ll pull ourselves together and bring some justice to this world. For these people, there’s no consolation when things don’t go well. But Christians have not only a passion for justice but also the knowledge that, in the end, justice will triumph. Confidence in the justice of God makes the most realistic passion for justice possible.
WHAT CHRISTMAS DOES FOR THE DESPISED (& THE DESPISER)
Lastly, in the package of Christmas, there’s the ability to reconnect with the part of the human race you despise. Have you ever noticed how women-centric the incarnation and resurrection narratives are? Do you realize that women, not men, are at the very center of these stories? For example, in the story of the resurrection, who was the only person in the world who knew that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead? Mary Magdelene, a former mental patient, is the one Jesus tells to take this news to the world. Everyone else in the whole world learns it from her. Women are the first people to see Jesus risen from the dead.
In the incarnation, the annunciation comes to a woman. God penetrates the world through the womb of a poor, unwed, Jewish, teenage girl. The first theological reflection group trying to wrap their minds around this to figure out what this means and what is going on is Mary and Elizabeth. We know that in those days women had a very, very low status. They were marginalized and oppressed. For example, we know that a woman’s testimony was not admissible in court. Why? Because of prejudice against women.
We say to ourselves, aren’t we glad we’re past all that? Yes, but here’s what we have to realize: God is deliberately working with people the world despises. The very first witnesses to his nativity and resurrection are people whom the world says you can’t trust, people the world looks down on. Because we don’t look down on women today, we don’t look at this part of the story and realize what we’re being told. But here’s what we’re being told: Christmas is the end of snobbishness. Christmas is the end of thinking, “Oh, that kind of person.” You don’t despise women, but you despise somebody. (Oh, yes you do!) you may not be a racist, but you certainly despise racists. You may not be a bigot, but you have certain people about which you think, “They’re the reason for the problems in the world.”
There’s a place in one of Martin Luther’s nativity sermons where he asks something like, “Do know what a stable smells like? You know what that family would have smelled like after the birth when they went out into the city? And if they were standing next to you, how would you have felt about them and regarded them?” He is saying, I want you to see Christ in the neighbor you tend to despise—in the political party you despise, in the race you despise, in the class of people you despise.
Christmas is the end of thinking you are better than someone else, because Christmas is telling you that you could never get to heaven on your own. God had to come to you. It is telling you that people who are saved are not those who have arisen through their own ability to be what God wants them to be. Salvation comes to those who are willing to admit how weak they are.
In Christmas there is a resource for something most of us don’t even feel the need of. We might be able to admit we have trouble being vulnerable or that we need help handling suffering or that we need more passion for justice. But almost nobody says, “What am I going to do about my prejudice and snobbery? I really need help with that.”
Do you remember what an incredible snob you were when you were a teenager? Teenagers generally want nothing to do with people who don’t dress right and look cool. Do you think you ever got over that? You’re not really over that. You just found more socially acceptable ways to express it. You see, teenagers let that aspect of human nature out and don’t realize how stupid they look, and after a while they get rid of it. But really they are just papering over it. There are all kinds of people you look down on and want nothing to do with—and you know it. But in Christmas you have this amazing resource to decimate that—to remove it and take it away.
These are the gifts that come in the package of Christmas— vulnerability for intimacy, strength for suffering, passion for justice, and power over prejudice. And you are blessed if you open this gift and take it into your life. If you do, you’ll be blessed. You’ll be transformed.
SOURCE: This adapted sermon is an excerpt from Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus: Experiencing the Peace & Promise of Christmas. Edited by Nancy Guthrie, Crossways. Copyright © by Timothy Keller, 2007.
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Tim Keller is the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, which he started in 1989 with his wife, Kathy, and three young sons. For over twenty years he has led a diverse congregation of young professionals that has grown to a weekly attendance of over 5,000.
WHY C.S. LEWIS NEVER GOES OUT OF STYLE
By Aaron Cline Hanbury
The author’s death barely made headlines 50 years ago when he died on the same day as JFK and Aldous Huxley. But today, his writings are more relevant than ever.
Wikimedia Commons; AP
Last month marked the 50th anniversary of a bizarre day in history. Three men of significant importance each died on November 22, 1963: President John F. Kennedy, author Aldous Huxley, and author and scholar C.S. Lewis.
On that day, the developed world (appropriately) halted at the news of the assassination of the United States’ 35th president. The front page of The New York Times on Saturday morning, the day after the tragic shooting, read, “Kennedy Is Killed by Sniper as he Rides in Car in Dallas; Johnson Sworn in on Plane,” and virtually every other news service around the world ran similar coverage and developed these stories for days and weeks following.
Huxley’s death, meanwhile, made the front page of The New York Times the day after Kennedy’s coverage began. The English-born writer spent his final hours in Los Angeles, high on LSD. His wife, Laura, administered the psychedelic drug during the writer’s final day battling cancer, honoring his wishes to prepare for death like the characters in his novels Eyeless in Gazaand Island. Huxley’s Brave New World depicts a haunting futuristic world where a sovereign, global government harvests its tightly controlled social order in glass jars; the Times obituary writer declared that Huxley’s well-known book “set a model for writers of his generation.”
The news of Lewis’s death, though, didn’t appear in print until Nov. 25, and it appeared in the normal obituary section of The New York Times weekday paper. At an earlier point in his life, Lewis enjoyed vibrant community with family, friends, and colleagues displayed famously in his writers’ club, the Inklings—which included, among others, J.R.R. Tolkien. By the time Lewis died, however, many of those relationships had fizzled out, and only a handful people even knew about Lewis’s funeral in time to attend. In one of the new biographies of Lewis by Alister McGrath (the now-definitive C.S. Lewis: A Life), the writer lists eight attendees, and assumes others, at the funeral for Lewis. No immediate family members were present—his brother, Warnie, stayed in bed, too drunk and distraught to venture to the ceremony. Lewis’s stepson, Douglas Gresham, represented the family at the understated memorial.
But amid all of the attention to these three men during the past year—new biographies, films, conferences, magazines, articles—the legacy of Lewis stands out in relation to both those of the 35th U.S. president and of the prescient Brave New World author.
As Henry L. Carrigan, Jr. puts it in Publishers Weekly, “While Huxley is now largely forgotten and Kennedy remains a symbol of lost promise, Lewis lives on through his novels, stories, essays, and autobiographical works.” While I think that oversimplifies Kennedy and underestimates Huxley, the underlying point is worth considering: In one of the great ironies of history, Lewis at his death received less attention than Huxley, and far less than Kennedy. But it may be true that Lewis’s ideas claim the most lasting influence, both on the Christian tradition and on the Western culture beyond.
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Lewis helped Tolkien finish perhaps the best work of literature from the century, ‘The Lord of the Rings’; another biographer suggests the Harry Potter series is kind of homage to the Narnia stories.
Lewis, a native of Belfast, Ireland, taught English literature at Oxford and Cambridge during the middle of the 20th century. Beginning in his teenage years and up through his early career, he was an atheist—but an uncomfortable one. In 1931, he became convinced that the Christian faith was more than a series of rational deductions; that it offered him a narrative that not only answered intellectual questions, but also satisfied his spiritual longings—what he described as the “god-sized hole” in his life. From that point on, he dedicated a significant portion of his energies to this idea that Christianity transcends facts and experience—Lewis believed Christianity wedded facts and experience in a deeper logical and emotional reality.
Lewis’s writing flowed in three streams: scholarly works, defenses of the Christian faith, and fiction. His canon, in addition to hundreds of essays and short writings, consists of more than 30 books, including widely celebrated criticisms on English literature and widely read works of fiction, poetry, and children’s stories. Today, several of these titles are familiar even to those with only a cursory interest in literature—such as the Chronicles of Narnia (which includes 1950’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), 1956’s Till We Have Faces, 1952’s Mere Christianity, and 1942’s The Screwtape Letters.
Just about any list of the best Christian books in the English language, of course, will include at least one Lewis title. In fact, when Christianity Today magazine asked more than 100 Christian writers and leaders to rank the most influential religious books of the 20th century, they named Lewis’s Mere Christianity No. 1 by far—which explains why readers have purchased the around 18 million copies of the book. And Harper Collins, which distributed some 10 million in unit sales since it acquired the rights to most of Lewis’s titles in 2001, reports more than 150,000 copies of Mere Christianity sold in the past year.
But even those numbers seem small compared to the more than 100 million copies (in at least 30 different languages) of The Chronicles of Narnia series sold.
And Lewis’s stories seem just as comfortable in Hollywood as they are in a corner bookstore. In recent years, three stories of the Chronicles of Narnia appeared as major film adaptations, with a fourth in development. And other films based on his life and works have materialized, too—such as Shadowlands, which casts Anthony Hopkins as Lewis and tells the story of his marriage to Joy Davidman, and a forthcoming film version of The Great Divorce, currently in the development stage.
Lewis narratives both answer intellectual questions and satisfy spiritual longings; he demonstrates the importance of images and stories without forgetting the necessity of reasoned, coherent belief.
Lewis’s works also appear onstage: Shadowlands began as television film and later turned into a play, and the theater production of The Screwtape Letters will continue its current tour in California later this month.
Traces of Lewis even appear in the works of other writers. Most significantly, he helped Tolkien finish perhaps the best work of English literature from the century, The Lord of the Rings; McGrath calls Lewis the “chief midwife” to the stories. Another biographer suggests that J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series includes seven volumes as a kind of homage to the Narnia stories. Rowling’s character Dudley sounds and acts like Lewis’s Eustace Scrubb (from the Chronicles of Narnia series), and in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Rowling said she found herself “thinking about the wardrobe route to Narnia when Harry is told he has to hurl himself at a barrier in Kings Cross Station.” Lewis’s work also shapes, axiomatically, the stories of Christian writers like N.D. Wilson (also the screenwriter for The Great Divorce adaptation) and Andrew Peterson, and has also influenced writers like Lloyd Alexander—who said, “In our times, every fantasy realm must be measured in comparison with Narnia.”
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One of the few men who did attend Lewis’s funeral was the English theologian and philosopher Austin Farrer. In his eulogy that day, Farrer effectively described the combination of logic and emotion—of fact and imagination, of prose and poetry—that made Lewis’s writings resonate with many demographics of readers: Farrer said, “There lived in his writings a Christian universe that could be both thought and felt, in which he was at home and in which he made his reader at home.” In other words, readers found—and still find—that Lewis narratives both answer intellectual questions and satisfy spiritual longings; Lewis demonstrates the importance of images and stories for the life of faith, without forgetting the necessity of reasoned, coherent belief, as well.
But Lewis’s appeal clearly reaches further than his Christian audience and draws appreciation from adherents of other faiths and the non-religious. There’s a profound reason for that. As the flamboyant, avant garde theater critic Kenneth Tynan, a proud proponent of amorality, wrote in his diary after reading Lewis’s novels, “How thrilling he makes goodness seem—how tangible and radiant!” And after reading a work of nonfiction, he wrote, “C.S.L. works as potently as ever on my imagination.”
In a culture that views the world more as charcoal than black-and-white, Lewis’s vision of the world speaks to a whole new mind of the 21st century as well as his native 20th.
In honor of his achievements as a writer, officials of Westminster Abbey announced last month that they will honor Lewis in the prestigious Poets’ Corner alongside literary figures such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Charles Dickens. The memorial stone displays Lewis’ famous summary of his faith: “I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen. Not only because I can see it but because by it I can see everything else.”
This vision for a Christian lens to the world permeates Lewis’s stories, because, for him, the best stories hinted at the deep structures of reality, helping humanity in the journey for truth and significance. Good stories point to an ultimate story. And as Farrer—but few else—might have predicted, Lewis appears more relevant today than ever.
Lewis’s writings still often show up in both religious and secular conversations. As recently as last week, writers for The Atlantic recalled Lewis while analyzing contemporary, mainstream works of fiction: One writer invoked Lewis while in a critique of Disney’s Frozen, and another used Lewis’s The Four Loves to make a positive case for the film Love Actually. We live in a culture that views the world more as charcoal than black-and-white—a culture that prefers the mixed-motive, quasi-heroes in 2010’s True Grit to the good-guy-bad-guy figures in 1969’s version; a culture that prefers the more experiential, sensitive atheism of Slavoj Zizek to the cold, laboratory atheism of Richard Dawkins. But Lewis’s vision of the world still resonates in the 21st century as well as it did in his native 20th.
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Like all good stories, Lewis’s includes an antagonist of sorts, or at least an opposing moral force: Philip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials Trilogy (perhaps more familiar to Americans as the series that includes The Golden Compass), an explicitly atheist alternative to the children’s literature of Lewis’s. In 2002, a headline in the Daily Telegraph read, “Pullman does for atheism what C.S. Lewis did for God.” Pullman decried Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia as “blatant religious propaganda.” and accused Lewis of sexism and racism, among other things.
But, as McGrath, author of C.S. Lewis: A Life, points out, Pullman’s statements about Lewis’s wide readership almost 40 years after his death only draw more attention to the Narnia author, and “affirms Lewis’s cultural significance.” In this way, “Lewis’s most strident critic, paradoxically, turns out to be one of the most important witnesses to his present-day influence and importance.”
Last month, a writer for The Guardian suggested that Huxley was actually the more “visionary” of the two writers who died on Nov. 22, 1963. He points out specifically how Huxley’s Brave New World hints at today’s social networking websites that exchange services for members’ “intimate details.” He writes: “So, even as we remember C.S. Lewis, let us spare a thought for the writer who perceived the future in which we would come to love our digital servitude.” Still, he admits that, compared to Lewis, “Aldous Huxley never attracted that kind of attention.”
And assessments of Kennedy’s ideas, in turn, remain mixed. His actions, certainly, caused massive repercussions on the nation: In part, his term shaped the future of presidential campaigns, as television became a normal aspect of elections campaigns. And his celebrity-type appeal added style, in addition to substance, to the list of essential characteristics of a United States president. But crises like the Bay of Pigs debacle, the Cold War, the convoluted situation in Vietnam, and racial discord around the country arguably mark his time in office more than his Camelot White House.
“Assessments of Kennedy’s presidency have spanned a wide spectrum,” according to Kennedy scholars at the University of Virginia. “Early studies, the most influential of which were written by New Frontiersmen close to Kennedy, were openly admiring. They built upon on the collective grief from Kennedy’s public slaying—the quintessential national trauma. Later, many historians focused on the seedier side of Kennedy family dealings and John Kennedy’s questionable personal morals. More recent works have tried to find a middle ground.” So, the legacy of Kennedy’s ideas remains ambiguous; today, he is perceived by many as an intriguing national figure who lost his opportunity to fulfill many promises.
Back 50 years ago, no one reading the news headlines from November 1963 would predict that the ideas of an English scholar and children’s writer would wield (arguably) greater influence on European and American cultures than Kennedy’s or Huxley’s. After all, Lewis’s funeral only included one family member, related by marriage.
Huxley once wrote that “the prophet must make a selection of the facts that are more significant, that will have the greatest effect on the greatest number of future human beings.” And Kennedy famously said that a “man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.”
And that’s why, in 1963, Lewis left us a legacy with influence that reaches far beyond 1960s England: He wedded significant facts with ideas that live on.
*SOURCE: THE ATLANTIC @ http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/12/why-cs-lewis-never-goes-out-of-style/282351/
SUNDAY NT SERMON: Tim Keller “Politics of the King” – Ephesians
Series: The King and the Kingdom – Part 7
Preached in Manhattan, NY on September 3, 1989
We’ve actually been studying Ephesians 2 for a few weeks now because it tells us so much about the church:
14 For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, 15 by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, 16 and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. 17 He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. 18 For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.
19 Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. 21 In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. 22 And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. – Ephesians 2:14–22
What we’re doing these last few weeks of the summer in these messages is envisioning the church, getting a clear picture of what the Bible says the church ought to be. I want that picture to be so clear and bright that it burns a hole in your mind and ignites a passion in the core of your being to see that picture realized.
Recently, I read two different accounts of two individuals who lived in two different centuries, on two different continents, and yet the same thing happened to them both. They had lived all their lives in abject poverty. For one reason or another, both of them found someone died and left them a fortune. Millions. They were dressed, and it was brought to their attention now there were millions of dollars in the bank in their name, and each one of them said, “Ah, that’s great. Fine. I’ll get it when I need it,” and never drew a cent for the rest of their lives and continued to live in abject poverty.
Interesting stories. Maybe you’ve heard of one of them, and probably there are more cases than that. The reason that happened was not that they disbelieved it, but I believe, because after years and years of living on nickels and dimes and quarters, their imaginations couldn’t comprehend those figures. They knew there was something in there they could draw on when they had a need, but they really couldn’t get their imagination around it.
We’re exactly like that when it comes to the church. Exactly. Because the things the Bible says about the nature of the church are so magnificent they beggar the imagination, and without God’s help, our puny, shriveled little imaginations cannot get around it. So over the next three weeks, we’re going to take a look at Ephesians 2. For three weeks, we’re going to look at these verses I just read.
Many of you (those of you especially with a church background) have heard these things before. “The church is a holy temple. The church is the family of God. The church is one new man,” which means a new humanity. “The church is a colony of heaven. We’re citizens of heaven, and we’re a colony of heaven.” You’ve probably heard these things, right? They’re in the bank. They’re there to be drawn on, and we sit there, and we go, “Uh-huh,” and we live like beggars. Aren’t you tired of going around in rags yet?
Now Ephesians 2:13–22, is a bank account for a Christian, and all we’re going to look at this particular evening are the first few verses, especially verses 14–17, where it talks about the peace of the church. One of the things the church has is peace. It comes up three times: “For he himself is our peace …,” in verse 14; “In this one body, he reconciled both of them, and he made peace,” in verse 15; and in verse 17, “He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near.”
The teaching of this passage, in summary, is the church is a place of supernatural unity and solidarity, and that supernatural unity and solidarity is craved by the world. They’re dying for it, but only the church can realize it. That is what the teaching is. Now let’s break it down.
In these verses, Paul, first of all, explains there’s a major problem mankind has with peace, a major problem, and then he gives a solution. The problem he talks about by giving us a case. He’s a casuist here. He’s giving us a case study, and what he’s doing is he gives us one particular case of the great hostility that exists between man and man, between men and women, between labor and management, between races and races. In this one case, he gives the example of the hostility between Jew and Gentile, and he talks about how that has been solved by the church, so let’s take a look at that.
The problem Paul gives us … He gives us a good analysis of the problem, the hostility you see in verse 14. He says he “… has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility,” and then secondly what Paul says is the answer, what brings peace, and that is he destroys the hostility through what? Verse 16: “… through the cross …”
Let’s look at the problem, then the solution. The problem: Paul points out the hostility, and you could make a great case that the problem of the human condition is the lack of peace. We live in a world of great strife and enmity. We pay billions of dollars to diplomats. Now I know there are some of these in the room: policeman, lawyers, social workers, arbitrators, mediators. What are you all out there to do? To keep us from killing each other. Guess what. You’re failing. You’re failing.
The only reason there is some peace in the world is because of what’s termed enlightened self-interest. The Bible gives us a great analysis of the cause of the hostility and the continual strife. Why is there war? Why is there terrorism? Why is there litigation? Why is there divorce? The Bible says the reason for the lack of peace in the world is the inherent selfishness and pride of every human being.
The only way the world is able to go about getting peace … It can get it in a partial way, in a sort of way. There’s a sort of peace that can be developed when selfish people find they can work for peace because working for peace helps them toward their goals. Enlightened self-interest. It’s a partial, and it keeps the world from being an absolutely unlivable place. When somebody sees it’s beneficial to their goals to work and live at peace with other people, then they’ll do it. So we do everything we can to set that up, and I’m glad we do.
Did you notice, for example, this week, ARCO came out with a new gasoline, which is far more pollution-free than has ever been produced? It was right on the front page of The New York Times. The ARCO spokesman admitted freely they could’ve been doing this years ago but he said they had no incentive. Well, you know what the incentive is. California has passed certain laws about emission control, and now they’re going to be penalized a terrific amount of money if they don’t produce the gas.
Suddenly (isn’t this incredible?), they’re working for peace, peace with the environment, peace with the environmentalists. Why? Because they said, “Now we have incentives.” Well, what that means is … Our selfishness has been coordinated, your selfishness and my selfishness. Now we can work together, because by working together we can both get what we want. Enlightened self-interest.
Some years ago, do you remember a really, really great ad campaign for why people should not drive recklessly, why people should drive cautiously and soberly? “The life you save may be your own.” Why is it that the ad people didn’t put up there on the billboards, “The life you save may be somebody else’s?” Well, because it’s just not as powerful an argument. “The life you save may be some other poor slob.” Okay. “The life you save may be your own.” Oh, well, all right. Ooh, wow. Okay.
Don’t you see? That’s the only way the world can create peace. It’s doomed in the end. It has to be, because it’s only temporary. Eventually, it’s not in your best interest to work for peace. At some point, if you’re trying to reach your goals, the most beneficial thing for your self-interest will be to push somebody aside to cheat, to stab, or just to walk away. Because it’s the selfishness which creates the strife and the enmity and the conflict, and you can only harness it so far. It’s the selfishness and the pride that creates it.
Now Paul, I said, gives us a case study of how that works. He could’ve chosen all sorts of conflicts we have, but he chose one, which is very, very well known, and one, of course, which we have plenty of still in the world today, the conflict between Jew and Gentile. He says something pretty interesting. He says he “… destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations.”
What does that mean? One thing we do know is Jesus Christ never abolished the Ten Commandments. We know that because the Sermon on the Mount is all about the Ten Commandments. You know, Jesus says, “You’ve heard it said, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ but I say unto you, if you hate your brother, you have killed him, and if you ignore and are cold to your brother, you have killed him.”
What is Jesus doing? Is he saying, “Ah, you don’t need to follow the Ten Commandments anymore?” He’s saying, “Oh, my friends, the Ten Commandments are far more broad in their ramifications than you ever thought. It’s critical we live according to the commandments.” So Jesus did not abolish the Ten Commandments, no. The key is Paul is thinking of something else. He is thinking, I think, literally, of a partition, a real wall, a literal wall.
Yes, there are figurative walls between labor and management, and there are figurative walls between male and female and between black and white, but there was a real wall between the Jews and the Gentiles. It was a wall. It was a partition in the temple, and the people inside were the Jews, who had not just the Commandments but the regulations, the ceremonial laws, the clean and the unclean laws, all the regulations by which they kept themselves separate from the world.
The Gentiles, who did not have all those laws, who were uncircumcised, who ate unclean meat, and so on, they were on the outside. What Paul points out is the Commandments and the regulations created hostility. That’s not the reason God gave the regulations. Why did God make Israel a separate people? Why did he set them apart with all those regulations?
Not to create enmity, not to create separation, but to make Israel a holy nation who would attract the Gentiles to God. That’s why so many of the calls to worship we do here … the first thing, when I call you to worship … very often, I read it from the Psalms. These were the calls to worship at the temple. Very often, in the Psalms, you see calls to worship from temple that don’t just go, “Come worship all ye people.” What does it say? “Come worship all ye peoples.”
God expected Israel to be drawing all peoples to the worship of God. But what happened was the regulations were distorted and twisted by the pride and selfishness in our hearts. The Jewish people began to take those regulations, which were a gift, and instead of being humbled by them, they became proud, and they said, “Look at these Gentile dogs who eat the wrong food. Look at these unwashed pagans. Why should we have anything to do with them?”
Their gift became a source of pride, and instead of serving the Gentiles with their gift, they scorn them and look down their nose at them. The Gentiles say, “Well, who needs these stuck-up people?” So they became a dividing wall of hostility.
Listen. Let me say, very clearly, this is only one case. Tonight we are not picking on Jewish people because this is a universal principle. Every person who receives a gift, every strength you have, everything that is good about you, sin will twist it and turn it around and turn it into something that makes you look down your nose at other people.
I remember, for example, the school district in my hometown came up with this brilliant idea. They said, “Let’s take the smartest kids from all the different parts of the school district together, and we’ll put them in one class, because they can really, really study, and we can get them three and four years ahead in math and three and four years ahead in all these things.” They put them all together. They didn’t say, “You are the gifted class,” but everybody in that class knew they were pretty intelligent.
Twelve years later, they evaluated the program, and they stopped it. I remember reading the evaluation, and the reason for that was there was tremendous hostility created between that class and everybody else. The class developed a sense of, “Oh, we know who we are. We are the smart kids, and we know who you are. You’re the ones who couldn’t cut it and get into this class.” Of course, everybody else says, “They’re the snobby, smart kids, and we want nothing to do with them,” and there was violence because of that.
I’ve counseled, and I sure hope I don’t do a whole lot more of it, but I did a lot of marriage counseling when I was in Virginia because the nearest therapist was about 300 miles away from my town, so I did it. One of the things I found in this little blue-collar town was the women were more adaptable than the men, by and large.
Everybody got married at the age of 16 or 17, and then as time went on, the women were more adaptable. They learned. They grew. They took courses. Even though most of them were just high school graduates, they would take other courses, and they changed and grew, and their husbands didn’t.
Ten to fifteen years later, here’s what happened: For whatever reason (and I can’t document this), the women were more adaptable to their environment. They were more responsive. They were more receptive, and the husbands, it was harder for them to admit when they were wrong. This was a gift these women had.
I don’t know if it’s inherent to the female brain. I don’t know. I haven’t read that, but I do know these women, almost all of them, would get together and talk about it, and they turned it into a tremendous source of pride. They would constantly scorn their husbands about their male ego. The male ego … he can’t admit when he’s wrong. The male ego is rigid.
What happened was they turned their gift into pride. Everybody does it. All of us do it. The gifts God gives us become walls of hostility, barriers. Don’t you see? What does God do about it? What does Jesus say is the solution? The solution is in verses 15 and 16: “by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross …”
The answer to the problem, the inveterate problem, the problem that cannot be solved any other way is here were two people, two groups, Jew and Gentile, at each other’s throats. Jesus reconciled them to God and thus to each other through the cross. Now how does the cross do that? Here we go. The cross does it (and only the cross) because it eliminates boasting.
Have you seen that? One of the problems with the new translations are they get rid of that word boasting? There are a lot of places where Paul says, “No one will boast,” or, “I will boast in nothing.” In fact, my favorite verse, and the verse I need to read you right now, is Galatians 6:14, a very important verse.
He says, “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Neither Jew nor Gentile means anything but a new creation. Peace to all who follow this rule.” Did you hear that? He says, “I boast in nothing but the cross; therefore, Jew and Gentile mean nothing to me. I look at everyone differently, and peace comes to those who follow this rule.”
The cross eliminates boasting. The trouble with the word boast is what? When you think of boasting, what do you think of? You think of a braggart. You think of somebody at a party, huh? You think of the lady in the TV commercial where the lady says, “Now darling, enough about me. What do you think of my dress?” Do you remember that one? Yeah.
Anyway, you think of bragging. You think of somebody who’s always talking about their accomplishments. No. It’s a much deeper word than that. Many times this word boast is translated glory. “I will glory in nothing else but the cross.” You see, the word glory in the Bible means something of weight, and what Paul says here is, “There were many things I used to glory in.” Now what does that mean? “I used to boast in them. I used to glory.”
Does it mean I bragged about them at parties? No. Here’s what it means: To glory in something means to say, “This is what gives me weight. This thing is what makes me count. This thing is what gives me substance. It’s because of this that I am not chaff blown into the wind. I’m not smoke. I’m not an illusion. I’m not a holograph. It’s this thing that makes me real. It’s this thing that defines me. It’s this thing that makes me count.” Paul says that is eliminated by the cross, and only the cross can eliminate that.
He goes into more detail in another incredibly important passage where he gives, virtually, his life story in a few verses, and it’s in Philippians 3. It reads like this: “If any man has reasons to boast, I have more. Of the people of Israel …” He’s talking about himself. “[I was] of the people of Israel … a Hebrew of the Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless.”
Listen. “But whatever was to my profit, I now consider debit. For the sake of Christ, I consider them all as rubbish that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from obeying the law, but a righteousness that comes from God through faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection.”
He makes a list. He says, “If anybody has things to glory in, I have more.” That list, he says, “I was a Hebrew of the Hebrews.” He’s talking about his family, pedigree, his social status. Then he says, “I was a Pharisee.” He was a scholar, “… as to knowledge, a Pharisee …” He was a scholar. His education was impeccable, all right? Ivy League, see?
Then thirdly, he says, “As to zeal, I persecuted the church.” That’s professional success as a rabbi, all right? Social status, educational excellence, professional success, and then he says, “… as to legal righteousness, faultless.” He says, “In every way, my moral record, all these things, I get glory in them. I looked at them, and they gave me weight. They made me feel like I count. I know who I am. I’m somebody.”
They gave him his identity. He says here, “In order to become a Christian, I had to stop glorying in any of them.” He didn’t just say, “It happened when I became a Christian.” He says, “That I might know Christ, I had to count them all as rubbish.” By the way, that is a euphemism, okay? That’s a euphemism because the Greek word means dung, excrement, urine, all those things that got the art banned in Washington, DC.
He says, “I had to count them as refuse. I stopped looking at them as being things I got my identity from.” Does that mean he threw his books away and stopped being a scholar? No. He enjoyed the fact he was a scholar. Did that mean he stopped being moral? Of course not. Did that mean he stopped being a member his family, stopped being a member of the tribe of Benjamin; he didn’t go to the Benjamin family reunions anymore? What did that mean? It meant they no longer were foundational to his identity. He no longer gloried in them.
Now my friends, when that happened, as a Jew, all the things he boasted in were knocked out, and that meant suddenly there was no difference between the Gentiles and him. It’s not just Jewish people who do that. Friends, every religion other than evangelical Christianity does the same thing. It says, “Here’s what you have to do. Go out and get it. Do it. When you succeed, then you know you count.”
I got an interesting little brochure. I won’t mention the church just in case … You know this is New York, and who knows? I might get sued, but there’s a place full of conflict. There’s not much peace here, you know, strife and litigation … But this particular church believes they can give you spiritual purification.
Here’s how their religion works: In the brochure, it says, “Come take our Purification Rundown. The rundown will return your energy and alertness to its natural, sparkling, clear, fresh state. The program is a strenuous one, but you can complete it by following the rules. The Purification Rundown is not concerned with the body. The aim of the Purification Rundown is freeing the individual spiritually. There are no medical recommendations or claims made for the program. The only claim is future spiritual improvement.”
On the back, there’s a testimony, and this person said, “After completing the rundown, I became vice president of marketing for an international cable company. I was able to complete all my work in just a few hours with my new energy level, and for the first time in years, I had evenings and weekends free.” Don’t you realize …? That’s crass. Of course, it’s crass. “Come. It’ll be hard work, but if you follow our religion you’ll reach all of your goals, and then you’ll feel so good about yourself.”
Of course, that’s crass, but friends, every religion, every philosophy outside of evangelical Christianity, whether you get an old one that’s been around for thousands of years or you make up your own, does the same thing. Can I give you a little more subtle personal example? When I was in college, I was very depressed at a period, and I went to a counselor, and the counselor said to me, “One of the things we have to do to help you in your depression is help your sense of self-esteem,” which, in other words, well, he says, “You’re not glorying in anything.”
Now he didn’t put it like that, of course, but that’s what he meant, and he said, “What are you good at?” I shudder to tell you this, because it was a long time ago, but at the time I was a trumpet player, and I said, “I’m a pretty good trumpet player.” He said, “Now I want you to do this: When you start to get depressed, I want you to imagine yourself playing a solo that brings down the house. Do that whenever you are feeling depressed,” and I tried it.
I can give you this testimony: In the short run, it does make you feel better, but then you’re on a treadmill. There are only two things that can happen to you; either you achieve what you imagine, and you build your identity on your gift, and next thing you know, you’re starting to look down your nose (just like Paul says here) at every other inartistic Philistine, every other boorish person who’s not like you.
If you really get successful, you can put yourself in a power bubble surrounded just by people who tell you how great things are. The only other alternative is you fail. Then what happens to you is you’re eaten up with envy and resentment all the rest of your life. In either sense, in either situation, peace is gone. You’re either eaten up with pride or you’re eaten up with envy and resentment. I’m speaking personally.
Paul says the gospel and the gospel alone, the cross and the cross alone, changes all that because what the cross does is it takes you and shows you all these things you’re glorying in, though good in themselves, are nothing before God. They cannot make you in even one iota acceptable to him. They are nothing before God, and compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Christ, they’re less than nothing.
Years ago (I’ll use him as an illustration), there was a man named David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, one of my heroes, and I’ll quote him as often as I possibly can. He and C.S. Lewis, you’ll hear quotes all the time. Why not? They’re both dead, but they’re like my tutors, my friends, when I read them. Lloyd-Jones was a surgeon in London in the 20s, and he was a man of great standing and distinction. The trouble was, after he became a Christian, he discovered, to his consternation and everybody else’s, he was an incredibly good speaker, a tremendous preacher.
One of the best things you can do if you’re a Christian and a doctor is to be a great Christian doctor, and one of the worst things most Christian doctors could do would be to go out and try to preach. This man was clearly called to the ministry. He had to do it, and he did. He left being a surgeon and he went into the ministry. At that time he took a 90 percent cut in salary. His salary as a minister was one-tenth of what it was as a surgeon.
Some years after that happened, a reporter came to him, and the reporter said, “Dr. Lloyd-Jones, many people were intrigued when you made this choice. You gave up so much. There were so many things in your life you had to give up, and I’m sure there has been a great deal of enjoyment and satisfaction doing what you’ve done, but I’ve come here to find out, on balance, after reflecting and weighing everything up, was it worth it?”
Lloyd-Jones growled at him in Welsh (because he was Welsh), and he says, “I gave up nothing. I received everything.” In other words, let me translate. He says, “My dear man, you don’t even understand the basic nature of Christianity. Christianity is not one way among many that can help you be happy. It’s not just a way that we have to say, ‘Will this help me really reach my goals in life?’ It’s a total reorientation.”
What Lloyd-Jones said is just what Paul said. He said, “All those things I used to glory in, all those things that used to be sources of pride for me, things through which I got my identity, I saw, compared to what I needed to be (acceptable before God), they were nothing. Compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Christ, they were less than nothing, and so I gave them all up.” “I gave up nothing. I received everything.”
By the way, if there is anybody here tonight who has been thinking about committing your life fully to Jesus Christ … I’ll bet you some of you are sitting around saying, “Ah, but will it be worth it? I might have to give up so much.” Oh, you will have to give up some things. Of course, you have to give up some things. You’re weighing it up. My dear friends, you know what you’re weighing up? Good things in themselves, many of them, but compared to the surpassing worth of Jesus Christ, dust balls.
You won’t know this until you do it, until you give yourself to him. You are like a person sitting around saying, “I have millions in the bank, but I’m agonizing. Do I want to spend 25 cents on that stamp to send in my withdrawal request? Oh, I hate to do that.” You know, maybe a 25-cent stamp represents your life savings up to this point, but you have all that in the bank. “I gave up nothing. I received everything.”
The Bible says when a person is like that and when a person does that, there’s a fundamental change in their relationships to all other believers. Don’t you see why? Because now you have an identity which is deeper than your family identity. That doesn’t mean you stay out of your family, but now you have an identity deeper than your family, an identity deeper than your gender, an identity deeper than your race, an identity deeper than your culture.
Why do you think Jesus Christ can say, “You must hate your mother and father and love me?” He doesn’t mean you literally write poison-pen letters to your parents as soon as you become a Christian, but what he does mean is he says, “Now compared to what you feel about me, compared to your commitment to me, your commitment to your family is smaller.” Or put it this way: The Hatfields and the McCoys, remember them? They were fighting and shooting each other and killing each other for years and years back in the hinterland of West Virginia.
As a result, anybody who was a Hatfield, that defined them. If you were a Hatfield, you didn’t shoot at another Hatfield, and if you were a Hatfield, you shot at McCoy. That’s how your life was run. But if a Hatfield and a McCoy both became Christians, then those two people had far more in common with each other than they did with their own families. That is the nature of the gospel because that’s how radically different your identity is in Christ.
In a sense, everything I’m doing now, this passage, is a commentary on the claim I made last week. If you’re a Christian, you’re a Christian first and you’re an American second. If you’re a Christian, you’re a Christian first and you’re a white person or a black person second. If you’re a Christian, you’re a Christian first and you’re a ruling class or a poor person second. Don’t you see that?
Because the relationship you have in Christ is much more fundamental than any other relationship you have. That is absolutely the nature of the gospel. As a result, the unity and solidarity Christians can have is the sort of thing the world has been trying to get for years. It can’t get there because it doesn’t embrace the cross. The cross knocks down the sources of pride, the things that divide us, and unites us. Unites us completely.
Some of you have heard of Matthew Henry. He wrote a very famous commentary. He lived in the 1700s. It’s a very old commentary and a good favorite. His father’s name was Philip Henry. His father and mother were courting. They were dating, and unfortunately, Philip Henry was from the wrong side of the tracks. The girl he was dating, who was going to be Matthew Henry’s mother, was from Society Hill.
At one point, the parents of Matthew Henry’s mother came to her and said, “This Philip Henry who you’re dating, we’re concerned. We don’t know where he’s from. We don’t know who his parents are. We don’t know what part of the city he’s really from. We don’t know where he’s from.” She looked at them and said, “I don’t know where he’s from either, but I know where he’s going.”
You see, that’s all that matters. That’s why Paul can say, “… henceforth we know no man according to the flesh …,” which means, “I know longer think of people the same way.” Christians will find there’s more solidarity with other Christians of other races than they have with non-Christians of their own race. Christians will find there’s more solidarity between themselves and Christians of other families than they have with non-Christians of their own family, and so on, and so on.
The Greek word for church is ekklesia, called out, and you’re not called out of involvement with the world. You’re called out of the identity. That’s the reason why we can say you’re a Christian first and you’re white or you’re black second. You’re a Christian first and you’re this family or that family second. You’re a Christian a first and you’re rich or poor second. That’s the reason why the solidarity Christian can have should be, can be, unsurpassed.
We’re a new humanity. That’s what it means when it says, “The two have become one man.” What does that mean? It means there’s a new humanity, a new race. A new race. In conclusion, I want to just ask, “What are the implications of this?” I’ll give you two. Just two.
1. If this is true, don’t you see the church is not a nice place just to drop in on every so often?
Don’t you see the church is not a club? Do you begin to understand why there are these commands in the Bible who almost no one in this room, including me (because I’m new here), are obeying? I’m not sure I was obeying them in Philadelphia. The Bible says, “Confess your sins to each other …”
Here’s another one: “Exhort one another daily lest you be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” Do you have relationships that are so strong there’s somebody who understands you well enough to know day to day when you’re falling down on the job, so that person can encourage you and exhort you so you’re not hardened? Are you obeying that verse? Are you making provision to obey that verse?
“Exhort one another daily lest you be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” Confess your sins to one another. Welcome one another. Bear one another’s burdens. Submit to one another. The reason for this is the church is a place where you forge relationships that are full of accountability.
Do you know what real worldliness is, friends? To be conformed into the image of the world right now means you as Christians bring your Americanism in, and Americanism is, “I’m responsible for my own life. My problems are nobody else’s business. My sins are nobody else’s business because there is no relationship in which I can’t walk out if my needs aren’t being met.” That’s the American way today. That flies right in the face of everything we have been looking at.
An awful lot of Christians will come into the church … In fact, some of you might be considering … Well, you’re coming to listen to me. Because you want to know whether, if you have the need, you’d be willing to confess your sins to me. Okay … Only if you have the need, you know. Whether you would come and let me exhort you weekly, “… lest you be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.”
You’re trying to figure out whether you want to just come to the place where you have one person who you’re doing that for occasionally. The Bible says you are still holding the church at arm’s length. You’re still refusing to come into the church. You’re still refusing to be truly committed because you’re not making provision for other believers to exhort you daily “… lest you be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” If you don’t obey that verse, you will be hard. You have to be.
It’s not good enough just to come and to say, “Okay, the guy up front, I’ll listen to him. I’ll try to develop a relationship with him.” It’s not good enough. It’s not good enough. We have to be a church in which the truth is spoken in love, and my friends, it’s a church where people can walk up to you and say, “Excuse me. I’ve been praying about this for several weeks. I haven’t talked to anybody else about this. You can hit me. Maybe you will hit me later on. Possibly, we can still talk about. I’m trying my very best to do it right. Do you realize your temper is the talk of the whole office?”
Now you have to get ready. You duck. If you and that other person are a Christian, that’s the nature of the unity you have to have. That other person might hit you and later on come back and say, “Thank you.” Later on, you may find out, if the person hits you, they were right; you exaggerated. You didn’t act on proper information, but a church … That’s the church, a church where you’re forging ties that are as deep as the family.
What else does it mean when it says, “Hate your father and mother and love me?” It can’t mean you really hate your father and mother. It must mean you forge tremendously strong bonds with other believers in the church. Don’t forget, Jesus died on the cross to put you into the body. He didn’t die just to save little individual people to run around and go wherever they get blessed the most. He saved you to put you into the body and make you a new person with other people, okay?
By the way, if I was in New York, I’d probably be doing what a lot of you have been doing for years, but I’m trying to say, once you see what the Scripture says, and once you have opportunities, you need to make provision. You need to make provision. The other thing I just want to say is, keep this in mind. In Ephesians 1, Paul writes to the Ephesians, who he has never met, and he says, “I’ve heard you are true believers because of, one, your faith in Jesus Christ and, two, your love for all the saints.” Now those were the tests.
2. Your love for all the saints
Don’t you see? Some of you may say, “I know I’m a believer because I believe all the doctrines. I believe all the right things. I have faith in Jesus Christ.” But don’t forget the other test of whether you’re really a Christian. Do you love all the saints? All the saints.
David Martyn Lloyd-Jones used to say one of the reasons he realized he had changed … After he became a Christian, he would sometimes wonder, “Have I really changed?” He suddenly realized something really weird had happened. You have to remember England (those of you who are from Britain realize this) is a lot more of a class-conscious society than we have here, though we have classes. Silly to say we don’t have classes, but Britain has that class-consciousness.
As he got into a church in a little mining community in Wales, he used to spend a lot visiting with what he called “old Welsh fisherwomen,” women with no formal schooling at all but who were godly women. He would sit down, and he would talk with them for hours by their hearth. Then he would go and spend time with his old friends, the people he went to Oxford with, the people he went to medical school with.
He suddenly realized one day, he says, “I enjoy, more, hours of fellowship with another Christian who is as opposite as these fisherwomen are to me than I do talking with my peers, the people who are of the same ilk, the same education with me.” He suddenly realized, “What could take a British ruling class person and do that?” Only the gospel, your love for all the saints.
There may be people in here who come in here and because of your gifts and your talents, you’ve always scorned the hoi polloi. Some of you may come here, you respectable types, and you’re not sure how you like to deal with these street types. Other people might come in here who have a kind of disrespectable background, and you’re afraid the respectable types won’t work. You might be the tough guy who kind of hates those artsy types.
My friends, I don’t care whether or not you believe all the doctrine. The way you know you’re a believer is you love all the saints, and you find that as you work for it. This is how I end … My weekly C.S. Lewis quote. He says, “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal …” They’ll end, right?
“… and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.
And our charity must be real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.”
We should be treating each other as infinitely precious vessels, as if you were in a house and you picked up a vase and looked at it, and you said, “Oh, what is this?” Then somebody said, “Oh, that’s a 2,000-year-old vase from the Ming dynasty.” You would be in shock. Suddenly, fear and trembling would overtake you, and you would treat that vase as the precious thing that it is. There’s something infinitely more precious in the pew next to you tonight.
About the Preacher
In 1989 Dr. Timothy J. Keller, his wife and three young sons moved to New York City to begin Redeemer Presbyterian Church. In 20 years it has grown to meeting for five services at three sites with a weekly attendance of over 5,000. Redeemer is notable not only for winning skeptical New Yorkers to faith, but also for partnering with other churches to do both mercy ministry and church planting. Redeemer City to City is working to help establish hundreds of new multi-ethnic congregations throughout the city and other global cities in the next decades.
Dr. Tim Keller is the author of several phenomenal Christo-centric books including:
Joy for the World: How Christianity Lost Its Cultural Influence and Can Begin Rebuilding It (co-authored with Greg Forster and Collin Hanson (February or March, 2014).
Encounters with Jesus:Unexpected Answers to Life’s Biggest Questions. New York, Dutton (November 2013).
Walking with God through Pain and Suffering. New York, Dutton (October 2013).
Judges For You (God’s Word For You Series). The Good Book Company (August 6, 2013).
Galatians For You (God’s Word For You Series). The Good Book Company (February 11, 2013).
Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Plan for the World. New York, Penguin Publishing, November, 2012.
Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, September, 2012.
The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness. New York: 10 Publishing, April 2012.
Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just. New York: Riverhead Trade, August, 2012.
The Gospel As Center: Renewing Our Faith and Reforming Our Ministry Practices (editor and contributor). Wheaton: Crossway, 2012.
The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God. New York, Dutton, 2011.
King’s Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus (Retitled: Jesus the KIng: Understanding the Life and Death of the Son of God). New York, Dutton, 2011.
Gospel in Life Study Guide: Grace Changes Everything. Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 2010.
The Reason For God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. New York, Dutton, 2009.
Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Priorities of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters. New York, Riverhead Trade, 2009.
Heralds of the King: Christ Centered Sermons in the Tradition of Edmund P. Clowney (contributor). Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2009.
The Prodigal God. New York, Dutton, 2008.
Worship By The Book (contributor). Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002.
Ministries of Mercy: The Call of the Jericho Road. Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 1997.
SUNDAY OT SERMON: James M. Boice – Genesis 1:1-2 “VIEWS OF CREATION: THE GAP THEORY”
SERIES: GENESIS – PART 7
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. – Genesis 1:1-2
In The Invisible War Donald Grey Barnhouse gives an illustration of what has come to be know widely as the gap theory of evolution. A motorist was driving through America’s great southwest and had planned to arrive at the Grand Canyon of Colorado from the South and then proceed on across it northward into Utah.
He shared his plans with a friend who knew the area, but his friend immediately pointed out that what he wanted to do was impossible. On the map it looked as if he could drive north across the canyon, but that tiny fifteen-mile gap, which barely shows on the map, is actually a gigantic and impassable chasm. One can get north only by taking a detour over hundreds of miles of hot desert roads.
According to the gap theory, the first two verses of Genesis are like that. They appear to be continuous, but in between there is actually a long but indeterminate period in which the destruction of an original world and the unfolding of the geological ages can be located.
A Popular Viewpoint
This theory is also called the restitution or recreation theory. Arthur C. Custance, who has written an excellent book in the theory’s defense, traces it to certain early Jewish writers, some of the church fathers, and even to some ancient Sumerian and Babylonian documents. It crops up in the Middle Ages as well. It was in Scotland at the beginning of the last century, through the work of the capable pastor and writer Thomas Chalmers, that the idea gained real coherence and visibility.
Chalmers was anxious to show that the emerging data concerning the geological ages was not incompatible with sound biblical exposition. So according to him, Genesis 1:1 tells of God’s creation of an original world in which all things were good, for God cannot create that which is bad. Lucifer ruled this world for God. Lucifer sinned. God judged the world along with Lucifer, as a result of which the earth became the formless, desolate mass we discover it to be in Genesis 1:2 (“Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep”). The earth continued like this for indeterminate ages in which the various rock strata developed. It was only at the end of this period that God intervened to bring new order out of the prevailing chaos, which is what Genesis 1:3–31 describes. These verses actually describe a recreation.
Chalmers wrote in the early 1800s, but his views thrived around the turn of the century as they were picked up by the various writers of early fundamentalism. The best known was G. H. Pember, whose book on the theory, Earth’s Earliest Ages (1876), went through many editions. My own copy is the fourteenth.
Pember wrote, “It is thus clear that the second verse of Genesis describes the earth as a ruin; but there is no hint of the time which elapsed between creation and this ruin. Age after age may have rolled away, and it was probably during their course that the strata of the earth’s crust were gradually developed. Hence we see that geological attacks upon the Scriptures are altogether wide of the mark, are a mere beating of the air. There is room for any length of time between the first and second verses of the Bible. And again, since we have no inspired account of the geological formations, we are at liberty to believe that they were developed just in the order in which we find them. The whole process took place in preadamite times, in connection, perhaps, with another race of beings, and, consequently, does not at present concern us” (G. H. Pember, Earth’s Earliest Ages and Their Connection with Modern Spiritualism and Theosophy. London and Glasgow: Pickering & Inglis, n.d., 28).
In subsequent pages Pember developed his theory of the fall of Satan, the influence of demons in the world prior to Noah, and the relevance of this for the resurgence of spiritism that he observed in his day.
Arthur W. Pink held Chalmers’s view and doubtless also learned from Pember. He wrote, “The unknown interval between the first two verses of Genesis 1, is wide enough to embrace all the prehistoric ages which may have elapsed; but all that took place from Genesis 1:3 onwards transpired less than six thousand years ago” (Arthur W. Pink, Gleanings in Genesis. Chicago: Moody Press, 1950, 11. Original edition 1922).
Harry Rimmer was another influential writer. In 1941 he authored a book entitled Modern Science and the Genesis Record. In it he said, “The original creation of the heaven and the earth, then, is covered in the first verse of Genesis. Only God knows how many ages rolled by before the ruin wrought by Lucifer fell upon the earth, but it may have been an incalculable span of time. Nor can any students say how long the period of chaos lasted; there is not even a hint given. But let us clearly recognize in these studies that Moses, in the record of the first week of creation, is telling the story of God’s reconstruction; rather than the story of an original creation” (Harry Rimmer, Modern Science and the Genesis Record (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1941, 28).
The single most effective teacher of this view was C. I. Scofield, who included it in his notes on Genesis in the astonishingly popular Scofield Reference Bible. From there it became the almost unquestioned view of fundamentalism, though, as I have already pointed out, The Fundamentals themselves contain an article by James Orr that almost embraces evolution. In more recent times various forms of this theory have been held by C. S. Lewis, M. R. DeHaan, Donald Grey Barnhouse, and others. Francis Schaeffer acknowledged parts of it as a possibility (Schaeffer, Genesis in Space and Time, 62).
Exegetical Strength
There is widespread opposition to the gap theory today, even on the part of very conservative writers. But these often dismiss it too easily, without adequate attention to the biblical data on which the gap theorists built. This theory may be wrong, but it is not possible to dismiss it cavalierly.
What are the lines of evidence for this theory? The first and by far the most important is its exegetical or biblical base. Indeed, without this, Chalmers, Pember, and the others would have had no case at all. The exegetical argument has a number of parts.
First, in the Masoretic text of Genesis, in which ancient Jewish scholars attempted to incorporate a sufficient number of “indicators” to guide the reader in proper pronunciation and interpretation of the text, there is a small mark known as a rebia following verse 1. The rebia is a disjunctive accent. That is, it serves to inform the reader that there is a break in the narrative at this point and that he should pause before going on to the next verse. The rebia might also indicate that the conjunction that begins verse 2, a waw, should be translated “but” rather than the more common “and.” (This has bearing on how the second verse should be translated because, as we will see, it could be rendered “But the earth became a ruin.”) To be sure, the rebia was not in the original text of Genesis and therefore represents only the considered judgment of the Masoretes, but their opinion may guide us to a correct interpretation.
Second, there is the structure of the creation account itself. Each of the accounts of the activity of God on one of the creative days ends with the words, “And there was evening, and there was morning—the first [second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth] day.” In other words, there is a very marked parallelism. Moreover, on the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth days, those same sections begin, “And God said. …” It is only natural, therefore, to assume that the account of the first day of creation begins, not with verse 1 but with verse 3 where the parallel phrase occurs (“And God said, ‘Let there be light’ ”). If this is so, then the first two verses stand apart from the rest of the account and describe a creation prior to the work of God on the first day.
Third, there is the possibility (some would say necessity) of translating the Hebrew verb “to be” (hayah), which occurs in verse 2, not “was” but “became.” So the verse would read, “But the earth became formless [that is, a ruinous mass] and empty [that is, devoid of life].” It is also possible that the verb is to be taken as pluperfect with the meaning, “But the earth had become… .”
The arguments concerning the meaning of this basic Hebrew verb are long and tortuous, not ones that most people would readily or cheerfully follow. But they boil down to the point that this is at least a possibility and perhaps even a strong possibility. Those who oppose this view—Bernard Ramm, in The Christian View of Science and Scripture, is one—argue that those adopting it make a novel and very questionable interpretation that rests on an infrequent and secondary meaning of the verb. But it is not at all evident that it is that infrequent or secondary. Let us take the matter of whether “became” is a secondary meaning first. In Arthur Custance’s defense of the gap theory’s exegetical base, the point is made that the Hebrew verb hayah, while frequently translated “was” rather than “became,” nevertheless primarily means “became” for the simple reason that the Hebrew language does not really need a verb for “be.” That is, if a Hebrew-speaking person wanted to say “The man is good,” he would not use a verb at all but would simply say, “The man good.” The verb would be implied. This sentence differs from the descriptive phrase “The good man,” because the Hebrew way of saying that is “The man the good.”
In his critique Ramm declares that “the Hebrews did not have a word for became, but the verb to be did service for to be and become” (Bernard Ramm, The Christian View of Science and Scripture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954, 202).
But as Custance points out, the reverse would be more nearly correct, namely, that “they did not need a word for ‘to be’ in the simple sense, so made their word for become serve for to be and become” (Arthur C. Custance, Without Form and Void: A Study of the Meaning of Genesis 1:2. Brockville, Ont.: Doorway Papers, 1970, 104). In Custance’s judgment the word should be translated “became” unless there are reasons to the contrary.
The other matter is frequency. John Whitcomb has written that there are only six examples in the entire Pentateuch of the verb hayah being rendered “became.” This seems to be an error. Custance claims that there are at least seventeen cases in Genesis alone, but that is in the King James Version. Other versions give the translation in other instances. The Latin Vulgate has the equivalent thirteen times in just the first chapter. Some sample verses:
Genesis 3:1—“Now the serpent had become more subtle than any beast of the field.” Most versions say “was,” but this verse probably indicates that the serpent became subtle or crafty as the result of Satan’s use of him for the purpose of tempting Eve.
Genesis 3:20—“Eve became the mother of all living.” The King James Version says “was,” but this is strange since no children had been born to her at this time. The New International Version recognizes the problem and translates the verse accordingly: “Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.”
Genesis 21:20—“And God was with the lad [Ishmael]; and he grew, and dwelt in the wilderness, and became an archer.”
Genesis 37:20—“We shall see what will become of his [Joseph’s] dream.”
These translations are not beyond challenge, of course. But they do show the frequency of this possible translation of this verb. Custance’s own conclusion is, “By and large, therefore, I suggest that the rendering, ‘But the earth had become a ruin and a desolation,’ is a rendering which does more justice to the original and deserves more serious consideration as an alternative than it has been customary to afford it in recent years” (Ibid, 116).
Fourth, the words “formless and empty” (tohu wa bohu) may be verbal clues to a preadamic judgment of God on our planet. True, the words have various shades of meaning and do not necessarily indicate the destruction of something that had formerly been beautiful. But they sometimes do. Besides, there is the important text in Isaiah 45:18 that says, using the words of Genesis 1:2, that God did not create the world a ruin. If this is a direct reference to Genesis, as it may be, it says that God did not create the world in the state portrayed in Genesis 1:2. (On the other hand, it may simply mean that God did not create the world to be desolate but rather created it to be inhabited, as in the New International Version translation.)
When Did Satan Fall?
This message has dealt largely with the exegetical support for the gap theory, because it is the point from which its adherents argue. These arguments have not been taken seriously enough by those who oppose the theory. But this is not to suggest that there are no other lines of support for the reconstructionists’ view. A second line of support is theological.
This has to do with the fall of Satan. From Genesis 3 we learn that evil was already in existence at the time of Adam and Eve’s creation, for Satan was there to tempt Eve. Besides, there are texts that suggest, not always clearly, that there was an earlier fall of Satan, followed by a judgment on Satan and those angels (now demons) who sinned with him. Of course, the fall of Satan may have occurred without any relationship to earth. But he is called “the prince of this world” and seems to have a special relationship to it. Is it not possible, even reasonable, that he may have ruled the world for God in an earlier period of earth’s history—if there was such a period? And if this is so, couldn’t a fall and judgment fit between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2? If not there, where does the fall come in? The only other option would be before creation itself, which would put the creation of Satan before anything else we know.
There is also the problem of the first appearances of death. If the fossils indicate anything, they indicate a period of struggle, disease, and death prior to man’s appearance. But if death came through the sin of Adam, how can death be evidenced in the fossil record unless the death witnessed is the product of God’s judgment on the sin of an earlier world and race? There is another explanation of this that the creationist school supplies, namely, that the fossils were created by the flood and so came after Adam. But the argument at this point—while it will not speak to creationists—should speak to most other schools of thought.
Some Lingering Difficulties
What should we think of this theory? It has commended itself to many in recent generations. It is a serious attempt to be biblical. It seems to solve the problem of the long geological ages. Should we adopt it? We should consider it seriously for each of the reasons just given, but before we adopt it we should also consider the difficulties.
One serious criticism of the gap theory is that it gives one of the grandest and most important passages in the Bible an unnatural and perhaps even a peculiar interpretation. This is hardly a conclusive argument, but it is probably the point at which most other Bible students and scholars begin to hesitate. Ramm puts it like this: “From the earliest of Bible interpretation this passage has been interpreted by Jews, Catholics and Protestants as the original creation of the universe. In seven majestic days the universe and all of life is brought into being. But according to Rimmer’s view the great first chapter of Genesis, save for the first verse, is not about original creation at all, but about reconstruction. The primary origin of the universe is stated in but one verse. This is not the most telling blow against the theory, but it certainly indicates that something has been lost to make the six days of creation anticlimactic” (Ramm, Christian View, 201).
This same argument may also be stated biblically, which Ramm does not do but which would presumably have more weight with the gap theory advocates. To give just one example, we read in Exodus 20:11, “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day.” A person might point out that the verb used here is “made,” not the powerful Hebrew verb “created” (baraʾ), and that this allows for a recreation or reforming. But that aside, the verse does sound like a description of an original creation. “It neither states nor implies recreation to most people” (L. Duane Thuman, How to Think about Evolution & Other Bible-Science Controversies . Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1978, 121).
Second, the exegetical data, while impressive, is nevertheless far from certain. And it must be certain if we are to be expected to embrace such an unusual theory. I have argued above that critics of the gap theory have been far too cavalier in dismissing its supporters’ exegetical arguments, but those arguments are still not clearly right. The Hebrew verb hayah may mean “became,” but there is no doubt that it is also correctly translated “was” and that far more frequently. Again, waw may even mean “but,” although it more commonly means “and.” And as for tohu wa bohu, this may simply mean that the land in question was uninhabitable. Whether that condition was the result of God’s judgment on the earth or was due to some other factor is to be determined from the context and not from the words themselves (cf. Isa. 24:1 and 45:18; Jer. 4:23–26). It is significant in this regard that, although the New International Version supports the possibility of translating the Hebrew hayah as “become” in a footnote to Genesis 1:2, it does not render Isaiah 45:18 in a way that would support the gap theory.
Third, the gap theory does not really settle the problem posed by geology. Geology shows us successive strata of the earth’s crust containing fossils of earlier life-forms. Advocates of the gap theory wish to account for these in the supposed break between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. But at which point in this break did the judgment of God enter in? If it came after the laying down of the fossil evidence, then death was in the world before judgment. If the judgment came first, then the conditions arising from that judgment could not be as the second verse of Genesis describes them (a chaotic world submerged in darkness), for in such a world no plant or animal life could survive. The only escape from this dilemma is to imagine a gradually descending or advancing judgment in which the various forms of life are progressively snuffed out, but this is the precise opposite of what the geological strata seem to indicate. They show a progressive development of life from simpler to more complex forms.
Some gap theorists have seen this problem and have appealed to the flood for producing the geological evidence. Rimmer appeals to both the earlier ages and the flood. But if this is the case, we do not need the gap. The impression left is that the theory has not been carried through sufficiently to provide us with a clearly workable model. It may be possible. But we will want to consider the other views of creation before we settle on this as the only true Christian possibility.
About the Preacher
James Montgomery Boice, Th.D., (July 7, 1938 – June 15, 2000) was a Reformed theologian, Bible teacher, and pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia from 1968 until his death. He is heard on The Bible Study Hour radio broadcast and was a well-known author and speaker in evangelical and Reformed circles. He also served as Chairman of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy for over ten years and was a founding member of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. James Boice was one of my favorite Bible teachers. Thankfully – many of his books and expositions of Scripture are still in print and more are becoming available. The sermon above was adapted from Chapter 7 in Genesis 1-11: An Expositional Commentary. vol. 1: Creation and Fall. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006.
Under Dr. Boice’s leadership, Tenth Presbyterian Church became a model for ministry in America’s northeastern inner cities. When he assumed the pastorate of Tenth Church there were 350 people in regular attendance. At his death the church had grown to a regular Sunday attendance in three services of more than 1,200 persons, a total membership of 1,150 persons. Under his leadership, the church established a pre-school for children ages 3-5 (now defunct), a high school known as City Center Academy, a full range of adult fellowship groups and classes, and specialized outreach ministries to international students, women with crisis pregnancies, homosexual and HIV-positive clients, and the homeless. Many of these ministries are now free-standing from the church.Dr. Boice gave leadership to groups beyond his own organization. For ten years he served as Chairman of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, from its founding in 1977 until the completion of its work in 1988. ICBI produced three classic, creedal documents: “The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy,” “The Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics” and “The Chicago Statement on the Application of the Bible to Contemporary Issues.” The organization published many books, held regional “Authority of Scripture” seminars across the country, and sponsored the large lay “Congress on the Bible I,” which met in Washington, D.C., in September 1987. He also served on the Board of Bible Study Fellowship. He founded the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals (Alliance) in 1994, initially a group of pastors and theologians who were focused on bringing the 20th and now 21st century church to a new reformation. In 1996 this group met and wrote the Cambridge Declaration. Following the Cambridge meetings, the Alliance assumed leadership of the programs and publications formerly under Evangelical Ministries, Inc. (Dr. Boice) and Christians United for Reformation (Horton) in late 1996. Dr. Boice was a prodigious world traveler. He journeyed to more than thirty countries in most of the world’s continents, and he taught the Bible in such countries as England, France, Canada, Japan, Australia, Guatemala, Korea and Saudi Arabia. He lived in Switzerland for three years while pursuing his doctoral studies. Dr. Boice held degrees from Harvard University (A.B.), Princeton Theological Seminary (B.D.), the University of Basel, Switzerland (D. Theol.) and the Theological Seminary of the Reformed Episcopal Church (D.D., honorary). A prolific author, Dr. Boice had contributed nearly forty books on a wide variety of Bible related themes. Most are in the form of expositional commentaries, growing out of his preaching: Psalms (1 volume), Romans (4 volumes), Genesis (3 volumes), Daniel, The Minor Prophets (2 volumes), The Sermon on the Mount, John (5 volumes, reissued in one), Ephesians, Phillippians and The Epistles of John. Many more popular volumes: Hearing God When You Hurt, Mind Renewal in a Mindless Christian Life, Standing on the Rock, The Parables of Jesus, The Christ of Christmas, The Christ of the Open Tomb and Christ’s Call to Discipleship. He also authored Foundations of the Christian Faith a 740-page book of theology for laypersons. Many of these books have been translated into other languages, such as: French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Chinese and Korean. He was married to Linda Ann Boice (born McNamara), who continues to teach at the high school they co-founded. Sources: Taken directly from the Aliance of Confessing Evangelicals’ Website |
Boice’s Books:from the Tenth Presbyterian Church website Chapters1985 “The Future of Reformed Theology” in David F. Wells, editor,
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BOOK REVIEW: FOUR VIEWS ON THE HISTORICAL ADAM
In Search of the Historical Adam
Book Review by David P. Craig
In this counterpoint book the subject of the Historical Adam takes center stage. There are four views presented: (1) No Historical Adam – presented by Denis Lamoureux, Professor of Science and Religion at St. Joseph.s College in the University of Alberta; (2) A Historical Adam: The Archetypal Creation View – presented by John Walton, Professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College; (3) A Historical Adam: Old Earth Creation View – presented by C. John Collins, Professor of Old Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary; and (4) A Historical Adam: Young-Earth View – presented by William D. Barrick, Professor of Old Testament at The Master’s College.
The format of the book is as follows: Each Professor writes on essay addressing three essential questions: (1) What is the biblical case for your viewpoint, and how to you reconcile it with passages and potential interpretations that seem to counter it? (2) In what ways is your view more theologically consistent and coherent than other views? (3) What are the implications your view has for the spiritual life and public witness of the church and individual believers, and how is your view a healthier alternative for both? Upon answering these questions each scholar counters followed by a rejoinder from the presenter. At the end of the book there are two essays representing two different stances on the debate and impact on the Christian faith by Greg Boyd (Senior Pastor at Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota) and Philip Ryken (President of Wheaton College and the former pastor of Tenth Presbyterian in Philadelphia).
I Appreciated the personal testimony of Denis Lamoureux’s pursuit of truth in the fields of science and theology. He has definitely wrestled with and struggled with all the issues at hand – as a non-believer, as well as a believer in Christ. Lemorourex concludes that his view of evolution disallows for belief in the historical Adam that is revealed in the Scriptures. He argues at length that the reality of history conflicts with modern science. He believes that ancient science (the view of the biblical writers) conflicts with modern science and therefore what we have in the Bible is God accommodating inerrant spiritual truths.
In summary “Lamoureux rejects scientific concordism, the idea that God chose to reveal through the Scriptures certain scientific facts and that modern science, properly understood, can be aligned with the Bible. To the contrary, he says the authors of Scripture had an ancient perception of the world, apparent in their belief in a three-tiered universe, their view of the ‘firmament,’ and elsewhere. When it comes to humanity’s biological origins, the biblical authors likewise had a primordial understanding. They held to ‘de novo creation,’ the belief that God created man and everything else directly, immediately, and completely, that is fully mature.”
Lamoureux argues that Adam did not exist, but that Jesus Christ is a historical person who died and rose again for our sins. He attempts to show how modern science has changed his views on interpreting the Bible through understanding distinctions between ancient and modern science, language accommodation, and his rejection of concordism.
I found his essay to be interesting, but unconvincing. I especially struggled with his weak theological explanation of the historical “Adam” from the lips of Jesus and the Apostle Paul in the New Testament. I also struggled with his interpretation of Genesis 1-11 as not being historical. Lastly, I found his interpretation and methodology in arriving at his conclusions insufficient – leaving me with more questions than answers. I agree with C. John Collins assessment of his essay when he writes, “Lamoureux has followed a style of reasoning that is oversimplified, specifically in that he generally poses either/or questions with only two options; he does not consider whether there are alternatives.”
In contrast to Lamoureux, John Walton believes that Adam was a historical person. He believe’s that the primary emphasis of the Bible and Ancient Near Eastern literature is to demonstrate that Adam (and Eve) are archetypal representatives of humanity. He believes that Genesis 2 is not about the biological origins of Adam and Eve. He argues that Adam and Eve may not even be the first humans who came into existence or the parents of all humankind. Walton doesn’t reject or accept evolution, but his view does allow for evolution and an old earth. I found Walton’s essay to be difficult to follow and his discussion of archetypes to be interesting, but not totally sustainable.
C.J. Collins, like Walton, agrees that Adam and Eve were real historical persons. He demonstrates in his essay with great theological precision how a real Adam and Eve are necessary to demonstrate our need of Savior (the second Adam – Jesus) to save us from the sin we inherited as legitimate children of Adam’s race. He does a wonderful job of showing that the story line of the Scriptures reveals three major truths: (1) Adam and Eve as a pair represent humankind as one family; (2) Adam and Eve were created supernaturally by God; (3) Through Adam and Eve came forth sin. As a result all humanity is guilty before our creator God for our experience as sinners, and in need of redemption from the perfect Adam – the Lord Jesus Christ.
An interesting aspect of Collins’ view of Adam is that he may have been the chieftain of his tribe, i.e., there were perhaps many more people around when Adam and Eve were around. He is also critical of theistic evolution because it fails to account for the special creation of human beings as made in the image of God. He does not believe that a literal twenty-four hour days in Genesis One is required to maintain inerrancy.
Michael Barrick, expounds the most traditional of the four views presented. He argues for the supernatural creation of Adam by God, who is the father of all mankind. Barrick gives the most emphasis of the four views to the significance of Adam in understanding and applying the gospel. He holds to a literal twenty-four days and young earth perspective. He holds to a high view of the Scriptures and believes his view best accounts for the consistent testimony of the biblical authors (Moses and Paul) with Jesus’ teaching. Barrick’s essay argues that when science and the Bible have a conflict – science must always concede for Scripture is inerrant and totally authoritative on all matters it addresses.
In the concluding section of the book Greg Boyd and Phil Ryken (Theologian/Pastors) address the following issues raised by the other essayists by answering the following six questions: Does Adam’s existence or nonexistence (1) affect the rest of the Christian faith and those doctrines Christians have historically affirmed throughout the centuries? (2) shape a Christian worldview, especially the biblical story line from creation, fall, and redemption, to new creation? (3) have an impact on the gospel, or how the gospel is preached and applied, specifically in church? (4) have influence on how we live the Christian life and ‘do church’ as the body of Christ? (5) make a difference in our evangelical witness to a watching world? and (6) What is at stake in this debate for evangelicals in the church today?
Of the four views presented I found myself in the most agreement with Barrick, followed by Collins, then Walton, and lastly by Lamoureux. I think that Barrick’s essay was the easiest to read because it was the essay that took the passages of Genesis at face value – literally. The other three essayists seemed to have to do a lot of hermeneutical gymnastics to make their views work. This is a complicated issue. I appreciated the grace reflected by Lamoureux, Collins, and Walton in particular. Barrick came across more defensive and dogmatic than the other three. At the end of the day, this book deserves a wide reading. It shows the immense complexities of hermeneutics, science, theology, history, and inerrancy. I appreciated what each writer taught me – I gained new knowledge and insights on all five of these topics. I had many questions answered, and yet still have many unanswered questions. My hope is that this book will continue to spark theologians and scientists to work together in the pursuit of truth. I am grateful for the time invested by all the contributors and heartily recommend this book. It is a challenging read, but well-worth the effort.
BOOK REVIEW: FIVE VIEWS ON BIBLICAL INERRANCY
IS THE BIBLE TRULY WITHOUT ERROR?
Reviewed By David P. Craig
Four primary topics are treated in this multi-view book: (1) God and his relationship to his creatures, (2) the doctrine of inspiration, (3) the nature of Scripture, and (4) the nature of truth.
Instead of allowing the author’s to simply give a defense of their positions – each scholar tackles the same outline and passages from their own perspective with reference to the Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrancy (ISBI). Therefore, specific scriptures are handled to demonstrate each view along the lines of three specific categories: (1) The factuality of Scripture, (2) canonical coherence, and (3) theological coherence.
The scholars therefore all interact with the following texts: Joshua 6, Acts 9:9 compared with Acts 22:9, and Deuteronomy 20 in relation to Matthew 5. Joshua 6 was chosen since current details of historical and archaeological evidence have called into question the accuracy of the text’s account of the destruction of of Jericho. The Acts passage which describes Paul’s conversion was chosen due to the apparent discrepancy between what the witnesses saw and heard during this event. For theological coherence the author’s grapple with the question “How is it that Deuteronomy 20 instructs Israel that the complete extermination of Yahweh’s enemies is a matter of Israel’s purity before and obedience to Yaweh, while Jesus subsequently says faithfulness to God requires nonretaliation and sacrificial love of enemeies (Matthew 5:38-48)?”
The scholars addressing these biblical, theological, and historical concerns are two biblical scholars (Michael Bird and Peter Enns), two systematic theologians (John Franke and Kevin Vanhoozer), and one historical theologian (Albert Mohler). Part one consists of Mohler’s and Enns’ essays in a section entitled “Perspectives on Inerrancy and the Past.” In part 2 Michael Bird (hailing from Australia) addresses “Inerrancy from an International Perspective.” In part 3 Kevin Vanhoozer and John Franke represent “Perspectives on Renewing and Recasting Inerrancy Today.” Each essay is then responded to by the other four scholars.
Albert Mohler’s essay was disappointing in that his argumentation was circular and sophomoric. Of all the essays in the book I was looking forward to his the most. It seems that he didn’t put the time into the essay that was necessary. He simply wholeheartedly agreed with ISBI and did a poor job with the biblical material. His historical study of inerrancy was limited to the mid-late 1900’s. Mohler’s essay was answered in broad strokes and an a priori apologetic that was redundant and unconvincing. Mohler does a much better job in his essays of response – especially in his response to Enns. I wish that the editors would have chosen a biblical scholar in place of Mohler (with his same postion) – because his handling of the biblical material was particularly simplistic and weak. It just seemed like Mohler’s schedule was too busy to put the necessary scholarship into his essay. However, I wholeheartedly agree with Mohler’s assessment of biblical inerancy when he says, “I do not believe that evangelicalism can survive without the explicit and complete assertion of biblical inerrancy…The afirmation of biblical inerrancy means nothing more, and nothing less, than this: When the Bible speaks, God speaks.”
Peter Enns came across as just plain “ticked off” at the whole idea of biblical inerrancy. He gave a plethora of reasons why he doesn’t think ISBI is a fair or accurate document. He does not adhere to inerrancy (as defined by ISBI) and calls it “erroneous.” The closest he comes to arriving at any position on the Bible is when he writes: “Scripture is a collection of a variety of writings that necessarily and unashamedly reflects the worlds in which those writings were produced. The implication of this metaphor is that an understanding of those historical settings can and should affect interpretive conclusions.”
Enns handling of the biblical material was influenced primarily by liberal scholarship. He believes the Jericho episode didn’t happen due to the archaeological evidence. He believes Paul’s conversion reports are blatant contradictions. Lastly, he thinks that the God of the Old Testament as described in Deuteronomy is different than the God portrayed in the New Testament. He writes, “Israel’s depiction of God vis-a-vis the nations unmistakably, and understandably, reflects the ubiquitous tribal culture at the time.”
Mohler writes of Enns, “So, taking Peter Enns at his word the Bible contains numerous passages that not only fail the test of historical accuracy (even to the point of questioning whether the exodus took place), but also present a false and dangerous misrepresentation of God’s very character and will.” The overall response of the other essayists was similar to my own own response. I felt that Enns was overly critical of Scripture, and didn’t really give a constructive or positive view of Scripture at all. It felt like his whole essay was reactionary and destructive. There was really no positive argument given. It was a lot like reading the “new atheists” – a lot of attack and very little evidence or support for their own view.
Michael Bird’s essay was perhaps the most interesting of the five. If he ever loses his job as a theologian he could become a night club comic. He provides humor in his essay and in his responses to the other essayists (especially humorous is his response to Enns). Bird has the difficult task of reflecting the idea of inerrancy outside of the USA. He covers a lot of ground and shares where he agrees and disagrees with ISBI. He provides a very balanced essay in his response to ISBI, his historical reflections on inerrancy around the globe, and his biblical argumentation – brief but very cogent and clear. One of the highlights of Bird’s essay was this gem, “The goal of revelation is not knowing facts about God but also enjoying fellowship with God.” Overall Bird’s essay is very witty, theologically insightful, and interesting.
Kevin Vanhoozer’s essay argues for what he terms “A Well-versed inerrancy.” He basis his definition largely on the historic tradition of Augustine. Vanhoozer proposes this definition of inerrancy, “to say that the Scripture is inerrant is to confess faith that the authors speak the truth in all things they affirm (when they make affirmations), and will eventually be seen to have spoken truly (when right readers read rightly).” The bulk of Vanhoozer’s essay buttresses his definition of inerrancy with a particular interest in the terms “truth” and “language” and he ties these concepts to the writings and concepts developed by Augustine. His essay utilizes careful language and sophisticated theological and philosophical depth that one would expect of a top-notch systematic theologian. Vanhoozer handles the biblical passages with tremendous theological and exegetical skill.
Vanhoozer gives the practical importance of a well-versed inerrancy with these words: “Implicit in my definition of inerrancy is that we be not only literate readers who rightly see what proposition an author is proposing (the literal sense) and what kind of attention to this proposition is required (literary sensibility) but also right-minded and right-hearted readers who respond rightly to each and every communicative act of Scripture (Spirit-given literacy) Ultimately, a well-versed approach to inerrancy constitutes nothing less than a standing requirement that the community of Scripture’s interpreters become persons capable of understanding, loving, and participating in the truth.”
I love the conclusion to Vanhoozer’s essay where he quotes Augustine’s approach to the veracity of the Scriptures: “And if in these writings I am perplexed by anything which appears to me opposed to the truth, I do not hesitate to suppose that either the manuscript is faulty, or the translator has not caught the meaning of what was said, or I myself have failed to understand.” Of all the essays, I found Vanhoozer’s to be the most theologically profound and exegetically sound.
John Franke does not believe that the ICBI should serve as the standard-bearer for inerrancy. He offers an alternative model – what he calls a fallibilist perspective, “inerrancy functions only within the limits of language alone. It applies to Scripture only in the context of the original settings in which the texts that we have were constructed, and its affirmations and teachings cannot be abstracted from those contexts and offered as absolute truth, because only God knows and is Truth…this means that the ultimate truth and inerrancy of the Bible are finally contained not in the particular narratives and teachings of individual texts but rather in relation to its intended purpose and function in the economy of God…the Bible is that language the Spirit appropriates and employs to effect the social construction of the Christian community.”
Therefore, for Franke, the Bible is essentially fallible because it was written by fallible human beings. He expects that the Scriptures will contain errors and in his discussion of the biblical passages he is not troubled in the slightest by the historicity of the conquest of Jericho, nor the historic details of Paul’s Damascus Road vision. He seems more concerned about the big picture than the little details of the Bible. In doing so – he never quite tells us what inerrancy is. He never tells us what truth is. I found his essay to be confusing, fragmented, and unconvincing in regards to his theology, epistemology, and exegesis.
On the whole this is a fascinating multi-view book. The terrain covered is theologically rich, historically insightful, and exegetically helpful. The final chapter written by Stephen M. Garrett and J. Merrick was just what the doctor ordered. It helped bring synthesis, clarification, as well as a much needed explanation of the continuity and discontinuity on the spectrum of issues presented throughout the book. I highly recommend this book for everyone who loves God’s Word and is seeking to know, love, and live out His truth as revealed in the Scriptures.
JERRY BRIDGES: “The Resurrection of Jesus” (Yes, At Christmas Time!)
This article on the resurrection of Jesus appears at the time of year when we are focusing on His birth, not His death and resurrection. To stop and think about the resurrection may seem like an unnecessary aside to the beautiful story of our Savior’s birth.
To think only about the birth of Jesus, however, fails to do justice to the incarnation. It fails to consider the purpose of Jesus’ coming to earth. At the occasion of His birth, the angel said to the shepherds, “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11). The meaning of Savior is clarified before His birth when the angel instructed Joseph: “You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21). How will He save His people? Paul answers in 1 Corinthians 15:3: “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures.” And on the eve of His crucifixion Jesus Himself said, “But for this purpose I have come to this hour” (John 12:27). As we celebrate His birth, let us keep in mind that He came to die.
This article, based on the account in Matthew 28:8–15, focuses, not on His birth or death, but on His resurrection. However, there is actually a seamless connection between the four major events of Jesus’ life: His birth, death, resurrection, and ascension. All four events stand or fall together. At the same time each event had its own unique role to play. What role, then, does the resurrection of Jesus play in the overall story of redemption? There are at least four major truths about the resurrection that teach us about its absolute necessity.
First, it proved that Jesus was indeed the divine Son of God. Paul wrote that “[He] was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Rom. 1:4). Actually it was impossible for Jesus’ body to remain in the grave. Just as it was impossible for the divine nature of Jesus to die because God cannot die, so it was impossible for the human nature of Jesus to remain dead because of its union with His divine nature. Peter said on the day of Pentecost: “God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it” (Acts 2:24). So it was not possible for Jesus’ body to remain in the grave. And in raising Him from the grave, God declared beyond all shadow of doubt that this Jesus whom lawless men crucified was indeed the divine Son of God.
Second, the resurrection of Jesus assures us of our justification. Paul wrote, “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (I Cor. 15:17). If Christ were still in the tomb it would mean God’s wrath was not satisfied, and we would still stand guilty before God. But as Paul also wrote in Romans 4:25: “[Jesus] was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.” It is not that the resurrection accomplished our justification — Jesus’ sinless life and sin-bearing death did that — but rather it assures us of our justification. It was God the Father who raised Jesus from the dead (Rom. 8:11), and by that act God declared that Christ’s atoning sacrifice had been accepted. The penalty for our sins was paid in full. The resurrection was God’s declaration that He had cancelled the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands (Col. 2:14).
Third, the resurrection assures us that we serve a living Savior who even now is interceding for us. The writer of Hebrews wrote that He always lives to make intercession for us (Heb. 7:25). Paul was even more emphatic when he wrote, “Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died — more than that, who was raised — who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us” (Rom. 8:34). The One who died for us now lives to intercede for us. When you are going through struggles of any kind, be it adversity that you face, or sin you are struggling with, remember that Jesus is interceding for you.
Fourth, the resurrection of Christ guarantees our future resurrection. In his extensive treatment of the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:12–58, Paul wrote, “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ” (vv. 20–23).
So as you celebrate the birth of Christ this Christmas, remember His birth is only the first of the four major events of His life. Not only can we say, “He is risen indeed,” but we can also say with Paul: “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command. …And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive…will be caught up together with them…and so we will always be with the Lord” (1 Thess. 4:16–17). Maranatha! “Our Lord, come!” (1 Cor. 16:22).
SOURCE: DECEMBER 1ST, 2008 BY JERRY BRIDGES @ http://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/resurrection-jesus/
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SUNDAY NT SERMON: “Access to the King” by Tim Keller
Series: The King and the Kingdom – Part 6
Preached in Manhattan, NY on August 27, 1989
We’ve actually been studying Ephesians 2 for a few weeks now because it tells us so much about the church:
14 For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, 15 by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, 16 and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. 17 He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. 18 For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.
19 Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. 21 In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. 22 And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. – Ephesians 2:14–22
What we want to focus in on tonight is the fact this passage tells us the church is a building. You see, in verse 19 it says we’re God’s household. In verses 21 and 22 it talks about us as stones that are being built into a temple, to a house. In other words, Christians are not just a loose aggregate of individuals, but rather we are parts of a larger whole. The Bible talks about this in a number of places. In 1 Peter 2, Peter writes, “… come to him, the living Stone—rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him—you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house …”
For the Bible says, “I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.” The teaching is that we were not designed to live for ourselves or to stand by ourselves any more than a hewn stone is supposed to stand by itself on the grass. If you just see a boulder or a rock on the grass, it looks great, but if you ever come to see a brick or a stone or a couple of stones that obviously were supposed to be a part of a building that are just sitting, spread out on the grass, it looks so forlorn, doesn’t it?
The Bible says we were designed to fit, to be part of God and of his kingdom and of one another. Now this flies completely in the face of the spirit of the age. Recently, 81 percent of all Americans affirmed this statement. (I love saying things like this. It sounds so authoritative.) Eighty-one percent of Americans affirm, “An individual should arrive at his or her own religious beliefs independent of any church, any synagogue, or any religious tradition.” What do you think? Does that sound democratic? Does that sound healthy to you?
Think what you’re saying. This kind of religion (a religion you choose independent of what any church or synagogue or any religious tradition says) eliminates the possibility of obedience or self-denial or courage, because obedience, self-denial, and courage are an individual taking his or her needs or desires and submitting them to a larger call to a whole, saying, I am just a part, and I’m submitting to the whole. That’s the only way you can obey. That’s what self-denial is. That’s what courage is.
Up until 50 or 60 years ago, everybody understood this. Everybody. All nations understood this. They understood what obedience and self-denial and courage were. It was interesting. There is this musical, Les Miserables, and in the musical there are a bunch of college students who are ready to lead a revolt to overthrow the government, to liberate the poor. (Not a bad thing to do.) One of the college students, Marius, is in love, and the leader of the college students turns to Marius, and he says,
Marius, you’re no longer a child. I do not doubt you mean it well,
But now there is a higher call. Who cares about your lonely soul?
We strive toward a larger goal. Our little lives don’t count at all!
Now everybody claps, you know … New York audiences clap … but they have no idea what he’s talking about, because you see, 81 percent of Americans say you need to do what fulfills you in religion. You should not say, “My little life doesn’t count at all. I have to submit to a higher call. I have to become part of the whole.” Americans’ understanding of life and meaning and religion is really summed up in what Barbara Walters said while talking to Sam Donaldson.
She said a person has a right to live any way that makes him happy as long as he doesn’t interfere with others doing the same thing. Now that’s the essence of what we believe today. What she has said is very, very revealing. There is only one high call. What is the highest call? The only thing that’s wrong to do is to keep somebody else from doing what will make him happy.
That’s the only absolute. It’s the only thing that’s inviolate. It’s the only high call, and of course, that brings us to the place where we are with that young man who all the photographers snapped back when Jimmy Carter was trying to reinstitute the draft and there were protests. One guy held up a banner or placard that said, “Nothing is worth dying for,” which is true for 81 percent of all Americans, I believe, or more.
Because if you say the highest call is anything that fulfills me is right unless it keeps somebody else from doing the same thing (finding what makes them happy), there is no possibility of self-denial because there is no basis for it. There is no possibility of courage; there is no basis for it. There is no basis for ever dying for anything. There is no basis for ever saying no to yourself unless you hurt somebody else on that same quest for joy and fulfillment.
The Bible says something different, but you see it would be possible to argue against this on completely pragmatic grounds. I wouldn’t even have to go to the Bible, but I will. You can be pragmatic. You can say, “Do you realize up until 50 or 60 years ago, everybody understood what that man was saying in Les Miserables? Everybody understood the idea at certain points there are high calls and high causes. There are things that are right, and it doesn’t matter what you want because they are more important. We have to submit. We have to become a part of a whole. We have to be a building block in a building.”
Everybody understood. We might have disagreed on what those higher calls were. Every culture had different ones. Every religion had different ones. We all believed there were such, but now we’ve come to the place where everybody is saying, “No, no, no. What’s right is what fulfills me.” You can’t have a community, you can’t have a government, and you can’t have a nation like that. If you look at most of the political problems we have, it boils down to this. People are saying, “Yeah, this is necessary to do, but not in my neighborhood. Yeah, this is necessary to have done, but not out of my pocket.”
What that means is, “I refuse to be a part of the whole. I see I should sublimate myself for the good of the whole. There is a higher cause, a higher goal. Not on your life. I will not be a building block in a house. I am the house.” Now when you have that attitude, you can’t have a nation, and you can argue against that view on the basis of pragmatism, but I won’t do that, because the Bible says the reason it’s stupid, the reason it’s impractical is because it’s wicked. It’s not impractical just because it’s impractical; it’s impractical because it’s wicked.
God says, “Because of the way I designed you, you must lose yourself to find yourself. You must submit to me in order to be free. You must fit in to my house and to my kingdom or you will find you’ll be tyrannized to fit into somebody else or something else.” Now do you hear that? Bob Dylan put it this way: “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.” Do you remember that? What he meant by this is everyone is mastered by something, and Jesus Christ says, “You shall know the truth, you continue in the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
What he means at that point is, “… my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” He says, “It’s easier than any other yoke, because if you don’t fit in, if you don’t sublimate yourself to me, to my rules, to my agenda, to my kingdom, you will be mastered by something else. You’ll be mastered by your drives, or you’ll be mastered by the social circle or the group of people you have to fit in with,” because we all have to fit in with somebody, huh? You have to dress to fit in with the group of people you need to be in to find that happiness.
You need to speak in a certain way to fit in, don’t you? There are some of you out there saying, “Oh, no. I’m not that kind of person. I’m absolutely independent. I refuse to fit into anybody,” so you fit in to non-conformity. I know your type, and you know who you are, too. You are just as enslaved because you have to be an outsider. You won’t ever conform. You won’t ever fit in, even when you need to, even when you should out of love, you see. You have to serve somebody. Everybody has to fit into something. Nobody really is a freestanding stone, and God says, “Lose yourself to find yourself.”
That means, “Lose yourself in my service. Lose yourself in obedience to me. Come in and be part of my larger whole, or else somebody else will get you, and you’ll fit into something else.” When Jesus says, “… my yoke is easy and my burden is light,” he is saying, “I’m the only Master who won’t crush you. I’m the only One who won’t crush you. Every other master is a taskmaster. I’m the only Master who adopts. You won’t just be a slave; you’ll be my son, my daughter.”
Now you see, the Bible says if you are built into God’s house, first of all, you’ll experience freedom. Really, for the first time in your life, you’ll be able to be creative because you won’t need to fit into anybody else or anything else. You’ll also have a sense of purpose. You’ll know what you’re for. You’ll know where you fit. Are you experiencing that in your life? If you’re not at all, or if you’re not enough, then it’s because in some way you’re failing to let yourself be built into God’s house.
Now how can you be built into God’s house? There are five things this text suggests you have to do, and every one of them is not just another sermon … it’s a series … and I will get to them all, but not tonight. Now let me explain what this means. This text here tells us we are built into a house. We are, first of all, in verse 20, laid on a foundation. There is a depth dimension to building a house. There has to be a foundation. If you are to be a living stone in God’s house, you have to be laid on that foundation.
Secondly, there is a height dimension. It says the building “… rises to become a holy temple …” That means you don’t just stack stones any old way. The stones have to follow the blueprint of the architect. There is a design, and it has to rise according to the blueprint. Lastly, there is a breadth aspect, because it says in verse 22 we are built together to form a holy temple in the Lord. That means the blocks are built together.
Now let me draw some analogies here to help us see what it means to be a living stone in God’s house, because this gives us a tremendous inventory, a way for you to look at yourself tonight and say, “First, on the basis of this inventory I can see I am not in God’s house at all. I’m not a living stone. I’m not part of his kingdom. Or, you might say, I’m not experiencing the freedom I should. It’s because I am not doing as well in one of these areas as I should.” Now let’s take a look at these areas.
1. Foundation
It says if you are to be a living stone, you have to built on the foundation. What is that foundation? Do you see? “… the foundation of the apostles and the prophets …” The prophets and the apostles were the people who brought revealed truth from God, and it’s written down in the Word of God. When we say there is a foundation, we mean stones have to be laid on the foundation. They can’t be laid on the plain earth, can they? They can’t be laid partly on the foundation and partly on the earth. They have to be laid on the foundation.
This means a Christian has to submit completely to the Word of God. I plan to preach on this next week, but I’ll just explain what it means real briefly here. If you look through the Word of God and you say, “I like what it says about integrity and honesty, and I like what it says about love and relationships,” but if you don’t like or if you just ignore what it says about sexuality or what it says about materialism and wealth and the use of your money, then you are a person who is setting your rock partly on the earth and partly on the foundation.
Everybody knows what will happen to a house built like that. When Jesus Christ says, “… my yoke is easy and my burden is light,” what he is saying is all other ground is sinking sand. “Build your life on what I say in my Word, on the foundation of the prophets and the apostles. There is no other foundation that will hold you up.” If you refuse to do that, you’re just not building yourself into God’s house. That is the first step, you might say, to being a stone.
2. The building rises
Now that means several things, frankly. First of all, for a building to rise that means stones are being cut out of the earth somewhere at a quarry, right? They used to be part of the earth. They are cut out of the earth, and they’re brought. It says in 1 Peter 2, “… come to him, the living Stone,” and become a living stone and be built up. Do you know what this means? You have to be added to the church. To be added to the church means you have to be converted. You have to be converted.
It says in Acts 2, daily God added to the church those who were being saved. When it talks about the fact you need to come to him, the living Stone, and become a living stone in the house of God, it means in order to be fit for the kingdom of God you have to be converted. Are you saying, “Okay. Let’s move on. Everybody knows that?” First of all, to be in the house of God, you have to be built on the prophets and the apostles (the Word of God). You also have to be converted.
Now before somebody says, “Come on. Move on. Everybody knows that.” Listen. Most of the people sitting in churches today in this city or anywhere in the country, if you went up to them and asked them, “Are you converted?” they would be angry and/or confused. Very angry and very confused. Why? Because they don’t know. That’s why they are angry or confused, or both. Now usually, and I think this is fair, if you don’t know if you’re converted or not, you’re not. Usually, you see. However, there is still some confusion because some people are awfully good at giving conversion stories that are incredibly dramatic.
Sometimes some of us say, “Well, that never really happened to me,” so let me just say if you are going to be a living stone in the house of the Lord, you have to be converted. How do you know if you’re converted? All conversions, whether they are dramatic or not, I think have two sides or aspects to them. They all have this in common. If you’re converted, first of all, you have a deeper sense of your sin. The Bible says the Spirit comes into the world to convict people of sin.
What I mean by that is there is a sense of sin that comes with conversion. There has been a time in your life in which you finally can’t run from your weaknesses, your limitations, your faults, and your flaws anymore (the things you’ve hidden from yourself for years, things you’ve blamed on other people, things you ran from and rationalized away). The Spirit opens you to the place where you finally say, “I’m helpless. I see it finally!” You know, some people say there are two selves in every person.
There is the higher self (the noble self) and there is the lower self (the animal self). That is based more on Plato and the Greeks than on the Bible. Frankly, my dear friends, there are three of you. Very, very confusing. Each one of you has three selves, and only Christians can see the three. In fact, it takes conversion and conviction of sin to see those three. The first self is the false self, the one we try to make ourselves and other people believe. A self that denies the pride that’s there, denies the hurt that’s there, denies the pain that’s there, and denies the wickedness that’s in there. That’s a false self, a false front.
Then there is the true self. The true self is so much more full of anger and so much more full of fear and so much more full of pride and self-centeredness than we ever dared believe, and only the Spirit of God in conversion can give us the courage to admit that self is there. The third self is the potential self, the incredible, beautiful person who you know in Christ you can become, that you are becoming. It’s far greater than anything you ever dared hope you could be. You see, before conversion you could only see the false self and none of the rest, but when you’re converted, when you’re convicted of sin, you see all three. Has that happened to you?
The second aspect of real conversion is besides the sense of sin there is a sense of the preciousness of Christ. Now I use that word carefully, because what I just read you in 1 Peter 2, where it says, “… come to him, the living Stone …” it says no one who ever believes in him will be put to shame. Then it says, “Now to you who believe, [he] is precious …”
You may believe in Jesus in the sense you believe he existed, you believe he did all the things the Bible says, but have you ever come to the place where he became precious to you? That means, did you ever get to the place where you began to look at him the way a very hungry person looks at great food, the way a very, very poor person looks at a pile of money? Have you ever gotten to the place where he began to be your hope, someone you really depended on? That is preciousness.
Conversion brings both of those things together: a sense of the preciousness of Christ so you depend on him and a sense of conviction of sin so you admit who you are. It is this experience that fits us for the household of God. The reason we fit together, friends, is because Christians have been cut out of the world by conversion. We never will be the same. We don’t fit there anymore. There is a place in 1 Corinthians that says the spiritual man judges all things but himself is judged of no one.
Do you know what that means? It means on the one hand, the spiritual man judges things, he can evaluate things, but nobody can figure him out, because, you see, a person from the world can’t figure it out. Conversion, on the one hand, because of the first thing (the conviction of sin) makes you much more realistic about yourself, much more willing to take criticism, but on the other hand, the second part of conversion (the preciousness of Christ) brings a kind of brimming confidence, but it’s a humble confidence. People can’t figure that out.
People who haven’t been through that can’t figure that out. You’ve been cut out of the world. You’ve been cut out of the quarry. You don’t fit there anymore. You fit in the temple. You fit in the house of God. So when we say the temple rises, that means God has added you to the temple. That’s not all. When we say the temple rises, we also mean you’ve been shaped. It says you’ve been fit together, in verse 21. You see, if I just go to the quarry and cut out a piece of rock and just bring all the pieces of rock and just try to build a building out of them, they don’t fit together. They have to be shaped.
In 1 Peter it says the living stones grow. What that means is God is shaping you. He is maturing you, and if you’re a living stone in the household of God, that is happening. Now let me ask you. Let me be very, very specific. Is it happening? Do you see yourself growing into the likeness of Christ? Do you see yourself growing in supernatural maturity? Do you see yourself growing in the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, patience, peace, kindness, humility? Have they grown deeper since last year? Have they grown deeper since last month?
Do you see him shaping you or not? You’re not a stone unless you’ve been shaped. In construction, the shaping of a stone to fit into a building is a mechanical process, but in the church, the way God shapes us to fit together is an organic process. He grows us. Here is the sermon series. There are three ways in which you can grow: the way of acceptance, the way of exchange, and the way of nourishment.
The way of acceptance means when God sends troubles into your life, instead of kicking and screaming and fighting like a wild horse fights the bridle, you say, “I admit your rights over me, Lord. I’m looking for my lessons. I am patient with the things you’ve given me, and I will grow.” Are you like that? When troubles come into your life, do you say, “Lord, I accept this as your teaching and your training; show me what you want me to learn?”
Then there is the way of exchange. That means Christians are supposed to support and confront each other. Did you hear that? Not everything I say you have to really, really listen to, but you have to listen to that one. Support and confront. There is no growth, there is not this hewing and shaping of your stone, in Christian relationships unless you have both: supporting and confronting. Not one or just the other. If you have a person who is only confronting you, you’re going to get rid of that relationship. If you have a person who is only supporting you, you’re not going to learn a thing.
Have you recently heard yourself on a tape recorder? Do you know why it sounds so awful? Do you know why you say, “Who is that? That sounds like my sister. That sounds like my brother. That sounds like my mother. That’s not me.” Do you know why it sounds so awful? Because you know it is exactly how you really sound. It really is. You don’t sound like what you sound to yourself because you don’t hear yourself. You hear yourself through the bones of your ears or something.
The point is … unless you have tape recorders, video cameras, and things like that, you don’t know what you look like, and it’s ghastly when you see it. Right? But that’s what you really look like. Without fellowship you’ll never know who you really are. You’ll never have perspective. You’ll never be sane. You’ll be out of touch with reality unless you have people through whom you’re growing through the way of exchange.
Then there is the way of nourishment. Do you know what the way of nourishment is? The way of nourishment means taking God’s truth in the Bible (his summons, his promises, his commands, everything he says) and not just saying, “Yep, I believe that,” but eating it. Now how do you eat the truth? Well, how do you eat food? You taste it. You get the sweetness out of it. You reflect on the truth. You meditate on the truth, and you get it into your heart and into your mind till it is saturating you so you think and look at everything through a biblical grid. Do you see?
It really becomes part of you. You digest it, you see, just like Erma Bombeck says. “Why eat spaghetti? Why don’t I just put it on my hips?” Food is something you digest; it becomes part of you. Food is something you taste, and when truth is something you’re tasting and it’s something you’re digesting and making part of you, that is the way of nourishment. That’s a process, not just reading the Bible but praying it in. Are you growing? If not, you are neglecting one or two or all three.
The way of acceptance means troubles in your life you’re refusing to learn from. The way of nourishment means you just don’t have the discipline to spend the time with the truth. The way of exchange means you’re too busy or too shortsighted or too scared to actually get into decent Christian friendships where you can grow.
One more thing about stones. Stones not only have to be added by taking out of the quarry, they not only have to be shaped, but then they have to be placed. You see, every stone has its own function in the building. Not every stone can be a capstone. Not every stone can be a keystone. Just try it; it doesn’t work. In the same way, in Ephesians 4 it says the church grows when every part is working properly.
This means for a Christian to be a part of the building, a Christian has to know and discover his or her spiritual gifts. What does that mean? The Bible teaches when Jesus Christ ascended to heaven, it says, “… he gave gifts to men.” It tells us this in Ephesians 4. Before he went to heaven, he said something very strange. He said to his disciples, “You will do greater deeds than me.” Do you believe that? You say, “Oh, that was just those apostles,” but if that’s all he meant (just those 12 apostles) how could they have done greater deeds than Jesus?
Here’s the answer. When Jesus went to heaven, he gave gifts to men, and that means he is determined to distribute his ministry powers out to his people so he can continue his ministry in the world through us. See, Jesus had the power to win people and the power to teach and the power to counsel and the power to do all things. What we get is a distribution, so some of us get some of his powers, and some of us get some of his powers, and some of us get some of his powers, but it’s really him. He died so we wouldn’t live for ourselves, but he could live his life through us.
His business in the world is to make new men and women, and our business in the world is to let him live his life through us to do the same thing. Now Paul is so committed to this truth he says something almost in passing, almost casually, that if you’re not thinking, you miss it. Right there in 2:17, he says to the Ephesians, “He came and preached peace …” Jesus Christ came and preached peace to you who are near and who are far away. Hey, I have a question for you. When did Jesus Christ ever go to Greece? When did Jesus Christ ever go to Ephesus and preach?
We know Jesus Christ never left Palestine. Then how could Paul talk like this? Paul is so, almost unconsciously, committed to this truth that he just goes on by. The fact is somebody, some Christian, went and used gifts of public communication to preach to the Ephesians, and as far as Paul is concerned, it wasn’t that person; it was Jesus Christ doing it. Jesus has distributed his ministry gifts to us all. Do you know what that means?
It’s a picture God is giving us of a stained glass window. Every one of us is a little piece of glass in that window, and as pretty as those little pieces of white and red and emerald glass are, it’s only when they’re put together and the sun hits them all at once you see the whole picture. Only as we pull together, coordinating our gifts, using our gifts, discovering our gifts and ministry abilities can we show the world Jesus Christ in all of his glory. Now coordination is critical. For example, there is no gift of counseling in the Bible. Do you know that? You can’t find the gift of counseling.
There is the gift of mercy. (Tender people.) There is the gift of confrontation. There is the gift of exhortation. There is the gift of teaching. Do you know why? I’ll tell you why. Everybody’s problems are different. As a counselor, I know that. Some people need to have their hand held. Some people need to have their mouth socked; they need a punch in the mouth. Some of you know this. You went to counselors until somebody finally said, “Cut it out,” and it was the best thing you ever got!
But that same counselor, who says, “Cut it out,” to everybody (because that’s the gift that counselor has) will crush other people, because you see, it’s only as all of our gifts are working that we can solve everybody’s problems. It’s only as we all have and use our ministry abilities that we can show Jesus Christ to the world. Now this is exciting, but it’s humbling. It’s exciting because it means Jesus is really in charge of the church. How do you know …? How do I know what kind of ministries this church is supposed to have in New York City?
I don’t know. Do you know why? Because this church is like a connect-the-dots picture. Until God surfaces people with their burdens and their gifts and their ministries and all that, we can’t know what God wants the church to be. Do you see that? Only as you come to understand what you’re supposed to be giving to the Lord (your ministry ability) do we find out what the church should be. Somebody says, “I don’t know what my gifts are. In fact, I’m not gifted at all.” Don’t be so proud. You are gifted.
What you do is you proceed to get active. You proceed to minister. It’s just like how you find you’re good at anything else. You do some things. You check out your desires. You check out your affectedness. It takes time, but you can’t be a consumer. You cannot come and sit and soak. Matthew 25 tells us about the day Jesus comes back and he has three servants. One of them was given five talents, one was given two, and one was given one. The one with five talents said, “Here, Master. I got your five talents. I invested them, and I have 10 back.”
Another person said, “Here, Master. I had two talents, and I invested them, and I give you four back.” The last one said, “Here, Master. I have one talent, and I knew you’d be scared if I lost it, so I buried it, and here it is.” That last guy said, “I was scared,” and a lot of you are going to say, “I don’t know what kind of ministry I could do. I’m scared. I don’t want to look foolish,” but do you know what? In that parable in Matthew 25, the king does not say to that last guy, “You wicked, scared servant.” He doesn’t say that. Do you know what he says?
He says, “You wicked, lazy servant!” He says, “I gave you something, and the only way to take care of it was to invest it.” I hate to say this in a room like this, in a city like this, but you’re stockbrokers for God. If somebody gave you, as a stockbroker, a huge amount of money to invest, with fear and trembling, you knew you could not sit on that because if you sat on it that person would be losing money. You had to invest it. You had to invest it well. You had to give a good return on it. This is far more valuable than a billion dollars.
This is far more powerful than a billion dollars. Do you understand that? We should be looking at New York saying, “All the power we have,” but who knows what it’s going to be? We have to get it out there. Now you see why Jesus can say, “You will do greater works than me,” because Jesus Christ, as powerful as he was, was in one body and one place, but now his ministry gifts and his kingdom powers are distributed in millions of cells that can go everywhere, and there are not enough of them in New York, but we need to penetrate.
If you want to be in the house of God as a living stone, you have to be built on the foundation. That means you have to be obeying his Word. You have to be converted. You have to be growing in supernatural maturity. You have to be finding and using your gifts, not a consumer, not just sitting and soaking, but doing things for him, using the gifts he’s given you. Lastly, it says we fit together into the church, and that just simply means just as a good stone in the walls here, you don’t want gaps in the masonry. You want the stones to be completely related to the other stones at every point.
We talked about this several weeks ago. If you want to be really built into the kingdom of God, you have to have intimate relationships with the people of God, and you have to work at it. It says bear one another’s burdens. It says confess your sins to each other. It says exhort one another daily lest you be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. It says pray for one another. My friends, how many people do you have that you’re obeying those commandments with?
How many people do you know so well they’re exhorting you daily lest you be hardened by sin? How many people are you confessing your sins to? How many people are you bearing burdens with? Now we talked about this, but the fact is that kind of fellowship is a command, so here we are.
End of the service. Here is the inventory. Look at it. Are you converted? Are you obeying? Are you growing? Can you see yourself changing in character? Are you ministering? Have you discovered what your gifts are and what God wants you to be doing in the world? Are you really plugged into good fellowship? Five things.
If you are not experiencing the freedom in your life, the power in your life God wants you to have, you are weak somewhere. Some of you are definitely weak at the fellowship level; you’re too busy, or you’re too scared. Some of you are definitely weak at the gifts level; you’re just consumers. Some of you are definitely weak at the growth level, because for one reason or another you’re not being disciplined in the way of acceptance and the way of nourishment and the way of exchange.
Some of you are simply refusing to be obedient. There is an area of your life you’re not giving him obedience in. How do you expect to know the truth and have the truth set you free? How can you expect to find yourself when Jesus Christ says lose yourself to find yourself? Become part of the whole, the higher call. Submit. It’s a good inventory, but let me just warn you about something. You’ll never be the same again because of what you’ve read and what you’ve heard. You never will.
Do you realize, now that you have this very clear chart you either will obey what you’ve heard and act on it, and you’ll become far more a living stone, or else you won’t act on it and you’ll become harder in your heart and guiltier before God? You’re responsible, my friends. I should have warned you before you sat through this. Don’t you see? You have been polarized. You can either be pushed ahead or way behind in your relationship with God because of what you’ve heard tonight.
You’re responsible, but don’t be afraid. Go ahead. “… come to him, the living Stone,” and you can be living stones built up into a spiritual house, for God has said, “I am laying in Zion a cornerstone. No one who believes in him will ever be put to shame.” Let’s take a moment of silence (and I do mean a moment here), and I’m going to suggest some of you who know you need to work on obedience will promise him that obedience, things in your life you know you should be obeying and you’re not. Some of you, it’s a lack of discipline, just an unwillingness to give God the time and give ministry the time.
Some of you I hope realize you’ve never been converted, and if that’s true, what you need to do tonight is go to him and pray and say, “Lord, I see I’ve been trying to stand on my own. Build me into your house. I receive you as my Lord and Savior.” It needs to be said tonight. Let’s take time to ask God to apply this to our hearts.
About the Preacher
In 1989 Dr. Timothy J. Keller, his wife and three young sons moved to New York City to begin Redeemer Presbyterian Church. In 20 years it has grown to meeting for five services at three sites with a weekly attendance of over 5,000. Redeemer is notable not only for winning skeptical New Yorkers to faith, but also for partnering with other churches to do both mercy ministry and church planting. Redeemer City to City is working to help establish hundreds of new multi-ethnic congregations throughout the city and other global cities in the next decades.
Dr. Tim Keller is the author of several phenomenal Christo-centric books including:
Joy for the World: How Christianity Lost Its Cultural Influence and Can Begin Rebuilding It (co-authored with Greg Forster and Collin Hanson (February or March, 2014).
Encounters with Jesus:Unexpected Answers to Life’s Biggest Questions. New York, Dutton (November 2013).
Walking with God through Pain and Suffering. New York, Dutton (October 2013).
Judges For You (God’s Word For You Series). The Good Book Company (August 6, 2013).
Galatians For You (God’s Word For You Series). The Good Book Company (February 11, 2013).
Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Plan for the World. New York, Penguin Publishing, November, 2012.
Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, September, 2012.
The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness. New York: 10 Publishing, April 2012.
Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just. New York: Riverhead Trade, August, 2012.
The Gospel As Center: Renewing Our Faith and Reforming Our Ministry Practices (editor and contributor). Wheaton: Crossway, 2012.
The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God. New York, Dutton, 2011.
King’s Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus (Retitled: Jesus the KIng: Understanding the Life and Death of the Son of God). New York, Dutton, 2011.
Gospel in Life Study Guide: Grace Changes Everything. Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 2010.
The Reason For God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. New York, Dutton, 2009.
Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Priorities of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters. New York, Riverhead Trade, 2009.
Heralds of the King: Christ Centered Sermons in the Tradition of Edmund P. Clowney (contributor). Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2009.
The Prodigal God. New York, Dutton, 2008.
Worship By The Book (contributor). Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002.
Ministries of Mercy: The Call of the Jericho Road. Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 1997.
SUNDAY OT SERMON: “Views of Creation: Theistic Evolution” by Dr. James Montgomery Boice
SERIES: GENESIS – PART 6
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. – Genesis 1:1-2
Atheistic evolution is no possible view of creation for Christians. It is ruled out simply because it is atheistic. But this does not mean that an evolutionary model must in itself be ruled out. Some who would retain belief in evolution while nevertheless identifying themselves as Christians are the theistic evolutionists.
Theistic evolution is the view of those who are committed to the theory of evolution and who retain it in full except at those few points where, as it seems to them, it is not entirely compatible with Christianity. They are theists because they believe in the Christian God. They believe that he has revealed himself in Scripture. But they are also evolutionists because they think that evolution is right. That is, they believe that everything has evolved through long periods of time from primitive to more complex forms. They believe that life has evolved from nonlife. They believe that man has evolved from the lower animals. Generally they accept the scientific data urged in support of evolution. The main difference between the theistic evolutionists and the atheistic evolutionists is that the former believe that God, specifically the God of the Bible, is providentially guiding the evolutionary process, while the latter attribute the identical developments to chance.
Another way of putting it would be to say that the God of theistic evolution is the God of the gaps. In the last message we pointed out four major problems with atheistic evolution: it cannot explain the origin of matter, the form of matter, the emergence of life, or the appearance of personality or God-consciousness in man. The theistic evolutionist would bring in God at these points. God creates matter and life. But aside from that the theistic evolutionist would view things as having happened precisely as his nonbelieving counterpart views them.
A Possibility
What are we to say to this view? The first thing we must say is that it is at least a possibility. We may put it like this. There is no reason for the Christian to deny that one form of fish may have evolved from another form or even that one form of land animal may have evolved from a sea creature. We may not believe that this has actually happened, for the reasons set forth in our last message. But in itself this view of creation is not biblically impossible.
The Hebrew word translated by our word “let,” which occurs throughout the creation account, allows for this. It does not specify a method by which God caused most things to come into being. However, there are three points at which even the Genesis narrative seems to require something different. These are the points at which the powerful Hebrew word baraʾ, rendered “created,” rather than the word “let” occurs. Baraʾ means to create out of nothing. It is used in verse 1, which speaks of the creation of the original substance of the universe out of nothing; verse 21, which speaks of the creation of conscious life (that is, of animals as opposed to plants); and verse 27, which speaks of the creation of man in God’s image. At these points there is an obvious introduction into creation of something strikingly new, something that did not and could not have evolved from things in existence previously. So long as the evolutionist speaks of the Christian God as the one who has introduced these new elements and has guided the evolutionary development at other points also (so that the result is not the mere product of chance but rather the unfolding of God’s own wise and perfect will), most Christians would say that, thus far at least, the approach of the theistic evolutionist is possible.
Some important Christian thinkers have said exactly this. No less weighty a scholar than B. B. Warfield, in an essay, “On the Antiquity and the Unity of the Human Race,” said that although evolution “cannot act as a substitute for creation,” it can supply “a theory of the method of the divine providence” (B.B. Warfield, Biblical and Theological Studies, P&R, 1968, 238).
Another example is the great Scottish divine of the last century, James Orr. In the years 1890–91, Orr gave the well-known Kerr lectures on the subject “The Christian View of God and the World,” in the course of which he defended evolution. “In reality, the facts of evolution do not weaken the proof from design, but rather immensely enlarge it by showing all things to be bound together in a vaster, grander plan than had been formerly conceived. … On the general hypothesis of evolution, as applied to the organic world, I have nothing to say, except that, within certain limits, it seems to me extremely probable, and supported by a large body of evidence” (James Orr, The Christian View of God and the World as Centering in the Incarnation. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1960, 90).
Even more significant is the essay published by Orr in that collection of conservative writings that appeared at the beginning of this century, The Fundamentals, from which the term “fundamentalist” came. In it Orr defends theistic evolution as propounded by R. Otto in Naturalism and Religion. He says at one point, “ ‘Evolution,’ in short, is coming to be recognized as but a new name for ‘creation,’ only that the creative power now works within, instead of, as in the old conception, in an external, plastic fashion” (Orr, “Science and Christian Faith,” The Fundamentals, vol. 1, ed. R.A. Torrey, A.C. Dixon, and others. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1972, 346. Original edition 1917).
Neither of these men was himself a theistic evolutionist, though Orr comes very close to endorsing the position. The point is simply that in the judgment of these cautious and eminently biblical spokesmen, theistic evolution is a possible theory and therefore should not be rejected out of hand by Christian people.
Points in Favor
Possibility is not certainty, however, and it is only fair to say that for what they consider to be very good reasons other Christians reject this approach entirely. One of them is Davis A. Young, whose own position is progressive creationism. (To be discussed in a future sermon – Genesis – Part 9) He writes against theistic evolution saying that it “leads logically and ultimately to the death of genuinely biblical religion.” In the heading of the chapter in which theistic evolution is specifically studied he calls this view “a house built upon sand” (Davis A. Young, Creation and the Flood: An Alternative to Flood Geology and Theistic Evolution. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1977, 18, 23ff.).
What are we to think of theistic evolution? Positively, we may say that it has two important points in its favor. First, truth is truth wherever it is found. So if evolution is true, as evolutionists certainly believe, and if the Bible is also true, then something like the view of the theistic evolutionists must be reality. Again, this does not mean that evolution is true. But it does mean that we must at least ask whether it is true or not, and if it is true, we must learn from it. We must remember at this point that many theories of science were once declared to be anti-Christian but are now held by Christians and non-Christians alike with no apparent ill effects to Christianity.
One example is Copernican astronomy. Copernicus discovered that the earth was not the physical center of the universe. This was immediately assailed by those who felt that the Bible taught differently. Today we recognize that biblical language that was thought to imply a central earth is merely phenomenal. That is, it describes things as they appear to an earthbound observer (for whom indeed the Bible is written) and not as things actually are from a scientific standpoint. But in Copernicus’s day this was not seen, and Galileo, who held to the Copernican astronomy, was eventually compelled by irate churchmen to recant. Similarly, in the past there have been Christians who have opposed most advances in medicine—pain killers, anesthetics, operations—feeling that these wrongly oppose God’s decrees. Others have opposed such scientific devices as lightning rods, arguing that lightning was from God and that if God chose to strike a building it was sinful on our part to oppose it. In all these cases the terrible warnings made in support of the “Christian” position did not materialize and truth prevailed.
The second argument in favor of theistic evolution is that God seems to work according to this pattern in other areas. Theistic evolution posits a universe that operates according to fixed, universal laws into which, however, God sometimes intrudes, as in the creation of life from nonlife or the implanting of God-consciousness in man. “Isn’t this exactly what we see in life generally or, for that matter, in the history recorded for us in the Bible?” the theistic evolutionist might say. “For the most part the history of Israel and the church flows along naturally. Leaders arise, do their thing, and then die giving place to other rulers. It is only occasionally that God intervenes miraculously. To see this pattern at work in evolution is biblical. It is what we should expect on the basis of what we know of Christian history.”
A House on Sand
Then Christians should all be theistic evolutionists? Not necessarily! There are also important weaknesses in this view to which none should be blind.
First, there is a problem with the supposed truthfulness of evolution itself. The theistic evolutionist believes in evolution, as we have seen. But evolution is not necessarily true, as we have also seen. Indeed, there are important reasons for discounting it. One main reason for rejecting evolution is the lack of fossil evidence. To be sure, the evolutionist reads the fossil record differently, seeing in it a sketchy but adequate history of the development of higher forms of life from lower forms. But the record is at best incomplete and may, as creationists hold, actually provide better evidence for the creationist’s view than for the evolutionist’s. As we said in the last message, it is not merely a question of a few missing links. There are hundreds of missing links. It is questionable whether there is any evidence for the development of one species from a lower species. What the fossil evidence actually shows—even granting the alleged antiquity of the earth and the accepted sequence of fossils and rock strata—is the sudden appearance of major groups of species. If evolution is true, we should expect to find a finely graded and continuous development. Since we do not, we can honestly object to the theistic evolutionist’s first argument in support of his theory, namely, that evolution is true and that the Christian should not be afraid to acknowledge it.
Again, we must emphasize the fact that certain forms of evolutionary development may be true. But the creationist may well ask the theistic evolutionist whether he does not hold his position, not so much because of the scientific evidence for it, but only because it is the accepted (and only acceptable) theory in his field of work.
The second objection corresponds to the theist’s second argument, just as the creationist’s first objection corresponds to his first. The theistic evolutionist might appeal to the Bible as suggesting a pattern of God’s dealings with the human race, which he also sees in evolution—general development according to fixed laws with only an occasional supernatural intervention. But we must ask whether this is really the biblical picture. According to evolution, the development of life on earth has proceeded over a period of several billion years with at best two or three divine interventions. Is this the pattern we find in Scripture? It is true that in biblical history miracles are not everyday occurrences, but they are not all that infrequent either. Hundreds of supernatural interventions by God are recorded. And as for the development of the rest of history along the lines of natural law, would it not be more accurate to say that all history is in God’s hand and that it is being directed by him in intricate detail according to his own perfect plans?
The theistic evolutionist would say that in his view God has directed evolution just as he has directed the history of Israel. But if God has directed evolution according to that pattern, it is not quite the kind of evolution real evolutionists talk about. According to them, evolution is a long, slow, wasteful, crude, inefficient, and mistake-ridden process. The God of the Bible hardly fits those categories. If evolution is made to conform to his nature—efficient, wise, good, and error-free—it is hardly evolution, and the theistic evolutionist who is really a biblical theist has become a creationist though he does not actually describe himself by that word.
Third, we may ask whether the method of creation viewed by the theistic evolutionist does justice to the biblical record. Since the method of God’s creating the animals, birds, and fish is not given in Genesis 1, it may be that God effected this segment of his creation according to an evolutionary model. But in the case of man there does seem to be something of a method, at least in Genesis 2: “And the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (v. 7). This suggests that in the creation of man God began, as it were, de novo. That is, he started with inorganic matter into which he then breathed life. It does not suggest that man developed from the lesser animals.
We could always say that man is made of dust even though the actual steps of his creation involved a lengthy development through lesser species. But we run into further difficulties when we get to the case of Eve, for Eve is said to have been created from Adam. This does not correspond to any evolutionary theory.
Again, there is the problem of the singularity of Adam. In Romans 5:12–21 and 1 Corinthians 15:22–23 and 45, comparisons are made between Adam and the Lord Jesus Christ. It is basic to this comparison that Adam was an individual whose act affected his progeny. Does this fit in with evolutionary theory? In evolution the basic unit is population, not an individual. At what point did Adam appear? Or did he appear? If God chose one individual from a population of prehuman but manlike beings and made him man, what happened to the rest? Questions like these make questionable whether the theistic evolutionist can defend his position on biblical grounds.
Death of Biblical Religion
This leads us to our last criticism, the one Davis Young alludes to when he says that theistic evolution leads “logically and ultimately to the death of biblical religion.” There is an unbiblical view of the Bible that Young feels to be characteristic of these men.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is perhaps the best known and best read of the theistic evolutionists. He is French and is a Roman Catholic priest, which should speak well for his Christian commitment. He has a concern for the immaterial or spiritual as well as the material. He can even chide science: “Has science ever troubled to look at the world other than from without?” (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper & Row, 1959, 52). But he is also an evolutionist of the most convinced stripe, and this determines his theology in the final analysis.
For de Chardin there is no question that evolution on the grandest scale has taken place. Therefore, if our understanding of Scripture seems to be in conflict with evolutionary views, it is our views of Scripture or even Scripture itself that must give way before science. He writes: “It may be said that the problem of transformism no longer exists. The question is settled once and for all. To shake our belief now in the reality of biogenesis, it would be necessary to uproot the tree of life and undermine the entire structure of the world. … One might well become impatient or lose heart at the sight of so many minds (and not mediocre ones either) remaining today still closed to the idea of evolution, if the whole of history were not there to pledge to us that a truth once seen, even by a single mind, always ends up by imposing itself on the totality of human consciousness. … Is evolution a theory, a system or a hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.”
His thought is his own, of course. We do not suggest that all theistic evolutionists share it. Yet it is evident from these quotations why Young calls this view ultimately destructive. Biblical religion must by its very definition start with the Bible and make all other theories subordinate to that. In de Chardin’s case, everything has become subject to evolution, and an ability to hear the reforming, correcting Word of God in Scripture has been lost. We must ask whether such a tendency is not present in all theistic evolution.
What should the Christian’s proper position be? An openness to all truth certainly, but not the kind of openness that allows scientific theory or any other theory to sit in judgment on the truthfulness of God’s written Word. Actually, the Christian’s task is the opposite: to bring every thought into subjection to the written Word. Paul knew this. He wrote to those of his day, “The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:4–5). We may not know the truth in any given area. But we must know that our ultimate standard for truth—whatever it is—is the written Word of God.
About the Preacher
James Montgomery Boice, Th.D., (July 7, 1938 – June 15, 2000) was a Reformed theologian, Bible teacher, and pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia from 1968 until his death. He is heard on The Bible Study Hour radio broadcast and was a well-known author and speaker in evangelical and Reformed circles. He also served as Chairman of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy for over ten years and was a founding member of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. James Boice was one of my favorite Bible teachers. Thankfully – many of his books and expositions of Scripture are still in print and more are becoming available. The sermon above was adapted from Chapter 6 in Genesis 1-11: An Expositional Commentary. vol. 1: Creation and Fall. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006.
Under Dr. Boice’s leadership, Tenth Presbyterian Church became a model for ministry in America’s northeastern inner cities. When he assumed the pastorate of Tenth Church there were 350 people in regular attendance. At his death the church had grown to a regular Sunday attendance in three services of more than 1,200 persons, a total membership of 1,150 persons. Under his leadership, the church established a pre-school for children ages 3-5 (now defunct), a high school known as City Center Academy, a full range of adult fellowship groups and classes, and specialized outreach ministries to international students, women with crisis pregnancies, homosexual and HIV-positive clients, and the homeless. Many of these ministries are now free-standing from the church.Dr. Boice gave leadership to groups beyond his own organization. For ten years he served as Chairman of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, from its founding in 1977 until the completion of its work in 1988. ICBI produced three classic, creedal documents: “The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy,” “The Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics” and “The Chicago Statement on the Application of the Bible to Contemporary Issues.” The organization published many books, held regional “Authority of Scripture” seminars across the country, and sponsored the large lay “Congress on the Bible I,” which met in Washington, D.C., in September 1987. He also served on the Board of Bible Study Fellowship. He founded the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals (Alliance) in 1994, initially a group of pastors and theologians who were focused on bringing the 20th and now 21st century church to a new reformation. In 1996 this group met and wrote the Cambridge Declaration. Following the Cambridge meetings, the Alliance assumed leadership of the programs and publications formerly under Evangelical Ministries, Inc. (Dr. Boice) and Christians United for Reformation (Horton) in late 1996. Dr. Boice was a prodigious world traveler. He journeyed to more than thirty countries in most of the world’s continents, and he taught the Bible in such countries as England, France, Canada, Japan, Australia, Guatemala, Korea and Saudi Arabia. He lived in Switzerland for three years while pursuing his doctoral studies. Dr. Boice held degrees from Harvard University (A.B.), Princeton Theological Seminary (B.D.), the University of Basel, Switzerland (D. Theol.) and the Theological Seminary of the Reformed Episcopal Church (D.D., honorary). A prolific author, Dr. Boice had contributed nearly forty books on a wide variety of Bible related themes. Most are in the form of expositional commentaries, growing out of his preaching: Psalms (1 volume), Romans (4 volumes), Genesis (3 volumes), Daniel, The Minor Prophets (2 volumes), The Sermon on the Mount, John (5 volumes, reissued in one), Ephesians, Phillippians and The Epistles of John. Many more popular volumes: Hearing God When You Hurt, Mind Renewal in a Mindless Christian Life, Standing on the Rock, The Parables of Jesus, The Christ of Christmas, The Christ of the Open Tomb and Christ’s Call to Discipleship. He also authored Foundations of the Christian Faith a 740-page book of theology for laypersons. Many of these books have been translated into other languages, such as: French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Chinese and Korean. He was married to Linda Ann Boice (born McNamara), who continues to teach at the high school they co-founded. Sources: Taken directly from the Aliance of Confessing Evangelicals’ Website |
Boice’s Books:from the Tenth Presbyterian Church website Chapters1985 “The Future of Reformed Theology” in David F. Wells, editor,
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