Homosexuality, Serpents, and Doves

The tag-line for BJU’s What in the World! newsletter is “helping believers be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” I borrowed, of course, the words of Jesus in Matt. 10:16 as He sends His disciples out on a preaching tour.

Every sinful age demands that Christ’s disciples have this serpentine wisdom or cunning—φρόνιμος is the same word used to describe the “subtil” serpent in Gen 3:1 (LXX). So one major purpose of What in the World! is to engage in what Bryan W. Smith calls “Christian-worldview shaping.” Readers need to know what the world is arguing and how to respond.

But Jesus also called for His servants to be “harmless as doves.” R. T. France points out in his TNTC volume on Matthew that this harmlessness or innocence (ἀκέραιος) “demands not naivety, but an irreproachable honesty” (p. 182). So What in the World! urges purity by shedding light on the sins of the church.

France’s last comment on Matt. 10:16 struck me today: “The balance of prudence and purity will enable Christians both to survive and to fulfill their mission to the world.” His words fit exactly our situation in the culture war over homosexuality and gay marriage.

If we were more prudent then, yes, we wouldn’t have biblically illiterate Christians making the Bible look silly during radio call-in programs.

But if Christians fulfilled the simpler task of being pure, then Lisa Miller could not have written important paragraphs in her recent infamous Newsweek opinion piece. Two points here:

• If Christians had led the culture—instead of dragging it backwards—in granting civil rights to all God’s image-bearers regardless of race or skin color, Miller and others could not so readily draw a direct line from Martin Luther King to Matthew Shepard.
• And if Christians didn’t divorce one another she couldn’t say, “Paul argued more strenuously against divorce [than against homosexuality]—and at least half of the Christians in America disregard that teaching.”

If we love homosexuals we mustn’t give up the fight for the right to openly tell them the truth about their sin. But Jesus knew best: we must be wise and pure ourselves.

Tolerance as a Defense Mechanism

Stanley Fish is always provocative and thoughtful in his New York Times blog. I presume his books bear the same qualities, though I’ve only ever picked up his most famous.

Gilbert Meilaender recently reviewed in First Things a new Fish book addressed to college professors: Save the World on Your Own Time.

Fish is on an admirable search for truth, according to Meilaender:

“You will never,” Fish writes, “hear in any of my classes the some-people-say-X-but-others-say-Y-and-who’s-to-judge dance. What I strive to determine, together with my students, is which of the competing accounts of a matter (an academic not a political matter) is the right one and which are wrong.”

But Meilaender has a helpful rejoinder which might give you insight into yourself, your students, or other college-age young people you know:

I do not disagree, but I think Fish . . . might ponder a bit more why it is that many students are drawn to the “who’s-to-judge dance.”

They are drawn to this position for the most understandable of reasons—and one for which we ought to have considerable sympathy. Theirs is, essentially, a posture of self-defense. Knowing that many of their beliefs are being deliberately undermined in their classes, and knowing also that (most of the time) they are not yet in a position to articulate a full defense of their views, they take refuge in tolerance. You are entitled to your opinion, which I ought not criticize. And, thankfully, this means that I am also entitled to my opinion, which you ought not criticize.

Usage determines meaning, literally.

I really enjoyed this essay on that poor, abused English word “literally.” If you’ll read it carefully you’ll get a very helpful point for Bible interpretation as well as parlor talk.

Note, too, that “wrongainey,” one of the four known thoughtful commenters on the Internet (the other three frequent this blog, thankfully!), has done it again with a mild rejoinder.

Al Martin on Childrearing

For the last year my wife and I have been in the young couples Sunday School class at Mount Calvary Baptist Church. The first six months focused on the marriage relationship; for the last six we’ve been learning from experienced parents about how to raise godly children.

Our teacher has highly recommended a series of 40 messages on child-rearing from Al Martin, long-time preaching pastor at Trinity Baptist Church of Montville. I’m thankful for Trinity’s generosity in making this whole series available for free online.

Unfortunately, the website’s format makes it difficult to download them all! So I have collected the links for you. Just go to this page and click away!

N.B. If you have one of my favorite Firefox extensions, “DownThemAll,” you can get them all without having to click on every link.

David Wells Comments on Fundamentalists

David Wells recently gave an excellent address sponsored by the (Carl F. H.) Henry Center on preaching to postmoderns. He spoke in the ATO chapel at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Wells made a few comments about (American Protestant) Fundamentalism toward the end of the Q&A session. I’ll include the positives and the negatives to be fair, but I do think the positives are striking:

Those of us who have developed a few gray hairs look at this new [evangelical] monasticism with a certain bemusement, remembering the fundamentalist decades. There for a long time it was fashionable to mock the fundamentalists as being little-minded, bigoted, narrow. They withdrew from the mainline denominations, they set up their own school system, they developed their own radio, their own communities; they had their own yellow pages—they were monasteries!

And we who were first “New-Evangelicals” and then a little bit later on “evangelicals”—we said, “No, no, no, no… That withdrawing from the world is hopeless, because you withdraw all your Christian influence from it and what happens? The salt is taken away from the meat and the meat rots. So, of course we’ve got to get back into the mainline denominations, back into the educational system, we [unintelligible] gotta get doctorates.”

So we got back into the culture and we became a part of it. So now what’s happened? Well, now what we’re hearing is that we’ve got to become monastics, indeed even recovering, retrieving, some of the Catholic monastic forms because this is the only way that we will survive and preserve the Christian faith….

I’m not convinced that the fundamentalist solution was a good one, although I can say to their credit tht they did preserve the Word of God. And they did in their missionaries do some extraordinary social relief, though it was not in America; it was in far away countries—and here we battle the social gospel instead. There were good things to the fundamentalists but there were real defects. And those real defects, I think, remain any time we try to resurrect any form of monasticism.

God Uses PHAT Christians

I once heard a sermon titled “God uses PHAT Christians.” The preacher’s acronym spelled out the following:

• Pure
• Humble
• Available
• Teachable/Trained

Now don’t try to guess who preached this sermon. I don’t know. I keep a “bad sermons” file—simply because I want wild examples to show to future homiletics students but I’m not creative enough to come up with them! But I take the preacher’s name out of each file because it doesn’t matter.

However, I have heard many preachers make the same point this man was making, just without the cheesy acronym. Over and over I’ve heard “God’s only going to use you if you make yourself into a clean vessel.” Now, I deeply want to be holy, but I don’t think this talk from preachers is helpful. I have often thought, What about Pharaoh? What about Samson?

Recently, Mark Dever and Don Carson discussed this point in Mark Dever’s 9Marks Leadership Interview Series, a set of recordings I highly recommend. They feature an intensely (almost annoyingly =) knowledgeable pastor asking knowledgeable questions to knowledgeable guests. And I can add “godly” to “knowledgeable” for pretty well everyone involved. The discussions are edifying, informative, and Scripture- and theology-heavy.

After talking about fallen ministers, Dever and Carson talked about PHAT Christians:

Dever: Never think that because your ministry is apparently successful that reflects your relationship with the Lord. There are many holy ministers who’ve not been used in any apparently mighty way, and there are those who have been used mightily by God whose own work we will known in the last day how God will judge it in regards to themselves but God used the burning bush, God used Balaam’s donkey. The fact that God uses something speaks to God’s greatness.

Carson: That’s right; it does not necessarily speak to the moral perfections of the agent used.

Dever: And sometimes in our pious language we make it seem like the more holy we are the more powerfully we’ll be used. And while there’s some truth to that, you think of Pelagius, who was known as a very pious man but whose theology could not have been more prideful.

Carson: And there is no direct correlation between piety, godliness on the one hand and fruitfulness on the other. There is some correlation in the grace of God sometimes, but you cannot build anything on that. Some of the most godly Christians I know live and serve in corners of the world where there is almost no fruit, and there is a great deal of suffering, and when the saints go marching in they’ll be somewhere near the head of the pack and people like me won’t be anywhere near.

Well said.