A friend’s colleague recently posted a summary of wrong ways that evangelicals read the Bible, based on a chapter in Graeme Goldsworthy’s book, Gospel-Centred Hermeneutics. [1]

Boiled down even further, the main errors are:

1. The “me-centred” approach: Context is meaningless. Texts speak directly to me.
2. Literalism: Fulfilment in Jesus is ignored.
3. Legalism: We rail about keeping the Sabbath but eat prawns.
4. Subjectivisim: My reading of a passage is right because I felt a peace from God.
5. Pluralism: The Bible has many possible interpretations.
6. Pragmatism: There are more people at church, so what we are doing must be right, regardless of what the Bible says.

This is a good list, but simply dividing the Bible into pre-gospel and gospel leads to a misinterpretation of much biblical prophecy. Mr Goldsworthy’s blanket-style “everything is fulfilled in Jesus” hermeneutic means he himself ends up with a “me-centred” approach to the Bible.

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“Conservative theologians have bravely held the fort like the guardians of heaven. Unfortunately, when it comes to biblical interpretation, they are boring as hell.“

Paul Washer recently tweeted: “The measure of biblical truth that we have grasped is not determined by the size of our heads, but the breadth of our hearts.”

The divide between the head and the heart is an issue of integrity, of holiness. But even within the realm of “head knowledge,” the intellectual level of Biblical interpretation, there is a sort of left brain/right brain divide. The issue here is not one of holiness. It is one of “intellectual sex.”

[This post has been refined and included in Sweet Counsel: Essays to Brighten the Eyes.]

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In his post You Will Never Guess Who Is Really Responsible For The Softening of Males In The Church, Mark Sayers shifts the blame for the current “sea of passivity” in modern males from feminism to men like John Newton.

To rescue masculinity in the West we must remember that we stand on the shoulders of giants. One such giant was John Newton, a man whose debauched life as a slave trader ensured that he had inhabited the old world of male violence. Yet Newton was thoroughly transformed by his encounter with the truth of the gospel. Newton operated as a template for the new evangelical mode of masculinity. He chose to champion others rather than simply build his own empire. A committed calvinist, he collaborated with and encouraged other believers who thought differently to him, maintaining a warm friendship and working relationship with John Wesley.Newton was not a prim and proper Georgian dandy, often he was described as uncouth. Newton was passionate and dedicated, his communication of the gospel was uncomprimising. Yet what entranced his contemporaries was that his gospel communication was described as having an almost ‘womanly tenderness’.  Newton was pointing the way forward to a new mode of being male, one shaped by the Gospel not the code of honour and violence. Newton would act as a father figure to a whole generation of evangelical leaders who would not just transform culture’s idea of masculinity but culture itself.

So what are we to do with our current crisis of masculinity? What advice should be given to young men who find themselves looking for male role models, who wonder what it is to be a Christian man in today’s culture of passivity and indecision. I think that if you want to be a man, stop trying so hard. Instead look to Newton’s advice, understand that you are a wretch who has been transformed by a grace that is amazing. Allow yourself to daily mediate upon and live out of that reality and one day you will get up to shave and the face in the mirror looking back at you will be the face of a man.

Great advice. But Newton and those of his time understood that men need a mission, something to construct and some to conquer. With the rejection of Christianity by our culture, that mission was replaced first with the empty quest for wealth, but now has been lost altogether. People, men in particular, are rebels without a cause. With everything else now shown to offer false hopes, the only real cause left is the New Covenant. [1]

Two Women for Every Man

In his post Old style evangelical gender politics, Steve Holmes tries to shore up the gender imbalance with some history of great evangelical women who followed this “transformation of masculinity.”

This evangelical generation changed the world, or major parts of it at least: they broke the international economic system of the day because it was unjust; they reformed prisons, factories, poor laws, and anything else they could think of; they saw major revivals, and huge numbers of conversions; when it came to gender politics, they taught men to be gentle, and women to be active in ministry.

Besides the few radicals he mentions, a lot of good was most certainly done, but how did that lead to the situation we are now in, where many men wouldn’t be found dead in a mainline Western church. Or, in reality, they might only be found in such a church if they were actually dead. Here’s a clue:

Methodist and holiness movements provided a particular intensification of this theme, as a woman who could lay claim to the experience of entire sanctification was in a demonstrable position of spiritual superiority to men who could not, a situation creating a significant pressure to reverse cultural-normative gender roles. Phoebe Palmer’s astonishing evangelistic ministry is the most obvious example of this, but there are many others (Hannah Whitall Smith’s entry in the Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals notes that, at the Brighton Convention for the Promotion of Christian Holiness in 1875, ‘[t]he most popular sessions … were those in which Hannah preached her practical secrets of the happy Christian life to audiences of 5000 or more, mostly clergymen who were theologically opposed to the preaching ministry of women’).

There was a deep-seated structural problem in this “transformation.” We might say that well-meaning evangelicals fell off the other side of the horse.

The Stigmatization of Male Traits

My friend Alastair Roberts’ comments after this post are the reason why I am posting this at all. He’s very familiar with the “liturgical” roles for men and women laid down in Genesis. [2] Modern evangelicals either don’t believe Genesis, or don’t know how to apply the Bible’s types, and so are left bumping around in the dark regarding gender roles in the Church, and in the interpretation of their history. Roberts makes a lot of sense, so I’ll post it in full. He writes:

It seems to me that the picture is rather one-sided. More probably needs to be said about the manner in which disempowered women and disempowered clergy joined forces to bring about the reformation of men’s morals, epitomized by such things as the temperance movements of the 19th century. This alliance between women and the clergy was coupled with a sentimentalization and feminization of religion, as in many quarters religion became conformed to dominant forms of cultural sentimental femininity, operating on the assumption that women had a greater affinity with religion and according to the narrative of the woman who reforms wayward men by making them see things more like them.

This wasn’t the only thing that was going on at the time, of course. There was also the ‘muscular Christianity’ of such as Kingsley, with its commitment to an imperial model of masculinity, and the refined and aesthetic masculinity of the Oxford movement. However, this ‘feminization’ and ‘sentimentalization’ trend has had a significant effect upon the worship, piety, theology, image, and demographics of the Church in many quarters.

It led to a stigmatization of many stereotypically male traits, along with a celebration of many stereotypically female traits. Within such a context, Christian spirituality was increasingly colonized by the sort of sentiments that are usually reserved for cheap romantic paperbacks. The agonistic and martial language of much biblical piety was increasingly abandoned in favour of a rather sickly emotionalism.

The problem is that, in the process evangelical spirituality drifted further away from the sort of biblical patterns of spirituality that one finds in the psalms, which do not exalt sentiment and sentimentality to the position of dominance that it often possesses. Churches also lost contact with men, as churches increasingly ordered themselves around disempowered women and children and their forms of piety (in a related movement, Christian piety started to disconnect from the wider world of society, life, and work to focus ever more narrowly on the individual soul and its private spirituality). The expectation that men conform themselves to a culturally feminine sentimental model of spirituality (rather than the expectation that both men and women conform themselves to a biblical model of spirituality) encouraged men to view the Church as emasculating and irrelevant to their lives, or as an unwelcome imposition upon them to be borne grudgingly and passively.

If the full story of the evangelical transformation of masculinity is to be told, we need to take this part of the picture into account. The evangelical church has often tended to neuter its men in order to empower its women. Its celebration and empowerment of women within its walls has gone hand in hand with its cultural marginalization and disempowerment. It has also fallen prey to a gross distortion of biblical piety in the form of sentimental piety, which still prevails in many quarters. This sentimentalized evangelical church has proved more effective at producing milquetoasts, who are culturally ineffective, than it has at producing men and women of firm character who make a powerful impact in the wider society.

The ‘masculinization’ of the church championed by Driscoll and others is obviously not the answer, but the Church is generally ‘feminized’ in a profoundly unhealthy manner, and something needs to be done to address this. What we have at the moment is a culturally marginal or irrelevant institution where there are almost twice as many women as men, where men are more inclined to be passive, and where piety is overly fixated on sentiment and emotion. I hardly think that this this qualifies as a success in terms of the transformation of gender norms and the shape of society…

[I will] explain in more detail what I mean by the ‘feminization’ of the Church here. Gender identities are indeed largely socially constructed (which perhaps should not surprise us if our most fundamental identity as human persons is a symbolic one, rather than one of biological essence, as we are created images of God). The problem comes when a particular social construction of one gender, which has little to do with Scripture and is at odds with it at various points, becomes a norm that is increasingly imposed upon all within the Church. For instance, I think that it is fair to say that Mark Driscoll is attempting a ‘masculinization’ of the Church, without suggesting that the gender norms that he is working in terms of are anything but ones contingent upon the surrounding culture.

I believe that the last couple of centuries witnessed just such a conforming of the evangelical church to norms of a particular cultural gender identity, in the form of sentimental femininity. I don’t see this particular development in piety as having much to do with an attempt to conform to biblical patterns of piety. Rather, it seems to me to arise primarily out of particular set of historical circumstances in which the interests of clergy and women aligned against a dysfunctional masculinity, and men were increasingly expected to conform and submit themselves to a cultural form of femininity, rather than to Scripture.

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[1] If you don’t understand Covenant-as-cause, please read my book, Bible Matrix II: The Covenant Key.
[2] See Liturgical Man, Liturgical Woman.

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One thing that has struck me since becoming a preterist is how much evangelicals play down the badness of the baddies in the New Testament, i.e. the unbelieving Jews and Christian Judaisers.

Evangelicals would never believe that Jesus and the apostles were mistaken in their warnings of an imminent judgment (and let’s face it, this imminence is a facet of the New Testament that is inescapable). So the only other option they see as viable is a position that defies logic: an event that was near, at the doors, yet could happen at any time over next few millennia.

Of course, there is another position: preterism. The event of which Christ and His delegates warned came to pass. If you are willing to entertain this wild idea (temporarily) as you read the New Testament, all of a sudden a great many problem verses fall into place. And so does a secondary great truckload of verses which seemed somehow slightly disconnected from the reality of our experience. You suddenly GET WHERE THE APOSTLES ARE COMING FROM. It’s like you’ve been driving on outback dirt roads all your life and finally run across some bitumen. The New Covenant scriptures cease to jar.

Thus, evangelicals refuse to interpret the New Testament in context. They think they are interpreting it, but they are, in fact, only applying it. Like the rest of the Bible, the New Testament was written for us, but it wasn’t written to us.

Once you have the film actually aligned with its historical sprockets, the texts become a lot easier to interpret. The modern church’s failure to understand the significance of AD70 in redemptive history means that one has to cover a lot more ground to answer the tough questions.

One example, as Peter Leithart mentions in The Promise of His Appearing, is the problems caused by reading Reformation-era debates back into the epistles of Paul. Paul wasn’t actually dealing with Roman Catholics, regardless of how helpful his words might be in debating them. His epistles must interpreted correctly before they can be correctly applied.

Another example I came across today, beginning Peter Leithart’s recent commentary on the epistles of John, is the identity of the false teachers in 1 John. Understanding that the final letters are warnings to Jews concerning the impending end of Judaism allows us to find answers to many nagging questions much closer to textual home.

“…This background helps clarify some of John’s major concerns. John, for example, mentions “antichrist” several times. In 2:18, he writes, “It is the last hour, and just as you heard that antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have arisen; from this we know that it is the last hour.” Where did they hear that antichrist was coming? They perhaps heard it from John, or from another apostle or preacher. But where did the apostles learn about antichrist? If John had already received the visions recorded in Revelation, that might be one source. Ultimately, though, Jesus’ own teaching is the source, especially the sermon recorded in Matthew 24 and its parallels. Early on in the discourse on the Mount of Olives, Jesus warns that “many will come in my name saying ‘I am the Christ’ and will mislead many” (Matt. 24:5). Again in 24:24 he adds, “false Christs and false prophets will arise and will show great signs and wonders, so as to mislead, if possible, even the elect.” Similarly, John warns about antichrists and “false prophets” (2:18-19;4″1). John is saying that antichrist has come, just as Jesus predicted. As Jesus warned, the appearance of antichrist is a sign of the approaching end of the age.

Can we be more specific? Can we identify the specific kind of false teachers, false Christs, and false prophets threatening John’s churches?

Many commentators on 1 John believe he is opposing an early form of Gnosticism and Docetism…

In his first epistle, however, John doesn’t give a great deal of emphasis to the fleshliness of Jesus. He mentions it in 4:2, and it is implicit in the opening verses of the letter, but John does not indicate that it is particularly characteristic of the false teachers’ theology…

Does John appear to be responding to gnostic Christology? John’s positive teaching about Jesus is that he is “the Christ” (5:10), that he came in the flesh (1:1-4; 4:2), that he is the Son (repeatedly), and that he came “by water and blood” (5:6). That is a thoroughly anti-gnostic Christology, and the church was right to cite 1 John in later debates with Gnostics. Identifying the heretics of 1-3 John as Gnostics gets us close to the truth, but in my judgment John’s focus is elsewhere.

What then? What false teaching are the false teachers teaching? We can begin by how John defines “antichrist.” In 2:22-23, the antichrist is the one who “denies that Jesus is Messiah,” and this denial of the Son is also a denial of the Father. Though this might describe gnostic Christology, it is just as accurate as a description of anti-Christian Judaism. Many Jews, obviously enough, denied that Jesus was the Messiah, the Anointed One from Yahweh. In fact, John’s description of the views of antichrists applies more precisely to Jews than to anyone else. What sense does it make for a Greek to deny that Jesus is “Messiah”? Did they expect a Messiah in the first place? Wouldn’t they simply be indifferent, as Pilate was, to the internal Jewish debates about messiahship?…

John’s opponents, I submit, are primarily Jews or Judaising Christians. If this is the case, what do we make of the gnostic echoes that so many commentators have heard in the letter?

Here is a hypothesis: Gnosticism is, in (perhaps large) part, a product of Judaism and, more specifically, of Judaising. On the face of it, this is a bizarre thesis. Gnosticism is a radically dualistic system, while Judaism affirms the goodness of the creation from the very first pages of its Bible. Counterintuitive as it may seem, several lines of evidence link Judaism with Gnosticism…” [1]

It makes me cringe when smart Christians insist that we are in the last days, the same last days that the first century writers of the New Testament insisted were a reason for the Jewish Christians throughout the Roman empire to remain faithful and not slide back into a corrupted, rebellious, Satanic distortion of the faith delivered to their fathers.

Yes, we should also live holy lives today, with all the fear and reverance due to our God, and no fear of men. But that is not interpretation. It is application, and selling it as interpretation makes a great deal of the New Testament mysterious to modern Christians.

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[1] See also How to Read the New Testament.
[2] Peter J. Leithart, The Epistles of John Through New Eyes: From Behind the Veil, pp. 10-13.

After reading (“orthodox”) preterists for a few years, the failure of modern evangelicals to read the New Testament in its historical context, and to understand its constant allusions to Old Testament event structures now floors me. How is it that we so easily underestimate the importance of the destruction of Judaism in AD70? And worse than that, how is it that we fail to understand that the imminent warnings of the apostles as prophets related to that event? Here’s a perfect example that hits both these ugly birds with one stone; some pure gold from Peter Leithart this week:

Do Not Touch A Woman

Given the high view of marriage and sexuality in Scripture, Paul’s instructions to the Corinthians are odd and out of character. Why would Paul think it good for everyone to be as he is?

Jeremiah 16 provides a clue. In verse 2, Yahweh instructs Jeremiah not to take a wife or raise children “in this place,” because Yahweh is bringing distress on the fathers, mothers, and children who are born in doomed Jerusalem: “They will die of deadly diseases, they will not be lamented or buried; they will be as dung on the surface of the ground and come to an end by sword and famine, and their carcasses will become food for the birds of the sky and for the beasts of the earth” (v. 4). In view of the present distress, Yahweh says, Jeremiah ought not marry or have children. Jeremiah would remain unmarried as a prophetic sign of Yahweh’s determination to withdraw peace from His bride (v. 5).

As Paul makes clear in various places, he is an apostle like Jeremiah, not only in being called from the womb but also in his singleness, a sign of the approaching doom on Jerusalem and Judaism.

This kind of common-sense interpretation really isn’t that common, is it? How is it that garden-variety scholars miss the Old Covenant context of the warnings in the gospels, epistles and especially the Revelation? Flipping through Goldsworthy’s Gospel and Revelation again this week, he comments on the fact that the book is very Jewish, but the significance of this seems to escape him, as does the significance of the details in the book. In many places he does little more than summarise the text and make some helpful application. Where is the interpretation? The book has been misunderstood as “timeless wisdom” for the church, rather than an urgent seismic warning for those to whom it was written. And people wonder why I rave about Jordan and Leithart. They get it.

Does this mean, as a friend challenged me this week, that the New Testament doesn’t apply to us? No. Does the book of Ezekiel apply to us? The real question is, was it written to us?

The interpretation of this passage above must take into account that its context is a first century distress. It came and went. Being single is not a principle that applies to the church throughout history. It is a wartime measure.

This widespread misinterpretation of the New Testament leaves Christians open to ridicule, like that in the graffiti pictured above. The answer is, Jesus did come soon, as He promised. He destroyed the scoffers, the backsliders, those who loved money, those who were disobedient to their parents, etc. He allowed them to be slaughtered and their city to be burned. He prepared a place for His disciples AND THEN HE RECEIVED THEM AS HE PROMISED. It is history.

So, how to answer the graffiti artist? Just as the Herods were wiped from history in the church’s first victory as Jericho, every individual and institution that exalts itself against the knowledge of God and His Son Jesus Christ will be wiped from history when Jesus comes to judge the World. Just as Jericho began Joshua’s conquest and Hazor completed it, our Hazor is yet to come. (Go read what happened to Hazor.)

The New Testament records for us God’s judgment in the Garden and in the Land. The World is yet to come, but there is no promise that this final “Gentile courts” judgment will be soon.

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See also How to Read the New Testament.

“If the academies turned out faithful women armed with Picture Bibles we would be better off than we are with you lot.”

Once upon a time, not far from here, there was a graphic designer who busted a gut for five years teaching the Bible in a local high school. He was committed to building a biblical worldview through the communication of the exciting, terrifying, comforting narratives of the Old Testament as a foundation for the gospel, to a generation starving for this stuff and filling the gap with movies and novels like Harry Potter and Twilight. After all, postmoderns love narrative.

But then he wrote and self-published a book with some ideas wrongly perceived as “radical” by members of the local ministers association with executive responsibility for the Bible teaching at the high school. These men were not comfortable with literary analysis or typology, although they hardly taught the Bible in their churches, let alone the Old Testament.

One, a godly, gentle, pastorly man with a big heart, allowed a woman to preach about a church where gold dust, gemstones and feathers regularly fall upon the congregation, but he wouldn’t stomach any reference to the Tabernacle or Temple during songleading or preaching. He also allowed a visiting student minister to share a message totally based around the film Gladiator, but discouraged systematic teaching of Bible history. Another, although capable of moments of brilliant perception, favoured signs and wonders, and encouraged congregants to sit around waiting for a word or vision from the Lord while their Bibles, brimming with such words and visions, stayed mostly closed.

So, with a quiet, impersonal letter to the coordinating teacher at the school, the graphic designer was removed from coordinating curriculum without so much as a thank you. They still wanted him to teach, of course, because there’s no one else to fill the gap in the team. Apparently, teaching in public schools is not something ministers can do themselves.

Consequently, the Bible, a book that far surpasses Harry Potter for plot, drama, symbolism, intrigue, history, family saga, “supernatural themes” and with the power to transform not just single lives but entire cultures to boot, is denied to teenagers hungry for it to be taught fully. Instead they are going to be drip fed with lite milk—gnostic-mystic drivel—at a rate that would insult the intelligence of a first grader. Well, why not? This is what they do in their churches and it works just fine.

And we wonder why Harry Potter wins the day. What does Paul say about those who hide the truth in a box and sit on the lid?

My Christian walk is not perfect, and these men have attributes I greatly admire. But I call them and any others who refer to themselves as ministers of the gospel on this fundamental failure. It is the one that brought our culture to where it is today. If we have to qualify any part of the Bible (from outside the Bible) or any part of it embarrasses us, we should not be in the ministry of Bible teaching.

MINISTERS, OPEN YOUR BIBLES, READ THEM, PRAY OVER THEM, WEEP OVER THEM, WRESTLE WITH THE TOUGH BITS UNTIL BIBLE OVERFLOWS IN EVERY CONVERSATION. Then you will find you have lost the taste for Christian mysticism, escapist gnosticism, Christian pop-psychology and compromise with humanism. It is these things which become obsolete, not the Bible. 

If all this is too hard, get a book of illustrated Bible stories and teach from that. Even this has more guts than what gets passed off as preaching. My first grader could tell you that. He loves it when we read these stories and asks for more. If the academies turned out faithful women armed with Picture Bibles we would be better off than we are with you lot. Get it right, or get out of the way.

If you can’t tell, I am deeply grieved. The Bible is a weapon, and Satan hates it. So, it seems, do you.

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See also Church For Dummies, The Obsolete Testament, Eagle and Emus.

Is it a bad thing?

“The sooner God destroys the world of evangelical gnosticism, the sooner authentic Christian churches can begin to do what we are called upon to do.”

James Jordan makes some good observations about evangelicalism in Obama as Fool.

And Doug Wilson has comments here:

“There are (at least) two kinds of disasters. One is when an asteroid lands on the most beautiful albaster-gleamy city we have. This is disaster straight up. Then there is the disaster revelatory — it was a disaster all along, and now we know about it… The coming evangelical collapse will be the disaster revelatory.”

God periodically shakes the Land so that the trash falls away. We need to read our Old Testaments.

Stop Asking Me

I gave kudos to iMonk for getting pretty much global recognition for his “death of Evangelicalism” piece, right? So credit where credit’s due and all that.

Many of you have e-mailed me to ask, “yeah, but what do you think about the essay?” Look: I’m not going to take the bait. The truth is that Michael and I get along pretty good as long as we don’t talk about things we blog about, and I’m really intent on keeping it that way as I have no free time to speak of.

That said, here’s what Doug Wilson thinks about that essay, and I would endorse without comment Doug’s affirmations and denials.

The problem is not that there’s too much conservatism: it’s that there’s a lot of unfounded, flabby conservatism running around with plastic fishes attached to it rather than a robust, young, and dangerous conservatism riding around on the fat, noisy Harley which is the Gospel.1

Now there’s an image.

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1 http://centuri0n.blogspot.com/2009/03/stop-asking-me.html

I don’t really know why someone thought it was necessary to do a poll to see just who were the most disliked groups in society, but the results are in. While serial killers and IRS agents still come in last, hot on their heels are evangelical Christians. Not Christians in general. Not Roman Catholics. Not all Christians, but evangelical Christians…

My response to iMonk’s article, Why Do They Hate Us?

As a Christian, my own hypocrisy and lack of love break my heart, but I am dealing with them. As Christians, we need to remember that dominion only comes through sacrificial service. That goes right back to Eden.

But the unbelievers need to remember that everything good they enjoy comes from our Christian worldview. The morality the atheists claim is ‘reasonable’ is stolen capital. They are living on our land, whether they like it or not. Unless they repent, they are squatters complaining about the room service. They are like the grass that is here today and incinerated tomorrow.

Dominion of the world by Christianity is only a matter of time. How long it takes depends upon our love and service, not votes. When the church fails to witness faithfully (Adam, Mordecai, Jews), her rule will be usurped for a time (Satan, Haman, Herod). Nothing’s changed. But the bad guys always get thrown down eventually in a victory for Christ.

We must not forget that although the gospel is not the gospel without a presentation in love, it is still an ultimatum. Those who claim a “right” to their unbelief are deluded, whatever faults they find in the church.

To those who have been hurt by Christians, judgment begins at the house of God. He will deal with His people FIRST, as He always has (just read the Bible!), but then, make no mistake, He will deal with YOU. When He does, I sincerely hope you are in Christ, or that His perfect justice brings you to Him.

Like Mordecai, we have forgotten what our weapons are. Prayer, love and sacrifice bring the powers that be tumbling down. So do apologies for the times we have wronged others. When Christians repent, the world follows. And when we are faithful in the use of these weapons, God sets His opponents upon each other. That’s the pattern. There will be ups and downs over the centuries, but we can’t lose.

Van Til believed, along with Augustine, Calvin, Kuyper, and Klaas Schilder that the building of a Christian culture is a biblical imperative. Van Til castigated the Barthians for their repudia tion of a Christian culture. “For them,” he wrote, “there is no single form of social, political, economic order that is more in the spirit of the Gospel than another.” Christians today are hearing a similar refrain from within evangelical circles. If there is no specifically biblical blue print, we are left with a pluralistic blue print, no blueprint, or a postponed blue print (dispensationalism)…

Read It Takes More Than A Theory (Part 1) by Gary DeMar, here and (Part 2) here.