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 - Endorsed - Indifferent - Contested
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| The Nashville Statement
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Name:Daniel
Home: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
About Me: I used to believe that evolution was reasonable, that homosexuality was genetic, and that people became Christians because they couldn't deal with the 'reality' that this life was all there was. I used to believe, that if there was a heaven - I could get there by being good - and I used to think I was more or less a good person. I was wrong on all counts. One day I finally had my eyes opened and I saw that I was not going to go to heaven, but that I was certainly going to suffer the wrath of God for all my sin. I saw myself as a treasonous rebel at heart - I hated God for creating me just to send me to Hell - and I was wretched beyond my own comprehension. Into this spiritual vacuum Jesus Christ came and he opened my understanding - delivering me from God's wrath into God's grace. I was "saved" as an adult, and now my life is hid in Christ. I am by no means sinless, but by God's grace I am a repenting believer - a born again Christian.
My complete profile...
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Daniel's posts are almost always pastoral and God centered. I appreciate and am challenged by them frequently. He has a great sense of humor as well.
- Marc Heinrich
His posts are either funny or challenging. He is very friendly and nice.
- Rose Cole
[He has] good posts, both the serious like this one, and the humorous like yesterday. [He is] the reason that I have restrained myself from making Canadian jokes in my posts.
- C-Train
This post contains nothing that is of any use to me. What were you thinking? Anyway, it's probably the best I've read all day.
- David Kjos
Daniel, nicely done and much more original than Frank the Turk.
- Jonathan Moorhead
There are some people who are smart, deep, or funny. There are not very many people that are all 3. Daniel is one of those people. His opinion, insight and humor have kept me coming back to his blog since I first visited earlier this year.
- Carla Rolfe
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| Thoughts on James 2:14-17 |
What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, "Go in peace, be warmed and filled," without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. - James 2:14-17 [ESV]
If one regards the teachings of Christ (as recorded by the authors of the New Testament) to be accurate and truthful (and I count myself in this group), then one is forced to conclude that whenever anyone is saved they are necessarily saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, and that no other way of salvation exists.
It is not only possible, but all too common for people who call themselves Christians to agree entirely with the words I have used to summarize my own understanding - yet when you compare what they believe to what I believe concerning the gospel, you will find that we are far from one another in our understanding of what it meant.
Starting with the word faith. Do you remember the old School House Rocks cartoon vignettes that used to be played on Saturday mornings? I liked the Grammar ones the best, though I have a soft spot in my heart for the one where the bill becomes a law. In the vignette on conjunctions ("Conjunction Junction") - the conductor who is singing the song introduces the conjunction "or" with the words, "And then there's or: Oh or!" If you know the tune, and the part, I want you to inject that exact inflection into these words as you read them: And then there's faith. Ohhhhh faith. If you aren't familiar with School House Rocks, well, that's your loss. The one on pronouns is quite a hoot.
I have heard some whom I would regard as doctrinally astray, describe faith in terms of intellectual assent. They would define faith as having sufficient conviction that a thing is true. Thus faith, for the "easy believer" or "free gracer" is nothing more than an intellectual conviction.
Now, while I won't go so far as to defend someone who is so confused about what faith is that they reduce it to an intellectual conviction, I will say that I can understand why some of them (at least) want to define faith in such superficial terms - they think they are guarding the gospel of grace from a gospel of works.
Scripture everywhere teaches that the way to draw near to God is through contrition, ie., through surrender to God's rule. We cannot draw near to God except through our own humility. Unfortunately when we think of humiliation we don't tend to think of someone surrendering their will to another, rather we think of someone feeling grossly embarrassed about something. So also when we say "humble" we tend to think of being humble as simply having a very low opinion of our selves. But when the bible says humble it means willing to obey, and not that we have a low self image.
The word scripture uses most often to describe contrition and humility is couched in the context of man's rebellion against God. Until a person accepts God's authority to rule over their life, they are in a state of rebellion against God. When a person changes their disposition towards God, and moves from rebellion to contrition - the bible refers to this change of heart as repentance.
Thus the way of salvation that is given again an again in the scriptures is that sinners should repent (of their rebellion against God) and believe the good news concerning Jesus Christ.
Martin Luther entered the history books because by his day, the Catholic church had so corrupted both the way of salvation and again the way of sanctification, that grace became something not only could earn through meritorious conduct, but indeed something you needed to earn in order to offset various sins by which you were condemning yourself all over again.
Without delving too deeply into the Catholic system, it is enough to say that evangelicals reject entirely the notion of meritorious works. Yet some have fallen off the horse on the other side, in that they not only reject meritorious works, but reject the teaching that contrition (giving up your rebellion against God, recognizing His authority over you, and surrendering your will to God) is a necessary component of saving faith. They would argue that this contrition (or repentance) is a "work of merit" - and so reject the teachings of Christ and the Apostles that we are to repent and believe the gospel, and supplant that with a thinner, easier version, whereby we need not repent at all, we need only to believe.
This is an old error. A very old error, for we find James the brother of our Lord correcting it in the passage that makes the header of this post. There we have, by way of an example, the gist of what James is saying on the matter.
When James speaks of "works" he is speaking of those works of contrition that necessarily testify to the validity of our surrender to God. We could call them "works of repentance" - meaning works that flow from our having turned away from rebelling against God's rule.
Thus James is saying that there is a difference between the faith of someone who has surrendered control of their life to God, and someone who hasn't. He likens it to one who sees another in need but rather than supply their need gives them empty words ("Go in peace, be warmed and filled,"). Faith without surrender is just lip service - that's what James is saying.
His argument is that the faith that saves flows from contrition, and not rebellion. The man who refuses to surrender to God's rule, and at the same time imagines that God is going to save him because he has managed to convince himself that the gospel is true - is not only mistaken, he is worse off than the man who has never heard the gospel in the first place - for who, after having become convinced that the way is broad, wants to embark on the narrow? The broad way is better they say, and so having set their foot on the road of ruin, are happy to boldly stomp their way into every increasing ignorance and folly.
Instructing a person out of such an error is a work and a half - because the person has rejected the notion of repentance, and believes themselves to be able to hold onto Christ without every letting go of the world.
Faith that never gives evidence of contrition is not saving faith. I say this with only one caution - and that is the caution that Christ gave with regards to the angels being unable to discern by looking between immature faith and false faith (ie. between the tares and the wheat). The purpose of such instruction is not to make you a "fruit inspector" who goes around judging the validity of anyone's profession of faith. Rather the purpose of this post is to make a distinction between easy believism and genuine saving faith - and thereafter to apply that teaching to ourselves, comparing it to what we believe.Labels: doctrine, edification, faith, foppy faith., repentance |
posted by Daniel @
12:25 PM
2 comment(s)
 
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| Doctrine For The Avante Garde... |
If someone were to ask me if I have ever changed my doctrinal opinion in a matter, I would have to say yes. Surely as my understanding of grace deepens, I have come to see just how broad the road that seems right to a man really is, and how narrow the road of grace truly becomes. Five years ago had you questioned me about sanctification, I would have given you an answer that isn't as refined as the one I might give today, and I suspect that in five more years, you would receive a more articulate answer from me that you might receive today. Which is to say that doctrinally speaking, I find that I am refining what I believe, and in that sense my doctrine has "changed" - in that it hasn't stayed stagnant, but has deepened, or perhaps I could say, it has become more established, more firm in my understanding - more real, more experiential.
I almost wish that I could say that I had gone through some serious doctrinal shift, if only to demonstrate my willingness to do so should the need arise. Though I confess, I have never been persuaded by any argument or opinion from what scripture has plainly taught me since the day I began asking God to open the scriptures to me.
So I am not really equipped I guess, to understand how it is that some Christians change their doctrinal position ten times over the course of five years. I mean, the bible hasn't changed any...
This seems a more common or even unique phenomenon amongst those who learn their doctrine primarily from secondary sources, such as lectures, theology texts, and scholarly books and debates. I believe that many and likely most (though certainly not all) who play doctrinal ping pong like this are not careful, noble Bereans, who hear a thing and test it against scripture, though I suspect they paint themselves thus - rather I suspect these come to an academic rather than a spiritual conviction about scripture; that is, they tend to regard the latest, best-est argument as correct until someone more clever comes along and refutes it with a better argument.
Part of the reason for this phenomenon is that in our ivy halls we are expected to exalt the avante garde intellectual for their clever grasp and witty articulation of whatever is the cutting edge position of the day, and students are quickly assimilated into that "feed the beast the chow it desires" mindset. Do you want to be exalted? Do you want your opinion respected? You better be cutting edge baby, you better be up to snuff on what everyone who is anyone has to say on the subject. You better have an answer for those who quote obscure references, because if you haven't read them, that marks you as a second class student, and regulates your opinion to that of an outclassed, backwoods bumpkin - and as such your opinions can be dismissed without ever being heard.
Unless universities have changed since my tenor, I expect that that kind of intellectual bigotry is alive and flourishing now as it was in my day, and that when it filters back into the church, it presents itself as a noble search for doctrinal purity, but in practice enables the sort of doctrinal flip-flopping I am talking about.
So when I see this sort of thing, I am usually looking at someone who spends more time reading the opinions of other men about scripture, than scripture itself - it betrays, I think, an underlying problem - that of being unable to trust one's own opinion unless one can bolster it from someone else's opinion. You will know when you are talking to someone like this because their opinion is always filtered through what this counsel, creed, confession, theologian, professor, or author had to say, and weight proportionate to the fame or character of the source is presumed to punctuate or underscore the certainty of the conviction. If the answer is given from scripture, it is not given from a first person study of it, but rather is distilled from someone else's presentation - "copied" rather than plumbed by one's own understanding.
Now only a fool would ignore the teachers God has given to the church, so to avoid the pendulum effect I say so - God has certainly given teachers to the church, and we do well to sit under their instruction, and to give careful thought to what they have to say - not only those who are alive today, but likewise those whose teachings have come to us having been preserved from centuries past.
I am concerned for Christians who cannot hold an opinion unless someone has made a good argument for that opinion. I mean, it is one thing to cling foolishly to a thing that reason and scripture show to be false, and I am not saying anything about that - I am talking about the believer who cannot believe a doctrine until he hears what his favorite teacher believes about it, and I am talking about the believer who can't make up his mind on which teacher's opinion to take as his own, such that in the space of ten years he flip-flops between teachers, and between their opinions as he adopts them himself.
I say, I am at a loss because I have never approached doctrine in this way. I hear what so and so says, and I compare it with what I have already learned in scripture. I don't just take it and check the proof texts, I instead regard it according to the whole account of scripture - does this teaching harmonize with the whole bible, or just pieces of it? Does it make sense? What theological presumptions (if any) are required to hold such a position? etc. I mean, I hear a thing and in the moment I hear it, I have already compared it against the whole bible and made some conclusion. Not because I am well read about what everyone else thinks of scripture, but because by reading the whole bible again and again, I have come to know know what the whole bible has to say.
There are some clever things out there, and there is some good teaching, and I benefit richly from such things - but my doctrine has only deepened, it hasn't flip floped back and forth over time.
I have concern for those who find it otherwise with themselves. How about you readers? Do you find yourself changing your doctrine significantly every so often?Labels: doctrine |
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posted by Daniel @
9:55 AM
6 comment(s)
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