Cranmer House Communique

Anglican Homily on Salvation: Parts II and III

2011-11-05T16:15:00.009-05:00

From our series of modern-language versions of the Anglican Homilies, this is the second and third part of the homily on Salvation.

A SERMON ON THE SALVATION OF MANKIND BY ONLY CHRIST OUR SAVIOR FROM SIN AND DEATH EVERLASTING

Part II

In the first part of this homily, you heard from whom all men ought to seek their justification and righteousness, and how also this righteousness comes unto men by Christ’s death and merits. You also heard that three things are required to obtain our righteousness; that is, God’s mercy, Christ’s justice, and a true and a lively faith from which springs good works. It has also been declared that no man can be justified by his own good works, because no man fulfills all the requirements of the law. As St. Paul declares to the Galatians, “For if there had been a law given which could have given life, truly righteousness would have been by the law” (Galatians 3:21). And again he says, “If righteousness comes by the law, then Christ died in vain” (Galatians 2:21). And again he says, “You have become estranged from Christ, you who attempt to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace” (Galatians 5:4). And furthermore he writes to the Ephesians as follows, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). The sum of Paul’s argument is this: if justice comes of works, then it does not come of grace; and, if it comes of grace, then it does not come of works. And to this end all the Prophets preached, as St. Peter says: “To him give all the prophets witness, that through his name whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins” (Acts 10:43).

Furthermore, all the ancient authors, both Greek and Latin, spoke of justification by true and lively faith in Christ. Let us look at three of these: Hilary, Basil, and Ambrose. St. Hilary says these words plainly in the ninth Canon on Matthew: “Faith only justifies.” And St. Basil, a Greek author, writes thus: “This is a perfect and a whole rejoicing in God, when a man does not boast in his own righteousness, but acknowledges himself to lack true justice and righteousness, and to be justified only by faith in Christ” (St. Basil’s Homily on Humility). He continues, “Paul glories in contempt of his own righteousness, and looks for the righteousness of God by faith (Philippians 3:9).” And St. Ambrose, a Latin author, says these words: “This is the ordinance of God, that he which believeth in Christ should be saved without works, by faith only, freely receiving remission of his sins.” Consider these words carefully. Without works, by faith only, freely we receive remission of our sins. What can be spoken more plainly than to say that freely, without works, by faith only, we obtain remission of our sins?

These and similar statements are found often in the best and ancient writers. Besides the passages quoted from Hilary, Basil, and St. Ambrose, we read the same in Origen, St. Chrysostom, St. Cyprian, St. Augustine, Prosper, Oecumenius, Photius, Bernardus, Anselm, and many other authors, Greek and Latin.

Nevertheless, when the ancient authors say that we are justified by faith only, they do not mean that justifying faith is alone in man without true repentance, hope, charity, dread, and fear of God, at any time or season. And when they say that we are justified freely, they do not mean that we should afterward be idle, with nothing else required of us. They certainly do not mean that being justified without our good works means that we should do no good works. Saying that we are justified by faith only, freely, and without works takes away all merit of our works, which are unable to deserve our justification at God’s hands, and it plainly expresses the weakness of man and the goodness of God, our great infirmity and God’s might and power, and the imperfectness of our own works and the most abundant grace of our Savior Christ. The merit and deserving of our justification is attributed to Christ only and His most precious bloodshedding. Holy Scripture teaches this faith, and this is the strong rock and foundation of Christian religion. All of the ancient authors of Christ’s Church approve this doctrine, which advances and sets forth the true glory of Christ, and beats down the vainglory of man, and whoever denies this doctrine is not to be counted for a true Christian man, nor for a promoter of Christ’s glory, but for an adversary of Christ and his Gospel, and for a promoter of men’s vainglory.

True indeed is this doctrine that we are justified freely without all merit of our own good works (as St. Paul states), and freely by this lively and perfect faith in Christ only (as the ancient authors wrote), yet this true doctrine must be also truly understood and most plainly declared, or else carnal men would unjustly take occasion to use this doctrine as an excuse to live carnally after the appetite and will of the world, the flesh, and the devil. To prevent this mistaken view of justification, the third part of this homily will set for a right understanding of this doctrine so that no man shall use it as an occasion of carnal liberty to follow the desires of the flesh or as an excuse to fall into greater sin or an ungodly lifestyle.

The first thing to note is that in our justification by Christ, it is not all one thing, the office of God unto man, and the office of man unto God. Justification is not the office of man, but of God, for man cannot make himself righteous by his own works, neither in part, nor in the whole; for it would be the greatest arrogance and presumption of man that Antichrist could devise, to affirm that a man might by his own works take away and purge his own sins, and so justify himself. Justification is the office of God only; and is not something we offer Him, but which we receive of Him; not which we give to him, but which we take of him, by his free mercy, and by the only merits of his most dearly beloved Son, our only Redeemer, Savior, and Justifier, Jesus Christ.

The doctrine that we are justified freely by faith without works—or that we are justified by faith in Christ only—does not mean that our own act of believing in Christ, or even the faith in Christ that is within us, is what justifies us or causes us to deserve justification. If that were the case, we could count ourselves to be justified by some act or virtue that is within ourselves. What it means is that, although we hear God’s Word and believe it, although we have faith, hope, charity, repentance, dread, and fear of God within us and do many good works, yet we must renounce the merit of all our virtues and good deeds that we have done, shall do, or can do, recognizing them as being far too weak, insufficient, and imperfect to deserve remission of our sins and our justification.

Therefore we must trust only in God’s mercy and in that sacrifice which our High Priest and Savior Christ Jesus, the Son of God, once offered for us upon the cross, to obtain thereby God’s grace and the remission of our original sin in baptism, as well as of all actual sin committed by us after our baptism, if we truly repent and sincerely turn to Him again. Although St. John Baptist was a virtuous and godly a man, yet in this matter of forgiving of sin he turned the people from himself and pointed them unto Christ, saying, “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29).

Even so, as great and as godly a virtue as the lively faith is, it turns from itself, and points us unto Christ, for only by Him do we have remission of our sins or justification. So that our faith in Christ, as it were, says unto us thus: It is not I that take away your sins, but it is Christ only; and to Him only I send you for that purpose, forsaking all your good virtues, words, thoughts, and works, and only putting your trust in Christ.

Part III

In the previous parts of this homily it was plainly declared that no man can fulfill the law of God, and therefore by the law all men are condemned. As a result, it stands to reason that something else other than the law is required for our salvation, and that is a true and a lively faith in Christ, which brings forth good works and a life according to God’s commandments. You also heard the ancient authors’ teachings on justification declared so plainly that the true meaning of the statement, “We are justified by faith in Christ only,” is as follows: We put our faith in Christ, that we are justified by Him only, that we are justified by God’s free mercy and the merits of our Savior Christ only, and that we do not deserve it by any virtue or good work of our own that is in us, or that we are able to have or to do, Christ Himself only being the cause meritorious thereof.

Here you will notice many words have been used, to avoid contention with those who delight in bickering over words, and also to show the true meaning in order to avoid evil interpretations and misunderstanding. Yet perhaps even this effort will not quiet those who are contentious, for contenders will ever forge matters of contention, even when they have no occasion to do so. Nevertheless, such plain language offers less to dispute, so that all those may profit who are more desirous to know the truth when it is plain enough than to contend about it and obscure and darken it with pedantic arguments.

Truth it is that our own works do not justify us. In other words, our works do not merit remission of our sins, nor do they make us who are unjust, just before God. But God of His mere mercy justifies us through the only merits of His Son Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, because faith directs us to Christ for remission of our sins, and by faith given us by God we embrace the promise of God’s mercy and of remission of our sins, which could not be accomplished by any of our virtues or works, therefore Scripture states that faith justifies without works. And since the statement “Faith without works” is essentially the same as “Only faith justifies us,” the Church fathers sometimes used the latter statement to mean the same as St. Paul meant when he said that faith without works justifies us. And because all this is brought to pass through the only merits of our Savior Christ, and not through our merits, or through the merit of any virtue that we have within us or any work that comes from us, therefore, in that respect of merit and deserving, in a manner of speaking, we forsake our own faith, works, and all other virtues. For our own imperfection is so great, through the corruption of original sin, that all is imperfect that is within us, faith, charity, hope, dread, thoughts, words, and works, and therefore not apt to merit and deserve any part of our justification for us. And we speak in this way to humble ourselves before God and to give all the glory to our Savior Christ, who is most worthy to have it.

Here you have heard the office of God in our justification, and how we receive it of Him freely, by His mercy, though we do not deserve it, through true and lively faith. Now you shall hear the office and duty of a Christian man unto God, what we ought to return unto God for his great mercy and goodness. Our office is not to pass the time of this present life unfruitfully and idly after we are baptized or justified, not caring how few good works we do to the glory of God and profit of our neighbors. Much less it is our office, after we have been made members of Christ to live contrary to that calling, making ourselves members of the devil, walking after his enticements and after the suggestions of the world and the flesh; whereby we know that we serve the world and the devil rather than God. For that faith which brings forth, without repentance, either evil works or no good works is not a right, pure, and lively faith, but a dead, devilish, counterfeit, and feigned faith, as St. Paul and St. James call it. For even the devils know and believe that Christ was born of a virgin, that He fasted forty days and forty nights, and that He worked all kind of miracles, declaring himself very God. They also believe that Christ suffered most painful death for our sakes, to redeem us from everlasting death, and that He rose again from death the third day: they believe that He ascended into heaven, and that he sits on the right hand of the Father, and at the end of this world shall come again and judge both the living and the dead. These articles of our faith the devils believe; and so they believe all things written in the New and Old Testament to be true: and yet for all this faith they are still devils, remaining in their condemned estate, lacking the very true Christian faith. For the true Christian faith is not only to believe that Holy Scripture and all the previously mentioned articles of our faith are true, but also to have a sure trust and confidence in God’s merciful promises to be saved from everlasting damnation by Christ; and from this follows a loving heart to obey his commandments. No devil has this true Christian faith, nor does any man who in the outward profession of his mouth and in his outward receiving of the Sacraments, in coming to the church and in all other outward appearances seems to be a Christian man and yet in his living and deeds shows the contrary.

How can a man have this true faith, this sure trust and confidence in God, that by the merits of Christ his sins are forgiven and he is reconciled to the favor of God and made a partaker of the kingdom of heaven by Christ, when he lives ungodly and denies Christ in his deeds? Surely no such ungodly man can have this faith and trust in God. For just as they know Christ to be the only Savior of the world, so they know also that wicked men shall not enjoy the kingdom of God. They know that God hates unrighteousness and that He will destroy all those who speak untruly. They know that those who have done good works, which cannot be done without a lively faith in Christ, shall come forth into the resurrection of life, and those that have done evil unto the resurrection of judgment. They also know well that to those who are contentious, and to those who will not be obedient unto the truth, but will obey unrighteousness, shall come indignation, wrath, affliction, and so forth.

Therefore, to conclude, we must consider the infinite benefits of God mercifully given unto us, though we did not deserve them. He not only created us out of nothing, and from a piece of vile clay, of his infinite goodness, has exalted us, with regard to our soul, unto His own likeness; but also, while we were condemned to hell and death everlasting, has given His own Son (who is God eternal, immortal, and equal unto Himself in power and glory) to be incarnated, and to take on our mortal nature with the infirmities of the same, and in the same nature to suffer most shameful and painful death for our offenses in order to justify us and to restore us to life everlasting; so making us also His dear beloved children, brothers to His only Son our Savior Christ and inheritors forever with Him of His eternal kingdom of heaven. These great and merciful benefits of God, if they are well considered, neither provide us occasion to be idle and to live without doing any good works, nor provoke us to do evil things. To the contrary, unless we are desperate persons with hearts harder than stones, they move us to render ourselves unto God wholly with all our will, hearts, might, and power. They move us to serve Him in all good deeds, obeying His commandments throughout our lives; to seek in all things his glory and honor, not our sensual pleasures and vainglory; and to live in dread of willingly offending such a merciful God and loving Redeemer in word, thought, or deed. The benefits of God, deeply considered, also move us for His sake to be ever ready to give ourselves to our neighbors, and to endeavor to do good to every man. These are the fruits of the true faith: to do good, as much as lies in us, to every man; and, above all things and in all things, to advance the glory of God, of whom only we have our sanctification, justification, salvation, and redemption. To Him be glory, praise, and honor, world without end. Amen.

Anglican Homily on Salvation: Part I

2011-09-05T20:29:00.001-05:00

Another of our modern-language versions of the Anglican Homilies, this is the first part of the homily on Salvation.

A SERMON ON THE SALVATION OF MANKIND BY ONLY CHRIST OUR SAVIOR FROM SIN AND DEATH EVERLASTING

Part I

Because all men are sinners and offenders against God, and breakers of His law and commandments, no one can by his own acts, works, and deeds, regardless of how good they are, be justified and made righteous before God. Everyone must seek another righteousness or justification to be received at God’s own hands, that is to say, the remission, pardon, and forgiveness of his sins and trespasses. And this justification or righteousness, which we so receive by God’s mercy and Christ’s merits, embraced by faith, is taken, accepted, and allowed of God for our perfect and full justification.

To better understand justification we must remember the great mercy of God; how that, when all the world was wrapped in sin by breaking of the law, God sent his only Son our Savior Christ into this world to fulfill the law for us, and by shedding of His most precious blood to make a sacrifice and satisfaction or (as it may be called) amends to His Father for our sins, to assuage His wrath and indignation conceived against us for the same. Infants, being baptized and dying in their infancy, are by Christ's sacrifice washed from their sins, brought to God’s favor, and made His children and inheritors of His kingdom of heaven. And all who commit sin after their baptism, when they turn again to God in sincerity, are likewise washed by this sacrifice from their sins so that there remains no spot of sin to be imputed to their damnation. This is that justification or righteousness of which St. Paul speaks when he says that no man is justified by the works of the law, but freely by faith in Jesus Christ, saying further, "We have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified" (Gal. 2:16). Although this justification is free to us, it does not come so freely that no ransom is paid at all.

But this line of reasoning brings consternation. If a ransom is paid for our redemption, then it is not given to us freely. A prisoner who pays his ransom is not let go freely, for what does going freely mean unless to be set at liberty without payment of ransom? This difficulty is satisfied by the great wisdom of God in the mystery of our redemption, in that He has so tempered His justice and mercy together that He would neither by His justice condemn us unto the everlasting captivity of the devil and his prison of hell, remediless forever without mercy, nor by His mercy deliver us without justice or payment of a just ransom, but with His endless mercy He joined His perfect and equal justice. He showed us His great mercy in delivering us from our former captivity without requiring us to pay any ransom or make any amends; indeed, it was impossible for us to do so. And because we could not pay the price, He provided a ransom for us, the most precious body and blood of His own most dear and best beloved Son Jesus Christ; who, besides His ransom, fulfilled the law for us perfectly. And so the justice of God and His mercy embraced and fulfilled the mystery of our redemption. In Romans 3, St. Paul speaks of this justice and mercy of God knit together:

For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. (Romans 3:23-26)

He also speaks of it in Romans 10: “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth” (Romans 10:4) and in Romans 8:

For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. (Romans 8:3-4)

In these Scriptures, the Apostle covers three things that must go together in our justification: upon God’s part, His great mercy and grace; upon Christ’s part, justice, that is, the satisfaction of God’s justice, or the price of our redemption by the offering of His body and shedding of his blood with fulfilling of the law perfectly and thoroughly; and upon our part, true and lively faith in the merits of Jesus Christ; which yet is not ours but by God’s working in us. So that our justification involves not only God’s mercy and grace, but also his justice, which the Apostle calls the justice of God; and it consists in paying our ransom and fulfilling of the law. Thus the grace of God does not shut out the justice of God in our justification, but only shuts out the justice of man, or more specifically, the justice of our works as merits deserving our justification.

St. Paul declares here nothing upon the behalf of man concerning his justification, but only a true and lively faith; which nevertheless is the gift of God, and not man’s only work without God. That faith, however, does not shut out repentance, hope, love, dread, and the fear of God, which all accompany faith in everyone who is justified. These do not, however, accomplish justification. Similarly, that faith also does not shut out the justice of our good works, which are our duty towards God, commanded in Holy Scripture all the days of our life; but it excludes them so that we may not do them to the intent of being made good by doing them. For all the good works that we can do are imperfect, and therefore do not merit our justification. Rather, our justification comes freely, by the mere mercy of God. This mercy is so great and free mercy that even though no one in the whole world was able to pay even a part of the ransom, and none of us deserved to be ransomed, our heavenly Father was pleased to prepare for us the most precious jewels of Christ’s body and blood, by which our ransom might be fully paid, the law fulfilled, and His justice fully satisfied. As a result, Christ is now the righteousness of everyone who truly believes in Him. He paid their ransom by His death. He fulfilled for them the law in His life. Now in Him and by Him every true Christian may be called a fulfiller of the law. Whatever we lacked in our infirmity, Christ’s justice has supplied.

(Parts II and II to follow)

Anglican Homily on Holy Scripture

2011-07-03T23:25:00.046-05:00

Here we provide the third in our series of modern-language versions of the Anglican Homilies. One of the hallmarks of Anglicanism is its emphasis on Holy Scripture, and this homily encourages every Christian, regardless of educational background, to "read, mark and inwardly digest" the Word of God. A PDF version of this homily, complete with all Scripture references, is available at this link.

A FRUITFUL EXHORTATION TO THE READING AND KNOWLEDGE OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

Part I
To a Christian, nothing is either more necessary or more profitable than the knowledge of Holy Scripture, for it is God’s true Word, setting forth both His glory and man’s duty. Every truth and doctrine necessary for our justification and everlasting salvation can be drawn out of that fountain and well of truth. Therefore, all who desire to enter the right and perfect way unto God must apply their minds to know Holy Scripture. Without it they cannot adequately know God and His will, nor can they know their office and duty. As drink is pleasant to the thirsty and food to the hungry, so is the reading, hearing, searching, and studying of Holy Scripture to those who desire to know God and do His will, or to know themselves. By contrast, those who despise the heavenly knowledge and spiritual food of God’s Word show themselves to be so drowned in worldly vanities that they cannot savor God or godliness. It is for that very reason that they desire vanities rather than the true knowledge of God.

People who are sick with malaria find that whatever they eat or drink, no matter how good it may be, tastes as bitter as wormwood, not because the food is bitter, but because of their illness causes a corrupt and bitter disposition in their own tongue. In the same way, the sweetness of God’s word bitter, not of itself, but only unto those who have their minds corrupted with long custom of sin and love of this world. Therefore, let us forsake the company of those who follow after the flesh and instead reverently hear and read Holy Scripture, which is the food of the soul. Let us diligently search for the well of life in the books of the New and Old Testament, and not run to the stinking puddles of men’s traditions, devised by man’s imagination, for our justification and salvation. For in Holy Scripture is fully contained what we ought to do and what to avoid, what to believe, what to love, and what to expect at God’s hands. In those books we find the Father from whom, the Son by whom, and the Holy Ghost in whom all things have their being and are maintained.

In these books we also find these three Persons to be but one God and one substance. In these books we may learn to know ourselves, how vile and miserable we are, and also to know how good God is and how He makes us and all creatures to be partakers of His goodness. We may also learn in these books to know as much of God’s will and pleasure as is suitable for us to know at present. And, as the great cleric and godly preacher St. John Chrysostom says, “Whatsoever is required to salvation of man is fully contained in the Scripture of God. He that is ignorant may there learn and have knowledge. He that is hardhearted and an obstinate sinner shall there find everlasting torments prepared of God’s justice, to make him afraid, and to soften him. He that is oppressed with misery in this world shall there find relief in the promises of everlasting life, to his great consolation and comfort. He that is wounded by the devil unto death shall find there medicine, whereby he may be restored again unto health.” He further states that if there is need “to teach any truth or reprove false doctrine, to rebuke any vice, to commend any virtue, to give good counsel, to comfort, or to exhort, or to do any other thing requisite for our salvation; all those things,” says St. Chrysostom, “we may learn plentifully of the Scripture.” Similarly, “There is,” says Fulgentius, “abundantly enough both for men to eat and children to suck. There is whatsoever is suitable for all ages and for all degrees and sorts of men.”

Therefore, these books ought to be much in our hands, in our eyes, in our ears, in our mouths, but most of all in our hearts. For the Scripture of God is heavenly meat for our souls, the hearing and keeping of it makes us blessed, sanctifies us, and makes us holy. It converts our souls. It is a lantern to our feet. It is a sure, steadfast, and everlasting instrument of salvation. It gives wisdom to the humble and meek. It comforts, makes glad, cheers, and strengthens our consciences. It is a more excellent jewel or treasure than any gold or precious stone. It is sweeter than honey or honeycomb. It is called the best part, which Mary chose, for it has in it everlasting comfort. The words of Holy Scripture are called words of everlasting life for they are God’s instrument, ordained for the same purpose. They have power to convert through God’s promise, and they are effectual through God’s assistance; and being received in a faithful heart, they continue to perform a heavenly spiritual work. They are living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow. Christ calls him a wise builder who builds upon His Word, upon His sure and substantial foundation. By the Word of God we shall be judged, as Christ says: “He who rejects Me, and does not receive My words, has that which judges him—the word that I have spoken will judge him in the last day.” He who keeps the Word of Christ is promised the love and favor of God, and that he shall be the dwelling place or temple of the blessed Trinity. Whoever is diligent to read the Word and to imprint upon his heart what he reads will have his affections for the transitory things of this world diminished and his great desire of heavenly things, which are therein promised of God, increased. There is nothing that so strengthens our faith and trust in God, that so supports innocence and purity of heart and also of outward godly life and conversation, as continual reading and understanding of God’s Word. For the message which by continual reading and diligent searching of Holy Scripture is deeply printed and engraved in the heart, will eventually seem to be a part of his own nature. Furthermore, the effect and benefit of God’s Word is to illuminate the ignorant and to give more light unto those who faithfully and diligently read it; to comfort their hearts, and to encourage them to do what God commands. It teaches patience in adversity and humility in prosperity. It teaches what honor is due unto God and what mercy and charity to our neighbor. It gives good counsel in uncertain matters. It shows to whom we should look for aid and help in all perils, and that God is the only Giver of victory in all battles and temptations of our enemies, both physical and spiritual.

In the reading of God’s Word, the one who profits most is not the one who can quickly locate passages or the one who can recite many passages by rote. Instead, the one who profits most is he who is most attuned to its message, who is most inspired with the Holy Ghost, whose heart and life are changed by what he reads in the Word. It is he who is daily less proud, less wrathful, less covetous, and less desirous of worldly and vain pleasures. It is he who daily, forsaking his old sinful life, increases in virtue more and more. In sum, there is nothing that more maintains godliness of the mind and drives away ungodliness than the continual reading or hearing of God’s Word, if it is accompanied by a godly mind and a desire to know and follow God’s will. For without a single eye, undivided in devotion to God, a pure intent, and a good mind, nothing is allowed for good before God. Conversely, nothing more darkens Christ and the glory of God, nor brings in more blindness and all kinds of vices, than ignorance of God’s Word.

Part II

In the first part of this Sermon, which is an exhortation to the knowledge of Holy Scripture, it was declared that the knowledge of the same is necessary and profitable to all men, and that by the true knowledge and understanding of Scripture the most necessary points of our duty towards God and our neighbors are also known. This matter will now be developed further.

If we profess Christ, why are we not ashamed to be ignorant of His doctrine? A man would be ashamed to be called a philosopher if he does not read the philosophy books; or to be called a lawyer, an astronomer, or a physician, who is ignorant in the books of those professions. How can any man then say that he professes Christ and his religion, if he will not apply himself, as much as he is able, to read and hear, and so to know, the books of Christ’s Gospel and doctrine? Although other sciences are good and should be learned, no man can deny that this is the chief of all learning, and incomparably passes all other knowledge. What excuse shall we therefore make at the last day before Christ, if we delight to read or hear men’s fantasies and inventions more than His most holy Gospel? What excuse shall we make if we will find no time to do that which chiefly, above all things, we should do; if we would rather read other things instead of the one thing for which we ought to lay aside reading of all other things? Let us therefore apply ourselves, as often have time and leisure, to know God’s Word by diligent hearing and reading thereof; as many as profess God, and have faith and trust in Him.

But those who show no affection for God’s Word commonly give one of two empty excuses. Some excuse themselves by their own frailty and fearfulness, saying that they dare not read Holy Scripture lest through their ignorance they should fall into any error. Others pretend that the difficulty of understanding it is so great that it is suitable to be read only by clergymen and scholars.

Regarding the first excuse, ignorance of God’s Word is actually the cause of all error, as Christ himself affirmed to the Sadducees, saying that they erred because they did not know the Scripture. How then can those who choose to be ignorant avoid error? And how will they come out of ignorance if they will neither read nor hear the very thing that will give them knowledge? He who now has the most knowledge was ignorant at first: yet he did not refrain from reading for fear he should fall into error; but he diligently read, lest he should remain in ignorance, and through ignorance in error. And, if you refuse to know the truth of God (a thing most necessary for you), lest you fall into error, by the same reasoning you must then lie still and never leave your house, for by going, you may fall in the mire. Similarly, you must not eat any good meat because you might overeat; nor will you sow your corn, nor labor in your occupation, nor use your merchandise, for fear you will lose your seed, your labor, your stock. By that line of reasoning, it would be best for you to live idly and never do any manner of good thing, because if you do, something bad might happen. But if you are still afraid that you will fall into error by reading of Holy Scripture, I will tell you how you may read it without danger of error. Read it humbly with a meek and lowly heart and for the purpose of glorifying God and not yourself with the knowledge of it. Daily pray to God that He would direct your reading to good effect; and do not try to expound it any further than you can plainly understand it. For, as St. Augustine says, the knowledge of Holy Scripture is a great, large, and a high palace, but the door is very low; so that the high and arrogant man cannot run in, but he must stoop low and humble himself that shall enter into it. Presumptuous arrogance is the mother of all error; humility needs fear no error. For humility will only search to know the truth; it will search and will bring together one passage with another; and, where it cannot find out the meaning, it will pray, it will ask of others who may know, and will not presumptuously and rashly define anything that it does not know. Therefore the humble man may search any truth boldly in the Scripture without any danger of error. And, if he is ignorant, he ought to read and to search Holy Scripture even more, to bring him out of ignorance. A man may prosper with only hearing the Word, but he will much more prosper with both hearing and reading.

Concerning the second excuse, the difficulty in understanding Scripture, he who is so weak that he is unable to bear strong meat may still consume the sweet and tender milk, and defer the rest until he grows stronger and more knowledgeable. For God receives the learned and unlearned, and casts away none, but is impartial unto all. And the Scripture contains enough low valleys, plain ways, and easy paths for every man to walk in, as well as high hills and mountains that few men can climb. St. John Chrysostom says that whoever gives his mind to Holy Scriptures with diligent study and burning desire will not be left without help. For either God Almighty will send him some godly doctor to teach him, as he sent the Apostle Philip to instruct Eunuchus, a nobleman of Ethiopia and treasurer unto queen Candace, who had a great desire to read the Scripture, although he understood it not; or else, if we lack a learned man to instruct and teach us, yet God himself from above will give light unto our minds, and teach us those things which are necessary for us, and of which we are ignorant.

Chrysostom also says that man’s human and worldly wisdom or science is not what is needed for the understanding of Scripture, but the revelation of the Holy Spirit, who inspires the true meaning to those who with humility and diligence seek it. He who asks shall have, and he who seeks shall find, and he who knocks shall have the door open. If we read once, twice, or thrice, and do not understand, let us not cease, but continue reading, praying, asking of others; and so, by still knocking, the door will finally be opened, as St. Augustine says. Although many things in Scripture are spoken in obscure mysteries, nothing is obscure in one place that is not in other places spoken more familiarly and plainly so as to be understood by both the educated and uneducated.

Regarding those things in the Scripture that are plain to understand and necessary for salvation, every man’s duty is to learn them, to print them in memory, and effectually to exercise them. As for the dark mysteries, every man’s duty is to be contented to be ignorant in them until it pleases God to open those things unto him. In the meantime, if he lacks either the capacity or opportunity to learn these difficult matters, God will not consider him foolish. And those who are able to learn should not set aside reading, just because some others are not. Nevertheless, the reading of Scriptures ought not to be set aside simply because some passages are difficult. As St. Augustine says, by the Scripture all men be amended, weak men be strengthened, and strong men be comforted. So those who are enemies of the reading of God’s Word are either so ignorant that they do not know how wholesome it is, or else so sick that they hate the very medicine that would heal them, or so ungodly that they wish all people to continue in blindness and ignorance of God.

Thus we have briefly touched upon some of the products of God’s Holy Word, which is one of God’s principal benefits given and declared to mankind here on earth. Let us thank God heartily for this His great and special gift, beneficial favor, and fatherly providence. Let us be glad to stir up this precious gift of our heavenly Father. Let us hear, read, and know these holy rules, injunctions, and statutes of our Christian religion, upon which we made profession to God at our baptism. Let us with fear and reverence lay up in the treasure chest of our hearts these necessary and fruitful lessons. Let us night and day muse, meditate on, and contemplate them. Let us ruminate and as it were, chew the cud, that we may have the sweet juice, spiritual effect, marrow, honey, kernel, taste, comfort, and consolation of them. Let us calm, quiet, and certify our consciences with the most infallible certainty, truth, and perpetual assurance of them. Let us pray to God, the only Author of these heavenly studies, that we may speak, think, believe, live, and depart from here according to the wholesome doctrine and verities of them.

And by that means in this world we shall have God’s defense, favor, and grace, with the unspeakable solace of peace and quietness of conscience, and after this life of misery we shall enjoy the endless bliss and glory of heaven, which is granted to us all by Him who died for us all, Jesus Christ, to whom with the Father and Holy Ghost be all honor and glory both now and forever. Amen.

The First Homily on the Coming of the Holy Spirit for Whitsunday

2011-05-30T19:19:00.075-05:00

Provided below is the second in our series of modern language versions of the Anglican Homilies. It is the first of a two-part series for Pentecost. The author makes the interesting connection between the coming of the Holy Spirit and the giving of the Law, which is discussed as the original meaning of the Old Testament Feast of Pentecost. The sending of the Holy Spirit to dwell within the Church and lead us into all righteousness is the culmination of God's working in history to call unto Himself a people to be holy.

The PDF version of this homily, complete with footnotes and Scripture references is available at this link.

Before we declare the great and manifold gifts of the Holy Spirit with which the Church of God has been forever replenished, it is first necessary to discuss the origin of the feast of Pentecost or Whitsuntide. The feast of Pentecost was always kept the fiftieth day after Passover, a great and solemn feast among the Jews, in which they celebrated the memorial of their deliverance out of Egypt, and also the memorial of the publishing of the Law, which was given unto them on mount Sinai upon that day. This feast was first ordained and commanded to be kept holy, not by any mortal man, but by the mouth of the Lord himself; as we read in Leviticus 23 and Deuteronomy 16. The place appointed for observing it was Jerusalem, where many people came from all parts of the world; as is evidenced in the second chapter of Acts, where mention is made of Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, and various other places. By this we may also partly gather what great and royal solemnity was customary in that feast.

This observance which was commanded of the Jews in the Old Testament was confirmed by our Savior Christ in the time of the Gospel. He ordained a new Pentecost for His disciples when he sent down the Holy Spirit visibly in form of cloven tongues like fire, and gave them power to speak so that everyone who heard would understand them in his own language. So that this miracle might be kept in perpetual remembrance, the Church has thought it good to solemnize and keep holy this day, commonly called Whitsunday. Just as the Law was given to the Jews on Mount Sinai the fiftieth day after Passover, so was the preaching of the Gospel through the mighty power of the Holy Spirit given to the Apostles on Mount Zion the fiftieth day after Easter. The number of days is how the feast came to be called “Pentecost,” for as St. Luke writes in the Acts of the Apostles, when fifty days were come to an end, the disciples being all together with one accord in one place, the Holy Spirit came suddenly among them, and sat upon each of them, like cloven tongues of fire. No doubt, this event occurred to teach the Apostles and all other men that it is He who gives eloquence and utterance in preaching the Gospel; that it is He who opens the mouth to declare the mighty works of God; that it is He who engenders a burning zeal toward God’s Word, and gives all men not just a tongue but a fiery tongue so that they may boldly and cheerfully profess the truth in the face of the whole world. Isaiah was endued with this same Spirit: “The Lord GOD has given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him who is weary.” The Prophet David cries out to have this gift, saying, “Open my lips, O Lord, and my mouth shall show forth Your praise.” Similarly, our Savior Christ says to His disciples, “It is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father who speaks in you.” All of these testimonies of Holy Scripture sufficiently declare that the mystery of the tongues is a sign of the preaching of the Gospel and the open confession of the Christian faith in all who are in the control of the Holy Spirit. So that if any man remains silent and does not profess his faith openly, but cloaks and disguises himself for fear of danger in time to come, he gives others just cause to doubt that he has the grace of the Holy Spirit within him, because he is tongue tied and does not speak.

Having established that the Feast of Pentecost or Whitsuntide had its origin in the Old Testament and was continued in the New, let us consider what the Holy Spirit is and how He accomplishes His miraculous works towards mankind. The Holy Spirit is a spiritual and divine substance, the third Person in the Deity, distinct from the Father and the Son, and yet proceeding from them both. This truth is not only proclaimed in the Creed of Athanasius but may be also easily proved by God’s Holy Word. When Christ was baptized by John in the Jordan River, the Holy Spirit came down in the form of a dove and the Father thundered from heaven, saying, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” In this passage, note three separate and distinct Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; who nevertheless are not three Gods, but one God. Likewise, when Christ first instituted and ordained the Sacrament of Baptism, He sent His disciples into the whole world, commanding them to baptize all nations in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He also says, “I will pray unto my Father, and he shall give you another Comforter.” Again, “But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceeds from the Father, he shall testify of me.” These and such other places in the New Testament so plainly and evidently confirm the distinction of the Holy Spirit from the other Persons in the Trinity that no man can possibly doubt it without blaspheming the everlasting truth of God’s Word. As for His proper nature and substance, it is altogether one with God the Father and God the Son, that is to say, spiritual, eternal, uncreated, incomprehensible, almighty; in sum, He is even God and Lord everlasting. Therefore, He is called the Spirit of the Father; therefore He is said to proceed from the Father and the Son; and therefore He was equally joined with them in the commission that the Apostles had to baptize all nations.

But as proof of these truths, it is necessary to mention the wonderful and heavenly works of the Holy Spirit, which plainly declare to the world His mighty and divine power. First, it is evident that He wonderfully governed and directed the hearts of the Patriarchs and Prophets in old time, illuminating their minds with the knowledge of the true Messiah, and giving them utterance to prophesy of things that should come to pass a long time after. For according to St. Peter, the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man, but the men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. And of Zacharias the high priest it is said in the Gospel that he, being full of the Holy Spirit, prophesied and praised God. So did also Simeon, Anna, Mary, and various others, to the great wonder and admiration of all men.

Moreover, was not the Holy Spirit a mighty worker in the conception and birth of Christ our Savior? St. Matthew says that the blessed Virgin was found with child of the Holy Spirit, before Joseph and she came together. And the angel Gabriel expressly told her that all of this would happen, saying, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow you.” This is a marvelous matter: that a woman should conceive and bear a child without intimate knowledge of a man! But where the Holy Spirit works, nothing is impossible, as may further also appear by the inward regeneration and sanctification of mankind.

When Christ said to Nicodemus, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God,” he was greatly amazed and began to reason with Christ, demanding how a man might be born when he is old. “Can he enter,” he asks, “into his mother’s womb again, and so be born anew?” Nicodemus is a living example of a fleshly, carnal man. He had little or no intelligence of the Holy Spirit, and therefore he bluntly asks how this thing could possibly be true. Yet if he had known the great power of the Holy Spirit, in that He inwardly works the regeneration and new birth of mankind, he would never have marveled at Christ’s words, but would have rather taken this occasion to praise and glorify God. Just as there are three separate and distinct Persons in the Deity, there are three separate and distinct offices among them: the Father to create, the Son to redeem, the Holy Spirit to sanctify and regenerate. Regarding these latter works, the more their operation is hid from our understanding, the more all men ought to be moved to wonder at the secret and mighty working of God’s Holy Spirit, which is within us. For it is the Holy Spirit and nothing else that kindles the minds of men, stirring up in their hearts good and godly actions that are in harmony with the will and commandment of God; otherwise, their own crooked and perverse nature would never have such inclinations. That which is born of the flesh, says Christ, is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.

Man of his own nature is fleshly and carnal, corrupt and wicked, sinful and disobedient to God, without any spark of goodness in him, without any virtuous or godly inclinations, only given to evil thoughts and wicked deeds: as for the works of the Spirit, the fruits of faith, charitable and godly inclinations, if anyone has these, they proceed only from the Holy Spirit, who is the only worker of our sanctification, and makes us new men in Christ Jesus. Did God’s Holy Spirit not miraculously work in the child David, when from a poor shepherd he became a royal prophet? Did God’s Holy Spirit not miraculously work in Matthew, sitting at the tax tables, when from a proud tax collector he became a humble and lowly Evangelist? And who would not be amazed to consider that Peter should become from a simple fisherman a chief and mighty Apostle, and Paul from a cruel and bloody persecutor, a faithful disciple of Christ to teach the Gentiles?

Such is the power of the Holy Spirit to regenerate men, and to bring them forth anew, so that they shall be nothing like the men that they were before. For Him, it is not enough to work the spiritual and new birth of man inwardly, unless He also dwells with him and abide in him.

St. Paul says, “Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” and “Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?” Again he says, “You are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His.” In agreement with all of this is the doctrine of St. John, who similarly writes, “The anointing which you have received from Him abides in you.” And the doctrine of Peter says the same: “The spirit of glory and of God rests upon you.” O what a comfort is this to the heart of a true Christian, to think that the Holy Spirit dwells within him! If God be with us, as the Apostle says, who can be against us?

But some may ask, How shall I know that the Holy Spirit is within me? Indeed, as the tree is known by its fruit, so is also the Holy Spirit. The fruit of the Holy Spirit, according to St. Paul, is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance, and so forth. By contrast, the deeds of the flesh are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, debauchery, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissention, heresies, envy, murder, drunkenness, gluttony, and the like. Here is the mirror in which you must behold yourself to discern whether you have the Holy Spirit within you, or the spirit of the flesh. If you see that your works are virtuous and good, consistent with the decree of God’s Word, savoring and tasting not of the flesh but of the Spirit, then assure yourself that you are endued with the Holy Spirit: otherwise in thinking well of yourself you only deceive yourself.

The Holy Spirit always declares Himself by His fruitful and gracious gifts, namely by the word of wisdom; by the word of knowledge, which is the understanding of the Scriptures; by faith, in doing of miracles; by healing those who are diseased; by prophecy, which is the declaration of God’s mysteries; by discerning of spirits, diversity of tongues, interpretation of tongues, and so forth. All of these gifts, proceeding from one Spirit and given to man according to the measurable distribution of the Holy Spirit, rightfully cause men to appreciate God’s divine power. Who will not marvel at what is written in the Acts of the Apostles, to hear their bold confession before the council at Jerusalem, and to consider that they went away with joy and gladness, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer rebukes and reproaches for the Name and faith of Christ Jesus? This was the mighty work of the Holy Spirit; who, because He gives patience and joyfulness of heart in temptation and affliction, has worthily obtained the name Comforter. Who will not also be astonished to read the learned and heavenly sermons of Peter and the other disciples, considering that they never received a formal education, but were called straight from their fishing nets to fulfill the office of Apostle? This transformation was the mighty work of the Holy Spirit; who, because He instructs the hearts of the simple in the true knowledge of God and His Holy Word, is accurately called the Spirit of truth.

Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History tells a strange story of an educated and intelligent philosopher, who, being an extreme adversary to Christ and His doctrine, could by no means of persuasion be converted to the faith, but was easily able to withstand all the arguments that could be brought against him. Eventually a poor simple man of small wit and less knowledge, reputed among the learned as a dullard, came forward in God’s Name to dispute with this proud philosopher. The bishops and other educated men standing by were amazed at his attempt, thinking that he would fail and put them to open shame. Nevertheless, he began in the Name of the Lord Jesus and quite opposite of expectations, he brought the philosopher to the point that he could not choose but acknowledge the power of God in his words, and to give place to the truth. Was it not miraculous that one feeble, uneducated soul could accomplish what many bishops of great knowledge and understanding were not able to do? So true is Bede’s observation that “where the Holy Spirit doth instruct and teach, there is no delay at all in learning.” Much more could be told of the manifold gifts and graces of the Holy Spirit, which are most excellent and wonderful in our eyes, but there is not time to recount them all. Seeing you have heard the main points, you may easily deduce the rest.

The question that remains is whether all who boast and brag that they have the Holy Spirit truly prove that they have these gifts and graces. This will be the topic of the next part of this Homily. In the meantime let us, as we are obligated to do, give hearty thanks to God the Father and his Son Jesus Christ for sending down this Comforter into the world; humbly beseeching him so to work in our hearts by the power of this Holy Spirit that we, being regenerate and newly born again in all goodness, righteousness, sobriety, and truth, may in the end be made partakers of everlasting life in his heavenly kingdom through Jesus Christ our only Lord and Savior. Amen.

Richard Hooker's Sermon on Justification

2011-05-03T19:55:00.001-05:00

This is not a book review but a sermon review. As anyone will tell you who has known me very long, I’m very committed to the concept of justification by faith only, which is part of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion. Yet I’m afraid that some today are equating faith in Jesus for righteousness with faith in the doctrine of justification. We have linked Richard Hooker’s excellent sermon on Justification as a free download in PDF format. You will delight in this short read, and I trust that it will help you:

http://www.cranmerhouse.org/articles/hooker-justification.pdf

--The Very Rev. Dr. Curtis I. Crenshaw

A Homily for Good Friday Concerning the Death and Passion of Our Savior Jesus Christ

2011-04-22T21:19:00.010-05:00

The following is an attempt to bring into modern English the first half of the Anglican Homily for Good Friday. The two Books of Homilies are mentioned in the Thirty-nine Articles as being "godly and wholesome doctrine and necessary for these times." Although that statement was written more than 400 years ago, it is our contention that the messages contained in the Homilies are so Scripturally based that they are necessary as well for THESE times. As time permits, we will provide additional homilies, in hopes that returning to our heritage will help us to preserve our Anglican identity. All of the Homilies are available online at Footstool Publications. For a PDF version of the post below, complete with footnotes for Scripture references, click here.
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Beloved in Christ, it would not be suitable for us, having been redeemed from the devil, from sin and death, and from everlasting damnation, to let this day pass without meditating upon the excellent work of our redemption accomplished on that first Good Friday through the great mercy and love of our Savior Jesus Christ for us, even though we were wretched sinners and His mortal enemies. If we would take care to remember what a mortal man has done for the benefit of his country, how much more should we remember the benefit of Christ’s death, through which He has purchased the sure pardon and forgiveness of our sins, and through which He made us to be at one with our Father in heaven, who has accepted us as not only His loving children, but also with His only Son Jesus Christ, fellow heirs of the kingdom of heaven!

Christ’s kindness appears even greater to us when we consider that it pleased Him to divest Himself of all the godly honor that He held equally with His Father in heaven, and to come down into this vale of misery to be made a mortal man. Furthermore, He came in the state of a lowly servant, serving us for our profit, even though we were His sworn enemies who had renounced His holy law and followed the lusts and sinful pleasures of our corrupt nature. Despite all this, Christ put Himself between God’s deserved wrath and our sin, to expunge the charge that was against us, by which we were in danger to God. He paid our debt, a debt so great that we could never pay it, and without payment, God the Father could never be at one with us. It was not possible for us to be set free from this debt by our own ability. Therefore, Christ was pleased to pay it, completely settling our account.

Who could even consider the grievous debt of sin that could not be paid except by the death of an innocent, without hating sin in his heart? If God hates sin so much that neither man nor angel could pay the price of redemption—only the death of His only and well-beloved Son—who will not stand in fear of sin? If we, my friends, consider that for our sins this most innocent Lamb was driven to death, we shall have much more cause to grieve that we were the cause of His death than to cry out of the malice and cruelty of the Jews who were there that day to pursue Him to His death. We did the deeds for which He was stricken and wounded: they were only the ministers of our wickedness.

It is appropriate, then, for us to thoroughly examine our hearts and mourn our own wickedness and sinful living. If the most dearly beloved Son of God was stricken for sins He did not commit, how much more ought we to be punished for the manifold sins which we commit against God daily, if we do not earnestly repent, and if we are not sorry for them! No man can love sin, which God hates so much, and be in God’s favor. No man can say that he truly loves Christ while maintaining friendship with sin, which is Christ’s great enemy and the author of His death. Our love for God and Christ is equal to our hatred for sin. Therefore, we should take care not to favor sin, or else we will be found enemies to God and traitors to Christ. For those who nailed Christ to the cross are not His only tormentors and crucifiers; rather, everyone who commits immorality and sin (which brought Him to His death) crucifies again the Son of God.

If the wages of sin is death and death is everlasting, surely it is no small danger to be in service of sin. If we live according to the flesh and the sinful lusts thereof, we shall surely die, as Almighty God warns us through the words of St. Paul. The only way we can live to God is to die to sin. As St. Paul says,

And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.

But, if sin rules and reigns in us, then God, who is the fountain of all grace and virtue, has departed from us; then the devil and his ungracious spirit has dominion over us. And surely, if we die in such a miserable state, we shall not rise to life, but fall down to eternal death and damnation.

For Christ has not redeemed us from sin so that we may safely return to it again; instead, He has redeemed us so that we should forsake every sinful deed and live in righteousness. We are therefore washed in our baptism from the filthiness of sin that we should live thereafter in purity of life. In baptism we promised to renounce the devil and his influence, and we promised to be, as obedient children, always following God’s will and pleasure. Then, if He is truly our Father, let us give Him His due honor. If we are His children, let us freely show Him our obedience, just as Christ openly declared His obedience to His Father, for as St. Paul writes, Christ was obedient even to the very death, the death of the cross. And He did this for all who believe in Him. Jesus Christ was not punished for any sins of His own, for He was pure and undefiled by any sin. He was wounded, says Isaiah, for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities. He suffered the penalty of them Himself, to deliver us from danger. Isaiah says that He bore all our sores and infirmities upon His own back: no pain did He refuse to suffer in His own body so that He might deliver us from pain everlasting. It was His pleasure to do this for us: we did not deserve it.

As a result, the more we see ourselves bound to God, the more we ought to thank Him and the more hope we have that we shall receive all other good things of His hand, in that we have received the gift of His only Son through His liberality. For as St. Paul says, He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? If we need any thing either for body or soul, we may lawfully and boldly approach God as our merciful Father, to ask what we desire, and we shall obtain it. For such power is given us to be the children of God, to as many as believe in Christ’s name. Whatever we ask in His name will be granted. For Almighty God the Father is so well pleased with Christ His Son that for His sake He favors us and will deny us nothing. This sacrifice and oblation of His Son’s death, which He so obediently and innocently suffered, was so pleasing to God that He was willing to take it for the only and full amends for all the sins of the world. And such favor did Christ purchase by His death from His heavenly Father for us that for the merit thereof (if we are true Christians indeed, and not in word only) we are now fully in God’s grace again, and clearly discharged from our sin.

Surely no tongue is able to express the worthiness of so precious a death! For in this stands the continual pardon of our daily offenses, in this rests our justification, in this we are accepted, in this is purchased the everlasting health of all our souls; indeed, there is nothing else that can be named under heaven to save our souls except for this work of Christ’s precious offering of His body upon the altar of the cross. Certainly no work of any mortal man, no matter how holy, can be added to the merits of Christ’s most holy act. For no doubt all our thoughts and deeds were of no value, if they were not allowed in the merits of Christ’s death. All our righteousness is far imperfect when compared with Christ’s righteousness. For in His acts and deeds there was no spot of sin or any imperfection (which is why they could be the true amends of our unrighteousness), whereas our acts and deeds are full of imperfection and infirmities, and therefore nothing worthy of themselves to stir God to any favor, much less to challenge the glory that is due to Christ’s act and merit: for “Not to us,” says David, “Not to us, but to thy Name give the glory, O Lord.”

Let us therefore, good friends, glorify His Name with all reverence; let us magnify and praise Him forever. For He has dealt with us according to His great mercy; by Himself He has purchased our redemption. He did not spare Himself and send an angel to do this deed. Instead, He did it Himself so that He might do it the better, and make it the more perfect redemption. Not even the intolerable pains that He suffered in the whole course of His long passion could turn Him from His purpose of doing good to His enemies, but He opened His heart for us, and gave Himself wholly to ransom us. Let us therefore now open our hearts again to Him, and study in our lives to be thankful to such a Lord, and always to be mindful of so great a benefit.

In fact, let us take up our cross with Christ, and follow Him. His passion is not only the ransom and whole amends for our sin, but it is also a most perfect example of all patience and endurance. For, if Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead, how should it not be appropriate for us to bear patiently our small crosses of adversity and the troubles of this world? For surely, as St. Peter says, “For to this you were called, because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that you should follow His steps.” And, if we suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him. Not that the sufferings of this life are worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us, but we should gladly be content to suffer, to be like Christ in our life, so that by our works we may glorify our Father in heaven. And, even though it is painful and grievous to bear the cross of Christ in the sorrows and unhappiness of this life, doing so brings forth the joyful fruit of hope in all who endure this discipline. Let us not focus on the pain so much as the reward that shall follow that labor. Rather, let us strive in our suffering to endure innocently and guiltlessly, as our Savior Christ did. For, if we suffer for our own faults, then we would be expected to endure without complaint: “For what credit is it if, when you are beaten for your faults, you take it patiently?” But, if we suffer loss of goods and life through no fault of our own, if we suffer to be evil spoken of, for the love of Christ, this is “commendable before God,” for that is how Christ suffered.

He never sinned; neither was there any guile found in His mouth. Even when He was reviled with taunts, He reviled not again; when He was wrongfully dealt with, He threatened not again, nor revenged His quarrel, but delivered His cause to Him who judges rightly.

Perfect patience cares not what or how much it suffers, nor of whom it suffers, whether of friend or foe; but seeks to suffer innocently and without deserving. The one who possesses perfect charity cares so little for revenge that he studies how to return good for evil, to bless and say well of those who curse him, to pray for those who persecute him, according to the example of our Savior Christ, who is the most perfect example and pattern of all meekness and patience. For even while He was hanging upon the cross in most fervent anguish, bleeding in every part of His blessed body, being set in the midst of His enemies and crucifiers, who mocked and scorned Him despitefully without compassion, even though they saw how terribly He was suffering, Jesus Christ had towards them such compassion of heart that He prayed to His Father of heaven for them, saying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” What patience He also showed when one of His own trusted Apostles and servants came to betray Him to His enemies to the death! He said nothing worse to him than, “Friend, why have you come?”

Thus, good people, we should call to mind the great examples of charity which Christ showed in His passion, if we are to profit by remembering His passion. We should bear the same sort of charity and love to one another, if we want to be true servants of Christ. As He says, “For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so?” We must be more perfect in our charity than this, even as our Father in heaven is perfect, who makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. In this same way, we should show our charity impartially, as well to one as to another, as well to friend as foe, like obedient children, after the example of our good Father in heaven. For, if Christ was obedient to His Father even to the death, and even to the most shameful death (as the Jews esteemed it), the death of the cross, why should not we be obedient to God in lesser points of charity and patience?

Let us therefore forgive our neighbors their small faults, as God for Christ’s sake has forgiven us our great faults. It is not fitting that we should desire God to forgive our great offences while we refuse to forgive the small trespasses of our neighbors against us. We call for mercy in vain if we will not show mercy to our neighbors. For if we will not banish wrath and displeasure toward our Christian brother from our hearts, God will not forgive the displeasure and wrath that our sins have deserved of Him. For under this condition God forgives us: that we forgive others. It is not suitable for Christian men to be hardhearted to one another or to think their neighbor unworthy to be forgiven. For no matter how unworthy your neighbor may be, Christ is worthy to have you do much for His sake: He has deserved it of you that you should forgive your neighbor. And God is also to be obeyed, who commands us to forgive, if we will have any part of the pardon which our Savior Christ purchased of God the Father by shedding His precious blood. Nothing becomes Christ’s servants so much as mercy and compassion.

Let us then be merciful to one another and pray one for another, that we may be healed from all frailties of our life, that we may reduce the opportunities to offend one another, and that we may be of one mind and one spirit, agreeing together in brotherly love and concord, as dear children of God. By these means we will move God to be merciful to us for our sins. Furthermore, such behavior will prepare us to receive our Savior and Maker in His blessed Sacrament to the everlasting comfort and health of our souls. Christ delights to enter and to dwell in that soul where love and charity rule, and where peace and concord are seen. As St. John writes, “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.” And by this, he says, we shall know that we are of God, if we love our brothers. Furthermore, by this shall we know that we have been delivered from death to life, if we love one another. But he who hates his brother, says the same Apostle, abides in death, even in the danger of everlasting death; and is moreover the child of damnation and of the devil, cursed of God, and hated (so long as he remains in hatred) by God and all His heavenly company. For just as peace and charity make us the blessed children of Almighty God, hatred and envy make us the cursed children of the devil.

May God give us all the grace to follow Christ’s example in peace and charity, in patience and endurance, so that we may have Him as our guest to enter and dwell within us. By this, we may have full assurance, having such a pledge of our salvation. If we have Him and His favor, we may be sure that we have the favor of God by His means. For He sits on the right hand of His Father as our advocate and attorney, pleading and interceding for us in all our needs and necessities. Therefore, if we lack any gift of godly wisdom, we may ask it of God for Christ’s sake, and we shall have it.

Let us examine ourselves to determine what we lack in the virtue of charity and patience. If we see that our hearts are not inclined to forgive those who have offended against us, then let us acknowledge our lack and pray that God will supply what is needed. But, if we lack this virtue and still see in ourselves no desire to have it, we are truly in a dangerous case before God and need to pray earnestly that God will change our hearts, grafting in a new one. For unless we forgive others, we shall never be forgiven of God. No, not all the prayers and merits that others may offer can pacify God’s wrath toward us, unless we are at peace and in unity with our neighbor: not all our deeds and good works can move God to forgive us our debts to Him unless we forgive others. He values mercy more than sacrifice. Mercy moved our Savior Christ to suffer for His enemies; it is right for us to follow His example. For it will profit us little to meditate on the fruits and price of His passion, to magnify them, and to delight in them and trust them, if we do not also intend to follow His examples in passion. If we remember Christ’s death and will hold fast to it with faith for the merit of it, and will also frame ourselves so as to give ourselves and all that we have by charity for the good of our neighbor, as Christ spent Himself wholly for our profit, then we truly remember Christ’s death; and, being thus followers of His steps, we shall surely follow Him to where He sits now with the Father and the Holy Ghost, to whom be all honor and glory. Amen.

Book Review

2010-07-30T20:23:00.003-05:00

Dear friends of Cranmer House,

We're going from a monthly to quarterly newsletter publishing schedule, and we thought it would be a shame to waste all of the wonderful book reviews that Dean Crenshaw produces. So here's the first of our book review blog entries.

Darrell L. Bock & Daniel B. Wallace
Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture’s Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ (2007)

Bock and Wallace are both professors at Dallas Theological Seminary, progressive dispensationalists (the milder form), and very conservative. Bock has expertise in New Testament backgrounds, and is often called on by the secular media as an expert in such things as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Judas. Wallace has written the advanced Greek grammar used in most seminaries, and he is an expert in New Testament manuscripts and textual criticism, a hobby for me. This is the story of the Discover channel and its presentation of “alternative gospels,” how Bock was consulted and how they respond to Discover’s hatchet job on these materials discovered in 1947 (Nag Hammadi).

This is more tedious than Peter Hitchen’s book (reviewed in the summer edition of CTH Update), and delves into more scholarly issues, but still very readable for those with just a modicum of perseverance. Bock does a very fine scholarly job in demonstrating that the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Thomas were written at least 100 years after the New Testament was completed, if not longer, and that they were known by the early fathers and rejected by them. Reasons for their rejection were that the books were too late to be apostolic, too Gnostic to be true, and denied the faith as it has been handed down for at least 150 years. For example, the Gospel of Thomas states that a woman must become a man before she could be a Christian, which is conveniently overlooked by too many liberals in their zeal to discredit Christianity.

Bart Ehrman, who is on a tirade to destroy Christianity, having converted to liberalism from his Moody Bible College days, tries to demonstrate how the New Testament Greek manuscripts were tampered with by those allegedly untrustworthy early fathers, and Wallace comes to the defense of the integrity of both the fathers and the manuscripts. Wallace demonstrates many times how Ehrman leads people to believe things by innuendo. Having read Ehrman’s book, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, I concur wholeheartedly with Wallace concerning Ehrman’s subjectivity in many of his arguments regarding how changes took place in some of the early Greek New Testament manuscripts.

Attacking Christianity by attacking the Bible is not new, of course, but has been going on since Marcion in the 140s who tampered with the text, rewrote much of Luke and Paul’s epistles, and rejected the connection between Old Testament and New Testament. The fathers rose to the occasion, rejected his Greek texts that he rewrote, and rejected him. Then a few decades later, the fathers rejected the new gospels as an attack against orthodoxy, wrote against them, and maintained both the original four gospels and the gospel of the grace of God as contained in them. In this day of constant attacks by the media, we need to be armed to answer our people who may be concerned by these wicked wolves. As Peter said, “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15).

--The Very Rev. Dr. Curtis I. Crenshaw

What is Empty Religion?

2010-01-27T18:41:00.003-06:00

By The Rev. Doug Sangster
Rector, Church of the Holy Trinity, Houston, TX

Lori and I have friends who live in Ft. Worth. They attend a gorgeous church with dark hardwood floors, an ornate rood screen, and a stunning altar that are perfectly coordinated with the rest of the sanctuary.

Once when we worshipped with them I heard the squeak of the door. I turned and saw three people cross themselves and slide quietly into a pew. A moment later, I heard the hinges again. More people signing themselves and settling into pews. By this time the priest was consecrating the elements. Then the hinges signaled a third time. Now there were more people in the back than in the front.

“Come to the Marriage Supper of the Lamb.” Lori and I communed and returned to our pew. When I looked up I was shocked to see that the people who came in after the sermon were at the rail. Incredulity crawled across my face. My friend whispered, “They do that almost every week.”

During the next few moments, I realized that it’s possible to have all the accoutrements of worship and still turn God into a genie, a God Who “loves” people without reforming their lives. And it occurred to me that it’s possible to be heirs of the English Reformation and still be superstitious and impious.

Author David Wells writes the following about this condition. “It is one of the defining marks of our time that God is now weightless. I do not mean by this that he is ethereal but rather that he has become unimportant. He rests upon the world so inconsequentially as not to be noticeable. He has lost his saliency for human life. Those who assure the pollsters of their belief in God’s existence may nonetheless consider Him less interesting than television, His commands less authoritative than their appetites for affluence and influence, His judgments no more awe-inspiring than the evening news, and His truth less compelling than the advertiser’s sweet fog of flattery and lies. That is weightlessness” (God in the Wasteland p88).

How do Churches slide into spiritual decline? Do you remember Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof? In the movie someone asks him how the Jews in Russia maintained their identity in a time of change. “Tradition,” he says. Then he is asked where tradition came from. “I will tell you,” he says. “I don't know!” Tradition and ignorance can be a toxic alloy that can easily morph into mindless tradition, a mere “going through the motions.”

As I sat in that beautiful church in Ft. Worth and looked at the long line of parishioners who regularly skip the reading and preaching of God’s Word, it occurred to me that the liturgy had become an end in itself, not a means to an end. That is spiritually perilous, and those who believe it’s okay to disregard God in that fashion are toying with their souls.

Isaiah 9:6-7: The Final King

2009-03-06T21:10:00.021-06:00

In these days of Christian persecution around the world, and mounting in our own country, it is good to be reminded what God promised Isaiah: the coming of the final King who would rule the world with peace and righteousness. John Watts states:

Christian exegesis of the Old Testament is keenly aware of the elements which the New Testament understands to be fulfilled in Jesus. Foremost among these are the royal aspects of Messiah. Jesus is understood to be the Son of David, heir to divine promise of an everlasting and universal throne.
This understanding of Messiah is founded on 2 Sam 7:11b–16 and on the royal Psalms (including Pss 2, 45, and 110). These proclaim a very high view of the king and the kingdom, in which God is directly involved with both. Among the OT passages which present such a view, none ranks higher than Isaiah 9:5–6[6–7] or 11:1–5. The first lists throne names for the Davidic king of Zion (see below), while the second announces, or prays for, the spirit of the Lord to so fill him that he achieves the highest aims of the kingdom.
What the Old Testament, including Isaiah, can only record as promises and ideals that contrast starkly with human reality, the New Testament invites the Christian to see fulfilled in Jesus Christ, Son of David and Divine King of Heaven and Earth.[1]

Here is a proposed translation of Isaiah 9:6-7:

(1) For a child is born to us,[2]
(2) a Son is given to us;
(3) And the administration will be on His shoulder.
(4) And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Father of eternity, Prince of peace.
(5) Of the increase[3] of His government and peace there will be no end,
(6) Upon the throne of David and over his kingdom, to order it and establish it with judgment and justice from now and forever.
(7) The zeal of the LORD of hosts will perform this.

The larger context concerns world peace and government. Isaiah gives three reasons for joy in verses 4-6, each verse beginning with a “for.” The first reason for joy in v. 4 is that sin has been dealt with. In v. 5 the second reason is that the instruments of war have been destroyed. The third reason is in vv. 6-7, which brings us to the translation above, the coming King.

(1) “Child” is put first in Hebrew for emphasis. Notice that this refers to His humanity, and that He will be born, signifying the manner of His first coming. As Isaiah says earlier, He will be born of a virgin (Isa. 7:14). “The divine ruler will not merely be God, but although partaking of the divine attributes, will have the most human of all arrivals upon the earth, namely birth.”[4] Oswalt adds, “This is clearly an eschatological figure, the Messiah. The Targum explicitly identifies the person as the Messiah.”[5] The Targum was written before Christ came; after His birth, the Jews have reinterpreted this to mean the birth of Hezekiah.

(2) The “Son” is given, for as eternal deity He cannot be born. Notice the accuracy of the language. The Son cannot be born because He is eternal, thus He is given. The child is born, which refers to the humanity of the that He gained at the Virgin conception. We have here the prediction of the theanthropic Person, God and man in one person. As man, He is born, but as God He is given, signifying His previous existence. Indeed, He is without beginning (John 8:58)! Very early, Messiah was known as the God-man, not only from the many theophanies, but also from passages like this one (see Isa. 48:16 for the Trinity. Gen. 4:1 may possibly be rendered “I have begotten a manchild, even the LORD,” though most reject that translation).

(3) When world power was threatening to undo God’s people, God promised a child who would rule the world for His people. He would not only rule, but the very “administration” (many versions render it “government”) itself would rest on Him. The Hebrew word translated “administration” is not only the kingdom of God and grace but also nature and power (see Matt. 28:19, 20; Col. 1:15-19). He would rule it all; that is, the kingdom of God and the world at large. He would rule the kingdom of the world by sovereign might providentially, whether anyone liked it or not (Ps. 2:7-9), which would include not only nature but also the kingdoms of mankind.

(4) There are four names for Messiah in these verses, as supported by the Massoretic accentuation, not five as some translations have it.[6]

(a) “Wonderful Counselor” is a clear statement of His deity, for in Judges 13:18 the Angel of the LORD, using basically the same word, says His name is Wonderful. As you may recall, the Angel of the LORD is God Himself (Exodus 3:1-14). He is also “Counselor,” indicating that it requires wisdom to sit on David’s throne, and in Messiah “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom” (Col. 2:3). “So this counselor is a wonder because his counsel goes beyond the merely human.”[7] The Messiah therefore is a qualified statesman.
(b) He is called the “Mighty God” as a title of undisputed deity (see Isa. 10:21). The word for “God” is “El,” which in this singular form is used only of God Almighty in the Old Testament. “Whenever el gibbor [mighty God] occurs elsewhere in the Bible there is no doubt that the term refers to God (10:21; see also Deut. 10:17; Jer. 32:18). This king will have God’s true might about him, power so great that it can absorb all the evil which can be hurled at it until none is left to hurl (53:2-10; 59:15-20; 63:1-9).”[8] As Mighty God He is able to execute His plans, for He is our Hero of war.
(c) “Father of eternity” indicates one who is a Father to His people, for He is our guardian, a father in the sense of Ps. 103:13. “This person’s fatherhood is claimed to be forever.”[9] The United Pentecostals wrongly use this passage to say that Jesus is God the Father, thereby denying the most basic belief of Christianity, the Holy Trinity. But Jesus is a Father to His people—not a Father in relation to the Trinity.
(d) “Prince of peace” indicates the kind of ruler He will be. “To elevate the Davidic government to a government of eternal peace is the end to which He is born.”[10] (See also Zech. 9:9, 10; Micah 5:2-5a.) “It is appropriate that this title should come as the last of the series, for it is the climactic one (see. 32:17). What sort of king is this? He is a peaceful king, one who comes in peace and one who established peace, not by a brutal squashing of all defiance, but by means of a transparent vulnerability which makes defiance pointless. Somehow through him will come the reconciliation between God and man that will then make possible reconciliation between man and man (53:5; 57:19; 66:12; Luke 2:14; John 16:33; Rom. 5:1; Heb. 12:14).”[11]

(5) Peace and government are mentioned together, which is what the world is always seeking and not able to obtain apart from Him and His administration. We see that Messiah’s reign will be perpetual and progressive. When I was pre-mill, I tried very diligently to make the Hebrew word for “increase” not really mean that, but indeed it does. Jesus’ kingdom will increase until He delivers to the Father a conquered kingdom at the end of the world:

For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive. 23 But each one in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, afterward those who are Christ’s at His coming. 24 Then comes the end, when He delivers the kingdom to God the Father, when He puts an end to all rule and all authority and power. 25 For He must reign till He has put all enemies under His feet. 26 The last enemy that will be destroyed is death. (1 Cor. 15:22-26).

As Keil and Delitzsch rightly observe of the idea for increase:

Ever extending dominion and endless peace will be brought in by the sublime and lofty King’s Son, when He sits upon the throne of David and rules over David’s kingdom.[12]

John Calvin is also very insightful in his commentary on Isaiah 9:7:

Now, this continuance, of which Isaiah now speaks, consists of two parts. It belongs both to time and to quality. Though the kingdom of Christ is in such a condition that it appears as if it were about to perish at every moment, yet God not only protects and defends it, but also extends its boundaries far and wide, and then preserves and carries it forward in uninterrupted progression to eternity. We ought firmly to believe this, that the frequency of those shocks by which the Church is shaken may not weaken our faith, when we learn that, amidst the mad outcry and violent attacks of enemies, the kingdom of Christ stands firm through the invincible power of God, so that, though the whole world should oppose and resist, it will remain through all ages. We must not judge of its stability from the present appearances of things, but from the promise, which assures us of its continuance and of its constant increase.

(6) Furthermore, His reign is to be over David’s throne and kingdom. Let us observe several things here:

(a) The reign is said by Isaiah to begin with the birth of the babe (“from that time forward,” which means from the time the child is born and the Son is given), which the New Testament confirms:

[An angel says to Mary:] “And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bring forth a Son, and shall call His name JESUS. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David. And He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of His kingdom there will be no end.” (Luke 1:31-33)
[Peter speaking:] “Men and brethren, let me speak freely to you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Therefore, being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that of the fruit of his body, according to the flesh, He would raise up the Christ to sit on his throne, he, foreseeing this, spoke concerning the resurrection of the Christ, that His soul was not left in Hades, nor did His flesh see corruption. This Jesus God has raised up, of which we are all witnesses. Therefore being exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He poured out this which you now see and hear. For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he says himself: 'The LORD said to my Lord, ‘Sit at My right hand, till I make Your enemies Your footstool.’ Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.” (Acts 2:29-36)!

(b) A 1,000-year millennium is not forever, and the text says His rule is to be forever, beginning with His birth, having no end, and gaining in momentum over the years.
(c) “Administration” and “kingdom” are used synonymously, indicating that both began at His birth. We see the same thing in Daniel where God said that in the days of the Roman empire that He would establish a kingdom that would destroy all other kingdoms, would fill the whole earth, and would last forever.

You watched while a stone was cut out without hands, which struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold were crushed together, and became like chaff from the summer threshing floors; the wind carried them away so that no trace of them was found. And the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth. (Daniel 2:34-35)
And in the days of these kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed; and the kingdom shall not be left to other people; it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever. Inasmuch as you saw that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it broke in pieces the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold—the great God has made known to the king what will come to pass after this. The dream is certain, and its interpretation is sure. (Dan. 2:44-45).

The saints received it from the Ancient of Days (Dan. 7:9-14, 18, 22, 27). We know assuredly that Christ received the kingdom at His ascension and that it is now spreading over the whole earth (Acts 6:7; 14:22; 20:25; 28:23, 31). In fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant that he would be a blessing to all nations (Gen. 18:18; 22:18; 26:4; Gal. 3:8), the sovereign King of kings gave his apostles the great commission that the kingdom was now for the whole world:

And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Amen. (Matt. 28:18-20)
(d) This One will be the final King as seen in that His kingdom will never end, “from now and forever.”

(7) This indicates the certainty of what will be accomplished. “In itself this zeal . . . designates the deep love which God has for His people and . . . His profound desire to protect and guard them and their welfare. But even more the word signifies a determination jealously to protect the divine honor and to vindicate the divine purposes.”[13] There is no power and no person, not even Satan, who can stop the good purposes of this King! Christians are winners! Let us remember that the Lord of glory came to earth not only to save His people from their sins, but also to establish a kingdom that would be perpetual and progressive, “for He must reign until He has put all enemies under His feet” (1 Cor. 15:25).

Even so, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.

[1] John D.W. Watts, Word Biblical Commentary, Volume 24: Isaiah 1-33, (Dallas, Texas: Word Books, Publisher) 1998, CD ROM, on Isa. 9:6-7.
[2] In this section of Isaiah, the Hebrew is one verse behind the English.
[3] The Jewish commentators made much of the final mem that is not final but occurring up front in the word. It just seems to be a scribal error.
[4] John A. Oswalt, The New International Commentary on the Old Testament: The Book of Isaiah, Chapters 1-39, p. 245.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Only an arbitrary emendation can produce five names.
[7] Oswalt, Isaiah, p. 247.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Keil and Delitzsch, electronic.
[11] Oswalt, Isaiah, p. 248.
[12] K&D, electronic version on Isaiah 9:7.
[13] E. J. Young on Isaiah 9 in his commentary.

The Greatest Love Possible (John 3:16)

2008-12-06T20:31:00.013-06:00

The Very Rev. Dr. Curtis I. Crenshaw

INTRODUCTION

During this time of year when we prepare our hearts for the Advent of the King, it is appropriate to reflect upon John 3:16, where we learn about the love that was demonstrated to us in His first Advent.

God = The greatest Lover
So loved = The greatest degree
The world = The hardest to love
That He gave = The greatest act
His only Begotten Son = The greatest gift
That whoever = The greatest opportunity
Believes = The greatest simplicity
In Him = The greatest attraction
Should not perish = The greatest promise
But have = The greatest certainty
Everlasting life = The greatest possession

It seems every Christian has a favorite Bible verse. With John Wesley it was Zechariah 3:2: “Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?” David Livingston preferred the last words of Christ to His disciples, recorded in Matthew 28:20: “I am with you always, even to the end of the world.” John Newton, who wrote “Amazing Grace” and was a former slave trader, reveled in Romans 5:20: “Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” Luther loved Romans 1:17: “The just shall live by faith.” I’m not in the league of these men, but mine is Romans 3:26: “That He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” But John 3:16 has to be the all time favorite verse of the Church down through the centuries. Its richness cannot be exhausted.

In the Greek text there are three clauses in the verse: (1) the main clause (God so loved the world); (2) the result clause (that He gave His only Son); and (3) the purpose clause (in order that whoever believes in Him may not perish but have everlasting life).

I. The Love of God

It was not necessary for God to send His Son, for He could have let us perish as He did the angels who fell with Satan. He did not owe us love. In the first portion of the verse, we will focus on three words. First, “so” is an adverb that indicates the manner of His love, not the intensity, though His love was infinitely intense. Second, “Loved” is not just an emotion but a doing, as the rest of the verse clearly states. Love is action. Third, “World” is here not a quantitative term that indicates how many He loved. Rather, it is a qualitative term, revealing the kind of people God loves: those who love darkness rather than light, as the next verses state. In other words, His love extends to sinful ones, like you and me (see vv 18-21). We don’t exalt God’s love by saying the infinite God loved a finite number of people. We exalt His love by acknowledging that the Most Holy Creator stoops to love His rebellious creatures. His love is exalted by the kind of person He loves, as seen in the following passages:

And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed (John 3:19-20).

But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 2:4-7).

But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8).

“For the object of His love is not the world in its first condition when He pronounced it “very good,” but the world ruined by sin and condemned for apostasy. . . . Yet without any change in His claims or character He loved us. And this love is not a mere relenting which might lead to a respite, or simple regret which might end in a sigh. There is no merit in loving what is lovely. There is nothing about man but his misery to attract the Divine attachment. Man’s sin is not his misfortune, but his fault. And the marvel is there is nothing God hates so much as sin, and yet no one He loved so much as the [elect] sinner.” (Biblical Illustrator)

Therefore, the grandest thought we can have is expressed in the words of the simple song many of us learned as children:

Jesus us loves me, this I know,
For the Bible tells me so.

Moreover, this love of God is infinite, for He is infinite. That means it will never end, that its depth cannot be plumbed, that nothing can stop it, that it conquers all:

. . . that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love,, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height —to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:17-19).

God’s infinite love is demonstrated in the account of the martyrs of Ecuador. In 1955, Nate Saint, Jim Elliot, and three other missionaries who had previously made inroads with the Huaorani tribe were massacred. Yet the murderous hearts of the Indians were transformed as Nate’s sister Rachel and Jim’s wife Elisabeth not only forgave them but went to live among them to share the Gospel. Love is the most powerful force there is.

God’s love is giving, continually giving to us all that we need. As a giving love, that in turn means it is unchangeable.

For I am the LORD, I do not change; therefore you are not consumed, O sons of Jacob (Malachi 3:6).

The Old Testament book of Hosea presents God’s unchanging love for Israel. God commanded Hosea to marry a former prostitute to illustrate His love for Israel, and when she fell back into her sin, God commanded Hosea to go get her and clean her up again! God wants us to recognize that we are the undeserving prostitute upon whom He showers His love.

II. Result of His Love (He Gave)

There is virtually no mention of the love of God in the New Testament without the Cross being in the context. The Cross is the greatest demonstration of God’s love, and it provides the pattern for human love as well:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her (Eph 5:25).

Further, observe that we are not the reason for God’s love. We cannot be, for we are too sinful. Not even Christ is the reason for God’s love, for Christ is the manifestation of God’s love, not that the Son won God’s love for us. It was because God loved us that He gave His only Son! The Father and the Son loved us! Indeed, the whole life of Christ is a manifestation of the love and mercy of God, for Christ never turned anyone away who asked for mercy.

When we consider that God gave His Son, we must not think that the Father made the Son do something He did not want to do. We are told, in fact, that He “for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2). He always delights to do the Father’s will, so He came willingly.

“His only Son” means not only that Jesus Christ was unique, the one and only, but also that He was the one who was begotten from all eternity so that we can say He was always the Son just as the Father was always the Father. “Only begotten” is one word in Greek, and does not mean begotten in the sense of beginning. Thus the Nicene Creed says that the Son was “begotten not made.” He is one of a kind, the only Son of the Father, and the best He had to give. The incarnation is the greatest mystery in the Bible because in it we find God Almighty in the Son adding to Himself humanity forever. As man He could not raise Himself from the dead, and as God He could not die. But as God-man, He died, shed His blood for us, and raised Himself from the dead.

Right after my daughter had her first child, a son, she said to me on the phone: “Daddy, for the first time I’m beginning to understand God’s love in giving us His Son. I’ve only had my son less than an hour, and I cannot imagine giving Him up for others, especially for those who might hate him.”

Once I was talking to a couple who were having trouble in their marriage, and the wife kept saying that her husband did not love her. He kept saying he did, and he listed all the things he had done for her: nice house, expensive cars, beautiful clothes, and so forth, to which she responded: “You’ve given me everything but yourself.” God gave Himself. That is the result, the manifestation of God’s love.

How do we know that God loves us? He gave Himself to us and for us in the person of His Son. It is not just all the marvels of creation, the food, shelter and so many things that demonstrate His love, but God gave HIMSELF!

We are also to reflect God’s love to others, even to those who hate us, who use us, yes, even to the spouse who wearies us with his/her sins, to the boss who takes advantage of us, and to the person in traffic who cuts us off.

III. Purpose of His Love (everyone who believes)

Believing seems so simple that the world rebels against it. One person stated to me that he could not conceive of a God who would allow someone to cause a lifetime of misery to others only to escape at the last minute by “just” believing in Jesus. My reply was that he underestimated the value of the gift, for no one gets away with anything: the Son took the punishment. And believing is not so simple as just saying the words “I believe in Jesus,” but it is a total commitment to Christ to love and serve Him to death.

But on the other hand, it is simple in one sense. He is there and available for His people:
It is said that some years ago a vessel sailing on the northern coast of the South American continent, was observed to make signals of distress. When hailed by another vessel, they reported themselves as “Dying for water!” “Dip it up then,” was the response, “you are in the mouth of the Amazon river.” There was fresh water all around them, they had nothing to do but to dip it up, and yet they were dying of thirst, because they thought themselves to be surrounded by the salt sea. How often are men ignorant of their mercies? How sad that they should perish for lack of knowledge! Jesus is near the seeker even when he is tossed upon oceans of doubt. The sinner has but to stoop down and drink and live. (Spurgeon)
But belief is also something that holds on to the mercy of God:

When a shipwrecked sailor, left to the mercy of the waves, has no help within reach or view but a spar or mast, how will he cling to it, how firmly he will clasp it — he will hold it as life itself. If a passing billow sweeps him from it, with all his might he will make for it again, and grasp it faster than ever. To part is to perish; and so he clings — and how anxiously! So the awakened sinner feels. The ocean of wrath surrounds him; its billows and its waves go over him. Hell yawns beneath to engulf him. The vessel is an utter wreck. All its floating timbers are very rottenness. Oh, how he strains his eye searching for a mast, a plank, a spar! His eye rests on the only hope, the only rock in the wide ocean of wrath, the Rock of Ages, the Lord Jesus. He makes for the Savior — he clasps Him. He cleaves to Him. Every terror of sin and of unworthiness that strives to loosen his hold only makes him grasp with more terrible and death-like tenacity, for he knows that to part company is to perish. (Biblical Illustrator).

There are two sides to the one coin: “may not perish but have eternal life.” There is the negative (not perish) and the positive (have life with God). This is the free gift!

Perishing is possible. We don’t like to think about hell, but the Lord Jesus talked more about hell than all the rest of the Bible combined. We could wish hell were not true, but we must not apologize for God’s truth. Every fiber of my being could wish it were not true, but every fiber of my being tells me it is true if God has righteousness — and He does have righteousness. We must be warned to “flee from the wrath to come,” as John the Baptist put it.

Jesus said:

And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life (Matthew 25:46).

Paul stated:

. . . when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with His mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on those who do not know God, and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ (2 Thessalonians 1:7-8).

The Apostle John proclaimed:

And the smoke of their torment ascends forever and ever; and they have no rest day or night, who worship the beast and his image, and whoever receives the mark of his name (Revelation 14:11).

And anyone not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:15).

No one is annihilated, but they go on forever in full consciousness. What makes hell so awful is being in the immediate presence of the infinitely holy God devoid of all righteousness and without any grace at all. Yet we read:

“Do I have any pleasure at all that the wicked should die?” says the Lord GOD, “and not that he should turn from his ways and live?” (Ezekiel 18:23).

The final words of this verse, “but have eternal life,” may be the most comforting because they mean that we have it right now! That is the gift! Our life with God in heaven begins right now. John does not say one day we’ll have eternal life, but HAVE (present tense in Greek) the life now. And isn’t that what John’s epistle states: “HE WHO HAS THE SON HAS LIFE, but he who does not have the Son does not have life” (1 John 5:12).? Because we have life now is one reason I’ve said in the past that death for the Christian is a change of geography, but not much else. We go from enjoying eternal life now in a sinful state to enjoying it in a perfect state, which means we’ll be able to have the full enjoyment of God! Right now our sins hinder us from enjoying our relationship with God.

Conclusion

In John 3:16, we have a view into the heart of God: He delights in mercy, not in wrath. There are no second-class citizens of God’s kingdom, the Church, for we are all loved by God, and every one of us has been given the Son for our surety, our inheritance. Thus whatever the Son has, we have.

He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? (Rom 8:32).

What are our needs that Christ supplies? (1) We need to know about God, and Jesus is the perfect revelation of the Father (John 14:9). If you want to know what God is like, read about Jesus in the Gospels. (2) We need a savior from our sins, and Jesus is the perfect savior, not only taking our punishment in our place but also delivering us from sin’s power so as to enable us to overcome the enslaving power of sin. (3) We need to have victory over our greatest enemy, death. We don’t like to think about death, but we will all die. Christ also died, and His resurrection is our resurrection!

Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage (Heb 2:14-15).

Thank God for giving His Son for us and to us, God’s greatest gift, Himself. He who has the Son has life, and he who does not have the Son does not have God’s life. Amen.

Preaching Jesus versus Pleasing People

2008-10-31T21:29:00.016-05:00

The Very Rev. Dr. Curtis I. Crenshaw, Th.D.
31 October 2008

Suppose you visit a church. The sermon is about how to succeed in life. Point one is to be kind to yourself, for Jesus said that we must love our neighbors “as ourselves.” It is negative not to love ourselves. Point two is to think positive thoughts, for how can you achieve success with negativism? Thus, believe in yourself. Point three is to follow three easy steps to financial success.[1] After all, God wants to bless His children, doesn’t He?

If someone who knew nothing about Christianity were to visit this church a dozen times, hearing basically the same things, would he understand what Christianity is all about? Does this sort of teaching help us to know Christ?

Now suppose you enter a Mosque. You hear: “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.” You attend a dozen times, and always hear that creed and the Koran explained. Would you know what Islam is about?

What is wrong with this picture? Can we win spiritual battles with materialistic mantras while Islam teaches their people the essence of their faith?

At the so-called Christian church mentioned above, there is no mention of sin, no mention of the Triune God, no mention of the Incarnation, no mention of the death of Christ on the Cross for our sins, no mention of His bodily resurrection or ascension, no mention of the Bible as the Triune God’s infallible revelation of Himself, indeed, no mention of anything that is distinctively Christian. At too many local churches, the Bible has been turned into a popular psychological manual, and Christ-centered preaching has been traded for motivational pep-talks designed for self-improvement. God may not be glorified, but worshipers go home happy, and that seems to be all that matters.

We are told that people do not want to hear about sin, judgment, and the crucifixion, but are the congregation’s preferences relevant? Has the Church in the past taken its message from the people’s desires or from God’s infallible Word, the Bible? Is the pulpit determined by the pew or the pew by the pulpit? Let us consider a few reasons why preaching must be focused on the message of the Church and of God’s Gospel as revealed in the Bible.

First, if anyone reads the Bible, he will quickly discover that the majority of the content is narrative, but there are some shorter books of the Bible that contain primarily theological and moral instructions in light of God’s law. In the Old Testament, for example, historical narrative begins in Genesis and ends in Esther, which is most of the Old Testament. The poetry and wisdom literature (Job through Song of Solomon) are given to help one to be wise and “successful” from God’s point of view, which means knowing how to live for God. Then the five major prophets and the twelve minor prophets are God’s concerns with sin in the lives of His people. These are supporting documents that are not intended to advance the historical narratives but to bring God’s covenant lawsuit against His erring people. These books supplement the narrative sections of the Bible and often address issues that were prevalent at the time written.

The New Testament follows basically the same pattern. The four Gospels and Acts establish the basic narratives about Jesus and the history of the Church, with Paul’s epistles supporting the theology of the first five books of the New Testament. The seven very short General Epistles provide us wisdom regarding how to live pleasing to God, and the Revelation is the victory of the Church through the ages, a fitting end to the 66 books of the One Book. (Read Genesis 1-3 with Revelation 21-22, and you’ll see how the Bible begins and ends with the same themes.) In other words, the Gospels and Acts tell us what happened, and the epistles give us the divine interpretation of the Gospels and Acts. For example, the Gospels tell us that Christ died (history), but Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 15:3 that “Christ died for our sins” (theology). Then Paul adds: “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,” which ties the Old Testament to the New Testament, demonstrating that one theme is common to both testaments. In other words, the Bible reveals basically one message, which is the fall of man into sin and redemption, and it reveals this by historical narratives.

Second, one way to know whether a religion is true is to find out whether it is anchored in history. If so, and if the history is reliable, the religion may be also.[2] The Bible is not a philosophy but history, though it contains philosophy. One can read the Koran for a philosophical approach to God, or one can follow Buddhism, Hinduism, or New Age for the same, which is a great weakness of these religions. How would we know whether Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism is correct? We must either make a leap of faith against our intelligence, based on some experience, or we must use reason to figure it out. Thus either experience or reason is enthroned, both of which are man-centered, and the result is to rule out revelation as final authority. But God is revealed historically, especially in Jesus of Nazareth, for the one who has seen Him has seen the Father (John 14:9).

How do we know that Christianity is correct? There are real events in history that can be validated, such as the great works of redemption, which are creation (Romans 1:18ff), the flood, the exodus from Egypt, the death of Christ on the Cross, and especially the empty tomb. We rest our entire case on the bodily resurrection of Christ as historically revealed and easily validated by early sources. Indeed, there was never a discussion of whether the tomb was empty, but the discussions were always how it got that way. Then there is the creation of the Church from twelve men who hid from the authorities when their Lord was crucified, afraid they would be next, but then gladly went to their deaths after His resurrection. How do we explain the change? We have hundreds of eyewitnesses to His resurrection, four early written documents with witnesses to His resurrection (five including Acts). The New Testament manuscripts are the best attested documents in ancient history; nothing else even comes close. We have real cities that still exist and are in the daily news (Nazareth, Jerusalem), real people (Pontius Pilate who is well known in history), secular writers who speak of the Lord’s resurrection (even though they may not have believed it), of the period of darkness when the Lord was on the Cross, and so on. The fact that these historical events have been independently attested lends tremendous credence to the rest of the story. In these events we are confronted with God Himself, not just given thoughts or experience to analyze.

Take Islam for example. How do we know it is true? One man claims that an angel appeared to him and dictated the Koran. (This is the same in Mormonism, both Islam and Mormonism being copycat religions of the Judeo-Christian heritage, but without historical validation.) Where are the miracles? Where is the history to validate this? Where are the cities in the Book of Mormon that allegedly existed in the USA centuries ago? Where are the multiple witnesses? Are we to trust one man’s word without historical confirmation, without a death and resurrection? By contrast, the Bible was written in historical circumstances over a period of 2,000 years if we go back to Abraham and by about 40 different authors, and archaeologists keep digging up artifacts that support the biblical account. In a court of law, which faith could be proved, the one with one witness and no confirmations from circumstances, or the one with at least 40 witnesses and centuries of independent confirmations?[3]

Moreover, if Christianity is grounded in history, revelation is Lord, not reason. I don’t mean that we believe something contrary to the evidence or that we don’t use our minds to understand or to conclude, but that reason is not final authority. Rather, reason is servant to revelation in Christianity, whereas in Buddhism and Hinduism, not to mention the psychological approach to modern preaching, reason must be the judge of what is being presented, or some kind of mystical experience that cannot be communicated. Today with the human-centered approach to preaching, anyone who does not like what he hears can go down the street to some other church, and in smorgasbord style, choose what soothes his ego. But if the great works of redemption were presented at all churches, as they once basically were, every worshiper would be confronted with God in whatever church he attended.

Third, the psychological pep-talk approach to preaching really makes Christianity just another natural religion, not a supernatural one, and eviscerates its power in confronting people with God Almighty. The power of God for salvation is the Cross, not our so-called wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:18ff). It is precisely in the offenses of Christianity, such as the Cross, where the power of God resides to convert people. Pep-talk preaching is basically a liberal approach, making Christianity just another moral religion that can be molded into what one wants since one’s reason is in charge, not revelation. This was the approach of Thomas Jefferson, who took a razor blade to the Bible and cut out all the supernatural works of redemption that Christ did while on earth, especially His miracles, reducing Christianity to morals only. In a private letter, Jefferson wrote to John Adams on April 11, 1823:

And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.[4]

Unfortunately, Jefferson’s “prophecy” has come true, as evidenced by the mess Christianity is in, especially in the West.

Positive thinking churches do not confront culture because they have nothing unique to say, no powerful word from God about sin, judgment, and the life to come, but are just another human voice to make people feel good. John Gresham Machen wrote an incredibly insightful book, Christianity and Liberalism, that I highly recommend, in which he argues that Christianity without its historical, supernatural revelation is not Christianity at all, but some hybrid religion.

Fourth, we are changed by viewing God, not ourselves. The modern approach to preaching tends to focus on ourselves, our needs, our wants, our successes, how we can live a wonderful, fulfilled, and happy life. It’s all about me. But we become like that which we behold. God has revealed Himself in the great works of redemption, and Paul states in clear terms in 2 Corinthians 3:

But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord (v. 18).

In other words, Paul says we are to behold God in Christ, for in Him God is revealed finally (Hebrews 1:1ff), clearly (John 14:9), and sufficiently (John 14:6; Acts 4:12). Reducing Christianity to psychology[5] makes us the focus, makes us the glory of ourselves. As we are encouraged to behold ourselves, we become selfish, self-centered, wanting God to bless us according to our understanding of blessing, which means, of course, that we should have money, a wonderful self-image, a fantastic marriage, a great place to work—in short, God becomes the genie in the bottle to jump out and grant our wishes if we only rub the lamp correctly.

Fifth, let us not run past this last statement too fast: “rub the lamp correctly.” This faulty idea is that if we take a particular action, then God must respond, which is moralism and legalism, and what is worse, it means that our obedience is the condition for God’s grace. This is what I call “ought” religion. Our obligation (“ought”) is the condition for God to change us. We initiate, God responds. But that is backwards. This formula makes the horizontal the basis for the vertical, by which I mean we relate to God (vertical) from ourselves (horizontal). But throughout Paul’s epistles, Paul gives us the “is,” the grace, and then commands the “ought.” In other words, our obedience rises out of God’s grace: the vertical relationship with God is the basis for our relationships with Him and with one another.

Do we want to be successful in our marriages? We must preach Jesus’ love for His bride and the bride’s submission to Him (Ephesians 5:22ff). Do we want to know how to forgive and how to be forgiven? We must see how God for Christ’s sake has forgiven us (Ephesians 4:32). Do we want success in life? We must see how God defines success and pursue that (Psalm 1). Do we want our people to change and be conformed to the moral image of Christ? We must hold Him up so people can see Him, for if He is lifted up, He will draw all people to Himself (John 12:32). Anything else is just playing church games to be popular. We are not in a popularity contest with other ministers, but in a judgment contest to please Him who is “the blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see” (1 Timothy 6:15-16), whom to know is life eternal.

As Anglicans in the liturgical tradition, we have a tremendous advantage over other churches, for the Book of Common Prayer requires preachers to read and generally preach on the Gospels, historical acts of redemption, to confront the people with revelation, and not to skirt the miracles, for they especially are God’s revelation to us. Furthermore, the epistles are read with the Gospel Lessons to give the theology of the Gospels.

Moreover, reciting the Creeds (Apostles’, Nicene, Athanasian) grounds the local church in the faith. Notice how the Nicene Creed, which is the most basic Creed held by all branches of Christendom, is designed around the Holy Trinity and the great historical acts of redemption in Christ:

I believe in one God,
the Father Almighty,
...Maker of heaven and earth,
...And of all things visible and invisible:
And in one Lord Jesus Christ,
...The only-begotten Son of God;
...Begotten of his Father before all worlds,
...God of God, Light of Light,
...Very God of very God;
...Begotten, not made,
...Being of one substance with the Father,
...By whom all things were made:
...Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven,
...And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary,
...And was made man,
...And was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate.
...He suffered and was buried,
...And the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures,
...And ascended into heaven,
...And sitteth on the right hand of the Father.
...And he shall come again with glory
...to judge both the quick and the dead:
...Whose kingdom shall have no end.
And I believe in the Holy Ghost,
...The Lord and Giver of life,
...Who proceedeth from the Father and the Son,
...Who with the Father and the Son together
......is worshipped and glorified,
...Who spake by the prophets.
...And I believe one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
...I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins.
...And I look for the resurrection of the dead,
...And the life of the world to come. Amen.

Now, when people come into our churches and hear this, they will know what Christianity is about. It is this faith that will overcome the world, overpower Islam, and save the soul. Anything less is self-serving. This Creed is the wonderful combination of historical revelation from God to us and of theological meaning of those historical events.

These truths are those which the Holy Spirit can use to work grace in someone’s life, just as the Lord said in John 16:

"Nevertheless I tell you the truth. It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I depart, I will send Him to you. And when He has come, He will convict the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: of sin, because they do not believe in Me; of righteousness, because I go to My Father and you see Me no more; of judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged.” (John 16:7-11)

The Holy Spirit does not convict of sin if we do not preach it, especially the sin of not believing in Jesus. The Holy Spirit does not[6] convict of righteousness if we do not preach the commandments and preach the righteousness of Christ who was received by resurrection and ascension back into His Father’s presence. The Holy Spirit does not convict of judgment if we do not preach it, especially that Satan was judged by the Cross and resurrection (Hebrews 2:14-17), which means that if the worst sinner of all time was judged, so will everyone else be judged.

But we do not really believe this passage in John 16, so we withhold preaching the truth of sin, righteousness, and judgment. We think we can do a better job than the Holy Spirit, so we don’t mention these three interlocked truths. They are negative, and we want to be positive. As a result, we leave people feeling great about themselves but unprepared to face God in the judgment and impotent to live for Him now. May the Triune God help us not to “improve” His Gospel, but just to proclaim it. God the Holy Spirit will do the rest. Amen.

[1] (Yes, the Bible has a lot to say about finances, and there is a proper time to teach on these matters, but not when we come to worship God and proclaim His Gospel.)
[2] There are other ways, of course, such as the impossibility of living life without assuming the Triune God and His commandments.
[3] We are speaking of legal proof, not the formal logical proof of apologetics.
[4] Link to source. Apparently John Adams was a Calvinist. Jefferson began his letter to Adams thusly: “The wishes expressed, in your last favor, that I may continue in life and health until I become a Calvinist . . . would make me immortal.”
[5] There is a place for psychology, but not in presenting the Gospel.
[6] When we say God “does not” do these things, we do not mean He “cannot,” for He is sovereign, but He has chosen normally to work through His people for the salvation of others.

Update after Hurricane Ike

2008-09-17T19:48:00.007-05:00

Dear friends,

Everyone associated with Cranmer Theological House appreciates your prayers and concern during this time of rebuilding after Hurricane Ike. Rest assured that Dean Crenshaw and his wife are alive and well, as are Bishop Grote and all of the students we've heard from, but at this point much of the Houston area is still dealing with limited services and resources. Please pray . . .

That utilities and other services will be restored quickly to the greater Houston area.
That our students do not suffer undue financial setbacks because of lost work.
That God will provide traveling mercies to all of our students who had to evacuate.
That God will heal Bonnie, the mother of one of our students. Bonnie is undergoing test to diagnose a heart problem (not related to the storm).
That classes can resume soon.

Most of all, we are thankful for God's continued protection. Our Lord is truly gracious to His people!

In Christ,
Dss. Teresa Johnson

GAFCON Statement

2008-07-16T14:32:00.003-05:00

Cranmer House is pleased to direct your attention to the following documents issued by the REC following the Global Anglican Future Conference:

GAFCON - Statement

Our Presiding Bishop's Report on GAFCON

May God bless all who work for Christian unity founded on biblical truth.

Donne and the Via Media

2008-05-06T21:23:00.010-05:00

In an attempt to summarize and categorize the life and ministry of Donne, William Mueller writes the following:

“John Donne was an early seventeenth century Anglican to the core. If the Divine Comedy is a literary monument to Thomism, and The Pilgrim’s Progress the dramatic embodiment of Puritanism, then the Sermons of Donne are the most compelling presentation of that Summa of Anglicanism: Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiatical Polity.” (p149)

A careful reading of Donne’s life and sermons reveals that he possessed a keen awareness of the genius of Anglicanism. In my estimation he fleshed out at least two essential elements that marked the English Church of the seventeenth century:

Donne knew not only what to say but what not to say. The axiom, “There are some things better left unsaid,” most certainly applies to Donne.
Donne possessed a pastoral flexibility that enabled him to skillfully accentuate what Anglicanism considered to be the essentials of the faith, while tactfully avoiding what she reasoned to be issues of needless controversy.

While considering these issues, it is helpful to remember that Donne lived out these principles in an effort to unify both a national Church and the Church Catholic. This ministry paradigm was labeled the via media, or the “middle way” between Rome on the one hand and the progeny of Geneva and Wittenberg on the other.

One of the greatest tributes that can be paid to Donne is that during his sixteen year ministry he maintained his theological equilibrium. This is especially noteworthy since he lived in an era when the Church was rocked by excitable circumstances that left her bruised and staggering.

Donne knew the necessity of and limits of reform. He possessed the diplomatic savvy to delicately navigate the English Church through the turbulent waters of change without running her aground on the rocks of schism.

In a sermon preached at St. Paul’s on Philippians 3:2, “Beware of the circumcision,” he writes, “[Circumcision] is an orderly, a useful, a medicinal, a beneficial pruning and pairing off, [of] that which is superfluous.” Concision (i.e. mutilation) on the other hand, “is a hasty and a rash plucking up, or cutting down, and an unprofitable tearing down, and rending into shreds and fragments . . . “ (X p112)

Donne considered the disease of Rome to be superfluity, or an excessive amount of extra-biblical baggage that hung like millstones around the necks of weary parishioners. On the other hand, the Separatists were plagued by deficiency, or an unbridled zeal to cast off the meaningful traditions of the Continental and English Church.

To continue with St. Paul’s and Donne’s illustration, it might be said that the Anglican Church was able to carefully circumcise its Roman foreskin while avoiding emasculation at the hands of the Separatists.

In a sermon preached at White-hall, April 30, 1620, Donne wrote, “Sects are not bodies but rotten boughes, gangrened limmes, fragmentary chips, blowne off by their owne spirit of of turbulency, fallen off by the waight of their own pride, hewn off by the excommunications and censures of the Church. Sects are no bodies, for there is nothing in common amongst them, nothing that goes through them all; all is singular, all is my spirit and thy spirit, my opinion and thy opinion, my God and thy God, no such aprehension, no such worship of God, as the whole Church hath been aquainted withall, and contented with."

According to Donne, true religion is not to be found “either in a painted Church, on the one side, or in a naked church, on the other; a church in dropsie, overflowne with ceremonies, or a church in a consumption, for want of such ceremonies, as the primitive church found usefull, and beneficiall for the advancing of the glory of God, and the devotion of the congregation.” (VI p284)

As one might expect, Donne asserted that the evenhanded, carefully measured, and levelheaded mean was to be found in the Church of England.

“. . . we stript not the Church into nakedness, nor into rags; we divested her not of her possessions, nor of her ceremonies, but received such a Reformation at home, by their hands whom God enlightened, as left her neither in a dropsie, nor in a consumption; neither in a superflous and cumbersome fatness, nor in an uncomely and faint leanness and attenuation.” (IV p106)

It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance which Donne places on the Church’s responsibility to distinguish between the fundamentals and the indifferent, collateral doctrines that qualify as the nonfundamentals of the faith. For Donne and the English Church, the essentials of the faith, or the sine qua non, were to be found in the Apostle’s Creed and the Thirty-Nine Articles.

Here, Donne states in explicit terms his greatest objection to the Roman Church, that is, its insistence upon making “indifferent things to be necessary.” In the aforementioned sermon, he is mostly likely reacting to the Council of Trent which met between 1545 to 1563 to redefine its doctrine and condemn the Reformation.

Donne diagnosed the diseased-ridden papacy as overestimating the authority of the Church and undervaluing the role of Scripture in establishing doctrine. Donne and the English Church of the seventeenth century affirmed that the Church does not make articles of faith but merely declares them.

In a sermon on Job 19:26, preached at Lincoln’s Inn, he writes, “In the Gospell, the way is, Fecit, & dicta sunt, God makes articles of faith, and the Church merely declares them, presents them.” (III pp94-95)

He tells King Charles and the congregation at Whitehall on April 1, 1627, “Take heed what you hear” (Mark 4:24) When Christ so addressed his apostles, he was urging them to ‘Preach all that, preach nothing but that which you have received from me.'” (VII p395)

Elsewhere he added, “. . . they deliver more than the Scriptures do, and make other rules and cannons equall to Scriptures.” (VII p402)

The result of this ecclesiastical amalgam of Scripture and tradition is that the Roman Church was as quick to damn those who denied collateral doctrines as those who denied the fundamental teachings of Christ.

Having made a sufficient stand against the frontal assault of Rome, Donne was careful to guard the flank of Anglicanism by deflecting the verbal blows of the Separatists. They “have gone away from us and vainly said that they have as good cause to separate from us, as we from Rome.” (X p174) If Rome had too many “essentials” for Canterbury, then Canterbury had too many for the Separatists.

Generally speaking, the Separatists believed that the English reformation had moved the Church in the right direction but it failed to move it far enough. Seventeenth-century Anglicanism, on the other hand, insisted that the Separatists were as rigid about nonessentials (vestments, kneeling at prayer, church music) as the papists.

“Call not ceremonial, and rituall things, essentiall parts of religion, and of the worship of God, otherwise then as they imply disobedience; for obedience to lawful authority is always an essential part of religion.” (VI p258)

The first part of the statement frees Anglicans from the collateral doctrines of Rome and would seem to liberate the Separatists from the demands of English ceremony. The second statement frees Anglicans because they didn’t recognize the authority of the pope. Yet, it hobbled the runaway sects, for they were lawful citizens of King Charles, who was head of both Church and state.

“Except there be error in fundamental points, such as make that Church no Church, let no man depart from that Church, and that religion, in which he delivered himself to the service of God at first.” (III p129)

For Donne, the Separatists were too contentious over indifferent matters, too willful and proud of their own opinions, and too disrespectful of God-ordained authority. They would rather desert the Church than tolerate its nonessentials.

“In matters that are not fundamental, it is better to be wrong than to be uncharitable, and the man who is uncharitably right may have less chance of entering heaven that the one who is charitably wrong, for in such cases, humility, and love of peace, may, in the sight of God excuse and recompense many errors, and mistakings.” (VII p97)

Why Study Apologetics?

2008-04-09T06:47:00.007-05:00

By Frank M. Levi

The question “Why study apologetics?” implies that there are positive reasons for engaging in such a study. However, before answering that question there is a negative question that needs to be addressed. Why do many shy away from apologetics, some even finding the discipline rather revolting? There are three main reasons that come to mind.

The word “apologetics” conjures up visions of a formal debate between a Christian and an atheist in some academic environment, throwing arguments containing words like ontological and epistemological back and forth at each other. These types of debates do take place, but it gives the average believer the false impression that apologetics is just for the intellectually elite. The truth is that most of us are capable of greater things mentally that we might realize. Our minds and reasoning abilities are part of the image of God and when we use our minds in the right way we are bringing glory to our Creator. St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “Brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature” (1 Cor. 14:20 ESV). Refusing to apply our minds, even to difficult doctrinal issues, is every bit as much a sin as theft or covetousness. Some aspects of apologetics may be difficult, but one does not have to be an intellectual giant to benefit from its study.

Another reason why some have been turned off by apologetics has nothing to do with apologetics, but with the apologist. Some of this criticism is legitimate and some is not. It is certainly true that apologetics does tend to attract augmentative people, as well as those who are afflicted with intellectual pride. To anyone who is argumentative by nature or who enjoys the superior feeling they get from proving someone else wrong I would say, don’t study apologetics until you repent and become more mature spiritually. Unfortunately, some so-called apologists have done more harm than good toward the advancement of the Kingdom of God.

However, some paint with a very broad brush and consider all apologists to be prideful, arrogant people. Such is certainly not the case. Obviously anyone engaged in doing the work of apologetics is going to be convinced of the truth of his position. Today it is quite unpopular to say that one really believes something to be absolutely true. Consequently when an apologist presents an argument, it is more likely that he will be attacked rather than the argument he is presenting. C. S. Lewis has been accused of engaging in “triumphalistic” apologetics because he maintains that atheism is provably in error.[1] In a recent article in Christianity Today about L’Abri, one of the current instructors there is quoted as saying, “Presuppositionalism can appear to be humble, but actually it’s quite arrogant. . . .”[2] Two responses to this sort of criticism are appropriate. First, words such as “humble” and “arrogant” apply to persons and their character and not to ideas or philosophical positions. Individuals may be humble or arrogant, but their ideas and beliefs are valid or invalid, sound or unsound. Those who use personal epithets such as “arrogant” in an attempt to cast a negative light on a philosophical position are making a category mistake, i.e., they are confusing and mixing qualities that may be true of one category (the apologist), with a second category (the argument used by the apologist). This amounts to the same thing as saying that algebra is arrogant because the textbook and the professor insist that there are correct and incorrect answers to the math problems on the test. Some apologists may be arrogant, condescending, and argumentative, but to say that apologetics as a disciple is so is unfounded. Secondly, to say that someone such as Lewis is triumphalistic and therefore conclude that his arguments are to be rejected is to commit the logical fallacy called ad hominem. Ad hominem is the attacking of the man rather than his position. Such attacks are often used in political campaigns. But the ad hominem proves nothing, for a man may be arrogant and abrasive and still have a valid argument.

Hopefully, we have been able to clear away some of the common reasons for not studying apologetics so we may now turn to the positive reasons for pursuing this discipline. Number one on my list may be a surprise to many because it has nothing directly to do with debating a non-believer. I would say that the first and most basic reason for a Christian to study apologetics is for their own spiritual benefit. One of the most famous arguments for the existence of God is the Ontological Argument, which was formulated by St. Anselm (1033-1109) during a time in history when it would have been difficult to find an atheist with whom to debate. So why did Anselm develop such a complex argument? The argument begins, “And so, Lord, do thou, who dost give understanding to faith, give me, so far as thou knowest it to be profitable, to understand that thou art as we believe: and that thou art that which we believe. And, indeed, we believe that thou art a being than which nothing greater can be conceived.” What we have here is a prayer coming from the heart of a true believer requesting that God would grant him greater understanding of his heavenly Lord. True knowledge begins with faith, but faith seeks greater and greater understanding of its content. St. Augustine wrote, “I believe in order that I might understand.” Faith is fundamental to any discipline. Even the scientist must have faith in his rational and observational abilities as well as faith in the validity of the scientific method. Armed with that faith the scientist explores the intricacies of the physical world, seeking greater understanding of nature. St. Augustine began with faith, but he didn’t fall into fideism, i.e., faith devoid of intellectual content. No, St. Augustine longed to know all that he could about the God who created him and loved him. For saints like Augustine and Anselm and many others apologetics is first and foremost a prayer to know and understand God and His ways better. When we are in love, we want to know as much as possible about the one we love.

As Christians our faith is always under attack, not so much by skeptics, but by someone much more clever and ruthless. St. Paul commanded us: “Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil” (Eph. 6:11 ESV). The apostle tells us that we need “the belt of truth” and “the shield of faith” if we are to stand against such an enemy. Much of the battle for the faith takes place in the mind of the believer as Satan throws his flaming darts of doubt at us. How are we to resist? We fight off his attacks by having faith and knowing the truth. In all honesty most Christians will never have an opportunity to use the ontological argument in a discussion with a non-believer or ever be a participant in a formal debate. But Christians regularly have to do battle with Satan’s attacks on their faith. Apologetics helps us face our doubts and questions, which often we suppress or deny, and defeat them. It is only after we have increased our own assurance and know why we believe what we believe so that we will be able to speak with confidence to the non-believer.

The final reason to study apologetics, which some mistakenly think is the only reason, is the presentation of the faith to the non-believer in a clear and persuasive way. The Scriptural basis for apologetics was stated clearly by St. Peter when he wrote, “. . . always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect. . . .” (1 Peter 3:15,16 ESV) St. Peter was not writing to college professors or professional apologists. No, he was writing to every Christian. Every one of us has a responsibility to prepare ourselves so that we might be able to explain our faith to a non-Christian when the opportunity arises. When we hear the word apologetics, many of us immediately envision Greg Bahnsen and Gordon Stein engaged in The Great Debate. But the reality is that most apologetic encounters take place in the context of a Christian explaining Christianity to some interested non-Christian. Much of the work is simply clearing away common misconceptions about our beliefs. That is something every Christian should be able to do, but it does take study and preparation. Alister McGrath made this point quite well when he wrote: “Remember Augustine’s remarks about Christianity after hearing Ambrose of Milan preach: ‘I had yet to discover that it taught the truth, but I did discover that it did not teach the things I had accused it of.’”[3] Satan has only one weapon—the lie. Only one weapon, but he uses it quite effectively. Satan’s lies are defeated by the truth, and we need to be able to confront his lies with the truth. Instead of being only an academic study reserved for the intellectually elite, apologetics is one of the most practical of disciplines. That it is not for the average Christian is also one of Satan’s most effective lies.

So why study apologetics? We study apologetics that we might know our Lord better and to equip us with the armor we need to resist the attacks of the devil on our faith. We also do so for the benefit of others, not to defeat them but to help free them from Satan’s lies that they too might know God and glorify His holy name. Amen.

[1] See C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea by Victor Reppert IVP.
[2] Christianity Today, March, 2008, article “Not Your Father’s L’Abri,” p. 60.
[3] Alister McGrath, Intellectuals Don’t Need God and Other Myths, p. 193.

End Time Hysteria

2008-02-20T17:56:00.015-06:00

By The Very Rev. Dr. Curtis I. Crenshaw, Th.D.
© 20 February 2008

We have extremes today regarding the Second Coming of our Lord. On the one hand, we have those who are full preterists, virtually denying the Second Coming of Christ altogether, or else saying it happened at AD 70. On the other hand, we have the prophecy buffs who interpret every thing in the news as a sign of the imminent Rapture. I call this “newspaper eisegesis,” reading into the Bible from current events.

I was once invited to an online debate about whether there is a Second Coming, and the person who invited me was of the opinion that it had taken place at AD 70. I sent back an email that I was objectively closed minded since the three creeds of the Church (Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian) stated that there was a Second Coming, that every Reformation doctrinal statement I was aware of stated it, and that it was yet in the future, not at AD 70, as important as that event was. The man wrote back a scathing email saying that he thought I was supposed to be a Reformation man, believing in Sola Scriptura. My response was that that expression did not mean just the Bible and me. The Reformers did not believe that the Bible was the only authority but that it was the ultimate authority, and I am unwilling to interpret the Bible contrary to the history of the Church. I also quoted the great Presbyterian Charles Hodge who taught at Princeton for fifty years:

If the Bible be the only infallible rule of faith and practice; and if . . . the Spirit guides the people of God . . . into the knowledge of the truth, then the presumption is invincible that what all true Christians believe to be the sense of Scripture is its sense.[1]

But this is a small movement, and I surely hope it remains such.

The other movement—the Rapture movement—is much larger. I was reared in it, and there are many fine Christians in what is called dispensationalism. The problem is the inordinate emphasis given to a certain view of the Second Coming. This unhealthy emphasis tends to ignore such creedal doctrines as the Holy Trinity, creation, Incarnation, the Church and sacraments. It is not that all these “weightier” matters of the law are not believed but that they are ignored. We’ve had students here at Cranmer House who came from that background, who had been fired from their churches for not being “pre-trib” but were never asked anything about the Holy Trinity. In the doctrinal statment of Dallas Theological Seminary (the “Mecca” of this view) as of 2003, which remains unchanged from 1972, there was one sentence on the Holy Trinity and four long paragraphs on “The Dispensations.”

This imbalance comes over into one’s theology as “end times” being what is really important, not what the Church hammered out over the centuries in the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. One is subtly trained to treat anyone who is not pro-Israel as suspect, if not outright liberal. This in turn has led to a Christian Zionism that supports Israel back in the land as the fulfillment of prophecy, and back as God’s people. But one can emigrate to Israel today as an atheist but not as a Christian, demonstrating that they are Christ haters, anything but God’s true people. If one were to demonstrate from the Bible that the land promise was fulfilled in Old Testament Israel and that it was upgraded in the New Testament to include the whole world (Rom 4:13; Matt 5:5; 28:18-20), he would be labeled a heretic. Or, as Dss Teresa Johnson has so eloquently put it, we have a kind of Rapture each time we have Holy Communion:

We have a Rapture during every Eucharist service when we are invited to ascend into heaven to commune with our Savior. Everything Satan does is designed to divert our attention from what it needs to be on. If we are thinking about the Rapture, we are not looking for the Real Presence that is available to us now. If we are wondering if the Real Presence turns the bread into a not-bread corpus, we are not looking at the continuing Corpus Christi in the form of the Church, the Body of Christ, the Communion of Saints.

Some may read this and say that we do not believe in a real Second Coming, but that would be false. Jesus will come at the Last Day to judge the living and the dead (John 5:28-29; 11:24; 12:48), and it is my view that there will be a Rapture at that time, as we see in 1 Thessalonians 4:13ff, but the “Rapture” will simply be part of the Second Coming, not a secret coming separated by seven years.

My plea is that we hold tenaciously to the Second Coming, be charitable about various views of it (pre-mill, amill, post-mill), do not become Christian Zionists and support those who hate Jesus and His people but consider them as candidates for evangelism, and especially that we do not label other Christians as false prophets who disagree with our end time scheme. After all, the Church for 2,000 years has not held to such an emphasis, but has ever promoted the belief in the Last Day judgment with Jesus appearing as Lord and Judge. At the Last Day, it is not the Rapture that will deliver us, but that we believe

. . . in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible:

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of very God, Begotten, not made, Being of one substance with the Father, By whom all things were made: Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, And was made man, And was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried, And the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures, And ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of the Father. And he shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead; Whose kingdom shall have no end.

And so on. Amen.

[1] Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:437.

Was Christ God While on Earth?

2007-11-06T22:11:00.001-06:00

by The Very Rev. Dr. Curtis I. Crenshaw, Th. D.
© 6 November 2007

In the previous blog entry I spoke of a Christology from above, by which we meant that it was the Second Person of the Holy Trinity who was Incarnate, and that He remained God. Sometimes we don’t draw the obvious conclusion from who God is—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—to the Incarnation, that God the Son cannot change. Even those who consider themselves conservative today have forgotten the Church’s teaching that Chalcedon in 451 clearly stated about the Son not giving up His deity in the Incarnation:

In agreement with the holy fathers we all unanimously teach that we should confess that our Lord Jesus Christ is one and the same Son; the same perfect in Godhead and the same perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, the same of a rational soul and body; consubstantial with the Father in Godhead and the same consubstantial with us in manhood; like us in all things except sin; begotten of the Father before all ages as regards his Godhead and in the last days the same, for us and for our salvation, begotten of the Virgin Mary the Theotokos as regards his manhood; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only-begotten, made known in two natures without confusion [the two natures did not merge in some way to form a third nature], without change [each nature remained fully what it was before the joining], without division [the two natures did not constitute two persons], without separation [the two natures were in union with the Person]; the differences of the natures being by no means removed because of the union but the property of each nature being preserved and coalescing in one person (prosopon) and one hypostasis [another word for person], not parted or divided into two persons but one and the same Son, only-begotten, divine Word, the Lord Jesus Christ; as the prophets of old and Jesus Christ himself have taught us about him, and the creed of our fathers has handed down.[1]

Amidst this wonderful theology, one point the fathers were making is that in the Incarnation, the deity of the Son did not change in essence or in function. Incarnation was by addition, not by subtraction.

The Problem: Incarnation by Subtraction

I did my doctoral dissertation on the word-faith movement some years ago, and wrote a book on it entitled Man as God: The Word of Faith Movement (Available from Footstool Publications). Part of what makes their teaching so dangerous is that their view of Christ is contrary to the Church’s teaching over the centuries and, of course, contrary to the New Testament. They will say things such as Christ gave up His deity while on earth, or that He gave up the use of His deity. Either way, we do not have an Incarnation. The word-faith people especially want to emphasize that Christ only functioned as a man by the power of the Holy Spirit, for this means they can do all that Christ did. In other words, they destroy the uniqueness of the person of Christ by saying we have the same Holy Spirit and can do any miracle He did—if we have enough faith. Even one of their favorite passages to “prove” that the Son was not God (Phil 2:5ff), really says, as virtually all the fathers noted, that He was God on earth: “who, although existing in the form of God. . . .” As J. B. Lightfoot noted over 100 years ago, the word for “form” means “essence,” and the word for “existing” is not unlike the verb for “was” in John 1:1, denoting eternal existence.[2] The idea in this passage is that the Son, while continuing to exist in essence as God, added to Himself perfect humanity. Lightfoot was a tremendous patristic scholar, Greek scholar, and Anglican, whose works are so accurate and significant that scholars and Greek lexicons still quote him.

On another occasion, I was in a bookstore, and I saw a book written by a man with whom I attended seminary. I was glad to see him writing, so I purchased the book to be encouraged in the Gospel. To my horror, I read that Jesus did not function as God while on earth, that He was not omnipresent while on earth but His divinity was only in the “vicinity” of, but never far from, His humanity while on earth. I wrote the publisher, quoting John Walvoord against the author, stating that we did not so learn Christ at our seminary. Thus, the problem of the Incarnation is a pervasive one.

I’m not alone in seeing that the word-faith view of Christ is the main area of controversy. I know a man who graduated from Kenneth Hagin’s Rhema Bible College, read his way out of the movement, did a Ph. D. at Oxford in church history, and said that my work on this was especially important because their view of Christ was the main problem, which is what I addressed in the book. I’ve seen pastors come out of the movement once they realized the implications of it.

I’m not trying to be unkind. Perhaps these people mean well, but sincerity is not the issue; truth is the issue. The price to have the purity of the Gospel is eternal vigilance. We must constantly defend the old Gospel, not only from its enemies, but also from those who mean well but are misinformed. One’s faith is only as good as the object of his faith, and the object only as good as the propositions about that object. Here are a few reasons it is so important to maintain that Son was “the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Heb 13:8) and that on earth He not only was unchanged as God but also functioned as God.

Solution: Incarnation by Addition

(1) If Jesus was not God or only functioned as man, what would this do to the Holy Trinity? This would mean God would be reduced to two persons, the Father and the Holy Spirit. It is no better if someone says He was God but did not function that way, which is to give with one hand and take back with the other.

Furthermore, how does this reconcile with the Council of Ephesus in 431:

If anyone shall say that Jesus as man is only energized by the Word of God, and that the glory of the only-begotten is attributed to Him as something not properly His: let him be anathema.

If any man shall say that the one Lord Jesus Christ was glorified by the Holy Spirit, so that He used through Him a power not His own and from Him received power against unclean spirits and power to work miracles before men and shall not rather confess that it was His own Spirit through which He worked these divine signs; let him be anathema.[3]

At Ephesus it was rightly understood that if the Son did not function as God, we have no redemption, for that would mean we only had a finite man who died on the Cross, not one who was also God. In turn, that would mean His work was only finite, not infinite.

Moreover, other early fathers maintained the same view as Ephesus:

Origen asserts that the rule of faith[4] lays down that the Logos “being made man remained that which he was before”; and Augustine, echoing the voice of the older tradition, says, “Thus he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, not losing the form of God; the form of a servant was added, the form of God not subtracted.” Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa, while admitting that the Word so far emptied himself as to appear not in his native majesty but in the humility of human nature, yet insist on his unaltered substantial greatness; and this remained the established view. Athanasius, in opposition to the Arians . . . fights for the unchangeableness of the Logos as the palladium[5] of orthodoxy; the Logos does not increase in wisdom (Luke 2:52), is not hungry or troubled even unto death (John 12:27), is not in ignorance of the day of judgment, does not suffer or die—all these things happen only to his “flesh,” to his human nature. And after Athanasius not only the Atniochian school but even Apollianaris and Cyril make similarly strong assertions of the unchangeableness of the Godhead of the Logos. . . . By a corresponding train of thought, the “exaltation” of Phil. 2:9 is always in patristic theology referred exclusively to the human nature of Christ. In all this there is no room for such a theory as that of Thomasius [Christ emptied Himself of His deity]; in fact, it is more than once expressly opposed [emphasis added]. . . . Cyril’s attitude is unmistakable; . . . a limitation of the Godhead in Christ is essentially unthinkable on account of his unity with the Father[6]

But at the time that the Father appointed,[7] the Son of the living God added a human nature to Himself, conceived in the Virgin’s womb by the Holy Spirit. The Second Person of the Holy Trinity had added to His undiminished divine Person a perfect human nature, taken from Mary. His humanity came from Mary, as the Last Adam had to be in the lineage of the first Adam, of the fallen human race, not a new race created outside of the existing one. As redeemer He had to be one with us, yet outside us without sin. He took from her what was human as mankind was originally created, but not as fallen. He was fully human, having a real body and a rational soul. He got hungry, needed to sleep, had human emotions of joy and anger, but He never sinned. He was fully human as if not God.

But He was also fully God as if not human. He was the second Person of the Trinity, God of God, light of light, very God of very God, the same in essence as the Father in every way, existing from all eternity. When the Virgin conceived by the Holy Spirit, humanity was joined to His Person, not that His Person came into existence, not that He gave up His deity or the use of it. Indeed, He was unchangeable[8] so that His deity did not change one iota at the holy conception. He added to His divine person perfect humanity, but nothing divine was subtracted.[9] If He had ceased in any way to be God, there would have been no Trinity and no God, for God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Giving up His deity would be incarnation by deicide. Or if Christ had ceased to be fully God, there would have been two “gods” left, the Father and the Spirit, which would mean the death of God. A savior who is not fully God is a bridge broken at the far end, and a savior who is not fully man is a bridge broken at the near end. He would not reach fully either to God or man.

The problem some have with Christ being both God and man is that they do not see how He could function fully as man if He were God. But that is part of the mystery of the Incarnation. If He could not function as both at the same time, we are left with some very difficult theology. This would seem to mean He was man on earth but not God, but would also this mean that He is God now but not man? So if there is no continuity with the Son as God before the Incarnation, what was that Person born of Mary? Who is He now? But if He is both God and man now, fully functioning that way, why could not He have been the same while on earth? No, the Church has always taught that from the conception onward, Christ is both God and man, fully functioning that way forever. Even today, as our High Priest, He is fully man to identify with us and fully God to identify with the Father. Such had to be the case to be the Mediator, which by definition means an identity with us and with God but in one person so the two could come together.

(2) If Christ gave up His deity, there would be no redemption since God must accomplish it. If redemption could have been done only by a human who was not God, why did God send His Son? All we would need then would be Jeremiah filled with the Holy Spirit to come back and die on the cross for our sins.

(3) No, redemption must be done by one person who was both God and man, fully functioning in both natures. He had to be a man to redeem man from his sin and death, to be identified with the human race that lost relationship with God. As God He could not die, but as man He could. He had to be God to satisfy infinite holiness, to take an infinite penalty, an infinite curse. What He did in His atonement was absolutely dependent on who He was, the two aspects being inseparable. Adam sinned and died. Jesus must be one with the seed of Adam so that He could die.[10] Adam owed God perfect obedience. Jesus obeyed God perfectly for us.[11] Adam came under the penalty of sin, which was divine judgment. Jesus took our punishment.[12]

He had to be one Person so that what one nature did would be united with the other nature in the one Person, thus joining the work of both natures. If He had only been a man indwelt by God, He would have been a great prophet, but not the One who could redeem; just one of the prophets of old. Under this circumstance, when He died, we would be left with a dead man and a distant God. But as God-man in one person, when He shed His blood, it was the blood of God: “to shepherd the Church of God which He purchased with His own blood.”[13]

(4) If the Son gave up His deity while one earth, where is the doctrine of co-inherence of the Persons of the Trinity, which means “that each person manifests the fullness of God, which means that each person must manifest the other two persons as well”?[14] And does not this also mean that each person indwells the other two to the infinite degree? How could the Son of God gives this up, even temporarily? What kind of God are we left with if He can change His essence?

(5) If Christ only gradually became aware of who He was while on earth, we would have a gradual Incarnation, not one complete from the beginning. This carries its own refutation. If this were a gradual incarnation, this would in turn mean that Christ only had one nature for most of His incarnate years, so for all those years His work for us was human only. Moreover, considering that one’s self-knowledge identifies oneself, that when one has amnesia he is not the same person, we would have one who was completely unaware of Himself for most of His life. Can you imagine how absurd it would be to have Him suddenly “come to Himself” one day and say, “Hey, I just remembered I’m God.” But if He remembered He was God, it was not true, for God by definition is omniscient, but He would not have been such.

(7) If Incarnation by deicide is true, by giving up His deity or the use of it, how is God revealed since Jesus functioned only as a man? Whom do we know? Jesus said that the one who had seen Him had seen the Father (John 14:9), but how is this true if His deity is suppressed? With this view, we do not know God but only another prophet, though perhaps the greatest one of all, but still just a prophet.

(8) There is only one essence in God, and that essence is fully manifested by each divine Person, Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. If one Person can opt out of that essence, we must have more than one essence, or the essence must be divisible, denying the unity of God, or somehow the essence is not necessary to each person, so that perhaps later the Father can opt out. Or, if one person (the Son) can cease to function as God while still being God, we have meaningless words. What does it mean to have the essence of something without manifesting it? Can a dog not function as a dog, a whale not function as a whale, and so on? Someone will say, “God can do anything,” which is emphatically false. God cannot lie, cannot deny Himself, cannot cease to be God, and certainly cannot cease to function as God.

(9) Theologically, the Incarnate Son was the second person of the Holy Trinity, which meant that His self-consciousness was that of God the Son, the Son from all eternity, the One who cannot change (Heb 13:8). To elaborate, this meant that it was the second person of the Holy Trinity who was the person of the incarnation. He was not two persons. He could not be a human person apart from the divine person, for that would make Him two persons. The divine person without His divine nature does not and cannot exist. The PERSON who was the subject of the Incarnation was God the Son, who added a human nature to Himself but did not gave up His divine nature or nullify His divine person in some way. He did not add a human person to Himself, only an impersonal human nature. There was no separate human person, only the divine person before the Incarnation and then the divine-human Person after the Incarnation.

(10) The New Testament is clear that the Son functioned as God while on earth. For example, at age 12 He said He had to be about his Father’s business (Luke 2:49), thus revealing His divine self-knowledge. He claimed to be the I AM when the soldiers came to arrest Him, and by His divine power they went backwards and fell to the ground (John 18:6). He claimed to be able, like the Father, to reveal Himself sovereignly to the elect (Matt 11:27). He was on earth and in heaven at the same time (John 3:13, NKJ, majority text). The New Testament makes clear that Christ is the One who sustains all things (Heb. 1:3) and the one in whom all things hold together (Col. 1:17). Apart from Him, the universe has neither Preserver nor Governor; so who did this while He was allegedly not God or not functioning as God?

Indeed, if Jesus only did miracles in the power of the Holy Spirit, and not also His own power, then what did John mean when he said he wrote his Gospel around signs so that people would see the uniqueness of Christ as the Son of God and come to faith in Him (John 20:30-31)? If He were not unique and His miracles reveal such, if we can do all the same miracles by the Holy Spirit, then John’s statement makes no sense. So did Christ heal by the Holy Spirit? Of course, but not by the Holy Spirit only. As the Council of Ephesus reminded us, He did so by His own authority also. Indeed, in Matthew 9 when the Jews questioned His statement that the paralytic’s sins were forgiven, He said:

“For which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven you,’ or to say, ‘Arise and walk’? But that you may know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins”—then He said to the paralytic, “Arise, take up your bed, and go to your house.” (Matt 9:5-6)

It was the “Son of Man” who had the divine authority both to heal and to forgive, and that miracle spoke to the uniqueness of His Incarnation, that He was both God and man, fully functioning that way all the time. Let us believe the Nicene Creed fully. AMEN.
_________________________________________________________

[1] As quoted in Gerald Bray, Creeds, Councils, and Christ, p. 162ff. See also vol. 1, p. 544 of Christ in Christian Tradition, by Alos Grillmeier.
[2] J. B. Lightfoot, Philippians, p. 110ff.
[3] Henry R. Percival, The Seven Ecumenical Councils of the Undivided Church (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1979), pp. 213-214.
[4] This was the faith deposited in the Church that was handed down from Apostles to bishops and others and was protected by the writings of the Apostles. The early fathers often speak of it. [5] The “pure silver,” so to speak.
[6] Schaff-Herzog, pp. 315-316.
[7] Galatians 4:4
[8] Hebrews 13:8
[9] The modern day heresy of kenosis states that Christ’s incarnation was by subtraction, that He gave up something of either His deity or the use of His deity.
[10] Hebrews 2:9
[11] Hebrews 2:10 (The grammar indicates that Jesus was bringing many sons to glory by His being made perfect.)
[12] Isaiah 53:5; Romans 3: 25; Galatians 3:13
[13] Acts 20:28
[14] Gerald Bray, The Doctrine of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993), p. 224.

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Christology from Below vs. Christology from Above

2007-09-17T19:05:00.001-05:00

It is becoming ever more common for modern Christian scholars to speak of a Christology from below. The problem is not so much the statement itself as it is with what they do with it. By this they mean that we must begin with the human Jesus and work our way back to the divine Son of God. They may challenge us that though John unequivocally begins with the Word as the second person of the Holy Trinity, yet Matthew begins with the Virgin Birth of the lowly Jesus. True, but Matthew quickly adds that He was Immanuel, which means “God with us.”

Yet the modern approach—contra 2,000 years of church history—begins with the historical man Christ and seeks to work back to God, if indeed it ever arrives at God, and whoever “God” may be. Of course, this nearly always results in a thoroughly human but not divine Christ. As Carl Henry rightly observes of this position:

Despite its deep ecclesial inroads, modernistic theology failed to stifle transcendent Christology. Modernism’s christological inconsistency Lawton traced to a vulnerable and indeed “wrong starting-point.” “In the realm of pure Christology,” he commented, it is “inexcusable . . . to begin with Christ’s humanity and human life, and . . . to work upwards . . . to the confession of his Deity. Those who do not begin with the fundamental Christian assumption that ‘the Word was made flesh,’ but . . . attempt to show how . . . a complete man as they suppose Christ to have been was united to God” cannot but end in confused and self-contradictory views.[1]

But the modern approach is basically to ignore John’s Gospel and to begin with a human Jesus, who—surprise, surprise—never quite reaches full divinity. James Dunn even says that it would be “irresponsible to use the Johannine testimony on Jesus’ divine sonship in our attempt to uncover the self-consciousness of Jesus himself.”[2] Yet St. Athanasius in his masterly defense of the deity of Christ in the early church (from the Council of Nicea 325) constantly uses the Gospel of John for the self-consciousness of the Son of God, as did the other early fathers.

But how does the Gospel of John begin? It begins with the diivine Word, eternal in being (“in the beginning was the Word”), states that He was with the Father from all eternity (“the Word was with God”), was Himself of the same essence as the Father (“the Word was God”), and that He was the Creator (“All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made”).

It is only after the Christology from above is given in clear terms that John gives us the Christology from below: “And the Word became flesh and [tabernacled] among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). We cannot appreciate verse 14 and the Word becoming flesh unless we first know who He was.

But the Christology from below is allegedly the “scientific” approach of modern criticism, allowing the documents to speak once the faith of the Church has been stripped out, which in turn means no supernaturalism. As Henry rightly says: “The notion that the biblical writers believed in miracles because as pre-scientific men they were ignorant of the laws of nature is preposterous.”[3]

Such arrogance assumes that the last one hundred fifty years is the measure of all things, that those who were there and saw the miracles invented them (read: lied), and that only now in this scientific age can we truly know what happened then. Of course, no historical fact can be scientifically tested by a repeated experiment, and the only way we can know any historical event is by documents and eyewitness testimony. It is not the objective history of the early church and the Gospels that is the problem, but the assumptions of the modern scholars and their neverending search for the “historical Jesus” that predetermine what they see.

Of course, Chalcedon and the whole Church for 2,000 years have a Christology from above, beginning with the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the Son of God. But there is much talk today of a functional Christ, meaning that it does not matter who Christ was, only what He did was important. But as the Church has noted from Nicea in 325 on, what He did is predicated on who He was. Functionality is based on ontology. To restate this: “Ontology and soteriology mutually condition one another.”[4] Or to put this in our terms, what Christ did was based on who He was.

The modern theologian considers his philosophical views as more substantive than God’s revelation. Once again, Henry is on target:

The recurring appeal to regnant modern philosophy as sufficient reason for abandoning incompatible views [such as rejecting Chalcedon] rests on a presumptive culture-pride more than on truth. Modern philosophy is not necessarily superior to ancient philosophy; at its best it even sometimes echoes enduring aspects of ancient philosophy. Nor has “modern philosophy” achieved a consensus. Nor is it necessarily superior to the philosophy of the future; the philosophy of the end-time will prevail over it.[5]

Let us forever remember that the Incarnation is not from below, not from mankind, but it is from above, from the realm of eternity. To put this another way, the Incarnation is by addition, not by subtraction. It was the eternal, divine Son of God who added to Himself perfect humanity that constituted the Incarnation, not the boy of Mary who somehow realized He had a divine mission one day when He was about thirty years old. Even at age twelve He said that He had to be about His Father’s business (Luke 2:49).[6] It was God the Son who became man, not a son of man who became in “some sense” divine. It was the eternal Son of God who constituted the Person of the Incarnation, for He had been the Son from all eternity, not a human person who “somehow” became divine or cognizant of some divine mission, as is often stated today. Amen.

[1] Carl F. H. Henry, The Identity of Jesus of Nazareth (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1992), p. 20.
[2] James D. G. Dunn, Christology in the Making, p. 31. Italics are Dunn’s.
[3] Henry, 29.
[4] Henry, 94.
[5] Henry, 102.
[6] If we translate this “My Father’s house,” the idea is the same.

The Genius of Anglicanism

2007-08-16T20:10:00.001-05:00

by The Very Rev. Dr. Curtis I. Crenshaw, Th.D.

Over the centuries the Church has struggled with primarily three heresies: Arianism (denying the deity of Christ), Gnosticism (separating the spiritual from the physical), and legalism (that one can earn his salvation). The irony is that the other side of the coin to legalism is license, that one can live like the devil and still go to heaven when he dies. I would like to consider legalism and license.

During the time of the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church was selling indulgences, people literally paying for their sins in advance so they could enjoy them later, which is the flip side to legalism, a license to sin. Thus legalism implies license. It works like this: if one can earn his salvation (legalism), that puts him in charge of grace, and makes God his debtor. If he is in charge, he can refuse His grace and still claim to be a Christian (license).

The Protestant Reformation brought the Church back to a reasonable position from the legalism and the license of Rome. Statement after statement by the Reformers made it clear that one could not earn his salvation (contrary to legalism), but that faith without works was dead (contrary to license).

For example, in 1538 Cranmer said:

[We] are yet not justified on account of any worth or merit of penitence or other works or merits of [our] own, but freely by faith on account of Christ when we believe. . . .

But then a few lines later he also added:

For good works are necessary to salvation, not because they justify the ungodly, nor because they are a price paid for sin, or a cause of justification; but because it is necessary that one who is already justified by faith and reconciled to God through Christ, should strive to do God’s will. . . .[1]

There is the balance. We are justified by faith in Christ apart from works, but the faith that justifies is living faith that necessarily produces works (James 2:14ff; 1 John 2:3-4).

So what is the problem? The problem is that legalism and license are still with us. Rome still has its problems with legalism and license, but so now does Protestantism. (Orthodoxy, which hates St Augustine and his biblical view of grace, has terrible problems with legalism and Pelagianism.) The Protestant revival fire of the 1500s that brought the Church back in line now needs to be brought back in line itself. We are selling grace as seen in the emerging church movement, as seen in the entertainment models for salvation, in the smorgasbord approach to Church where the “consumer” will pick and choose what he likes—not what is biblical.

Here in Houston we have several mega-churches that advertise their entertainment services each week. One has a stage play each Sunday, sometimes with motorcycles jumping on stage, another time with cars smashing into one another. Another mega-church has a large globe behind the preacher that gradually turns with not a cross in sight. Thus the symbolism is that the cross has been replaced with the world. I’ve never heard the preacher preach on sin or the cross. The slogan is “Find the champion in you,” not in God. Other churches have contemporary worship where the consumer, not God, is the center. In each case, the emphasis is on us humans and what we like, not on God and what He requires.

So am I just being mean spirited? They have large churches and we don’t, so I have to find something wrong with them? That is not the problem. If they were preaching the Gospel, I would rejoice, but one perhaps occasionally preaches the Gospel and the other one has announced that it will preach on sin, but will affirm the people. So how does all this connect with legalism and license?

Listen to the preaching from these mega-churches and what do you hear? It is not about God and His majesty and sovereignty. It is not about sin, the Ten Commandments, and judgment. It is not about Christ and His death on the Cross for our sins. It is five steps to financial success. It is six steps to have a good relationship with your wife. It is how to eat right and be healthy (not kidding). In other words, besides being man-centered, it is “You do this and you’ll be blessed,” which is legalism. It is putting “ought” as the way to “is,” making performance the way to grace. This is not the way of the Cross.

Since it is a smorgasbord approach, the Christian is taught that it does not matter where he attends, what services are important, or whether he even joins a church or not, but that whatever he does, God smiles and all is well (license with a vengeance).

Moreover, we also have the mish-mash approach to theology, with more and more people playing down any real theology. Just believe what you want. This is especially true in the emerging church approach. Are churches today Trinitarian? Who knows. Are they Incarnational? It is difficult to tell. Even otherwise conservative scholars are falling prey to kenosis theology, which teaches that Jesus did not know who He was until later in His ministry, if even then. Thus we have a gradual incarnation, or no incarnation. Then we have the increasingly popular universalism movement, with some following Barth, which is the ultimate license view: if all are going to heaven, eat, drink, be merry, make light of God’s sexual morals, live like the devil, for tomorrow we die and we all go to heaven. (A society that forgets hell goes there.)

So where does Anglicanism come into all this? If by Anglicanism we mean the historic Anglicanism, the one committed to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, the old Reformation Anglicanism, then it is just what is needed in today’s horrible Christian milieu.

This Anglicanism has a balance between the Cross and the Church. By emphasizing the Cross, it maintains that our relationship with God is not by our merits, not by our righteousness, but by the righteousness of Christ. On the altars of just about all Anglican churches is a cross, the center of our worship, the way we approach God, the mediation between us and God, our only hope in life and in death, the ultimate symbol pointing to the unconditional love of God for His people. It is the constant reminder that we do not earn grace, that we are sinners without hope, which is why the Son of God had to come, and it is God’s way of telling us not only that sin is real but that it is so awful that it took the death of His Son to save us. If the Cross is the not the center of worship and in our lives, we will necessarily fall into legalism, seeking to please God our way. The return of the doctrine of the Cross, with its emphasis on substitutionary atonement, was one of the great benefits of the Reformation, and especially of Anglicanism. (For one of the best books I’ve ever read, get The Cross of Christ, by John Stott, an Anglican scholar and minister.)

But the second pillar of true Anglicanism is an equal emphasis on the doctrine of the Church. By that we don’t mean some so-called rapture, but the importance of being part of a visible, local church that teaches the Word and administers the Sacraments. With regular oversight and with regular attendance to receive the Word and Sacrament, the Church should guard us from license, thinking we can live just any way we please. No one is so righteous as to be without some human authority over him, and God has given that human authority in the Church.

And Protestantism has lost its original fervor for the Church, and has now gone to the other extreme from Rome: We don’t need any church. We’ll just choose what we like, and do as we like. We think that any strong doctrine of authority in visible churches is Roman Catholic, which allegedly means that we can only go to God through human priests. That is not Anglicanism or Protestantism. Anglicanism (and Protestantism) eliminated the doctrine of the magic touch: if you’ve been touched by someone who has been touched by someone who has been touched by an Apostle, you have received grace. But now we’ve gone to the other extreme—we don’t want church at all, or we’ll make up our own version. Church is an add-on to our faith, but only if it’s convenient, if we don’t have a hunting or fishing trip planned, if the kids don’t have sports events to attend, or if company has not come in from out of town.

We forget that it was John Calvin himself, that great Protestant reformer in Geneva, who echoed St. Cyprian's assertion that we should not call God our Father if the Church is not our mother (Institutes, 4.1.4.). That is true Protestantism.

It was Puritanism, in reaction to English Anglicanism, that did not want a strong doctrine of the Church. Thus they emphasized individualism when they settled this country. At first they were a wonderful and godly people, but in time their individualism has become part of the reason we have inherited such a smorgasbord approach to worship today and to egalitarianism in our culture.

Again, Anglicanism has a striking balance: in our Books of Common Prayer, we have strong Trinitarian theology, strong doctrine of the Incarnation of God the Son, and the Cross is at the center. Sin also is at the heart of our theology as we confess our sins to God looking to the Cross for forgiveness. This protects us from legalism.

But Anglicanism also has strong worship with a healthy emphasis on Word and Sacrament. It sees itself as under the great Head of the Church, that its ministers are specially called by Christ and given to His Church to protect it from heresy and to help people in the Christian life (Eph 4:11-16). Christ’s own authority is in His Church; thus we must do things His way. A pastor is also guardian over the souls of those in his care. This protects us from license.

Perhaps an example will help us to understand this. In some circles, the Cross is rightly held up as the great cure for our sins, the only cure. But then the people are taught things like “you aren’t saved because you are in the Church, but you’re in the Church because you are saved.” In this mindset, the Cross is only for individuals, not for the corporate Church. It is only the individual who decides what his state before God is, and the Church is made irrelevant. This tells the individual that he does not have to come to worship and does not have to keep the commandments of God as the necessary evidence of his salvation (contrary to 1 John 2:3-4). It also tells the individual that what one does in worship does not matter, for the Church is irrelevant to his salvation. In other words, salvation is put completely outside the context of the Church.

Here is another example. I know a very sweet Christian lady who has been baptized three times because two times she decided (not the Church) that she had not really meant it when she said she believed in Jesus. On the contrary, it is not we who decide to join Christ’s Church, but it is He who decides to join us through His ordained and appointed ministers. And once we have received the sign of entrance, we must never receive it again, for baptism does not belong to the individual but to Christ. The first time she was baptized Christ was serious, and thus she never needs it again. If she is in control of her Christian life, then an option is license, using the Church and sacraments according to her rules, not Christ’s rules, or no Church at all. We have the smorgasbord approach again.

The genius of Anglicanism is that the Cross and the Church complement one another. On the one hand, the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ where He died for our sins guards us from legalism, from thinking we can earn our way into God’s favor. On the other hand, the Church is Christ’s gracious institution to keep us in line, where the means of grace are administered to His people. The two go together, for the Church should lead us to God via the Cross, and the Cross should lead us back to the Church. We must not think of these as separate.

With Rome, you can only have access to the Cross through the Church, which promotes their legalism. With modern day Protestantism, you can have the Cross apart from the Church, which is license. With Anglicanism you have the Cross in the context of the Church, which is balance.

Amen.
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[1] Gerald Bray, Documents of the English Reformation, pp 187-88.

Why I Am No Longer a Dispensationalist

2007-08-16T19:39:00.000-05:00

© 2002 Rev. Dr. Curtis I. Crenshaw
(PLEASE WATCH OUR WEB SITE FOR THE REPRINT OF THE BOOK and for audio files on “The Middle East, the Jews, the Land, and Biblical Prophecy” by Dr Crenshaw: http://www.footstoolpublications.com/ )

(This is a personal letter to one of my past dispensational Bible college professors who wanted to know why I had left dispensationalism. I have rewritten some of the letter for broader distribution. In particular, some of the harder hitting points, such as the section on repentance, were not in the original letter, though they were in the book (Dispensationalism Today, Yesterday, and Tomorrow) I wrote that I sent him.)

Dear Dr. . . . ,

You asked me about my ecclesiology (doctrine of the Church); you have asked me about it previously. I have deliberately not pursued it with you as I do not want that to come between us. I did not want to debate you about it at lunch recently but to enjoy the fellowship in the Gospel. Indeed, the ecclesiology issue is an “in house” debate among evangelicals. The basic theology I learned at Mid-South Bible College (MSBC, now Crichton College) and from my mother and grandmother (2 Tim. 1:5 applies to me) I have never laid aside but adhere to it tenaciously. The Trinity, hypostatic union, Virgin Birth (actually virgin conception, as Dr. Crichton rightly stated)—in short, the Apostles’ Creed, Nicene Creed, Athanasian Creed, Chalcedon on the Person of Christ, are what the Church has defined as evangelical orthodoxy for centuries, with justification by faith alone in Christ alone added during the Reformation as a necessary implication of the Apostolic faith. Cranmer quotes the early fathers who held to “faith alone,” even using those very words. Our doctrinal statement here at Cranmer Theological House is the Thirty-Nine Articles, which you would find quite satisfying in most points.

But regarding my ecclesiology, I have enclosed my part of a book that Grover Gunn and I wrote in 1984, Dispensationalism Today, Yesterday, and Tomorrow. (This was not in the original letter: It sold well for 15 years but is now out of print. Many are asking for it so it needs to be brought back into print. A photographic copy of the latest edition can be purchased from Cranmer House for $15.00 postage paid.) I graduated from DTS; and Gunn finished all the courses, but they would not allow him to graduate, which seems to me both illegal and immoral. Most of your questions regarding my ecclesiology will be answered in the pages from the book you now have. But I shall give you my personal history.

When I went to Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) in 1972 (as the first MSBC student with an accredited degree), I was convinced of dispensationalism. The first year there I had no doubts, but mid-way through the second year I was in rapid Greek reading when a professor (Dr. Ed. Blum) stated that there were two views of sanctification on campus. (The question was raised from the passage we were “Greeking,” as we used to say.) We were told that there was the Walvoord/Ryrie/Pentecost view, which was Arminian, carnal Christian, and higher life without perseverance, and then there was the perseverance or Calvinistic view. Naturally, I told myself that I was of the former view since I had been taught that at MSBC. But the seed Blum planted stayed with me, causing me later to question my assumptions regarding grace and later the assumptions of dispensationalism itself.

Later that year I took an elective in apologetics from the same professor, and we read thousands of pages. We read many of the rationalists and Arminian apologists, and finished the course by reading Van Til’s Defense of the Faith. As you may recall, for many years he taught apologetics at Westminster in Philadelphia. Van Til’s book stirred my thinking, not only in apologetics, but also to challenge my own theological presuppositions. As time went on, I read Warfield, Calvin’s Institutes, Luther’s Bondage of the Will, The Westminster Confession of Faith, John Owen, and many other Reformed works. I had many personal conversations with Charles Ryrie, and I discovered to my utter shock that he was basically ignorant of the Reformation and Reformed writings, often incorrectly quoting them or misrepresenting their beliefs. I had placed the big three (Walvoord/Ryrie/Pente-cost) on such a pedestal that it took me two years at DTS to accept their fallibility. For example, in one class when Ryrie was promoting his unlimited atonement view, he said that even the great John Owen had not discussed 2 Peter 2:1 in his volume on the atonement. I went to the library, opened volume ten of Owen’s works, looked in the index, and then read Owen’s careful explanation of it. It took me all of three minutes to find it, and another five minutes to read it. Either Ryrie had not looked it up, or he had forgotten about it. This was typical of the big three dispensational men regarding the Reformed writings. If they were wrong here, were they also wrong in other areas?

(Once when I was teaching with you at MSBC in 1977 after graduating from DTS, Walvoord came to Memphis, and I’m sure that he had me in mind when at a luncheon he made comments about the Calvinistic doctrine of “limited” atonement. His ignorance on the topic was typical, especially when he thought he was making significant statements against the Reformed view, but did not even understand them, engaging in straw men.)

But one conversation in particular I had with Ryrie was a turning point in my thinking; it took place not long before I graduated in 1976. I went to his office and asked him to prove dispensationalism, that I would be the devil’s advocate for covenantal theology. He was glad to oblige. (Three other students were with me, only one of whom is still dispensational and that only mildly.) He went to Matthew 16:18 where Jesus said “I shall build My Church,” which was a future tense Greek verb, implying to Ryrie that it did not exist at the time. My response was that such an inference on a future tense was very tenuous, that it was not necessarily supported by the Greek grammars, and that the Church was mentioned in Matthew 18 anyway, only two chapters later. Thus it did exist, as Jesus Himself stated. Of course, Ryrie stated that Matthew 16 had the “technical” use of the word “church” while Matthew 18 had the “non-technical” use. That was a point I was not willing to concede but seemed to me to be assuming what he wanted to prove.

Next he invoked Ephesians 2:20 where the Church is built on the foundation of apostles and prophets, meaning that it did not exist before the apostles. He reasoned that since apostles were mentioned first that the prophets must have been limited to NT ones. But I rejoined that the context spoke of OT Israel and the NT Church as being in one body (see my notes) thus favoring OT prophets. Even further, in the context Jesus Himself was the chief cornerstone, and was He not also such for the OT saints or were they saved without Jesus? Did they have some other foundation, contrary to 1 Corinthians 3:11?

Next he used the argument from Acts 2 that the Church was formed on the Day of Pentecost by the baptism of the Spirit, making reference to 1 Corinthians 12:13, meaning that it did not exist prior to Pentecost. My response was that if the OT saints were not included in the Church, then how were they saved? Was not the Lord’s death retroactive to them, which he admitted to some extent (whatever that meant), but then excluded them from the Church! And did not Peter quote Joel in this Acts passage, stating that this was what the OT had predicted? If His death was retroactive, why would not the Church also be retroactive, or better, progressive (OT bud to NT flower)? How could His death be retroactive for them if Christ did not legally represent them? And if He legally represented them, they were part of His body, in His Church. I agreed that Acts is a new phase of the one people of God.

Then I asked him about Ephesians 1:4 where Paul says that we were predestined before the world to be in Christ; did not that include all the elect of all ages? He unhesitatingly stated that such was true. Then I observed: “That included Moses, which means Moses is in Christ, and therefore he is in the Church.” Ryrie just about dropped his teeth on the desk. He said that he had never heard a covenant theologian use that argument, and stammered for an answer. That in turn caused me to drop my teeth since it was such a standard covenantal argument. It indicated that Mr. Dispensationalism himself had not read the Reformed writings to miss such a basic argument. This caused me to have doubts about dispensationalism, for if Ryrie had misrepresented and misunderstood the Reformed so badly, could it be that his own system was flawed? Though I did not change my theology immediately, the conversation stayed with me over the years. (And obviously it is still with me vividly.)

Furthermore, I argued, there is one new covenant made with Israel and the Church (Jer. 31:31ff; Heb. 8), which speaks of one people of God. It used to be common for dispensationalists to speak of two new covenants (Ryrie did at one time), but they have been challenged so much by scholars all over the world for such strained exegesis that I know of no dispensational scholar today who still maintains such. Perhaps some popular preacher would, but there is just no excuse for it. It is not only exegetically impossible, but it necessarily implies two kinds of salvation, which the Church has always seen to be completely erroneous. It strongly implies two brides for Christ.

When I graduated from DTS in 1976, I was still a dispensationalist, and the first church I had was such. During my first pastorate, I taught with you at Mid-South Bible College for a couple of courses. I pursued the Reformed writings after my first pastorate and after teaching at MSBC, which eventually led me into Presbyterianism and covenant theology, and now into Anglicanism. Since those days, the early fathers and the Reformers, none of whom were dispensational, have only confirmed my position, but all were covenantal in their view, every one of them holding to infant baptism, which is necessarily built on the unity of the Old Testament with the New Testament and on the unity of the people of God in both testaments. Indeed, infant baptism was not challenged until the Reformation and then only by a few Anabaptists. The basis for infant baptism is covenantal unity between the Testaments (see Col. 2:11-12; 1 Cor 10:1ff for a NT infant baptism!).

Then the historical argument greatly disturbed me. (This was and still is a hurdle that I cannot imagine one overcoming.) I had been taught both at Mid-South Bible College and at Dallas Theological Seminary to have little respect for the history of the Church in the area of eschatology (read dispensationalism) and the doctrines of grace. Dispensationalism is not found in the Church before 1870 or so and not developed until the early 20th century. While I was attending DTS, Dr. Walvoord (the president of the seminary at the time) commissioned one of the church history professors to study the early church for signs of dispensationalism. When the professor reported that there were no signs, Walvoord stated that it did not matter since it was biblical. This autonomous spirit, disconnecting oneself from the history of the Church, still permeates dispensationalism. By Sola Scriptura the Reformers did not mean “just the Bible and me.” In other words, the Bible was the ultimate authority, not the only authority. Even the great Presbyterian protestant Charles Hodge stated: “If the Bible be the only infallible rule of faith and practice; and if . . . the Spirit guides the people of God . . . into the knowledge of the truth, then the presumption is invincible that what all true Christians believe to be the sense of Scripture is its sense” (Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:437).

But the historical argument bothered me greatly. Something as novel as dispensationalism, first appearing in the history of the Church in the late 1800s, taught against by the whole history of the Church by maintaining covenant unity between the Testaments, has the 99.999% presumption of being wrong. Indeed, the early fathers opposed dispensationalism in principle when they opposed Marcion who rejected the OT as having anything to do with the Church and when they proclaimed the Bible was one book for one people of God. Likewise, every Reformation confession written states the same, not the least of which is our own Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion. This theology of one Bible, one people of God, continued unchallenged for almost 1900 years until Darby, being unheard of in the Creeds and in the Reformation confessions. How could the best theologians in the history of the early fathers and the Reformation and post-Reformation miss something allegedly so important? Was everyone wrong for 2,000 years except the modern dispensationalists, who are today still a small minority when we consider Christendom as a whole, and are primarily a USA phenomenon? (Our isolationism here from the rest of the Christian world is astonishing. There is a strong group of Christians in southern India who claim to go back to the Apostle Thomas. I was in seminary with one of them. We know for sure they were there in the third century. They were for the most part cut off from the West and the rest of Christendom. But what is their theology? They hold to the creeds, to Chalcedon, have bishops, and have had little to no contact with dispensationalism. We think American Christianity is all there is.)

Then there was the ever-present “literal” hermeneutic, which allegedly gave rise to the whole dispensational system. I took a course my senior year at DTS entitled “The NT’s use of the OT,” taught by S. Lewis Johnson, one of the finest scholars that DTS ever produced. He had been head of the OT department at one time, was head of the NT department for many years, and was being groomed to be head of the theology department when DTS fired him for his Calvinism. (DTS considered the “rapture” more important than the doctrines of salvation, which also bothered me tremendously.) He virtually sight read both Hebrew and Greek, not to mention French, German, and Latin. A dictum repeated at DTS ad nauseam was that since the OT prophecies of Christ were all fulfilled literally, so the NT prophecies of His Second Coming would be so fulfilled. The problem was that no one seemed to have checked out the OT prophecies as fulfilled in the NT. I did so check on the whole NT, and only 35% were fulfilled “literally” (whatever that may mean), the balance being anti-types, analogies, eschatological Yahweh fulfillment, and so forth (see my book). This course more than any other course at DTS raised doubts about the so-called literal hermeneutic in my mind.

After seven consecutive years of formal studying in dispensational institutions, it became my contention that the so-called literal hermeneutic was not the basis for dispensationalism but the result of it. They had not understood their own presupposition, that their distinction between Israel and the Church had actually produced the hermeneutic, and they forced prophecies to be fulfilled according to their humanistic understanding of literal. Now I have been vindicated as the new or progressive dispensationalists have abandoned the literal hermeneutic with a vengeance, essentially stating what I’ve been saying for 25 years. (See the book edited by Craig Blaising, Progressive Dispensationalism who was a fellow student when I was at DTS; see also Three Central Issues in Contemporary Dispensationalism.) Indeed, scholars all over the world have taken them to task for their “literal” hermeneutic, which, in my opinion, virtually has no definition, at least by them (see my chapter on it enclosed).

But the greatest weakness of dispensationalism was what they considered their greatest strength and the essence of their system: two peoples of God, two bodies, an OT people and a NT people, Israel versus the Church, however we want to state it. And this is what drove me out of dispensationalism as the last straw. I agree that the two peoples doctrine is what makes dispensationalism what it is. But if there is a danger to dispensationalism, it is precisely with the two peoples of God doctrine, which necessarily implies two ways of salvation, even though they try to deny this. There is no salvation except in union with Christ, and how could another body of people be saved apart from union with Him? If they are saved by Him, how is it done? Can He legally represent them without being their Head and they His body, His people? Is Christ a bigamist, having two brides, an OT bride and a NT one? There is no way to have salvation except in union with Christ. The first Adam was the head of all humanity, and the Last Adam was the head of the elect of God, Israel, the body, the Church (see Gal. 6:16; Heb. 2:9ff; Eph. 2:11ff). There are no other options. Christ is the head of one body, not two, which is what the Church has said for 2,000 years. There is one Lord, one faith, one circumcision/baptism (Eph. 4:5; Col. 2:11-12).

You stated at our luncheon recently that Dr. Crichton (the president of MSBC) would commonly state that the Old Testament saints were headless, having no covenantal head. If so, they have no salvation. If Christ is their savior, He must be their head. If He is not their covenantal Head, He is not their savior. But if the OT and NT saints are saved by the same grace, the same salvation, by the same covenant Head, Christ, what is the point of two peoples of God? What does one body have that the other does not have? I have never seen this dilemma solved by dispensationalists. The progressive dispensationalists are still struggling with it, which is why dispensationalism is now in its third major redefinition and why they are saying that Christ is now reigning on David’s throne. As you may recall, Walvoord/Pentecost /Ryrie have taught that David’s throne is a literal seat in Jerusalem to be occupied by the Lord after the Second Coming in the so-called millennium. Now this is being challenged by Dallas Theological Seminary professors themselves, so where is the literal hermeneutic?

The relationship of Old Testament to New Testament is bud to flower, as every scholar has seen for 2,000 years, from St. Augustine to Calvin to the vast majority of Christians today. If one does not see this, he maintains at least two ways of salvation, an OT way and a NT way, Christ related one way to the OT saints and another way to the NT saints, necessarily implying two brides. And that is just another reason dispensationalism will never avoid the charge of two ways of salvation until they drop this two peoples of God idea, which would mean they would no longer be dispensationalists. Again, there is one Lord, one faith, and one circumcision/baptism (Eph. 4:5, which in context includes both OT and NT saints, see Eph. 2:12ff and my notes on it in the material I’ve sent you). This two peoples of God idea is the major reason I left dispensationalism.

Then there was the related issue of how OT saints were saved. C. I Scofield and Lewis Sperry Chafer (one of the founders of DTS) taught that Old Testament saints were saved by their own works. In volume seven of Chafer’s Systematic Theology: Doctrinal Summarization under “justification,” Chafer emphatically states that OT saints were “just because of their own works for God, whereas New Testament justification is God’s work for man in answer to faith.” That teaching runs through all seven volumes of his theology as Grover Gunn has documented quite well in his part of our book.

Of course Ryrie tried to avoid the charge of two or more ways of salvation by saying—contrary to Chafer and Scofield—that the Old Testament saints were saved by faith and grace. But even granted Ryrie’s concession, he still had two peoples of God which necessarily means two ways of salvation: Israel without a covenant head as savior and the Church with a covenant Head, the Savior.

Furthermore, he disallowed any saving knowledge to the content of the OT saints’ faith, saying, for example, that Abraham was saved by belief that he would have a large family (“Your seed shall be as the sand”). What does that have to do with his own sins, with a savior, or with the Messiah to come (and he did look to the Messiah: John 8:56)? With each OT saint having a different content to his faith, we have as many ways to be saved as there were OT saints. Indeed, if one has no soteriological content to his faith, he really has no faith in any meaningful sense. If I learned anything at the Bible college where you taught and at DTS, it was that true faith embraces propositions, which is also why the early Church had so many councils to define the correct propositions about the Holy Trinity and Christ. DTS guarantees the dichotomy between OT Israel and the NT Church by denying that any OT saint could have had Messianic content to his/her faith. In the DTS doctrinal statement as recently as several months ago, DTS still said that “it was historically impossible” for the OT saints to have had “as the conscious of their faith the incarnate, crucified Son, the Lamb of God” and that the OT saints “did not comprehend” that “the sacrifices depicted the person and work of Christ.” Incredible. That is clearly two plans of salvation (or more), an OT nebulous faith in God but without any concept of personal sin, repentance, Messiah, etc, and a NT concrete faith in Jesus as Savior who will forgive one’s sins.

Contrast that with Article VII of the Thirty-Nine Articles: “The Old Testament is not contrary to the New: for both in the Old and New Testament everlasting life is offered to mankind by Christ, who is the only Mediator between God and man, being both God and man. Wherefore they are not to be heard, which feign that the old Fathers [the OT saints] did look only for transitory [temporal] promises.” Such statements could be multiplied over hundreds of times from the fathers and the reformers. Therefore, such disunity to the Bible and two peoples of God, stating that the OT saints only looked for temporal promises, is also a major reason why I left dispensationalism.

Indeed, it was never the case that “Israel” or the seed of Abraham was composed only of physical descendents from Abraham, but dispensationalists think so. There was a physical seed, but “not all Israel is Israel.” All the circumcised were in covenant with Yahweh, but then many had fallen from the covenant (John 8:32ff; 1 Cor 10:1ff) and Gentiles were also part of the body of Israel. Dispensationalists consider the physical Jews in Palestine today to be the chosen people of God, in covenant with Him, even though they deny Christ! Even in Abraham’s time, there were many in Abraham’s household who were circumcised and not descendents of Abraham. Others (such as Ishmael) were his seed, but were not part of the covenant. In John 8, the Lord said that the Jewish leaders with whom He was dialoging were the seed of Abraham as physical descendents, but were really of their father the devil (John 8:33-44). Just look at the genealogy of Christ in Matthew chapter one to see that there were Gentile women in His line. Thus, as Paul stated, the true Jew was not the one outwardly circumcised but the one inwardly circumcised of the heart (Rom 2:28-29). We cannot identify the “Jewish” nation with a physical seed but with a covenant seed. Thus to say that the “Jews” in Palestine today are the chosen people of God is to identify them with a physical seed. (Today the Church is the new “nation”, 1 Peter 2:9-10.) The physical seed idea is contrary to all of Scripture from Genesis through the New Testament. It is interesting, by the way, that dispensationalists who so oppose infant baptism because one’s physical relationship to the covenant means nothing promote the same idea with a vengeance when it comes to physical Jews!

Another reason for my departure is dispensationalism’s tendency to deny the lordship of Christ in salvation. Of course, some dispensationalists, such as John MacArthur and his followers, adamantly deny such gross error, but DTS promotes it with such vehemence that one stands amazed. (I can’t imagine standing before Christ at the Last Day having preached that one could be saved in his sins rather than from them, that it is possible to be a “Judas” and still go to heaven.) DTS has a section entitled Eternal Security in its doctrinal statement, but then denies perseverance of the saints, which means that one can have Christ as Savior while rejecting His Lordship. To use the modern vernacular, that is promoting “once saved always saved” but without perseverance, which means one can have genuine faith without works. I’m not aware of anyone in the history of the Church fossilizing such horrible theology in its institutional and formal statement, published to the world. Ryrie in Balancing the Christian Life even states that anyone who teaches such lordship salvation is teaching another gospel! That means for the past 2,000 years 99.9999% of the Church has perished. Much of dispensationalism is off base, but this one tenet, like the two peoples of God issue and works salvation of OT saints, is outside the bounds of historic orthodoxy. The whole Church for 2,000 years and 95% of Christendom today rises up against such an idea. Never in the history of the Church—and here I include all three branches of Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism—has anyone heard of anything so monstrous as the DTS teaching that repentance, by which is meant a turning from one sins, is not necessary for salvation. According to DTS, NT “repentance” is only a change of mind about Christ, not also a change of mind about one’s sins. One can allegedly have Christ and his sins also. How one could possibly come to Christ for forgiveness of sins and still love his sins is an indomitable mystery. It would be tantamount to raping someone and saying, “Forgive me but I intend to do it again.” (See my chapter on repentance in my book, Lordship Salvation: The Only Kind There Is. There has recently been another dissertation at DTS (Ph.D.!) denying repentance in salvation with the usual plethora of straw men against the Reformed scholars. But this is not just a Reformed issue but an issue in every branch of Christendom since Pentecost.)

And consider the doctrinal statement of DTS. It is greatly imbalanced, having one sentence on the Holy Trinity and several long paragraphs on its view of dispensations and prophecy. This imbalance continues with those who will not allow one to be a member of their church unless their prophecy is “right” while rarely asking questions about the potential member’s view of God. One’s view of antichrist is now more important than one’s view of Christ, at least on a practical level. This produces Christians who can expound long and hard on Israel, antichrist, end time prophecy but who have very little understanding of the most basic teaching of the Church since the Apostles: the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation (these two stand or fall together, as I’m sure you would agree).

Who knows the future of dispensationalism? They themselves do not know where they are going. I have recently talked to professors at DTS who do not want the Ryrie dispensationalism but the progressive dispensationalism, which at least means no literal hermeneutic and no pre-tribulation rapture. I hope it means they will embrace repentance. I have conversed with recent graduates who tell me that the pre-tribulation rapture idea is hardly mentioned at DTS these days, and that while some still harp on the literal hermeneutic yet most deny it. Tommy Ice, a graduate of DTS, sees the implications of the new dispensationalism at DTS, and he, as a dispensationalist, is writing against the professors at DTS! But the weight of scholarship is against him. This is very ironic and has never happened in DTS history that one of its graduates would challenge that DTS is not consistently dispensational! In his latest edition of his landmark book, Dispensationalism (formerly Dispensationalism Today), Ryrie is also challenging DTS!

It will be a relief when DTS drops the pre-tribulation rapture, which in my humble opinion has done tremendous harm to Christianity. It is based on very tenuous inferences, divides the people of God into two peoples, makes “Israel” in the Near East seem to be the people of God even in a state of denying Christ, and puts the USA in a precarious position with other nations when Christian Zionists push us to support them with the erroneous idea that the “land” is theirs. The Jews have so intermarried since the time of Christ that no one even knows who they are anymore. Some are black, some are white, some are olive, and some we don’t know what they are.

Sadly, the pre-tribulation rapture has become part of the non-negotiable faith in many circles—even though the Church did not hear about it until recently—and some think that if you don’t believe it that you are liberal. (Recently when Walvoord died—a godly Christian man, let me add—the DTS alumni newsletter noted that he was a great defender of the faith, defending such critical doctrines as the pre-trib rapture. It is too bad that he spent so much time on such a non-essential issue.) It is sad to see the ancient creeds ignored but the pre-trib rapture doctrine promoted as if it were as important as an ancient creed. These are wrong theological priorities to the extreme. The effect of such wrong priorities can be seen in Tim LaHaye selling 50 million (and counting) copies of the left behind series on the antichrist, but evangelicals will not purchase 10 thousand copies of a book about Christ. All the end time hysterical weirdoes who embarrass the Church with their errant predictions, such as Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye, Pat Robertson, Paul and Cheryl Crouch on TBN and TBN in general, are dispensationalists. Hal Lindsey was invited to DTS for the 50th anniversary in 1974 while I was studying there, and his hermeneutic was so incompetent with his helicopters in the book of Revelation (“literal”?) that even the DTS professors said he would never be invited back again. To my knowledge, he never has been back. Yet TBN regularly has him on as (and I quote) “the world’s greatest prophecy expert.” He and Jack van Impe are constantly going through the latest news articles to demonstrate that we are in the last days, which is more eisegesis (reading into the text) than exegesis (reading out of the text). The pre-tribulation rapture doctrine with its escape motif and Satan as lord of the world who has predestined the failure of Christ and of the Church (Would God predestined His own failure?) has produced an impotent Church that will not stand against the culture. As dispensationalist J. Vernon McGee once said: “Why polish the brass on a sinking ship?” Such statements have immobilized dispensational churches. Thus as our culture slides ever more into the sins of the Canaanites, it has the blessing of the dispensationalists, for this allegedly means Christ is coming that much sooner to bail us out, for allegedly things must get worse and worse just before He returns. It is to our shame that the Roman Catholic Church has led the way in the opposition to abortion.

Then consider the absurdity of the whole dispensational scheme. When things are really bad, the Lord Jesus comes secretly to “rapture” His Church (a “secret” Second Coming), the man of sin/anti-Christ is manifested, and we have seven years of great tribulation. During the seven years, God again deals with Israel as an Old Testament nation while the Church is in heaven. Incredible. How anyone on earth could be saved without a visible Church and without any other Christians to evangelize them is a serious problem dispensationalists have not worked out except to say some sinners read tracts and the Bible and are converted. Though God could save people however He chooses, He has always chosen to use His visible Church (or His Israel) as His instrument and its sacraments. Such theology makes the visible Church totally irrelevant. What happens to baptism and the Lord’s Supper during this alleged seven years, and what sacraments are available is another enormous corner dispensationalists have painted themselves into. All three branches of the Church have always considered the sacraments (at least baptism and the Lord’s Supper) as non-negotiable, as necessary for salvation, but now they are gone! Apparently, they are not needed. All we need is autonomous individualism—incredible. But all is a complete failure once again, and at the end of the seven years comes the public and non-secret second [sic] Second Coming, at which point Christ establishes His 1,000 year reign from Jerusalem, the animal sacrifices are reestablished, and the temple is rebuilt! Now we are back to the types and shadows of the Old Testament in complete denial of the whole book of Hebrews, and the advancement God made over the animal sacrifices to the once for all sacrifice of Christ and advancement over the land of Israel to the whole world is forfeited to a literal hermeneutic. All this comes from a distinction between Israel and the Church as two separate peoples of God.

I guess I given you more than you asked, but I hope that this will not cause us to break fellowship. I count many dispensationalists as my brothers in Christ and my personal friends, including you. I would like for it to remain so.

In His death and resurrection,
Rev Dr Curtis Crenshaw, ThD

(P.S. This professor’s response was non-engaging, very gracious, stating that he would not break fellowship with me. We continue to email one another.)