Danny Akin on This Critical Moment in the SBC

Dr. Akin writes:

. . . we are confronted with important issues that cannot be ignored or papered over. And, they must not be caricatured or misrepresented. We must face them squarely, honestly and most of all biblically and theologically. Only then will we discover if we can truly walk together as a unified denomination.

The death of Adrian Rogers is, in my judgment, the symbolic moment that signaled a new day in terms of leadership in the Southern Baptist Convention. Things are now different.

I am convinced in this new day and context we need men with a vision for what can be called “A Great Commission Resurgence.” Building on the “Conservative Resurgence,” we need a new passion and commitment to the final marching orders of the Lord Jesus.

Akin then raises and answers two questions:

1) Why should we come together in a Great Commission Resurgence? 2) How can we come together in a Great Commission Resurgence?

He lists seven points on which we are in agreement, and then gives five ways we can come together.

Read the whole thing.

An Important New Blog: Between the Times

Bookmark it, put it in your RSS Feed, add it to your reader, or put it with your other buttons in Mozilla. Whatever you do with the addresses of the blogs you visit often or keep up with, add this one to the list. Nathan Finn writes:

Between the Times (http://betweenthetimes.com) is a blog that includes five SEBTS professors: myself, Danny Akin, David Nelson, Ken Keathley, and Bruce Ashford. We will be posting on a variety of topics, including theology, culture, mission, the SBC, and book reviews. The first post is already up—Bruce has posted on “Toward a Great Commission Resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention: Part One.”

Nathan Finn has a post up summarizing Dockery’s SBCR, and SEBTS President Danny Akin has a post up on Integrity in Ministry.

I’m encouraged that Dr. Akin has entered the blogosphere, and I look forward to the future posts on this blog.

Denton Bible Holding the Line

I am glad to see that Denton Bible Church is standing strong on the complementarian point of view by hosting an important series of messages on Women in Ministry.

If you’re in the Dallas area, I would encourage you to attend the events described below in the letter from Tom Nelson of Denton Bible. May the word of the Lord prosper!

———————–

June 4, 2008

Dear Pastor,

I’ve pastored for 31 years in Denton and have never had a reason to contact other pastors with what Denton Bible was doing—until now.

We are doing a 3-week series at DBC on the egalitarian issue, “Can a woman be in authority over a man in the local church?”“Can they serve as pastors, elders or deacons over a man?”

The teaching of the Bible is “no” (I Tim. 2:9-15; 1 Cor. 14:34);

The example of the Bible is that men lead;

The historic position of the church is that men lead;

Because of these, this has been our position at DBC.

In the last 20 years this has been challenged. Even within my own seminary—Dallas Theological Seminary—this has been challenged. But it is not primarily being challenged because of a difference in the interpretation of a particular verse (lower criticism) but rather a difference of hermeneutic (higher criticism); meaning that the Bible was true then for that time, but not for ours. The hole in the theological dike here is obvious: At what point do we say what is now “outdated”? Something is ended only if Scripture says it is ended.

With this in mind, DBC is doing a 3-week Sunday sermon series on the egalitarian issue from June 15 to June 29. In these three weeks, I and two other men who are tops in their field will address this issue.

On June 15 I will bring the message in the 2 morning services (9:00 and 11:00 AM). Our College Pastor will bring the message in the evening service (5:00 PM).

On June 22 we have invited Dr. Bruce Ware to speak at all three Sunday services (9:00 and 11:00 AM and 5:00 PM). Dr. Ware is Professor of Theology at Southern Baptist Seminary having previously taught at several seminaries most recently at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He is a highly esteemed theologian, popular speaker and prolific author. He has spoken and written frequently on a wide variety of gender role issues.

On June 29 Dr. Russell Moore will be speaking at all three Sunday services. Dr. Moore is Dean of the School of Theology and Senior Vice President of Academic Administration at Southern Seminary. He is also the Executive Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement and Senior Editor of Touchstone Magazine: A Journal of Mere Christianity. He too is a frequent speaker and writer on gender issues and matters affecting popular culture.

On June 22 and 29 our 5:00 PM evening service will have the same men preaching to those (the younger crowd) of that service. It is not often that this issue is addressed. If we can be of any service to you men who support this tradition in your churches or to your churches, DBC would simply offer its services.

May God equip you in every good thing to do His will,

Tom Nelson

Senior Pastor

A Chiasm in Daniel?

I’m putting this out there because I find it intriguing. I welcome comments–does this chiastic structure for the book of Daniel work? I know that it is slightly unbalanced with chapter 2 being matched by chapters 7-9 and chapter 1 being balanced by chapters 10-12. Does that invalidate it? Is it likely that Daniel intended this?

——

Daniel 1–Daniel Exiled

Daniel 2–Nebuchadnezzar’s Vision (Statue representing four kingdoms)

Daniel 3–Deliverance from the Fiery Furnace

Daniel 4–Nebuchadnezzar Humbled (seven years of insanity)

Daniel 5–Belshazzar Humbled (handwriting on the wall)

Daniel 6–Deliverance from the Lion’s Den

Daniel 7-9–Daniel’s Visions (Four kingdoms represented in various ways)

Daniel 10-12–Daniel’s Vision of the End of the Exile

——-

Anyone interested in my sermons on Daniel, through chapter 10, can find them by scrolling down on this page.

Southern Baptist Consensus and Renewal, by David Dockery

I know some people who are really depressed about the state of affairs in the SBC. I am not in the ranks of those people, and one of the big reasons is because I am hopeful that the SBC will indeed find consensus around the theological program that David Dockery lays out in his new book, Southern Baptist Consensus and Renewal. (And I am not alone. See here here here here and here). If you don’t like what you perceive the SBC to be about, please read this book! If you don’t like what you perceive about vocal persons involved in the SBC, please read this book!

This book is a word in season. I hope and pray that God will be pleased to move mightily in and through our cooperating churches, and I am on board with the vision Dockery sets forth. I have no qualms whatever about the theological assertions in this volume, and I hope that people from every theological persuasion in the big tent of the Southern Baptist Convention will read this book, digest its proposals, and lock arms with everyone else that can unite around the truths presented here.

It seems to me that this is the great need of the hour: for the various parties and factions in the convention to somehow find the first part of what Dockery sets forth here–consensus–that we might work together toward the second part–renewal.

This book is like a banner on the battle field. I hope the representatives of the various sub-groups of the SBC–especially the vocal ones–will see it waving (i.e., read the book), rally to it, and agree that the aim of our cause is not to conquer other parts of our own army (other sub-groups in the SBC) but to advance the Kingdom of the Lord Christ against all the powers ranged against it.

May the Lord use this book to bring about the two things in its title: consensus and renewal.

Reading the Greek New Testament

Lee Irons has some good advice on Reading through the Greek New Testament year by year. He has even worked up a one year calendar for doing it. If anyone knows of similar resources for the Old Testament in Hebrew (and/or Greek), I would be grateful to know of them.

He is also putting together syntactical notes on the Greek New Testament, which you can get to by scrolling down this page until you see the heading “Greek New Testament.”

If you decide to read through the Greek New Testament, be careful. The things in that book got most of its authors killed, and when people have taken it seriously in the history of the church, crazy things like the reformation have happened and some folks even got themselves burned at the stake.

The Greek New Testament is decidedly unsafe. If you embrace it, you will be hated (see John 15:18-20). To paraphrase Lester De Koster: there it is, throbbing on your desk, the living word of God.

Schreiner’s New Testament Theology

My copy of Thomas R. Schreiner’s New Testament Theology arrived last night, and I have been feasting on it with great delight! I cannot recommend this book highly enough. My advice is to quit reading this right now, go to Amazon.com, and order your copy at their 34% discounted price. Then come back and read the rest of this (since you have some time before your copy arrives. If you already have a copy, quit reading this post and crack open Schreiner’s New Testament Theology–it will be a lot better for you than this post!).

Those of you who are back from ordering your copy, while you’re waiting for it to arrive, let me urge you to give yourself to the meditative reading of the Bible.

In addition to that, let yourself enjoy a guided tour of the themes of New Testament Theology with one of with ablest interpreters of our times.

C. S. Lewis once said that the best devotional books were the ones that seriously interpret the message of the Bible. He’s right. And that means that Schreiner’s New Testament Theology is not only, in the words of Simon Gathercole, “A magnificent acheivement!” in terms of its scholarship, it’s also one of the best devotional books you could hope to find.

G. E. Ladd’s A Theology of the New Testament was published in 1974, and it has been the standard text on New Testament Theology since that time. In my opinion, the starting place for New Testament Theology is now Schreiner’s volume rather than Ladd’s.

I think every scholar, pastor, student, and Christian layman would do well to put this volume at the top of the summer reading list and enjoy!

Andy Naselli on Keswick Theology

Andy Naselli’s first Ph.D. dissertation was on Keswick Theology (he’s working on a second Ph.D. at Trinity), and he recently gave a presentation at Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary that summarizes his dissertation. I found his summary and critique of the Keswick movement enormously helpful for sorting through the way that the Keswick view of sanctification has leavened itself all through evangelicalism.

PS: I think Andy’s blog is worth adding to your google reader and keeping an eye on. Enjoy!

I would especially encourage pastors, students, and theologians to check out these lectures. Dr. Naselli has done us a great service in sifting through this material and presenting it in a humble, winsome way. He writes:

Detroit Seminary is hosting the following resources from the lecture series:

1. Handout (five-page PDF)

2. Power Point presentation as a PDF (eighty slides with lots of pictures) [12.1 MB]

3. MP3s:

· A Historical and Theological Survey of the Early Keswick Movement (1:10:32)

· A Theological Analysis of the Early Keswick Movement - Part 1 (57:20)

· A Theological Analysis of the Early Keswick Movement - Part 2 (with Q & A) (49:24)

PS: I think Andy’s blog is worth adding to your google reader and keeping an eye on. Enjoy!

A Wedding Sermon

Yesterday I had the great joy of preaching at a wedding for one of the guys in our church, who is also a student at SWBTS Houston. At the encouragement of a couple friends who were present, I’m posting my remarks here. May the Lord be pleased to bless our marriages that we might be living pictures of the mystery of Christ and the church!

—————

When God gave the woman to the man in the Garden of Eden, the words were pronounced, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gen 2:24). The harmony enjoyed in Eden was soon lost when the couple sinned, and God said to the woman as he pronounced judgment, “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you” (Gen 3:16). That curse is the origin of all marital difficulty. That curse is the origin of feminism. That curse is the origin of males who sinfully “rule over” their wives in inappropriate ways. That curse came because of human sin, and that curse threatens to make marriage hopelessly impossible.

What a depressing thing to say at a wedding!

But we aren’t hopeful about your marriage because we can make a joke and lighten the mood. We are hopeful about your marriage because when Jesus came, he died on the cross to pay the penalty for sin. His resurrection shows that he has triumphed over the curse. He has opened the way to life.

All who trust in Jesus are justified before God and empowered to live in a new way, a way that is not doomed by the dreadful curse on sin.

So, Aren’t We All Cessationists? (at least on this point)

I have been sitting on this post for a long time. My students have heard me make this argument in class, but I have been hesitant to post it. The main reason I haven’t posted until now is my great respect for the continuationists at Sovereign Grace Ministries. Those guys are among the most humble, godly, joyful, loving people I’ve ever met, and I don’t mean any disrespect to them in this post. I disagree with them, though, and I’m about to say why. Before I do, some caveats:

First, my argument for cessationism is exegetical, but it is not tied to any statements in 1 Corinthians 13.

Second, this argument is not tied to a particular form of either dispensational or covenant theology (I’m in that overlapping middle that is sympathetic with both Progressive Dispensationalism and New Covenant Theology).

Third, below I will lay out my argument. When I’m done, I’ll tell you what I think is the major defeater of my argument (in other words, I’ll tell you how I would argue against this position if I were a continuationist), and then I’ll tell you what (I think) defeats that defeater.

Here goes:

D. A. Carson has written,

“As long as ‘apostles’ are understood to refer to a select group (the Twelve plus Paul) whose positions or functions cannot be duplicated after their demise, there is a prima facie case for saying at least one of the cari,smata (charismata) passes away at the end of the first generation, a gift tightly tied to the locus of revelation that came with Jesus Messiah and related events” (Showing the Spirit, 88).

I would define The Apostles that Carson describes as those who saw the risen Lord Jesus and were commissioned by him. This would seem to mean that The Apostles were the 12, with Matthias replacing Judas (Acts 1:15–26), James the Lord’s brother (1 Cor 15:7; Gal 1:19), Paul (1 Cor 15:8-9), and maybe Barnabas (Acts 14:4, 14).

The word “apostle” is also used in the NT to describe those who were “sent out” from the churches, and these instances are generally translated along the lines of “messenger” (see, e.g, 2 Cor 8:23; Phil 2:25). If we were to follow the pattern of the NT on this point, we might call missionaries that we send out from our churches “apostles,” but we would always want to clarify that we don’t mean Apostle in the way that Paul and Peter were Apostles. All we would mean is “messenger,” or perhaps, “missionary.”

Dave Harvey has written the Sovereign Grace book on Polity (available free online here), which I think has beneficial information, but I don’t think the statement on “apostles” is helpful:

“While Sovereign Grace Ministries heartily agrees that ‘no one in the church today functions with the authority of the original apostles,’ let us not hastily extrapolate . . . to conclude that no one today functions as an apostle of any kind.”

I don’t think this is helpful because it clearly says, “We don’t mean Apostle in the sense of Paul and the 12, but we still want to use the word as though some people today have the gift.” The problem is, when Ephesians 4:11 says, “He gave some as apostles,” I think it’s really hard to make that mean something other than “Paul and the 12, James, Barnabas, and maybe Jude.” Ephesians 3:5 refers to The Apostles as those to whom the revelation of the mystery was given, which seems to refer to the guys who wrote the other parts of the New Testament. Right before that, Ephesians 2:20 refers to The Apostles as foundational for the church. So it seems to me that The Apostles that Paul describes Jesus giving to the church in Ephesians 4:11 are this closed circle of men who saw the risen Lord and were commissioned by him (the twelve and the few others added after the resurrection).

I understand the “gift” of “apostles” in both Ephesians 4:11 and 1 Corinthians 12:28 to be a gift of certain people. That is, I do not understand either verse to be referring to a “skill set” of apostleship, but to certain men who were given to the church as The Apostles.

It seems to me that, in the passage cited above, Harvey concedes that the gift of Apostle has ceased, but then wants to say that something similar to it continues. But if that’s what the gift means, we might all be continuationists!

But we’re not really continuationist on this point. The real continuationists are those who conduct themselves as though the gift of Apostle hasn’t ceased, and there are at least two groups who behave as though it does: Roman Catholics and Mormons. For the Roman Catholics, tradition and the Pope’s ex cathedra statements are as authoritative as Scripture. The Mormons also claim to have new revelation that is on the level of Scripture.

It seems to me that any group that holds to a closed canon thinks that the gift of Apostle has ceased (I have argued the same point regarding prophecy here). Those who think the canon is closed and call themselves “charismatic/continuationist” on this point can only do so because they have redefined the terms.

Perhaps an analogy would be helpful here. I think this would be like me re-defining what it means to be an Arminian and then claiming to be one–after all, I do think that people have free will! Let me put it in a way that corresponds with Harvey’s statement above: “While we agree that free will as the Arminian typically understands it does not exist, let us not hastily extrapolate that there is no such thing as free will of any kind.”

Would it work for me to announce, “Therefore, I believe in free will, and I will call myself an Arminian.” Is this helpful in the discussion? Wouldn’t a real Arminian object to the way that I have co-opted their language?

So it seems to me that everyone who thinks that there are no more Apostles like Peter and Paul thinks that at least one spiritual gift has ceased. It seems, then, that this discussion is simply over the degree of cessationism that we hold, because anyone who holds that there is no one in the church today with the same kind of authority possessed by Peter and Paul believes that the gift of Apostle has ceased. In conclusion, it appears to be the case that, at least as it regards the gift of Apostleship, all protestants are really cessationists. If they are not, they can, in principle, add to the New Testament.

One final tongue in cheek comment: if we had an apostle or a genuine prophet today, wouldn’t it be possible to settle some of the thorny issues that divide protestant Christians into denominations? For instance, wouldn’t an Apostle or a Prophet be able to tell those paedo-baptists to quit sprinkling their babies and join up with the Baptists!?

A Possible Defeater

If I wanted to maintain the continuationist position, I would argue that the term “Apostles” cannot be limited to this “closed circle of men” (the twelve minus Judas plus Matthias, Paul, Barnabas, James, and maybe Jude) described in the New Testament. One text (which my friend Denny Burk pointed out to me) that might open up the circle of The Apostles is 1 Corinthians 15:7, where after saying that Jesus appeared to the twelve in 15:5, Paul says that Jesus appeared to James and “all the apostles.” This text could be taken to mean that “The Apostles” refers to a broader group than those named above. Incidentally, those who think that Junia is both female and an Apostle (Rom 16:7) also think there are more apostles than those I have named.

Answering the Defeater

I think it likely that Paul mentions the twelve in 1 Corinthians 15:5 and then mentions “all the apostles” in 15:7 because The Apostles is a broader group than merely the twelve. One member of this broader group has been named in the previous phrase in 15:7, James. I am inclined to think that the reference to “all the apostles” in 1 Corinthians 15:7 is a reference to all those who make up this group of fifteen or sixteen men (the twelve including Matthias, James, Jude?, Barnabas, and according to 1 Corinthians 15:8, Paul). I think that Paul is saying that Jesus the Risen Lord appeared to them and commissioned them.

With D. A. Carson, I think that The Apostles are a closed circle and that when those men died the foundation of the church had been laid and the gift of Apostle ceased.