The quest for illegitimate certainty

I like certainty. God likes certainty too, and has told us lots of things so that we can be certain of them. Of that, I am certain!

On the other hand, though, there are things that God hasn't told us. Some of them are on topics that will cut "close to home", having a significant impact on us in some way or other. They may touch upon important issues of theology and consequent practice.

Some people find this difficult to cope with, and as such are drawn towards simple solutions. The problem is, the simple solutions tend not to have sufficient reason for people who love God with all their minds to be able to say "God has said this" rather than just "this might be true, but it remains obscure because the revelation on it is partial and fragmentary". As such, it's actually wrong to say "this is revealed by God as true", even if the thing actually does turn out to be true: because our belief is not justified. We are giving false testimony; we are saying God has said what he has not, which is bad just as denying what God has said is bad.

Of course, in any particular example I give, it'll be something that some will find controversial. That's the nature of things. One man has a deeper understanding and sees things that are there, though subtle, because of prolonged, careful study and thought; another has a drive to believe that something is true without adequate grounds, and takes up beliefs on flimsy grounds merely because he likes them - or, worse, because his false certainty makes him look authoritative and clever, ahead of others, and thus more able to draw followers after himself. Which is which? That takes time and effort to work through, and even then we might not be sure.

So, let me annoy everyone (though they're not reading, so I'll get away with it) by giving enough examples to do so:

• When will the end be? We haven't been told.
• Has my young child become one of God's people? I'd really like them to be.... a doctrine like paedobaptism would be really comforting there. (Except that having an "inner ring" and "outer ring" then brings back the same problem, because being baptised in historical Reformed theology doesn't mean you're in the "inner ring" - so then people are pushed onto even more aberrant theologies like the Federal Vision and paedocommunion). (Don't misunderstand me: I do believe young children can respond to the gospel, with visible consequences in their lives. But that's quite different to saying that we will always or even, at certain ages, usually or likely know the answer to the question posed).
• When my baby or small child died, are they guaranteed salvation? (Even if you think the Bible does say "yes" to this question - I am of John Bunyan's view that where the Bible has no voice, we have no ears, but can rest content that God is astonishingly merciful and makes no mistakes - then you still can't tell anyone at what age the Bible says a child passes to an "age of responsibility").
• What proportion will be saved? (We are told that they will constitute a great absolute number; but concerning relative proportions, we are not told directly, though the imagery we are given of God's true people throughout Scripture at various times invariably pictures a remnant seed - for example, the ark, strangers and exiles, the ubiquity of sufferings before glory in discipleship, etc.).
• Is there a single best manuscript (or best manuscript family, or procedure for identifying infallibly the best reading at every point) for the Scriptures? People can speak about "the preserved text", but this begs the question, since if all the variants we have to discuss hadn't been preserved, we wouldn't have to discuss them! So much easier to boil it down to a nice, simple rule that removes ambiguity (except if you ask difficult questions, which then pushes people even further into utter absurdity, like the alleged infallibility of the King James translation).
• What would all the laws of an ideal Christian nation look like? What percentage will all the taxes be, and which heretics will be executed? (There is no such thing; you question has no meaning; none of them).
• What is the one true procedure that I should carry out for disciplining my children, dealing with a straying wife, church member, or whatever, a set of rules I can apply in all situations to know I did the right thing? What is the one proper way of educating my children to make sure that I brought them up in the fear of the Lord?

The sorts of people drawn towards seeking more certainty than God has provided may be tempted to respond to some of the above with false dichotomies. "Are you saying anything goes? We should have no convictions? God hasn't said anything? Everything's relative, then?". Well, to answer that: no; no; no; no it isn't.

Life is complicated. And since it's not a simulation and we don't get to rewind after seeing the consequences of our decisions, and since procrastinating is also an action we are responsible for, we have to make choices, and learn from them: hopefully, we will mature through reflecting upon them.

The New Testament does have some people in it who couldn't cope with complexity, and whose way of looking at God and his Word led them to try to tie everything down precisely. And of course, when cases came up outside of their very neat rules, things went wrong. (A contemporary example of that that springs to mind is when churches' rigid, one-sided understandings of martial submission and when the Bible allows separation leads them to tell abused wives and children that they have a duty to keep living with their abuser, and then begins to disciple them if they don't). Who were those people? The Pharisees. They tithed mint and herbs... but overlooked the weightier matters of justice, mercy and the love of God. They knew all the details: but unfortunately mainly the ones they'd invented for themselves.

In the mindest I'm thinking of and warning against here, there's a lot of fear. "David, if you speak that way, you've begun a journey; soon you'll be questioning the Bible, then you'll be affirming sexual depravity, and then the year after you'll be an atheist and have announced your new identity is as Deidre!" But this kind of thing is to say: we must hold on to our illegitimate certainties, because admitting "I don't know, but we can trust God and seek to honour him with what we do have" is too dangerous. Trusting God is not actually dangerous, though, when it is trusting God. God is able to take care of us when we hold onto what he's revealed whilst also confessing that we're also in the dark about other things. What is it to walk by faith, after all, if there is no darkness that matters? 

Some people do claim to be ignorant of things God has actually revealed; but claiming to know things that God hasn't revealed isn't a better alternative. I really don't see where God told us when the end will be, that all babies (or all babies of at least one Christian parent, or is it grandparent, or is it great-grandparent?) go to heaven if they die young, that God has told us that a flat tax of 20% (or is it 23% or 26%) is the ideal tax rate, that all valid manuscript readings of the Bible are found exclusively in the bundle of manuscripts that Erasmus had (or is it the Majority tradition?), that God has promised that 100% of my children will be saved if I'm faithful enough (not even father-of-the-faithful Abraham had that), or (as a friend told me this week - really!) that we should have no qualms about baptising any 4-year old who says that they love Jesus), or any such. It's not in the Bible, so I don't have to believe it. If I do chose to believe something might be possible, or even probable, then that's still all. But if I make it a significant plank of my faith or practice, then to the extent that I do that, I'm actually following a man-made idol, rather than walking in the faith that should characterise the sons and daughters of pilgrim Abraham.

It seems to me that God deliberately, intentionally gives us unavoidable complexity. It's part of his call to trust him in darkness or partial darkness. He gives us things we find difficult to cope with and that go beyond what we can see: not just in every-day life, but in doctrinal questions too. At some point a pastor will preach through John's gospel. What exactly should he say about the passage about the woman caught in adultery? (Do read the article to understand the situation and possibilities. If you have a firm conviction either way, which one of the possibilities in the article are you in, precisely?).

Personally I'm comfortable with the idea that even though we can't show that it was known to anyone before the 5th century, and even though it has numerous features indicating very strongly that it has a separate origin from the rest of the gospel, yet we can trust God's providence (though on the other hand, there is also his providence in making it known to us that this passage isn't terribly well attested), and inspiration isn't the same idea as "we can name which apostle wrote every passage, and no passage ever had an inspired editor" (for it is evident in the Pentateuch that later editors wrote some things, which Jesus and the apostles accepted as Scripture - and hence we thus know that those editors were divinely inspired; so, super-intending divine inspiration does not mean believing that the final book was written at a single sitting by a single person). So, I do not see the passage as definitely non-inspired. However, uncertainty remains, because I don't hold to any doctrine that says that the church in any one particular year or Bible translation must have got everything right. I could be wrong; a mistake could have been made in my weighing up of the data, or perhaps indeed I don't have enough data to be able to know even after weighing it all up. It might, after all, not be inspired. God is providentially super-intending history, and it's that supervision that has led to the present-day complexity that leaves us with issues like this one (or if you don't agree on this one, there are many others with all kinds of different features) where we can't truthfully say "I know, for God has revealed it" - even though the thing itself is important.

Excessive certainty is not a sign of spiritual maturity, but the opposite, spiritual immaturity. And this spiritual immaturity can go with being highly educated and confident too, as history proves repeatedly. Again, don't misunderstand me. If I were saying that the list of issues I've given above is definitely the one true list of debatable issues, then I'd be making the same mistake myself. What I am saying is that here is a tendency and temptation, to be aware of in ourselves - and to be aware of in others, if we want to be discerning about healthy and unhealthy spiritual influences upon us. Unfounded dogmatism is not a virtue, it is a fault. Admitting to not knowing may indeed be "a sign of weakness"; but if you're a disciple of Christ rather than aspiring to be Nietzsche's Übermensch (super-man) , that's a good thing, not a bad.

Why we serve

I don't know if you've had cause to browse lists of job advertisements lately. How does this one take your fancy? "For I will show him how many things he must suffer for my name’s sake." (Acts 9:16).

That, of course, is the apostle Paul. "I affirm, by the boasting in you which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily", he wrote to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 15:32). "For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So then death is working in us, but life in you." (2 Corinthians 4:11-12).

That was Paul's service. He was a disciple of Jesus Christ, the cross-bearer. Jesus taught that if anyone wishes to be his disciple, then he must take up his cross - to die to self - daily. Cross-bearing is not a special event in the Christian life: it is the Christian life. The Christian says "today, I choose to give away my life for others, for Jesus' sake". Ship-wrecked, stoned, naked, hungry, in constant danger, exhausted, beaten, imprisoned for years, etc.: this was the life Paul chose. Death worked in him: but what glorious life has worked in so many others, because of the choice he made.

I was touched by this in reading Acts 13 this morning:

"⁵⁰ But the Jews stirred up the devout and prominent women and the chief men of the city, raised up persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and expelled them from their region. "

There it is: more death. Expelled from the reason. The great ones of the region against them, and they had to leave and go elsewhere. But what about two lines later?

⁵² And the disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit.

Ah. That's why we serve.  That's why we choose, each day, to give away our lives. Death works in us: but life in you. Lord, it's hard, it's very hard. But, it's not the hard life of living still for self: that's the other sort of death. The sort without any resurrection in it: just barren death, leading to eternal death. We who take up the cross see Jesus, the risen one. After the cross, there was the resurrection. And we know as well that one day we'll be where he is. Death worked in him: and because of that, life works in us too. 

Infant baptism requires two separable doctrines of descent in the Old Testament

The ground covered so far 

Recently (essay, follow-up), I've been examining the Reformed (covenant) argument for paedobaptism, and conclusions from the claim that the New Testament is silent about the revocation of covenant membership for the infants of believers, when that is a subject that we would have expected to generate controversy and debate.

I've argued that the claim itself is incorrect. The New Testament contains numerous passages, self-consciously controversial, which directly contradict an expectation that under the New Covenant relationship to the Messiah can or would pass by hereditary descent.

The reason why paedobaptists overlook these passages (for they do overlook them, generally not including them for discussion at all in their analyses of relevant material in their arguments) is because of how they define how the debate ought to, according to their presuppositions, be carried out. Because the debate is not carried out in that way, thus they effectively define these passages out of existence. Specifically, they require the passages to be explicitly framed in terms of one-generational descent from covenant members (from believers) to their infants; passages discussing physical descent from Abraham are overlooked. They assume that the Old Testament's "infant inclusion" is in in terms (if we speak in terms of primary concepts, i.e. the self-conscious focus of the subject) of "the infants of covenant members" rather than in terms of "descendants of Abraham". Because they do not find such passages, they then assert that this is because the concept which they find in the Old Testament has carried over, unaltered, uncontroversial, universally accepted.

Two separate concepts? 

Noting and describing this helps us to shed further light on the precise nature of the paedobaptist error. The paedobaptist - intentionally or not, consciously or not - has asserted that the Old Testament has two separable teachings about covenant descent. That is to say: for the paedobaptist, in effect (i.e. whether he explains or even realises this or not), in the Old Testament the patrilinear descendants of Abraham via Jacob are covenant members by virtue of that descent; but also the infant offspring (at the first generation) of covenant members are also covenant members. You may be thinking "isn't this precisely the same group of people?" Yes, it is (we bracket proselytes, who are treated as de facto descendants of Abraham). And that is precisely the problem.

So: when we come to the New Testament, we have the various passages which intentionally, directly and explicitly deny that those of Jewish descent are ipso facto members of the New Covenant, the great renewal and fulfilment effected by the Messiah. These are the passages I discuss in my essay. John the Baptist, Jesus, Paul: they all directly deny that mere Jewish descent is enough to qualify you as a member of the New Covenant: you must have faith in Christ to be a child of Abraham. You must be born again. Reformed paedobaptists are aware of these passages; they read them, they understand them, and they agree with what I just said.

What they don't do, however, is allow that the same passages have any relevance to the status of the infant offspring of believers (whether Jew or Gentile). They will say things like "such passages are discussing adults, who are developmentally capable of faith in Christ; infants are not in view; thus they have nothing to say about infants, to whom a separate category of entitlement applies". (Or there are a few who will instead argue that we are taught to, perhaps presumptively if not actually, believe that infants of Christians actually have saving faith, in some prototypical form - but that is problematic when the claimant has also conceded contradictory claims about the New Testament's silence - which, after all, is the question we are responding to; it also is a doctrine that calls for wholesale revision of the Reformed doctrine of what saving faith is).

The implications of this claim, this denial of relevance, is that Jewish descent and descent as an infant from a covenant member, are two separable concepts. They are so separable that one can be entirely, explicitly abolished (via Messianic fulfilment, if we wish to be precise!), whereas the other can carry on, entirely untouched, not having even been mentioned or in anyone's mind because it was so uncontroversial. And yet, as we have already noticed, the people affected up until this point were entirely the same group of people. The infants of Israelites were Israelites. 

The thing to notice here is that the claim of "uncontroversial and complete continuity" relies upon this separation. In turn, then, this relies upon this separation, this conceptual distinction, being actually taught in the Old Testament. It cannot be argued that this separation is actually taught in the New Testament, because the claim is of perfect continuity supported by complete New Testament silence. So, the Old Testament must give us passages in which it explains that infant covenant membership has a two-fold aspect; one is from Abrahamic descent, the other is from descent from one's immediate parents, and that these two are separate claims such that one can remain whilst the other falls away.

An unreasonable demand 

It is quite evident, of course, that this demand is ludicrous and absurd. A false distinction has been introduced. A splitting of a single concept into two which has no real basis in the relevant Scriptures has been made. The two concepts are only one. Thus, when one is changed, fulfilled or abolished in whatever, then so is the other. The denial that membership by descent in the nation of Israel means participation in the Messiah under the New Covenant is the same thing as denial that the infant children of covenant members are already covenant members by virtue of their descent. The latter way of putting things, focussing on infants and parents is, as I argued in my essay, simply a choice of focus made, one which comes naturally to post-Industrial Revolution Westerners whose own primary "clan" focus is dominated by the nuclear family. But Israelites did not have the same narrowness of focus, and the Old Testament Scriptures do not teach that covenant descent has this corresponding bifurcation. There is no separable, separate "descended from Abraham" as well as "descended from my covenant parents"; no dual covenantal status of "I am a legitimate Israelite - but also a member of this nuclear family of legitimate Israelites".

We see this with clarity when we remember (as touched upon in the essay) that there was never any denial that the Jews, even after the resurrection and ascension of Christ, were under the Old Covenant. Pharisees and unbelieving Jews: those who either explicitly rejected Christ, or who at least had not yet believed in him, are spoken of as (Old) covenant members. The repudiation of the covenant, its annulment by God (together with the threatened Deuteronomic curses), is not until AD70, when the Romans come and destroy Jerusalem and the temple. Nowhere prior to that is there any claim that the Jews were not children of Abraham under the terms of the Old Covenant.

So:

• Acts 13:26 - "Men and brethren, sons of the family of Abraham, and those among you who fear God, to you the word of this salvation has been sent." Here, Paul affirms to unbelieving and not-yet-believing Jews to whom he is explaining the gospel for the first time, that they are sons in Abraham's family. He does not, and cannot, mean that he is affirming that they all have faith. And neither can he be affirming that they are all infants, for plainly his address assumes an adult audience. Though the New Covenant was already in force, these adults, independently of their actual belief in Jesus as the Messiah at this point, were the sons of Abraham (under the terms of the Old Covenant).
• 2 Corinthians 11:22 - "Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they the seed of Abraham? So am I." Paul, of course, is a true son of Abraham, as the New Covenant bifurcation of this concept was well underway by the time that he wrote. Yet he affirms that the false teachers, the false apostles, the Judaizers, if any of them had a claim to be Hebrews, Israelites, seed of Abraham - so did he. It is nowhere suggested that he believed none of them actually did. 
• “The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. Therefore whatever they tell you to observe, that observe and do," - Matthew 23:2-3. There is no suggestion that these adult Pharisees, though enemies of God's Son, had manifested a lack of faith in the Messiah that meant that they could or should be excommunicated from the nation of Israel. That would be to back-port New Covenant aspects into the Old Covenant.
• Romans 9:4 - "who are Israelites, to whom pertain the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, and the promises". The unbelieving Jews, as Paul wrote, possessed these things, in the present tense. Paul has made the distinction between them and true Jews (many times) - but he never suggests that they should also be considered as already excommunicated from the Old Covenant.

Anticipating a response 

I expect that in response to these points, a paedobaptist might make true, but actually irrelevant, observations like "there was an overlap of the covenants". Of course there was - who denied it, because I was affirming it? That is not the salient point in the observations above. The key point is that Old Covenant membership explicitly did not work along the lines of "you can join by virtue of being an infant born within the covenant, but to remain in, you must have faith". Adults, lacking faith, were members. If the paedobaptist wants to distinguish between saving faith and some form of "implicit" faith, then this opens up even more problems: should such adults, including ones who explicitly reject Jesus as the Messiah, be New Covenant church members, as they were in the Old? I don't think that paedobaptists have really thought their doctrine of "strict covenant continuity" through.

Conclusion

The Old Testament did not teach two separable-but-coinciding routes into covenant membership for the same group of people, such that the New Testament can explicitly repudiate one route, and leave the other completely undiscussed, enjoying perfect continuity, paving the way to infant baptism. Again we see that the paedobaptist demand for an explanation of the New Testament's "silence" is one based upon his own imported and unjustifiable assumptions. There is no "strict continuity", because the conceptual furniture of Reformed paedobaptism does not exist in the Old Testament any more than it does in the New. The "silence" is entirely a product of making unwarranted demands that the New Testament be written in terms of this furniture. It is silent about such things, precisely because the Old Testament also knew nothing about them. The implied split is not there in either Testament. 

Under the Old Covenant, the seed of Abraham according to fleshly descent was circumcised; under the New, his children according to the second birth which manifests by repentance and faith in Christ are baptised. There are, in fact, two separable descents. Some are born of the flesh, only - and some also of the Spirit. This is taught in both Testaments. But this in no way maps onto "patrilinear descent to any number of generations (through Jacob)" and "physical descent at one generation if your parents have saving faith". That is a chimera, a confusion, faithful to neither Testament, mixing external foreshadowing and Messianic fulfilment up into a mass that is neither one nor the other.

Labels and generalisations

Once a label begins to mean everything, it also has begun to mean nothing. At the heart of useful, iron-sharpening-iron debate is clear definitions, leading to clarified understanding. Light is shed - borders and boundaries are seen. Conversely, at the heart of empty gibbering is noises with little distinct meaning. Words and labels that don't help to clarify and make distinctions because they are not well-defined and understood in the same way across the discussions.

I suggest that the term "feminism" has gone this way. As used in the world at large, and in the Bible-believing church, it is widely used to mean everything and nothing. It covers the whole ground in between "I am glad that God made women" to a whole militant, conspiratorial "the point of life is to crush, in every possible sphere, the omnipresent patriarchy, which is the source of all evil" worldview. It is a rallying cry for adherents (of many different things), and a bogey-word to rally on the other side (again, of many different, mutually contradictory things).

I don't say "stop using the word 'feminism'". But I do say that there's no real point in just throwing it out as part of a Tweet or slogan to either rally people for or against your cause. "What feminism has done to us is...", "The problems caused by feminism...", "Feminism has taught us that..." - these are usually the prefixes to some gross sweeping generalisation that clarifies nothing of use, some under-cooked and under-developed lazy thought that is likely just a way for the speaker to signal his tribe and rally support for it. i.e. Not faith seeking understanding, but just preaching to the choir for applause. So, if you want to use the word, then define and clarify what you mean by it. Otherwise, you will say everything and nothing: strong-sounding words though also entirely deniable ones because you actually didn't mean that when you said "feminism" or "feminist". Clarify, and say "the type of feminism which believes....", or somesuch.

Other related terms have gone or are going the same way. "Patriarchy" seems to have suffered this fate from the moment that it began to appear in academic debate around 1970. Attempts to re-appropriate it in a theological sense in recent years seem to be doing no better, as it apparently can mean anything from "our particular tribe of Internet theo-bros with all 10,000 of their specific, detailed views on absolutely everything pertaining to male-female interactions" right down to a minimal "the Bible teaches that men should take on the responsibility of leadership within households and churches". "Complementarianism" can now be either "thin" or "thick" (and the boundaries between "thick" complementarianism and patriarchy are not clear).

Again, don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that there aren't people who are working hard to carefully define, debate and defend what they mean, or that these words themselves are somehow toxic. What I am saying is: beware of those who just throw out words and sweeping generalisations to signal their tribe and draw followers after themselves. It's not a useful activity; it is a harmful one. It does not indicate depth of thought and godly sincerity; it's a short-cut that superficially looks good on the outside. Proper study of God's word and the issues it raises cannot be carried out through chanting ambiguous slogans. The first question is always "and how shall we define the term being used, such-and-such...?."

Infant baptism and anachronistic versions of "continuity"

This is a short follow-up to my post of a few days ago.

There I presented a lengthy argument. But now let me instead briefly summarise the main arguments in succinct form, "that he who runneth may read it". The two paragraph version (omitting lots of supporting and side arguments).

The Reformed paedobaptist, quite correctly, notes that the New Testament has a complete absence of argument, debate or teaching about modifications to arrangements for children of believers being part of God's covenant. Quite incorrectly, he concludes from this resounding silence that no changes have been made and that thus the Old Testament arrangement of inclusion remains, uncontroversial in everyone's eyes.

The significant errors here begin with the idea that the Old Testament itself focussed as the significant unit upon "believers and their children". It did not. This is an anachronistic back-porting of something related to, but subtly and importantly different to the real concept of "Abraham and his seed". In the Old Testament, Abraham and his seed received the promises and (the male seed) were circumcised as a sign and seal of this. Once we recognise this, we then note that the New Testament has many and frequent teaching sections (gospels and epistles) in which controversial change is announced and explained. There is a new identification of who Abraham and his seed are - one which cuts out many who before were included, and brings in, even to dominate, many who previously were far off. The New Covenant cuts across family lines, and Abraham's family is constituted around being born again, born from above; those who have faith are the children of Abraham. There is no "Abraham and his children - and their offspring too". The concept of "believers (Abraham's children) and also their seed" is not faithful to either Testament; it is anachronistic in both ages, over-emphasising New Testament distinctives in the Old Covenant era, and retaining fulfilled Old Testament scaffolding during the New. Paul, most directly, addresses the question of the distinction between Abraham's seed and his children in Romans 9, showing that right at the beginning God, intentionally, made it clear that automatic inheritance via bodily descent has never been a permanent part of God's plan, under-cutting the Reformed paedobaptist assertion of uninterrupted continuity at a stroke, in the first and second generations.

So, quite simply, there is an entire silence about the controversy that Reformed paedobaptists demand to be addressed in the New Testament because their demand is unreasonable. They wish the apostles to announce a development in a concept that is different in important ways from the actual Old Testament concept, and hence an unfair and invalid demand.

Beware of content machines

Some pastors seem to believe they are called to be content machines. They must output content - podcasts, tweets, blog posts, videos, etc., with their "hot takes" on everything from politics to history to theology to cultural analysis, several times a week.

I see no good reason for this. God's purpose in giving us the body of Christ is to teach us to rely on eachother. And he has deliberately distributed his gifts widely and in ways that always confound our neat, pre-determined patterns, in order to humble us. Anyone who tries to do everything, and dominate his followers' lives so that they get all or a large quantity of their input and ways of thinking from him, is harming his hearers and contradicting God's plan for the church.

One conceit that pervades our race is the idea that we can ignore the fact that we are creatures. I'm quite familiar with this. Do more! Go further! Outstrip the others! (It's hard to get away from having this drilled into you for years at school. Every Monday morning assembly: commendations and rewards for those who won, achieved, got prizes.... I'm very grateful for all things my school did equip me with, but it takes longer to untangle you get taught without them ever being explained or defended. Let us all do the best we can with the means we can - but let us never measure ourselves or others by the resulting rankings).

The fact is, though, that God puts those limits on us for our good. We must sleep, and thus we must lay down our heads each night and be completely out of control, out of awareness, as good as out of this world. All must, by faith and prayer, be left with God. Each Sabbath day too, we must cease (which is what "Sabbath" means) - for our own good. It's a gift of God's kindness, and reminds us every week, that we don't need to try to be in control. And then there will be times of rest and retreat - either  planned, or enforced by the simple laws of our finite biology, catching up with us one way or the other. These things are actually helps: rather than give someone our own opinion on everything, we can instead point him or her to someone who's been gifted and had the time to go further than we have, and they can learn from them.

Some pastors are very fine scholars. And some people are just generally amazing in what they can do. However - the very strong likelihood is that any pastor who is trying to be an omni-present "content machine" who virtually or actually presents himself as an oracle on all things likely has both a problem in himself, and gets a lot of things wrong which you'd be able to detect easily enough if you listened and read more widely. Deep study and reflection, pastoring a church, and producing a fast-paced stream of useful output, are three activities which are extremely difficult to all do in the same life-time, much less all at the same time. 

There's no real reason to try it, since it contradicts God's purpose and is going to harm the hearers. There will, though, always be plenty of people trying it. Even the church at Ephesus, planted by an apostle, had to be told "Also from among yourselves men will rise up, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after themselves" (Acts 20:30). Men are always trying to draw away followers after themselves. How aware they are of what they're doing may vary much, self-deception being what it is. But trying to be a one-man content machine who leads his followers into thinking that he's a great authority on everything, seems like a pretty good sign of it. For your own spiritual health, beware of content machines. We have 20 centuries of Christian writers and thinkers to learn from. People from all sorts of times and places can humble us and help us with what they've learned. Let the body of Christ minister to you, as God intended.

Why is there no controversy in the New Testament about not baptising infants?

Kip Chelashaw forwards a question for Baptists.

And wouldn't you know, I have answers! 

Not short ones, but I thought it a good question which deserves a systematic response.... and so here you go: https://david.dw-perspective.org.uk/da/index.php/a-question-for-baptists-answered/

Moving from the text to the sermon: preaching from Ecclesiastes

Some years later than I intended, I have added my Master dissertation (MTh) on Ecclesiastes to the "Writings" page of my website. I hope it will be useful to someone.

Masters dissertations aren't meant to be casual reading. But if you're interested, the title is "From text to sermon: A comparative study of two evangelical approaches to the interpretation and contemporary application of the book of Ecclesiastes". Below follows the abstract.  In brief, it is about how we read Ecclesiastes, and then how we apply and preach it in the church today, with understanding and confidence (and without contradicting ourselves by just mixing together second-hand ideas that don't actually blend!). It discusses this by using two contrasting commentaries to show and evaluate the different options.

Abstract

This study examines the routes from the text of the book of Ecclesiastes to applications to a contemporary Christian audience, for an evangelical preacher or teacher. This examination is carried out via interaction with two specific commentators. These are Tremper Longman III and Iain Provan. 

The major interpretative issues which will influence the application process are identified and analysed. As well as issues in reading Ecclesiastes commonly discussed by critical scholarship such as its structure, the identity, outlooks and relationships of the speaker or speakers within the books, the meaning of hebel, the relationship between “optimistic” and “pessimistic” passages, the question of multiple levels of context is identified as a crucial one. In this regard, the narrative context of the account of creation and fall is identified as especially important. The question of the author's attitude to Israel's narrative has some significance for interpretation despite Ecclesiastes' lack of explicit focus upon it. Ecclesiastes' canonical context is found to generate applications which are not part of the outlook of the original author's discussion. 

It is found that the effect of the canonical context is that a wide variety of interpretations of Qohelet's thought will result in similar applications of the book as a whole, though the balance of emphasis between different kinds of applications may differ. This conclusion is well illustrated by Longman and Provan. Furthermore, it is argued that the original author's discussion is deliberately narrowly focussed, and as a consequence that such applications are legitimate. 

Overall, it is believed that the analysis and distinctions in this study will help the development both of a deeper understanding and of a greater confidence in applying this ancient book to contemporary hearers. 

People who want to live their dreams cannot be Jesus' disciples

 These are very challenging words from the mouth of God's Son, recorded in Luke 14:25-33:

²⁵ Now great multitudes went with Him. And He turned and said to them, ²⁶ “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple. ²⁷ And whoever does not bear his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple. ²⁸ For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it— ²⁹ lest, after he has laid the foundation, and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, ³⁰ saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish’? ³¹ Or what king, going to make war against another king, does not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? ³² Or else, while the other is still a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks conditions of peace. ³³ So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be My disciple.

Note that Jesus is not talking about how to advance to a higher level of discipleship. He is not giving tips on growing as disciples, upon improving and maturing. He is talking about an absolute requirement to be a disciple at all. Those who fail this test are not simply those who are inferior disciples, or immature disciples; according to Jesus, they are just not disciples. If Jesus is not supreme above those with the greatest claim upon your love and devotion, be it parents, be it the one to you are united in the marriage union where God puts two together (and let not man part them), be it your own dear offspring: if what they claim from you clashes with what God demands from you (and we are thankful that in the ordinary paths of daily  duty, the  two usually coincide), then you cannot put any other claim above that of Jesus.

You cannot be his disciples unless you live the crucified life, taking the beams of wood to the place of death so that your own  desires for pleasure, for fame, for wealth, for success, for achievement, for pre-eminence, for recognition, for comfort, and whatever else, are put to a brutal and shameful death, and instead Jesus is served. Unless you forsake all that you have, and give it to Jesus, then you cannot be his disciple. You cannot gain your life unless you first give it away.

How quick we are to want to clarify this, and explain what it "really" means - which so often in effect seems to mean turning it on its head, and explaining that Jesus was wrong, and that we can seek and prioritise all of these things. How strong is the desire to domesticate and tame what Jesus has proclaimed, so that following him can be reduced to a nice orderly package, a collection of well-constructed and striking doctrines that we nod our heads to, whilst remembering that there are in fact  many ways to have the best of both worlds, to have our cake and eat it after all. How readily, in the service of having orderly churches, orderly programmes, orderly routines  that allow Christianity and its outward institutions to flourish peacefully in society, we reduce all that Jesus said with the caveat "but of course, if your pattern of life is something else, then Jesus is full of grace and will understand."

Jesus will understand? Will he? What do we mean by that? Why would we want to find out the answers to those questions anyway? Jesus tells us plainly, in advance, several times that there are many who are going to be surprised to hear the fearful words one day "I never knew you". 

The happiest man we know in the Bible after Jesus was the apostle Paul. As he tells us in Philippians, he had learned the secret of contentment in every situation. To him, to rejoice in the Lord was not an idea to be admired, but the reality of his experience. He lived with joyful hope, looking for the coming of his Lord. And he also said, 1 Corinthians 15:31, "I die daily".  Those two things aren't contradictions. They're the same thing. The person who dies daily to self, rises also with Christ.

If your Christianity is respectable and safe, a gentle routine, beautiful, elegant ideas and comfortable familiarity, then that's very sad. If you're building a church that looks beautiful to the world, polished music, finely nuanced doctrines, so orderly, but without the daily struggles of crucified people who can say they've gone through and are going through the war with the flesh as they again and again give away their own lives for the sake of Christ, then that's a sorry thing. You need to be converted. Then you can know what Paul meant when he said (Galatians 2:20) "I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me." If you are not yet crucified with Christ, and are not then responding by taking up your cross daily, then you are not yet Jesus' disciple; but if you'll go to Calvary with him, you can be.

If the Western church is full of disciples with Jesus, then why are there such a small proportion of its adherents whose lives resemble what Jesus said was fundamental to even being a disciple at all? Why does "my aim as a Christian is to give my life away, so that others can receive life" characterise us so little? Brothers and sisters, let us not take our standards from what passes as respectable around us. Let us listen to what Jesus actually said, and then do it.

Sell your possessions

From my Bible reading this morning in Luke 12: 

12:29 “And do not seek what you should eat or what you should drink, nor have an anxious mind. 30 For all these things the nations of the world seek after, and your Father knows that you need these things. 31 But seek the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added to you.

32 “Do not fear, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. 33 Sell what you have and give alms; provide yourselves money bags which do not grow old, a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches nor moth destroys. 34 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. 

That's an interesting clause there in verse 33 which I've highlighted, isn't it? "Sell what you have".

We're accustomed in Western conservative evangelicalism to emphasise thinking about what proportion of "our" income we'll give to the kingdom. The way round this ought to be said, biblically, is thinking what proportion of God's money that he has decided to channel through us will be given directly and immediately to kingdom projects, and what proportion will serve God in other ways, including through our immediate needs. 

But let's leave that aside for now. Here, Jesus didn't speak to us about giving from our income. He spoke about giving from our possessions. He told his disciples to liquidate from their assets, and give specifically from that. He even told us what specifically to do with the liquidated assets.

How often, I wonder, have you or I heard about that? Memory is very unreliable when trying to review a lifetime of hearing, but frankly, I don't ever remember hearing it. I've read it a handful of times (book recommendation). But if I've ever heard it taught in church ministry - well, at the very least, it must have been very rare.

Our temptation is to immediately jump to caveats and questions such as "of course he didn't mean all of them so that you become a beggar yourself, of course some people are still dependants, students, spending other people's money, of course we must be wise, this, that and the other....". This temptation should be resisted. Let's not start with what we're not going to do, and what Jesus did not tell us to do. We might take in what we're not going to do along the way at the appropriate point: but that can never be the departure point.

The Son of God did tell us to do something, and did not clarify, immediately or otherwise, that it was in fact optional. What did he teach, what does the positive response look like for us? Do we actually want to receive the wonderful promise that he attached in the following verses? Or will we be quite content if he eternally chips the promise away into essentially nothing in the way that seems to be the norm for Christians in our setting and culture with his instruction?

The confusing world of BBC morality - "sex workers", or victims of exploitation?

"British soldiers using sex workers in Kenya despite ban, inquiry finds", proclaims the headline. And the piece continues along the same lines:

An investigation by the British army has found that some soldiers stationed at a controversial base in Kenya continue to use sex workers despite being banned from doing so.

Soldiers at the British Army Training Unit Kenya (Batuk) used sex workers "at a low or moderate" level, a report said, adding that more work was needed to stamp out the practice.

In the propaganda of our crazy Western societies, since any sexual activity between  consenting adults can never be immoral (self-determination, expressed most fundamentally in sexual self-expression being the most basic values of post-sexual-revolution thought), it follows, logically, that neither prostituting oneself nor exploiting prostitutes can be fundamentally wrong. The idea that sexual intercourse involves a union which far transcends bodily pleasure, and that our Creator designed it as part of an expression of whole-life-union, in that sense sacred, intimate, private, and impossible to conceive of as a commercial transaction just for sensual pleasure, has been abolished by secular humanists. It is utterly incompatible with their claims about the cosmos.

As such,  following the logic of their views, if bodily sexual pleasure is sold as a commodity, then that is legitimate - and the person selling it is a "sex worker". It's how they choose to earn their living, just like you or I may choose to earn ours by fixing electrics or adding up accounts. It is - that most sacred of things for the modern materialist - a career, and choosing it is a career choice. It is through our career choices that we (in the modern world) are supposed to find our true value and worth, and to prove ourselves as we make our way to discovering and expressing all our potential.

Negatively, then, according to this belief nobody should be stigmatised for their sexual choices; that smells of being an unenlightened Victorian reactionary. However you express yourself is good for you, and don't judge anyone else for expressing themselves otherwise. The only thing to be stigmatised is stigma itself (a position which, of course, cannot be ultimately held on to, since it's arbitrary  - why should only stigma be stigmatised? If no consensual bodily act someone else commits can be deserving of stigma, then why is someone else's expressed opinion be? Just why can words cross these boundaries when acts cannot?).

In this "enlightened" world-view, which the BBC very much approves of and promote, then, prostitutes are not prostitutes (how dare you stigmatise them); they are "sex workers". They are working, and should be allowed to do so without being shamed by reactionaries.

Do you spot the problem here, though? These things supposedly being so, why would any soldiers need to be investigated for employing these "workers"? If that is their chosen field of work, then it is, for one thing, one which cannot actually be worked in without someone else coming along to purchase the product; until purchased, there is no product. Even a baker can bake loaves when nobody buys them, as long as he has enough funds in reserve to keep providing the raw goods. A "sex worker", though, cannot exist at all unless someone else is buying. Until that point, they're merely a would-be sex-worker. Can I be a Formula 1 driver if I've not yet been in a car and done a lap? As such, then, it's only because there are soldiers who are "using" these "sex-workers" that there even are any "sex-workers" to begin with. And why that's a problem, is not explained at this point.

But later, it is.... not by the journalist's chosen framing but in the actual bona fide reportinng:

UK Chief of Defence Staff Gen Sir Roly Walker said in a statement that the army was committed to stopping sexual exploitation by those in its ranks.  ... There is absolutely no place for sexual exploitation and abuse by people in the British Army. It is at complete odds with what it means to be a British soldier. It preys on the vulnerable and benefits those who seek to profit from abuse and exploitation.

Ah. It's not work after all. It's exploitation. It is an abusive activity, with an abuser, and an abused person (who may or may not have consented to her own abuse). The women are not "workers"; they're financially (or physically) desperate people who have gone into prostitution, selling the "permission" to others to exploit them in consequence in order to alleviate their financial desperation. It's something dishonourable, wrong and to which zero tolerance should be applied. A woman's body is not, in fact, a work-place, and even if two adults consent to gross exploitation when one is in a desperate situation, it is still completely wrong; grossly wicked, in fact, at many levels.

Often the woman will have been trafficked; in this case she is more accurately called a "prostituted woman" than a "prostitute". That term can really do in all cases, since it can be understood to cover the cases where she willingly prostituted herself. But in many (most?) cases, she is herself a victim. Terminology of "worker" which suggests choice and agency then tells a lie. To call trafficked people and enslaved people "workers" is like calling a someone who is repeatedly assaulted a "sparring partner", or saying that a shop-keeper who gets burgled every night must presumably in their economics be a communist.

Financial desperation itself does not transform the tragic decision (whether voluntary or under coercion) to prostitute oneself into one of selecting the caerrer of "sex worker", any more than a financially desperate man who is persuaded to join a gang of bandits is now a "redistribution worker". Somewhere there is a line between choice and coercion/exploitation, and we are not always competent to judge - and wherever the line goes, there will be someone fractionally one side, and someone else fractionally the other. Nevertheless, nobody who is selling access to their body is a "sex worker", and calling them such is unhelpful and nonsensical. If a default assumption has to be made, then "prostituted woman" in Kenya in my judgment is likely to cover more cases than any other.

Shame on the BBC. This so-called "sex-positive" vocabulary is nothing of the kind. It is a word-game played by privileged people which covers up serious exploitation and serious depravity, to nobody's gain.

"British soldiers using sex workers", BBC ? No. "British soldiers exploiting prostituted women".

Christian Nationalism: becoming all things to no men

Christian Nationalists appear to believe, in practice, that the truism "in all things (including in the state) God should be obeyed" is a truth that trumps all others, and erases and obliterates all other considerations.

When Christ was on the earth, he was asked by a man (in Luke 12:13-14) to give him assistance with obtaining his rightful inheritance from his brother. Christ asked the man what this concern had to do with him.

When the Corinthian church wrote to Paul about marriage (1 Corinthians 7), amongst the many things Paul had to say, he reminded his readers that "the form of this world is passing away" and on this basis included the exhortation "that from now on even those who have wives should be as though they had none".

Jesus informed Pilate that his kingdom was not of this world (John 18) - one of the major themes of John's gospel is that it is of heaven, and thus is superior. Christians of a theocratic persuasion like to point this out if someone should mis-use the verse to imply that that the church has nothing to say to the world outside; but they seem to miss the corollary that Jesus drew from his own observation: "If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight." Since the kingdom is not of this world, it does not operate in a worldly way.

There are things which belong to Caesar, even though Caesar is a thorough-going pagan, and in this age, the correct response to that  is to render those things to Caesar. The small-print to that does not say, "whilst making clear your contempt for him, and giving him a lecture" (see Romans 13).

The fact that our citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20) does not only affect the future; if affects our outlook on the present too. Paul wrote those words whilst unjustly a prisoner for the gospel's sake. Whilst he did on appropriate occasions call for his rights as a Roman citizen to be honoured, he entirely omitted to make a major, or even a minor, part of his apostolic ministry calling for the crown rights of King Jesus to have the laws altered to be more reflective of biblical law. Why is this fact treated as of no ultimate significance? What do Christian Nationalists know that Paul misunderstood?

When Paul wrote to Timothy, he gave him a word that would be profitable if considered with wisdom: "No one engaged in warfare entangles himself with the affairs of this life, that he may please him who enlisted him as a soldier." If you are called to be a pastor, or gospel worker who in some manner represents the kingdom of God, then you are warned to avoid being "[entangled] with the affairs of this life", on pain of displeasing the one who called you. No one should attempt to do this, even if they consider themselves very wise and astute political pundits.

The Corinthians (1 Corinthians chapter 6) were rebuked for their use of the secular courts. The rebuke did not entail that all such use was automatically ungodly. We must consider the reasons given. The reasons given are that the church is a superior kingdom which transcends those overseen by the ungodly. For the church to ask the ungodly to be our judges is to deny who we are. Christian Nationalists do not ask the ungodly to judge church disputes; but they do, in practice, testify through their actions and allocation of energy and resources that the great drama of this world is centred around who has gained the upper hand in the things of this life. There are the things we should fight over and be known for fighting over.

Paul knew a lot of things, and had the great privilege of being Christ's apostle. He had great spiritual gifts, and had received great revelations (see 2 Corinthians 12). Happily for him and for us, he was also a man who knew what his calling was. He was called to the work of calling, shepherding, teaching and guarding the flock of Christ. To this end, he became "all things to all men". Amongst Jews, though free from Jewish regulations, he lived as if he were a Jew, accepting things that were indifferent to him, so that the focus of his Jewish hearers could be drawn not to things of comparative indifference, but to Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah. Amongst Gentiles, though he was himself a Jew, he lived as if he were a Gentile, so that the focus of his Gentile hearers could not be drawn to the strangeness of Jewish things of indifference,  but to Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah.

If Paul were with us today, he would avoid like the plague being associated with a campaign to have pastors and churches telling law-makers how they should legislate the kingdoms of this world, and telling those kingdoms that they speak on behalf of Christ. He would, as he did when he was with us, be following his Master who, though actually being himself the Son of God and heir of all things, took the form of a humble servant so that sinners might understand how much God loves them.

Christian Nationalism is a prideful and repugnant doctrine which takes the words of men who gave up their rights and became all things to all men so that they might be saved, and instead takes a public stand, demanding our rights (supposedly in the name of Jesus), associating him with a stance and outlook utterly foreign to his actual servant mission and plan. As Christians, we may respectfully present our reasons to our rulers for considering wise and God-pleasing laws. What we may not do is have the church of Jesus Christ known as a place that thinks it should be running the present age, and falsely demanding or implying that this is the church's right or calling. Those who are called to take up the cross and follow Jesus may not also become Christian Nationalists.

The Lord, to be my shepherd

Inverting Psalm 23, some of us have probably seen "If the Lord is not my shepherd", laying out what we do not have, if we do not belong to God through Christ. No doubt you can find it quickly with a search engine.

But what did it cost the Lord Jesus, who is the Good Shepherd, the fulfilment of the promise made several times through various prophets that God himself would come and shepherd his people, to take on that role? What was his own experience, in order that ours might be that of this beautiful Psalm? This question invites us to have a go at the Psalm looking at it along these lines.

1 The Lord Jesus has become my shepherd; he suffered every want.

2 He left behind the green pastures; led into the waters of tumult.

3 His soul made an offering of sin; he was led away as one of the wicked for my sake.

4 Yes, he walked into the tomb, into death itself, and endured every evil; the rod of God's anger struck and no staff guided away, no comfort at his demise.

5 His enemies feasted at his death, as he was taken away from the table; his head was crowned with the thorns, and the cup of suffering overflowed.

6 Bitter hatred and scorn were his lot in life; he came and dwelt in our ruined house, to save us forever.

I'm not sure I've handled all the lines consistently and at the level of scanning there's infinite scope to do better. I hope somebody will! 

What or whom do you love?

Do you love the comfort zone of the Christian church in a world of chaos?

Do you love the beautiful order and comprehensive of Biblical ideas and doctrine?

Or do you love Jesus?

It's quite clear that there are plenty of influential people in the orthodox world of Christianity today who love ideas, at least as much if not more than they love Jesus himself. 

Or at least, if they don't, they have a strange way of going about things in their ministries.

What, then, about I or you?

If our initial reaction is to deny that there's a real difference between these things, then Jesus reminds us otherwise; this problem was there in the first century:

“2 I know your works, your labour, your patience, and that you cannot bear those who are evil. And you have tested those who say they are apostles and are not, and have found them liars; 3 and you have persevered and have patience, and have laboured for My name’s sake and have not become weary. 4 Nevertheless I have this against you, that you have left your first love. 5 Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent and do the first works, or else I will come to you quickly and remove your lampstand from its place—unless you repent." (Revelation 2:2-5)

The blessings of the Christian life, and the beauty of Christian truths are wonderful things. They are, though, simply rays coming from the sun. Jesus himself is infinitely above, and all other true beauty is coming to us from him. So let's admire God revealed to us in Christ first, and then admire what comes from him as part of our admiring of him. Let's love them because they lead us to him. Let's love them because they lead others to him too.

The cessation of the miraculous/charismatic gifts

Recently I was asked to make a presentation upon why we should believe that the miraculous gifts of the apostolic era (especially particular people who were given a spiritual gift of speaking in tongues, or prophesying) ceased.

I've put the slides for my presentation on the "Resources" page of my website, together with a booklet I wrote on the subject in 2007. The presentation proceeds under these four headings:

1️⃣ Today’s “gifts” clearly differ from those in the Bible.
2️⃣ The Bible’s gifts are tied to the age and ministry of the apostles.
3️⃣ Having those gifts today would be against God’s revealed purposes.
4️⃣ Answering objections. 

If you think the arguments have faults or need sharpening, fire away - comments are open!

In praise of United Beach Missions

https://www.ubm.org.uk

Whether you have, or have not, previously come across United Beach Missions ("UBM"), let me commend them to you!

Firstly, it's an organisation in which the purpose is to serve others, and particularly, to serve the lost by reaching them with the gospel. There are many fine Christian organisations in the world, and the work of the Great Commission involves many different tasks. Nevertheless, all armies and nations are especially grateful for those on the front-line. Without the front-line activities, nothing else would or could exist. UBM makes it easy for busy people to get to the front-line, and take part in the work of Jesus Christ, coming and being where lost people are, showing love to them and declaring him to them.

Taking part directly in such work, even if it's just one or two weeks a year, is very good for our souls. Life is full of many responsibilities once you reach the adult world, and faithful servants must be careful to remember the primary and direct purposes that their Master has given to them in their service. The Master has given us many helps in this: the local church, its worship, his word, prayer, the Lord's Day - and these are all things that UBM stands for. Team members are not only given service opportunities, but service opportunity in the context of the local church, worship, teaching, training, fellowship and prayer within the team, and the Lord's Day is honoured.

As such, I find it very much preferable to most Christian camps for teenagers and young people. I don't want to denigrate them: it's surely infinitely preferable to go on a camp where there's teaching in a Christian community setting led by godly people, rather than to spend the time at home gawping at the world's media. And no doubt on all camps there is some measure of service as you do the washing up and clean the camp toilets (though I think some misguided souls have eliminated even these minimal duties). But UBM reflects the fundamental principle of how Jesus taught his disciples (and indeed, what wise people do in pretty much every walk of life): learning by doing. Learning by working alongside the experienced folks who are not simply telling you what should be done, but doing it too, leading by example, encouraging and showing.

Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up, Paul told us in 1 Corinthians 8. It's too easy for one's Christian life to drift into focussing upon comfortably accumulating knowledge at a distance. Alongside the teaching of the church, there are books, conferences, podcasts - all available from our preferred celebrity pastors, and glowingly endorsed by all the big-wigs who inhabit their particular circles to assure us that we're in the right place. But in the end, we may end up resembling the overweight armchair sports pundit who knows everything about his preferred sport, and can explain in detail exactly how the game should have been won, but hasn't done any exercise for years and whose confident proclamations have no beneficial impact on anyone, anywhere. The Christian life turns into an intellectual game, in which the aim is to be more right than others, to stake out our position better than others do. Meanwhile, our actual spiritual muscles atrophy, and we're good for nothing except illustrating the folly of knowing our Master's will but not doing it. (The New Testament tells us directly, many times, that this policy will have disastrous results for us on the final day). Jesus spent his time with needy people, and gave up his life for theirs. The church today has built vast "comfort zones" where Christians can live their whole lives in ease and only rarely come into contact with the lost. In the "secular" West, of course, there are often many barriers to making meaningful contact, and it can take a long time to move from "building bridges" to actually driving something across them. Many give up along the way. UBM makes it easy: it's a straightforward Christian mission (it's there in the title), which is up-front about what it's doing, whilst forcing nobody to be involved in anything they're not comfortable with. Moreover, there are pathways through its associated organisations to keep on serving in various ways, at whatever stage of life.

Another way in which UBM keeps you humble is the other Christians that you'll meet. It is easy for us to become "wise in our own conceits". We have worked out all the details of the Christian life, and are wiser than the ancients, or so we think.... until such ideas are best exposed by reality. There are many Christians with fine knowledge and reputation, who serve little. But at the front-line of service, there are many Christians at all kinds of stages, holding many beliefs we find strange, dubious or flat-out wrong, who love the Lord and are full of zeal to serve him in all sorts of difficult circumstances. They resemble Christ and remind us of him. We are reminded of  what the Spirit of Christ is really like, and led away from the pride that had started to grow, that all the best Christians are found in our own circles and look quite like us and hold our opinions. In fact, we begin to see things differently: there are lots of us who have every advantage, but are going in the wrong direction... but others who, despite many disadvantages, are doing a lot better than us with what they have. God's wisdom, and God's choices of who he uses, humble and correct us. Moreover, by being actually exposed to people who see things differently (and not only exposed to people who already agree with us who describe the beliefs of others), we might find out that in fact we were wrong!

UBM is not perfect; unfortunately every person involved is a son or daughter of Adam. But, it does have a track record of serving on the front lines whilst simultaneously giving people (both young and old) opportunity for evangelistic service, fellowship and growth. May God keep and bless them for many more years to come.

(Footnote: my parents encountered UBM on a beach on a holiday when I was a child and found that in one of God's "coincidences", that the team leader lived in our home town. Later again "coincidentally" meeting the same church in an "in the park" service, we began attending there. Not long after that a visiting evangelist, strongly associated with UBM for many years, came to our church and talked to all the Sunday School classes. That day the Lord saved me through the gospel of Christ which he explained. Over a decade later whilst at university my first UBM team week was led by the same leader as on the original beach; and indeed the visiting evangelist spoke at my first UBM annual reunion).

God wants us for ourselves

God doesn't want us for our talents, our time, our gifts or our energy. He doesn't need any of those things. He is himself eternal, infinite in power, infinite in wisdom and capability. He is himself absolute perfection in himself, not by anything that he does, seeks or finds, but in whom he is. He doesn't need us to be or become anything, because he already is. He is glorious.

And as such, it is not because of anything that he can gain from us that he sent his Son to die for us. It is out of pure love. He does not seek what belongs to us, but he seeks us, ourselves, that he may lavish his love upon us.

Christian service is a wonderful thing; but not because we are giving something to God in order to add to him. He is no Pharaoh, who demands a daily load from us, and is ready to beat us if we do not produce. He is wonderful in himself, and out of his generosity and goodness desires that we partake in his divine life. He saves us so that we might be joined to him, through our union with his Son. God so loved the world, that he gave, and in that giving, takes us to himself. If we see, we will give too: not because a quota of bricks has been demanded from us, but because such a glorious, all-encompassing, all-consuming divine life cannot but overflow in the same way to others: not because we want something out of them, but because the love that is in us, by its very nature, must flow out to them too. That is its nature, because it is God's nature. God loves us, not because of what is in us, but because of what is in him. For that reason, it is a love that cannot fail, no matter how much we do. He did not want us because he reasoned we would never fail. He wanted us so that his life might swallow up and overcome and dissolve all our failures, replacing them with his perfect love.

Stuart Olyott on Money

This is a pithy and precious summary of the Christian believer's attitude to money, as described throughout the New Testament: https://www.knowyourbiblerecordings.org/_files/ugd/6d6075_c5cdf7b33bdb480898a730e0592b6a5b.pdf. Here's a quote:

Unconverted people look on money as something they have earned, which belongs to them, and which they can spend as they like. This is true even of generous people. Unfortunately, when it comes to money, many Christians have an unconverted mindset. Little by little this mindset ruins them, until they are spiritually fit for nothing. 

From: https://www.knowyourbiblerecordings.org/notes-and-articles

Christian Nationalism, and the need for new hearts

As explained previously, I am no fan of "Christian Nationalism" (inasmuch as it's still possible to be for or against a label which increasingly appears to mean something different to each person who uses it. That in turn is a sign of a project that's dominated more by in-house debate rather than useful service of people in need).

It's certainly infinitely superior, for everyone, to have laws that are based on truth than laws based upon lies, and it's a good thing when the One who is the Truth is explicitly named and honoured by those under him. This observation, though, has only the slightest overlap with the Christian Nationalist idea that Christ has called churches in the West to take political power over nations, and that we are now at a stage where we can put such a plan into action.

In fact, such an idea completely contradicts important and central things that the Bible does clearly tell us.

One of the key lessons throughout the Old Testament is the need for a new heart. Without regeneration, we cannot even see the kingdom of God. Man's heart, after the fall, is blind, ignorant and deceitful - to such an extent, that there is no hope for man at all, unless he has a new heart. If the entire earth is washed clean in a cataclysmic judgment, man does not long retain the lessons. If people are scattered and divided across the earth and their languages confused because of man's pride, he soon puts it aside in his thinking. If a ruler's nation suffers plague after plague, he will carry on in his hardness of heart until all his people and even his own household is destroyed, rather than consider the wisdom of truly turning to the LORD.

But, but, what if man was given a perfect law, given directly from the mouth and finger of Almighty God himself? What if the people to whom it was given had seen his great signs and wonders, and been redeemed as slaves and brought into a wonderful inheritance, led there personally by the divine presence? What if his tabernacle were amongst them? What if he gave them peace from their enemies, insofar as they kept his law, giving them perfect freedom to walk in his ways, and brought them trouble only when they turned away from it, so that they would turn back? What if they actually heard his voice speak from the holy mountain? Surely, surely, then, they would be a wise people and walk in his ways forever?

No, they would not; because of their hearts. Only a New Covenant, in which the law is written upon their hearts, inscribed upon their very souls by the Spirit of God directly, can do this. Only by becoming part of this New Covenant can people be changed. Otherwise, they will love evil, and pursue it relentlessly, because it is what they admire and desire.

What, then, do "Christian Nationalists" hope to achieve by calling for laws that are explicitly based upon the Nicene Creed, whose fundamental principle is "Jesus is Lord", etcetera? Is it something more than an Internet parlour game for those apparently without enough other things to do in serving Jesus, or whose main aim is to gain followers after themselves by staking out their positions rather than doing the things Jesus actually told us to be doing? The very best laws, so the biblical narrative intentionally and explicitly teaches us, will not succeed in stopping the people under them from continually turning to rank idolatry. On the contrary, they will spectacularly fail. Even if God himself dwells in your midst, you will become a nation given over to grinding the faces of the poor, the most depraved vices, and open advocacy of what is evil, no matter how good your laws are (though if they are Bible-based, there is also likely to be a good dose of hypocrisy, the kind that God finds even an even worse offence than the above, around too).

So again, what are they hoping to achieve?

From what I can discern, at this point in discussion, a list of either/or fallacies and truths that aren't the pertinent ones to our actual context are likely to be trotted out. "So, you want ungodly laws!" "If you don't want ungodly laws, you're already a Christian Nationalist!" "We're just campaigning for to get rid of ungodly laws, what's wrong with that?" "It's Christ or chaos!" "He is the king of kings!" "You are supporting the secular consensus that is ruining us!", etcetera.

• "So, you want ungodly laws": no, I want godly laws.
• "If you don't want ungodly laws, you're already a Christian Nationalist!": no, the idea of building a "Christian nation" through political campaigning for better laws is a significant error. The Christian nation is the kingdom of God, which you enter through being born again, repentance and faith in Christ. The church is the city on the hill which acts in society as salt and light, but is not called upon to rule over it.
• "We're just campaigning to get rid of laws, what's wrong with that?" That's a classic motte-and-bailey move; Christian Nationalists in their published literature are arguing for vastly more than this.
•  "It's Christ or chaos!" - quite so, but please do not identify Christ with your particular campaign for political power, as that dishonours him and puts a barrier between people and coming to him. For the truth of that, please consult actual real-world experience, not empty theories; I don't think either of us find it convincing if  a Communist says "ah, but it just hasn't been implemented quite correctly yet, and the results would have been entirely the opposite if it had".
•  "He is the king of kings!" - Amen, and please read the New Testament when he has told you is the time when you can reign with him, and stop asking if you can yet now sit at his right or left hand.
•  "You are supporting the secular consensus that is ruining us!" - this is an empty slur. It's as likely to convince me as "you're just a wannabe theocrat who isn't happy unless he's policing the details of everybody else's lives" is to you (unless of course, you actually are).

If someone actually wants to see a nation that more closely reflects God's truth, the thing to do is to work on plans for spreading the gospel, to pray earnestly for God's blessing on those plans, and to put them into action, repeatedly. When I see Christian Nationalists online, their main interest seems to be in staking out their personal positions, drawing the already-converted into their folds, and enlarging their personal reach into more and more existing churches. The very thought of such a thing, in light of the fact that Christ will soon judge us for what we have done with the minas that he left in our hands, ought to make us tremble. Brothers and sisters, let us give ourselves to serving Christ by reaching the needy, and like the plague let us avoid empty talk, especially including empty talk about the law.

Is infant baptism a "natural and inevitable consequence of the fundamental pattern of covenantal integration" ?

 "The fact that identity is constituted in covenant bodies requires that we baptize our babies. Infant baptism is not explicitly taught in Scripture because it is such a natural and inevitable consequence of the fundamental pattern of covenantal integration."

Kip Chelashaw - https://xcancel.com/ChelashawKip/status/1940003362335867137#m

This is a favourite argument of many evangelical Presbyterians. The fundamental reason why, we are told, nothing teaches, requires or alludes to infant baptism in the New Testament is because it's something so integral to everything that a biblically-minded person would already think, that it would be entirely redundant. Not just in keeping with, but "because" it is so "natural and inevitable", it isn't mentioned.

Firstly I'd like to note and bank the true and in honesty unavoidable concession that "Infant baptism is not explicitly taught in Scripture". But is it, as asserted, taught implicitly?

What things does the Bible assume and for that reason not directly state?

I've never yet read an explanation from brethren who hold this belief as to why it is, in their understanding, that the New Testament does frequently and clearly state so many other fundamental beliefs. Infant baptism, we are told, is not taught explicitly because something so important is all-pervasive. But what about other all-pervasive, fundamental truths? Are they not taught explicitly either? Or not taught every often? Quite the opposite....

There is one God; the God of Abraham is the Creator of the world; his blessings are received by grace through faith based upon his own works and not ours; God will judge the world; God deals with people through covenants; the covenants climax and are fulfilled in the coming of the Messiah; etc., etc., etc. Although all of these things are as inherent and integral as you could get, yet, they don't therefore escape mention - on the contrary, they are mentioned early, often, and late, and often again. Of course they are: it was the intended purpose of Christ and the apostles he sent to manifest the truth openly and clearly, so that even a child could grasp the essentials. As wise teachers, dealing with weak, foolish and fallible human beings, Christ and his servants therefore made sure to lay out their teachings clearly and frequently. Moreover, since these things were in many cases being taught to those who were either strangers and foreigners (Gentiles), who were previously bathed in all kinds of wrong understandings, or who even as Israelites had been indoctrinated in very wrong ideas by the Pharisees or others, it was necessary to rewire them at every level.

The idea that because infant baptism is so obvious a teaching to those to whom the apostles wrote, that therefore it is not something that we'd expect them to openly mention, flies in the face of everything they did mention.

Things that the first Bible readers needed explicitly stated for them

I see this idea as something from Presbyterian fantasy-land (do feel free to share with me the things that you think come out of Baptist fantasy-land). Let us look at the actual churches and Christians we find in the New Testament. To the Galatians, the idea that justification was by faith alone apart from the works of the law, had become vague and cloudy; the very doctrine that underpinned their salvation was being twisted and lost. To the Hebrews, it was no longer entirely clear that Christ's coming meant that all the Old Covenant ordinances were annulled and done away with in Christ. To the Corinthians, the fact that our bodies would be raised from the dead, and that Christians should not consort with prostitutes, was something they were losing their grip on and needed strong instruction and exhortation over. And so on, and so on. In the gospels, Jesus must patiently and repeatedly explain to his hearers that God requires mercy, not sacrifice; that the fundamental commandments are of love; that it is no part of God's law that we treat human beings worse than animals; and many other fundamental things that are part of the warp and woof of all the Scriptures to that point. 

But, but, but.... all of these brethren, we are assured, of course never wavered for even a minute in their inevitable and unshakeable understanding that wherever there was a divine covenant, those whose immediate physical parents were covenant members must also be thereby be entitled to that covenant's sign. This was a point, we are solemnly assured, beyond the possibility of anyone's misunderstanding; merely appealing to the idea of a "covenant" was enough to make this perfectly plain. And anyone who doesn't see this just doesn't understand covenants at all. He is still a babe, and the apostles, supposedly, didn't stoop to explaining things necessary for babes.

Is not merely to state these ideas to expose their complete absurdity? The Corinthians, the Galatians, the Hebrews, the first disciples of Jesus, the crowds, etc., suffered from great darkness and prejudice (as is common  across the entire human race and our own personal experience too) on the most fundamental and basic topics of Scripture.... but somehow, all with the marvellous exception that they were fine covenant theologians who were beyond all possibility of error on any of the relevant details and important consequences? Are you being serious?

The fact that infant baptism is nowhere, whether directly or indirectly, alluded to (without painful contortions), is, in reality, a great embarrassment to the paedobaptist case. The fact that, where historically churches have practised it, they have done so on mutually contradictory and incompatible grounds, is equally embarrassing. Which is to say, if the Presbyterian "covenantal" argument were such a clearly Biblical one, then Lutherans, Roman Catholics, etc. would have been glad to take it up and add it to their arsenals. The fact that the Presbyterian argument for paedobaptism has to appeal at its heart (having conceded that there is nothing explicit) to a priori claims is not a strength, but a significant "tell".

You and your seed, according to Scripture

Kip's fundamental error above is not, in fact, in noticing that the covenant is "to you and your children"; he is quite correct to hold that when God promised to Abraham that he and his seed would be his people forever. The error which pervades Presbyterian argument for infant baptism is the failure to notice how the New Testament has, explicitly and consistently, explained the fulfilment of the concept of "seed", and what it means to be born into the covenant. It is not silent, but speaks loudly, telling us who the "children" are. That concept has, as with many others, attained a point of transformation and fulfilment in the New Testament. See Romans 9, Galatians 3, Matthew 3, John 3, and many others. The Scriptures explicitly clarify who are the seed of Abraham, and directly deny that physical descent alone, under the New Covenant, means that you are one of them. The promise is to Abraham and his children - and it is those who are of faith who are believing Abraham's children. The preparatory shadow of literal, physical descent gives way to the glorious intended final reality of being born again, by the Holy Spirit, into the final family of God (and this often results in earthly households divided against themselves). 

Fulfilment and reality

We do baptise babies: babes in Christ. But we do not baptise babes born only of the flesh, because there is neither command nor example to do so. If you've been following, that silence is something that cannot be accounted for, if you believe that Christ and his apostles wished every Christian family anywhere and ever to do so, no matter their level of maturity. If you study everything (and there is plenty) that the New Testament does say about baptism, then amongst all the rich variation, one constant is the note of fulfilment, of reality, of accomplishment, of a meeting of the sign and the thing signified. Baptism is tied together conceptually with the coming of the Holy Spirit and receiving him, repentance unto life, the exaltation of the Messiah, being born into his kingdom, etc.... but universally this is depicted in terms of experienced reality, not of a kind of covenantal promise that still looks ahead to the baptisee being initiated into the personal experience of it if he will, when he reaches a stage of being able to respond, believe and personally appropriate it. He always already believes and is glorying in what he already experiences; the Spirit is come, and the New Age has dawned, not objectively only, but personally, too.

Doctrines of the gaps

Infant baptism is a "doctrines of the gaps". Such doctrines end up functioning as hermeneutics. i.e. They are used as controlling paradigms to pre-interpret Biblical texts, instead of allowing the texts which explicitly and directly discuss those subjects to determine what our hermeneutics will be. Overlooking and minimising the many things we are directly taught, "doctrines of the gaps" come in, with the claim that they are the real background, the fundamental assumption which must control the reading of everything else. The "a priori" conclusions rewrite the actual conclusions that the apostles explicitly and directly wanted us to understand when they exegeted the meaning of Christ and the nature of the New Covenant to us. Then when those hermeneutics are worked out, they lead on to all sorts of other mistakes as they are applied in other areas.

Kip is a Protestant, not a Roman Catholic. Thus, when a traditional Roman Catholic denies the explicit and direct teaching of Romans 3-4 or Galatians 3-4 with his claim that the fundamental hermeneutical assumption of The Church (TM) leads us to see justification as being channelled through the sacraments, Kip will rightly urge his antagonist to try, for a moment, to take off his glasses and first deal with what it was the direct concern of the apostles in these and other passages to seek to assert, as revealed firstly by their context and wording; and then to re-shape his doctrine of the church in the light of that, and not the other way round. But Kip needs to do the same when he reads all the direct and intentional teaching in the Bible about the New Covenant, and its relationship to what went before, and how this transforms our understandings of covenant membership, birth into the covenant, being a child of Abraham, the privileges of covenant membership, etcetera. The traditional Roman Catholic asserts that every member of the people of God always understood in every age that the church on earth has a visible head, whom we must all be in direct submission to. Kip will urge him to try to understand the Newness of the New Covenant, and that we do indeed still have a head, and he is actually visible; but that does not lead to the conclusions about Popes that the Roman Catholic holds to. The matter is not pre-determined by what comes before, but rather the fulfilment explains for us how to understand the earlier stages of the plan. I similarly urge Kip and all those who hold his views to try to understand analogous things in respect of Christian baptism.

Theonomic postmillennialism: nail, meet head

Some weeks ago I wrote on the topic "Postmillennialism - a theology of hope? On the contrary, a theology of hope misplaced", writing about how the thought-world and motivations that postmillennial advocates recommend in our service differ fatally from the thought-world and motivations of the apostles.

Today I came across this related quote which is so succinct, so apposite and relevant, that I gladly share it. The nail meets the head, without a word out of place. Firstly, the writer quotes a theonomic postmillennilist (which Googling reveals is CREC minister Uriesou Brito), who wrote as follows:

Our postmillennialism is deeply embedded in our lives. This is more than a preference for historical optimism. Postmillennialism is how we see the Bible moving. It is far from a mere academic discussion. In fact, it would not be easy to function happily in the CREC without that eschatological predisposition. It impacts everything from our preaching/teaching to our education and interpretation of the times.

And here, in response, Jacob Gonzales nails it:

So much for catholicity. Postmillennialism, in this formulation, is a hermeneutic rather than an eschatology. It shapes and determines the meaning of the prophets, rather than being shaped and determined by them.

None of the Reformed confessions speak this way. Our hope is in the coming of the Lord and the resurrection of the dead. There is no way, as this makes clear, to function happily within one of these churches without presupposing a very peculiar modern formulation of postmillennialism. Everyday a new application of this hermeneutic reveals itself, whether it be masks veiling the glory of God or some other religious-political commitment. I don’t see how binding the consciences of the sheep to eschatology in this way does anything but create schism.

The next commentator is also apposite: 

And so much for Ben Merkle’s sermon at the CREC general assembly (or whatever they call it) about 10 years ago. He urged that those things must not become the shibboleths of the CREC. It was a very encouraging sermon. Sad to see it so blatantly rejected.

To see an example of that, see this, in which postmillennialism has become the only real motivation for Christian service or strategic thinking, and paedocommunion has become the sina qua non of authentic Christian child-rearing.

Beware of theonomic postmillennialism. As it works out its presuppositions and conclusions consistently throughout someone's system of thought and church life, the negative fruits will become more and more apparent, and the churches and believers embracing it will become more and more sectarian and political in outlook and strident in tone, and it will be increasingly difficult for other believers to find common ground with them in any practical endeavour. Note that that's not just me observing that - that's what those of that persuasion are saying themselves. I'd plead with those of this persuasion to notice what a mistaken place they've got themselves into, and return. The mainstream Reformed tradition is not something that was discovered (or recovered) in the 1970s in a particular North American cultural milieu. There is another way, and a better way, and one that is explicitly shaped and determined by reading and submitting to the New Testament and then reading the whole Bible chronology in the light of the authoritative interpretation given there.

Choosing barbarity

It is difficult to find words to describe the British parliament voting to legalise of a mother killing her unborn child, for any reason she wishes, at any time, up until the moment of birth (at which  point it then becomes in law a heinous offence, leaving the perpetrator liable to the maximum penalty in British law of life imprisonment). This, as if there were something magical about passing down the birth canal which transforms the baby from having no rights whatsoever, fewer rights in law even than a pet hamster, into someone who suddenly has the full set of human rights.

This distinction (which end of the birth canal you are) is of course entirely arbitrary, and it remains to be seen what judges and parliamentarians will do with it in future. How long until it is argued that Mother Smith was just about to have the child hacked to death or have its skull pierced and brains vaccuumed out, as was her hard-won  legal right, when unfortunately labour began, and child was unexpectedly delivered two weeks prematurely, depriving said Mother of her rights to bash its skull in instead of now having a legal duty to raise it responsibly and lovingly to adulthood? Why does a 40-week baby  still in the womb have zero rights, whilst, if born 5 weeks early, those rights are received? It can't be because "in the womb the baby is dependent upon its mother", because in law, parents have non-negotiable responsibility to take care of their children until adulthood. Baby is dependent upon its mother after being born too. And so as I say, how long will this current, inconsistent settlement stand (for the previous inconsistent settlement  could not)? And what is this horrific doctrine, that anyone who is dependent has no rights and can be killed, by any means whatsoever, without consequence? Who in the world is independent in any case? Do all those who voted for this reach their current stage in life having been abandoned at the moment of  birth to their own glorious independence? Last time  I checked, we had a government dominated by self-proclaimed socialists, at any rate.

The brute fact is that parliament has voted that the weak and vulnerable can legally  be killed, should their lives be deemed to be undesirable by those who hold power  over them. We delude ourselves, of course, if we pretend that this is a new thing. Thus has human government, human authority, ever operated, when it has been allowed to. Thus has the British government long operated, though for the 60 years until now in the case of human abortion under the pretence that it was still legally a crime and that there were proper "checks and balances" to prevent abuses, as if the ending of innocent life (rather than vigorous activity to defend it) were not in itself always an inherently heinous abuse. We pretend to be sophisticated, and we look down on the moral reprobates of previous centuries. The Romans, if they did not want a child, left it on a rubbish heap to die from exposure after its birth. We pretend that they are savages, but we are enlightened, because.... because what? Because we do our killing using pills, scalpels and vacuums instead of leaving it to the elements?

God, have mercy. This is us. This is who we are. This is what we want, and this is how we wish to live our lives. If anything should get in the way of self, then let its blood be poured out, has been our cry. Now we begin to throw off the pretence and to show who we are more openly. We hate God, and we love death. And God is allowing us to have what we wish for. God, save us from ourselves. May the death of your Son deliver us, and deliver the innocent who are assigned for slaughter.