Water From Iraq?

The media's ignorance of the most basic biblical facts and Christian doctine continues to amaze me.  Even the otherwise reliable Wall Street Journal was forced to recant their recent statement that according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, "Moses brought water from Iraq . . ."

Of course the correct statement is "Moses brought forth water from a rock."

Read about it here:  Water from Iraq?

Apologetics in a Post Christian Age (Audio) -- God's Revelation (Part One)

Here's the audio from the Wednesday Night Bible Study:  The Enlightenment Challenge to the Divine Revelation

Previous lectures in this series can be found here (scroll down): Apologetics in a Post Christian Age

"Children in the Hands of the Arminians" (Part Three)

Here is part three of B. B. Warfield's "Review" of The Child as God's Child, by Rev. Charles W. Rishell, Ph.D., Professor of Historical Theology in Boston University School of Theology. New York: Eaton & Mains. Cincinnati: Jennings & Graham (1904). 

Warfield's review of Rishell's book was originally published in Vol. xvii of the Union Seminary Magazine, 1904.  Warfield entitled his review, "Children in the Hands of the Arminians."

To read the previous posts in this series, go here: Children in the Hands of the Arminians -- Part One, and  Children in the Hands of the Children --  Part Two.

We pick up where we left off last time.

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Warfield continues to address the questions raised by Rishell's universalism -- children come into the world "saved" (not just "innocent"), and the church is to regard them as such.

As one reads on, from page to page, he is appalled by the extremity to which Dr. Rishell pushes these contentions. What he says, it is to be observed, is not that the children of believing parents are to be presumed, on the strength of the covenant promise, to be the children of God, and are to be treated accordingly. This is a Reformed doctrine; and we could only wish that Dr. Rishell and all our Arminian brethren were not only almost but altogether such as we are, in it. What he says, he says of all children that come into the world, without exception.

As Warfield points out, the Reformed notion of the covenant is grounded in God's covenant promises to be God unto us and to our children.  But Rishell's notion is quite different.  Since children are born "saved," they have already "been added" to the church.  Thus, he argues, children ought to be baptized because they are saved and came into the world that way.  This notion completely changes how the church treats its little ones.

[Rishell] formally bases a doctrine of universal baptism of children upon this postulate. Since all children are born saved, they all without exception have an indefensible right to the temporal as well as to the eternal gifts of God to His people. Nor does he say that we should treat children as presumably the objects of God's mercy, present them to God in faith, and seek the gifts of grace for them. He says that they are already - all of them - the possessors of God's saving grace; that they have, all of them, already been born anew, as truly and as effectively as any adult convert; that they, all of them without exception, begin life on this high plane, and that their only concern is to preserve the salvation they already, all of them, enjoy, and to keep the grace they, all of them, possess.

In other words, since the children are already "in," the goal of the church's nurture of its little ones is to keep these already saved children in the same condition into which they were born.  On the Reformed view, membership in the covenant does not equal election, which is why children of believers who are in the covenant are to be baptized, then catechized and instructed by their parents and their church in the Christian faith.  Christian parents trust God's promise that their children eventually make a personal profession of faith and then become communicant or "professing" members. 

But the very possibility raised by Rishell's view that "saved" children can "fall from grace," moves a Christian parent from trusting in God's covenant promises to a morbid sense of fear that our saved children can remove themselves from their saved status from the very first moment of consciousness!

One is dismayed as he thinks of the vigor of the doctrine of "falling from grace" which is here involved. Every mother's son of the children of the heathen throughout the world; the large majority of the children born in Christendom; even a considerable portion of the children of Christian parents - forthwith "fall from grace" on the first motions of conscious life! And so serious is this fall that, as Dr. Rishell tells us, only sixty per cent of the "Christian children" who attend Sabbath school, for example, ever find their way even into the Church as an external organization, to say nothing now of finding their way to Christ!

So serious is this problem, Dr. Rishell believes, that all the non-Christians unsave themselves immediately, while 40% of saved Christian children cease to be saved the very first moment they can unsave themselves, and then never find their way back to the church!  But is this not where consistent Arminianism takes us--a universal atonement which supposedly saves all until they "subtract themselves" (to follow Rishell's logic)?  All non-Christian people do this, Rishell believes.  Fully 40% of Christian children manage to "unsave" themselves from the first moment of consciousness!  Hard to believe, but the common evangelical notion of an age of accountability wherein the children are born "innocent" (rather than already but precariously "saved") is a tenuous improvement of a very untenable understanding of God's grace.

In this state of the facts, surely, whatever may be its theoretical value in evangelicalizing the Arminian system, the practical value of the postulate that all children are born in a state of grace is as nothing; and we cannot wonder that our Arminian brethren have neglected it and have diligently sought to save their children. Born saved or not, they are no longer saved when they come under our observation; and every Christian heart will be zealous to secure or recover, as we choose to call it, salvation for them.

The logic of this leads to the following quandary, which Warfield is only too happy to point out.

In recommending parents and the Church to reverse their methods, to cease to seek the salvation of their little ones, and to treat them consistently as all already by virtue of their very nature saved, or at least safe, we fear that Dr. Rishell has "pressed beyond the mark"; and if his teaching were universally adopted, we very greatly fear we should soon find that the quotation would need to be filled out to its bitter end. We shall not benefit the children by teaching them - or by teaching those who have their spiritual good in charge - that their part in salvation is so of nature that the "faithful saying" that "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners" has but a modified application to them.

If Jesus came into the world to save sinners, why are children who are born saved, in need of Christ's salvation?  Rather, Rishell contends, we seek to keep them from severing themselves from Christ and his covenant promises by making some dreadful choice (which is in their power) with eternal consequences.  Warfield commends Rishell where he can, but chides him for his inconsistency.

There is much in Dr. Rishell's book about the duty of Christian parents and of the Christian Church to their children which it is well to say, and which is well said. Perhaps the whole of it might be read with profit by an Arminian parent who is imbued with the terrible notion - Dr. Rishell is our authority for fearing it may exist among our Arminian brethren - that children must be left untrammeled to exercise their own free choice as to salvation when the choosing time comes. As against such a dreadful idea he rightly pleads the duty and profit of Christian nurture, and seeks to put on the hearts of his readers the Biblical precept, Train up a child in the way he should go. . . . But the whole of Dr. Rishell's counsel is so vitiated by his fundamentally false postulate that its universal adoption would be as noxious as, perhaps more noxious than, the abuse which he seeks to correct.

The result is that on this scheme children come into the world "safe" at worst, and "saved" at best.  If the children do not need to be saved, then they do not need to hear the promises of the gospel, and then place their personal trust in the Savior into whose covenant they are members by virtue of God's covenant promise ratified by their parents in baptism?

We have spoken of the postulate as finding its best expression in popular speech in the assumption that all children are born saved. But we have also spoken of it as, perhaps; more accurately expressed by declaring that they are all born safe. The difference of expression marks the difference between the Evangelical Arminian and the Pelagianizing, or, to use a more modern term, the Rationalizing Arminian. The difference is a purely theoretical one; it has no practical significance. In either case every child is presumed to come into the world in no need of saving. In either case the problem with the whole human race is not to save it, but to keep it from getting lost. So to state the problem is, to a believer in the Scriptural revelation, already to dismiss it.

For Warfield, Rishell's operating assumptions are biblically flawed--hence the terrible inconsistency.  The entire world is born saved until that salvation is lost.  This virtually echoes the Muslim claim that humans are universally Muslim, until they renounce Islam.

Surely the Bible does not think of the world as a saved world, which needs only to be kept saved; but as a lost world, which needs saving. To say that this lost estate in which the world is found is for every generation purely post-natal may be an easy rejoinder for those who are determined to support a theory and are careless of the props used. But it can convince nobody. Everybody knows in his heart of hearts that the world is by nature a lost world, and that he himself has been born a child of wrath, even as the others. To tell him that this is not true is to him the prime absurdity; and it will matter little whether he is told he is born saved or safe. The difference between the two answers is, in fact, a difference of tone rather than of principle. The one reveals a deeper sense of dependence on Christ for all the goods of this life and the next: the other reveals a stronger feeling of self-dependence. Arminianism and Rationalism - how close they lie together! The human soul is too much of a unit, and its "faculties" too little separable entities, for a strong feeling of autonomy in the one sphere of its operations to fail to work its way through all.

Warfield ties rationalism (that is, religion is grounded in human reason, not revelation) and Ariminianism together which, in this case, seems to operate without proper appeal to any biblical categories, such as the nature of human sin and the person and work of Christ in saving sinners born into a lost and fallen world, and who have no hope of salvation until called, regenerated by the Holy Spirit, and given faith through the preached gospel.  Warfield notes elsewhere (in his "Review" of Methodist Theologian John Miley's Systematic Theology," that human freedom is the foundation of all Arminian theology.  Warfield applies that same argument here.

Say that Arminianism is formally Thelematism [from the Greek for "will" - thelema] rather than Rationalism. It is certain that Thelematism will never escape the dangers of Emotionalism or of Rationalism, according as the temperament (or the temperature) of the individual opens this or the other channel for its extension. Professor Rishell's temperament appears to be that which is more inclined to the rationalistic side, and there is accordingly a very unpleasant tone of rationalism running through the whole volume. He makes visible efforts to keep true to current Methodist conceptions. The efforts are indeed too visible; too obviously needed. And the leaven of Rationalism is working throughout the whole discussion.

The biblical starting point is God's creation of all things as good, but now fallen and under the universal sway of sin, including its curse "death."  Fallen sinners need to be saved by Christ--they are not born that way!  The Arminian starting point is grounded in human reason, and upon the assumption that humans are born saved unless and until they "unsave" themselves.  This is, as Warfield notes, nothing but "will" worship, arising from a distorted view of natural revelation.

More to follow.

"It Is God Who Works in You" -- Philippians 2:12-30

The Fifth in a Series of Sermons on Paul's Letter to the Philippians

As Paul sees it, the Philippians are in a very difficult situation.  There is tremendous pressure from the Greek and Roman citizens of Philippi for Christians to renounce their faith in Jesus and return to the Roman religion of their friends and neighbors.  It was a dangerous thing, the Romans thought, not to honor the gods.  Those who renounced the traditional Roman gods and now followed Jesus might even anger the gods to the point that calamity would come upon the empire.  Christians must be identified, and pressured to renounce this new and foreign God, Jesus.  Then there was the pressure coming from those who professed faith in Jesus, but added good works as a condition for being saved from the wrath of God on the last day.  These men were known as Judaizers and fully convinced that in addition to believing that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah, one must undergo ritual circumcision, keep the Jewish feasts, and follow the Jewish dietary laws and customs.  The Philippian Church has withstood this pressure so far, but Paul exhorts them to stand firm until he or his emissary Timothy can arrive to offer them encouragement.

We are continuing our series on Paul’s letter to the Philippians.  We are working our way through the second half of the second chapter.  As I mentioned last time, the system of chapter and verses is useful to help us find a particular passage in the Bible, but not so helpful when the chapter breaks disrupt the flow of an author’s thought.  This is the case in Philippians chapters 1-2, when, at the end of chapter one (vv. 27-30) Paul exhorts the Philippians to stand firm–an exhortation continuing on well into the second chapter where Paul appeals to the “Hymn to Christ” (the Carmen Christi) of verse 6-11 where Jesus’ humility is set forth as an example for his readers to follow.  As we saw last time, the Christ hymn was composed by Paul or someone else, and was likely sung in the apostolic churches.  Paul appeals to it, because the Philippians were probably familiar with it.  

But Paul’s exhortation actually continues until verse 18 of chapter 2.  The theme of this lengthy exhortation is best summed-up by verse 27 (of chapter 1), “let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that . . . I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel.”  Recall that Paul was instrumental in the founding of the church at Philippi when he proclaimed the gospel of Christ crucified there ten years earlier.  Yet, he now finds himself under house arrest in Rome when composing this very personal letter to a church far way in Greece, many members of which Paul knows quite well.  

One of the key points made by Paul is that in order for the Philippians to stand firm and accomplish the things which the Apostle is admonishing them, the Philippians must adopt the same attitude (mind-set) which Jesus did in his incarnation.  In the Carmen Christi, we read that Jesus “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”  Though existing eternally in the form of God, Jesus did not use his deity to his advantage after he took to himself a true human nature in the womb of the virgin.  Rather, Jesus humbled himself by taking the form of a servant, becoming obedient unto death so as to accomplish those things necessary for our salvation.  Although the Philippians are to follow the example of Jesus, our Lord’s incarnation is a unique event and cannot be repeated.  Nevertheless, the Philippians are to have the same humble attitude of Jesus, if they are to stand firm in the face of persecution which they were then facing from the Greco-Roman pagans without the church, and from the Judaizers within. 

To read the rest of this sermon:  Click Here

This Week at Christ Reformed Church (April 2-8)

Sunday Morning, April 8:  We return to our series on the Minor Prophets.  We will tackle the prophecy of Nahum, and ask and answer the who?, when?, what?, and why? questions.  Our worship service begins at 10:30 a.m.

Sunday Afternoon:  We are studying the Belgic Confession and have come to the two articles dealing with the Holy Trinity (Articles 8 and 9).  Our catechism service begins @ 1:15 p.m.

Wednesday Night Bible Study (April 4 @ 7:30 p.m.):  We continue with our series, "Apologetics in a Post-Christian Age."  Our lecture this week addresses the Enlightenment challenge to the Christian notion of divine revelation.

The Academy (Friday, April 6 @ 7:30 p.m.):   We continue our lecture/discussion series based upon Allen Guelzo's Teaching Company Course, The American Mind.  Our topic this week is "populism and progressivism."

For more information on Christ Reformed Church you can always find us here (Christ Reformed Church), or on Facebook (Christ Reformed on Facebook).

"He Has Risen from the Dead" -- Matthew 27:58-28:15 (A Sermon for Easter Sunday)

Here's the audio from this morning's Easter sermon:  He Has Risen from the Dead

This Week's White Horse Inn

An Interview with Simon Gathercole

On this edition of the program, Michael Horton talks with Cambridge New Testament Scholar Simon Gathercole about his various books and articles. Right at the outset, they discuss the contemporary debate concerning “theories of the atonement,” and then they move to a discussion of the views of N.T. Wright and whether his recent book on this topic has under-emphasized the traditional substitutionary view of Christ’s work on our behalf.

Click Here

"My God, My God" -- Matthew 27:27-56 (A Sermon for Good Friday)

Here's the audio from tonight's sermon on Matthew 27:27-56: Click Here

"When I Drink It New With You" -- Matthew 26:17-30 (A Sermon for Maundy Thursday)

Here's the audio from Thursday night's sermon on Matthew 26:17-30: Click Here

"The Name Above Every Name" -- Philippians 2:1-11

The Fourth in a Series of Sermons on the Philippians

One of the most famous and well-known passages in all the Bible is the famous hymn to Christ (the Carmen Christi) of verses 6-11 of Philippians 2.  Martin Luther writes in his famous essay The Freedom of the Christian, that this passage is a prescribed rule of life which is set forth by the Apostle Paul, who exhorts us to devote our good works to the welfare of our neighbor out of the abundant riches of faith.  John Calvin tells us that anyone who reads this passage but fails to see the deity of Jesus and the majesty of God as seen in his saving works, is blind to the things of God.  The passage contains a very rich Christology, but is included in this letter not to settle any debate over the person and work of Jesus, but rather, to instruct Christians how to imitate Jesus in a profound and significant way.  The Carmen Christi also speaks directly to modern Americans by reminding us that the self-centered narcism of American culture is not a virtue, but runs completely contrary to the example set for us to follow by Jesus in his incarnation.

As we continue our series on Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi (the Epistle to the Philippians) we come to the second chapter and will work our way through this beautiful and powerful passage.  I need to say from the outset that as many of you know, our system of chapters and verses are not in the original biblical text and were first introduced in the 16th century.  While they are very helpful in allowing us to find “chapter and verse,” there are times when the chapter breaks seriously disrupt the flow of thought of the original author–they do so in the transition from the opening chapter of Philippians as we move into chapter two.  As we go through our passage, we will see that Paul’s exhortation which opens the second chapter is really an expansion of his desire for the Philippians to stand firm (vv. 12-30) and is the basis for his introduction of the Christ hymn (which we will cover momentarily).

In expressing his candid thoughts to the Philippians, the apostle is reflecting upon the persecution which he himself had faced, particularly in the light of the news which just reached him from Philippi that the Philippians were still facing significant persecution.  When Paul was first in the city of Philippi, he was arrested and thrown into jail.  Paul was miraculously delivered, the jailer and his household came to faith in Jesus, and as recounted in Acts 17, shortly thereafter, Paul left the city to continue his missionary journey to the Greek cities of Thessalonica and Berea, before finally making his way to Athens.  When Paul writes this letter to the Philippians about ten years later, he is in jail again–this time under house arrest in Rome.  Paul knew something about persecution.  He knows that the Philippian Christians are facing persecution also.  The Philippians may not be not in chains, but they are finding that their fellow Greco-Romans are not accepting, nor tolerant of their faith in Jesus.  And then there are the Judaizers who have arrived on the scene and are now disrupting church life in Philippi.

After reflecting upon these things, in the concluding verses of chapter 1, (vv 27–30) Paul exhorts the Philippians, “let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel, and not frightened in anything by your opponents.  This is a clear sign to them of their destruction, but of your salvation, and that from God.  For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake, engaged in the same conflict that you saw I had and now hear that I still have.”  The Philippians are to do several things.  The first is to live their lives in a manner worthy of the gospel which Paul had preached to them.  Their conduct in the face of persecution should grow out of their understanding of the person and work of Jesus.  The second thing they are to do is to stand firm in one spirit and in one mind in the face of those persecuting them.  The third is not to be frightened by anything their opponents–the Judaizers and Greco-Roman pagans–may throw at them.  Jesus is more powerful than all and he will protect his church.

To read the rest of this sermon, Click Here