Theology

From Thinking about Israel to Thinking God’s Thoughts After Him: Christ Over All’s January Intermission

/ davidsschrock

2024–02-Thinking-Gods-Thoughts-STEach month, I write editorial transition for the website Christ Over All. These “Intermissions” highlight the past month and introduce the next. Along the way, I offer a few reflections on Christ and Culture. Here is the most recent Intermission: ‘From Thinking about Israel to Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him.’ 

Read it and pass it along to others.

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One month into the new year, and we are on pace to repeat at least some of the events of 2020. The Chiefs and the Forty-Niners are back in the Super Bowl, and unless something drastic happens, Biden and Trump will be on the presidential ballot. At the same time, and on the same day, Biden’s Department of Justice threatened six peaceful protestors with eleven years in prison, while it comforted an anxious American populous with the wisdom of Elmo (of Tickle-Me Elmo fame). Equally, Michael Cassidy—the man who beheaded Satan’s statue—has been charge with a hate crime, while countless other beheaders-of-statues remain at large. And all of this as Gov. Abbott of Texas exercises his right as a lesser magistrate to resist the Supreme Court’s Red Carpet treatment for illegal aliens—6.3 million since 2020.

Welcome to America 2024. Continue reading →

A Dangerous Calling: Two Ways to Seek Ministry

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boy wearing crown statue

Adonijah the son of Haggith exalted himself, saying, ‘I will be king.”
– 1 Kings 1:5 – 

But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness,
and all these things will be added to you.
– Matthew 6:33 –

There is nothing wrong with seeking the kingdom of God, or in seeking a place in that kingdom. In fact, it is absolutely right. Yet, with every good intention, there is the possibility to go astray, to take something good and to seek it badly. And for this reason, it is not sufficient to seek the kingdom. We must seek the kingdom and his righteousness.

In other words, seeking God’s kingdom is not the whole command. We must seek God’s kingdom righteously, which is to say, we must seek to be righteous in God’s kingdom. And this is the point that I want to pursue here and in the next two blogposts.

Unfortunately, too many followers of Christ have seen ministers who have sought the kingdom without righteousness. Likewise, too many who are now serving the Lord can reflect on the ways (multiple ways?) we have pursued ministry for vain reasons or with wrong motivations.

For instance, I learned of pastor last fall whose church had served as a money laundering front for his financial dealings. Clearly, he was seeking a kingdom, but not the Lord’s. Yet, as he stood in the pulpit each week, his vain pursuits were not seen. It took years for his self-interest to come to light. As Paul writes to Timothy, “The sins of some people are conspicuous, going before them to judgment, but the sins of others appear later” (1 Tim. 5:24).

So too, the fruit of ministry takes time to discover. Sometimes what looks like good fruit is not genuine. Similarly, for every ministry aspiration that is good, there are other aspirations that are corroded by pride, selfish ambition, and vain glory. As Paul David Tripp declared, ministry is A Dangerous Calling. How dangerous? So dangerous that three of the men who endorsed his book are no longer in ministry.

Accordingly, we should both be slow in seeking ministry (James 3:1). And we should be slow to affirm the ministries of others (1 Tim. 5:22). At the same time, we should be quick to learn from Scripture, what God says about seeking the ministry and a place of service in his kingdom. And to help us, I want to return to the book of 1 Kings and the story of Adonijah, the self-promoting son of David. For in him, and in comparison to Solomon, we can learn much about ministry. Continue reading →

Tolle Lege: The Return of the Strong Gods by R. R. Reno

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an aerial shot of the apple park in california

Apple Park in Cupertino, California

From Brexit to the rise and fall of Donald Trump, we have heard a lot about the dangers of globalism and return of populism. Many charged Trump with a kind of nationalism that led to all kinds of racism, fascism, and other political maladies. But many others, would share a concern for commercial giants like Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet Inc. (that’s Google’s parent company) who are assuming powers that transcend geopolitical nations.

In short, debates range today over what is most dangerous: Is it the tyrannical rise of globalism which calls for diversity, antiracism, and economic justice? Or is the greater concern a view of the world that affirms boundaries, borders, and limited budgets?

Those are big questions which touch on every area inch of public life, but connecting them all is a shared history of how to make sure that the fascism of Nazi Germany and the race-based slavery of America don’t happen again. Indeed, the push towards diversity and the denial of strong authorities is strongly associated with a push against the world events that ran from 1917 to 1945. Throw in the boom of technology and the ideologies of the 1960s (chronicled in Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self ) and you have a starting place for understanding our age.

The Return of the Strong Gods

renoAdding to this understanding in R. R. Reno’s book The Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West. In this work of history and cultural commentary, Reno begins with the idea of the Open Society put forward by Karl Popper. He argues that Popper, along with many others, pushed hard against the militant authorities of the two world wars and called for a society that had no such “strong gods.” Reno explains how this worked out in the liberal policies of the 1960s and following, and how our world today is suffering under the weight of a world without any strong ideas. In other words, by evacuating strong leaders, strong ideas, strong gods from the world, it created a nice, safe, open space for individuals to express themselves without destroying others. Continue reading →

Applying Progressive Covenantalism to the Errant Demands for Corporate Confession: My 2023 ETS Paper

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Dividing-the-Faithful-cover

ETS Paper Link:

Waking Up to Corporate Confession:
What Scripture Does and Does Not Say
About Corporate Guilt and Repentance

It has been some time since I have posted here. Actually, it has longer than I remembered (May 2023). But that does not mean writing has slowed. You can find regular content that I am writing and/or editing at Christ Over All, where for the last six months we have looked at a number of pertinent issues, including

At the same time, my new book Dividing the Faithful: How a Little Book on Race Fractured a Movement Founded on Grace released in September. This book responds to Michael Emerson and Christian Smith’s book Divided by Faith. I believe their sociological study surveying black and white relations in the American church is poison pill. Undergirded by progressive views of culture and liberal theology, it leeched Critical Race Theory into the evangelical water supply. And churches, pastors, and scholars have been trying to catch up since.

At the same time that I wrote Divided by Faith, I also wrote an article on the demand for white churches and their pastors to publicly confess their white supremacy and complicity in racism. These demands reached fever pitch in 2020, and to help our church think about these matters I wrote up the attached paper. It just so happens that my paper followed very closely to the progressive covenantalism advocated by Stephen Wellum and Peter Gentry. And so today, at the Evangelical Theological Society, I am reading this paper—or at least, a portion of it.

You can find the whole thing here. And if you read it, let me know what you think. For a teaser, here’s the opening page:

In 2020, the death of George Floyd touched off a series of questions about racism and corporate guilt, not to mention justice and the justice system. In churches across the country, decisions split as to the right public response. Similarly, academics took up the issue, albeit often in more popular platforms. For instance, Michael Rhodes asked online, “Should We Repent of Our Grandparents’ Racism?” And Kyle Dillon wrote for The Gospel Coalition, “Are We Held Accountable for the Sins of Our Forefathers?” In both articles, biblical theology was used to affirm the need for modern individuals to identify with the sins of their fathers.

What can be appreciated in these articles was the way these men applied Scripture, especially the Old Testament, to contemporary questions. What was problematic, however, was the way they made applications that did not address the covenantal differences between Israel and today. As Stephen Wellum has demonstrated in his chapter on doing ethics from the perspectives of Progressive Covenantalism, the Old Testament remains needful for instruction, correction, reproof, and training in righteousness (2 Tim. 3:16–17), but biblical ethicists must recognize covenantal differences when they apply God’s Word.

In this paper, I will pick up where Wellum left off and apply progressive covenantal categories to questions about corporate guilt and repentance. In particular, I will seek to answer some of the following questions:

    • Are new covenant believers responsible for the sins of their ancestors?
    • How should we apply Leviticus 26:40–44, which calls for the need to confess the sins of our fathers?
    • Do the corporate confessions of Daniel, Ezra, and Nehemiah call us to do the same?
    • How does the New Testament understand confession in the corporate sense?
    • And most specifically, if we were to turn the clock back to 2020, what might we say from Scripture about the practice of corporate confessions.

In what follows, I will answer these questions and show how progressive covenantalism provides a more robust biblical answer to ethical questions concerning corporate guilt, generational sin, and corporate repentance.

Again, you can keep going here.

For now, I will keep working on writing and editing at Christ Over All. But Lord willing, in the near future, I will be back on this site to add more biblical and theological reflections. Until then . . .

Soli Deo Gloria, ds

Ontology 101: A New Sermon Series

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ontology1920x1080-1“It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” Those infamous words, uttered by Bill Clinton under oath in 1998, should have told us that the world and everything in it was already succumbing to the deconstructive forces of postmodernism. Postmodernism claims that meaning is no longer found in what a human author intends or what the Author of life declares. Rather, meaning is decided by individuals or groups interpreting, or in most cases reinterpreting, the words others.

In college after college, postmodern ideas have sprung to life since the 1960s, and by 1998 such epistemic redefinitions and verbal deconstructions were emerging in the public square. Bill Clinton’s elusive response to a question about his relations with Monica Lewinsky was not abnormal for a culture celebrating transgression (think: the Hippies of the 1960s), raised on MTV (think: the teens of the 1980s), or enslaved to self-expression instead of submission to the truth (every generation since WWII).

Fast forward 25 years, add two decades of social media, a handful of contested elections, one global pandemic, and endless woke crusades in public schools and city streets, and it is not just language that has come under assault, it is everything that God upholds by the word of his power. To be certain, Christ the Lord reigns in heaven. But on earth, all is not well. And in our day, our cultural elites can’t even figure out what a man is, why women’s sports should only include women, or why children should not be exposed to drag queens at the public library.

In a word, the world has gone mad. And its insanity began when words could mean anything, or nothing, or something at one time and not another. Continue reading →

What Is the Mission of the Church in a Racialized World?

/ davidsschrock

Gospel,+Race,+&+the+ChurchLast year, I joined Nicholas Piotrowski, Charles Ware, and Gus Pritchard for an event in Indianapolis called “Gospel, Race, and the Church.” Through six short messages and six panel discussions, plus a Q & A we worked through many subjects related to contemporary discussions on race and justice in the church. While this subject is fraught with landmines, the overall tenor of the event was positive, biblical, and prayerfully helpful.

To encourage candidness in the moment, the audios were not made public, so I can’t link to those. But what follows is an updated version of my second message. You can find the manuscript of the first message (Is Racial Justice a Gospel Issue?) here.

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Here is the thesis that I want to argue: Your race is more important than your ethnicity.

When defined biblically and not sociologically, one’s race is more important for identity formation than one’s ethnicity. And by extension, the mission of the church is to help you make that statement true. Which raises the question. What is race? And do you know what your race is?

As insulting as that question may sound at first, I am going to suggest it is an easy question to mistake—especially if we have fused biblical ideas with worldly ideologies. At the same time, if we can answer this question from the Bible and the Bible alone, then we have hope for knowing and growing the mission of the church. This is the point that I will argue here, and here is how I will proceed.

  1. I will show why the concept of racialization in America is popular and pervasive, but ultimately unhelpful—if not harmful.
  2. I will attempt to draw the lines of race and ethnicity according to the Bible.
  3. With those lines in place, I will demonstrate that the mission of the church helps men and women, who hold PhD’s in ethnic Partiality, ethnic Hostility, ethnic Discrimination, grow up into Christ, who is the head of a new chosen race, redeemed from nation (ethnē).

So that’s we are going. Continue reading →

Salvation from Judgment: A Survey of John’s “Good News”

/ davidsschrock

eskay-lim-nhPSp2wB5do-unsplashA number of years ago, a church I know purchased something like 100,000 copies of the Gospel of John. Why? So that they could share the message of salvation with everyone in their Chicago suburb. That is to say, by putting a copy of John’s Gospel in everyone’s mailbox, they hoped to share the good news of salvation with all their neighbors.

I don’t know the fruit of that endeavor, but I know it was motivated by a commitment to the Word, a passion to sow the seeds of the gospel, and a prayerful desire to see their neighbors know God and find salvation in the Son. And the use of John makes sense. As John tells us, the Evangelist wrote his book so that his audience would believe in Christ. As John 20:30–31 reads,

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

“Life in his name” is another way of saying salvation (John 3:16) or entrance into the kingdom of God (John 3:3–5). And so, John’s Gospel is rightly associated with the theme of salvation. And more, it is usually not associated with judgment. Jesus even says as much. “For I did not come to judge the world but to save the world” (John 12:47).

Case closed. Jesus has come to save, not to judge, and so let’s print up the Gospel of John and send it to everyone who needs salvation. So good, so far. Except, we haven’t answered the question: Saved from what? Saved from death? From sorrow? From sin? From what? Well, that’s what brings us back to judgment—a theme ignored or despised by many who offer Christ today.

The answer to the question about salvation in John’s Gospel is inextricably related to Jesus’s testimony regarding his judgment and the role of the Spirit who brings to completion the judgment of Christ reigning in glory (cf. Psalm 110). To show this, and to better appreciate what salvation is, I will show from John’s Gospel how the theme of judgment develops. And in its development, it may be surprising how prominent judgment is and how important it is for John’s message of salvation. Continue reading →

For the Kids Nobody Wants: Why Be Fruitful and Multiply Needs a New Social Imaginary

/ davidsschrock

aaron-burden-ob6O_xd67O0-unsplash

What follows is part one of a longform essay published at Christ Over All. You can read both parts here and here.

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Past the grove of cypress trees Walter—he had been playing king of the mountain—saw the white truck, and he knew it for what it was. He thought, That’s the abortion truck. Come to take some kid in for a postpartum down at the abortion place.

And he thought, Maybe my folks called it. For me.

He ran and hid among the blackberries, feeling the scratching of the thorns but thinking, It’s better than having the air sucked out of your lungs. That’s how they do it; they perform all the P. P.s [post-partum abortions] on all the kids there at the same time. They have a big room for it. For the kids that nobody wants.[1]

1. Philip K. Dick, “The Pre-Persons” (1974). Available in The Eye of the Sibyl and Other Classic Stories. (New York: Citadel Press, 1987), 275-296.

In 1973, the Roe v Wade decision inspired Philip K. Dick to envision a world where children were unwanted and adults were free to alleviate their unwanted burdens with the help of the “County Facility.” In his short story, “The Pre-Persons,” Dick tells the story of Walter, the twelve-year-old boy who is traumatized by the thought that his parents did not want him. All around him, he knows children by name who have been taken, kicking and screaming, by the van. Fully legal, these children have the life sucked out of them, all because the parents did not want them.

Through the use of dystopian satire, Dick shows what happens when children are unwanted.

To date, white vans are not circling cul-de-sacs looking to pick up “the kids nobody wants,” but that doesn’t mean children are any more safe. Planned Parenthood “targets minority neighborhoods” to offer up their unwanted children. Walgreens and CVS just decided to stock its pharmacies with the abortion-inducing pill, mifepristone, so that unwanted pregnancies can end by a pill in the privacy of one’s own home. The Supreme Court of South Carolina just defended abortion by ruling that abortion is protected by the right to privacy. And in 2021, Senate Democrats blocked the passage of the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, while this year 210 voted against a similar bill, which would protect children who have already been born.

Is our world much different than Walter’s for unwanted children? It doesn’t appear to be. And yet, it’s not just these direct assaults that endanger children, it is the social imaginary behind them.[2] A social imaginary is like a worldview, only with less thought and more feeling. And today, a predominant social imaginary is one that envisions a world unencumbered by children. That is to say, our culture’s images of human flourishing are those without kids. To give one example where childlessness is presented as a blessing, consider the ad campaign by Hilton’s Home 2 Suites.

2. A “social imaginary” is a term coined by Charles Taylor in his heavily-cited A Secular Age. Following Taylor, Kevin Vanhoozer, Hearers and Doers, 8, defines it this way: “The social imaginary is that nest of background assumptions, often implicit, that lead people to feel things as right or wrong, correct or incorrect.”
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Continue reading →

Jesus is God: Four Ways to See Jesus’s Divinity in John’s Gospel

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marcos-paulo-prado-xec7srO4U5c-unsplashThis month our church returns to the Gospel of John, and specifically we have started to look at the Upper Room Discourse (John 13–17), picking up in John 14. For those familiar with John 14–16, as well as the whole book of John, you know how often trinitarian themes, doctrines, and verses emerge. As John recounts the way Jesus speaks of his Father, the promise of sending the Spirit, and the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit, we have perhaps the richest vein in Scripture for mining trinitarian gold.

To help our church, and those reading along here, I am going to begin posting some short pieces on the doctrine of the trinity and the key ideas related our God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Today, I will begin with a note from Scott Swain, author of many works on the Trinity, including Crossway’s Short Studies in Systematic Theology volume, The Trinity: An Introduction.

In his blogpost, “How John Says Jesus is ‘God’,” he offers four ways to think about Christ’s deity in John, and he concludes with this fourfold textual proof of Jesus’s divinity from John. All told, Swain actually offers seven ways to think of Jesus as God. And what I include here is the four point, with four proofs. Take time to consider each, and then as you read John, keep your eye out for the ways that John presents Jesus as God.

1. Jesus shares the divine name(s).

According to the Fourth Gospel, Jesus shares his Father’s holy “name” (Jn 17:11; cf. 12:41). Throughout the Gospel, Jesus is not only acclaimed as “God” (Jn 1:1; 20:28), he is also identified by God’s proper name YHWH, “the linguistic token of God’s uniqueness par excellence,” along with the “corona of connotation” established by various OT ways of expounding God’s proper name (Kendall Soulen). The monogenēs is called “the one who is” in John 1:18 (echoing Exod 3:14 LXX). Jesus is called “the Lord” in John 1:23 (citing the Tetragrammaton from Isa 40:3) and John 20:28 (echoing Ps 35:23 [34:23 LXX], which calls YHWH “my Elohim and my Adonai”). Perhaps most significantly, Jesus identifies himself as the one true God by means of a series of absolute (Jn 4:26; 6:20; 8:24, 28, 58; 13:19; 18:5, 6, 8) and predicate (Jn 6:35, 41, 48; 8:12; 10:7, 9, 11, 14; 11:25; 14:6; 15:1) “I am” statements, which echo YHWH’s own self-identification in the Old Testament (Deut 32:39; Isa 41:4; 43:10, 13, 25; 46:4; 48:12; 51:12; 52:6).

2. Jesus possesses divine attributes.

He shares God’s eternal and unchangeable being, in contrast to temporal and changeable creatures (Jn 1:1-3; 8:35, 58). He manifests YHWH’s unique “glory” (Jn 12:41, alluding to Isaiah 6), abounding in “grace and truth” (Jn 1:14, which alludes to Exod 34:6). He has “life in himself,” just “as the Father has life in himself” (Jn 5:26). Jesus is a divine king (Jn 18:36) who holds all divine authority in his hands (Jn 3:35; 13:3).

3. Jesus performs divine works.

As the Word who created all things (Jn 1:3-5), Jesus also proclaims the divine name to creatures (Jn 1:14, 18; 17:6, 26). Because he holds all divine authority in his hands, he executes divine judgment, raises the dead, and grants eternal life to whomever he will (Jn 5:21-22, 25, 27; 10:18; 17:2). Jesus predicts the future, revealing that “I am he” (Jn 13:19). Whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise (Jn 5:19), completing the divine work of salvation that the Father gave him to do on the cross (Jn 13:1; 19:3). For all the aforementioned reasons and others,

4. Jesus is worthy of divine honor.

The Father “has given all judgment to the Son, that all might honor the Son, just as they honor the Father” (Jn 5:22-23). Jesus is worthy of the same faith that is due God (Jn 14:1; cf. 3:14-15; 8:24; 20:31), and also the same love (Jn 14:15). As one who shares the divine name, he is “lifted up” and “glorified” as “I am” (Jn 8:28; 12:32, 41). After Jesus’ resurrection, Thomas exclaims, “my Lord and my God” (Jn 20:28), a scriptural expression of covenant devotion (Ps 35:23). Though personally distinct from the Father as his Word and monogenēs, Jesus, according to John, is “one” God with the Father in every way (Jn 10:30).

From these four points and others, we have every reason to see that the Bible is unequivocal in calling Jesus ‘God.’ And thus, we should worship him not only as a good and great man, but as our God—Creator, Redeemer, Lord, and Second Person of the Trinity. Indeed, let us come to the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit, bringing him all the praise he deserves.

Soli Deo Gloria, ds

Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash

Engaging Tim Keller’s Politically-Subtle, Seeker Sensitive Movement

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coin telescope in a viewing deck

In November, Christ Over All published a series of article on evangelicalism and its history over the last century. If you didn’t see those articles, I would encourage you to check them out. They will give you a solid introduction to the key doctrines, debate, and debaters over the last one hundred years. This month, in an encore piece, we have just published a two-part consideration of Tim Keller and his impact on evangelicalism.

In many ways, I am thankful for Keller’s ministry, his heart for evangelism, and his faithfulness to the Lord. On occasion I have cited his works on this cite, and I recommended this evergreen article on church size dynamics to some men today. At the same time, Keller’s method of ministry bears careful observation. And in these two pieces, you get a sense of how Keller’s Third Way-ism has negatively impacted evangelicals. In what follows, I offer the concluding paragraphs of Mark DeVine’s analysis. Take a look and then go back and read his full argument here and here.

A Politically-Subtle, Seeker Sensitive Movement 

Between 1994 and 2006 Reformed theologian David Wells published four volumes that track and analyze how church growth movements, despite their formal assent to orthodox, evangelical doctrinal statements, have nevertheless compromised the faith. Unfortunately, Keller’s Third Way, despite its stated determination not to do so, has often done just this, producing terrible ethical fruit.

What most distinguishes the Keller-led Reformed resurgence from the other major church growth movements among evangelicals over the last half century? Is it theology, or something else? The “seeker,” “church growth,” and “purpose-driven life” movements targeted predominantly white suburban communities. Comparatively, the Keller movement aimed to reach the more ethnically diverse blue communities located in urban centers. Each movement labored to remove as many stumbling blocks to the gospel in order the reach their respective targeted communities.

Measured in buildings, bucks, and bodies, each movement was successful, at least for a time. Yet, looking over the last twenty years, it becomes clear that Keller-movement Evangelicals built platforms, brands, and messages in order to be found winsome by the blue communities they sought to reach. As with the old-line liberalism of Friedrich Schleiermacher, exquisite sensitivity to target audiences will shape the message delivered far more than its deliverers intended. Only in this case, winsomeness has elicited complaints and thoughtful retractions from Reformed evangelicals who once flew the Keller flag. All of this suggests that once again, the gospel once has suffered distortion in the otherwise laudable quest to avoid unnecessary violation of unbelievers’ sensibilities.

Such a result of Keller’s Third Way is disheartening, but not surprising. The message of the cross is foolishness to the world, and yet it is the wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:18–25). Doctrinally sound evangelicals have too often been enticed to package the product of the gospel in cellophane for the consumer, yet wisdom, or its opposite, is proven by her children. Over the last decade, many children of Tim Keller’s Third Way have imagined that formal adherence to an orthodox confession is sufficient to protect the gospel message from distortion. But it’s not.

As the seeker-senstive and purpose-driven movements of the 1980s taught us, branding and ongoing messaging exert powerful influence on how that confession is received. And now the same is being seen with Keller’s politically-subtle, blue-community-sensitive seeker model. In each of these iterations, the fruit of these sincere efforts to advance the gospel have found themselves making friends with the world at the expense of the intrinsically offensive gospel that the world so desperately needs.

May the Lord help us to see this clearly, and to walk in his light accordingly.

Soli Deo Gloria, ds

Photo by Ramil Ugot on Pexels.com