Steve Pettit, president of Bob Jones University, just announced changes in the dress standards especially for females, two in particular:  (1) permission to wear pants or slacks to class and (2) “shorts” for athletics that rise to two inches above the knee.  It didn’t seem odd, but representative of BJU and the churches that send their students there.  This really is who they are and where we are today.  Most seem to celebrate this news.

This last week going evangelizing door-to-door I encountered a young family, who attended an Anglican church in San Francisco.  I had just been in the U.K. and visited a few well-known cathedrals there, including Westminster, so the Anglicans had been on my mind.  I could not remember ever talking to an Anglican in California — Episcopalians yes, and many of them, but Anglicans no.

The Anglicans said they were very involved in their church.  The husband and wife had both graduated from Asbury University in Kentucky and lived in California for about 6 months.  They claimed to believe the gospel, didn’t think salvation was by works but by grace, and that the Lord’s Table was only a symbol.  They couldn’t keep talking at that time, but their church interested me, so I went home and looked it up.

The church of the young Anglican family believed the 39 articles, which date back to 1571.  They were better than I thought.  From history and my knowledge of Henry VIII, I thought they would be worse.  They have good differences that distinguish them from the doctrine of  Roman Catholicism.  The following article is the biggest problem:

BAPTISM is not only a sign of profession, and mark of difference, whereby Christian men are discerned from others that be not christened, but it is also a sign of Regeneration or new Birth, whereby, as by an instrument, they that receive Baptism rightly are grafted into the Church; the promises of forgiveness of sin, and of our adoption to be the sons of God by the Holy Ghost, are visibly signed and sealed; Faith is confirmed, and Grace increased by virtue of prayer unto God. The Baptism of young Children is in any wise to be retained in the Church, as most agreeable with the institution of Christ.

How does this relate to Lutherans?  I lived in Wisconsin for 13 years — jr. high, high school, college, and graduate school.  We played several Lutheran schools in sports in jr. high, high school, and college.  After games, I evangelized players on their teams.  They were not saved.  I never talked to a saved Lutheran.  My next door neighbor, really a rarity in our area, is a Lutheran, conservative one, and not saved.  He’s depending on his works for salvation and doesn’t need any help — nice guy but lost.

I follow the Pyromaniacs twitter feed, because I like to look at their linked articles.  I noticed that Phil Johnson was at a Lutheran church in Minnesota and preaching at a conference with Lutherans.  The mention of Martin Luther at times by these conservative evangelicals has been disconcerting to me.  I evangelized many Lutherans when I was in Wisconsin and they were not saved people, not friendly at all to evangelism.  The Lutheran Church where Johnson spoke was American Association of Lutheran Churches.  It has a short doctrinal statement with these sentences.

The Holy Spirit, through the Word, reveals our sinful nature and God’s perfect, eternal nature.  Through Baptism, the Word works through water to bury our sinful nature and raise us to a new, eternal life in Christ.  In the Lord’s Supper, the believer receives the forgiveness of sins through the presence of the Body and Blood of Christ in bread and wine.

The church claims to believe the Unaltered Augsburg Confession, which is very similar to the Anglican Church of the earlier young family.  That confession says:

Of Baptism they teach that it is necessary to salvation, and that through Baptism is offered the grace of God, and that children are to be baptized who, being offered to God through Baptism are received into God’s grace.

The Anglican statement on baptism might be a little better than the Lutheran one.  This is a corruption of the gospel by adding a work to grace.  When I have talked to those who believe like Anglicans and Lutherans, I have gone to Galatians 1:6-9 and Galatians 5:1-4.

How many works need to be added to corrupt the gospel?  Just one.  Adding circumcision corrupts the gospel.  Christ becomes of no effect.  You replace circumcision with baptism and you’ve got the same, very serious problem.  Paul says if someone preaches another gospel, let him be accursed.  That’s different than preaching with them.  Preaching with them is not saying, let them be accursed.

Evangelicals and Catholics together have violated Galatians 1:6-9.  Evangelicals and Lutherans or Evangelicals and Anglicans together do the same.

The content of this post is now available in the study of:

1.) Evan Roberts

2.) The Welsh Revival of 1904-1905

3.) Jessie Penn-Lewis

on the faithsaves.net website. Please click on the people above to view the study.  On the FaithSaves website the PDF files may be easiest to read.

You are also encouraged to learn more about Keswick theology and its errors, as well as the Biblical doctrine of salvation, at the soteriology page at Faithsaves.

Parts One and Two and Three

As I’ve written within the previous posts on Christian liberty, many adhere, especially evangelicals and many fundamentalists, to the notion that Christians have liberty wherever scripture does not speak in an explicit manner — meaning that if the very words of whatever it is that is possibly prohibited are not found in scripture, then someone has liberty to do it.  That’s not good for people to be thinking, anyone and particularly Christians, because it isn’t true.  It goes further though.

Professing Christians are so messed up about the grace of God, that they think that they are partakers of more grace when they participate in these activities that they say can’t be proven by scripture.  As the shorts on a woman creep further up her leg, they are showing how deep and wide she is embracing God’s grace, diving into His broad river of love and letting it wash all over her.  Grace almost exclusively shortens her skirt, not lengthens, makes his rock music rock even harder, and expands their list of alcohol choices.  In reality, this viewpoint is an old perversion.

The most common deviation from God’s grace in the United States is not adding works to grace, but what Jude says the ungodly do, turning the grace of God into lasciviousness (Jude v. 4).  2 Peter 2 is similar to Jude, and Peter says that these servants of corruption promise liberty.  They allure through the lusts of the flesh.  It’s a popular grace that isn’t about God, but about what you want to do.  This brings me to the main point of this post.

Eight times scripture commands either “honour thy father and mother” or “honour thy father and thy mother.”  It’s all over the Bible, both Old and New Testaments — Exodus, Deuteronomy, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Ephesians.  There are also verses like Proverbs 23:22, “Hearken unto thy father that begat thee, and despise not thy mother when she is old,” several like that one.  What if a father tells his child to do something that he doesn’t think is taught in the Bible?  He might not be sure, but he thinks he might have liberty.  In many cases today, it isn’t even liberty, it’s just one of these “fake areas” of liberty, that relate to no direct, word-for-word prohibition, as I talked about above.

Does a child have liberty to dishonor his parents?  When I say this, I’m not talking about disobedience or transgression of scripture.  I know young people right now who aren’t obeying scripture because their parents told them not to.  They know they are disobedient, and yet they don’t want to “dishonor” their parents by obeying scripture.  That is in the category, I’ve mentioned in another post, obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29).

Just the opposite today, the world is full of young people, 18 and older, who don’t honor their parents in either areas of liberty or areas of “fake liberty” or a perversion of liberty.  It isn’t the grace of God, but turning the grace of God into lasciviousness.  They’re all over the place.  They think it’s even what it means to be “out on their own.”   They call this “having their own convictions.”  They aren’t convictions.  They are violations of Christian liberty.  No one has the liberty to dishonor his parents.

The idea of a conviction among evangelicals has become very personalized.  A conviction is yours with the emphasis on you.  It’s yours.  To have it be yours, the thought here among the youngest adults is, you can’t have it be your parents.  That would theirs and not yours. That would make you too much of a child.  Almost definitionally, children want to do something different for the conviction to be theirs.  This signals independence to them, what it means to be an adult.

A conviction to be an actual conviction must be scriptural and what I see from many young people today is that they want their own convictions, but they haven’t taken the time to study the Bible, know what it says, about the convictions.  Young adults look around at what other people are doing who call themselves Christians, and practice like they do.  Now they have their own conviction, except it isn’t a conviction.  They treat it like a conviction, because they keep doing it even if someone encourages them to take a conviction, an actual conviction, like their parents have done, which means something studied out from scripture and likely in agreement with the rest of their church.

I believe and have instructed that as children become adults that they take the same positions as their parents.  They should change only if they have a conviction, an actual conviction to do so, and that is only where they see the change as necessary for obedience to scripture.  If it is a Christian liberty, children should just keep practicing like their parents out of honor to their parents, because scripture commands to honor parents.

There is a specific passage that will help on this.  Read Jeremiah 35 and the tale of the Rechabites.  Verses 6 and 8 of that chapter say,

But they said, We will drink no wine: for Jonadab the son of Rechab our father commanded us, saying, Ye shall drink no wine, neither ye, nor your sons for ever. . . . Thus have we obeyed the voice of Jonadab the son of Rechab our father in all that he hath charged us, to drink no wine all our days, we, our wives, our sons, nor our daughters.

It wasn’t just drinking no wine, but a few other particular instructions of their father that they did, just because he told them to do them.  Some of them are in the category of non-scriptural issues.  Read them.  They obeyed them alone because he had told them to do these things.  Read the whole chapter, but this is how it turned out for them (verses 18-19):

And Jeremiah said unto the house of the Rechabites, Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel; Because ye have obeyed the commandment of Jonadab your father, and kept all his precepts, and done according unto all that he hath commanded you: Therefore thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel; Jonadab the son of Rechab shall not want a man to stand before me for ever.

They honored their father and God honored them for honoring their father.  They did this for hundreds of years over many generations.  One generation after another passed down the same beliefs and practices, that weren’t necessarily biblical commands or explicit to practice, and God honored them for it.

A family could be preserved if it honored its father.  A nation could be preserved if offspring honored its father.  We wouldn’t be seeing the degradation of society, the downward trend and trajectory toward destruction.

How again does honor of parents relate to Christian liberty?  If the parents instruct to disobey scripture, of course adult children don’t do that.  If the parents instruct in non-scriptural, not unscriptural but non-scriptural, areas, the children honor their parents and do what their parents instruct.  Children do not have liberty to dishonor parents.

As a parent, I attempt to allow my children or give them Christian liberty.  I want them to have liberty in those areas.  I try to speak not in my preferences, but in what scripture teaches.  Now, my children might think they have liberty in areas I don’t think they do, but either way, they don’t have the liberty to dishonor me or their mother.  I’m giving myself as an example, I know.  It’s something I expect of my own children, but I also expect it of myself with my own parents.  It’s been important to me that I honor them with what I do and how I treat them.

Christians don’t have liberty to dishonor their parents.

Parts One and Two

The fundamental of Christian liberty is that we are free from something unto something else, which is that we are free from bondage to sin, including the causal factors, the world, the flesh, and the devil. We are no longer citizens of this world, but heaven. Our god isn’t our belly any longer. We don’t mind earthly things, as someone who is building his own kingdom on this earth through his own efforts.  Our affections are set on things above — we are free to do that. We get to do that.

Christian liberty is liberty not to sin. We don’t have to sin anymore and don’t even want to sin anymore. In Romans 7, Paul said, when he would do good, that is when the law of sin in members rises up against that desire.  You are worshiping and serving the Creator rather than the creature.  God didn’t save you to serve the creature, yourself.  Liberty isn’t being able to serve your self now; it’s being able to serve God.

Hebrews 2:2 divides sin into two categories:  transgression and disobedience.  Those are the categories of sins of commission, doing what you aren’t supposed to do, and disobedience, not doing what you are supposed to do.  Sin isn’t just not doing wrong.  It is also not doing right.  Liberty isn’t getting to do what you want, but doing what God wants, what pleases Him, which is of the highest value.  Your life takes on greater value, eternal value, versus the bondage to temporal things, which waste your life.

All of what I said above is what Christian liberty is about, that is, finding out what God said and doing it, because you can do it now that you’ve been set free to do so.  This lines up with the great sections on Christian liberty by Paul in 1 Corinthians 6:1-11:1 and Romans 14.  It also fits into what we read about in Galatians 3-6.  Your liberty serves others, not yourself.  As his prime example of this in Galatians, Paul says it is restoring someone taken in a fault (6:1).  That requires confronting someone for doing something wrong.

Liberty is contrasted in the New Testament with license. Liberty isn’t license. License is permission and some today confuse it with liberty.  They think and then say that you are restricting their liberties in a kind of legalistic fashion, because you are not giving them license.  They want to do something that they don’t have liberty to do, and when you say, no, they say that you are teaching some type of salvation by works.  They are depending on grace, which is why, they might explain, you can’t bring that restriction.  By doing so, they feign that you are an opponent of the grace of God.  This is an abuse of God’s grace, turning it into a garbage can into which pours their own lust.

Alright.  Think about what I’ve written so far, but I want to relate Christian liberty to church autonomy.  We don’t have liberty to disobey scripture, even if our church takes an unscriptural position.  The Bible is the final authority.  Church is about the Bible and not vice versa.  Church isn’t an excuse for being unscriptural.  Quite a few independent or even unaffiliated Baptist churches seem to treat scripture as if it has a major purpose of protecting church authority, sort of putting the cart ahead of the horse.

In Acts 15, correction of the Jersualem church came from Antioch.  You see this at the beginning of Galatians when Paul came in to correct Peter.  I’ve heard something to the effect, “You can’t talk to me about that, because I’m not part of your church, so it’s none of your business.”  Because of the nature of the media and social networking, churches have more effect on each other than ever.  One church can harm another church, because of the connection between members, and it is rampant.  What one church is “allowed to do,” which isn’t in fact a Christian liberty, can affect another church, when one of its members is influenced by the membership of another church.  Very often, it spreads through family members who are in various other churches.

Church members are going to go outside of their church for teaching and materials.  They will watch or listen to podcasts.  Most of the time today, they’re going to get a bad influence from outside of the church.  As a pastor, I don’t want my church to get a bad influence from outside of the church.  It happens.  They can hear almost anything that disagrees with what our church teaches.  A church member doesn’t have liberty to listen to or watch harmful materials.  Autonomy of a church is justified here, because it protects someone from unscriptural belief and practice.

In a less significant way today, one church could affect another church in a stronger way or in a biblical way.  Someone is sinning.  He doesn’t have liberty to sin.  He needs to change.  He reads that in a blog or receives that influence from another family member on social networking.  Maybe he believes it or receives it and it clashes with the teaching of his church, so that now he puts his own pastor on the radar.  The pastor of his own church is being judged by this teaching that he hasn’t taught.

Let me give you an example.  Our church sings psalms.  We use the versification of a psalter.  It isn’t the King James translation that we’re singing to God.  By the way, that would make me not KJVO, even though I take credit for being KJVO.  It’s obvious that technically I’m not.  I think that the versification we sing of the Hebrew Masoretic text is scripture.  However, it’s hard to sing psalms if you haven’t done it.  It’s not like riding a bike.  You have to acquire the ability through some labor, because you believe in it.  Lots of churches won’t want it, sometimes because they want those 7-11 songs, the same seven verses sung eleven times.  They’ll want to stick with something else that people like and is easier for them to do.

So the church member of the psalm singing church through social networking affects the member of a non-psalm-singing church.  He quotes Colossians 3:16 and Ephesians 5:19.  The influence leads the member to pressure his pastor toward psalm singing.  The pastor doesn’t want to sing psalms for whatever reason.  This seems to trouble a church.  The church can do what it wants to do because it is autonomous.  It isn’t required to do what some other church is doing.  It has liberty not to sing psalms based upon its own autonomy.  Or does it?  Autonomy is not for disobeying scripture.  Finding out something you are not doing, that you could and should be doing, is not trouble for you.  That’s a good thing happening to a church, to find out how to be more scriptural.  Autonomy is for protecting a church against unscriptural practices not scriptural ones.

Autonomy doesn’t guide Christian liberty.  The Bible does.  We are all under the same truth and the same authority.  Churches are not allowed to function in a different way just because they want their own way, that they call autonomy.  If someone can prove something from scripture, the answer to the argument isn’t church autonomy.  Churches are not to protect themselves from biblical practice.  Professing Christians shouldn’t join a church or even stay for the cover it gives them for their sin or lust.

I ended the last post with the biblical and historical teaching of sola scriptura.  Scripture itself does not denude a church or individual Christian from the influence of the church past and present.  Scripture doesn’t start teaching something different after centuries.  The displacement of the church from its agreement with the past teachings of the church is differentiated from sola scriptura with the terminology, nuda scriptura.  The same Holy Spirit who guided the church four hundred years ago and two hundred years ago is the same Holy Spirit today.  Endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit considers the unity with the church five hundred years ago in its application of scripture.  Divorce from former teaching is divorce from reliance on scripture.  That is not sola scriptura, but nuda scriptura.

Sometimes you’ll hear of the “heresy” of a particular false religion.  Heresy is division.  I see in scripture two types of heresy.  There is the factiousness in a church, dividing from the unity of a church and the leadership of its pastor.  This is the heresy of Titus 3:9-11.  However, it is heresy to divide from historic, established, orthodox teaching and practice.  The new teaching that differs from biblical belief and behavior is the heretical teaching.  The Bible teaches this.  This is one of the aspects of Paul’s teaching, walking disorderly against the traditions that you received.  These are not the traditions of men, but the means by which God delivers His one faith or doctrine to you.  You don’t have liberty to veer off already established teachings, unless you can show how that those people had been wrong all those centuries.

A human tradition is one originated outside of scripture, like infant sprinkling or transubstantiation.  You can see when those entered into the belief and practice of churches.  They didn’t start with the Bible.  Something that has been believed and practiced from the Bible isn’t a human tradition, but it is a tradition nonetheless, like the ones that the Thessalonian churches received from Paul.  We don’t have liberty to disobey those traditions.  They are part of sola scriptura, because teachings of scripture cannot be nor should be extricated from the context of the church, the temple of the Holy Spirit.

Sola scriptura does not rightly justify dropping the rightful applications of the bible by the church for centuries.  Immodesty then was immodesty now.  Forbidden gender indistinction then should be the same now.  Skirts or dresses on women then should be skirts or dresses on women now.  Scripture is being either transgressed or disobeyed because it isn’t being applied like it has been for all of church history.  This is a violation of Christian liberty.

Again, read the last few full posts written this week.

I don’t know him, never met or talked or interacted in any way, but I have read and listened to Jeff Riddle in the last year or two.  We take similar if not identical views of the text of scripture.  When we wrote and published TSKT in 2003, I wrote the chapter (19), “Test of Canonicity as Applied to Words,” which I hear from Riddle too.  He wrote a great article on the ending of Mark in the Puritan Reformed Journal (look for it), published here.  He interacts with a conversation between James White and Michael Kruger on the canon argument here, which will point out the contradiction in the evangelical presuppositions for canon and text.  It’s important.  An index to all his materials is here.