Church historians will say that a big part of the history of the church is a reaction to major heresies or at least strains of heresy that caused major problems in the church.  The true church starts with the truth, and a heresy would be a deviation or detour off that path.  A heresy would be a false teaching that diverts from true teaching, so some kind of perversion of the truth.  Pelagianism is identified as one of these major strains of heresy in the history of the church.

Before I get to that point, I digress.  Are there really only five strains of heresy in the history of the church like some pose:  Judaizers, Gnostics, Arians, Pelagians, and Socinians?   One old one, seen through the New Testament, and then throughout church history, but especially today in professing Christianity, is antinomianism, where grace is used as an occasion of the flesh, what seems to be the grace of modern Christianity.  Now back to the point of this post.

Pelagianism, also called Pelagian heresy, is the Christian theological position that the original sin did not taint human nature and mortal will is still capable of choosing good or evil without special divine aid or assistance.

The novelty of the doctrine which he taught is repeatedly asserted by Augustine, and is evident to the historian; but it consisted not in the emphasis that he laid on free will, but rather in the fact that, in emphasizing free will, he denied the ruin of the race and the necessity of grace.

In 2011 I attended incognito the Evangelical Theological Society meeting in San Francisco, and listened to Robert P. George in a session entitled, “Ethics in an Age of Relativism.”  He described students in general in today’s colleges and universities as selectively relativistic.  They become very absolute usually only when they judge a personal offense.  They know you’ve offended them.

As an example, love has an objective meaning that proceeds from scripture.  It doesn’t mean acceptance or toleration, yet that’s the definition most accept today.  “Love is acceptance” gets 115,000 results when you google it.  Many call this “unconditional love” (21 million results) about which someone wrote:

The practical extension of the theories of unconditional love is a permissive attitude and a morally nonrestrictive atmosphere.

I’ve read several say that millennials don’t want to be judged.  They don’t want to be preached to or told what to do.  A fifth of Americans claim to be religiously unaffiliated, according to a 2012 Pew Research Center survey, which categorizes them as “nones.”  Millennials are less devout than any other age bracket polled and describe Christianity as “hypocritical” and “judgmental.”  Both those words are common for millennials.

Hypocrisy of any kind is ironic for someone who doesn’t want to be judged, doesn’t want you to be judgmental.  Hypocrisy requires a standard.  No one can be a hypocrite when there is no standard, unless he is selective.  They apply hypocrisy to you because you have a standard.  They then feel entitled to have no standard because you have violated your own, meaning that it doesn’t matter to keep it.  They have a standard of which they are only sure when they are offended.

Judgment is an important aspect of actual Christianity, so this is where selective relativism enters.  They want to be accepted based on who they want to be and what they want to do without judgment.  That is the new love.  They can’t be “authentic” if they can’t live exactly how they feel without recrimination.  This isn’t love.

Love as we know it today originated from the Bible.  As it began to be used in English discourse after the translation of the Bible into English, love took on a biblical meaning, because that’s where the idea came from.  It maintained biblical parameters, until words started taking on new meanings to adapt to the inclinations or views of the reader.  Usage of the word “love” then changed.

A millennial might tell you that you don’t love him, but he doesn’t mean biblical love when he says love.  Today fellow millennials know what the other means.  When he says you don’t love him, he means you are judging him and you aren’t accepting or tolerating his behavior.  This is the “unconditional love.”  In fact, if you do love him, actually love him, you can’t tolerate or accept all of his behavior.

Love that proceeds from scripture, the only actual love, is of God, like John wrote in 1 John 4:7, “love is of God,” which is one of the first verses we had our children learn.  Love is an attribute of God.  He defines love, which is why John also wrote, “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 18).  If something clashes with God, it can’t be love.

Love assumes standards, because something that violates the standards of God is not love.  The ten commandments, which are standards, are reduced in the Old and New Testaments to two standards, love God and love your neighbor.  You aren’t loving God when you disobey and dishonor Him, and you aren’t loving your neighbor when you are disobeying and dishonoring God.  God explains what it is to love your neighbor.

In the love chapter, Paul writes that “love rejoiceth not in iniquity” (1 Corinthians 13:6).  Consider these two verses:

Proverbs 3:12, “For whom the LORD loveth he correcteth; even as a father the son in whom he delighteth.”
Hebrews 12:6, “For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.”

that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word.

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.

Whenever I get to a slavery passage when teaching the Bible, I like to talk about slavery.  I taught Ephesians this year in our school and I had to talk about it in Ephesians 6:5-9.  I couldn’t just say, let’s talk about the employer-employee relationship, since it starts with slaves being obedient to their masters in verse 5.

Slavery is actually a big part of the Bible.  In the New Testament, the noun form of “slave” (doulos) occurs 127 times, and its verb form occurs 25.  Scripture doesn’t hide the fact of slavery.  It’s right there again and again.

This week Nike, the shoe company, canceled its Betsy Ross Flag Sneaker, which had a rendition of the flag of the original thirteen states on its heel.  Colin Kaepernick, who works for Nike, objected.  Vox, a site sympathetic to him, reported:

This early version of the flag, he argued, is pulled from the era of slavery and doesn’t warrant celebration.

Many are predicting sales of Nike will increase based upon this decision.  July 4th and this story got me thinking again about slavery.

Neither Jesus or Paul tried to stop slavery.  Did they approve of it?  Both did.

Slavery in the Bible isn’t an overly complicated issue, but I want to give what I believe are the cliffs notes on it.  It’s worth understanding, because there is good and bad here.

One, slavery itself is acceptable to God.  Two, slavery is regulated in the Bible by God and violating His regulations is sinning against Him.  Three, ending slavery isn’t a target for the church, even as it wasn’t for Jesus and Paul.

Those three points are hard for the modern American mind.  The institution of slavery doesn’t exist in the United States any more, but as seen in the Nike controversy above and others like it, it’s still an issue.  Thinking about slavery in a biblical way is of the greatest value.

I want to start with the regulations.  Kidnapping is wrong, so capturing someone and making him a slave is a violation (Exodus 21:16).  That would prohibit a slave trade and involuntary slavery.  Having a racial component to slavery is wrong, because the Bible teaches against racial superiority.  Everyone is equal in essence in the sight of God.  All the other regulations of slavery would fit the regulations in scripture for how anyone treats another human being.

A lot of the society of Jesus and Paul violated scripture.  The mission of the church superseded stopping what was wrong in the culture.  The focus was the permanent perfection of everything under the reign of Jesus Christ.  The priority is the kingdom of the Lord over all temporal, short-term human institutions.  The nature of change is important in scripture.  For a Christian, the successful long term changes of a society or culture depend on belief of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The world doesn’t understand the last point.  Nothing could be more important to the world than its seventy to one hundred year lifespan on earth.  However, not to God.  Jesus or Paul don’t attempt to upheave social institutions, which include marriage and government.

If you are slave, be the best slave for Jesus Christ.  If you are wife to an unsaved husband, be the best wife for Jesus Christ.  If you are in an oppressive government, be the best citizen of the state for Jesus Christ.  The Bible treats this life like the short life that it is.  I don’t assume that living according to scripture won’t turn the world into the best possible place even in the short term.    The permanent though should not be sacrificed on the altar of the immediate.

The Bible teaches that Christians have their identities in Jesus Christ.  They are not  a Jew or Gentile, but they are a Christian.  They are not male or female.  They are a Christian.  They are not bond or free, but Christians.  That brings me back to the first point.

The Bible teaches slavery.  Believers are slaves of Jesus Christ.  Every person is a slave to something or someone.  Paul said you were either a slave of sin or a slave of righteousness — you are either one or the other and not both at the same time.

The hierarchy of slavery isn’t wrong.  An earthly master isn’t better than his slave, but he has authority over him.  All men are created equal, like Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence.  Submission to someone in authority over you doesn’t mean he is better than you.  His position is greater even as God the Father is greater than God the Son.

The kind of slavery before the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation and the series of constitutional amendments ratified after the Civil War doesn’t exist any more in the United States.  Maybe that history of slavery is still a concern to unbelievers, but it shouldn’t matter to a Christian.  The slavery issue is a distraction from what the real problem is.  Christians shouldn’t cooperate with that distraction as they so often do today, so that they will appear to be “woke.”

Anyone who rejects the gospel of Jesus Christ will go to Hell.  Hell will be worse for everyone than any other form of slavery that exists on earth.  Rescuing people from sin and Hell must far outweigh any other cause.  Nothing is worse.

There are things worse than slavery that violate biblical regulation of slavery.  If we can’t be more concerned about those things over the slavery issue, then our values are truly perverse.

 In one sense, everyone is owned by God as a submissive slave, or as a rebel against, following his own way.   On the other hand, believers are voluntarily slaves of Jesus Christ.   Believers do not do well to cooperate with a general dislike of the concept of slavery.   We want to encourage slavery to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.  If someone doesn’t acquiesce to the Lordship of Christ, he’ll be a slave anyway to the world, the flesh, and the devil and meet a damnable end.

In the first half of Acts 6 Stephen along with seven others was chosen to service the Grecian widows of the Jerusalem church.  In the second half of Acts 6, the focus stays alone on Stephen with his courageous gospel disputations in the Hellenistic Jewish synagogues.  He is charged with blasphemy by them, which then gains the attention of the Sanhedrin.  When he is called before that august council in Acts 7:1, Caiaphas asks him a question about the charges of the synagogue leadership:  “Are these things so?”  The rest of the mammoth chapter records Stephen’s answer to the high priest’s question.

The accusation against Stephen was blasphemy and he turns that on its head against his accusers.  The English word “blasphemy” transliterates the Greek noun, blasphemia.  BDAG says that it is “speech that denigrates or defames, reviling, denigration, disrespect, slander,” and in particular denigates or degrades God.  The Hebrew word that translates “blaspheme” means essentially the same.  Very often blasphemy is associated with taking the name of the Lord God in vain, breaking the third of the ten commandments, which is blasphemy.

In Acts 6:11, Stephen is accused to have spoken blasphemous words against Moses and against God.  Part of what Stephen is doing in Acts 7 is defending himself, but he does it in a cohesive manner so as to prove that his accusers were the ones guilty of blasphemy.  He uses the entire Old Testament to prove the apostasy of Israel and its leaders.  Blasphemy and apostasy come together, but what is it?

Key to understanding the sermon of Stephen in Acts 7 is in the conclusion to it in verses 51-53:

51 Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye. 52 Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? and they have slain them which shewed before of the coming of the Just One; of whom ye have been now the betrayers and murderers: 53 Who have received the law by the disposition of angels, and have not kept it.

This is the theme of Stephen’s presentation.  His audience, he says, always resists the Holy Spirit, as their forefathers did.  They did that by persecuting the prophets, ending in the slaying of the Just One, Jesus, so having received the law, they have not kept it.

Stephen’s present accusers and their forefathers denigrated God, blasphemy, by not hearing or heeding the voice of God through His spokesmen.  They denigrated them all the way up to the greatest spokesman of and for God, the Lord Jesus Christ.  This is something Jesus also had proven to them while He preached during His ministry.

What I’m writing here reinforces a theme I’ve been asserting in recent posts here on apostasy, authority, and heresy.  In his epistle about apostasy in 2 Peter, Peter equates the apostasy with the despising of government and speaking evil of dignities, and in Jude’s epistle also about apostasy, “despise dominion.”  “Despising,” “speaking evil,” and again “despise” are to “denigrate” or “defame.”

A person, including a professing Christian or Israelite, can imagine or fancy himself respectful of God.  He has formed or fashioned his god in his imagination into one who accepts his lifestyle.  This is what Jude calls ‘turning the grace of God into lasciviousness.’  Meanwhile, this person defames actual God by denigrating God’s representative human authorities that this person cannot morph into what he wants.

The denigration of the human authority is what Stephen specifies to evince blasphemy of God.  When Jesus came, He was God in human flesh.  They couldn’t get away with this separation of God from human authority.  Jesus was human.  They had to deal with something concrete with which they were unable to pass off through their fancies and mere imagination.  Here was God before them.  Who was it before?

Well, according to Stephen, before it was first Joseph.  Yes, Joseph.  The last fifteen chapters of Genesis  areabout Joseph.  Stephen said about Joseph, “God was with him.”  I looked into who else that was said about in the New Testament.  One time.  Acts 10:38.  It was said about Jesus by Peter.  Joseph and Jesus.  God was with them.

The parallel for Stephen among the Patriarchs were the twelve tribes, the sons of Jacob, who envied Joseph.  This related to lust, another theme for Peter in 2 Peter and Jude in Jude.  They weren’t getting what they wanted and Joseph was in the way.  What they wanted wasn’t what God wanted and God was with Joseph.

At the end of Genesis, Joseph says God meant it for good (Gen 50:20).  That didn’t relieve the responsibility of the twelve, according to Stephen.  They were opposing God nonetheless, like whom?  Like Judas for one, another apostate, whom Stephen’s accusers used to betray Christ.

There are thousands and thousands of millennials today, who feel justified in changing their own views about God, because of their problem with human authority, maybe a parent or a pastor.  The human authority is the one saying, no, and punishing them when they do wrong.  They want their way.  Instead of succumbing to the human authority, whom God is with, whether they like it or not, they speak evil of it and despise it, while thinking they are loving God.  This is blasphemy.  They are blaspheming God by blaspheming, denigrating and defaming human authority.  I know about this personally and painfully.  They are not loving God, because this is how God works — through people, human authority.  They have merely shaped a new god in their minds who rejects their human authority — like Joseph’s brothers.  Their new god, who isn’t actual God, agrees with them, and actual God, Who speaks through human authority, doesn’t agree with them.  They are blaspheming Him.

Stephen moves on from there, but that’s how he makes his case in Acts 7.  It would be good for you to understand that.