In the late nineteenth century, so-called bible or theological scholars began conforming their views of origins and Genesis to Darwin.  This was the influence of modernism, which changed the basis of epistemology from know by faith to know by human reasoning.  One could say that this was the time of the bifurcation of science and faith or science and theology, moving religion to the arts side of the campus.  Darwinism had not truly been tested.  It was embraced not because of science, but despite it, and professors with a desire to conform and please capitulated.  One can read it even in The Fundamentals with some of the authors promoting old earth creationism.  The two book approach validated the most foundational of the fundamental.

Now we know how the cell works.  We know about DNA.  We have looked into the fossil record.  We get irreducible complexity.  We see that philosophy or even rebellion was the basis of replacing God with naturalism or uniformitarianism.  Faith was still the way to know.  God still expected men to believe what He said.  What He said and wrote to us was and is still the truth.

Since scripture is true and a valid, unimpeachable knowledge, what Peter called the pure mother’s milk or sincere milk and what James referred to as without variableness or shadow of turning, we can and should say there is one truth.  The one truth proceeds from one God.  God expects us to embrace his own truth, what Jude called “the faith” once delivered unto the saints.  The wrenches thrown into the gears or the speed bumps formed on the way from secularism, naturalism, or evidentialism are not to sway or corrupt the church or God’s people.  They are to keep receiving God’s Words.

At the time of the first printed editions of the Greek New Testament shortly after the invention of the printing press, godly men believed and promulgated a doctrine of verbal, plenary preservation of scripture.  They knew the existence of textual variants.  Their view, I believe, is well represented by this statement by Richard Capel:

[W]e have the Copies in both languages [Hebrew and Greek], which Copies vary not from Primitive writings in any matter which may stumble any. This concernes onely the learned, and they know that by consent of all parties, the most learned on all sides among Christians do shake hands in this, that God by his providence hath preserved them uncorrupt. . . . As God committed the Hebrew text of the Old Testament to the Jewes, and did and doth move their hearts to keep it untainted to this day: So I dare lay it on the same God, that he in his providence is so with the Church of the Gentiles, that they have and do preserve the Greek Text uncorrupt, and clear: As for some scrapes by Transcribers, that comes to no more, than to censure a book to be corrupt, because of some scrapes in the printing, and ‘tis certain, that what mistake is in one print, is corrected in another.

Many other statements were made by Christian men, church leaders, through those hundreds of years of printed history, that represent their bibliology and historic Christianity, showing that they believed they possessed in copies the very words of God in the language in which they were written.  They took this position from scripture, assuming that God would do and did what He said.  What changed?

Premoderns saw and believed truth was transcendent.  Truth is known by revelation, bypassing depravity, what I have called the trampling of the crime scene.  One can think he knows the truth by evidence, but he must not trust first his lying eyes and second the effects of a sin-cursed world on the evidence he thinks he sees.  Darwinism is a sample, a big one.  It changed the landscape of man’s thinking, and it was based upon limited observation, where credit was given that was not really earned in an effort toward compatibility with scholarship.

Textual criticism is similar in that it defers to a modernist’s approach, depending on rationalism.  Believing God is just not good enough and scripture is not to be depended upon. What is it that textual critics, of a modern so-called science, notice?  There are variations in the handwritten copies.  They point those out.  They do not belie God’s preservation.  Divine work is involved, using men, not only in making the copies, but judging the copyist errors.

Scripture reports the expectations, every word.  God works in what He says He will do.  Textual criticism, the so-called science, is a different epistemology, knowing, albeit not really knowing, in a different way than what God wants men to know or has even ordained them to know.  The godly should presuppose what God said He would do and doubt their own observational abilities.  If someone doesn’t believe in preservation, no settled text, based on different presuppositions and really a different view of the world, a modern one, he sees an ongoing, never-ending adjustment, tweaking, and never being certain.

A shift occurs from divine to human.  Men are still searching, still discovering, applying rationalistic criteria in the way of man-made rules and in the context of unbelieving methods.  This. is. what. is. happening.  It is not the same thing as what true Christians believed and did.  They settled.  They possessed God’s Words in their hands, preservation equaled availability.

Erasmus in the 16th century did not invent a preserved text of scripture when he published the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament.  That text already existed and was already received by God’s people.  Kurt Aland, who has no skin in the doctrine of preservation, says with unpretentious honesty (“The Text of the Church?” in Trinity Journal, Fall, 1987, p.131):

[I]t is undisputed that from the 16th to the 18th century orthodoxy’s doctrine of verbal inspiration assumed this Textus Receptus. It was the only Greek text they knew, and they regarded it as the ‘original text.’

This didn’t start in the 16th century either.  Kurt Aland’s wife, Barbara Aland, writes in her book The Text of the New Testament (pp. 6-7):

[T]he Textus Receptus remained the basic text and its authority was regarded as canonical. . . . Every theologian of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (and not just the exegetical scholars) worked from an edition of the Greek text of the New Testament which was regarded as the “revealed text.” This idea of verbal inspiration (i. e., of the literal and inerrant inspiration of the text) which the orthodoxy of both Protestant traditions maintained so vigorously, was applied to the Textus Receptus.

Kurt Aland in his publication, The Text of the Church?, writes:  “[T]his Byzantine text was regarded as ‘the text of the church’ . . . from the 4th . . . century.”  He also wrote in The Text of the New Testament (p. 11) writes:

We can appreciate better the struggle for freedom from the dominance of the Textus Receptus when we remember that in this period it was regarded even to the last detail the inspired and infallible word of God himself. 

I quote the Alands, because again they have nothing to hide.  They don’t care what the church believed.

For the premoderns, the doctrine of preservation from scripture guided a presupposition of a perfect text.  This corresponded to the nature of God.  One God, one doctrine, one scripture.  An irony exists among professing evangelical textual critics for a comparison between the doctrines of canonicity and preservation.  The Holy Spirit was at work in the acceptance of a perfect number of books, sixty-six, but not for what scripture actually teaches, perfect words.

The deviation from biblical epistemology, knowledge by faith, creates uncertainty.  The doubt fuels suspicion of biblical teaching and practice.  It can’t buoy against worldly attack and rejection.  It diminishes the authority of scripture, which causes faintheartedness and apostasy.  Biblical standards of holiness have fallen.  They clash with the world and the doubt saps strength to stand for Christian living.

Two term Democrat mayor of South Bend, IN, and presidential hopeful, Pete Buttigieg, made the news this last week talking about “faith,” calling his own same-sex marriage “conservative” and something that “moves me closer to God.”  Furthermore, he called Mike Pence, “cheerleader of the porn star presidency,” and continuing, said:

I’m reluctant to comment on another person’s faith, but I would say it is hard to look at this president’s actions and believe that they’re the actions of somebody who believes in God. . . . I just don’t understand how you can be as worshipful of your own self as he is and be prepared to humble yourself before God. I’ve never seen him humble himself before anyone.

Then today he went further toward Mike Pence:

If you got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me — your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.

What does Buttigieg hope to accomplish by talking about his own “Christianity” as a homosexual?  Both his and Donald Trump’s are not actual Christianity.  Neither.  Buttigieg knows that at least millennial evangelicals could vote for him.  He’s attempting to pick off professing evangelicals.  I’m saying this is the condition of evangelicalism today, and the leaders are afraid of a mass exodus of sympathetic to homosexuality.

Hailey Bieber in an interview this last week said her purpose is to ‘represent Jesus’ in the modeling industry.  In the linked article, she recognizes the contradiction, but this is a similar if not identical alternative form of Christianity as Buttigieg.

For all of Christian history these two above presentations would be in outright, diametric incongruity with the Bible and Christianity, and yet this is where a kind of professing Christianity is today.  Just like there is one truth, there is only one Christianity, the one Christ requires true churches to keep.  What has happened?  A lot.  So many things that it is difficult to put a finger on just one thing.

Today many represent the incongruity in a philosophical way as postmodernism.  It is a helpful category.  Premoderns thought truth came from God, so we know with certainty truth by faith through revelation.  Distinguished from them, moderns said we know by human reasoning or discovery, opting for rationalism.  Postmoderns conclude truth was a social construct, more of just a personal theory, our truth is our truth, so my truth is as good as any other truth.  Modernism was a machine that failed, trampling everyone into the dirt, not turning out well for whatever its basis might be.  With postmodernism, no definite terms, boundaries, or absolute truths exist.  Since everything is in error anyway, and it’s not safe to trust conclusions, nothing is absolute, except what the postmodern wants.

The philosophical explanation brings categories and the story of demise.  It chronicles transitions, but it wasn’t the cause for permissible multiple massive variations in Christianity.  Judgment begins in the house of God.  2 Peter and Jude provide a biblical explication.

Buttigieg says same sex marriage moved him closer to God and that a hypothetical rejection by Mike Pence, who hasn’t said anything to or about Buttigieg that I have heard or read, is a quarrel with Buttigieg’s “creator.”   Buttigieg doesn’t go to scripture at all to defend his claim.  The Bible repudiates homosexuality in no uncertain terms, let alone same sex marriage, based upon God’s design as Creator.  God created male and female.  A man leaves father and mother and cleaves to his wife by God’s design.  Buttigieg is not arguing from scripture, and apparently he thinks this won’t matter to his audience, especially millennial evangelicals based upon his polling.  He gives the following evidence for God “creating” him “gay”:

If me being gay was a choice, it was a choice that was made far, far above my pay grade. . . .  [I] would have done anything to not be gay, when I started to half way realize what it meant that I felt the way I did. . . . If you had offered me a pill to make me straight, I would have swallowed it before I could get a sip of water.

Buttigieg puts his own feelings on par with revelation from God.  He believes God created him homosexual because he has feelings he says that he really doesn’t want to have, even though they in the end make him a better man.  Scripture says just the opposite.  James 1:14 in a classic passage on sin says that “every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.”  Buttigieg’s sin originates in his desires.  This isn’t God communicating to him, but his own flesh.

A lot of sin is based on feelings someone wishes that he didn’t have.  He doesn’t want to lie.  He does.  He doesn’t want  to react in selfish, angry way.  He does.  He doesn’t want to mouth off.  He does.  Postmoderns can say that God said something to them without any evidence, but their own feelings.  Their churches accept this.  Nothing in the Bible or the history of Christian theology matches this view.  It’s an man-made and man-centered invention.

Buttigieg’s talk isn’t Christian.  There aren’t several Christianities and you don’t get to choose the one you want.  Again, 2 Peter and Jude both expose and foresee this perversion of Christianity.  Jude 1:3-4:

 3 Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. 4 For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ.

Don’t skip the verses.  Go back and read them.  Churches must contend for the faith.  Why?  Ungodly men infiltrate churches, “turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ.”  The emphasis in Jude and 2 Peter 2 is the denial of the Lordship of Christ.  Men like Buttigieg want to do what he want to do, which is lasciviousness, and so he uses his feelings to allow for it.  This is turning the grace of God into lasciviousness and denying Jesus as Lord.  Buttigieg becomes lord, does what he wants, not what Jesus wants, and then justifies it.

The way the Lord Jesus Christ rules lives is through scripture through His churches.  Rather than submit to scripture, we see men elevate their feelings above.  This is worshiping the creature rather than the Creator (Rom 1:25).   Very often today churches are embarrassed about scripture.  They don’t like what it says.  They don’t want to expect or require what it says.  It’s easier to accept what people want to do.  This acceptance is their new love.  It isn’t love.  It’s better to call it sentimentalism, if not just lust.  They say they love each other and they feel love for one another, but their professed love contradicts scripture.

Churches and godly leaders of churches must contend for the faith, which is the one Christianity.  There are no alternatives.  I read someone recently who called the alternatives “the great omission” in contrast to the Great Commission of Matthew 28:19-20.  The great commission says “teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you,” but the alternative Christianity omits this, in so doing, “denying the Lord that bought them” (2 Peter 2:1).

Introduction to the Debate    Part One   Part Two   Part Three

by Kent Brandenburg

Answer to Q3

We need to get this settled immediately, even though it’s the actual affirmation of this debate, what I have written everywhere, and in the first question I asked—I believe that every Word of God is preserved in the languages in which they were written. Worded another way: I don’t believe that preservation of Scripture comes through a translation. A translation at best can accurately represent Greek and Hebrew words; it isn’t those words though. Since we do have translation occurring in the NT by Jesus and the Apostles, we know that translation is God’s will and can sufficiently communicate God’s Word, but it isn’t what God preserved.

You are correct that Turretin is speaking about translations in your quotes—I agree with him. Translations are not equal to preservation because they are not the words that God gave. They are a human effort. God doesn’t ever promise a perfect translation. Turretin, like me, believes that preservation occurs in the original languages because that is what Scripture teaches. This is where Mr. Turk would do well first to study what the Bible says about its own preservation and then enter into a debate with set Scriptural presuppositions. God inspired Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek words. He didn’t breathe out English words. He promised that “jots” and “tittles” would not pass from the law (Matthew 5:18). Those were Hebrew letters—the jot is the smallest consonant in the Hebrew alphabet and the tittle (keraia) is the vowel point according to Gill and Owen. God promises to preserve the letters and words that He actually gave. You cannot defend an English preservationist view using Scripture. You can defend that God preserved the actual Words He inerrantly revealed to mankind in His Holy Word. I can hold up a translation and confidently say, “This is the Word of God,” but it does not Scripturally represent the doctrine of preservation.

Comments for A3

Mr. Turk writes: “Kent wants to imply that unless all the words are present, none of the words are validly considered God’s word.” In my answer to his question #2, I write: “Neither the KJ translators, nor many others, would say that a translation in the places where it is faulty is the Word of God.” I already implied that any translation is the Word of God where it accurately translates the preserved original language text.

Mr. Turk’s “11 Greek words” versus “24 English words” illustrate the above point exactly. With a translation, we get as close as possible to the meaning of the original words in a formal equivalence, so we regularly use more words in the receptor language.

The nature of the word “preservation” says something was originally there that was kept intact. God didn’t start with Spanish or Latin or English. Something had to be there first before it could be kept. Mr. Turk says that God kept ideas and concepts and no sweat on exact wording. That doesn’t jive with Scripture.

Mr. Turk is right that it is ludicrous to abandon a translation because it has more words in it than the original text. However, we should abandon a text that has different words than what God has preserved. In 2 Thessalonians 2:2, we know that impostor text was being offered up as genuine Scripture. Revelation 22:18-19 warns very seriously about adding or taking away from the Words of the book—not the ideas or the concepts, but the Words.

Mr. Turk writes—”even if the words of the Greek and Hebrew were not perfectly handled.” Copyists made errors but that does not nullify Divine preservation. A good explanation of how a pure Word was maintained is written in 1658 by puritan Richard Capel:

[W]e have the Copies in both languages [Hebrew and Greek], which Copies vary not from Primitive writings in any matter which may stumble any. This concernes onely the learned, and they know that by consent of all parties, the most learned on all sides among Christians do shake hands in this, that God by his providence hath preserved them uncorrupt. . . . As God committed the Hebrew text of the Old Testament to the Jewes, and did and doth move their hearts to keep it untainted to this day: So I dare lay it on the same God, that he in his providence is so with the Church of the Gentiles, that they have and do preserve the Greek Text uncorrupt, and clear: As for some scrapes by Transcribers, that comes to no more, than to censure a book to be corrupt, because of some scrapes in the printing, and ‘tis certain, that what mistake is in one print, is corrected in another.

This represents the historic position of NT Christianity on the doctrine of preservation, simply fleshing out what Scripture says on this doctrine but sharp contrasting with Mr. Turk’s neo-orthodox conceptual Word of God. Neither does it fit with this monologue (John MacArthur on Matthew 24:35):

That’s a convenient view. The idea that there’s some idea, concept, religious notion there that may or may not be connected to the words, but the Bible claims to be the very words of God. First Corinthians 2:13 . . . . John 17:8 . . . . The message was in the words, there is no message apart from the words, there is no inspiration apart from the words. More than 3800 times in the Old Testament we have expressions like “Thus says the Lord,” “The Word of the Lord came,” “God said,” it’s about the words. There are no such things as wordless concepts anyway. When Moses would excuse himself from serving the Lord . . . . God didn’t say, “I’ll give you a lot of great ideas, you’ll figure out how to communicate them.” God didn’t say, “I’ll be with your mind.” God said to him this, “I will be with your mouth and I will teach you what you shall say.” And that explains why 40 years later, according to Deuteronomy 4:2 . . . . God did not give ideas without words but in some cases He gave words without complete ideas.

Part One

Proverbs 22:6 says:

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

“When he is old” in this verse means, when he is an adult, which could be when he is outside the home.  The Hebrew word first appears to refer to Sarah when she was saying she was too old to have a child.  Among many other points, the verse expresses a concern of parents, that when their children do become adults, they don’t depart from what they were trained as children.  There is a reason parents are training their children in these things — not just because they want them to do them as children, but that they would also believe and do them as adults.  If children comply as children and go a different direction as an adult, a parent likely views this as a failing.  If the way in which they were trained was the truth when they were children, it continues to be the truth for them as an adult.

The instruction to the son in Proverbs 1:8 is similar, “forsake not the law of thy mother:”  A mother and father are not going to be okay with their son forsaking the law of his mother.  A father seems to be speaking to a young person about when he becomes an adult in Proverbs 3:1-2:

1 My son, forget not my law; but let thine heart keep my commandments: 2 For length of days, and long life, and peace, shall they add to thee.

When would the son perhaps be forgetting his parents’ law?  It seems to be obvious that it’s when he’s an adult child.  The threat of that occurring is why the passage even says what it says.  When he forgets his parents’ law (it’s not even saying God’s law), he’s forfeiting in general length of days and peace.  Over many years and seeing adult children, I can attest to it by personal experience.  A lack of peace is in the future of an adult child, who forsakes his parents’ law.

I move to Proverbs 4:1-4:

1 Hear, ye children, the instruction of a father, and attend to know understanding. 2 For I give you good doctrine, forsake ye not my law. 3 For I was my father’s son, tender and only beloved in the sight of my mother. 4 He taught me also, and said unto me, Let thine heart retain my words: keep my commandments, and live.

The father says to his son, “Retain my words: keep my commandments, and live.”  Parents have the right to expect their adult children to retain their words and keep their commandments.

Society today would say, “You’ve got to let those adult children go — don’t tell them to retain your words and keep your commandments when they are adults, because that is a deal breaker and will only turn them off.”  Scripture says that nowhere and says just the opposite.  No one wants to lose a child and parents become desperate, willing often to give up aspects of historic, biblical doctrine and practice, and this harms everyone.  It is never right to do wrong.  It is still a normal expression of a psychobabble, even among Christians. I read it with no verses attached as a kind of seat-of-the-pants home-spun good counsel.  Later in chapter 4 (vv. 20-21):

Incline thine ear unto my sayings. Let them not depart from thine eyes; keep them in the midst of thine heart.

Negatively, the adult child is not to let his parents’ teaching depart from his eyes and he is to keep it in the midst of his heart.  Most millennials consider this terrible advice, a total fail, that is, any parent in his right mind should just quietly accept decisions of adult children that depart from how they’ve been trained.  “Just agree to disagree, and if you don’t, you’re the problem, you are failing.”

Evangelical churches today often craft their church growth strategies around capturing adult children away from their parents’ teaching, catering to the law of sin in the members, as Paul put it in Romans 7, especially attacking the parents on cultural issues, calling them legalists without any proof even of the existence of their perversion of the term.  Within the context of the subject of relationship Paul wrote in Ephesians 4:17-20:

17 This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, 18 Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart: 19 Who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness. 20 But ye have not so learned Christ.

Anyone given over to the lasciviousness, as other Gentiles walk, have not so learned Christ.  Very often it is young men alluring young men, against parental counsel, akin to Proverbs 1 (vv. 10-11, 15-16):

My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not. If they say, Come with us . . . .  My son, walk not thou in the way with them; refrain thy foot from their path: For their feet run to evil.

Parents don’t have to stand by and watch this occur to adult children.  They can say, incline your ear to my sayings, not theirs, and retain my words, not walking in their way with them, consent not to them.  That should be normal for parents of an adult child, who seems to be departing from the way trained as a child.  An adult child, who won’t understand that, is blinding or hardening himself.  I would ask anyone from scripture to show me how what I’m writing here is wrong.  Scripture actually says a lot about it, it just clashes with secular culture.

As an example, let’s say an adult child, who doesn’t live at home, wants a tattoo.  I’m sure this occurs, but I don’t know one personally.  The parents, say, “Don’t do that.”  Even, “Here’s what I think scripture says about it, and this is historic Christian teaching, certainly not out of left field, so please listen.”  The friends of adult children are encouraging otherwise and against parental counsel.  Adult children should and must listen to parents on this.  Parents could even say to them, “This is walking as other Gentiles walk in the vanity of their mind, alienated from the life of God, giving themselves over to lasciviousness.”

Paul commanded even Timothy, a young man, a pastor himself, “Flee youthful lusts” (2 Timothy 2:22).  He commanded him like a father to an adult son.  Paul was successful to tell him that.  It was good.  Would someone suggest to Paul the Apostle, “Give him some space, because he needs to feel like he’s his own man and might eject if you use commands at all”?  No.  Commands of biblical content work well with someone with “unfeigned faith,” something Timothy possessed (2 Tim 1:5).  Biblical Christianity is not finessed into adult children like walking on eggshells.

There seem to be sins against conventional thinking that bode worse to people, especially millennials, than actual sins against God.  The goal should be to please God, not protect psyche and personal autonomy.  Success isn’t making one’s way through as the one who makes the decisions, but making the right one, the one that does the will of the Father.

What I’m talking about seems to be akin to a referee being corrected by video.  A call should be overturned if it’s the wrong call, because getting it right is more important than someone having his way.   How could someone agree with that for a game, but is opposed in decisions in real life?  Parents come in to get calls right with adult children, and children fight for mere autonomy or a “happiness” of not being told what to do?  Scripture contradicts that.

I want to bring in 1 Samuel 3:13 and Eli here.  I hear different points of view on contemporary application of the example of Eli and his adult children.  His sons were both killed by God and the translation into English says that Eli “restrained them not.”  God pinned responsibility on Eli for not restraining his sons.  I’ve heard people say that we can’t use that same reasoning or argument today.  I don’t hear evidence for why not, especially in light of all the other teaching in scripture.  John Gill writes:

This they did, they preferred their lusts, and the indulging of them, to the honour and glory of God: this Eli knew, and he restrained them not; from their evil practices; he did not make use of his authority, neither as a father, and especially not as high priest, and the judge of Israel, who ought not only to have sharply reproved them, which he did not, but to have censured or punished them, and turned them out of their office.

Keil and Delitzch, Hebrew scholars, don’t disagree with this Gill explanation.  Albert Barnes writes:  “He restrained them not – In the sense of punishing. He did not remove them from their office, which he ought to have done.”  Indicating the historical nature of what I’m writing, H. Crosby writes in the Biblical Illustrator:

God is a holy God, and He will have His people holy; and if they substitute a ceremonial for holiness, His holy wrath will certainly fall upon them; and in this blow not only those will fall who, like Eli’s sons, commit gross wrongs, but those also who, like Eli, through indulgence or apathy, fail to rebuke and resist the evil. The Church of God is today courting the world. Its members are trying to bring it down to the level of the ungodly. The ball, the theatre, nude and lewd art, social luxuries with all their loose moralities, are making inroads into the sacred enclosure of the Church. God will not bless a Church that drags down His heavenly things into the dust–that gilds vice, calls it Christian, and then indulges in it. But His holy vengeance will assuredly come and strip such a Church of its pride and make it eat the bread of affliction.

If this was an application and concern of Crosby at his day (1826-1891), it is prescient and even more appropriate for today.  The new, unbiblical position is that parents should stay silent, because the example of Eli and his sons don’t apply.  I don’t see it.  Eli was guilty of more than not speaking.  He was also expected by God to do something, what I call, using all the scriptural tools from the toolbox.  Parents need to consider strongly that God views them the same toward their adult children as God did Eli.

Most parents don’t want to step in with an adult child, but just leave that situation alone.  Surely, some go out of their way to micromanage their adult children’s lives, but intervening for expectations of scriptural behavior is not that.  Any biblical counselor would counsel an adult child to follow scripture as it relates to his parents.

More to Come

I lived with my parents.  After around a thirty-eight year break, my parents now live with me as of August 2018.  I had to make a decision for them to live with my wife and I and our two daughters, and they agreed.  They knew it was best. My mom could probably make it on her own, even though both she and my dad have type 2 diabetes, but he also has alzheimers.  During our entire lives, my parents and I have had a very good relationship.  Since they moved in with us, even though my dad has regressed and will continue to do so, their health has improved and my mom’s drastically.  Almost every number is better, my dad no longer wasting, gaining weight, and my mom losing a lot with a healthy diet.

When I was twenty-seven years old, my parents were living and working in Arizona, and I asked my dad to come and be principal of our school.  It helped us to have him, but I also viewed that decision as my supporting my parents.  It was the best they had ever done financially and secure.  My mom also worked at our school doing things she would not have done otherwise.  They could come and I wanted it because my parents and I were walking together in agreement based upon the Word of God.  They have since been members of my church for over thirty years.  Every Sunday morning right now, I take my parents in their car to pick up a blind man for church services, and we’re the first to arrive every week to open the church building.

My parents never said to me as I grew up, keep a good relationship with us, son.  I heard preaching on that, what the Bible required of me.  Love your parents.  Obey them.  Honor them.  Tell them you love them.  I knew the ten commandments.  I knew Ephesians 6:1-3.  It never occurred to me to be a rebellious son.  I felt guilty anytime I dishonored my parents.  This related to God.  I wasn’t pleasing God if I didn’t esteem my parents.  I would have thought and still think that you can’t be a rebellious son and also be right with God.  My relationship with God ties into my relationship with my parents, and that is my responsibility, not my parents.  I’ve got to keep it right with my parents — not leave that up to them.

My dad was a firm disciplinarian in our home.  That’s very often how homes were in the Midwest in that era.  Your parents told you what to do.  You did it.  You did it right away.  You did it with a good attitude. If you didn’t, you received physical discipline.  In addition to the corporeal punishment, many times my dad yelled at me, too many to count.  It was normal for him to yell at me — not all the time, but not unusual.  A particular type of instance of his yelling at me was when I walked and he wanted me to run.

When falling asleep in church, next to my dad, and I got pinched hard on the leg.  I never viewed both physical punishment or yelling as abusive.  Both of those are justified by scripture.  I never ever felt abused.  I believed the Bible taught it and when I got it, I deserved it, and usually deserved worse than what I actually received.  I knew my parents loved me and in part, because of the discipline they gave me.

I was afraid of my dad, afraid of getting in trouble for doing something wrong.  That resulted in my doing less wrong than what I would have done.  It spared me from doing more wrong.  The fear of my dad then translated into a fear of God.  Fear of dad preceded fear of God.  That’s the way it works with parents and it is what the Bible teaches.  I’ve never felt resentment for how they treated me, which I think is the result of biblical expectations.  Later, I want to address the resentment of adult children, because of childhood discipline, perceived as mistreatment.

Fearing my dad didn’t mean that he didn’t love me.  Those two don’t contradict each other.  Fearing God doesn’t mean we don’t love God.  We can’t love God and not fear Him.  It wouldn’t have occurred to me that fearing my dad was not congruent with love and a relationship.  I worked on the car with my dad.  While under the car, he told me to hand him a tool.  If I didn’t quickly enough, he might raise his voice, which motivated me to get the tool to him faster, which was better.  I can understand what he was doing.  I did much better work, because I had some fear, and this is what the Bible itself says that is a good quality of an employee, to function with fear.  It lead to future fear when I worked as an employee, to please my boss.

If you are an adult child, you still have responsibility to your parents.  There are examples of and teaching on this in scripture from Genesis to Revelation.  The Bible also warns about violating these examples and this teaching.  Paul in 2 Timothy 3:2 says that in the last days men shall be disobedient to their parents.  In Romans 1 Paul explains reprobates as “disobedient to parents.”  God’s Word is replete with teaching about responsibility of children to parents.  One of the ten commandments is “honor thy father and thy mother.”  There isn’t one about parents to children.  There is no, “honor thy children.”  1 Timothy 5:1 says, “Rebuke not an elder, but intreat him as a father,” but nowhere says, “rebuke not a son, but intreat him.”  Parents should be open to that verse if it existed.  It doesn’t.  Parents should not be held hostage to children who want the roles reversed.

Parents should do everything they are supposed to and can do while their children are at home.  They should do the same regarding the transition to the next phase of life, which might be college time or the time between 12th grade and marriage.  Whether because of something occurring from childhood or college or early adult life, however, an adult child turns away from the belief and practice of his childhood.  He or she seems to depart from the way his parents trained him.  What does a parent do with an adult child, who is like that?  Does he just leave him alone, wait to see what happens?

More to Come

The excerpt above is from Wilhelmus a Brakel’s 4 volume systematic theology called The Christian’s Reasonable Service, which has been made available in an indexed form online. 

Part One

Just as a matter of interest and information, I noticed after writing part one that a lot had been written against Tullian Tchividjian’s new and false teaching on sanctification and by extension, also salvation.  Not in necessarily any order, here are some that have written good stuff exposing his false teaching and it should be considered, before anyone ever gets to all the problems that Andy Stanley has, whom I mentioned in part one.  You can find some here (part one, part two), here (really important to read this one), here, and here (and really those are just a start).

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In our time on earth, we are not brains in a vat.  God created sentient beings with awareness of their surroundings.   Immediately He gave Adam things to do.  From the beginning, God commanded Adam.  Do this.  Don’t do this.  Human beings live, which means they do things.  They can do wrong things and they can do right things.  They do not get to do wrong things and then just apply what is called grace and suddenly it’s a right thing, where they get credit for the right thing even though they didn’t even do it. That is just playing games.  However, it’s also not far off of how Tullian Tchividjian characterizes the grace of God.

I googled the word “performancism,” since I had not heard it until I considered writing on this subject, and Tchividjian came up in the headline of the second article.  His book is titled, Jesus + Nothing = Everything, which it seems the crucial word of the three is “nothing.”  When the Father said,  “This is my beloved. Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17), He was well-pleased with His Son’s performance, not nothing.  His Son performed and He was pleased.  Jesus is our model.  We’re not thinking about nothing, when it comes to pleasing God.

Grace is not about not performing.  Jesus said in His longest recorded sermon in scripture (Matthew 7:21), “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.”  Who will enter into the kingdom of heaven?  Read it.  “He that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.”  When you read about the life Jesus lived on earth in the gospel of John, He was doing everything the Father wanted Him to do.

I get how people don’t want to feel guilty about not doing the right thing.  They don’t want expectations or restrictions, even though the Holy Spirit is called “The Restrainer” in the New Testament (2 Thess 2:6) and fruit of the Spirit is “temperance,” self-control. This is also the way of millennials especially today, as a generalized trait.  When one brings up an expectation to a millennial, this is a “relationship” ruiner.  You’ve offered a “rule.”  Relationship can’t have rules except for one rule, toleration.  They want accept, accept, accept.  “I’m going to do this.”  I accept.   “I did this.”  I accept.  They have lived for years with only a “like” button, no dislike or disapproval.

The movement of Tchividjian and those who have accepted it are not just some minor, non-essential modification or tweaking of Christianity, where it retains its identity.  His teaching corrupts Christianity.  It is something different than biblical Christianity even compared to many aspects of evangelicalism, which don’t do that.

When someone might go about explaining the gospel to someone, he should bring the Old Testament into his explanation.  That’s what Jesus and the Apostles did.  The gospel is not detached from the Old Testament.  The new covenant is corollary to all the other covenants.  Blessing comes from obedience.  We fail at obedience and we receive the perfect obedience of Jesus Christ.  That justification changes how we live.  The fleshy heart that replaces the heart of stone gives us the ability to do what the Lord wants and we receive blessing.

In order to be saved, we confess Jesus to be Lord.  We give up our life for His life.  He now owns us.  We’re His slave.  This means we still have expectations on us, but we’ve been changed to do that out of love.  The goodness of God leads us to that repentance.  Paul counted His former life as loss that He might win Christ.

The Lord Jesus Christ enables the fulfillment of the obligations and expectations.  His yoke is easy.  The commandments are no longer burdensome.  Even if we do sin, we have an advocate with the Father.  The grace enables to perform.  Performance is the means by which you then know that you are saved.  You don’t just say that you know Him, but you also do what the Lord says.

There is more to the attraction of scandalous grace than just dumping obligation, expectation, and disapproval.  I recognize a mysticism and subjectivity to it.  Part of the freedom is the inward leading, what I call the voice in the head.  It is untethered to the objective standards of scripture.  It is so important for its supporters to feel without judgment that feelings take on a prominent, if not preeminent role.  No one can judge anyone if there isn’t anything solid by which to judge.  Feelings are elevated, and this is obvious in the “worship.”

Worship in scripture is regulated as much as anything, but there is this “freedom” to the expression of the worship.  Whatever the outcome, it’s the Holy Spirit, and this kind of spontaneity and creativity is supposedly the meanderings of the Holy Spirit through individuals, making it more authentic.  This has never been true worship in the history of the church, and it is more fitting with the ecstasy of Babylonian mysticism in Corinth and the delirium of the Samaritans on Mt. Gerrizim.

There is so much freedom, so much liberation, that its not about God.  Biblical grace is changing grace.  Liberation is freedom from sin, which frees from the consequences, but Jesus taught that it is freedom too from the practice of sin (John 8:31-34).  Christians don’t want to sin anymore.  Christians don’t want to do what they want.  They want to do what Jesus wants.  That isn’t legalism.  That is what grace looks like.

Left-wing legalism reduces what God wants to what is acceptable and performable, like the Pharisees.  They worked in shortening everything to the things they could do.  They left out the weighty things (barus), which means more burdensome or harder.  Those aren’t hard to do if it is grace.  Grace eases everything.  It’s why believers will conform to the image of Christ.  God works in believers to do that.  That is liberation.

Someone might say, unlike the Pharisees, Tchividjian isn’t about performance.  He’s about performance, just a different one, one that looks more like me and my flesh, yet calling it Jesus.  Those most embedded in the Tchividjian movement of hypergrace are as showy as I’ve ever seen.  You’ll see more selfies than anywhere.  Image is big — that you can see — from the see-through acrylite or lucite pulpit to the right fit in the blue jeans.  It is an expression that clashes with the beauty of the Lord and His nature.  It is obvious that it needs liberation from the world, because if there is a pathological need, it is for them to get the culture to love, appreciate, and approve of them.  They are chained to that.  They just attach a designer “grace” sticker to it with the authentic background of crumbling urban infrastructure.