Force Multiplication
In recent days, as I read various material, I saw for the first time that I remember, the use of the terminology, “force multiplier.” I really don’t think I heard it before and on the same day I saw it twice. Military officers or strategists might be rolling their eyes, because of those words’ common usage.
The Concept of Force Multiplication
In definition, a smaller factor when added to a larger one multiplies the larger one in its effectiveness and outcomes. Colin Powell said, “Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.” On a football team, the addition of what some might call, “one key player,” results in many players better than they were before his inclusion. If you are a baseball fan, you’ve seen a whole line-up add multiple runs per game with the addition of one good power hitter in the middle of the batting order. I see force multiplication explicated by Solomon in Ecclesiastes 4:9-12:
9 Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. 10 For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. 11 Again, if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone? 12 And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.
The addition of one to one doesn’t equal two in Solomon’s explanation. One can hardly measure how much greater the achievement and results with the addition of one to one. Something exists, a force multiplier, that brings more than the addition of one.
The efforts of a single person in a church can take the church to far greater affects than the addition of one. It multiplies the effort of the entire church in an exponential way. Even the addition of one skill or one surrendered talent to one person could take the whole church to a new level. A utilized tool could make one person so much more effective that it multiplies the accomplishment of the whole church.
Kinds of Force Multiplication
The encouragement of a less talented individual could bring confidence and greater motivation to the more talented individual. He may lack the spirit to continue. The production of the less talented person does not increase, but the effect of his encouragement multiplies the production of the talented person. The encouragement is a force multiplier. God knows this effect that encouragement has. If you are a wife, you could do this for your husband. If a child, you could do this for your parent or a parent for a child.
The day after I learned “force multiplication,” while working out I listened to a podcast of William Lane Craig and Stephen Meyer. They discussed with a host the existence of God and origins. If you have one good argument for the existence of God, that will help. Craig is now well-known for the “Kalam cosmological argument” for both the existence of God and the origin of the universe.
Stephen Meyer argues for the same conclusion as Craig, but gets there with what he calls “inference to the best explanation.” His inference is a God hypothesis, part of the name of his magnus opus, Return of the God Hypothesis. He says that the choice of God as a hypothesis best explains the available data, whether the irreducible complexity of the cell or the information found in a strand of DNA.
If it is true that God is the explanation for everything, then one would think more than one argument exists for that. It’s like doing a math problem and checking the outcome of your figures by the use of a second method. Joining the inferential argument by Meyer, a more inductive approach, to the philosophical argument, more a deductive tact, it becomes a force multiplier to Craig.
The Whole Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts
Each true path ends in God. And those are not the only ways to reach that same outcome. Several more exist than the inductive argument of Meyer and the deductive one of Craig.
As I think about force multiplication, I am reminded of the statement, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” A church is a body. Each body part fits into the whole. Each body part functions in a greater way by fitting into the whole body. A church can outperform the actual summation of the abilities of each member by their working together.
When you were reading this post, you perhaps thought of other force multipliers for the church, your family, and your individual life. You think, prayer. Maybe you added, God’s working in your life, or Bible knowledge. As powerful as America is, its rebellion against God can and will debilitate its apparent advantages. The United States could lose its technological dominance very quickly. God Himself is the ultimate force multiplier.
Bifurcation in Beauty: Dualism of Spiritual/Sacred and Natural/Secular, Pt. 2
Bodily Resurrection as Paradigm for Unity Regarding Beauty
Jesus’ Bodily Resurrection
The bodily resurrection of Jesus reveals a paradigm for the unified physical and spiritual. It contradicts a denigration of the physical. Bodies are not the product of chance. God created them and they have a purpose, His purpose.
The Greeks in Corinth according to Gnosticism, joining others across the Roman Empire, denied bodily resurrection. God’s creation of the material world deems it valuable. Just like God redeems sinful mankind, He will also redeem His physical creation. God created man in His image in a physical body. Paul also commands in 1 Corinthians 6:20, “Glorify God in your body.”
In addition to creating a physical world and man in a physical body, God took human flesh and raised it from the dead. The Greeks and others were fine with a spiritual sort of phantom resurrection, Jesus as an archetype or an avatar. However, the power in Christianity, and why the Empire persecuted Christians, was because Jesus really did bodily rise.
Future Bodily Resurrection
In the future, believers in resurrected physical bodies will inhabit a new physical creation. Jesus rose as a firstfruit of that future resurrection. It is more than an archetype. It is a true, real, factual, and historical event that presupposes other future events. As such it sits at the foundation of the gospel message. God requires a belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ as a prerequisite for one’s own future bodily resurrection.
As a result of a natural and spiritual split, Corinthian unbelievers justified fornication with the statement, “Meats for the belly and the belly for meats.” They considered sex to be natural or physical and as such has no intrinsic moral value. It is the consequence of blind and materialistic selection. It is, therefore, neutral. Nothing spiritual or sacred would exist on that plain.
Sanctified through Thy Truth (and Beauty)
Known Truth
Jesus, God the Son Incarnate, the Creator and Sustainer of all heaven and earth, prayed to God the Father in John 17:17: “Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.” The Word of God sets apart someone unto God. Being set apart means a boundary, which is the Word of God, the truth. On one side of that boundary of truth is someone sanctified and on the other side is someone not.
This boundary over which someone can pass implies a law. A law implies a lawgiver. God is the lawgiver from the beginning. The distinction between the two sides of that boundary, set apart from the other, implies a penalty. Does the penalty occur? It does.
God the lawgiver established natural laws and moral laws. None of these are arbitrary. It is not that you just may or may not be sanctified by the truth, that is His Word. You are in fact sanctified by the Word, which is the truth. Every thing in the Word of God sets a person apart from something else, which would not be of the nature of God.
Think on These Things
In Philippians 4:8, the Apostle Paul in the New Testament of the Word of God, commands:
Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.
Scripture commands, “Think on these things.” One of “these things” is “whatsoever things are lovely.” This commands a person to think on something lovely because he can also think on something unlovely. When he thinks on something unlovely, he breaks that command, “Think on these things.” He is then not sanctified by the truth. As in the nature of God, truth and beauty are inextricably connected.
By definition, a fact is something true or proven true. Everything in the Word of God is true and proven true. Truth is in accord with a fact, which is also reality. Scripture is reality. Because of the nature of the Word of God, you know it is true. You are certain of its truthfulness. Since God’s Word is true, you can and should know what is beauty or loveliness by which to be sanctified.
The Contradiction
On the one hand, within the confines of the physical or natural, men deny morality or objective beauty because it is deterministic machinery. On the other, in the realm of the spiritual, men cannot know if or what exists in this realm. Morality is necessary to adjudicate behavior, but it has no objective meaning. The spiritual allows for freedom beyond the restrictions of the physical. It must be private and subjective.
The contradiction comes in the incapability of natural causes to regulate morality. They are just natural. And yet the spiritual cannot judge morality because it follows personal freedom. Neither can the spiritual judge morality because it is subjective. It isn’t knowable. Everything becomes secular through this contradiction.
God is the author of the physical and spiritual world. The sacred does not isolate to the spiritual. Truth, goodness, and beauty proceed from Him. They are knowable and objective through the whole world and everything in it.
When churches and their leaders today give a wide latitude of acceptable aesthetics, they come from at least a variety of the secular view that finds beauty in the realm of freedom from objective meaning. Meaning is assigned. It is not knowable. There are other reasons, pragmatic ones, for this treatment of beauty, including lust. But the underlying thinking comes from the dualism that finds truth only in the physical world, even if it is deterministic.
Keep Them Coming
As I write this, a few hours ago a notification appeared on my computer telling me about a film called, The Jesus Revolution. That would catch my interest anyway, but more so when I saw a name actor was in it, Kelsey Grammer. I watched the trailer and found it used a book written by Greg Laurie, the most well known Calvary Chapel pastor today. Grammer plays Chuck Smith, the pastor of the first Calvary Chapel, who tutored Laurie.
A major character in the story is Lonnie Frisbee, played by the actor who is Jesus in the series, The Chosen. Someone could call that an ironic choice since that’s how Frisbee styled himself. Years ago I wrote a post, “A Modern Revival That Wasn’t,” that would help in understanding. I’ve also witnessed closely The Calvary Chapels and other California spin-offs.
The trailer shows rock music and dressing like a hippie an important part in the Jesus’ Movement. Lonnie Frisbee visits Chuck Smith and Smith must decide he will change the entire aesthetic of his church. As a result, his church explodes with numerical growth and spawns this movement all over the world. Is the Jesus of the Calvary Chapel Movement the Jesus of the Bible? He is different than the one up to that moment in historical Christianity.
Smith accepted a new, different Jesus, an innovative aesthetic, and a novel spirituality to gather and keep massive numbers of people. It also turned away older members. The trailer reveals them to be terribly wrong in not welcoming a new kind of church, dress, people, and culture. The environment for acceptance of this new movement relates to the bifurcation of truth that required turning beauty into a subjective, private notion.
Objections to Christians Learning Hebrew and Greek (7/7)
Post six in this series examined five common objections to Christians learning Greek and Hebrew. Part six followed the first five blog posts summarizing Reasons Christians Should and Can Learn Greek and Hebrew, the Biblical Languages, which explained the value of learning the Biblical languages and explained that the languages are not too difficult to learn–indeed, Biblical Greek and Hebrew are easier languages to learn than modern English. This final post will examine some remaining common objections, #6-12 on pages 57-68 of Reasons Christians Should and Can Learn Greek and Hebrew, the Biblical Languages.
6.) “The many computer tools and other study helps available today make knowledge of the original languages superfluous.”
Computer tools are certainly very valuable. However, they do not come close to eliminating the value of learning the languages themselves. Furthermore, the Christian who does not know Greek or Hebrew runs the serious risk of misunderstanding what his computer Bible software is telling him.
7.) “People have gone to big-name seminaries, learned Greek and Hebrew, and come back full of doctrinal compromise.”
Sadly, this has certainly happened. But it has been the consequence of compromise in the seminary and in the sinful heart of the person who compromises. It is not a problem with God’s Greek and Hebrew words.
8.) “There have been godly servants of the Lord who never learned the Biblical languages.”
There certainly have been godly servants of the Lord who never learned the Biblical languages. There have been godly servants of the Lord who never learned to read at all, or who were even unable to read because they were blind of possessed some other unfortunate handicap. That God can use illiterate Christians for His glory does not mean that learning to read has no value. No more does the fact that God can use Christians who do not know Greek and Hebrew serve as a sufficient cause to fail to learn the Biblical languages.
9.) “I have heard that learning the Biblical languages was useless.”
People who actually know Hebrew and Greek do not say that they are useless. Only people who do not know the languages seem to make this claim. Someone who voices this objection should be asked: “Do you claim that Hebrew and Greek are useless for understanding the Bible because of your experience and in-depth study of those languages, or are you making that claim from a position of ignorance?”
10.) “Learning Greek and Hebrew undermines the King James Version.”
Why? Does this objection assume that the translation cannot withstand scrutiny? Who is undermining the KJV then? The KJV translators would have viewed a low view of Greek and Hebrew as a Catholic false teaching. They would have viewed it as utterly antithetical to a Bible-believing Protestantism.
11.) “Maybe Protestants valued Greek and Hebrew, but Baptists did not.”
Such a claim is simply ignorant. Countless Baptists, from Hetzer and Denck who translated the Bible into German before Luther did, to William Carey, the “father of modern missions,” to expositors like Alexander Maclaren, to martyrs like Felix Mantz, to fundamentalists like James Josiah Reeve, to Landmarkers like Ben Bogard have viewed knowledge of the Biblical languages as tremendously valuable.
12.) “It is wrong for a woman to learn the original languages of Scripture.”
The New Testament commands women to “learn” (1 Timothy 2:11), and never even once states or implies that women are to be less committed to learning Scripture than men, or that they are only to learn the Bible in the vernacular but not in the original tongues. Why should women who have the holy duties of teaching other women teaching children (Titus 2:3-5; 1 Timothy 5:10, 14) be kept from the increased ability to understand, teach, and practice Scripture that comes from knowing Greek and Hebrew?
Reasons Christians Should and Can Learn Greek and Hebrew, the Biblical Languages concludes:
[A]rguments against the study of Greek and Hebrew are unconvincing … [while] the reasons why Greek and Hebrew are extremely valuable, and clearly learnable, are compelling. May the Father who revealed His glory and redemptive mind and heart in the Hebrew and Greek words He gave His Son to deliver to His saints by His Spirit bless these facts to the flourishing of reverent study, loving practice, and bold proclamation of those infallibly inspired and perfectly preserved words to His eternal glory and the advance of His spiritual kingdom. Amen!
And to that conclusion, again I say, “Amen”!
–TDR
Bifurcation in Beauty: Dualism of Spiritual/Sacred and Natural/Secular
You have heard, “Life imitating art or art imitating life.” In that vein, art imitates worldview.” Even when someone says, this is his worldview, his art may contradict what he says is his worldview. The art or his aesthetic is a better or more accurate expression of his worldview than other means of expressing it.
You could see what was important to Jesus by His reaction to the corrupting of the temple, His Father’s house. When someone blows his top because you dinged his car, that says something about the priority of his car, more than if you asked him. A person’s music has that way of explaining the meaning of a person’s life.
Worship of and Love for God
One biblical and historical element of worship of God is music. The Bible is full of music. Worship is an offering to God. God regulates the offering. It must be what God wants for Him to accept it.
Someone said, “You are what (or who) you worship.” Whatever you give God, that’s what you think about Him. If you give that to Him, then that expresses who you are, as much as it does who God is.
You can say you love God, like you can say you know God. If you don’t do what He says, you neither love Him or know Him, which overlap. The love shines through what you offer. It is like giving God the present you wanted, not what He did. You love yourself.
The “life imitating art” part of the equation says that art affects life. Life changes by the art influencing it. A person especially changes by the thoughts expressed about God through the music offered God.
The Meaning
What I have written assumes that art means something. It also says that art itself is not subjective and personal. Scripture says this, when it says that God is worshiped in the beauty of His holiness.
Beauty, which relates to aesthetics or art, is not in the eye of the beholder. It is objective in its meaning. Holiness is beautiful. That would mean that the unholy is not beautiful. Everything is not beautiful in its own way. Some is beautiful and some is not.
God separates from what falls short of the perfections of His attributes. That is the holiness of God. God will not receive as worship what falls short of His attributes. He separates from that as characteristic of His nature.
Bifurcation of Beauty
How is it that today churches do offer God the profane, that is, what conflicts with His attributes? Churches bifurcate beauty, just like they do with truth. They separated the spiritual or sacred from the natural or secular. Like there is total truth, one truth like one God, there is total beauty.
Churches and their leaders (or perhaps the leaders just pander to the people) went along with the split. They regarded and treated spiritual things as sentimental and emotional, not on the same plain as the natural and the secular. Church is an escape from the real world.
The music offers that escape and that feeling, which lifts someone emotionally, and is seen as a sacred or spiritual experience with God. That’s what church does as its most essential. People leave with a skip in their step, ready to go in the real world, the secular one, even thinking it was God.
Some churches and their leaders would disagree they do what I described in the previous paragraph. They explain it as something different, so removed from what occurred, because now that is the norm for a church. It’s been done so long, it’s just church now. It follows the trajectory of a revision of true worship, not true worship.
A church with corrupt music and worship doesn’t see its art as negative or corrupted. That is instead something profane to the extreme like a Mapplethorpe exhibit of a crucifix in a jar of urine, pushed by the National Endowment of Arts in the late 1980s. Certain extreme or exotic modern or even postmodern forms, those are wrong. Not the profanity churches now perform and consider worship.
Tell-Tale
Without the church doing much to anything to help it, the world’s culture has decayed. Churches veered off objective beauty, or one beauty. Something is either beautiful or it is not. Beauty is not related to secular or spiritual or even sacred.
Music isn’t sacred because it is used in the church; it is sacred because it is sacred. That also means it is beautiful, because, again, beauty relates to the glory of the Lord. A corruption of beauty, used in worship in the church, does not become beautiful by a church using it, what some today call, “redeeming” it.
The music someone plays and enjoys, and especially for someone who says he is a Christian, by that you can tell who he is. I know some of you readers hate that. You deny it sharply and often angrily. The reasons for the heat also help explain what is happening.
It is easy today for professing Christians to stand up against decadent culture. They can point out what’s very horrible in bad books in schools and their curriculum. Meanwhile, their churches are decaying at perhaps a little slower pace but a continuous one that isn’t far behind the world.
What is light and easy, sentimental and emotional, and entertaining also sells. Salzburg and Vienna and the rest of Europe went for Mozart’s music because of the former, the light and easy, etc. His dad Leopold, however, liked the selling part of it. It wasn’t lost on the religious leaders that Mozart also boosted their prominence and position.
Church Consumers
Entertainment, Not Worship
Church attenders become consumers, which is the opposite of worship. They also confuse that feeling from true spirituality. It doesn’t matter, because that feeling and spirituality are on the same plain. When the congregants leave their meeting, they take that experience as preparation for the real world. That’s also now constituted as God. The people think they’ve associated with God because it is indistinguishable from Him. It is actually more aligned with the world they enter after their assembling ends.
Even Baptist meetings have long encouraged the decadence of consumerism. They entertain a crowd. The feeling is an apparent sanctified one, which is a lie. The one who does this the best, a kind of circus-master, is a wanted commodity. It or he improves the spirit of the meeting, again this superficial, sentimental emotionalism. God is using his talent. Most cannot resist the popularity of it. It is its own pop music.
How could churches permit a philosophy in conflict with God? Some don’t judge music. Even though arts are full of meaning, they relegate it to meaninglessness. It is in this meaningless realm of spirituality, not like what occurs where there is meaning, eight to five, a real life. Many also judge against the extreme and deem themselves better by comparison.
Loss of Discernment
Young people in church often feel left out. If they get this music, it at least might connect them to the real world. This is the acquiescence to youth culture. Their hormones are raging and they chafe under parental authority. They look happier and parents think the church succeeds at keeping them. Its young people are happy. At least they can smile to the rhythm, the feeling, and the allurement.
Churches lose their discernment, described in a biblical way as unable to distinguish the holy from the profane. It occurs through incrementalism. Men won’t separate from it. They won’t say no to it. It gets worse and then doesn’t stop getting worse. To explain it requires something more than a thirty second sound byte. Even if you can, the Bible doesn’t have a play button to give the kind of proof necessary for such diminished discernment.
Country music or Country Western arose in church settings. It grew among church going young people in the Bible belt. They took the sentimentality and feelings that corresponded to the bifurcation of beauty in the church. Country western stars, who began in church, brought a more intense version of it to the world. It produced an even more extreme response.
Holy and Profane
Ryman Auditorium, the temple of country music, looks like a church building. It gives people, especially young ones, that feeling they had at church, making their experience in the world indistinguishable from church. The entertainers at church just do a lesser version of the same thing. This contrasts with Ezekiel 44:23:
And they shall teach my people the difference between the holy and profane, and cause them to discern between the unclean and the clean.
The country stars were good at country music. What started in church succeeded in the world. The success in the world, more excessive in its effect, travelled back to the church. The church accepts it, because that’s the domain of the spiritual.
To Be Continued
King Arthur and the Reality Of and Belief In the Supernatural: A Paradigm for Bifurcation of Truth
Part One
The Story of King Arthur
If you were like me, you heard the story of King Arthur and his Round Table as a child. The archaeologist Nowell Myers wrote: “No figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian’s time.” I understand someone using his life to chase down this story. In the United States, journalists and historians both speak of the Kennedy era as Camelot. It insinuates a metaphor of utopianism.
When I read, heard, or saw the tale of King Arthur, I wondered if he was real. I wouldn’t have agreed the fanciful aspects of the Arthur story were true. Was he a true character though or just legend like Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox? The extraordinary figures, like Merlin, and magical qualities did not extinguish the wonder, rather enhanced it.
How does someone leap from the imaginations of the supernatural and yet inquire of the historical? The two seem to contradict. Do they? Supernatural and historical?
I would speculate that the Arthur saga disappears without human vulnerability to paranormal intervention. Normal doesn’t explain a planet hanging in space with the beauty and complexity of earth. The imagination of the human mind takes a trajectory into the supernatural. Man knows God. This is his default position.
Carlisle Castle
My wife and I have lived for a few months in the Northern England city of Carlisle. Saturday we walked around and through Carlisle Castle. We left the castle to return on foot to our flat, a small studio apartment, but we stopped along the way into the lobby of Tullie House Museum.
During the English Civil War, royalists occupied Carlisle Castle under the command of Sir Thomas Glemham. From October 1644 to June 1645, the Scots besieged the castle under Major General Sir David Leslie. The battles fought in the Civil War included Scottish Covenanters. Isaac Tully was in Carlisle the whole time and he wrote in his diary a journal of the siege now possessed by the British Museum in what are called the Harley Manuscripts. Isaac Tully’s family, who built the Tullie House in Carlisle, was a member of the merchant guild.
Carlisle Castle and Tullie House Museum dovetail at this siege during the English Civil War. Hundreds of years later my wife and I walked into both. As we passed through the lobby of Tullie House, we noticed an exhibition beginning there on February 4 on the The Legend of King Arthur. My mind raced back to my childhood.
Arthur at Tullie House
Apparently, one tale in the King Arthur story relates to Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, a Middle English rhyme written about 1400. Middle English is the very difficult English of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written at a similar time. This early English poem features Sir Gawain, the apparent nephew of King Arthur and an English knight of the Round Table. This permits the city of Carlisle to claim King Arthur as its own and motivates it to feature an exhibition with his name.
The main museum leadership stood in the lobby last Saturday at about 4:30pm. I asked the two older men and woman whether Arthur originated in Carlisle. A conversation ensued for five to ten minutes. One of the men smiled and said several English towns or cities claim King Arthur. I asked, “Is he real?” All three laughed, while knowingly looking to each other. The other man said, “Come to the exhibition!” The woman answered, that was a difficult explanation.
Supernatural
I told the three museum employees that I thought it was interesting that some or many think about a historical derivation to the story and yet it includes the supernatural in it. All three of them just stood and stared in silence. No. Comment. What turned them from very talkative and engaged to frozen incapability to reply? I said the one word, “Supernatural.” They smiled in silence and I smiled back with a small laugh. I laughed because I knew why they said nothing in reply.
Continuing, I said something like the following: “The instinct for the supernatural in these stories complements the understanding of the supernatural in the world that they see. They know all this, as complex as it is, didn’t take place by accident. It is not a natural only world.” The three still just stood and smiled with no comment. It is a government funded museum and exhibit.
If the three museum workers showed agreement even by nodding “yes,” then as government employees, they use their positions to confirm the supernatural. Nothing supernatural can be a fact. I would enjoy even a minimal philosophical agreement that, even if not themselves, others enjoy the supernatural element of the King Arthur narrative, mirroring what they accept in the real world.
Two Other Examples of Shunning the Spiritual, Supernatural, Religious, or Biblical
York
This experience reminded me of a trip my wife and I took to York earlier, where we walked into a shop in the Shambles there. Something on a sign in the shop mentioned ghosts. The two young ladies said the shop was haunted and talked of a few experiences of validation. So I asked them, “So you believe in the supernatural?” I continued, “This is not just a physical world. There are spiritual beings. It is more than just a natural world.” I stood waiting for an answer, and they stood staring at me.
Castle Gift Shop
Before we walked home from the castle, passing through the lobby of the Tullie house, my wife and I stopped one more time into the castle shop. It is an English Heritage site and has a large assortment of items to purchase. In one of the two rooms, bottles of alcoholic beverage filled several shelves to buy. On a small table, three bottles sat and a young man said that today they offered some for a sample. Two were alcoholic. One was not.
My wife and I sampled the non-alcoholic beverage, a Ginger flavored one. Though non-alcoholic, it was intended, he informed us, to give the same kind of initial kick that alcohol gives. He said that the company started during the days of the temperance movement in England, which continued today selling these non-alcoholic type drinks. I mentioned to him that the United States had a period of prohibition of alcohol. He knew about it.
I began explaining to him why the prohibition movement started in the United States and referred him to the Ken Burns three part documentary on the Prohibition. He wrote it down. I told him that in part the prohibition occurred for biblical reasons. Before he answered me, he put his hand over the English Heritage Site logo on his shirt, warned us that this was not the opinion of his employers, and then he commented on the temperance movement in the United Kingdom. He felt the pressure to offer a disclaimer that was nothing more than a historical observation, because of its thread-like proximity to something scriptural.
Bifurcation of Truth
What I am illustrating is the real-life bifurcation of truth in the world. People segregate the spiritual from the physical. They divide the natural from the supernatural. They treat the Bible and anything religious as distant from facts and even history. Few to none will make mention of it.
I would expect little different in the United States to what I’m describing in England. A vast majority of people relegate the truth, if it is in the Bible or if it is moral or even religious, to a different category of information. They would not call it knowledge. They see it as a matter of faith, which is relativistic, individual, private, and subjective.
Employees in public institutions in a widespread manner, almost exclusively, will not talk about anything even related to the supernatural in a public setting. I will often mention the Bible. I did not even do that in this instance. That alone brought total silence.
Post Enlightenment Dualism
Previous to the Enlightenment, no divide existed between the natural and the spiritual, a rebellious invention of human derivation. Both proceeded from a single mind, consolidated in a unified whole. Man reflected the image of God, which also fulfilled his purpose. This is also the truth about man. He is not the product of an accident of nature.
Modern science arose from believers in God, who saw His invisible hand in all matter and space. The arrangement of the parts with mathematical precision turned to a conception of a machine with its varied innerworkings, contraptions, and mechanisms. The body functioned according to scientific laws with the mind regarded as operating as an independent entity. The concession to man as mere device gave way to everything no longer the design of a Creator.
The recalculation of man as outgrowth of natural causes did not occur solely by rationalistic determinations. Man wants what he wants. To get it, he eliminates God, a final judge, to stop him from getting what he wants or judging him for wanting it. What I describe, however, is the means by which people discarded God for their own lust. His inclusion in a conversation interrupts their self-approval and personal autonomy and violates their conscience. As a feature of their fallenness, they avoid that conversation with its awkwardness, painfulness, anxiety, or anger.
Gail Riplinger & Acrostic Algebra-an Update for the LSB / KJV James White Debate
As many blog readers may know, I should have the privilege, Lord willing, this upcoming February of debating Dr. James White of Alpha & Omega Ministries on the topic “The Legacy Standard Bible, as a representative of modern English translations based upon the UBS/NA text, is superior to the KJV, as a representative of TR-based Bible translations.” Dr. White has debated or discussed the King James Only position with people like Gail Riplinger, author of New Age Bible Versions and leading New Age conspiracy theorist, and Steven Anderson, the acclaimed Holocaust denier and promoter of “1-2-3, pray after me, 4-5-6, hope it sticks” evangelism.
I have found a great argument to use against the Legacy Standard Bible which will be defended by James White. Rather than using arguments from my resources on Bibliology or from Thou Shalt Keep Them: A Biblical Theology of the Perfect Preservation of Scripture (also here; Amazon affiliate link), I have an update to Dr. Gail Riplinger’s argument from Acrostic Algebra.
Dr. Riplinger, as you may know, wrote the book New Age Bible Versions. David Cloud has a review of her book. She has also written a large volume about why Christians should not study Greek and Hebrew. Ms. Riplinger herself is highly qualified in the Biblical languages-as a little girl she took Latin in school, and she taught English to immigrants from Greece. She received an honorary doctorate from Hyles-Anderson College, indicative of the scholarship of New Age Bible Versions, with which Hyles-Anderson wishes to identify. (I am reminded of the honorary doctorates that my first year Greek class received-all the students formed their own school one day, and we gave everyone an honorary PhD, ThD, DD, or comparable honorary doctoral degree-except for one student, to whom we gave an honorary GED.) While many Hyles graduates are not known in the scholarly world, they do excel at gathering crowds of children with candy, leading them to repeat the sinner’s prayer, and then baptizing millions of them on the backs of church buses, often baptizing the same children many times, thus creating more sinner’s-prayer-repeaters by far than the number of converts gathered on the day of Pentecost, when Peter, not having read Hyles’s church manual, told the lost to repent instead of telling them to ask Jesus into their hearts (although the converts at Pentecost seemed to stick around a lot longer, even without gifts of soda pop and candy, Acts 2:41-47). Dr. Riplinger also has earned degrees in home economics, which help her to be qualified not only to be a keeper at home, but also to write scholarly works on textual criticism and Bible versions. Among many other fine arguments by Mrs. Riplinger, her Acrostic Alegbra stands out, proving the New American Standard Version and New International Version are inferior to the Authorized Version:
- Step 1: (NASV – NIV) – AV = X
- Step 2: (NASV –
NIV) – AV = X - Step 3: (ASI + NV) – AV = X
- Step 4:
ASI + NV– AV = X - Step 5: SIN = X
Clearly, the fact that one can get to the letters “SIN” from the NASV and NIV in this fashion proves the inferiority of these Bible versions.
Since I am supposed to debate James White on the LSB, or Legacy Standard Bible, which is an update to the NASV, it is appropriate that I also update Dr. Riplinger’s Acrostic Algebra. Note:
The LSB leaves things out, as do other modern versions. If one leaves out the middle line of the “B” in “LSB,” one is left with “LSD,” a dangerous drug which is a SIN. Thus, just like the NASV and NIV, through acrostic algebra, lead to SIN, so does the LSB.
-QED
My discovery of this argument reminded me of the quality argumentation of leading atheist Dan Barker, who, employed Dorothy Murdock’s great mythicist scholarship in my debate with him. Ms. Murdock argued that Moses is borrowed from pagan mythology because of a 16th century AD Michelangelo painting displaying horns on Moses’ head, which represent psychedelic mushrooms or LSD. Barker also employed the weighty arguments of Barbara Walker, an author of books about tarot cards and knitting, in our two debates over the Old Testament.
I think that this update to Dr. Riplinger’s Acrostic Algebra should prove very convincing. James White, get ready!
Note: Wishing to be fair, I tried to reach out to Ms. Riplinger by means of the website where she sells her books. I asked her about the acrostic algebra. I would have liked to reproduce the response I received, which both asked about whether those who questioned her use of it had taken a class in symbolic logic at Harvard (which I assume she believes would somehow support her use of acrostic algebra-indicating she never took a class in symbolic logic at Harvard) and also said that the acrostic algebra was simply rhetorical rather than a substantive argument. However, I was not given permission to reproduce the email. So I wanted to give Ms. Riplinger a chance to defend the Acrostic Algebra in her own words, out of fairness, but I was not allowed to do so.
–TDR
The Requirement of Censorship with the Separation of Church and State: The Truth of the Bible Requires Institutional Adherence
Recent Twitter Files reveal widespread and coordinated censorship there. Where vile language acceptable, those speaking truth have lost their jobs. Long before, state institutions censored the most important truths in human history without recrimination.
Before you continue, I offer you a guide. This post will move outside of most people’s box. I ask you not to delve into the establishment clause of the first amendment of the United States Constitution. Before you jump to practical ramifications, consider the truth of the post.
The Truth, the Logos
When you read Genesis 1 in the Bible, you are reading the account of the beginning of all time, space, and matter. Everything originates with God out of nothing. That is the explanation for everything. It does not even exist without Him, but He also sustains it.
The Bible record is truth as well as is the truth. Scripture presents itself as the truth. Jesus, God the Son, said to His Father God in John 17:17, “Thy Word is truth.” It might make you feel good and help your life, but that is just a byproduct of its truth. It works because it is the truth. The truth is one, because God is one. Nothing in this record contradicts any other part. God does not deny Himself.
God created man in His image and with His likeness. He intended man to reflect Him in his nature. Men should treat and look at the world in every aspect like God would. They should follow what God says, the truth, for and about everything. God expects men to view the world, see it, like He does.
Modernists speculate a fully naturalistic origination and continuation of all things. They opine this as progress from the superstition of ignorance. In fact, the premoderns had it right. It never was a natural world. The Greeks were right in their concept of cosmos, which they called logos, an intelligence that permeated all space and matter and in contrast to random and chaotic naturalism.
People in John’s day understood his Logos in John 1:1, who He said was Jesus Christ, was the source for this cohesion, intelligence, and order. Paul wrote that in Christ were hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3) and that by all things consisted (1:17). That was the Logos.
No Bifurcation of Truth
Paul was also emphatic in the truth of Christ’s bodily resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). Jesus showed Thomas the wounds in His hands. He was one, whole Person. A physical body was the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). Both body and spirit glorified God. This contradicted a pagan dualism, that separated truth into separate spheres of the spiritual and physical.
This New Testament presentation matches the Old Testament concept of truth, “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7). Every aspect of knowledge falls under the purveyance of God’s truth. Even though someone may divide the truth into various fields such as government, economics, math, and biology, it still is one cohesive, orderly truth proceeding from the one mind of one God.
Whatever field or region under the sovereignty of one truth splinters from the one, or whenever it does, it becomes distorted, superficial, meaningless, and subjective. The greatest advancements today in philosophy and science come in what Stephen Meyer calls “the return to the God hypothesis.” The universe is fine tuned. A cell is irreducibly complex. In philosophy, only God explains the existence of everything that exists. It’s impossible for something that exists not to have a reason for its existence.
Separating the truth from government, art, music, and economics, leaves any one in chaos and moral relativism. The gospel does not stand apart from all the truth of the Bible. And the gospel itself cannot and should not be divided into separate components of different degrees of subjective value. For instance, it is good for social reasons and perhaps psychological ones but not to reconcile to God and appease His holy wrath.
Religion the Truth, Equal with Facts
The state is good with religion as long it isn’t the truth. If it becomes the truth, it is equal with facts, science, math, and engineering. True religion cannot just stop with the true definitions of a man and of a woman. Next it says you go to Hell if you reject Jesus Christ. Even worse it limits your marijuana use.
Much of the philosophical conversation today revolves around what I here write. One faction, even considered conservative now, bemoans the loss of Western Civilization and its advantages. It is the water in which we swim, even if no longer Judeo-Christian ethics.
Classically liberal intellectuals warn readers and listeners. They won’t like the disappearance of Christianity, hearkening Nietzche’s prophecy about the death of God in the 19th century. However, if you remove the resurrection, ascension, and second coming of Christ, the consummation of all things in the future literal, physical reign of Jesus Christ, you eradicate all of Christianity. It is a whole that cannot be separated into disjunctive parts.
Total Truth
For a long time Christians self-censored by backing away from total truth (the title of Nancy Pearcey’s book). They stopped bringing the truth to all the subjects and every institution, all ordained by God. The dismissal of one is the dismissal of all.
A moral statement is either true or false. True moral statements come from the Word of God. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, nothing else the Bible says is true. Paul says this in 1 Corinthians 15. You cannot chop the Bible up like that. The moral values become meaningless without the truth of the history and the scientific declarations.
The table of nations in Genesis 10 is the truth. The prophecies of Daniel 11 are the truth. What scripture says all over about men and women is the truth. These are not subjective and relativistic. They are objective. They are true. All these writings should be taught everywhere as truth, not in religion class as an alternative along side the lies of other religions.
The separation of church and state, which is not in the United States Constitution, necessitates censorship. Anything church related is only church related and stays in the church. Only state stuff belongs in the state, which as many of you know, includes everything in the world, including biblical issues like marriage and parenting practices. Then the state labels all of theirs science and facts and outside of the state, unless cooperating with the state, subjective, private, and even conspiracy. If it is truth, it is your truth, subjective truth, which is fine as long as you keep it outside of institutions.
Take Moses into the Supreme Court Building
For awhile the state has been fine with a sculpture of Moses with the two tablets on the Supreme Court building. It is a decoration. It is a ritual. Maybe it’s even an archetype into which you read whatever you want. They cannot use it as grounds for decision making, even if its self-evident truths form the basis for logic, argument, and morality.
Perhaps a government and big business or oligarchical complex now joins in widespread censorship. Let’s just say that complex does censor the citizenry of the United States and other Western countries. Christians already censored themselves by segregating themselves away from God’s world and keeping the truth away from its institutions, whose very existence arises from that truth.
God requires more than talking about the truth at church. He requires adherence to the truth in every institution. This is the teaching of all nations. True discipleship requires national adherence. Churches at least should adhere, but their goals are further than that. They want the knowledge and dominion of His truth everywhere.
Should True Churches Ascribe Perfection to the Apographa of Scripture? pt. 2
Confidence, Absolutism, or Skepticism?
A recent panel of friends decided on three categories of faith in the text of scripture: confidence, absolutism, and skepticism. They chose “confidence” and determined the other two to be false. Further explained, our present text of the Bible has what they consider minimal errors, which yields overall maximum confidence.
Absolutism posits zero errors, relying on a presupposition from a biblical and historical doctrine of preservation. The panel said no one can be, nor should be, absolute or certain with the text of scripture. The Bible may say that the text is certain, but the facts or the science say otherwise. Scripture may say that God preserved every Word, but since He didn’t preserve all of them, those passages must mean something else.
Those just confident in the text, but not certain, foresee a sad future for absolutists. In their experience, they witnessed other absolutists go right off the cliff after the awareness of errors in the text of scripture. They love those people. They are trying to save them. The key is to manage expectations. By encouraging the expectation of only minor errors, but overall stability (what is often called “tenacity”) of the text, they will prevent a doomsday mass exodus of future absolutists. This reads as a kind of theological pragmatism, using human means to manipulate a better outcome. Remaining fruit requires human adaptation.
Skepticism, like absolutism, the panel of friends said also was bad. There is no reason to be skeptical about a Bible with minor errors. Not only do we not know what all the errors are, but we do not know how high a percentage there is. The confidence collective says, “Don’t be skeptical and don’t worry either, it won’t affect the gospel; you can still go to heaven with what’s leftover from original inspiration.”
Faith in Preservation of Scripture Not Arbitrary
The words of God are not arbitrary in their meaning. If scripture teaches that God preserved every one of His words for every generation of believers, then He did. You must believe God. You do not say you believe Him and then put your head in the sand. Let me further explain.
If someone asks, “So what were the words that God preserved?” you give an answer. If you will not (and I mean “will not”) give an answer, then you do not believe what He said He would do. Denying is the opposite of believing. You also don’t answer with something like the following: “I know God preserved every word, but I don’t know which words they are. I just hope that at some time in the future — ten, a hundred, a thousands years from now — I can say I do know what they are.
Furthermore, if you say that you believe what God said about His preservation of His inspired words in the language in which He inspired them, your position must manifest that belief. Standing, as Mark Ward did in his latest video production, and saying, “I do not have a perfect copy of the Greek New Testament” [I typed that verbatim from his latest production (at 48 second mark)], does not arise from faith in what scripture teaches on its own preservation. For the believer, the teaching of scripture forms the standard for his expectation of what God will do. This is his presupposition.
No Percentage of Preservation Less Than 100 Percent
Scripture does not teach the moderate preservation of scripture. It does not teach a high percentage of preservation. The Bible does not reveal nor has historic Christianity believed that God preserved “His Word,” an ambiguous reference to the preservation of something like the message of God’s Word.
When you start reading the New Testament, it refers to Old Testament predictions of Jesus. Based on those presuppositions, you receive Jesus. The Old Testament presents the correct ancestry. Jesus fulfills it. It prophesies a virgin birth. He again fulfills it. And so on. Then in the real world, you receive Jesus Christ. This is a model for faith. This is how Simeon and Anna functioned in Luke 2.
If you read Daniel 11 and the predictions there of future occurrences, as a believer you would believe them and then start looking for their occurrence in the real world. Faith follows a trajectory that starts with scripture. Scripture does not say how many books the Bible would have. Various truths in scripture guide the saints to the sixty-six canonical ones.
The Scriptural Expectations of Churches
The church, so the historical belief of true churches, expected a standard sacred text, a perfect one, based on scriptural principles, despite the existence of textual variants. Then they received that text. They believed those principles, the doctrine which proceeded from scripture, during an era of slightly differing printed TR editions. They still believed in one settled text.
In Mark Ward’s orbit, the bases for rejecting a perfect text are the variations either between manuscripts or early printed editions. That is enough for him and others to say that we do not have a perfect copy of the Greek New Testament. They mock those who believe in a single perfect Bible. They only accept multiple differing Greek New Testaments and multiple differing versions. Scripture doesn’t teach this.
As I wrote earlier, the doctrine of preservation is not arbitrary. An actual single Bible in the real world comes with it. When you don’t believe the latter, you don’t believe the former. Not believing the latter is akin to saying you know (so believe in) God and then not as a practice or lifestyle keep His commandments (cf. 1 John 2:3-4). John says this person is a liar.
Mark Ward can mock the fact that I and others believe the perfect text is the one behind the King James Version, but that belief proceeds from all the various truths in scripture about preservation (which we explicate in Thou Shalt Keep Them). We start with scripture. Ward starts, like a modernist, with sensory experience or what one might call empirical evidence. This approach to knowledge brings constant revision. It is why James White will not rule out future changes in the text based on potential new manuscript discoveries.
A New Line of Attack on Scriptural Doctrine of Preservation
A new line of attack from Ward is pitting the King James against an early Dutch translation of the textus receptus. He imagines a Dutch believer offended when an English one calls his Statenvertaling (translated in 1635) “corrupt.” The translators of that Dutch version attempted to produce a translation for the Dutch like the King James Version. English believers applaud that. They haven’t and they wouldn’t call it corrupt.
Ward is correct in pointing out that the two translations come from a slightly different TR edition of the New Testament. That means they cannot both be right. Both could not represent perfect preservation. One is slightly wrong. Ward puts “corrupt” in the mouths or minds of King James Version advocates against the Statevertaling. They wouldn’t call it corrupt anymore than they would any TR edition.
I don’t know of any angry Statevertaling supporters, standing on its differences from the King James Version. No Dutch reaction to the English exists, such as that when Peter Stuyvesant stomped his wooden leg upon New Netherland becoming New York in 1664. Instead, the Dutch followed a Christian belief in the received text and its faith in divine preservation.
Abraham and Bonaventure Elzivir were Dutch. Their printings of the textus receptus (1624, 1633, and 1641) were essentially a reprint of Beza 1565. Their printings were elegant works, a grand possession for a Bible student. They wrote in Latin in their preface: “Therefore you have the text now received by all in which we give nothing altered or corrupt.” That sounds like textual absolutism to me.
Hints at English Supremacy?
Ward suggests a charge of English supremacy in a sort of vein of white supremacy or English Israelism. Advocates of capitalism do not proceed from Scottish supremacy. Majority text supporters do not arise from Eastern Roman supremacy or Byzantine supremacy. Beza and Stephanus were French. Are TR onlyists French supremacists? I don’t follow a French text of scripture. Or maybe better, Huguenot supremacy. This is another red herring by Ward. It’s sad to think this will work with his audience.
I do not see the trajectory of true churches passing through the Netherlands and the Dutch Reformed. I don’t trace it through the Massachusetts Bay Colony either. Each has a heritage with important qualities. Ward tries to use this argument to justify errors in the Greek New Testament, the mantra being, “various editions differ with errors found everywhere.” This is not what the Christians of that very time believed. They did not believe like Ward and his textual confidence collective. These 17th century believers were absolutists.
False Equivalents and Historical Revisionism
Ward calls the differences between the Dutch Bible and the King James Version with their varied TR editions, “text critical choices.” He uses another informal logical fallacy called a “false equivalent.” He takes modern critical text theory and projects it back on the textual basis of the Statevertaling. The translation proceeded from the Synod of Dort as a Dutch imitation of the King James Version. The point wasn’t changing anything.
Labeling the differences in TR editions “text critical choices” is also historical revisionism. Ward revises history to justify modern practice. Modern historians deconstruct the past to challenge the status quo. History does not provide the desired outcome. They change the history and construct new meaning in the present.
I see modern textual critics undermine a true historical account by exaggerating certain historical details or components. Two examples are the so-called backtranslation of Erasmus in Revelation and then a conjectural emendation of Beza. Advocates of modern textual criticism latch on to these stories and construct them into a revision of the historical account.
While men like Ward and others use false equivalents and historical revisionism, it does not change what the Bible, perfectly preserved for believers, says about its own preservation. Everyone will give an account for their faithfulness to what God said. He will make manifest the damage teachers do by creating or causing doubt or uncertainty concerning the text of His Word.
Go-To Page for the James White / Thomas Ross Bible Text and Version Debate
Thank you to all readers who are praying and/or fasting for me and for God’s kingdom and truth to be glorified and advanced in my upcoming debate with James White.
I have created a go-to page with information about the debate. Links to the video should be posted there when it becomes available, as well as being accessible on the KJB1611 YouTube and KJBIBLE1611 Rumble channels. The go-to page should be updated with specific debate times in case you wish to attend in person, as well as the debate livestream link which we are hoping to make available. So:
Click here to visit the go-to page for the James White / Thomas Ross Bible Text and Version Debate
–TDR
Keswick Theology: A Day in Keswick, Cumbria, the UK
Derwentwater, named after Lord Derwentwater, who was executed for treason, is a large lake in the English county of Cumbria, part of the Lake District National Park. On the northernmost tip of that lake is the small town of Keswick, a market town which name traces to the 13th century. In the 19th century it became popular for tourism and especially with the building of a trainline there from nearby Penrith.
Church of England in Keswick
In the late 1820s, William Wordsworth, the poet, encouraged John Marshall II, whose father and he earned a fortune in Leeds in the textile industry, to build a house near Keswick. Because Marshall saw a need, first he planned with the architect Anthony Salvin to erect a building for a Church of England parish there, named St. John’s the Evangelist, in the old English style. Frederic Myers, not to be confused with Frederick Meyer (early Keswick theology proponent), became the first vicar there in 1838, then in 1840 after the death of his first wife, married Susan, a daughter of John Marshall.
Shortly before Myers’s death, T. D. Hartford Battersby (biography with preface by H. C. G. Moule) came to join him, having read his theology (1841), which had persuaded him toward evangelicalism. Battersby, while attending and then graduating from Oxford, hungered for greater spirituality amidst confusion of the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement. In 1851 Battersby became second vicar of St. Johns and stayed there until 1883.
Something of great historical and theological significance occurred in Keswick on June 28, 1875 in a tent on the lawn of St. John’s. Under the leadership of Battersby, a prayer meeting began a convention there for a week, which spawned the Higher Life Movement in the United Kingdom, also called the Keswick Movement and the related Keswick Theology.
Trip to Keswick
The beautiful little town of Keswick makes a wonderful day trip of an hour and fifteen minutes by bus from Carlisle. In an entire day and early evening of pouring rain, my wife and I travelled with our umbrellas there Tuesday to look. We walked around the quaint town, first entering a shop of Lucy Pittaway, of whom I had never heard, but found she was three years running the most popular artist in the country. While my wife shopped, I began talking to the two ladies. Something like the following occurred:
Have you heard of the Keswick Movement?
They both nodded, no.
It started here. The Keswick Movement influenced now over 500 million people all over the world. It began here in the 19th century in this town. Do you know what it is?
They both nodded, no. One of them asked, “What is it?”
It is theological, I explained. It relates to the Bible. Do you know the Bible?
They both nodded, no.
Have you heard of the Old and New Testaments?
They both nodded, yes.
The New Testament starts with the first four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Have you heard of those?
They both nodded, yes.
The gospels tell the story of Jesus. Part of what bothers people about the Bible is that Jesus did miracles. He is God. He healed everybody in Judea and Galilee. People want to know, if the Bible is true, why doesn’t that happen today? It’s not a bad question.
I explained the Keswick movement, second blessing theology, and moved into the gospel in a nutshell. They listened in complete rapt attention to everything I said there in that art shop.
Keswick Information Center
My wife and I walked down that cobble stone historical small downtown area and she went into a “bunny store.” Beatrix Potter was born in the lake district, so her books are all over there. We saw a whole section of Beatrix Potter products in the grocery store next to the bus stop. While she looked there, I went into a very old chapel in the middle of town that houses their Keswick information center. Tourists in Keswick today (and probably for centuries) mainly want to hike around the lake, which few to no one was doing in the pouring rain and ‘gale-force’ winds.
When I walked into the information center, it was one woman behind a desk. We greeted one other, she wondered why we were there. I asked if she heard of the Keswick movement. The conversation above happened again. She listened too with riveted attention. She was not religious, but she was so excited that she left from behind the desk to get a co-worker. I began explaining the same thing to him. This was seeming easy. Each time I brought in the gospel.
Walk to St. John’s
I went out in time for my wife to leave the bunny store and we kept walking up that main street. It went up a hill. The lake district is full of steep hills. Water runs down them and forms lakes. If you hike those hills, you get amazing views when it isn’t pouring down rain. My wife and I found St. John’s. I told her this is where the Keswick movement started. Even though the town heard and knew nothing about Keswick theology, I wanted to see if I found evidence for it in that old building.
Bridget and I opened a very old gate and took a path up some steps around the front of the edifice. Three men walked very quickly in front of us into the building in heavy rain gear. We took some pictures on the outside. We entered and walked around, while those three talked.
Two of the three men were trying to sell internet services to St. John’s. The other man was the present vicar, Charles, only the 13th since 1833. I had a long talk with him about Keswick theology, the Church of England, and the gospel, until an elderly man entered with whom he needed to meet. The Keswick Convention continues today, but doesn’t believe Keswick theology that still continues in various forms it introduced and propagated.
The theology from the first few decades of the Keswick Convention generated the Charismatic movement and a wide range of corruption in evangelicalism and through ecumenism. This includes many varieties of higher life and second blessing theology infiltrating fundamentalism and Baptists, including independent ones in the United States. The town itself and many surrounding communities today is mainly irreligious, non-religious, atheist, and in great need of the gospel.
Battersby
What engendered the spiritual hunger of Battersby in 1875? Why did he need more spiritually than what he already had?
Before conversion, everyone falls short of the glory of God. After justification by faith, no one does. Even of the church at Corinth, Paul wrote, “Ye come behind in no gift” (1 Corinthians 1:7). True believers have every spiritual blessing in Christ (Ephesians 1:3). Among saved people, there are not spiritual haves and spiritual have nots, only spiritual haves.
Believers do not need more Holy Spirit. The fulness of the Holy Spirit is not more Holy Spirit. Those who believe in Jesus Christ receive all the Holy Spirit. In fulness, the Holy Spirit has all of you, not your having more of Him.
The Church of England says that faith and repentance are necessary for the reception of the Sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist, which are generally necessary to salvation. It says infant sprinkling people regenerates and makes members of Christ and children of God. Someone depending on more than Christ for salvation will not receive the Holy Spirit, so he will always hunger for spirituality. Anglicans like Battersby, sprinkled as infants, even if later confirmed, are not saved. Conversion comes by faith alone through grace alone.
Paul wrote that we are complete in Jesus Christ (Colossians 2:10). Baptism and the eucharist add works to grace, thereby Christ is made of no effect unto them (Galatians 5:4). The Church of England says that the bread and the drink of the eucharist preserve a soul unto everlasting life.
Everyone who trusts in more than Jesus Christ will hunger for spirituality that is a basis for seeking for a second blessing. It is not a second blessing they need, but a first. It isn’t higher life, but life itself. More spiritual experiences, especially invented, conjured, or manipulated ones, will not and cannot replace true salvation by faith in Jesus Christ alone.
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