I don’t know that I’ll be writing the critique of the Sword of the Lord Lordship salvation article.  I missplaced it or lost it and I’m not going to work that hard at getting it back.  If it shows up or you send it to me, I’ll write on it, because I want to.  I’ll be continuing the series on prayer.  I’ll be writing on the Anderson/White video.  I don’t have the time to write about those today, because it will take more effort there.  I have time for this, because it relates to my last post, which touched on cultural issues.

At the beginning of my last post, I ticked off a few future posts I want to do.  I failed to mention another one I’ll be doing, Lord-willing.  The Sword of the Lord sends me its publication and in the last issue, they wrote a horrible piece, entitled, Renouncing Lordship Salvation.  I’ll write a critique of that upcoming.

I’m not going to comment on who is guilty, whether Michael Brown or Darren Wilson, in Ferguson. What piqued me during this event has been the consideration of whether evangelicalism needs involvement in changing social structure or infrastructure for successful integration of blacks into their congregations.  Put another way and in the form of a question, will evangelical white leaders fail at reaching blacks with the gospel if they don’t work in a very public way at making society more fair for black people?  A few ideas sent my thoughts in this direction.

From my vantage point, the most well known black conservative evangelical is Thabiti Anyabwile, and I read what he wrote about the Ferguson situation (here 1, here 2, here 3, here 4).   By the way, I don’t think people understand the plight of black America without knowing the division at the turn of the 20th century between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Dubois.  This would require reading Washington’s book, Up From Slavery, but even further over twenty years ago I scoured the writings or works of Washington in print that included all of his Sunday evening talks (example) at Tuskegee.  It would also be worthwhile to read the theology of Martin Luther King, Jr. in his writings and the black liberation theologian, James Cone.  I have read all those out of a curiosity and desire to interpret and discuss the issues rightly.

African Americans made a plain choice to follow the path or ways or instruction of W. E. B. Dubois related to Washington dying at a young age without a successor.  A convenient, albeit unsuccessful, “solution” was chosen, which was to rely on government. Since then, the same mistake has been repeated again and again, reminding me of the adage about insanity:  “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”  Old Testament principles about government could be applied successfully, if followed, but those are being rejected for something less sure than a full court heave.

In addition, I had preached in the last few months for five or six weeks mid-week about marriage, including 1 Peter 3 and 1 Corinthians 7, which reminded me of the New Testament approach to societal structures.  If God was amillennial or post-millennial, could Peter or Paul each talk like he does in those epistles?  No way.  Christianity is not designed to change social structure.   I would say that New Testament, biblical, Christianity is ambivalent or agnostic to social structure, and even further than that.  The New Testament takes a more extreme view than even ambivalence.

Calvinist amillennialists or post-millenialists interest me, because of what appears to be an obvious contradiction.  If you think that salvation is totally dependent on God, you’re monergistic, how can you connect changing societal structures to reaching a particular segment of the population with the gospel?  And this is where the Calvinist evangelicals are.  They employ rap.  They start food pantries.  They encourage dressing down.  They talk a lot about racial reconciliation.  And contextualization.  This includes the Tim Keller way in New York City with his professorial talks, evening jazz “worship,” and no mention of same sex perversion, all key in getting it done there. They speak and act like all these are necessities to help the gospel along.  Be Calvinist if you’re Calvinist!

Amillennialists and post-millennialists see the current age as the kingdom of God and so recognize the reign of Christ not just in the hearts of believers today, but impacting societal structure change. They brainstorm the dawn of the kingdom (which relates to Augustine and bifurcation of truth that I wrote about), allowing for mission creep.  It’s now not just about the gospel, but commencing functional structures of the kingdom. Amillennialism and post-millennialism trigger the weird cousin of liberation theology, dominionism or reconstructionism.

I believe the position of Anyabwile and those like him in fact hinders the gospel.  Often the same Calvinists who argue that cultural issues, i.e. “non-essentials,” which are merely obedience to the Bible or sanctification, the practice of New Testament Christianity, serve to undermine the gospel, hone in on this cultural issue.  They essentially argue that the gospel will fail without the accompanying support of societal structure change.  This is more than a strain of evangelicalism.  It is mainstream.  It does sabotage the gospel, akin to the new measures of Finney.

1 Peter 3, the whole epistle, and then 1 Corinthians 7:17-24 both weigh in on the relationship of Christians to social structures.  In 1 Peter 3, Peter could tell masters to sell their slaves or propose they run.  Paul could have done the same with Philemon.   But no, to those under oppressive government, he says, “Submit.”  To slaves under masters, he says, “Submit.”  To women under unsaved husbands, he says, “Be subject.”  He elevates conversion of those in government, of the master, and of the husband.  Peter says, we’re strangers and pilgrims in this world, and this is how you act like it.  You don’t attempt to change social structure, because that just confuses people as to where your loyalties lie.

From 1 Corinthians 7, we see Paul’s message that Christianity was never designed to disrupt social relationships.  Folks at the Corinthian church used their Christianity to justify all manner of social change.  Paul corrects that.  The essence of vv. 17-24 is don’t turn Christianity into changing social structure; instead, make sure that everybody understands that spiritual regeneration can exist in any societal situation.  The Bible reveals a right understanding of government and of history, but the New Testament is single in its focus of what Christians should be and do.

We can die a thousand different ways, including that brain eating amoeba in shallow warm fresh water, which most often kills young children.  But Paul had a desire to depart.  Jesus took away the sting of death.  Everyone — blacks, whites, reds, yellows — needs to heed what Jesus said: “Be not afraid.”  Fear God, yes.  But unscriptural fear fuels bad decisions and then philosophies for so many people.  Anyabwile validates a particular behavior motivated by fear.  When someone trusts the sovereignty and providence of God, like Jeremiah in Lamentations, the mercies of God are new every morning, great is His faithfulness.  That’s the message people need to hear.  Not anxiety.

The gospel defeats fear.  Fear of death is a tool of Satan.  And the fear of man brings a snare, one common for evangelicals.  It should be repudiated, but there is a fear of the charge of racism.

Changing social structure merely rearranges the deck chairs on the Titanic.  You might have the best arrangement, but it’s a waste.  Instead, we should be manning the rescue boats.  We’re strangers here.  When Jesus comes, He Himself will change the social structure.  Until then, that practice might seem tempting, but don’t go there.   Instead, let’s act like we don’t belong here.

For the most part, America rejects, shall we call it, the Honey Boo-Boo subculture, whose appeal is not acceptance, but felt superiority.  The culture at large (white culture?) scorns that subculture, mocks it, deservedly so.  Booker T. Washington also proposed the repudiation of the inferior — you read that in his ‘Sunday evening talks’ at Tuskegee.

In this case, black America should join in the disavowal of its own Honey Boo-Boo, rather than embrace and defend.  Evangelicals should stop pandering to this destructive practice with their Christian rap and hip-hop and Jesus Junk and so much more other “Christian” Honey Boo-Boo (this is how they say you get multi-ethnic; not the gospel).   Think of what Peter revealed about conversion in 2 Peter 1:3-4:

[H]is divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue:  hereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.

Salvation elevates us.  We become partakers of the divine nature.  Jesus came to bring us to Him not lower Himself to our level.  He became a man, yes, but a perfect man.  He has called us to glory and virtue, not the corruption that is in the world through lust.

Booker T. Washington said “build a better brick.”  Build a more beautiful brick.  But first admit the ugliness.  Turn it down.  Shun the Honey Boo-Boo.

A further aside.

The gospel is the power of God unto salvation.  Yes.  Buuuuuuuuuut.  Your church might shrink from a lack of diverse worship styles.  Those styles are not the power of God unto salvation, just the power unto shrinking your church size.  Of course, those are genuinely saved people that are leaving, that you could keep with worship styles.  The gospel has saved them, but they’ve got to have their way on a few things, and you’ve got to make sure they can have it.  There is nothing wrong with what they don’t like, but they’ve got to have what they want as saved people by the power of the gospel.

Worship styles are said to be non-essentials (worship styles are the kind of non-essentials you need a 75% rule for).  This is the one area that Paul didn’t know there could be disunity (1 Cor 1:10).  It is essential that they are non-essential.  You could lose people if you don’t have diverse non-essential styles.  It is essential you try to keep those saved people in your church, who will leave over those non-essentials.  The power of the worship style is greater than the power of the gospel.   Salvation perseveres except in the impossible-to-overcome trial of not getting the worship style you want.  They themselves say that worship styles are non-essential, which is why they’ll leave if they don’t get what they want.  On the other hand, the people who believe there is sacred music, who don’t think styles are non-essential, since they are worship, it is essential they see worship styles as non-essential.  They are factious if they will not allow for multiple, diverse styles, because they don’t care if supporters of diversity will leave the church.  They must see worship styles as non-essential

The 47% need government programs and hand-outs to stay in one party, so there will be programs that redistribute wealth and there will be hand-outs.  You can be very upset at that, because of what it does to the country.  A large percentage of church attenders need their worship style to keep coming, to stay in the church, so there will be diverse worship styles.  The former is pandering, because that is government, but the second you’ve got to act like it isn’t, because that is only church.

When I recently watched a chunk of the Strange Fire Conference, a couple of speakers said that the entrance to the Charismatic movement was the music style.  That received “Amen”s.  But worship styles are non-essential.  They are only an entrance to the Charismatic movement, even though they are amoral.  Get it?

I wrote something related to this post just this last Wednesday.  I will continue my series on prayer (which you’ll be able to get to each part from here) — stay tuned.

There is one God.  There is one universe.  There is one world.  There is one truth.  All of these former interrelate with one another.  It’s not as though anyone gets to work under other laws of nature.  There isn’t one set of laws of nature for one person and another set for someone else.  We don’t live out God’s one book in some alternative universe.  There isn’t a separate will of God for certain people, while there is another for others, the first getting to have their own way in a manner that the other does not.

Where did Christianity start going down the wrong path, related in the first paragraph?  Satan gave Eve an alternate choice in the garden.  She could do something that God prohibited and still be OK.  He tempted her with a liberty she didn’t have.  Satan justified what she would do contrary to God’s prohibition.  With that being settled, today’s various iterations of two truths or two stories or two realms hearkens back to Constantine and then Augustine among others in early Roman Catholicism.

I mention Constantine, because he took his cue from a vision of a cross in the sky, a highly subjective experience that he attributed as God’s direct revelation to himself in almost apostolic fashion.  Then he proceeded to invent an unscriptural form of Christianity.  Even before he became a Catholic type of Christian, Augustine loved Platonic philosophy.  He brought Plato’s philosophy into Christianity that bifurcated ideal truth from its concrete counterpart in the real world, the former the heavenly realm and the latter the earthly.  These were his two cities in his City of God.  The truth in the real world didn’t necessarily match up with the truth of the ideal.  The church could essentially disobey God on the ground, while fulfilling obedience in the other realm spiritually or mystically.  When the Donatists confronted Augustine about the corruption in the church, he said that the true church was invisible and spiritual, bifurcating reality from the ideal.  This was straight out of Plato.

Roman Catholicism spiritualized huge swaths of scripture through allegorization.  This allowed all sorts of reading the personal and subjective into the text to allow for the Catholicism’s own desired ends.  Evangelicalism traces its origins from Roman Catholicism through Protestantism.  Covenant theology defends amillennialism with a non-literal interpretation.  This spiritualization allows for wide latitude in meaning that continues to exist in evangelicalism, bifurcating truth in numbers of different ways.

The Bible itself has been subjected to the bifurcation.  You have the original manuscripts, an ideal text, and then we have what’s in our hands, riddled with possible errors, and subject to the regular correction and tweaking of textual scientists.  The originals are that subjective, mystical spiritual text, even an ideal, and the modern critical text, the concrete, scientific reality.  Warfield saw a future danger in one truth, so he argued an original manuscript inerrancy, separated from the infallible apographa of preceding generations.  In Augustinian fashion, a mystical Bible in the ideal with a less than perfect manifestation in the physical.

Theological liberalism rose in Germany from German Protestantism, an outgrowth of Augustinian Catholicism.  These German theologians and philosophers idealized and spiritualized Jesus separate from a concrete, physical history.  They took bifurcation to another iteration by separating the supernatural of scripture from the lower realm of science and relegating it to a spiritualized upper level, only representative of reality.  Someone could receive Jesus without receiving His miracles.

Augustine’s two cities found themselves in the ideal of a spiritual perfection of an invisible church and the less than perfect manifestation of every day life in a visible assembly.  Unity could be found in a spiritual sense through the invisible church without doctrinal and practical agreement in real life.  The bifurcation still counts this as unity.  Then to match this in the real world, truth was bifurcated into essentials and non-essentials, not expecting agreement in the latter, because spiritual reality had already been attained.  For whatever disunity there is, it still counts as unity, because it exists in a metaphysical ideal.

Bifurcation has affected the gospel of evangelicalism.  You see the spiritual experience beginning with a profession that doesn’t produce biblical change.  At the some point in the future that higher life is reached through a process of succeeding crisis until someone is dedicated or surrenders to Jesus as Lord.  Truth is divided into what can occur, the spiritual unity around the gospel, and then the practical, concrete, resultant behavior that would suggest obedience, but relegated to non-essential.  This all is a later iteration of the spiritualization of Augustine.

It is no wonder that worship has become most often mystical and subjective, very much like the relativism of modern art.  One personal experience is as good as another without objective criteria.  This is the nature of this upper realm, fenced off from the lower quantifiable and scientific.  No one can judge the approach to God in the realm of the spiritual.

This bifurcation of truth produces dual definitions of terms.  Words can mean what someone wants in the upper, spiritualized, subjective story.  Love can be toleration or sentimentalism.  Grace can be license.  Immodesty is nudity only.  Rock music is now sacred.  A word from God is what you might hear in your head, that you say was the Holy Spirit.  And now marriage can be same sex.  The terms become flexible outside of a scientific standing.  The world in which they exist is also very pliable.  In that world of imagination, few rules any longer apply.

Someone can live the Christian life without in fact living it.  He’s living it in a subjective, personal sense, that counts, because the truth has been separated from tangible, real world application.  Anymore, someone can be a good Christian with hardly obeying the Bible.  He’s a good Christian.

Little can be criticized because the Bible can’t be read one way.  There are several ways to take everything, including the gospel.  As a result, the primary ethic is acceptance.  Non-acceptance is the new disunity.  Obedience is accommodation.  The conscience can’t rightly function, because there is nothing to accuse, only to excuse.

No one can know if he is really saved or not really saved, because the basis of knowing has been rendered ambiguous by bifurcation.   A person might have a story and a feeling.  Another carries the card but rarely shows up.  Some just punch the Christian time clock.  You can’t violate what you can’t be sure about.  It doesn’t matter if you’re sure because the upper realm is so subjective.

Anything can be justified through bifurcation of truth.  More people can get along.  The amillennialist does fine with the premillennialist, the pretribulationist with the post, the continuationist with cessationist, and the infant sprinkler with the credo-baptizer.  None of the truth can matter enough with its spiritualization in an upper story.  More people getting along results in a bigger crowd.  The bigger crowd means that God must approve, so you’re s success.

The one who won’t fit in is the one who won’t bifurcate truth.   Mockery of him comes in concrete, real world terminology.  He alone can be known to violate a standard.  Without him, however, there is no hope for truth.

What great arguments John Piper gives for avoiding television shows like Game of Thrones!  For decades, we haven’t had cable, so we couldn’t flip to it or couldn’t watch it without effort, but the fictional historical period would have piqued my interest before reading of the perversity of it.  Piper reads the slide toward Gomorrah and here throws obstacles to slow it.  Christians shouldn’t be watching it.  But why?

I’m right with Piper on being against television shows like this.  I applaud him again.  He reads like a separatist in this article, making certain types of arguments you’d hear from a separatist or a fundamentalist. He’s preaching personal separation.  The truth honors God.

Piper’s article doesn’t define nudity.  He assumes everyone knows what it is.  Does everyone?  I don’t think so.  Scripture doesn’t use the term “nudity,” whether KJV, NASV, or ESV.  It uses “nakedness” (ervah) which is merely shameful exposure of the body.  Is that nudity?  It’s not a subject evangelicals talk about much.  They admit it’s out there, but they won’t tell you what it is — too afraid perhaps.  Is the true problem only someone having all his clothes off and showing his vital parts?  He doesn’t say.  He assumes we know.  He doesn’t make a solid argument even against nudity, whatever it is.  He tells us not to look at it, even that it is sin, but he doesn’t tell us what “it” is.  Some might think that these — defining nudity and what is wrong with it — don’t matter, but they really do.  When these are not defined and reasons given, then people take it into their own hands.

John Piper sounds like he’s being tough on Game of Thrones and the like.  He doesn’t like that stuff himself. He won’t watch it himself.  Besides not liking it and not watching it and giving people reasons for not watching it, he and evangelicalism treat dress and entertainment like a liberty issue.   They don’t draw lines on this. Even here, Piper won’t say you “can’t do it.”  These things are non-essentials to evangelicals and increasingly more with fundamentalists.  If a fundamentalist talked about a television show like this, many men will say that he’s not being gospel centered or that he’s diminishing the gospel by emphasizing a non-essential.  When John Piper does it, people agree with him, and give him a pass, perhaps because he has a well of good will for what he accepts from other people.

I looked at the Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, MN website to see programs at Piper’s church, surfing to the youth and then camp section.  There was a video promoting Bethlehem’s camp. On the video, there were visuals of many girls wearing shorts all the way up to their crotch area. There were photos of girls with swimsuits.  I didn’t keep investigating, but this is where the evangelical standard becomes very subjective.  Is this a biblical standard or a preferential one?

Piper sees a problem.  Evangelicals do.  You can see it with their reaction to same-sex marriage.  They are rethinking their doctrinal statements, their covenants, and even their stands on separation.  But they don’t have a biblical, defensible standard.  They don’t offer a definition of modesty or nakedness.  Drawing the line at “nudity” isn’t scriptural.  The Bible doesn’t use the term.  If they were consistent, evangelicals should be angry or upset, because Piper is going beyond scripture with this standard, but we all knew evangelicals were being selective with this terminology.  It’s not a biblical, but convenient.  Piper can erect a barrier to prevent further moral erosion without tuning in to God’s position.

God is one, and He reveals one truth, one goodness, and one beauty.  The correct understanding of God is most important.  The gospel itself is all about God and not us.  We should, well, desire God.  And God isn’t represented by the aesthetic, the culture, of Piper and evangelicals and fundamentalists like him or who identify with him.  They are actually a part of the problem, maybe the worst part of the problem.

Pornography is about lust, about defiling, about profanity.  It makes common what should be kept sacred.  Made in the image of God, we keep our clothing on.  In so doing, we keep our marriage covenant sacred.  Showing more body is that moral defilement that dishonors the imago Dei.  Evangelicals already do that with their music.  They already blaspheme God with the profanity of their worship.  They already cater to men’s lust that way.  They take what is already more sacred, the worship of the church, and make it common.  They take holy words and defile them with sensual music.  This perverts a true understanding of God worse than the “nudity” does, and it happens in church, the holy congregation of the Lord.

Evangelicals opened up the movie house to Christians.  Evangelicals eroded stands against secular entertainment.  They already wouldn’t make these applications of scripture.  It was part of their thinking about evangelism and how they could reach more people.  They reasoned, like liberals, that a certain sociology could help Christianity along. They already have relegated so much to the realm of the non-essential.  John Piper sits and accepts Mark Driscoll, a profane preacher with the Christian kegger parties. And now we’re reaching these unacceptable depths to a generation like Piper, who was right there, a part of the cause, Piper has something to say to try to stop it.   That train has already left the station.

Many fundamentalists, especially young ones, won’t admit what I’m writing here.  This is the truth, but they cannot declare the emperor’s nakedness.   Evangelicals go after all the doctrinal issues, but that is not the downfall of Christianity.  They have a conduct and an aesthetic that is not becoming the gospel or sound doctrine.  It changes the meaning of the doctrinal and practical terms.  They won’t do anything about it, because their enrollments are shrinking and they’ve got to meet the payroll.  They look for a “centrist” point of view, as I heard it from Steve Pettit in this summer’s BJU town meeting.  Pettit can’t say something is wrong with Northland because he won’t do that about a parcel of land where he parked his trailer after a long trip and his children ran on to said property with sheer joy.  A place where they had such a good time can’t receive criticism.  Pathetic.  This is where we are at in Christian discernment today, and it is Piper and those with him that brought us and helped bring us there.  Game of Thrones itself departs from “centrism,” a center point, which happens to be continuing to move to the left.

There is so much wrong, but I’ll leave you with this to think about.  If you can’t see it or admit error, you are a contributor to the slide.  May God have mercy on you.

Some are upset that I won’t accept the fundamentalist label.  It is suitably derogatory for me to be a fundamentalist, and if they don’t have that title to designate me, they’re unhappy.  The still call me a fundamentalist, because I become too hard to label without it.  However, continuing to do it is lazy and untrue.

Fundamentalist is the best word, maybe the only word, most have for the most theologically conservative in doctrine and practice.   To them you can’t be more conservative than a fundamentalist, so I’ve got to be one.  To review, if someone could be a fundamentalist by dictionary definition, that is, strong adherent to a standard, I could be that.  I strongly adhere to the Bible and I wouldn’t apologize if that’s what fundamentalist meant.  However, Christianity has a very specific meaning that rules me out as a fundamentalist, if we’re going to be honest with the terminology.

Someone questioned recently why I attack fundamentalism.  If I’m not a fundamentalist, what am I?You’re left with an evangelical or new evangelical or conservative evangelical — things not fundamentalist.  So if I’m attacking fundamentalism, must I be an evangelical?

Labels themselves don’t bother me, but we’ve got to be honest with them.  They have a purpose for marking someone, helping understand who someone is.  Sometimes the terms are used as a pejorative to shame the target.  The media does that with conservative evangelicals.

To say I am or I’m not a fundamentalist, we’ve got to know what a fundamentalist is.  Being a fundamentalist does have to do with the fundamentals and it is a historical position.  Fundamentalism is a movement that responded to theological liberalism in the early twentieth century. Fundamentalists separated from others, those deemed liberals, for not believing and teaching what they called the fundamentals.  They separated only over the fundamentals, so they unified or fellowshiped merely if someone believed and taught the fundamentals.  They reduced unity and fellowship to the fundamentals.

It dawned on me several years ago that I couldn’t keep self-identifying as a fundamentalist, because I believe that more is required for unity and fellowship than the fundamentals.  Scripture doesn’t support unity on just fundamentals.   If there are fundamentals, the Bible doesn’t say what they are.  I often say that I figured out that I can’t be a fundamentalist and obey the Bible, and obeying the Bible is more important than being a non-scriptural title or even idea.  I don’t know that I ever truly was a fundamentalist.  I didn’t know what one was, but when I understood it, I decided I wasn’t one.

As an example, our church separates over mode of baptism.  Our church separates over ungodly worship.  Our church separates over immodest dress.  Our church separates over false doctrine and practice.  We don’t immediately cut other people off.  We give people an opportunity to grow.  But we don’t divide the Bible into the so-called essentials and non-essentials and separate only over the essentials, whatever size of list that is growing to or shrinking to.

I give credit to fundamentalism for separating at all.  That’s why I most often am defending fundamentalism here.  For that reason, I care about fundamentalism.  Fundamentalism still teaches separation.  Evangelicals do not hold ecclesiastical separation. They don’t teach it.  Often they repudiate ecclesiastical separation.  Evangelicals are in non-stop rebellion against the doctrine of separation.  They can’t be right.   If I was an evangelical, I would doubt my own salvation.  Why? I would be in continuous disobedience to scripture.  I would say that I know the Lord, but not keep His commandments, and, therefore, be a liar.  Evangelicals reading — think about that.  Those who consider me a fundamentalist do so because I believe in separation.  However, I separate on more than just the fundamentals.

What I have noticed about fundamentalism is that it struggles with separation.  The list of fundamentals is very nebulous.   Most fundamentalists have a different or varied list of fundamentals over which they will separate.  Some separate over a smaller number and others over a much larger number.   What they have in common is that they believe that someone should separate just over fundamentals, whatever size the list of fundamentals might be.  Because fundamentalists can’t agree on what the list is, there is non-stop debate and fundamentalists are rightly targeted for being political, because the size of the list often seems to correspond to fundamentalist politics.   There are many ways to illustrate this.

Fundamentalism will separate over Billy Graham because of the gospel.  Aspects of the gospel are fundamentals.  They often will not separate over the various iterations of Jack Hyles over the gospel. They won’t separate over the Hyles type of gospel, but then they will separate over those who will use the English King James translation only.   I’ve noticed that often now fundamentalists will separate from those who they think separate too much, because those people are heretics.  Explanations for why and who to separate from are regularly changing.

Fundamentalism is about separation, but not just about separation, because it is also about militancy. Fundamentalists historically are militant in their stands on doctrine and practice.  Even if they won’t separate over whether someone drinks alcohol or doesn’t drink alcohol, since it isn’t a fundamental, they will fight over alcohol drinking.  They will make resolutions.  They will repudiate.  They will use very strong language against alcohol drinking.

Here’s a tough one now for fundamentalists, which shows why it is hard to be a fundamentalist. Fundamentalists separated from the Southern Baptist Convention.   Calvinism is growing in fundamentalism.  Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is Calvinist.  The Convention still harbors a false gospel among many.  However, it seems that fundamentalists can now fellowship with Southern Baptists and Calvinism is the glue.  Calvinist fundamentalists will fellowship, again, it seems, with Southern Baptist Calvinists.  Those same Calvinists have a much bigger problem with the King James Version than they do Southern Baptist Calvinists.  Go figure.  Perhaps, go try to figure, because you won’t understand the doctrine of it.

Maybe I can’t say that Calvinist fundamentalists hate the revivalist fundamentalists.  Maybe hate is too strong a word.  But that’s what it seems like.  The Calvinist fundamentalists seem to like the Southern Baptist Calvinists more than the fundamentalist revivalists.  I’m laughing.

Anyway, I digress.  You can’t practice the Bible and be a fundamentalist.  Scripture does teach ecclesiastical separation, so you can’t be an evangelical and be biblical, but you can’t be a fundamentalist and practice separation like the Bible teaches.  The most that fundamentalists have done with me is find inconsistencies to prove that no one can be consistent, to justify their own inconsistencies.  What they should do is just believe and obey what the Bible teaches.   The practice of ecclesiastical separation isn’t easy.  Church discipline isn’t easy.  How long do you wait before you discipline someone out of your church?  You try to be patient.  It can take longer to separate from someone outside of your church.  However, the only consistent position to take is to separate over every doctrine and practice of the Bible.

The Bible is perspicuous, that is, plain.  The Bible is sufficient.   The Bible is sufficient in everything that it teaches.  You leave some out and part of the Bible isn’t sufficient.  To keep the doctrines and practices of the Bible, which are plain, we have to separate over all of it.  We can, because we can know what it means.  We should, because we need all of it.  God never said to do otherwise, no matter what kind of convoluted explanation a fundamentalist might try to make.

I understand evangelicals.  They believe in a universal church, so they fellowship with all believers. They don’t want to separate and cause disunity in the universal, invisible body.  But then they have all the doctrinal and practical garbage that flows in and through, spoiling everything.  Fundamentalists, also universal church, don’t want to spoil unity or doctrine, so they try to bridge the gap between the two with incessant argument.

The key here is to understand where unity is.  Unity is in a church, in an assembly.  You can keep doctrine and practice pure in a church.  Each church fellowships with churches of like faith and practice.  Each church separates from churches with a different doctrine and practice.  What I just described is not fundamentalism.  But it is what I am.  It is biblical.  Join me.

In a classic case of poisoning the well (a logical fallacy), Kevin Bauder concludes that “thoughtful fundamentalists” will be “OK” with Clarence Sexton preaching at their FBFI conference, because he’s now got an acceptable KJO position.  I’m not kidding:  if you don’t agree with Bauder, you are not a “thoughtful fundamentalist,” which, of course, he is, along with anyone who agrees with him.

Bauder’s view here represents an intellectual vacuum in fundamentalism.  His kind of thoughtful reminds me of Jehoshaphat in 2 Chronicles 18, as he considered allying with Ahab.  His father Asa had been in utter separation with the north, but the perceived benefits (18:2,3) of a northern alliance, perhaps lofty images of coalition grandeur, the man who reunited a divided kingdom, influenced his thoughts.  I’m sure he was thinking, but his thinking was patently wrong.  Bauder’s is too.

Thoughtfulness for Bauder is looking at the wording of Clarence Sexton’s school website for minutiae on the Crown College use of the King James.  Like Ahab, Sexton knows how to tweak a statement in order to attain an alliance.  But Bauder, like Jehoshaphat, can’t see through it.  He digs into butchered sheep and oxen served by Ahab and decides everything’s OK now.

Bauder crawls over 1-2-3 pray with me, the false gospel, the silly carnival atmosphere, the irreverence, the superficial theology, Jack Schaap, hero worship, the lack of church discipline, rank pragmatism of the highest order, Jack Trieber, Tony Hudson, and all the rest of the fragmented and unrepentant remains of the Hyles coalition to find subtle wording in one version of a statement on the use of the King James.  This is his “thoughtful fundamentalism.”

Quite a few people would agree with Bauder.  KJO is their major separating issue.  With this criteria, Bauder concludes, Sexton OK, KJO bad.  I was enlightened by Bauder’s article, because I had never heard explained how that KJO had risen to the level of a false gospel.  Now we can see it’s worse than a false gospel, but I had never heard an explanation.  From Bauder, we get one.

He says KJO is a serious error because it denigrates the Word of God by saying that other versions are not the Word of God.  As I see it, many KJO, such as myself, believe (for the dreaded doctrinal reasons) that there is only one Bible, one set of Words, like Christians have believed for centuries.  I wouldn’t say about other versions, “This isn’t the Word of God,” because a biblical position is more sophisticated than that. In other words, those versions do contain the Word of God.  However, words that contradict each another can’t both be the Word of God.  Only yellow is yellow.  Red isn’t yellow.  Bauder, I guess, expects people to accept contradictory words.  This should help you understand how messed up fundamentalism is.  Unless you agree that red is yellow, you’ve reached a level of serious error.

Knowing what Bauder has said and written about separation in the past, his explanation in this post somehow means that KJO undermines the gospel.  Now Sexton actually undermines the gospel by, well, encouraging a false gospel, but Sexton is now approved by Bauder solely because he’s cleaned up his act enough on the King James.  If you didn’t think before that the King James wasn’t the third rail of fundamentalist politics, you should now.  This is not just unthoughtful.  You’re required to park your brain at the door.  It’s no wonder that men have complained that fundamentalism isn’t very mental.

I don’t care if fundamentalists separate from me because I believe in the perfect preservation of scripture.  If they think that’s false doctrine, they should separate.  But fundamentalists don’t separate from false doctrine.  They’re not even separating in this case over a false gospel, among many other good reasons to separate from Sexton.

Bauder’s post doesn’t surprise me about fundamentalism.  I watched the online video introduction of Steve Pettit as the new president of Bob Jones University.  Pettit has introduced many fundamentalists, bridged the gap, to Getty, Townend, and Kauflin.  Pettit was there when Northland went where it did. He worked with Matt Olson for many years while Northland was tanking.  What hope does anyone have that Bob Jones won’t continue its slide?  I write this, knowing it really is just shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.  These are not institutions either in the Bible or that God has promised to preserve.  They have zero biblical authority.

I was reading comments about the transition to Pettit, and one fundamentalist complained that he was one of those guys who believed women shouldn’t wear pants.  Not long after, someone produced a picture of a woman working with Pettit wearing blue jeans.  Instant relief.  All is well again among thoughtful fundamentalists.  Pettit’s women wear pants.  Phew!

Perhaps here is a thoughtful question.  What has Sexton done to merit an FBFI national conference speaker status?  What does anyone do to get that slot in a national conference?  Is it because he has been faithful to the Word of God?  Is it because his church is a model of biblical obedience?   Is he a model of biblical preaching?  Bauder concludes by saying that a good reason to allow Sexton on your platform is to encourage him for having his feet pointed in the right direction on KJO.

Let’s think through this in an attempt to be thoughtful.  If someone is bound in horrible, deceiving, gospel undermining error and you think he might be changing, because he’s tweaked one point in one of his doctrinal statements on one of his websites, you would do well to have him preach in a national meeting in order to encourage him to go further with these types of moves.  Go straight to the national meeting with him.  Dangle that carrot to make him move further.  Is this a good motivation for change? Isn’t this just politics?  Isn’t this really just more fundamentalism?

What’s a better argument?  The Bible says the teaching of the Bible is clear, is plain, is understandable.  Or, a lot of people have disagreements about what the Bible means, so it must not be very easy to understand.  The second one has the most traction today.

The doctrine of the clarity of Scripture (often called the perspicuity of Scripture) is a Protestant Christian position teaching that “the infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture, is the Scripture itself; and, therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any scripture (which is not manifold, but one), it may be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly.”  Clarity of scripture is an important doctrinal and Biblical interpretive principle for many evangelical Christians. Perspicuity of scripture does not imply that people will receive it for what it is, as many adherents to the doctrine of perspicuity of scripture accept the Calvinist teaching that man is depraved and needs the illumination of the Holy Spirit in order to see the meaning for what it is. Martin Luther advocated the clearness of scripture in his work On the Bondage of the Will.  Arminius argued for the perspicuity of scripture by name in “The Perspicuity Of The Scriptures.”

Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment. 

Catholic means universal.  The Catholic church came out of an allegorical, neo-platonic interpretation of scripture, convenient to amillennialism.  The Reformers protested a chunk of Catholicism, not all of it.  Among some other doctrines, they kept catholicism itself.  They kept a state church mentality too.