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?

As a pejorative, inventors of a new doctrine of salvation have titled what is the historical and biblical plan of salvation, “Lordship salvation.”  The terminology doesn’t sound bad to me, so I own it.  However, all sorts of garbage have been dumped on it to where it must be defined.  One risk is cherry-picked quotes taken out of context.  Lordship salvation isn’t hard to defend, just avoiding tortured sound bytes.  The pejorative nature of “Lordship salvation” is that “Lordship” is added to salvation.  I still like the label because it distinguishes from a deficient doctrine of salvation most common today in professing evangelicalism and fundamentalism.

Last week a hoax resulted in some believing that the “late” Andy Kaufman was still alive.  Some had already felt he had faked his death in 1984.  I knew little of Kaufman.  I remembered seeing him once on television when I was a teenager — I never saw one episode of Taxi, a show on which he was a regular. Because of the reported hoax, I read a little about him and watched some of his material on youtube to explore the big deal.  It seemed that people found it difficult to understand who Andy Kaufman really was or whether he was really serious about his routines.  His performance was very different.  For that reason, he was difficult to categorize — not a comedian or an actor, so a performance artist, just like what people might name certain kinds of avante garde art.

“You aren’t going to find that kind of music in a reformed church.”  John MacArthur said that about the music of the Charismatic movement in the Strange Fire Conference (HERE is the a semi-transcript—there is stuff missing).  He said it is in fact the music is what drives these events and brings the attraction.  He says, “the attraction is sensual experience that disconnects you from the realities of life.”  He says it would end if you shut down the music and turn on the lights, and they must be “white lights,” he says.  John MacArthur is saying this.  Even more is said.  Todd Friel said that his children listened to “Jesus Culture.”  He asks, “Should I be concerned?”  MacArthur says, Yes, and it is demonic and pagan.

In fact, you do have this in reformed churches all over.  Where is MacArthur coming from?  What about the reformed Charismatics?  What about the sovereign grace churches?  What about C. J. Mahaney?  But that’s not all.  It’s all over the place in reformed churches.  You find worse in John Piper’s reformed church.  It’s just not true!

Pennington said that the music is the avenue to bring them into their teaching.  He said, “Mormons do the same thing.”

At the afternoon q and a, which I’m watching right now, they say that the music is where the problem is.  He says that evangelical churches are using unacceptable to suck people in, as if the music will result in people being saved.  It’s so close, MacArthur says, to what evangelicals use.  It’s hypnotic.  They are pulled in.  The music, the style, is what pulls them in.  They are saying this.

These men act like that this is somewhere else.  This is at MacArthur’s own church.  People who leave Grace Community and Masters bring it with them.  It’s all over.  The staff there, their defenders, are very touchy about that.  They use what they are attacking.  And a reason why people are at Grace is because this is acceptable.  Like Friel said, his own daughters have it on their play list.

Let’s go further with this.  The men they fellowship with, the men they promote, also listen to this kind of, even worse, pagan music.  You see the rock music their people enjoy.  James 3 speaks about this with the tongue.  Out of the same fountain can’t come bitter and sweet water.  If your fountain has this kind of pagan, godless, immoral, sensual music, then how can you say it is wrong or that it can’t be used for worship.  And in fact most of them do use that for worship.

The contradiction should be obvious.  I understand that some will say that it isn’t.  If it is wrong, then it is wrong.  I agree with these men.  A major problem is when the “good guys” sit with the “bad guys,” something Justin Peters said.  MacArthur and Grace and Masters College validates it by either having it or accepting, and it is accepted all over among these men.  They have bridged that gap and will not take a stand against it, so even though they are saying really great things against it, in their practice, they are not taking the stand against it.  They will push Douglas Wilson, who while working on one of his blogposts, wrote this:

While working on this post, to take a snippet of my playlist at random, I have listened to “Feelin’ Alright” by Joe Cocker, “Rivers of Babylon” by the Melodians, “96 Tears” by ? and the Mysterians, “Lonestar” by Norah Jones, “Almost Hear You Sigh” by the Stones, “Watching the River Flow” by Dylan, “Motherless Child” by Clapton, and you get the picture. 

If you play the music for any episode of Mortification of Spin with Carl Trueman, a favorite of these men, ironically a play on John Owen’s Mortification of Sin sermon, you get just the opposite of mortification.  Some would say this doesn’t matter.  It does!  You don’t mortify sin with this kind of music.  You make provision for it.  Owen would turn over in his grave.

These men also allow the eschatology, the dominion theology, by allowing and fellowshiping with postmillennialism and amillennialism.  The postmillennialism is common.  But they continue to fellowship with these men who make this kind of millennialism popular, that turns the goal of the church into a social goal.  And yet they don’t separate from Dever, Sproul, Keller, and Wilson, who push their amillennialism and postmillennialism.  You are going to get more of the same.

They talk about kind of mindless, new age style of music, and rock music.  They use it.  It helps keep them popular.  MacArthur said that the Jesus Movement was a true revival, and that bridged the gap for that music and that worship.  This is what fools people.  MacArthur said and it is written (you can find it):

I can trace certain trends and a visible process over the past twenty-two years. When I first came to this church as pastor, I started to preach this way and people flooded the place. It was an interesting time. It was just after the publication of The Living Bible — for what it is worth — and that certainly gave people a fresh insight into Scripture. Then came the New American Standard Version, the “Jesus Movement,” Calvary Chapel, and the intensive interest in personal Bible study. People came to church carrying Bibles with covers featuring a dove and a cross, and all that. Christian bookstores and publishers began to flourish. Maranatha Music hit — and Christian music exploded.  I really think that one hundred years from now the 1970s and the early 1980s will look like a revival — and that period really was.

For the similarities on the music, you can see it in these pictures from the Resolved Conference, which is put on by MacArthur and Grace.  Look what they do to And Can It Be.  This is exactly what MacArthur himself was speaking against.  Lights off.  Rock music.  it’s blasphemous. But now they are bringing it into the Shepherd’s Conference too (look at between 52 seconds and about 1:10 especially).  Look at Todd Friel himself and his intro (this is typical).  They use the same thing.  I see this as a bigger problem even than a John Piper, who is in the fuzzy middle between the Charismatics and the non-Charismatics, that Phil Johson talked about in his afternoon.  The gap is being bridged with the music.

I hope they will have this in either video or audio or at least in print in their archives afterwards so you can hear this session, the first q and a on Thursday (THEY DO, HERE IT IS—as I went through it, stuff is missing).  Friel says something like this:  The Charismatics will say that there is nothing in the Bible about falling down, shaking, etc. (he says a few more of these things), and so it is permissible, so what do you say about that?  I thought that was a tell-tale moment, because this is typical of these evangelicals.  The Bible doesn’t say it’s wrong!  Phil Johnson himself would say that when we deal with these extra-scriptural issues that we are going beyond what is written (1 Cor 4:6) and he would treat me dismissively and disrespectfully.  MacArthur’s answer to this Charismatic argument, the same as what evangelicals and Phil Johnson himself would use?  That’s such a cheesy argument.  That’s his answer.  He counts it as nothing.  And, of course, it’s true, but it is their argument.  Here’s a statement from their Pulpit Magazine:

[T]he Bible tells us “not to exceed what is written” (1 Corinthians 4:6). We cannot add to the Scripture without subtracting from its effectiveness in our lives. If we elevate personal preference and man-made tradition to the level of God’s Word (Mark 7:6-15), we risk entangling people in the bondage of legalism and diverting them from the true issues of sanctification (Romans 14:17).

Cheesy?  What do you think?  Same argument.

MacArthur went into a long explanation for why it’s OK to use instrumental music with what point?  The only point it could have been was to try to explain the compromise of his own music.  It’s not that they use instruments.  And he extrapolates from that there is nothing wrong with guitars, and then electrical instruments.  Point being?  He’s justifying what they do with their music.  It’s not what instrument — it’s what they do with those instruments.  And if you are going to use electric guitars, what is a sacred or godly use of that instrument invented for rock music, to put on a particular tone that is in fitting with pagan music.  He says they need to turn on white lights.  Why?  Where does scripture say they need white lights?  He’s making applications all over the place.  MacArthur says the music is sensual.  It’s not the words.  The words aren’t very good, but they’re not wrong per se.  That’s a point Friel was driving at, and Friel could not get a solid answer, because he’s dealing with people who are tip toeing all around the edges because of their own compromise.  You listen to it or watch it yourself.

I could write a lot more, and this is not a very formal presentation, more off the cuff, but it is important, I believe, for folks to think about.  If this is going to change, and they want it to change like the Strange Fire Conference is talking about, then these very people need to repent of the past and make a change, to count it as dung, like Paul was willing to do with his past.  They need to stop defending it.  Do I think they will?  I wish it were so, but I don’t think they will.