I was in a hotel in southern California last week and the USA Today newspaper showed up in the hallway in front of the door to my room. I paged through it until I got to an article in the opinion section, entitled Fightin’ Words. It was a positive review of Bart Ehrman’s book Jesus, Interrupted. I’m settled that Ehrman is scourge of the earth. What most sealed that for me in this column was this quote:

Ehrman’s central message is that the New Testament is a human book, written by different people in different situations with different audiences and different objectives. Is this a bid to disabuse believers of their Christianity? Absolutely not, Ehrman says.

What a bold-faced lie. He knows exactly what he’s doing. That’s all that he wants to do, that is, pull people away from Christianity, well, besides making money and being the beloved pseudo-scholar of the atheist and Islamic. He more than others, because of his background in evangelicalism, understands that he is trying to get people to forsake Christ. I’m thinking that his chair at UNC motivates him to say he isn’t trying to get people (college kids) to leave Christianity (that would be a separation of church and state issue too, wouldn’t it?).

With all that being said, a recent debate between James White and Bart Ehrman revealed only minutiae of differences between the two in their approach to the preservation of Scripture—they both have about the same view. They differ greatly as to the conclusions to be made, but their differences on preservation itself aren’t much. James White and Daniel Wallace are about the same too and here’s what Daniel Wallace said in an interview about textual criticism:

I have quite a few heroes! Colwell for his method; Metzger for his learning and insights; Fee for his ability to burst bubbles with data; Tischendorf for his dogged determination in search of manuscripts; Kurt Aland for his vision for INTF; Jerome and Origen for their handling of the textual variants in the pursuit of truth; Sturz for his humility. The list is endless, frankly. I could add Michael Holmes, Bart Ehrman, . . . .

Bart Ehrman is a hero to Wallace. He said it. There are some strong similarities between Ehrman and Wallace. Ehrman assumes the Bible must not be true if God promised preservation, because he’s looked at the evidence and that ruins everything about Christianity for him. Wallace has also shaped his view of inerrancy around evidence. Ehrman kept what he thought Scripture said, looked at evidence, and apostatized his beliefs completely. Wallace looked at evidence and then changed what he believed about Scripture. Both have allowed evidence to alter their beliefs. Wallace has said:

Up until the last few years, I would say—and have said—that the practice of textual criticism neither needs nor deserves any theological presuppositions. For example, I am not convinced that the Bible speaks of its own preservation. . . . As for the broader realm of the integration of theology and scholarship, . . . sometimes that pursuit seems to be in conflict with bibliology. My own views on inerrancy and inspiration have changed over the years. I still embrace those doctrines, but I don’t define them the way I used to. The evidence has shaped my viewpoint . . . . What I tell my students every year is that it is imperative that they pursue truth rather than protect their presuppositions. . . . When they place more peripheral doctrines such as inerrancy and verbal inspiration at the core, then when belief in these doctrines start to erode, it creates a domino effect: One falls down, they all fall down. . . . The irony is that those who frontload their critical investigation of the text of the Bible with bibliological presuppositions often speak of a ‘slippery slope’ on which all theological convictions are tied to inerrancy. Their view is that if inerrancy goes, everything else begins to erode. I would say that if inerrancy is elevated to the status of a prime doctrine, that’s when one gets on a slippery slope.

Since Wallace starts with evidence, which is in his case the textual variants and then the theories that he believes in, he submits his view of preservation and inerrancy to evidence to arrive at what he believes about the perfection of Scripture. He suggests that in order not to push the eject button on Christianity like Ehrman, everyone should dumb down their doctrine so as to spare themselves the falling away from the Christian faith, essentially adjusting Christian doctrine to external evidence.

What Wallace has done isn’t anything different than what Benjamin Warfield did to come to his view of an old earth and a day-age creation account. He also revised the meaning of the Westminster Confession because of similar concerns as those communicated above by Wallace. Warfield was also afraid that once men saw variants, they would sort of freak out theologically and not hang on any longer to what they believed. Warfield also had history to deal with, so like is often the case with modern historians, he revised the history of the doctrine of preservation and extrapolated new beliefs for the reformers and the post-reformation divines. We call this revisionist history (sometimes also called politically correct history). Now Warfield’s belief, altered by evidence, also had a “history.” D. G. Hart and John R. Muether write:

For a variety of historical reasons American Presbyterians throughout the nineteenth century were fully committed to the Enlightenment and scientific methods as the surest means for arriving at truth. Though still believing in the authority of Scripture, the best—or at least the most widely accepted—way of demonstrating the truth of the Bible was by appealing to reason and Scripture’s harmony with nature and the self-evident truths of human experience. Even though the Presbyterian theologians who taught at Princeton Seminary, such as Charles Hodge and Benjamin B. Warfield, believed in and defended the sinfulness of man, including human reason, their fundamental acceptance of the Enlightenment also produced apologetics that in many cases deemed the mind to be a reliable and authoritative guide to truth, including the truths of the Bible.

What Presuppositions?

James White in his debate with Ehrman decries Ehrman’s unbelieving presuppositions. The USA Today article makes mention of this:

One of Ehrman’s chief critics is the theologian and author James White, a leading practitioner of apologetics, the branch of theology devoted to defending and proving the orthodox faith. White denounces Ehrman as an apostate guided by deep anti-Christian bias. He charges in one Internet post that Ehrman has “moved far beyond the realm of his narrow expertise in his last three most popular books, all of which are designed to do one thing: destroy Christian faith.”

This was White’s biggest point in the debate. It was really all he had to debate, since they were both in such agreement on textual criticism. The key phrase from White in USA Today is “an apostate guided by deep anti-Christian bias.” He is saying that Ehrman shouldn’t be guided by theological bias in his view of the text. White and Wallace would say that they don’t have a theological bias at all, only Ehrman. I again point you to these words from Daniel Wallace:

Evangelicals tend to allow their doctrinal convictions to guide their research. It is better to not the left hand know what the right hand is doing: methodologically, investigate with as objective a mind as possible, allowing the evidence to lead where it will.

Wallace’s statement agrees with the idea of not having a theological bias in our approach to the text. Of course, this isn’t the historic position, the one recorded in the Westminster Confession and London Baptist Confession, but it is the view of textual critics. The biblical and historic Christian approach to the preservation of scripture, and, therefore, the identity of the New Testament text, has been guided by biblical presuppositions, so a presuppositional epistemology.

Bart Ehrman, even by testimony of White and Wallace, is one of the foremost textual critics in the world. Ehrman comes to his conclusions through evidence. Since they themselves do not rely on scriptural presuppositions, White and Wallace must rely on evidence to overturn Ehrman. Credentials are an important factor in modern textual criticism. White and Wallace aren’t as credentialed as Ehrman. That hurts any argument they make in a world that depends on credentials.

White and Wallace live and die by textual criticism, since they both hang on it so absolutely. Textual criticism, as a science, turns and shifts. New discoveries and then conclusions are made. Consensus is reached in the scientific community. We can see a new kind of paradigm being reached in the textual criticism world. The outstanding textual critics seem to be splitting from the evangelicals. It is obvious that something is driving this, and based on what White has plainly said and Wallace has intimated, it is their theological presuppositions that seem to be causing the split.

If one is guided by theological presuppositions, then those must be what we see in scripture. Wallace has done a couple of things to make sure that his textual criticism and his beliefs are compatible. First was this:

I am not convinced that the Bible speaks of its own preservation.

If you have a hard time believing your eyes, then consider what Detroit Baptist Theological professor, William Combs, wrote about Wallace’s position on preservation:

In an article entitled “Inspiration, Preservation, and New Testament Textual Criticism,” by Daniel B. Wallace, we find what is apparently the first definitive, systematic denial of a doctrine of preservation of Scripture.

But what is the epistemology of William Combs? Notice what he wrote as a comment to someone asking him about Matthew 5:18 and his approach to its interpretation:

I think perhaps you are correct–Matt 5:18 probably does deserve more attention than I gave it in the article. . . . As far as it being a hyperbole, I also cited Robert Stein in support, and there may be others, but I can’t remember. But I wonder how it could be anything else but hyperbole? Taken literally, it would seem to demand perfect preservation, which, of course, the evidence flatly refutes.

Even if the Bible does teach perfect preservation (which it does), Combs isn’t going to believe it, because “the evidence flatly refutes” it. Do you see how he is willing to make his interpretation of Scripture depend on external evidence? This is not presuppositionalism. It is the equivalent of Thomas not believing in the bodily resurrection until he could physically touch Jesus. Whatsoever is not of faith is sin (Romans 14:23).

We see Wallace go to a brand new “Christological-incarnational based” approach to the text, which is very difficult to understand and is a brand new doctrine. Wallace has said:

As for the broader realm of the integration of theology and scholarship, I would fundamentally disagree with Michael Fox’s definition of faith as having nothing to do with evidence. Genuine Christian faith is a step, not a leap. The driving force in my pursuit of truth is the Incarnation. Unfortunately, too many evangelicals make Christology the handmaiden of bibliology, rather than the other way around. But the Incarnation requests us and even requires us to investigate the data. And sometimes that pursuit seems to be in conflict with bibliology. My own views on inerrancy and inspiration have changed over the years. I still embrace those doctrines, but I don’t define them the way I used to. The evidence has shaped my viewpoint; and I must listen to the evidence because of the Incarnation.

Maybe you have a hard time wrapping your brain around that too. Shouldn’t evangelicalism be questioning this new position? I wonder why we don’t see other evangelicals criticizing something that has no historic basis, and I speculate it is the evangelical credentials of Wallace that are the reason.

On the other hand, White just attacks Ehrman’s anti-theological bias without mentioning that he himself has his own bias. Why? Textual critics aren’t supposed to have theological bias. It’s a science. You can see the problem. Do we have theological presuppositions or do we not? Of course we are supposed to and they are the basis for what we believe about preservation of the Bible and, therefore, the text.

Integrationism

One word that stuck out to me in Wallace’s quote was the word “integration.” It is quite fitting for him, “the integration of theology and scholarship.” Integrationism is a big problem in evangelicalism. Normally when we think of integrationism, we think of the integration of the “science” of psychology with biblical counseling. This is the new Christian psychology. The critique of this would be the same as for Wallace’s integrationism. He mixes his science of textual criticism with biblical doctrine. We will corrupt the Bible, in this case the teaching of God’s Word and its text, when we practice this integration. And this all relates to epistemology. Can we trust man’s observations in either of these fields? The consequence as related to the text of Scripture is a lack of certainty in the text of God’s Word.

In integrationism, there is an attempt to find truth in two places: in God’s revelation and in human observations. Often this act is justified by a misused mantra from history: “All truth is God’s truth.” This raises the level of man’s observations to “truth,” the same authority as scripture. Nowhere in the Bible do we see science to have a role in enhancing what God has said. We have no scriptural model for submitting the truth of Scripture to man’s findings or discoveries. Man’s discoveries do not even rise to the level of general revelation, let alone the truth of Scripture. By nature man doesn’t discover something that is authoritative.

Examining the Explanations

Examination of the explanations of Ehrman and White (Wallace would be like White) indicate the failure of being able to make a significant point of certainty about the text of scripture by means of evidence. I’ve been watching this closely and let me tell you what’s happening. To start, everyone knows that we have no original mansuscripts, so we’re all depending on copies for the preservation of God’s Words.

Both sides, White and Ehrman agree that the earliest even fragment of a hand-written copy of Mark dates to around AD 220, called P45, only eight chapters of the gospel of Mark. If Mark was completed as late as AD 70, P45 is 150 years after its original writing. P45 might be six generations of manuscripts after the original.

Both also believe that the worst copying and the greatest errors came into the earliest manuscripts. The explanation is that the copyists were not trained as scribes and neither did they have the right conditions for copying like men did three hundred years later, when scriptoriums were built. Therefore, the most errors came into copies in those early years. This theory is backed up by a comparison of the two oldest manuscripts of the New Testament, Vaticanus (AD 300) and Sinaiticus (AD 350). Those two manuscripts differ in thousands of places and yet they provide the primary basis for almost all of the modern versions of scripture. There are as many differences between them as there are verses in the New Testament. Despite the fact that most of the mistakes were made early on, according to their theories, they say that still means that the oldest manuscripts are the best, because more years equals more errors. Period. They speculate that the Byzantine manuscripts, those that are the basis for the textus receptus, come from one copy that dates around the same time as Vaticanus and Sinaiticus in a different family or line of manuscripts.

Since we don’t have the original manuscripts, we don’t know how much different the copies are from the originals. Hypothetically, they could be vastly different. We don’t have the evidence to make that decision. But we are talking about one bad copy being made from another bad copy, which is made from another bad copy, and so on. Even by the time they were trained in copying and had good resources to accomplish the task well, they were starting from poor copies with unknown numbers of errors because a lot of bad stuff happening before anyone knew what he was doing.

All the textual critics believe in everything I’ve written so far. White’s theory for what happened next is that by looking at vast numbers of copies with similarities and at translations that match up with those manuscripts, we can extrapolate what the original text was enough to give us assurance that none of the doctrines of scripture are lost. So we look at copies that look similar, have most of the same words, and we get attestation from that of what the original words likely were.

Ehrman says “no.” He says that we can’t come to that conclusion. He contradicts that with a few points. He says that the similarities between copies just mean that they were made from the same manuscript and probably the same very corrupt manuscript. He also says that we’re talking about books that were copied based on a bias of those copying. They had a particular view of Jesus that they wanted to support with the words that they wrote down. Their understanding of Jesus may be different than what we might read in the originals if we had them. Therefore, we can’t be absolutely sure what was even the content in the original copies, let alone the words. On top of that, Ehrman would say that other books written at that time and refused by the churches will give a fuller texture and description of the people and times than what we see in only the apocryphal books.

White says that Ehrman gets his position based on his own “anti-Christian bias.” Ehrman says again, “No, I got it from looking at the evidence, allowing the evidence to lead me, like the evidence leads all major textual critics. And who are you to criticize me? What have you done and who do you know?” Ehrman says that the bulk of the experts agree with him, their all reaching the same conclusions the same way that he did. And, therefore, Ehrman means that White’s position is based upon White’s own bias to give more accreditation to the Bible, because he needs what the Bible says in order to support his faith.

When White says that Ehrman is wrong, he says that Ehrman is holding the Bible to a higher standard of preservation than he does other secular writings. He says that the Bible has more textual attestation than Tacitus for instance. Ehrman retorts that all textual critics hold their particular texts, whether secular or scriptural, in a great deal of doubt, so they shouldn’t handle the books of the New Testament any differently. Ehrman goes further in his writings by saying that we’re not even sure that the gospels themselves are the true version of Christ’s life, but just the ones that made it through the scrutiny of some very biased followers who wanted to keep His story alive to give them hope.

So between White and Ehrman you get two interpretations of the evidence. Ehrman says we really don’t know what exactly Jesus said because there are so many variations. Based on this, he gets the title of his book, Misquoting Jesus. White counters by saying that, based on earlier textual critics, who came to different conclusions than Ehrman, we should think that there is great textual attestation for the Bible, enough to say that at the bare minimum all the teachings are intact. Both of the views depend on the interpretation of the evidence by men, irregardless of doctrine or the Holy Spirit.

No matter which side you believe in the battle of the textual critics, you get a 150 year period that we have no evidence whatsoever, a time from the originals to the first fragment. Both sides say that we should assume lots of corruption. One side says that it could be amazing amounts of alteration. The other says that we should conclude that it is very little change in content. Both are relying on naturalistic, humanly-derived process and analysis, probably coming at it from a certain bias, but both not admitting that they do so.

How Certain Are They in Their Science?

I’m going to use Ehrman for this, because he would be the one between White and him, who would be the most sure about his methodology. He’s the expert. He’s the one who other experts have on speed dial. Consider these lines from Ehrman in Misquoting Jesus:

It appears (emphasis mine) that Erasmus relied heaviy on just one twelfth-century manuscript for the Gospels and another, also of the twelfth century, for the book of Acts and the Epistle—although he was able to consult several other manuscripts and make corrections based on their readings” (p. 78, this last part, saying that he consulted other manuscripts, is often left out).

All of these texts, however, relied more or less (emphasis mine) on the texts of their predecessors” (p. 79).

Erasmus’s edition princeps, which was based on some rather late, and not necessarily (emphasis mine) reliable, Greek manuscripts (p. 80).

It appears that someone copied out of the Greek text of the Epistles, and when he came to the passage in question, he translated the Latin text into the Greek (p. 82).

One of the reasons that someone must say “appears” and “necessarily” and “more or less,” as well as other qualifiers, is because he isn’t completely sure. First, we don’t have the originals, so based upon evidence, we can’t say that a certain wording isn’t in there. If we aren’t sure about a text that has thousands of copies, then how can we be sure about a history that has far less validation? As a basis for textual criticism, the textual critic must perform the function of erasing what was the text received by the churches in order to create the new text received by the scientists, based upon their theories. They do this by attempting to break down what Erasmus, Bezae, and Stephanus did in the sixteenth century.

Normally in a dialogue between textus receptus believers and critical text supporters, we get a pushing match over Erasmus versus Westcott and Hort. I think this happens mainly because of the critical text side. Why? The method used by men is what they depend upon to come to their conclusions. To establish how good their work is, they start by bashing Erasmus. In response to that, the textus receptus side often smacks around Westcott and Hort. Then you get a tit-for-tat walloping of both sides. In the end, Erasmus played with silly string and Westcott and Hort were demon worshipers. This is the textus receptus side arguing on the same terms as the critical text side. It’s not good.

I don’t think I’ve ever written in all of my work one critical word about Westcott and Hort. I don’t reject the critical text because of who Westcott and Hort were. I reject it because it doesn’t fit the presuppositions that we read in scripture. I believe God would do what He said He would do.

The bigger problems should be that the position of the textual critics doesn’t fit what God said about the preservation of His Word. Instead, we should believe what God said He would do, not what men speculate had happened. Faith is what pleases God. Since everyone is in different degrees of doubt based on evidence and since no one can prove what happened between AD 70 and 220 anyway, we trust in the Lord as our evidence. This includes the intangible witness of the Holy Spirit. His truth is good enough.

The Great Awakening was perhaps the second most important era in American history after the founding of the Jamestown colony in 1607. The Great Awakening describes a period in the mid 1730s to early 1740s in England and its colonies that resulted in a massive number of conversions and increased devotion to God’s Word. In America much of it centered on the open air preaching of George Whitefield. Whitefield preached to very large crowds with many turning from sin to Christ. Many of the new believers found they must leave their dead churches to submit to scriptural baptism into the multiplying number of independent Baptist ones.

Jonathan Edwards, a Christian, graduated first in his class at Yale in 1720. He continued studies in theology and became full-time pastor in Northampton, CT in 1729. The Great Awakening began at Edwards’ church in 1733, including his famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. This revival subsided and then surged again with the arrival of Whitefield a few years later.

Toward the end of the Great Awakening, Edwards became concerned about the genuineness of the conversions in this revival. He wrote various books to point out the problems and potential ones that he witnessed. His concern solidified into a series of sermons he preached in 1742-43 at his church from which came a book he authored in 1746 entitled, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. In it he provided a means by which the validity of conversions could be tested. Edwards thought that much of the Great Awakening was real, but some was not, as seen in its lack of certain distinguishing marks.

In his treatise, Edwards centered the problem of false conversions on the means by which men responded to the preaching of the gospel. To explain, he wrote of the difference between responses that were either too intellectual or too emotional. He showed how that genuine salvation was centered in man’s affections. Edwards in essence used the term “affections” to describe scriptural love, distinguishing it from something oriented to man’s feelings or passions. These affections were part of the inward working of man’s soul in contrast to the functions of his body. Jonathan Edwards presented a pre-enlightenment understanding of love, unspoiled by rationalism or romanticism and even worse perversions in contemporary culture.

Edwards portrayed the soul as understanding and deciding. Man knows and then chooses based on that knowledge. However, underlying the mind and the will of a man is his affections. His affections are his inner yearnings that are informed by his understanding. Edwards taught an internal anthropological order fleshed-out from scripture. Man receives revelation in his intellect, which interacts with his affections. Nature reveals a good, loving God and man is either grateful or unthankful. The proper response of the affections to the right understanding of God is faith. Belief is a choice (volitional) informed by knowledge (intellectual) and affection. Man will not choose God without affection for Him. The right knowledge and the right affection and the right choice results in a genuine conversion.

We can see Edwards’ teaching in Scripture. Knowledge without love is not a true salvation (1 Corinthians 16:22; John 14:15-23; Romans 8:28; all of 1 John but especially chapters 3 and 4; 1 Corinthians 13:1-3; etc.). The greatest commandment is to love the Lord. The true believer loves the Lord. The truth of salvation impacts a man’s affections resulting in a life-changing choice, beginning a life of love for God.

The rest of Edwards’ treatise provides indications as to whether this is genuine in an individual. There are certain signs that are not trustworthy as a basis of knowing this. They may indicate someone is saved, but not necessarily. Edwards gives twelve of these. He follows these signs with twelve manifestations of real salvation in a person. These twelve show genuine conversion that center on the affections of a man. On every point, Edwards comes from the Bible as his authority.

We can learn much from Edwards’ teaching. He provides an accurate basis for a proper analysis of someone’s salvation. He reminds us of the importance of preserving the right view of love. We see the priority of protecting a proper function of our affections. In so many cases today, we have replaced affections with passion, emotions, or lust. We are fooled into thinking that feeling produced by external, bodily means is affection, when it is in fact just the opposite. It has been choreographed by man. Men, even professing Christians, mistake love for a cheap, worldly imitation. Churches and other religious groups all over participate in the process in their contemporary music and marketing techniques. We find from Edwards’ exegesis that the affections are closely related to the mind and the will. We do great damage in whatever manner we use to separate love from intellect and volition. We must nurture our affections by what what we see and hear—our literature, art, and music especially.

Edwards’ expositions relate to the nature of our gospel presentation. We must properly inform the minds of men toward a love for God, so that they do choose the Lord from their affections. Salvation isn’t just intellectual. It isn’t merely volitional. A proper view of God is vital. Men are greatly affected in their view of God by how we worship Him. The worship must match up with His nature. If we love Him, it will. We will choose the manner of worship out of scriptural understanding. Our affections for Him will demand it. Faith in Christ is man’s first act of worship, presenting our soul to God as a sacrifice, our mind, affections, and will. God’s saving grace will enable believers to persevere in the faith in a life pleasing to God until the day they see Him.

I will be continuing my epistemology series soon. However, this does much relate to epistemology.

I do not believe that evangelicals especially, conservative or otherwise, obey biblical commands of separation. The mighty problems in evangelicalism and even fundamentalism come in a major way because they do not separate as Scripture teaches, either ecclesiastically or personally. They fellowship with unscriptural doctrine and practice. The descending slide in this country has been helped along by lack of the practice of separation. Evangelicals and fundamentalists both explain away ecclesiastical separation with their primary-tertiary doctrine teaching. They say that we come together based on the essentials and that we don’t separate over non-essentials. When it comes to personal separation, evangelicals categorize many matters into non-scriptural issues by means of a kind of hermeneutic. They relegate what were once worldly and sinful practices into now unclear applications that we can no longer judge, so that we must tolerate those practices. The intolerant are often referred to as legalists. Recently some of the conservative evangelicals seem to be changing their tune.

First I would like to refer to the sermon preached (or as evangelicals like to say, “talk given”) by Phil Johnson, member of MacArthur’s Grace Community Church and executive director of Grace To You, on March 6 this year (2009) at the Shepherd’s Conference. Johnson and MacArthur have both been major contributors to the essential/non-essential teaching and to the tolerance of worldly practices. I have been mocked and ridiculed by Johnson and those on his team blog, Pyromaniacs, for pointing out issues of conduct in violation of scriptural teaching. They are not only unresponsive in these areas, but they ridicule those who choose to communicate violations of biblical holiness. Then they resort to their standard arguments, that these issues of conduct are matters of Christian liberty.

I believe that conservative evangelicals have reached their size and popularity because of their tolerance in matters of personal separation. They have not stood against worldliness in cultural issues. They relegate them to secondary matters or Christian liberty. MacArthur is one that has practiced this way. He has not stood against worldly and fleshly music and dress. He does not make those types of applications of Scripture, or at least in the past. That has helped him to get where he is, because people who join him or affiliate with him can still fit in with the world in these ways. It is not just the issue of music, but that of worship. But that is what brings me to my point.

Iain Murray in his recent biographical sketch (2009) within the volume commemorating MacArthur’s fortieth anniversary, Truth Endures, (on pp. 7-69) makes a major point of MacArthur “widening his base.” In this section, covering twelve pages (pp. 36-48) Murray commends MacArthur for spurning fundamentalism and their kind of separatism over these types of secondary, cultural issues. Murray (on p. 37) quotes MacArthur from his book, Reckless Faith:

Another wing of fundamentlism moved in the opposite direction. . . . This right wing of the fundamentalist movement was relentlessly fragmented by militant separation . . . . Petty concerns often replaced serious doctrine as the matter for discussion and debate.

It is true that men can go too far with an emphasis on cultural and practical issues when they unnecessarily exclude doctrinal ones, but a balance is easily maintained with expositional preaching through books. However, that should not preclude these important concerns of personal separation. Those issues do directly relate to doctrine, a point that Johnson makes plainly in the before-mentioned Shepherd’s Conference sermon (that I will talk more about later).

Murray in the same biographical sketch commends MacArthur, as a part of this swing away from separatism, to reconnect to an “older Christianity of the Reformed tradition” (p. 37). He quotes MacArthur again from his book, The Master’s Plan:

There was a day in the history of the church when the great students of Scripture and theology were pastors. Puritan ministers, rather than being just good communicators, were first and foremost students of God’s Word. They worked at understanding, interpreting, and applying the Word of God with precision and wisdom.

My observation is that MacArthur has reconnected with the Puritans on many doctrines, but he has ignored what they say about worldliness and cultural issues. They had plenty to say about that too, but he has not been one to share their “precision and wisdom” from the Word of God on those subjects. Just because some fundamentalists parked on topical preaching and pet issues doesn’t mean that MacArthur should have forsaken the cultural ones to which he now seems to be returning.

MacArthur has in the last few years been making scriptural applications that I have never heard him make before. I believe that he is reacting to a worldliness that goes beyond that with which he is comfortable. And now Phil Johnson is doing the same. Much of this is in response to what is going on in churches in the name of church growth and marketing and of contextualization. They now are preaching messages that true separatists have been preaching for decades against some of the same problems they are dealing with. And now suddenly, these cultural topics, issues of conduct, are seemingly no longer so secondary and neither are they Christian liberties.

I agree with MacArthur and Johnson, but they are truly Johnny (and Phil) come lately. It also rings of hypocrisy to me. It seems that since the emergent (or emerging) movement and the Purpose-Driven phenomena (among other church growth schemes) have gone beyond even Johnson and MacArthur’s tolerance for worldliness, that now the Bible suddenly says something on these matters. We’ve gotten where we are because these well-known and popular evangelicals have been silent already. Many recent articles and publications from MacArthur are dealing with these topics. And yet MacArthur had already clearly pushed himself away from those of us who have long been preaching against the same problems. Not only that, but Johnson and MacArthur still do the same kind of things and worse as the men that they are pointing out. I’ll plainly illustrate this later.

Phil Johnson preached an expositional message from Titus for the purpose of dealing with something that is occuring in evangelicalism, that is, pastors and preachers using foul and risque language in the pulpit. Johnson gave several examples of what he was talking about, saying that this kind of practice has become widespread. His poster boy for the message is Mark Driscoll, a maverick Reformed pastor in the Seattle area, who has become known as the “cussing preacher,” because of the off-colored humor and corrupt speech that he uses in his sermons. The primary defense of men like Driscoll is that this is a kind of biblically espoused contextualization. It is missional, attempting to connect with and relate to a kind of mainstream sinner to whom he is preaching.

Johnson uses an expositional sermon from Titus to deal with this practice. He mainly parks on Titus 2:1-6. I listened to the message twice and I’m going to use the quotes as they directly came out of Johnson’s mouth, rather than the ones that are up as a part of the transcript on the Shepherd’s website. I believe we get what Phil is thinking in the exact quotes.

To start, the sermon was very good. He communicated the essence of what Titus 1 and 2 were about as well as I have ever heard it. Phil was right on with almost everything he said. It is true, as Johnson contended, that Titus 2 repudiates the practice of contextualization. The opposite of contextualization may be the very point that Paul is making in those two chapters to Titus. The churches on Crete were not to have leaders that behaved like Cretans. They were to provide a different kind of example, a contrast, to those people that lived on the island. An emphasis is placed upon behavior that was dignified and reverent, not that which would attempt to fit into the world. I wouldn’t use the text behind the ESV like Phil did, but I will not be judging based on that criteria for this post. Even if he preached from the textus receptus, the message is the same, the emphasis is identical. I applaud Phil for it.

Phil was tough in the message. I heard excited men, shouting “amen” in the background. On the audio that I had, at 34:15, Phil made this important statement:

Sanctified behavior is the essential companion to authentically sound doctrine. It’s essential. It’s one thing to acknowledge that the gospel is essential; we need to acknowledge that to a certain degree some of the aspects of sanctification are absolutely essential. To a very large degree, I would say. And Paul’s point here is that you may verbally affirm the finest confession of faith ever written, but if your words and your deeds deny it, Paul wouldn’t have affirmed you as an authentic Christian at all, much less would he have laid hands on you for ministry.

That, by the way, is not how it reads over at the transcript at Shepherd’s, but it is the quote word for word without a few verbalized pauses and stumbles.

Essentials?

Phil is making what he is preaching to be one of the “essentials.” If it wasn’t before, well, it is now an essential. This is what makes this very different. First, notice how that statement fits in with something that Phil said previously in the message. I take this quote straight from his transcript:

Doctrine is vital, yes. Some doctrines are essential, right? That’s the premise of “Together for the Gospel,” The Gospel Coalition, the Shepherds’ Fellowship, and other similarly-minded groups. We may not agree on everything down to the smallest minutia, and we won’t let insignificant disagreements rupture our fellowship. But we must agree on the gospel. That’s the only basis for authentic Christian fellowship.

Then Phil says, very similarly:

Doctrine per se is not extraneous or superfluous, despite what our postmodern friends try to tell us. Some truths are vital—especially the rich tapestry of truth at the heart of the gospel. Some truths are so vital that if you deny or try to alter them in any way, you’re anathema—accursed.

We even get italics for emphasis. Phil brings in his essential and non-essential teaching here. This isn’t a thing that is in the Bible, that is, “we won’t let insignificant disagreements rupture our fellowship.” We don’t see that teaching at all in Scripture. It is made up out of thin air. And what are insignificant disagreements? I’m sure that Mark Driscoll right now, and maybe John Piper, would say that what Phil is preaching is an insignificant disagreement and Phil knows it. He is moving it into the realm of significant, even though it isn’t the gospel.

In this sermon, Phil Johnson makes bad speech a test of fellowship and that after he already says, “But we must agree on the gospel. That’s the only basis for authentic Christian fellowship.” Later he explains his point. He says that bad speech is the gospel. That’s right, he does. Suddenly cultural issues and certain conduct or behavior are woven into the gospel by Phil Johnson. Later Phil says these statements:

But get this: there are likewise certain principles of sanctification and personal conduct that are so vital we’re required to break fellowship with those who ignore them. . . . Paul’s point is that sanctified behavior is the essential companion to authentically sound doctrine. You may verbally affirm the finest confession of faith ever written, but if your words and deeds deny it, Paul would not have affirmed you as an authentic Christian at all. Much less would he lay hands on you for ministry. . . . Notice that Paul encourages Titus to cultivate sound behavior, sound doctrine, and sound words—and to be a model in all those ways (not just the doctrine). Your life, your doctrine, and your speech are all crucial aspects of your pastoral duty. In fact, Paul words these instructions so that those categories are interwoven. Each one is essential to the others. They aren’t three totally separate things, but three aspects of the same duty.

In these words, Phil Johnson weaves the speech and conduct into the gospel. Because the gospel is essential and they are woven into the gospel, then they’re essential too. That’s fine, but where does it say what is essential and not essential? Notice how many times that Phil uses the word essential in the quote that he is making good speech to be an essential. Three. And he says that it is the means by which someone can tell that you are an authentic Christian. Phil has chosen this particular violation as one at the level of the gospel. As a result, this is a separation issue.

Speech toward People

Let’s consider what it is that Phil is criticizing. This is speech that is directed toward people. He says that our bad speech toward people will misrepresent the gospel to the degree that it is a perversion of the gospel. Therefore, it is an essential, so it is something that is worth separating over. Isn’t all sinful behavior not adorning the gospel to the degree that it can affect people’s understanding of the gospel? We can’t just pick and choose what our separating issues are going to be. This has crossed the line for Johnson and MacArthur. They don’t want gutter pulpit speech and so it is elevated in its seriousness to an essential issue, despite the fact that the gospel is the issue of Christian fellowship, at least that’s what Phil said before.

If you listen to the audio, you can hear that Phil becomes a little unsure of himself at that juncture, when he is raising the speech issue to the level of an essential. He says, “We need to acknowledge that to a certain degree some of the aspects of sanctification are absolutely essential. To a very large degree, I would say.” By the way, not all those words are in the transcript. They took them out. He says “to a certain degree” and “to a very large degree.” Well, how can something be “absolutely essential” “to a certain degree” and “to a very large degree,” and then he adds, “I would say.” You would say? I thought we were depending on Scripture. Phil becomes very unauthoritative at that point. He knows that this contradicts the things he has been saying about essentials. We have been together for the gospel, but now we’re also together for holy pulpit speech, well, I would say, um, to a certain degree or a large degree.

Then Phil has to do something that is real important in the making of this point. Phil must define what filthy speech is. He must tell us something that isn’t in the Bible. This has been a major sticking point for the evangelicals against separatists—those militants that MacArthur pulled away from because they majored on the minors too much. Titus 2 assumes that we will know what sound speech is and what filthy speech is. I agree with Phil that we can know, but how can we make that determination for others when it is something that is not stated in Scripture. Over at Pulpit Magazine, the MacArthur/Johnson people tell us:

[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).

When we determine what the filthy words are, words that are not said to be filthy in Scripture, are we elevating man-made tradition to the level of God’s Word? Not only does Phil tell us that we’re wrong if we say these words not found in the Bible, but we’re violating an essential and that is worthy of separation.

Definitions

Phil goes about defining what cuss words are at the end of his sermon. In essence, he says that these words are so obvious that anyone would know what they were. We are expected to know what foul language is. And saying these words is worth separating over, even according to Phil Johnson. It is speech made to men. Phil says that it is blasphemous when that kind of language is mixed into the preaching of God’s holy Word. I don’t disagree with him. I just wonder about the inconsistency in the matter of profanity.

What then is speech that has been profaned by worldly, undignified, irreverent music? In other words, what about worship? For Phil and even John MacArthur, whatever kind of music we send to God, whatever the taste we prefer, that’s fine. It hasn’t always been that way. At one time, it was wrong to use a certain type of music with godly words. But now that’s not blasphemous. Is it possible that the same thing has happened to certain words, that we can’t consider them to be foul anymore? Phil says that speech made to men, that is blasphemous. This is where they choose their essential behavior based on their own preference, even though it is not specifically mentioned in God’s Word.

I agree with Phil Johnson and John MacArthur. I believe that this speech is intolerable. It is worth separating over. The men that use it should step down from the ministry. But what about the worship that has been mixed in with the rock and jazz music that is fleshly, sensual, worldly, and perverse? The same exact argument should be used about not using profane music in worship. Earlier in his sermon, Phil says:

There’s nothing whatsoever here about adopting the badges of the youth culture in Crete. Not a word about the importance of fitting in or adapting your ministry to the lowbrow lifestyle of Crete. Titus was the one who was supposed to set the standard for them, not vice versa. . . . He doesn’t tell Titus to get creative and learn to adapt his strategy to fit Crete’s youth culture. . . Paul clearly recognized Crete’s cultural tendency to favor the things of the flesh, but he was not in favor of making that tendency part of the ambience of the churches he was planting on Crete.

This is exactly what you see in the promotional material for their Master’s College and for their Resolved Conference (you tell me what this does to worship and the name of God). They have the same kind of lighting and ambience at a secular rock concert. They have the trap set, all of the same types of music that we would hear in the world with its worldly, godless philosophy. You will find the same style of music used at the Shepherd’s Conference, only a bigger production of it. Somehow this profanity misses MacArthur and Johnson, and yet this is speech that is sent toward God. They assume that God will enjoy this lack of dignity and reverence. What does that do to the adorning of the gospel? Why not make an application there? On this point, since they do these things, they would selectively say that this is legalism. The truth is that their worldly music that they call worship is exactly what has led to the further profanity that we see from Driscoll and others. Do you see this inconsistency?

I have more questions about evangelicals and not contextualizing. Phil said the word “cool” a couple of times in the presentation, speaking of what to try not to be.

And too many pastors are enthralled with the idea of being cool in the eyes of the world.

Paul wasn’t the least bit concerned about adjusting the gospel message to eliminate the offence of the gospel; or adjusting the message to suit the tastes of some subculture; or making himself seem cool and stylish.

One might desire an interesting writing style, but if you read Pyromaniacs, Phil’s blog, how many times do these forty-plus old men use the word “dude?” “Dude” may be the most-used word at Pyromaniacs. Should the term “dude” be used so many times if one is attempting to be dignified, a requirement from Titus that Phil emphasized? And why this picture that Phil chooses to represent himself? I understand the picture now and then, but to have this be the one that you want to be you. Is someone trying to be cool?

I’ve got more to say about MacArthur and Murray in part two.

Culture transmits its values from one generation to the next with symbols laden with meaning. Lesslie Newbigin explains:

[O]ne must include in culture, and as fundamental to any culture, a set of beliefs, experiences, and practices that seek to grasp and express the ultimate nature of things, that which give shape and meaning to life, that which claims final loyalty.

A culture, especially formed from the absolute truth of God in Scripture, knows the necessity of preserving itself for posterity. The nature of God revealed through His creation and Words do not change in meaning. In the sights and sounds and sentences, we apprehend the message God expects men to inculcate into their lives and their descendants. This culture has used biblical criteria to shape its convictions and their communication. It has restrained its symbols to those manifested by God’s revelation and reflective of the transcendent character of God.

Not any symbol or meaning or value will satisfy a culture regulated by a Divine standard. The Apostle Paul wrote under inspiration in Philippians 4:8:

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.

A culture which responds to the purposes of God must respect and obey the imperatives that God gives. If God commands men to think on certain things, then those things can be comprehended. Therefore, men can and should know what is true, honest, just, pure, lovely, and of good report. If God is expecting men to think on what is lovely, then men can know what lovely is. In other words, loveliness is not subjective, but objective.

Once those symbols and values have been discerned, they shouldn’t be changed. At best and at worst, they should be honed to demonstrate even more the resplendent nature of God. A God-honoring people will be careful and circumspect to protect what is right and best. They will do this by rejecting other cultures with a set of different symbols that communicate different values. By the character of God, this culture is superior to others and should be judged as such. As the greater it should reject the lesser.

God gave a culture to Old Testament Israel that He expected her to preserve for proceeding generations. He gave her a means by which to convey and protect it. As a nation, Israel was to contrast with those around her. She was their example. Her way was right, because it was God’s way. The differences between Israel’s culture and the others were found all the way down to the clothes that she wore, keeping the distinctions between her and them. God expects the same distinctiveness from the church and from the nation who would love Him.

Fleshed out in history, we should pay close attention to the culture in history at the juncture of its subservience to the Bible. This points to the reformation in Germany and England and their music, art, and literature. The Spirit of God wasn’t silent in these periods. He was working through men with spiritual capacity to discern what is true and good and beautiful. Even cultural neutralists use these periods as a standard to judge excellence in music, art, and literature. With further analysis, we see the poetry of this culture to mirror in style and often substance that of David in his psalms.

The culture transformed by biblical thinking was changed through subtle steps of cultural syncretism reminiscent of Israel’s compromise with the Canaanites. The Philistines and others came with their own symbols deep in meaning. Association with and then acceptance of a different culture formed a new one without the distinctions God required. As we trace the histories of Germany, England, and the United States we witness the same trends in acceptance of new cultures.

A new way of life was not immediately accepted. The old culture eroded. New cultures with different values than the old synthesized with the old to form a new. The process started over. With toleration as the chief ethic, new cultures were allowed and then welcomed. Judgment was reproved. The cultural diffusion violated the absolute standard of truth and goodness and beauty. God was no longer represented. Ways not reflective of Him were indulged and then propagated.

What has become unacceptable is criticism, except of intolerance. Nobody’s opinion is denied. The river has become polluted from every imaginable source. It will never supply the pure water it once did, unless we are willing to stop throwing everything into it. We must guard the river for the resources it provides. Without it, we are in greater danger than we might think. J. Gresham Machen gave this warning in 1913:

Modern culture is a mighty force. It is either subservient to the gospel or else it is the deadliest enemy of the gospel. For making it subservient, religious emotion is not enough, intellectual labor is also necessary. And that labor is being neglected. The Church has turned to easier tasks. And now she is reaping the fruits of her indolence. Now she must battle for her life.

Machen argued that by not standing up to the change in culture, we were already championing the worst enemy of the gospel. It wasn’t just a matter of taste, but an issue of eternity.

As we have chosen cultural relativism as a societal norm, that is, that any culture goes, but especially the one that will please self, society has dumbed itself down to the lowest common denominator. David Wells (No Place for Truth, p. 148) writes:

Accountability, for example, dies when the self is thought to be accountable only to itself, and in its place there has arisen an ethic that resolves everything into a simple proposition: what’s right is what feels good. This in turn dictates that the pursuit of affluence as a means to self-fulfillment holds the key to life.

Robert Bellah (Habits of the Heart, pp. 77-78) in his study on modern individualism adds to this: “[U]tility replaces duty; self-expression unseats authority. ‘Being good’ becomes ‘feeling good.'”

Loss of Distinct Roles

T. S. Eliot in his Notes on the Definition of Culture wrote:

The primary channel of transmission of culture is the family: no man wholly escapes from the kind, or wholly surpasses the degree of culture which he acquired from his early environment.

Dad and mom inculcate a culture into their children. To change a culture at a root level, you break up the family in its most foundational sense by destroying the roles of the man and the woman. One distinction of a scriptural culture are distinct roles for the man and the woman that complement one another (1 Corinthians 11:3; Ephesians 5:23-32). The diminishing of the distinctions between the roles alters the culture.

We’ve got major problems because of the disappearance of the male role. Rampant divorce. Crime. Boys lethargic in school. Lack of spiritual leadership. Young men don’t know what they’re supposed to do. Marriage itself is on the decrease. Single men wandering the landscape, listlessly not knowing what to do. And homosexuality of many types is on the rise. The fatherless home is statistically the greatest cause of social ills in America.

For the most part, evangelicals don’t like what they see happening, and they’re reacting to it. Mark Driscoll in Seattle thinks it’s ridding the church of “the boy-band ballads crooned to Jesus” (1) and encouraging a tattoo. He’s proud to say at his church, Mar’s Hill, that “their favorite movie isn’t ‘Amazing Grace’ or ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’ — it’s ‘Fight Club.'” Mark Driscoll is one of the most popular evangelicals in America and he believes that, among other strategies just like it, this is the way to deal with the lack of masculinity in today’s churches. Evangelicals, like John Piper, have contributed to a huge volume entitled Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and have begun The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. Many mainstream evangelicals belong to this council—they see an obvious need. Evangelicals strongly oppose multiplying homosexuality across the land, being pushed by the media and even the government.

How has the church helped us get there? I believe that there are many ways that churches have helped hurry along the demise of the roles of men and women in culture—their own day cares for their working women (Titus 2:3-5), the loss of male oversight of single, unmarried women (1 Corinthians 7:36-38), the multiplying number of single men wandering around without commitment to marriage and family among packs of unmarried singles who “hang out” together (Psalm 128; Proverbs 31:10; 1 Timothy 3:4; 5:11, 14), men with long shaggy hair and women with a butch hair-cut (1 Corinthians 11:14-15), music that makes men sing like women and women like men (1 Corinthians 6:9), and women speaking out and doing the business of the church (1 Corinthians 14:29-35).

Scripture highlights the calamity of role reversal or confusion right at the beginning when Eve asserts herself above Adam’s headship. We got the fall out of role reversal. We know for sure that this was not what God intended (1 Timothy 2:12-15; 1 Corinthians 11:3). So we know this is very serious, yet the Bible gives very few explicit texts on this subject. So what it does say we should pay attention to. And what does it say is important regarding role distinctiveness? If we think reversal and confusion should stop, we should look at what Scripture says. Right? God knows more about this than we do. Doesn’t He?

Sexuality is learned behavior. Certainly we were designed female for male, Eve for Adam. We have distinct roles. But even though we have physical and even psychological differences, the way that boys learn to be men and girls learn to be women is by what they see, by watching. God knows that. He made us. Society knew that too. That’s why it exploded over even subtle alterations in female fashion.

Here is what God said in His Word, an explicit statement of His moral law, for the role distinction in dress. It is very clear. Very specific. The plain meaning has also been the historic meaning. It is Deuteronomy 22:5.

The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.

It doesn’t say that the garment is an abomination or that the activity is an abomination. The person is an abomination. This is the only time in Scripture that a person is an abomination unto the LORD for doing something. Why? Because it attacks or rebels against God’s design. At a root level, God is our Creator (Rom 1:25). He wants recognition of that by the acknowledgment of His design. It is also another way that those roles are preserved. Appearance is the primary way that roles are taught. This is why we have a gigantic passage in the New Testament that also deals with this issue (1 Cor 11:3-16).

My experience has been that people don’t care any more what Deuteronomy 22:5 says, when at one time it was the normal practice of not only churches, but society. America practiced Deuteronomy 22:5. Society itself frowned on not practicing this. They knew not doing so was “against nature” (Rom 1:26). As people began disregarding this text, the world reacted. Then the world accepted. Christians reacted too. Even when the world accepted, Christians still reacted. Now Christians accept. Not only do they accept, but now the Christians who still preach Deuteronomy 22:5 are the ones that are not accepted, even by other Christians. They are embarrassing to them. They are marked and treated with inferiority, the offscouring of the earth; well, like Christians. The world still knows what this means, because now we’ve moved one step further toward the male skirt.

Look back up at Deuteronomy 22:5 and let’s see just what it says. It doesn’t say “men should look like men and women should look like women.” It says nothing about transvestism or Canaanite worship, some of the new inventions to avoid practicing the text. It says nothing about women putting on military gear. It doesn’t say, “they both wore robes,” because it isn’t about removing distinctions. What it does say is that a man should not ever have on the woman’s article and that the woman should not wear the male garment. It assumes that there is a male item of clothing designated to differentiate him from the woman, as well as a female item designated to differentiate her from the man.

Today, when I ask what the male article of clothing is, if the person isn’t thinking, he’ll say, “pants.” But then he’s got to stop, because women wear pants too. In other words, our culture has eliminated the male garment. There is none. The woman still has the skirt or the dress. The man has nothing. When the man lost his pants (no pun intended), he lost his role. He lost the male uniform. Everyone wears pants, so no one wears the pants. When the world did away with the male garment, Christians protested. When women started wearing pants, Christians opposed it. When Christian women started wearing pants, it wasn’t because a group of godly women got together and prayed about it and sought God’s will. No. It was a matter of rebellion and then the church went along with the world on this one. It’s been so long since most churches practiced this, that it doesn’t even seem like a biblical teaching any more.

The biggest argument that I hear is: “the Bible doesn’t say anything about pants and skirts.” There. They’re done. That’s the extent of their deep exegesis and application. What we have here is total capitulation by Christians to the world, changing the culture. Now we’re debating whether homosexuals should be able to be married or not. We’ve gotten our comeuppance folks.

(1) Where are the cultural neutralists when you need them—no outcry about Driscoll’s stated observations that music has meaning. Some music, according to him, can be feminine and some can be masculine. He thinks that “Christian” music being feminine is a big problem. How can we get meaning out of music when it is amoral and neutral? Ooops. Where in the Bible do we find that music can communicate something feminine or masculine? Isn’t this taking man’s traditions and making them into the commandments of God? Of course, the reason why Driscoll doesn’t get called on this is because he is suitably worldly and secular enough to get his credentials on music, so forget the inconsistency here. What this example does show, however, is how stupid the concept of music neutrality is. I think everyone knows it’s wrong; they just don’t want to give up their self-gratification, some of which they call “worship.”

After Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden, he cursed the man:

And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

Adam still had all the same responsibilities God intended, but now with much more difficulty as punishment for sin. God still wanted man to obey all those initial commands in Genesis 1:28—He never rescinded them—“be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion.” However, sin and its curse do not lend themselves toward man’s self-denial and subservience. Romans 1:25 describes the direction of man under the curse—he changes “the truth of God into a lie, and worship[s] and serve[s] the creature more than the Creator.” He puts his own interests above God.

I write in my book Sound Music or Sounding Brass (p. 37):

In the evil pre-flood society after Cain (Genesis 4-6), Lamech lead the Cainites into open rebellion against God. God told them to replenish the earth, and yet they built a city. They had as a goal to live comfortably and conveniently in sin under the curse. God gave the standard of “one man, one wife,” but Lamech took two wives, Adah and Zillah. The sons of Lamech helped in making life easier for wicked living in a cursed society.

Under the curse of sin, instead of repentance and then glory of God, man thinks about the easy life, the one that will be the best for him. He wants to alleviate difficulty and pain. Rather than pleasing God, He thinks of His own pleasure. Rather than mastering what God had said, he becomes his own master. Sin will end man’s life, but instead of thinking of numbering those days and living for eternity, he tries to make something of himself and his life on earth. Rather than taking his punishment, he lives to avoid it, attempting to build his own garden for his own pleasure.

The Bible becomes a record of two different cultures—one righteous and the other wicked. One about God and the other about man himself and the environment in which he lives. The first is vertical and the other horizontal. Scripture calls for a wide chasm between the two, which is described in many different ways, including light and darkness, truth and error, and righteousness and unrighteousness. God has given us a book, the Bible, and a Person, the Holy Spirit, and a new nature to discern.

Culture Isn’t Neutral

Culture itself isn’t neutral. We can judge it. Raymond Williams in The Society of Culture says that culture is a “signifying system through which . . . . a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced, and explored. . . .” (p. 13, emphasis his). Human action is meaning based. We have a wink and twitch of the eye and we know the difference. Clifford Geertz defines culture as “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life” (The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 89). Leslie Newbigin writes (Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture, p. 3):

Central to culture is language. The language of a people provides the means by which they express their way of perceiving things and of coping with them. Around that center one would have to group their visual and musical arts, their technologies, their law, and their social and political organization.

Since culture transmits meaning, the meaning can and should be judged. Not all meaning pleases God.

We get the superior standard for judgment from the revelation of God in creation, in the Bible, through the Holy Spirit, as manifested in ages of conviction about absolutes, truth, virtue, and beauty. Based on scriptural criteria, we decide that Thomas Jefferson is a more significant thinker than a headhunter from Borneo or than Bruce Springsteen. T. S. Eliot in sorting through these things in 1948 put down this vital thought in his Notes Toward the Definition of Culture:

The important question that we can ask is whether there is any permanent standard, by which we can compare one civilization with another, and by which we can make some guess at the improvement or decline of our own.

We know the nature of God through the Bible, so we know perfection. We see His creation, so we know His standard. Our art, music, and literature should reflect His nature as manifested through His special and general revelation. Without the higher purpose of God, men are Eliot’s Hollow Men wandering the earth aimlessly, ending in a whimper.

The Enablers of the Slide

David Wells writes in God in the Wasteland (p. 35):

It is ironic that there are those in the church who view culture as mostly neutral and mostly harmless, even though they have a compelling Christian reason to think otherwise, while there are those in society who recognize that culture is laden with values, many of which are injurious to human well-being, even though they have no compelling religious or ideological reason to come to this conclusion.

Concerning his own take on culture, he says in No Place for Truth (p. 11):

Yet I would be remiss if I failed to point out that while the angle from which I approach culture may be commonplace among some of its interpreters, it is not common among evangelicals. Evangelicals are antimodern only across a narrow front; I write from a position that is antimodern across the entire front. It is only where assumptions in culture directly and obviously contradict articles of faith that most evangelicals become aroused and rise up to battle “secular humanism”; aside from these specific matters, they tend to view culture as neutral and harmless. More than that, they often view culture as a partner amenable to bein coopted in the cause of celebrating Christian truth. I cannot share that naivete; indeed, I consider it dangerous. Culture is laden with values, many of which work to rearrange the substance of faith, even when they are mediated to us through teh benefits that the modern world also bestows upon us.

Wells, in my opinion, falls short in telling us exactly what he’s talking about. I think he leaves that for us to figure out on our own. From all the rest of his books, I believe it is safe to say that he does refer to music, art, technology, and all the ways meaning is conveyed in a civilization. I’m guessing that he leaves out the details, so he can stay in good favor in evangelical circles. If it really is as serious as he says, he should give specific examples of what he is talking about. Wells is one of the few evangelicals to say anything about these things, but then he does the great disservice of continuing his cozy relationships with major violators.

I’m going to name a few who have aided the slide: Rick Warren, John Piper, Ron Hamilton, Joel Osteen, Chuck Swindoll, John MacArthur, Mark Driscoll, and Jack Schaap, not necessarily in that order, and in no way is that list all-inclusive. Some are far worse than others, but they’re all a part. Evangelicals, including almost all fundamentalists, have caved on the culture. Many of them hate what they see happening, but they are actually enablers of the cultural downfall.

A ravine separates one culture, God’s, from all the others, which really are all one culture, the world’s. Richard Lints writes in The Fabric of Theology: A Prolegomenon to Evangelical Theology (p. 104): “It is easy to think of culture in the abstract, as if it were some entity far removed from the concrete life of ordinary people.” It isn’t. Culture contains the symbols by which we understand meaning. The world had rebelled against God. The church has accepted it, even welcomed it into the church with its self-centered shallowness.

Next time I’m going to talk about this has happened and then continues.

Evangelical leaders know something is terribly wrong today. They know it relates to the culture. You just have to read them to understand. David Wells has become well known for his four book series that exposes the problem (No Place for Truth or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?, God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision, Above All Earthly Pow’rs: Christ in a Postmodern World). Wells manages to take big bites out of the issue without actually sinking his teeth into the culprits of evangelicalism. He describes the damage done in his first book as the disappearance of evangelical theology. The late Francis Schaeffer hit some of the same topics in The Great Evangelical Disaster and D. A. Carson in the more recent The Gagging of God. They all know something’s wrong.

You can see a little panic over some of the comeuppance from other evangelical writers. John MacArthur regularly addresses the fruits of evangelical compromise (The Truth War, Ashamed of the Gospel, Hard to Believe, Reckless Faith, Fools Gold: Discerning Truth in an Age of Error, The Vanishing Conscience). I don’t think his books about this have worked. I have read four of them and liked them, but I found that in the end they rang hollow in light of what scripture says to do. I’ll deal with that later. His counterpart, Phil Johnson, executive director of Grace to You, says something about this almost every week at his blog, Pyromaniacs. MacArthur sees what’s happening all over and sounds the alarm as has Schaeffer, Wells, and Carson. Recently he wrote:

[M]any evangelicals now seem to think unstylishness is just about the worst imaginable threat to the expansion of the gospel and the influence of the church. They don’t really care if they are worldly. They just don’t want to be thought uncool.

That way of thinking has been around at least since modernism began its aggressive assault on biblical Christianity in the Victorian era. For half a century or more, most evangelicals resisted the pragmatic thrust of the modernist argument, believing it was a fundamentally worldly philosophy. They had enough biblical understanding to realize that “friendship with the world is enmity with God. Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God” (James 4:4).

But the mainstream evangelical movement gave up the battle against worldliness half a century ago, and then completely capitulated to pragmatism just a couple of decades ago. After all, most of the best-known megachurches that rose to prominence after 1985 were built on a pragmatic philosophy of giving “unchurched” people whatever it takes to make them feel comfortable. Why would anyone criticize what “works”?”

The evangelicals see the effects of cultural compromise and write about it. Sometimes, although seldom, they’re even specific about what it is. Their timidness about marking the offenders among their own fellowship, however, make them complicit in the comeuppance they’re now witnessing and bemoaning.

The church is most responsible for preserving a culture. If we won’t stand for a Christian culture, even in our own church, how can we expect the world to do that? Each church must build up the walls and keep a culture separate from the world. Sure, we’re in the world, but we’re not of the world. The church is different, separate, yes, holy, like God is holy. Of course, Satan is working against this. He knows that the church’s compromise will make his job easier and more successful.

The church gave up science to a detrimental impact. But men stood up against that compromise—Henry Morris and others. Today creationism abounds in churches because Christians took back scriptural science. The same is needed for cultural issues, to see what they are and respond in a biblical way.

We’ve allowed the decline of meaning through several factors. The recipient of text has become sovereign. Without objective meaning, words lose their authority and impact. Truth is lost. Without truth or authority, people choose what is acceptable behavior and often do what’s convenient. But that’s not all.

The Undoing of Understanding

Many have preceded me in a concern over understanding. When I say “understanding,” I’m talking about something different than meaning. “Meaning” relates to the words. “Understanding” relates to the hearers. We’re in trouble if words can mean anything we want them to mean, but we’re also in trouble if we can’t understand a linear thought. Neil Postman warned about this cultural phenomena in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Wikipedia sums up his book well:

[H]e argues that media of communication inherently influence the conversations carried out over them. Postman posits that television is the primary means of communication for our culture and it has the property of converting a culture’s conversations with itself into entertainment, so much so that public discourse on important issues has disappeared. Since the treatment of serious issues as entertainment inherently prevents them from being treated as serious issues and indeed since serious issues have been treated as entertainment for so many decades now, the public is no longer aware of these issues in their original sense, but only as entertainment.

The Bible is a book. It has words, sentences, and paragraphs. It isn’t a video or a show. When we read a book without pictures, we think linear. If men arrive at a point where they can no longer grasp sentences at the level that God gave them in His Word, they’ll have moved beyond a grasp of salvation. Faith comes from the Word of God, not from a video about the Bible or a comic that communicates pictorially not linearly.

This relates to modernity. The way of modernity has restructured society around man’s comforts and conveniences. It hasn’t taken into consideration what will be necessary to believe in and obey God. In so many ways, modern society and its technological advances frame man’s thinking and not God’s Word. The saturation of television, movies, and other forms of visual media has had an adverse effect on the ability to listen, think, and reason, causing an entire society to suffer from attention deficit disorder.

Jonathan Edwards read his sermons in a monotone because he was afraid that someone might respond to his technique rather than to truth. During the Great Awakening, halfway through his messages, people were crying for mercy from God. They lived in a cognitive age, one in which they responded to thought.

During the Lincoln-Douglas debates, two senatorial contenders stood eye-to-eye for seven hours before a huge crowd and debated politics and socio-economics. Men in their professions didn’t better themselves by reducing their thoughts to thirty-second sound bytes, but by stringing together whole paragraphs of complex sentences, filled with beliefs and applications. With its shriveled attention span, today’s generation couldn’t function in that setting.

God’s Word is powerful, but not like a divining rod or voodoo doll. The Words take on their authority with their proper meaning. People who can’t endure two or three long sentences without losing attention won’t be able to catch on. It is not a book meant to amuse, but to cogitate and meditate. It uses figures of speech that connected require careful judgment to deduce. Everything God said can be understood but a person must desire to know and then strive. If a society or even a church will understand God’s Word in a saving and life-changing way, it must maintain an ability to apprehend the meaning and application of Scripture.

If any people or institution should concern itself with what will lend itself toward God’s will, it is the church. The church shouldn’t start with what men want, feel, or even need, but what God says. Churches, however, have, albeit a slower pace, followed the flow of the culture in the means by which they receive their information. Television centers on entertainment and churches have taken this cue by prioritizing showmanship in the communication of God’s Word.

Instead of going to Scripture to find out what a church should do, churches have conformed the interpretation of Scripture to the kind of church people will like. By doing so, churches can still grow numerically in a media dominated culture. The serious byproduct, however, is that they have dumbed down the message of God’s Word to something less than the meaning that God intended. There is no wonder that when a political candidate wants to sway people, he’ll best get that accomplished with a short television commercial. If churches have followed this movement of the world, then the world itself has little to keep it from sliding further.

How is it that we have reached the state where people in the United States are almost incapable of the cognition sufficient to understand the Word of God? More to point, how have churches contributed to this? First, there is little preaching against television and movies. Churches will not be healthy where the preaching centers on issues. However, people need to know what their means of accessing information will do to them. People oriented toward pictographic access to knowledge will struggle with reading anything not meant to entertain.

The ability to understand plummets from television watching, but that’s not all that happens. Men also lose perspective and the capacity to nuance information. Neal Postman points out that even the news is a performance. The talking hair-dos coolly present brief segments about war, murder, crime, and natural disaster that are punctuated by commercials trivializing the stories and isolating them from any context. Postman recounts a news broadcast in which a Marine Corps general declared that global nuclear war is inevitable immediately followed by a commercial for McDonalds in which an orange-wigged Ronald came hopping across the screen. People are not expected to respond rationally. In Postman’s words:

The viewers will not be caught contaminating their responses with a sense of reality, any more than an audience at a play would go scurrying to call home because a character on stage has said that a murderer is loose in the neighborhood.

Second, the preaching itself has been altered to fit the pictographic mindset. In fitting with the changing culture, many preachers decided to make major accommodations to the appetites of a generation weaned on media and entertainment by leaving biblical preaching behind. Preaching in most conservative evangelical churches has more amusement than teaching. Most churches feature a half-hour sermon with lots of anecdotes and little doctrine. This type of presentation has served to condition the people for even less understanding of God’s Word. Crowds have rewarded the abusive with their attendance.

Third, churches have replaced psalm-type hymn content with short, simple ditties with refrains that have mirrored the popular music style of the day. Hymn writing once reflected the model God gave by inspiration in the book of Psalms. They defined the beauty of God’s attributes, work, and creation with a deliberate, didactic purpose. They proclaimed the truth in a way that enhanced the singer’s comprehension of doctrines about God. After all, almost all of them were written to give praise to God, centering on Him in His majesty and magnificence.

People have been weaned off of songs modeled after scripture. Church leaders are afraid that they’ll lose their crowd out of boredom, knowing people can’t wrap their brains around that depth of truth. This started in the early twentieth century with the gospel song that led to today’s praise choruses, often with identical stanzas of words liberally repeated. Churches have elevated people’s feelings about the music above what God has shown that He wants to hear. A continuation of these worship practices serves further to weaken people’s ability to understand and discern.

Fourth, churches have kowtowed to the youth culture with their types of children and teen programs. Young people now for generations have grown up with the wrong image of church, and by extension a fraudulent view of God. Children are sent off to Sunday Schools and junior churches where the little ones are pampered with a presentation configured for short attention spans, guaranteeing that they’ll continue down that path. They cannot risk boredom by spending too much time teaching. The children are kept occupied with forms of communication to which they have become accustomed at home with their television and videos.

“Teen evangelist” means lots of stories with a popular vocabulary and little to no exegesis. The youth pastor is a master game man with expertise in filling a calendar with activities. By the time they graduate, they’re prepared for a singles group with relevant social events. None of these strategies came about until the world at large grew away from thoughtful contemplation upon spiritual truths or even upon anything. Their further practice has not done anything to break their adherents away from what brings a devastating numbness to their understanding.

Fifth, the churches who do see the debilitating effect caused by the practices that undo understanding and so don’t participate in them, however, continue in fellowship with the churches that either do or don’t see this same effect, but either way, they keep operating in the same fashion. If we don’t separate from those who won’t stop, are we taking seriously the effect of these contributing practices?

People are comfortable making words mean whatever they want them to mean. Even if they were willing to accept their meaning, they can’t understand them because of a loss of comprehension, deadened by a popular medium of communication. Their minds have been conditioned by the means by which they have attained their information. Now they can’t grasp enough spiritual truth to become a Christian. Satan and his world system with a modern church as an accomplice have succeeded at ruining the soil into which God desires the seed of His gospel to take root.