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My Initial Thoughts on The James White Debate (KJV/TR vs. LSB/NA/UBS)
I am thankful for everyone who prayed for me in the debate with James White over the topic:
“The Legacy Standard Bible, as a representative of modern English translations based upon the UBS/NA text, is superior to the KJV, as a representative of TR-based Bible translations.”
Thank you!
I believe that, for His glory and by His grace, the Lord answered the prayers of His people and the debate went well. God is concerned that His pure Word be in use among His people, and I believe He blessed the debate towards the furtherance of that cause.
Thank you as well to everyone who helped with all kinds of details, small and great, with the debate. Without you it would the case for the truth of the perfect preservation of Scripture would have been much less effectively presented. Thank you very much!
We arrived in Tennessee the day before the debate. Our flights were fine on the way out, and on the way back (although THE PLANE WENT DOWN!!! -but only when it got to the runway at the airport). My wife and I had dinner with James White the night before the debate and had a cordial conversation.
We are thankful for the help of a godly KJVO Baptist in the area who helped us with things from making sure that we would be able to project slides (something was worked out with the pastor at the Reformed Baptist congregation where the debate was being held) to a way to print our notes (the church had no printer available, nor any WiFi there for me to even have my notes on an IPad–that is why it was not livestreamed.) It was recorded by a professional videographer, so it should be high quality once it comes out, Lord willing. Please pray for the production of the video, as there have been some issues there that are quite important and could seriously impact its effectiveness.
The people at Covenant Reformed Baptist Church of Tullahoma, TN were kind to us. The pastor, who makes a living rebinding Bibles, presented us with a beautifully bound KJV Bible (he gave a similarly beautifully bound LSB to James White). So if you need you need a Bible rebound, he may be worth considering for you.
James White was not quite as cordial in the debate as he had been at dinner the night before, in my opinion, but I suppose I will let you decide that when you watch the debate video. I was particularly struck by the fact that, despite pressing him on it, and the obvious fact that Biblical promises of perfect preservation, and the recognition of the canonical words of Scripture by the church were crucial to my case, he still did very little to dispute my case from Scripture, nor to present a Biblical basis for his own position. I am still not sure if he thinks there are any promises from the Bible that indicate that God would preserve every Word He inspired, or if he just thinks that we have them, or almost all of them, somewhere, because of what textual critics like Kurt Aland say, or at least according to him they say, although his view of Kurt Aland may not be Kurt Aland’s view of Kurt Aland.
Overall, I think that the debate went well, and that the case for perfect preservation, and its necessary consequence of the superiority of the TR/KJV to the UBS/LSB, was clear. However, I am also well aware that I am biased in favor of my position, so you will have to watch the debate yourself to see if you agree.
The slides we had prepared–many of which were used in the debate, while others were not–are available at the main debate page here if you want to get a sense of what my argument was or what is going to be on the debate video, Lord willing. I asked Dr. White if he wished to put his slides up there as well so that both of our presentations had an equal representation, but he has not responded to me as of now, whether because he is very busy or for some other reason.
There is much more that can be said about the debate, but that will be enough for now. Thank you again for your prayers, and all the glory to the one God, the Father who gave the canonical words of Scripture to the Son, so that He could give them to the assembly of His saints by His Spirit.
–TDR
Men Seek Signs and Wisdom, But God Saves by the Foolishness of Preaching the Gospel
1 Corinthians 1:18-32: The Foolishness of Preaching
In 1 Corinthians 1, Paul said God uses the foolishness of preaching to save. God saves people through the foolishness of preaching. Paul started out this section in verse 18 by saying that “the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness.”
It’s not that the cross is foolishness or that preaching is foolishness. People think it is foolishness and Paul is saying, “That thing they think is foolishness; that’s what God uses to save.” God uses a means that does not make sense. Because people think the gospel is foolishness, they become offended from it.
Of all the offenses of the gospel, Paul gives at least two. (1) The Cross, and (2) Preaching. The cross is offensive. It is this way also in at least two ways. (1) Someone on a cross needs saving. Saving comes by a powerful means. (2) The cross would be to say that Jesus is the Savior or the Messiah. I’m not going to write about that in this post. Instead, preaching.
Rather Signs or Wisdom
Paul in essence asks, “Why use preaching when Jews seek after signs and Greeks after wisdom?” (1 Cor 1:22) He divides all men into these two different methodological categories. Jews and Greeks need signs and wisdom, not preaching. In my thirty-five plus years of ministry, I agree that every audience of ministry breaks down into those two general categories.
When you think of signs and wisdom, that might seem like two items people should like and want. They are two biblical words. In a very technical sense, a sign is a miracle. Almost exclusively, I think someone should view a miracle as a sign gift. I will get back to that.
Wisdom. Isn’t Proverbs about wisdom? We pray for wisdom. How could wisdom be bad? Proverbs 4:7 says, “Wisdom is the principle thing.”
Signs and Wisdom
Signs
Signs are something evident in a way of supernatural intervention. If there is a God, won’t He do obvious supernatural things? “If He doesn’t do those, why should I believe in Him? I want to see some signs. Wouldn’t He give me those if He really wanted me to believe in Him? That would be easy for Him, if He really did exist. If God did give me signs, I would believe. Since He doesn’t, then I won’t believe or I don’t need to believe.”
The absence of signs is not that God is not working. He works in thousands of different ways in every moment. They are all supernatural. We even can see how God is working in numbers of ways.
People would say they want more than God’s providential working. That isn’t enough. They want God to make it easy for them to believe by doing something amazing and astounding like what they read that Moses, Elijah, Elisha, Jesus, and the Apostles did. People desire direct supernatural divine intervention.
Churches feel the pressure to fake signs, because people want them. They aren’t signs, because they’re faking them, which redefines even what a sign is. Churches also conjure up experiences that give an impression that something supernatural is occurring. People can claim a sign from a lowered expectation of what a sign is. Even if it isn’t something supernatural, people want to feel something at church that might have them think the Holy Spirit is there. This is their evidence for God.
Wisdom
Wisdom in 1 Corinthians 1 isn’t God’s wisdom, but human or man’s wisdom. This could be what people call “science” today. It is scientific proof or evidence. They need data or empirical evidence. This is very brainy arguments.
God is working in the world. It is good to talk about that. This is known as the providence of God. He upholds this world and all that is in it in many various ways. I love that.
A lot of evidence exists out there for everything that is in the Bible: archaeological, scientific, psychological, logical, and historical. People will say that’s what they need and that’s what makes sense to them. Even if they’re not saying that, it makes sense to believers that they need intellectual arguments.
Jews and Greeks in 1 Corinthians 1 represent all apparent seekers in God. If churches and their leaders are seeker sensitive, they would provide signs and wisdom. In a categorical way, that’s what they do. They use the preferred ways of their audience, rather than what God says to do. Apparent seekers are not the source for a method of salvation. God is.
You could give analysis as to the place of signs and wisdom as categorical approaches for ministry philosophy. Churches are rampant with both. Paul is saying, eliminate those as methods. Use the God-ordained method only.
God wants preaching as the method of accomplishing salvation. People are not saved any other way than preaching. Many reasons exist for this, some given in 1 Corinthians 1 and others in other biblical texts.
Bifurcation in Beauty: Dualism of Spiritual/Sacred and Natural/Secular
You have heard, “Life imitating art or art imitating life.” In that vein, art imitates worldview.” Even when someone says, this is his worldview, his art may contradict what he says is his worldview. The art or his aesthetic is a better or more accurate expression of his worldview than other means of expressing it.
You could see what was important to Jesus by His reaction to the corrupting of the temple, His Father’s house. When someone blows his top because you dinged his car, that says something about the priority of his car, more than if you asked him. A person’s music has that way of explaining the meaning of a person’s life.
Worship of and Love for God
One biblical and historical element of worship of God is music. The Bible is full of music. Worship is an offering to God. God regulates the offering. It must be what God wants for Him to accept it.
Someone said, “You are what (or who) you worship.” Whatever you give God, that’s what you think about Him. If you give that to Him, then that expresses who you are, as much as it does who God is.
You can say you love God, like you can say you know God. If you don’t do what He says, you neither love Him or know Him, which overlap. The love shines through what you offer. It is like giving God the present you wanted, not what He did. You love yourself.
The “life imitating art” part of the equation says that art affects life. Life changes by the art influencing it. A person especially changes by the thoughts expressed about God through the music offered God.
The Meaning
What I have written assumes that art means something. It also says that art itself is not subjective and personal. Scripture says this, when it says that God is worshiped in the beauty of His holiness.
Beauty, which relates to aesthetics or art, is not in the eye of the beholder. It is objective in its meaning. Holiness is beautiful. That would mean that the unholy is not beautiful. Everything is not beautiful in its own way. Some is beautiful and some is not.
God separates from what falls short of the perfections of His attributes. That is the holiness of God. God will not receive as worship what falls short of His attributes. He separates from that as characteristic of His nature.
Bifurcation of Beauty
How is it that today churches do offer God the profane, that is, what conflicts with His attributes? Churches bifurcate beauty, just like they do with truth. They separated the spiritual or sacred from the natural or secular. Like there is total truth, one truth like one God, there is total beauty.
Churches and their leaders (or perhaps the leaders just pander to the people) went along with the split. They regarded and treated spiritual things as sentimental and emotional, not on the same plain as the natural and the secular. Church is an escape from the real world.
The music offers that escape and that feeling, which lifts someone emotionally, and is seen as a sacred or spiritual experience with God. That’s what church does as its most essential. People leave with a skip in their step, ready to go in the real world, the secular one, even thinking it was God.
Some churches and their leaders would disagree they do what I described in the previous paragraph. They explain it as something different, so removed from what occurred, because now that is the norm for a church. It’s been done so long, it’s just church now. It follows the trajectory of a revision of true worship, not true worship.
A church with corrupt music and worship doesn’t see its art as negative or corrupted. That is instead something profane to the extreme like a Mapplethorpe exhibit of a crucifix in a jar of urine, pushed by the National Endowment of Arts in the late 1980s. Certain extreme or exotic modern or even postmodern forms, those are wrong. Not the profanity churches now perform and consider worship.
Tell-Tale
Without the church doing much to anything to help it, the world’s culture has decayed. Churches veered off objective beauty, or one beauty. Something is either beautiful or it is not. Beauty is not related to secular or spiritual or even sacred.
Music isn’t sacred because it is used in the church; it is sacred because it is sacred. That also means it is beautiful, because, again, beauty relates to the glory of the Lord. A corruption of beauty, used in worship in the church, does not become beautiful by a church using it, what some today call, “redeeming” it.
The music someone plays and enjoys, and especially for someone who says he is a Christian, by that you can tell who he is. I know some of you readers hate that. You deny it sharply and often angrily. The reasons for the heat also help explain what is happening.
It is easy today for professing Christians to stand up against decadent culture. They can point out what’s very horrible in bad books in schools and their curriculum. Meanwhile, their churches are decaying at perhaps a little slower pace but a continuous one that isn’t far behind the world.
What is light and easy, sentimental and emotional, and entertaining also sells. Salzburg and Vienna and the rest of Europe went for Mozart’s music because of the former, the light and easy, etc. His dad Leopold, however, liked the selling part of it. It wasn’t lost on the religious leaders that Mozart also boosted their prominence and position.
Church Consumers
Entertainment, Not Worship
Church attenders become consumers, which is the opposite of worship. They also confuse that feeling from true spirituality. It doesn’t matter, because that feeling and spirituality are on the same plain. When the congregants leave their meeting, they take that experience as preparation for the real world. That’s also now constituted as God. The people think they’ve associated with God because it is indistinguishable from Him. It is actually more aligned with the world they enter after their assembling ends.
Even Baptist meetings have long encouraged the decadence of consumerism. They entertain a crowd. The feeling is an apparent sanctified one, which is a lie. The one who does this the best, a kind of circus-master, is a wanted commodity. It or he improves the spirit of the meeting, again this superficial, sentimental emotionalism. God is using his talent. Most cannot resist the popularity of it. It is its own pop music.
How could churches permit a philosophy in conflict with God? Some don’t judge music. Even though arts are full of meaning, they relegate it to meaninglessness. It is in this meaningless realm of spirituality, not like what occurs where there is meaning, eight to five, a real life. Many also judge against the extreme and deem themselves better by comparison.
Loss of Discernment
Young people in church often feel left out. If they get this music, it at least might connect them to the real world. This is the acquiescence to youth culture. Their hormones are raging and they chafe under parental authority. They look happier and parents think the church succeeds at keeping them. Its young people are happy. At least they can smile to the rhythm, the feeling, and the allurement.
Churches lose their discernment, described in a biblical way as unable to distinguish the holy from the profane. It occurs through incrementalism. Men won’t separate from it. They won’t say no to it. It gets worse and then doesn’t stop getting worse. To explain it requires something more than a thirty second sound byte. Even if you can, the Bible doesn’t have a play button to give the kind of proof necessary for such diminished discernment.
Country music or Country Western arose in church settings. It grew among church going young people in the Bible belt. They took the sentimentality and feelings that corresponded to the bifurcation of beauty in the church. Country western stars, who began in church, brought a more intense version of it to the world. It produced an even more extreme response.
Holy and Profane
Ryman Auditorium, the temple of country music, looks like a church building. It gives people, especially young ones, that feeling they had at church, making their experience in the world indistinguishable from church. The entertainers at church just do a lesser version of the same thing. This contrasts with Ezekiel 44:23:
And they shall teach my people the difference between the holy and profane, and cause them to discern between the unclean and the clean.
The country stars were good at country music. What started in church succeeded in the world. The success in the world, more excessive in its effect, travelled back to the church. The church accepts it, because that’s the domain of the spiritual.
To Be Continued
Sing the Psalms–A Free App for your Apple or Android Phone
Scripture commands: “[S]ing Psalms” (James 5:13). The Spirit-filled saint is singing “psalms” as well as hymns and spiritual songs (Ephesians 5:18-21). If you are a believer, you have the obligation to sing God’s inspired psalms. You have the blessed privilege to sing the inspired psalms. You have the glorious blessing to sing to the Father the same words that the Lord Jesus sang to His Father on earth. What a blessing this is!
I am very thankful that recently Bro David Cloud wrote a valuable article commending psalm singing. Our church has sung from the 1650 Scottish Psalter, a literal psalter, for many years. My wife and I have sung through the 1650 Psalter numbers of times in our family devotions–we sing the same psalm every day for a week, and then the next week go on to the next psalm. (We also sing hymns from the Trinity hymnal, Baptist edition–as does our church–and from the Metropolitan Tabernacle’s hymnbook.)
Unfortunately, the edition of the 1650 Psalter that our church and our family worships with–a version which includes conservative tunes, rather than being words-only, called the Comprehensive Psalter–is not in print. The people who have the copyright are planning to reprint it, I have heard, so feel free to reach out to them if you would like physical copies for your church and home. However, if you are not able to get a physical copy, I am delighted to let you know that a quality app has been designed which includes the text and tunes of the 1650 Scottish Psalter. The app also plays the tunes so people who do not know how to read music can easily learn to sing the entire psalter. I would definitely recommend that you download the app, add it to your electronic devices, and joyfully obeying God’s command to sing the songs Christ sung in worship, the inspired, infallible, inerrant Psalms.
There are other metrical psalters (versions of the psalms that can be sung), but, in my view, the 1650 Psalter is the best, because it is one of the most literal of the singable psalters. Probably, in my experience, The Book of Psalms for Singing is my second choice.
I added links to both the Apple and Android version of the 1650 Psalter app on my website here in the ecclesiology section, where you can also find other useful helps for psalm-singing. Here are direct links to the apps:
1650 Psalter App for Apple devices
1650 Psalter App for Android devices
The price is right for the apps–100% free. That also makes it a great price for people who wish to obey God’s command to sing the psalms in foreign lands. Anyone, anywhere in the world, can download the app and sing the psalms using his electronic device. Churches who want to get physical copies of the 1650 Psalter can have everyone sing from his phone until physical copies are in print again.
God commands you to sing the psalms. Why not start today?
If you do sing the psalms, how has it been a blessing in your life, in addition to glorifying the Lord? Feel free to explain in the comment section.
–TDR
35th Anniversary of the Church I Planted in California, pt. 2
Every true church starts by the grace of God and under the headship of Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul wrote and I echo his belief in 1 Corinthians 15:10:
But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.
He described in part his planting of the church at Corinth, a New Testament church under the authority of Jesus Christ.
My first church was a Baptist church, First Baptist Church of Covington, Indiana. As a 12 year old, I joined Maranatha Baptist Church in Covington. Later that year, I gave a public testimony of salvation to become a member of Calvary Baptist Church in Watertown, Wisconsin. For three months after my last year of graduate school, I became a part of Lehigh Valley Baptist Church in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. I came back to Calvary in Watertown for two years before joining Emmanuel Baptist Church in Elkhorn, WI.
One of my college professors, the late Richard Weeks, allegedly had the largest personal Baptist history library in the world. He accumulated a huge collection of old, out-of-print Baptist books available for his students to read. The bookstore sold Baptist books, required for outside reading. My college reprinted the two volume A History of Baptists by Thomas Armitage. The textbook for Baptist History was John T. Christian‘s, A History of Baptists. We read books by Roy Mason, S. E. Anderson, Chester Tulga, J. M. Carroll, and B. H. Carroll.
I was and am a Baptist. I believe that there have been true churches in perpetuity since the first church in Jerusalem, known by different names. They began calling those churches, Baptist churches. Certain distinctives characterize those churches, the first of which is the Bible is their sole authority for faith and practice. They are also separatist, separated personally and ecclesiastically. True Baptist churches are the Lord’s churches.
Three different summers I traveled to 70-80 churches out West. I witnessed firsthand the dearth of true, biblical churches in the San Francisco Bay Area. Both the teaching of Romans 15:20 and the obvious need to preach the gospel to every creature (Mark 16:15) worked on me toward the idea of starting a church in the San Francisco Bay Area, Romans 15:20 reading:
Yea, so have I strived to preach the gospel, not where Christ was named, lest I should build upon another man’s foundation.
It was not my desire to go somewhere where I believed the gospel was already being preached. With 40 million people in California and 7.75 million people in the San Francisco Bay Area, in my lifetime I would not run out of the opportunity to preach to people who had not heard, no matter how hard I worked. The Bay Area is also a transient society with a huge turnover. Every 5-10 years, new people or families occupy the same apartments or houses. Even if most didn’t listen or were hostile to the gospel, some would.
From my own observation, professing Christians were not bumping into each other and scrambling all over the Bay Area, like ants on an anthill, to preach the gospel to those who haven’t heard. I didn’t know how they would react, but I was optimistic. I theorized that the Bay Area was so bad, as bad as people think or worse, because not much preaching occurred there. Before fire fell like Sodom and Gomorrah, someone should make a greater attempt at preaching to it.
As I went to college in the early eighties, I heard very little exposition of scripture, except on the radio. I became convinced of exposition as superior or even God’s will for preaching and dedicated myself to its practice. Exposition became my belief for or philosophy of preaching. It was not until graduate school that I planned in the sense of preparing to preach exposition. Zooming forward to right now, I preached or taught through every word of the Bible over the thirty three years. Nothing had a greater impact toward success than the Word of God in its context.
I had decided that I would start the church with raising only limited support. I determined not to spend any extra time doing so. Instead, I would receive some money from churches and work a job. I had not heard the term, bivocational, but I did know the word, tentmaking. Rather than spend months waiting, I wanted to get going right away.
In May 1987, I knew the San Francisco Bay Area, but I wasn’t sure the exact location where I would begin. I drove out to California in a Dodge Omni my parents gave me, stopping in churches on the way. Once I arrived, I started scouting. I did that for one week. There was no internet. I couldn’t go online to find out about cities, towns, and other churches. Using paper maps, I went from one town to another, stopping at a phone booth to look for what churches were there in the yellow pages of phone books and took notes at each stop. I called churches at pay phones and talked to their leaders. I had a goal of finding towns with no Baptist church at all.
To Be Continued
Mark 7:4 and the Baptism of Tables–Video
Mark 7:4 reads:
And when they come from the market, except they wash [baptidzo], they eat not. And many other things there be, which they have received to hold, as the washing [baptismos] of cups, and pots, brasen vessels, and of tables.
This passage is the best attempt in Scripture if one wishes to argue against dipping or immersion for baptism. “Surely the Jews did not immerse their tables in water!” many pro-pouring or pro-sprinkling Protestants and Catholics have argued.
This issue was discussed in the past on the blog; see part 1 here and part 2 here.
People have also attacked the King James Version for rendering the Greek word baptidzo as “baptize” instead of as “immerse.” Is that a valid criticism? Did King James or the KJV translators have an evil motive, and were they trying to hide the fact that baptism is immersion?
If you would like to watch a video that answers these questions, please check the discussion in my first year Greek class #23 here on YouTube, or see the same video on Rumble, or go to 5:23 into the video embedded below:
The discussion of baptidzo continues through 22:55 on the video.
This passage does not prove sprinkling or pouring for baptism because the evidence is actually clear that the Jews did indeed immerse their dining couches or tables. Also, there was no conspiracy to hide the fact that baptism is properly by immersion, as King James himself was immersed (as an infant), as were the English monarchs before him. A strong anti-immersion push actually developed only several decades later at the Westminster Assembly, where requiring immersion for baptism lost by the narrowest of margins–one vote.
–TDR
Debunking of Nine Marks Dual Church View: Both Universal and Local Churches, Part Three
Nowhere does scripture make a connection between an earthly church and then a final heavenly church. Neoplatonic Christianity or professing Christianity invented this idea, one borrowed by Jonathan Leeman in his article, The Church: Universal and Local, for the 9 Marks parachurch organization. A believer in a salvific way has a citizenship in heaven and has a seat in heaven in the sense that God reserved it for him, which is like someone seated in Congress without physically being there. Because He saved me and keeps saving me, Jesus anchors me in the heavenly holy of holies. The seating of me and the anchoring of me there does not mean I am there in the present. It is a blessed guarantee of my salvation.
Universal church ecclesiology uses neoplatonic language. It says the true church is all believers, the apparent “universal church,” which manifests itself in a visible church, the local one. It finds reality in the ideal or the mystical. Leeman says the universal church becomes local by gathering. A church is a gathering. A gathering doesn’t become a gathering by gathering. The not-gathered thing is not a gathering. This is also how all of the New Testament reads. It’s not called a gathering or an assembly when it doesn’t assemble. It isn’t an assembly then. The only reason why Leeman talks about the church as universal comes from neoplatonism.
Jonathan Leeman writes a unique ecclesiology. The dual church view isn’t unique, but his attempt to keep an attachment to the literal meaning of ekklesia, “assembly.” 9 Marks and he see the damage of the typical universal church teaching, that becomes easily untethered from the biblical practice of the church, which is only local. The typical universal church teaching creates free agents without accountability, living how they want yet continuing to call themselves Christians.
The attempt to keep congruity between assembly and universal church keeps Leeman in the mainstream of evangelicalism, which loves its universal church. It keeps alive a multitude of boards, conventions, associations, colleges, universities, and other parachurch organizations. Someone can live and work in that parachurch world as if it is Christian ministry without anything like it in the Bible. It is unhelpful, but mainly untrue. Whatever kingdom-like quality Leeman wants to attribute to the church, the mixture of the universal undermines the authority that the kingdom of Jesus Christ possesses.
As one might expect, Leeman’s system of interpretation effects his outcome. He fails to mention, however, his system — amillennialism. That system must see a universal church, which is a synonym with the kingdom. It erases a line between soteriology and ecclesiology. It results in reading his conclusions into scripture.
A Kingdom Argument
Leeman uses a doctrine of the kingdom to argue for a universal church. Some truth exists within the framework of his argument. As a representative of His church, Jesus gives Peter the keys to the kingdom in Matthew 16:18-19. That does not mean the church is the kingdom, which emerges from amillennialism, an eschatology of Roman Catholicism and Capital Hill Baptist Church, Mark Dever, and 9 Marks. The church and the kingdom interrelate like the church and the family of God do.
Leeman says the church provides the way to say who citizens of the kingdom are. He compares church membership to the means of possessing the passport into the kingdom. To know who they are, Leeman postulates baptism and the Lord’s Supper as the means. He says these are covenant signs of the new covenant, so they express the entrance requirements into the kingdom. Nothing in the Bible says this. It is nifty inventiveness to attempt to prove a point, while having nothing to do so. It’s another way of my saying that it’s a stretch by Leeman.
The article further argues the kingdom/church concept with the language of “binding” and “loosing” in Matthew 16:19 and 18:18. Churches are doing kingdom work. They are not the kingdom. They represent the kingdom on earth. God gives the church — churches — heavenly authority to judge who is in and who is out. I’m sure that Leeman knows that doesn’t mean that the church kicks people out of heaven or out of the kingdom.
Jesus characterizes the extent of the judgment of the church in Matthew 18:17, “Let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican.” The church regards a person as heathen. He may not be heathen. The man under church discipline in 1 Corinthians 5 proved himself to be a kingdom citizen, even though the church loosed him. The Lord Jesus Christ gives to the church, which is visible and local, the earthly judgment of heavenly or kingdom citizenship.
It’s true that someone, who isn’t baptized, doesn’t take of the Lord’s Table, won’t join a church, doesn’t submit to church leadership, and won’t gather with a church, the church should judge as not saved. Christ gave that judgment to the church. This doesn’t mean the church is the kingdom. It’s been given the authority of the kingdom. The King of the kingdom is Christ and the Head of the church is Christ.
The Bible offers a distinct soteriology and a distinct ecclesiology. They are distinct doctrines. However, they also relate to one another. Church membership requires salvation. However, it also requires baptism. Baptism isn’t salvation. It isn’t a “putting away of the filth of the flesh” (1 Pet 3:21). According to the New Testament, a church can have unbelievers in it, a mixed multitude, and will very often have unsaved church members, who should examine themselves whether they be in the faith (2 Cor 13:5). Most reading here know that church membership is not the same as salvation.
Terminology like church, temple, and body relate to the church. Words like kingdom, family, and saint relate to salvation. You can be in the kingdom, family, and a saint without baptism. To be in the church, temple, and body, you must be baptized. Scripture shows some relationship between terms of the church and of salvation. However, Leeman takes this further than what scripture teaches in order to vindicate his false universal church teaching.
Historical Argument
Leeman attempts to justify the universal church with a historical argument, using the patristics and the Protestant Reformers. He portrays a pendulum swing between an emphasis on the local church then the universal church and then back to the local church, meanwhile both churches existing with his dual church view. He writes the following:
Yet among Baptist groups the risk now would be to shift the weight of the body entirely onto the other foot, where Christians would give all their attention to the local church and little to the universal. Certain strains of Baptist churches, such as the Landmarkists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, would in fact argue that only the local church exists. They would also refuse to share the Lord’s Supper with anyone who was not a member of their own church. Gratefully, such strains were rare.
He charges Baptists with overemphasis on the local church, especially those he calls and others label, “Landmarkists.” He attacks closed communion, unwillingness to share the Lord’s Supper with someone not a member of his church. I would contend that the Landmarkists brought ecclesiology back to scripture and communion back to its “communion of the Lord’s body,” which is local only. Christ gave communion to His church, which is local only.
The Landmarkers rose out of the Southern Baptist Convention, when Protestants shared their pulpits and partook in their communion. Baptists distinguish themselves as separatists. They separate from false doctrine such as infant sprinkling. Further, Southern Baptists allowed modernism or liberalism into the churches and rejected church perpetuity in their seminaries, leading to ecumenism. Landmarkers brought the Convention back to scripture and historic Baptist doctrines.
Leeman uses a kind of smear tactic, because his knowing what readers may have heard about Landmarkism. It’s like calling someone “flat earth” or “election denier.” It’s a rhetorical tactic. It doesn’t make a true historical or biblical point. He assumes people will think Landmarkism is bad, so they’ll associate local only ecclesiology then as bad too.
I agree that men through history believed in a local church, a universal church, in only a local church, and in both a local and a universal church. You can find all of those ecclesiological positions through history. However, we know a church is local. Where is the universal church in scripture and did it develop through history? Did it arise from neoplatonism?
Forced Universal with It “Showing Up”
Leeman says the universal church shows up in churches, which are local. He says that happens when churches cooperate with another in common service or labor for the Lord. Yes, churches all have the same Head if they are true churches. That doesn’t make a universal church. It is a generic church. It is an institutional understanding of church. Each true church has Christ as its head. This is not the discovery of or a doctrine of a universal church.
Churches either fellowship based upon the same doctrine and practice or they separate from one another. When they fellowship, that isn’t a universal church concept. That is just fellowship between two churches, like existed between the Jerusalem church and the Antioch church.
The universal concept of church seems to require churches cooperating. It leads to diminishment and corruption of true doctrine. If there is to be “no schism in the body” (1 Cor 12:25), and the body is universal, then no church should separate from one another. However, “the body” in 1 Corinthians 12 is defined as local in v. 27, when Paul says, “Ye are the body of Christ,” speaking of the church at Corinth. If it was universal, Paul would have written, “We are the body of Christ.” He doesn’t. Schisms exist between bodies. They are not to exist in the body.
The unity that Jesus prayed for in John 17 (v. 22) is found in separate churches that fellowship one with another based upon the truth (John 17:17). Unity is required in individual churches (Eph 4), not between separate churches. Separate churches attempt to have unity like Jerusalem and Antioch tried in Acts 15. True unity requires separation.
Evangelicals like Leeman do not teach biblical separation. They don’t write on it. They talk about church discipline, but they don’t teach on separation from other churches. Their false universal church teaching fuels this, which will mean apostasy for their churches and their movement. Every New Testament epistle teaches the doctrine of separation, which depends on a right view of the nature of the church.
The Judgmental Church: Apostolic, New Testament, and Seeker-Friendly?
The Judgmental Church!
Everyone knows that being judgmental is one of the greatest sins that a person can possibly commit. The sin of being “judgmental” is mentioned and condemned in the following verses in the Bible:
The sin of being judgmental is regularly mentioned in 1st and 2nd Opinions, books which most people are much more committed to living by than they are, say, the Pauline epistles and the Gospels.
While being “judgmental” is not mentioned in the canonical New Testament, only in the pseudepigraphical 1st and 2nd Opinions, and the passage in the Sermon on the Mount that people misuse to prove this position actually commands one to help one’s brother remove even a speck or smaller sin from his eye (that is, Christ commands one to judge) as long as one does not hypocritically have a beam in one’s own eye (Matthew 7:1ff.), there are plenty of memes and commonly supported cultural images for it, which, in the eyes of many, should be a sufficient substitute for the total lack of support in the inspired text of Scripture.
Were the New Testament Churches Judgmental?
Did the apostolic, New Testament churches judge? In addition to Matthew 7:1ff., Christ commanded: “Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment (John 7:24). So Christ commanded people to judge–it was not only not a sin, but it is a sin to fail to judge. Did the New Testament churches follow Christ’s command to judge? Consider 1 Corinthians 14:23-25:
23 If therefore the whole church be come together into one place, and all speak with tongues, and there come in those that are unlearned, or unbelievers, will they not say that ye are mad? 24 But if all prophesy, and there come in one that believeth not, or one unlearned, he is convinced of all, he is judged of all: 25 And thus are the secrets of his heart made manifest; and so falling down on his face he will worship God, and report that God is in you of a truth.
Wow! Not only did this New Testament church fail to recognize the (alleged) sin of judging, but Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, wanted every member of the congregation to be judging. In fact, if a new visitor comes to a church service, “all” are supposed to judge him, with the truth of Scripture, and by this means he will not be turned off by their being so “judgmental,” but on the contrary, he will fall down on his face and will worship God, recognizing that God is in them of a truth.
Consider also Isaiah 1:21:
How is the faithful city become an harlot! it was full of judgment; righteousness lodged in it; but now murderers.
It was good for God’s people to be “full of judgment.” That was being “faithful,” and was characteristic of “righteousness.” When that stopped it was unfaithfulness, spiritual harlotry.
The second greatest commmand is to love your neighbor as yourself–the only greater command is to love God with your whole being. What is involved in loving your neighbor? Note Leviticus 19:17-18:
17 Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him. 18 Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD.
Rebuking others is showing your neighbor love–just like not hating him, not avenging, and not bearing grudges. Sin is the greatest evil, so rebuking your neighbor, so that he does not sin, is one of the kindest and most loving things you can possibly do.
The Apostolic, New Testament Way to Be Seeker-Friendly
Do you want visitors to your church to come to true conversion? Do you want your church to glorify God and follow the New Testament? Then start having lots of judging of others go on, so visitors can fall on their faces and confess God is in you of a truth. Exercise lots and lots of God-glorifying, loving, non-hypocritical, but Biblically accurate judgment. That is part of loving your neighbor as yourself. Reject the Satanic advice of the world, the flesh, and the devil that you are not supposed to judge anyone or anything. As in so many other situations, this idea is exactly the opposite of what the Bible actually says.
John 7:24; 1 Corinthians 14:23-25; Isaiah 1:21, and Leviticus 19:17-18 should be carefully expounded in every evangelical “church growth” book that actually cares about what God says about the church and that wants genuine growth, not cancerous pseudo-growth. So should the fact that “come as you are” is a lie-the Biblical advice is “sanctify yourselves.” But I’m not holding my breath–I suspect that, in the minds of many, the sin of being judgmental, as condemned in 1st and 2nd Opinions, will continue to greatly outweigh the evidence to the contrary from Christ, the apostle Paul, Moses, and Isaiah.
“You mean I am wrong in saying being ‘judgmental’ is a sin condemned in the Bible? How DARE you judge me about that!”
–TDR
Debunking of Nine Marks Dual Church View: Both Universal and Local Churches, Part Two
The word “church” in the English translation of the New Testament, like Nine Marks wrote in its online article by Jonathan Leeman, means “assembly.” “Universal assembly” is an oxymoron, yet still firmly held by Catholics, Protestants, evangelicals, and fundamentalists against its incoherence and contradiction. Why? How?
Neoplatonism is a philosophical and religious system, beginning with the work of Plotinus in c. 245 AD, that analyzes and teaches interpretations of the philosophy and theology of Plato, and which extended the interpretations of Plato that middle Platonists developed from 80 BC to 220 AD.
Neoplatonism is a non-theistic philosophical spirituality. It became, however, part of institutional Christianity, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, and then came out the other end in the Protestant Reformation. The universal church is not scriptural. It’s obviously a neoplatonic concept.
With Plotinus, individual souls, the temporal, resided within the soul, the eternal one. The insecurity of the individual souls give undo attention to bodily concerns. Love becomes a lower love, appetite, out of which proceeds moral evil. The individual soul loses unity and goodness. A tension exists in the soul between what is above and is eternal and that below and temporal. Purity relates to the hierarchy from eternal to temporal, the eternal being one and the temporal being individual and particular. Good is a return to the One, which is defined in mystical terms. [Understanding of Neoplatonism taken from a course on Philosophy by Arthur Holmes, video 19]
Augustine thought that scripture was divinely inspired but being part of the temporal, finite world, it was susceptible to corruption. Augustine took this neoplatonism as his explanation of a Catholic church, when challenged by the Donatists. The Donatists claimed the true church was local by which it kept itself separate from communion with the world. For Augustine the true church was spread throughout the world.
The Donatists asked Augustine how that the church could be Catholic or universal if there were unbelievers in it. He answered in neoplatonic fashion that there were two churches, the visible and the invisible. The invisible, the one, was pure, and the visible or particular had corruption. Augustine’s neoplatonic church was spread throughout time and rooted in eternity. This reflects his neoplatonism with purity in the One and the mystical, a kind of ontological church. It is not a church though. A church is visible and local, and as an assembly, it assembles.
According to Peter Brown in his biography of Augustine, Augustine brought to the masses “the esoteric truth of Plato” (p. 221). Augustine was impressed by Ambrose’s rhetorical technique when he delivered sermons, which were carefully modeled on Cicero and influenced by the contemporary exponents of Plato, the Neoplatonists (p. 61). In his writings, Augustine borrowed freely from Plato and Plotinus (p. 486). When Augustine argued (The Works of St. Augustine) for the universal church to the Donatist, he relied on kingdom predictions of the Old Testament, such as Psalm 2:7-8, and a catholic church as the fulfillment, where the Messiah ruled over the world in a mystical manner (Letter 49:2, Sermon 47:17, Sermon 129:5-6). This invented amillennialism as a teaching. From the New Testament, he contended that the seven churches of the letters in Revelation 2-3 are universal due to the symbolism of the number 7 (Sermon 229J:5).
You do not see a universal church in the Bible. This mystical interpretation of scripture corresponds to the allegorical interpretation of Origen beset and popularized in Roman Catholicism through neoplatonic theologians, such as Ambrose and Augustine. They could explain the Roman Catholic Church as the true church, which is also the spiritualized fulfillment of the kingdom prophecies in the Old Testament. This view of the kingdom became called, ammillennialism, which was later systematized into covenant theology.
Reading Plato into the Bible is also eisegesis. Universal church can’t be read out of the Bible, so it is read into it. Instead of taking a singular noun as a generic usage, it imagines a mystical or platonic usage. You can see that neoplatonism affected every doctrine in Roman Catholicism and then Eastern Orthodoxy. It is now borrowed in the teaching of Jordan Peterson among others, who do not present a biblical view of Christianity. It allows for someone to read almost anything he wants into the BIble.
At salvation, God did raise us up and seat us in heaven spiritually, as Leeman asserts, but that is not membership in a universal church. It is adoption into the family of God. A person spiritually becomes a brother or sister in Christ. This family relationship does not depend on geographical boundaries or locality like an assembly does. Someone can have a father, who lives a thousand miles away, and he’s still his father.
Leeman says that the “universal church is in heaven.” If the entire “universal church” is in heaven, then it isn’t universal. It is in a location, whether someone believes that is a church or not. It can’t be universal, if it is in one location.
Leeman also writes that this heavenly church is the one Jesus promises to build in Matthew 16:18. A wrong understanding of “build” contributes to a wrong understanding of the nature of church. The Greek word translated “will build” in Matthew 16:18 is oikodomeo, which is mainly translated “to edify” through the New Testament, so the understanding is “I will edify my church” or “I will build up my church.” The sense of “build” that Leeman gives is adding to the numbers in this heavenly city or church. When Jesus said He would edify or build up His church, He’s saying more than that. He is going to add the offices of the pastor and deacons. He will add the Lord’s Table and church discipline. The Lord Jesus will provide the book of Acts, the epistles, and the book of Revelation. He will give to the church what it needs to prevail against the gates of hell.
At the time Jesus said, I will build my church, there was one church. It wasn’t in heaven. It was in Jerusalem. He would build up that church in Jerusalem, but His church as an institution, which is always on earth. I’m not saying there won’t be an assembly in heaven. It’s just that Jesus was talking about His assembly that functions on earth. The Jerusalem church would reproduce other churches, other assemblies, by fulfilling the Great Commission, which Jesus also added to the church in Matthew 28:18-20 and the version of that in the other Gospels. Each of those churches is still His church.
Leeman must assume that when Jesus says “church” in Matthew 16:18 and means something mystical and heavenly spread out over a large expanse of space and time that His disciples thought that’s what “assembly” (ekklesia) meant. It doesn’t register to him with his presuppositions that they wouldn’t think like Plato, like Augustine and then Jonathan Leeman would. When Jesus a very short while later talks about bringing evidence for discipline of someone to the church in Matthew 18:15-17, that His disciple audience could make that jump from Platonic to Aristotelian in that moment, from the universal to the particular. Were they bringing a church member to a universal church? They were so tuned into Greek philosophy, that when Jesus meant church in Matthew 18 in a totally different way than in Matthew 16, they automatically knew that? Amazing, huh?
To Be Continued
Debunking of Nine Marks Dual Church View: Both Universal and Local Churches, Part One
On 8/25/2022, the organization Nine Marks, started by Pastor Mark Dever of Capital Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, published on its website an article written by Jonathan Leeman, the editorial director of Nine Marks, entitled, “The Church: Universal and Local” (Click on the article to compare this analysis with the post). Nine Marks, I believe, wants to defend “local” because that is the main emphasis of Nine Marks. In the articles I have read by Nine Marks, they want to emphasize the meaning of “assembly” for ekklesia. That is enough to get major push back from the rest of evangelicalism.
Despite its doctrine of the church, local, Nine Marks teaches a universal church in the above article also as its position on the church, so a dual church view. Is there both a universal church and a local church? This post will begin an assessment of Leeman’s article as to its ecclesiological veracity.
In his first paragraph, the introduction, Leeman provides his definition for a universal church, a contradiction in terms, and for a local church. He calls the “universal church” “a heavenly and eschatological assembly.” You have to admire the point of consistency from Leeman with the meaning of ekklesia in his definition. He sticks with “assembly” through the essay. However, if it is an assembly, how could it be “universal”? Something universal does not and can not assemble. Leeman forces the definition to fit a catholic presupposition.
In Leeman’s summary, the second paragraph, he says the “New Testament envisions two kinds of assemblies.” I can’t argue against an assembly in heaven. Saints will assemble in heaven (cf. Hebrew 12:23). The church is not just any assembly though. The New Testament uses ekklesia to refer to something other than the church, and the King James translates it “assembly,” referring to a group of people gathered together, not a church (Acts 19:32, 39, 41). An assembly in heaven, the King James also calls “an assembly,” because it isn’t a church.
I’ve heard the heavenly assembly called a “church in prospect.” Leeman doesn’t use that terminology, but he takes the essence of that and stretches it into something mystical and for today. He calls salvation the membership for the universal church. All the saints will not be in “heaven,” actually the new heaven and the new earth, until the eternal state. The Bible has terminology for all saved people: the family of God and the kingdom of God. What occurs in heaven is not an ecclesiological gathering. The heavenly assembly does not function as a New Testament assembly.
The practical ramification of a “universal church,” Leeman explains, is “a local church that partners with other churches.” Leeman knows that nowhere does an English translation call the church a “local church.” Every church is local. Assemblies are always local. Churches should partner with other churches, but that isn’t a universal church. Those are still assemblies partnering with other assemblies of like faith and practice.
In his section, “Two Uses of the Word ‘Church’,” Leeman utilizes Matthew 16:18 and Matthew 18:17, the only two usages of ekklesia in the Gospels and both by Jesus. He says the first is universal and the second is local. Since no assembly is universal, he’s wrong on Matthew 16:18. An analysis of every usage of ekklesia by Jesus, most in Revelation 2 and 3, and over twenty times, every one is obviously local. Good hermeneutics or exegesis understands Matthew 16:18 like all the other times Jesus used ekklesia, where Jesus said, “my church.”
Jesus’ ekklesia is still an ekklesia, not something scattered all over the world, but still an assembly. When He calls it “my ekklesia,” Jesus distinguishes it from other governing assemblies. People in that day already understood the concept of a town meeting, a governing assembly. Jesus rules through His assembly and gives it His authority. Ekklesia was also the Greek word translated for the Hebrew congregation of Israel, the assembly in the Old Testament.
Leeman attempts to illustrate his dual church doctrine with two examples from the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:18 and 1 Corinthians 12:28.
For first of all, when ye come together in the church, I hear that there be divisions among you; and I partly believe it. (11:18)
And God hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers, after that miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, diversities of tongues. (12:28)
Leeman says that 11:18 must be local and 12:28 must be universal. Leeman fails to mention a syntactical structure in Greek and English, either the particular or generical singular noun. Singular nouns have either a particular or generic usage. Singular nouns must be one or the other. 11:18 is an example of a particular singular noun. 12:28 is an example of a generic singular noun. The latter speaks of the church as an institution, representing all churches.
Ephesians 5:25 is a good example of the generic use of the singular noun.
For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.
If there is a universal church, then there must be a universal husband and a universal wife. All of these singular nouns are examples of the generic singular noun. “The husband” is still a husband in one particular place or location. There is no mystical or platonic husband. This is how Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians 12:28. If the church in 12:28 is universal, then Paul excluded himself from salvation in 1 Corinthians 12:27, the previous verse, when he writes:
Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.
He says concerning the church at Corinth, “ye are the body of Christ,” excluding himself. When Paul uses the body analogy, he means something local. All bodies are local. All body parts belong to one particular body, not spread out all over the planet.
Leeman assumes without proving. He does not prove a universal church. He assumes it and then he sees it places in the New Testament where it isn’t. His conclusions do not follow from his premises. In his section on “Universal Church,” being “God’s people” in 1 Peter 2:10 and adopted into God’s family in Romans 8:15 are not allusions to a church or “the” church.” These are salvation terms, not ecclesiological ones.
All 118 usages of ekklesia in the New Testament are an assembly either used as a particular singular noun or a generic singular noun. An ekklesia is always local. In a few instances, the assembly is something other than a church, but when it is used for the church, it is always local. That’s what ekklesia means.
To Be Continued
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