All of these points do have something in common, I believe. There’s the theory of salvation by grace through faith (God does it), the theory of salvation by works (get working and earn it), and the wonderfully western theory of salvation by intellectual assent to correct theology. I would suggest, however, that this intellectual assent version falls afoul of Paul’s note “not of works lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:9, emphasis mine). I think that could justifiably be paraphrased “not of intellectual assent (or prowess) lest any man should boast.”

But no, there’s a substantial group of Christians who hold implicitly, if not explicitly, that without getting certain parts of their theology right, people cannot be saved. No thieves hanging on crosses need apply! One wonders just how many facts about atonement the thief on the cross grasped in the moment that he said “Lord, remember me”? Did he even know what “Lord” meant in that context?

Now I’m told that I put too much weight on the story of the thief on the cross, but I think it’s a tremendously important counter-example. That thief hangs there athwart the path of all those who want to make salvation difficult by requiring amounts of time, training, works, or even understanding. There’s nothing there but a cry for help and grace extended.

People frequently paint pictures of God from the theological prose of the Bible that contradict the God who appears in the stories. Personally I think this is reversed. As the thief on the cross hangs athwart the path of those who require intellectual understanding, so do Deborah (Judges 4 & 5) and Junia (Romans 16:7) stand in the way of those who want to claim that God can’t use women as leaders. At a minimum, those two examples should make one look carefully at each individual woman one meets in ministry and ask, “Is she one for whom God has made an exception?” Of course I think there are better theological reasons for rejecting gender exclusion in ministry, but that’s another post.

But what does all of this have to do with the last example I gave, a liturgical one, and with the title of the post which refers to idolatry? Quoth Paul again, “Much, in every way!” I use the basic definition for idolatry I got from reading Tillich: “Treating as ultimate anything that is not ultimate.”

• The commenter on my YouTube video has made the KJV the ultimate thing, replacing God and Jesus as the agent of salvation, and replacing it with a book, a translation made by human hands.
• The young man who questioned my salvation based on his theological propositions has made those theological propositions into his god. They are the idol of God before which he worships. I would note here, however, that in my view grace is sufficient for gossips and murderers, and yes, even idolaters!
• The student who asked about what must be believed was a very sincere person who was nonetheless distressed by the idea that he might not present the right pieces of the puzzle and thus not reach someone. He was being tempted by idolatry.
• The church member who quits over liturgy, well . . . see below.

I suspect that liturgy is the part of theology which tempts us most to idolatry. Many people ignore the atonement debates and simply believe that Jesus died for them. The idolatry is more frequently one of church leaders than church members. But everyone knows whether you raise your hands or don’t. Everyone knows what kind of music they like. Everyone knows whether they like a fixed order or a more spontaneous service.

Preferences aren’t the problem. In fact, it’s not a problem to seek to understand and believe correct theology. That is, until what you say about God and how you worship becomes more important than God. Worship is about experiencing and worshiping God in community with one’s fellow believers, the body of Christ. When you let your personal preferences keep you from corporate worship, at least some elements of that are lost. In fact, I would suggest that if you are in no sense giving up something to others in worship, you may not be fully experiencing corporate worship.

And when you let those individual preferences keep you from worship, then that becomes idolatry as well. Something that is not ultimate–the form of the worship service–has become ultimate for you instead of God.

Should pastors, church leaders, and liturgists not strive for a good worship service? Absolutely they should do their best in this area. I am not advocating sloppiness either in theology or in liturgy. I am advocating the correct priority. When a pastor presents the Eucharist carelessly and thoughtlessly, for example, it may make it harder for people to experience the presence of Christ in their midst. I very much enjoy the Eucharist. There have been times, however, when I have had to work to experience the presence of Christ because it was so clear that the pastor was not experiencing it, and didn’t care.

On another occasion I recall a minister who I thought might ascend from before the altar at any moment because he was so thoroughly engaged in the liturgy he presented. The simple fact that his worship was so completely directed at God, and so engaged his entire being, made it easy for the worshipers to join him.

It is not good liturgy and good theology that I’m challenging here. Good liturgy and good theology help bring one to God. But no liturgy or theological proposition that stands between God and the person can be truly good.

A tree is a good thing, but when one bows down and worships it, it becomes an idol. It is the same in our theology. A good doctrine, a good worship service, or a good deed, placed above the one in whose service they should stand, has become an idol.

Friends, keep yourselves from idols. Amen! — 1 John 5:21

It seems that Adrian Warnock doesn’t like people to be “cool-headed” about the atonement. He says:

To be honest, when I heard this book was going to be “cool-headed” I was already concerned about it. I’m not sure the atonement is a subject that it’s possible to be terribly cool about. That’s because another word for cool is lukewarm. Jesus hates us to be lukewarm about crucial issues, even threatening to spit the lukewarm from his mouth (Revelation 3). I much prefer interacting with someone who is either hot or cold about important issues like this.

Dave correctly points out that Adrian is using a questionable definition of “cool-headed.” But I would like to make a few more remarks.

There’s a tendency among many religious or spiritual people to believe that the more belligerent and confrontational one is, the more truly one believes and is committed to one’s beliefs. I would suggest that just as frequently the one who is belligerent and pushy is quite insecure about those beliefs and makes up for confidence with bluster.

I’m frequently told that my self-designation as a passionate moderate is an oxymoron, as one cannot be both passionate and moderate at the same time. There’s a grain of truth to this, if I accept that the meaning of words is determined by usage. But many people who self-identify as moderates would also regard themselves as passionate about their moderate beliefs. Having determined on a position that is not at either extreme on a particular issue, I can be quite passionate about opposing either of the extremes.

But there’s another point here. Often being cool-headed is the best way to advocate for a particular course of action. You stir more people up by being confrontational, but you don’t necessarily persuade anybody that you’re right.

Having said that, I’m not sure that I’m as cool-headed as Dave on this one. Frankly I do find the hard-line position of penal substitutionary atonement, when it includes the idea that this is the meaning of the atonement, rather than one (only slightly) helpful metaphor amongst many, is not just wrong, but dangerous. It is a position that drives people away from God’s grace, not toward it in many cases. I also believe it is scripturally wrong.

Often the liberal or moderate position is argued as an OK, not so tense, alternative to the conservative position–acceptable, rather than more correct. That is unfortunate. I believe what I do because I believe those positions to be better than, not merely an OK alternative for more relaxed people. I regard the teaching of PSA as the meaning of the atonement as wrong. I regard exclusion of women from positions in ministry as wrong. It is not that I ask tolerance from my more conservative brethren for my sake. Rather, I believe tolerance would be good for them.

So perhaps I’m not the best person to argue for cool-headedness in this case.

First let me note a couple of quotes to which I want to respond briefly and then get to the actually topic.

Heddle says: “The scriptural support for PSA is impressive.” He then proceeds to cite Isaiah 53:5 and Romans 3:23-25. Of course both sides claim support from scripture–that’s required–but it seems to me that proponents of PSA find every verse that has both the words “redemption” (or salvation, or something similar) and the word “for” in them, and claim that they support substitutionary atonement as understood in a courtroom setting.

That importation is certainly wrong in Isaiah 53, which quite clearly has the concept of substitution, but lacks the courtroom metaphor and doesn’t deal with someone being adjudged in one way or another. It is not good practice to interpret the substitution of Isaiah 53, in which the servant suffers for a group of people, without looking at the servant passages in general. In this case, we have a small group of people suffering as a result of the actions of the whole nation. There is substitution and representation, but there is no imputation or impartation going on. The more I study “clear” texts supporting penal substitution, the less clearly they support penal substitution. In particular, few can properly be read in a courtroom setting.

Then we have this:

The liberal attacks against PSA, at least the more ridiculous ones, follow the formula that most liberal attacks take, the if I were God, I wouldn’t do that, therefore God wouldn’t do that line of reasoning. The expression of this formula is typically found in liberal insistency that conservatives spend way too much time on the ideas of sin and wrath and not enough time on the nice passages about love and forgiveness. The most notorious recent “in the family” criticism of the PSA is from Steve Chalke, who, in his book The Lost Message of Jesus (Zondervan 2003) famously characterized it as “Cosmic Child Abuse.”

The problem I have here is that there is clearly a priority and a proper place to be given to scriptural texts. So what precisely is ridiculous about a liberal (or anyone else, for that matter) asking one to give proper priority to one set of texts or another? Jesus himself said that the law and the prophets hang on the two laws (Matthew 22:40). Now there are a number of ways one can view that, but I think it tends to put those two laws at the center. Thus I’m not at all unhappy to ask people to talk a bit more about love when they get hung up on God’s wrath. Jesus did!

It’s also quite appropriate, of course, to ask liberals to look a bit more at texts that reflect a less sympathetic God. One needs to deal with everything that is said in scripture in one way or another, after all. The problem is that we all have a mental framework that we bring to interpreting scripture. If I had different view on how to fit the pieces together, I would understand scripture differently. Those who claim to “just do what the Bible says” are missing some major components, or perhaps they’re lying to themselves.

As a quick example, let’s take Ezekiel 18:32, where God tells us he has “no desire for the death of anyone” (REB). On the other hand we have passages on predestination, which have been interpreted into the Calvinist scheme of predestination. Some people are predestined to life, while others, not so much. Then there’s double-predestination in which God makes two lists (and probably checks them twice), one of those who will be eternally saved, and the other of those who will be eternally damned. None of this is based on anything about the person; it’s just the way God decreed it.

I could go into the texts they use to support this view, but let’s just assume for the moment that they have them, and at least on the surface they seem to support that position. Then we go back to Ezekiel 18:32 (along with the rest of the chapter and Jeremiah 18), and see that God doesn’t desire the death of anyone. So God, who desires nobody to die, nonetheless makes certain that some do. This hits both the Limited Atonement and Irresistible Grace elements of TULIP. If God truly desires that nobody perish, and his grace is irresistible, how is it possible that his grace is not universally efficacious? If God desires that nobody should perish, why would he limit his atonement? If God applies irresistible grace to people without reference to their merit, and yet applies it to a number less than all of them, then he must somehow feel it necessary to kill a bunch of people (or torment them eternally in hell) for no reason. (And yes, I eagerly await the “inscrutable purposes of God” answer.)

Yes, I’ve read explanations for how these various texts fit in from Calvinists, but frankly they have failed to impress. They generally seem to me to amount to “it doesn’t really mean that.” To be fair, Arminian explanations of some of the good predestination passages (Romans 9 comes to mind) very often sound very much the same way; we’re just discounting different texts.

Finally, before I get to my main point, Heddle says the following about my previous post (this is actually after the part to which I intend to make my main response):

Reading between the lines, it seems to me that Neufeld is not so much against the PSA but against a different Reformed doctrine: Total Depravity. There is where we indeed find the language of loathsomeness and wrath that Neufeld so dislikes (and who can blame him.) But Total Depravity reflects God’s view of the unregenerate, not his view of believers. And the Atonement reflects God’s plan for those he loves, not those he hates. The two doctrines do not overlap much, but Neufeld, it seems to me, conflates them.

Actually I’m quite well aware of the two doctrines, and Heddle seems to share with his fellow PSA-proponents a certain blindness to the way their doctrine plays. One of the things that has repeatedly amazed me in discussions with Calvinists in general (and Heddle is certainly right that PSA fits well with Calvinism), is the way they can blithely ignore what is going to happen to billions of people through no particular action or inaction of their own. God has just decreed that they are to burn eternally in hell, but somehow I’m supposed to bask in the love of God for me, because I happened not to fall into that group. Elsewhere in his post Heddle mentions that I’m a believer, and thus God doesn’t loathe me. But you see, I’m concerned about what God thinks about my unbelieving neighbor down the street.

If I were one of two children, and my parents loved me dearly, yet hated my brother and beat him regularly, would I be right to call them loving parents? If I did, I would be a very narcissistic person, caring only about what happens to me. “My parents are really loving,” I would say. “Too bad they hate my brother and beat him mercilessly no matter what he does, while they reward me no matter what I do, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are loving.” Of course we wouldn’t accept such behavior on the part of parents, yet God supposedly behaves that way toward the universe, and we’re supposed to call it love.

It’s also instructive that Heddle tries to put my objection down to a point of doctrine. I find that the current day advocates of PSA are very much taken with confessional statements, and that the key to debate is generally found in such statements rather than in a particular passage of scripture. This is one way in which the reinterpretation of “died for sins” takes place. “For” gets instantly filled with the courtroom metaphor, and PSA slips in.

But the real key point to which I wanted to respond was this:

Neufeld argues that God’s love and forgiveness, not the PSA, are central to the gospel. I really have nothing to say about that, because I don’t have a clear understanding of what is meant by “central.” God has love. God forgives. The Atonement happened. It is not that there is something central to the gospel, but instead the gospel in central to all.

But right in there while saying “the gospel is central” Heddle must, of course, define the gospel. “God has love. God forgives. The Atonement happened.” So to him, as to other advocates of PSA, the atonement as they understand it is the gospel. To explain myself, that is what I mean by central. Taking the punishment, imputed sin and righteousness, that’s the central point of the gospel in PSA. And I regard that as unbalanced.

One cannot reasonably say simply that “the gospel is central” because the nature of the gospel is precisely what is in question. I think the core statement of the gospel should be something like this: “God loves you, desires the best for you eternally, and has made provision for your redemption/restoration.” That includes the willingness to forgive. It also means that while God’s anger goes out against sin, and will indeed catch those who stay in sin, God’s redemptive power (God’s love) also calls to everyone.

Now I could quibble about just about every word in that statement. I’m not the right person to write concise doctrinal statements–never say in a word what you can expend 10,000 words to say! But I think it’s close enough for my purposes.

Now we come to the idea of how God accomplishes redemption, and more directly how we describe the way in which God accomplishes redemption. It’s important to realize that we are not seeing or describing the very reality of God. Reformed theologians are very good at seeing how mysterious God’s purposes are when it suits them. “Who am I to question God? Who are you? If he wants to burn billions of people for all eternity, that’s his right! He’s God!” But when you come down to a metaphor describing God’s, PSA, they insist it’s the reality and that they understand just how God approaches it and what he can and can’t do.

Well, I think God’s forgiveness, or God’s willingness to forgive, and God’s love are just as much past my understanding as anything else about God. But he’s chosen to reveal it to me in scripture through different metaphors. Atonement, imputation, impartation, propitiation, and so forth are just words that are combined in metaphors to describe the reality of God’s love and forgiveness. That’s what I mean by “central.” God redeems because he loves–that’s central. The process by which God does that is peripheral.

A courtroom with the judge declaring the defendant not guilty, but yet where someone else paid the penalty made sense in a medieval environment. You couldn’t have justice without the penalty being paid after all. But if you press the metaphor too far, you have an injustice (punishment of the innocent) supposedly making another injustice (declaring the guilty innocent) acceptable in some way. You have God effectively either lying or pulling the wool over his own eyes in saying that the sinner is not guilty. As one metaphor, it works. Pushed into the center it just gets silly. Steve Chalke was quite right to call it divine child abuse.

At this point I also want to comment on misunderstandings and misstatements of PSA. I’m not going to go out and look for the purest, best statement of PSA I can find, and only try to object to that, though as long as it’s still made central, I would object. One of the problems with any metaphor is that it gets stretched one way or another. One way this happens to PSA is that it gets expressed without its trinitarian underpinnings. Without that, we get God punishing his son, who is a separate entity for the sins of the world. At the same time we get God being hoodwinked by Jesus so that he doesn’t see the real sinners. Now these versions are, of course, not proper expressions of the PSA theology, but they are very common expressions out in the pews.

Now I’m not going to say that PSA should be blamed for every misunderstanding, but I do think that when any metaphor is not acknowledged as such, it’s going to be extensively misunderstood and misapplied. As long as people understand that it’s an illustration, then it’s much easier to correct the excesses.

Obviously there are many, many items in Heddle’s post to which I have not responded. I’m currently working on some material on 2 Corinthians 5, responding to Wright and Piper, which will be published over on my Participatory Bible Study Blog. In that, I agree with Wright that 2 Corinthians 5:21, a standard PSA proof text, is not talking about PSA. This is a change of position for me, as I used to regard that as a PSA text, even though I still regarded it as a metaphor.

There is so much to be said about the set of related issues involved here that even in what is probably an excessively long post, I have hardly touched on any of it. I will, of course, return to this topic during the coming months.

Adrian has put a good deal of emphasis on what he sees as the gracious approach that John Piper has taken toward N. T. Wright’s work, and how accurately, in his view, Bishop Wright has been portrayed. I have no reason to believe that Piper is intending to be anything but gracious and accurate, and yet there are some things that bother me just a bit. (On these, see below.)

I’m going to outline the points here, but much of my reading on the new perspective has been from sources other than N. T. Wright, so I want to emphasize two things. First, I am in no way trying to characterize Wright’s views on this. I think those who really want to understand him should read what he has written. I linked to an excellent paper he wrote in my previous post on this topic, Justification: The Biblical Basis and its Relevance for Contemporary Evangelicalism (PDF). Second, I am myself exploring these ideas, and my training was primarily Old Testament, though I did a considerable amount of exegesis in Greek in school, and afterward. But even so I think I can perhaps help clarify a couple of things.

I started from Adrian’s post today, Legalism Versus Grace in First Century Judaism, in which he says:

Anyone who has read anything about the New Perspectives on Paul will realize that one of the key arguments is that we have misunderstood the Pharisees through the perspective of the Reformation. The first century Jews were never legalists, we are told. . . .

But there are a number of problems with this claim as well. First, it is not essential for the New Perspectives on Paul (NPP) that one assume that there were no Jewish legalists, or that there were no legalistic Pharisees. The key position is that Judaism was and is not a legalistic religion, and that in it favor with God was based on grace. I can find any number of legalistic Christians, plenty of whom would fit as targets of some passages in Luke 18 (cited by Adrian later in the paragraph), but they do not make Christianity into a legalistic religion by nature.

Jesus can encounter dozens and hundreds of legalistic Pharisees, and yet the essential foundation of Pharisaism need not be legalistic, nor does it have to carry over into modern Judaism in a legalistic fashion. Just how far one goes on this issue is another matter, and one which I am studying. I definitely believe that the religion of the Mosaic covenant, Israelite religion, was founded on grace expressed through the covenant. That has been my position long before I read any NPP material.

I tend to see first century Judaism as both a bit more corrupted and also more fragmented, so that I find it questionable to make many generalizations about first century Judaism. One could make a few generalizations about groups. Having said that, the Pharisees were probably one of the less corrupt groups. I suspect that they often disputed with Jesus because they were able to connect more frequently, while still not agreeing with him.

But this whole debate illustrates one of the problems I’m seeing with the online critique. (And again I must emphasize that I have not read The Future of Justification, and thus am not commenting on Piper’s own work, but only on Adrian’s presentation of it on his blog.) This issue of legalistic Pharisees as opposed to the legalistic nature of Judaism (or not, as Wright would maintain), illustrates the major paradigm shift that Wright and others are making. They are not seeing justification as dealing with whether an individual is “saved” or not, but rather as proclaiming/acknowledging that person’s entry into God’s people as a group. It is an individualistic perspective that, in answer to the claim that a faith position is based on grace, points out individuals who are legalistic.

For the NPP, we have been reading Galatians and Romans from the wrong perspective, asking the wrong questions. This was drilled into me both as an undergraduate Biblical languages student and in seminary: The message of Galatians is that we are saved by grace through faith and not by the works of the law. Essentially, in that case, Galatians is written in opposition to legalism, and particularly Jewish legalism.

Since first reading a bit about the NPP, I have worked through Galatians twice in Greek, using two different commentaries that at least partake of portions of the NPP. Each time through has been a bit mind twisting. But as I teach at the most basic level of Bible study methods, your questions often determine your answers, so it is very important to ask the right questions. In the case of Galatians, in the seminary classroom, I asked the question “How can I be saved?” I found an answer there–not by the works of the law, but rather by faith.

The NPP suggests that Paul is answering a different question: How does one become a part of God’s people, i.e. how does one come under the covenant? Paul’s enemies say it is by becoming Jews, with the sign of circumcision; Paul says that incorporation takes place because of the death and resurrection of Jesus and through faith. We are looking here much less at individual salvation, and much more at the definition of community. Neither side believes that being part of the covenant people can be earned by works. The sign and the means of incorporation are different.

This is over-simplified, partially because I haven’t incorporated the vocabulary myself, but after two passes through the book of Galatians trying to answer those questions I think I begin to see how the categories work. If you really want to try to understand the NPP, one good exercise is to ditch the “how does an individual become righteous in God’s eyes?” question, and replace it with “how and why does a person come under God’s covenant?” Then read Galatians looking for the answer to that second question. I’m not saying give up your view ahead of time. Just tentatively ask yourself how the book would work if you were asking a different question.

Ironically, it looks to me like Piper might have erred in an attempt to be as gracious as possible. He attempts to read Wright as favorably as possible from his own perspective. In Adrian’s post John Piper: Is N. T. Wright Preaching Another Gospel?, he quotes Piper noting the areas in which Wright would agree with the reformed view, and then the single item on which he disagrees. From Piper’s point of view, making Wright agree in most senses with the reformed view appears gracious. But it looks to me like he is missing the point. It is not that Wright goes along with the standard view and then disagrees because he does not believe righteousness is imputed or imparted. Rather, he is defining righteousness in a different way, and therefore the declaration that one is righteous means something different. It is a paradigm shift in which almost all definitions are adjusted, not a minor alteration.

I think we need to understand the NPP, and particularly Wright’s view of all of this carefully as a whole. Picking it apart in a point by point comparison with the reformed view, or any other for that matter, will not work well, because Wright is shifting the categories. Justification doesn’t mean the same thing to him as it does to a traditional reformed theologian.

Other than to note the escalation, however, the grace (or lack thereof) of Piper’s book (which I have not read) is not my topic. I don’t have a dog in this hunt, so to speak, because I am not nearly as concerned that one gets justification precisely right. This topic is, in my view, very susceptible to “doctrinal correctness”–a tenseness about precise terms that makes it difficult to explore. Reformed theologians in particular seem to want to make one’s precise understanding of justification they anchor point of their theology. They equate it with the gospel. I couldn’t possibly disagree more. The gospel is not a precise understanding of esoteric points of theology.

Which leads me to the actual purpose of this post. What is driving the discussion? Piper is criticizing Wright’s view on justification, and I’m not going to criticize him directly, but there is a clear tendency in Adrian’s quotes from Piper, and that is simply define what reformed theology has been up until now, demonstrate that Wright disagrees, and leave the obvious impression that Wright must be wrong.

Elsewhere, there are some who claim that Wright’s theology is driven by ecumenical goals–bringing Catholic and protestant views together. I’m not sure how well that is going, if it is true. Certainly the hardliners in the reformed camp aren’t feeling the ecumenical spirit in all of this.

But when I read Wright himself, I get a different impression entirely of his driving force. Now I need to place a caveat here. I am only a small part of the way through my own preliminary studies of this New Perspectives on Paul, and I probably won’t try to express my own opinion on some of the key issues for months. Right now I can simply say that the work of Wright answers some questions about Paul for me and raises others. I’m tempted to simply fall back to the notion that Paul was a complex character, and does not willingly fit into our theological boxes.

When N. T. Wright goes about doing his own writing he appears to me to be driven not to find or produce a particular theological result, but rather by exegetical concerns. He seems to be more careful to follow the text where it leads than the majority of writers. I’ve read. For an example of his exegetical writing, see On Becoming the Righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21). For a more theological view, with Wright expressing his own view of justification, see Justification: The Biblical Basis and its Relevance for Contemporary Evangelicalism.

In response to this, we need more than theology. I have no doubt that there are reformed theologians making theological arguments, yet there are also many who are simply happy to point out that Wright fails to meet their standards of “orthodox evangelical theology” and thus can be dismissed out of hand.

But wasn’t one of the features of the reformation going directly back to scripture? At this point it looks to me like the Bishop of Durham is behaving like a reformation theologian–digging through the texts and trying to come to the best understanding possible, while the purported defenders of the reformation are left to point out just how orthodox their teaching is–by their standards.

If I’m given the choice between defending theological turf and wrestling with exegesis and trying to understand Paul in his world and mission I’ll choose the latter every time.

Responding to Torture

First, I have been trying to get a handle on writing a post on torture, with the Mukasey hearings, but I haven’t gotten beyond “torture is evil.” After that it feels odd to be explaining that torture is bad. It’s so much a part of me, that I have a hard time taking it seriously as a debate, but there it is, being debated by presumably serious people.

But Joe Carter has saved me on this point, by writing a 100% on target, excellent post, Our Tortured Silence: The Shameful Response of Christians to Waterboarding.

All I would add is that our fear sometimes makes us waffle on our moral convictions. We must fight terrorism, but we must be sure to maintain our integrity while we do it, or the terrorists win even if we physically defeat them. Let’s be sure we like who we are when we’re done.

Dividing the Denominations

Through an unrelated comment, I found a post on the division of the church, Happy Reformation Day/Hallowe’en. This relates to my own previous post, Setting Doctrinal Priorities. I’m not concerned about their being denominations, or at least accountability organizations that bring congregations together, but we very often do not see the unifying factors, and thus splinter further and further.

What is the Gospel?

Again, relating to two earlier posts, Adrian Warnock has posted on justification again, and after quoting a description of forensic justification, and details of imputed righteousness, he says:

That, my dear reader, is the Gospel. What better explanation of it have you ever read?

Now I don’t have a problem with Adrian seeing the gospel there, but that is simply one way of expressing it; it is not the only one. When we divide along such detailed lines, I see many problems ahead for Christian unity.