Archive for April, 2008

In the most recent issue of The Baptist Bulletin (March/April 2008) I noticed a two-page memorial tribute about Wendell Kempton, the President Emeritus of ABWE, who died January 6, 2008. I probably would have paid no attention if I had not received earlier this year an e-mail sent out by Larry Smith, with whom I worked for a couple of years in the 1990s at Heritage Baptist College and Seminary. Until I received Larry’s e-mail I do not believe I knew the name of Dr. Kempton.

I was struck by one paragraph in particular about Dr. Kempton. Larry wrote this about him:

“I was in my office in Santiago, Chile beginning our second term of missionary service when I learned that our new president of ABWE was a man named Wendell Kempton. I did not know him or anything about him. I asked a missionary colleague who he was and he replied, “We call him Wendy—he’s a coach.”

“…As time passed, I was privileged to have Dr. Kempton “coach” me. I remember sitting in the airport in Santiago, Chile and listening intently to him as he coached me with words of wisdom on how to become a better missionary. As I approach retirement, I remember him telling me that “it is more important how you leave an organization than how you entered”.”

Those are wise words indeed.

We who live in a culture consumed by being and staying young need to pause and listen to the wisdom of poets like John Donne:

“No Spring, nor Summer beauty hath such grace,
As I have seen in one Autumnal face.”

[cited Jilly Cooper, The British in Love (Penguin, 1980), 158].

A dear friend, John Clubine, recently passed along to me a couple of pages from The Berean Call, 23, No.3 (March 2008), an article by T.A. McMahon entitled “Ancient-Future Heresies.” There are a number of things in the article with which I would wholeheartedly agree. But at one point the following is stated:

“…it takes very little scrutiny of men like Origen, Ireaeus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Cyprian, Justin Martyr, Athanasius, John Chrysostom, Cyril of Jerusalem, Augustine, and others, to see their flaws, let alone their heresies. For example, Origen taught that God would save everyone and that Mary was a perpetual virgin; Irenaeus believed that the bread and wine became the body and blood of Jesus when consecrated, as did John Chrysostom and Cyril of Jerusalem; Athanasius taught salvation through baptism; Tertullian became a supporter of the Montanist heresies, and a promoter of a New Testament clergy class, as did his disciple Cyprian; Augustine was the principal architect of Catholic dogma that included his support of purgatory, baptismal regeneration, and infant baptism, mortal and venial sins, prayers to the dead, penance for sins, absolution from a priest, the sinlessness of Mary, the Apocrypha as Scripture, etc. It’s not that these men got everything wrong; some on certain doctrines, upheld Scripture against the developing unbiblical dogmas of the roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless, overall they are a heretical minefield. So why seek them out?” (p.4).

John Lukacs, a marvelous historian, has recently said that one of the reasons why we need to do history is that there is so much bad history out there. And this paragraph is a case in point! Much of what is said here is out and out erroneous, some of it needs nuancing and parts of it are right. It would take a book to respond adequately, and a blog is probably not the best place in engage in developing an adequate response.

But suffice it to say this: the paragraph ends with a very erroneous statement and a very important question. The deeply erroneous statement: “overall they are a heretical minefield.” Wow! There have been some in the past who argued thus, but they were usually ones who disagreed with the Reformation impulse and felt that the entire history of the church between the Apocalypse of John and the Reformation was an utter wasteland. Best to forget it all and start anew.

This was not the view of the Reformers, who felt that the Fathers of the Church could aid them in the Reformation needed in their day. Not that the Reformers believed everything that the Fathers wrote. They tested all against Holy Scripture. But they did believe that the Fathers more often supported them than they did their Roman Catholic opponents.

The question: “why seek them out?” Because the Reformers like Calvin and Cranmer and Knox believed that the Fathers were important witnesses to biblical truth and they bore witness to the grace of God at work in the Church.

In the Ancient Church a Christian was a person who turned from idols and embraced the living God as he had revealed himself definitively in the crucified and risen Christ (1 Thessalonians 1:9-10). What made him a Christian? Faith, which was rooted in the electing work of God (see Acts 11:18; 13:48; 15:7-9; 16:31).

None of the early New Testament authors believed that the act of baptism alone saved anyone (thus Mark 16:16). Baptism is the way a person with a good conscience (to see what this is and how one obtains it, read Hebrews 9:14) responds to the saving work of God. Thus 1 Peter 3:21 means that the baptism which saves is that which is “the pledge of a good conscience toward God.”

These convictions must be asserted afresh today for the upholders of the so-called Federal Vision maintain that the baptism of infants makes them Christians—a position that is simply taking us back to the disastrous confusion of the medieval Church. As a Calvinistic Baptist I have deep admiration for many Reformed paedobaptist brothers, though I would disagree with their argument that infant baptism is a covenantal sign that must be affirmed later in life. But such brethren do not argue for trust for salvation in the baptismal rite. There must be conversion.

But this position is quite different from the affirmation that a human rite in itself and by itself saves. The Apostle clearly rejects this latter argument in 1 Corinthians 10:1-5. If participation in the ordinances saved, then surely those who followed Moses out of Egypt would have entered the Promised Land. But they did not—for baptism (and the Lord’s Table) do not save.

God will not give the glory of being the Saviour of his people to another person or thing!

This past Saturday morning, The Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, now located at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (www.sbts.edu) , teamed up with Toronto Baptist Seminary (www.tbs.edu ) to present a mini-conference of two lectures by Dr Liam Goligher of Duke Street Church in Richmond-on-Thames, London (see www.dukestreetchurch.co.uk ). This conference had been planned before the move of the Andrew Fuller Center to Louisville, but it is hoped that the Center will be able to hold a similar event annually in southern Ontario.

Dr Goligher superbly and succinctly analyzed the Emergent Church in his first lecture and then looked at the deviations from a solid biblical focus on penal, substitutionary atonement in his second talk. Coming from a position Goligher described as “Catholic [that is rooted in the patristic era], Protestant, Reformed, and Evangelical,” he examined Emergent thinking in relation to Scripture, humanity, Christ, salvation, ethics, and Christian orthodoxy. He urged his hearers that while we must be humble in the way we present the truth, we should not “be humble about the truth” itself. Truth can be known—though obviously not all the truth about any given topic. Insightfully he suggested that the opposite of humility today for many people—even Christians—is not pride, but conviction.

Goligher’s second lecture looked at the doctrine of the cross in the New and Old Testaments. He ably responded to Steve Chalke’s recent argument that viewing the cross as God’s judgment on sin is simply cosmic child abuse and rightly pointed out that the charge is not a new one. Goligher powerfully argued that the cross achieves propitiation, reconciliation, redemption, and victory over evil.

It was a morning well spent. We hope, DV, to have another set of lectures next year at roughly the same time. On that occasion, Dr Stephen Wellum of Southern will be with us lecturing on the person of Christ. Plan on joining us!

For another report of the lectures by Dr Goligher, see Kirk Wellum: Post Lecture Thoughts.

The audio of Dr Goligher’s lectures can be found here on the Toronto Baptist website:

Lecture #1 The Emergent Church – Reinventing Liberalism

Lecture #2 – Preaching The Cross Today

The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University is offering a summer course on Jonathan Edwards: see Summer Course June 9 – 13, 2008 The World of Jonathan Edwards. It looks awesome. I have prior commitments, or I would almost definitely take this in.

HT: Justin Taylor

Some great words from Hilary of Poitiers (c.315-367/8), whom I have long desired to study more and even write a biography of him:

“The Apostle, who instructs us on many things, also teaches us that the Word of God must be treated with the greatest reverence, saying “whoever speaks, [let him speak] as uttering the oracles of God” [1 Peter 4:11]. For we ought not to treat Scripture with a vulgar familiarity, as we do in our ordinary speech; rather, when we speak of what we have learned and read we should give honor to the author by our care for the way we express ourselves… Preachers, then, must think that they are not speaking to a human audience, and hearers must know that it is not human words that are being offered to them, but that they are God’s words, God’s decrees, God’s laws. For both roles, the utmost reverence is fitting.” [Tractatus super Psalmum 13.1 (CCSL 61:76, ll.1-6, 21-24)].

It seems so obvious that when a significant portion of Holy Scripture is poetic in form, poetry in genre, that preachers should take courses in understanding ancient poetry—and some instruction on how to interpret more modern forms of poetry would surely help as well. But the poetic is not in vogue in our culture (apart from modern music, and that is usually little better than nursery rhymes!), and we, and preaching, are the worse off. Is it no wonder that the Psalms, the poetic portions of the Prophets and other poetic portions of Holy Scripture are not regularly preached as much as the more didactic forms that appeal to the modern western mind-set?

Ah, these shallows of the spirit,
When time tapers, grows thin—
Legion in this cracked life we lead.

But, oh by Spirit to probe Profundity
To tread Time’s thickness by sole
—Is not this why feet were made?

Michael A.G. Haykin©2008.

Honey couldn’t melt this tongue
Held fast by frost;
These dry lips, from the belly of hell,
Moaned my gaping stone to be moved;
Shrieking at Heaven’s roof
I yelped my disobedience loud:
“This stone is too heavy to bear.”

Then, at winter’s sweetness
My spirit was raised;
From beneath a forest-lawn
To a river, wounded with drenchèd hope,
Regal joy made me sense
The awe-full groanings of the deep:
Tides, high as the Temple.

Michael A.G. Haykin©2008.