Postmode

I’ve kind of gotten to a point in studying theology where all of the general concepts make sense to me, and I have a general understanding of what is orthodox and what is unorthodox. But I also have a horrible memory and have done nothing to link my beliefs to scripture; essentially, if called upon to defend my theological persuasions, for a great number of them I could not (at least if my own knowledge is the key factor; I’ve actually had several experiences where God totally brought random pieces of Scripture to my mind, out of the blue, when talking with some people). I was talking with my friend Sean about this about a week or two ago, and I’ve decided that I really want to be studying these issues and at least be writing down a defense of orthodox beliefs that I would hold to but could not defend on the spot. This may not be the end goal I seek for, but it gets me a step closer and I would certainly be more likely to remember this stuff.

I’m starting with discipline because it’s a topic I’ve been meaning to get a better grasp on for a while now. But it should be obvious that this isn’t necessarily a large issue of orthodox doctrine, as justification or penal substitutionary atonement is. Thus, accept that these are about orthodox doctrines even when it comes to the loosest of things. In this new category of posts on this blog, I want to consider anything that is true and has a bearing on or basis in Scripture or the Church.

I begin with discipline. I have begun studying the topic, and the first full resource (aside from articles and blog posts) that I’ve turned to is Jay Adams’ Handbook of Church Discipline. I don’t have the time or space to do a full outline of where all of this comes from in Scripture, but it’s all basically drawn out as an implication of a few select passages, mainly Jesus’ words on discipline in Matthew 18.

Discipline is a mark of the true church, commanded by Jesus (Matthew 18:15-20). It is a right of every professing believer, who receives the right by virtue of being in the church catholic, but by means of the church local. Furthermore, discipline is fundamentally a matter of educating believers. As Adams says, in Hebrews 12:11 the word discipline in Greek is paideia, which refers to the Greek way of educating children. Therefore, this context suggests that the author is saying that the goal in discipline is to teach. Teach who? Those who are either 1) unlearned (preventive discipline) or 2) sinning (punitive discipline).

Preventive discipline consists primarily of teaching believers the Word of God; secondarily it consists of administering the sacraments of water baptism by either immersion or sprinkling (as an infant if the parents are in agreement, or else as adults) and holy communion. In essence, our attempt is to equip members to hopefully be at a point where they will know what is sin, and not do those things that are sinful.

Punitive discipline consists of four stages. In all of these, the chief goal is that the person listen and repent. If at any point the person does repent (even if it is after having been removed from the church body) they are to be welcomed back, accepted, forgiven, loved, and most importantly assisted with the sin and effects of the sin they were struggling with. When calling a member to repentance, the member should be confronted as much as is necessary at one stage to confirm that the person has not listened to the call to repentance. This is not a once-a-step deal. This does not apply in all places, though; for example, see Titus 3:10-11. In such cases, discipline can be executed much more quickly so as to be in line with Paul’s commandment to Titus.

The first two stages of punitive discipline can be described as informal because it does not require the elders or congregation as a whole to have any part at all. In fact, from the “widening” scope of the number of people who find out about the sin in the system that Jesus has established for us, it is clear that keeping the issue confined to as few people as possible is a priority, which would mean that the elders or congregation not only are not required to know, but in fact should not know. The person’s reputation is to be protected unless it is necessary to discipline them within a wider group of people.

Informal discipline is done by calling the sinning member or group to repentance first on a one-on-one basis (e.g., one person calls a person or group to repentance), and if it is clear that the person or group has not listened to the call to repentance, this is escalated to include two or three witnesses going with the original confronter for yet another series of calls to repentance given to the sinning member or group. It is not necessary that these people have witnessed the person or group’s sin themselves; they are there to confirm that the member was confronted and called to repentance and did not in fact do so. This is evident from Jesus saying in Matthew 18:16, “that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses.” The word that I believe to be used for “charge” here, rhema refers to the words spoken or the subject matter discussed. So they are to be there to witness what is said to the person.

The third and fourth steps of punitive discipline can be described as formal, meaning that the leaders and entire church are involved. In these stages, the entire local church exercises discipline towards an errant individual or group. The third step of discipline consists of calling to repentance, in the presence of the entire gathered congregation (and them only) the member or group who is/are in sin. If they do not repent, the second stage of formal discipline is to cast the person out into the world and treat them as a Gentile and a tax collector (Matthew 18:17).

A few wolves can do great damage in a naive flock.

- Mark Driscoll, “Putting Pastors In Their Place” (click to watch/download) - Text & Context, February 25th, 2008

If you’re saved by the blood of Christ, by his grace which causes you to have faith in him and rely on him for salvation… then you have at least one.

We don’t talk about these often, and when we do, it’s usually the crazy guy with white pants, a $400 weekly hair-cut, who always talks about slaying people in the spirit while pushing them over, and has a wife who wears too much make-up and is also called “pastor” - the “charismaniacs”, in Mark Driscoll’s words. And when these guys do speak about spiritual gifts, they sound and look like crackheads and so most people ignore them, and that’s good, because we don’t want you or me or anyone else to be listening to somebody who doesn’t know what in the hell they’re talking about, and while we’re talking about hell, who are also probably going there because they’re not obsessed with Jesus but with all the money that people will give them because they think they’re loving on Jesus by doing that. Those men are shameless, and I hope you never have to be exposed to teaching about spiritual gifts from them. But to where shall you turn?

Fear not! If you’ve never really thought about what your spiritual gifts may be, or don’t know much about what spiritual gifts are, there’s a good guy named Mark Driscoll who is a pastor up in Seattle at a little church called Mars Hill. He did a series of six sermons on spiritual gifts. I downloaded them all and put them up on my website for you to download (cause their website is kind of a hassle to use, a little bit). Here are links below. Right-click and click on “Save Link As…” (Firefox users) or “Save Target As…” (Internet Explorer users). I don’t know what text you have to click on in Safari to download sermons, but typically only smart people use Macs, so I figure you’ll probably already know how to download files anyway. Once you’ve downloaded them, you can listen to them in iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, etcetera. Alternatively, if you just click on the link (instead of right-clicking) it should play in your browser.

Spiritual Gifts I: Overview, and Wisdom & Knowledge
Spiritual Gifts II: Faith, Healing, Miracles, and Discernment
Spiritual Gifts III
Spiritual Gifts IV: Encouragement, Giving, Leadership, Mercy, and Hospitality
Spiritual Gifts V: Tongues and Prophecy
Spiritual Gifts VI

I said in an earlier post about the supremacy of Christ in reason that it seems that with reason we have two alternative views that can be held: one consists in believing that we can have reason because we think reasonably (a one-step circularity, where the idea of reason upholds and supports itself), the other consists in believing that we can have reason because God forms the basis for rationality in our world (this results in a two-step circularity, in which the idea of reason is upheld by God, and we believe in God because of rational reasons).

My original question was: “Is there some kind of excellence in the many-faceted kind of circularity like we find in Christianity that is not present in singly circular reasoning?” But I do believe that I got the horse before the cart here. Before we can ask whether two-(or more)-step circularity is superior to one-step circularity, where reason validates itself, we have to ask whether there are any contradictions in either. I was reading through the Drange-Wilson debate earlier this week and realized that I hadn’t even considered that one might be inherently flawed by virtue of contradiction. This eradicates the asking of this question because it pre-emptively answers it. Doug Wilson writes about the contradiction present in non-Christian presuppositions here.

Note: This post is about 1) Doug Wilson’s post Dead Rat Behind The Fridge, and 2) Jeff Hutchinson’s response at Green Baggins, I Am Doug Wilson’s Dead Rat Behind The Fridge. Please note also that while I may sound acerbic here, my main focus is on keeping the facts straight. I’m not trying to attack anyone. And in the fashion of Jeff’s post “And So It Begins”, I am not making this post at the request or with the permission of Doug Wilson. As Jeff said of Bob Mattes, if Doug Wilson would prefer that this not be up I’d be more than happy to take it down.

A few things to mention, along with various interleaved questions.

• In response to the questions pertaining to the names of certain individuals that Doug failed to provide, here’s a list:
  • “PCA men who have misrepresented my doctrinal views in their books, articles, reports, and blogs;” - I believe this would fall under the headings of “Johnson, Gary”; “Waters, Guy”; and “Clark, Robert Scott”.
  • the “bureaucratic insiders” and “gatekeepers” in the PCA;” - Well, it starts with people who make unjust accusations on their blogs and then keep anybody from responding in a public forum to openly confront lies. It goes on from there, but in particular this foundation has been well established on the Heidelblog. This isn’t the actual place where this occurs (I think Doug was referring to the actual actions in the PCA), but this sort of thing is an indicator of what is going on.
  • the “leaders among the FV critics;” - This would again include misters Johnson, Waters, and Clark. There are also a number of men who, if I recall correctly, put out a report talking about the views of the Federal Vision in which they denounced it - without ever having once spoken to a Federal Visionist. The next two groups on the list of people who were mentioned by Doug Wilson also fall into this same category.
• In response to Jeff’s questioning of Doug’s accusation of anonymity-mongering, please consider other sources such as Robert Scott Clark’s blog. Here are some choice selections: How Does the Salvation of the Culture Look in Moscow? and Interpreting Providence? (it is absolutely shocking to me that nobody calls Clark out on his - in the words of Doug’s own post - “crap”. The elders of Christ Church have addressed that issue, and as they themselves said here, “The pastor and elders of Christ Church deeply regret that the enemies of our church have decided that additional pain to the families of the victims is worth the petty political points they think they can score with this.”). So the claim that 1) nationally recognized leaders against the Federal Vision are recognizing anonymous attack blogs and that 2) they are stooping to the level of “sneeveling around with slanderous accusations circulated by anonymous and lying cowards” and that 3) they are “producing ‘crap’” are quite well-founded. There’s simply no question about it: I just linked to one example of this above.
• “And So It Begins” may well have been a post aimed at exposing the attack, but instead, it ended up being a vicious maligning of brothers in Christ by accepting any word concerning them with absolutely no discretion, and for that Jeff is as much in need of making an apology as he believes is the case with Doug Wilson and Mike Lawyer. There is no justification for the length of time that the post was allowed to go unchecked. He is supposed to be an imitable model for all other believers. “I then allowed comments (some of which included links to articles and primary documents) to be posted on Greenbagginses, with appropriate warnings, for those who might choose to read the articles and documents, as to reading with godly discernment.” Have you forgotten Psalm 23? We’re SHEEP. Sheep are dumb, stubborn, don’t want to listen to anybody else, and routinely screw themselves over. It is the job of a pastor (shepherd) to look out for the flock, and just because they happen to live in a different city doesn’t mean pastors who live in other areas - and this is especially true with the dawn of instant, high-speed, internet communication - aren’t charged with looking out for them too. Geographical proximity puts a pastor in closer touch with certain members of the Church than it does others, but this by no means negates the responsibility of a pastor to look out for the church as whole (else why have anybody but members of Auburn Avenue or Christ Church attack the Federal Vision?)

• This is the series of events to which Doug Wilson was referring when he wrote his blog post, “Dead Rat Behind the Fridge.” This and this alone. This website and my post.

  In other words, I am Doug Wilson’s #1 dead rat behind the fridge.

  Except for Bob Mattes, who perhaps was following my lead, no one else among the large group of men that Doug Wilson charges, allowed links to be posted to the internet articles and primary documents that various commenters forwarded to us, on this blog or anywhere else that I am aware of. No one else. I and Bob were the only ones who did that. Not Lane. Not Reed. Not David. No one else. Certainly not anyone in the PCA who has written “books, articles, or reports” about the FV. And certainly not anyone on the SJC!

  There are not scores of dead rats behind the fridge. There is one dead rat, two if you count Bob (Bob, don’t let anyone ever tell you that you don’t count!).

  As I have capably demonstrated (and it only took two or three Google searches) this is patently false. Even the two most recent posts I link to above on the Heidelblog discredit this claim.

• To him, I am the dead rat behind the fridge, but the facts are not as he represents them. I did not “cite anonymous attack blogs as credible sources;” I did not “demonstrate that I believe (anonymous attack blogs) sufficiently authoritative” (nor do I believe that, whether or not I “demonstrated” it); I did not “demonstrate in public that I am prepared to accept, and have accepted, anonymous testimony” (nor have I or would I, whether or not I “demonstrated” that); I have not been “sneeveling around with slanderous accusations circulated by anonymous and lying cowards;” nor was my post ”crap.”

  Jeff had to moderate the comments being posted. I know this is true because somebody said something that seemed like it was a direct response to me, and I got a little bit hot-headed and made a response in justification of my claim that I was not one of Doug Wilson’s five clones (he keeps them lying around for all the things he can’t get to in between holding all of Moscow hostage and shooting puppies with a .23 - these things have been well documented by Mark T and dougsplotch respectively). Jeff, in turn, said that he was moderating the comments and that mine had not been posted yet when the other person made the comment. I quickly apologized.

  Now, how is it that he isn’t complicit in all of these things? He allowed them to be posted, and if I recall correctly was quite happy to continue allowing certain “slanderous”, “anonymous” comments by “lying cowards” to go straight through.

• Third–and I would be glad to be corrected about this one–neither Mike Lawyer nor Doug Wilson have apologized to Bob for their attacks upon him, though I believe they have removed the letter Mike Lawyer wrote from the internet, which is certainly a good first step.

  I do believe that something close to an apology (if not at least an explanation) of the incidents surrounding Mike Lawyer’s letter can be found here.

  • UPDATE: Mike Lawyer has posted an official apology here.

Grace and peace to everyone.

Grace has no handles and is impossible for sinners to pick up. But grace does have hands and consequently has no difficulty picking us up.
- Douglas Wilson, “Grace Has No Handles”

On total depravity:

I disbelieve that doctrine, partly on the logical ground that if our depravity were total we should not know ourselves to be depraved, and partly because experience shows us much goodness in human nature. Nor am I recommending universal gloom. The emotion of shame has been valued not as an emotion but because of the insight to which it leads. I think that insight should be permanent in each man’s mind: but whether the painful emotions that attend it should also be encouraged, is a technical problem of spiritual direction on which, as a layman, I have little call to speak. My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to ‘rejoice’ as much as by anything else.
- C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

I think that Lewis’ comments here on the doctrine of Total Depravity highlight a shortness of thought (even in that excellent intellect of his) when it comes to this doctrine.

Most people, if they have been raised in the church, believe that the Christian view of morality is of morality as synonymous with righteousness, and therefore morals in general are synonymous with the righteousness of God, which is the virtue of in all things seeking to glorify God in a way that simultaneously respects his gracious law. This overlap view is adopted, I think, because in so many ways it happens to match the various sentimentalities that we see not only in ourselves but in others.

But morality and righteousness are entirely different beasts. Only in religion will you find the idea of righteousness. Speaking of the virtue of righteousness in atheism sounds very odd, like a desperate relic of religion. Likewise, Christians ought to recognize that their idea of morality is only one among the multitudes of moral beliefs in the world, each dictated by its god, each rooted solidly in its religion. This is even true of an atheist, who unwittingly makes a god out of the Ego or Reason. Of course I speak loosely of “gods” here; no atheist would call that a god. I am only insinuating that they have many of the same relations to their object of worship – themselves, reason, pleasure – that a theist has to their god, and they follow and love it like a god.

We can also clearly see that one can be a very moral person and yet not be righteous in any way. I have never murdered anybody, I have never had promiscuous sexual relationships - knowingly having aids and infecting all my partners in their ignorance of that fact (just to make it truly vicious); I have never done drugs or stolen cars or killed cute animals. I’m a very moral person to all appearances. But “without faith it is impossible to please God.” And if this is the case, then it means that we can keep the requirement of the law and yet never possess righteousness. Righteousness by its very nature “tracks”, in a sense, the pleasure of God. If we are not therefore pleasing God without faith, we do not possess righteousness either.

Seeing that morality as we use the word is divergent from true righteousness, not one of us should fall into this snare. This snare is what Lewis traps himself in. He says, “I disbelieve that doctrine, partly on the logical ground that if our depravity were total we should not know ourselves to be depraved…” We certainly do see that we are not morally depraved because we can see what is morally right and wrong - morally in its root, I think, referring to social mores, things that help society (Wikipedia: Mores). But if we were depraved in a righteousness sense, we wouldn’t know that we were depraved because we have already ignorantly suppressed the truth to follow our own desires - which may very well be moral - and there is no reason to think that we do not know we are depraved. We suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

Lewis is identifying morality with righteousness here. But the meaning of the doctrine of total depravity is not that we are as immoral as possible, it is that we lack all righteousness, which means we lack faith. So total depravity is not a complete lapse into immorality, it is a complete absence of faith. This is what it means to be totally depraved: that we behave either morally or immorally, but in either case do not have faith, which is the evidence for our hope. Every one of us who is not in Christ is still under the curse of total depravity because they do not have faith. This doesn’t stop them from recognizing “goodness in human nature” as Lewis supposes.  In fact, it leads to us seeing goodness in human nature: particularly ourselves.

I am sure of two things regarding skepticism. The first is that it is a philosophically valid objection to philosophical theories of knowledge. The other is that the view is wholly unbiblical. I’m not very familiar with presuppositional apologetics, and until I ran across this summary essay of the views of presuppositional apologists such as Bahsen and Van Til, I was completely oblivious. I think it doesn’t really cross our minds to found even these arguments in scripture. Most of this comes from the philosophical assumption of objectivity: that we can discover things on our own, without God. It has deeply permeated our culture.

Apologists who utilize the transcendental argument for God, such as Cornelius Van Til and Greg Bahnsen in the past, and also Alvin Plantinga and Doug Wilson in the past and continuing into the present, argue that traditional arguments for the existence of God fail because they presume this subtle philosophical assumption. They fail because the theist grants to the non-theist the possibility that one might be entitled to logical formulations without presupposing the existence of God. And that these arguments are fundamentally flawed is true. But we need not be worried. There is a solution to this problem: Argue that atheists do not have the benefit of logic. This view has a wide variety of philosophical import because if it is true then theists alone can be logical and rational, exposing the non-theist as a connoisseur of absurdity, people who can only have, but do not want to have, their foundation in what Kierkegaard calls, for Christians, “the strength of the absurd.”

This argument in particular falls into the larger category of presuppositional apologetics, which argues that the presupposition of God’s existence is necessary for all issues, which by the universal nature of such a claim includes all issues rooted in philosophy or theology.

What does this view have in store for epistemology? I’m sure that philosophers with the repute of Bahnsen, Van Til and Plantinga have probably touched on this (especially Plantinga because his studies focus largely on epistemology and logic), but what happens if we question the skeptical argument on biblical grounds?

What does the Bible say? It says that God created heavens and the earth. The epistemological effect that this has is justification for believing that there is an external world (questioned by external world skeptics) and that we can have knowledge because we are created in the image of God. God has all knowledge, therefore we might at least have knowledge of some things, particularly those things that we find in scripture. If one wants to solve the skeptical problem, it seems to me that this is the only solution.

There are two interesting things to note here. The first is that neither of these necessitates that one should necessarily believe in the existence of God. The only effect that presuppositional arguments have is that it makes it very distasteful for somebody to deny the existence of God. Theists in the modern general population have been aware of this in the field of ethics for a long time. With God goes ethical certainty and any normative system of ethics. It is surprising to me, then, that they have failed to realize this about logic and epistemology.

But I have digressed here: we are concerned with the distasteful effects of denying God. This ethical consequence fails to be convincing because not many in the general population see this as an entirely bad thing. But losing logic and knowledge totally screws an atheist. No longer can they claim any right to argue or believe. Their beliefs are relegated to the absurd; their arguments are relegated to the absurd. But obviously this doesn’t necessitate believing in the existence of God; as I have said it merely makes it extremely unpleasant to not do so and makes philosophy irrelevant in general.

The other interesting thing is that this puts theist in a very special position with atheists who still want to presume they can be ethical, knowledgable, and rational. For these individuals who persist in believing such things, theists are on unique grounds now because faith is on higher ground than the atheist god Reason. Thus, there can be no argument pushing faith to the side as inferior to rationality. Rationality must be founded in faith, and faith cannot be dismissed as lower than reason but must be seen to govern reason.

Thus, it is of importance for Christians to show that arguments of the presuppositional variety are developed and put in front of atheists. If the existence of God will be the sole solution of these problems, then for any person who dislikes these it serves as a good means of showing the necessity of God. Of course, those who are not elect will continue to suppress their knowledge of the existence of God because they cannot come to God, but we should continue to pursue these avenues of dialogue in philosophical issues.