At long last, it’s finally here: P. Andrew Sandlin & John Barach, eds., Obedient Faith: A Festschrift for Norman Shepherd (Mount Hermon, California: Kerygma Press, 2012).

Preface — P. Andrew Sandlin

Tributes — John H. Armstrong, John M. Frame, Charles A. McIlhenny, Michael D. Pasarilla, Steve M. Schlissel, Jeffery J. Ventrella, Roger Wagner

1. Growing in Covenant Consciousness — Norman Shepherd

2. The Whole Counsel of God: The Abandonment of John Murray’s Legacy at Westminster Theological Seminary — Ian Alastair Hewitson

3. Original Righteousness — Ralph F. Boersema

4. The Glory of the Man: Women, Psalms, and Worship — James B. Jordan

5. Faith’s Obedience and Israel’s Triumphant King: Romans 1-5 Against Its Old Testament Backdrop — Don Garlington

6. Mother Paul and the Children of Promise (Gal. 4:19-31) — Peter J. Leithart

7. Sola Fide: True and False — P. Andrew Sandlin

8. The Reformed Doctrine of Justification by Works: Historical Survey and Emerging Consensus — Rich Lusk

When Peter confessed Jesus as the son of the Living God, Jesus blessed him for listening to the Father. Five minutes later Jesus condemned him as a mouthpiece of Satan.

Also, of course, I had a physical father; and if I were a Presbyterian clergyman I would address Presbytery as “Fathers and Brethren,” acknowledging that older minister are fathers to younger ones. Every human being has God the Father as his father by creation; Adam as his father by generation; and the devil as his father by Adam’s decision to give the world to him. Christians have God the Father as father because they are in Christ, the Son.

Perhaps I should write “faithful Christians.” It seems to me that the Bible is telling us to be concerned about who is faithful, who trusts and obeys, and leave the heart (and “regeneration”) to God.

Doug writes that someone who denies the Apostles’ Creed and breaks all Ten Commandments is not a true (faithful) Christian. Well, of course. Certainly. My only beef, such as it has been, is with the use of “regeneration” and the implication that this means a “change of nature” in what I personally think is a more philosophical sense of “nature” than I’m happy with. People who deny that God knows the future; men who won’t let their wives have the Lord’s Supper save by their own hands; people who keep mistresses — that’s what excommunication is for. I’ve had the privilege of kicking wicked people out of the church more than once — and in those cases I did not shed a tear. They were wolves.

In his second post-Jordan post, Doug speaks of his own father’s remarkable work. I note that his dad’s name is Jim. So, there. What more need be said?? I’m certainly all in favor of what his father did. Sure, there are more than a few baptized people who need conversion, to “get saved.” But here again I have to enter a caveat from the chapter on “Conversion” in my Sociology of the Church. Let’s take a case in point. Mr. RB is asked to teach Sunday School to adult men in a liberal church. He teaches them, and they come each week, but there is no real sign of life. Until the third (yes, third) year. Then one after another the men seem to have eye-opening “AHA!” experiences. Suddenly it all makes sense as it had never before. They each feel converted and think that for the first time they are real Christians.

Ah, but is this what happened? Something happened, yes; something wonderful. Alleluia (as we say in Matins, which is a darned good discipline for Christian schools and others). But was this conversion from death to life, or from baby faith to self-conscious faith? Or a conversion from confused messed-up trust in as much of God as their liberal church had taught them to a wonderful faith in the whole-Bible God? If these men, who went to church every week in a liberal city where they could have stayed at home, who thought of themselves as Christians, who would have argued that Jesus was the savior even if they could not carry the argument very far — had died in the first year of this Sunday School class, would they have gone to hell?

Well, folks. I don’t know. Some were probably ignorant, shallow real believers. Some may have been in the church merely for social reasons. (There was a Jewish man who always came to my father’s class at the Methodist church when I was little — it was his way of staying in touch with other businessmen.) Anyway, that’s why I’m a Bible teacher. My job like Doug’s is to teach indiscriminately anybody who will give me the time of day every last thing I know from the Bible.

But what I do earnestly believe is that is can be very dangerous pastorally to hold up such situations as this as normative for actual faithful Churches. The norm in a serious church is for children to grow up never knowing a time when they were not loyal to Jesus, and undergoing conversions along the way from baby faith to child faith to adolescent faith, etc. The first epistle of John speaks of baby faith, youthful faith, and aged faith. They look different.

Two other tads and I hope I’m done for now. 1. I do not see Jesus or anyone else ever accusing children or even ordinary Christians of being sons of the devil, etc. This language is reserved for older men who are officers in the communities of the faithful. It’s not “woe to you, whoever you are,” but “woe to you, scribes and pharisees.” These also are the only people Jesus threatens with hell. Those who presume to be teachers incur stricter judgment. Please note also that in Matthew 7, those who come and say “Lord, Lord” and to whom Jesus says, “I never knew you,” are in fact false prophets, not ordinary people. I’m not at all saying that “ordinary” Christians cannot be sinful hypocrites and bound for hell; but I am suggesting we learn our rhetoric from Jesus and Paul.

2. And here’s a serious question: were Abraham and David regenerated? Were they born again? Did they have the New Heart? My answer is no. All these things are Pentecostal blessings and aspects of the New Age. Only by some kind of metonymy can they be applied to people before that time. But, were Abraham and David friends of God? Were they despite all, faithful men? Certainly. Abraham is the father of the faithful; he is not said to be father of the regenerate. My plea is that we talk the way our Protestant Reformers did: of faith and faithfulness; of obedience and disobedience.

And a final note: I don’t know about erstwhile queens of Norway, but this erstwhile princess of Sweden is a heroine of mine. Check out her great hymn.

Beginning of citation:

As a result of all this [the inability of the Reformers to get full liturgical worship and weekly communion in place in the churches], protestant people came to think of preaching as the most important aspect of the institutional Church. This was a mistake, because God has not given many gifted orators to the Church. (St. Paul was ridiculed for his lack of oratorical skill, and Moses had the same problem; see Exodus 4:10ff. and Acts 20:7-9; 1 Corinthians 2:1-5; 2 Corinthians 10:10.) The proclamation of the gospel needs the pastoral context of the whole “body life” of the Church, and particularly needs the seal of the sacraments. By its exaltation of preaching as a charismatic art, the Reformation moved in the direction, subtly and unintentionally to be sure, of undermining the Church itself.

As time went along, this unhealthy opposition of preaching to sacramental pastoral ministry became more pronounced. The Puritan opposition to prayerbook worship wound up, in practice, often pitting preaching against a more wholistic view of the Church. This opposition broke out into the open, in America, during the Great Awakening. Roaming preachers caused tremendous disruption in the normal pastoral life of the Church. As Hofstadter has written, “In truth, the established ministers found it difficult to cope with the challenge of the awakeners. The regular ministers, living with their congregations year in and year out under conditions devoid of special religious excitement, were faced with the task of keeping alive the spiritual awareness of their flocks under sober everyday circumstances. Confronted by flaming evangelists of Whitefield’s caliber, and even by such lesser tub-thumpers and foot-stampers as Gilbert Tennent and Davenport, they were at somewhat the same disadvantage as an aging housewife whose husband has taken up with a young hussy from the front line of the chorus.” [Anti-intellectualism in American Life, 1969, p. 67.] Because this is so important, and because there is so much mythology about how wonderful the Great Awakening and subsequent revivals were, I want to insert here some comments on George Whitefield; but since I dare not criticize him myself, I shall let the eminent Charles Hodge do it for me:

“It is impossible to open the journals of Whitefield without being painfully struck on the one hand with the familiar confidence with which he speaks of his own religious experience, and on the other with the carelessness with which he pronounces others to be godly or graceless, on the slightest acquaintance or report. Had these journals been the private record of his feelings and opinions, this conduct would be hard to excuse; but as they were intended for the public, and actually given to the world almost as soon as written, it constitutes a far more serious offence. Thus he tells us, he called on a clergyman, (giving the initials of his name, which, under the circumstances completely identified him,) and was kindly received, but found `he had no experimental knowledge of the new birth.’ Such intimations are slipped off, as though they were matters of indifference. On equally slight grounds he passed judgment on whole classes of men. After his rapid journey through New England, he published to the world his apprehension `lest many, nay most that preach do not experimentally know Christ.’ . . . Whitefield was much in the habit of speaking of ministers as being unconverted; so that the consequence was, that in a country where `the preaching and conversation of far the bigger part of the ministers were undeniably as became the gospel, such a spirit of jealousy and evil surmising was raised by the influence and example of a young foreigner, that perhaps there was not a single town,’ either in Massachusetts or Connecticut, in which many of the people were not so prejudiced against their pastors, as to be rendered very unlikely to be benefited by them (from a Letter to Whitefield from Edward Wigglesworth, in the name of the faculty of Harvard College, 1745). This is the testimony of men who had received Mr. Whitefield, on his first visit, with open arms.”

Hodge also comments on the belief, new at the time, that anyone had the right to set himself up as a gospel preacher, over against the ministry of the Church. The perspective which Hodge sets out here, which has been the universal catholic view of the Church of all ages, is almost completely lost today, and seems very odd to the modern reader: “Whitefield . . . assumed the right, in virtue of his ordination, to preach the gospel wherever he had an opportunity, `even though it should be in a place where officers were already settled, and the gospel was fully and faithfully preached. This, I humbly apprehend,’ he adds, `is every gospel minister’s indisputable privilege.’ It mattered not whether the pastors who thus fully and faithfully preached the gospel, were willing to consent to the intrusion of the itinerant evangelist or not. `If pulpits should be shut,’ he says, `blessed be God, the fields are open, and I can go without the camp, bearing the Redeemer’s reproach. This I glory in; believing if I suffer for it, I suffer for righteousness’ sake.’ If Whitefield had the right here claimed, then of course Davenport had it, and so every fanatic and errorist has it. This doctrine is entirely inconsistent with what the Bible teaches of the nature of the pastoral relation, and with every form of ecclesiastical government, episcopal, presbyterian, or congregational. Whatever plausible pretences may be urged in its favor, it has never been acted upon without producing the greatest practical evils.”[The Constitutional History of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, 1839, II:89-90, 98.]

Thus, the Great Awakening went far toward breaking down the historic connection between the wholistic ministry of the local Church and the preaching of the gospel. Subsequent revivals have only worked to further the disaster. Piety came to be seen exclusively in individualistic terms — individual souls responding to the ministry of the preacher — and corporate piety as the public performance of worship visibly on the earth before the throne of God for His glory, was increasingly lost from view.

End of citation

But.

My pal Doug Wilson has been writing a series of essays on “Life in the Regeneration” (I like the title!) and I’m being constrained to say something. So let me do this as a series of points.

1. I’m a postmillennialist, because I actually believe (gasp!) that Jesus was serious when He said He intended to disciple all nations.

Disciple.

All.

Nations.

Got it?

So, I don’t think I have to get everything right today. In fact, I know I won’t. In the year AD 35,678, some theologian in what is now Sri Lanka will come up with the very best explanation of the things under discussion, and I’m willing to wait.

2. As a Federal Visionary (?) I want to use Bible language the way the Bible uses it whenever I can do so. Well, “regeneration” in the Bible means the new age. In the regeneration the twelve Jewish apostles will rule over the tribes of Israel, in the way Jesus did (by teaching, miracles, and martyrdom). This happened in the Apostolic Age. (Mt. 19:28).

Also baptism places every baptized person into the New Age (Titus 3:5). It does not turn him magically into a faithful believer. While in Titus Paul is speaking about faith-full believers, the baptism of nations into the new age has also a wider significance, just as did the baptism of the nation Israel in the Red Sea.

France today is a baptized nation. Are most people faithful believers? No. But is this a nation that lives with archaic taboos of sex, food, calendar, and location? No. They are post-Christian secular humanists. They have moved into the New Age. They are an apostate Christian culture. It happened in history. There’s no going back.

This is true whether French atheists take their babies for baptism or not (and many do!). Jesus said nations would be transferred by baptism from old to new, and they are.

3. The “washing of regeneration” can also have a closer meaning. Children are baptized into the church and receive a new life in the Spirit. They sing new songs, have new aunts and uncles, speak new words, learn some of the Bible, and so forth. Some do not persevere, but pretty much all Christian children have a gut loyalty to Jesus. Yes, they do. And the new life that was given them was, yes, a new life.

New.

Life.

And they can never escape it. Never. If they die apostate, they die as apostate Christians.

Note well, the new life that children have is in Christ. They are included in the Messianic Community whose Head is Jesus Christ. They are not “partly” in Christ. Those who eventually fall away were not “pseudo” in Christ. They have the new life, as described above, which life comes from Jesus via the Spirit in the Messianic Community.

4. “Regeneration” as it is often used (moving away from how the Bible uses it) can also mean a new life that is familiar with God, friendly with God. The question here is whether such regenerations must be permanent or can be temporary. Here is the Scylla and Charybdis of this discussion. Some say that regeneration must be permanent. This has come to be the conventional “Calvinistic” notion. Others, like me, say that because the new life is in Christ, if a person turn away from being in Christ he loses his regeneration in that sense, becoming, we may say, de-generate. But he was once truly regenerated, sincerely given new life by God, the God of truth who never lies. God does not trick anyone by giving them a mere “taste” of the Kingdom and then damning them.

5. This whole business of “regenerated” (using the word in a way the Bible does not) Christians who fall away is a mystery. Adam was created good, not neutral. God blessed him (Gen. 1:28; compare Num. 6:22-27). So, how can a sinless person blessed by God turn away from Him? How is that possible? If you think you can understand this, I recommend you think again. You cannot. You would have to be God to understand it.

The same is true when we consider how a person who is changed and reoriented to God, and given the Holy Spirit, can turn away and be damned. Consider Saul. The Holy Spirit came upon him mightily (1 Sam. 10:6). He was given a new heart (v. 9). He prophesied (v. 10; and consider Acts 2:17). He received a new father (Samuel; vv.11-12). Is there something missing here? What else does the text need to say to indicate that Saul was “regenerated” (better: reoriented)? But later on, Saul attacked the Lord’s anointed, David. He murdered the priests, which was a direct assault on God Himself. He wound up participating in a memorial feast with unleavened bread with a witch. And at the last he committed suicide. He never took any opportunity to repent.

6. The recent Calvinistic notion that “true regeneration” means a person will never fall away is simply not borne out by the facts. And it is a dangerous notion, in my opinion. For one thing, it means none of the warnings in Hebrews or anywhere else in the Bible are real, because “regenerate” people cannot fall away, and “unregenerate” people were never in the faith at all and there’s nothing they can do (or want to do) to get themselves elected and regenerated. For another thing, it has meant a tendency to replace faith-religion with sight-religion, the most famous and horrid example being the “visible sainthood” business that the Puritans got themselves into. Trusting God’s promises was not good enough for these Puritans; they had to see evidence of “real conversion,” and of course they did not see this in their children, who had grown up in a normal Christian way living the life of faith and obedience but not going through any crises.

The influential pentecostal Calvinistic Methodist Martyn Lloyd-Jones created a good deal of havoc in England doing just this stuff. A British friend told me that toward the end, Lloyd-Jones had half the evangelicals in England worrying about whether they were really born again because they had not had the kind of glorious Holy Spirit baptism that Lloyd-Jones was pushing. Men and women were begging God for this blessing, and not receiving it were moving into despair. I personally know of more than one case of this.

7. Instead of lodging an anchor of perseverance in a changed individual, we need to see the unchanging anchor and heart as Jesus Himself. “If anyone is in Christ – a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17).” Outside of Christ, no new creation. “Your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears” (Col. 3:3-4). Outside of Christ, no new life. A person has a new life and is a new creation as long as he clings to Jesus; but if he turns away he loses his participation in new life and in the new creation.

As I wrote in my paper at some length, the new heart of Ezekiel 36 is not some new heart in individuals, but is Jesus. Ezekiel is in the temple, as he was a high priest, and in the holy of holies (the heart) of the Temple was the Word Made Stone – a wonderful thing, solid, dependable, but temporary and not powerful enough to cause men to life the right way. There is something better coming: the Word Made Flesh, and that is the new heart. This by the way is just how Paul understands Ezekiel in 2 Corinthians 3.

If our regeneration is in Christ, united to His resurrection from the womb of the earth, then our perseverance lies in clinging to Jesus. From God’s side, we persevere because Jesus prays for us (John 17) and sends the Spirit to keep us.

8. Doesn’t God change peoples’ “natures” somehow, so that they now want to receive Jesus and put faith in Him? This is the normal recent Calvinistic understanding, that God regenerates people hearts and then they turn to Jesus. Peter Leithart has dealt with this matter quite well here and here and here. There is also good information here. The question involves what is a “nature,” and also whether God does things impersonally to people. There seems to be hidden here a notion of “grace” that is really like the Force from Star Wars, so that God sends an infusion of grace-stuff into peoples’ “hearts” and that changes them so that then they enter into a personal relationship with God.

Well, I don’t think so. I believe that the only kind of relationship we can have with God is personal. We either like God or we don’t. What happens when an adult is converted is that God reorients him from hating Him to liking Him. I do not see the Bible probing into the mysteries here, and I believe that numerous passages have been misread precisely because of the influence of this mechanical notion of salvation (such as John 3, Ezekiel 36, etc.).

The misreading is also due to the influence of Socratic and Cartesian thinking. Socrates said, “Know yourself.” Nothing more stupid can be imagined from a Christian standpoint, given that we are infinitely complex images of God. As Rosenstock-Huessy says, “It is not given to man to know himself.” We must trust what the Bible says about us. Similarly, Descartes says, “I can doubt, so I know I exist.” (“I think, therefore I am.”) Nonsense. I know I exist because others speak to me. Both of these traditions are pretty individualistic. The individualism of the Enlightenment played into the development of the recent Calvinistic notion of personal “regeneration.” Understanding the New Heart, the New Life, the New Root, etc. as Jesus Christ, and our participation in union with Him, was not the order of the day. All these phrases and others were read as what happens to individuals.

9. The last bit simply has to do with church discipline. Doug in his blogessays is very concerned about warning Christians who are not living the Christian life. I completely agree. I’ve rebuked men before (it’s never pleasant), and most fled and left the church, though a couple appreciated my words and are friends now. What I do not see anywhere in the Bible is someone saying, “Friend, you aren’t regenerate. You have not been born again.” It would be kind of weird for Paul to say something like that, because there’s nothing a person can do about it. He cannot born himself again. He cannot create himself. He cannot ask God to predestinate him for salvation.

But the Bible certainly shows people being rebuked for sin, and in very strong language. A good example is Acts 7:51, “You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you. Etc.” Was Stephen saying, “You are unregenerate”? There’s really no reason to say that or to speak to unregenerate people at all, since they cannot hear what you have to say. No, Stephen charged them with deep sin and apostasy, but any such rebuke has to have an evangelical motive. The subtext is always, “Change your ways and repent while it is day, before the night comes and no man can repent.”

The theoretical theological question about “heart regeneration,” whatever that might or might not be, is simply off the table pastorally. We cannot know who is elect to eternal life, or whom God might choose to reorient to Himself. We preach and exhort and rebuke people as people, accountable to God. A baptized person caught up in a prevailing sin needs to be exhorted to turn back to Jesus, to reorient himself, to avail himself of the means of grace, such as worship, psalmody, the Lord’s Supper, and getting someone else to be accountable to in the body. An unbaptized person needs to be invited into the kingdom, and warned of the consequences of failing to do so.

I can mention that Doug Wilson has a good post on this matter here. I don’t agree with everything, as my essay here makes clear, but he has a good point about a pastor’s duty to evaluate and counsel people based on their narratives.

10. I’m myself not particularly bothered if someone wants to hold to the recent Calvinistic view of “heart regeneration” as a theory connected to the doctrine of predestination. What bothers me is when this theory is drawn down into the life of the church as if it is something we can actually understand and make applications from. I believe that doing this has had disastrous effects historically. I mentioned Martyn Lloyd-Jones, but we can also think about Primitive Baptists and any number of Dutch and Scottish sects in which people wait to be regenerated before they dare to come to the Lord’s Table.

Well, uh, duh, no, that’s not what is going on. First of all, the Holy Spirit is not wasting His breath showing us Jesus putting down various morons. This conversation is included because it is profound. Second, John’s gospel deals with profound depths, as all expositors agree, and so again this is not some stupid conversation. Third, Nicodemus was a member of the great Sanhedrin (John 7:50), which means he had served in a local sanhedrin as a judge for a number of years before being selected to the first small sanhedrin, then after more years advancing to the second small sanhedrin, and finally being approved to be one of the 70 members of the Great Sanhedrin (Article, “Sanhedrim,” in McClintock and Strong, Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature [1867]). He was therefore an older man, probably twice Jesus’ age and worthy of respect. Fourth, Jesus tells us that Nicodemus was “the teacher of Israel” (John 3:10). Are we to take this as sarcasm, unworthy of the spotless son of man who knew to respect the aged? No, Jesus means what he says: Nicodemus was the preeminent theologian and teacher in Israel, and therefore on the surface of the earth, and not a fool.

Finally, Nicodemus was not at all reluctant to defend Jesus in public (John 7:50) and to be seen helping to bury him (19:39). (I’ll bet Caiaphas was pretty angry about that.) He came to Jesus at night in order to have a long conversation with Him uninterrupted. The notion that Nicodemus was not a believer does not stand up. He certainly was a faithful old covenant believer who was headed for paradise. If by “regeneration” we mean someone who has a life with God and is destined for heaven, Nicodemus was regenerated every bit as much as Abraham, Moses, David, and Elijah.

So then, what Nicodemus says is not stupid, but powerful and profound. We have only a very brief summary of his conversation with Jesus, which means we must pay careful attention.

My purpose in this essay is not to write 50 pages on all the background and theology in John 3. My sole purpose is to expose just who it is that is being born again here. The answer is Jesus. It is Jesus who is born again, and our experience of a new birth can only be in union with His.

As is so often the case in John, something is said or written that is deliberately ambiguous and joins two ideas in one. In this case it is Jesus’ statement that one must be born again, or born from above. Arguing which of these is in view is a mistake because both are intended, as the conversation shows.

Jesus begins “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless someone is born again/from-above he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Now, if you’re Nicodemus you might be frustrated by this. Let’s fill in the conversation in a sane and careful way. “But Jesus, rabbi, we both know that God’s people have been born again over and over from above. God has give us new births many times, and showered new blessings of His Spirit on us. We got a new start at the Flood, but then look what happened? Then again at Sinai, a nation was born in a day! And then look what happened!! After the Babylonian wilderness we got Cyrus the New Imperial Messiah, a believer with Daniel at his right hand. We got the wonderful 49-fold lampstand of Zechariah 4, the bronze pillars became bronze mountains in Zechariah 6, and we rode out bringing peace to the nations, spread out as the four winds of heaven. And now look where we are!!

“What you are saying, Jesus, gives me no hope. One more new birth? One more new kingdom of God? Jesus, the human race is old, and the way I see it, the only way to get out from the death-nature we have from Adam would be to go back into our mother’s womb and be born again.”

Is that what Nicodemus said? Believe me, something like it surely is. This is the summary in verse 4: “How can mankind be born when he is old? He cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born, can he?” There are two Greek words for “man.” The one is aner/andros, which refers to an individual person or a husband. The other is anthropos, which is more general and can refer to man generically, or mankind. It is anthropos that Nicodemus uses here. Now, I cannot press this too far. Often anthropos is used for an individual. It does not matter which way we take it. If Nicodemus were being sarcastic or stupid, he would have said, “Can an individual man (aner) climb up his mother’s birth canal and come back out again?” That not what he said. He was asking a serious and profound question.

We can note that in verse 7, Jesus says, “Do not marvel that I said to you (singular), you (plural) must be born again.” I’m saying to you, Nicodemus, that humanity needs a new birth.

I believe Nicodemus was fully aware that he was talking about Adam’s original birth as the generation of the heavens and the earth (Gen. 2:4). Adam was born out of mother earth (adamah, feminine) and the breath of the Spirit of God (2:7). The dust of which he was made was pre-baptized (1:9), a baptism with the waters below. Nicodemus was saying that a new humanity would have to be born again in such a way as to negate the consequences of Adam’s sin. Nicodemus was not a dummy. He knew what the issues were.

Now, again we have to fill in the conversation. Jesus replied to Nicodemus, “Now you’re cooking with gas, Nicodemus. Yes indeed. Only a new start out of mother earth is going to do the trick. You’ll be there, won’t you?” Well, maybe Jesus did not say exactly that, but somehow Nicodemus got the point, because when Jesus died and was about to be buried into mother earth, into a virgin tomb for a new virgin birth, Nicodemus was there to spice up His body. The disciples had fled. Nicodemus had not fled. Nicodemus had a good idea of what was going to happen next.

Before we go further, we have to remember how John’s gospel is structured. It has a series of simultaneous structures. One of them is creation week, and that’s obvious from how the gospel begins. We should not be surprised, then, that here early in the book a discussion of how human beings are born goes back to the birth of the first human.

Being born over again is also being born from above. The reference is to heaven, to what is on the other side of the firmament set up in Genesis 1:6-8. What is on the other side of the firmament is the heavenly ocean. It is sprinkling with water from above, or passing through rivers with water running downstream, that signifies (in the strong sense) being born by the Spirit from above. Jesus told Nicodemus not to marvel at what He was saying, because it was commonplace. All the baptisms of the old time were by sprinkling or by water running downhill. A person who contracted ceremonial death (“uncleanness”) was resurrected by water from above, always. If in Adam we all contract death, is it a birth by water and Spirit from above that will make us a new creation.

But more than that: It is Jesus and ONLY Jesus who is really born again from above. We are born again from above in union with Him. It cannot be otherwise. This is given us in verse 8, “The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who has been born of the Spirit.” So, that’s you and me, right? Really? Is that how you live? I don’t think so. BUT, look at Jesus after His new birth, after His resurrection: He appears here, and then He disappears. He appears there, and then He disappears. He speaks words (Luke 24), and then He disappears. Jesus, in His resurrection, is the One who is born of the Spirit. It is only in union with Him that anything like this is true for us.

Now, Nicodemus says, “HOW can this be?” Yes. That’s probably after an hour or two of discussion. That’s all wonderful, says Nicodemus. I’m so happy to be living now at this time in history. But how? How? HOW?

Then Jesus says, “Nicodemus, if there’s anything you as THE teacher of Israel should understand, it’s how this can happen. Someone has to die, Nicodemus. It has to be a Better Isaac. It has to be the Seed of the Woman-Tree. The Son of Man will be lifted up like the bronze serpent. Do you see, Nicodemus? Have you seen all the crosses the Romans used for the rebels? Can you see what’s going to happen to Me? Do you see HOW?

Well, the point of this essay is to begin to explore this “regeneration” business. Being born again is being in union with Christ, the Reborn One. I do not see anything in the Bible to tell me I can know who is born again permanently and who is not. God predestinates some people to persevere. But God predestinates some people to be united to Jesus, to be inside of the new birth, and then to deny the Lord who purchased them. I’ll try to do a bit with that next time.

(The essay of mine to which Doug refers is Thoughts on Sovereign Grace and Regeneration: Some Tentative Explorations. Biblical Horizons Occasional Paper No. 32, January, 2003; available for $5.00 from Biblical Horizons, Box 1096, Niceville, FL 32588; or see here.)

First of all, then, what is “an evangelical”? That will be our topic in this posting. The use of the adjective “evangelical” as a noun is, to start with, a bit strange, but “Evangelical Christian” is the actual term, with “evangelical” being shorthand.

The usual and broad meaning of “an evangelical” in the United States (where it matters most) is this: someone who accepts that the truth claims of the Bible are without error not only doctrinally but also with respect to historical and spatial matters, who accepts the teaching that God is three equal persons in one Godhead, and who trusts in the work of Jesus Christ alone for his justification and salvation. This is the definition that will get you into the Evangelical Theological Society, of which I have been a card-carrying member since 1976. And in this sense, James B. Jordan is most definitely “an evangelical.” And I know that Douglas Wilson fully accepts that this is so.

There are, however, other usages of the term “evangelical.” First of all, it is used for the churches in the Lutheran traditions in contrast to those in the Reformed traditions. Churches in Germany, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, etc., and the United States that follow the Lutheran tradition are “evangelical,” including those who have separated from state churches and become “Evangelical Free,” “Swedish Covenant,” etc. churches. All other churches of the Reformation accept Luther of course but also Bucer, Calvin, Cranmer, Laski, Bullinger and other Reformers, and include the Churches of England, Scotland, Hungary, the Netherlands, the Palatinate, and all those descended from them as “free” churches and others. I myself was baptized and confirmed in a Lutheran Church, which is now known as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America even though it is now pretty liberal for the most part. (When I was baptized it was the United LCA, and then the LCA [1962], and now the ELCA [1987].) I left this kind of evangelicalism when I became convinced of the Reformed approach to reality in 1971.

Another understanding of the term “evangelical” is found in the writings of Dutch Reformed immigrants to the United States, preeminently of Cornelius Van Til. These men view “evangelical” as synonymous with “Arminian,” and with some good reason. They came from a tradition that sang almost exclusively the psalter, though in metrical paraphrases. Their ministers wore distinctive garb as officers in the army of God, and as “dominies” tended to keep a distance from laymen. When these people came to America and saw the undisciplined and psalm-less churches that predominated, they took them as “Arminian.” While it is important to understand this use of the term “evangelical” when reading the writings of these men, few would use the term in that way today.

Continuing our attempt at “ordinary language analysis” of the use of “evangelical,” we come to how I, James B. Jordan, have sometimes used the term, and that is as “soft liberal.” Your standard evangelical scholar, while he affirms the inerrancy of the Bible based on his understanding of the Bible, is still sadly Biblo-phobic. He is terrified of the stipulations of the “laws of Moses” as he calls them. He finds the Psalter unpalatable: too mean, too rough. He rejects the chronology of the Bible, despite its universal acceptance throughout the history of Christendom. He is committed to a minimalist approach to the Bible: no significant numbers, nothing in the stellar heavens, no openness to revisionist history of the ancient world, as little typology as possible, etc. I’ve heard older men at Evangelical Theological Society meetings complain about “all these chiasms” as if they refused to look again at the text to see what might be there. (Though I can sympathize with an old guy’s reluctance to reopen everything!) It can be said that this kind of “evangelicalism” wants some amount of acceptability in the world of late 19^th and early 20^th century scholarship. They don’t seem to realize that the world has turned and that a far more penetrating understanding of writing now prevails.

Oh, and of course, virtually all American “evangelicals” are committed to the notion that Jesus does not intend to disciple all nations. (He was just joking, it seems.) In fact, Jesus might return at any moment. Not only so, but it is important for our personal sanctification that we believe this notion and act as if the world might end any time. The Holy Spirit, it seems, continually deceives people into thinking Jesus could come back any time, and employs what has rightly been called “sanctification by deception.” Well, James B. Jordan is certainly not an evangelical in that sense.

This brings me to the fourth and final meaning of “an evangelical,” which is someone who is sympathetic to some degree with the Methodist experiential religion that is the earlier form of American civic religion. I need to begin this section biographically. The first of my Jordan ancestors to arrive on these shores was named Robert Jordan, and he came as a minister of the Church of England to what is now Maine in 1640. His son was a Church of England minister, and it continued such until the Jordans became Methodists.

My great-grandfather, for instance, was once “told by the Holy Spirit” to pick up and visit a rough town in the Dakota territories. He took his wife and put up placards announcing that he was going to preach the gospel. He rented a hall, and Monday night he announced a hymn that he and his wife sang, after which he preached the gospel – to nobody. The same thing happened Tuesday night, and then on Wednesday and Thursday. Friday night came, and at the saloon evidently one man said, “Have you heard about this crazy preacher? He’s been preaching to absolutely nobody night after night!” Someone else said, it seems, “Well, let’s go hear this nut.” So they all went down to hear my great-grandfather – and they were all converted. The next night they brought their friends and the girls from the upper floor of the saloon (if you take my meaning) and they were saved also. My great-grandfather stayed another week, founded a Methodist church, and shut down the saloon. Or so I’ve been told. Hey, I don’t doubt it. Our God reaches into the world and saves people.

My grandfather, also a Methodist minister, was once on a train from California to Minnesota, where he pastored. Some young men were playing cards, drinking, and swearing up a storm. My grandfather stopped as he walked through the car and put his hand on one young man: “Young man, do you know where you are going?” was all he said. Then he walked on. Years later my grandfather was at a Methodist meeting. A man stood up to speak. “Once, when I was a young man and living in sin, a man came by me on a railroad car while I was gambling. He said only this: Young man, do you know where you are going? Well, those words stuck in me, and I could not escape them. I’m here today to speak Christ to you because of that man.”

Now, I write these personal histories to say that I have no reservations about what God can and does do in history. I’m glad for what Catholics, Dispensationalists, Baptists, Methodists, and even Calvinists have done in history.

So, now to the last form of “evangelical” that I am not. Doug Wilson begins one of his blogs with this: In his small book, What Is An Evangelical?, Martin Lloyd-Jones says a number of helpful things (along with some pretty unhelpful ones). But one of the helpful ones was this — “The next thing, clearly, about the evangelical is the tremendous emphasis that he puts upon the rebirth. This is absolutely basic to him . . .” (p. 56). Doug’s whole series of essays on “Life in the Regeneration” is about this matter of rebirth. I’ll try to take that up in the next essay in this series. Suffice it to say for now that if Methodist Lloyd-Jones had written that an evangelical is someone who places a tremendous emphasis on living by faith in God and His word, I could be an evangelical. While I believe, obviously, that people need to be born (again) from God, I cannot see emphasizing it because such a new birth is not an experience anyone can accomplish. Telling people that they need to be born again is the same as telling them they need to be predestinated to be children of God. It’s rather pointless. More on that next time.

2012 Annual Biblical Horizons Conference.

Dates: 16-20 July, Monday evening to Friday noon.

Topic: Back to Basics.

Speakers:
        Peter Leithart: Gratitude and Thanksgiving.
        Jeff Meyers: The Ministry of the Church as Priest, King, and Prophet.
        James Jordan: Basics of Biblical Worldview.
        Toby Sumpter: Children and the Kingdom

Worship: Sung Vespers each evening; Psalm Roar in the mornings.

Film: The Complete Metropolis. With the discovery of the missing 25 minutes in Argentina two years ago, it is now possible to view the entire 2 and 1/2 hour film for the first time since 1927. James Jordan will lead discussions of the remarkable use of Biblical and Christian imagery and symbolism. Metropolis argued that it is the church and acts of Christian sacrifice that alone can reconcile workers and capitalists, and prevent communist revolution.

Price: $100 per adult. $75 per high school or college student. $125 for families.

Youth Conference?: Friday night and Saturday morning. Since many young people stay over from BH with the intention of going to the CREC Youth Conference in Texas, we may have a meeting of the RPZTL* this year and present material on how to think Christianly about the present world.*RPZTL: The BH youth arm: the Righteous Power Zombie Terror League (Righteous in Christ; Powerful in the Spirit; Dead, yet Alive; Wise in the Fear of the Lord; Leagued in the covenant).

Contact: jbjordan4@cox.net

First, here is the quote from Bavinck’s The Doctrine of God, page 317, Banner of Truth edition (1977) under the heading of Inter-Personal Relations.

The Greeks derived the unity of God’s essence and the unity of the persons not from the divine nature as such, but from the person of the Father. He is the only ‘originating cause.’ The three persons are not viewed as three relations within one essence, the self unfoldment of the Godhead, ‘but the father is viewed as the one who imparts his being to the Son and to the Spirit. As a result, the Son and the Spirit are so coordinated that both in the same manner have their ‘originating cause’ in the Father. In both, the Father reveals himself. The Son causes us to know God; the Spirit causes us to delight in him. The Son does not reveal the Father in and through the Spirit; neither does the Spirit lead us to the Father through the Son. The two are more or less independent of each other; each leads to the Father in his own peculiar way. Thus, orthodoxy and mysticism, mind and will are placed in antithetical relation to one another. And this peculiar relation between orthodoxy and mysticism characterizes the religious attitude prevailing in the Eastern Church. Doctrine and life are separated: doctrine is for the mind only; it is the fit object of theological speculation. Next to it and apart from it there is another fountain of life, namely the mysticism of the Spirit. The fountain does not have knowledge as its source but has its own distinct origin and nourishes the heart. Thus a false relation is established between mind and heart; ideas and emotions are separated, and the link that should bind the two in ethical union is lacking.

Secondly, is what Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy maintains in The Christian Future (page 146). He says that canon 28 of the Chalcedonian Council in 451 AD is what is largely responsible the stagnation of Byzantium. Canon 28 stated that Rome had primacy amongst the Bishops because Rome was the capital of the Empire. The Eastern Church upheld the proposition. The Western Church rejected it. The West said that Rome had primacy because Peter was martyred outside of Rome’s walls. I. e., it gave a reason that was not dependent upon the Empire, and was in conflict with it. The East upheld this because by 451, Rome was no longer the capital of the Empire, but Constantinople was. So now, the East would have the new primacy. Hence, primacy in the church continued to be dependent upon the Empire. This meant that Orthodoxy never made an exit from the pagan world, got moored at the exit, and that church was essentially a department of state.

It was for this reason that the prophetic office never developed within the Eastern Church. The tension of the prophet talking back to and opposing the King never happened. The West was characterized by this tension, and it led to the greatest dramas of western political and ecclesiastical theatre (just think of the great movies it led to—Beckett, A Man For All Seasons for example—there are no great Eastern block buster movies along these lines.)

However, Rosenstock-Huessy does not stop there. He says that much of the meaning of Marxism was in the overthrow of the Czar (Caesar) as the still lingering representative of the ancient Empire. And, he says that in the Providence of God, beginning in the 19th century, the Orthodox began producing the greatest of the prophets and thus leaped ahead of all other branches of the Church (Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, and Rosenstock-Huessy did not live to see Solzhenitsyn, who was the greatest of all prophets of the 20th century.)

And thirdly, the flowering of Russian literature, and especially, the great Russian novels in the 19th and 20th centuries, is and was a return from the “childish picture religion” of icons to the primacy of the word. The word made its greatest advance in the world in that time and came back from the icon.

Can the Orthodox Church now continue to find its way out of the backwoods of the rejection of Filioque, the consequent separation of mind and heart, find its way out of a religion of no prophets, and out of a childish religion of pictures back to the Word?

That is the challenge. May God lead them forward. May God continue to make the Orthodox “leap ahead of all others,” as Rosenstock-Huessy noted had been happening in his own time. Again, that is the challenge.

1. We don’t follow the world; we lead it.

2. We don’t conform to culture; we change it.

3. We don’t take up our ideas from what gooey liberal and gooey evangelical churches do or don’t do; we get our instructions from the Bible.

4. Jesus had a special and very valuable tunic (John  19:23-24). Compare Exodus 28:40. Jesus’ special tunic and several pieces of outer garments correspond closely to the special garments of the priests. Apparently these most modern of bloggers have got better sense in how to dress than did their Lord. They might take their cue from the doctrine of union with Christ and what that might mean for them as officers in the army of the Lord of Hosts.

5. Back in the day when clergy wore uniforms and the Church was an army, we were well on the way to world conquest. Compare today.

Rosenstock-Huessy contended that schizophrenia was the paradigmatic mental illness of modernity, because it was the carrying of “objectivity” to its logical conclusions. Rosenstock-Huessy is in a sense following along after Chesterton when he said that insanity was not the loss of reason, but when reason is all that one is left with. Chesterton was referencing a paranoid, and Rosenstock-Huessy, schizophrenia, but both may be diseases of rationalistic modernity (post modernity will have different illnesses).

What Rosenstock-Huessy meant was that the schizophrenic is the one who carries objectivity so
far forward that he does away with his own subjective being, and his very person, or ex-person, becomes only an object to be observed along with everything else. He gives as an example the professor who wanted to be wired to be able to watch, through his own brain, brain surgery being done on him.

Jason’s above entrance has a whiff of the schizophrenic about it. He is not like a paid trial lawyer who takes the case, no matter what (although on does wonder how close to madness some lawyers come in taking on cases they cannot believe in themselves).

Is it not the case that the rise of the Bible, and being able to listen to and to believe in the Bible as the Word of God is what gave rise to real personhood in the first place? I suspect it was marginally less possible for say, Virgil, or Homer, to be in unity with their own stories than for a Bible believer. A background of many gods and behind that a Greek dualism cannot give rise to integrated wholeness such as the Church could give rise to (Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, gives massive documentation to this).

As a test case for modernity, compare say Abraham Kuyper with Rudolph Bultmann.

Bultmann would have to be the complete and totally “objective” German professor, totally divorcing his own personal convictions from anything he taught or believed as a human being, as a citizen, a father and husband. His convictions about the New Testament (and Old Testament, which is even less relevant) could give what kind of guidance to his life as a citizen, or husband, or neighbor? How could he not become the play thing of whatever the Principalities and Powers are floating around in the air as the current opinion? His professional life might be fascinating, and his research absorbing. But he can no more unite his professional opinions with whole life than water and fire can cohere together. They have nothing to do with one another. As a professor, he must transform his person into an object who is an onlooker at all that he does and teaches. Then that on-looker must at some point in the day be at home with his wife and children and nieces and nephews, and must at some point engage in political discourse concerning the fate and travels of the nation. He must somehow carry on discourse as a professor with other professors, and in all of this, his most “core beliefs” can offer…nothing. He is an observer as a person and an observer of himself as he “objectively” observes all other things.

And worst of all perhaps, what kind of pretty pickle does he leave the local and national parish pastors in who have always found his way in this Book that is now a tatters because of “objectivity.” Must he too become objective non-person who also will be forced to take all of his cues from the principalities and powers and the opinion that is in the air?

Compare this to Abraham Kuyper (as a good test case and contrast). This will take far fewer words, is so much simpler, and almost completely coherent (nobody is perfect). Although, he no doubt fell short, and made sincere mistakes, and the mistakes and misapprehensions that sin leads even the best into, his life is a coherent whole everywhere, because he has been spoken to by God Himself, and all areas of his life are subject to the personal God. He is subjectively healthy; he is person in coherence and under Person. When he seeks truth, he does so not as a divorced object, but as a subject who is subject to the Subject. Inward and outward, he is whole and complete.

To destroy the Bible as the foundation is to destroy the possibility of personhood? I think so, I deeply suspect so.

Now, how exactly does Klinianism with its common and sacred split fit into all of this? Klinianism is certainly not Bultmannianism. But it does turn large, if not vast areas of life over to the “objective realm” that is not spoken to personally by a personal God… I would suggest it is the “crack in the door” that gives rise to the above sort of schizophrenia.

To return to Rosenstock-Huessy again, he replaced the Cartesian dictum, “I think therefore I am…” with, “I have been spoken to, therefore I am.” If the Bible in toto (with Bultmannianism) or in part (in Klinianism) is no longer the personal Word of God to me in all of life, then one is to that extent turned over to the barren, and impersonal, and objective, and even the ego begins to be objectified. When the Bible is silenced, one might begin to long for a word from a Pope, from a Magisterium. One cannot bear the realm and the splitness of objective silence.