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What John Wesley really said about money

Apr 29th, 2012
by misterrichardson.
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It’s become somewhat fashionable these days to use John Wesley as an example of how we should live. So many have taken his adage of “make all you can, save all you can, give all you can” to be absolute scripture and, therefore, a handy implement with which to berate you because you’re not giving enough money. They don’t care about the needs of you or your family, just give until it hurts.

But the context is always conveniently left out. Well, here is what John Wesley really said about giving and it’s not nearly as “radical” as some would like it to be.

The directions which God has given us, touching the use of our worldly substance, may be comprised in the following particulars. If you desire to be a faithful and a wise steward, out of that portion of your Lord’s good which he has for the present lodged in your hands, but with the right of resuming whenever it pleases him, First provide things needful for yourself; food to eat, raiment to put on, whatever nature moderately requires for preserving the body in health and strength. Secondly, provide these for your wife, your children, your servants, or any others who pertain to your household. If, when this is done, there by an overplus left, then ‘do good to them that are of the household of faith.’ If there be an overplus still, ‘as you have opportunity, do good unto all men.’ In so doing, you give all you can; nay, in a sound sense, all you have: For all that is laid out in this manner is really given to God. You ‘render unto God the things that are God’s,’ not only by what you give to the poor , but also by that which you expend in providing things needful for yourself and your household.

- John Wesley, The Use of Money, III,3.

Posted in: Christianity, Quotes.
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Ken Ham misrepresented again

Mar 8th, 2012
by misterrichardson.
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I saw this article on the Aquila Report and thought I would respond, since I have posted previously on this particular topic. The author (David Wallover, a PCA minister) of this editorial is himself responding to a blog post written by Ken Ham.

Here’s how it goes. Some time ago Tim Keller posted a video on Youtube in which he speaks about the relationship between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. Then, recently, Tim Keller wrote an article on Biologos in which he made this statement:

Many secular and many evangelical voices agree on one ‘truism’—that if you are an orthodox Christian with a high view of the authority of the Bible, you cannot believe in evolution in any form at all. New Atheist authors such as Richard Dawkins and creationist writers such as Ken Ham seem to have arrived at consensus on this, and so more and more in the general population are treating it as given. If you believe in God, you can’t believe in evolution. If you believe in evolution, you can’t believe in God.

Ken Ham’s blog post corrects this misrepresentation:

I have stated many times that there are many men and women of God who believe in evolution or millions of years. But I am also quick to say that salvation is conditioned upon faith in Christ—Christ alone! Believing in evolution or millions of years is not necessarily a salvation issue per se, but it definitely is an authority issue—a battle over the authority of the Word of God. So to make the statement Tim Keller has declared about me—that,“If you believe in God, you can’t believe in evolution. If you believe in evolution, you can’t believe in God”—is a gross misrepresentation.

Then you have David Wallover’s response to Ken Ham:

It becomes evident to this reader that Ken Ham has himself misrepresented Tim Keller’s position.

When one “clicks” on the link provided in Ham’s article to Keller’s discussion of the relationship between Genesis 1 and 2, one hears a very different position than the one which Ham summarizes in his article. Keller is holding that Genesis 1 and 2 only contradict one another IF (!) they can be shown to say opposite things at the same time and in the same relationship or frame-of-reference (the law of non-contradiction).

Keller is insisting that in fact Genesis 1 and 2 say different things at different times in two different frames-of-reference; and thus Genesis 1 and 2 are not contradictory. One may not agree with Keller, and my point here is not to defend Keller’s position, per se. I am simply pointing out that Ham is equally guilty of misrepresentation; He has not accurately represented Keller’s own position.

Well, this certainly got me interested. I’ve been following Tim Keller’s subtle attacks on the authority of Scripture for some time. Those who support him in this are always quick to praise him as a super-intellectual who is probably speaking about things way too complex for us lesser mortals. And that’s the exact impression I got from Mr. Wallover’s take on the whole situation.

And then I watched the video in question. I’m not sure exactly which video Mr. Wallover saw, but in the one I watched, Tim Keller said this:

If you believe that the Bible is true, you have to believe that there are two literally genres. You have to. And that’s one of the reasons that I do not take every part of Genesis 1 literally is because if I do, it undermines the authority of the Bible.

There is no mention of different frames of reference. The very reason that Mr. Keller gives for believing that Genesis 1 is a poem and Genesis 2 is history is that if they are both history, then they would contradict each other and the authority of the Bible would be compromised. Listen for yourself. If you start at about the 4:00 mark, you’ll get the whole context.

This is why I believe Ken Ham is correct when he says:

…for whatever reason, these conservative scholars like Tim Keller seem to be blind to the fact they have two different approaches to hermeneutics—one approach for Genesis 1–11 and one for the rest of Scripture.

This was something Francis Schaeffer warned us about 40 or 50 years ago. And much of what he said back then has come to pass just as he said it would.

Could Ken Ham have misunderstood what Tim Keller was saying? Of course he could – Keller is all over the place when he gives explanations. All you have to do is watch the Martin Bashir interview and you’ll see what I mean. It’s almost like he believes that an answer must be complex and confusing to be true. But in assessing this video and article by Tim Keller, Ken Ham is correct.

What’s lost in all of this, though, is how PCA pastors, who have taken a vow to uphold the Westminster Confession, can publicly contradict that vow and get away with it. And they do it because there are quite a few others in the PCA who will aid and abet them, even stooping to posting comments and writing articles attacking (oh so subtly!) those who dare to oppose them.

That’s why I bother to write posts like this – I’m just joining the conversation.

Posted in: Bible, Christianity.
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Machen on missions

Jan 25th, 2012
by misterrichardson.
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One thing is perfectly clear – no missionary work that consists merely in presenting to the people in foreign lands a thing that has proved to be mildly valuable in the experience of the missionary himself, which he thinks may perhaps prove helpful in foreign lands in building up a better life upon this earth, can possibly be regarded as real Christian missions. At the very heart of the real Christian missionary message is the conviction that every individual hearer to whom the missionary goes is in deadly peril, and that unless the message is heeded he is without hope in this world and in the dreadful world that is to come.

Then, on the basis of those two great presuppositions – the awful holiness of God and a mankind lost under the guilt and power of sin – the first Christian missionaries preached Jesus Christ.

But how did they preach him? Did they preach him as a great teacher and example, as a great inspirer of a new religious life? Did they go about the world saying: “We have come under the spell of a great person, Jesus of Nazareth; contact with that person has changed our lives; we proclaim him to you as he lives in our lives; and we beg you to let him change your lives, too”?

Well, that is  what modern men might have expected those first Christian missionaries to say, but every historian must admit that as a matter of fact they said nothing of the kind. Every historian must admit that as a matter of fact they proclaimed Jesus not primarily as an example or as an inspirer, but as a Savior from divine wrath and from the awful bondage of sin.

In so proclaiming him, they appealed to their holy book. The case is not as though they appealed to the Old Testament merely for presuppositions of the gospel and then turned away from it when they preached the gospel itself. No, even in preaching Jesus they turned to God’s written Word. They did not preach Jesus as one whose coming was a sort of afterthought of God, one who had no connection with what God had done before. No, they preached him as the fulfillment of a glorious divine promise, as the culmination of a mighty divine plan.

…The early church, even the very earliest church in Jerusalem, did more than proclaim Jesus as an example; it proclaimed him as a Savior. It made him not merely the author, but also the substance, of the gospel. It did more than proclaim what he proclaimed about God: no, it proclaimed him.

- J. Gresham Machen, pgs 240,241, Selected Shorter Writings

Posted in: Christianity, Quotes.
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Tim Keller vs. Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones on Genesis

Jan 18th, 2012
by misterrichardson.
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…we may read the order of events as literal in Genesis 2 but not in Genesis 1, or (much, much more unlikely) we may read them as literal in Genesis 1 but not in Genesis 2. But in any case, you can’t read them both as straightforward accounts of historical events.  Indeed, if they are both to be read literalistically, why would the author have combined the accounts, since they are (on that reading) incompatible? The best answer is that we are not supposed to understand them that way.

- Tim Keller from the Biologos website.

Some have put forward the theory that Genesis does not claim to be a scientific treatise, but is just allegory or poetry, that the Bible does not pretend to be scientfically accurate but is a typical, poetical, allegorical way of describing creation. To this the answer is, of course, that there is not a trace of poetry in these early chapters of Genesis. The form is not poetical at all. It claims to be history. It claims to be giving facts, and the history that follows immediately and directly out of it is certainly true history and not allegory.

- Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, from God the Father, God the Son, pg 134.

Posted in: Christianity, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Quotes.
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Churches celebrate Christmas by canceling services

Dec 15th, 2011
by misterrichardson.
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Note: This is something I wrote last year, when Christmas day fell on Saturday, but never  posted. I’ve no doubt that the same will be true for this year, if not more so. You can read the article to which I refer here.

It used to be that churches only canceled their worship services if Christmas day fell on a Sunday. But now they’ve gone a step further – canceling church if Christmas falls on a Saturday. An interesting turn of events this is.

[Bill] Willits told The Christian Post that the church requires at least 2,000 volunteers every week to pull off one of the Sunday morning services.

Hundreds of those volunteers include high school students who help with the middle school worship environments before going to their own service time.

He said the church has always taken the Sunday after Christmas off, a move that has been widely applauded.

Two thousand volunteers? Worship environments? Their own service time? Spurgeon used to preach to 6,000 people every Sunday morning and evening at the old Metropolitan Tabernacle and all he had was a couple dozen elders and deacons. But then again, I’ll wager that none of the pastors canceling their services are anything like Charles Spurgeon.

Pastor Perry Noble of New Spring Church in Anderson, S.C., also cited recovery time for volunteers as the reason for canceling communal worship time on Sunday.

Church workers will put on 17 Christmas services across four different campuses, drawing over 20,000 in attendance.

Well, here we have it. They’ve been busy. But busy doing what? Putting on Christmas services. You “put on” a show, not a worship service.

And herein lies the problem. Many church services have become nothing more than entertainment. Disheveled youths strumming on their guitars and banging on their bongos provide the musical entertainment and some sort of Wayne Dyer wannabe comes out to try to make sense out of the bewilderment all the hurting people are going through. And during the Christmas season, you get the added bonus of scores of people wearing bathrobes and staring blankly at a baby doll. If the show is really top notch, there will be angels swinging from the rafters, too. Yes, I’d be tired too if I had been a part of this show.

But is this really what the Bible speaks of? Do we really honor the lowly Baby in the manger with all these gaudy shows? I think not.

The old puritans thought that we honored and worshiped Jesus Christ best when we treated every Sunday as the Lord’s Day. The preaching of the gospel contained in the Scriptures was the high point of every week. And they never tired of doing it. They laid the foundation for the Methodist revivals of the next century. John Wesley and George Whitefield traveled all over the place preaching many times a day, many days a week, and never tiring nor stopping until they died. All that was needed for both Puritans and Methodists was a Bible and a voice and the Holy Spirit.

Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries was anything but easy. Yet, you never read of any churches shutting down because people were tired. No one ever canceled a service “to be with their families.”

And they had Revival.

Posted in: Christianity.
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