4.95 on the "Calvinist" Scale?

- another ~Billy Goat~ rant.

For a number of years I've considered myself a full blown five point Calvinist, whatever that means, and the "whatever that means" is the whole point of this article. What do you mean when you say you are a "5 point" or a "4 and a 1/2 point" Calvinist? To simply say it refers to how you stack up when measured by the "5 points of Calvinism" assumes there is an objectivity to those points that allows such a comparison. But is it really that simple?

There are some in the world of Christianity that would say I am no "Calvinist" at all because I hold to the free and full offer of the Gospel to each and every person, elect and non-elect (including Judas Iscariot). But that is exactly the point. Is it more important to be a "5 point Calvinist" or to be Biblical?

Frankly, I am at a point in life where I really do not give a big fat rat's rear end where I rank on the "Calvinist" scale. Nor do I care a whole lot where anyone else might place me on that scale. That's your problem for trying to fit me into your nice neat little categories that keep you from letting the Bible be the Bible.

In my own assesment, I woke up one morning and realized I was a 4.95 point Calvinist. No, I am not going to try to explain that. It just is, so live with it.

I also find I no longer have any patience with the "supra" and "infra" -lapsarian debate (having to do with the order of God's decrees in eternity past as they relate to salvation and the elect). When you have descended into that debate, you simply have gone beyond what the Bible reveals, and you have set your theological reasoning above the Scripture. It's my observation that the infra-supra debate is a mark of those groups and denominations that have stagnated into a Reformed confessional scholasticism to the detriment of Biblical Theology.

I could go on. God loves all people and God hates the workers of iniquity. Don't try to reconcile that with your idea of election. Let the Bible be the Bible and live with the tension. And it would not be the "end of the world" if you did live with that tension. In my own mind, the fact that God loves and hates the same people is not a tension. If there was never any love at all, there would never had been any hatred. We can only hate as deeply as we have loved. "For God so loved the world..."

~ The Billy Goat ~

Excerpts from

Jesus Versus The Eldership

by Dr. Norman Park

"Jesus and his apostles stand solidly in opposition to the modern-day authoritarian institution called "the eldership" in the Church of Christ. Unknown to early Christianity, this institution functions as a self-perpetuating, collective papacy. It is a sort of combination of the corporate board of directors and a Communist politburo. As a corporate board, it exercises total decision-making power, it asserts total administrative authority, and it claims total power to rule. As a politburo, it pursues a sleepless watchdog role over the church to maintain official orthodoxy. Results have been the destruction of congregational responsibility, reduction of members from participants to attendants, and the stifling of individual growth. This does not mean that the men who compose this latter-day papacy are bad men. As unquestioning prisoners of a closed-end orthodoxy concerning elders, which is no longer subject to examination, they are victims not unlike the many who suffer under the oppressive institution......

There were elders in the assemblies of the Lord established by the apostles but no "eldership." The former were older and spiritually mature persons who were primarily teachers and also leaders by example. The latter is a collective authoritarian institution devoted to ruling and decision-making. It has been demonstrated that Jesus, in building his church, did not create a power structure, and specifically denied the use of power to any of his disciples, saying, "It shall not be so among you." The modern eldership is a power-wielding body, arrogating to itself all decisions for the church, issuing excommunication bulls ("withdrawal of fellowship"), exercising total control over church property, declaring official orthodoxy, and practicing exclusive mastery over the church's money.......

The growth of legalism, which views the faith as a code of laws, has contributed to the growth of the eldership institution. Someone is needed to legislate, someone is needed to "watchdog" over the church to see that the code is followed, someone is needed to guard "dangerous" thinking, someone is needed to enforce uniformity--and that someone is the modern authoritarian eldership. The corporation culture has been absorbed into religious thinking. It holds that the few must rule, the many must serve. It has bred a wholesale distrust of the capabilities and potentialities of the ordinary pew occupant. The consequences of the eldership system are bad. First and foremost, it fails "to prepare God's people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining the full measure of perfection found in Christ" (Eph. 4:12). In denying the congregation the experience of decision-making and the give-and-take of interpersonal relations involved in discussion, it promotes immaturity. People who never have the responsibility of facing group problems and applying intellectual and spiritual resources to their solution will remain spiritual children...."

For the complete article at Battered Sheep Minstry click here.

Mohler: Seminaries must nurture faithfulness in a faithless world - (BP)
By David Roach & Jeff Robinson, Jun 21, 2004

"INDIANAPOLIS (BP)--Southern Baptist seminaries face the great challenge of producing faithful ministers in a faithless world, R. Albert Mohler Jr. said in a report to the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Indianapolis June 16.

In an age of decreasing adherence to scriptural truth, seminaries must answer the question, “When the Son of Man returns, will he find faith on earth?” said Mohler, who serves as president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.

“We are living in a time when so many in the church are beginning to sense that there is a problem not only out there the world, but also in the church,” he said. “... In this critical turning time in human history, it is our responsibility to make certain that we do everything in our power demonstrate faith in the face of a faithless world.”

Mohler listed five imperatives to which Southern Baptists must adhere if they are to demonstrate biblical faith in the world.

First, Southern Baptists must maintain a bold vision of biblical truth.

“There is no way we will be able to demonstrate faith in face of faithlessness if we do not recover biblical truth,” he said. “This means that we must as people and as churches ... be bold all the time, evermore, courageously and convictionally before the world about what it is we believe.”

Second, Southern Baptists must renew their commitment to teach biblical truth in churches and seminaries.

The Christian teaching ministry must always be grounded in the Word of God, he emphasized. “If there is any one educational principle that Southern Baptists must embrace at this convention and keep before ourselves, it is the absolute non-negotiable, undilutable responsibility of Christian parents and Christian churches to teach Christian truth,” Mohler said. “If we do not do it, it will not be done.”

Third, Southern Baptists must experience a bold recovery of expository preaching, Mohler said.

Preachers must not merely use biblical texts as jumping-off points for their sermons, he said. Instead, they must “confront an age of biblical ignorance and biblical apathy with the vibrant living and active two-edged sword of the inerrant, infallible Word of God.”

Fourth, Southern Baptists must experience a reenergized embrace of evangelism and missions, Mohler said, adding that Christians should take joy in preaching the Gospel to the furthest regions of the earth.

“We set before ourselves that vision set before us in the Book of Revelation of that throng before the throne in eternity made up of men and women from every tongue and every tribe and every people and every nation. For the cause of the glory of God we will never retreat. We will always advance,” he said.

Fifth, Southern Baptists must raise up a new generation of leaders in the faith, Mohler said....."

It's not just our Southern Baptist friends who need to lay hold of the five imperatives listed above. These five points are imperative for the Evangelical church at large. Please note Dr. Mohler's 3rd imperative regarding expository preaching.

~ The Billy Goat ~

Excerpt from: The Blinding and Binding Teachings of Bill Gothard
by Paul Sue

"It's probably safe to say that most Christians in North America have heard of or have even attended one of Gothard's seminars. Because of the popularity and mass appeal of Gothard's ministry, attempting to question it or criticize it is to face the wrath and anathema of the legion of loyal (blindly loyal in some cases) fans. Gothardites get angry and defensive when you question their beloved leader's teachings or integrity, as if he is somehow beyond reproach or accountability."

---

If you are like me, you have always found yourself wary of Bill Gothard's teaching; specifically his sloppy hermeneutics and mis-exegesis of Scripture. Paul Sue's review of A Matter of Basic Principles: Bill Gothard & the Christian Life, by Don Veinot, Joy Veinot, Ron Henzel. (21st Century Press, 2002), will help you understand why your apprehension regarding Gothard is well founded. To read the full review, click here.

~ The Billy Goat ~

Ramblings on Texas and Spiderman 2

Things have been a little busy and hectic. There are things I want to do, and the things I need to do before doing the things I want to do.

Two weeks ago we left on vacation for Texas. The occasion was a family reunion to celebrate my wife's mother's 90th birthday. This time we drove down instead of flying. That's 1,300 miles from the Grand Rapids, MI area down to the Austin, Texas area, and 1,300 miles back. It still beat spending time at work even if the office is air conditioned.

I like the Texas/Oklahoma plains area. You can see off in the distance a good 30 - 40 miles away; wide open sky and dry heat; a good place to snowbird some day, Lord willing.

On another note, this past Friday night my daughter and I went to see Spiderman 2. I agree with those who say Spidy 2 is better then Spidy 1. I wanted to go primarily to see the special effects on the big screen, and on that point was not disappointed.
There were also some philosophical issues to deal with, and some other time I may post my comments on those aspects of the movie. It was very clear at the end of Spidy 2, that there is every intent to have a Spiderman 3.

So, have you seen Spiderman 2? What are your thoughts?

~ The Billy Goat ~

Of Sunsets & Such

Tonight's sunset was very pretty. The western sky was edged in soft shades of pink and red. "Red sky at night, sailors delight." the old saying goes. I made myself take some time and go outside and enjoy the painting of the Great Artist of all artists. What He painted tonight was very beautiful.

There was a time when I use to watch the sunsets on a fairly regular basis. I know now that "sunset watching" at that time in my life was a defensive measure to keep some degree of sanity through some very troublesome times. Watching the sunset helped me focus on Him who being God of all things, is God of the sunsets. In all the turmoil and uncertainty of those times, He was in control, arranging my steps and guiding me through that contentious situation to where we are today. "Hitherto has the LORD helped us."

The Psalmist tells us that the creation declares the glory of God. The sunsets of our life are a precious part of that awesome declaration.

Praise to Him who being Lord of all, is Lord of the sunsets, and Lord of the colors of the sky, and Lord of the wind, and Lord of the trees, and Lord of the grass of the field, and who is Lord of our lives. Praise the LORD.

~ The Billy Goat ~

Calling All New Testament Greek Scholars

My find of the week is the The Greek New Testament Gateway page found at Dr. Mark Goodacre's The New Testament Gateway site.

The New Testament Gateway describes itself as "...the award winning web directory of internet resources on the New Testament. Browse or search annotated links on everything from the Greek New Testament to Jesus in Film."
The Greek New Testament page contains links to a number of on-line sources and texts relating to the Greek New Testament.

I came across this when getting into the Greek New Testament Audio Files at Christian Classics Ethereal Library. These MP3 files were narrated and compiled by Marilyn Phemister using "the public domain Westcott and Hort text, which is almost identical to Nestle-Aland."

Each chapter of the Greek New Testament has its own file. The file names are constructed to allow identification, and also retain the New Testaments sequential order by book and chapter.

Over the past several weeks I've been in the process of downloading these MP3 files. The idea is to listen to the readings while following along in my Greek New Testament. The hope is that in doing so, I will retain what little Greek I still remember from my seminary days so long ago. The downloads are really slow on my dialup connection, but those of you with high speed internet will find the downloads a piece of cake.

Now, where are those Hebrew Old Testament MP3 files?

~ The Billy Goat ~

Ronald Wilson Reagan

1911 - 2004

In 1980 we were still coming off the disillusion and malaise resulting from Vietnam and Watergate. It was a pessimistic time, and it was hard to see much hope for the future. What could we expect from a former movie actor from California, even if he had been a state governor?

I remembered him from that old TV show; the one where he would introduce the stories. The kind of stories of the old west that in retrospect were very similar to the Louis L'Amour short stories I came to enjoy as an adult.

He was optimistic in a pessimistic time. As I watched the debates, he had a way of exposing the intellectual sophistries that had become prevailing political dogma. He gave voice to those fundamental things we had found difficult to articulate in those dark times.

On Election Day, I sat at the table in the place where our precinct was to vote, representing the party that had nominated him for the highest elected office in the United States of America. They came in to vote. Young and old, the common trait was the sober and serious faces, concern written across their countenances. The voting was heavy in our blue collar, union precinct.

Then came a renewal of hope; a renewed vigor of spirit. Once again we could look to the future with some degree of confidence.

I can remember as a child, the building of the Berlin wall. That wall typified the fear and weight of conflict we of the post WW-II generation had carried all of our life. I never believed I would live to see the day that wall would be torn down. But he issued the challenge, and some time later we all watched in amazement as the medium of TV carried all over the world the images we never thought we would see. For the first time in our post WW-II lives, we had a sense of a degree of peace and safety.

Of the eleven presidents that have served in my lifetime, the greatest was Ronald Wilson Reagan. In my mind he ranks with Washington and Lincoln. To quote another, he now belongs to the ages. Those of us who grew to love and respect him will miss him.

RIP

~ The Billy Goat ~

More Cogitations on "The Lost Cause" Understanding of the Civil War

In response to my "Unrepentant Yankee" post of 06/11/04, Topher asked for a short statement regarding what is meant by "The Lost Cause". The short answer is taken from a Claremont Institute article titled The 'Lost Cause' In Retreat"

"There are two parts to this (Lost Cause)interpretation (of the Civil War). The first is political, insisting that the cause of the war was not slavery but the oppressive power of the central government, which longed to tyrannize over the Southern states. The South desired merely to exercise its constitutional right to secede, but was thwarted by a power-hungry Lincoln. The second part is military: the noblest soldier of the war was Robert E. Lee. For three years, he and his army proved the backbone of the Confederate cause, fighting in Virginia, the most important theater of the war. But though his adversaries were far less skillful, they were able to bring to bear superior resources, ultimately overwhelming the Confederacy. "

In another Claremont Institute article, How the Confederates Won, Mackubin Thomas Owens reviews David Blight's book, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. This extended quote from that review sheds more light on the issues of the "Lost Cause" interpretation of the Civil War.

"According to Blight, the post-war era engendered three competing memories of the conflict. One, arising out of the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln's Second Inaugural, remembered the war as a struggle for freedom, a rebirth of the Republic that led to the liberation of blacks and their elevation to citizenship and constitutional equality.

A second, the "Blue-Gray reconciliationist" view, developed out of the necessity for both sides to deal with so many battlefields and so many dead. It focused almost exclusively on the sacrifices of the soldiers, avoiding questions of culpability or the right and wrong of the causes. In this view, the war was the nation's test of manhood. There was nobility on both sides. The essence of this view was captured by Lew Wallace, a Union general who wrote Ben Hur: "Remembrance! Of what? Not the cause, but the heroism it evoked."

The reminiscences of the soldiers who fought the war lay at the heart of this view. Most symbolic of this memory were the Blue-Gray reunions in which soldiers of both sides gathered for "fraternalism and forgetfulness." The soldiers, writes Blight, sought to "reassemble the chaos and loss inherent to war into an order they could now control. While doing so, they cleaned up the battles and campaigns of the real war, rendered it exciting and normal all at once, and made it difficult to face the extended political meanings of the war."

The third memory was the white supremacist vision arising in part from the Democratic Party's counterrevolution against radical Reconstruction. The South may have lost the war, according to this view, but it triumphed over Reconstruction and the radical Republican legacy of corrupt, carpetbagger government and the anarchy of Negro rule. It restored labor discipline and economic dependency among blacks, thereby saving white civilization.

The white supremacist view was reinforced by the "Lost Cause" account of the Civil War. As Edward A. Pollard wrote in the 1867 book that gave this interpretation its name, "all that is left the South is the war of ideas." The essence of the Lost Cause thesis was (and remains) that the war was not about slavery, but "states' rights." It is neatly summarized in an 1893 speech by a former Confederate officer, Col. Richard Henry Lee. "As a Confederate soldier and as a Virginian, I deny the charge [that the Confederates were rebels] and denounce it as a calumny. We were not rebels, we did not fight to perpetuate human slavery, but for our rights and privileges under a government established over us by our fathers and in defense of our homes."

The Lost Cause interpretation of the war was the South's response to physical destruction and the psychological trauma of defeat. In this view, the Old South was a racial utopia, an organic society composed of loyal slaves and benevolent masters. The war pitted this "slave democracy" against the "free mobocracy" of the North, and the noble side lost. The matchless bravery of the Confederate soldier succumbed to the "juggernaut of superior numbers and merciless power." As Robert Penn Warren once wrote, "in the moment of its death, the Confederacy entered upon its immortality."

[Full disclosure requires me to disclose that before David Blight became Dr. David Blight, the Amherst College professor of history, he and I were roommates for one and a half of our undergraduate years at Michigan State University. It was Dave who introduced me to the Civil War battlefields when we took a couple summer trips together for that purpose.]

Owens again describes the "Lost Cause" perspective in another article, The Case Against Secession:

"It was an article of faith among advocates of the "Lost Cause" school of Civil War history that Southern secession was a legitimate act and that the North had no right to prevent the South from leaving the Union. The view that the South should have been permitted to depart peacefully resonates today among several disparate groups on the political right: the "neo-Confederates," the heirs of the Lost Cause school, who see the South as the exemplar of everything decent in Western civilization; some Christians, who see the supposed virtues of the ante-bellum South as preferable to the crass materialism of the commercial society they believe was created by the Union victory in the Civil War; and libertarians, who, lament the growth of the federal government and its incursions into the private sphere.

For many such conservatives, Abraham Lincoln, far from being a great statesman who re-founded America on the basis of the original principles of the American Revolution, is a villain. By using force to prevent the peaceful exodus of the Southern states, Lincoln caused a bloody and unnecessary war. While might was on the side of the North, right was on the side of those who wished to secede.

But this is bad history that lends itself to worse constitutional theory. When the Neo-Confederates and their libertarian friends make Lincoln out to be a scoundrel who plunged America into an avoidable war, they ignore the fact that his views on Union and the nature of republican government differed not at all from those of such luminaries as Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Andrew Jackson, and Daniel Webster. They also ignore the practical reasons why the president of the United States could not permit the Union to be torn asunder. Far from avoiding war, the breakup of the Union would have meant perpetual conflict on the North American continent."

The issue at stake in this for Christians is a truthful accounting of history. I have seen more then a few conservative Christians embrace a romantic view of the "Lost Cause" based on the obvious Christian character of men such as R. E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. What is not remembered is that these men, as good as they were, were still imperfect men and still influenced by their times. If we want to know what succession was about, we need to look to the acts of succession, and the speeches and rehtoric of those advocating succession. That I will save for a latter time. In the meantime, I remain the "Unrepentant Yankee"...

~ The Billy Goat ~

Finding The "Perfect Church" was Never the Issue
Three yeas ago my family and I were in the midst of a process that eventually brought us out of a church we had been involved with for over 25 years. In the midst of that process more then a few people made the remark, "No church is perfect." or, "You'll never find the perfect church." These statements were true enough in and of themselves, but were pointing to a matter that was never the real issue in all the cogitations and wrestling of soul that lead us out of that church. In fact those who made those remarks were actually way wide of the mark, and missed the real issues at hand. The "no perfect church" mantra became a smoke screen to avoid the real issue.

The real issue never was that of finding the "perfect church". The real issue was a toxic spiritual culture that was antithical to the advancement of true spirituality. We were not talking about an imperfect church, we were talking about a destructive church that was choking and smothering true Christian spirituality.

As I look back over the years in that church, I realize that any real growth I had in true spirituality was when I was standing against some of the prevailing tides that would sweep over that particular congregation; the times when I refused to accept the pulpit pronouncements on this or that, and forged my own opinion on the basis of my own study and wrestling before God, and my own observations of the wider cultural scene.

But over all the toxicity corroded the soul and heart to the point where I knew if I stayed, true life would be extinguished and I'd become another spiritual; zombie in the congregation of the "Stepford Christians".

It is amazing to me in looking back, how some who should have known better, would go to such lengths and twisting of reason to justify issues and actions that were just plain unjustifiable. I observed a Protestant version of Jesuit like casuistry that was very cultic like in its fruits.

So the next time someone tells you there is "no perfect church", please tell them finding the "perfect church" is not, and never was, the issue.

~ The Billy Goat ~