CampOnIntellectual Dishonesty in the Debate

Everyone can recognize a caricature when they see one. Here is how our President is portrayed and the President himself. The caricature grossly exaggerates some feature or characteristic of a person in order to visually portray that person in a certain light. Here we are to believe that President Bush not only possesses these huge fly-out ears and little beady eyes but a level of intellectual shortcoming as well. Caricature is used of ideas and concepts as well, usually of an idea with which you disagree. The caricature contains some element of the original idea, just enough to make it identifiable. It is then lampooned and distorted in a way intended to either belittle or dismiss the thought without actually engaging the idea. It is often intellectually dishonest.

So, what role should caricature play in the discussion of theology? Is God’s word and its interpretation and application the domain of comedy and not-so-subtle deception? Certainly, Elijah was not kind to the prophets of Baal as he questioned why their god was indisposed, perhaps in the rest room but by and large, the Bible presents the unvarnished truth without resorting to deprecation rooted in falsehoods. Because we engage in discussion that has eternal implications, those who write and speak on topics relating to God and His truth should consider carefully how we present our ideas.

Steve Camp has once again done his best to caricature the Calvinist-Arminian theological debate by portraying Arminian theology incorrectly. In a post entitled “The Five Points of Free Will” he writes this;

The previous post represented a condensed version of the five points of Arminianism that sparked the development of the five points of Calvinism at the Synod of Dort in 1618-1619 as a theological and biblical corrective to the heretical views of Jacob Arminius.

The previous post is where the real caricature appears as he presented this little cutesy test by which one could engage in a witch trial of your own to determine if, according the theologian Camp, you held to the correct framework. Here are the questions which he claims to be representative of the Arminian framework:

1. God graciously enables every sinner to repent and believe, but He does not interfere with man’s freedom. Each sinner possesses a free will, and his eternal destiny depends on how he uses it. Man’s freedom consists of his ability to choose good over evil in spiritual matters. T or F?

2. God selected only those whom He knew would of themselves freely believe the gospel. It was left entirely up to man as to who would believe and therefore as to who would be elected unto salvation. God chose those whom He knew would, of their own free will, choose Christ. T or F?

3. Christ’s redeeming work made it possible for everyone to be saved but did not actually secure the salvation of anyone. Although Christ died for all men and for every man, only those who believe on Him are saved. His death enabled God to pardon sinners on the condition that they believe. T or F?

4. The Spirit calls inwardly all those who are called outwardly by the gospel invitation; He does all that He can to bring every sinner to salvation. Man’s free will limits the Spirit in the application of Christ’s saving work. The Holy Spirit can only draw to Christ those who allow Him to have His way with them. Until the sinner responds, the Spirit cannot give life. T or F?

5. Salvation is accomplished through the combined efforts of God (who takes the initiative) and man (who must respond) – man’s response being the determining factor. God has provided salvation for everyone, but His provision becomes effective only for those who, of their own free will, “choose” to cooperate with Him and accept His offer of grace. T or F?

Reading the comments attached to this quiz is typical of the CalBloggers as they high-five one another for scoring so high on the exam without once pointing out that this does not accurately reflect the theological points made by the Remonstrants. (BTW, according to Mr. Camp, the answer to all of these should be False, something that an Arminian would agree with.)

Okay, everyone had a bit of fun and in a few days the post will scroll off into blog oblivion but when do we begin to consider the long term effects of this kind of discourse? Mr. Camp’s blog is quite popular and many (most?) accept whatever he writes without challenge or correction. Because he inaccurately portrays a theology that he does not support, he is either a) disingenuous or b) ill informed on the topic on which he writes. Which I dare not speculate but leave that up to you to decide. Although, Steve, it seems to me that there is something in the Bible about bearing false testimony…

Seeking the Prosperity

Sunday after Sunday in our churches, we laud (and rightfully so) our missionary teams for their travels and service in foreign lands. We are living out the Great Commandment and those who commit themselves to this endeavor find favor with God. While we enjoy the pictures and the stories of transformation, we need to remind ourselves of a parallel concern of Gods; Jeremiah reminds us:

This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jersusalem to Babylon: Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.

Stott and Ervin on Spirit Baptism Part Three

(Part Two Here)

In this final post examining how John Stott and Howard Ervin contrast the different doctrines of Spirit Baptism, our attention turns to the idea of being filled with the spirit. The question at hand is whether this is a single event or series of fillings. Stott conservatively separates the baptismal event and subsequent episodes of being filled with the spirit.  As stated in my second posting, Stott does not hear Scripture speaking of a secondary Baptism but he does take an interesting stance on the fullness of the Spirit when he says “that this gift needs to be continuously and increasingly appropriated.” He sees this infilling taking three forms. First, the normal condition of the Christian is to be “filled” with the Spirit (ie: Acts 11:24). The second form is a unique to an event or ministry. As an example, we are pointed to John the Baptist who was “filled with the Holy Spirit” in advance of his prophetic ministry. Similarly, in advance of Paul’s ascension to apostolic office (Acts 9:17) Ananias prays for him to be “filled with the Holy Spirit.” The third form of infilling, according to Stott, is a more temporal filling unique to an immediate task or emergency. Zechariah was filled prior to prophecy and Stephen prior to his martyrdom.

Dr. Ervin’s Pentecostal position is much easier to enumerate as he associates the full infilling with the Spirit Baptism. Viewing them as inseparable, he posits that for subsequent infilling events to occur, one must experience re-baptism, certainly a non-biblical notion. We must be mindful that this doctrine is developed predominantly from within the Lukan corpus and lies at the heart of the Pentecostal position on Spirit Baptism. When he turns to the Pauline instance in Ephesians 5:18:

Do not get drunk on win, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit.

Ervin points out that the word for “be filled” is in the present tense, imperative mood, and passive voice. This leads the interpreter with a choice of a repeated action (be filled again and again) or a continuous action (be continuously filled with the Spirit). Good exegesis points us to the immediate context for guidance and in doing so we find a parallelism in the verse between the warning against getting drunk on wine and the encouragement rather, to be filled with the Spirit. The present imperative is used in the first component of the comparison (do not get drunk), consistent interpretation calls for the present imperative in the second half of the parallelism as well. As Ervin paraphrases the verse “Stop being habitually drunken with wine but be continuously filled with the Spirit.”

Conclusion

This is a secondary issue to a secondary doctrine but one that calls for greater consideration by all Christians. Brother Stott points our attention to John 7:37-39:

On the last and greatest day of the Feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him. By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to received. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.”

Bishop J.C. Ryle wrote of this passage “It has been said that there are some passages in Scripture which deserve to be printed in letters of gold.” The Lord refers to a ritual of the Feast in which water from the pool of Siloam was poured out in prescience of the coming of the Spirit and that Jesus would provide this water to all who thirsted and came to Him to be relieved. As we meditate on this passage we can see that the empowerment of the Spirit is directly tied to our penitent approach to the Lord. Not only that, but this living water will stream from us to others infusing our ministry with power. Whether the Christian views this as a fresh filling of the power of the Spirit or a further releasing of the pent up power within us, we do well to continue our repeated approaches to the throne so that the streams might flow into and out of us all.

Selfish Ambition

St. Paul reminds us of our appropriate attitude between ourselves and the world.

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others. (Phil 2:3-4)

Following closely in the shadow of our Lord we see over and over as He attends to others rather than himself, giving us the model for our own life of sacrifice.

Stott and Ervin on Spirit Baptism Part Two

(Part One here)

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. [Acts 2:1-4]

At Pentecost, the disciples find themselves huddled together awaiting the gift that their Lord had promised to them. And come it did, with fire and the evidence of the newfound gift of tongues. The question for us, two thousand years later, is how we shall interpret this and other similar incidents recorded in the passages of scripture? Are they normative such that we should continue to expect their repetition or were they miraculous events that occurred once and should be understood as fulfilling a unique need at a moment in history? In the immediate context of the passage, the gift of speaking in foreign tongues served a timely purpose as the 12 were to communicate with the myriad peoples of many nations assembled in Jerusalem (vv 5-13). Peter and the other disciples stood before a crowd and associated the day with the prophesy of Joel:

And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days. I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. [Joel 2:28-32]

Old Testament prophesy is seen by Peter as associated with the baptism of the Spirit spoken of by John the Baptist and Jesus. As he speaks to the crowd in vv 38, calling them to repent, he has in mind that they will receive the two incomparable gifts promised by the Lord, the forgiveness of sin and bestowal of the Holy Spirit.

Neither Stott nor Ervin disputes that these twin blessings are to be expected and greeted by the Christian. The question comes in the issue of subsequence; does the Spirit Baptism occur distinctly separate from the moment of conversion? Stott is among those who say no, that the Spirit indwells all believers as a step in the conversion event. He points to the plain reading of Acts 2:40-41 in which 3,000 blessed souls are saved, receiving the forgiveness and the indwelling of Spirit simultaneously. Exegetically, Stott is cautious in separating the unique experience of 120 and the believers who enter the kingdom subsequently. His hermeneutic framework does not find the narrative passages in Acts appropriate for deriving a doctrine of the work of the Holy Spirit. He reminds us that “it is a fundamental principle of biblical interpretation to begin with the general, not the special.” A more appropriate interpretive passage regarding the timing of the indwelling is seen in Galatians 3:14 “…by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit.” The context of the passage makes it clear that this “faith” is not a second, subsequent act of belief but the saving belief of conversion.

What of the two further incidents mentioned in Acts in which there appears to be a separation between conversion and Spirit indwelling? In Acts 8:5-17, one encounters the Samaritan believers, converted upon hearing the gospel from Philip the evangelist. With the exception of Simon the sorcerer, there is nothing out of the ordinary in the saving event of these believers except for the fact that these were Samaritans. Philip’s boldness in proclaiming the gospel in Samaria for the first time and the response of the people is nothing short of astonishing. Not only had Philip, a Jew, preached the gospel to the Samaritans despite the bitter rivalry that existed between the two peoples, they had accepted the word and believed! Here Stott poses an important question in understanding why Peter and John would need to make a trip to see these believers firsthand. “Is it not reasonable to suppose that it was precisely in order to avoid the development of such a situation (Jewish-Samaritan estrangement causing a schism in the new Church) that God deliberately withheld the gift of His Spirit from the Samaritan believers until two of the leading Apostles came down to investigate” and confirm the conversion by laying on of hands? The unique nature of this incident and the inability to repeat it makes this situation inappropriate as precedent for today in the development of doctrine.

The second incident is found in Acts 19:1-7 where we encounter the Ephesian disciples. The question that must be examined in this context is whether or not the ‘disciples’ were truly Christian disciples. Certainly, Paul refers to them as such but the reader must discern of whom they were disciples. Stott makes the case that their lack of knowledge of Jesus and the Holy Spirit marks them as non-Christian disciples. The repentance of John’s baptism must be followed by belief in the work of the Cross before one can claim the title of Christian disciple and it appears here that this was not the case.

Pentecostal theologian Ervin asks us to consider a different hermeneutic in which events must be interpreted in the context of history transitioning from the old covenant to the new covenant. He points us to John chapter 20 in which we find the disciples huddled frightened and in despair until the Lord appears to them with the greeting “Peace be with you!” and then breathed upon them, imparting the Holy Spirit to them. This moment marks the culmination of the old Sinai covenant and a new nation created in The Church. This imparting of the Spirit is to be interpreted as one that equips the believer for service and, by extension and in view of the Church’s commission, is a necessity for all members of the body. He further states “In the Pentecostal hermeneutic, repentance, faith, and water baptism constitute conversion and initiation into the new covenant community. Repentance and faith are the results of the Spirit’s action in the spiritual experience of the convert. These elements are the conditions for the new birth from above, for apart from the Holy Spirit convicting of sin there can be neither repentance nor faith. They are, therefore, sequentially prior to the Lukan gift of the Holy Spirit.”

The reason that Ervin  brings up the Johannine experience is to draw the difference between that and the Pentecost experience(s) of Acts as recorded by Luke. John’s new birth message is ontological, it is a change in one’s nature where Luke’s gift of the spirit is functional, preparing one for service. Is the experience of Acts normative though? Ervin supports it by dismissing the assertion that Pentecost was a “once and for all” event in the church’s history by pointing to the narrative of Cornelius in Acts 10 which was separated from the event by at least ten years. He further disagrees with Stott as he points out that so long as the Great Commission of our Lord remains in effect, so too the need for Baptism in the Spirit as experienced at Pentecost will remain in order to supply the Holy Spirit power through which it will be accomplished.

The Pentecostal insists that the passages in Acts which describe the Baptism of the Holy Spirit are normative for Christian experience and are sufficient from which to derive a doctrine on this subject. The reasoning forwarded for establishing this position is that there are no other recorded experiences due to the fact that later authors would not see it as necessary since the experience was taken for granted that readers would already be familiar with it. We must turn to the Acts narratives for information on this and therefore, it is authoritative on this topic. Ervin gives 5 propositions that support this theological position:

1.John the Baptist’s baptism supplied the type for the baptism in the Spirit. (cf Acts 1:5) The baptism of Jesus places the Christian in Spirit.

2. Jesus himself is the administrator of this Spirit-baptism.

3. The baptism in the Holy Spirit is not synonymous with conversion and the new birth from above. Instead, it is subsequent to conversion and regeneration.

4. There will be normative evidence of this Spirit Baptism in the form of charismatic manifestations of the Spirit’s personality and power.

5. Baptism in the Spirit is synonymous (in Luke) with being filled with the spirit.

Grammatically, the description of the first Spirit Baptism (Acts 2:1-4 see above) contains the word translated “they were filled” in the ingressive aorist tense, meaning that the verb indicates a state or condition and denotes the entry into that state or condition. In other words, they moved from one state to another, that of being filled with the Spirit. In the narrative of the Samaritan Believers (Acts 8:14-17), Ervin reads this passage in the framework described in the previous paragraphs and therefore sees a clear subsequence to the conversion/Spirit baptism sequence. He does not engage the possibility that there may be a reason for God to have withheld the Spirit from this group of believers. Addressing the Ephesian disciples in Acts 19, Ervin does acknowledge that they may have had an incomplete presentation of the gospel to which they responded but he does not allow for the possibility that they may not have been regenerate, instead electing to emphasize the ordering of the process with conversion baptism preceding Spirit Baptism.

Conclusion

Both theologians offer conservative and reasonable exegesis in the original language and with appropriate  Old Testament reference. As a secondary issue, it appears that one will follow the doctrine that best fits their overall theological framework. That is, unless they find themselves with experiential evidence that contributes to a reading of the narratives in a different light. Shall we divide fellowship over this? In no way.