I haven’t followed all the twists and turns of the social media debate about David and Bathsheba and whether their sexual relationship was rape or adultery. But I do know that there is a debate, and it provoked me to take a closer look at the question for myself. I have no dog in the Twitter fight. My goal in this is simply to understand what the Bible says and to believe it. If I have misunderstood what the Bible teaches on this in the past, then I want to correct my views based on what scripture says. Semper reformanda. My aim in this post is simply to pass something…
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Is Egalitarianism within the Pale of Southern Baptist Cooperation?
In the year 2000, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) made complementarianism a part of its foundation for cooperation by including the doctrine in The Baptist Faith and Message 2000. Two additions to the BF&M are worth noting. Article VI on “The Church”: “Its scriptural officers are pastors and deacons. While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” Article XVIII on “The Family”: “The husband and wife are of equal worth before God, since both are created in God’s image. The marriage relationship models the way God relates to His people. A husband is to…
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How to know the difference between the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error
The apostle John explains to his readers how to tell the difference between the Spirit of God and the spirit of antichrist: 1 John 4:6 “We are from God; he who knows God listens to us; he who is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.” This means that if you want to know Jesus and if you want to know the truth, then you must listen to His apostolic witnesses. If you refuse to listen to and to believe in the apostolic portrait of Jesus, you are listening to the spirit of antichrist (1 John…
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The Will of the Father and the Will of the Son in the Covenant of Redemption
A couple months ago, I wrote “A Clarification about a New Book on the Trinity” in which I addressed criticism of an article I wrote back in 2004. In my article, I had argued that the Son’s submission to the Father is a feature of the economy not of the immanent trinity. I based this conclusion on a certain reading of Philippians 2:6, which gives us a Pauline depiction of the preincarnate Christ. Paul says that “although [Christ] existed in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God as a thing to be grasped for” (Phil. 2:6, my translation). The point was not that the Son’s essence…
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A. T. Robertson on Women Preaching
A. T. Robertson is without question the greatest scholar of New Testament Greek that the Southern Baptist Convention has ever produced. Indeed, he is one of the greatest scholars of New Testament Greek that has ever lived. In 1906, Robertson wrote a sharp critique of the practice of women preaching in “mixed public assemblies.” His brief remarks appear in the introduction to W. P. Harvey’s booklet Shall Women Preach (Louisville, KY: Baptist Book Concern, 1906). I recently came across this short essay and thought it worth highlighting here. See below.
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Beware of a “Test the Fruit” Hermeneutic
When Matthew Vines’ book God and the Gay Christian came out in 2014, I could hardly have imagined how much of an impact it would have among evangelicals. Nevertheless, it has had an impact. Some of the high-profile evangelicals (e.g. Jen Hatmaker) who have come out affirming gay marriage have done so on the basis of arguments found in Vines’ book. Among the ideas from Vines’ book that I still see gaining purchase among evangelicals is a particular hermeneutical oddity that Vines draws from Jesus’ teaching about “trees” and “fruit” in Matthew 7:15-20, where Jesus says, Every good tree bears good fruit; but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A…
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A Review of James Dolezal’s “All That Is in God”
I really wish I had not waited as long as I did to read James Dolezal’s 2017 book All That Is in God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism (Reformation Heritage, 2017). As it is, I only picked it up a month or so ago, but I would have picked it up much sooner if I had realized what an important book this is. It’s only 137 pages, but it is without question one of the most significant books that I have ever read. I don’t agree with everything in this book. In fact, there are parts of it that I found quite frustrating. Nevertheless, the main…
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The PCA General Assembly Affirms the Nashville Statement
Last night I stayed up until after 1am watching the annual General Assembly (GA) of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). The debate went into the wee hours of the night because the assembly had several measures before it relating to sexuality and gender identity. The most controversial measure was Overture 4, which is titled “Declare the Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood’s ‘Nashville Statement’on Biblical Sexuality as a Biblically Faithful Declaration.” Overture 4 is remarkable not only because it affirms the Nashville Statement, but also because it calls on the PCA to use the Nashville Statement in discipleship materials produced by the denomination. Here are the relevant lines from…
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Divine Discipline
Better to learn in the gentle classroom of God’s word than in the hard chambers of his discipline. “So the princes of Israel and the king humbled themselves and said, ‘The Lord is righteous.’ When the Lord saw that they humbled themselves, the word of the Lord came to Shemaiah, saying, ‘They have humbled themselves so I will not destroy them, but I will grant them some measure of deliverance, and My wrath shall not be poured out on Jerusalem by means of Shishak. But they will become his slaves so that they may learn the difference between My service and the service of the kingdoms of the countries. They will…
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Complementarianism? What’s in a name?
Over the last several weeks, the evangelical interwebs have been astir with debates about women preaching and complementarianism. I have noticed in much of this discussion that there seems to be much confusion about what complementarianism is. As a result, some of us have been trying to address this confusion in hopes of shedding some light on the matter (see here, here, and here). But that is not my purpose in this short post. Rather, what I would like to do is make a brief historical point about the origin and referent of the term complementarian. While it was common for older commentators to point out that Adam and Eve…
