The Truth War (23 page)

Furthermore, any time a preacher squelches or softens a hard truth of Scripture to make the message more palatable, that preacher has suppressed Christ's true message and thereby usurped His rightful authority as Lord over the church.

No-lordship theology. In previous books, I have critiqued a popular system of theology that argues that every reference to the lordship of Christ should be omitted from the gospel message.
²
According to this view, surrender to Christ's lordship is an optional matter, relevant only after someone has been a Christian for some time. The gospel is therefore reduced to an invitation to believe in Jesus as Savior, while carefully omitting any reference to His authority as Lord. Gone from the message are Christ's call to discipleship, all His hard demands about cross-bearing and self-denial (Matthew 16:24; Mark 10:21; et al.), and His admonition to count the cost of following Him (Luke 14:26–33). The no-lordship “gospel” meticulously avoids calling sinners to repentance too.

No-lordship doctrine rose to popularity in the mid-twentieth century and was almost unchallenged as the dominant system of theology in American evangelicalism for several decades. The no-lordship message has filled the church with people lacking spiritual fruit and absent every other vital evidence of living faith—who nonetheless are convinced they are authentic Christians.

In fact, according to no-lordship doctrine, someone who lives an utterly debauched lifestyle should nevertheless be embraced as a true Christian if he or she ever once professed faith in Christ. These so-called “carnal Christians” are regularly given strong reassurances that their salvation is secure no matter how long or how egregiously they rebel against Christ's authority. Of course, that completely eliminates the meaningful exercise of church discipline. It also effectively unseats Christ from His rightful place of authority over the church.

In fact, it is hard to think of a more direct or more deliberate way to attack the rightful lordship of Christ over His church.

Accommodations to political correctness. Evangelicals willing to bend biblical truth to make Christianity seem more politically correct are in effect denying Christ as the true Head of the church. For example, Scripture expressly forbids women to teach men or have authority over them in the church (1 Timothy 2:12). Many evangelicals have chosen to ignore that principle or tried desperately to explain it away. Some even go so far as to write it off as an uninspired, misogynistic expression of the apostle Paul's personal opinion.

CHRIST'S HEADSHIP IN THE
CHURCH IS LIKEWISE BEING
CHALLENGED BY THOSE IN
THE EMERGING CHURCH
MOVEMENT WHO HAVE
SUGGESTED THAT SCRIPTURE
IS SIMPLY NOT CLEAR ENOUGH
TO ALLOW US TO PREACH ITS
TRUTH WITH ANY DEGREE OF
CLARITY, CERTAINTY, OR
CONVICTION.

Thus we have seen an influx of women into pastoral and teaching roles, even in evangelical circles. Many evangelical seminaries are now aggressively recruiting women for pastoral training programs. Numerous once-conservative evangelical churches are ordaining women as elders, encouraging them to teach adult classes filled with men, and even appointing them to pastoral and preaching roles.

Such feminism has gnostic roots. It is an opinion that was universally rejected by mainstream Christianity until the current generation, when it was proposed mainly as a politically correct way to respond to the secular feminists' charge that Christianity is too male dominated and therefore outmoded. The rapid acceptance of “evangelical” feminism is a measure of how many in the church are determined at all costs to bend Scripture to make it fit worldly opinion.

The same kind of mentality drives Bible translators who have revamped the language of Scripture itself to make gender references as nonspecific as possible, in an effort to make the Bible seem “inclusive” enough to satisfy postmodern standards.

POSTMODERNISM'S ANGST ABOUT CERTAINTY.

Christ's headship in the church is likewise being challenged by those in the Emerging Church movement who have suggested that Scripture is simply not clear enough to allow us to preach its truth with any degree of clarity, certainty, or conviction. Most would never come right out and deny that the Bible is the Word of God, but they accomplish exactly the same thing when they insist that no one has any right to say for sure what the Bible means.

Brian McLaren epitomizes this mentality in the introduction to his book
A New Kind of Christian
:

I drive my car and listen to the Christian radio station, something my wife always tells me I should stop doing (“because it only gets you upset”). There I hear preacher after preacher be so absolutely sure of his bombproof answers and his foolproof biblical interpretations. . . . And the more sure he seems, the less I find myself wanting to be a Christian, because on this side of the microphone, antennas, and speaker, life isn't that simple, answers aren't that clear, and nothing is that sure.
³

Thus “evangelical” postmodernism has transformed doubt, uncertainty, and qualms about practically every teaching of Scripture into high virtue. Strong convictions plainly stated are invariably labeled “arrogance” by those who favor postmodern dialogue.

Now, obviously, we cannot righteously be dogmatic about every peripheral belief or matter of personal preference. Virtually no one believes
every
opinion is worth fighting about. Scripture draws the line with ample clarity: we're commanded to defend the faith once delivered to the saints; but we're forbidden to pick fights with one another over secondary issues (Romans 14:1).

Some are now suggesting, however, that humility requires everyone to refrain from treating
any
truth as incontrovertible. Instead, we are supposed to put
everything
back on the table and “admit that our past and current formulations may have been limited or distorted.”
⁴

This approach has been referred to by some as “a hermeneutic of humility”—as if it is inherently too prideful for any preacher to think he knows what God said about anything. Of course, such a denial of all certainty has nothing to do with true humility. It is actually an arrogant form of unbelief, rooted in an impudent refusal to acknowledge that God has been sufficiently clear in His self-revelation to His creatures. It is actually a blasphemous form of arrogance, and when it governs even how someone handles the Word of God, it becomes yet another expression of evil rebellion against Christ's authority.

Christ has spoken in the Bible, and He holds us responsible to understand, interpret, obey, and teach what He said—as opposed to deconstructing everything the Bible says. Notice that Christ repeatedly rebuked the Pharisees for twisting Scripture, disobeying it, setting it aside with their traditions, and generally ignoring its plain meaning. Not once did He ever excuse the Pharisees' hypocrisy and false religion by apologizing for any lack of clarity in the Old Testament.

Jesus held not only the Pharisees but also the common people responsible for knowing and understanding the Scriptures. “Have you not read . . . ?” was a common rebuke to those who challenged His teaching but did not know or understand the Scriptures as they should have (Matthew 12:3, 5; 19:4; 22:31; Mark 12:26). He addressed the disciples on the road to Emmaus as “foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe” because of their ignorance about the Old Testament's messianic promises (Luke 24:25). The problem lay not in any lack of clarity on Scripture's part but in their own sluggish faith.

The apostle Paul, whose writings are most under debate by scholars today, wrote virtually all his epistles for the common man, not for scholars and intellectuals. Those addressed to churches were written to predominantly
Gentile
churches, whose understanding of the Old Testament was limited. He nevertheless expected them to understand what he wrote (Ephesians 3:3–5), and he held them responsible for heeding his instruction (1 Timothy 3:14–15).

Paul and Christ both consistently made the case that it is every Christian's duty to study and interpret Scripture rightly (2 Timothy 2:15). “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!” (Matthew 11:15; 13:9, 16; Mark 4:9).

Even the book of Revelation, arguably one of the most difficult sections of Scripture to interpret, isn't too hard for a typical lay reader to understand sufficiently and profit from. Hence it begins with this blessing: “Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written in it; for the time is near” (Revelation 1:3).

Protestant Christianity has always affirmed the
perspicuity
of Scripture. That means we believe God has spoken distinctly in His Word. Not everything in the Bible is equally clear, of course (2 Peter 3:16). But God's Word is plain enough for the average reader to know and understand everything necessary for a saving knowledge of Christ. Scripture is also sufficiently clear to enable us to obey the Great Commission, which expressly requires us to teach others “all things” that Christ has commanded (Matthew 28:18–20).

Two thousand years of accumulated Christian scholarship has been basically consistent on all the major issues: The Bible is the authoritative Word of God, containing every spiritual truth essential to God's glory, our salvation, faith, and eternal life. Scripture tells us that all humanity fell in Adam, and our sin is a perfect bondage from which we cannot extricate ourselves. Jesus is God incarnate, having taken on human flesh to pay the price of sin and redeem believing men and women from sin's bondage. Salvation is by grace through faith, and not a result of any works we do. Christ is the only Savior for the whole world, and apart from faith in Him, there is no hope of redemption for any sinner. So the gospel message needs to be carried to the uttermost parts of the earth. True Christians have always been in full agreement on all those vital points of biblical truth.

As a matter of fact, the postmodernized notion that everything should be perpetually up for discussion and nothing is ever really sure or settled is a plain and simple denial of both the perspicuity of Scripture and the unanimous testimony of the people of God throughout redemptive history. In one sense, the contemporary denial of the Bible's clarity represents a regression to medieval thinking, when the papal hierarchy insisted that the Bible is too unclear for laypeople to interpret it for themselves. (This belief led to much fierce persecution against those who worked to translate the Bible into common languages.)

In another sense, however, the postmodern denial of Scripture's clarity is even worse than the darkness of medieval religious superstition, because postmodernism in effect says
no one
can reliably understand what the Bible means. Postmodernism leaves people permanently in the dark about practically everything.

That, too, is a denial of Christ's lordship over the church. How could He exercise headship over His church if His own people could never truly know what He meant by what He said? Jesus Himself settled the question of whether His truth is sufficiently clear in John 10:27–28, when He said, “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me. And I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither shall anyone snatch them out of My hand.”

Other theological fads and novelties.
Dozens of other challenges to Christ's headship over the church are currently percolating in the wider evangelical movement. Some impugn Christ's lordship by their faulty doctrine.
Open theism
, for example, suggests that God doesn't know the future infallibly. That diminishes the truth of divine sovereignty and thereby undermines the whole basis of Christ's lordship.

Others would formally affirm Christ's sovereignty and spiritual headship over the church, but they resist His rule in practice. To cite just one instance of how this is done, many churches have set various forms of human psychology, self-help therapy, and the idea of “recovery” in place of the Bible's teaching about sin and sanctification. Christ's headship over the church is thus subjugated to professional therapists. His design for sanctification, however, is by means of the Word of God (John 15:3; 17:17). So wherever the work of God's Word is being replaced with twelve-step programs and other substitutes, Christ's headship over the church is being denied in practice.

Popular entrepreneurial styles of church leadership (where the pastor casts himself in the role of a corporate CEO rather than being a faithful shepherd to Christ's flock) likewise undermine the headship of Christ over the church. Such enterprises may be labeled churches, but often they are merely the products of human ingenuity and carnal energy. They are works of “wood, hay, straw” in the words of 1 Corinthians 3:12, good for nothing eternal but destined to be burned up at the judgment seat of Christ. He is building the true church (Matthew 16:18), and He alone is its true Head (Ephesians 5:23). His rule is mediated not through the cleverness and industry of entrepreneurial leaders, but solely and only by His revealed truth as it is rightly preached, explained, applied, and upheld.

Sadly, almost everywhere we look in the contemporary evan gelical movement, Christ's headship over the church is being challenged, rejected, ignored, overruled, or otherwise disputed. A right understanding of the church begins with this recognition: Christ is the one true Head of the church, and whatever interferes with His headship has the seeds of apostasy in it. Conversely, every form of apostasy is an implicit denial of “the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ” (Jude 4) and is therefore a form of rebellion against the church's one true Head.

WHAT DOES
Head
MEAN?

What is included in the biblical idea of headship? It is a much-disputed idea these days, thanks to evangelical feminism. For the past two decades or so, people seeking an egalitarian understanding of the New Testament have had to grapple with the clear meaning of Ephesians 5:23: “The husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church.” They have sought creative ways to strip the concepts of leadership and authority from the notion of headship.