Joe Hellerman - When Church was Family

Re-Evaluating 'Church'

"But teaching our people about the church as a family will not suffice to alter deeply ingrained patterns of behavior. We must also reevaluate the social contexts of church life, the ways in which our ministries are executed. The priority most churches place upon the success of the Sunday service subtly but powerfully communicates the message that this impersonal, once-a-week social environment is quintessentially what 'church' is all about. After all, this is where most church leaders count heads, and this is where we collect money. As a result, the one event preeminently identified with the word 'church' in most congregations finds our people seated side-by-side, facing forward, with little or no interpersonal interaction with person to the right or to the left. A fellow sitting next to me in Sunday church might have lost his job - or his spouse - that very week. Tragically, however, I would never know it."

-J. Hellerman, When the Church was a Family, 177

Tremendous Demands

"Consider the contrast with the church in the West today. The early Christians made tremendous demands of their converts - demands that affected the most important areas of their lives. And people came in droves. But we bend over backward in our churches to accommodate the radical individualism of people who come to us to find a 'personal' Savior who, we assure them, will meet their every felt need. And the overwhelming tide of secular culture threatens to suffocate what is left of the spiritual life of our churches, as the West becomes less and less Christian."

-J. Hellerman, When the Church was a Family, 101-102.

Justification & Familification

"It is time to inform our people that conversion to Christ involves both our justification and our familification, that we gain a new Father and a new set of brothers and sisters when we respond to the gospel. It is time to communicate the biblical reality that personal salvation is a community-creating event, and to trust God to change our lives and the lives o four churches accordingly."

-J. Hellerman, When the Church was a Family, 143.

Grace & the Messy Life

"Someone asked me how things were going recently. It's not really a 'yes' or 'no' ('good' or 'bad') question. Life in our congregation is messy. People have a wide variety of problems and many of those problems are out on the table. Are things going well when one of your members has been hauled out of a pub in a drunken state? When people admit problems in their marriage? When people are struggling with depression? Actually I think the answer can be, 'Yes, things are going well.' A key verse for me in recent years has been the first beatitude, which I paraphrase as: 'Blessed are the broken people for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.' God's blessing is found among the broken people. I don't rejoice in people's problems, but I do rejoice to be part of a community of broken people. I sometimes describe our church as a group of messy people led by messy people. It's proved a context in which I've been able to address my own struggles.

What's the alternative? One alternative is to be a church in which there's a lot of pretending - where people have problems, but the culture doesn't allow them to be open. Churches like this are very neat and respectable. But I know I'd rather be in a messy church! Mess reflects, I think, a culture of grace. We pretend because either we don't trust God's grace for ourselves or we don't trust others to show us grace."

Tim Chester, You Can Change, 162.

Help Me Simplify My Library

We are moving to Fort Worth in August and I need to reduce my library. They are priced very cheap so get while the gettins good:

http://www.amazon.com/shops/Christ-centeredBooks

You Are a Missionary

You are a missionary. I know what you are thinking, “Not me. I live in the states!” So goes the typical conception of Christians in North America. We are not missionaries, but we know we are supposed to pray for and support them. Now, I don’t mean to denigrate those Christians who have left North America to preach the gospel to other nations. Obviously that is needed and extremely important! Local churches should prioritize financial and prayerful support for foreign missionaries.

What I am concerned with is that those Christians who stay home fill as if they have done their part by praying for sending a check. Not the case. If we simply define missionary as one who is sent by God to tell the gospel to others, then we are all missionaries. A missionary is a person sent to promote the Christian faith. That’s all of us.

Every single Christian is mandated to make disciples. A disciple is one who makes disciples (Matt 28:18-20). Disciple-making is not optional for New Testament Christians.  Every single Christian has been sent. This may strange at first, but think about it. You do believe in the biblical teaching that God is meticulously sovereign, don’t you? “We may throw the dice, but the Lord determines how they fall” (NLT).

Christian, you are not in your city by accident. Before your grandpa’s grandpa had his first job, the Lord knew that you would be working where you are working right now. You live in the neighborhood that you do by divine decree. Acts 17:26 reads, “From one man he created all the nations throughout the whole earth. He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries.” That includes your location. You are there because God has put you there. Are you representing his rule well there? Do you neighbors know about him?

Every one of us are sent ambassadors (2 Cor 5:18-21). If America ever was a “Christian nation,” it certainly isn’t now. It is the new mission field. Ask the Lord to grant you his eyes. Are you serious about the Lordship of Christ? How are you seeking to serve your neighbors and gain a hearing for the gospel? Do you know their names? Are you intentional in your workplace? Do you view your co-workers as those who will one day face God in judgment if they do not turn to Christ?

You are a missionary. If you have neglected this aspect of your calling and identity, join me in pursing gospel intentionality all the time in all aspects of life.

“As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.” (John 20:21)

Texas Pride

Is There a Covenant of Grace?

"If we stick with the Biblical presentation of one "purpose" in Christ, and a plurality of covenants in history, we will avoid the confusion of Dispensationalism's earthly-purpose-for-Israel, heavenly-purpose-for-church theory, and the unnecessary assumptions of Covenant Theology which are used to bring infants into the New Covenant church."

-Jon Zens, in his seminal essay, "Is There a Covenant of Grace?"

Hermeneutics and Intoxication

"Read the prophetic books without reference to Christ - what couldst thou find more tasteless and insipid? Find therein Christ, and what thou readest will not only prove agreeable, but will intoxicate thee."

-Augustine

Apostolic Exegesis

"We must learn from how the New Testament writers themselves interpreted the Old Testament. When we do this, we will see that the Old Testament prophecies concerning the nation of Israel are fulfilled in Christ and in the gospel."

-Ben Merkle, "Old Testament Restoration Prophecies Regarding the Nation of Israel: Literal or Symbolic?," The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 14.1 (Spring 2010), 21.

2 Peter and AD 70

In his book, The Promise of His Appearing, as Peter Leithart unpacks 2 Peter, he gives five "Knock-Down Arguments" for seeing the entire letter as about Jesus' prophecy concerning the coming crisis of Jerusalem and Judaism in A.D. 70 (cf. Mark 13):

1. Peter wrote his second letter on the theme of the coming of Jesus, which he says was also a theme of his first letter, which is 1 Peter. Since 1 Peter's teaching about the "coming" of Jesus highlights its imminence, 2 Peter must be dealing with the same looming event.

2. Peter defends the reliability of the promised coming of Jesus by reference to the Transfiguration. In each of the Synoptics, this event is connected  immediately with a prophecy of Jesus' "coming" within the lifetime of some of His disciples, a prophecy filled out in the Olivet Discourse. Peter's argument from the Transfiguration makes best sense if he is using it to support this prophecy. Thus the "coming" that Peter insists will happen is an event that Jesus said would take place in the first century.

3. Peter says explicitly that the destruction of false teachers is coming "soon." Their destruction is the same event as the destruction of the present heavens and earth, the "day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men" (3:7). If the destruction of false teachers was near when Peter wrote, so also was the destruction of the heavens and earth and the coming of a new heavens and earth.

4. Peter responds to mockers who doubt the promise of Jesus' coming because time has passed without any sign of the Parousia. If there were no time limit on the original prophecy, then the mockers would have no grounds for their mockery and no way to attract converts to their skeptical views. Therefore, the original prophecy must have included a time limit, a terminus ad quem, and that time limit must have been the lifetime of the apostles.

5. For the mockers, the passing of the "fathers," the apostles and their associates, casts doubt on the truth of Jesus' promise to come in power. This objection has weight only if Jesus had in fact promised to come before the "fathers" passed from the scene. Thus the prophecy in dispute in 2 Peter 3 promised a "coming" within the apostolic generation. The prophecy Peter says will be fulfilled is a prophecy about Jesus' coming within the generation.

Pre-PhD Summer Reading

I always bite off way more than I can chew, and end up making changes along the way, but here are my hopes for my last summer before the PhD starts:

• Two Testaments, One Bible - David Baker
• The Fabric of Theology - Richard Lints (re-read)
• An Uncommon Union - John Hannah
• Biblical Theology in Crisis - Brevard Childs
• Defending the Faith - D.G. Hart
• This World is Not My Home - Michael Williams
• Progressive Covenant Theology - Blaising/Bock (re-read)
• Kingdom Through Covenant - Gentry/Wellum
• Dominion and Dynasty - Stephen Dempster (re-read, again)
• A House for My Name - Peter Leithart
• Jesus and the Victory of God  - N.T. Wright (finish)
• Institutes of the Christian Religion - John Calvin (start)
• The Reformers and Their Step-Children - Leonard Verduin (finish)
• Biblical Theology - Perdue/Morgan/Sommer

Any particular reads you are excited about this summer?

SBC Statement on Salvation

If the SBC is your denominational world, you have doubtless heard about the controversial document called “A Statement of the Traditional Southern Baptist Understanding of God’s Plan of Salvation.”

I found it sort of interesting that Arminian theologian Roger Olson has criticized the document for being more semi-pelagian than Arminian. He writes,

"Let me say first that among the authors and promoters of the statement are Southern Baptist theologians who have been adamantly denying that they are Arminians even though they are not Calvinists. I have thought, upon reading some of their writings (e.g., Whosoever Will), that they are Arminians who just don’t want to wear that label. Now, however, I’m not so sure. . . . A classical Arminian would never deny that Adam’s sin resulted in the incapacitation of any person’s free will."

Joe Carter has put together a very helpful blog post here. He notes that this position has only been "traditional" since 1963. See this post by Thomas Kidd.

Al Mohler has weighed in here.

Tom Ascol is in the process of responding now (5 Parts so far).

A Truncated Gospel Story?

"If the Paul you have met is one who seems to have too little to say about how to follow Jesus, then the heralds who have introduced you to him have likely been living out a truncated gospel story at best."

J.R. Daniel Kirk, Jesus Have I loved, but Paul?, 89