What a start to a day! Nearly 60 men (and a few ladies) singing a few great hymns like For a Thousand Tongues to Sing & The Solid Rock (acapella). How glorious! Books were made available from NextStep Resources www.nsresources.com and from www.matthiasmedia.com .
For slides and other resources from this conference go to www.waterdam.org/staysharp09 and www.matt-mitchell.blogspot.com for more great thoughts and notes!
Theological Issues
DOCTRINE OF GOD
Knowing God, J.I. Packer (transcendent emphasis but does not preclude the issue of immanence)
Experiencing God, Henry Blackaby (immanent emphasis but does not preclude the issue of transcendence)
Yet often people focus on one aspect and almost neglect or ignore the other.
20th Century Theology: God and the World in a Transitional Age, Stanley Grenz & Roger Olson
People swing between the Transcendence of God and the Immanence of God. This shows in the people's interest in the book The Shack by William P. Young. How should we respond? The good is the book encourages people to get with God in the Shack of difficulty, the bad is that it undefines God and makes Him much more like one of us than the God who is revealed in Scripture. We need to leave not with question marks in our lives, but exclamation marks from God's Word! See Paul Grimmond's review at http://matthiasmedia.com.au/briefing/librar/5395/
NOTES FROM GREG REGARDING THE SHACK:
"How should we respond to The Shack? My first response was to run away as quickly as I possibly could. But then I realized that The Shack gets one thing right when it encourages us to meet God in the difficult issues. 'The shack' functions as a metaphor for two things: it is the place where we stuff the things that are too hard to think about, and the place where we meet with God face-to-face.
Young is dead right to suggest that we need to get to know God in the midst of the hard questions. The problem is that he brings us face-to-face with a God who is not God at all. In his zeal to 'free' God from the chains of misunderstanding, Young has shackled God beyond recognition. The solution, though, isn't to run away from 'the shack'; the solution is to spend more time there—not in William P Young's 'shack', of course, but in the place where the living God speaks for himself about the big issues of life. We need to spend more time gazing into the face of the God who reveals himself in the Bible. We need to think about the big
questions of suffering and obedience and truth while we sit at the feet of our Lord. In fact, if we have been reading our Bibles, we will have found that these are issues that he is only too willing to discuss. Indeed, it is the triune God of Scripture alone who is both sovereign enough and good enough to deal with evil.
I am not pretending that there won't be difficult questions. Nor am I suggesting that the answers will be totally satisfying for everyone. We may even need to
accept that God is not willing to answer some of our questions right now. But we will certainly be better off hearing from the God who sent his Son to die for us,
than listening to the god of our imaginations. If western Christianity had spent more time in 'the shack' with the true and living creator, and less time wallowing around in our felt needs, then, just maybe, less people would have been fooled.
We might have recognized The Shack for the empty shell that it is. Our churches might even have become places where people could meet face-to-face with the holy God of Scripture. Only when we come into the presence of the loving, holy, majestic, glorious, gracious, judging, rescuing, creating, sustaining and redeeming God, who holds the future in his awesome hands, will we have a real message to offer a world obsessed with pain."
THE DOCTRINE OF THE BIBLE
How Do We Define Inerrancy? The Chicago Statement on Inerrancy - http://www.alliancenet.org/partner/Article_Display_Page/0,,PTID307086%7CCHID750054%7CCIID2094584,00.html
Paul D. Feinberg, "The Meaning of Inerrancy"
(chapter 9), 267-304.
Inerrancy means that when all facts are known, the Scriptures in their original autographs and properly interpreted will be shown to be whollytrue in everything that they affirm, whether that
has to do with doctrine or morality or with the social, physical, or life sciences.
We cannot answer today's questions with 50 year old answers, so we must constantly be reforming our reformation back to God's Truth revealed in His Word.
Challenges Today:
1. The postmodern shift in epistemology(i.e. post-foundational) has led some evangelicals to question propositional revelation.
2. A significant number of conservative students have/are graduating with doctorates in biblical studies and theology from non-evangelical institutions.
3. Relevance and respectability in the guild is often desired more than faithfulness.
4. The notion of parallelomania is used when doing background study, and if a similar account is found in some other ANE (ancient Near East) document, it flattens and possibly even
negates the supernatural nature of the Word.
5. Modernism's strength was an emphasis on truth; its weakness was that it came at the expense of God's overarching story. Postmodernism's strength is an
emphasis on story; its weakness is that it comes at the expense of Truth.
6. There is a healthy focus on the church doing theology (e.g. Vanhoozer, Green). This is good. But the problem is that it is often theology that is tangentially related to the Bible.
THE DEATH OF CHRIST
Essential to the Gospel
"We believe this doctrine (penal substitution) to be central and essential to the gospel. While the atonement accomplished by Christ cannot be reduced to this understanding alone (and no one should claim that it should), to deny or confuse this doctrine is to deny that Christ died on the cross for our sins and as our substitute." Al Mohler, In My Place Condemned He Stood, forward, 15.
THE CHURCH: Emerging-Emergent
"First Person: Understanding the emerging church" by Ed Stetzer, January 6, 2006
http://www.sbcbaptistpress.org/bpnews.asp?ID=22406
- Relevants - emerging
- Reconstructionists – emerging/emergent
- Revisionists – emergent
(the quotes to follow are from Stetzer)
Relevants – Emerging (i.e. Mark Driscoll)
There are a good number of young (and not so young) leaders who
some classify as "emerging" that really are just trying to make
their worship, music and outreach more contextual to emerging
culture. Ironically, while some may consider them liberal, they are
often deeply committed to biblical preaching, male pastoral
leadership and other values common in conservative evangelical
churches. They are simply trying to explain the message of Christ
in a way their generation can understand.
They are, instead, intentionally reaching into their communities
(which are different than where most Southern Baptists live) and
proclaiming a faithful biblically-centered Gospel there. I know
some of their churches -- they are doctrinally sound, growing and
impacting lostness.
Reconstructionists -
The reconstructionists think that the current
form of church is frequently irrelevant and
the structure is unhelpful. Yet, they
typically hold to a more orthodox view of
the Gospel and Scripture. Therefore, we
see an increase in models of church that
reject certain organizational models,
embracing what are often called
"incarnational" or "house" models.
Revisionists - Emergent
Revisionists are questioning (and in some cases
denying) issues like the nature of the
substitutionary atonement, the reality of hell, the
complementarian nature of gender, and the
nature of the Gospel itself. This is not new --
some mainline theologians quietly abandoned
these doctrines a generation ago. The revisionist
emerging church leaders should be treated,
appreciated and read as we read mainline
theologians -- they often have good descriptions,
but their prescriptions fail to take into account
the full teaching of the Word of God.
Parameters
See C.Michael Patton in his writing, "Would the
Real Emerger Please Stand Up" for some helpful charts that help to define
http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/ParchmentandPen/files/Michael-Patton/Would_the_Real_Emerger_Please_Stand_Up.pdf
Michael Patton, "The Second Coming of Emergers": http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2008/09/the-second-coming-of-emergers/
A New Alliance
Scot McKnight and Dan Kimball
They have not yet named this new community, but those who are
participating share an "urgency about the mission of Jesus and
evangelism." Here is how it is further described:
Friends, pioneers, innovators and catalysts who want to dream and work
for the Gospel together rather than alone.
Leaders, entrepreneurs, pastors, misfits, and artists who share a high view
of Scripture and a radical commitment to evangelism while being faithfully
committed to what is expressed in the Lausanne Covenant.
Missionally-minded people from different backgrounds who use different
methods in different cultural contexts but share the same experimental
passion and risk-taking heart for serving, loving, and helping people
connect to God through Jesus.
What is going to unite this new alliance is the Lausanne Covenant, which
consists of a strongly worded statement of the Bible and a strong
commitment to the exclusive claims of Jesus Christ in evangelism, among
other pertinent doctrinal matters: http://www.lausanne.org/lausanne-1974/lausanne-covenant.html
CONCLUSION: This Stay-Sharp Workshop was loaded, and I highly encourage you to go to the www.waterdam.org website and download the powerpoint and pdf files for a lot more insights than I could put in this blog.
.JPG)
