Paul's Passing Thoughts

….but tape it, don’t nail it. That way you will only be brought up on church discipline and not also arrested for vandalism. PDF available here: The 95 Theses Against New Calvinism

“Therefore, Christians don’t obey for the purpose of maintaining our just standard; it is a finished work by Christ that needs no further maintenance. We obey for other reasons….”

Have you ever noticed? The Scriptures NEVER call “obedience” works salvation. We are never told that people are trying to earn their way into heaven through “obedience.” Obedience, in the Scriptures, is ALWAYS associated with the truthful application of God’s word to our lives in how we think and what we do. It is the truthful application of our role in sanctification which is putting off the old self and putting on the new creature (Ephesians 4:20-24). In the Scriptures, truth is always assumed in obedience.

This is New Calvinism’s greatest deception, the idea that one can sincerely seek to apply God’s word to their lives in a truthful way, and at the same time do so to maintain a just standing before God without realizing they are doing so. This invokes a dependance on them, a don’t try sanctification at home  mentality. Though they claim that obedience is motivated by fear within the evangelical community, their sanctification formula propagates an unfounded fear that obedience is nothing more than works salvation, in and of itself. The fact of the matter is that works salvation is always based on falsehood.

Unlike the Bible, New Calvinists don’t associate obedience with truth, a love for the truth,  and faith. They separate the two, specifically by separating “law” and “gospel.” Law is obedience, whether practiced in truth or not, and gospel is truth. There are many examples of this, but here is the best one I have seen of late:

This is fundamentally no different than Islam! The Gospel offers us freedom from our sin-stained hearts and our obedience-stained garments and bids us rest in the finished work of Christ which is better than us being better!!!” (Jean F. Larroux, III, Green Grass of Grace Southwood blog).

Notice: obedience is obedience whether it is Christian or Islam. Truth isn’t the issue. But the apostle Paul clearly unites the two:

They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ!—assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness (Ephesians 4:19-24).

Obviously, Paul is calling on Christians to learn truth, and put off what we learn to put off, and put on what we learn that is to be put on. The Bible calls this “obedience” when it is done as biblically prescribed. If I tell my son to take the trash out to the curb, but instead he leaves it halfway down the driveway, that’s not obedience. Unless you’re a New Calvinist. With them, truthful obedience is neither here nor there because it is impossible for Christians to accomplish anyway:

The bad news is far worse than making mistakes or failing to live up to the legalistic standards of fundamentalism. It is that the best efforts of the best Christians, on the best days, in the best frame of heart and mind, with the best motives fall short of the true righteousness and holiness that God requires [notice that there is no distinction between this sentence and the one prior (legalistic standards verses true righteousness)]. Our best efforts cannot satisfy God’s justice. Yet the good news is that God has satisfied his own justice and reconciled us to himself through the life, death, and resurrection of his Son. God’s holy law can no longer condemn us because we are in Christ (Michael Horton, Christless Christianity p. 91).

It is also extremely important here to notice the crux of New Calvinist error in this statement; specifically, the supposed need to maintain justification: “….the best motives fall short of the true righteousness and holiness that God requires…. Our best efforts cannot satisfy God’s justice.”  But in sanctification, God no longer requires a just standard to maintain salvation, that has already been accomplished as a finished work. God no longer “requires” perfection that maintains our just standing. Therefore, Christians don’t obey for the purpose of maintaining our just standard/standing; it is a finished work by Christ that needs no further maintenance. We obey for other reasons—to glorify God, to experience the reality of our new birth, to show others the abundant life, and to destroy evil works, to name just a few.  And also, our God-given love for the truth compels us to apply it to our lives.

Therefore, New Calvinism fuses what shouldn’t be fused and separates what shouldn’t be separated, turning orthodoxy completely upside down. They fuse justification and sanctification, and separate obedience from truth, while fictitiously calling obedience “law” (whether Christian or Islamic), and encapsulating truth in the “gospel” which is supposedly distinct from “law.” But what would we know about the gospel apart from Scripture? Christ said man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of God. Wouldn’t that include the law? Paul told Timothy that we are fully equipped for every good work by ALL  Scripture. Wouldn’t that also include the law?

This fusing of what shouldn’t be fused  and separating what shouldn’t be separated is the basis of their Gospel Contemplationism. Law (any effort to obey, whether according to the truth or not) is separate from gospel and impossible for us to obey perfectly in order to maintain a salvation that doesn’t need to be maintained to begin with. The formula? Contemplation on the truth that results in a “Christ formation” within totally depraved, dead jars of clay. Doubt that? reread  Larroux’s quote; our hearts are sin stained as well as any obedience we may perform.

The truth: we are declared righteous and are righteous, though hindered by the flesh. Though our striving falls short of perfection, we know that can’t affect our righteous standing that has already been declared based on the finished work of Christ. And that cannot be revoked. As we strive, we also long for the day when we can obey our Lord perfectly without hindrance. So like Paul, we cry out, “who will deliver me from this body of death?”

Our striving creates that thirst, experiencing both the blessings of that truth and the failures that prevent the full experience. Peter states clearly that we are to strive for a “rich entry,“ not the beggarly entry that comes from let go and let God theology.

paul

Cruising down the highway as a young man, I was feeling pretty good listening to my rock music on the awesome new technology that replaced 8-track tapes, cassettes. One of my preferred bands was Bachman-Turner Overdrive, and one of my favorite songs was “Taking Care Of Business.” Sure, I knew a particular statement in the lyrics made no sense at all; “We love to work at nothing all day,” but I really dug the song man, and at that time of my life, trust me, the tune was way more important than the truth.

Since I have been studying New Calvinism for nearly five years now, that song has constantly been triggered in my mind. As I was perusing Southwood’s blog this morning, stopping to read “Green Grass of Grace,” by Jean (pronounced “ Jon”) F. Larroux (don’t forget: “The Third” hereafter; “JL3”), I observed the opening sentence: “Grace is difficult. It is harder than trying harder.” Then it happened in my head:

“People see you having fun

Just a-lying in the sun

Tell them that you like it this way

It’s the work that we avoid

And we’re all self-employed

We love to work at nothing all day

And we be…

Taking care of business every day

Taking care of business every way

I’ve been taking care of business, it’s all mine

Taking care of business and working overtime.”

In another post, JL3 said, “I’m not arguing for NO EFFORT or WORK I am arguing for GREATER EFFORT and MORE DIFFICULT WORK, the work of humbling ourselves, being broken, repentant, prostrate before God, looking past our ‘symptomatic sins’ to their root causes and being faced with such horror over my depravity that I am left with no other options than Jesus” (not sure, but I think the comment was pulled down).

Tullian Tchividjian, JL3’s obvious mentor stated it this way in “The Tyranny of Accountability Groups”:

The bottom line is this, Christian: because of Christ’s work on your behalf, God does not dwell on your sin the way you do. So relax and rejoice…and you’ll actually start to get better. The irony, of course, is that it’s only when we stop obsessing over our own need to be holy and focus instead on the beauty of Christ’s holiness that we actually become more holy! Not to mention, we start to become a lot easier to live with!

Oh really? I would think that people who focus on Matthew 7:24 with the result of their life being built on a rock would be the ones easier to get along with. And of course, I am constantly told by New Calvinist hacks that for me to say that these kinds of statements insinuate that Jesus obeys for is “reading into their statements.” Whatever. We see four things in Tchividjian’s statement: 1; Christ has done the work of sanctification on our behalf (ie., sanctification’s work was part of the atonement). 2; Doing less results in being “better,” productivity for the sake of the kingdom is conspicuously absent—per the usual. 3; Holiness comes by focusing on Christ’s holiness and not our own, resulting in more holiness. And I am often accused of “reading  things into their statements” regarding the “Gospel Contemplationism” charge. Again, whatever. 4; The either/or communication technique, It’s either Christ’s holiness or our holiness, it can’t be both.

JL3 continues:

We are allergic to resting in the finished work of Christ and the hardest ‘trophy’ to lay down is that trophy of obedience I have been working for my whole life. To make the shift from an life driven by fear to a life motivated by love is very, very painful.

Notice that the finished work of Christ pertains to both justification and sanctification. Accuse me of reading into to this if you will, but what else can be surmised? Also, we gain see the either/or hermeneutic: we are either motivated by love or fear, it can’t be something else—it’s either/or. But the contradictions in JL3’s posts are too massive to document; for example, the Scriptures are clear that at times, God does motivate us by fear. Like all New Calvinists, JL3 validates love as something that is always (as stated by, of all people, John MacArthur) “always sweet, never bitter-sweet.” This removes the self-sacrifice aspect of love through obedience. And it brings us back to Bachman-Turner  Overdrive theology as well: they only worked hard at what they loved, which was doing nothing.

Most of us have obeyed because of fear of reprisal from God. To know that we are loved apart from our obedience or disobedience is a truth that is elusive. This is why it must be pounded into our souls week after week.

This is a bunch of boloney, and notice JL3’s New Calvinist us against them mentality. “Most” obey from fear? Anybody who does counseling knows that isn’t true—fear of God is never been more lacking in recent church history.

We have purposed to drive deep into those fields ripe with the green grass of the grace of God, not into the rocky crags of fundamentalism, legalism and pietism hoping that some nourishing shoot of grace will emerge every now and again. The sheep cannot be sustained on a sparse diet of occasional grace.

Either/or: it’s either grace, or rocky crags. Nuff said, like all New Calvinists, his whole realm of speech is fraught with deceptive communication techniques.

Everything in Christendom tells them to weave for themselves garments of obedience and performance to wear before the Great White Throne of Judgment as ‘jewels in their crown.’

This hearkens back to JL3’s ancestors of the Australian Forum (the cradle of New Calvinism) who mixed Reformed teachings with SDA investigative judgment theology. Christians fear no future judgment concerning our righteousness—the righteousness of God has already been accredited to our account in full.

This is fundamentally no different than Islam! The Gospel offers us freedom from our sin-stained hearts and our obedience-stained garments and bids us rest in the finished work of Christ which is better than us being better!!!’

So, obedience in Islam is no different than obedience in Christianity? Sure it is. Christian obedience is based on T-R-U-T-H. The fundamental difference between Christianity and all other religions is our God given love for truth (2Thess. 2:10), which translates into applying it to our life. Hence, “If you love me, keep my commandments.” You can’t separate love for the truth from wanting to learn more about it, and then making it part of you. We are promised blessings if we do that (James 1:25).

JL3’s  New Calvinistic teachings also has another tone shared by Bachman-Turner theology: the song demeaned people who supposedly wasted their life by doing things they didn’t like to do. New Calvinists often refer to our striving to obey as “rats on a treadmill” etc. Like MacArthur, we are told by JL3 that we should strive for a life that is “sweet, never bittersweet.” The fact is rather this: in pursuing truth, it will often collide with life, and other times  it will bring joy. But when the experience is “bittersweet,” that’s not works salvation, it’s called “self-sacrifice.”

The apostle John reminded us that the Lord’s commands are not “burdensome.” We need to be reminded of this, because his commands are truth, and we love the truth. Sometimes the truth is hard, and it calls for us to reject the tune in exchange for the truth. Whatever the tune may be, whether, “resting is better than being better,” or  a “love to work at nothing all day.”

paul