Kuyperian, Author at Kuyperian Commentary

On August 20, 2022 By Kuyperian In Podcast 1

Kc Podcast: Ep.103, The Sabbath and the Lord’s Day

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The Lord’s Day carries remarkable continuity with the Sabbath. Consider it this way: the Sabbath was a creation ordinance to indicate the rest God had when he completed his labors. When God made man and woman, he said it was very good. So he brought to life new flesh, bearing his image.

When the Lord’s Day, or the first day of the week, comes to life in the New Covenant, it also carries the promise of rest. There, God raised Jesus from the dead promising rest for all humanity. The new humanity will find rest in the true Sabbath.

The Sabbath indicated God’s rest when he made the first man. The Lord’s Day indicates God’s rest in raising the true Man. “The Sabbath is made for man not man for the Sabbath” is God’s way of saying, “We are united to the true man when we gather to worship him.”

That bit of theologizing may seem fine and dandy in the manual, but what about the nature of the Lord’s Day? How do we assume that the Sabbath has been transformed into the Lord’s Day? What about Jewish festivals? What role does the condemnation of “delight” in Isaiah 58 play in modern discussions of the Lord’s Day?

Our guest is Stuart Bryan:

Stuart Bryan and his wife, Paige, have seven children, four homegrown and three adopted internationally, as well as seven grandchildren. Stuart earned his B.A. in Religion from Whitworth College and his M.A. in Theological and Historical Studies from Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida. Stuart has been the pastor of Trinity Church in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, since 2007. Before moving to Coeur d’Alene, he taught at The Oaks, a Classical Christian school in Spokane, Washington. He has written several articles for the Veritas Press Omnibus curriculum and is the author of The Taste of Sabbath: How to Delight in God’s Rest. He’s also been known to enjoy a fine glass of port or a pint of porter and to cheer on the Zags.

Purchase The Taste of Sabbath

On August 19, 2022 By Kuyperian In Culture Like

Contemporary Worship and the Performer’s Burden

Guest Post by Charles Jacobi

The contemporary worship so widespread today is often accompanied by lights, screens, and other strobes that all form the stage into the epicenter of attention. By design, the congregation is led to follow a select few from a distance—the performers—in lieu of the intimate, participatory nature of regulated worship. A chasm splits the observing congregation and performers in this contemporary scene.

Among Christians who enjoy its regulated counterpart, there is consensus contemporary worship is detrimental to the congregation facing the stage for the aforementioned reasons. Such is rightly agreed on. But, we should consider how contemporary worship affects the performers as well. The members on stage may suffer the most, albeit gone unnoticed by many. Their burden might be concealed on the surface though the observant eye will notice the performers never fail to be emotive. They have few bleak moments, less during dramatic songs demanding sentimental mannerisms. The pressure to manufacture expressions with the repeated choruses and mood-setting strobes must be great under the crowd’s gaze. Everything points to the stage.

This is not to say some performers could be sincere in their expression throughout the entire service, as some are surely capable, but to suppose every gleaming mannerism on stage is backed by genuine emotion is untenable. Here is where the contemporary culprit lies.

The performers do not bear the brunt of the error, and, indeed, church members should stray from ingenuine expression during worship, but the contemporary environment’s design pressures the performers into doing so. Individuals in the crowd may not reserve explicit expectations for the performers. But the performers will feel implicit expectations, then pressured to generate an outward passion to satisfy the crowd lest they appear unspiritual. The architecture of the worship is to blame. It can be exhausting, at times heart-wrenching, to watch the members on stage satisfy their demands.

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On June 25, 2022 By Kuyperian In Culture, Pro-Life Like

God’s Mercy and the Spirit of the Age

Guest Post by Samuel Parkison

As I write this, it is mid-morning in the Middle East. I am looking over a balcony at the ocean, with the Arabian Gulf just a two-minute walk across the street, getting used to the sights and smells and tastes (and heat) of my family’s new home. Some of you know that for the better part of the past year, we have been working to move here for a career transition of sorts. I have come here to be a professor of theology at the first ever evangelical seminary in the Arabian Peninsula. There will be other occasions for me to share more about this particular venture; I’m simply pointing out that this is my new home. I am, geographically speaking, about the furthest away from the United States as I can be. And yet, never have I felt more of a bond with my “kinsmen according to the flesh” (cf., Rom 9:1-2), my fellow Americans, than last night while walking around a giant mall in the UAE when I received a notification on my phone that the Supreme Court ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Gratitude for God’s Mercy

The news stopped me dead in my tracks. My knees got weak, I felt woozy and had to sit down to concentrate just to keep the tears from coming out. So much gratitude. I never thought I would see this day. Of course, I have prayed for it. Hoped for it. Spoken and written about the need for it. But even when the now infamous draft-leak of Justice Alito’s opinion filled me with great hope, I confess it was difficult to keep my cynicism at bay. I have learned to brace myself for disappointment. But last night was real. So, while I am settling into my new home in the Middle East, I continue to rejoice with my countrymen.

No matter how you cut it, yesterday was a win for justice, which means it was a win for America, a people who have been incurring a mind-boggling amount of blood-guilt since 1973. We have been polluting the land with our wickedness and have been begging for the wrath of God Almighty. Think I’m exaggerating? Listen to how Psalm 106 describes child-sacrifice:

[Israel] served [pagan nations’] idols,

which became a snare to them.

They sacrificed their sons

and their daughters to the demons;

they poured out innocent blood,

the blood of their sons and daughters,

whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan,

and the land was polluted with blood.

Thus they became unclean by their acts,

and played the whore in their deeds. (Psalm 106:36-39)

The blood of innocent children idolatrously sacrificed in demon-worship (which, I would remind you, does not require the conscious awareness of its worshipers for it to qualify as demon-worship, per 1 Cor. 10:20), pollutes the land. My beloved nation has been doing this very thing on a nation-wide scale since 1973, with the body count of some 67 million deaths. The blood of our innocent has been crying out from the earth, calling for the just wrath of God which makes yesterday so great a mercy I can hardly bear it. What do we deserve? We deserve for God’s holiness to be vindicated by a swift and decisive judgment. We deserve to be destroyed like Sodom and Gomorrah. We deserve to be decimated like Egypt was when God delivered Israel from captivity. We deserve for our walls to crumble like Jericho. And yet, what did we receive yesterday? Mercy. An invitation to repent.

Reactions from the Opposition

Now, as a reminder, we should keep in mind how modest of a ruling came down yesterday. This is important because I have seen a lot of curious reactions. There are two general reactions I want to call attention to here.

Reaction One: “You Aren’t Really Pro-Life Because You Don’t Care for the Vulnerable”

This reaction is represented in the memes and tweets that effectively deride pro-lifers like myself for not really caring about the babies, because if we did we would put our money where our mouths are, stop being so fiscally conservative, and get on board with big government policies that support women in need with medical care, adoption, foster care, etc. My favorite taunt along these lines is, “If you really care about the babies, would you support mandatory child-support for the fathers in every situation? Huh?” To which I reply with a hearty, “Yes! Absolutely! I am pro-expecting fathers to take responsibility for their offspring!”

To the challenge for pro-lifers to support the care of those in our society who are in desperate need of help, I simply agree. The question is, what is the best method for taking care of those in need in our society? My skepticism that big-government policies are the solution for taking care of the needy and vulnerable in our society does not come from my penny-pinching conservativism, it comes from the conviction that the government is intrinsically incompetent to do that work. I say “intrinsically” to emphasize that this is not a deficiency on the government’s part. That’s not what the government is supposed to do, and so it should not be surprising that it’s bad at it.

But even if you disagree with that position, we should point out that it is not as if pro-lifers have been neglecting care for the needy and vulnerable in our society. We have been accepting the challenge to care “holistically” with our dollars and time for decades. On every meaningful metric, it is the religious and pro-life demographics that are the most generous with their time and resources to non-profit organizations that do the work of caring for the orphan and widow without compulsion from their neighbors or government. This is the demographic overwhelmingly represented in foster care and adoption. This is the demographic that starts and funds and operates crisis pregnancy centers whose agenda are not simply to “end abortion,” but rather to care for families in general and needy and vulnerable mothers in particular. However, even if that were not the case, this reaction is a poor argument in favor of abortion. In my recent book, Thinking Christianly: Bringing Sundry Thoughts Captive to Christ, I interact briefly with this line of thinking. Here’s an excerpt from that section:

Let it be known that there is no necessary social prerequisite for getting to speak out against abortion. We should decisively put to death that foolish notion that says before objecting to murdering babies under the banner of “pro-life,” one must satisfactorily establish “pro-life” status by being on the forefront of orphan care, adoption, refugee ministries, homeless ministries, etc. These things are clearly consistent with being “pro-life,” but the increasingly common dichotomy of “pro-life” vs. “pro-birth” should be laughed out of the room. How, pray tell, is it possible to be “pro-life” without first being “pro-birth?”

This is a smokescreen, and to put the matter plainly, Christians who play along are suckers. The goal-post will always change for what constitutes as caring for enough issues to get to care about abortion. Hating “baby-hacking” requires no credentials, especially if those credentials are handed out by those who have no objection to “baby-hacking.” Frankly, I’m quite sure I do not want the approval of such individuals anyway. They can keep it.[1]

Reaction Two: “The Government Has No Right to Control the Bodies of Women“

This reaction seems to assume that what happened on June 24 is the making of a law to illegalize all abortion. But the Supreme Court did not outlaw abortion. All they did was deny that it was a “constitutional right,” which means that if a state chooses to enact legislation that prohibits abortion, that state is not being unconstitutional in doing so. States are not infringing on constitutionally recognized rights by enacting pro-life legislation.

Now, I actually do think abortion should be nationally prohibited, and not only for moral and theological reasons. There is a strong legal argument for the abolition of all abortion on the grounds of, at least, the 14th amendment (this has bearing on the “my body, my choice” argument. Abortion is not merely about a pregnant woman’s body, but also the body of her infant). But the point is that yesterday’s ruling did not force any state to stop performing abortions.

So, think about the mindset that lies behind, for example, protestors in California marching the streets with signs demanding the right to abortion. What exactly are they mad about? What are they protesting? They are mad about the fact that not every state must make abortion legal. That the citizens of a state like Oklahoma maintains the right to elect the representatives they want to reflect their values, which includes a high value for the unborn, is intolerable for these protestors. They do not want Oklahomans to have the ability to establish representatives who will establish and elect those laws. Protestors in California have lost literally nothing by way of “ability.” Their state has enshrined abortion with legislation in anticipation of the reversal of Roe v. Wade. But they are so passionate about mothers having the “right” to kill their pre-born babies that they are protesting other states having the ability to prohibit pre-born-baby-killing. Their own state protecting their ability to kill their babies isn’t enough: they demand that every state everywhere be obligated to do the same. Such a response, frankly, is madness.

Behind the Veil: What’s Really Going On

As a Christian theologian, I have to also point out that this is not only irrational, it is demonic. I’m not calling people on the other side of this issue demons, mind you. No, they are not demons or sub-humans, they are image-bearers of God himself, having more dignity and worth, and value than they themselves could possibly imagine. I am saying, rather, that the spirit that possesses a group to take to the streets in angry opposition to the verdict, “baby-killing is not a constitutional right,” is not a spirit of love and goodness and justice, but rather a spirit that arises from the domain of darkness (cf., Col 1:13). I am quite certain that most of the individuals vehemently opposed to yesterday’s ruling “do not know what spirit they are of,” but that does not make their clamor for abortion any less demonic. The crowd that boils over with rage over the prospect of mothers losing the ability to kill their children is possessed by a dark mindset indeed. What we see (and will continue to see in the coming days) with violent threats and attacks on churches and crisis pregnancy centers is the removing of the veil. The veneer of love and gentleness and justice is being peeled back and the darkness of the culture of death is showing its true colors. It is losing all motivation to be seen as loving and is perfectly content with showing its rage.

Still, I can’t help but suspect that many of the most passionate men and women clamoring for more death are driven by shame and guilt. They shout for abortion as an effort to shout down their own consciences. They have the blood of abortion on their own hands, they know it deep down, and they wish to silence that part of them that accuses. So they stop their ears and cry out that the evil they participated in is “good,” and the good that would have protected their children from execution is “evil.” Rather than applying the balm of grace to their sinful self-inflicted wound, they ignore the wound and try to convince themselves that there is no sin to repent of. They may be throwing rocks at the windows of crisis pregnancy centers, but they are aiming at that part of their souls that knows what evil they have committed. To those, I would simply say, “Give up trying to silence your conscience. It won’t work. You know what you have done. So go ahead and let your conscience speak. Let it call the sin, sin. Then, and only then, will you be in a position to hear a better word, spoken by the blood of Christ. He does not silence the accusation by pretending like it’s not there, he silences the accusation by answering it with his own blood. He does not invite you to ignore your sin. He invites you to let him deal with it in a decisive way. You are not beyond redemption and forgiveness and healing. But it is only those who know themselves to be sick who will seek out a Doctor. So, seek him out; he is not far.”

Concluding Prayers

What now? Well for starters, we should unflinchingly celebrate this surprising mercy that God has shown us. We should praise God that at least some states in this country will slow down on racking up the unfathomable debt of blood-guilt they have been incurring since 1973. We should praise God for the lives that this will save. We should thank God for the gift of sacrificial saints who have worked tirelessly for decades to see this ground made (while many of us cynically doubted that their efforts would succeed). We should thank them for their faithful endurance, and say, “You were right; God bless you and your longsuffering work!” We should thank God for the common grace of a justice system that does some good (even if it is imperfect).

And we should pray for revival. We should pray that our culture of death would disintegrate and that righteousness be established. We should pray that the hearts of those possessed by the spirit of rage and bloodthirstiness would be turned. We should pray that such individuals would have ears to hear their cries for death afresh, and that they would be shocked by the revelation of what their own voice sounds like; shocked into repentance. We should pray that they receive the cleansing blood of Christ for the forgiveness of their sins (both the sin of abortion and the sin of celebrating abortion). We should pray that God would hallow his name, and make his Kingdom come and his will be done here on earth as it is in heaven.

He could do it, you know.

Don’t forget that Nineveh was converted with a five-word sermon. I can’t think of a better invitation to pray for big things like this than the (previously) unthinkable reversal of Roe v. Wade.

[1] Samuel G. Parkison, Thinking Christianly: Bringing Sundry Thoughts Captive to Christ (H&E Publishing, 2022), 105.

*The image for this post is a depiction of Pharaoh demanding the death of Hebrew babies in Exodus 1. It seemed fitting.

Samuel Parkison received his Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from @MBTS). He is the Associate Professor of Theology (Gulf Theological Seminary in the UAE). You can find him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/samuel_parkison

On June 2, 2022 By Kuyperian In Culture, Theology, Worship 2

Holy Priest, Holy Warrior: Reflections on Psalm 110

Reading through Psalm 110, one cannot but help notice that by the end of the psalm, the dead bodies are piling up. In verse 1, Christ’s enemies are made into a footstool for his feet. In verse 2, he rules in the midst of his enemies — and has a scepter to smite them. In verse 5, he shatters kings on the day of his wrath. In verse 6, he executes nations and fills them with corpses.

And yet right in the middle of this “messiah on the warpath” imagery, we have a reference to Christ being an eternal priest after the order of Melchizedek. It is perhaps easier for us to see how the battle imagery of the psalm fits with Jesus’ kingship. After all, we expect kings — especially Davidic kings — to be battlefield heroes. Jesus does not disappoint in that way. He strikes and smashes his enemies from the beginning to the end of this psalm. The psalm paints the portrait of an utterly victorious king.

But since the psalm also pays homage to Jesus’ priesthood, an astute reader might wonder where priestly imagery shows up in the psalm. I would contend that the battlefield imagery fits not only with the motif of Jesus as reigning king but also with him as everlasting priest. In the Bible, priests are warriors just as much as kings. Waging holy war has been a priestly calling from the beginning.

There is a lot of biblical evidence for this truth, and we will only survey a fraction of it here. Start with Adam. Adam was a priest, serving in the sanctuary of Eden. We know this because the verbs used to describe Adam’s task in Eden, “tend and keep,” or “serve and guard” (Gen. 2:15), are used later to describe the tasks of the priests at the tabernacle, e.g., Num. 3:7-8. A priestly vocabulary is used for Adam’s task from the very beginning; he is to guard and keep Eden, just as the later priests would guard and keep the tabernacle. Of course, this also came to mean that he was to guard and keep the woman (the embodiment of Eden) after she was created, just as the priests were to guard and keep the people of Israel (the living tabernacle).

When Adam was told to guard the Garden, he should have deduced that there would be an invader. And sure enough, an intruder shows up. As soon as the serpent started questioning God’s Word to the woman, Adam should have stepped between the serpent and the woman to protect her. He should have silenced the lying serpent by crushing its head. That was his priestly task, and because he failed at that priestly task, he lost both his priesthood and his sanctuary. Adam should have piled up at least one corpse in Eden; he should have made the serpent a footstool for his feet. He should have ruled in the midst of his enemy (the serpent) by shattering and executing the serpent in a show of righteous wrath. Unfortunately, he did none of those things. What should have been the day of his power became a day of weakness and failure. He failed as a priest because he failed to fight. He refused to exercise holy violence and so he lost his holy status and access to the holy place.

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On June 1, 2022 By Kuyperian In Culture Like

Criminals Laugh at Gun Control Laws

Guest Post by Gary Demar

The House of Representatives and Senate are considering more expansive gun control bills considering the latest school shooting in Texas. These school shootings are horrific and evil. The parents of these children are devastated as I would be. I can’t imagine the anguish they must feel.

Some Republicans joined past gun control bills and some of them are working with the Democrats to enact even more restrictions. Criminals laugh at these laws. Do members of Congress believe that such laws are going to stop criminals from purchasing and using firearms? How well has it worked with drugs? Elected officials take an oath to uphold the Constitution. How many obey that oath? They, too, laugh at the built-in restrictions of the Constitution.

Every day people kill other people with guns, knives, automobiles, and even water by drowning. These are not going to stop with new laws. Murder is already against the law. People are the problem, not guns. Recent surveys have determined that around 40% of adult Americans own a gun or live with someone who does. More than 99+ percent of all gun owners have never shot anyone. Mentally disturbed people are going to do disturbing things. Better to eliminate soft targets like schools. Why this hasn’t been done is insane. Parents need to take control of their schools. Demand physical security for your children!

To show that guns are not the problem, decades ago, many public schools had shooting clubs. According to John Lott:

Until 1969 virtually every public high school—even in New York City—had a shooting club. High school students in New York City carried their guns to school on the subways in the morning, turned them over to their homeroom teacher or the gym coach during the day, and retrieved them after school for target practice. Club members were given their rifles and ammunition by the federal government. Students regularly competed in citywide shooting contests for university scholarships.

Even today there are “more than 2,000 high-school rifle programs across the United States. In 2015, 9,245 students in 317 schools across three states participated in the USA High School Clay Target League. In 2018, participation had increased 138% with 21,917 students from 804 teams in 20 states.”

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On May 25, 2022 By Kuyperian In Church 2

Tragedies: The Southern Baptist Convention Sex Abuse Problem and The Texas School Shooting

by Rev. Rich Lusk

You may have seen the absolutely horrific report on sexual sin and sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention that was released earlier this week. The report is the fruit of an extended independent investigation into claims made against various Southern Baptist leadership and congregations. I have not looked into the report in any detail but it is an absolute travesty. The report documents cases of adultery, fornication, and child molestation. In some cases, offenders were able to move from church to church, multiplying their victims. Those who tried to sound the alarm were silenced. Far too many in the Southern Baptists denomination were obviously more concerned with protecting their “brand” than doing what is best for victims. They used their polity (a commitment to the autonomy of each local church) as an excuse for not warning churches about predators hopping from one congregation to the next. Some leading pastors in the Southern Baptist Convention, including former president J. D. Grear, have argued that the Bible only “whispers about sexual sin” — a claim that was incredibly foolish when it was made and now sounds like complicity in the cover up. The entire sordid ordeal is a massive black eye for all Christians, even those of us who are not Southern Baptist.

What makes it even more unfortunate is that we live in a time when there are all kinds of excellent resources available to churches and pastors to aid in detecting and dealing with abuse. There is really no excuse for church leaders to not have well established protocols for addressing abuse claims.

There are many lessons the broader church can take away from this mess. Obviously, making sure that you only have qualified leaders is a must. Do not confuse giftedness and personal charisma with holiness. Making sure abuse claims are taken seriously and the proper authorities inside and outside the church are involved is also a must. At TPC, we partner with MinistrySafe to help us in this area MinistrySafe provides an online training course for everyone who works with children. They are also able to provide highly competent guidance and counsel if and when an issue arises. We had the entire leadership of the CREC go through MinistrySafe pastors training at our General Council meeting several years ago. To my knowledge, the CREC is the only denomination that has done something like this, but it is highly necessary; church leaders simply must be informed about abuse, how to handle abuse claims, and how to get the best care for abuse victims.

One other note: As so often happens in our culture, tragedies are immediately politicized and weaponized to further an unrelated agenda. I’ve already seen people arguing that the Southern Baptist scandal happened because the denomination is committed to a male-only pastorate, or that this case proves that all churches are full of sexual hypocrites and therefore the church should not be listened to when it speaks about homosexuality, transgenderism, etc. While any scandal like this should drive a church to humbly repent, we should also recognize that Satan uses things like to seek to silence faithful churches from teaching the truth about men, women, marriage, and sex. As tragic as the Southern Baptist sex abuse problem is, it will also be tragic if that scandal is used to steer the entire denomination in a progressive direction, which is clearly what some are going to try to do with it.

The school shooting in Texas yesterday was yet another tragedy of senseless evil at work in our world. We can grieve with those who grieve, even at a distance, and we can certainly pray for the community in Uvalde. Sadly, as with abuse scandals, mass shootings tend to be quickly transformed into political talking points about race, gun control, mental health, or some other agenda. This a ridiculous response: We are not going to stop horrific acts of violence like this with one more gun control law, and everyone in their right mind knows that. Knee-jerk emotional responses do not change the world in a positive way. But there was one thoughtful thread on Twitter that someone alerted me to yesterday. Ali Beth Stuckey asks the question: If the one commonality among all of these shooters is that they are young males, does that indicate something significant? Her response does not say everything that probably needs to be said about the issue, but she raises some good questions. The young men perpetrating these wicked acts are certainly not victims, but their actions do point to a much wider social sickness and spiritual rot that surrounds us.

On May 19, 2022 By Kuyperian In Family and Children Like

A Review of the Documentary, “Eve in Exile” from Canon+

Guest Post by Melinda Brito

Rebekah Merkle’s documentary, Eve in Exile, begins where all good theology does: in Genesis. It reminds us that in God’s creative order, work and specific mandates were given to man and woman. Man was created first, and then the woman was created to be a fit helper for man. They were designed to accomplish these God-given tasks together.

The documentary continues by presenting a historical overview of the rise of feminism. Merkle identifies three “waves” in the feminist movement. The second wave is probably most relevant for us to consider because it came after the rise of technological inventions and innovations. The result was that the fixed and fulfilling work that women had been doing, the arduous yet rewarding work of producing and preparing food, making and repairing clothing, and educating the children, necessary tasks for the survival and well-being of the family, began to change. With the advent of easy-to-use domestic inventions, these tasks that were the worthy work of women became less time-consuming. As a result, women could shop for their food and clothes, cook meals, keep a clean house, and still have time to spare.

In 1963, The Feminine Mystique, authored by Betty Friedan, found a sympathetic audience by a generation of women who felt isolated, bored, and discontent with merely being ornamental in their homes. Friedan’s answer to the problem was that women should find work and the fulfillment of a full day of labor outside the home. This effectively began “the tearing down of the house” by women’s own hands.

While Rebekah does a more than adequate job of demonstrating the shift of women from inside to outside the home, she also takes the opportunity to critique the Christian woman’s lack of thoughtful or biblical consideration and wholesale acceptance of the secular community’s answer to the problem. While we may find commonality in identifying a problem, the generation that opened their arms and embraced feminist ideals as their messiah did not consider the end of the matter. Even today, Christians fail to grasp that the “how” and “why” of how someone comes to a conclusion is just as important as the conclusion itself because the how/why will determine the path we take as we seek to deal with the problem. In this case, Christians blindly followed the path set out by unbelievers on how to deal with the issues of boredom, feelings of unfulfillment, and loneliness simply because they agreed that a problem existed. But Christians must contemplate a truly biblical response to the problem, rather than adopting unbelieving presuppositions.

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On May 18, 2022 By Kuyperian In Church Like

Temptations for Christians Who Want to Change the World, Part 2

See Part 1

Guest post by Rev. Jeff Meyers

This is the second installment of a condensed version of the “Final Reflections & Summary” from my book Wisdom for Dissidents (full title: Ancient Wisdom for Today’s Christian Dissidents).

The third temptation is to cozy up to our enemies, thinking that we can win their favor. If we can get them to like us, maybe they will leave us alone. This is the “partiality” problem James criticizes in 2:1-13. It is not simply that they are favoring the rich over the poor. That would be bad enough. But the man who is being catered to in their assembly is the one who wears the ring of authority and the robe of office (2:20). He is explicitly identified as an oppressor, someone who drags them into court, and a blasphemer against the name of Jesus (2:6-7). To “judge” the rich oppressor as someone more deserving of special care than the poor believer is “to become judges engaging in an evil conspiracy” (2:4). That evaluation from James is not just about individual “evil thoughts” but about how the brothers have conspired together to appease their rich enemies. They have thereby dishonored those poorer disciples whom “God has chosen . . . to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom” (2:5).

The appeasement option ought not to be on the table for conscientious Christian leaders. To turn a blind eye to immorality and abuse with the hope of getting a hearing from some powerful government or academic figure would be to betray our allegiance to the Lord. Not only is such schmoozing mostly ineffective—the more you give, the more they will take—but such behavior runs counter to the examples of the prophets and of Jesus himself. The prophets denounced the rich and powerful, even, maybe especially, when they were in positions of authority in Israel. Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others did not cozy up to corrupt, immoral leaders. Neither did Jesus.

Fourth, the most insidious temptation, according to James, is to use the power of our words to guide the church toward aggressive and violent action thinking we are acting thereby as agents of God’s justice. As we have argued, James 3:1-12 is at the heart of the letter. And the key passage that unlocks the entire letter is James 1:19-20, “Know this, my beloved brothers: let every man be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.” Anger against their oppressors has fueled impetuous speeches with the intent to rally the disciples to make things right by means of aggressive, retributive action (3:13-16; 4:1-12). This kind of Christian “zealotry” will not make things right. Instead, such speech and behavior are not of the Spirit but demonic (3:15). These angry and violent responses have been fueled by the immature rhetoric of their teachers, the brothers responsible for leading their communities. They want freedom, but they are going about achieving liberty in the wrong ways.

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On May 9, 2022 By Kuyperian In Culture Like

Temptations for Christians Who Want to Change the World, Part 1

Guest post by Rev. Jeff Meyers

This is a two-part, condensed version of my “Final Reflections & Summary” from my book Wisdom for Dissidents (full title: Ancient Wisdom for Today’s Christian Dissidents).

In 1980 a friend approached me after church and handed me a manila file folder. “Read these and let me know what you think,” he said. I did. It turned out the folder was filled with samples of 3 or 4 Christian newsletters. These were newsletters giving Christian commentary on contemporary cultural issues—abortion, economics, art, and politics. After reading them, I mailed in a donation and a request for subscriptions to all of them.

I had just come out of a severely dispensational Christian community where everyone was convinced that the end of the world was upon us. Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth was a Christian bestseller. Because the world was ending you don’t polish brass on a sinking ship, rather you wait for the ship to begin to sink and then Jesus will swoop down deus ex machina to snatch up Christians off the tilting deck and rapture us into heaven. This meant that careful thinking about what might be happening in American society and how Christians might make a difference was new to me. But I was 23 years old with a wife and newborn daughter which meant I was motivated to think about the future.

Well, we thought things were bad back then. Christians in the early 1980s were worried about the increasing secularization of American culture. A few months ago, we renovated our basement and I had to box up three walls of books. I had an entire bookshelf of books from the 1980s that analyzed the anti-Christian drift that was occurring in American society.

Today, however, the marginalization of Christians in education, culture, and politics has accelerated faster than anyone could have imagined even ten years ago, let alone in 1980.

And this has led to some interesting proposals from Christian leaders on how Christians ought to respond. Everything from the call to “faithful presence” by James Davidson Hunter, to the “benedict option” by Rod Dreher. And then there’s the Trump-inspired populism of the last few years. Now, Dreher is prepping us to suffer as martyrs in his recent book Live not by Lies.

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On April 15, 2022 By Kuyperian In Theology 1

Between Two Insurrectionists: Riots in the Capital

Guest Post by Tim Gallant

No, not that capital, silly. We’re talking about real insurrectionists here. It is Good Friday, after all.

So first things first.

Insurrectionists, Not Thieves

Jesus did not die between two thieves.

“What??” you exclaim. “My Bible tells me he did just that, in both Matthew and Mark” (Matthew 27:38, 44; Mark 15:27).

The Greek word used, however, is lestai (singular lestes). While this term apparently can refer to violent bandits (and thus “robbers”), it is not a term associated with what we generally think when we hear the word thief (pickpockets, burglars, larcenists etc). Such thieves would almost certainly never have been crucified.

The Romans can justly be criticized for resorting to crucifixion frequently — but they didn’t use it on generic criminal elements. It was their great weapon against non-Romans who seriously disrupted the social order, such as runaway slaves and revolutionaries.

Moreover, the term lestai itself also happens to refer to revolutionaries — people who engage in insurrections and plotting. John 18:40 identifies Barabbas (for whom Jesus’ death basically became a ransom) as a lestes. Meanwhile, Mark informs us that Barabbas was imprisoned awaiting punishment because he had been involved in insurrection, and indeed had committed murder in the process (Mark 15:7). He is not a lestes because he is a thief; he is a lestes because he is a rebel, a revolutionary.

That verse, incidentally, says that Barabbas was bound with the insurrectionists (stasiastes) who had made insurrection (stasis) with him. This strongly suggests that the “thieves” crucified with Jesus were co-insurrectionists involved in the same rebellion that Barabbas was involved in.

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