The following video, though only recently posted to Youtube, is obviously from the 1990s or thereabouts in time. And although the person who posted it is obviously doing so from a place of impure motives (trying to pit these two brothers against one another) and is clearly missing the point, it is still very worth watching.
If you can take 12 or 13 minutes to watch, I highly recommend it. The part of this post that follows the video assumes that you have watched the video.
Again, the Youtuber who has posted this video has missed both the point and the beauty of it. Nevertheless, it was tremendously helpful, was it not?
A Friendship Tested by Fire I greatly admire both of these dear brothers and am deeply grateful to the Lord for the wonderful model of their friendship of many years. I believe that this conference was the beginning of that friendship. Later, Piper went on to invite Wilson to serve as a speaker at numerous Desiring God conferences. And when criticized for doing so, he gave explanations that defended his friend.
Moreover, Piper, who wrote a book on racism, undertook to serve as a mediator between Wilson and Thabiti Anyabwile. The latter pair could easily have ended up as another Christ-dishonoring pair of Christians talking past each other and vilifying each other (watch here). In this process, Piper said, “One of the things I appreciate about Doug is walking toward reconciliation and walking toward efforts to talk and understand, rather than away.”
There is absolutely no question that his friendship with Wilson has created a significant demand on Piper’s energy. That’s what happens to those who would be true friends of the prophetic pain-in-the-neck types (not that Piper is not, himself, something of a prophetically uncomfortable figure at times). It would have been so much easier for him simply to pull back, not return emails or phone calls, and just let Wilson be that weirdo from Idaho. But Piper did not do that. He has hung in there with Wilson. And he has become much sharper for doing so.
As recently as the 2020 presidential election, this friendship has been tried and tested again. But as far as I know, these brothers continue to model for us how to disagree strongly and openly while maintaining real and deep friendship in Christ.
Not Rejection, but Balance In the video above, Wilson explicitly describes himself as someone who consciously tries to follow the model of the Lord Jesus in His polemic against wicked ideologies.
Wilson says, “I don’t believe that we imitate Christ’s love perfectly, His gentleness perfectly. I don’t believe that we imitate anything He did perfectly. But i do believe that we are called to imitate Him across the board. And we can do so, confident that God has justified us and receives our imperfect attempts at imitating Him because of His perfect active obedience and passive obedience and His death on the cross…. You don’t turn the world upside down by being nice. You turn the world upside down by being biblical.”
Now what is absolutely crucial not to miss is that John Piper does not cancel or counter or reject what Wilson says; he seeks to “balance” it! He means it when he says to Wilson, “We need you like crazy!” He wants to take nothing away from Wilson’s rhetoric. He wants to add to it.
Piper’s pointing to Mark 3:5 is quite apropos: Jesus looked around at the religious people in the synagogue “with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart.” Piper does not ask Wilson or anyone else writing for “Credenda Agenda” to stop using satire or any other hard-hitting rhetorical practice. Instead, he asks for “more obvious tears” (“more” either in degree or volume).
And who could fail either to see Piper’s point or to agree with it? What seems to be missing from Wilson’s witty and satirical exposés is the visible grief that would surely be there, if his piercing critique really is coming from a Christ-filled heart of love for people.
But Piper’s adjective “obvious” is also enormously helpful! He leaves room for the highly probable case that there are such tears in Wilson’s heart, even if he is not presently showing them as much as he might wish. Doubtless, if Wilson writes an article ripping apart the foolishness of some pro-abortion rhetoric, there is, within his breast, a great deal of grief over the horrific realities of the abortion holocaust in the modern world. Piper’s admonition about the tears is that they become more obvious, more a clear part of Wilson’s presentation, even while he is being so effectively sharp in his critique.
Wilson’s—and Piper’s!—Defense of “Immaturity” In my previous post, I made the claim that “almost no church today, conservative or otherwise, would allow any of the prophets or apostles to serve in a leadership role.” That is because, unlike both Wilson and Piper in this video, most Christians have not developed any biblical sense of holy anger, holy sarcasm, holy hard-hitting rhetoric of just about any kind. Of course, they think they have. But the fact that they have not developed it rears its head whenever such things actually show up in the room to make people uncomfortable.
The point made so wonderfully in this video, first in Wilson’s establishment of the basic truth, and then in Piper’s balancing addition, is precisely what I was getting at in writing about the spiritual “immaturity” of the prophets and apostles. What I did not write about in that post was the question of what Jesus would do, which Wilson points to here. And the reason I did not take that line was exactly because of the problem pointed out by Piper: Jesus was not sinful, but we are. Use of anger and sarcasm was not dangerous for Him, but it is for us. What I wish was that, in response, Wilson had moved to the examples of the prophets and apostles, who were sinful human beings but who themselves imitated YHWH and Jesus in those ways. If we are to imitate Paul as he imitates Christ (I Cor. 11:1), we must eventually learn to do it in every aspect, just as Wilson points out. Ultimately, at some point, to refuse to try to learn some sense of holy irony, anger or tangy critique is to refuse to follow Paul as he follows Christ–and in a pretty important part of His life of ministry.
“Sometimes Love Just Ain’t Enough” (–Smyth and Henley) Sadly, the fact is that, at many points in today’s culture of ‘nice’ Christianity, the obvious tears are not enough. Being a man or woman of genuine love and grace is not enough of an addition to the polemic. Prophetically tough ways of speaking, teaching, and leading are simply forbidden, no matter what evidence of love might attend them. In the eyes of the ‘nice’ Christians who populate and–[sighhhhhhh…] “lead”–our churches today, to have any polemic at all completely eclipses any love or grace one might have. ‘Nice’ Christianity, for all its pretense of cautious care, turns out to be pretty shallow, simplistic, one-sided. And in an odd twist of irony, it turns out to be quite graceless and unkind to Christians who do want to follow the Lord and His prophets and apostles in their rhetoric.
Praise God for the willingness of John Piper and Doug Wilson to be more biblically complicated!
Let me put on Jesus Christ, Not the flesh where sin abides, By Your Spirit, not device Full of lusts and wants and prides. Let me seek Your kingdom’s sake For Your glory, let me live To release what You would take And receive what You would give. Let me love all that You love; Give me hate for what You hate. What would not Your cause behove Let my heart not adulate. Give me anger that is Yours, Let me mock the things You mock. Let my words impact hearts’ doors As the sound of Your own knock. Abba, Father, let this child Be an echo of Your roar, All at once both strong and mild T’ward the sinners You adore. ‘Tis Your power, ’tis Your art To transform the likes of me To a semblance of Your heart, Looking like Your family.
“Foyle’s War” My wife and I have just finished watching a British crime drama titled “Foyle’s War.” It features Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle, who solves murders and other mysteries in Hastings on the southern coast of England during World War II.
One of the subthemes running throughout the show is the seriousness and severity of English life during the war. Situated just across the channel from German-occupied France, England could not afford to relax in its resolve or its vigil. Food rationing, rigorous air-raid practices and other strictures were universally understood to be necessary for the very survival of the country.
Treason was a serious and hangable offense, of course; but what comes as an eye-opener is how delicate was the balance between free speech (which is also a British value) on the one hand, and Nazi-sympathizing on the other. Even more stark is how some things which would hardly register on anyone’s offensiveness radar today were seen as criminal treason during the war. Speaking or acting so as to undermine the morale of the English people or its troops was treasonous. A little act of vandalism that might unintentionally take out the telephone service of an English town living under constant threat of German bombing or invasion was punishable by harsh prison sentence and maybe even death. To speak publicly so as to discourage the English cause was a crime which was swiftly answered with jail, material losses, and—more importantly—social ostracism.
Faith’s War That the church is in a war is a biblical truth without dispute (Matt. 16:18; II Cor. 10:3-6; Eph. 6:10-17; Rev. 13:7). The understanding of the nature of that war and the seriousness of life that it entails are apparently matters of widely variant opinion. Therefore, let me be clear: I do not personally hold to any notion of a landed Christendom which would serve to fuse together the church and the state in any way or in any case. I am not speaking of any such thing as an earthly turf war waged for control of material domains. Rather, I am referring to the pan-historical, cosmic struggle between the kingdom of God and all the kingdoms of this world which, together, are the domain of darkness ruled by the prince of the power of the air.
Moreover, ours is not a “culture war,” per se—certainly not one of the kind that is usually envisioned by use of that phrase. But culture is not wholly irrelevant to it either. The Battle of Normandy was not merely a battle to own that beach or even that part of France. But it is meaningful that it took place there at that time and not somewhere else at a different time. And the physical, geographic realities of the water and the beach and the land beyond play major parts in the story of the battle. Even so, “culture,” however defined, is often the theater in which our war and its battles are played out.
As it happens (which is ultimately to say—in God’s providence) in this late hour of history in the modern West, one of the major areas of conflict between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world is that of human sexuality.
Sometimes people ask, ‘Why don’t Christians focus on preaching the gospel and other issues? Why do we focus so much of our engagement with the world on issues of marriage, sexuality, homosexuality, and such?’ The answer to the first question is simple: We do. The answer to the second is: None of us chose to make marriage and human sexuality such a major theater in the war between God’s kingdom and the kingdoms of this world. We simply find that it is a major point of the world’s attack; and so we respond. (The truth is, the very notion that we are spending too much time and energy on this subject is itself a tactic of the enemy.) For students of the Bible, it should come as no surprise that marriage and sexuality should be issues of such importance in the war of the world against its Creator; it has ever been so (Gen. 6:1-4).
Kingdom Treason As with any war, there are sometimes within the borders of God’s kingdom, acts of treason which must be taken seriously. And one of the major places we see these occurring is in the area of beliefs and practices regarding human sexuality. When Christians begin to agree with the world over against Scripture, church history and their fellow believers who maintain fidelity to Scripture, they are not merely mistaken; they are traitors to the cause of the kingdom. And while I would not be rash or reckless or simplistic in pronouncing hasty sentences of treason on brothers and sisters who have joined the world in these matters, I do insist on framing the issue with the utmost seriousness and biblical accuracy.
Recently, Max Lucado has come under criticism from conservative Christians for caving before the world (as represented by extreme progressive “Christianity”) on these very issues. (Here is one example.) I do not share all the views of these critics, but that Lucado has committed a major wrong in this matter is quite clear to me. Many have pointed out how Lucado’s waffling is wrong. But among the most important aspects of his pathetic compromise is that it is treasonous!
While not using this word, Todd Pruitt and Carl Trueman do a good job of pointing out the demoralizing effect of Lucado’s recent apology: See “At the First Puff of Wind” (listen, particularly, to the part around 10:00 to 15:00). Rightly, they point out that, as a national Christian leader, Lucado has not only set a bad example for Christians in America, but he has betrayed thousands and thousands of normal everyday believers who risk losing much more than he ever could if they stand for biblical truth. He is guilty of demoralizing the troops!
Pruitt specifically points to the fact that his (Pruitt’s) church’s website takes a clear, strong stand for a biblical understanding of marriage and sexuality and to the fact that each of the church’s elders is identified by name (with photo) as upholding that position. They are all taking major risks with their very livelihood in standing for biblical truth. What an insult to their faithful fortitude it is for someone as wealthy and untouchable as Max Lucado to kowtow to the world!
The world is looking at biblical Christians and telling them they are not real followers of Jesus, because they don’t love people (i.e. affirm their sinful lifestyles) and because they say mean and bigoted things (i.e. tell the truth about sin). Some Christians, like Lucado, want so badly to avoid being seen this way that they either join the world in its lies or at least begin to blush with embarrassment at the truths of Scripture making vain, insipid apologies for them. But in doing so, they throw their brothers and sisters under the bus who actually love people enough to tell them the truth about their sin and God’s grace in Jesus. What Lucado has actually done is say to the world, “You are right about those other Christians who tell you that it is sin to make of your sexuality what you want instead of what God wants. You are right about them. They are mean, unloving, grace-deniers who don’t really follow Jesus.”
Local Acts of Treason But what should we do, if we find that the elders of our own local church are guilty of this same sort of thing? Should we call it treason?
I know of one particular church here in my area which has had that very problem recently. Unbiblical views of marriage and sexuality have been held in secret by the leaders of this church for quite some time. And of course, the problem is not merely the unbiblical views of the issue of sexuality but the low view of Scripture that allows for them. And it was not merely that one or two leaders were holding to these views, but that even those who continue to hold to biblical views would not address the problem with any real force of action or firmness of resolve. Thus, unbiblical understandings of ‘love,’ and ‘grace,’ and ‘unity’ serve to tolerate and sustain unbiblical views of sexuality and even of Scripture itself. And this very act of tolerance serves to undercut those who would stand for the Lord against the tide of the world.
What is one to do?
Call It What It Is It is a sad fact that, as bad as these things are now, they are bound to get much worse. In the days ahead, many Christians who would step out onto the field of battle to take a stand for God’s truth in this world will find themselves not only facing opposition straight in front of them from outside the church, but they will also find that there are many of their brothers and sisters (both actual and false brethren) who are coming up behind them and kicking the backs of their knees. Many of these quislings believe themselves to be loving and gracious. They may truly believe that they merely see things a bit differently from their more “traditional” brothers and sisters. They do not think of themselves as traitors who are demoralizing the troops. But they need to be disabused of the delusion that they are anything less. They need to be told that, while they and certain others may think of them as loving, open-minded, gracious Christians, they are, in fact, betraying their brothers and sisters who are obediently holding the line where the Scriptures say to hold it.
I am not calling for executions, or vicious treatment, or anything like that. I want nothing other than the love of the Lord expressed in clear truth and right actions toward these folks who are giving aid and comfort to the enemy from within the fold of the flock of God. But it is time we started calling this what it is. It’s treason.
My departure from Facebook is not so much a political stance as it is the drawing to a close of a little year-long experiment with that kind of social media. (And, oh BOY, what a year I chose, huh?!) The truth is, I have too long neglected my humble little blog, TLW.
It is perhaps one of the great, sad signs of the age that the phenomenon of ‘the blog’ has largely been killed by Facebook. People can’t or won’t take the time to read much text. They want pictures, memes, short videos, etc. Well…
Since it’s been such a long time since I was very active here, I may soon take a stab at changing some things around. Don’t be alarmed if it looks a bit different in the near future!
If you followed the link from FB, please take just a moment to let me know you are here. And if you think you might enjoy seeing stuff here as I post it, please feel free to subscribe. It’s more painless than any vaccine! I promise. Shalom BaMashiach! — KC (aka, “Talmid”)
I am nearly done with my farties (read with an Irish accent).
It seems so strange to me that I am soon to be a man in his fifties (come this October). All my life, I have seemed to be in the role of ‘the young guy’ in most of my significant circles. But it is time for that to change. Yesterday at work, my job lead, who is 38 years old, complimented me by turning to the 41 year old other guy working with us and saying, “This old guy is showing us up!”
The past few weeks have been quite the whirlwind–a good whirlwind, but a whirlwind nonetheless. On Friday the 19th, I quit a job where I had been working for about twenty months. Then I spent the week of the 21st – 27th out at High School Camp, where I was the chapel speaker. Then on Monday the 29th, I began my new job for a different company.
One of the big reasons for this needed shift in employment was the fact that the atmosphere at my previous place of employment was very unhealthy… for me, at least. For the last year or so of my time there, I was going to work every day under a great cloud of acrimony and accusation. It was crazy.
It was also a time of growing much closer to the Lord. Since most of the suffering and setbacks in my life have been (at least in my mind) the result of my own sin and stupidity, it was a rare opportunity to walk with Him on the road of false accusation and undeserved maltreatment.
Among the specific accusations leveled at me were these: I was a “liar,” an ingrate, a “malcontent,” a manipulator, an untrustworthy person, and a Bible-denier. For a very intense period of more than a month, I was under the threat of termination unless I agreed that this treatment was “kindness” and “friendship,” a la Psalm 141:5. The fact is, they never really knew me. They didn’t even get my sins (of which I have plenty) right.
I had committed to the Lord last October that I would stick it out until He moved me on, either by my getting fired or by His provision of another job. Following that, He took me through nine more months of trial, some of it so intense that I was seriously worried for my health. And just when I was about to throw in the towel and give up on my commitment to Him (it was not as though He had given me a command to obey; it was a voluntary dedication), He provided me with a new job at a company where people seem to be appreciated–even celebrated–in ways that provide a direct contrast to my experience over the past year or so. So it is that I have been reveling in the kindness of my God lately.
Anyway, one of the reasons that things were so difficult for me in the previous place was that the accusations had the effect of making me feel… juvenile. My superiors in employment had set themselves up as my superiors in every facet of life. They were the ones with all the wisdom and understanding and goodness and truth, and I was a fool and a liar and so on. It was as though I was being told that I needed to grow up morally and socially. Anyone who has been the victim of constant accusation knows that, after a while, it gets under your skin in such a way that you begin to… if not believe it factually, at least feel that you somehow have it coming. It is a terrible thing.
Meanwhile, I was aware of the calendar and the unrelenting approach of age 50. But I was going to work every day at a job that constantly made me feel like a 20 year old punk who is having his britches refitted. I found myself spending much of age 49 in a terrible funk, and I certainly did not want to turn 50 in such a state.
In other areas of my life, it has been clear in recent months that the Lord has been shaping my heart for a readiness to take on the role of the… let us say… seasonedness of my age and stage. In May, my first grandchild was born. In a couple of weeks, I will be getting a new son-in-law who is now about the age I was when I took charge of the Bible and Theology department at Heritage Christian School (in 2003). And in church life, I am in the process of stepping into a much more active role of leadership and ministry.
So what was all that awful stuff of the past year or so all about? Well, I do not pretend to know what the Lord is up to in the secret counsel of His own sovereign plan. But right now, I can see at least two major benefits of it. First, because it had the effect of putting my finitude under a microscope, it forced me to do much self-examination, both to own the things I could and should own as my faults and to be able to defend myself against that which was untrue. But also, since it was largely unearned persecution, it gave me a taste of what it is to be irrationally maligned in such a way that, though the cruelty came from other human beings, I could smell all around it the bad breath of the dragon (Rev. 12:9-10).
Obviously, I still have just that sort of ‘immaturity’ in me that causes people to write blog posts of this sort. I mean, wouldn’t the mature thing be to just go on quietly and not put something like this out there for the whole world to read? Maybe. (I think there is another post to be written on that subject in the not too distant future.) But this will likely be read by next to no one, anyway. And who knows?–it just may serve to help someone.
Meanwhile, I will say with Asaph,
“As for me, the nearness of God is my good;
I have made the Lord YHWH my refuge,
That I may tell of all Your works.”
— Psalm 73:28
Well, I took out the garbage today
And expected a “Hip-hip-hooray!”
So it did get my goat,
When my wife took no note,
Let alone had a “thank you” to say.
When I pointed out what I had done,
She just paused and said, “Oh, thank you, Hon…”
Then went on scrubbing floors
And with other such chores
On her list of a hundred and one.
How she gets so much done, I don’t know,
But it’s clear that it’s never for show.
Yet I would be remiss,
If I didn’t say this:
That her setting is always on “Go!”
And all of it’s done with the touch
Of a gentle, sweet Mom who gets such
Little rest for her lids,
Taking care of her kids
And the husband who loves her so much.
A few years ago, I changed the name to “asthéneia” (Greek for “weakness”), because I felt the need to have my title emphasize the importance of the call to embrace weakness.
Now I am changing back to the original name. Here is why:
I have just begun a second blog which will be more focused on the aspects of my thought which led to the prior change. That is, it will be dealing with the ideas of heroism, power, greatness, and the biblical call to weakness. The new blog, geberology, will be a bit more academic in focus, allowing this one to be more personal and devotional by comparison. (Actually, both blogs will be both academic and devotional, but not equally so.)
Therefore, it is best to return to the title which comes from my life verse (II Samuel 3:1) and the over all theme of the life which the Lord has given me so far.
Well, I took out the garbage today
The Long War 