Beloved, Let us Love

"Beloved", says the Apostle John, "let us love one another, for love is of God." The Christian is called to love even, one might say especially, his or her enemies (Matthew 5:44). Now that means we pray for them, however unpleasant or persecuting they may be. And note that Jesus says, "Pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you." He does not encourage our sinful hearts by saying "Pray against those who spitefully use you..." We need no encouragement to add the imprecatory Psalms to our daily devotions or to pray that our foes may come to a bad end, but we emphatically need encouragement to pray that our foes may cease to be our foes and become our friends.

Now, if we wish to understand what love is, where better to turn than 1 Corinthians 13:

"Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."

Note that love involves the opposite of suspicion. Rather than putting the worst possible construction on a person's words where there is an ambiguity, love puts the best possible construction. Love does not lightly make accusations, but shies away from such accusations unless it is forced to think otherwise. Love does not take any but the best arguments as evidence of a person's guilt. Malice should be one of those attitudes that the Christian "puts off", as Paul argues in Colossians 3.

Now, love does not mean being willfully blind to a real fault, for the sinner is to be reclaimed, and to overlook actual sin is not loving, for as long as sin is not confessed there can be no repentance, and to encourage a sinner to remain impenitent is to encourage sin. But no doubtful accusation, no mere argument of words, should be accepted by a Christian against a brother in Christ - or against a complete pagan and a persecutor, for that matter.

Let us be slow to speak in condemnation of another, and swift to examine the accusation carefully. Much harm has been done by those who, however well-meaning, have been too swift to share accusations that are either untrue or undetermined. Brethren, these things ought not to be so.

"Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God."

Yes, but What Do You MEAN by That?

The Elephant Room controversy has claimed another victim, Brian Broderson of Calvary Chapel. In a blog post he has stated:

"According to the Oneness doctrine, there is no Trinity—one God in three persons; rather there is one God who expresses Himself in different modes, sometimes as Father, sometimes as Son, and sometimes as Spirit. Now this teaching is certainly contrary to the biblical doctrine of the triune nature of God and is therefore "heretical," but to say that those who hold this view are not Christians is in my opinion going too far. Granted, it is an incorrect view regarding the nature of God, but it is not like other anti-trinitarian views that deny the full deity of Christ. I personally do not think you can put those who hold the Oneness doctrine in the same category as a Jehovah's Witness or a Mormon. I might be wrong, but that's the way I see it at this point. Should we seek to correct the view of the Oneness Pentecostals? Yes we should, in the same way we would seek to correct any person or group that has fallen into theological error. What I don't think we should do is spurn them or cast a final eternal judgment on them."


Now this is, I am afraid, appallingly bad theology, and shows a huge doctrinal blind spot in Broderson's thinking; yet it is a blind spot that is increasingly common in Evangelicalism. Increasingly the tendency is to say "Well, so-and-so believes in Jesus" and leave it at that, as if that is enough. Broderson has taken this a little further and said, "Well, so-and-so believes Jesus is God, so he can't be that bad."

On the contrary, he can be; for the question is really more fundamental than "who is Jesus?" it is, "Who is God?" That brings us back to the question of the Mormons, for the Mormon says "Jesus is God." Now Mr. Broderson is still sharp enough to recognise that the Mormon god is not the same as the God of trinitarian Christianity, but seems to have compromised enough that he is willing to fudge the issue on the god of Oneness Pentecostalism.

A denial of the Trinity is fundamental, for it affects one's whole perception of God in a multitude of ways. If God is unipersonal, then what does it mean for God to be love? Love is defined in the Bible in terms of self-giving, but if God is unipersonal, to whom can that one person give himself? It means that either he is not essentially love, or that the universe is necessary to God; that God could not have done other than create beings whom he could love. It challenges the doctrine of the love of God and changes it, it also challenges the independence of God, giving us a picture of a god who needs something outside of himself and upon whom is therefore laid the necessity of creating.

And despite Mr. Broderson's naive remarks, Oneness does alter the conception of Christ. According to classical Oneness teaching Christ has two personalities, a human and a divine, and when he prayed it was the human personality praying to the divine. That creates at best a schizophrenic deity, and at worst an incarnation that is not truly an incarnation at all, where the human and divine are separated to such an extent that the divine merely indwells the human, in which case I fail to see how there is a difference of anything but degree between Jesus of Nazareth and a Christian who is indwelt by the Holy Spirit. It creates huge problems for our Theology and Christology.

Where does one draw the line? The moment you start to draw it anywhere other than where the Bible has drawn it, you are in trouble. Who is a Christian? Either we say "All those who claim the name are", which Broderson does not do, or we say "all those who believe in the Christ of the Bible." There is no middle ground.

So what is going on in Broderson's statement? What is going on all over the place; based on a personal and unwritten standard people are affirming modalists as, in some sense, brothers in Christ. Well, I am having none of it. If a fellow will not confess the Apostles' Creed I will not baptize him, and I cannot affirm as a brother in Christ a person whom I could not baptize. Nor can I share the Communion with him, and so again, he is not a brother in Christ.

That does not mean I could not call him a friend, or like him; I have never met a Unitarian I did not like, and I parted from the last Jehovah's Witness I had any interaction with on the best of terms, but we are quite clear; the Unitarians and I, the JW and I, may be friends, but we can never call one another brethren. We certainly cannot call one another Christians

Review: 'The Trail of Blood'

J.M. Carroll: The Trail of Blood (Ashland Avenue Baptist Church, Lexington, KY)

This booklet of 55 pages is famous. It has practically given its name to the whole Baptist Successionist dogma, and is referred to by just about everyone in that context. But how good is this booklet? Frankly, I was disappointed. There is no detail at all given of the supposed 'ancient Baptist groups', they are assumed, not proven - and yet no reputable historian today would agree with this. In fact, outside of a very small group of fundamentalist Baptists, no-one today would agree with the Successionists - and that includes many, many Evangelical Christians, even the Baptist writer N.R. Needham. Successionists like Carroll rely on a highly speculative historiography that is based in particular on works written before the 1890s.

Carroll's work contains no original research - and avowedly so, it is after all a record of a course of popular lectures, not an historical work. Yet even so, the work is lacking in details of the 'ancient Baptist groups'. In fact he has assumed that practically every heretical group from the early Church through the Middle Ages rejected infant Baptist, and that these groups were connected. So on P. 19 we read of "'Montanist,' 'Tertullianists', 'Novationists', 'Paterines,' etc." Now these are three different groups (no-one today thinks that a group called 'Tertullianists' ever existed). The Montanists were a charismatic group that taught the continuance of prophetic gifts, all centred on Montanus, their founder, who was regarded as a prophet. The Novatian Schism, on the other hand, was over the question of church discipline - Novation refused to re-admit those guilty of 'Mortal Sin' to the Church on profession of repentance. Both of these groups may have re-baptized, but that would have been because they did not recognise 'Catholic' baptism as valid! 'Paterines' is another name for the Medieval Bogomil movement. They were dualists of a sort, who believed that Jesus was the brother of Satan, and whose'baptism' was being patted on the head with a copy of John's Gospel! Thus each of the three groups mentioned here that actually existed were very different theologically.

More seriously, Carroll's understanding of the history of the Church is rather sketchy at times. He writes: "The fourth [ecumenical council] met at Chalcedon, AD 451, and was called by Emperor Marian; 500 or 600 bishops or Metropolitans... were present. During this council the doctrine of what is now known as Mariolatry was promulgated. This means the worship of Mary, the mother of Christ" (P. 21). In fact Chalcedon was called to correct mistaken view of the person of Christ, and the title 'Theotokos' applied to Mary was Christological in intent - to emphasise that the one born of Mary was indeed God. Only later was the Chalcedonian declaration used to glorify Mary herself (see K.S. Latourette, A History of Christianity [London, Eyre and Spottiswoode Ltd., 1964] 171-2 and Harold O.J. Brown, Heresies [Peabody, Mass., Hendrickson, 2003] 172-3). Harold O.J. Brown writes: "The term theotokos originally was intended to affirm the deity of Christ, but it gradually came to be a title of honour for Mary." Mariolatry was not imposed at Chalcedon - it arose as a corruption in popular piety.

On P. 23 we have another catalgue of names by which 'True Baptist Churches' were called: "Donatists, Paterines, Cathari, Paulicians... Petro-Brussians, Arnoldists, Henricians, Albigenses, and Waldenses." Who were these groups? The last was indeed an orthodox evangelical group - but today is rather inconveniently paedobaptist! The Donatists, like the Novatians, rejected all Catholic Baptism, but were not necessarily anti-paedobaptist! They could also be quite violent against Catholics. Paterines, Paulicians, Cathari and Albigenses are all names given to Medieval dualist groups. The Petrobrussians were the followers of Peter of Bruys, an ascetic who burned crosses and opposed the Catholic Church. He was, however, the originator of his party, not a member of an existing group. The Petrobrussians did not last long after Peter's death - unsurprisingly, really. The Arnoldists and Henricians were similar groups, also about the same time. All of these thrived in the 12th century, but they all have the same problem - they do not emerge from existing groups, but begin with a charismatic, ascetic leader. They were reactions against the corruptions of the Catholic hierarchy, and certainly de Bruys and his followers rejected infant baptism. It seems, however, that Henry of Lausanne, founder of the Henricians, and Arnold of Bresica, did not. Henry did however reject all sacraments administered by corrupt priests as invalid - so that he would re-baptize his followers if he had any doubt about their baptisms!

Waldensianism seems to have begun a little later, as a lay-renewal movement in the Catholic Church. Originally it was accepted, but in 1179 the 3rd Lateran Council refused to authorise them, and they were excommunicated in 1184, after which they merged with an Italian group called the Humiliati, who had broadly similar aims. Unlike the Petrobrussians they were not violent, and unlike the Arnoldists they did not ally themselves with political dissidents. As a result they remain in existence to this day. They sought to follow the New Testament. Although at first they tried to remain within the Medieval Catholic Church, they were finally forced into a separate existence. Persecution finally restricted them to the valleys of the Italian Alps, where they remained until the Reformation. Since at least some of them held, with the Henricians, that sacraments administered by corrupt priests were invalid, many joining the movement were re-baptized. The Waldensians themselves did not oppose infant baptism if performed by godly clergy.

Baptist successionism relies on the idea of an unbroken 'trail of blood' through the centuries. The book The Trail of Blood fails to establish such a trail - and indeed Carroll admits that he is assuming, against the evidence, that these groups were all orthodox!

On Pp. 32-33 we read, "During all these hard struggles for Reformation, continuous and valuable aid was given to the reformers, by many Ana-Baptists, or whatever other name they bore. Hoping for some relief from their own bitter lot, they came out of their hiding places and fought bravely with the reformers." This makes for good rhetoric, but is unfortunately untrue - I have been unable to discover references to any pre-existing baptistic groups who joined with the Reformers. All of the Reformation-era Anabaptist leaders, Balthasar Hubmaier, Conrad Grebel, Hans Denck, Menno Simons, were former Catholics. Hubmaier and Simons were both former priests, and they were by no means alone among Anabaptist leaders in being so. Grebel and Denck were both humanist reformers who rejected infant baptism. It is a fact that not one Reformation-era Anabaptist leader was from a pre-existing group, or gained his views from one.

In short, Baptist successionism is a speculative dogma, not a proveable historical fact. It is therefore something that should not be stated as such, and certainly cannot be the basis of any doctrine of the Church, any more than the dogma of Apostolic succession.

Bad ways to argue against Roman Catholicism

When the Da Vinci Code was coming out, I met with an evangelical who declared that he was surprised I was arguing against the movie because "it was against Roman Catholicism." I replied that, while it was true that the book contained criticism of the Roman Catholic Church, those criticisms were in fact mostly arguments against all Christianity. I expect that the majority of readers know that the Da Vinci Code contains the claim (repeats the claim might be a better way of putting it) that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and they had a child. Parrotting such strange fantasies as The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Dan Brown's book claimed that the early Church believed that Jesus was just a man, and that the deity of Christ was a doctrine imposed on the Church by Constantine at the Council of Nicea in the 4th century.

I told him so, and he went on his way. But a recent e-mail to Fighting for the Faith has set me thinking, and starting Gail Riplinger's original New Age Bible Versions (Ararat, VA, AV Publications Corp, 1995) has confirmed the need to say something about this. There are, sadly, a lot of Protestants who think that as long as they have an argument against Roman Catholicism, it must be valid. As a result they do not consider however the wider implications of the argument and the reasoning behind it.

The example of this referred to by the correspondent was The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop, which she recommended enthusiastically. As Hislop was writing in the 1850s, we don't want to treat him too harshly. After all, he was a minister in the Scottish Highlands in the mid-19th century, and not an achaeologist, historian or anthropologist. The state of knowledge about the ancient world was sketchy at the time, and it takes time for information to travel from London and Edinburgh to Arbroath. The fact of the matter is, however, that the book is far more a work of the imagination than an account of the realities of Babylonian mythology. Hislop's vivid imagination constructed a complex web of connections between the ancient Babylonian religion and the worship of the Roman Catholic Church. The book seemed very convincing to many at the time, and is still accepted as such by many Protestants today.

Sadly, the fact is that there is no informed scholar today who would describe the Babylonian religion the way Hislop does. I'm not an archaeologist, but I know a bit about the subject from reading widely, and I know an archaeology student at one of England's top universities. I have read somewhat in the mythology of the pagan world, including Egypt and the Middle East. A lot has been learned since Hislop's death, remember! The genetic fallacy and the fallacy of false etymology are committed often by Hislop. Scottish words are derived from Chaldean roots, and pagan gods from widely separated cultures identified with one another where there is no connection. In fact, if Hislop is to be believed, practically all pagan gods are Nimrod, and practically all goddesses his wife Semiramis (in fact there is no evidence that Nimrod and Semiramis were around at the same period in history, let alone that they were married). Hislop wrongly dated the rise of the Mystery Religions to pre-Christian times when most modern scholars would date them to after the time of Christ, and thus brings in ceremonies that post-date Christ as coming from Babylon.

Hislop is a source of the argument that the letters 'IHS' stand for the Egyptian triad of Isis, Horus and Set. There are two problems with this. First of all, Isis and Horus are associated with Osiris, whose brother Set was, secondly, Set (or Sutekh), is the evil god who murdered Osiris, but his body up, and usurped his throne. As anyone with any knowledge of Egyptian mythology (or the Doctor Who story 'Pyramids of Mars') knows. It seems Hislop had to hunt around for an Egyptian god whose name begins with 'S'!

In the course of his argument, Hislop proposed that Constantine had merged the official Roman paganism with Christianity. Now, he was an orthodox Presbyterian and held to the Westminster Confession. But his arguments, that the religion of the Roman Catholic Church was mostly derived from paganism, and that Constantine corrupted Christianity, have been picked up on to attack not Roman Catholicism, but the Church of Jesus Christ. Writers hostile to all Christianity followed Hislop's lead, and used his method to attack Christianity itself and to argue that nothing in Christianity is original - which leads us right back to Dan Brown and the Da Vinci Code. Intending to attack the Church of Rome, Hislop has made a rod for Protestant backs. As a reviewer (Quoted in Woodrow The Babylon Connection? P. 20), wrote in 1859: "Mr. Hislop's argument proves too much. He finds not only the corruptions of Popery, but the fundamental articles of the Christian Faith, in his hypothetic Babylonian system". Others have seen just that - and acted accordingly!

Ralph Woodrow, once a supporter of the Hislop hypothesis, wrote an excellent book refuting it called The Babylon Connection? (Palm Springs, CA, Ralph Woodrow Evangelistic Association, 1997). Woodrow's original book, Babylon Mystery Religion was extremely popular, and is cited by Gail Riplinger in NABV. I recommend The Babylon Connection? to anyone who wants an in-depth analysis of what's wrong with Hislop.

[NOTE: I am NOT a supporter of Roman Catholicism, and I think it seriously flawed and unbiblical. I just don't think that it's a mythical 'Babylonian Mystery Religion' that never existed in reality'. I would point to books such as James White's The Roman Catholic Controversy; Mary, Another Redeemer?; McCarthy's The Gospel According to Rome, Svedsen's excellent Evangelical Answers. And for the voice of the Church of Rome, the Catechism of the Catholic Church. But I am also a believer in the importance of truthfulness, and the use of good arguments.]

A lighter post

Well, actually a reference to someone else's post. At stufffundieslike.com, there is an old post on the Trail of Blood that actually says some important things about the fable of Baptist successionism. I'm not a Roman Catholic, I'm not going to be tricked into acting like one.