I am trying to navigate the theological tsunami that is threatening to permanently alter the face of our denomination. The amendments to the constitution regarding ordination standards, diversity, inclusiveness, interpretation of Scripture, and so on, are incredibly important to our identity as a people of faith, and incredibly divisive. You may find the whole mess really distasteful. Or it may just seem so distant from your daily life, your own effort to know and follow Jesus Christ, that you just tune out. Some of you may be thinking, “What’s the point of being in a denomination anyway? I just want to worship God and study the Word and try to live a good life.”
If you’re not thinking something along those lines, I applaud you. Because I, for one, am really depressed by the whole situation and wish I didn’t have to think about it any more.
But you know what? This is the passage that comes next in the series, and I have to play the hand I’m dealt. As you may have noticed, I don’t preach topical sermons, that is, looking around into the world and deciding what needs to be addressed and then searching for the Biblical passages that support what I want to say about the world. What I do is decide on a course of study at the beginning of the year- either a series, or a particular track out of the lectionary - and preach the Scripture passage that is presented to me as it comes up each week. I do it that way for two reasons. First, it keeps me honest. It means that I preach on all the Word, not just my favorite bits. And second, it takes away some of my control and gives the Holy Spirit room to surprise me - and you.
And I often am surprised, although I shouldn’t be after all this time. Without my knowing it, often the passage that comes up for a given week is exactly what people need to hear. But this week it’s almost too obvious. I ducked it for a good part of the week because, as I’ve said, I find the whole mess really depressing.
Jesus said these words almost 2000 years ago and I’m sure he didn’t have the slightest idea that I was going to preach on the Sermon on the Mount this year. Nor did he know that we would be arguing over the scope of his authority (God the father did, of course, but Jesus, in his human capacity, was somewhat more limited in terms of omniscience) .... And yet, here we are, being warned against false prophets right at the very moment in our church history when our leaders seem to be undermining the ground on which our faith stands. How did he know? Well, for one thing, false prophets are always with us. They come along in every generation.
Some are obvious, easy to identify - so-called prophets like Jim Jones who led his people to mass suicide in Guyana, or David Koresh who led his people into a more violent death in Waco, Texas. When Jesus says, “you will know them by their fruits,” the fruit of their teaching is clearly evil, clearly in direct opposition to the message of life that Jesus brings.
Some are less obvious. The followers of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, who taught that suffering is illusion, are still with us. And Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon has more followers every day, and in many ways their fruits are admirable: strong families, clean living, commitment to community, supporting the church. All these are good - and yet we know that they were false prophets. How do we know? Because their teaching adds to - and for that matter contradicts - God’s revelation in Scripture. And the Apostle John, who lived longer than any of the other apostles and gave us - so to speak - the last word on the subject, said “I warn every one who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if any one adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.” [Rev 22:18-19]
So we can identify one kind of false prophet by the fact that they lead their people off a cliff. Other false prophets can be identified by the fact that they place some new revelation above Jesus’ own words.
But there’s a third kind of false prophet that we need to be aware of, and this third kind is harder to get a handle on, because they’re very slippery. This kind of false prophet preaches a message that echoes the culture, that is attractive and easy to swallow, that sounds plausible, that caters to some natural human impulse.
How can you tell the false prophet from the real thing?
It’s not easy. Because, as Jesus said, they wear sheep’s clothing in order to blend in. They don’t say, “Don’t listen to Jesus.” That we could easily identify and be armed against. Instead they stand in front of the narrow gate that Jesus said we have to enter and say, “not that way, here’s another way that is what Jesus was really talking about.”
To add to the confusion, not everyone agrees about what we should be looking for as marks of identification.
Some people believe that Jesus is talking only about false teaching, that is, their teaching is the fruit, and if we check the teaching against the Scriptures and find it false, that takes care of the matter.
Another group disagrees, saying that this reference to false prophets has nothing to do with teaching, it has to do with the kind of life they live. British preacher Alexander MacLaren, said “It is not a test to detect heretics, but rather to unmask hypocrites.” This position is that their teaching is right but their living is wrong, and they’re often not even aware that they are hypocrites.
Martin Lloyd-Jones says that it doesn’t matter which one you emphasize; both are right, and both are wrong. Because the idea that you can believe rightly, and yet act wrongly, is just as far out of line as the notion that you can believe wrongly but act rightly. This isn’t a mushy middle, weak-kneed compromise between two opposing positions, but a stark recognition of the plain fact that belief and action are simply two sides of a single coin.
Lloyd-Jones then goes on to say, “Most people who have any modicum of discrimination can detect a heretic. If a man came into a pulpit and seemed to be doubtful about the being of God, and denied the deity of Christ and the miracles, you would say that he was a heretic. There is not much difficulty about that.”
Would that we lived in such simple times! Because it seems as though that is exactly what is happening with our leadership. Now, we’ve always had doctrinal disagreements. Presbyterians - like most Protestants - are noted for splitting and reuniting and then splitting again. It’s what we do best, it seems. But in the last century we’ve taken an ominous turn. Let me explain what I mean.
Back in 1729 the Adopting Act dealt with the threat of schism by saying that a candidate for ordination didn’t have to affirm explicitly every part of the Westminster Catechism and Confessions. Instead, he could take exception to a particular section, and the presbytery would then decide whether the particular section was essential or not. Over the next 200 years, we split over revival, over educational standards, and most seriously over slavery. None of these was over what you might call the “essentials of the faith,” although few social issues have ever been more important than slavery.
In 1927 our denomination split again, this time over the “fundamentalist-modernist controversy.” There were five “fundamentals” that conservatives said all right-thinking Christians had to believe. These were: the inerrancy of Scripture, the divinity of Jesus, the virgin birth, the penal substitution theory of atonement, and the belief in the physical resurrection and bodily return of Jesus Christ. Not too heavy, right? No controversial position statements on baptism, or the rapture, or women’s rights. And previous General Assemblies had, in fact, declared these to be essential tenets of our faith. But in 1927 the General Assembly said that in order to make a doctrine essential, they would have to say so in the constitution. And we didn’t put it in, and we’ve been arguing about what constitutes the “essentials” ever since.
And now we can’t even affirm that Jesus Christ is the only way to God. Or, as I said last week, our commissioners were so offended at being asked to affirm it that they refused, and then passed a watered-down statement that says “we cannot limit the extent of God’s grace.” Well, I agree that we can't - but surely Jesus can, wouldn’t you say? At the very least, we should listen when he explains how to receive God’s unlimited grace.
And Presbyterian ministers - taught to do so by the professors in our Presbyterian seminaries - are discarding the bits of Scripture they don’t like, saying it’s outdated, conditioned by the culture, or some other such rationalization. For instance, listen to this quote from a book by our current moderator, Jack Rogers: “Not all of the particular cultural applications in the Biblical text apply to those of us not living in ancient Near Eastern cultures. Take, for example, the recurring theme in the Old Testament that God’’s covenant people should be fruitful and multiply and fill the land. The Old Testament heroes of the faith followed that mandate by taking multiple wives, concubines and slaves to bear children to them. We can understand the original function of the divine mandate without feeling obligated to follow it today.” The idea is to preserve "the function of Biblical principles, but not the form."
You wouldn’t believe how many interpretative mistakes there are in those foour and a half sentences. The most glaring is that descriptive passages of Scripture have been portrayed as though they were normative, that is prescriptive, in order to make the “form” of Biblical teaching seem quaint and morally irrelevant. And the effect of this kind of teaching is to reduce the confidence of the people that they can get clear guidance for life from Scripture, and encourage us to rely on our own feelings and preferences instead, governed only by a warm fuzzy admonition to “love one another.”
Well, I’m not going to give you an introductory course in Biblical interpretation in the next five minutes. What I am going to do is point out what is happening to our church, and to the faithful people who are trusting their leaders to teach them the word of God, “rightly explaining the word of truth,” [2 Tim 2:15] as Paul tells Timothy to do.
First of all I want to say that Jack Rogers calls himself “the confessing moderator.” He is a professor at Fuller Seminary, and he is one of our denomination’s “experts” on interpreting our Confessions. He is charming, humorous, pleasant, congenial. He uses all the terms that a Christian teacher and preacher should teach. He talks about God, he talks about Jesus, he talks about Scripture, he emphasizes the love of God. The sheep’s clothing fits perfectly. He’s a comforting preacher, like the prophets in Jeremiah who “say, “'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace.” [Jer 6:14]
Martin Lloyd-Jones says that the problem with these people - Jack Rogers and others of our leadership - is not what is included, but what is excluded. The best way to describe the problem is that their teaching leaves out the hard road and the narrow gate. The false prophet has nothing that is offensive to our natural selves, nothing that we need to repent of - except perhaps racism. In modern terms, forty years after Lloyd-Jones wrote his wonderful commentary, the centerpiece of their teaching is “inclusivity.” We must celebrate our diversity, they say, not force everyone into a single mold. I wonder how they feel about forcing everyone through a narrow gate. I wonder how they would preach on that passage....
At the same meeting where my colleagues talked me down from sending out the incendiary letter I told you about last Sunday, an elder from the Medford church asked how many pastors they knew who dared to preach against anything. “We hear sermons in favor of a lot of things,” he said, “and rightly so. I hear preaching in favor of loving our neighbor, of studying the Bible, of peace and patience, kindness and self-control. We emphasize the love of God, the wideness of his mercy, the completeness of his forgiveness. But do we ever preach against anything?” he asked. And the pastors present - all conservative - agreed that they didn’t preach against abortion, or against divorce, or against homosexuality - because there would always be someone in their congregation who might take offense, because either they or someone in their family had been wounded by one or more of those things.
We cannot treat the wounds of the people by saying, “'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace.” Jesus says that the way to the peace of God, to salvation and eternal life, is through a narrow gate. And we do no one any favors by avoiding talking about it because the way is hard.
Now, I’m not saying that I am going to get up in the pulpit from now on every Sunday and thunder about sin and judgment, hellfire and damnation. Jesus didn’t, why should I? But he didn’t pull his punches about the cost of discipleship, and we can’t afford to either.
God is holy and righteous, as well as merciful and loving. Sin is very serious, but it’s unpleasant to talk about. And the false prophets perform elaborate dips and contortions, back bends and side-steps, to keep us - or themselves - from facing it. They’re good dancers, these wolves; you rarely see one of them fall on their keister. The problem is that dancing slippers don’t suit the hard road that leads to the narrow gate, and the wolves never warn their people that they need hiking boots instead. And so they dance away into the sunset, polished floors smooth and pleasant under their feet, totally unaware that when the lights go out, they’ll be left all alone in the dark. Because the light of the world has gone ahead, on a harder road.
