Covenant College

(Tim) Several years ago, I was talking with one of the patriarchs of the PCA about a series of pieces we'd published here exposing the promotion of false doctrine within one of our largest denominational institutions. Although we've worked together in other battles outside the denomination, any thought of discipline or conflict inside these hallowed grounds of the PCA was beyond the pale to this church father. He expressed his disapproval of what I'd written with the simple statement, "Tim, I'm a loyalist when it comes to (that institution) and the PCA."

What is loyalty?

Was Hezekiah loyal when, informed by Isaiah of the coming Babylonian captivity his people and his own sons would suffer, he responded, "'The word of the LORD which you have spoken is good.' For he thought, 'There will be peace and security in my lifetime?" Was the Apostle Peter loyal when he left the Gentiles and went over to the Jews at church potlucks? Were those giving preferential treatment to rich men within the church loyal in seeking to provide for the church's financial well-being? Was Eli loyal when he allowed his sons to continue to profane the holy things as they held sacred office?--family first, you know.

From loyalty, Monday we called attention to the fact that friends from CBMW days seem to have no problem with a woman, Dr. Diane Langberg, publicly teaching men doctrine at a theology conference their professional association, the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, is co-sponsoring. There they all are--John, Al, C.J., Lig, Phil, John--and they're promoting the ministry of a woman teaching men. In fact, beyond promoting, a couple of them (Don and Al) are sharing the pulpit with her.

From loyalty, yesterday we ran a piece on the apparent lack of discipline of faculty members at our denomination's Covenant College, pointing out that one third of them support Barack Obama's presidential bid and half of them decline to acknowledge abortion to be "Very important" in their choice. To put this in perspective, imagine a PCA college in Germany during the Third Reich, keeping in mind that the number of little babies slaughtered now by abortion absolutely dwarfs the number of Christians and Jews Hitler's men slaughtered during the Nazi regime.

Once again, from loyalty to this faith community known as the PCA, we turn to the Rev. Dr. Tim Keller...

(Tim) Blogs live in a weird world. On the one hand, posts can be responded to immediately in the comments section at the bottom of the page. On the other hand, posters can't live their lives responding to the comments unless the blog is all they do. Over 12,500 comments have come in to this blog in the past two and a half years and readers know it's not unusual for a single comment to run into the thousands of words.

Think about it this way...

(Tim, w/thanks to David) Last week, Senator Biden went public with his position concerning the slaughter of little children. The New York Times reported it this way:

(Senator Biden declared) that as a Catholic, he believes life begins at conception. But the Delaware senator added that he would not impose his personal views on others...

* * *
In the interview Sunday, Mr. Biden tried to walk the line between the staunch abortion-rights advocates in his party and his own religious beliefs. While he said he did not often talk about his faith, he said of those who disagree with him: “They believe in their faith and they believe in human life, and they have differing views as to when life — I’m prepared as a matter of faith to accept that life begins at the moment of conception.”

With slight reworking, am I right in wondering whether this summary of Senator Biden's position  might not bear some resemblance to the position held by many enlightened evangelicals such as the Covenant College profs who believe Senator Obama is a Christian and support his presidential candidacy?

(Tim, w/thanks to the usual suspect) Growing up in Wheaton among evangelicalism's elite, it became apparent to me more than twenty years ago that my Christian sanity depended upon never looking at, let alone subscribing to, Christianity Today or her many sister publications. Alas, it's never been that easy.

Some years back, a young couple attended Church of the Good Shepherd while doing graduate work at Indiana University. Too, too late, I discovered they were related to CTi's CEO (since retired). Had I known it from the beginning, I would have nipped our relationship in the bud. By the time I found out, alas and alack, we loved them and they us. Ever since, we've made do as best we could. For their part, they became reformed and he stepped into the eldership of a PCA church in the D.C. area. For our part, we assured them regularly that some of our best friends work on Gunderson Drive.

My father-in-law looked at my aversion to CT as quixotic and several times gave me a gift subscription, urging me to read it. It took a while, but finally I was able to convince him I was seriously opposed to that thing entering my home. With a temperament as sweet as honey, finally he gave in.

Normally, then, I'm able to escape knowledge of the suits and their profitable religion.

Just now, though, I let down my guard and it all came back to me when I ran across this at Touchstone's "Mere Comments." It's a post responding to a recent news piece CT ran on Tony Campolo's membership on the Democratic Party's Platform Committee. Yes, you read it right: That patriarch of Christian liberal arts colleges and chapel service prophet worked with other members of the Democratic Party and produced these planks on child-slaughter...

(Tim, w/thanks to Jake) Would you understand me if I said Baptists seem to have courage Presbyterians lack? Maybe it's a byproduct of being despised by Presbyterians, but whatever its origins, it's a wonderful gift from God to them and all of us.

Speaking of manly preaching, I give you Russell Moore. if you don't make a habit of listening to what he has to say or readingwhat he writes, you're missing out big-time. A few years back, Russ and I met at a conference. His work's been a great encouragement to me since then.

Here's a message he gave this past week at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary titled, "Joseph of Nazareth Is a Single-Issue Evangelical: The Father of Jesus, the Cries of the Helpless, and Change You Can Believe In." One of our ClearNote Pastors College students, Jake Mentzel, summarizes the message...

For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not in cleverness of speech, that the cross of Christ should not be made void. For the word of the cross is to those who are perishing foolishness, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will set aside." (1 Corinthians 1:17-19)

(Tim) Here are some thoughts about the state of our civil compact as we approach Election Day. And, following the political stuff, I make a stab at some applications to those who identify themselves as the prophetic voices of the Emergent Church. If your patience wears thin with the political part, buck up and finish it because it forms the perfect backdrop to grow in our understanding of the goals and strategy of church leaders today who have woman deacons, talk a lot about the city and contextualization, and have a staff member titled "Associate Pastor for Art, Weird Glasses, and Chai." First, then, let's look at the political scene...

(Tim) Method often tells us as much as words themselves, do. Three cases come to mind.

First, when I had something to correct in what Phil Ryken had written, I wrote him privately asking him to issue the correction himself. He persisted in leaving the matter uncorrected so I took it public. But taking it public, I left the comments open below what I'd written so Phil could explain his words or actions.

When Phil had a complaint against me, though, he took it public first with no prior private e-mail to me. And when he took it public, he refused to allow any responses below what he wrote. Things he wrote were not true but they're likely to be out there uncorrected until the end of time...

(Tim) Here’s the truth. Obama is the oppressor of children, born and unborn. But since his skin color is black, we can’t believe he’d oppress anyone. So we come out with all this blather about other social justice issues equally commanding our attention as Christians. Our goal, of course, is to obscure the fact that abortion absolutely dwarfs the death toll of all other forms of oppression around the world combined. That’s combined, brothers and sisters!

Why, just in these United States alone, since the bloody decision, Roe v. Wade, was issued, our nation has torn limb from limb, leg from torso, body from mother’s womb, over fifty million—50,000,0000—of our little children.

This number is so large that it makes Africans' Rwanda, Asians' Pol Pot, and Europeans' Hitler look tame by comparison. The only bloody oppressors who are even close to slaughtering the numbers we have slaughtered by our own national, systemic, bloody, oppressive, enslaving child-murders are Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.

But, get this: If instead of talking about the death toll in our nation alone, we consider the international death toll from child slaughter through the murders we call “abortions,” then we’re talking about one Joseph Stalin every year. That’s well over 50,000,000 children slaughtered EVERY SINGLE YEAR!

It’s disgusting for otherwise educated and thoughtful men to seek to legitimize their conniving at this great bloody oppression that defines our nation by sniveling about systemic poverty and education and secondhand smoke and carbon emissions and AIDS.

If men who claim to know the Triune God want to vote Democratic; if men who claim to know the Triune God and have faith in Jesus Christ have black skin and want to vote for another man with black skin; we’d all be better off if they’d have the courage of their prejudices and admit them... You know, something like, “I’m afraid of not appearing progressive enough.” Or “I’m afraid my congregation would have my hide if I didn’t speak up for the brother.”

(Tim) A few news items related to the PCA's Covenant College. First, Inside Higher Ed ran an article a couple months ago titled "Broken Covenant" which reported on Covenant's financial crisis and the initiatives being planned by Covenant's administration in response to that crisis. Those initiatives include downsizing of academic programs and staff (labeled "right-sizing" by Covenant's President Nielson), along with spending $500,000 for a new building and to beef up athletics--both efforts to attract more students...

A prominent evangelical magazine just did a piece on the complaint by Calvin College faculty reps that Calvin's board has issued policy barring members of their faculty from promoting sodomy. The article starts this way:

The magazine, published in Wheaton, continues:

The case is being watched with interest by other (evangelical) schools struggling to balance compassion and doctrine in their policies on gays.

"Struggling to balance compassion and doctrine?" What on earth are they saying?

Well of course, the point is that the evangelical world today is moving toward the normalization of sodomy and the rubric under which it's being done is the silencing of Scripture's denunciation of sodomy as an abomination before the Lord. Other abominations such as fornication, unbiblical divorce and remarriage, and adultery have already been normalized, and now it's sodomy's turn.

The path to normalization is cleared by much talk of compassion with only an occasional tip of the hat to sin and righteousness and judgment. Which is to say that the Holy Spirit is nowhere present in such discussions since "When He comes, He will convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment."

There's no conviction of sin going on--none at all. Instead, we're busy balancing compassion and doctrine. Wheaton College's "sexuality scholar," Stan Jones, puts it like this...

(Tim) A couple days ago, under the post "Why Same-Sex Intimacy Is Sin," a comment appeared written by Baylyblog's resident scoffer, Cliff Foreman. For twenty-five years, Professor Foreman's day job has been professing Reformed Christian faith as a member of the English Department at the Presbyterian Church in America's Covenant College. Most of our readers are aware that David and I aren't fans of Covenant College. We think it would be best for our denomination to sell it to Tim Keller, but to this point no one's taking our suggestion seriously.

As a simple defense of our position, consider this exchange between Prof. Foreman and a mere graduate student here at Indiana University--a young whippersnapper who lacks the terminal degree as well as the wonderful privilege of a quarter-century of spiritual and theological growth there at Covenant College, at ease in Zion on top of Lookout Mountain within the wonderfully safe cocoon of scores of like-minded Reformed PhDs sharing his commitment to the Westminster Standards.

Here then is Prof. Foreman's explanation to a shake-the-dust-off-your-feet hard-hearted unbeliever of why sodomy is wrong, followed by Josh Congrove's deconstruction of Prof. Foreman's explanation:

* * *

CLIFF FOREMAN WRITES: How about this: God created human beings and intended them to find happiness and fulfillment in committed heterosexual marriages. Then human beings fell and sin entered the world. This meant that people would be born with sinful desires and that through life experiences those desires would solidify into sinful patterns of behavior. But God set his son to offer us forgiveness and the opportunity for significant healing in this life. Our struggle against sin is difficult, but success is possible because of Jesus' sacrifice and the ministry of the Holy Spirit. But of course, in order to be healed and to enjoy the blessings of health, we need to admit that we are sick. If we say that our sinfulness is normal, we won't seek healing. We may tell ourselves that our disease isn't contagious and that it hurts no one, but we will never, then, know what it is to be healthy.

If this scenario, which is what the Bible teaches, is true, then the people who are condemning your behavior are doing so because they think you are missing out on something that would be better for you...

(The PCA needs to) provide safe places to talk about new ideas to advance the PCA’s faithfulness to biblical belief... (The PCA needs) more seats at the table; especially younger generation, women, ethnic leaders, global church representatives... e.g. advisory voice on committees, (S)essions, Boards, speaking at gatherings, consulted by presbyteries; employed in non-ordained ministries.

-Strategic Plan for the PCA

(Tim) I've been sent a number of links to discussions of the Strategic Plan for the PCA and I think it's time we do what is necessary to provide for the work of the Stated Clerk and the Office of the General Assembly in a way that relieves them of the indignity of begging for our support. The men and women who serve in these areas are essential to our well-being as a denomination and, in my experience, carry out their duties faithfully and with real wisdom. If it requires a change in the amount or method of payment to attend General Assembly to fund these works faithfully, let's do it.

However, there's no need for all the philosophical and sociological and political and metaphysical and ontological accretions and gnashing of teeth being tacked on as riders to the bill. Fund the OGA well and stop at that. All the rest of what's known as the Strategic Plan is simply jeopardizing this one thing we should all agree is necessary...

(Tim) So, speaking only personally, I have a friend fired from the faculty of Greenville College (a small Christian liberal arts college in Southern Illinois where three of my in-laws attended), for defending Christian orthodoxy; another friend denied the Ph.D. by Harvard because his thesis defended Christian orthodoxy; another friend ejected from his Ph.D. program in the history department at UW-Madison (my own alma mater and major department) because of his commitment to Christian orthodoxy; another friend terminated from Covenant College who found the atmosphere there stifling to Reformed orthodoxy; another friend disciplined and publicly humiliated by the Vice Chancellor in the Faculty Council (on which he sat) for holding to Christian orthodoxy (see here, here, and here); and now, another friend has been terminated...

(Tim) Back in 1993, I wrote an article on a conflict over the policy of Westminster School in Atlanta that required board members of this private Christian school to be confessing Christians. The New York Times had done an article on the controversy and I took the piece as a jumping-off point to say a few things about home, public, and Christian schools. Since then, Mary Lee and I have educated our five children (as well as several other children who lived with us through the years) in each of those ways--home, public, and Christian school. This is the final year we have a child at home and Taylor, our youngest, is finishing high school at the school my wife Mary Lee, with a couple others, founded and served as principal--Lighthouse Christian Academy.

It's been years since we've had a child at LCA. When it put up a building, we watched its former commitments decline. It seemed bent on becoming the sort of Christian school that, from the beginning, we'd worked hard to avoid. But this is the ho-hum way of all institutions, Christian or otherwise, and there have been some encouraging changes at LCA the past couple of years--hence Taylor's presence there this year.

But as I point out in the article below, the best antidote to school decline is the founding of a new school. It worked with Yale as a reform of Harvard, Princeton as a reform of Yale, and it's still working with schools like New St. Andrews being a reform of Wheaton, Westmont, Gordon, and Covenant.

Tired and timid souls always laugh at the upstarts...

I don't write much about Indiana politics and government but it's caused me no small sadness to contemplate the term-limit-departure of our fiscally excellent governor a little over a year from now. Gov. Mitch Daniels will have completed his second term and will have to leave office.

If I am comforted in our loss of Mitch's magnificent fiscal leadership, my comfort comes from this: that his likely successor is a man, Representaive Mike Pence, who promises to govern with the same fiscal commitments while adding a theological framework to those commitments that promises to extend far beyond fiscal discipline, on to principles concerning many other areas of governance including the battlefields on which the destroyers of our nation and its states are focussing their revolution: sexuality, the Image of God in man, the origin and nature of sexuality and marriage decreed by our Creator in His Order of Creation, and so forth.

As you read through Daniels' penultimate State of the State Address delivered yesterday evening, you will gain a hint of why I respect him. He has been unflinching in disciplining the educationists of our state by a host of private initiatives that have finally brought competition into public education. True, he brags about over half of our state budget going to edcuation, and he seems to see higher education as an unqualified good. I disagree with both things as I disagreed with President Bush on similar matters. Mitch Daniels is not a wild-eyed enthusiast. He's a realist who really changed our state. Definitively. And reading, you'll see what difference it makes to each citizen of the state.

But there's something else I want to say, here.

Some thirty years ago, I was at the Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly to oppose their denominational abortion policy. My dear Mary Lee was pregnant and, since we were in the habit of having home births, I'd called the midwest representative of the PC(USA)'s self-funded independent medical insurance plan to ask if they'd cover the cost of our midwife? It was awkward. He hemmed and hawed and said he didn't know and would have to get back to me on it...

Dirty is good in the church. Often I've pointed readers to that glorious warning found in Proverbs: "Where no oxen are, the manger is clean, but much revenue comes by the strength of the ox" (Proverbs 14:4). This is the Reformed church, today. Our mangers are sterile, and so there's no revenue. No babies by Evangelism or the marriage bed. We depend upon Cru to do the dirty manger work, and then cull from their revenue to keep our coffers reasonably provisioned. Which is to say the Reformed church is impotent in both kinds of propagating a godly seed--Covenant children and Gospel proclamation and witness. And the second half of this isn't just my own conviction--it was the relentless lament of Iain Murray every time he spoke at Banner of Truth back when David and our brother, Nathan, and I used to attend.

Dirty is good in the home. A study of Finnish homes demonstrates that children who grow up in dirt are healthier than those who grow up in clean. Children with pets have fewer ear infections and dirt in the first year of life inoculates them against allergies.

Homeschooling done by mothers who are the heads of their husbands (only privately, of course) and desperate to protect their children from every evil influence in the world (including the authority of the Church, of course) inevitably produces children with a defective immune system, spiritually...