News: Devotional Apologetics Online Seminar

12 October 2008

Apologetics is devotional, worshipful, and radically sanctifying…

…if it’s done properly.

Most Christians find that statement surprising.  Christians tend to respond to challenges to their faith by succumbing to one of two temptations.  On the one hand, the gung-ho debaters among us seize on the opportunity to score a few points on the forces of unbelief, and there are some serious temptations that go with that.  These folks, however, are only a tiny minority — and even they wouldn’t normally describe their experience as devotional and worshipful.

Then there’s everyone else — those who dread a serious challenge to their faith.  These are the people who get past the local freethinkers’ society table at the county fair by walking fast and not making eye contact, who respond to Jehovah’s Witnesses at the door by pretending that nobody’s home, who retreat from serious discussion with a skeptical friend by saying “I don’t know how I know it’s true — I Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Matthew 18:15-17: Who are the Witnesses?

14 September 2008

In the pagan world, when one person wrongs another, the first step is often to involve third parties: friends, a coworker, the boss, a lawyer, etc. In serious cases, the first step may be to take the offender to court. If either party is unsatisfied with the outcome of the court case, then the unsatisfied party can appeal to a higher court, and so on, until the Supreme Court gives a final ruling. In that system at its best, the goal is justice. For offenses among believers, however, Jesus instructs us in a different procedure and a different goal. In Matthew 18, Jesus establishes the pattern for a believer to follow when one of his Christian brothers has sinned against him. He says,

Moreover if your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he hears you, you have gained your brother. But if he will not hear, take with you one or two more, that “by the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established.” And if he refuses to hear them, tell it to the church. But if he refuses even to hear the church, let him be to you like a heathen and a tax collector.

The procedure seems clear enough. When some brother Christian offends you, there are four steps. We might think of these as a lower court, an appeals court, the (earthly) supreme court for Christian conflict resolution, and a final judgment. Read the rest here.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Two Books for a More Robust Bibliology

7 September 2008

“The site is not the source.” In bodywork, this maxim means that where the client feels pain is probably not the location of the real problem. Back pain can be the result of an ankle injury that didn’t heal completely; pain in the elbow can come from chronic tension in the neck, and so on.

The same holds true in theology. We feel the pinch in a lot of areas lately, and we usually set about defending at the site — the place where we feel the pinch.

The Bible suggests a different approach. “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” If we’re hungry, eating is not the only, or even the first, solution. The first thing is to go back to God’s Word.

The Battle Belongs to the Lord by K. Scott Oliphint makes this line of thought explicit in the field of apologetics. When pressed by various Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted by Tim Nichols

How Not to Read Genesis

10 August 2008

The opening chapters of How to Read Genesis by Tremper Longman III are pretty good. So when I got to chapter four, titled “Myth or History? Genesis and the Enuma Elish” I was excited. I had just recently engaged an unbeliever on the question of whether the biblical stories — or at least the supernatural ones — were myth or history, and I have also long been intrigued by the contrasts between Genesis and Enuma Elish. I was looking forward to seeing Longman’s take on it.

I’m sorry to say that I was sorely disappointed. Longman writes:

Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted by Tim Nichols

How to Use the Bible…according to God

29 June 2008

Both my parents went to Bible college. Dad is a Th.M. graduate of Capital Bible Seminary, and was a Bible and history teacher by trade for a couple of my formative decades. Needless to say, I learned how to study the Bible growing up. I took my first formal course in hermeneutics when I was 18, and quickly caught on to the fact that if my approach to the Bible was wrong, I could take all the Bible and theology courses in the world from the best teachers, and still come out lopsided. On the other hand, if my approach to the Bible was right, I could weather the storm of poor teaching if necessary, because the Bible itself would straighten me out.

With that in mind, hermeneutics became a major focus of my study for the next decade or so. I took hermeneutics and advanced hermeneutics courses in seminary, and when I graduated and began to teach, I taught hermeneutics myself. When Bob Wilkin of GES came up to teach an advanced hermeneutics course, I exercised my right to faculty audit and sat in the back to listen. It would be fair to say that I was mildly obsessed with the subject.

So imagine my surprise when, fairly late in the process, it dawned on me that hermeneutics has to be founded on the Bible itself. I’d been studying Charlie Clough’s Framework material, and as a result, presuppositional apologetics and philosophy from Bahnsen, Van Til, Frame, Rushdoony and others. All of this drew my attention to Romans 1-2, Colossians 2, Genesis 1-3, and other passages that made it increasingly clear that everything has to start with the triune God of the Bible and move forward from there.

It followed that one’s approach to the Bible must do the same.

Duh.

So I scrapped the seminary hermeneutics curriculum I had developed three years earlier, and set to work writing a new one. I began to develop a narrative foundation approach to hermeneutics. Almost immediately, I found out that “hermeneutics” was not the category I wanted to be working with. The Bible does deal with how it should be interpreted, but only as an organic part of a larger category: how the Bible should be used. The biblical authors are not interested in correct interpretation as an end in itself, but as a precursor to belief and obedience. This does make a difference in approach; meditation on the Word becomes a hefty part of one’s approach to Scripture, for example.

Within that larger enterprise, however, the biblical authors do present examples of how to interpret Scripture properly, and offer a few choice comments on proper interpretation. I recently had occasion to teach a ten-week course at two churches showcasing some of the more striking examples. I’ve not yet had time to write all this material out, but the handouts are available here, and you can find recordings of the sessions under my name on Grace Chapel’s website.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Who Can Understand the Bible?

2 June 2008

There are two basic myths about understanding the Bible, and most of the evangelical community believes one or the other.

The first is that only a select few can understand the Bible. This myth comes in various flavors, all of them with a seed of truth, and all of them deeply flawed nonetheless. Some insist that one must be a scholar, conversant with the culture, languages, and history of the Bible in order to understand it at all. Some even insist that one must be conversant with some particular set of theological categories in order to understand the Bible (the Roman Catholic Catechism, the Westminster Standards, somebody’s Basics series, whatever). Of course, this raises not only the question of which set of categories, but the much more important question of where the categories come from in the first place, that they are able to exercise hermeneutical authority over the Bible.

Other believers move in a less academic direction, preferring to focus on spiritual qualifications: one must be a Christian, or a Christian walking by the Spirit, or a mature Christian, in order to understand the Bible. Some — the real elitists — insist on all of the above.

Despite the great disagreements about the identity of the select few — or should I call them the elect few? — there’s a lot of tactical continuity in these types of arguments. When person A insists that only a select few understand the Bible, his version of the select few generally includes himself, or at least his sources, and does not include you, and yours. Convenient, that…

Biblically speaking, this first myth (in whatever form) forces the conclusion that Scripture is not profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness — at least not for most of the people, most of the time. (See 2 Timothy 3:16-17 for a comment on this point.)

On the other side of the line is a second myth, the idea that really, the text means many different things to different people, and even many different things to the same person over time. At its root, this myth is based on the idea that the meaning of the text is my experience of the text. The author’s intent has nothing to do with it, nor do societal conventions about the meaning of words. This is simple selfishness, an “It’s all about me!” attitude applied to interpreting the Bible. Moreover, in biblical terms, it is the notion that Scripture is of a private interpretation — a position roundly condemned in Scripture itself (1 Peter 1:16-21).

The Bible itself not only opposes both these myths, it systematically sets up a totally different picture of language, meaning, and God’s communication to us. To read more, see Who Can Understand the Bible?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Black & Tan

25 May 2008

If those who hate the Word of God can succeed in getting Christians to be embarrassed by any portion of the Word of God, then that portion will continually be employed as a battering ram against the godly principles that are currently under attack. In our day, three of the principal issues are abortion, feminism, and sodomy. If we respond to the “embarrassing parts” of Scripture by saying “That was then, this is now,” we will quickly discover that unembarrassed progressives can play that game even more effectively than embarrassed conservatives can.

This gem comes to us from Douglas Wilson’s Black & Tan: Essays and Excursions on Slavery, Culture War, and Scripture in America. Weighing in at less than 120 pages, this is definitely not the last word on slavery or culture war. But then, it isn’t trying to be. Rather, Wilson raises some much-neglected points and offers a valuable corrective to typical contemporary evangelical sensibilities. Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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