Culture

Racism and the gospel

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As reported by Tim Challies, Tuesday night’s message at Together for the Gospel was on the topic of racism. It was led by Thabiti Anyabwile.

This issue of racism came up for me several months ago when preaching through John 4. In that chapter, Jesus rejected social norms and the prejudices of His day by talking to a Samaritan woman. This event was shocking because (1) she was a Samaritan and (2) she was a woman. She had two strikes against her before she even arrived at the well! But Jesus approached her with love, humility, and respect. Neither the woman (Jn. 4:9) nor the disciples (Jn. 4:27) could understand why Jesus would talk with her, but Jesus recognized she was created in God’s image, and that He had come to seek and save lost people just like her.

As I watch Jesus minister to this Samaritan woman, I am forced to ask myself, “Is it possible that I have racial prejudice?” My immediate answer is, “No, of course not! I’ve been born and raised in a culture of equality and color-blindness! And as a Christian, I treat people of all colors and nationalities with dignity!” Or do I? Perhaps, at times, I have harbored racial prejudice deep within my heart. In doing so, I fail to love my neighbor and give glory to God.

Here are some soul-searching questions that may reveal racism:

  • Do I have less compassion on illegal immigrants because they look differently and speak another language?
  • Am I reluctant to adopt a child of a different skin color?
  • Do I make judgments about a person’s intelligence, abilities, etc. based on their ethnicity?
  • Do I frown upon marriages that are ‘interracial’?
  • Would I hesitate submitting to a pastor with a different color skin?
  • Do I tolerate humor that ridicules other nationalities?
  • If I boarded an airplane and discovered my seating assignment was next to an Arab man, would I treat that person with any less respect?
  • Would I be willing to incorporate into our worship service styles of music that represent other cultures?
  • Is my conception of Jesus that of a White, Anglo-Saxon?
  • Do I ignore the painful discrimination that people of another skin color have experienced in the past or present? (“weeping with those who weep,” Rom. 12:15)
  • Would I be willing to give my life to share Christ with people of another ethnic heritage?

Wretched man that I am! Why would I ever consider my language, or my culture, or my skin color superior in any way? Why would I give preference to people who look or sound like me, while showing prejudice against those who are different? This is just another example of pride. It must be confessed and purged from my thinking.

What does the gospel have to do with all this? Thankfully, Jesus Christ abolished racism, not only in His life, but ultimately in His death. By shedding His blood on the cross, He died for the sins of all humanity and became the “Savior of the world” (Jn. 4:52). With the price of His blood, He purchased for God “men from every tribe and tongue and people and nation” (Rev. 5:9). There is no racism in heaven, and there should be no racism in the church. The final remedy for racism is the cross of Jesus Christ.

Shepherding

The courage to be protestant

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Eerdmans has just released a new book by David Wells called The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World. It’s the summary and culmination of his last 15 years of research and writing.

Wells is a deep thinker, and is very perceptive when it comes to identifying problems and offering gospel-centered solutions for the contemporary church. Though humble and soft-spoken, he is a theological heavyweight who takes powerful swings at both the seeker-sensitive and the emergent church models.

Here are some endorsements for his latest work:

“David F. Wells speaks for a great many commentators inside and outside the evangelical camp when he contends that American evangelicalism is sick at soul . . . His work is being hailed as a bombshell by evangelical leaders who hope it will wake up American evangelicals and alert them to their peril.”
— The Christian Century

“David Wells is one of the most profound Christian thinkers of our time . . . .His insight is keen, his burden righteous, his moral pain deeply felt.” — Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society

I’m very excited about this book, and plan to begin blogging through it in May, taking one chapter per week. Would you like to join me? If so, just order your own copy, and I’ll give reading instructions as we get closer. I’d love to get your impressions of the book and to use this blog as a forum to discuss some of the issues Wells brings up.

Do YOU have the courage to be protestant? Why not read the book and find out?

Teaching

A review of the HCSB

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Someone recently asked me what I thought of the Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB). This translation was published in 2003 and is doing quite well. In fact, it ranked #7 in Bible translation sales in February, beating out The Message and my own personal preference, the New American Standard Bible (you can see the full report on the CBMW Gender blog). In the introduction to the HCSB, the editors list four goals:

  • to provide English-speaking people across the world with an accurate, readable Bible in contemporary English
  • to equip serious Bible students with an accurate translation for personal study, private devotions, and memorization
  • to give those who love God’s word a text that is easy to read, visually attractive on the page, and appealing when heard
  • to affirm the authority of the Scriptures as God’s inerrant word and to champion its absolutes against social or cultural agendas that would compromise its accuracy

In his book How to Choose a Bible Version, Robert Thomas gives a mixed review of the Holman Bible. (The parenthetical numbers represent his five main criteria for choosing a Bible.) He says,

The HCSB has the same goal as many other versions of the Bible: to obtain the ideal balance between faithfulness to the original text and readability. It has probably sacrificed too much of the former in order to achieve the latter, however. For example, it has omitted many conjunctions of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek originals, and has rarely if ever translated into English the original’s basis for the familiar ‘and it came to pass’ (KJV) or ‘and it came about’ (NASB) that occurs so frequently in the text. That and similar factors reduce the effectiveness of this version as a study tool (#3). The presence of two English stylists on the eight-member editorial committee overseeing the project probably accounts for the diminishing of literal renderings, but also increases the readability value for the casual reader (#5). Also, the version’s decision to render the Greek word Christos as ‘Christ’ in some context (426 times) and ‘Messiah’ (125 times) in others introduces interpretation of the translators into the text and thereby weakens its value as a study tool (#3). As a rule, the HCSB has allowed an Alexandrian text-type, but has clouded the issue by not clarifying instances where the reader must choose between the Alexandrian and Byzantine text-types. The version has created this confusion by including ancient uninspired texts from Christian tradition and interpretation alongside the inspired text without alerting the lay reader in each place which text is inspired and which is not. This is a weakness in the area of textual basis (#2) as it is also in the area of theological bias (#4) because it implies a weak view of biblical inspiration. One would hasten to say, however, that this impression does not reflect the translators’ view on the inerrancy of Scripture. As a whole, the version is theologically conservative, including its determination to avoid gender neutral inclinations (#4). Of course, the HCSB falls outside the Tyndale tradition of translations and thus possesses no historical lineage (#1). (quoted from pp. 156-57).

Picture a line with word ‘readable’ on the far left, and ‘literal’ on the far right. Every Bible translation falls somewhere on this continuum. Versions on the left side are what scholars call ‘dynamic equivalence,’ while versions on the right side are ‘formal equivalence.’ The goal is to find a translation that finds a balance of both, but there is always going to be a trade-off. In general, the more readable or conversational your translation is in English, the less faithful it will be to the original Hebrew or Greek.

I think it’s good for many people to start with a more readable translation, like the NIV or HCSB, and then gradually work toward a more literal translation like the NASB, NKJV, or ESV once they become more skilled at reading and more familiar with the flow of Scripture. The more literal versions are not as enjoyable from a literary standpoint, but they are more conducive for deep Bible study.

Perhaps the best solution is to keep 3-4 translations at your fingertips and to compare between them regularly. But I think we all eventually fall in love with one particular translation. And as long as we are regularly reading and applying it, that can be a very good thing.


December 2010 Update: I’m becoming more and more impressed with this translation, and have been giving it a “test drive” from the pulpit this month. With the Apologetics Study Bible, HCSB Study Bible, and a 2009 revision, I believe this translation has really matured and gone more mainstream. Here’s a paper by Dr. Bill Barrick showing the exegetical accuracy of the HCSB. 

October 2011 Update: After a year of testing, I finally decided to go with the ESV translation. Click here to find out why.

Shepherding

7 trends for the modern american church

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Last Saturday, I attended the “Equipped for Excellence” conference in Riverside. This annual event is organized by the Inland Empire Southern Baptist Association and hosted at Cal Baptist University. The conference began 17 years ago as a Sunday School Teacher Training workshop, and has evolved into quite a large-scale teaching conference. This year, attendance surpassed 1500 – what I believe is a new record for “E for E.”

There were three things I really enjoyed about this year’s conference. First, the fellowship with other church members. A total of seven members from our church attended. It was so good to spend the whole day with them, traveling together, singing together, eating together, and learning together. It made the day not only a time of personal enrichment, but of mutual edification and team building.

Second, I appreciated the organization. From publicity, to registration, to meals, to speakers, to handouts, the whole event was executed almost flawlessly. It’s obvious that Marty Leech and his staff put a tremendous amount of time into planning and praying for this event. I applaud them for modeling good organization, communication, and spirit of excellence to all of the Sunday School teachers who were present.

The third highlight was the parables class. After an opening general session, all the attendees split up into different electives. Several from our church chose to attend a class on the parables, taught by Richard Mobley, New Testament professor at Cal Baptist. Mobley did an outstanding job giving an overview, interpretive framework, and specific examples in the parables. His passion and knowledge held our attention all morning and afternoon. Perhaps I’ll share some of these principles in a future post.

For now, let me summarize what was said during the general session. We were privileged this year to have Thom Rainer as the keynote speaker. Rainer is the president of Lifeway Christian Resources and has written many books including The Unchurched Next Door and Simple Church. The title of his message was “7 Trends for the Modern American Church.” Rainer is a statistics guru. So it came as no surprise when he said most of these observations came from statistical or anecdotal evidence. Here are the seven trends, with some brief reflections:

  1. More and more churches are de-emphasizing evangelism. As Rainer said, evangelism must be taught and modeled by leadership. But even more importantly, the gospel must become more central to all we say and do as a church. We must “guard what has been entrusted to us, avoiding worldly and empty chatter and the opposing arguments of what is falsely called ‘knowledge'” (1 Tim. 6:20). As our people develop a higher view of God, a more accurate view of man, an appreciation for the work of Christ, and an understanding of human responsibility, we will naturally begin to share the gospel with greater compassion, frequency, and effectiveness.
  2. The increasing receptivity of lost people to the gospel. While lost people are probably becoming more receptive to spiritual things, this does not necessarily mean they are receptive to “the gospel.” Our postmodern society is driven by feelings, opinions, and experiences, but many resist any claim to absolute truth. We must offer them biblical truth and certainty in a spirit of grace and humility. We must proclaim with confidence that Jesus Christ is exclusively “the way, the truth, and the life” (Jn. 14:6).
  3. The closing of 100,000 churches in the next 10 years (though many others will be started in this same time period). This statistic is too broad to mean much. Does this include all religions? Only Protestant Christianity? The mere existence of a church does not guarantee spiritual health. A little town with 30 churches may be better off with only 10 churches a decade from now, if those 10 churches are more faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ. So, our goal is not simply more churches, but healthier churches.
  4. Sermons and Bible studies based on the same text. If synchronized sermons and Bible studies are helping more churches get into the Word, then praise the Lord! But if more preachers would just be faithful to exposit the Word of God, this would not be a problem. There is a spiritual famine in modern evangelicalism, and many of God’s people are starving for biblical truth. Those of us called by God to be pastors have a responsibility to feed the sheep (Jn. 21:17).
  5. Churches implementing a process of discipleship (often tied to a purpose statement). I’m thankful that more churches are becoming clear in their goals and proactive in discipling new believers. We must make sure that these goals and priorities align with the Word of God.
  6. Churches are moving toward four major emphases: right structure, right content, right attitude, and right action. Rainer was moving pretty fast by this point, and didn’t have a chance to develop his last two points very much.
  7. Great disparity between the churches that do survive. Rainer didn’t explain what he meant by this, but I can attest that churches seem to be growing more diverse rather than more alike. In fact, this seems to be part of the NAMB church-planting strategy. They want to plant a church to reach every sub-culture. So, you end up with a hip-hop church, a biker church, a yuppie church, an emergent church, etc. The problem with this is that the church should be a “melting-pot” of all ages, races, and cultures. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). We must balance our zeal to reach different sub-cultures with our zeal to promote Christian unity. I believe churches should have ministries that cater to these different sub-cultures, but we should ultimately be able to put aside our differences and serve and worship together. Otherwise, we will lack diversity and become dangerously self-centered. One of the hallmarks of the local church should be our ability to co-exist through our common bond in Christ. It may be difficult at times, but I believe it’s worth the effort.

At the end of his message, Rainer encouraged us to stop majoring on the minors, keep our priorities straight, and remember that “It is a sin to be good when God has called us to be great.” God has chosen to do His kingdom work through the church, and we must learn to appreciate and support it. Very true!

Thoughts on Life and Leadership