Please Pray for Our Training in Namibia

Grace Ministerial AcademyNext week, Dr. Richard Barcellos and I will be flying to Namibia, Africa to teach two modular courses to indigenous pastors and church leaders at Grace Ministerial Academy. He will be covering hermeneutics while I will handle worldviews.

Please pray for us! In training these pastors, we have a wonderful opportunity but also a humbling responsibility entrusted to us. To help you in your prayers, I have included below my course syllabus. May we glorify Christ through the equipping of His people for the growth of His kingdom!

Christianity and Its Competitors:
Contending for the Christian Worldview

Course Purpose
The purpose of this course is to equip each pastor and church leader to “hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it” (Titus 1:9). This will be accomplished through establishing a Biblical foundation of contending for the faith, explaining the Christian worldview, and evaluating other competing worldviews.

Course Reading
James W. Sire, Scripture Twisting: 20 Ways the Cults Misread the Bible (Downers Grove IL, USA: Intervarsity Press, 1980).
Richard Gehman, Who are the Living Dead? A Theology of Death, Life After Death and the Living-Dead (Nairobi, Kenya: Evangel Publishing House, 1999).

Course Requirements
Four Quizzes: each quiz is worth 25 points, 100 points total
A quiz will be given each day on Tuesday through Friday covering the previous day’s lectures. The quizzes will have multiple choice, true or false, matching, fill-in-the-blank, short answer, and listing questions included. Together, they will cover all of the lecture material for the course.

Final Exam: each essay is worth 50 points, 100 points total
A final exam will assess overall competence in the topics covered in the course. Two essay questions will be completed which integrate the course reading with critical reflection on the lecture content and supplemental material.

Final Essay Questions
1) Using Sire’s Scripture Twisting, select ten Scripture reading errors. For each misreading, identify and define it, give an example of it from the lectures or supplemental materials (not included in Sire’s book), and provide a biblical response. 5 pages minimum.
2) Summarize and compare the theology of death, life after death, and the living-dead between three worldviews: 1) African Traditional Religion (using Gehman’s Who are the Living Dead?), 2) a Christian competitor (chosen from the course lectures or the supplemental materials), and 3) the biblical worldview. 5 pages minimum.

Course Evaluation
The student’s final grade will be determined by dividing his total points earned in half. A student will have successfully completed this course by achieving a cumulative grade of 75 percent or above for his course work. The letter equivalents for the percentile grades assigned are as follows:

A — 96-100 B- — 81-84
A- — 91-95 C+ — 78-80
B+ — 88-90 C — 75-77
B — 85-87 C- — 71-74

Course Outline
First Unit: Christianity
Part 1: Biblical Foundations
I. Jude 1-4
II. 1 Peter 3:14-16
III. Romans 1:18-32
IV. Acts 17:16-34
Part 2: The Christian Worldview
I. What is a Worldview?
II. What is the Christian Worldview?

Second Unit: Its Competitors
Part 1: Recognizing False Worldviews
I. The Five Keys of Biblical Discernment
Part 2: Evaluating False Worldviews
I. Roman Catholicism
II. Prosperity Gospel
III. Seventh-Day Adventism
IV. Jehovah’s Witnesses
V. Mormonism

Appendix

Who’s Tampering with the Trinity? (Part 3) I believe in one God the Father???

I suspect that many evangelicals today would choke on the very first words of the Nicene Creed—if they are really thought about what they were confessing. Here is the first paragraph of the Nicene Creed: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.”

How far many of us have drifted from historic Trinitarianism is revealed by how queasy these words make us feel when we think about. “Surely,” we think, “The Son is also the Maker of heaven and earth. And does the Nicene Creed really mean to say that there is some distinct sense that we are to identify the Father as God? Does this imply that the Son and Spirit are not God?”

If these kinds of questions and concerns come to us when we really think about what we are confessing in the Nicene Creed, it should make us wonder if we have really understood and whether we entirely hold the historic Trinitarian creed. So what are we missing?

We are missing, first of all, that the creed is squarely biblical. In a number of important passages when the persons of the Trinity are being delineated the Father is given the personal name, God.

This happens in John 1:1-2: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” The context of these verses it is to be noted is not the economy of redemption. Orthodox Christians read these verses as speaking of the period at the beginning of the creation of the world. One cannot read into them the incarnation and the economy of redemption in which The Son became a man. They are speaking of the Trinitarian relationships which existed before the creation of the world—at the beginning. In speaking of these eternal relationships describes one person of the Trinity as “the God.” (The Greek definite article is present in both occurrences of the prepositional phrase, “with God,” in these verses.) The Apostle describes the other person of the Trinity as “the Word.” So in these verses you have two persons: “the God” and “the Word.” Both of these persons possess the entire divine essence. The Word is as to His substance and being God. Yet in the language of these verses, He is not “the God.” Clearly, in some distinct personal sense the Father is God, while the eternal and divine Son is “His” Word. Thus, the Nicene Creed confesses and must confess: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.”

Another illustration of this way of describing the Father is found in one of the most important assertions of the Trinity in the New Testament. 2 Corinthians 13:14 contains this Trinitarian benediction: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all.” Exegetes have often noted the unusual order of this benediction in which the Son is mentioned first, the Father is mentioned second, and the Holy Spirit is mentioned third. Egalitarian Trinitarians have leaped to the conclusion that this means there is no particular order in the Trinity. This conclusion is misguided for a lot of obvious reasons. First, it ignore that there is a common, ordinary, and dominant order in the mention of the person of the Trinity in the New Testament. It is usually Father, then Son, and then sometimes Holy Spirit. It is simply wrong to use the unusual order of 2 Corinthians 13:14 to contradict and undo this usual order and deny that there is a particular order in the eternal Trinity. Other objections to this use of 2 Corinthians 13:14 might be mentioned, but the true explanation of the order of this benediction is that the Father is here given the central position in the benediction. The grace of the Son is traced up to the love of the Father and brought down all the way down to us in the fellowship of the Spirit. So even in the order of this benediction the first-ness of the Father is maintained. And what makes this so clear is the name given to the Father here. He is not called the Father in this benediction. In language which echoes John 1:1-2 he is called “the God.” How can we miss the implication that in some sense the Father occupies the first place among the persons of the Trinity? That is why the Nicene Creed must confess first its faith in “one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.”

Who’s Tampering with the Trinity? (Part 2) Do we really believe the Nicene Creed?

I concluded my last blog with a number of conclusions I have drawn as I have read, studied, and taught the doctrine of the Trinity in the midst of the modern debate over “egalitatarian” views of the Trinity and the role relationships of men and women. The first of those conclusions was that significant problems have developed among evangelicals since the Enlightenment on the doctrine of the Trinity.

I suppose that the first question someone might ask me about that assertion is, “By what standard?” My answer is by the standard of the Bible, but also by the standard of the Nicene Creed. The Nicene Creed or at least its identifying trinitarian formulas were adopted by all the mainstream confessions and creeds of the Reformation. Here is the language of the Nicene Creed in the form that it emerged after the Council of Constantinople in 381 and in which it is commonly used liturgies today. Though it differs slightly from the version published after the Council of Nicea, its doctrinal assertions have not substantially changed:

“We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds light of light, very God of very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made; who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate of the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried, and arose on the third day according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right hand of the Father, and cometh again with glory to judge the quick and the dead; of whose kingdom there shall be no end.

And in the Holy Ghost the Lord, the Giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified, who spake by the prophets;

In one holy catholic and apostolic church; we acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; we look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”

The key words of importance for the modern debate I have placed in bold italics. The Nicene Creed asserts, of course, that there are three persons who are God. It also asserts that there is only one God. Thus, the deity of the Son and Spirit is identical to the deity of the Father. The Son is “of one substance with Father” and by implication so is the Spirit.

But when these two truths (that there is one God and that there are three persons who are God) have been stated, the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity has not yet been fully stated. The Creed is at pains to state with incredible repetition and emphasis what we call the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son. The Lord Jesus Christ is the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds light of light, very God of very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father. Unless we believe this doctrine, we do not believe the Nicene Creed; and we do not—by the standard of the Nicene Creed—hold to the Trinitarianism of historic Christianity. Modern evangelicals need to think about that!

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