The Gospel of Paul
Article: The Gospel of Paul (click for online version)
- From Portland Monthly Magazine – with Paul Young, author of The Shack (Download PDF)
- For a theological analysis of The Shack, click here: Challies.com Book Review
Points of Theological Error:
- The Doctrine of the Trinity: Who is God?
- Leadership, Hierarchy & Authority within the Trinity (Functional Subordinationism) and within the Body (Submission)
- The Necessity of the Local Church and Biblical Guidelines for the New Testament Church
- The Atonement, The Wrath of God and Penal Substitution
- In the Portland Monthly article, he refers to his adultery as an “affair”. And he refers to the whole fiasco – his downward sin spiral, adultery, midlife crisis, financial meltdown, etc. – as a “personal reboot.” That made me cringe.
Revisionist Theology:
Note to self: Beware of anyone who writes a book on theology and describes themself as a “former pastor turned freelance Christian thinker.” That’s code for the disgruntled children of evangelicalism, with a chip on their shoulder and a bone to pick. The Shack is a book of fiction, but it is a deeply theological book, intended to communicate theological truths. Here are some interesting quotes from the article:
“All religions, as institutions, are trying to appease an angry God. People are realizing that an angry God doesn’t work. People are looking for something that calls for some personal authenticity.” – Paul Young
“Why the repression of women in leadership roles in the church? Why has Scripture been translated and interpreted this way? Those questions take you straight into the nature of God. Is God 51 percent male and 49 percent female, or what? I’ve always been a questioner.” – Paul Young
“I grieve over the fact that this book seems so edgy to evangelicals because I think God is actually even edgier than this book.” – Paul Metzger, Multnomah Biblical Seminary
“Something profoundly new is coming, and right now we’re in between. Many people feel like evangelicalism as it exists is a failing project. I think a lot of evangelicals who read The Shack think, ‘Wow, this is the God I would prefer to believe in, rather than the God of the culture wars.’” – Michael Spencer, InternetMonk.com
“A lot of this is about power and control. Doctrine, and the interpretation of doctrine, has become like property. We don’t live in a feudal system, where you build a wall around your castle. We’ve turned intellectual property – whether it’s your idea of the Trinity or whatever else – into the ground that we wall off and defend.” – Paul Young
“People see the Trinity as an abstract concept that’s best left alone…what Young does is take that concept off the shelf, and say that it is real, not abstract, and that God is involved in our lives.” – Paul Metzger, Multnomah Biblical Seminary
“I used to know what God was up to, and I would spend a lot of time telling other people what that was. I don’t do tht anymore.” – Paul Young
Liberal Evangelicals like Paul Young are guilty of revisionist theology, i.e. attacking God’s character, Gender Roles, Substitutionary Atonement, Authority of Scripture, The Doctrine of the Trinity, etc. They want to sand off the rough edges of the Gospel, to leave out the offensive or confusing parts. Our job is not to revise or repaint the Gospel, i.e. to make it more palatable and relevant to people. Our job is to steward and display the Gospel, i.e. to show people how the Gospel is already relevant to their lives. In a similar way, an art teacher does not need to “repaint” the Mona Lisa in the style of anime, or graphic novel art, for today’s students to understand it. It’s a masterpiece that needs no revision. The teacher simply needs to interpret it through their language and apply it to their cultural context so that the students can appreciate it’s full beauty and meaning. It’s about contextualing the message without compromising it.
Paul Young’s definition of the Church:
From “The Gospel of Paul” article:
I ask Young if he goes to church. For the only time during our meeting, I catch a wary glint in his eye. “Do you mean, am I a member of a particular religious institution?” he says. “No. Do I show up in religious institutions all the time? Yes. Usually by invitation. Am I part of a community of people who try to live their faith and discover what love is? Yes. That’s what I consider church. The church is people.”
Wayne Jacobsen/Dave Coleman/Jake Colsen’s new book So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore
From Challies.com Book Review
By the book’s closing pages, Jake has left the church and now meets irregularly with an irregular group of people from his community. This is presented as being a form of authentic spirituality that is closer to the biblical model than that which is practiced by the vast majority of Christians today…the better alternative to church as most Christians know and experience it.
Interesting quotes from the book:
“Most of what we call ‘church’ today are nothing more than well-planned performances with little actual connection between believers. Believers are encouraged toward a growing dependency on the system or its leadership rather than on Jesus himself. We spend more energy conforming behavior to what the institution needs rather than helping people be transformed at the foot of the cross!”
“Jesus indicated that whenever two or three people get together focused on him, they would experience the vitality of church life.”
“My favorite expression of body life is where a local group of people chooses to walk together for a bit of the journey by cultivating close friendships and learning how to listen to God together.”
“By providing services to keep people coming, [an institution] unwittingly becomes a distraction to real spiritual life. It offers an illusion of spirituality in highly orchestrated experiences, but it cannot show people how to live each day in him through the real struggles of life.”
“The more organization you bring to church life, the less life it will contain.”
“As long as we see church life as a meeting we’ll miss its reality and its depth. If the truth were told, the Scriptures tell us very little about how the early church met. It tells us volumes about how they shared life together. They didn’t see the church as a meeting or an institution, but as a family living under Father.”
“Any human system will eventually dehumanize the very people it seeks to serve and those it dehumanizes the most are those who think they lead it.”
“[God's wrath at the cross] wasn’t an expression of the punishment sin deserves; it was the antidote for sin and shame.”
Vintage Church by Dr. Gerry Breshears and Mark Driscoll:
Definition: “The local church is a community of regenerated believers who confess Jesus Christ as Lord. In obedience to Scripture they organize under qualified leadership, gather regularly for preaching and worship, observe the biblical sacraments of baptism and communion, are unified by the Spirit, are disciplined for holiness, and scatter to fulfill the great commandment and the great commission as missionaries to the world for God’s glory and their joy.”
In the book they then go on to examine the nine marks of the true local church as:
- Regenerated church membership
- Qualified leadership
- Gather for preaching and worship
- Sacraments rightly administered
- Unified by the Spirit
- Disciplined for holiness
- Obey the great commandment to love
- Obey the great commission to evangelize and make disciples
This conversation will soon move from the Trinity to what the role of the Church is in the life of believers. 85% of churches in the US are plateaued or declining. That fastest growing segments are Liberal Emerging churches with revisionist theology, and Relevant Reformed churches with sound doctrine, e.g. Tim Keller’s Redeemer movement in New York and Mark Driscoll’s Mars Hill movement in Seattle. When the battlefield shifts to the questions of ‘what is a church?’ and ‘why are Christians called to serve their local church?’, we need to recommend books like Vintage Church, instead of So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore The words of Paul in his first letter to Timothy are words we need to keep in mind as we recommend books to people: “Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers” (1 Tim 4:16).
For an understanding of the Atonement, The Wrath of God, and Penal Substitution, here are some helpful resources:
- The Bible
- Books on Penal Substitution
- Books on the Cross
- Death by Love: Reflections on the Cross – sermon by Mark Driscoll
- Death by Love: Letters from the Cross – book by Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears
