restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations

The FDR-ing of the Church

 David Alan Black 

Americans have always been a hard-working, resilient people. That is, until FDR. Today, as a result of government social programs, we have come to depend more and more on the federal government to take care of us. Government redistribution of wealth is now accepted as “normal” (does anyone really question the legitimacy of welfare or Social Security any more?), even though it is completely unconstitutional.

I would like to suggest that the same thing has occurred in the church. But instead of wealth redistribution taking place, we might say that responsibility redistribution is occurring. That is, instead of parents willingly and gladly assuming the responsibility to teach their own children as the Scripture commands (see Deut. 6 and Eph. 6), they have handed that job over to the church, whose paid professionals are only too eager to “help.” The only problem is that, just as wealth redistribution is wrong (since it involves taking your money through government coercion and simply giving it to someone else), so responsibility redistribution is wrong (since in involves parents surrendering to others their own God-mandated duty to raise their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord).

Both approaches, it seems to me, are based on flawed assumptions. Take welfare, for example. Most of our politicians assume that the federal government has legal authority to create or administer a welfare program. (I say “most,” because there are men like Ron Paul, a Republican Congressman from Texas, who think quite differently.) However, Congress has only those powers that are explicitly granted to it by the U.S. Constitution. If you will read the Constitution with an unbiased mind you will be forced to conclude that there is absolutely no federal authority whatsoever for welfare programs. Yet our government willfully ignores that fact. As I have noted elsewhere, “Government employs us, feeds us, regulates us, and now claims to be able to solve our problems, including gambling…. For many Americans, the state has become their church, and the federal government has become an idol, stripping individuals and communities of their social responsibilities and engaging in the immoral transfer of wealth. And since the New Deal, a trickle has become a flood.”

To no one’s surprise, Bush’s latest proposal to revamp Social Security provides no systematic justification for involving government in social welfare. The reason is obvious. There can be no justification given for the state usurping the function of private individuals and the church. I agree with Ron Paul that “the federal welfare state is neither moral nor constitutional.” The tragedy is that American Christianity has so closely allied itself with the government of the day that the transcendent Gospel has become submerged in the world’s values.

“But Dave,” you say, “if government doesn’t take care of these people, who will?” The Bible teaches it is the church’s job to fulfill Paul’s injunction to “do good to all men” by helping non-Christians in need – feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing the homeless, healing the sick. And no believer is exempt from this task (see Luke 3:11; 1 John 3:17; James 1:27). On the other hand, no Scripture supports an active government role in alleviating poverty or the use of coercive measures. Even Paul refused to command believers to help their less fortunate brothers, stating: “Each man should give what he has determined in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Cor. 9:7).

Now let us apply these same principles to Christian education. Many parents have abdicated their responsibility to nurture their children and to teach them the things of God. As a result, the church has stepped in to provide a whole host of programs designed to compensate for the parents’ inactivity – Nursery, Children’s Church, Youth Ministry, Sunday School. The only problem is that these programs are unscriptural. They are also, by and large, ineffective. As Pastor Scott Brown of Trinity Baptist Church has noted:

The scriptures are perfectly clear: children should be trained in spiritual matters by their fathers. The father is the delivery system for the news of the kingdom of God, and when you bypass him, you reject the Biblical order for the church and the home.

As the church has followed the world system, she has nearly obliterated the scriptural role of the head of the household in church life. This has paralleled what the world has done in the broader culture. Unwittingly, the church has taken over the father’s role and given it to preachers, women, Sunday school teachers, and childcare workers.

The problem becomes clearer, when you look where the bulk of the energy of human resource is directed in the average church. Massive amounts of energy are plunged into things that secure short term attendance bumps by making low entry level slots for people to be involved, but neglect the long term activity and energy investment that secures a future for many generations.

Similarly, Doug Phillips of Vision Forum Ministries emphasizes the need for an age-integrated philosophy of ministry. Commenting on his church’s “youth program,” Doug writes:

I have the privilege of worshiping in a small, family-integrated church. When asked about our various church programs, I explain that we are blessed with more than thirty different organizations to which our members belong – they are called families. I further explain that we have more than sixty youth directors – they are called parents. In fact, we have such a full schedule of events that there is a mandatory activity every day of the week – it is called family worship.

What these men – and many others like them – are saying is simply this: It is the home, and not the church, that is the God-ordained seat of Christian education. Why, then, should the church make it easy for parents to abdicate their job? Why, in other words, should the church encourage responsibility redistribution?

In our day, parents seem to be busy with everything except the personal discipleship of their children. There’s got to be a better way. In fact there is. We can get off the church welfare dole and begin to build strong families. When that happens, the church itself will be the greatest beneficiary.

January 26, 2005

David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com. If you would like to know more about becoming a follower of King Jesus, please feel free to write Dave.

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   restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations

The Core Problem Is Not Political But Theological!

 David Alan Black

If you are a Christian, let me invite you today to stand up for three solas of the Reformation: solus Christus, sola scriptura, and sola fide.

By emphasizing these solas, I would remind you that the controversies within American public life today are first and foremost a theological problem, not a political problem. Thus, by this understanding, the church of Jesus Christ has a theological, not a political, task. In other words, anyone who confesses Jesus Christ as the one Word of God has set a clear, unmistakable, and unambiguous limit to the divine aspirations of the state, its supporters, and its ideas.

What we are witnessing in our society is this fact: other lords than Jesus Christ, other commands than His commands, are gaining power over us. They are offering themselves to us as redeemers, but they are proving to be the torturers of an unredeemed world. I would remind you that, according to Scripture, the church does not face the state in silence. By reminding the state of God’s Kingdom, God’s commandments, and God’s righteousness, the church reminds it of its limits and at the same time tells the state what it simply cannot tell itself.

The church reminds the state that there are certain criteria for its actions that it cannot set for itself but are set by God’s Word. To these criteria, rulers and ruled are subjected, and to these they are responsible—whether they are prepared to acknowledge this or not. The church understands that it cannot itself act politically. Its task is to remind. It reminds the state that not only is the state necessary but that its monopoly of power is not absolute, but instrumental—to seek justice and peace.

In the church’s struggle against binding the Word of God to any ideologies, a new ideology has crept in through the back door, namely the ideology of expediency. I am “amazed” (Gal 1:6) at how easily the church has lost its prophetic voice of ensuring that the state fulfills its God-given function as state. The “true” church always has a responsibility to ensure that there is a “true” state. Indeed, having allegiance to Christ alone, the church is freed from the political intrigue that so often characterizes the functions of other groups within the civic community.

According to the New Testament, the state, as one of the angelic powers, is understood to be under the constant threat of demonization—the temptation to make itself absolute. When, therefore, the state takes on theonomous pretensions, it does so only through its presumption of autonomy, which itself it based on its renunciation of its true dignity and authority given and confirmed through submission to God. Thus the greatest service the church can render the state is to ensure that it never perverts its authority. The church is always to hold before the state an ideal of what it can and should be.

This understanding of church-state relationships is one that gives to the church enormous responsibilities with regard to the state. It demands an uncompromising “No” to the Promethean efforts of a state that has lost its true dignity by presumptuously feigning autonomous authority, as seen, for example, in the recent Supreme Court decision on sodomy or in the president’s decision to launch the nation into war in defiance of the law of the land, the U.S. Constitution.

If the church is to be true to its calling in American society today, it must resist humanity’s trust in its own resources—yes, adamantly oppose it!— for when linked to the self-aggrandizement of Kulturchristentum, such hubris can only lead to one thing, and that is disaster.

My friends, will you please consider this question: Shall the church keep silent, or will it fulfill its God-given role of “reminding”?

It is for you and me to decide whether we will stand up and be counted. If there is no true state today, it is because there is no true church.

July 22, 2003

David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com.

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Advice to Prospective Doctoral Students

 David Alan Black  

This week I am scheduled to meet with a couple of potential Ph.D. students. I will tell them, as I tell anyone who considers asking me to be their major advisor in our doctoral program, that I am not necessarily looking for more doctoral students. In fact, to show you how selective I am: the seminary has its application form, and I have mine!

What, then, do I look for in potential students? Men and women mature enough to know what they want — godly, humble, gifted, ambitious, versatile, restless, willing to think independently. Above all — and this will sound egotistical but it really isn’t — I am looking for students who for one reason or another have deceived themselves into thinking that studying with Dave Black might have some benefit to them.

When I was looking into doctoral programs back in the late 1970s, I well remember meeting students who told me they went to Aberdeen because of Marshall, or to Manchester for Bruce, or to Princeton for Metzger. To me, that seemed the only sensible thing to do. Many years ago in Germany students were constantly migrating from one university to another in order to profit from some course being taught that year by a famous scholar. There is, I think, much wisdom in that method.

Here’s something else I tell prospective students. All other things being equal, you will want a university doctorate rather than a seminary doctorate. I am not saying that seminaries do not offer excellent Ph.D.s, and I am certainly not saying that students should not earn their doctorates from SEBTS. But, I think, mature students fare less well in the typical seminary curriculum than in the more research-oriented program in most universities. The irony is that your favorite professor might very well teach in a seminary, in which case it will be obvious where you ought to study! When I ended up in Basel it was largely because I didn’t want to suffer through the busy work of the typical U.S. seminary Ph.D. program, and I most certainly did not want to get my theological education second hand. I was not disappointed on either count. Basel was for researchers who could work independently.

University degrees can, of course, be overrated. I recall reading, a month or so ago, how one New Testament scholar in his blog referred to his university as the “Rolls Royce” of theological education in North America. I had never before heard automobile models used as metaphors for educational excellence. I suppose for some teachers this is a useful fiction — something like Santa Claus. However, I dislike such self-aggrandizement intensely, and hope never to elevate my own institution’s status through such hype.

Basel may have been no Rolls Royse, but it certainly was an excellent place to study. We had no required lectures, though during my first semester I took 20 hours of weekly lectures, and 15 during my second. The New Testament courses were taught by men like Markus Barth and Heinrich Baltensweiler (an expert in Pauline theology), who tragically died of a heart attack though he was a relatively young man. I was naturally partial to courses taught by my Doktorvater, Bo Reicke. His public reputation, then at its height, had been won in the field of New Testament exegesis, but his wide-ranging intellectual interests were known to all. To me it was an immensely stimulating time — which brings me back to where I began this essay. Doctoral studies should be an exciting time. Absolute frankness and devotion to truth are formidable virtues to have if one is to benefit from a doctoral program. I recall sitting under my professors and hailing their latest publications with all of the rapture with which graduate students of today extol Tom Wright or Jimmy Dunn. What happiness to study under great scholars! It stole the hearts of crude young Doktoranden to watch professors teach as those having authority, and not as the scribes.

This, then, is my advice to prospective doctoral students. Anyone can study books, but books cannot guarantee wisdom. Perhaps the Greatest Teacher of all said it best: “When students are fully taught, they will be just like their teachers.” No one can furnish a perfect definition of teaching, but that one comes about as close as I think we will ever get.

November 29, 2010

David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com.

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Confessions of a Missional Greek Prof

 David Alan Black  

As I have been thinking and praying about my plans to travel and missionize abroad this next year, I have been forced to reflect again upon my own raison d’être.

Although I am perhaps known for my criticisms of much in the church’s practical life, I seek above all to be a churchman rather than a theologian or a scholar. For me, theology can be distinguished but never separated from the Christian life. I myself have sought to study and emulate the apostle Paul’s theology because it takes seriously the experience of Christianity. The mystical presence of Christ (Paul’s “in Christ” formula) forms the undertow of daily life. It affects everything we do – getting up, sitting down, eating, working, even sleeping. Nothing in our lives is “profane” if we live to know Him and to make Him known, as Paul did (Phil. 1:21).

Thus I like to think of my own teaching as preeminently missional. If we really believe in the Gospel, what should we be doing to advance it? What is the church, and how can we help it transform society? Although I dislike the term “missionary” (the expression itself is not found in the New Testament), I admit candidly that I feel “called” to be one. Hence I always ask myself when I read Paul, “How did this letter contribute to his work as a church-planter and disciple-maker? And what can it teach me about doing the same?”

By and large, I have shied away from systematic theology. Instead, I have produced separate theological investigations of specific biblical texts – say, of Rom. 12:9-21 or Phil. 2:1-4, to take but two examples of passages that are replete with “practical” theology. I did this, I think, because of the time required of a person to do a larger investigation of a theologoumenon step by step and passage by passage. The closest I’ve come to doing that was my doctoral dissertation on astheneia and its cognates in the Pauline literature, which was published in 1984 under the title Paul, Apostle of Weakness. Today, if I wished to work on a similar project, I would naturally have to pay very close attention to the texts under consideration. In fact, I don’t think I will ever write another book like my work on Paul because the task obviously exceeds what I can do with my heavy teaching and travel schedule, in addition to numerous other obligations I have here on the farm. There are even days when I write nothing at all because God has not given me the opportunity to do so. I have simply tried in all of this to accept myself as I am, to acknowledged my own considerable limitations, and to take satisfaction in what I can without comparing my literary output with anybody else’s. Thus the quantity of my work has never posed a problem for me.

Not long ago I took the wholly unthinkable step of deciding to publish a book on politics, which, while it didn’t excite the general public terribly, rubbed many Christians the wrong way. However, I make no apology for questioning the unconditional loyalty that American evangelicals pay to the god-state, especially in its GOP manifestation. Similarly, while not a church historian per se, I am completing a study of the sixteenth century Anabaptists who took incredibly dangerous steps to restore the church to its New Testament patterns. The importance of Anabaptism within Baptist ecclesiology is often overlooked, even though their writings had a considerable and noticeable affect on the development of Baptist polity vis-à-vis the state.

But my primary concern is with the evangelization that the church is required to carry on throughout the world. I still remember how enthusiastically Lloyd Quast taught us the book of Acts when I was a student at Biola University in the early 1970s, and I suppose that his lectures were a milestone on what has become a long and exciting pilgrimage.

Do I really believe in the Great Commission? Do I really depend on the Holy Spirit alone for the salvation of souls? I must then continue to pray that the Lord of the harvest will send me out, and I must go, depending not on my own worthiness and merits, but on the ground of the merits and worthiness of the Lord Jesus.

April 1, 2008

David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com.

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