Faith for Faith

I have heard it said that a fish does not understand the fact that he lives, moves, and has his being in water until the moment he is taken from water and finds that he is in an entirely different environment–an environment that is even hostile to his very nature. Likewise, humans take for granted that they live upon land and do not understand the significance of land until they find themselves in an unfamiliar environment such as water where their terrestrial foundation is removed from under their feet and their airy source of life is replaced by water.

All creatures have a propensity to become acclimated to that in which they live, and all creatures by that acclimation come to understand reality through that environment. And because of this, we all are to an extent blinded to those things in which have been reared and cannot rightly understand reality until we are removed from that environment, like a fish from water.

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Posted by D. Matthew Brown under Theology | 8 Comments »

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit (2Cor 3.18).

Listening to a rather enlightening sermon this weekend, I came to the realization that in my personal warring against the deeds of my flesh by the Spirit (cf. Rm. 8:17), I have been praying for the wrong things and searching for the wrong remedies. And though it is indeed comforting that in spite of my ignorance of how I ought to pray that the Spirit of God intercedes for me with groanings that accord with the will of God (cf. Rm. 8:26, 27), it is nevertheless wonderful and helpful when the Spirit shares his groanings with me either through his Word or through expositors of it.

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Posted by D. Matthew Brown under Theology | 4 Comments »

When it comes to fate of those who die apart from hearing the Gospel, according to some theologues, there is some ambiguity in the Scriptures that arises from a philosophical problem. That supposed problem essentially is this: “If men are saved only through the preaching of the Gospel, and some men have died apart from hearing the Gospel, their fate then is uncertain for they cannot be held accountable for that which they have not heard.” And such a statement is not found merely among those who would call themselves liberal in the faith, but I have personally heard it from the mouths of those who call themselves conservative, Bible-believing evangelicals.

The problem with such a belief is clear when seen in light of the salvific exclusivity claimed of faith in Christ by the Scriptures, but its root is a much deeper issue, namely a fundamental misunderstanding of the Gospel itself.

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Posted by D. Matthew Brown under Theology | 2 Comments »

Upon leaving Christian Philosophy class somewhat perturbed and despairing after having listened to the teachings of Scripture trampled by the philosophies of men again, I came to a sad realization, namely that we as Modern American and Evangelical Christians have absolutely lost the great doctrine of Justification by Faith. I am sure that there are many who are standing by quick to object to such a charge, but I am fully convinced that the justification by faith that we preach today is not the same Justification by Faith that was heralded by the great reformer Martin Luther neither does it resemble anything taught by Christ or the apostles. Additionally, since this great doctrine is by necessity one of the great pillars of the Christian religion, its loss has had profound effects on subservient doctrines, so much so that our tainted minds cannot even begin to fathom the depths of their distortion. I am not quite sure of the goal of my writing this, for I am nearly convinced that we are so blinded by our presuppositions on the matter so as to beyond retrieval. I pray that God might grant grace to me as I write and to you, the reader, as you think upon this most weighty of doctrines.

Justification by Acceptance rather than Justification by Faith
As those who claim to be Evangelical Christians–those who bear the very word Gospel (euangelion) in our self-made title, one would think that we would be quite sure about the Gospel to which we claim such allegiance. Yet in spite of our nominal allegiance, we find in modern Evangelical Christianity in place of the Gospel call given exclusively in Scripture by Christ and the apostles, namely, “Believe and repent!”, there is now almost exclusively the call: “Accept Jesus Christ as your personal Savior, and ask him into your heart.”

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Posted by D. Matthew Brown under Theology | 7 Comments »

I love the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. He had a rare gift, and his poetry was solely a song from him to his Creator. His works were not published till well after his death, and that not by his design. It is a grace of God that his works were discovered and published:

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Posted by D. Matthew Brown under Poetry | 1 Comment »

I had a great conversation the other day with one my wonderful brothers in Christ concerning our failings as believers and how we are to respond to those failings. And though such failings among God’s people are inevitable because of the nature of our present state in this age, we oftentimes do not know how to respond rightly to those failings. And it is not a simple issue. For when we fall into sin and temptation as children of God, our whole soul is cast into upheaval. For our mind understands our fall and logically seeks to rectify it, our heart feels it and is torn by it, our will comprehends it and strives against it, and our spirit is broken by it and feels as though it is severed from the very Spirit of God.

And because of this turmoil that captivates our souls when we fall into sin and by it turn from our God, we long to jump up quickly and turn back onto the path of obedience. However, despite our desire, the path back to obedience is not always as quick and easy as we would like it to be. And I have found this to be the case in my life, where I have walked the path of obedience and then, seemingly out of nowhere, fell into temptation and then found that the obedience that I desired to have was even more difficult than it was prior to my fall.

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Posted by D. Matthew Brown under Theology | 5 Comments »

“Lord kill me if I don’t preach the Gospel.” It is the first line of Lecrae’s song, “Go Hard,” and it is a prayer that most of us are terrified to utter. For if we pray such a prayer, we know that if the Lord grants us our request that one of two things will happen: either our lives will be radically changed so that everything we think, say, and do revolves around the Gospel, or we will be killed. And more often than not, neither of those two options appeal to us. For if we must live for the Gospel, we would forfeit the lives we desire to live, and if we do not and are killed, we would lose our life so that we could not live the lives we desire to live. Either option produced by such a prayer requires that our lives in this life become forfeit for the sake of the Gospel.

For the apostle Paul, this prayer was the prayer of his life. For, instead of regarding this life as worth living for and indulging in, he regarded it as rubbish, and it was for this reason that he was able to say, “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Ph. 1:21). For his heart’s desire was his Lord Jesus Christ and to glorify his name, and he knew that whether he lived or died, his Lord ruled both the living and the dead.

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Posted by D. Matthew Brown under Theology | 2 Comments »

What is baptism? Having grown up a Baptist, I have been taught and have held the typical Baptist view that baptism is merely a symbol and an ordinance, administered rightly by immersion and done as an “outward expression of an inward reality.” And in my many years as a Baptist, I have heard countless preachers and seminary professors give a thousand explanations and arguments concerning the mode of the “outward expression” of baptism from Scripture and from Church history, but I have yet to hear one sermon or lecture on the inward reality that the outward expression represents. For this reason, I am convinced that we who call ourselves Baptists have focused so much on the proper mode and administration of baptism that we have lost what baptism truly is. In this way we are much like the Jews of old who properly administered circumcision on the eighth day of a child’s life (even if that eighth day fell on the Sabbath), who yet forgot and neglected the reality that that practice represented, namely the circumcision of the heart by the Spirit of God to love God and to obey his law (cf. Deut. 10:16; 30:6; Jer. 4:4; Ezek. 44:7; Acts 7:51; Rm. 2:29).

And because of our focus on the physical ordinance of baptism and our neglect of the reality of baptism, we as Baptists are terribly confused by such declarations as that of the apostle Peter, who wrote, “Baptism now saves you” (1Pet. 3:21). For we have so ritualized and despiritualized the practice of baptism that we have become unbiblical in our understanding of it despite our denomination’s title. And instead of doing as we ought and running to the Scriptures to discover what true baptism is, we do as many have done with other doctrines by forming our doctrines and then explaining away passages that do not fit our doctrinal understanding rather than explaining them.

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Posted by D. Matthew Brown under Theology | 2 Comments »

[Repost from 4/6/2006] Every morning I do the same thing: I get home from work, put on a pot of coffee, grab my bible, and step out onto my back patio to read the chapter of Proverbs that corresponds to the date. Every morning my dachshund Lucy does the same thing: she comes down the stairs, greets me, wags her tail violently, and lays down by the back glass door to watch me while I read my morning Proverb.

Lucy is a very affectionate dog. She loves attention from anyone and is quick to jump and to lie on the lap of whoever is sitting down, whether he is willing or not. She spreads her doggy love to everyone in the room without discrimination (even if they say she’s fat) and is quite content on being the center of attention, that is, until I step out of the house onto the back patio. Suddenly it is as if everyone else in the room disappears and I am the only one left. She quietly moves over to the door, positions herself at the best angle to watch me, lies down, and lets out an occasional whimper.

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Posted by D. Matthew Brown under Theology | No Comments »

“Calvinism is not the Gospel.” I must admit that it is rather bold of me to contradict the quote of so great a man as Charles Spurgeon, especially granting that I myself unabashedly hold to what are known as the “Five Points of Calvinism.” I do profess to believe that each of those points are biblical, even that one from which many who call themselves “four-pointers” shy, viz. limited atonement–a doctrine upon which I have written quite extensively (see On Particular Redemption).

However, the reason that I am making such a statement is not so much based upon a disagreement with Spurgeon and his sympathizers, but is more of a reaction to an attitude of many that seems to have come about from it. For it is one thing to say, “Calvinism is the Gospel,” and mean by it that Calvinism is the proper understanding of what God has accomplished for men through his Son Jesus Christ, and it is another to say, “Calvinism is the Gospel,” and by that declaration attack every Christian that does not hold to Calvinism as defined by Dordt. For the former is a humble and mature assent to God’s revelation of himself in Scripture, and the latter is a proud and immature conquest to quell every non-Calvinist dissenter. The former comes from a heart-felt realization of unmerited grace received and creates in a person a heart of mercy and love, and the latter comes solely from an intellectual understanding of God’s revelation and creates in a person a heart of arrogance and disunity. The former understands the Gospel; the latter, despite theological precision, misunderstands the Gospel.

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Posted by D. Matthew Brown under Theology | 1 Comment »