The point I'm trying to make is the same one that Calvin, Owen, Edwards, Philpot, Bunyan and so on make very clearly in their works. The reason that I make that point repeatedly, and will continue to do so, is that the church, and the teaching of the church, as a whole is OUT OF BALANCE on the issue, preferring to dwell on the truth in the mind and not insisting that the truth in the mind as a notion is not saving. In my opinion, this is the danger and this is not being emphasized enough in the writing and preaching of the church today.
The latest article you released on the Highway, by Pastor Coles, has an interesting reference to this problem which I quote as follows:
“I replied that I thought that I also put a strong emphasis on God’s grace as the motivation for obedience. But he responded that his wife couldn’t even relate to God’s grace — it went right by her. I was a bit taken aback, and so I said, “You mean that the many times I have spoken on God’s grace, she didn’t hear me?” He said yes, in her 20 years on Crusade staff, never once had she felt God’s grace and love on a personal level.
I thought about what he had said and asked some clarifying questions to make sure I understood him. Then I responded, “If your wife has never felt God’s love and grace, she is not converted!” I had been reading Jonathan Edwards’ classic, A Treatise on Religious Affections, in which he makes a strong biblical case that saving faith is not mere intellectual assent to the gospel, but that it affects the heart. This elder got very upset with me. But I stuck to my guns then and do so now, that if a person can sit in church for 20 years and never be moved by God’s grace and love as shown to us at the cross, then that person is not truly converted.”
This conversation is VERY REVEALING. Note how Pastor Cole stresses in his conversation that if she hasn’t FELT SOMETHING SHE ISN’T CONVERTED. Let me repeat that, IF SHE HASN’T FELT SOMETHING, SHE ISN’T CONVERTED. Notice how he says that he had "put a strong emphasis on God’s grace as the motivation for obedience". Ok, but had he ever made the point blank statement that he makes here about not being converted? I doubt it because he tells us he had to think it over in terms of what he had recently been reading from Edwards and had to "stick to his guns". Well, may be thats the problem. Maybe in expressing it as he had in those nice soft, but not too clear, words about "Gods grace as a motivation for obedience", which tend not to ruffle as many feathers as what he has finally said in private to one of his elders, maybe in so doing he had deemphasized the problem.
In other words, you can memorize large parts of the bible, and become conversant in many branches of theology and do many good works, like 20 years on staff at Campus Crusade, but still be dead in your sins. That is what I’m trying to say and because I keep saying it, you seem to think that I am out of balance in unduly stressing it. I don’t think so. I note much, much attention given, rightly so, in the conservative church, to charismatic error, but very little attention given to the errors in the conservative camp, which is this dry dead religion.
Pastor Cole makes some excellent points in his article, but in focusing on the errors of the Christian Psychology, he deflects the due error of the conservative church in contributing to the problem which is a singular focus on the mental and behavioral aspects of the assimilation of the truth.
Note how Pastor Cole, in the beginning of his article, rightly credits Edwards and Calvin with focusing him on this aspect of the teaching of the church which is neglected today, but then goes on to pin the primary focus on Christian Psychology. Didn’t he start out telling us that he was taught these errors in seminary? And doesn’t he say that he’d never read Calvin’s Institutes until he had been pastoring for years? Well, it seems pretty clear that if the emphasis had been on the Bible and Calvin and Edwards, and Philpot, and Gill and Bunyan, etc, men who taught the Bible, in the first place, perhaps it wouldn’t have taken him so long to sort all of this out.
I stress it because the church doesn’t and in fact the modern church minimizes it, I stress it because I’m trying to counter something that is out of balance, not because I’m out of balance or because the men I refer to were out of balance. Truth be known, if churches were stressing it as it ought to be stressed, there probably would be less false solutions like “Christian Psychology” running rampant today. People are looking for these things as a solution because they aren’t hearing the real solution from the pulpit. Swindol, Cloud, and Townsend are all Armenians theologically trained at DTS, where the Holy Spirit is denied, minimized, given lip service and quenched.
I was surprised to hear Pastor Cole say that he respected Swindol. Why, because he’s very intelligent and well read and because he has a huge following and has written many books and in the eyes of man he is a success? Don’t the scriptures tell us to be wary of these very things, especially if those that have them don’t teach the “faith once delivered to the saints? Is it any wonder that Swindol teaches what he does and is the kind of model he is if he “knows not the Spirit”?
Again, as Philpot, Edwards, Owen, Calvin, Bunyan and all of these men stressed in their teaching true religion starts in the Mind, Moves to the Heart, and Motivates the Feet and Hands and Lips. This is what these older preachers recognized as the missing part of the teaching of the church, it is what makes “irresistible grace” irresistible and keeps the doctrines of grace from becoming just another dry mental work of the flesh. “The Letter kills, but the spirit gives life.”
One last thing, Pilgrim, I'm not saying you, or your position is out of balance. I don't know you well enough or your site well enough to say that. Frankly, based on what I've heard you say and the articles I've seen you post, it seems to me that you try to maintain a proper balance. What I am saying is that as I read church History, when Godly leaders saw an imbalance, or an error, they tried to address it in their preaching and their writing and I don't see the Conservative Church as a whole doing this, on the contrary, in my view they are part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.
