The Gospel Coalition

The greatest temptation in Christian communities is to avoid confession altogether, to maintain the facade, the uneasy stasis of staying right near the surface and never getting too deep, too real, too honest with each other. But on the other side, another temptation, perhaps not as great but just as real, is what often happens in place of real confession. We might call it “confession as performance.” Here’s an insightful piece from Bonhoeffer’s invaluable Life Together:

[A] danger concerns the confessant. For the salvation of his soul let him guard against ever making a pious work of his confession. If he does so, it will become the final, most abominable, vicious, and impure prostitution of the heart; the act becomes an idle, lustful babbling. Confession as a pious work is an invention of the devil. It is only God’s offer of grace, help, and forgiveness that could make us dare to enter the abyss of confession.

Again, let us not steer clear of real gospel confession with our brothers and sisters. The Bible commends it too much for us to safely avoid it. But Bonhoeffer has touched on something important here, something I’ve witnessed in a few small group settings. The safe space for confession can be taken advantage of, in a way. Here are some ways we might exploit and pervert the confessional act:

1. We treat the confession itself not as an act of repentance but mainly of catharsis. This is the employment of cheap grace. Basically, we’re not looking so much for the grace that frees and empowers us but the opportunity to “get something off our chests.” At least, until the next opportunity.

2. The confession becomes a self-indulgent “pity party” session. It is not about receiving the word of forgiveness in the gospel from our brethren and walking in that freedom but about occupying their ears to satisfy our need for attention and soaking up their consolation. It’s not the gospel’s embrace we really want, in other words, but some pats on the back.

3. We turn our confession into self-justification. We end up spending most of the time blaming our wrongs on all the people whose fault it really is. We use the time to confess others’ sins, not our own.

4. We treat confession secretly as sport. Mainly, we confess certain things to see what might scandalize our community or offend their sensibilities. We enjoy cultivating a prurient interest or creating a shock factor. This is relatively rare but still real.

5. We confess sins to look like good confessors. This is what Bonhoeffer is mainly addressing in the excerpt above.

Note: Some of these sins can only be self-diagnosed. Let us be more on guard of our own hearts’ tendencies toward these perversions of confession than on the watch for others’ tendencies toward them.

What if we looked at 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 from the reverse angle? I think it helps us put so much of our pettiness and self-interest in stark perspective and shows love as that much more beautiful.

Impatience and unkindness is hatred.
Hate is envious and ego-centric.
Hate is arrogant and rude.
Hatred is insisting on one’s own way;
hatred is irritable or resentful;
it celebrates sin, and it mocks what is true.
Hate is whiny and thin-skinned,
thoroughly skeptical,
always pessimistic,
a born quitter.

But hatred ends . . .

You have likely heard the arguments, becoming more and more common among progressive Christians and others seeking to make same-sex romantic relationships compatible with the orthodox faith. It goes something like this: “Paul and the other NT writers were not condemning committed, consensual, monogamous” — to limit the typical qualifiers to just three — “homosexual relationships. The way the church has read these texts for 2,000 years is eisogesis. They are references to temple prostitution, pedophilia, or rape.”

Are they on to something? Have we had it wrong for so long?

Well, no. Scholar Robert Gagnon writes in response:

I know of no serious biblical scholar, even prohomosex biblical scholar, who argues that Paul had in mind only or primarily temple prostitution—not Nissinen, not Brooten, not Fredrickson, not Schoedel, not Bird, not Martin, etc. There are many reasons why this view has not found a welcome in serious biblical scholarship . . .

Paul’s views on homosexual behavior were profoundly influenced by the alleged existence of “seven thousand prostitutes, male and female” at the temple of Aphrodite in Corinth in Paul’s day. As it happens, the only ancient account that refers to cult prostitutes at the temple of Aphrodite in Corinth is a brief mention by Strabo in Geography 8.6.20c

And the temple of Aphrodite was so rich that it owned more than a thousand temple-slaves, prostitutes, whom both men and women had dedicated to the goddess. And therefore it was on account of these women that the city was crowded with people and grew rich. (Text and commentary in: Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, St. Paul’s Corinth: Texts and Archaeology [GNS 6; Wilmington: M. Glazier, 1983], 55-57)

Any critical New Testament scholar knows that Strabo’s comments (1) applied only to Greek Corinth in existence several centuries before the time of Paul, not the Roman Corinth of Paul’s day; (2) referred to “more than a thousand prostitutes,” not seven thousand; and (3) mentioned only female (heterosexual) prostitutes, not male (homosexual) prostitutes. Scholars agree that there was no massive business of female cult prostitutes—to say nothing of male homosexual cult prostitutes—operating out of the temple of Aphrodite in Paul’s day; and that there may not have been such a business even in earlier times (i.e., Strabo was confused). This is not particularly new information, which makes it all the more surprising that [pro-homosexuality scholar Jack] Rogers was taken in, apparently, by an ill-informed tour guide. For example, Hans Conzelmann made the following remarks in his major commentary on 1 Corinthians written some thirty years ago:

Incidentally, the often-peddled statement that Corinth was a seat of sacred prostitution (in the service of Aphrodite) is a fable. This realization also disposes of the inference that behind the Aphrodite of Corinth lurks the Phoenician Astarte. [Note 97:] The fable is based on Strabo, Geog. 8.378. . . . Strabo, however, is not speaking of the present, but of the city’s ancient golden period. . . . Incidentally, Strabo’s assertion is not even true of the ancient Corinth. (1 Corinthians [Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1975 [German original, 1969], 12)

This continues to be the view held by scholars. As Bruce Winter notes in a recent significant work on 1 Corinthians,

Strabo’s comments about 1,000 religious prostitutes of Aphrodite . . . are unmistakably about Greek and not Roman Corinth. As temple prostitution was not a Greek phenomenon, the veracity of his comments on this point have been rightly questioned. The size of the Roman temple of Aphrodite on the Acrocorinth ruled out such temple prostitution; and by that time she had become Venus—the venerated mother of the imperial family and the highly respected patroness of Corinth—and was no longer a sex symbol (After Paul Left Corinth: The Influence of Secular Ethics and Social Change [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001], 87-88; similarly, Murphy-O’Connor, St. Paul’s Corinth, 55-56)

The scholarly consensus that there was no homosexual prostitution at the Corinthian temple of Aphrodite in Paul’s day is enough, all by itself, to dispense with Rogers’s theory and show Rogers’s unreliability as an exegete of the biblical text . . .

In all the critiques of same-sex intercourse as “contrary to nature” that can be found in the ancient world, not a single one ever refers to the idolatrous or commercial dimension of same-sex intercourse. For example, the physician Soranus described the desire on the part of “soft men” to be penetrated (cf. 1 Cor 6:9) as “not from nature,” insofar as it “subjugated to obscene uses parts not so intended” and disregarded “the places of our body which divine providence destined for definite functions”(Chronic Diseases 4.9.131). Moreover, numerous cases of same-sex erotic relationships involving neither prostitution nor cultic activity can be documented for the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial periods . . .

The Old Testament—particularly Deuteronomy and the “Deuteronomistic History” (Joshua through 2 Kings)—does condemn “homosexual cult prostitutes” (the so-called qedeshim, “consecrated ones”). But even here, parallel figures in the ancient Near East—the assinnu, kurgarru, and kulu’u—were held in low regard not so much for their prostitution as for their compromise of masculine gender in allowing themselves to be penetrated as though women (The Bible and Homosexual Practice, 48-49). Even Phyllis Bird, a prohomosex Old Testament scholar who has done as much work as anyone on the qedeshim, acknowledges that the writers of Scripture emphasized not the cultic prostitution of these figures but rather their “repugnant associations with male homosexual activity . . .”

The term malakoi in 1 Cor 6:9—literally, “soft men”—was often used in the Greco-Roman world as a description of adult males who feminized their appearances in the hopes of attracting a male partner. Jewish and even some pagan moralists condemned them, not for their role in temple prostitution—most were not temple prostitutes—but for their attempted erasure of the masculine stamp given them in nature.

Read the whole piece, which lists 15 reasons to reject the common critical arguments, from the fellow who literally wrote the book on the subject.

Related, elsewhere:
Making Sense of the Scripture’s “Inconsistency” (Keller on why Christians appear to “pick and choose” which laws to obey)

Our friend Tara-Leigh Cobble has a new album out called Come Back Soon. I’d love to give away a copy to one blessed reader.

But you gotta work for your treats in my joint. So here’s the deal: Since the album is themed after the blessed hope, create your best artistic rendering of our Lord’s second coming using only crayons and tweet a pic of it to me on Twitter (@jaredcwilson). Make sure to include the words “Come Back Soon” in your tweet so I won’t miss it.*

The best entry — as judged by Miss Tara-Leigh herself — received by noon (EST) Thursday will win the album.

Hardly anybody ever jumps through these hoops, so if you enter, the odds are good you’ll win the goods.

*If you don’t have Twitter, you can email me your entry at jared AT gospeldrivenchurch DOT com

“Jesus’ essential call was to plant churches. Virtually all the great evangelistic challenges of the New Testament are basically calls to plant churches, not simply to share the faith. The ‘Great Commission’ (Matt. 28:18-20) is not just a call to ‘make disciples’ but to ‘baptize’. In Acts and elsewhere, it is clear that baptism means incorporation into a worshiping community with accountability and boundaries (cf. Acts 2:41-47). The only way to be truly sure you are increasing the number of Christians in a town is to increase the number of churches. Why? Much traditional evangelism aims to get a ‘decision’ for Christ. Experience, however, shows us that many of these ‘decisions’ disappear and never result in changed lives. Why? Many, many decisions are not really conversions, but often only the beginning of a journey of seeking God. (Other decisions are very definitely the moment of a ‘new birth,’ but this differs from person to person.) Only a person who is being ‘evangelized8 in the context of an on-going worshiping and shepherding community can be sure of finally coming home into vital, saving faith. This is why a leading missiologist like C. Peter Wagner can say, ‘Planting new churches is the most effective evangelistic methodology known under heaven.’”

– Tim Keller, “Why Plant Churches” (pdf)

Audio and video from the 2013 Gospel Coalition Conference is now uploaded and ready to enjoy.

Also, the audio from the recent Men and Women of Wisdom Conference in Hingham, Mass. featuring Ray and Jani Ortlund and myself is now up.

C.S. Lewis’s stepson Douglas Gresham tells the story of Lewis and a friend walking along the street one day when a beggar approached them asking for money. Lewis’s friend kept walking, but Lewis stopped and emptied his wallet, giving the beggar its contents. After rejoining his friend, he was chastised. “You shouldn’t have done that, Jack. He’ll only spend it all on drink.” Lewis replied, “Well, that’s what I was going to do.”

The situation is a common one and ages old. We are no more faced with beggars today than the disciples were in the first century. In urban settings or rural, the specific approach and contexts may differ, but the neediness and the opportunities do not. What is your response when a stranger asks for money?

You are walking down the street or pulling out of the grocery store parking lot and you are confronted by a haggard figure, perhaps holding a sign, perhaps telling a familiar story about being homeless or hungry or needing to travel to a certain location or having a car out of gas. The stories can be eerily similar. I’ve heard the “I’m trying to get to _______ but don’t have money for gas” story quite a bit. I have offered before to go to the gas station and put gas in their car. Sometimes they agree. Sometimes they don’t. I have offered to get food instead of giving them cash for food. Sometimes they agree. Sometimes they don’t.

Let’s make the options simple for the sake of the gist of the argument. A hand is outstretched before you. Do you put money in it or do you decline?

Most of us at that point begin to measure up the man (or woman) before us. Do they look honest? Do they look authentically down and out? Do they look like an alcoholic or drug addict? Then the street smarts kick in. They will probably just spend it on alcohol. I am probably just supporting their drug habit. If they put just as much energy into finding a job as begging for money, they wouldn’t be in this situation. If they weren’t so lazy, they wouldn’t have to suffer this indignity. By giving them money I’m just enabling them, not actually helping them.

The street smarts — based on assumptions and presumptions, not actual knowledge of the person — are thinly veiled justifications for not helping. They help us feel better about saying no.

What does Jesus say?

The Sermon on the Mount is so impractical. So inefficient. If you were designing a religious system for maximum ease and self-actualization, this would not be it. The whole thing seems designed to make its adherents “get taken” left and right. Somebody asks for my coat, and I give them my shirt too? Somebody asks for a mile, and I go with them two? Somebody hits me, and I offer them my other cheek? This isn’t only not street smart, it isn’t even common sense. Jesus is asking us to put ourselves in some very vulnerable positions. And in Matthew 5:42, he says:

Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.

Immediately we begin thinking of all sorts of loopholes and footnoted caveats to explain that this doesn’t mean exactly what it says. And maybe some of those caveats are right. For instance, if you know someone’s going to waste money on an addiction, not just suspect they are, it’s probably wiser to give them another form of help — a meal, loving counsel, a friendship. We only ought to take care that our refusal to give what is being asked is based on facts, not imagination, and is not the “plausible argument” we’re using to justify our disobedience to a pretty clear command that comes with no asterisks. “Give to the one who begs from you.”

Is Jesus smart? Does Jesus know the way the world actually is? Can he be trusted in this moment to give us sound counsel?

Here’s what I think Jesus wants us to do, and our response to a beggar gives us the opportunity to do it:

1) Hold our money loosely. I think that’s what Lewis was getting at in the exchange with his friend. He was comparing the beggar’s suspected frivolity with his own known frivolity. Only in the economy of self-justification is my spending $3 on a coffee or even a beer deemed more virtuous than, by presumption, a beggar’s doing the same.

2) Trust him with people’s sins. Maybe that person will squander what you give them. It’s not our job to manage the expected sins of others. It’s our job to be faithful to God, obedient to his commands. So the better hedging of the bets here is to give out of obedience and trust the beggar’s financial management to the only God who judges the living and the dead. Let us give, and let us let the Lord sort it out.

In one of his Letters to an American Lady, from which we get another version of the “spend it all on drink” story, Lewis writes these other pertinent words on giving to beggars:

It will not bother me in the hour of death to reflect that I have been “had for a sucker” by any number of impostors; but it would be a torment to know that one had refused even one person in need.

No, it’s not street smart or common sense to give to those who ask of you, but it is wise. Very, very wise. It is wise to obey Matthew 5:42 with as few loopholes as you can attach to it because doing so says you obey God, not your suspicions, and you hold your money loosely because God is your God, not money. What you do with your money bears witness to what you worship.

I was had for a sucker last week. I felt pretty sure I was even before I knew I was. I was not surprised later to find out I’d been had. I had reminded myself of Matthew 5:42 in deciding to give the money out, and I reminded myself of Matthew 5:42 after I realized it was a mistake. I should have helped in one of a variety of other ways. Only God has 20/20 foresight. But it wasn’t just Matthew 5:42 and the Sermon on the Mount’s kingdom ethos in general that got me. It was this:

I picture myself as I truly was, apart from Christ, in the light of God’s holiness. Unclean, undesirable, unjustified. A beggar. Jesus could have taken one look at me and come up with infinite excuses not to help. In fact, because he is God, with the omniscience of being God, he didn’t have to presume or predict — he knew that throughout my life, even after salvation, I would waste his grace like the prodigal moron. And yet, unhesitatingly, eagerly, with all the love of him who is Love, he gave me no mere pittance, but lavished on me the immeasurable riches of his kindness and mercy, united me to himself in spirit, and guaranteed for me the inheritance owed himself. Try being stingy and common-sensible with that reality crowding out your brain.

Video intros to the first slate of study guides in Crossway’s new Knowing the Bible series have been added to their website. I was honored to have contributed the installment on Paul’s letter to the Romans. Below is some of my rambling about the roaring ocean waves of grace in that great epistle.

Knowing the Bible Series: Romans from Crossway on Vimeo.

Via The Lookout:

On March 11 2005, Kevin Berthia wanted to take his life. He had climbed over the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge and was prepared to take a fatal jump into the San Francisco Bay when he heard a voice calling out to him from above.

It wasn’t the voice of a spiritual presence, but rather that of California Highway Patrol (CHP) Officer Kevin Briggs. The two talked for 60 life-changing minutes before Berthia decided to climb back up the bridge and give life another chance.

Eight years later, the pair reunited as part of an emotional ceremony honoring Briggs and other members of the CHP whose job is to verbally persuade suicidal men and women from jumping off that bridge.

“It was phenomenal,” Berthia, 30, told Yahoo News about his reunion with Briggs at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention public service ceremony.

May I be vulnerable with you for a moment? I anticipate some pushback if only because of those names you see up there in the title, but this is part of my story, part of my gospel wakefulness, and it is a part I will never deny or disavow.

I have met John Piper just once, a couple of years ago, when I was in Minneapolis to record some material with Desiring God Ministries in promotion of my book Gospel Wakefulness. On the way to what would be a brief visit to his home, I clutched in my hand a copy of my book to give him. I was told I ought to sign it, because he’d like that. I don’t remember what exactly I wrote inside that front cover but I know it included this line: “God used you to save my life.”

That is not an exaggeration. I don’t mean that Piper’s work was instrumental in my conversion. I professed saving faith in Christ as a child, before I’d ever heard of the man. I mean he saved my life. In my twenties, mired in the rotten fruit of my sin — the wreckage of my marriage, the dead-endings of my aspirations, and the bottoming out of my spirit — I spent a lot of hours feeling nothing and contemplating taking my own life. I dare not describe all of that to you, but I was in a bad way. We had a church but the teaching we received there was in the order of “seizing the day” based on inner potential. I had none of the latter so I could not manage the former. What kept me alive?

I was clinging to the hem of Christ’s garment then, sleeping in our guest bedroom, by which I mean living in the guest bedroom and spending plenty of nights face down on the carpet groaning. I was picking up the crumbs where I could find them. Two sources of bread. The podcasts of the aforementioned Pastors Mark and John. I was getting a vision of a very big Jesus with a very big grace for sinners from them. And the Spirit used their preaching in those days to work a gospel renaissance in my life, a miracle really. My wife can attest to that.

I read the story of this fellow talked off the bridge by a friend he didn’t know he had, recently reuniting to thank him, and I think of the strange places we find ourselves in life. I think of sitting down with Pastor John for those few minutes, his thumbing through my book and looking up the Wikipedia entry for Middletown Springs, Vermont on his Macbook. I know I’m not supposed to be a respecter of persons but I can be an admirer of them, and I can certainly be a “thanksgiver” of and for them.

Providence does make strange friendships. A black man in despair and a white cop. Two animated preachers (one a bit on the scream-o side) and a neurotic, depressed, “stuttering wimp” (to quote a girl’s appraisal of me in the 4th grade — still remember that, don’t you know). The God of the Universe and sinners.

Don’t stop preaching the gospel. And if you don’t preach the gospel, start. Then don’t stop. You don’t know whose life you are saving. Not you, really, but God.
God is in his gospel faithfully proclaimed doing his thing, talking people off bridges. Me? I’ll never forget. So I’ll never stop.

“[I]f a king be reigning somewhere,but stays in his own house and does not let himself be seen, it often happens that some insubordinate fellows, taking advantage of his retirement, will have themselves proclaimed in his stead; and each of them, being invested with the semblance of kingship, misleads the simple who, because they cannot enter the palace and see the real king, are led astray by just hearing a king named. When the real king emerges, however, and appears to view, things stand differently. The insubordinate impostors are shown up by his presence, and men, seeing the real king, forsake those who previously misled them. In the same way the demons used formerly to impose on men, investing themselves with the honor due to God. But since the Word of God has been manifested in a body, and has made known to us His own Father, the fraud of the demons is stopped and made to disappear; and men, turning their eyes to the true God, Word of the Father, forsake the idols and come to know the true God.

“Now this is proof that Christ is God, the Word and Power of God. For whereas human things cease and the fact of Christ remains, it is clear to all that the things which cease are temporary, but that He Who remains is God and very Son of God, the sole-begotten Word.”

– Athanasius, On the Incarnation