Peter Witkowski Apologetics

Why I Support The Law Amendment: Missions, Lloyd-Jones and the Danger of Pragmatism

Without question, the Law Amendment and its call to restrict the office of pastor to qualified men has capture the attention of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Pastors, SBC entity presidents, and even Dr. Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary have published videos, blogs, and essays in defense of or in opposition to this amendment. Though the vote on the amendment can rightly be viewed as a referendum on whether the SBC will permit women to serve as pastors, it also represents an even more basic and existential question: will the convention be defined by the Scriptures or by pragmatism?

What About Missions?

Most who oppose the amendment do not do so for hermeneutical or Scriptural reasons. Like the amendments’ supporter, they recognize that 1 Timothy 3, Titus 1 and the Scriptures in general limit the office of pastor or elder to qualified men. The line, “I’m a complementarian but oppose the Law Amendment because….” has been used by many. The issue is not what does the Bible say but whether obedience to the Bible on secondary issues will prove too costly.

Most oppose the amendment because they fear such actions will dampen if not outright extinguish the SBC’s heart for missions. They view the Law Amendment as an attack on both the financial and the human resources needed to evangelize our nation and the world. Only with the help of churches who employ women pastors can the SBC hope to fulfill the great commission.

But such concern should not be seen as the exclusive domain of those opposed to the Law Amendment. Those in favor of the amendment also possess a passion for missions and fear that getting the amendment wrong could hurt missions. The disagreement over the amendment turns out not to be over whether or not to do missions but over how to best do missions. In other words, is the gospel best advanced by associations bound together by shared doctrinal convictions and a heart for biblical fidelity even if said group is small? Or is the gospel best advanced by large associations united by minimal convictions that can be remolded and even jettisoned for the sake of greater results? Scriptural authority or pragmatism?

What Can the 20th Century Teach Us?

While this discussion may prove novel to this generation of SBCers, it is not a new development. During the twentieth century, our evangelical brothers and sisters in England faced a similar dilemma. Seeking to evangelize the rapidly secularizing culture of post WW2 Britain, men such as John Stott encouraged evangelicals to embrace those who held doctrines at odds with traditional evangelical convictions for the sake of missions. The argument then as it is today consisted of a call to expand the circle of cooperation for the purpose of reaching the world…to look the other way when discussing things such as women pastors and the inerrancy of Scripture so that the busy coal miner, the over worked mom, and the poor youth could be won for the gospel. Pragmatism for the sake of salvations.

Dr. David Martyn Lloyd-Jones who pastored Westminster Chapel during those tumultuous years shared Stott’s passion for evangelism. But the Welsh doctor disagreed with his fellow evangelical’s methodology. He feared that big tent pragmatism as represented by the ecumenical movement of his day would not foster but rather frustrate missions. According to Lloyd-Jones, missions was, “highly doctrinal.” Given that salvation depended upon a person’s acceptance of the Scriptures as God’s word, the deity of Jesus, and his substitutionary atonement and resurrection, the Welsh pastor believed that the church’s ability to reach the lost depended on the church’s faithful proclamation of and adherence to the Scriptures. He wrote, “If you want to help others you must know your doctrine.” Lloyd-Jones also noted in a sermon on Philippians 4:3 that, “If the church is not right…she grieves the Holy Spirit, and if she grieves the Holy Spirit, she loses her power and she cannot be a missionary Church.” Or as he stated a touch more positively elsewhere, “Do not be concerned about numbers. If we stand for God’s truth, we can be certain that God will honor and bless us.” If a church embraced women preachers or pastors (an act which the Scriptures “prohibits:) it would not enrich by starve its missional output. For Lloyd-Jones, doctrinal purity was not a missional suppressant or limitation but there very means by which the church would fan missions into flame. He concluded, “The real understanding of doctrine leads to a heart’s longing and desire and prayer for the salvation of the lost.”

Is this A Matter of Faith?

For the sake of Christian charity, one must admit that the discussions around the Law Amendment as did the ones in twentieth century England prove secondary and not primary. It is a discussion among brothers and sisters and not one of enemies. The open defense of women pastors does not negate one’s hope in the justifying power of Jesus’s blood. Nor do such positions necessarily arise from duplicity. The SBC would do well to embrace the charity that Lloyd-Jones extended to his opponents and assert with him that, “We do not impute wrong motives to them. We grant them that they are as sincere as we are and as honest as we are, and that they believe the gospel as we believe it.” Christians can disagree about over such things.    

Does Ecclesiology Matter?

But they cannot disagree about ecclesiology and hope to effectively evangelize the lost. As Lloyd-Jones noted, “If we want revival we must start by considering this doctrine of the nature of the Christian church.” Expanding upon this idea, Lloyd-Jones proclaimed, “You can be a Christian and yet defective in your doctrine, but our concern and our endeavor is to have true doctrine presented in its fullness because we believe that it is only as this is believed and preached and propagated that men and women are going to be converted and added to the church. When a church has gone wrong in doctrine, she has ceased to be a converting influence.” In other words, the success of missions depended upon an affirmation of the essentials of the faith and upon a biblical ecclesiology. Without such supports, missions would slowly die. And any denomination that either willfully or passively adopted an ecclesiology that runs counter to the Scriptures and that willfully dilutes its adherence to its doctrinal statement will not increase but rather destroy its missional output.

Moreover, such changes to secondary or even tertiary doctrines will (if unchallenged) undermine more than missions. They will eventually reach the central tenants of the gospel and destroy the very institutions they claim to be saving.  Lloyd-Jones observed, “Every part because it belongs to every other part…if you make what appears to be a minor change somewhere on the circumference it will soon have its effect even upon the center.” If Christians accept that the rejection of the Scriptures can lead to more conversions, then no doctrine will prove essential or uneditable. Given enough time, uncontested, evangelical pragmatism will hollow out even the most cherished of doctrines of the SBC.

What Happened in England?

Though some followed Lloyd-Jones’s advice and have continued to thrive, most British denominations and their evangelical cohorts rejected the Welsh pastor’s appeals and embraced the big tent pragmatism of their day. Unfortunately, that choice has proved costly. If researchers’ predictions hold true, most of England’s historic denominations will disappear by 2050. Even Stott’s beloved Anglican church is on pace to disappear around 2060.  In other words, Lloyd-Jones has been vindicated: missions cannot thrive apart from sound doctrine and ecclesiology.

What Will We Do?

Now we must decide. As the messengers gather in Indianapolis, they will undoubtedly speak to the question of women pastors. But in so doing, they will also speak to the essence of the convention. They will determine if the SBC is primarily a doctrinal people or a pragmatic people. To borrow from Lloyd-Jones, “The ultimate question facing us these days is whether our faith is in men and their power to organize, or in the truth of God in Christ Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit.” May we choose wisely. May we Christ Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit. May we choose the Law Amendment.  

Peter Witkowski Apologetics, Evangelism

Just One More: A New/Old Kind of Skeptic

Though academics such as Bertrand Russel have won recognition from their ability to skillfully assault the claims of Christ, the typical skeptic that buzzes around the modern evangelical congregation has spent little time debating whether or not Jesus’s claims in Matthew 16 can be applied to the transfiguration. He or she possesses a different sort of skepticism altogether.

The Essence of Skepticism

Their issue is not so much the intellectual solvency of Christianity as much as their felt needs. I suspect many pastors and faithful church members have heard numerous people on the fringes of their congregation say that they would return to church if they had the time, or if their church had better preaching, more engaging music, or a more lively kids’ program. Others remain distant because God failed to meet a non-church need in a timely fashion. Despite the now skeptic’s prayers, he or she is still single, childless, sick, stuck in a professional rut, and hurting. In other words, this skeptic needs God to do one more thing for him or her in order that he or she might believe. They require another sign: a better preacher, a wedding date, or just something that proves that Jesus is truly who he says he is. Until then, they will happily give their Sunday to the local sports complex or to hiking the blue ridge mountains. Will they get it?

Jesus’s Response

In Matthew 16:1-4, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the spiritual elite of Jesus’s day, come requesting a sign. They want to know whether they can trust Jesus. And their question arises not from their study of the Scriptures but rather from their denial of their Old Testament scrolls. If these men had truly believed their God’s word, they would have understood that Jesus was the Messiah for his miracles fulfilled the promises of old. Matthew makes this explicitly clear when he writes of Jesus’s miracles, “This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah: ‘He took our illness and bore our diseases (Matt 8:17).’ In other words, these men want another sign because they have rejected the revealed words of God as found in the Old Testament and Jesus ministry. Jesus condemns them as being “An and adulterous generation,” and then declares that they will receive only one more sign, “the sign of Jonah” the sign of the resurrection (Matt 16:4; 12:39-41).

If the resurrection of Jesus will not convince someone to follow our Savior, nothing else will. If a soul can assent to the reality of their sin, to Jesus’s death as the substitutionary payment for said sin, and to his resurrection which grants us eternal life and then say, “show more me,” it will never be satisfied. Even if Jesus were to comeback and perform a modern-day miracle or bless a church with the most amazing music ministry, or give someone a positive pregnancy test, the skeptic would still not believe. If God’s currently revelation as contained in the Bible is not enough for them, future revelation will also fail to convince them of the reality of Jesus’s claims. There is no greater sign than the sign of Jonah.

Our greatest need is not tied to our love life, or our professional career, or to the efficiency of our church. Our greatest need is deliverance from sin and death. If Jesus’s unique ability to give us eternal life will not draw us to our bibles throughout the week and to our churches on Sunday morning, neither will good health nor a full bank account. The Jesus of our health and family will ultimately prove as convincing or unconvincing as the Jesus of the resurrection.

How To Pursue the Skeptic

Men and women who regularly find Jesus and his church wanting do so not because of some great fault in either Jesus or his people but because their hearts are hard. And if Jesus responds to such skepticism with fresh mentions of the resurrection, then we should follow suit. We should not stress about whether we have the best this or that. Nor should we should spend our time trying to produce a program or event that will positively meet their felt need. Rather, we should continue to lovingly and unapologetically preach the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In other words, the only antidote for the religious skeptic who frequently buzzes about our church is the gospel of Jesus Christ. If the sign of Jonah is not enough nothing will be.

Peter Witkowski Apologetics

1 Corinthians, KJV Pitfalls, & the Need for a Readable Bible

The church should value a Bible translation’s readability as much as its fidelity to the intent of the original authors. For a translation of God’s Word to change lives, it must be understandable. Paul makes this point in 1 Corinthians 14:9: “If with your tongue you utter speech that is not intelligible, how will anyone know what is said? For you will be speaking into the air.” Though Paul addresses the ability to share the gospel in a foreign language through divine inspiration, the passage can be easily applied to the topic of Bible translations. Just as witnessing proves useless if no one can understand you what you are saying, a Bible translation proves useless if people cannot understand it.

Understandability proves to be the great downfall of the view that King James Bible is the best Bible translation of all time. Most readers simply cannot understand the Old English of the KJV as they don’t use “thee” and “thou” when grabbing a soda at their local gas station.

A Brief KJV History

Admittedly, the King James Bible has not always been associated with Shakespearian or highbrow English. It has not always been hard to understand. The original translators often stated that the goal of their translation was to gift English speakers a Bible in their “vulgar” or common tongue. When the translators of the King James Bible wrote out 1 Corinthians 15:31 as,

I protest by your reiocycing which I haue in Christ Iesus our Lord, I die daily,

the average 1611 reader could easily understand the terms above.

Thankfully, the original translators understood that no Bible translation “is begun and perfected at the same time.” The translators of the KJV Bible were in large part updating the text of the Bishop’s Bible and anticipated that the KJV would need to be updated in the years ahead. The KJV would be undergo five major updates and more than 100,000 changes between 1611 and 1769. Because of those changes, 1 Corinthians 15:31 reads, “I protest by your rejoicing which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily.” The text undoubtedly benefited from the updating. I have yet to meet anyone who carries around a first edition 1611 KJV reprint.

After 1769, the updates stopped. The translators made a more decisive break from the KJV and published the Revised Version of the Bible in 1885. Around 1930 following the teachings of a Seventh Day Adventists, the King James only crowd emerged and rather arbitrarily declared that the KJV could no longer be updated. The sentiment reflected their misplaced effort to protect the inherent meaning of the text against the attacks of Christian liberalism which had gained influence at the beginning of the 20th century. In the process of trying to protect the relevance of the KJV, KJV only crowd fossilized the text.

More Than A Dictionary

Admittedly with the help of a dictionary, readers can look up some uncommon words like ‘chapmen’ and get to the meaning of the text. But that is not the only challenge facing readers of the KJV. In addition to relying upon an antiquated vocabulary, the KJV also contains a host of “false friends“: words which meant one thing in 1611 and another in 2022. For example, 2 Timothy 2:15 in the KJV reads “Study to shew thyself approved unto God.” The word “study” in the KJV does not mean Timothy needs to grab his Bible, pencils, and highlighters and head to the library. The word in Old English meant “to do one’s best.” The KJV contains countless such illusionary words that can lead readers to false assumptions about the Biblical text. The fault lies not with the translators nor with the readers but in the span of time between the two groups during which the meaning of words naturally changes. Even academic works published in English a few hundred years ago such as John Wycliffe’s volumes require translation. Like many other old English works, the KJV no longer contains the “vulgar” language of the everyday reader.

Church History & KJV

Still some counter that the beauty and history of the KJV should compel readers to pull out their massive English dictionaries. Though well intended, the impulse to demand that Christians read the KJV as opposed to a more colloquial translations goes against the intent of the Scriptures and of the history of the protestant Church. When the apostles penned the New Testament, they used Konia Greek which was spoken by everyday merchants as opposed to the “Classical Greek” of Plato and Aristotle. The God who was the Word become flesh desired for people to readily have access to his thoughts.

Before there was a King James only camp, there existed a Latin only camp. This group of scholars, pastors, and churchmen believed that the poetic nature of the Latin Bible translated by Jerome proved far superior to the then unimaginative and modern language Bibles appearing in vulgar tongues such as English. Yet as John Wycliffe noted in 1384, those who mandate the usage of a hard-to-understand Bible unquestionably go against the teaching of Scriptures they seek to protect. He wrote,

“The Holy Spirit gave the Apostles essential knowledge at Pentecost in order to know all languages to teach the people God’s Word. God willed that people were taught his Word in diverse tongues; therefore, what man acting on God’s behalf would reverse God’s ordinance and his revealed will?”

One of the things Protestants protested was the absence of the Bible in the common language. For sinners to be saved, Christians sanctified, and pastors held accountable, men and women needed access to Bibles that they could understand.

The events of Pentecost, Paul’s comments in 1 Corinthians 15, and the history of the church reveal that God intended for people to have a Bible in their language. Since the KJV no longer contains common English, readers should be suspicious of pastors who demand strict adherence to the KJV. That sentiment resides outside the bounds of Scripture and historic Protestantism. John Calvin concluded, “Faith needs the Word as much as fruit needs the living root of the tree.” The Scriptures should be understandable.

Benefits of the KJV

Despite its perils, the KJV remains an accurate translation of the Bible. Many pastors, Christians, and historians can still appreciate the poetic beauty of the KJV. Others rightfully find a sense of peaceful familiarity in the KJV when they recite the Lord’s Prayer and other well-known passages. The KJV was a masterful translation for its time and still contains value for some modern readers.

A Readable Bible

But it was never meant to be the final English translation as all the updates to the original 1611 edition make clear. We also no longer live in a world of “thee’s” and “haveth’s” or “harts.” The Bibles in our homes and in our pews should be readable. They should use the language of today’s construction workers, middle school teachers, and doctors. A good Bible translation will be accessible to all readers.