Tag Archives: scripture

An open letter to YC regarding having Brad Jersak speak at your conference.

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Dear YC.

I want to start off by saying that YC has been responsible for many kind memories. I first attended in 1997, back when they were only a few thousand people in Red Deer.  I remember being dismayed when Reality Check had to cancel their show, but then you guys brought the house worship band in and they were tremendous and was probably my favorite and most impactful worship experience I ever had. I remember when you released the YC Shine CD. I wore it out listening to it so much. [And in fact if anyone has a copy of it, I would do near anything to have it] I remember going for almost 7 years as a youth,  and then later on supervising a Church group there as a Youth leader. I had many, many wonderful memories of attending hearing the speakers,  particularly Miles McPherson, as well as jumping on people in my sumo wrestler suit and watching early morning Veggie Tales. In short, I was deeply impacted by the ministry and wish it to be used as a way to shape the hearts and souls of Christians kids so that they can be bold, authentic and faithful believers.

Understanding this, it was for this reason that I was deeply troubled to read that Brad Jersak will be attending YC and doing a workshop there. I first became aware of Brad Jersak through his Listening Prayer series, and later on when he came to my city and did a weeklong workshop at one of the Churches here.  The more I heard him and the more I became aware of him, the more I realized how many unorthodox positions he holds. Even though I know that YC is a non-denominational Christian gathering, many of Brad Jersaks beliefs go far outside the realm of Biblical orthodoxy and I think this may be cause for concern.

Among some of his unorthodox beliefs is that he does not believe in an eternal hell. Instead, much like the view Rob Bell promulgated in his book “Love Wins”,  Brad Jersak teaches a variation of ‘Hopeful inclusivism” and believes that because a loving God would never send people to eternal hell, we should be hopeful and trust that all will be saved eventually.  He believes that people still have the ability to freely deny the love of God in the afterlife, or freely accept the love of God in the afterlife, and that many will choose God after they die.

He categorically denies penal substitutionary atonement, or actually any form of substitutionary atonement and considers the idea evil. He finds the notion that “Christ took on the wrath of God for our sins on the cross” to be wrong and in fact, considers that notion a form of “cosmic child abuse.” Brad Jersak has an illustration called “The gospel in chairs” where he contrasts the “traditional view” which he believes to be outdated, erroneous and harmful, and his new version which he calls the “restorative” version.

Quoting Brad Jersak directly where he tells us what the “traditional view” of the gospel is.

“They [Adam and Eve]  are expelled for all time because God is holy and pure and righteous and cannot look on sin and he turns away from man. In this state, man cannot work his way out of sin. All our efforts to please God and justify ourselves and make ourselves righteous are filthy rags, we’re totally depraved and desperately wicked. But God in his love sent his Son to stand on behalf of humanity, who turned toward God himself and walked in perfect fellowship with his Father, preached good news,  healed the  sick and was perfectly obedient to the father. At the end of his life Jesus is put to death and the father puts all the sins of the world on his Son and he who knew no sin became sin, [on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of Christ] he became a curse, And while he was on the cross God poured out all his wrath on his son in our place. He appeased the father’s wrath and anger. Jesus then rises from the dead, and those that believe in him can have a relationship with the father. At that point the chairs are again facing each other.”

Whereas I would say that’s a decent summary of the arc of scripture and what Christians have historically taught and what the Bible teaches, Brad Jersak does not. He completely disagrees with his above summation and does not believe it to be the gospel. Continuing in this vein, he says

” There’s this idea that if we don’t  believe in Jesus and what he’s done for us we remain in our sin and God must remain at enmity with  us and we’re alienated from God. And if we die in that state, of course we experience the eternal conscious torment of the wrath of God for all times as sinners condemned to hell… This is not the gospel.”

“What bothers me about this version is how fickle God is. He is the God who turns from us and turns towards us and turns from and turns toward us and also he’s a little bit like…. you know…. the one who has to torture his own Son in order to get his anger off his chest. I shared this with Archbishop Lazaure of the Eastern Orthodox Church.. and he goes “that’s not Yahweh, that’s Molech. Molech  was the god who [the] Israelites would try to appease, they would try to suck up to him and try to get his blessing by sacrificing their own children so that his wrath would not come against them. And when in the book of Jeremiah, Jeremiah says ” that’s not ok”. He says this; ” God would never even think of such a thing. It would never even enter his mind.”

Furthermore, because he believes that God is exactly like Jesus in every respect, he believes that God never exhibits any wrath or anger towards anyone. He does not believe that God has ever directly and purposefully visited punishment, judgement, or wrath upon the Israelities or any of Israel’s enemies. From his perspective, God would never, ever purposefully kill a human being in the scriptures and all allusions to God’s wrath are strictly metaphorical. From his perspective, Jesus is all loving, and so the God of the Old Testament and New can only be all loving, and did not do anything of the righteous and holy judgements that he is accused of doing in the writings of the prophets. He also denies the notion that humans are born with original sin, which ties in close with his denial of an eternal hell. There is also some question about his view of scripture and whether or not he believes scripture to be innerant and infalliable.

From what I can tell he does not, and in fact in a recent interview at beyondtheboxpodcast.com, he agreed with his guests that we need to get over our fundamentalist, evangelical belief in the  innerancy of scripture, and even plugged the book that elaborates on this.  For example, at one point they stated

“If  I could redo the New Testament, I would put Revelation as the first book in the New testament, as it’s an abortive attempt to talk about Christ. It’s still locked into the vengeful God stuff, so I see it as an abortive attempt. I would put Matthew after Revelation, as another attempt that tries to get there, but doesn’t succeed. And then I would put Mark, Luke, John, Paul etc…we need to have a complete re-understanding from the old, worn out evangelical idea of innerancy and infallibility and really look at the text the way we say it was written”

Brad also spoke of his belief that Satan is not a creation of God- that is to say that Satan is not an angel, spirit, person or entity, but rather is mental construct that humans have conceived. Satan is “real” in a post-modern sense, but he has never actually existed as a creature that interacts in a meaningful way with Jesus or mankind. For example, it is said that Jesus never literally cast out Legion from the herd of pigs. Instead,  that story is metaphorical and represents an allusion to throwing off the shackles of the Roman empire. Satan never spoke to and tempted  Jesus in the wilderness either. It is said that is a inner metaphor for the potential evil that Jesus could have been accomplished had he given in to temptation, and in fact that whole conversation was only happening in Jesus’ mind between two factions of his thoughts.

I’ve written a bit about some of these issues at my blog, linked below. Please read and reconsider what this man teaches and preaches and read my biblical, exegetical critique Here and Here. Brad Jersak also is one of a few writers who blog on http://www.clarion-journal.com/ They are all close-knit and very similar in theology, and I would encourage you to read his writings there to get an idea of what else Brad Jersak believes.

Ultimately it’s your decision to bring in who you will. I see some excellent artists and speakers attending, specifically Francis Chan and Propaganda, both whom I personally love and would love to hear speak in person and whose ministries have shaped my life.  YC is and has always been a nondenominational gathering, which I think is part of its strength and appeal. People from all walks of life and possessing all different understandings of Christianity can go there and be fed and uplifted. This is a good thing. Not everyone is going to agree, and I believe it is a testament to the unity of the Body that we can all attend an event like this as brothers and sisters, holding the gospel to be central, and not having unimportant areas divide us.

But these issues that Brad Jersak believes are not unimportant. They are supremely important, and I believe there is a limit many unorthodox beliefs one man can espouse before we ask ourselves whether it is wise to include him in the teachings of our youth. Even if he is not speaking on these subjects specifically, we need to guard them from false and destructive doctrines, which I believe these to be. The culmination of heresies and false teaching is broad and expansive, and I believe it is detrimental to our goal of unity to have someone who lies so far outside of historical biblical orthodoxy speak at your conference. I don’t believe I am unique and alone in my concern, and I wonder how many Pastors and parents would have equally grave concerns and would think twice about entrusting their children’s spiritual care in your hands if they knew the extent of Brad Jersak’s beliefs. From the pastors and parents of Churches I know sending their kids to YC, such revelations would be like a bucket of cold water thrown in their faces.

I would encourage you to read what I wrote, do some research at his own blog [the clarion] , and contact him directly and ask him about these things. I am confident he will confirm them, though please be mindful that Brad Jersak has a propensity for post-modern semantical word games, and so you may have to be firm and really nail him down on what specifically he believes and what he repudiates.

In the case of the Church where I first heard him speak at and which they invited him to,  they have taken down their recording of him speaking, and have chosen to have his message not be propagated further. For all the reasons I stated, I would appeal you to reconsider inviting him to your conference, or having him as a speaker. There are many faithful pastors and ministers in the Alberta and Edmonton area who could step in and offer a robust, Christ-centered, Biblically faithful presentation to our Youth, and I would encourage you to contact them to fill in.

Thank you for reading.

In Christ,

Dustin Germain

The Message Bible is not a fan of St. Paul

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I heard a sermon recently where the Pastor quoted extensively from The Massage Message bible. Specifically he read a long portion of Romans 9, and then made attempts to exegete it. I don’t even know why he bothered.


I have a theory on why pastors use the Message bible. I wrote in another post that:


Why use the Mb? Because it words things in a way that the pastor finds compelling and gripping and in which he thinks he congregation will get a kick out of. And the congregants go along with that because it has ceased being important for a translation to accurately reflect what was being said. It has ceased being important that Jesus’ words, meaning, and intent-without additions or interpolations- are immortalized and cannonized.


It has become wholly acceptable to abuse and molest the original meaning  because for some people, the intent isn’t to know what the original meaning is, but rather to develop an emotional response. And as long as that emotional response in brought on by something remotely bibley, they can interpret their feelings as a spiritual encounter, which is the source of their security, affirmation and joy. The Pastors putting these paraphrases are are not doing it so that will have a cerebral or intellectual impact, but rather an emotive one.  Its not for piercing clarity, but for vague etherialities. Its not for maximum accuracy, but for maximum sentiment. That’s the thrust of the appeal- because warm fuzzies are an easier sell than  rigorous faithfullness to the text.


What I wanted to focus on in this post is the issue of accuracy and what it means to faithfully represent what was written by the apostles. We believe that the Scriptures are given by inspiration of God and are theopneustos. That is, God-breathed. Some Bibles seek to get as close as they can to the original texts, with our best scholars who painstakingly pore over every nuance so that they can give us a product that represents the best and most accurate and most faithful rendering of the originals we have. The Message bible is not one of those bibles..


When doing a critical scholarship of all the manuscripts that we have, our problem isn’t that we don’t have enough of the original, but that we have too much of what came after. We don’t have 95% of the originals, but rather we have 120% of them. Its like we have a puzzle with 20 extra pieces, and by doing textual and source criticsm, we can weed out the extra pieces, the variants, the transcription errors, the scribal interplorations, etc. The ultimate objective of the textual critic’s work is the production of a “critical edition” containing a text most closely approximating the original.


The Message bible is wholly unconcerned with trying to figure out what was actually said or trying to minimize the excess. I think this is seen well in Romans 9. In the ESV translation, there are 734 words.  The NIV has 738. In Romans chapter 9, the Message bible has 836. In many ways the Mb is similar to Codex Bezae- a codex infamous for its many strange and bizarre renderings, as well as gratuitous flourishes and additions. The horrific gluttonous additions to the Mb is bad, but it actually gets worse than that. Not only are there many places in the Message bible where it’s incredibly bloated with whole sentences added in, there are other places where there are whole sentences missing! There are concepts missing.  There are There are important details missing. There are important statements about God’s character missing. There are important details about God’s purposes missing. In short- it’s just not there.


The twoexamples I wanted to examine are found in Romans 9.


Romans 9: 17 and 18


17. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth. ESV


17. The same point was made when God said to Pharaoh, “I picked you as a bit player in this drama of my salvation power. Mb


18 So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills. ESV


18. All we’re saying is that God has the first word, initiating the action in which we play our part for good or ill. Mb


Here we’ve left out half of a verse. Evidently its not important to know that God’s purpose in hardening Pharaohs heart was so that his name would be proclaimed in all the earth, and so that the demonstration of power would yield him glory. I don’t know why that wasn’t included. Its not like it would be difficult to add that segment in. So that is a little strange, and in continuing the trend we see verse 18.  In verse 18, its nothing but vague obfuscation.  There is no mention of God’s mercy, nor is there any mentioning of the hardening that God enacts on whoever he desires. There’s no way to read the Mb and find that information in the scriptures  It doesn’t bring clarity to the texts, and it does not accurately reflect what is trying to be said.


Romans 9:21-23


21-Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? ESV


21-Isn’t it obvious that a potter has a perfect right to shape one lump of clay into a vase for holding flowers and another into a pot for cooking beans? Mb


22 What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, ESV


23 in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory—ESV


23 and 24 If God needs one style of pottery especially designed to show his angry displeasure and another style carefully crafted to show his glorious goodness, isn’t that all right? Mb


In verse 21, there is no mention of honorable use or dishonorable use in the MB. Instead we see merely a utilitarian difference . In verse 22 and 23, I actually can’t even figure out which verse is what. But look how much is being left out!




1. There is no mention that God has a desire to show his wrath


2.There is no mentioned that God is enduring the vessels of wrath


3.There is no mention that God is showing patience while doing so


4. There is no mention that these lumps of dishonorable use, these “pots for cooking beans” ‘are vessels of wrath 


5. There is no mention that these vessels were intended  for destruction


6. “Glorious goodness” is not the same as “the riches of his glory”


7. There is no mention that the wrath of God towards his vessels of destruction was to show his glory to the vessels of mercy


8. There is no mention this this was prepared by God beforehand


9. There is no mention that this was prepared by God for the the purpose of glory


10. There is no mention that the eternal state of the Vessels of mercy is glory. 




It amazes me at how much is missing, and how much we are being robbed from knowing by following this so-called paraphrase. And again, evidently its not important that we know these things. I would also recommend checking out verses 30-32 in both translations. In the case of the Mb, it is shocking bad and inadequate.


The  point is this; the Message bible isn’t a neutral, clever paraphrase. It doesn’t merely “re-word” things, but it adds whole sentences and it removes whole sentences. It actively seeks to distort what God said through his Son and through the writers of the scriptures.  In the case of Paul and Romans 9, it doesn’t care what Paul said. The important thing in not that we have an accurate record of what the Holy Spirit inspired Paul to write, and that we relate that to people, but rather its more important to tell people how one person remixes and reinterprets the words of Paul.  And so when someone reads from the Message bible from the pulpit, purporting it to be some kind of bible, it is very hard for me not to lose respect for them. Ultimately what they are telling me that its not important to know what God inspired the Apostles to wrote. That its not important to know what Jesus actually said. That its not important to share the actual revelation of God.

			

	
	
	


			
				


	

		
The Bible wants you to ask different questions.

				

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As believers, I think oftentimes our tendency is to read the Bible and make it about the Christian life, instead of about Christ. We  look to the Bible to answer questions like “What does the Bible say about smoking weed”. “What does the Bible say about gambling”. “What does the Bible say about debt and finances”, and so forth.  We’ve been told for a long time that the Bible is a guidebook for living. That’s its our B.I.B.L.E [ Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.] and because its our B.I.B.L.E, we’re able to read it as a manual and expect that it will have all the answers to all the questions we have, regardless of the topic or obscurity of thought.


So take questions on sex, debt, tattoos, smoking, dieting, leadership, pornography, etc. These are questions that we expect the Bible to answer. We have these things on our mind and we go through the Bible or type in a word search into biblegateway.com, and one of two things happen. 1) we get frustrated because the answers aren’t clear, or 2), or we get emboldened to extrapolate answers from bits and pieces of ideas that really were never designed to provide answers for us, which results in bad exegesis and ideas which go beyond the scope of what is actually written.


Why aren’t the answers front and center to those kinds of questions? Its because the Bible doesn’t just provide us with answers, but it changes the culture of the questions that we ask.  The answers aren’t always clear because when we read the scriptures, the Bible doesn’t push us to answer those kinds of questions. Rather, when we read the scriptures, we are prompted to ask different kinds of questions altogether. Questions like “Who will rescue me from this body of death, O wretched man that I am?” ” How can a man become right before God?” “Should we sin more so that grace may abound”? ” Who is my shield, my portion, my strength?”


The Bible wasn’t designed to answer all these relatively obscure questions we come to ask it, but rather the Scriptures actually informs and changes the very questions we ask. It pushes us to ask a whole separate kind of questions. The Bible talks about a lot of things, but it doesn’t give all its themes equal air time. Rather, the dominant message of the Bible is God loves and in Jesus justifies sinners. That framework functions as the lens by which every story, parable, historical happening, theological idea, person, miracle, act of God is read through and is purposed by. So as we read the Bible and study the world, we need to ask God to grip us by the radically disproportionate focus on God’s saving love for sinners, seen and accomplished in Jesus Christ,  up and against everything else.


Different kinds of questions. Different culture for the questioner.

			

	
	
	


			
				


			
				


	

		
And the winner is…………………!

				

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I want to thank everyone who entered and shared your thoughts with me about the scriptures and the wonderful hymns that I love and treasure. Ryan, you can send me an email at info@paperthinhymn.com [or facebook me] with your address and I’ll have it out sometime Wednesday afternoon.


To those who didn’t win, cheer up! I’m doing another contest in a month or so. September’s giveaway will more than likely be a bible leaf from the Book of Acts,  from the 1531 Latin Biblica Sacra, so you have that to look forward to.


Thanks everyone and God Bless!