Resources:
FREE EBOOK Theocast.org/primer
- Our podcast: Law/Gospel https://youtu.be/EMSfwPUuuVk
- Our podcast: Demands of the Gospel? https://youtu.be/VHUmO4eD8Lk
- Our podcast: Are You a Legalist or an Antinomian? https://youtu.be/xvGhu9Pc2LA
- Our teaching series: Covenant Theology https://youtu.be/iCfzmujnlHo
https://youtu.be/x-El9S9rlBk
Semper Reformanda Transcripts
Justin Perdue: Welcome to the Semper Reformanda podcast—first time we've ever said those words. Pretty exciting. We're excited to be able to have a conversation with you all. You are our friends, kind of our family, our team, our army, however we want to phrase that. We together have been changed and liberated by a theology that is quite old, that centers around the Lord Jesus Christ and what he has done for us, and we all are learning more and more all the time what it means to rest in Jesus. And so we're going to try to help each other do that in this podcast, and we're going to try to help other people do the same.
Today we're going to continue our conversation about leaving dispensationalism and I guess we'll tee it up with this, Jon. Like we say so often here at Theocast, if you are experiencing things in your Christian life, as you are maybe participating in evangelicalism in America or a similar context in the West, and you are thinking a lot of the things that are discussed on Theocast sometimes about the Calvingelical world and pietism, etc., all of that seems to be coming along with a dispensational perspective. I'm seeing some of this stuff, but I'm not sure if I'm seeing it the right way. Am I crazy? I think what we're saying to folks in part is that no, you're not crazy. And if you have seen a lot of dispensational ish stuff out there in the evangelical church, you probably are seeing some things correctly. And part of leaving that kind of broader evangelical context is leaving some of these dispensationalist notions behind as well. Is that a fair way to present it? Why don't you just riff on that a little bit?
Jon Moffitt: It is. The Facebook group has become the reason behind us wanting to start SR. So many people asking questions. There are those folks coming in and they don't want to debate, they don't want to fight; they're really baring their soul.
Justin Perdue: And God bless you for that.
Jon Moffitt: Yeah. Because you pulled on a thread and everything unraveled before your very eyes, and now you asked the question, which we did an entire podcast on: now what? Now what do I do? The whole internet has unraveled on me. This is kind of what was the design of this podcast, and we're going to probably say things a little bit more pointed here. And I will tell you for years, Justin and I have felt like cult leaders at our churches because when we talk about this theology, and we are preaching and teaching this, people really do struggle. They start to see these evangelical leaders who say things that are off; they're weird, they're random, and I will even say pietistic. And you want to ask yourself, why are they saying this? Why are they going this direction? The whole woke movement has been an interesting discovery for me of watching people's theology being played out. When a heavy enough wave comes, it tossed them. When Paul talks about not being tossed about by every wind of doctrine, the whole woke movement is a great example of being tossed about by a wave of doctrine, that when you are firmly seated in what we actually went through in this podcast—an understanding of the redemptive-historical understanding of Scripture, covenant theology, law-gospel, and ordinary means of grace—that comes, and I look at that and go, "Nope. That's not the Bible. That's not what we're supposed to focus on. That's not what transforms people."
Justin Perdue: So true. I can't help but think, and this is not the point of this podcast right now, but evangelicalism is characterized by one fad and one trend after another. Without fail, about every 18 months or so, there's some new big thing that has now come to the fore and you've got to get on the right side of this issue. And if you're not thinking the right way about this issue, then your Christian life is subpar at best. And that is an exhausting treadmill to just run on all the time. One of the things that the doctrine that we all confess and believe here, one of the things that it does ala Ephesians 4 is it grounds us and it makes us stable so that we're not just knocked here, there, and everywhere.
I'm tempted to riff on how some of the things that we talked about in the regular episode do ground a person, but I'll just pick one: the law-gospel distinction, for example. If you don't have a law-gospel hermeneutic, if you don't have that in your tool belt as a theologian, as a student of God's Word, you are literally going to get knocked on your backside constantly by things that you read in the New Testament. You're going to get knocked on your backside by things that come out of the mouth of Christ, because you are not going to be able to understand what Jesus is trying to do in so many of the things that he says to a group of Jewish people who think that they can achieve righteousness. He's trying to undo them. And if you don't have that law-gospel hermeneutic and that law-gospel paradigm in view, you're going to end up collapsing law and gospel, and you will have no assurance because you will see in the text a demand placed upon you that there's no way you can meet.
I want to tell a little anecdote just to illustrate a little bit of the "you're not crazy" and if I can say it, there are aspects of dispensational theology that are crazy and whack. I'll just front load it by saying this: in my time on staff at Capitol Hill Baptist Church, given my relationship at that point in time with Mark Dever, traveling with him, I was around a number of prominent evangelical guys pretty regularly for conferences, whether it's Together for the Gospel or Shepherds' Conference or whatever it may be. I had the opportunity to get to know John MacArthur a little bit over a period of years. John is an incredibly gracious and kind man. He is, I think, a much more humble, kind, and gracious man out of the pulpit than he seems to be in it sometimes. He was always very kind to me. I'm frontloading what I'm about to say with that—that this is not a personal indictment in any way.
I remember a time when John MacArthur was a guest preacher at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in DC. Just for framework, Capitol Hill, though it may not be exactly where we are on everything, is much closer to our end of the pool and certainly would not be dispensational in any way, but would lean more covenantal in its understanding of theology. And so MacArthur is a guest preacher on a Sunday morning, and he's going to preach Isaiah 53. And everybody knows that text. Even if you're brand new to the faith, you may know Isaiah 53, the passage about the suffering servant of the Lord and how he is going to be crushed for our iniquities. By his wounds were healed and by his righteousness, my servant will make many to be accounted righteous, he's going to bear our sins, all of these things. The apostles pick up on that over and over again in the New Testament that this is clearly about Jesus and what he did for us. So MacArthur's introduction to his message on Isaiah 53 began with something like this: "Most of you sitting here this morning probably think that Isaiah 53 is about Jesus. It's not. It's about Israel." There are a thousand people in the room. Everybody's looking around. As a staff, too, we're looking around at each other like, "What did he just say?" There's about to be a mass exodus up in here. About 800 people are about to walk out the door and just be done with this. He just literally said that this isn't about Christ but about Israel. But then the irony is that he then proceeded to preach a sermon that was about Jesus. It's like, "Hey, brother. In all humility and sincerity, what are you doing? Because you basically upset an entire room of people, and you said something that just patently falls on the face of it, that Isaiah 53 is not about Christ, that it's about Israel. But then you go on to preach Jesus. And by the time you get done, we're all in agreement with you. Why did you say what you said?" This is where dispensationalism or dispensational theology pushes a person. And it's insane.
Jon Moffitt: It is. Please hear us when we say we don't disrespect John MacArthur, John Piper, who... it's hard to know what John Piper is.
Justin Perdue: He's not so much a dispensationalist though he did write What Jesus Demands from the World, which is a collapsing of law and gospel.
Jon Moffitt: This is Semper Reformanda, so this is almost like education time. When you begin to look at theology of men that are not grounded on history—they don't know their church history, they don't know their confessions, they don't know their creeds, they don't know historical theology, like law-gospel distinction.
Justin Perdue: Or maybe they know maybe they know it but they disagree with it. Like Piper. He is aware of covenant theology and a covenant of works for example, but he would deny it.
Jon Moffitt: He would deny it. And because of that, they get thrown. They'll embrace some theological positions that are just... you start scratching your head.
Does a covenantal perspective, a law-gospel perspective, influence the way in which we read a text? Of course. 100%. And I think in a positive way, because it helps me get to the application of the text even faster because I have a framework—for instance, I believe God is sovereign so I read every text that way. I believe that there is a Trinity; I read every text that way. Because it helps you actually make the proper application of the text. If you just flop open your Bible and you start reading the part where God repents for making Israel and Moses is changing his mind, you would think that God is not all knowing and that He's not sovereign.
Justin Perdue: You would embrace open theism. Brief interjection. We do not, we cannot, and we must not read any texts in a vacuum as if it just stands on its own. That's not how God has revealed the Bible. Right. And it's not how He has revealed his plan of redemption. So stop doing that. And I'll just say this: any responsible theologian has to have some kind of an understanding of the whole of God's revelation if he's going to be faithful at all with any part of it. If we misunderstand the whole, we will do terrible things with the parts. And that's why at the most basic level, for me as a pastor, or for me here as a host of Theocast, one of the things that I am most concerned for people when it comes to reading and understand their Bibles, number one thing, is that they have an appropriate framework with which to view the entire thing, because if we can orient ourselves according to the Word with respect to what it is in its totality about, then we actually have a chance of going to the parts and pieces of it and making sense of them, and making up and down and heads and tails out of the thing. But if you have no idea what the point of the whole story is, how in the world are you going to get it right when you come to some passage in a history book in the Old Testament? All we're getting is a history of the kings of Israel and Judah. It's a carnage. It's a dumpster fire. What do I make of this? If you don't have a redemptive-historical view and a covenantal understanding and how God is going to actually save His people through the righteous son of David who is going to come and fulfill the law and represent the people, and how all of these other kings are failing, and as the king goes, the nation goes. If you don't have any of these things in your mind, you're not going to know what to do with that. The only thing you're gonna be able to do is moralize somebody's life, and that's not the point. That's a secondary application at best.
Jon Moffitt: I'm gonna use a couple of illustrations. We believe that God is a creator of all the world, and Christ is the creator and sustainer of the world. You read the Bible with that perspective. You read the Old Testament with the perspective of the New. I'll prove it to you. You all read the Old Testament knowing the New Testament's coming, so you read it with the lens of it. You're not wondering who the Messiah is going to be. Who's this promised seed? You know who the promise seed is, so you read that text and interpret it, knowing what's to come. And it's really important that you do that because if you don't, you can lose sight of what the actual meaning of the text is.
The Old Testament is very complicated at times because it's like a dark glass that has a lot of shadows going on. What's so helpful is that the New Testament comes and gives you the substance of what those shadows are. So we read it with that in mind when you read it with those lenses. What I get frustrated with sometimes is that dispensationalists are just going to say, "Well, I just believe whatever the Bible says." Well, okay, and we as covenantalists don't. We're weird Mormons. I don't mean to be a jerk, but yes, we do too. Everybody reads it with the theological system.
Justin Perdue: Everybody has a system.
Jon Moffitt: That's right. I'm just gonna read this text. I'm gonna take it at face value. Whatever the text says, that's what I'm going to believe. You can't do that with any kind of literature, for any time period, for any reason, because there's nothing that is written—unless it's a tiny little book that's like five paragraphs long and you know what the title of the book is—but there's nothing that's written of substance, of meaning, and you can take one section and pull it out and make the application from it, separating it from the whole. The individual books and individual passages cannot have its strength and power separated from the rest of Scripture. This is why all Scripture is inspired and must be interpreted with all in perspective.
Justin Perdue: To your point, there are different genres within Scripture and there's different kinds of language used within Scripture. For example, whenever the objection is raised by a dispensationalist, whether they're talking about eschatology or some other matter of doctrine is irrelevant, but they'll say they are just trying to take the Bible literally. Like you just said, "I'm just taking the Bible literally." Implication: you as a Reformed covenantal guy are not. I don't think that's true. I'm aiming to take it just as seriously as you are. I'm just trying to faithfully understand what's there. So for example, what I will use—the illustration I use all the time—somebody said, "I'm just trying to take the Bible literally." I'm like, "Okay. Well, you've read John 10. Jesus in that text says, 'I am the door.' How do you understand that?" And they're like, "He means that he's the way through which people would enter into salvation." Exactly. What is that? That's metaphorical language.
Jon Moffitt: Can I interject there? In John 6, that's exactly what they did. They took his words literally: drink my blood, eat my flesh. And they're like, "He's teaching cannibalism."
Justin Perdue: And he's not. He's pointing people to the fact that he is our spiritual sustenance and nourishment. He's a fulfillment of the manna in that sense. Obviously, too, he's pointing to his fulfillment of the Passover and the institution of the Lord's Table. All of that is in view, and that is the right way to understand the words of Christ in John 6. You will do insane things with the Scripture if you come to it with this very intellectually lazy approach of "it just says what it says". Yes, it does. But it's very clear, if you read the apostolic pattern in the New Testament, that they see things in the words that have a greater meaning. It's not a secret. It's not a trick. It's not some code that we got to unlock. It's reasons set on fire by the Spirit of God, and God has given us what we need to know in His word. And if we interpret Scripture with Scripture, we can arrive at these conclusions. And we stand on the shoulders of the saints who have come before us who have ironed a lot of stuff out, and we are just confessing and teaching the faith once for all delivered to the saints.
Jon Moffitt: Right. I think we have to remember that the goal here is not to be right and shoot down the enemy. The dispensationalists are not our enemy. Can I just say that loudly? They're not our enemy.
Justin Perdue: Please do. From the rooftops.
Jon Moffitt: That would mean to say anybody that we disagree with is not our enemy. I know of dispensationalists who treat people that way and it breaks my heart. Listen, we have one God, one faith, and one gospel.
Justin Perdue: There are Reformed types who do that, too.
Jon Moffitt: Oh man. The Reformed are sometimes the meanest. Y'all just need to take a chill pill and come back tomorrow.
The goal of this podcast is not to mow everybody down and explain why everybody's wrong. I mean, the question is why do we not promote a dispensational perspective? I'm going to say this: they're not heretical. Now there has been heretical teaching in the past that's been rejected. There's only one gospel and only one way of salvation; that other way has been rejected and I'm thankful that it has been. And that's to say that not every covenant theologian hasn't taught things that are a little eyebrow raising. To say that old covenant theologians have always got it correct—we're going to say no. There are times where they have wavered from historic theology, which, again, is why I go back. Justin and I find so much comfort in the confessions and the creeds because these have been handed down and accepted by the church by and large, and this is what orthodoxy is based upon. I will tell you right now, they may not embrace the confessions, but dispensationalists are held to orthodoxy because of the confessions. What I mean by that is a moment that a dispensationalist starts to reject that which has been handed to us and is a watermark of orthodoxy- the nature of Christ, the nature of the gospel, the nature of God, any of those things—you start rejecting that, and you will be booted from evangelicalism.
Justin Perdue: In part, that's because even evangelicals, as atheological as they may or may not be, evangelicals by definition are creedal Christians and that they would affirm the ancient creeds—the Orthodox doctrines of the church in that sense—and evangelicalism, even if it's not self-consciously confessional, has in some way, shape, or form been influenced by confessions that were produced in the era of the Reformation, because that's where Protestantism and thereby evangelicalism hails from.
There's a lot of remnants of stuff out there, which is why you end up hearing stuff that sounds schizophrenic because you hear stuff that's on the one hand, right, and on the one hand, true. But then, the very next sentence or the very next paragraph seems contradictory. I know for me, Jon, and I know that you feel the same, a lot of the exercises we go about doing is aiming to present these things consistently, not because we're trying to win arguments, but because our Christian lives are at stake here, our assurance, rest, and peace are at stake here, how we view the nature of our sanctification and all of that stuff is at stake. We're trying to save people's Christian lives in that regard.
Jon Moffitt: Rest. We want you to rest in Christ. I tell my church that if you rest in Christ, you're going to have more energy to obey Christ. If you're trying to find rest in Christ, you have no energy left to obey him. Because he says, "Come unto me, for I am gentle and lowly, and I will give you rest. For my yoke is easy, my burden is light." What you are speaking of is that once you find your confidence and you can finally just rest from earning favor, you now have the energy to love God and love your neighbor effectively as 1 Peter 1 and following says. Because you're not resting in the gospel, you are ineffective, because you're not loving, and you're not holy—holiness meaning reflecting the nature of God, not holiness and its nature. These are really important categories.
Just to go back, redemptive-historical, covenantal, law-gospel, sanctification, ordinary means. It's what I would call the armor of God. It's that bumper; it protects you from falling off one side or the other into theological despair.
Justin Perdue: Yeah. It's your lifeblood, and it is inextricably linked to the rest that you were talking about a minute ago. And I think it's an important observation—the one that you made. If you are clinging to a redemptive-historical understanding, a covenantal understanding, law-gospel distinction, ordinary means, all the things that we were talking about, and even a monergistic understanding of sanctification, then your objective and the project of your Christian life is no longer to chase after your standing before the Lord, because you can actually just rest in it and then love others.
I think what you said is profound, and I want to repeat it for our listeners to hear, because inevitably, if you are chasing after your status before God, you will inherently be self-focused. Because everything that you are doing, you are doing for your own sake to earn something, or to secure your place, to make yourself feel more assured or whatever it may be. I'm not saying that your motivations are completely selfish, but there is an inherent self-interest that's baked into that cake. Because even as I'm seeking to discipline myself or love other people, I'm doing that to prove that I'm legit. And it's all about me proving myself rather than it being Christ has done everything that I need, and now I really am at peace and at rest, and I can concentrate and focus on loving other people and in loving the Lord. I'm going to use these words: I can focus now on obedience and doing good works and practicing righteousness because I'm free to do that.
And this is why—another podcast for another day, I suppose—that the whole charge of antinomianism to me is absurd because it's not at all what we're promoting or advocating. We're advocating actually the pursuit of holiness, righteousness, obedience, and good works, but we're advocating for it from this place and from this perspective. And we would argue that it's actually at the level of pragmatism; it just works better.
Jon Moffitt: We literally could talk for another hour. Things at the Semper Reformanda will begin to change. One of the things we're going to start doing is giving you instructions on help on how to do your small groups. We are formulating those now. We are training our leaders. Those of you who want to be leaders, you can go to the membership section of the website and you can see the applications there. We are formulating the groups locally and online. It is a bear and a beast to pull this off. It's insane that we would even think that it's possible nor attempt this. For those of you who want to help these poor pastors who are pulling their hair out and growing gray beards faster than we want. Mine's so gray, it matches into my face. Anyways, we're so excited. We have no idea how we're going to do this other than it's necessary, and we are trying to get as many people involved as we can, because we want to see people rest in Christ. We want to see you rest in Christ. We want to see people change and so that they no longer live in fear. That's our true desire.
Justin Perdue: You're not crazy, but we might be. So help us. Please.
I look forward to having another conversation with our people, with our team, with our army, the Semper Reformanda again next week. We thank you so much, guys, for your love and support. We're excited about this new chapter or this new phase of Theocast and this new ministry. We pray it's a blessing to you.
That's really all we got. Grace and peace.
