Category: Standards

To Drink, Or Not to Drink

~ Bob Hayton ~ 9 Comments

I was swept away (again), into a fundamentalist feud over alcoholic drink. My ears perked up when I came across a humorous post on teetotaling. I figured that the issue was a current hot button topic at Sharper Iron, and so I went digging.

Turns out, Shelton Smith (The Sword of The Lord) and Robert Sumner (The Biblical Evangelist) rival editors of influential fundamentalist periodicals, have both recently decried a new book from BJU press on the alcohol question. I haven’t read Randy Jaeggli’s book The Christian and Drinking: A Biblical Perspective (he’s a prof at BJU), but from what I am reading at Sharper Iron, he defends an abstentionist position in a biblically defensible way. He is careful with the text and so believes Jesus actually drank alcoholic wine, albeit perhaps with less punch then is available today.

His honest treatment of Scripture is too much for the hard line fndamentalists to swallow. They view his book as only doing lip service to a temperance policy. The alarm must be sounded.

So I’ve had my nose in a few threads over at Sharper Iron, discussing this hot issue. I’m not so much discussing the book, as the merits of a moderationist position. You can find my position outlined in this forum post. And I detail the different discussion thread links, in a forum post over at our own Transformed by Grace forum site.

I’ve had quite a few interesting posts concerning wine on my blog in years past.   Click on the wine cateogory for the full list, but here are a few of my favorites:

John Piper on Entertainment's Danger to Our Souls

~ fundyreformed ~ 2 Comments

John Piper gives some excellent thoughts on why he doesn’t have a TV. This is not a rule he enforces on others, nor is he asking everyone to ditch their TV. But all of us should consider the important warnings he offers regarding the effect tv and movies can have on our souls. Read the entire article, but I’ve provided an excerpt from the meatiest part below.

I think relevance in preaching hangs very little on watching movies, and I think that much exposure to sensuality, banality, and God-absent entertainment does more to deaden our capacities for joy in Jesus than it does to make us spiritually powerful in the lives of the living dead. Sources of spiritual power””which are what we desperately need””are not in the cinema. You will not want your biographer to write: Prick him and he bleeds movies.

If you want to be relevant, say, for prostitutes, don’t watch a movie with a lot of tumbles in a brothel. Immerse yourself in the gospel, which is tailor-made for prostitutes; then watch Jesus deal with them in the Bible; then go find a prostitute and talk to her. Listen to her, not the movie. Being entertained by sin does not increase compassion for sinners.

There are, perhaps, a few extraordinary men who can watch action-packed, suspenseful, sexually explicit films and come away more godly. But there are not many. And I am certainly not one of them.

I have a high tolerance for violence, high tolerance for bad language, and zero tolerance for nudity. There is a reason for these differences. The violence is make-believe. They don’t really mean those bad words. But that lady is really naked, and I am really watching. And somewhere she has a brokenhearted father.

I’ll put it bluntly. The only nude female body a guy should ever lay his eyes on is his wife’s. The few exceptions include doctors, morticians, and fathers changing diapers. “I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I gaze at a virgin?” (Job 31:1). What the eyes see really matters. “Everyone who looks at a woman to desire her has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). Better to gouge your eye than go to hell (verse 29).

Brothers, that is serious. Really serious. Jesus is violent about this. What we do with our eyes can damn us. One reason is that it is virtually impossible to transition from being entertained by nudity to an act of “beholding the glory of the Lord.” But this means the entire Christian life is threatened by the deadening effects of sexual titillation.

All Christ-exalting transformation comes from “beholding the glory of Christ.” “Beholding the glory of the Lord, [we] are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Whatever dulls the eyes of our mind from seeing Christ powerfully and purely is destroying us. There is not one man in a thousand whose spiritual eyes are more readily moved by the beauty of Christ because he has just seen a bare breast with his buddies.

But leave sex aside (as if that were possible for fifteen minutes on TV). It’s the unremitting triviality that makes television so deadly. What we desperately need is help to enlarge our capacities to be moved by the immeasurable glories of Christ. Television takes us almost constantly in the opposite direction, lowering, shrinking, and deadening our capacities for worshiping Christ.

One more smaller concern with TV (besides its addictive tendencies, trivialization of life, and deadening effects): It takes time. I have so many things I want to accomplish in this one short life. Don’t waste your life is not a catchphrase for me; it’s a cliff I walk beside every day with trembling.

TV consumes more and more time for those who get used to watching it. You start to feel like it belongs. You wonder how you could get along without it. I am jealous for my evenings. There are so many things in life I want to accomplish. I simply could not do what I do if I watched television.

The Bible on Hair Care

~ fundyreformed ~ 5 Comments

No, I haven’t yet found a Biblical defense for using Pert’s Plus. I’m talking about what the Bible says about hair length.

This may be a surprise to you, but listen to what Paul says in 1 Cor. 11:14-15.

Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair it is a disgrace for him, but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For her hair is given to her for a covering.

What do we do with this teaching? In my fundamentalist upbringing, we had hair rules, and for us guys: hair check. If our hair was getting anywhere near our shirt collar or ear lobes, we would be in trouble. Demerits and/or detention would come in a hurry!

It’s easy to discount such standards as tomfoolery. Along with the head covering that 1 Cor. 11 refers to, we can easily contextualize this command as appropriate for Corinthians only. But are we doing justice to Paul’s appeal to “nature” here?

This is the question that a bunch of reforming fundamentalists and I have been addressing in one of our forum topics over at our new group site: Transformed by Grace. The discussion has avoided hard and fast extra Biblical rules, and has been quite profitable. Let me share one small quote, out of several I gave in the discussion. This is from Tom Schreiner in the book Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (Crossway):

Paul’s point, then, is that how men and women wear their hair is a significant indication of whether they are abiding by the created order. Of course, what constitutes long hair is often debated–what is appropriately masculine or feminine in hairstyle may vary widely from culture to culture.

I agree. On this point, I concluded with the following:

I do think women’s hair should be generally long, and men’s generally short. There is some room for varying styles and cultural fashions, but I do think today many of the short, short hairstyles worn by women are both non-attractive, and not glorifying to God.

What do you think? Does the Bible deal with our hair care? What about hairstyles today, is everything neutral or a-moral? Should a Christian look to the Bible before they run to a hairdresser? Please join the discussion in the comments here, or visit the Transformed by Grace forum on the question.

One last point: the Biblical view of a distinction between the genders being reinforced by our dress is also taught in Deut. 22:5. I dealt with that passage (often misused to condemn all women who wear pants) in an earlier post.

Fundamentalist Profundity

~ fundyreformed ~ 10 Comments

Pastor Steve Anderson is the embodiment of almost everything extreme about independent fundamental Baptists. It seems he enjoys posting his often abrasive and extreme preaching as a series of video clips on Youtube.

I’ve posted a jaw-dropping clip of his before, and this one almost tops that. In it he defends the notion that Jesus actually wore pants, not the middle eastern style robe that the rest of us thought he wore.

I thought it might be fitting to post this on April Fools’ Day. It reveals ignorance more than the Biblical notion of the word “fool”. I do pray God will reveal to this pastor the error of his ways and help him.

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.804431&w=425&h=350&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]

more about “Jesus wore pants, not a dress!!! IFBx…“, posted with vodpod

Long Pants, Basketball, and Modesty in the News

~ fundyreformed ~ 21 Comments

Recently, ESPN.com highlighted a small Christian school that required their boys to wear pants, when playing basketball [HT: Seth McBee]. For a couple years when I was in high school, I encountered the same thing. Check out Seth’s post, or the original ESPN article for the entire interview, as I’m sure many of my readers will have had some firsthand experience with this kind of standard. Let me give an excerpt from the interview, and then my own reflection that I shared at Seth’s blog.

reporter: Please forgive my ignorance on this point, but is there a specific verse of the Bible that addresses this?

school principal: There is, but I’d have to look it up — I don’t have it handy, but it’s definitely in Scripture. And I don’t know if you know this, but our girls’ basketball team dresses in skirts. [And the school’s cheerleading squad wears long skirts.]

reporter: From a layman’s standpoint, it seems like maybe you’d want the girls to wear pants as well, so they wouldn’t show any skin. But I’m guessing you don’t want the girls wearing pants or dressing the same as the boys, right?

school principal: Yeah, because the Bible says there should be a separate distinction between a man and a woman in terms of their apparel, so that’s what it’s all about.

Okay, some are laughing right now. Some can’t imagine this. But the sense of loyalty to the standards of a strict fundamentalist school is quite strong. Consider my own reflections (shared at Seth’s blog).

That brings back memories for me! I was one of those long-pants-ers.

Our school ran about 50-70 or so and we had a very low budget, so we bought uniforms but didn’t order the shorts. The plan was to order them a few years later, or so we were told. So we played in warm-up pants.

But because of this we were able to play one or two other schools that would not play against any team that did not wear pants. We did have a cheer-leading squad and their skirts went down to the knee or below.

We were independent fundamental Baptists, not charismatics.

Looking back on it, we sure looked stupid. And they were uncomfortable.

The college I went to did not allow men to wear shorts except for in the gym, pretty much. Women had to wear skirts/dresses all the time (even in the dorms). And no, there is no verse in scripture about the shorts thing.

There was even a time I wouldn’t wear shorts in the dorm because I just wasn’t sure whether it was sinful or not to wear them.

Boy, God has brought me a long way! And opened my eyes to His grace along the way.

[Just] thought I’d just share my perspective on this interesting story!

Anyone else have any memories about anything similar to this?