Death in the Pot

Open Door Community Church is in the Little Rock area, and is pastored by an open homosexual, as you can see. If you scroll down on their front page just a bit, you can see the enthusiastic endorsement of that church from Peggy Campolo, wife of Tony Campolo. If you look here, you can see Brian McLaren in the course of his visit to that church.

Now if you look in the comments section of the recent post “More to Being Reformed Than Believing in Jesus and Smoking Cigars,” you will see (our good friend) David Bahnsen’s take on when the use of satire is appropriate. He has no problem with it when we are dealing with out-and-out unbelievers and secularists, but does not believe it is appropriate when dealing with fellow believers.

But this lands us right back in the Auburn Avenue definitional difficulties. Define believer. If you believe in the objectivity of the covenant, as I do, then these people are in the covenant. They are covenant-breakers, and they are the kind of people who in the Old Testament would receive fierce visits from prophets bringing a covenant lawsuit against them. And the words used in such a visit — polemic, challenge, rebuke, preaching, and satire — are not banished by the terms of the new covenant.

I am no kind of baptist, as my federal vision opponents well know. But if there were a corollary to the expansion of the objective boundaries of the covenant, and the corollary was that we had to leave impudent and over-the-top sin like this alone, then no, thanks. Deal me out. I’d rather be a baptist. I’d rather be a faithful sectarian than an unfaithful churchman.

But this is a false alternative. It is possible to be a faithful churchman. Being in the new covenant does not mean that you cannot be a high-handed covenant breaker. And it does not mean that covenant-keepers are somehow prevented from pointing out what is going on — with all appropriate adjectives involved. Although one of my critics could not see this in my review of McLaren’s book, it was quite apparent to those who know how to read these signs where he (McLaren) was going. Well, now he is openly there.

That being the case, does anyone seriously think that Tony Campolo and Brian McLaren and others like them will suddenly feel that the broader evangelical world is unwilling to identify with them at all? That the book deals will dry up? That the speaking invitations will all go away? To ask the question is to answer it, which is to say, ha.

Now this is how it lands us back in the federal vision stuff. If you apply David’s rule, you have to apply it as a baptist or as an objective covenant guy. If you do the former, then you can go after McLaren and Campolo on obvious grounds — they are not Christians, and this is why you can have at them. If they were Christians, they would not be endorsing sodomy as somehow “within the pale.” This solves the problem (for conservative baptists) of lesbian Eskimo bishops, but it leaves them with the problems of genuine sectarianism — they successfully excised the skin cancer on the knuckles by cutting off the whole right arm. They get rid of problems like this, but they also cut themselves off from vast numbers within the healthy church.

But if you apply the rule as an objective covenant guy, then the whole thing becomes a vehicle of compromise. As the pressure to expand our ecumenical cooking increases, there needs to be an assistant to the prophet (me), looking over the rim of the kettle in which we are cooking our ecumenical stew, whose job it is to cry out, “There is death in the pot!”

As the evangelical church continues to disintegrate, it is most necessary that federal vision advocates be in the forefront of identifying immoralities, follies, rebellions, stupidities, blasphemies, and monkeyshines. If that does not happen, and happen on a prophetic basis, all the good that the federal vision promises will be squandered.