This post is a report on the 2018 Midwest Regional Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. This year’s regional meeting was hosted by Grace Bible College, which is the flagship school of a small group of “dry” (i.e., anti-baptism), hyper-dispensational (a.k.a. mid-Acts dipsensational) churches. The college itself seemed to be doing well enough in terms of enrollment and finances. It has more of an ecumenical feel than might be expected, since most of the students are not from hyper-dispensational backgrounds. In fact, the college seemed like a typical contemporary small Christian college (about 300 on-campus students and 600 online students).

One of the things that struck me most about this conference, as well as with other recent ETS meetings, was the complete absence of a sense of battle, or of an “us” vs. “them” mentality. In the early days of the Evangelical Theological Society, much of its focus was on the struggle against theologically liberal Bible scholars and theologians. Papers stressed responses to critical attacks on the Bible and critical denials of biblical truth in archaeology, science, and theology. In today’s ETS, liberal Bible scholars are often referred to as if they are friends, though the reality is that they are enemies of the cross of Christ. This is both a result and a symptom of evangelical scholars adopting critical views of the Bible, and it includes both mainstream evangelical institutions and many traditionally fundamentalist institutions. To me, this is a great tragedy. First Corinthians 2:14 makes plain that unbelievers cannot understand the Bible correctly, because the Holy Spirit is needed to reveal spiritual truth. Furthermore, liberal-critical scholars are anti-Bible, anti-Christian, and anti-God. Commentaries, theology texts, and even lexicons and grammars that are written by the critics should be viewed with suspicion and used with caution; they should not be placed on the same level as books written by Bible-believers. There is also a general failure of fundamentalists to recognize and warn against the use of higher criticism in recent evangelical commentaries. I also find it disturbing when faculty from seminaries which do not allow women to teach the Bible to men on the basis of 1 Timothy 2:9-15 nevertheless use and recommend Bible commentaries written by women. The ETS is part of a general trend in evangelicalism to promote female seminary students, speakers, authors, and pastors; homosexuals will follow next. It appears to me that much of evangelical academia is sliding toward liberalism once again.

The main plenary speaker at the conference, Amos Yong of Fuller Theological Seminary, is an ordained minister in the Assemblies of God denomination. His topic was understanding the future of Pentecostal and evangelical theology, given the ongoing pentecostalization and charismatization of world Christianity. The number of charismatic Christians worldwide is higher than many may realize, since charismatics are not defined by a denominational label. For example, one-third of Roman Catholics consider themselves charismatics, or are practicing charismatics. It should be noted that “Pentecostal” and “charismatic” are labels which include both evangelical and non-evangelical groups.

Yong began by giving a brief overview of the origins and history of the Pentecostal and charismatic movements. Pentecostalism is comprised of three main historic streams:

1. Classic Pentecostalism originated in the early twentieth century, drawing on nineteenth century holiness movements, revival movements, prophecy conferences, and other streams of influence. Yet it was not a continuation of those movements, but was something different, and was rejected by all established churches. The denominations of Classic Pentecostalism trace their roots to the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles (1906-1915), although the origins of modern Pentecostalism go back to 1901. Classic Pentecostalism is largely a sociological category, as it includes both trinitarian and Oneness (unitarian) Pentecostals.
2. The period from about 1960 to the early 1970s saw the rise of large Neo-Pentecostal and charismatic movements. These movements were different from Classic Pentecostalism in that they occurred within denominations that were not historically Pentecostal. The “charismatic renewal” movement encompassed churches that were Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, and so forth. This movement was especially strong in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. But more conservative denominations rejected the charismatic movement.
3. The “third wave” of the Pentecostal movement arose in the mid-to-late 1970s, gained steam in the 1980s, and has continued to the present day. This was the rise of independent or non-aligned Pentecostal churches, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and South Asia. These churches were developed indigenously, not by missionaries, and they developed outside of denominational structures. They exhibit Pentecostal expressions, but often do not describe themselves as Pentecostal or charismatic. As independent churches, they vary widely, with many incorporating very aberrant doctrines and practices. The larger independent churches usually form a sort of denominational structure as they grow.

As for what the future holds, Yong thinks “Pent-evangelicalism” (the fusion of Pentecostalism with evangelicalism) is post-denominational and is heading toward a more individualistic spirituality, which is less institutionalized or label-based. Pentecostalism emphasizes an emotional “vibrancy” over “dead” orthodoxy. Pentecostalism has also had historic anti-intellectual tendencies, with its emphasis on mystical, spiritual encounter. However, the problem with Pentecostalism is that these are not merely different emphases, but are in fact different theologies which have developed in contradiction to biblical Christian belief. The detachment of Pentecostal practice from biblical orthodoxy can be expected to continue and even to go further in the future. Confessions and doctrinal statements have traditionally played less of a role in defining Pentecostal groups, which are mainly defined by relational associations and “apostolic” networks.

While I agree with Yong that the professing Christian church worldwide is dominated by Pentecostalizing and charismatizing influences, I am not sure the same is true among those who are actually saved. I expect a clearer distinction to develop in the future between left wing or mainstream evangelicalism and the right wing of evangelicalism. A more individualistic spirituality, disconnected from church tradition, will generally mean a departure from the gospel and from biblical truth—every man doing that which is right in his own eyes. Pentecostalism’s emphasis on the physical (e.g., healing) has led and will continue to lead to doctrinal perversions which view the church’s mission as bringing people health and wealth and happiness in this life, rather than bringing a message that will save men’s souls and guarantee them a future resurrection but does not promise physical comfort in this life.

Well-known theologian Millard Erickson presented a lecture on the future of evangelical theology. On the positive side, Erickson hopes that evangelicalism will develop a more robust theology of the ascension. Specifically, he is interested in the idea that the resurrection occurred in two stages—first, with Jesus’ body being resuscitated in some way for forty days, and then with this body being perfected and glorified (nail prints gone, overwhelming brightness) at the ascension.

On the negative side (from my perspective), there is a continuing weakening of the biblical doctrine of hell in evangelicalism (see the book I have written on this subject). Inclusivism is on the rise, as it has been since the 1990s; advocates include Clark Pinnock, John Sanders, J. I. Packer, and Billy Graham; and, from the nineteenth century, Augustus Hopkins Strong. Inclusivism is distinguished from universalism (the idea that everyone goes to heaven) and pluralism (the idea that all religions are valid), but it is close. This is the view that there are “moral pagans” who will go to heaven without ever believing the gospel (in contradiction of verses such as John 14:6; Acts 4:12; 10:42-43; Rom 10:9-15; 1 John 4:15). Inclusivism is not a new idea; many medieval theologians believed that Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle went to heaven, although they clearly did not worship the true God. Inclusivism gets pushed closer to universalism by theologians who are teaching the unbiblical doctrine of postmortem evangelism (see Heb 9:27). Other evangelical theologians are teaching annihilationism—the idea that unbelievers simply cease to exist when they die, rather than going to hell (in contradiction of passages which describe a judgment by works, degrees of punishment, and eternal torment). Some who do not follow inclusivism per se nevertheless argue that one has to believe very little about the gospel in order to be saved—thereby making virtually all professing Christians and many non-Christians saved, in contradiction of Jesus’ teaching about the way being narrow and few finding it (Matt 7:14). Among those who still believe that the Bible teaches eternal damnation in the lake of fire, many say that the pain of the lake of fire is merely or mainly emotional, not sensory. A denial of sensory torment contradicts every biblical description of the lake of fire and undermines the gospel, for then there would have been no need for Jesus to shed His blood to pay the price for sin—if the second death is merely emotional pain, Jesus did not have to die physically. Indeed, the reality of hell is a doctrine that goes to the heart of the Christian gospel, since the whole reason for the crucifixion was so that Christ would die for our sins in our place (1 Cor 15:3; 1 Pet 2:24). The gospel message is a call to accept Christ’s substitutionary death in order to be saved from God’s coming wrath (Rom 5:9; 1 Thess 1:10). If there is no literal, eternal hell, then the gospel message is false and Christianity makes no sense.

Timothy Miller of Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary gave a presentation which compared three series of guides to the Greek New Testament. For my purposes, the SIL Exegetical Summaries are the most useful.

1. The SIL Exegetical Summary Series is a reference tool designed for Bible translators. The NT volumes of this series are nearly complete, and two OT volumes have also been produced. This series is very helpful for summarizing information found in various standard lexicons, grammars, and commentaries. The authors make no evaluation of the different viewpoints, but merely present them. This series is best used in Accordance or Logos, which will link to the resources cited.
2. The B&H Exegetical Guide to the Greek New Testament (EGGNT) is designed mainly for pastors and Greek students. In some ways it is like a commentary that is focused on an analysis of the Greek text. This series is now available in Accordance.
3. The Baylor Handbooks on the Greek New Testament (BHGNT) are designed for Greek students and scholars, as a “prequel” to writing a commentary. The BHGNT authors are committed to a specific “new” and controversial approach to Greek grammar which is opposed to the category of deponency, and also to some of the traditional categories of the aorist. Each volume is strictly a presentation of the author’s own views, often without citing any other views. Thus, the BHGNT is significantly more strident in tone than the other series, although it often gives helpful grammatical information. Logos is currently the only Bible software program that sells the BHGNT, although only half of the print volumes are available electronically.

Kyle Dunham of Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary offered an analysis of the structure of Proverbs and suggested that the book was meant as an educational program for novice leaders in ancient Israel. Dunham’s paper was well-researched and insightful, although I think it relied too heavily on critical scholarship and became too technical at times for a book that was written more as art than science. For example, I objected to understanding the book as having seven divisions based on the seven pillars of wisdom, when chs. 25–29 were added by Hezekiah’s men well after the original composition of the book by Solomon.

Benjamin Espinoza presented the case that we need to start thinking about how evangelical theology will change as a result of the church becoming less white and less North American. This is indeed something that we should be thinking about, although many are not. From my view: (1) In some cases, new perspectives can be good, and may fix existing problems; in other cases, new perspectives represent an abandonment of truth. (2) Different cultural situations will call for different theological emphases, which is okay so long as the emphases do not become excesses. (3) It is overstating the case to assume that old-school white theologians will go extinct, or that the men they have trained in other cultures will abandon the foundation they were given.

Finally, Richard McLaughlin argued from both church history and biblical history that Christian spiritual renewal can still occur today. Over and over again, there have been great spiritual revivals which have seen many people saved and the church purified. The main precondition for revival is the awareness of God’s greatness and our sinfulness. Without this awareness, we do not see any need for revival. Revival is indeed sorely needed today, and I look forward to seeing how God will work in various places in future years to save and sanctify many.

This past Friday and Saturday I had the privilege of attending the Midwest regional meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in my hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. I made many new friends at the conference and attended a number of helpful and interesting sessions, several of which are summarized below.

The well-known eighty-three year old theologian Millard Erickson gave a presentation which reflected on the past eighty years of American evangelical theology. He calls the period from 1936 to 1947 “the period of consolidation,” after liberals had finally won out in all the major denominations and institutions, and evangelicals had been forced to start their own churches and institutions. Erickson labels the period from 1947 to 1983 as “the period of construction,” in which evangelical scholars made the case for evangelical theology, in opposition to liberal theology, by means of positive contributions. In spite of denominational differences, evangelicals largely presented a united front in their efforts. Erickson labels the period from 1983 to the present as “the period of controversy,” in which evangelical scholarship has fractured over many theological issues, and evangelicals have debated each other as much or more than the liberals. Erickson lists biblical inerrancy as the foremost debated issue in evangelicalism, followed by the issue of gender roles. With regard to the present day situation, Erickson noted that many major theologians have passed from the scene in recent years, especially on the evangelical left, and that so far there is no clear future leader on either side. He believes the discipline of theology has been weakened by the increasing specialization of academia, so that most scholars can only engage in one specific aspect of the overall discussion, and are not broadly competent across the entire discipline. Also, evangelicalism has become increasingly fractured; according to Erickson, scholars on the evangelical left often are exclusively interested in dialogue and partnership with liberal scholarship, to the exclusion of the evangelical right. Another aspect of the present day situation is the popularization of the discussion. Seminaries are closing or downsizing, resulting in fewer trained theologians, while the great rise in social media has led to much theologizing being done on blogs, Facebook, and other social media. Some popular evangelical blogs are written by people with little or no formal training, and as a result often contain glaring, amateurish errors. Erickson encouraged the scholars in the audience to engage more in social media. Finally, looking forward to the future of evangelical theology, Erickson noted that it appears evangelicals will increasingly have to fight merely to have a platform to communicate—in contrast to past generations, in which evangelical scholars simply argued for evangelical theological viewpoints against liberal theological viewpoints. He specifically flagged political correctness as a major problem for evangelicals, since political correctness attempts to restrict what is even allowed to be said or suggested before the case for it can be made. Erickson called for more unity among evangelicals, even as he described how his own church is likely going to split over the call of a female minister whom he is recommending to the congregation. Erickson’s final exhortation was to prepare to fight the next battle, not the last battle or even the current one. He thinks academia is shifting away from the current postmodernism back to a form of modernism.

Jacob Prahlow, a Ph.D. student at Saint Louis University, presented an interesting paper on the Christology of the book of Revelation. Whether one studies the Christological controversies of the early church, modern theology books, or even commentaries on Revelation, there is a surprising lack of attention to the Christology of the book of Revelation. In fact, Revelation is replete with strong affirmations of Jesus’ divinity (His humanity is also affirmed in 1:13; 5:9; 11:8; 14:14). Clear references to Jesus as “Lord” are found in 11:8, 17:14, 19:16, and 22:20-21, although John’s preferred term for Jesus is “the Lamb” (in accord with 5:6), and John frequently calls the Father “Lord” (κύριος) as the Greek representation of the Hebrew term “Yahweh.” The title “Alpha and Omega,” used of Jesus in 22:12-13, is given as a title for God alone in 1:8 and 21:6. Jesus’ title “The First and the Last” (1:17; 2:8; 22:13) parallels God’s title “The One who is and who was and who is to come” (1:8; cf. Isa 41:4; 44:6; 48:12). Revelation 19:13 calls Jesus “the Word of God,” a theologically loaded title which is an affirmation of divinity (cf. John 1:1). Jesus is twice called “King of kings and Lord of lords” (17:14; 19:16), which implies that He is sovereign over everything and everyone in all of creation. Revelation 19:10 and 22:8-9 explicitly prohibit worship of anyone but God alone, yet the book approves of worship of Jesus/the Lamb (5:8-13). Jesus determines which names are in the book of life (3:5; 13:18), which means that He controls the eternal destiny of all men—who enters the lake of fire (20:15), and who enters the New Jerusalem (3:12). In chs. 1–3, Jesus very clearly claims lordship over the churches, calls God His Father (2:27; 3:5, 21), calls Himself (among other titles) “the Son of God” (2:18), and issues extraordinary promises that only God could make. In ch. 5, the Lamb was the only One in all of heaven, earth, or the underworld who was found worthy to take the seven-sealed scroll out of the hand of God and break its seals. In ch. 19, it is Jesus (“The Word of God”) who returns to earth to execute God’s judgment on the beast, the false prophet, and all the wicked in the earth. The very first verse of Revelation affirms that Jesus Christ revealed the whole vision of the book to His servant John. The final scene in the vision shows “the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb” as the temple and the light source of the New Jerusalem (21:22-23). All in all, the book of Revelation is at least as strong as any other book of the New Testament in its affirmations of the divinity of Jesus.

Marcus Leman, a Ph.D. candidate at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, gave a very helpful presentation on the utility of the Masoretic accents in the Hebrew/Aramaic text of the Old Testament. The accents have three basic functions: to mark stressed syllables, to mark the melody to be sung for each word (when the text is cantillated), and to mark syntactical breaks in the verse. The latter function of the accents is similar to a modern system of punctuation, but is different in that each word is given its own “punctuation mark” (accent) in order to identify precise syntactic, clausal, and semantic units. Understanding the meaning of these accents not only aids reading comprehension, but also allows the exegete to pull ready-made structural outlines out of the Hebrew text by understanding which accents are subordinate to other accents in the verse. One Hebrew professor in attendance at the session said he wonders whether he has been teaching Hebrew wrong for the last forty years. Leman’s work was based on that of his professor Russell Fuller, whose book on Hebrew accents is due out later this year.

Tremper Longman III gave a presentation on Old Testament commentaries, especially the various commentary series that he has edited or otherwise been involved with. I must say that I have some significant theological and practical disagreements with Longman, such as his adherence to theistic evolution and his view that every book of the Bible except Nahum(?!) was redacted after it was originally written. Longman promoted the new Story of God commentary series he is editing for Zondervan, but what he said about it made me not want to buy the series. He bragged about how they had gone out of their way to find women to write commentaries in the series (just under half the commentaries are to be authored by women), and that they had also found a woman to be one of the series editors. He specifically said they wanted to have as few white male Americans as possible writing books in the series, though he evidently made an exception for himself. One positive observation Longman made was that modernist (i.e., post-Reformation) commentaries had the virtue of not accepting premodern interpretations of the text. Many allegorical interpretations of the biblical text that are found in the (generally later) church fathers are repeated over and over again in medieval commentaries. Many post-Reformation Protestant writers, by contrast, saw the text as their sole authority and interpreted it literally, discarding the junk of allegorical exegesis. I will say that I am seeing an increasing amount of allegorical interpretation at ETS meetings and in commentaries, though it is rarely called “allegorical.” Texts are often read in highly symbolic ways so as to convey something other than their face-value, literal meaning.

Michael Wittmer of Grand Rapids Theological Seminary gave an excellent presentation in which he argued (against books by David Platt, John Piper, and Joe Rigney) that Christians can serve Jesus with an ordinary profession, and that it is okay for Christians to enjoy non-sinful pleasures and the good things of this world. Rigney’s ongoing affirmation of panentheism is particularly troubling, but it is the natural theological outgrowth of what his side is recommending on a practical level.

Finally, Abraham Kuruvilla of Dallas Theological Seminary gave a very engaging presentation on the exegetical process by which a sermon should be formed. My main problem with Kuruvilla’s hermeneutical model is that it treats the literal meaning of the text as of secondary importance (as can be seen in his commentary on Genesis). Nevertheless, I expect Kuruvilla’s work to continue to gain recognition in the evangelical world.