Month: January 2011

I have apparently offended a weaker set of brothers. Since the offense occurred on-line, perhaps an on-line mea culpa is in order. The problem though, as is usually the case with weaker brothers, is that these brothers don’t think they are weaker. They think I am.

My error happened during a discussion of what sort of actions are just or fitting regarding one’s membership in a Presbyterian communion. Tim Keller’s own understanding of justice was the basis for thinking not only about what Christians might owe to their neighbors but also their fellow brothers, sisters, and overseers in the Reformed faith.

The comments progressed and the along came the Baylys with their big foot on the matter of abortion. Tim, I believe, intervened with his usually loving touch:

Fifty comments by the most eminent among us filled out with accolades from their admirers and nary a word about the 1,300,000 unborn children slaughtered on our doorsteps, blood running in our gutters and bones in our dumpsters year after bloody year, decade after obscene decade.

When the question of conflict with the civil magistrate is brought up, examples are sodomites, Palestinians, African Americans, and Third Reich Jews.

Not a word about the unborn. Not a word about the greatest injustice in the history of man.

Well over a billion victims felled by this bloody oppression and neither Darryl Hart nor The Prince can quite remember it. The murders are carried out on their doorsteps day after day, many by souls in their congregations, but in a discussion of justice and civil disobedience, that particular injustice doesn’t quite make the cut. It’s not in their memory bank. It doesn’t tug at their minds or hearts.

Now here is the offense, apparently, though Tim (Bayly, that is) never specified the precise error (or sin?). I was carrying on a conversation about justice. The specific context was the justice that Presbyterians owe other Presbyterians. And my failure was not to mention the slaughter of innocents.

If I apply what Paul writes about weaker brothers in Romans 14, I need to start from the perspective that speech is itself not unclean. Paul writes in 14:20 that nothing is unclean in itself. That means that I was not wrong to speak. The further implication of Paul’s assertion is that speaking or writing about justice is also not unclean (two negatives adding up to the positive of “clean”). So far, I think I’m okay.

But then along comes Tim and says that to speak without mentioning abortion, or to speak about Presbyterian justice without mentioning the slaughter of innocents, is unclean. His explanation was that he “found instructive . . . the absence of any discussion of abortion.” But since Tim has gone on record and declared 2k to be deserving of anathemas, he would seem to think that the discussion at Old Life was more than instructive. It was wicked.

The implication here is that Tim and David are like the weaker brothers in Romans and Corinthians who could not bear to watch other Christians eat meat offered to idols. They actually do what Paul professedly forbids: they declare something good (a conversation about Presbyterian justice) to be evil; and they judge other Christian brothers for not mentioning abortion even though Paul says we should not judge each other for either talking about abortion or not mentioning it: “Let not him who eats (talks about abortion) despise him who abstains (silence about abortion), and let not him who abstains (silence) pass judgment on him who eats (talks); for God has welcomed him. Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls” [3-4].

John Murray has a very helpful essay on Romans 14 that explains the logic of Paul’s instruction and also elaborates the enmity that often afflicts the weaker brother. First, on the nature of the weakness:

While it is true that there is nothing unclean of itself; it does not follow that all have the knowledge and faith and strength to use all things. In this matter of conduct we have not only to consider the intrinsic rightness of these usable things but also the subjective condition or state of mind of the person using them. There is not in every person the requisite knowledge or faith. Until understanding and faith have attained to the level of what is actually true, it is morally perilous for the person concerned to exercise the right and liberty which belong to that person in Christ Jesus. The way of edification is not that conduct should overstep the limits of knowledge and faith or to violate the dictates of conscience, but for conscience to observe the dictates of understanding and faith. “Whatsoever is not of faith is sin.” The believer must always act out of consciousness of devotion to Christ and when he cannot do that in a certain particular he must refrain from the action concerned. We must remember that although nothing is unclean of itself; yet to him that reckoneth it to be unclean to him it is unclean. To use other terms, we must remember that though things are indifferent in themselves the person is never in a situation that is indifferent. Things are indifferent but persons never.

In which case, if the Baylys really are weak, their weakness comes from an insufficient understanding of the faith or ignorance. And what goes with this is often a sense of moral superiority. The remedy for this, according to Murray, is further instruction in the faith:

The weak must ever be reminded that their censorious judgment with respect to the exercise of liberty on the part of the strong is a sin which the Scripture condemns. “Let not him that eateth not judge him that eateth: for God hath received him.” “Who art thou that judgest the servant of another? To his own Lord he stands or falls. Yea, he shall be made to stand; for the Lord is able to make him stand” (Rom. 14:3, 4). The censorious judgment in which the weak are so liable to indulge is just as unequivocally condemned as is the contempt to which the strong are too prone. And with such condemnation there is the condemnation of the self-righteousness that so frequently accompanies such censoriousness.

Now, it could be that I am really the weaker brother. It could be that I do not fully understand how I need to mention abortion in every conversation. But if this were the case, is the treatment that I receive from the loving and pastoral words of the Baylys really the way that the stronger should bear with the weaker? Rebukes are one thing, but ridicule? Wouldn’t censoriousness, in fact, be the give away on which brother is weak or strong or whether both brothers are weak?