Does My Local Church Have the Authority to Contradict George Whitefield?

Published on by D. G. Hart

A recent survey indicated that 90 percent of evangelicals think the local church has no authority to declare whether a person is a believer. The responses from evangelical leaders indicated that upwards of 90 percent of those with authority in the church think the church has authority. Go figure. Here are a few of the responses (and notice the failure to invoke the “keys of the kingdom”):

Jesus charged the church with responsibility for its members. Those who are not behaving as Christians are to be held accountable, and the ultimate form of accountability is church discipline where someone who refuses to repent of known sin is removed as a member. J. Carl Laney, Bible professor, Western Seminary

Of course the local church has this authority. This is actually its responsibility, and it is exercised by every congregation that requires a credible profession of faith for membership—though the church cannot declare this with eternal certainty. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Many U.S. evangelicals think not. But historically, the church clearly has the right to say someone is not living in harmony with the gospel and to separate from them. And if being a Christian includes membership in the community of faith, then this does call their salvation into question. Brad Harper, Bible and theology chair, Multnomah University

As glad as I was to see these responses even if no one appealed to the keys — Protestants wonder how Peter could have monopolized them when he had so little to write for holy writ — I had to wonder how these evangelical leaders would have responded to George Whitefield’s sermon “The Kingdom of God” where he asserted:

The kingdom of God, or true and undefiled religion, does not consist in being of this or that particular sect or communion. . . . Again, as the kingdom of God does not consist in being in this or that sect, so neither does it consist in being baptized when you were young. . . . take care that you do not make a Christ of your baptism . . . . [N]either does [the kingdom] consist in being orthodox in our notions, or being able to talk fluently of the doctrines of the Gospel.

Say what you will about Whitefield and the qualifications he tried to make, his understanding of the new birth pulled the plug on the work of the institutional church — church membership, sacraments, and catechesis, for starters. So when will evangelical leaders understand that in backing the new birth outlook of a Whitefield or a Billy Graham, where church membership, doctrine, ceremonies are merely external matters that don’t fathom the import and depth of internal realities, they have sown the seeds of the laity’s disregard of church leaders?

12 thoughts on “Does My Local Church Have the Authority to Contradict George Whitefield?”

  1. It’s interesting to see the Mt. Tabor rivalry mentioned alongside SBTS. I didn’t know that Brad Harper counted as an eeeeevangelical leader. If his partnership w/ certain Multnomah Seminary profs is any indication, then the only place he is leading evangelicals is into watered-down Neo-orthodoxy.

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  2. My church does, don’t know about the other people who have eyeballs which these pixels currently are now hitting. (I’ve only met two other people in the flesh in these interwebs, hence the following signoff..)

    Yo.

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  3. Read that big bio on Whitefield a few years ago

    it could have been called “John Wesley is a ******* ******* **********!!”

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  4. So when will evangelical leaders understand that in backing the new birth outlook of a Whitefield or a Billy Graham, where church membership, doctrine, ceremonies are merely external matters that don’t fathom the import and depth of internal realities, they have sown the seeds of the laity’s disregard of church leaders?

    I’m voting for never. Evangelicals are good at the internals. Most of them can preach emotionally and whip up the crowd. Many of them can can do some very good exegetical preaching and call the heart to the repentance. But right across the street from their church is some gorgeous Catholic church with a semi-professional chorus maybe Gregorian vespers, incense and far better costumes. Next to that is a Methodist or Episcopalian congregation that can come close to the Catholic church. In the big city there is a Hindu temple nearby with golden statues, monks, music, meditative rites that last for hours and often really really good food.

    They get their butt whipped when it comes to externalities. They beat you guys, but… Either the emotions are the trump suit, or their hand is beat.

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  5. I’m voting for never.

    Good answer, since eeevangelicalism doesn’t exist.

    the central claim of Deconstructing Evangelicalism is precisely to question the statistics and scholarship on evangelicalism. The reason is not simply to be perverse or provocative. Good reasons exist for raising questions about whether something like evangelicalism actually exists.

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  6. The CT survey is probably a good measure to determine how steeped in revivalism/evangelicalism a person is. I’ll have to give it to my session.

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  7. Does water baptism grant regeneration (when would one find such in the teachings of the WCF on regeneration?) Is joining a particular church (and only that particular church) the means for joining the Kingdom of Heaven?

    Did Whitefield ever believe that membership in a particular visible church meant one had membership in the invisible church? Did he not believe that no one visible church exhausted the true church on earth?

    Given that Whitefield preached to people who had been baptized, and were nominal members of nominally Christian churches (of various denominations) it is quite clear that he was seeking to have them put their faith in Christ and His finished work, rather than in rites.

    Frankly, you sound like you are arguing for the Federal Vision position.

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  8. Roy Miller, you are aware that orthodox Presbyterians in North American and Scotland opposed Whitefield for his indiscriminate remarks, aren’t you?

    Federal Vision or Westminster Confession?

    The visible church, which is also catholic or universal under the gospel (not confined to one nation, as before under the law), consists of all those throughout the world that profess the true religion; and of their children: and is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, the house and family of God, out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation.

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  9. uh oh, another kook calls DGH federal vision on here…

    i guess i might have to start re-evaluating my blind following of DGH…..

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  10. Pingback: Today in Blogworld 11.12.14 - Borrowed Light

  11. @AB

    I think DgH has an excellent point in Deconstructing Evangelicalism that “Evangelical” especially when applied by groups other than Barna doesn’t tell you much of anything about their theology. What it tells you a lot about is their voting patterns and opinions on most public issues: especially if you control for race, economic status, education and age. It is a great variable for sociology, pollsters, political scientists. Just not particularly useful for theology in a more limited sense. Which is somewhat misleading.

    In a broader sense I think the attack on Evangelical as a label comes from not understanding the breadth of other forms of Christianity in America. Your typical OPCer might be horrified by the diversity of evangelicals but once you broaden out to mainline Christianity the diversity is much larger. For example I have a minister friend (Methodist) who is to my left on biblical authenticity. I have lots of friends who consider themselves solid Christians that have no idea how absolutely non-Christian their theology is. For example one of them said to me (for lurkers I’m a materialists) that, “I think everyone would agree that we are spirits trapped in the delusions created by our minds and matter”.

    a) That she doesn’t have believe in sin as being the cause of our fall but rather embodiment
    b) She thinks that doctrine is Christian and what Jesus saves us from.
    c) And that’s just to add that she doesn’t understand that I (and other atheists) don’t believe in spirits at all, that we are mind and matter. So no that’s not something I would agree with.

    Whatever problems OPC / PCAers have with evangelicals IMHO comes from them not understanding the spread that actually exists in America much less the world.

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  12. CD, I’ll think on that, thanks. I was reading this over the weekend, and I thought of it because you are kind of saying one of the problems a NAPARCer such as myself might face is one of being insular. I can see that, and that’s why I appreciate Fesko’s call for us to be readers of broad areas of theology, but also knowing where they stray from our classical, traditional, and orthodox positions. Here it is, maybe off topic, but I’ll give it a go anyway:

    It was Paul Tillich (1886-1965), one not known for his orthodoxy, who observed the great chasm between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant theology and contemporary fundamentalism. Tillich first distinguishes between classical Protestant orthodoxy, the genus under which one would find the theology of the Westminster Standards, and fundamentalism:

    We must also be sure to distinguish between orthodox and fundamentalism. The orthodox period of Protestantism has very little to do with what is called fundamentalism in America. Rather, it has special reference to the scholastic period of Protestant history. There were great scholastics in Protestantism, some of them equally as great as the medieval scholastics… . Such a thing has never been done in American fundamentalism. Protestant Orthodoxy was constructive. It did not have anything like the pietistic or revivalistic background of American fundamentalism. It was objective as well as constructive, and attempted to present the pure and comprehensive doctrine concerning God and man and the world. It was not determined by a kind of lay biblicism as is the case in American fundamentalism—a biblicism which rejects any theological penetration into the biblical writings and makes itself dependent on traditional interpretations of the word of God. You cannot find anything like that in classical orthodoxy. Therefore it is a pity that very often orthodoxy and fundamentalism are confused.
    So, then, Tillich was certain that fundamentalism and Protestant orthodoxy were beasts of a completely different stripe.

    Tillich goes on to explain specifically how Protestant orthodox theologians are different than American fundamentalists:

    One of the great achievements of classical orthodoxy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was the fact that it remained in continual discussion with all the centuries of Christian thought. Those theologians were not untheological lay people ignorant of the meanings of the concepts which they used in biblical interpretation. They knew the past meanings of these concepts in the history of the church which covered a period of over fifteen hundred years. These orthodox theologians knew the history of philosophy as well as the theology of the Reformation. The fact that they were in the tradition of the Reformers did not prevent them from knowing thoroughly scholastic theology, from discussing and refuting it, or even accepting it when possible. All this makes classical orthodoxy one of the great events in the history of Christian thought.

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