Last night I listened to an MP3 of Mark Dever speaking on church membership to a group of pastors in South Africa in January 2007. (I’m not sure if this MP3 is available online.)

Dever concludes by presenting what he calls a twelve-step recovery plan for pastors to regain meaningful church membership in the congregation. Step two sheds some light on Dever’s recent controversial statement that it is wrong to include millennial views in a church’s statement of faith. In my radio interview last week, I mentioned that the viability of Dever’s statement turns on his view of the function of statements of faith. Here’s how he stated his view on that in 2007 (53:33 to 55:39 in the MP3; emphasis added):

2. Have and use a congregationally agreed-upon statement of faith and church covenant.

Now I’m aware we’re from different polities at this minister’s conference, and that’s great. If you have a denominational statement, depending on your structure you can take your denominational statement and use that. If you’re a congregational independent church, you can come up with one yourself or use one that other churches before you have used. But with membership in the congregation comes responsibility, and the statements of what the congregation together believes (and in our church we call that our statement of faith) and of how we will live (we call that our church covenant) are very useful tools. They are a clear ground of unity, a tool of teaching, [and] a fence from error and from the worldly who would erase such distinctions or [from] the divisive who want to see them more narrow. We can point to the fact that, “We’ll actually, this is what we’ve agreed on.”

So, for example, I’ll give you something else provocative. Our church’s statement of faith talks about the second coming of Christ, and it basically says, “He will come back; he will raise the dead; he will judge them; and they will go some to eternal felicity with God and some to eternal torment in hell.” That’s it! “But Mark, what about the rapture? What about the nation of Israel? What about the seven-year tribulation? What about the millennium?” You know, praise God, our statement of faith was written in the 1830s, so Christians hadn’t thought of all that stuff yet. They were just about to get divisive about that in the late nineteenth century, but our statement of faith is so old we only have this really clearly biblical stuff about the return of Christ. And then we can disagree—we can argue with each other—as best we see implications of these other precious truths.

So every Christian in the church should believe a lot more than what’s in your statement of faith, but what you’re trying to define in your statement of faith is “What do we need to have agreement upon in order to be a church together?” And I think we need to know that Jesus is coming back and that he told his disciples that he could be coming back at any time, so they need to be ready. Beyond that, well, you and I can argue about it. We can [dis]agree. We can read and write books.

Kevin Boling, host of “Knowing the Truth” radio program, contacted me a couple of hours before his hour-long radio program this afternoon and asked me to be his guest to discuss the issue I highlighted in my recent blog post on Schreiner’s and Dever’s positions on millennial views.

Kevin, a gracious host, entitled the program “Are Millennial Views Essential?“ The interview is available from SermonAudio as a 55-minute MP3.

Update: See “Mark Dever on the Function of Statements of Faith.”

Tom Schreiner, professor of NT interpretation and associate dean at Southern Seminary and preaching pastor for Clifton Baptist Church, just finished preaching through the book of Revelation.

• In “The Millennium,” his sermon on Revelation 20:1–15 (preached on June 14, 2009), Schreiner begins by explaining that he recently changed his millennial position from amillennial to premillennial, largely as a result of studying that text (HT: Ben Wright).
• Jason Button transcribes some of Schreiner’s wise introductory remarks here.

Updates:

1. See A. J. Gibson’s “It’s a Sin to Sever Cooperation with Other Believers over Eschatological Issues,” which comments on the sermon on Revelation 20 that Mark Dever preached yesterday (July 12).
2. See Ben Wright’s “‘I’m saying you are in sin if you lead your congregation to have a statement of faith that requires a particular Millennial view.’” (Ben is a member of Capitol Hill Baptist Church.)
3. Justin Taylor weighs in.
4. Kevin Bolin interviewed me on this issue on July 14: “Are Millennial Views Essential?“
5. See Ben Wright’s “Amillennialists and Premillennialists: What Do We Agree On?“
6. See “Mark Dever on the Function of Statements of Faith.”

D. A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo, An Introduction to the New Testament (2d ed.; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), pp. 721–22 (bold emphasis added):

If, as we have argued, Revelation focuses on the end of history, then it is in the area of eschatology that it makes its most important contribution. Nowhere are we given a more detailed description of the events of the end; and while many interpreters have been guilty of finding far more specifics in John’s visions than his symbolism allows and of unwisely insisting that only their own circumstances fit those specifics, we should not go to the other extreme and ignore those details that John does make relatively clear.

But it is shortsighted to think of eschatology simply in the sense of what will happen in the end times. For the End, in biblical thought, shapes and informs the past and the present. Knowing how history ends helps us understand how we are to fit into it now. Particularly  is this so because the New Testament makes it clear that even now we are in “the last days.” Thus, Revelation reminds us of the reality and severity of evil, and of the demonic forces that are active in history. . . . At the same time, the degree to which Revelation exhorts believers should not be neglected. . . .

John’s visions also place in clear relief the reality of God’s judgment. A day will come when his wrath will be poured out, when sins will have to be accounted for, when the fate of every individual will depend on whether or not his or her name is “written in the Lamb’s book of life.” Equally clear, of course, is the reward that God has in store for those who “keep the word of endurance” and resolutely stand against the devil and his earthly minions, even at the cost of life itself. John’s visions are a source of comfort for suffering and persecuted believers in all ages.

After praising J. Christiaan Beker, Buz Meyers brashly asserts,

Nevertheless, the apostle Paul and other members of the first generation were wrong about the timing of the Parousia. Christ did not return, and the End did not arrive as was expected. This embarrassing miscalculation on the part of the early Church may help to explain in part why the apocalyptic dimension of the NT has not been fully appreciated until relatively recently. Doctrines of biblical inspiration and infallibility may have encouraged overlooking or ignoring NT passages that speak about the Parousia’s arrival in the near future. Errors with regard to the timing of the Parousia, however, have allowed later interpreters to question the certainty of the Parousia’s arrival as well and then dismiss the Parousia altogether. In other words, because the Parousia did not occur when it was supposed to, it probably will never happen, so why consider the Parousia at all? The apostle Paul’s thinking, however, demonstrates that a change in the timing of the Parousia need not undermine the certainty of its coming. . . . [A]lthough Paul may have changed his mind about whether or not he would be alive at the Parousia, Paul never gives up hope in Christ’s future return.

- Charles D. Myers Jr., “The Persistence of Apocalyptic Thought in New Testament Theology,” in Biblical Theology: Problems and Perspectives: In Honor of J. Christiaan Beker (ed. Steven J. Kraftchick, Charles D. Myers Jr., and Ben C. Ollenburger; Nashville: Abingdon, 1995), pp. 212–13 (bold emphasis added).

So Jesus’ coming really isn’t imminent, nor is the Bible inerrant. But even though Paul was way off on the timing bit, we can take comfort that he really was right that Jesus will actually return someday. What a blessing.

Is it possible to hold both the imminency of Jesus’ second coming and biblical inerrancy? I believe it is. Responding to a bold assertion similar to Buz Myers’ above, John MacArthur writes,

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