Judging Judge Not by Todd Friel

 

[The following was originally posted on our church blog on March 3, 2016]

Although generally familiar with Wretched Radio, I don't follow Todd Friel.  I picked up this book after it was recommended to me by another pastor; and after his commendation I was looking forward to reading it.  I came away, however, seriously disappointed.

I have taken the time to review this book because I believe it represents a troubling trend in conservative Christianity.

First, the pros.

A. Todd Friel is courageous.  He loves the truth as he puts it because "Loving truth is the same as loving God because He is the truth...  If we love God, we will pursue truth tenaciously and defend it at all costs."  Todd doesn't hesitate to name names believing that "refusal to confront error is" [as Spurgeon put it] 'treason to Christ'...".  I believe this is helpful, and I am grateful for his courage.  I have always had a particular love for those courageous for truth.  We need men like Todd brave enough to speak out against error; and so while I have significant reservations about his book, I applaud his courage and the sincere effort he has made toward contending for the truth.

B. Todd is right on many counts.  The book, in my opinion, is mostly orthodox.  In every section (though not every chapter) of this book I found myself - on the whole - in agreement with the author's doctrinal positions.  He is generally accurate in his assessment of what is happening in the Church, and his concerns are mostly worth paying heed to.

C. The book is informative.  I learned about movements I had never heard of and movements which pastors should at least be aware of.  His treatment of "The New Apostolic Reformation" was particularly enlightening, though also disturbing.  His introduction was well done and some of his insights are tremendous.  He says, for instance, "Every culture is a product of the dominant "cult."  The single largest moral influence in America is the Protestant church.  If American culture is ailing morally, it is because the Protestant church is ailing."  Chapters 4 and 5 were also excellent and probably the most important chapters in the book.

Second, the cons.

A. First, Todd Friel is often harsh and/or sarcastic.  For that reason alone I could never recommend this book to anyone about whom it is written.  It seems strangely ironic (and also disappointing) that those mired in any one of the many errors listed by the author will not likely be helped by the book which, presumably, is for them.  I can't help but wonder if Todd (either consciously or unconsciously) has written this book rather for his own followers who already share his opinions and enjoy his style.  Either way, it isn't going to have much of an impact on those outside his circle because of his manner.  We are to speak the truth boldly and unflinchingly but also lovingly.  We are to correct erring brothers in meekness and in a spirit of grace.  Friel loves to poke fun.  Sometimes he is also insulting and unkind.  I thought, for example, that his chapter titled "Big-Haired Christian TV" tackled an important subject but (sadly) in an ungracious way.

I regret that the book is replete with examples.  Even when I was agreeing with him I was frustrated by his tone.  I understand that there are numbers of Christians who will not even confront error because they think it unloving, but this book takes the opposite extreme.  Whatever may motivate the author, the words themselves do not convey a spirit of love.  They drip with sarcasm and condescension.

B. Second, where the author is sound in diagnosis he is weak on solution.  Each chapter ends with something like this: "...   ___________ has to stop."  While the author is critical of what he calls "Gospel Off-Centeredness" (Chapter 28), he doesn't make much use of the gospel.  Instead of offering an alternative to error/heresy he is usually found drawing the same conclusion: "it needs to stop".  That may be true but it isn't an answer.

C. Third, the book takes on too much.  I am not referring to the number of pages.  Its an easy book to read and doesn't take long to finish.  The problem is the lack of cohesion.  Instead of focusing on a particular theme or movement (it looks as if) Friel attempts to go after everything that is wrong in the Church.

D. Fourth, Friel criticizes what he calls hyper-allegorizing Song of Solomon in which Jesus is turned into "the zesty groom and the believer into the romanced wife." He is highly critical of Jesus Culture and Mike Bickle for misinterpreting this book and applying it to the relationship between Jesus and His bride. The problem is - whatever one may think of Jesus Culture and Mike Bickle - this was the consensus of the Church for centuries.  The Reformers, the Puritans and the preachers of the 18th century all believed that the Song of Solomon is about the "the greater than Solomon" Jesus.  Charles Spurgeon preaching on this book reflected the consensus of our Protestant forefathers when he said, "Its music belongs to the higher spiritual life, and has no charm in it for unspiritual ears.  The song occupies a sacred enclosure into which none may enter unprepared… The historical books I may compare to the outer courts of the Temple; the Gospels, the Epistles, and the Psalms, bring us into the holy place or the Court of the priests; but the Song of Solomon is the most holy place… The Song is a golden casket of which love is the key rather than learning.  Those who have not attained unto heights of affection, those who have not been educated by familiar intercourse with Jesus, cannot come near to this mine of treasure…”  In another sermon he said that the idea that this book is about Solomon and Pharaoh’s daughter is “one of the grossest mistakes that ever was committed.  There is nothing about Pharaoh’s daughter in it [italics are mine].”

When Jesus Culture writes (as quoted by Friel) "Over the mountains, over the sea Here You come running, my Lover to me... Do not hide me from Your presence Pull me from these shadows, I need You Beauty wrap Your arms around me Sing your song of kindness, I need You" they are expressing in contemporary language something of how the Puritans understood these words. The puritan John Flavel, for example, spoke of the Groom (Jesus!) leaping and skipping over the mountains of our sinfulness to be at us.  James Durham, Richard Sibbes and Samuel Rutherford are among the many puritans who would have understand those words similarly.

The fact is Song of Solomon makes no real sense except it is taken allegorically.  Why would the bride call herself "black, but comely" (1:5) except she were making the confession of a believer simul iustus et peccator ["At the same time righteous and a sinner"]?  Who else could be the "rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys (2:1)" but our Lord Jesus?  Of whom - but Christ - do we speak when we say "his banner over me was love (2:4)"?  Who else but our great King deserves the title "chiefest among ten thousand" and "altogether lovely (5:10, 16)"?  But consider Song of Solomon also from the other vantage point.  This book which modern scholars - influenced (as they are!) by higher criticism - believe is a book about marital intimacy contains material which doesn't make sense in such a setting, and material also which is actually immoral.  Consider just verse 1 of chapter 6.  After asking the bride what it is about her Groom that is better than other grooms (a question only the Christian could answer) the daughters of Jerusalem ask "Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?"  Why do they ask?  The answer follows: "that we may seek him with thee."  Entirely appropriate if the bride is a believer, but sinful in any other scenario.     

E. Fifth, and most troubling is Friel's critique of what he calls "Amorous Phrases" and "Romantic Love for God".  He admits that Charles Welsey "would have loved much of today's romantic music about Jesus."  Perhaps he would have.  If so it is hardly an indictment of modern worship.  Charles Wesley could hardly speak of Jesus in public without tears streaming down his face.  He dearly loved his Groom.

Consider what Todd Friel writes in commentary.  After quoting the lyrics of Jesus Culture (cited above) he says, "And all of God's people said, "Ewww."  Later speaking on the (so-called) hyper allegorization of Song of Solomon he says again "All together now, Ewww."  After citing a number of books by Bickle Friel says "If you are starting to get that icky feeling in your stomach with a burning sensation in the back of your throat, you are not alone."  But notice carefully the titles of those books: Passion for Jesus: Cultivating Extravagant Love for God, The Pleasure of Loving God... After God's Own Heart: The Key Knowing and Living God's Passionate Love for You, Seven Longings of the Human Heart, and Loving God: Daily Reflections for Intimacy With God.  I don't know anything at all about those books, but I find Friel's reaction to the titles utterly bewildering.  What is icky about passion for God, the pleasure of God, extravagant love for God, and/or intimacy with God?  Charles Spurgeon (the famous preacher of the 19th century), reading Song of Solomon allegorically, called that book the most holy place!  But He also admitted, "Those who have not attained unto heights of affection, those who have not been educated by familiar intercourse with Jesus, cannot come near to this mine of treasure."  He went on to say that it is only given to the spiritual to see and understand it.  Is this why Friel reacts with 'ewww'?  Is this why he finds extravagant love, passion for and intimacy with God icky?

So what's happening?  I see this as part of trend in conservative Christianity.  'Trend' may not be the best word for it; but it seems to me that (some) conservative Christians are increasingly distancing themselves from everything experiential.  Perhaps its a reaction to the charismatic movement or some other doctrinal aberration.  Either way Christianity in parts of the Church is being reduced to a certain set of objective truths accompanied by faith and obedience.  What's the problem?  That's Pharisaism.  Judge Not reads a lot like the description I find in Revelation 2 of the church at Ephesus.  They were sound.  They were contending for the faith.  They did not tolerate error.  This, of course, was all very good, but they had also tragically lost their first love... and that alone was enough for Jesus to threaten to remove their lampstand.  He would shut them down.

But isn't love demonstrated in obedience (John 14:15, 15:14)?  It is; but the wonder of the gospel is that it delivers men "from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter (Romans 7:6)."  Serving in newness of spirit is worlds apart from a life of obedience in the oldness of the letter; which is why Paul pronounces a curse on all those who do not love the Lord Jesus (1 Corinthians 16:22 ); and why Paul could say "Let love be without dissimulation (Romans 12:9);" and why faith works through love; and why the more excellent way (1 Corinthians 12:31) is not obedience but love (1 Corinthians 13).   

I understand that many modern choruses are shallow.  I find the endless repetition as annoying as Friel does.  But I simply cannot understand the hostility toward love language in song unless that hostility is coming from a carnal (and therefore unsaved) man.  The Christian is marked above all by love for the Lord Jesus.  As our faith grows so our love for our Beloved grows.  We find that we can (and do!) identify with the heartlongings of the bride for kisses from the mouth of her King.  We want to be drawn into His chambers, to hold Him all through the night and to sit under His shadow with great delight.  The puritans knew this lovesickness because they knew the Altogether Lovely One.   They saw it as a mark of grace and they decried its absence as a mark of desperate spiritual poverty and blindness if not perdition.        

I believe Friel's attitude is representative of a large part of the Church.  They are good on doctrine and strong in their defense of the faith, but their system is absent passion for God.  Christianity is reduced to doctrines [justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, etc.] and duties.  In truth, Christianity is so much more than a philosophy imbibed.  The Bible testifies that the Christian is a new creature.  The Lord Jesus came to make all things new (2 Corinthians 5:17), so that those born by the Spirit of God are constrained by His love.  They not only live by a different code, they want to live by that code and they even delight in it.  They not only believe in God, they love Him and long for Him.  He is their song, He is their joy, He is their life and their all.  They not only say they love Him but they really love Him.  They not only demonstrate their love by obedience, they obey because they love.

F. Sixth, Friel is critical of radical Christianity.  In a chapter that reminds me of Michael Horton's Ordinary Todd says that the call to radical Christianity is unbiblical, "dangerous and unkind."  The chapter opens with these words: "Who hasn't heard a sermon like this?  'Right now there are babies with distended bellies in Africa.  Our God loves starving children and if you love God, you will support an African child for the cost of a cup of coffee per day.'"  I wouldn't have put it in those words but it sounds reasonable to me. Isn't it?  Here are slogans by which the author suggests you may identify these radical preachers: "Jesus left heaven for you, what have you left for Him?  How can you  possess so much while Jesus had so little?  It's time we start living like first-century Christians who sold it all.  Are you doing great things for God?  We are not called to be ordinary Christians but radical Christians."  Except for the slogan about selling everything I would agree with every other statement.  But Friel thinks it is unbiblical.  Radical in biblical terms - according to Friel - is actually "Not having an abortion... Not getting a divorce... Being a dad who gives up his 'man cave' so his kids can have a Christian education.... Giving a portion of your income to your local church... homeschooling... never getting drunk... not worshipping a football team... not viewing pornography...".     

  
Think this through for a moment.  For decades Christian leaders have been saying the contemporary Church looks a lot like the Laodicean church.  We are neither hot nor cold.  We are complacent.  We think we are rich, we are financially wealthy, and yet we are lukewarm.  As David Platt wrote (in a book titled Radical!) "Every year in the United States, we spend  more than $10 billion on church buildings."  Our real estate - church real estate - "is worth over $230 billion."  At the same time today alone "twenty-six thousand children... will breathe their last breath due to starvation or a preventable disease."  Platt says "At most, we are throwing our scraps to them while we indulge in our pleasures here;" but Friel insists that (Biblical) radical is giving a portion of your income to your local church.  The Pharisees gave a portion too, but Jesus commended instead the woman who gave everything!
Writing in the 1800's Robert Dabney said "the only limit to the service we are to render to God is the limit of our strength, means and opportunities.  In whatever way it is possible for us to do anything, without sin, whereby the glory of God may be promoted, that thing it is our duty to do [italics are mine]."  He added, "But surely we have no right to misspend our Master's property in providing for our families luxuries, amusements, fineries, or wealth, which add nothing to their energies, bodily, mental or moral, but, on the contrary, produce vanity, effeminacy, envy and self-indulgence, and unfit them to 'endure hardness as good soldiers of Jesus Christ'."

What is so astonishing about Friel's critique is the misguided way he 'preaches' exactly opposite what this generation needs to hear.  It is something like telling a lazy selfish teenager to take it easy!  There are times when that message would be entirely appropriate.  Not, however, in the case of the lazy self-centered teenager nor in the case of a lukewarm, self-centered Church.  Simply observe the list of radicals presented by Friel.  In times past (when the Church was stronger and more spiritually vibrant) the absence of any one of those would have been cause for fasting and sackcloth.  Now they are presented by a conservative Christian leader as radical Christianity.  Why?  Is it merely to ease the consciences of Christians who have much and want to go on having much?

I do not know Todd of course and I cannot speak to his motives, but it looks to me like tickling itching ears (2 Timothy 4:3).  Consider how many cannot make church prayer meetings because too busy pursuing money and pleasure.  Consider how much is spent on restaurants, toys, luxuries, larger and fancier homes while the smallest of tokens (the scraps!) are given to the Church and to the poor.  Consider how many people in North America will never see a Christian come to their door to present them with the gospel, while most have seen a Jehovah Witness at least once.  This is not a generation that needs to be called to the "ordinary".

Men like David Platt and Francis Chan have been calling for something radical and it is their message - not Friel's - that so urgently needs to be heard.  Years ago George Verwer observed, "In some cases spiritual dwarfs become leaders of the congregation, and the contrast with New Testament churches is shocking.  If anyone points this out, he is regarded as a fanatic, an extremist, or a meddler."  A.W. Tozer confronted with the same kind of false teaching wrote, "Blind leaders of blind souls are admitting that there is something to be said in favor of world-glory after all; they insist that Christians should not cut themselves off from the pleasures of the world, except, of course, from those that are too degraded from respectable society."  Charles Peace once said to the half-hearted (ordinary) chaplain sent to minister to him, "Sir, I do not share your faith.  But if I did – if I believed what you say you believed – then although England were covered with broken glass from coast to coast, I would crawl the length and breadth of it on hand and knee and think the pain worthwhile, just to save a single soul from this eternal hell of which you speak."  Leonard Ravenhill in his day said, "Here's the world with millions, millions, millions dying. They were dying while you were sleeping last night, while you were fooling around somewhere! God is saying, "Who will go for Us?"  Martyn Lloyd-Jones said "At the final bar of judgment the gravest charge that will be made against us Christians will be that we were so unconcerned."  These are the voices we need to hear.

There is good and sound teaching in this book, but in this chapter Todd Friel comes like a false prophet to rebuke the true.  He says exactly what a lazy self-centered Church would want to hear.  As I look back over the many chapters in the many books I have read I must admit that few chapters have filled with me such a sense of disappointment as this one because it is exactly what the Church so desperately doesn't need to hear.

I would encourage you to read instead a history of revival (Calvinist Methodist Fathers, The Welsh Revival, Heaven Came Down, Revival and Revivalism, the Cambuslang Revival) a Puritan work (The Works of John Flavel vol, 1, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Richard Sibbes, vol. 2, The Works of George Swinnock, vol. 1), or something by Leonard Ravenhill or Martyn Lloyd-Jones.

E. Seventh, Friel says we are no longer bound by the Sabbath.  I will not make a case for the Christian Sabbath here since I have done that elsewhere.  Quoting Romans 14:5, 6 Todd insists - in an otherwise useful chapter - that "Paul also made it clear that the Sabbath laws were no longer in force."  For more on Romans 14:5, 6 go here.  What Todd doesn't acknowledge (or perhaps recognize) is that Christians across denominations were (until recently) united on this doctrine.  Whether Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, Anglican, Reformed they all believed that Sunday was the Christian Sabbath.  This conviction united John Wesley and George Whitefield (and every leader during the Great Awakening) as it did David Brainerd, John Newton, John Calvin, John Knox, David Livingstone, William Carey, Charles Spurgeon, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, George Muller, Hudson Taylor and Leonard Ravenhill [the list, of course, could go on].  For centuries our forefathers agreed that the 4th commandment was to be applied to the first day of the week.  This was the consensus of most the reformers, the puritans, the leaders of both the Great Awakening and the Second Great Awakening.  It was the consensus among those used in the revival of 1859, the revival in wales and the revival in Hebrides.  There has, in fact, been no revival that did not also involve a revival in Sabbath-keeping!

I find it interesting that the Sabbath was lost with the advent of higher criticism in the late 19th century.  It was not a healthy Bible believing generation that decided the Church had been wrong for centuries.  Rather it was a morally bankrupt and liberally informed generation that made the shift, and we have blindly followed their lead.   

Conclusion:  Like Todd I love the truth.  I have on my wall Spurgeon's famous words, "My motto is cedo nulli - I yield to none.  I have not courted any man's love; I asked no man to attend my ministry; I preach what I like, and when I like, and as I like.  Oh! Happy State - to be bold, though downcast and distressed - to go and bend my knee and tell my Father all, and then to come down from my chamber, and say - 'If on my face, for thy dear name, Shame and reproach shall be; I'll reproach, and welcome shame, For thou'lt remember me.'"  But I am troubled by the tendency in conservative Christian circles away from the experiential; and I am troubled too at  how quickly we dismiss believers who do things differently.  I am not calling here for ecumenism, nor am I suggesting that we should not testify for the truth and against error.  I am calling, rather, for more humility.  Is it absolutely impossible to believe that there is merit in contemporary worship music?  Is there nothing of value in these simple repetitive choruses?  Of course there is value, just as there is value when you have closed your eyes bowed your head and simply told God you loved Him.  It is easy for Calvinists to disdain everything Arminian, but I personally believe that some of the most godly men have been Arminian.  Its easy for churches that hold to the regulative principle of worship to disdain churches that do not, but I am of the opinion that the passion of some of the people in those churches puts the rest of us to shame.  Its easy to poke fun at simple repetitive choruses that express heartfelt love for God, but I am convinced those choruses sung in sincere love to God are worth far more to Him than the richest hymns sung without love and without feeling.  Its easy to criticize charismatic expressions of worship, but I would much prefer the occasional outburst of extravagant love (Matthew 26:7) over the heartless expressions of praise which in so many churches counts as worship.  I believe there is need for reformation in the Church, but if we will see God bless us we will need more than just a change of mind.  We need a change of attitude: a dose of humility and grace to go with the theology.  We don't just need reformation.  We need revival.