De Regnis Duobus: Cult, Culture, and the Christian's Dual Citizenship

Goodnight, and Have a Pleasant Tomorrow....

2010-02-16T20:19:00.001-08:00

Well, after four years and change, De Regnis Duobus as you’ve known it is coming to an end.

Yes, I will still be blogging, just not here. I have started a new blog called Creed Code Cult where I will be posting from now on. DRD will still exist and its archives will remain available for those who wish to peruse them, but the comments will be switched off. In addition, the entire DRD archive has been exported to Creed Code Cult, so all past posts will be available there as well.

Why the change? A few reasons. First, “Creed-Code-Cult-dot-com” is a lot easier to say than “De-Regnis-Duobus-dot-blogspot-dot-com” (especially if, like me, you’re really into the whole brevity thing). Secondly (and I’m going out on a limb here), having a blog that doesn’t, like, have Hitler on it... that’ll be pretty cool, too. I stand by the image and my reason for employing it, but well, let’s just say I won’t miss seeing ol’ Adolf on a daily basis.

There is another reason for the change, but suffice it to say that that will become known in the near future.

So anyway, I’d like to cordially invite you all over to my new digs. If anyone of you links to me on your own sites, you may want to update your blogroll (and should you feel inclined to dedicate a post to CCC’s launch, I’d surely appreciate it!).

Cheers,

JJS

A Mysterious Caller and a Vatican Pronouncement

2010-02-14T23:18:00.000-08:00

I plan to begin a series considering the warning passages in Hebrews, but that will have to wait a few days. For now, though, there are a couple things I’d like to bring to your attention.

First off, listen to this clip of a radio call-in show with guest Scott Hahn. In particular, listen to the voice of the caller asking the question, and take note of where he’s calling from. Is it just me, or does that voice sound eerily familiar? Could it be? And what does it mean?

Secondly, in a brilliant display of wisdom and insight, the Vatican made a pronouncement last Saturday that is so unquestionably correct, so unequivocally right, and so unarguably true that it should shake even the most ardently Calvinistic among us to our very core. Even a staunch two-kingdoms guy like me will give the Catholic Church a pass on this one.

Stay tuned, big news coming in the next few days.

A Short Exerpt from The Destiny of the Species

2010-02-11T12:28:00.000-08:00

Contrary to what one might think after perusing the “Christian Fiction” section of the local Barnes and Noble, it is not just evangelicals or fundamentalists who are preoccupied with better days ahead. Theologians and sociologists alike have often pondered the influence that man’s end has upon his life in the here and now, the sway that tomorrow holds over today. As I stated earlier, secular cultural commentator David Brooks insists that man has always lived in the future tense, and a mere flip through the pages of progressive and left-wing writers such as Naomi Klein, Matt Taibbi, and David Sirota will be more than enough to convince us that it is not just religious people who bet their bottom dollar that the sun’ll come out tomorrow. In a word, all people constantly look ahead, and future-focused man shall not live by Left Behind novels alone.

Christ, Kingdom, and Culture, Part 4: Horton

2010-02-07T21:40:00.000-08:00

The last lecture that we will be discussing from Westminster Seminary California’s annual conference, Christ, Kingdom, and Culture, will be Michael Horton’s, titled “Christ and the Workplace.”

What stood out most was his insistence (which he also highlighted last year, and which doesn’t have much to do with his actual topic) that “God doesn’t need your good works, your neighbor does” (which is a quote from Luther). Horton’s point is that, ironically, it is the believer whose church is a “full-service community” replete with ministries for every niche demographic under the sun who will be least equipped to love her neighbor. The reason for this is that when churches adopt an “every-member ministry” model, the result is that the people who come spend all their time ministering to other religious consumers—not just on Sunday but throughout the week—to the point of exhaustion. When you’re up to here in ministry to other church-goers, who has time to help a neighbor with a leaky roof?

On the other hand, when we have a proper understanding of the way a church’s ministry works—namely, that Jesus serves the people through his ministers (you know, the guys who wear the black gowns), and the people get ministered to—then the congregation will actually be empowered on the Lord’s Day rather than sapped of all strength. Then, lo and behold, they can go out and do their good works for those who actually need them, like their neighbors.

This is why at Exile Presbyterian Church the top line of our liturgy says, “The Divine Service.” Yes, there is service going on, but it’s Jesus serving his people, and not so much the other way around. After all, it is the righteousness based on law that is characterized by desperate and frenetic attempts to get God to notice us (think: prophets of Baal cutting themselves with stones), while the righteousness based on faith is content to receive first, so that it can give afterwards.

So the next time someone says something like, “Church isn’t supposed to be about getting from God, but giving to him,” you can respectfully demur, and say that Horton told you otherwise....

Calvin Versus Aquinas on Nature and Grace

2010-02-04T00:31:00.000-08:00

Speaking of David VanDrunen, I am reading his new book Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A Study in Reformed Social Thought (and really enjoying it). In his chapter on Calvin and his contemporaries, VanDrunen seeks to situate Calvin’s thinking relative to his medieval predecessors on the two loci under consideration. This passage really struck me this afternoon:

For purposes of comparing [Aquinas] to Calvin, the relative absence of the topic of sin in Thomas’s discussions [on nature and grace] is noteworthy. For Thomas, the fundamental reason why grace is needed in addition to nature is not corruption of nature due to the fall into sin, but the inherent limits of nature itself. While sin aggravates the need for grace in the post-fall world, Thomas’s nature-grace structure remains in all essential aspects the same before and after the fall.

So many questions and avenues for possible discussion, so little time....

I’ll kick us off, though: (1) Does VanDrunen accurately reflect Thomas’s thought here? (2) Does Thomas necessarily cast aspersion on creatureliness as such? In other words, if man before the fall was crippled in some ontological way, does this militate against God’s pronouncement that everything he made was “very good”? (3) If my Reformed readers answer “yes,” then what about Vos’s dictum that eschatology precedes soteriology? To rephrase, if pre-fall Adam longed for eternal life, are we committing the same fallacy we accuse Thomas’s advocates of committing? (4) Are those who insist that grace was operative before the fall in danger of falling into the error of which VanDrunen accuses Thomas, an error which essentially collapses law and gospel? (5) Does anyone else believe that people who write “methinks” should be shot?

Discuss....

Christ, Kingdom, and Culture, Part 3: VanDrunen

2010-01-31T21:17:00.000-08:00

Continuing our reflections on Westminster Seminary’s annual conference on the topic of Christ, Kingdom, and Culture, the third lecture, titled “Christ and the State,” was given by David VanDrunen.

VanDrunen made a great point about how that we must be careful not to equate the civil kingdom with the state and thereby collapse into the state all other civil endeavors or concerns. States can be oppressive and tyrannical, he argued, and there needs to be a sufficient decentralization of power in order to guarantee some sovereignty to things like education and the arts.

One point that VanDrunen was careful to make was that the state, though a post-fall phenomenon, is nonetheless a legitimate institution and sword-wielder. Quoting Calvin, he insisted that “tyranny is better than anarchy.” (Just a quibble, but I am not convinced of how helpful this point is, since the term “anarchism,” when used today, inevitably evokes the idea of chaos while ignoring its political and economic definition, which is basically synonymous with “libertarianism” or “socialism,” properly understood.)

The issue of civil disobedience also came up. VanDrunen argues that it is never proper for a believer to seek to fight against religious persecution by means of the carnal weaponry of the state or its courts. If memory serves, he believes the same rules apply in the civil realm as well, meaning that it any form of civil disobedience to lawfully ordained magistrates is wrong, unless they compel us to disobey God’s law.

To tip my hat to the just-deceased Howard Zinn, I would respectfully disagree here. While I do think a Christian should never resist religious persecution but rather endure it as an example of Christ-like cross-bearing, I do think it’s legitimate for the believer to fight against injustices that arise for non-religious reasons (such as during the civil rights movement), as long as such resistance (1) is non-violent, and (2) doesn’t violate the Westminster Confession and invoke our spiritual liberty as a reason to resist civil oppression (I wrote about this topic here, here, and here).

OK, discuss away....

Theology of the Cross, Salinger Style

2010-01-28T12:25:00.000-08:00

Finally, though, I got undressed and got in bed. I felt like praying or something, when I was in bed, but I couldn’t do it. I can’t always pray when I feel like it. In the first place, I’m sort of an atheist. I like Jesus and all, but I don’t care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while He was alive, they were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head. All they did was keep letting Him down. I like almost anybody in the Bible better than the Disciples. If you want to know the truth, the guy I like best in the Bible, next to Jesus, was that lunatic and all, that lived in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones. I like him ten times as much as the Disciples, that poor bastard.

I used to get in quite a few arguments about it with this boy who lived down the corridor, Arthur Childs. Old Childs was a Quaker and all, and he read the Bible all the time. He was a nice kid, and I liked him, but I could never see eye to eye with him on a lot of stuff in the Bible, especially the Disciples. He kept telling me if I didn’t like the Disciples, then I didn’t like Jesus and all. He said that because Jesus picked the Disciples, you were supposed to like them. I said I knew He picked them, but that He picked them at random. I said He didn’t have time to go around analyzing everybody. I said I wasn’t blaming Jesus or anything. It wasn’t His fault He didn’t have any time.

Anyway, when I was in bed I couldn’t pray worth a damn....

Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye

RIP, J.D. Salinger

"Three Things I Need You to Know"

2010-01-27T23:54:00.000-08:00

First off, a moment of silence in honor of the life and death of Howard Zinn. His magnum opus, A People's History of the United States, is a must-read for anyone at all interested in history and politics (it'll knock you on your, umm, rear, to misquote Will Hunting). I would especially commend it to those who insist that the church must fight for social justice; no church leader, regardless of how emergent, bohemian, or soul-patched, will ever come close to raising Americans' awareness of the plight of the powerless and disenfranchized to the degree that Zinn has done. His love for his neighbor should put us all to shame. Plus, he even puts social justice concerns in the correct kingdom....

Speaking of book recommendations, have you all heard of the Classic Reformed Theology book series? A new volume was just released: Caspar Olevianus's exposition of the Apostles' Creed with an Introduction by R. Scott Clark. Here is Volume One, and here is Volume Two. For those of you pinching pennies, a great deal on both volumes can be found here.

And lastly, I was dismayed to discover after Steve Jobs's unveiling of Apple's iPad that my life was suddenly meaningless because I don't yet have a -- what's it called again? -- oh yeah: an iPad. Then again, it looks like I'd still need to muster the energy to actually use my fingers to type on it, which is a total hassle. I mean, it's 2010 for crying out loud, I can't be expected to endure that kind of physical exertion anymore. Call me when you invent a microchip implant to make all my decisions, or a personal Avatar-body to live my life for me. Reality is too tiring....

Christ, Kingdom, and Culture, Part 2: Baugh

2010-01-24T20:11:00.000-08:00

The second lecture at Westminster Seminary California's conference on "Christ, Kingdom, and Culture" was by Dr. Steve Baugh; the title was "The Kingdom in the New Testament." For those who don't know Steve, he is an amazing exegete (in fact, I just incorporated some of his rich insights into this evening's sermon on the binding of the strong man from Luke 11). In typical fashion, Baugh stood at the lectern with an open Bible in his hand and, structure and decorum be damned, shot from the hip and offered his thoughts on what the New Testament has to say about the kingdom. Here's the description he gave of it:

"The kingdom of God proper is the fully consummated new heavens and new earth inhabited by the redeemed, resurrected saints in glory and incorruptibility where the triune God—including the incarnate Son—triumphantly rules supreme."

He brought out four elements that are necessary for the kingdom to be present in its eschatological fullness: Christ's rule, the people ruled, the king to rule them, and the territory in which this rule takes place. I hate to try to improve on Baugh's description of the kingdom, but I do think there is a catchier and easier-to-remember way of putting it (and in my defense, I am PCA): "The kingdom of God is fully present when God holy people are ruled in Gods holy land by God's holy king." (I preached a series of sermons on this topic a few years ago at Exile Presbyterian Church.)

Looking at the entire scope of God's revelation, it seems to me to be perfectly reasonable to say that the theme of the Bible is the kingdom of God, and the way in which that kingdom is administered is by means of historical covenants that God makes with his people. The most vivid picture of the kingdom in the Old Testament is seen in I Kings 8:14-15, 20-21:

Then the king turned around and blessed all the assembly of Israel, while all the assembly of Israel stood. And he said, "Blessed be the LORD, the God of Israel, who with his hand has fulfilled what he promised with his mouth to David my father.... Now the LORD has fulfilled his promise that he made. For I have risen in the place of David my father, and sit on the throne of Israel, as the LORD promised, and I have built the house for the name of the LORD, the God of Israel. And there I have provided a place for the ark, in which is the covenant of the LORD that he made with our fathers, when he brought them out of the land of Egypt."

Note that all the kingdom-elements are present: God's holy people are being ruled in God's holy land by God's holy king. Now this picture of the kingdom is typological, of course, foreshadowing the Day when the kingdom of this world will become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ. Then (and not before) the Lord's promise will be fulfilled and we will experience as God's holy people the reign of our holy King of kings in the true holy land, the new heavens and new earth. Our role in the here and now is not to try to create such a kingdom in this fallen age, but in the words of Peter, to "wait for and hasten the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn!" (II Pet. 3:12).

For my part, it seems that if Christians would understand the nature of the kingdom, and particularly that it reveals itself in this age by means of the obscurity, shame, and foolishness of the cross, it would really revolutionize the way we think of the Christian life, as well as challenge the triumphalistic (and, I would argue, postmillennial) expectations we place upon the church and her influence over the culture.

Three cheers, then, for Steve. May his house be blessed, and his tattered Nestle Aland be continually filled with treasure.

Israel's Leadership of the Gentiles

2010-01-19T21:36:00.000-08:00

I know this is off-topic, but this question has been bugging me for some time, and I just came across it again while reading N.T. Wright's Romans commentary. As many of you know, Wright insists quite strongly that much of Paul's indictment of Israel focuses not so much on how Israel is sinful like all the Gentile nations, but rather, that they who were destined to be God's solution have, because of their idolatry and rebellion, become part of the problem. He writes on Romans 2:17-29:

[Paul's] point now is not so much to bring out into the open a charge that [Israel is] sinful like the rest.... The point here is that Israel should have been--had been called to be--the divine answer to the world's problem; and that, instead, Israel is itself fatally compromised with the very same problem. Israel's sinfulness is at the heart of the charge, but the charge itself is that the doctor, instead of healing the sick, has become infected with the disease.

A few questions: (1) If Israel had "become infected with the disease" from which the rest of the world suffers, when did this infection occur? (2) If it occurred at the fall of Adam, then in what meaningful sense could Israel have been ordained to be God's solution to the sin problem? Were they themselves not sinful from the outset? (3) But if this infection occurred at some later date (like at the time just preceding the exile for example), then is not Wright's insistence that Israel, at least up until this apostasy, could have been a physician to the Gentile nations an example of a gross underestimation of original sin? And lastly, (4) If Wright is faithfully representing Paul's claim that Israel was to be "a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness" (Rom. 2:19), then is it possible that Paul shared Wright's high hopes for Israel, despite the fall? And if he didn't, what did he mean by his rebuke?

Christ, Kingdom, and Culture, Part 1: Godfrey

2010-01-18T00:18:00.000-08:00

I just returned Saturday night from attending Westminster Seminary CA’s annual conference, the topic of which was Christ, Kingdom, and Culture. I always enjoy these events, but this year’s was particularly good (the best since the first one back in ’04 or ’05, I think). Over the next several posts I would like to reflect on some of the faculty’s addresses.

Professor Robert Godfrey opened and closed the conference. In his opening address he pointed out the difficulty of trying to fit any of the various Reformed views on Christ and culture into a nice, tidy slogan. If one insisted on a bumper sticker, however, the only phrase he would suggest would be “Every Square Inch,” for regardless of whether one identifies himself as a Two-Kingdoms advocate or a Kuyperian (or some other option), we can surely agree that Christ rules all of the created order.

In his closing address Godfrey drew our attention to Kuyper’s idea of sphere sovereignty, which says that God rules his church, but he also rules various other institutions such as the state, the school, the family, and so on. With this emphasis, Godfrey said, we don’t need to speak of two kingdoms only, but we can speak of many.

This issue came up again in the Q&A session, at which time Dr. VanDrunen insisted that as Reformed believers we should be able to have our cake and eat it too, holding to both a two-kingdoms model as well as retaining sphere sovereignty. If we adopt the former only, we can end up collapsing the entire cultural kingdom into a one all-embracing category like the state (with its tendency toward tyranny). On the other hand, if we propound a sphere-sovereignty approach only, we can fall into the error of seeing the church as simply one of many institutions through which Christ exercises kingship, thus trivializing the sacred order. But if we embrace each concept we can have the best of both worlds, with the civil kingdom being understood to be much broader than merely the state, but also including the arts and sciences, sports, and education.

There was an interesting moment during the Q&A in which Horton challenged Godfrey’s prior statement about how quote-unquote progressive Kuyper’s cultural agenda was (he pointed out that Kuyper not only sowed the seeds of apartheid, but also opposed women’s suffrage and the rights of workers to strike). Apparently, whether one’s politics are progressive pretty much depends on whether they stand to your left, or to your right.

All in all, two great lectures from Godfrey. The man can work a room.

Some Tidbits, Three Cheers, and a Curse

2010-01-15T00:00:00.000-08:00

As some of you know, I am in CA right now to attend Westminster Seminary's annual conference (the topic is Christ and Culture). Should be good. One thing I am especially looking forward to is purchasing David VanDrunen's new book, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms (he gets a lot of his material from this blog, you know. Yes, that was a joke).

It was great to attend Westminster's 30th Anniversary Dinner last night (apparently we are R.C. Sproul's favorite seminary in the world). Although there regrettably wasn't a "Class of '04" table to sit at (probably because it would make everyone else jealous of how awesome we are), I was seated with some old friends. Plus, the chicken wasn't nearly as rubbery as I expected. Oh, and Godfrey just hit it out of the park with his address.

I am also pleased to announce that our very own Paige Britton has painstakingly pored over the DRD archives and single-handedly tagged every post (until recently only the last year or so was actually categorized). So now everything is nicely labeled and easy to sift through should you so desire. So three cheers for you, Paige, may the wind ever be at your back.

And lastly, I'd like to offer the exact opposite of a cheer and blessing to Pat Robertson. I don't know if people of his ilk are still able to feel shame, but I certainly hope he is brought to understand just how irresponsible his speech has been in the aftermath of the calamity in Haiti. Like Falwell's remarks after 9/11, Robertson's sanctimonious drivel makes me want to distance myself as much as possible from such self-styled representatives of evangelical conservatism. So Pat, if you're reading, may God silence you before you bring any further dishonor to his Name. You don't speak for me, and neither do any of your friends.

Baptism as a Seal of Saving Blessings

2010-01-11T00:02:00.000-08:00

There seems to be a lot of confusion of late surrounding baptism, and more specifically, what kind of salvific blessings can be attributed to the sacrament. In the minds of some, if things like union with Christ or forgiveness of sins are the results of faith, then we mustn’t give baptism any of the credit. After all, we’re not Federal Visionists, right?

I think the Westminster Confession is helpful here. We read in xxviii.6:

The efficacy of Baptism is not tied to that moment of time wherein it is administered; yet, notwith-standing, by the right use of this ordinance, the grace promised is not only offered, but really exhibited, and conferred, by the Holy Ghost....

So it appears that there is a thing called “baptismal efficacy,” but we are cautioned against insisting that baptismal efficacy takes place at the time of baptismal administration. What, then, is baptismal efficacy? In WCF xxviii.1 it says:

Baptism is a sacrament of the New Testament, ordained by Jesus Christ, not only for the solemn admission of the party baptized into the visible Church; but also to be unto him a sign and seal of the covenant of grace, of his ingrafting into Christ, of regeneration, of remission of sins, and of his giving up unto God, through Jesus Christ, to walk in the newness of life....
Baptism, then, is a seal to the believer of his union with Christ, his regeneration, and the forgiveness of his sins. Now the whole point of a “seal” is that it provides some sort of confirmation or authentication of something. In this case, the seal is baptism, which is meant to function for the believer as that which confirms his participation in the blessings of the entire covenant of grace.

Now here’s the kicker: If the Confession says that the efficacy of baptism is not tied to the moment of its administration, it stands to reason that there is a “moment” to which it is OK to “tie the efficacy of baptism.” Now, we would all agree that that moment is when we exercise saving faith. It follows, therefore, that it is perfectly valid for the believer (who has exercised saving faith), seeing his baptism as the seal of his regeneration, union with Christ, and forgiveness of sins, to attribute to that sacrament the blessings of the covenant of grace. In other words, he can say, “I have been united with Christ through baptism,” or “I have been forgiven of all my sins because I have been baptized.”

To deny this not only demonstrates a person’s suspicion of the language of confessional Reformed theology, but it also leaves him with little to say in response to the sacramental language of Scripture.

The Sign and the Thing Signified: Can You Tell Them Apart?

2010-01-06T23:52:00.000-08:00

In Reformed debates about baptism (especially when Federal Visionists are involved), the biggest issue that arises is the degree to which we can echo the New Testament's language concerining the sacrament's efficacy, and how much qualification we need to offer when we do it. Ironically enough, I was recently accused of sounding like a Federal Visionist because of an article I just wrote for Tabletalk in which I said things like, "Baptism accomplishes this" or "Baptism produces that."

Consider these exerpts from Calvin's Strasbourg and Geneva catechisms:

Question: How do you know yourself to be a son of God in fact as well as in name?

Answer: Because I am baptized in the name of God the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

Question: Is baptism nothing more than a mere symbol [i.e., picture] of cleansing?
Answer: I think it to be such a symbol that the reality is attached to it. For God does not disappoint us when he promises us his gifts. Hence, both pardon of sins and newness of life are certainly offered and received by us in baptism.

Now, everything in us is screaming that such language sounds way too Catholic (or Moscovite), but we must also admit that it also reflects the language of Scripture itself. Paul says that baptism unites us with Christ in his death and resurrection, Peter says that baptism saves us, and Ananias says that baptism washes away our sins.

How, then, are we to talk about the efficacy of baptism?

I maintain that the answer is found in properly relating the sign to the thing signified. If we can remember to carefully distinguish the outward sign whereby water is sprinkled on a person's head, and the inward reality of the sinner being cleansed by the blood of Christ, then we can go ahead and speak of the one as if it is the other.

There is, in every sacrament, a spiritual relation, or sacramental union, between the sign and the thing signified: whence it comes to pass, that the names and effects of the one are attributed to the other (WCF xxvii.2).
Think of the sign and the thing signified like you would twins: It's only after you've learned to tell them apart that it becomes safe to put them together.

On Mortification

2010-01-03T20:33:00.000-08:00

I just began teaching an adult Sunday School class on John Owen's classic work The Mortification of Sin in Believers, and this morning we looked at chapter 1 in which Owen lays out some opening remarks about the discourse. The whole treatise is an exposition of Romans 8:13b: "If you mortify the deeds of the body, you will live."

One point that gave rise to some helpful discussion focused on how Owen deals with the conditional nature of this promise. He says that we mustn't take Paul's statement as a condition that bespeaks uncertainty, as if this passage were a universally-applicable formula according to which if a person does Y, X will necessarily follow (but who knows if the person will ever get around to doing X in the first place?). The context rules out such an approach, since the passage is addressed to those for whom "there is no condemnation" because they have been "justified by faith" and "have peace with God" (8:1; 5:1).

Rather, Owen argues, the conditional promise highlights "a certain connection or coherence" between the duty (mortifying the deeds of the body) and the reward (life). Though Owen doesn't say it explicitly, the relationship of eternal life to mortification seems to me to be very much akin to that of faith to justification. Can one be justified without faith? No. But is one's justification earned by his faith? No. The meritorious cause of one's justification is the work of Christ, the benefits of which are received through the instrumental cause of faith. Our mortification, therefore, issues forth in eternal life, but eternal life is in no sense earned by said mortification.

In fact, Owen says that:

The pressing of this duty [of mortification] immediately on any other [than believers] is a notable fruit of that superstition and self-righteousness that the world is full of--the great work and design of devout men ignorant of the gospel.... Mortification from a self-strength, carried on by ways of self-invention, unto the end of self-righteousness, is the soul and substance of all false religion in the world.

I am curious to know your thoughts on Owen's treatment of Paul's conditional promise here, as well as whether or not you agree with his assessment of those who disagree with him (and I think we all know who it is that he has in mind).

All is Quiet on New Year's Day

2009-12-31T22:51:00.000-08:00

The title of this post, as many of you probably know, comes from U2’s “New Year’s Day” from their 1983 album War (which, incidentally, is the first U2 song I ever heard, after which, at age ten, I went out and bought the LP. The rest, as the fella said, is history). So here I am, 26 years later on what will in two hours be New Year’s Day, sipping Bunnahabhain, reading Hemmingway, listening to U2’s latest album No Line on the Horizon, and wondering where all the time has gone.

Exactly ten years ago tonight, at the turn of the millennium, I was preaching a sermon from Romans 9 to a group of Hungarians from the Calvary Chapels of Miskolc and Debrecen on the glory of God displayed in both the salvation of the elect and the damnation of the reprobate (I was young). Less than a month later I would find out that we would be kicked out of Calvary because of sermons like that, and three months later my wife and I would move back to the U.S. and figure out what the next step would be.

At this moment it is hitting me with an almost crushing sense of wonder that the ‘90s were no longer last decade, but now the decade before last. I began that decade a 16 year-old and ended it at the ripe old age of 26. I spent almost a year of it in Africa and six years of it in Europe, and it was during those years in Hungary especially that I sort of became who I am, both personally, philosophically, and theologically. It is probably the hours and hours I spent wandering the streets, alleyways, and courtyards of Budapest thinking about love and life and lamentation that are to blame for my ever-increasing desire to get back there somehow (for now I must content myself with videos like the one below, directed by an old friend). Ah, nostalgia: It ain’t what it used to be….

So anyway, here I am, waxing pensive and realizing once again that all my desires—whether for things past or things to come—are really just a big ol’ farce, nothing more than a longing for heaven that is every bit as hounding as it is haunting, equally intransient as inconvenient. “My mind races with all my longings,” sings the poet, “but can’t keep up with what I’ve got.” But I suppose I’m in good company, for if Adam longed for something better than Paradise, then who am I to be content with life in a passing age, characterized as it is by a servile bondage to decay and death?

A raising of the glass, then, to the coming decade—may it be filled with mirth as well as melancholy, laughter as well as lament. May we rise high above our feats and defeats, knowing that at the end of the Day when all is said and done, earth simply isn’t worthy of us.

(But I sure like it sometimes....)

From Eternity to Here: Baptism, Eschatologically Considered

2009-12-29T22:31:00.000-08:00

Sometimes we Reformed paedobaptists spend so much time defending the confessional view of the status of covenant children that we forget that baptism is a way bigger topic than merely the mode or subjects of the sacrament. Sure, the sprinkling-water-on-the-baby’s-head part is integral to the baptism discussion, but to focus solely on the mechanics and beneficiaries of baptism is to exalt the trees over the forest, or to change the metaphor, it is to use the microscope to the exclusion of the telescope. To modify the words of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes 3, there’s a time to zoom in, but also a time to break out the wide-angle lens.

Peter’s words to the crowd on the Day of Pentecost have a much broader significance than we often realize:

Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself (Acts 2:38-39).

In a word, what the apostle is inviting his hearers to do is something every bit as cataclysmic and profound as what happened to Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy when they dared to venture through the back of that magical wardrobe into the strange, new world of Narnia. Baptism represents an intrusion of the age to come into this present world, a breaking-in of the dynamic of heaven to the here and now. As the waters are applied, the sky is split and the pavement cracks, and all that we once were is forever changed. William Willimon writes:

In baptism, we are subsumed into a story of water and the word. A story of creation formed out of dark waters. A story of a God so righteous that he was willing to make war on the world he created.... A story of a people, created out of nothing, by a God determined to be worshiped rightly, led through waters into the desert as imperial chariots foundered. A story of a Jewish woman visited by God in a way that confounded her fiancé but caused her to sing. A story of a crazy man out in the desert proclaiming a new kingdom coming in water and fire. A story of One who saved by an issue of water and blood.[1]

The first thing that baptism accomplishes, claims Peter, is giving us a new past: “Be baptized... for the forgiveness of your sins.” The connection between baptism and forgiveness of sins is also made by Ananias in his instruction to the newly-converted Saul of Tarsus: “Rise and be baptized, and wash away your sins” (Acts 22:16), and is echoed in the Nicene Creed’s statement that “We believe in one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.” “Do you not know,” Paul asks the Romans, “that as many of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” In the same way that Christ “died to sin,” so we who have been united to him participate in that death to all that once defined us.

In addition to giving us a new past, baptism gives us a new family in the present. As Peter’s words in v. 39 indicate, our earthly, familial ties are transcended—and in some cases trumped—by our baptismal union with “all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.” Despite our modern and gnostic desire to maintain our personal relationship with Jesus apart from the awkward and inconvenient tie to the church (filled as it is with actual—and often annoying—people), the fact is that we can’t have the Head without the Body. Through baptism we are ushered into the middle of a tale quite long in the telling, a saga having been spun for thousands of years. This redemptive drama began with a married couple, then grew into a family of eight, then a tribe under the leadership of a chieftain, then twelve tribes that grew into a nation ruled by a king, until it eventually expanded into a truly worldwide and catholic Church with members from every kindred, tongue, people, and nation. Paul tells the Galatians that “As many of you as were baptized into Christ Jesus... are all one in Christ” (3:27, 28). And furthermore, whenever God’s people worship, we do so in the presence of this great “cloud of witnesses” together with whom we are summoned into God’s heavenly presence. Patriarchs and prophets, apostles and martyrs, bishops and fathers, sinners and saints—all of them gather with us as we, together with innumerable angels in festal array, get a glimpse (albeit brief) of the glorious banquet at which we will sit with the Mediator of the New Covenant whose bloods speaks a more comforting word than that of Abel (Heb. 12:1, 22-24).

Lastly, baptism bestows upon us a new future. “Be baptized,” Peter insists, “and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (v. 38). The Spirit is always spoken of in the New Testament in terms that hearken us forward to the new age, the age to come that began to dawn on Easter Sunday and will be finally consummated when Jesus returns. “You were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit,” Paul writes to the Ephesians, “who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it” (1:13-14). The Greek word that is translated “guarantee” (arrabōn, used in modern Greek for engagement ring) denotes a down payment toward something that will be fully acquired in the future. Through baptism God the Father marks us off as his own, bestowing upon us the Spirit of the age to come whose role is to bring the dynamic of the “not yet” to bear upon the “already.” David Dark writes:

Whether it’s trees clapping their hands, stars falling from the sky, bloody red moons, or crystal seas—it’s as if the new world on the way requires constant re-articulation to best bear witness of its freshness and new-every-morningness, perpetually straining forward to what lies ahead.[2]

One of the ways this “new world on the way” is “re-articulated” in the here and now is through the sacrament of baptism. Living the Christian life, therefore, is tantamount to living the baptized life, for this ancient ritual serves to pull the future into the present, effectively bringing the believer from eternity to here.

[1] William Willimon, Peculiar Speech: Preaching to the Baptized (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 5.
[2] David Dark, Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons, and Other Pop Culture Icons (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2002), 12-13.

Who Said That?

2009-12-27T20:04:00.000-08:00

A tip of my hat to anyone who can, without Googling, identify the source of this quote:

There [is a distinction between] one kind of understanding of earthly things; another of heavenly. I call “earthly things” those which do not pertain to God or his Kingdom, to true justice, or to the blessedness of the future life; but which have their significance and relationship with regard to the present life and are, in a sense, confined within its bounds. I call “heavenly things” the pure knowledge of God, the nature of true righteousness, and the mysteries of the Heavenly Kingdom. The first class includes government, household management, all mechanical skills, and the liberal arts. In the second are the knowledge of God and of his will, and the rule by which we conform our lives to it.

Good luck....

The Woman Who Rides the Beast

2009-12-20T20:18:00.000-08:00

I received something quite earth-shattering in the mail a couple days ago addressed to Occupant, sent from Baptist Gospel Tabernacle in Youngstown, OH (I'm just assuming they sent the same thing to every single home in America, so you probably know exactly what I'm referring to). The envelope included a tract (printed on newsprint using what appears to have been carbon paper) called The Priest Who Found Christ, a photocopied collage of various newspaper clippings about a future cashless society, Billy Graham, and the Federal Council of Churches, and a single-spaced, front-and-back article that begins with the words, "What I am about to say is the most important thing you will ever read. If you are not afraid to face reality then read on. If you are afraid then STOP, this message is not for you."

Hmmm....

On the one hand I am a sucker for reverse phychology, it always works on me. So my first thought was, "Oh, so you think I might be afraid to read what you've written? Well, we'll see about that! I'm going to read it, now who's the moron?" But then I thought to myself, "But then again, this paper is the most important thing I will ever read. Do I really want to take such a drastic step at such a young age? I mean, if it was only the most important thing I have read up until now, that'd be one thing. But if I read this paper and live to be 80, that means every single thing I read for the next 44 years will be comparatively unimportant." What to do?

Throwing caution to the wind, I read on.

We have 2 systems seeking desperately to enslave the world in bondage. These 2 are the Roman Catholic hierarchy and Communism.... The Berlin Wall coming down was not a step towards freedom; it was merely the reuniting of communism & Catholicism with one goal in mind....to "CONQUER" the whole world.

Gulp. (Whispering): I know some Roman Catholics. Shoot, I have shelves filled with books by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Naomi Klein. Am I a sitting duck, mere brainwash-bait waiting to get swept up against my will into some underground lair where I'll be forced into religious cannibalism while watching Rocky IV and cheering for Drago to kill the Italian Stallion like he did Apollo Creed?

Hands trembling, I continued reading:

In 310 A.D. Constantine the Pagan Emperor of Rome did exactly what Daniel said he would, he signed an edict that ALL his subjects HAD to worship on SUN-day. They're busy now making a new calendar to cover up their lie making MONDAY the first day so SUNDAY will come out the 7th. Nice try, but GOD's people will not be deceived.

It was a "nice try," so nice, in fact, that I had bought into the lie hook, line, and sinker. Is there any hope for me?

The POPE brain-washed the people into praying to Mary who in reality is the Pagan goddess found in the 7th chapter of Jeremiah.

Uh-oh. I have read Jeremiah 7 before, how did I never notice that it taught that Jesus' own mother was a pagan goddess? And if she was around in Jeremiah's day, then she must have been really old when Jesus was born! And if she could dupe the angel Gabriel himself into calling her "full of grace," then are any of us safe from her devious and hypnotic skills? Needless to say, I was shaken by this point, yea, to my very core.

By the way, how could Peter have been the first POPE when he was married? Read it in Matthew 8:14. Are you surprised? Don't be.... There was no pope until Phocus the Emperor of Rome convinced Boniface III to play the role of Pope. The Popes are emperors in disguise. Never forget the Saint Bartholomew Massacre, World War II, the French Revolution, or the Spanish Inquisition. The CATHOLIC System is responsible for ALL these wars and the wars of today. Soon GOD will DESTROY THE VATICAN AND COMMUNISM. Read it in Revelations 17 and Ezekiel 39. WAKE UP MY FRIEND!!!

Dang! I totally forgot about World War Two! Toward the end of the paper there were some recommended books for further study that:

... can be purchased through CHICK PUBLICATIONS. If you have been warned by your church not to read CHICK TRACTS, it's only because they do not want you to learn the truth. You've spent a lifetime swallowing their lies HOOK, LINE & SINKER... now WAKE UP!!!

Oh, I'm awake, perhaps more awake then I've ever been before. The first thing I need to do is get Doc Brown to juice up the DeLorean's flux capacitor with enough plutonium to reach 1.21 jigawatts so I can hightail it outta 1955. This place is scary.

And if that fails, I'll need the switchboard operator to patch me through to Joseph McCarthy and Loraine Boettner. Surely they'll know what to do....

What Do "Apostates to Rome" and "Machen's Vitriolic Spawn" Have in Common?

2009-12-17T10:20:00.000-08:00

I am honestly trying really hard to figure out why Mark Horne is mad at me this time.

As far as I can tell (and I'm open to correction here), his logic goes something like this: I have no business refusing to call Peter Leithart a heretic if I will allow an "apostate to Rome" (Mark's words) to subtly imply in the combox under my most recent post that the CREC may not actually be a part of the visible church.

(Insert image of head spinning around here)

Apparently, consistency demands that I treat Leithart like a heretic even if I don't believe he is one because, after all, someone on my blog whom I have never met made a comment that could potentially be construed as offensive to people in the CREC (and the person who made it is a Catholic, which is about as far away from being a rabid, Westminster-West member of "Machen's vitriolic spawn" as one can be. Oh, that description comes from one of Mark's commenters).

Well, while I fail to understand the logic of this post, at least I understand a bit better now why people like me are treated so disrespectfully by people like Mark Horne. The logic of internet consistency demands it.

Further Reflection on the Judgment of the SJC Panel

2009-12-13T20:20:00.000-08:00

One of the most interesting statements in the PCA's preliminary decision rendered by the panel of its Standing Judicial Commision is the following:

By appealing to Scripture... to justify positions that are out of accord with our Standards, an individual, or group, is in effect... amending the Constitution, not by judicial act, but by personal interpretation. If someone believes that the Standards have incorrectly or inadequately stated what Scripture says about a particular topic, then instead of ignoring what our Standards state and justifying their positions by personal interpretations of Scripture which are not consistent with the Standards, they should propose amendments to the Standards to clarify or expand the Standards, since our Constitution holds them out to be "standard expositions of the teachings of Scripture."

A couple thoughts in response to this. First, this calls into question the validity of the tactic used by Federal Visionists and others who insist that they are not contradicting what the Standards say by their suspicious expositions of Scripture, but only going beyond the Standards and saying more (this is done, we are told, so as to reflect more accurately what the Bible actually teaches).

My question at this point goes something like this: If the Westminster Standards teach that union with Christ is a saving and therefore non-losable benefit, but if I decide to "go-beyond-the-Sandards-but-not-contradict-them" by teaching my congregation that they may lose their union with Christ, how have I not fallen under the condemnation of the SJC's judgment above?

Secondly, how is it that Catholic and Orthodox believers can maintain that Reformed confessionalists are no different from the no-creed-but-Christ, just-me-and-my-Bible evangelicals when the PCA's highest courts says that "by appealing to Scripture to justify positions that are out of accord with our Standards, an individual is in effect amending the Constitution, not by judicial act, but by personal interpretation"? Is not this statement effectively denying sole interpretive authority to the individual, and placing it rather in the hands of the church and its Confession and Catechisms?

That's all. I just needed to get a couple things off my chest....

The Ruling of the PCA's Standing Judicial Commission

2009-12-09T20:13:00.000-08:00

A panel of the Standing Judicial Commission of the Presbyterian Church in America (which is the denomination’s highest court) issued its proposed ruling a few hours ago with respect to the complaint against the Pacific Northwest Presbytery that was filed by me and two others (for background, see here and here). The final ruling will be made in March.

In a word, our complaint was upheld, and SJC agreed that the presbytery erred in its failure to find a strong presumption of guilt on the part of TE Peter Leithart due to his doctrinal views being out of accord with the Westminster Standards concerning various fundamental issues. The ruling can be downloaded here, and some selective passages are pasted below:

Did PNW err in its handling of the reports from the PNW Study Committee appointed to
examine Leithart's fitness to continue as a PCA Teaching Elder?

Yes. The Complaint is sustained, and the case is sent back to PNW with instructions to
institute process and appoint a prosecutor to prepare an Indictment of TE Leithart and to
conduct the case (BCO 31-2).

The PNW case lies somewhere between these two cases [namely, those of the Louisiana and Siouxlands Presbyteries]. The PNW Study Committee was established after Leithart wrote to the PNW Stated Clerk to lay out his views with respect to the 9 Declarations. The PNW Study Committee was charged with examining Leithart's fitness to continue as a PCA Teaching Elder in light of the June 2007 General Assembly's receptions of the Ad Interim Committee's Report on the theology of the Federal Vision. In spite of being entitled a "study committee," what was essentially formed was a committee with an assignment to conduct a BCO 31-2 investigation. The work product of this Committee, including the Committee Report, the Minority Report, and Leithart' Response, constituted an excellent BCO 31-2 investigative report. The only conclusion that a court should reach, given the excellent work product produced by the PNW Study Committee, would be that there is a strong presumption of guilt that some of the views of Leithart are out of accord with some of the fundamentals of the system of doctrine taught in the Standards.

This does not mean that Leithart is a heretic. He is not. This does not mean that Leithart
is not or whether he is a Christian. He is. This does not necessarily mean that Leithart is outside of the broader reformed community. The sole question to be determined is whether Leithart's views place him outside of the Standards, as adopted by the Presbyterian Church in America.

Respondent argued in his brief that someone who holds to various central tenets of the Standards cannot be outside the Standards:

"In considering the views of Dr. Leithart, we are talking about someone who holds to the inerrancy of Scripture, to federal Reformed theology, the five points, penal substitutionary atonement, paedobaptism, and Presbyterianism and confesses his commitment to forensic justification, the necessity of faith for the effectiveness of baptism, etc. What are we saying if we say that such a man with such convictions cannot belong to our little Reformed Presbyterian church?"

But such an external criteria of central tenets is not the appropriate criteria. One could envision such central tenets that would encompass Anglicans within its bounds; similarly, Reformed Baptists could affirm some central tenets of the Standards. This does not mean that either Anglicans or Baptists are within the Standards. In the same way, Leithart appears to hold some views that place him outside of the fundamentals of the Standards, as adopted by the Presbyterian Church in America.

The error made by PNW was twofold. First, PNW erred in judging Leithart's views "to be
not out of accord with the fundamentals of our system of doctrine." Second, PNW also erred in not finding a strong presumption of guilt that some ofthe views of Leithart are "out of accord with the fundamentals of the system of doctrine taught in the Westminster Standards." Under BCO 31-2, "if such investigation, however originating, should result in raising a strong presumption of guilt of the party involved, the court shall institnte process" (emphasis added). The mandatory language of BCO 31-2 ("shall") means that under our polity, at this stage of the case, the proper procedure for determining Leithart's fitness to continue as a PCA Teaching Elder, as was the charge given to the PNW Study Committee, is to institute process under BCO 32 and 34.

One of the difficulties a court encounters when examining the views of men who hold views
styled as "Federal Vision," is a tendency to justify such views by appealing to Scripture in order to contradict the Standards. What Scripture says about a particular topic is set forth in our Standards.

BCO 39-3 states that:

"[W]hile affirming that the Scripture is "the supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined" (WCF 1.1 0), and that the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church in America is "subordinate to the Scriptures ofthe Old and New Testaments, the inerrant Word of God" (BCO Preface III), and while affirming also that this Constitution is fallible (WCF 31.3), the Presbyterian Church in America affirms that this subordinate and fallible Constitution has been "adopted by the church" (BCO Preface, III) "as standard expositions of the teachings of Scripture in relation to both faith and practice" (BCO 29-1) and as setting forth a form of government and discipline "in conformity with the general principles of biblical polity" (BCO 21-5.3). To insure that this Constitution is not amended, violated or disregarded in judicial process, any review of the judicial proceedings of a lower court by a higher court shall by guided by the following principles.

By appealing to Scripture in this way to justify positions that are out of accord with our
Standards, an individual, or group, is in effect doing just that (i.e. amending the Constitution, not by judicial act, but by personal interpretation). If someone believes that the Standards have incorrectly or inadequately stated what Scripture says about a particular topic, then instead of ignoring what our Standards state and justifying their positions by personal interpretations of Scripture which are not consistent with the Standards, they should propose amendments to the Standards to clarify or expand the Standards, since our Constitution holds them out to be "standard expositions of the teachings of Scripture."

This tension is evidenced by the PNW Committee Report which states:

"Presbytery's study committee cheerfully acknowledges that it approached its task with the intention of allowing Dr. Leithart the greatest latitude consistent with the second ordination vow (BCO 21-5) and of placing the best, not worst construction on his statements."

It is our opinion that PNW, even though confronted with statement(s) and writing(s) of
Leithart that place him out of accord with the fundamentals of the Standards, as adopted by the Presbyterian Church in America, chose to place Leithart' statements in the kindest of light and not engage in critical thinking and reasoned judgment, by stating:

"In the committee' view Dr. Leithart's views are compatible with the teachings of our standards though there are certainly some differences in statement, emphasis, and elaboration. Our brief was to determine whether he denied or contradicted the teaching of our Standards, not to object if he wished to say more than they say or even, in confessing the same truth, to improve upon their form of words. That his positive constructions may seem in some respects difficult to reconcile with the language of our standards is not itself evidence that he denies their teaching. The dialectical character of biblical teaching famously produces tensions that remain difficult, if not impossible to resolve. The opinion of the committee that his views, while in some cases going beyond the formulations of the WCF, are not a denial of them, should not, however, be taken to mean that the committee is persuaded that Dr. Leithart's construction of the doctrines in dispute represent an advance in understanding or that they provide a more accurate account of the teachings of Holy Scripture.

"Much of Dr. Leithart's work purports to provide a more complete picture of biblical teaching than is represented in the systematic presentation of that teaching in the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms. To that end he draws our attention to the fact that the biblical vocabulary of election, justification, and union with Christ is used in ways other than those uses reported in the Standards. He says often enough that, so far as it goes, the confessional summary is accurate, but he remains convinced that our doctrinal formulations would be enriched by careful attention to the complete biblical usage of this theological vocabulary. The complaint has been that using these terms in other than their accepted usage is unnecessarily confusing. The reply is that these are the Bible's own terms and a faithful interpreter of Scripture is duty bound to reckon with the fact that the Bible employs even these important theological terms in different ways. We likewise do not believe, we cannot believe, "that the Reformed confessions have been formed for all ages and stand in no further need of reformation."

"The committee wishes to say, however, that having read some of Dr. Leithart's works, we do wish he were more careful to avoid unnecessary confusion by stating more categorically and in different contexts what he is asserting in connection with the teaching of the Reformed tradition and, in particular, Westminster Calvinism, and perhaps more importantly, what he is not asserting.

"The committee does not feel that he has done all he could have done [as he has challenged accepted notions or critiqued familiar forms of words. Nevertheless, we are persuaded that at some key points, Dr. Leithart has, in fact, failed adequately to represent the fullness of biblical teaching. It is the view of the committee, however, that in his [Leithart's] positive construction of baptism and its efficacy, he [Leithart] fails adequately to represent the biblical data and the result is a one-sided and confusing, if not positively incoherent construction."

In failing to exercise this critical thinking and reasoned judgment, PNW has failed to guard
the church from teachings and writings "which injured the purity and peace of the church." (BCO 13-9.1) and in doing so has caused much pastoral confusion and harm.

In conclusion, since what amounts to a thorough BCO 31-2 investigation has been conducted by PNW, the results of which PNW should have recognized raised a strong presumption of guilt that Leithart holds views that place him out of accord with our Standards (the Constitution of the PCA), PNW erred in not so doing. In determining what is the appropriate remedy, the SJC remands and sends this case back to PNW with instructions to institute process, based on this finding of a strong presumption of guilt, and appoint a prosecutor to prepare an Indictment of Leithart and to conduct the case.

Please be in prayer for all who are involved in this matter, regardless of which “side” they are on. When it comes to issues surrounding the so-called Federal Vision, there are those who believe the very heart of the gospel is at stake, and on the other hand there are those who feel that mountains are being made out of molehills and our denomination is being turned into a mere sect. But what no one should forget is that intertwined with all the doctrinal debate are the personal relationships and livelihoods of those involved. All that to say that this is no occasion for congratulatory back-slapping. Just as the Reformed distinguished themselves from the fundamentalists in that they left the mainline churches weeping rather than rejoicing, so we who witness the state of our churches would do well to lament our own lack of unity.

There are no real winners here.

Horton on the Canon

2009-12-07T16:44:00.000-08:00

I have been re-reading Michael Horton's People and Place: A Covenant Ecclesiology, and I came across some good stuff on the canon that may prove to be good fodder for discussion:

Though usually advertised as a shift away from modern individualism, the drift toward assimilating soteriology to ecclesiology, justification to the church and its virtuous practices, and the word to ecclesial interpretation is more aptly described as a shift away from God's redeeming work to our own. To ask what consistutes the unity of the church, then, is to inquire as to what creates the church itself. The answer to both is the Word of God, both as means of grace and canonical norm. The gospel does not depend on reason, politics, marketing, or even on the church; it creates its own rationality, polis, publicity, and church. The gospel is self-sufficient, pulling everything else behind it.

This raises the critical issue at the heart or protests new and old against sola scriptura: the logical priority of canon and church. The sufficiency of Scripture is not an abstract, predogmatic rule but is intrinsically related to our view of God, the covenant, and redemption. Just as creation is the result of a conversation between the persons of the Trinity, the church is the offspring rather than the origin of the gospel. It is no wonder then that Paul compares the work of the gospel to God's word in creation (Rom. 4:16-17). While the covenant community is temporally prior to the inscripturated canon, the word that creates ex nihilo asserts its temporal and communicative priority over both.... The script has priority over even its most significant performances. Furthermore, the canon not only judges our poor performances but also liberates us from having to repeat or defend them.

The covenantal context proves its value once more when considering the claim that the church created the canon. God's word spoken has now also been committed to writing, a canon or consitution. The Bible is the textual deposit of God's unfading Word, whose oral proclamation had all along been creating and sustaining a church in the world since the protevangelium of Genesis 3:15. The church is not purpose-driven, but promise-driven.

Ecclesiastical authority derives from and is qualified and measured by its constiting norm: because we have this covenantal consitution, we are this particular covenant community. Thus, the priority of canon over church is the corrolary of the priority of God's grace over "human will or exertion" (Rom. 9:16).

Germinating around its nucleus of Christ's words and deeds, this canon--at first proclaimed, heard, and recalled--became a completed deposit and was treated as such long before the list of canonical books was officially prescribed in response to spurious texts.

"Theology is not free speech but holy speech," notes Webster. "Hence the authority of Scripture is a matter for the church's acknowledgement, not its ascription." ... Webster says that the solo verbo [by the Word alone] is the correlate of the sola fide [through faith alone]. To give priority to the Word is to give priority to the action of God.

As the ecclesial body cannot be equated with its sovereign head, ecclesial speech (tradition) cannot be equated with God's Word. Since Christ's person and work--and apostolic testimony to it--are qualitatively distinguished from the church and its practices, the canon does not simply offer us a good story to complete by imitation (a corrolary of the exemplary view of the atonement) or repeat by further acts of atonement and reconciliation, but a completed script that draws us into its story line as performers. The canonical characters are in a qualitatively different class than the postcanonical church that performs the play.

As in the secular polis, so in the covenant community: the distinction between the consistution (text) and the courts (interpretation) preserves us from reducing ecclesial speech to solipsism: the arbitrary exercise of power based on the church talking to itself. Yet there are still the courts. We read the Bible together, and our communaal interpretations--in the form of creeds, confessions, catechisms, and church orders--have a binding, though secondary, authority. Just as the extraordinary vocation of prophets and apostles is qualitatively distinguished from the ordinary calling of ministers today, the magisterial authority of the canon must take precedence over the ministerial authority of the church.

Thoughts?

Horton Hears a Boo

2009-12-03T11:22:00.000-08:00

PCA Federal Visionist Mark Horne just published what I will admit is a rather humorous, albeit scathing, post about how Michael Horton has no understanding of the gospel. (Between this and the flack he has taken for endorsing Scott Hahn's book on the biblical theology of Pope Benedict XVI, it seems that Horton's web-cred has taken a hit, at least among fundamentalists and haters in general).

So here's the background....

There's this thing called The Manhattan Declaration; Horton reviewed it and found it wanting, particularly due to its confusion of law and gospel; Horne then chimed in, claiming that Horton's definition of the gospel is completely unbiblical. He writes:

Horton is completely wrong in his definition of the Gospel. When Jesus preached the Gospel he did not preach the precise message that Horton says that he was supposed to.... What he teaches is Biblically illiterate and a twisting of Scripture. And the fact that professed Bible-believers cling to these false and groundless claims is as intellectually superstitious as any monk approaching a vial of Mary’s alleged breast milk on his knees.
Horne's tactic to demonstrate his claims was to take Horton's statement that the gospel is "the specific announcement of the forgiveness of sins and declaration of righteousness solely by Christ’s merits" and then plug that into various NT passages where the word "gospel" is found. The result looks like this:

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming God’s specific announcement of the forgiveness of sins and declaration of righteousness solely by Christ’s merits and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the specific announcement of the forgiveness of sins and declaration of righteousness solely by Christ’s merits." (Mark 1:14-15)

They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when, according to my specific announcement of the forgiveness of sins and declaration of righteousness solely by Christ’s merits, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus. (Rom. 2:15-16)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Shoot dang! Well I'll BE! When you take a systematic statement intended to define a concept according to the whole counsel of God and just plug it in wherever the original word is found, it sounds really funny! I'm doubled over even as I write, slapping the table with the palm of my hand.

Of course, this tactic, though rhetorically useful for scoring cheap points, does little to further any actual dialogue. For example, let's see what happens when I take a systematic definition that Horne actually agrees with and then plug that definition into some biblical passages that use the word being defined:

For who is a Spirit, in and of himself infinite in being, glory, blessedness, and perfection; all-sufficient, eternal, unchangeable, incomprehensible, every where present, almighty, knowing all things,most wise, most holy, most just, most merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, but the LORD? And who is a rock, except our Spirit, in and of himself infinite in being, glory, blessedness, and perfection; all-sufficient, eternal, unchangeable, incomprehensible, every where present, almighty, knowing all things, most wise, most holy, most just, most merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth? (Psa. 18:31; cf. Westminster Larger Catechism Q/A 7).

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge a Spirit, in and of himself infinite in being, glory, blessedness, and perfection; all-sufficient, eternal, unchangeable, incomprehensible, every where present,almighty, knowing all things, most wise, most holy, most just, most merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, therefore a Spirit, in and of himself infinite in being, glory, blessedness, and perfection; all-sufficient, eternal, unchangeable, incomprehensible, every where present, almighty, knowing all things, most wise, most holy, most just, most merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done (Rom. 1:28; cf. Westminster Larger Catechism Q/A 7).

Good heavens! Look what happens when we take the WLC's definition of God and substitute it for the word "God" in Scripture! Not only does it make the Bible way too long, it also demonstrates how silly the Westminster Divines' understanding of God was!

Maybe it's actually a good thing that Federal Visionists are hesitant to register their exceptions to the Westminster Standards to their presbyteries. I mean, given Horne's new hermeneutic, I doubt these presbyteries will be able to find the time to deal with all of them (let alone the will).

In Case You Missed It....

2009-12-02T23:50:00.000-08:00

I was interviewed on R.C. Sproul's radio program

Renewing Your Mind last week about Dual Citizens:

Worship and Life Between the Already and the Not Yet.

If you missed it and would like to listen, here you go.

There's No "I" in Worship

2009-11-30T00:47:00.000-08:00

I made a statement in my morning sermon yesterday that struck some people as unsettling, but I plan to stick by it unless I can be shown to be wrong:

Worship, according to the New Testament, is an almost exclusively corporate, rather than individual, phenomenon.

Take for example what is arguably the locus classicus on the topic of worship: Jesus’ interaction with the Samaritan woman in John 4 (in which the word “worship” is used no less than ten times). If we try to substitute the contemporary understanding of worship for what our Lord and the woman are talking about, the dialogue makes little sense. Worship, in the parlance of our times, usually refers either to singing songs specifically, or more generally to whatever goosebumpy, “Hallmark Moments” our private devotions happen to yield. But what Jew or Samaritan in antiquity, if they were in their right minds, would have argued that one’s personal quiet times needed to take place on a mountaintop either in Jerusalem or Samaria? The very fact that the initial argument between Jesus and the Samaritan woman focused on the where of worship demonstrates that it was not private devotions that were being discussed since, as everyone knows, those can take place anywhere.

Even the well-known passage Romans 12:1, in which Paul speaks of “our spiritual worship” cannot be taken to denote individual private worship. The apostle urges the Romans to offer their bodies (plural) as a living sacrifice (singular), and he then launches into a discussion of the one body and its many members, thus indicating that the Romans’ spiritual worship was that which they offered in covenantal assembly.

And then when we add all the “let us draw near” passages of Hebrews, we arrive at a picture of worship that is corporate, collective, and covenantal.

This is not deny the Reformed categories of individual, family, and corporate worship. But in our day and age, characterized as it is by the atomization of society, it is the corporate nature of worship that needs to be drilled into the heads and hearts of God’s people.

That’s all I’m saying….

Something for the Drive Home

2009-11-25T13:21:00.000-08:00

My lecture "The Destiny of the Species" from last month's Ligonier Conference can be downloaded here.

Enjoy....

N.T. Wright on Romans 3:27-29

2009-11-23T00:10:00.000-08:00

There has been an exegetical point that Wright has often made that has been on my mind lately. It concerns Romans 3:27-29, which says:

Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith. For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law. Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also.

No one would deny that v. 28 is in some sense a culmination of Paul’s preceding argument concerning justification by faith. On the verses that flank it on either side, Wright writes:

The meaning of the all-important verse Romans 3:28 is held firmly in place by the verses on either side. Romans 3:27 indicates that “the Torah of faith” excludes the “boasting” of Romans 2:17-20.... How then must we read Romans 3:28? [We must read it as] the decisive statement which explains (as the gar, “for,” indicates) the dramatic claim of Romans 3:27, and as the statement whose immediate implication is that God has one family, not two, and that this family consists of faithful Gentiles as well as faithful Jews.
In other words, the boasting that justification by faith eliminates is not a boasting in one’s moral accomplishments, but a boasting on the part of the Jew who takes solace in his status as being from the nation through whom God would save the world. And further, the little word “or” at the beginning of 3:29 serves to show that if the status of “righteous” were manifested by ethnic boundary markers rather than by faith, then the Jews’ boast would be true, and God is, in the end, the father of Abraham’s physical offspring only.

Thoughts?

An Update From Today's SJC Proceedings

2009-11-19T18:14:00.000-08:00

Just a quick update on the SJC proceedings:

We met for just over two hours, during which we (the complainants) presented our case, and Rob Rayburn (the respondant) presented his. The gist of our position was that on a number of points (such as the relationship of imputation to union, the efficacy of baptism, and the distinction between the covenants of works and grace), Rev. Leithart has expressly denied the clear teaching of the Westminster Standards, and that the Pacific Northwest Presbytery erred in failing to recognize this fact and act on it.

The respondant's position is that we (the complainants) are interpreting the Standards to be way more strict than they are (or have been understood to be throughout the history of the Reformed churches), thus "turning our church into a mere sect." If Leithart professes to hold to the Westminster Standards (which he does) and is a godly man who holds to eternal election, the five points of Calvinism, and paedobaptism (which he is), then it is wrong to "try to run him out of the church," especially when we have miserably failed to demonstrate that his views fall under the sanction of even one of the nine points set forth in the PCA's FV Report.

A couple of the eyebrow-raising statements from the respondant include: (1) His insistence that the Westminster Standards do not teach that the covenant of works sets forth a distinct principle by which we receive eternal life from that of the covenant of grace; (2) His encouragement to the SJC that they all read John Frame's review of Horton's Christless Christianity so as to learn from Frame how to avoid the dangers of Westminster Seminary California's sectarianism; and perhaps the most telling of all was (3) seeing firsthand what happens when one flattens out redemptive history so as to take Yahweh's dealings with Old Testament Israel under the conditional, Mosaic covenant as an unqualified, across-the-board paradigm for understanding how God relates to the church today. When asked by the commission, "In what sense are we saved by baptism?", the response was given, "Well, in the same sense that God can pardon his people and then damn them."

(For the record, my point is not that OT Israel has nothing to teach us, nor is it that the writers of the NT never refer us to Israel to learn from their mistakes. I get that. My point is that to read all the Bible's old covenant/new covenant language in purely existential rather than eschatological terms is to do violence to both the newness of the new covenant and the work of Christ as the second Adam and true Israelite who gained for us perfectly what his OT types could not.)

I am told that the SJC has 42 days to make a ruling. And to those of you who love asking, yes, if they find in favor of Leithart and against us, I will submit to that and never bring it up again.

Preliminary Hearing Before the Standing Judicial Commission of the PCA

2009-11-18T21:37:00.000-08:00

Just a heads-up: I am in Atlanta for a preliminary hearing with the Standing Judicial Commission of the Presbyterian Church in America (which is the denomination's highest court). The purpose of the hearing is to address the complaint filed against the Pacific Northwest Presbytery by me and two others due to presbytery's failure to take appropriate action with respect to Rev. Peter Leithart, a minister in the PNWP. As many of you know, the 35th General Assembly of the PCA near-unanimously judged the theology of the Federal Vision to be out of accord with the Westminster Confession and Catechisms, the doctrinal standards to which all our ministers subscribe. Rev. Leithart is an avowed Federal Visionist, and therefore we feel that the Pacific Northwest Presbytery's repeated refusal to take any action whatsoever demonstrates a failure on presbytery's part to protect the doctrine of the church as we have confessed it.

We meet tomorrow (Thursday) at noon EST. Prayers are appreciated for all involved, including Peter.

St. Paul on the Imputation of Christ's Active Obedience

2009-11-16T00:10:00.000-08:00

OK, we have given N.T. Wright the floor for our last handful of posts, it is now time to take it back.

For confessional Reformed believers, the biggest obstacle to a “new perspective” reading of Paul is Wright’s denial that Jesus’ life of obedient law-keeping is reckoned to the sinner in justification. Rather, Wright argues, the “obedience” that is so reckoned consist only of the Messiah’s death, and not his life. Wright loves to appeal to Philippians 2:8 at this point, which speaks of Jesus “becoming obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.”

I would like to offer some points by way of response.

First, regarding Philippians 2:8, Wright would surely agree that his Reformed opponents do not deny that Jesus’ death was an act of obedience to the Father. In other words, no one is denying what this verse says. For Wright to appeal to it in order to refute the imputation of Christ’s active obedience places a much greater burden on the text that it can bear, for in Philippians 2:8 Paul did not say that Jesus’ death alone constitutes the whole of his obedience to the Father, but simply that Christ “became obedient to the point of death.” And moreover, the apostle’s language of “to the point of death” (mexri + thanatos in the genitive case) would seem to indicate that the Messiah’s death was the culmination of his obedience and not just the sole example of it.

Secondly, we have in Romans 5:18-19 one of the most clear Pauline articulations of the doctrine in question:

Therefore as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one Man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.

A couple points need to be made here in order for these verses to have their full effect. First, although the ESV regrettably follows the NIV in translating di’ henos dikaiomatos as “one act of righteousness,” the context (as well as many commentators) demand that the word henos (one) be rendered in the masculine gender instead of the neuter (though they look identical in the original). In other words, the word “one” should be understood to refer to a masculine subject (“the Man”) rather than to a neuter one (“righteousness”), thus rendering the phrase not “one act of righteousness” but “the righteousness of the one Man” (as it appears in the NKJV). Surprisingly, many who deny the imputation of Jesus’ active obedience cite Romans 5:18 in such a way as to give the impression that it answers the question definitively, thereby demonstrating a complete unawareness of the grammatical debate surrounding it. But as Cranfield says:

Since henos is masculine in its three occurrences in v.17 and also in its two occurrences in v.19, and since the whole subsection is concerned with the relation of the one man Adam and one Man Christ to the many... it is surely better to take henos here as masculine (Romans, 289).
Another grammatical point that is worth mentioning is that here in Romans 5, Paul teaches the substance of the imputation of Christ’s active obedience without ever using the allegedly controversial word logizomai. According to many Federal Visionists, this Greek word that is usually translated as “impute” does not mean to transfer something from one person to another, but only to reckon it to be so. But follow Paul’s logic in vv. 15-19: first, Paul teaches that Christ, like Adam, functions as a federal Head who represents, and acts on behalf of, a people; second, through Christ’s representation his people are given a gift; third, this gift results in justification; fourth, this gift that results in justification consists of righteousness; and fifth, the righteousness that is given is the obedience of Christ, which constitutes us righteous. To summarize, Paul teaches that the obedience of Christ is given as a gift to the sinner resulting in his justification, all without ever using the word logizomai.

Lastly, if Christ’s “righteousness” (both in Romans 5 and elsewhere) refers to his covenant faithfulness, then the question must be asked, “To what, exactly, was Christ faithful?” Remember, Paul makes it clear in Romans 5:18-19 that Jesus’ “righteousness” is his “obedience.” So if Jesus’ obedience is given to the sinner as a gift resulting in justification (which Romans 5 explicitly says), then is Wright correct in saying that Christ’s obedience is his death only? I mean, for all of Wright’s moaning about how supposedly a-historical and non-covenantal Reformed theologians are, one would expect that his understanding of the Messiah’s covenant faithfulness would be defined as faithfulness to Torah, the covenant of law. But if Wright is willing—at precisely this most crucial of points—to surrender his boasted historicity and attention to covenant by removing Torah-keeping from his definition of Christ’s covenant faithfulness, then as far as I am concerned, all bragging right are henceforth null and void.

Please don’t interpret me as being dismissive of Wright as a whole—he makes many important exegetical points throughout his body of work. On this point in particular, though, the confessional Reformed believer must respectfully dig his heels and say with the dying Machen, “So thankful for the active obedience of Christ... no hope without it.”

Wright on Justification, Part Four: Christology

2009-11-08T16:45:00.000-08:00

As we have been seeing, N.T. Wright insists that the doctrine of justification must be approached from four distinct but related angles. We have looked at the first three (lawcourt, covenant, and eschatology), and in this post we’ll consider the fourth: Christology.

According to Wright, Christology comes to bear upon justification in the fact that God’s “single-plan-through-Israel-for-the-world” had a problem, namely, that Israel had not offered to God the “obedience” (Wright’s term) that was necessary to bring about the fulfillment of God’s saving promises to Abraham. He writes:

The task of the Messiah, bringing to its appointed goal the single-plan-through-Israel-for-the-world, was to offer to God the “obedience” which Israel should have offered but did not.... The problem with the single-plan-through-Israel-for-the-world was the “through-Israel” bit: Israel had let the side down, had let God down, had not offered the “obedience” which would have allowed the worldwide covenant plan to proceed. Israel, in short, had been faithless to God’s commission.... What is needed is a faithful Israelite, through whom the single plan can proceed after all.

Now before we Reformed confessionalists begin celebrating too much over what Wright says here, we must realize that when he speaks of obedience his thoughts turn immediately to Philippians 2:8. “Jesus,” Paul says there, “was obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.” For Wright, Jesus’ obedience as the faithful Israelite consists in his curse-bearing death—there is no sense in which the Father demanded a perfect performance from either Adam or Christ in order to qualify them to stand in his presence. And consistently with this is the denial of the merit of that law-keeping being transferred to those whom both Adams represented. No, what was given over to Adam’s offspring was the results of his deadly sin, and what is reckoned to the followers of Christ are the blessings of his death and resurrection.

My question to Wright (if I had the chance to ask him one) would be this: If Jesus, as our covenant representative, needed to qualify himself to bear the covenant curse by first leading a sinless life, then why is this the case? If the medieval notion of merit (which apparently plagues Reformed Protestantism) is so wrong-headed, then why did the Father insist upon perfect law-keeping from his Son before he could offer himself upon the cross? And since Christ’s covenant faithfulness was necessary (as Wright admits), then why would it not be a part of what gets reckoned to those who are united to Jesus? Or, did the Father wait until the Son’s earthly life was ending and his death beginning before he exclaimed, “OK.... Ready? Set? Go! Start redeeming NOW!”

But to be fair to Wright, that was four questions....

Covenant Radio Interview

2009-11-03T21:10:00.000-08:00

In case anyone's interested,
I was interviewed the other day
on Covenant Radio about my book,
Dual Citizens: Worship and Life
Between the Already and the Not Yet,
and the podcast can be downloaded here.

Enjoy....

Wright on Justification: Part Three: Eschatology

2009-11-01T20:59:00.000-08:00

After highlighting lawcourt and covenant, N.T. Wright moves on in Justification to a discussion of the third of his four aspects of the doctrine, namely, eschatology. Wright argues that Paul, like many of his Jewish contemporaries, expected that there would come a time in which all the world's wrongs would be put to right, but unlike his non-Christian Jewish contemporaries, insisted that this ultimate goal had already been launched in and through Jesus the Messiah.

Paul believed, in short, that what Israel had longed for God to do for it and for the world, God had done for Jesus, bringing him through death and into the life of the age to come. Eschatology: the new world had been inaugurated! Covenant: God’s promises to Abraham had been fulfilled! Lawcourt: Jesus had been vindicated—and so also all those who belonged to Jesus will be vindicated as well! And these, for Paul, were not three, but one. Welcome to Paul’s doctrine of justification, rooted in the single scriptural narrative as he read it, reaching out to the waiting world.

"For Paul," Wright goes on to say, "the events concerning Jesus the Messiah were nothing short of an apocalypse, the denoument of history, the bursting in of God's sovereign saving power to the world of corruption, sin, and death."

I remember some vigorous debates between faculty and students during my years of study at Westminster Seminary California on this very issue: Is there an eschatological element to our justification? In other words, is it solely a present phenomenon, or is it a present glimpse of a yet-to-be-announced verdict? I remember my own mind resonating with Horton's discomfort over one particular issue, namely, whether justification could truly be said to be eschatological if, as Wright insists, its basis in the present (faith alone) could be different from its basis in the future (the whole of our lived lives).

A good question, to be sure.

Now, Justification is the first of Wright's books I have read cover-to-cover (and it was not yet written when these debates were taking place at WSC), so it is possible that he has softened or nuanced his position since then, I'm not sure. While I certainly have serious misgivings about a supposedly already/not yet concept of justification if the basis of the former is different from that of the latter, I am somewhat comforted by the way Wright addresses this issue in his newest book:

This lawcourt verdict... is announced both in the present, with the verdict being issued on the basis of faith and faith alone, and also in the future, on the day when God raises from the dead all those who are already indwelt by the Spirit. The present verdict gives the assurance that the future verdict will match it; the Spirit gives the power through which that future verdict, when given, will be seen to be in accordance with the life that the believer has then lived (emphasis original).

So for Wright, although the basis for future justification is the entirety of the believer's earthly life while the basis for present justification is faith alone, there is no instance in which the person being justified in the here and now could conceivably fail to be justified on the last day. The Spirit serves to ensure that the "doing of the law in order to be justified [on the last day]" will take place for all those justified in the present.

Some thoughts on all of this....

While I certainly do not expect Wright to conform to doctrinal standards to which he has never subscribed, his formulation of justification is, from a confessionally Reformed standpoint, problematic. Although Federal Visionist-leaning brothers in the PCA will almost certainly disagree, I see no basis in the Westminster Confession for the idea of a "future justification according to works." Yes, there will be a final judgment of all men that will serve to vindicate God's people and his mercy toward them, but confessionally speaking, "justification" takes place "not due to anything wrought in, or done by [us], but for Christ's sake alone." In order to be faithful to our Standards, therefore, we must beware of speaking of our final vindication on the last day as a "justification by works."

This leads me to another brief point. Although Wright's admission that the believer's final justification by works will be more of a vindication than a verdict that we nervously and nail-bitingly await, his statement that present justification's "basis" is faith alone is still, from a Calvinistic standpoint, incorrect. The basis of our justification is the work of Christ in his life, death, and resurrection. Faith serves as a non-meritorious and non-contributory instrument whereby we receive what justifies, but it is never to be thought of as the ground or basis of our being received into Gods graces.

OK, discuss....

Wright on Justification, Part Two: Covenant

2009-10-29T22:47:00.000-07:00

The second of N.T. Wright's four "aspects" to the Pauline doctrine of justification is that of covenant (the others being lawcourt, eschatology, and Christology). In Justification he writes:

The key passages [on justification] in Romans and Galatians are all drawing on, and claiming to fulfill, two central passages in the Penta-teuch: Genesis 15, where God establishes his covenant with Abraham, and Deuteronomy 30, where Israel is offered the promise of covenant renewal after exile.... Paul's view of God's purpose is that God, the creator, called Abraham so that through his family he, God, could rescue the world from its plight.

For Wright, "covenant" is shorthand for "God's-single-plan-through-Israel-for-the-world":

The "covenant," in my shorthand, is not something other than God's determination to deal with evil once and for all and so put the whole creation (and humankind with it) right at last.... Dealing with sin, saving humans from it, giving them grace, forgiveness, justfication, glorification -- all this was the purpose of the single covenant from the beginning, now fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

As one would expect, Wright sees justification in the light of a broader, covenantal category that addresses questions bigger than merely "how to get to heaven when we die." He points to the fact that Paul, in Romans 4:11, quotes Genesis 17:11 which refers to circumcision as "the sign of the covenant," but changes the language, calling circumcision "the seal of the righteousness that [Abraham] had by faith." For Paul, covenant is the larger issue of which justification by faith is but a part.

Echoing Horton's most recent critique, I don't see how any Reformed believer who is at all indebted to theologians like Geerhardus Vos or Herman Ridderbos (as I am) would see any problem at all with Wright's emphasis on covenant here. What is baffling (as Horton correctly points out) is that Wright continues to stubbornly insist that his view is the antidote to that of Reformed theology. As I will highlight in subsequent posts, there are differences between Wright's conclusions and those of confessional Reformed orthodoxy, particularly pertaining to the role of Christ's active obedience in all of this, but this does not mean that we are left with the option of choosing Wright or Calvin on this matter (a false dilemma if there ever was one). In other words, there is no reason why we can't emphasize covenant on the one hand, seeing our justification as one ingredient in a much more grand and cosmic recipe, while on the other hand insisting upon Jesus lifelong obedience as the basis for it all.

Thoughts?

Wright on Justification, Part One: The Divine Lawcourt

2009-10-27T11:25:00.000-07:00

In his book Justification, N.T. Wright attempts to approach his doctrinal topic from four directions: lawcourt, covenant, eschatology, and Christology. These four aspects of justification, Wright argues, must be held together by the New Testament scholar in order to understand "what Saint Paul really said."

In this post I will interact a bit with the first of Wright's aspects: the lawcourt.

Wright begins by denying the claim of many that justification denotes "the entire picture of God's reconciling action toward the human race" (though the dikaios root "is indeed closely related to the whole theme of human salvation"). What, then, does "justification" mean? Wright argues that the word "righteousness" (Greek: dikaios) refers to "the status that someone has when the court has found in their favor." This has nothing whatsoever to do with the moral character of the person in question: on a human level a judge could incorrectly grant the status of "found by the court to be in the right" to a criminal, and it still would not change the fact that he now enjoys the status of "righteous." Turning to the verb form "to justify," Wright insists that what is in view here is not the remedial, Augustinian notion of "making righteous" (at least not if "righteous is referring to moral character). Rather, "to justify" means to declare that one is in the right with repect to the divine lawcourt:

"To justify" does not denote an action which transforms someone so much as a declaration which grants them a status. It is the status of the person which is transformed by the action of "justification," not the character. It is in this sense that "justification" "makes" someone "righteous," just as the officiant at a wedding service might be said to "make" the couple husband and wife....
This is why, according to Wright, any notion of the "imputation of the alien righteousness of Christ" is flawed, though understandable. The righteousness spoken of in Romans 3 is not a moral quality, but a status of legal vindication (meaning that the notion that one person's righteousness could be given to another is a confusion of categories).

From a confessionally Reformed perspective, some of what Wright says is rather benign, and some of it is even refreshing (especially his insistence on the Reformation emphases of the declarative and forensic). But once you start messing around with the doctrine of imputed righteousness, that is where the good Calvinist must dig his heels in and resist.

I have up my sleeve what I consider to be a pretty solid defense of the doctrine of imputation (which I will bring out eventually). But in the meantime, what are some ways that you would refute Wright's claims here?

Some Thoughts on N.T. Wright's Justification

2009-10-23T11:15:00.000-07:00

I’d like to offer a few random and disordered thoughts on N.T. Wright’s latest book, Justification. I may go back next week and fill in some details in order to offer a more cogent critique, or I may just let the messiness stand (depends on how emergent I’m feeling). So here goes….

First, some positives. Whether it is in response to his critics, or whether he’s been saying this all along, I’m not sure, but Wright does have a lot more to say about human sin and the need for rescue than I was expecting. One of the most common complaints from confessional Reformed theologians about the New Perspective on Paul is its failure to do justice to the serious nature of man’s plight before God (focusing instead on man’s estrangement from his fellow man, especially that of the Jew from the Gentile). This failure is seen most glaringly in E.P. Sanders’s somewhat lame claim that when all was said and done, the real problem with Judaism was that it was not Christianity. Perhaps Wright has been paying attention to the NPP’s critics at this point (or maybe he has been saying this all along, I am not sure), because in Justification he makes it clear time and time again that the whole point of Yahweh raising up a worldwide family by means of the Abrahamic covenant is to rescue man from the curses of both Genesis 11 and Genesis 3. Ecclesiology does not eclipse soteriology, but is the context in which salvation takes place.

One complaint that the confessional Reformed reader will still have, however, is with regard to Wright’s all-too-casual dismissal of the desire for personal salvation on the part of the person living in the second-temple period. Drawing from extra-canonical literature, Wright insists that the whole “What will happen when I die? Will my soul go to heaven?” mentality was just utterly foreign to the minds of people during Jesus’ and Paul’s day. What Wright seems all too eager to forget is the fact that New Testament characters asked these questions all the time. While we certainly don’t want to minimize the issue of table fellowship and Jew/Gentile relations, we must also remember that the rich young ruler had a heavy heart when considering the state of his own soul’s salvation, that the multitudes in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost were “cut to the heart” after hearing Peter’s accusations about their sin, and the Philippian jailor’s first question to Paul and Silas was “What must I do to be saved?” If Wright is going to claim to be doing justice both to ecclesiology and soteriology, he will need to do a better job integrating passages like these into his system if he wants his claim to be taken seriously. If, as he admits, every Jew has an Adam living inside him, then we need a little more Eden and a little less Babel in his formulations.

Finally—and here I will echo Horton’s complaints—I wish Wright demonstrated a greater familiarity with traditional Reformed covenant theology. Often his foil is the Dispensationalist who insists that when God’s “Plan A” didn’t work out the way he wanted it to, he then put “Plan B” into effect, according to which man would be saved by the grace of Jesus instead of the demands of the law. I often find myself scratching my head in bewilderment at Wright’s approach, as if he believes either that contemporary Dispensationalism (1) is a worthy enough adversary to be taken seriously, (2) is the only alternative to the New Perspective’s brand of covenant theology, or (3) that the Reformers were proto-Dispensationalists. If Wright were to show a proficiency of understanding with respect to how the Reformers read Paul (and Moses), and if he incorporated the views of men like Vos, Ridderbos, and Kline into his critique of the Old Perspective, his arrows may land more successfully than they do when he shoots them at strawmen.

More next week, perhaps.

The Boastings of a Straight-Faced Presbyterian, Part Two

2009-10-20T00:05:00.000-07:00

I’ll now continue my response to Called to Communion blogger Tim Troutman, who exhibited in the comments of this post great suspicion about whether anyone would dare, with a straight face, blog about the glories of Presbyterianism. This post will be an attempt to do just that. So hold on to your seats, folks, because I will now, with face quite straight, proceed to talk about how awesome Presbyterianism is.

For this second of two installments, I will focus on the issue of the grace of God in the salvation of sinners.

Now I realize that my friends from Tim’s tradition will insist that God brings just as much glory to himself by helping sinners save themselves as he does by just going ahead and saving them, but I don’t buy it. If, as Calvinists insist, man is spiritually enslaved to sin and to the devil and therefore unable to rectify his plight, then it would follow that it is God who must do the rectifying. If man is “dead in trespasses and sins” and “darkened in his understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in him, due to his hardness of heart, being past feeling and given over to practice every kind of impurity” (Eph. 2:1; 4:18-19), then what other conclusion can we reach other than that man is hopelessly hopeless without God’s sovereign intervention?

To put this another way, regeneration must precede faith. In the same way that in physical biology a baby must be conceived in the womb before it can turn around and act like a baby, so must the sinner’s heart be implanted with the seed of divine life before he can start acting like a saint (I Pet. 1:3, 23). Just as the doctrine of original sin teaches us that we sin because we are sinners and not the other way around, so the doctrine of the new birth demonstrates that we must be made new before we can act new.

So in the same way that a doctor would get a much less significant pay raise for convincing his patients to take their medicine than he would for resurrecting them from the dead after they ignore his advice, so the glory that God receives for man’s salvation is directly tied to how serious our malady was before he stepped in. At the end of the day, if God did no more for me than he did for my neighbor who (for the sake of argument) ends up in hell, then what accounts for my being a sheep and him a goat? Well, if all God did for me was beckon and woo, with the deciding vote being cast by yours truly, then there’s really no way around it: I saved myself. Now, the fact that God graciously made me a co-savior with Jesus doesn’t solve the problem of God’s diminished glory-getting—all it does is allow me to pray with the Pharisee, “God I thank you that I am not like other men.”

So there you have it: Presbyterianism is exceedingly praiseworthy because, in the case of the salvation of sinners, it sees man’s plight as more dire, and God’s power more divine, than just about any other tradition out there.

A Strange New World, Part One: Baptismal Initiation

2009-10-19T02:46:00.000-07:00

I just began a new series of sermons at Exile Presbyterian Church on the topic of baptism called A Strange New World. The first message is titled "Baptismal Initiation," and can be downloaded here.

Enjoy.

Who Said That?

2009-10-16T16:24:00.000-07:00

Big ups to whoever can correctly identify the source of the following quotation:

"But if 'righteousness,' within the lawcourt context, refers to the status of the vindicated person after the court has announced its verdict, we have undercut in a singe stroke the age-old problem highlighted in Augustine's interpretation of 'justify' as 'make righteous.' That always meant, for Augustine and his followers, that God, in justification, was actually transforming the character of the person, albeit in small, preliminary ways (by, for instance, implanting the beginnings of love and faith within them). The result was a subtle but crucial shifting of metaphors: the lawcourt scene is now replaced with a medical one, a kind of remedial spiritual surgery, involving a 'righteous implant' which, like an artificial heart, begins to enable the patient to do things previously impossible.

"But part of the point of Paul's own language, rightly stressed by those who have analyzed the verb dikaioo, 'to justify,' is that it does not denote an action which transforms someone so much as a declaration which grants them a status. It is the status of the person which is transformed by the action of 'justification,' not the character."

And as always, no Googling....

The Boastings of a Straight-Faced Presbyterian, Part One

2009-10-14T11:03:00.000-07:00

I mentioned a couple days ago that I plan to take up Called to Communion blogger Tim Troutman’s challenge to post an article on the glories of Presbyterianism with a straight face. This post will be part one of two, and rest assured, my face is very straight.

The first locus I would like to address to demonstrate Presbyterianism’s awesomeness is our doctrine of Scripture. We confess:

We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the Church to an high and reverent esteem of the Holy Scripture. And the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is, to give all glory to God), the full discovery it makes of the only way of man's salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof, are arguments whereby it does abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God: yet notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts (Westminster Confession of Faith 1.5).

The supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture (WCF 1.10).

Here we see that, despite the manifold internal evidence whereby Scripture demonstrates its divine authorship, it is ultimately through the testimony of the Holy Spirit whereby the believer is taught to esteem what has been written.

Does this leave any loopholes? Of course is does. Does it answer every conceivable objection? Not by a long shot. But Presbyterians are not rationalists who toss and turn at night over the possibility that a hole in our system might be poked, nor do we wring our hands over what to do if someone disagrees with us. If our Lord could appeal to what "is written" to answer the tests of the serpent, and if Paul could prescribe a remedy for heresy that consisted primarily in getting the gospel right even if he himself got it wrong, then despite its lack of perfect tidiness, we are content to trust the voice of the Spirit of Christ speaking in Scripture to Jesus' sheep. If he is our Good Shepherd, then we can hear his voice.

Concerning the role the church has in interpreting Scripture, we confess that

It belongs to synods and councils, ministerially to determine controversies of faith, and cases of conscience; to set down rules and directions for the better ordering of the public worship of God, and government of his Church; to receive complaints in cases of maladministration, and authoritatively to determine the same; which decrees and determinations, if consonant to the Word of God, are to be received with reverence and submission; not only for their agreement with the Word, but also for the power whereby they are made, as being an ordinance of God appointed thereunto in His Word (WCF 31.3).
Again, this does not preclude the possibility of confusion, but we live in a confusing world filled with false prophets and bad angels disguised as good ones (didn’t Jesus warn us about this?). But despite its lack of airtightness, this approach does pretty good justice to the distinction between revelation that is uttered under the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit on the one hand, and the non-inspired interpretation of those utterances on the other. Sure, the church can make mistakes and must grow in her understanding of God's Word, but why should that be something we are afraid to admit? Paul wasn’t:

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love (Eph. 4:11-16).
So to sum up, the Reformed understanding of the relationship between the church and Scripture is anything but pristine, but it does accurately reflect the nature of life in this age before the consummation. Indeed, on that Day all the loose ends will be tied up and all our questions will be answered. But until then, we who embrace our pilgrim status and are enabled to boast in seeming weakness and glory in seeming shame are content to labor, to learn, to grow, all the while knowing that God will guide his church into all truth.

Just How Awesome Are We? Stay Tuned, You'll See....

2009-10-11T21:18:00.000-07:00

Last month, Called to Communion blogger Tim Troutman wrote a piece titled "What is the Catholic Faith Like?" In it, he says:

For those outside her only pay lip service to what she wallows in. They say they believe in a certain priest-hood too – we have priests! They say they believe in the Real Presence too – we worship the Eucharist! They say they believe in the communion of saints – we ask them to pray for us! They say they believe in Church authority too – we submit to the See of Peter!

Now, I grant that Tim's article was intended more as a description than a defense, but I couldn't help but feel like his point was that the appeal of Catholicism is that it's well, the most Catholic of all the available options. I commented:

I can’t but think that what you’ve written... is a tad self-congratulatory. I mean, I could write about Presbyterianism and simply highlight its “Presbyterianness” as an argument for why Presbyterianism is so awesome. After all, no other church holds to the Westminster Confession like we do, so therefore we’re better.

To which Tim responded:

But JJS, I would like to see that post on Presbyterianism’s greatness. I’m curious as to what it would look like. I’m wondering what Presbyterianism has that no one else does, and what it is, specifically, that Presbyterianism embraces fully to which others only pay lip service. A lot of great things can be said of Presbyterianism, I won’t deny it for a second. But I have to admit my skepticism as to whether something like this could be written of the Presbyterian church with a straight face.

Well, you can't say that kind of thing to a graduate of Westminster Seminary California and not expect the challenge to be taken up, so this week I hope to write two posts on "Presbyterianism's Greatness," with one focusing on our view of Scripture, and the other on our view of divine grace.

Stay tuned....

What's Radder, WSC or BMX?

2009-10-09T10:15:00.000-07:00

As you may know, over at the Old Life Theological Society Darryl Hart has been challenging the label "Radical Two Kingdoms" affixed to people associated with Westminster Seminary California by Federal Vision-leaning theonomist-reconstructionists (yes, that feeling you're experiencing is irony).

I appreciate his point here:

But here is an important point: at least the current advocates of 2k theology, like Stellman, are trying to be self-consciously Reformed about their engagement of Christ and culture, or religion and politics, and do this in a modern context. That is, they draw on redemptive-historical notions of pilgrimage, exile, and differences between Israel and the church, to come up with a 2k theology that disentangles the gospel from a theology of glory, whether proclaimed by the Religious Right or neo-Calvinists. Meanwhile, the theology of glory crowd trots out defenses of state church arrangements from the 16th and 17th centuries, as if committed to them, but all the while embracing Roman Catholics and Mormons in the public square for the sake of a faith-based America.

That’s not radical. It’s two-faced.

Hart's point is that you don't get to call 2K folks historically "radical" if your tolerance of Catholics and Mormons places you closer to us than to Calvin on the Christ/Culture spectrum.

Thoughts?

Where'd You Get That Jacket?!

2009-10-07T09:29:00.000-07:00

Over at the Old Life Theological Society,
Darryl Hart questions Doug Wilson's label "R2K"
(radical two-kingdoms) when describing my view
and that of Westminster CA.

Check it out.

The Dominion Mandate in This Age, to Infinity, and Beyond

2009-10-04T20:41:00.001-07:00

If you have been following Doug Wilson's posts on my book Dual Citizens, you will have noticed that the theme of dominion has come up quite a bit, especially among his commenters. The complaints usually go something like this: Genesis 1:28 talks about how Adam was to take dominion over creation, and yet Stellman's focus on the believer's identity as a pilgrim and exile fails to do justice to the dominion mandate given by God at creation."

Assuming that this is a faithful summary of the critique, I would like to offer a response.

I agree that God told Adam to exercise dominion over creation, and I agree that Adam's dominion-taking would have helped usher in God's eternal kingdom, a kingdom which would have brought with it eternal life and Sabbath rest for Adam and his posterity. But where many go wrong, in my view, is in the fact that they seem to stop reading at Genesis 1.

After the Fall, God tells man that the elements of prelapsarian life, such as marriage, childbearing, and labor are to continue on, albeit in a context of curse. In a word, these aspects of life will now be perverted to reflect the curse sanction that God had pronounced on creation due to Adam's rebellion. Marriage will now be a power-struggle, childbirth will now be painful, and bread will now be produced through sweat and an uncooperative earth. The same is true of the dominion mandate.

The dominion motif comes to the fore again after the flood, only now Noah is to practice his mastery over creation in the context of a covenant that is not redemptive but common, a covenant made "between Me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations" (Gen. 9:1-17). As shown by the inauguration of the kingdom of man in Genesis 4, the cultural work of human hands is valuable for building a temporal, common kingdom, but due to the Fall, our cultural endeavors cannot bring about the kingdom of Christ (a kingdom which Jesus said "is not of this world").

What, then, of the dominion mandate?

We read in Psalm 8 a divine commentary on Genesis 1:28, one in which David speaks of man thus:

You have made him a little lower than the angels and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet... (vv. 5-6).

Sounds great, right? It sounds like the dominion mandate is still in force, reiterated in all its prelapsarian glory. But again, we need to keep reading. When we come to Hebrews 2, which is a commentary on Psalm 8 (which is a commentary on Genesis 1), we see a truly Christocentric interpretation of the dominion mandate. According to the writer,

Now in putting everything in subjection to [man], [God] left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. But we see Him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone (vv. 8b-9).

Talk about an already/not yet hermeneutic! According to the author here, there is a promise to man of dominion that is still outstanding and unfulfilled, one which we do "not yet see." But what do we see? "We see Jesus" who, like Adam, was made for a litte while lower than the angels. He is the One who exercises dominion, the One to whom has been given all authority in heaven and on earth. Will we, the men and women whom Jesus represented and whose nature he assumed, ever get to share in this dominion? Indeed we will, but the writer to the Hebrews insists that this dominion is "not yet." Immediately preceding the quotation from Psalm 8, Hebrews says:

Now it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking (v. 5).

The implication is that though this present fallen order is not under man's control, the world to come will be. The conclusion, then, is clear: The dominion mandate of Genesis 1 has not been revoked, but due to the Fall, man cannot by his own cultural labors usher in the power and glory of the kingdom like Adam could have. Rather, this promise is now reformulated Christocentrically, with Jesus experiencing "the dominion of the resurrection" now, as demonstrated in his ascension to the Father's right hand. We, on the other hand, do not see these things with our eyes, but only embrace them by faith and hopeful cross-bearing. The day will come, however, when faith will give way to sight and the cross will give way to glory. On that day, and not before, "the kingdom of this world will become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ," and we will reign with him forever and ever.

What Hath Qumran To Do With Confessionalism?

2009-09-30T21:04:00.001-07:00

I'd like to take a moment to respond to a question that Doug Wilson has posed to me on his blog. He writes:

Stellman tags, as he ought to, the importing of worldly techniques of marketing, entertainment, and so forth into the broader contemporary world of evangelicalism. And I am right with him when he does this. But radical two kingdom theology has no problem with bringing worldly standards of science and academic history into the church, for example. Why is that?

The charge, if I'm reading Doug correctly, is that if two-kingdoms theology (or as he calls it, "radical two-kingdoms theology") draws a line in the sand when it comes to the creeping into the church of marketing and consumer trends, then why stop there? If those things are rejected for being secular, then it is arbitrary not to also disallow all secular disciplines, including the findings of historians or other mucky-muck academy types.

Perhaps this is best answered by focusing on his phrase "worldly techniques" or "worldly standards." There is a difference, I would argue, between a historian saying something like, "Jesus of Nazareth wasn't really born in December, nor was he born in the year 0 BC" (claims which are relatively benign), and another historian saying something like, "Jesus of Nazareth may have been crucified under Pontius Pilate, but he wasn't raised from the dead." The latter claim is obviously a direct attack on a central tenet of our faith, while the former merely challenges some of our extra-biblical traditions.

Turning, then, to the issue of "worldly techniques of marketing, entertainment, and so forth," we must ask the question of whether we reject such things because we don't trust secular society and therefore must refuse its advice, or whether we reject such things because, like the second of our two historians, they represent an attack on some aspect of our most holy faith. I think that Doug and I would agree that a Saddleback approach to worship is idolatrous and, from a Reformed perspective at least, sinful. In other words, it is not rejected on the basis that we are pilgrims and there are two kingdoms, but because it is in direct opposition to our tradition's reading of Scripture and its regulative principle of worship.

And finally, Doug asks:

When someone says that we need to take full account of what the old earth scientists say, or that we need to accept what professional historians say about the period of Second Temple Judaism, why does Stellman not reject this out of hand, on the simple ground that we are sojourners and pilgrims? If we don't need no stinkin' church marketers because our congregation is a mere band of wayfaring pilgrims, then does it not follow that we don't need no stinkin' geologists either?

My response is that I do take into account the findings of old-earth scientists because the age of the earth has no bearing upon my faith. If those scientists reject the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, however, I will stop listening to them, but this has nothing to do with their being pagans. Same with the historian's findings with respect to Second Temple Judaism: it's one thing to have my exegesis of certain texts challenged by, say, the claim that the Judaism of Paul's day was more characterized by nationalistic pride in various ethnic boundary markers than by the obsession for individual salvation from the burden of sin, but it's another thing to be expected to reject the doctrine of justification by the imputation of alien righteousness received by the instrument of faith alone. Last I checked, it was specific doctrines, and not the specific exegesis of biblical texts, that I vowed to uphold as a minister in the Reformed tradition. Of course, if the exegesis no longer allows me to hold my doctrinal positions, then the honorable thing to do would be to inform my presbytery and resign my post (but that's a whole 'nother topic).

Lastly, I must say that, after a rocky start, the tone of the discussion at Doug's blog is very charitable and courteous for the most part, and I really appreciate that.

I Like My Ecclesiology Salty and Subversive

2009-09-28T17:10:00.000-07:00

Chapter Two of Dual Citizens: Worship and Life Between the Already and the Not Yet is titled "The Irrelevance of Relevance: Grits, Salt, and the Assembling of the Saints." I begin the chapter by drawing a contrast between grits, the southern delicacy that has no taste of its own but instead takes on the flavor of what is added to it, and salt, the condiment that Jesus described as "good for nothing" if it loses the distinctness of its flavor. The purpose of this culinary observation is to show that the Christian church should be more like salt than like grits; in other words, instead of chameleonically changing our colors to adapt to the world around us, the church should seek to retain its distinctiveness and peculiarity in the culture.

Our sacred activity, such as hearing God’s Word and receiving the Lord’s Supper, therefore, is about as unique and countercultural as we can get, while our secular activity is just the opposite—it is thoroughly common. It is primarily on Sunday, therefore, rather than on Monday through Saturday, that believers display their peculiarity and distinctiveness from the world.

This means that the church’s main task, as simplistic as it may sound, is to be the church, to be, in the words of Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, “a new people, an alternative polis, a countercultural social structure.” They continue: “The church does not exist to ask what needs doing to keep the world running smoothly and then to motivate our people to go do it . . . The church has its own reason for being, hid within its own mandate and not found in the world. We are not chartered by the Emperor.” This does not mean that the church ceases to be influential, but that the church’s influence is of an altogether different—and often unwanted—variety. “[We] seek to influence the world by being the church, that is, by being something the world is not and never can be.”

It seems to me that the evangelical church gets things precisely backwards at this point. Rather than being distinct from the culture on Sunday and part of the culture the rest of the week, they seek to be as distinct from the world as they can during the week, but as familar and non-threatening to the world as possible on Sunday. Hence the demand for Christian T-shirts and bumper stickers in order to stand out from the culture when they should be participating it it, and hence the market-driven desire to supply tailor-made worship experiences for Christian consumers (be they traditional, contemporary, or emergent) when they should be expressing their otherworldliness. Michael Horton is spot-on when he describes this approach as "ecclesial apartheid."

Darryl Hart has argued that the church's attempt to be relevant inevitably results in our sacralizing the secular and trivializing the sacred. Instead, argues Horton, "genuine relevance is found not when the church tries to be relevant, since repeating what people already think is rather boring. Genuine relevance is found in contradicting the wisdom of the world that we entered the church with on Sunday morning."

When the church fails to embrace this salty and subversive role in the culture, then, in the words of Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon (quoting Barth), "God is reduced to 'MAN!' said in a loud voice."

Something for the Morning Commute

2009-09-25T00:19:00.000-07:00

In case you're interested, the radio interview I did on New York's WNYG about Dual Citizens can be downloaded here.

Enjoy....

A Note to Pastor Wilson and his Peeps

2009-09-23T10:20:00.000-07:00

On the off-chance that any of you read both my blog and Doug Wilson's, you know by now that he is reviewing Dual Citizens. While I don't really have the time to interact with all of his commenters (nor the desire, to be honest), I did want to say a couple of things about his first post. The problem is that the blog requires an account in order to comment, and though I have submitted my information and am currently waiting for the pass code to be sent over email, I have yet to receive anything. So I will just say here what I would have said there. Here goes:

Hi all,

While I will not have the time this week to follow this discussion very closely, I would like to thank you, Doug, for taking the time to read and review my book.

A couple quick remarks: First, your readers may not realize that your quotations thus far are from the preface where I sum up the content of each chapter with literally a sentence or two. The reason I bring this up is simply because it would be more fair to judge, say, my thoughts on the Sabbath by my actual chapter on the Sabbath rather than a single sentence in the preface. This perhaps would have spared one of the commenters from having to “stare in disbelief at my cluelessness.”

One more thing: There seems to be some misunderstanding of one of the two-kingdoms position’s most basic points, namely, that we draw a distinction between the individual believer on the one hand and the Christian Church on the other. This means that I as a Christian person may fight against any number of political or social injustices, all the while insisting that the Church not adopt this or that social policy as “the Christian option.” Failing to appreciate this foundational principle of the two-kingdoms model will result in the implications stated already that, for example, we 2K’ers can’t condemn the Holocaust (!).

I realize that my view is not exactly the mainstream one, and I would hope that my FV-leaning brothers would empathize with the plight of an oft-misrepresented minority. Although you all are not always treated with the dignity you deserve, it is my sincere hope that you take the high road and demonstrate the charity that you are (unfortunately) sometimes denied and make every effort to understand the 2K position and read it in the best and most charitable light. Sure, you still may disagree, which is fine with me. I just hope the discussion is a profitable one for everyone involved.

Cheers,

Jason J. Stellman

Are There Somber Calvinists in Springfield?

2009-09-20T20:53:00.000-07:00

Last week I mentioned that I am reading David Dark's book Everyday Apocalypse, which surveys popular culture from Flannery O'Connor and the Coen brothers to Radiohead and The Matrix, seeking to recognize the ways in which the apocalyptic truths of the coming age creep into this one, even in ways unbeknownst to the artists themselves.

While Dark, so far anyway, refrains from calling all of life sacramental, he has no love for the sacred/secular distinction that two-kingdoms proponents insist upon. To be fair, though, he doesn't seem like he is all that aware of the doctrine of the two kingdoms, so who's to say he wouldn't appreciate it for its love of earth and it hatred of all things Gnostic?

In his chapter on The Simpsons he writes:

Unfortunately, the humility that is marked by a genuine readiness to know and acknowledge our own weaknesses and fears comes no more naturally to us than it does to the characters on The Simpsons. Yet without this humility of mind, no story, no art, and no apocalyptic can do its work on us. We walk through life unaffected, unmoved, and forever consigned to an invincible ignorance.

When viewed attentively, comedy like The Simpsons can awaken us to our disordered desires and motivations, breaking down our illusions of order, while holding back (temporarily) whatever false gods deceive us into regarding one another unkindly.

He then quotes Jean Bethke Elshtain: "We are not perched on top of the earth as sovereigns; rather, we are invited into companionship with the earth as the torn and paradoxical creatures that we are."

To put this all more simply, we shouldn't take ourselves so seriously. As long as we are expending all our energy seeking to maintain the facade we have created for ourselves to hide behind, we will be incapable of being made fun of. And once we reach the point of resentment when the mask is pulled back, we have become immune to all things apocalyptic.

I'm reminded of what the late Rich Mullins said about how he would rather live on the verge of radical sin than to maintain some Pharisaical fortress mentality that cannot admit weakness for fear of the bubble being burst.

Like it or not, this is the reputation we Calvinists have. Is it fairly attributed to us? And if not, is there anything we can do to dispel the myth?

It's a Small World After All

2009-09-19T14:42:00.000-07:00

Call me sappy and sentimental, but I have watched this about twenty times and can't get enough of it.

Enjoy (and be sure to view it from start to finish).

Who Was More Popular, "The Good Shepherd" or "The Walrus"?

2009-09-17T15:54:00.000-07:00

The first section of Dual Citizens focuses on the corporate nature of the believer's life as a pilgrim caught in the overlap of the ages, with my attention being given primarily to the issue of the church's worship. Chapter 1 is called "Corporate Worship: Covenantal Assembly of a Peculiar People," and in it I state the chapter's aim thusly:

My aim in this chapter... is to call into question the American church’s desire to avoid the obscurity and lack of popular appeal with which Jesus Himself was seemingly plagued. In place of the flashy, high-octane worship experience, I will commend faithful attendance on the simple means of grace that Christ has instituted for His people’s growth, unremarkable though they may be.

There's an interesting contrast (at least it's interesting to me) between John Lennon and Jesus that I draw the reader's attention to here. When Lennon made his famous proclamation in the mid-1960s that "The Beatles are more popular than Jesus," the American public went absolutely ballistic, with our displays of disapproval including public burnings of Beatles albums as well as crushing them with streamrollers. Freedom of religion was one thing, but questioning Jesus' popularity? That was a no-no.

But when you think about it, Lennon was kind of right, on one level anyway. The mourners who gathered at the vigil after his shooting far outnumbered the measly 120 that Jesus managed to attract (Acts 1:15).

The question I pose in this chapter concerns whether we as Christians are OK with following an unpopular Savior whose church is characterized by rather unremarkable means for growth and the edification of her members, means as mundane as the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments. We Americans, driven as we are by a theology of glory, are so consumed with success (as defined by the culture) that we don't really know what to do with the fact that Jesus spent a good deal of his time asking his friends not to be embarrassed by him (Matt. 10:32-33; 26:34; Mark 8:38). Paul followed suit, pleading with his young protege not to be "ashamed of the testimony of Jesus, or of me, his prosoner" (II Tim. 1:8).

Hardly the kind of rousing rhetoric that rallies the rabble for revolution....

Our Lord made it clear that the servant is not greater than his master. If we want to follow Jesus (the real one, I mean), we simply have no other choice than to identify ourselves with his own unpopularity, together with what the world sees as the weak and beggarly elements of the church that he founded. Balking at such divine foolishness is noting short of shirking the cross, as if it was fine for Jesus to die on, but not us.

Last Post on (shhh!!)... ¢@thol!¢!$m

2009-09-14T11:17:00.000-07:00

A quick point I'd like to bring to your attention:

I will no longer post anything having to do with Catholicism. The reason for this is that, though the claims of Rome are obviously great fodder for discussion and debate (281 comments in the latest thread), I am personally unable to faithfully monitor all that is said in the comments. Aside from my young family and weekly preparation of two sermons, I have meetings with hurting families, with newcomers to Exile Presbyterian Church, and with others that keep me pretty busy. Oh, and as John Bugay has recently reminded me, I have tons of "book signings and cocktail parties" to attend which regrettably keep me from sitting at my computer blogging all day.

What results from my having a day job is that "comment wars" often break out between Catholics and Protestants that I simply cannot referee. The fact that I don't have time to wage the Protestant Reformation on the Internet has made some people feel as if I am (what was it?) "dragging Jesus through the mud." While I obviously do not share this assessment, for the sake of peace I'd rather just put a halt to all Catholic-Protestant dialogue rather than letting it continue with whatever limited participation I can offer. If any of you have been scandalized or hurt by my laissez faire approach to these debates, I hope you will forgive me.

And lastly, if any of you are disheartened that, due to this development, there will no longer be any online forum to talk about Protestant-Catholic issues, be of good cheer, there's always this option.

"Worship and Life": Tearing Asunder What God Hath Joined?

2009-09-13T21:28:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me recently that as someone who has recently had a new book published, I'm not doing very much by way of promoting it (unless you count blogging about Dark's sacramental worldview and Newman's theory of doctrinal development, which I'm guessing you don't). So in the interest of reaching those of you who have yet to purchase Dual Citizens: Worship and Life Between the Already and the Not Yet, I will begin a brief walk-through of the book in the hopes that your interest will be piqued.

In what was originally Chapter 1 but is now the Introduction, I offer a lengthy defense of the book's subtitle. The reason for this is because distinguishing between "worship" and "life" has fallen way out of vogue these days, with it becoming more and more fashionable for pastors, authors, and theologians to insist that "all of life is worship." But as I seek to demonstrate, if there is no distinction made between worship and life, between cult and culture, between the sacred and the secular, then what inevitably ends up happening is not that the mundane gets elevated, but that the holy gets trivialized.

What follows is a biblical defense of the doctrine of the two kingdoms, much of which was taken from here, here, here, and here.

The reason I belabor this point about the distinction between the earthly and heavenly kingdoms is not, as is so often assumed by transformationist types, because we two-kingdoms folk are Gnostics who are all about world flight. Quite the contrary, it is the two-kingdoms advocate who is in a position to affirm even more loudly than the transformationist the goodness and legitimacy of creation (as I argue in this piece I recently wrote for the White Horse Inn blog). You see, if we look at culture and think, "So much untransformed creation, so little time," we are not really appreciating art or music for what it is, only for what it can become. And once we apply this standard more broadly to, say, jobs and the people who hold them, we run the risk of dehumanizing people simply because they don't love Jesus like we do.

But when we learn to appreciate earth for its own sake while still refusing to confuse it with heaven, we then can give true expression to our dual citizenship, engaging in secular pursuits without shamefacedness provided our love for this world is not greater than our longing for the next one. As Rich Mullins sang, "Nobody tells you when you get born here how much you'll come to love it, and how you'll never belong here."

I end the Introduction thusly:

Let the reader always remember, however, that being a pilgrim means more than just being homeless. There is a final destination, an eternal city, a true theocracy that awaits all who have been baptized into Christ Jesus. In this heavenly abode, there will be no serpents to distrust or Canaanites to dispel, for "No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever" (Rev. 22:3–5).

Do you long for this "building of God, a house not made with hands" (2 Cor. 5:1), compared to which the sufferings of this present time appear as mere trifles unworthy of mention? I hope that you do, for this is what it means to be a pilgrim.

Apocalypse Now?

2009-09-10T00:10:00.000-07:00

I just started reading David Dark’s book Everyday Apocalypse which, as far as I can tell, focuses on the various ways in which the dynamics of the future intrude into this present age. I say various ways because Dark has a much more sacramental view of the world than does your garden variety confessionalist (like me). For Dark, we experience spiritual realities not merely through the means of grace given to the visible church, but through the expressions of pop culture such as the music of Radiohead, TV shows like The Simpsons, and the stories of Flannery O’Connor.

A two-kingdoms guy he certainly is not, but still, he does seem to scratch where I itch.

Some excerpts on the nature of truly apocalyptic art:

The pictures and sounds and stories of apocalyptic expression are deliberately paradoxical in such a way that they tease the mind out of whatever old, self-justifying forms it has settled for.... Apocalyptic won’t flatter or privilege the powerful or congratulate us for our sincere intentions, but it will illuminate what is dark. It will passionately expose. It will make us see.

On the subversiveness of the apocalyptic:

Apocalyptic was and is the only language adequate to describe this new beginning while maintaining its practice as one of constant exodus. It keeps religion strange and ready to question the given "reality" of the day. Without apocalyptic, no questioning occurs and the biblical voice is easily edited (or censored) to the point that it appears to support whatever sentimental sap or suburban self-improvement program it’s pasted upon.

We indulge a historical deafness when we think of the Jewish and Christian movements as the uncritical endorsers of whatever societal structures currently hold the population captive. It was Augustine, after all, who described earthly kingdoms as large-scale criminal syndicates.
And on the farce of values-based entertainment:

Purposed domination [referring to Tolkien’s negative assessment of allegorical storytelling], we might say, is the method of propaganda. It leaves the audience with no room for "applicability," and the propagandist wouldn’t have it any other way. The tightly controlled "message," after all, was the point in the first place, not the dignity of the reader or the story (if we can even call it a story).... Given our current cultural climate, the media consumer does well to be wary of any product that has featured, foremost among its selling points, its so-called Christianness.... I’m personally convinced that such market-driven theology will be viewed, historically, with at least as much embarrassment as, say, the medieval sale of indulgences.
Provocative stuff indeed—but is Dark right?

Newman on the Development of the Papacy

2009-09-06T21:27:00.000-07:00

In chapter 4 of his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, John Henry Cardinal Newman takes up the issue of papal supremacy. Surprisingly, Newman argues that the papal office of Peter "would remain a mere letter, till the complication of ecclesiatical matters became the cause of ascertaining it." The universal jurisdiction of the first pope, in Newman's words, "slept." It was a "mysterious privilege, which was not understood, as an unfulfilled prophecy."

When the Church, then, was thrown upon her own resources, first local disturbances gave exercise to Bishops, and next ecumenical disturbances gave exercise to Popes; and whether communion with the Pope was necessary for Catholicity would not and could not be debated till a suspension of that communion had actually occurred. It is not a greater difficulty that St. Ignatius does not write to the Asian Greeks about Popes, than that St. Paul does not write to the Corinthians about Bishops. And it is a less difficulty that the Papal supremacy was not formally acknowledged in the second century, than that there was no formal acknowledgment on the part of the Church of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity till the fourth. No doctrine is defined till it is violated.

Far from being a universal body characterized by communion with the bishop of Rome, the early church was more decentralized, as Newman's citation of Barrow shows:

The state of the most primitive Church did not well admit such an universal sovereignty. For that did consist of small bodies incoherently situated, and scattered about in very distant places, and consequently unfit to be modelled into one political society, or to be governed by one head....

In fact, it was the exaltation of the church from the status of an illicit and persecuted religion to one of prominence and favor that precipitated the rise of the papacy:

If the Imperial Power checked the development of Councils, it availed also for keeping back the power of the Papacy. The Creed, the Canon, in like manner, both remained undefined. The Creed, the Canon, the Papacy, Ecumenical Councils, all began to form, as soon as the Empire relaxed its tyrannous oppression of the Church. And as it was natural that her monarchical power should display itself when the Empire became Christian, so was it natural also that further developments of that power should take place when that Empire fell.

This seems to coincide with Lampe's thesis in From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries that

The fractionation in Rome favored a collegial presbyterial system of governance and prevented for a long time, until the second half of the second century, the development of a monarchical episcopacy in the city.... Before the second half of the second century there was in Rome no monarchical episcopacy for the circles mutually bound in fellowship.

Some important questions arise (but are not begged) from Newman's position on the development of the papacy, not the least of which is: Is the view that the papacy developed consistent with Vatican I's statement that "We therefore teach and declare that, according to the testimony of the Gospel, the primacy of jurisdiction over the universal Church of God was immediately and directly promised and given to blessed Peter the Apostle by Christ the Lord" (a dogma that is called "a clear doctrine of Holy Scripture as it has been ever understood by the Catholic Church")?

Discuss....

Random Thoughts

2009-09-03T13:43:00.000-07:00

Just a few random things I'd like to bring to your attention....

First, be sure to tune in to Westminster Seminary California's new program Office Hours. It features interviews with various faculty members like W. Robert Godfrey and Julius Kim.

Thanks to all of you who have purchased by book, Dual Citizens. Next task is to read it, then talk and blog about it, and then tell others to buy it, too. Or just buy it for them.

Chesterton makes a great point in Orthodoxy about how we ought to see Nature not as our Mother, but as our Sister, since we both have the same Father. Mothers have authority, but not sisters. Sisters you admire but don't need to imitate. "Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi.... To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved." If this is true, and given evangelicalism's unease with earth, it appears that there's a bit of sibling rivalry going on.

Lastly, although Scripture tells us that the church speaks in Christ's name, it appears that Metro South Church in the Detroit area is now also speaking in Satan's. As a ploy to attract newcomers, they have rented billboards and printed tracts that say things like, "Metro South Church Sucks." Signed, Satan. I hate to say it, but I think this time Satan may be on to something.

Breaking Up With Jesus

2009-09-01T21:08:00.000-07:00

A member of my church just shared with me this story. It's about the journey of David Bazan, former Pedro the Lion frontman, from evangelical singer (with great crossover success among secular music fans) to agnostic. What struck me about this article was (1) the reactions of fans who recently saw him play the Crossroads Christian music festival after a five-year absence, and (2) Bazan's bitterness toward the evangelicalism of his youth and early adulthood.

I can't help but wonder if a healthy theology of the cross, chased with a couple shots of amillennialism, could have helped mitigate the tragedy? Or was there nothing any of us could have done?

Newman on the Development of Christian Doctrine History

2009-08-29T22:25:00.000-07:00

Anyone even remotely interested in historical theology will be familiar with John Henry Cardinal Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, originally published in 1845. Newman’s overall thesis is that when it comes to just about any system of thought, the growth and development of its ideas are to be expected, and Christianity is no exception.

Newman argues in Section III that the doctrines of the (Catholic) faith are "members of one family, and suggestive, or correlative, or confirmatory, or illustrative of each other." He writes:

… the very scale on which they have been made, their high antiquity yet present promise, their gradual formation yet precision, their harmonious order, dispose the imagination most forcibly towards the belief that a teaching so consistent with itself, so well balanced, so young and so old, not obsolete after so many centuries, but vigorous and progressive still, is the very development contemplated in the Divine Scheme.

He then goes on to insist that these doctrines, when understood aright, necessarily hang together.
One furnishes evidence to another, and all to each of them; if this is proved, that becomes probable; if this and that are both probable, but for different reasons, each adds to the other its own probability. The Incarnation is the antecedent of the doctrine of Mediation, and the archetype both of the Sacramental principle and of the merits of Saints. From the doctrine of Mediation follow the Atonement, the Mass, the merits of Martyrs and Saints, their invocation and cultus. From the Sacramental principle come the Sacraments properly so called; the unity of the Church, and the Holy See as its type and centre; the authority of Councils; the sanctity of rites; the veneration of holy places, shrines, images, vessels, furniture, and vestments. Of the Sacraments, Baptism is developed into Confirmation on the one hand; into Penance, Purgatory, and Indulgences on the other; and the Eucharist into the Real Presence, adoration of the Host, Resurrection of the body, and the virtue of relics. Again, the doctrine of the Sacraments leads to the doctrine of Justification; Justification to that of Original Sin; Original Sin to the merit of Celibacy. Nor do these separate developments stand independent of each other, but by cross relations they are connected, and grow together while they grow from one….

You must accept the whole or reject the whole; attenuation does but enfeeble, and amputation mutilate. It is trifling to receive all but something which is as integral as any other portion; and, on the other hand, it is a solemn thing to accept any part, for, before you know where you are, you may be carried on by a stern logical necessity to accept the whole.

Now, it is undoubtedly true that each doctrine of the Christian faith has certain implications and tends toward certain conclusions. For someone like Newman, then, to seek to postulate an idea like papal infallibility he would certainly ground it in prior-held notions about divine revelation and the Church as pillar and ground of the truth. So although I may disagree with many of Newman’s conclusions, I still can recognize how he arrived at them.

But what happens when the proposed development falls not only into the category of doctrine, but also of history?

Take, for example, the bodily assumption of Mary. It’s one thing to say that the doctrine of her being whisked up to heaven is a logical corollary of the doctrine that she was immaculately conceived. But it takes a lot more, umm, gumption to dogmatically insist that, as a matter of historical record, Mary in fact floated up into the sky and was received into glory (especially when some 1,800 years had transpired between this historical event and its being pronounced as church dogma).

Now, I’ve not studied this matter in any depth, so it may very well be the case that loads of people were standing around watching her fly off into space who then recorded the miraculous event in their journals (which is certainly what one would expect to have happened if they saw such a thing: the news of the event would immediately spread like wildfire). But on the other hand, if the first person to have borne testimony to Mary’s bodily assumption was not an actual contemporary of the Blessed Mother’s, but lived, say, a few generations later, then would not the most plausible explanation be that we are dealing with a legend and not an actual historical event?

I mean, if Jesus’ resurrection—a remarkable occurrence if there ever was one—went completely unnoticed by every single person who knew him, but then was spoken about a century or two later, we would be suspicious, wouldn’t we? Or take a more contemporary example: If someone writes a biography of Ronald Reagan next year that claims that the former president received an extra terrestrial visitor to the White House in broad daylight in the presence of the entire press corps, wouldn’t we wonder why no one has heard if such an event before? Or, if the event happened in secret (explaining why it wasn’t reported at the time), then our first question would be, "How did this author uniquely come by this information if he wasn’t there?"

My point, you ask? If Rome’s claim is that she only elucidates the initial apostolic deposit of faith but never expands its content, then it would follow that if the apostle John’s next door neighbor asked daily how Mary was doing, at some point he would have received the reply, "Great! She was bodily received into glory a couple hours ago, haven't you heard?"

But if Mary was taken into heaven as an actual historical event, and if John didn’t himself know about it, then it would seem that he wasn’t exactly keeping the close eye on her that her Son asked him to.

Kinship By Covenant, Part 6: From Sonship to Slavery, Or Vice Versa?

2009-08-24T00:35:00.000-07:00

In seeking to explain Paul's illustration of the son-as-heir in Galatians 4:1-7, Scott Hahn says that "Paul reintroduces the hard lessons of Galatians 3:19-25 in 4:2 by describing how Israel's sin increased the degree of Mosaic and angelic mediation," appealing to Paul's statement that the underage heir is under "guardians and trustees" until the time appointed by the father for his release frm such bondage. Hahn continues:

Israel's great failures at the golden calf and Beth-peor relegated it to the status of an immature minor son--differing little from that of a slave (4:1). As an immature minor son, Israel was placed under the (temporary) Levitical and Deuteronomic covenants that effected a reconfiguration of its filial relation to God along the lines of a treaty-type covenant. The relationship between God and Israel became characterized as that of a master and his slave (i.e., a suzerain and his vassal).

He then quotes Byrne:

What Paul appears to be doing in using this "immature heir" image is making allowance for a situation where an heir, though long-since designated as such, endures for a time a period of suspension of all legal rights and only later receives the true legal capacity to inherit by having the status of sonship conferred....

Hahn's thesis that Israel's initial status of sonship (Exod. 4:22) was reconfigured to a more servile form by the idolatrous episodes of the golden calf and Beth-peor may also be what was lurking behind Paul's two Old Testament citations in I Corinthians 10. There, in the midst of his warning against apostasy, Paul appeals to these two examples in particular (see vv. 7-8) in order to urge his readers onward in faithfulness. Clearly for Paul, these two events stand out as the paramount examples of Israel's fall, as the forbidden fruit episode did for Adam's.

Thoughts?

Dual Citizens Officially In Print

2009-08-21T11:48:00.001-07:00

The following was written on my Facebook wall a couple days ago by Chris Larson at Ligonier:

"On my desk is a fresh advance copy of your terrific book that arrived from the printer today. We should be shipping by early next week if not sooner."

Not long now....

Kinship By Covenant, Part 5: Dealing With Rebellious Teens

2009-08-18T09:47:00.000-07:00

In Kinship By Covenant, Scott Hahn directs his readers' attention to the prophecy of Ezekiel to demonstrate that the idea that the Sinaitic and Deuteronomic covenants are distinct is not a novel notion. In Ezekiel 20:10-13 the prophet recalls Israel's exodus from Egypt; Yahweh then gives them the law on Mt. Sinai, which the people promptly break by worshiping the golden calf. Despite Yahweh's option of destroying the people right then and there, he shows mercy to the them and spares them, despite their not being allowed to enter the land (Ezekiel 20:14-17).

A second chance is given, however, to the second generation, the children of those who worshiped the golden calf, as recorded in verses 18-21. God instructed them not to worship idols like their fathers did, and to live according to the laws he had given them in order that they might have life. But the second generation's idolatry as displayed in the Baal-peor incident demonstrated that the children were just as wicked as their fathers.

This is where a shift occurs, Hahn argues. In the light of the second generation's apostasy, Yahweh makes an additional covenant with the people, one not characterized by good laws but by statutes and restrictions uniquely suited not for a nation in its infancy, but in rebellious adolescence. Hence we read:

But I withheld my hand and acted for the sake of my name, that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations, in whose sight I had brought them out. Moreover, I swore to them in the wilderness that I would scatter them among thenations and disperse them through the countries, because they had not obeyed my rules, but had rejected my statutes and profaned my Sabbaths, and their eyes were set on their fathers’ idols. Moreover, I gave them statutes that were not good and rules by which they could not have life, and I defiled them through their very gifts in their offering up all their firstborn, that I might devastate them. I did it that they might know that I am the LORD (vv. 22-26).

This is consistent with Deuteronomy 29:1, which explicitly distinguishes between the covenants made at Horeb and on the plains of Moab. And interestingly, this position also has a pretty ancient pedigree. We read in the Didascalia Apostolorum (third century):

For the law which the Lord spoke before the people had made the calf and served idols consists of the ten commandments and the judgments. But after they had served idols, He justly laid upon them bonds.... But our Savior came to set us loose from the bonds of the Second Legislation.

And in Irenaeus (second century):

God himself personally spoke the Decalogue... that is why they remain valid for us.... But the precepts of slavery he laid separately upon the people through Moses.... When they turned aside to make the calf, they received further servile obligations, as Ezekiel says [citing 20:25].

Discuss....

The Flag of the World

2009-08-17T03:04:00.000-07:00

My latest lecture in EPC's series

on G.K. Chestrton's Orthodoxy

is now available for download.

It's called "The Flag of the World."

Enjoy....

Kinship By Covenant, Part 4: Why Then the Law?

2009-08-14T02:21:00.000-07:00

“Paul has argued for a radically different view of salvation history from that of his Jewish opponents,” writes Scott Hahn in Kinship By Covenant. “The foundational covenant with God’s people was not at Sinai but at Moriah.” If the Abrahamic covenant takes precedence over the Mosaic, then the question Paul needs to answer is the one the apostle anticipates in Galatians 3:19, “Why then the law?”

The answer has baffled many commentators, but perhaps unnecessarily: “It was added because of transgressions....” Many argue that what Paul means here is that the law was given in order to accentuate Israel’s lawlessness and heighten their sin. Hahn, on the other hand, argues that the verse is more straightforward, that it means exactly what it says.

It seems that Paul, like Ezekiel before him (Ezek. 20), has recognized an important literary-historical pattern woven into the fabric of the Pentateuch, with its continual oscillation between narrative and law. The pattern is consistently the same: Israel sins and laws are added (p. 264).

The main episodes in this pattern of sin-to-law, Hahn argues, are Israel’s sin with the golden calf which led to the Tabernacle legislation and imposition of the priestly code, and the idolatrous apostasy of the second generation at Baal-peor which gave rise to the Deuteronomic “book of the law” being imposed on the people.

So, Hahn asks, what does Paul mean in v. 19 by “law”? Is it all law, or an additional body of laws that were added later?

Hahn insists that it must be the latter for a couple reasons that are suggested in the text itself. First, it makes more sense to think of the Deuteronomic covenant as being something that was “added” to something that came earlier (such as the Decalogue). Secondly, if “the law was added because of transgressions,” how does this comport with the view that sees the law as being the Sinaitic covenant? Nothing in the narrative of the giving of the Ten Commandments suggests that some set of transgressions occasioned the giving of the Decalogue. Plus, Paul says explicitly in Romans 4:13 that “where there is no law, there is no transgression,” meaning that whatever “law” the apostle intends in Galatians 3:19 must be given over and above some law already in existence.

The “book of the law” from whose curses Jesus redeems his people, therefore, is the Deuteronomic covenant in particular.

Discuss....

Elves for Download

2009-08-13T16:37:00.001-07:00

My most current lecture in
Exile Presbyterian Church's
series on G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy
is titled "The Ethics of Elfland"
and can be downloaded here.

Enjoy.

Kinship By Covenant, Part 3: Curses Rehearsed

2009-08-10T16:02:00.000-07:00

Returning to our look at Scott Hahn's Kinship By Covenant, we now come to what is perhaps the most interesting and significant section of the book (for Reformed folks anyway). As we have seen, Hahn argues that Yahweh's initial covenant with Israel was a kinship covenant according to which the nation was constituted as God's firstborn son (Exod.4:22). After Israel's repeated rebellion and idolatry (particularly in the golden calf and Beth-peor episodes), however, Yahweh imposed on the second generation an additional covenant (the Deuteronomic) that was intended to reconfigure Israel's relationship with Yahweh into a more servile form, like that of a vassal to a suzerain rather than a son to a father. In Section Two, Hahn attempts to apply his findings to Paul's epistle to the Galatians, particularly chapters 3-4. Our goal over the next several posts will be to examine, bit by bit, the various NT passages (from Galatians and elsewhere) that bear upon this dictinction between the Sinaitic and Deuteronomic covenants.

Since there's loads of material to cover, my plan will be to keep my posts down to manageable, bite-sized portions. In this one I'll simply draw the reader's attention to Paul's Old Testament citation in Galatians 3:10: "For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, 'Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.'" The quotation is from Deuteronomy 27 in which the Deuteronomic covenant is ratified on Mount Ebal with an utterance of twelve curses, the last of which reads: "Cursed be anyone who does not confirm the words of this law by doing them" (v. 26). The following chapter records the blessings and curses attached to the covenant, but the balance hardly seems fair: there are 14 verses recording the blessings and 53 that rehearse the curses.

Since it is the Deuteronomic covenant in particular that threatens curses for disobedience and not the Sinaitic, Hahn argues, then it stands to reason that when Paul states that "all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse" he understands "works of the law" to refer to the statutes and ordinances that Yahweh imposed on Israel by the Deuteronomic covenant as they moved from infancy to rebellious adolescence.

Discuss....

A Kinder, Gentler Generation of Bishops?

2009-08-08T15:25:00.000-07:00

I just came across this quote from the fifth-century bishop of Ruspe, St. Fulgentius:

Firmly hold and never doubt that every baptized person outside of the Catholic Church cannot share in eternal life, if before the end of his life he does not return and is incorporated into the Church.... Not only pagans but also all Jews, all heretics and schismatics who finish this life outside of the Catholic Church will go into eternal fire, prepared for the devil and his angels (On Faith, To Peter, 37, 38).

I realize that the writings of the fathers are not on par with the Catholic Church's de fide pronouncements or anything, but I would be curious to hear how these sentiments (which are shared by many other fathers) square with the post-Vatican 2 business about the universal Church "subsisting" in the Church of Rome and we Protestants being only "separated brethren" who may still be saved, even though we're Presbyterians.

Has the Catholic Church lost the gall to condemn me?

Kinship By Covenant, Part 2: Israel's Original Sin

2009-08-06T00:31:00.000-07:00

Continuing our look at Scott Hahn's Kinship By Covenant, the author in Part Two of his book applies his overview of the Old Testament covenants to the three New Testament pericopes that explicitly deal with the theme of covenant in familial terms: Luke 22, Galatians 3-4, and Hebrews 1-9. For our purposes here I will focus primarily on Hahn's thoughts on Paul's letter to the Galatians.

Hahn tips his hat to E.P. Sanders, insisting that Sanders is largely responsible for the recent "paradigm shift" in Pauline studies and the focus on the centrality of covenant in the apostle's thought. But Sanders is somewhat shortsighted, Hahn argues, in his failure to do justice to Israel's plight to which divine grace is the solution. "Sanders," writes Hahn, "underestimates the degree to which the sins of Israel had introduced tensions and discontinuity into the covenantal relationship." He continues:

Sanders paints a picture of first-century Judaism in which covenant is primary, but there is no internal tension or predicament for which Paul's Gospel of Jesus Christ provided the solution. Thus his famous but hapless conclusion: "This is what Paul finds wrong with Judaism: it is not Christianity." However... a large portion of first-century Judaism embraced considerable internal tension: God's people were under a curse (cf. Gal. 3:10) because of past transgressions (the golden calf and subsequent infidelity) and in need of eschatological deliverance. Paul claims this deliverance has taken place in Christ (pp. 240, 241).

In fact, Hahn, echoing F. Weber, proposes that "the incident of the golden calf was to Israel what the fall was to Adam," a "virtually unpardonable offense... the evil consequences [of which] were never exhausted" (emphasis original).

As I pointed out in my last post, Hahn is of the opinion that it is not the Sinaitic but the Deuteronomic covenant specifically that Paul has in mind when he speaks of the "curse of the law" from which Christ has redeemed his people. It is this covenant, imposed in response to Israel's idolatry, that is called "the book of the law," and it is this covenant that not only threatens curses the likes of which are found nowhere in the Sinaitic, but also promises that the covenant will be broken and the curses will be enacted (Deut. 30:1). In a word, the Deuteronomic covenant was "intended to fail and thus invoke a new initiative of mercy (the circumcision of the heart) from God, which Paul sees realized in Christ" (p. 249).

And just to whet your appetite for our next post, it is the Deuteronomic covenant that Paul had in mind when he wrote in Galatians 3:19, "Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions."

Discuss....

Kinship By Covenant, Part 1: Will the Real Mosaic Covenant Please Stand Up?

2009-08-03T00:05:00.000-07:00

As some of you know, I have been reading through Scott Hahn’s recently published doctoral dissertation Kinship By Covenant, and I would like to begin a series of posts considering Hahn’s claims. It’s a hefty volume and I will not be going over every detail, but will stick the stuff I find most interesting.

A quick observation before we jump in: I have been reading the book somewhat defensively, always waiting for some Catholic zinger to be thrown in my face when I’m least expecting it. Like, "So in conclusion, from the evidence adduced concerning the nature of ancient Near Eastern Hittite suzerain-vassal treaties, we clearly see that the Pope is the boss of us, and that Mary’s body was whisked away to heaven. The End." But so far, nothing. The book is primarily exegetical in focus, so the reader will have to do some dot-connecting on his own to determine what systematic conclusions Hahn is putting forth (if any). Now I haven’t finished it yet, but thus far the grinding of any Catholic axes is only implicit and not explicit.

The first bit of interesting exegesis concerns the nature of the Mosaic covenants. Now I expect that some of you are wondering if my use of the plural for of "covenants" is a typo. It’s not. As Kinship By Covenant progresses, it becomes clear that one of Hahn’s key points is that the covenant made with Israel at Sinai (Exod. 19-24) and the covenant made in the book of Deuteronomy are distinct covenants with very different emphases. He writes:

Thus, the two accounts of the Mosaic covenant (Exodus and Deuteronomy) are actually complementary records of two different covenants distinguishable in time and space.... The Exodus narrative of the Sinai covenant accentuates the familial bond which was formed by the covenant ritual (Exod. 24:1-11); whereas the Deuteronomic covenant—ratified by oaths replete with curse-threats (see Deut. 27)—reconfigures that relationship in terms of suzerain-father and vassal-son (p. 65).
And:

Deuteronomy serves to reconfigure the familial bond between Yahweh and Israel in terms of vassalage (i.e., a treaty-type covenant between a suzerain-father and a rebellious vassal-son).... Deuteronomy implicitly recasts the filial status of Israel into a more servile form... (p. 66).

The evidence Hahn adduces for this claim includes: (1) Deut. 29:1 explicitly states that the covenants made at Horeb with the first generation and at Moab with the second generation are different, separated not only by location, but also by forty years time; (2) The Sinai covenant law was to be kept—inaccessibly—inside the ark in the Holy of Holies, whereas the Deuteronomic law was kept by the Levites "by the side of the ark" (Deut. 31:25-26); (3) The purpose of the additional Deuteronomic covenant was directly related to Israel’s idolatrous apostasy at Beth-peor (Num. 25), which was a sin as heinous for the second generation as the golden calf episode was for the first (Exod. 32); (4) Further characteristics of the Deuteronomic covenant include the fact that it was given in order to punish and then restore Israel; it includes many more layers of mediation between Yahweh and Israel than did the Sinai covenant; its focus is primarily upon curses for disobedience, the committal of which is a foregone conclusion (27:9-26; 28:15-68); and it serves to constitute the nation as a theocracy with a centralized cultic ministry.

In my next post I will draw out some implications of Hahn’s exegesis, but for now, let’s discuss what we’ve seen so far. Do you agree with this distinction? Can you anticipate where he’s going with it?

My Life According to U2

2009-08-01T11:08:00.000-07:00

Here's my version of Facebook thing that's going around....

***

Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. Pass it on to people you like and include me. You can't use the band I used. Try not to repeat a song title. It's a lot harder than you think!

Pick your Artist: U2

Are you a male or female: Drowning Man

Describe yourself: Stranger in a Strange Land

How do you feel? Numb

Describe where you currently live: City of Blinding Lights

If you could go anywhere, where would you go? The Playboy Mansion

Your favorite form of transportation: Kite

Your best friend is a: Lady With the Spinning Head

You and your best friends are: Trying to Throw Your Arms Around the World

What's the weather like? Bad

Favorite time of day: 11:00 Tick Tock

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called?: Alex Descends into Hell for a Bottle of Milk

What is life to you: Running to Stand Still

Your current relationship: Party Girl

Your fear: Staring at the Sun

What is the best advice you have to give? Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me

Thought For the Day: Love Is Blindness

How I would like to die: Miracle Drug

My soul's present condition: So Cruel

My motto: Love and Peace or Else

Anything Else to Add? I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight

Some Bits of Tid

2009-07-29T18:01:00.000-07:00

Chris Donato of Tabletalk magazine is continuing his "walk-through" of Dual Citizens on his blog. Here is Part One, Two, and Three.

By the way, I have been informed that Ligonier has pre-sold 200+ copies of the book thus far, not to mention the ones that have been pre-ordered from places like Amazon and CBD. The publisher seems pleased, and sees this as being indicative of people's interest in the issues the book addresses.

Switching topics, I read this in Hahn's Kinship By Covenant a few hours ago:

Paul's argument [in Gal. 3:15-17] is also a reductio ad absurdum: he shows that his opponent's position leads to an unacceptable conclusion. The Judaizers argue that obedience to the Mosaic law is necessary for the Abrahamic blessings to reach the Gentiles, that is, for them to become children of God and children of Abraham. In Paul's view, this would be tantamount to placing the Mosaic law as a condition for the fulfillment of God's covenant with Abraham to bless the nations through his "seed" (Gen. 22:16-18). Since, at the Aqedah [the binding of Isaac], God put himself under an unconditional, unilaterally binding oath to fulfill his covenant with Abraham, this would be nonsense. To suppose that God added conditions (the Mosaic law) to the Abrahamic covenant, long after it had been unilaterally sworn by God would imply that God acted illegally, reneging on a commitment in a way not tolerated even in human covenants. This would be an unacceptable conclusion; therefore, the premise that obedience to the Mosaic law had become the condition for Gentile inclusion into the Abrahamic covenant blessings must be rejected.

Sheesh, I guess the student of Meredith Kline doesn't fall far from the Klinean tree....

Lastly, a plea to Lamar Odom: Just sign on the dotted line, son. But either way, we're looking pretty good.

Who Said That?

2009-07-27T00:09:00.000-07:00

Any guesses as to the source of this quote?

"In Paul's view of salvation history, the Abrahamic covenant has chronological priority and ontological primacy over the Mosaic.... The logical corollary of Paul's view of the Abrahamic covenant is that the Mosaic covenant is secondary and subordinate. Moreover, its definitive shape is achieved, not in the earlier Sinai or Wilderness legislation (Exod 20 - Num 36), but in the book of Deuteronomy (i.e., the Book of the Law), where it is ratified by curses invoked and pronounced by Moses and the Levites (Deut 27-30).... Christ's curse-bearing death on the cross simultaneously bears and expiates the Deuteronomic covenant curses and releases the Abrahamic blessings promised to the nations at the [binding of Isaac]" (emphases original throughout).

And please, no Googling....

Catholics: Heartier Partiers?

2009-07-24T21:03:00.000-07:00

Speaking of the Protestant Reformation's crushing of the "creative activity" of the Middle Ages, author Tom Hodgkinson writes (with tongue in cheek):

The Puritan Revolution began to introduce boredom to the masses. Even religion and the path to salvation became boring. In the Middle Ages, religion had been full of blood and gore and death. Churches were centres of economic activity and partying as well as of worship. The Church was a patron of the arts and commissioned local craftsmen to make adornments for its properties. The sermons were attended largely for their entertainment value; they provided real theatre. In medieval Florence, people would queue all night to see a great preacher and then stream out of the church after the service, weeping copiously. All this drama and theatre was removed by the Puritans, who labelled the ways of the old Church "superstition" and "idolatry." In other words, all the pagan fun of the Catholic Church, which it had wisely kept, was taken away.

(I quote Hodgkinson here not because I necessarily agree with him, but because he has a knack for being really amusing, even as he offends just about everyone equally.)

This idea that Catholics are better partiers is perhaps what lay behind Sean P. Dailey's article titled "The Lost Art of Catholic Drinking," in which the author argues that the thing that distinguishes Catholic from Protestant drinking is not necessarily quantity, but control. Citing Chesterton's insistence that the way we thank God for wine is by not drinking too much of it, Dailey says that Catholics can steer the middle course between abstinence and excess that Protestants just can't seem to navigate.

(Oh, and another thing that distinguishes the two methods of imbibement is Hilaire Belloc's insistence that Catholics never drink any beverages that don't predate the Reformation [which supposedly limits their choices to beer and wine]. I suppose this would make The Wire's Jimmy McNulty's dismissing of Bushmills as "Protestant Whiskey" somewhat tautological (he prefers Jameson). Of course, legend does tell us that St. Patrick himself introduced the art of distilling to the Irish in the fifth century. But I digress.)

What's my point, you ask? Umm, I'm not sure I really have one, unless it's that with respect to the enjoyment of beverages, perhaps confessional Protestants are closer to Rome than they are to Saddleback after all. Not exactly a giant leap toward ecumenism or anything, but it's a start.

The Big Apple Versus The Growers of Big Apples

2009-07-22T10:39:00.000-07:00

Always the provocateur, Darryl Hart has written an interesting piece for Front Porch Republic titled "If Cooking Slowly and Growing Organically are In, Why Is Rural Ministry Out?" In it, Hart highlights the irony that amid all our praise of Slow Food and organic food production, our attitude toward ministry is one area in which we are still unabashed city folk.

Signs are not encour-aging ... that the growing concern among evangelical Protestants about the environment is having any effect on their church’s estimation of the people who work on farms and live near them. A recent story in Christianity Today on Tim Keller, a popular Presbyterian pastor in New York City, suggests that for all the desires that evangelicals have to be cutting edge and socially aware, a ministry accessible to the rhythms of farming and local communities does not qualify as hip. The story fawns over Keller for his ability to carve out a multiple-congregation structure in the Big Apple, for a theology of the city that says cites are where redemption happens, and for the model of ministry he exhibits to a crop of younger pastors who aspire to make an impact.

According to the news story, “New York attracts the best and the most ambitious.” Keller senses this and ministers accordingly. He told the reporter, “Suppose you are the best violist in Tupelo, Mississippi. You go to Manhattan, and when you get out of the subway, you hear a beggar playing, and he’s better than you are.” One of Keller’s former colleagues puts Keller’s understanding of ministering in the city this way: “Paul had this sense of, I really should go talk to Caesar. He’s not above caring for Onesimus the slave, but somebody should go to talk to Caesar. When you go to New York, that’s what you’re doing. Somebody should talk to the editorial committee of The New York Times; somebody should talk to Barnard, to Columbia. Somebody should talk to Wall Street.”

(No offense intended to the violinists of Tupelo, I'm sure. I mean, you're from Mississippi, for crying out loud! Surely you didn't expect to best the Big Apple's beggars, didja? Know your place, is what I'm saying.)

Perhaps lurking behind this infatuation with The City (yes, I capitalized it on purpose), Hart suggests, is the desire to "elevate one's status by hobnobbing with the influential" coupled with a "born-again infatuation with celebrity." Then, when you factor in evangelicalism's absolute fear of the ordinary, you've got a perfect recipe (ahem) for the kind of elitism that sees the inexperience of young ministers as disqualifying them for urban church planting while not standing in the way of their ministering to simple farm folk (at least until they graduate from fly-over country to the corridors of power).

Evangelicals are disposed to understand grace and faith in extraordinary categories and so overlook stories of ordinary believers, routine piety, and even rural congregations as insignficant. Discontent with the average and routine aspects of natural life and of grace appears to breed a similar dissatisfaction with humble ministries in places of little interest to the editors of the Times.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: The appreciation for the ordinary that amillennialism produces is as difficult to reconcile with postmillennial transformationism as faith is with sight, and as the cross is with glory.

Of Lunas and Lunatics

2009-07-21T00:05:00.000-07:00

The first lecture in Exile Presbyterian Church's series on G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy can be downloaded here.

Enjoy....

On Tooting One's Own Horn

2009-07-20T00:35:00.000-07:00

(Just an aside, but who else's horn would one toot?)

As the discussion in the previous thread turned to the issue of boasting, I was reminded of an old post that I thought I'd put up again (which, incidentally, was fleshed out to become a chapter in my book).

Enjoy....

The very idea of "boasting" would appear utterly inconsistent with the Pauline doctrines of grace were it not for the fact that Paul himself did it all the time. But in order for boasting to be legitimate, some qualifications are in order. As Walter Sobchak has reminded us, "This is not 'Nam, there are rules...."

First, it is not permissible to boast in the fact that we have done what we were told. Paul says in I Corinthians 9:16 that he cannot boast in preaching the gospel since he has been commanded by Jesus to do so.

Secondly, though, it appears that boasting is an option if we are going above and beyond the call of duty. Now don't misunderstand me, I'm not advocating the Pharisaical practice of inventing laws, fulfilling them, and then bragging about it ("I fast twice a week"). By going "above and beyond the call of duty" I'm referring to what Paul did, namely, denying ourselves the enjoyment of things that are perfectly permissible and voluntarily limiting our rights to benefits to which we are actually entitled (specifically for Paul these benefits included meat, marriage, and money, I Cor. 9:4-6).

This notion could have drastic consequences for American Christians, not the least of which is the distinct possibility that all those passages about suffering may actually apply to us (who says we Reformed ministers never give application?).

In the minds of many believers today, until the antichrist implants microchips into our foreheads and forces us to worship a statue or have our heads chopped off, "suffering" is nothing more than a noble theory that people in heathen lands have to deal with (plus, we'll all be raptured before any of that bad stuff happens anyway).

But could it be that carrying our crosses in more civilized lands like ours may mean that we cease to think in terms of our "rights" and what we're entitled to? It seems to me that the One who told us to carry our crosses had an inalienable right not to be nailed to one.

I'm Protestant, Therefore I Shop?

2009-07-15T22:06:00.000-07:00

In his post entitled “Ecclesial Consumerism vs. Ecclesial Unity,” Covenant-Seminary-graduate-turned-Catholic Bryan Cross writes:

One is an ecclesial consumerist if one's decision regarding which "church"
to attend is based on anything other than this question: Which institution is
the one founded by the incarnate Christ?

While I appreciate Cross’s attack upon ecclesial consumerism as well as the humble and irenic manner by which he argues his position, I must question, from the perspective of my own experience, the simplistic and reductionistic nature of this statement.

For my own part, one of the things I appreciate about Reformed ecclesiology in general (as well as my own church’s worship in particular, if I may toot my own horn) is the very fact that that we refuse to give people what they want, and instead insist on giving them what they need, even if this results in a lesser degree of “success” as defined by American evangelical criteria. In other words, there are certain things that I, individually speaking, would want in a church, such as an elaborate children’s program, professional-sounding music, and messages that tickle my (fallen) sensibilities as well as funny bone.

You know, like Mark Driscoll does.

But despite the pressure to grow in terms of both nickels and noses, faithful Reformed churches have deliberately and decidedly determined not to give ecclesial consumerists what they want. Do we claim to be the church that Jesus founded? Not exactly. But have we therefore fallen prey to the consumerism that characterizes churches like Saddleback or Mars Hill?

Not by a long shot.

Dual Citizens Reviewed by Chris Donato

2009-07-13T18:43:00.000-07:00

Chris Donato, senior associate editor of Tabetalk, has just begun a series of posts reviewing my book, Dual Citizens, on his blog, Growing Grace-full.

Check it out.

Oh, and while you're at it, order the book....

Pierced by a Freeway

2009-07-13T12:18:00.000-07:00

Speaking of sacramental worldviews, perhaps no one does a better job of beholding nature through the lens of spiritual reality that Bono himself. In the song "Heartland" from 1988's Rattle and Hum, he sings about the Mississippi River using the metaphor of a woman, and then goes on to sing:

She feels like water in my hand;

Freeway, like a river, cuts through this land

Into the side of love, like a burning spear.

Just like Rich Mullins refers to an open road as "a woman made from a rib cut from the sides of these mountiains, these great sleeping Adams," so Bono sees Route 66 as cutting through America like the spear that pierced the Savior's side, out of which a river of blood and water flowed.

I'll have what he's having....

Lonely Mountains, Sleeping Adams, Dancing Angels, and the Color Green

2009-07-09T23:57:00.000-07:00

I had a great conversation over cigars and stout with my good pal Armando on Wednesday, and we were discussing the way men like Chesterton, Bono, Rich Mullins, C.S. Lewis, and others wrote about God's involvement in the world (I have been told by my Catholic friends that these men have a "sacramental worldview," which I sort of understand, but not really). Anyway, they bring to the table a kind of richness and appreciation of God's immanence that cannot but stir one's heart, especially when you're just not used to that sort of thing.

I have written here before of Chesterton's view that apple blossoms produce apples not from the mere laws of nature but through magic, and that rivers flow downstream because they're enchanted, so I'll not repeat that stuff again. But consider these words of the late Rich Mullins from "The Color Green":

And the moon is a sliver of silver
Like a shaving that fell on the floor
Of a Carpenter's shop.
And every house must have its Builder;
And I awoke in the house of God.

Where the windows are mornings and evenings,
Sretched from the sun, across the sky,
North to south.
And on my way to early meeting
I heard the rocks crying out,
I heard the rocks crying out:

"Be praised for all your tenderness
By these works of Your hands!
Songs that rise, and rains that fall
To bless and bring to life your land!
Look down upon this winter wheat
And be glad that You have made
Blue for the sky, and the color green
That fills these fields with praise!"

Elsewhere Mullins fuses heavenly imagery with that of earth thusly:

And the work trucks come running
With their bellies full of coal,
And their big wheels humming
Down this road that lies open
Like the soul of the woman
Who hid the spies who were looking
For the land of the milk and the honey.

And this road, she is a woman;
She was made from a rib
Cut from the sides of these mounains,
O these great sleeping Adams who are
Lonely, even here in paradise;
Lonely for somebody to kiss them.

(If by God's grace I ever pen lines even remotely comparable to these, I will die a happy man.)

Sometimes I wonder what a man like Rich Mullins saw when he closed his eyes and meditated upon God, and the beauty and fieceness of his majesty. Whether he's singing about "angels dancing on Jacob's stairs" as "the moon moves past Nebraska, spilling laughter on those cold Dakota hills," or how God "takes by its corners this whole world and shakes us bored, and shakes us free," there was a depth (a simple depth actually, if you'll forgive the oxymoron) to his faith that I, for one, am trying to recover in my own life.

It is my conviction that, whether through a sacramental wordview or, even better, by means of a two-kingdoms theology whereby earth is legitimized, the greater our love is for this world, the greater will be our love for the God who made it.

Abraham's True Sons, Alexandria's True Bishops

2009-07-05T23:15:00.000-07:00

The other day I was directed to a fascinating discussion on the Puritan Board (which I've subsequently joined) on the topic of Sola Scriptura. The thread was started because one of the members was being challenged by a friend who had been investigating Catholic and Orthodox theology and began challenging him about whether the Bible and the early church fathers teach that Scripture is the believer's sole authority on matters of doctrine and practice.

Here's the thread: http://www.puritanboard.com/f121/sola-scriptura-scriptural-50212/

Now, as I read the various responses (some characterized by heat, others by light), I did notice a fair bit of straw-man argumentation. But fallacies aside, there were also a lot of quotes from church fathers that seem to indicate that true apostolic succession is what Protestants say it is, namely, a succession primarily of doctrine, with the issue of physical, laying-on-of-hands succession being a matter of historical coincidence and nothing more. Consider this quote from Gregory of Nazianzus (330-389):

Thus, and for these reasons, by the vote of the whole people, not in the evil fashion which has since prevailed, nor by means of bloodshed and oppression, but in an apostolic and spiritual manner, he is led up to the throne of Saint Mark, to succeed him in piety, no less than in office; in the latter indeed at a great distance from him, in the former, which is the genuine right of succession, following him closely. For unity in doctrine deserves unity in office; and a rival teacher sets up a rival throne; the one is a successor in reality, the other but in name. For it is not the intruder, but he whose rights are intruded upon, who is the successor, not the lawbreaker, but the lawfully appointed, not the man of contrary opinions, but the man of the same faith; if this is not what we mean by successor, he succeeds in the same sense as disease to health, darkness to light, storm to calm, and frenzy to sound sense. NPNF2: Vol. VII, Oration XXI - On the Great Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, §8.

Gregory seems to be saying that "the genuine right of succession" is rooted in a bishop's piety, without which he, though enjoying literal apostolic succession, is "only a successor in name." One is reminded of the argument both of Jesus and Paul that Abraham's true succession of children is traced not through physical lineage but through something not quite as visible, but nonetheless ar more important, namely faith.

Thoughts?

Dual Citizens Out Soon

2009-07-01T22:48:00.000-07:00

I got some good news from Ligonier today: Dual Citizens has been sent to the printer, with 4000 copies to be available soon (meaning that if you each buy a box-full or two, we can send this baby to a second printing in a couple months!).

One professor at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando will be using it as a text for one of his classes, which means a bunch of seminary students will be forced to buy it whether they want to or not, which is fine with me.

I'll keep you posted as I find out more. And remember, it's available for preorder from Amazon, CBD, Ligonier, and wherever else fine books are sold.

So go order one already....

The Complexities of Confessionalism

2009-06-28T22:43:00.000-07:00

Say what you will about Peter Leithart, but when it comes to his theology, the man just plain ol' doesn't care about anything other than that it is biblical.

Is this a bad thing?

When the study committee which he and I petitioned the Northwest Presbytery of the PCA to form began its work, Leithart's only request was that, in addition to comparing his views to the Westminster Standards, we also take the time to engage his work from the vantage point of Scripture. It was obvious that this latter concern far outweighed the former in his mind.

The conclusions of the minority report that I authored were that Leithart's positions, though biblically defensible to a certain degree, were nonetheless clearly contrary to the system of doctrine found in our Confession and Catechisms. The problem, the minority argued, was that he failed (or was unwilling) to read the Bible through the lens of the doctrinal standards of the PCA. And Leithart's response, in a nutshell, was "Isn't being biblical enough?"

Hence the complex nature of Reformed confessionalism. On the one hand, we recognize that there is no "view from nowhere," and that we simply cannot read Scripture in a lens-less, objective, Cartesian way. All of us bring presuppositions to the interpretive table. On the other hand, though, we don't want to be accused of simply reducing the Bible to the confession's handmaiden, as if Scripture is merely a collection of prooftexts to buttress one's own systematic theology.

An example from Leithart's own views would be the fact that Paul says in Romans 6:7 that the baptized believer has been "justified from sin." Clearly, Leithart argues, the word "justify" is being used as a kind of synonym for "sanctify," and not to denote God's one-time declarative act of pardon and imputation of alien righteousness. Our understanding of the term "justification," therefore, ought to be broad enough to include this usage, as well as the OT's usage of tsadaq in contexts were the issue is deliverance from enemies, not forensic acquittal.

I admit, I can see Leithart's point and can understand his frustration at being told "No, you must not echo Paul's language since it contradicts our theology." But at the same time, is there not a place for being a team-player and being willing to employ terminology that tries to avoid confusing people unnecessarily?

The options, as I see them, are as follows: confessional denominations like the PCA can either (1) broaden our theological parameters to make room for someone who can make a case that his theology is biblically plausible, or (2) we can insist that our ministers at times must avoid speaking the Bible's language for fear of muddying the systematic waters.

And I must say, I'm not completely thrilled about either of those choices (but then, who ever said being confessional would be easy?).

Apostles and Early Fathers: Who Were the Real Morons?

2009-06-24T21:07:00.000-07:00

Since Mark Shea's book By What Authority? founds its way into the conversation, I thought I'd clear up what I believe his point to have been, as well as put forth a question to him (or to anyone who feels like trying to answer it).

Shea draws his readers' attention to the way that evangelicals respond to the work of the Jesus Seminar, saying that evangelicalism is certainly correct in highlighting the absurdity of the idea that Jesus, whose knowledge and insight could penetrate into the very souls of men, was nonetheless so shortsighted that he couldn't seem to choose any disciples who would be able to correctly remember a single thing he said. In other words, how likely is it that, nine minutes after our Lord's death, his disciples would both immediately forget everything he really said and did, and invent a bunch of stuff he never said or did?

(This reminds me of the wisdom of Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye, who insisted that "Jesus needed his disciples like he needed a hole in the head." When challenged with the claim that if you reject the disciples you reject Jesus, Caulfield explained that Jesus picked his dicsiples at random since he didn't have the time to screen them properly, being busy and all.)

Now Shea's argument becomes challenging when he turns to Protestantism's response to Rome. The Protestant, Shea insists, commits the very same fallacy that the proponent of the Jesus Seminar does, only we push it back a generation. So we (rightly) deny the likelihood that the original twelve apostles completely messed up Jesus' teachings, but we also (wrongly) insist that the first generation of post-apostolic fathers misunderstood the apostles' teachings. We roll our eyes at the claim that John invented the idea that the Logos was God, while we nonetheless maintain that Ignatius delibererately inflated the authority of the bishop, or that Irenaeus concocted the theory of apostolic succession as a means to ensure orthodoxy. Thus we dismiss early church teachings on prayers for the dead, the sacrificial nature of the Mass, or veneration of Mary by insisting that the church fathers simply went astray pretty soon after the original twelve died.

The question to my Catholic readers is this: Does not Paul himself marvel at how quickly the churches of Galatia perverted the gospel they received from apostolic messengers? Is it indeed a given that the teachings of the early fathers were apostolic simply because they were in close chronological proximity to the apostles?

Going to California

2009-06-22T09:06:00.000-07:00

I'll be on vacation in Orange County for the next few weeks, but I will be blogging as often as the surf is flat. I hope to update the blog tonight or tomorrow.

Cheers....

PS - I wonder what this pic has to do with my post?

Binding and Loosing in Orlando

2009-06-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting here in Orlando at the PCA's General Assembly, and the food line is a mile long, so to kill time I figured I'd relay a question I was posing to some fellas last night over smokes and seven-and-sevens:

"Has anything been bound in heaven this week?"

(Insert blank stare and the sound of crickets here.)

The reason for my question is that Jesus says in Matthew 16, "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. And I give to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." What our Lord is promising here is that the church he will build will have the power to speak in heaven's name on earth, with all authority.

So the question I posed was, "Have we actually concluded anything in Christ's Name that we are confident is now bound in heaven and ratified with heavenly authority?" And my follow up question, if the answer given was "Yes," is, "OK then, should we go through the Yellow Pages once we're home and call all the other churches in our community and inform them of Jesus' decisions that were made at the PCA's GA?"

Again, crickets and stares....

I am certainly not trying to undermine or call into question the importance of the work that we are doing as PCA commissioners. But I guess I'm simply lamenting the fact that the church that Jesus seemed to describe in the Gospels, when compared with our current situation in Protestantism, is not exactly easily recognizable. Instead of declaring with heaven's own authority God's will for all Christians we are setting up the rules that govern our own little corner of the kingdom.

Do I like my corner? Sure. But I can't help but wish there were more unity and true catholicity within Reformed Protestantism. Here endeth the rant.

Off to Orlando....

2009-06-15T05:32:00.000-07:00

I will be in beautiful Orlando, Florida for the PCA's General Assembly all week (but still may find the time to update the blog). Prayers are appreciated.

By the way, if any of you regular commenters will be there, please introduce yourself.

Cheers.

The PCA: Present and Future

2009-06-12T10:55:00.000-07:00

The following is a piece, written in response to Charles Dunahoo's recent article on the state of the PCA, that will be published in the next issue of the Nicotine Theological Journal (edited by Darryl Hart and John Muether). Let the reader be assured that any snarkiness on the part of the author is to be taken in the spirit in which it was written, i.e., with a grain of good-natured, Spirit-filled, love-thy-neighbor salt. Enjoy....

Just to lay my cards on the table up front, I will admit that both my ecclesiastical background and my geographical location are very different from Mr. Dunahoo’s. Having been reared in megachurch evangelicalism in Southern California, and currently pastoring a PCA in the Seattle area, I have neither the broadness of perspective that Dunahoo enjoys, nor the memories of this denomination’s early days that he retains. Still, I’ll do my best to make some worthwhile remarks about the Presbyterian Church in America, both present and future.

Dunahoo lists five distinct groups within the PCA. In my four years as a member of the Pacific Northwest Presbytery, I can identify groups 1 and 2 (the “Reformed Fundamentalists” and the “Reformed Evangelicals”) in this neck of the ecclesiastical woods. That’s not to say the others don’t exist elsewhere, but as I said, my experience is limited to the fringe of the movement (“fringe” being used literally with respect to my presbytery’s location, and perhaps metaphorically with respect to its self-perception. More on this below). Now although I balk at the label affixed to me by Dunahoo (I happen to think of “Fundamentalist” as rather antithetical to “Reformed”), I do consider myself to fit squarely into his first category. I believe the Westminster Confession and Catechisms to be the most faithful articulation of biblical truth, and I believe that it is my calling and duty as a minister to expound Holy Scripture through the lens of the doctrinal standards to which I have submitted myself.

I would venture to say that Dunahoo’s second group, the Reformed Evangelicals, is the largest subgroup within the PCA. I may be wrong about this, but my excuse for such misperception is that the denomination’s official publications, as well as its seminary, all seem to presuppose the missional model, with hardly a paragraph being written in their literature that doesn’t remind the reader to redeem this or transform that. Words like “contextual” and “incarnational” are nearly as important in church planting circles as the phrases “Word and sacraments” or “the ordinary means of grace.” Apparently, word, water, and wine are all well and good provided they’re dispensed with sufficient cultural exegesis and social sensitivity. But I digress.

What I do find refreshing about Dunahoo’s perspective is, well, its perspective. In other words, he doesn’t simply draw a circle around himself and his friends and act as if there is no one else in the denomination besides his own subgroup. The reason I mention this is that I know what it is like to be treated like a virtual alien simply because I haven’t drunk the contextual Kool-Aid. I still feel the sting from the lashing I received at the PCA’s Church Planters’ Assessment when, in a certain exercise, I dared use the word “covenantal” while giving a mock church planting presentation to a pretend presbytery. Apparently it is a cardinal sin to assume that presbyters in the PCA understand the nomenclature used in chapter 7 of the Westminster Confession (I’m not bitter anymore, honest). My point here is that the sooner the confessionalists and transformationists (or, groups 1 and 2) recognize each other’s existence, the better. True, the two may never become one, but at least they’ll realize they are shacked up as roommates in the same house.

In the Pacific Northwest Presbytery where I am a member, the line dividing the Reformed Fundamentalists from, well, everyone else was recently made painfully apparent. At our stated meeting in October 2007, Rev. Peter Leithart and I jointly requested that presbytery appoint a study committee to evaluate Leithart’s Federal Visionist views and compare them with the Westminster Confession, with a particular emphasis on the nine “Declarations” of the previous summer’s General Assembly report on Federal Vision theology more broadly. The committee ended up split 4-3, with the majority concluding that Leithart’s views, though at times confusing and unhelpful, were nonetheless within the bounds of confessional orthodoxy, while the minority (of which I was a part) found his views to strike at the vitals of the Reformed system of doctrine. When we met a year later to present the reports, the debate on the floor of presbytery was rather telling (to say the least) in that it largely ignored the narrow issues that the committee was charged to address and focused instead on the larger (and, strictly speaking, irrelevant) question, “What is the PCA?” The concerns voiced were primarily focused on self-identity instead of whether Leithart’s theology was Reformed or not. The greatest fear on the part of the members of presbytery was that by voting to depose one of our own we’d become, well, like the OPC. In other words, we already represent a mere fraction of Christian believers anyway, and now, by defrocking everyone who fails to cross their t’s and dot there i’s the way we’d like them to, we will just paint an even smaller circle around ourselves, eventually paling into utter obscurity and irrelevance.

It seems to me that the events of the Pacific Northwest Presbytery’s October 2008 meeting demonstrate, albeit microcosmically, the identity crisis of the PCA as a whole. As the “A” in our name would seem to suggest, we are perhaps unduly fixated on being big, noteworthy, and successful, and whatever stands in the way of such success must be viewed with a measure of suspicion. Hence the ho-hum attitude on the part of Dunahoo’s “Reformed Evangelicals” towards a simple, ordinary-means-of-grace ministry that dismisses the fanfare and obsession with how many artists show up at our wine- and cheese-tasting soirees, and gives attention rather to preaching Christ and administrating the Supper each Lord’s Day. As much as the OPC’s obvious irrelevance (ahem) stands as an ominous warning to the movers and shakers at Covenant Seminary and sends chills down the collective spine of the powers that be in Atlanta, the fact is that our older cousin, though a runt in the Presbyterian litter, enjoys the freedom of Mere Presbyterianism to a degree that the PCA cannot (at least not as long as we’re pining for the approval of the artsy-fartsy, the bohemian, the indy, and the soul-patched).

Not being prone to prognostication, I am loath to guess where the rocky marriage between the confessionalists and transformationists will take the PCA. If Tim Keller’s work with the Gospel Coalition is any indication, it is at least possible that the Reformed Evangelicals will continue to value cultural engagement and renewal more highly than confessional exactitude, perhaps to the point of secession. Or to look at it from the other direction, if the so-called Reformed Fundamentalists continue to be made to feel hopelessly irrelevant and out of touch when we settle for a Sabbath-oriented, means of grace driven piety, a withdrawal could potentially occur. Then again, we could just continue with the live-and-let-live, quasi-congregationalism that we now enjoy, according to which I can be left alone to don my Geneva gown on Sunday provided I don’t hassle the PCA pastor in the next town over for using multimedia and drama to reach the “teenz.”

But either way, the Emergents are certainly right about one thing: the church, if not a mess, is nonetheless messy.

On Misfits and Grandmothers

2009-06-08T00:06:00.000-07:00

As I pointed out in an earlier post, many of the writers I have been reading over the past several years (Tolkien, Chesterton, Lewis) had such a unique outlook on the world, one characterized by a humility and wonder that is somewhat lacking in my own theological circles. One of you commented, suggest-ing that these men had a sacramental worldview. When I admitted that I have no idea what that means, another of you directed me to the short stories of Flannery O'Connor as an example of what a sacramental worldview looks like. So, off I went to purchase said volume.

I read a couple of O'Connor's lesser-known stories (one of which involved a boy dressing up as a gorilla for some reason I have yet to ascertain), but was then directed by a church member to read A Good Man Is Hard to Find, which I did yesterday (who, me unteachable?).

I admit, it is a disturbing story to say the least (though how it demonstrates a sacramental worldview I am unsure). The most interesting line is one of the very last, which is uttered by an escaped convict known as "The Misfit." After his cohorts murder a family of four, the only family member still alive is "the Grandmother," who has been engaging The Misfit in conversation, insisting that he is "not common," and indeed "good." She then reaches out to touch him, whereupon he recoils as if bitten by a snake, shoots her three times in the chest, and says:

"She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

Hmmm....

Is the point that O'Connor's Misfit is making that we need to be faced with fear and threat before we will truly demonstrate decency, that real virtue is produced in the crucible of danger?

Is Miss Flannery's Catholic skirt showing?

Dead Man Walking

2009-06-04T09:58:00.000-07:00

Leave it to Gilbert Keith Chesterton to come up with a truly thought-provoking argument against suicide. Most Christian writers would simply say, "Killing is wrong; suicide is killing; therefore, suicide is wrong." Not G.K.: "The man who kills, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men." He's got your attention, no?

The thief is satisfied with diamonds; but the one who commits suicide is not: that is his crime. He cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City. The thief compliments the thing he steals (if not the owner of them). But the one who commits suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it. He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake. There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer.

I cannot help but think of that obscure little line from Paul in Romans 1 in which, after enumerating the deviant and sinful practices of pagan Gentiles, he adds, "and neither were they thankful." From Chesterton's point of view it is precisely this lack of wonder, this failure to stand in awe of earth and its common blessings that makes suicide so insulting to everyone left in its wake. Suicide indeed kills all men.

Taking this a step further (and I have to give credit to my associate pastor Sy Nease for this insight), could it be that suicide can be committed spiritually rather than literally? In other words, when living people look askance at the world and view it merely with suspicion rather than wonder, could this be a kind of metaphorical equivalent to suicide?

To borrow Chesterton's terminology, if a person is Christian enough to hate the world and die to it, but not pagan enough to love the world and die for it, is he merely a dead man walking?

The Road to Rome, Constantinople, and the Emergent Village

2009-05-31T23:13:00.001-07:00

Every now and again you run across a passage in a book that is just chock-full of fodder for potential discussion and debate. I found just such a passage the other day in Scott Clark's Recovering the Reformed Confession. Under the heading "The Virtues of Being Confessional," he writes:

The evangelical and postevangelical discontent is the result of the two quests that have dominated American evangelical religion for more than two centuries. This explanation accounts for the relatively easy movement of evangelicals into what might seem to be foreign territory. With respect to the QIRE [quest for illegitimate religious experience], having grown up with flannel graphs of the Second Person of the Trinity, it is really only a short step to traditional icons. With respect to the QIRC [quest for illegitimate religious certainty], once one overcomes the predominating ignorance of and bigotry against Rome that permeate North American fundamentalism, once one discovers that Roman Catholics love Jesus and read the Bible, it is not a great step to trade the authoritarianism of fundamentalism for the magisterial authority of the Roman communion. In other words, though they occur in a different setting, Rome, Constantinople, and the Emergent Village each offer to fundamentalism and evangelicalism a more ancient and better-looking version of what already animates them.

As the yutes say, "Oh, snap!"

Discuss....

"No One Told You It Was Gonna Be This Way...."

2009-05-30T15:03:00.000-07:00

We've got a wide variety of readers here at DRD, so I'm hoping some of you can clear up a mystery for me.

Reformed people think they're on the same team with Lutherans, but Lutherans won't even offer the bread and cup to the Reformed. Anglicans often speak of themselves as non-Protestants more akin to Catholics, but Catholics don't understand themselves to be in communion with Anglicans. And it seems that Lutherans think of themselves as being much more Catholic than Calvinistic/Re-formed, while from the vantage point of Rome we're pretty much a gaggle of individualists.

What gives?

Elves in Geneva, Fairies in Heidelberg

2009-05-26T15:18:00.000-07:00

In G.K. Chesterton's chapter "The Ethics of Elfland" in Orthodoxy, he writes:

All the terms used in the science books (such as law, necessity, order, tendency, and so on) are really unintellectual, because they assume an inner synthesis, which we do not possess. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy-books: charm, spell, enchantment. They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched.

We may smile at the quaintness of Chesterton's sentiments here (though he wouldn't, and neither would he call them "sentiments"), but the fact is that there is an element of wonder, humility, and childlikeness that characterizes Chesterton's writings, as well as that of others like him such as Lewis and Tolkien.

And none of them were Calvinists.

Now, Chesterton was fond of Geneva-bashing, insisting, for example, the the great hymn-writer William Cowper suffered his melancholic bouts of depression as a result of his belief in predest-ination. Of course, it is difficult to know exactly what Chesterton had in mind when he spoke of "Calvinistic determinists," and something tells me it wasn't John Calvin himself, but more likely his late nineteenth-century proponents.

But straw man arguments aside, one has to ask why it is that of all the Christian authors who tend to display the kind of refreshing wonder that Chesterton did, very few are of the Reformed or Presbyterian persuasion.

I, for one, wouldn't mind letting a little bit of Elfland into Geneva, assuming the former would deign to darken the latter's door.

For the Love of Earth

2009-05-21T14:14:00.000-07:00

In his chapter "The Flag of the World" in Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton remarks that when he was a boy he was con-stantly told that there were two kinds of men in the world, the optimist and the pessimist. "The optimist," he writes, "thought everything good except the pessimist, and the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself."

Chesterton came to conclude that there is a "deep mistake" in categorizing people in this way, for before one can criticize or accept some aspect of the culture he must come to terms with his "primary loyalty" to the world as a whole. "My acceptance of the universe," he says, "is not optimism, it is more like patriotism." Thus the problem with the pessimist is not that he is overly-critical, but that he does not love what he criticizes. And likewise, the problem with the optimist is that he will defend the indefensible with the jingoistic battly cry of "My cosmos, right or wrong."

The way of escape from these two options is in what Chesterton describes as an irrational loyalty to the world, not because is great or even good, but because it is ours.

We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly content-ment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent.... Can [the ordinary man] hate the world enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing? ... Is he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it?

It is only the "irrational optimist" who can successfully smash the whole universe for the sake of itself, and love the city enough to set it on fire.

Again, Chesterton displays a unique and provocative ability to bring together seemingly disparate ideas (which is what the core doctrine of the Christian faith is all about, when you think about it). I have to think that the late Rich Mullins had been reading Gilbert's work when he penned the line, "Nobody tells you when you get born here how much you'll come to love it, and how you'll never belong here."

While evangelicalism does a pretty good job of making sure we don't love the world too much, Chesterton challenges us to beware of what happens when we love it too little.

Think More, and Harder

2009-05-18T13:06:00.001-07:00

There is a distinction that needs to be made when discussing the relationship of religion and politics, but for some reason, very few people seem to recognize it. So here goes (and please pay attention):

There is a difference between a moral principle and the implementation of a moral principle.

In other words, just because a handful of people agree on some point of ethics, that is not to say that they will all agree on what to do next. For example, two people may agree that abortion is wrong (a sentiment I share), but that part's easy. The hard part comes when we get to the "therefore...." Should it be made illegal? If so, by whom, the federal government or the states? What about the economic factors that often contribute to abortion, should we address them, too? What happens when a person thinks that one presidential candidate is against abortion but favors an economic policy that could actually further it, while another candidate is in favor of abortion remaining legal, but promises to address and help eliminate the factors that may lead to abortions?

My point? Simply that it's one thing to have a moral opinion, but the real thinking hasn't started yet.

Take the death penalty. Plenty of Christians believe that capital punishment is biblical, but also feel that it is unjustly administered in the United States. What then? Or what about gay marriage? Is there a legitimate distinction between saying that homosexuality is immoral and saying that the government should enact laws that keep gays from getting married? If not, then are we saying that every immoral practice should be criminalized by the state?

Or what happens when one's pro-life principles force him to choose between voting to outlaw murder in one arena but condone it in another? And even if the murder that happens in one arena (say, abortion) is far more widespread than that which takes place in another (like war), is there still room to weigh the practical chances of eliminating the greater versus eliminating the former, and actually play the odds and vote contrarily to one's preferences?

I don't think there are any easy answers to these questions, and therefore I will not pretend to provide them. All I'm asking for is that, amid our pulpit-pounding and rally cries to one cause or another, we take the time to think a little harder than we are accustomed to doing.

Especially before calling our opponent's faith or character into question.

Americans Choose Life?

2009-05-16T20:18:00.000-07:00

I just came across an interesting article, here's a snippet:

NEW YORK - The Gallup Poll reported Friday that 51 percent of Americans now call themselves "pro-life" rather than "pro-choice" on the issue of abortion, the first time a majority gave that answer in the 15 years that Gallup has asked the question.

The findings, obtained in an annual survey on values and beliefs conducted May 7-10, marked a significant shift from a year ago. A year ago, 50 percent said they were pro-choice and 44 percent pro-life — in the new poll, 42 percent said they were pro-choice.

I must admit, this really surprises me. I wonder what accounts for the shift?

Tyrants in the Pulpit, Victims in the Pew

2009-05-14T10:48:00.001-07:00

There is a pastoral element to the two-kingdoms model that many people fail to appreciate. One of the main functions of this way of thinking is to protect the congregation from ecclesiastical tyranny, and more specifically, from being subjected to a constant onslought of extra-biblical opinions being forced upon them by their ministers.

The reason for the failure to appreciate this, I think, is that when a theory is being implemented properly, you just don't really notice when it avoids potential problems. I mean, if I had cancer or leprosy or some other such malady, I'd probably notice that I suffer from them. But how often do I notice my not-having-cancer-or-leprosy condition? Pretty much never.

Now a pastor could never actually pull this little stunt off, but I think it would be a fun experiment for a minister who holds to the two-kingdoms model to subtly depart from it for a few months without telling anyone. Preach the cross and empty tomb a little less, and preach about social issues a little more. This would work especially well if said pastor's views on cultural matters were not exactly the "correct" ones that the congregation would agree with.

Can you imagine it?

"OK, this Sunday at Random Presbyterian we're beginning a new 16-week series of sermons entitled 'The Christian Worldview.' In the weeks to come we'll be considering from Scripture such exciting topics as 'War ON Terror or War OF Terror?', 'Love Thy Neighbor: A Defense of Universal Healthcare,' and my favorite, 'Nike: Shoe Company or Babylon Mother of Harlots?'"

As silly as this sounds, it demonstrates precisely what the doctrine of the two kingdoms protects the church-goer from. In other words, it's all fine and dandy to beg your minister to speak out against cultural evils, but what happens when he takes your advice and rails against issues you support and defends the ones you decry?

We have six days out of every seven to "do earth," so on Sunday you'll just have to pardon my heavenly-mindedness and forgive me if I want to focus on things like Word, water, and wine. If this is "irrelevance," sue me, because the day I become "relevant" as defined by this age is the day I quit pastoring and take up professional punditry.

The Two-Kingdoms Doctrine is Expanding!

2009-05-13T00:00:00.000-07:00

Geneva, Switzerland – According to recent reports, the World Council of Churches is set to expand the two kingdoms doctrine in order to include The Magic Kingdom. Speaking on behalf of the Faith and Order Commission, Prof. Constantine Scouteris noted, "Boniface and Luther had no idea of the immense power and glory of The Magic Kingdom, and our recent decision to include the sword in the stone alongside the temporal and spiritual swords reflects present realities."

Responsibilities allocated to the new kingdom include hilarity, exorbitant taxation, and the moral formation of millions upon millions of children. In return The Magic Kingdom was also ordered immediately to stop all further sequels to the Aladdin series and to produce DVDs and videos that self-destruct after three viewings, thus sparing family and friends infinite viewings of Beverly Hills Chihuahua and Space Buddies.

(Source)

Pope Versus Hope

2009-05-11T00:18:00.000-07:00

I have one of those MSNBC news-ticker things on my PC gadget bar (a sentence, by the way, that none of us would have been able to decipher a decade ago), and this headline caught my eye: Archbishop: Obama Advances Anti-Life Agenda. The story continues:

WASHINGTON - A powerful Catholic leader on Friday accused President Barack Obama of pushing an anti-life, anti-family agenda and called Notre Dame's invitation for him to speak scandalous.

Archbishop Raymond Burke, the first American to lead the Vatican supreme court, said Catholic universities should not give a platform, let alone honor, "those who teach and act publicly against the moral law."
Now, under a one-kingdom framework I can totally see how hopelessly at-a-loss the American Christian must be when it comes to navigating these this-worldly waters. After all, there’s no question that Archbishop Burke’s charge is correct—President Obama is unapologetically pro-choice, espousing a position on the abortion issue that is inescapably at odds with the Christian religion. What’s a believing American to do?

Well, distinguishing heaven from earth is a good place to start.

You see, there’s nothing particularly new about this dilemma we find ourselves in. Paul urged the Romans to submit to the civil magistrate, even calling the secular rulers of his own day “servants of God” ordained to bear the sword (13:1ff, and that was when Nero was in power, someone who makes Obama look like Tinkerbell). Moreover, Peter instructs his readers to “submit yourselves to every human institution,” even mentioning the “emperor as supreme” (I Pet. 2:13). Like it or not, Barack Obama is the leader that God has chosen to govern the United States, for he exalts and demotes whomever he sees fit, and none of us are allowed to question his wisdom on such matters (Dan. 4:35).

Given what is said above, we must be willing to differentiate between the civil and spiritual kingdoms if we ever hope to live as God’s faithful servants in this present age. President Obama’s job is not to inaugurate Christ’s kingdom or further its interests, that job falls to the ministers of Jesus’ Church. And likewise, it is not my job as a minister of the Word and Sacraments to meddle in civil affairs.

Of course, the abortion issue is not merely a political matter, but a moral one, too, and there is certainly no rule that prohibits concerned citizens (even believing ones) from making sure their voice is heard. In fact, I would argue that engaging in civil and secular matters is a logical outcome of a strong two-kingdoms theology (if, of course, one is prone to such things, but I also wouldn’t want to begrudge anyone his political cynicism and resultant sloth, either).

But saying that we oughtn’t even honor our president because he is anti-life on the abortion question? That seems to be taking matters too far, especially for a Reformation Christian.

Linguistic or Liturgical Intelligibility?

2009-05-03T22:33:00.000-07:00

In his book The Lord’s Service, Jeff Meyers makes a great point about the difference between intelligibility and familiarity, and how that often a lack of the latter is confused with a lack of the former.

Why does this matter?

Well, in discussions about the need for contextualization in worship, the claim is often made that all that’s being argued for is that pastors be intelligible in their presentation of the gospel. "Just speak in a language that people can understand," we often hear. If we reply, "Oh, you mean English and not Farsi?", we begin to see by the answer given that intelligibility involves a lot more than it seems at first glance.

On top of linguistic intelligibility, there also seems to be the need for liturgical intelligibility, which is far more controversial an issue.

But here’s where Meyers’s distinction between intelligibility and familiarity becomes very helpful. If we’re honest we will admit that a visitor at our church, whether a believer or not, will be able to understand lots of practices and concepts with which he still may be unfamiliar. For example, there’s nothing inherent in the practice of kneeling during a confession of sin or raising hands during the singing of the Doxology that is unintelligible to everyday Americans. Assuming a normal level of intelligence, anyone can look at a group of people bowing and asking God for forgiveness and conclude, "Hmm, it seems that these people think they’ve done something wrong, and they want the God whom they think they’ve offended to pardon them." The same goes for the lifting of hands during the Doxology: sure, the words and melody may be new, but the posture and practice themselves are perfectly understandable, albeit unfamiliar.

So the question that arises (but is not "begged") is, Is it legitimate to alter the church’s forms of, or practices in, worship for the sake of those for whom they may seem odd, foreign, or irrelevant?