Christ, Kingdom, and Culture, Part 4: Horton

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....

Christ, Kingdom, and Culture, Part 3: VanDrunen

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....

Christ, Kingdom, and Culture, Part 2: Baugh

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.

Christ, Kingdom, and Culture, Part 1: Godfrey

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.