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THE McDONALDIZATION OF AMERICA ❘ A THEOLOGY OF WORSHIP ❘ THE EXPERIENCE ECONOMY

MODERN REFORMATION

A Feast in a Fast-Food World VOLUME

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MODERN REFORMATION

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Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Executive Editor Eric Landry Managing Editor Patricia Anders Marketing Director Michele Tedrick Department Editors Mollie Z. Hemingway, Between the Times Ryan Glomsrud, Reviews Michael Horton, Final Thoughts Staff | Editors Jason Ching, Digital Production Assistant Lori A. Cook, Layout and Design Elizabeth Isaac, Proofreader Alyson S. Platt, Copy Editor Contributing Scholars Michael Allen Peter D. Anders James Bachman J. Todd Billings John Bombaro Jerry Bridges John N. Day Adam S. Francisco David Gibson W. Robert Godfrey T. David Gordon Gillis Harp D. G. Hart Paul Helm John A. Huffman, Jr. Daniel R. Hyde Ken Jones Julius J. Kim Philip J. Lee Jonathan Leeman Richard Lints Korey Maas Keith Mathison R. Albert Mohler, Jr. John Warwick Montgomery Kenneth A. Myers Roger R. Nicole Robert Norris J. I. Packer Craig Parton Mark Pierson Lawrence R. Rast, Jr. Donald P. Richmond Kim Riddlebarger Rick Ritchie David Robertson Rod Rosenbladt Justin Taylor Kate Treick David VanDrunen Gene E. Veith David F. Wells Donald T. Williams William Willimon Todd Wilken Paul F. M. Zahl Modern Reformation Š 2009 All rights reserved.

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A Feast in a Fast-Food World 14 Feasting in a Fast-Food World In a culture where life has become a food court, what does this mean for the church?

Are we settling for fast, empty calories instead of the nutritious feast God offers us with him in the communion of saints?

by Michael Horton

19 More than Meets the Mouth Or, the Meaning of Meals Why do we enjoy eating, especially within fellowship? Is this merely natural or is it symbolic of a higher communion, reminding us that we do not live by bread alone?

by Kenneth A. Myers

25 Local Church, Local Restaurant The pastor, like a chef, works with fine ingredients to prepare something excellent. Guests arrive and the meal is served—but God himself has paid the price for this satisfying banquet for starving, weary souls.

by Michael Brown

29 Holy Communion as a Strategic Plan for Church Growth In a society of gimmicks and programs, can Word and Sacrament alone promote church growth? The author explains what happens when a pastor teaches his church how to think and act biblically with respect to a theology of worship.

by John Bombaro Plus: Consuming Communion

12 Celebrating Calvin Ten ways modern culture is different because of John Calvin.

by David W. Hall

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In This Issue page 2 | Letters page 3 | Between the Times page 4 Ex Auditu page 7 | Common Grace page 9 | Interview page 35 Required Reading page 38 | Reviews page 39 | Final Thoughts page 44

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IN THIS ISSUE

“Slow Food”

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art of the genius of the Pixar animated movies is the oftentimes grim back story that sets the stage for the main characters and their escapades. Consider Pixar’s 2008 movie, WALL-E. After decades of over-consumption at the ubiquitous “Buy N Large” stores, the population of Earth is sent cruising on an intergalactic spaceship while robots clean up the environmental mess left behind. Seven-hundred years later, however, Earth is still a mess and the Axiom spaceship is filled with a generation of earthlings who have no memory of the planet their ancestors left behind. The convenience that was originally designed to help Grandma travel with the family (a hover chair) is now utilized by all the humans who have become fat from doing nothing except conversing with one another and being entertained by interactive screens. Convenience has even interrupted their nutrition as they consume all their food through a straw. Although they don’t know it, their holiday in space has become a form of bondage to convenience. And the movie’s climax occurs as the ship’s captain finds the will to break free of his own obtuseness to colonize Earth. Heady stuff, this, for our kids! But lessons can be drawn even for our own situations.

Our modern obsession with convenience at the expense of nutrition and real enjoyment of food has been chronicled by both secular and Christian observers (for example, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and nearly everything by Wendell Berry).

In these discussions, our attitude toward food becomes a window through which we can evaluate how we approach all of life (marriage, friendship, work, political involvement, and so on). But what is often missing from the discussion is how this drive toward convenience affects the worship and witness of the church. Among those who are concerned by the nutritional desert that is the fast-food industry, the “slow food” revolution aims to recover local growers, in-season ingredients, and home-cooked meals often shared within a community. In this issue of Modern Reformation, we’re advocating a slow-food approach to the spiritual nourishment Christians receive from the hand of God, himself, in his Word and Supper.

First up is Reformed theologian and our editor-in-chief Michael Horton, who says we ought not to give in to our fast-food world when God intends for us to feast. That very act of feasting is a witness to a world that has lost sight of true nutrition and joy. In much the same vein, the host of Mars Hill Audio and one of our favorite public intellectuals, Ken Myers, shares some thoughts about the place that meals occupy in Christian theology and community.

Reformed pastor and frequent contributor Michael Brown compares the church to a neighborhood restaurant in his article: the preacher takes on the role of the chef, the preached Word is the meal, and the parishioners are the patrons. The analogy helps pastors remember that they are heeding Jesus’ call to “feed” (not manage) the sheep, and it helps the average Christian to remember that Christianity has very little to offer if it is divorced from the ministry of the Word. Lutheran pastor John Bombaro (another frequent contributor to the magazine) takes up the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion and tells the story of reform and revitalization that accompanied increased attention to and reliance upon the means of grace God ordained for the growth and sustenance of the church.

We hope you take the time to enjoy this issue of Modern Reformation. Invite some friends to read and consider these issues with you. We’ll be happy to extend the reach of your gift subscriptions by including this issue as a special gift from NEXT ISSUES us in recognition of your support.

September/October 2009 Growing Up: Wisdom and Discipleship November/December 2009 Eric Landry Zion Executive Editor

LETTERS y o u r

In Dr. Horton’s article on the imitation of Christ (March/April 2009), he stated: “I am among a dwindling number of exegetes who still believes that Romans 7 focuses on this paradox: only believers struggle with sin, because sin is both an enduring reality (with many setbacks) and yet the believer’s enemy.” I’ve recently sought clarification of a similar statement on a Reformed blog—isn’t it true that some unbelievers struggle with sin yet find works as a satisfying remedy?

Steve Post

Author’s Response Given the fact that God’s law is written on the conscience of every imagebearer, there may certainly be an awareness of having offended God, but before this can awaken an unbeliever to his or her spiritual condition, it is suppressed. The unbeliever does not interpret this law properly in relation to God and his coming judgment and cannot submit to it in loving obedience (Rom. 6:15–23; 1 Cor. 2:14). Contrasting the virtue ethics of the Greeks with the biblical concept at this point, Puritan William Ames put it nicely. I’m summarizing: Unbelievers often struggle against the immoderate indulgence of the flesh (out of concern for the good life which avoids extremes), while for believers the struggle is between the Spirit and the flesh.

Michael Horton

I was struck by the narrow definition of Reformed theology implied by the book review written by Dr. Clark (March/April 2009). In his review, Clark lists the Westminster Standards as being truly Reformed. Later he denies the imprimatur of “Reformed” for the 1689 London Confession. Now, since the Westminster Confession and the 1689 are practically identical except for a few particular points, one can dis-

cern, from those points, what the touchstone of Reformed theology is, according to Dr. Clark.

Apparently Reformed theology is not about God’s sovereignty, election, justification, regulative worship, the doctrine of Scripture, the “five solas,” etc., for all of these are identical in both the Westminster and the 1689 confessions. In fact, Dr. Clark tells us that the issue is paedobaptism. According to Clark, one is Reformed if he practices paedobaptism and is not Reformed if he practices credo-baptism. Interestingly, he himself wrote against “sanctioning a ‘lowest common denominator’ approach to defining the adjective ‘Reformed.’”

I believe Dr. Clark has implied a unique definition for Reformed theology. The doctrine of baptism, while important, is usually viewed as being a secondary, less “weighty” issue (Matt.

23:23). That Modern Reformation itself stands in the historical path is obvious in the stated editorial policy, “The editors make an intentional effort to include voices from across the reformational spectrum in Modern Reformation’s pages. Our contributors come from Anglican, Baptist, Congregational, Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Reformed churches.”

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Calvin’s catechisms (1537, 1538, 1545), The Geneva Confession (Art. 15; 1536/1537), and the French Confession (Art. 35; 1559), all confessed the moral necessity of infant baptism. In the Belgic Confession (Art. 34; 1561), the Dutch Reformed Churches confess, “We detest the error of the Anabaptists,” specifically the practice of re-baptizing believers and denying infant baptism.

The Second Helvetic Confession (1561/1566; ch. 20) specifically condemned the denial of paedobaptism. The Heidelberg Catechism (Q. 74; 1563) insisted on infant baptism. The Westminster Confession 28.5 (1647) arguably calls the “neglect” or condemnation of infant baptism “a great sin.”

In the light of this evidence, it is hard to see how insisting on it is anything but consistent with confession of the Reformed churches in which one finds not only a soteriology but also an ecclesiology and doctrine of the Sacraments.

R. Scott Clark

James Balson, Jr. Macedon, NY

Author’s Response I am grateful to Mr. Balson for raising this important question. I wrote a book to address it, Recovering the Reformed Confession (2008). Evidently, the earliest Baptists did not think it necessary to call themselves “Reformed.” They called themselves “General” or “Particular” Baptists. In the Reformation, the Reformed Churches confessed infant baptism as essential to the Reformed faith.

In 1530, Zwingli did so in the Diet of Augsburg as did the Tetrapolitan Confession (ch. 18; 1530). The First Confession of Basel (Art. 12; 1534), First Helvetic Confession (Art. 22; 1536),

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Musical Pews Forty-four percent of U.S. adults have switched denominations or religions, according to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. That percentage jumps to 59 percent if counting the millions who switched and returned to their childhood church.

The survey provided a more indepth look at 2,800 of the 35,000 people contacted for last year’s Religious Landscape Survey. Different religious groups identify different reasons for switching. For instance, 71 percent of Catholics and less than 60 percent of Protestants left because their spiritual needs weren’t being met, they liked another faith better, or they changed their religious or moral beliefs. Most of the switches occurred before the age of 36.

Catholicism has suffered the most: 10 percent of adults quit the church with only 2.6 percent coming in. Most left Catholicism for other denominations because they stopped believing its teachings. The sexual abuse scandal was a factor for fewer than three in ten.

Protestant switches are motivated less by doctrinal differences than life changes. Moving to a new town or marrying someone of a different denomination were the most cited reasons. Another 36 percent said they left because of dislikes about denominational bureaucracies, practices, and people.

Those who left a denomination to become unaffiliated cited the hypocrisy of religious adherents, too great a focus on rules, or because leaders focus too much on power or money. They weren’t lured away by atheism or secularism so much as gradually drifted away, they said.

Some one in ten who leave their childhood religion return. Religious education and youth group participation didn’t prevent departures, but weekly worshipers were much less likely to switch.

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A New Lease on Sex Life An evangelical church’s sermons about sex—and advertisements featuring canoodling partners—have landed a church in hot water with Florida school officials. Brevard Public Schools threatened to evict New Hope Church out of Sherwood Elementary, its new home for Sunday services, because of a worship series titled, “Great Sex For You.” Church leaders mailed 25,000 fliers to residents asking them about their sex life and inviting them to go to Sherwood Elementary to learn how to have great sex.

Pastor Bruce Cadle said the Christian church has been “shamefully silent” on the typically taboo topic.

“Sex between married believers is a holy activity. It’s not a dirty activity. It’s not a shameful activity,” Cadle

preached. “It’s a holy activity. And the Bible is so clear about this. But it’s still hard for us to get it.”

That may be, but the school district said the mailers generated complaints and described the controversy as “obnoxious” and that the advertising was inappropriate. The school board is considering revoking the lease.

Cadle said the church had received complaints but that 23 newcomers had attended services.

New Hope Church also is offering “Exposed! The Naked Truth About Sex,” a teaching series for middle and high school students.

We’ll Keep Voting Until We Get the Answer We Want A Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) effort to change the constitutional requirement that church officers be

Notable Quotables “I can say without reservation that pastors need to be salt and light, and the light of God’s word shows us that marriage is to be one man [and] one woman for life.”

—Frank Page, pastor of First Baptist Church of Taylors, S.C., and member of Obama’s faith-based advisory council, responding to Rick Warren’s claim that fighting for traditional marriage is not part of his agenda.

“Members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostates and other general authorities raise their hands in a sustaining vote Saturday morning during the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Annual General Conference held in the conference center in Salt Lake City.”

—A caption in Brigham Young University’s student paper The Daily Universe. Over 18,000 copies of the paper were recalled after noticing the typographical error in describing the Mormon Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

“Our music is not traditional hymns. My message is not about doctrine. I don’t have to get 50 references from Scripture in a sermon for it to be a good sermon. Churches that are helping people live out a Christian life are growing and flourishing.”

—Joel Osteen, pastor of Lakewood Church, explaining how his prosperity gospel message continues to attract followers in times of economic recession.

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faithful in marriage and chaste in singleness to include sexually active homosexuals was defeated again.

Amendment B, proposed by the church’s 218th General Assembly last year, would have replaced the current constitutional requirement to live in “fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman or chastity in singleness.”

The proposed language read, “Those who are called to ordained service in the church, by their assent to the constitutional questions for ordination and installation (W-4.4003), pledge themselves to live lives obedient to Jesus Christ the Head of the Church, striving to follow where he leads through the witness of the Scriptures, and to understand the Scriptures through the instruction of the Confessions. In so doing, they declare their fidelity to the standards of the Church. Each governing body charged with examination for ordination and/or installation (G-14.0240 and G-14.0450) establishes the candidate’s sincere efforts to adhere to these standards.”

Presbyteries had until the end of June to vote, but by late April, 69 presbyteries were in favor with 88 opposed. Only 87 of the 173 needed to be opposed for the initiative to fail.

This is the third attempt to change the language, which was added in 1996, that has failed. The latest attempt was frequently publicized by denominational headquarters with news releases suggesting that the vote was close enough to win. Twenty-seven presbyteries that voted “No” in 2002 voted “Yes” this time while two that voted “Yes” last time voted “No” this time.

Methodist Council Rejects SameSex Marriage Even if same-sex marriages are legalized in a given jurisdiction, United Methodist clergy cannot perform same-sex marriages according to the church’s top court.

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By the Numbers $600,000. Annual compensation package of Rev. Brad Braxton, the incoming pastor of Riverside Church in Manhattan, famous for its Gothic architecture and promotion of liberal causes.

The Judicial Council ruled at its spring 2009 meeting that clergy may be charged with an offense if they perform such ceremonies. The ruling overturns resolutions from the California-Nevada Annual Conference and California-Pacific Annual Conferences.

“An annual conference may not legally negate, ignore or violate provisions of the [Book of] Discipline with which they disagree, even when the disagreements are based on conscientious objections to the provisions,” the council ruled.

The 2008 General Conference, the denomination’s top legislative body, retained its ban on same-sex marriages.

Pastors who perform same-sex unions risk losing their clergy credentials.

Denomination Dollars Decline Denominations across the theological spectrum report budget declines, layoffs, and program cuts.

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has laid off dozens of staff, citing the recession and restructuring efforts.

Workers also had to take a oneweek unpaid furlough. Presbyterian leaders proposed $4 million in budget cuts to help manage a projected deficit of $10 million.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America reduced its 2009 budget by $5.6 million to $76.8 million.

The action resulted in an unspecified reduction of staff positions. The World Hunger Appeal budget was also cut by $1.9 million.

At least 35 of the ELCA’s 65 synods revised their mission support

54. Percent of those raised without any religious affiliation who now belong to a religious group, according to a Pew survey. Thirty-nine percent of those unaffiliated as children became Protestants.

58. Percent of Americans who pray at least once a day. Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Black Protestants, evangelicals, Muslims, Hindus, and Orthodox Christians pray more than average while Jews, Buddhists, and mainline Protestants pray less than average.

24. Percent of nonbelievers who call themselves atheists, according to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

1. Percent of 18 to 23 year olds in America who have a biblical worldview, according to The Barna Group. Biblical worldview is defined as believing that absolute moral truth exists; the Bible is completely accurate in all of the principles it teaches; Satan is considered to be a real being or force, not merely symbolic; people cannot earn their way into Heaven by trying to be good or do good works; Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth; and God is the all-knowing, allpowerful creator of the world who still rules the universe today.

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plans, resulting in a downward adjustment of $2.4 million for 2009. The church also reduced its global mission budget by $3.6 million, significantly reducing overseas mission work.

The budget reductions “will hit hard companion churches and the Lutheran World Federation at a time when they, too, have to deal with the impact of the worldwide financial crisis, which is resulting in (an additional) 46 million people falling into poverty,” said the Rev. Rafael Malpica Padilla, executive director, ELCA Global Mission.

The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship cut staff salaries by 1 percent last March and reduced funding for theology schools and other partner organizations by 30 percent in an attempt to save $5.5 million over 19 months.

An Indian Bible?

The New Community Bible in India, published with official church approval by a Roman Catholic group in Bombay, has provoked controversy.

The text isn’t new but the footnotes comparing and contrasting Christianity with Islam and Hinduism are.

The illustrations are also Indian with Mary wearing a sari and a bindi on her flight to Egypt and Joseph sporting a turban.

While Christianity has been in India since the first century, only 2.3 percent of the 1.1 billion Indians are Christian, compared to 80 percent who are Hindus and 13 percent who are Muslim.

The Bible has come under protest from Protestants who say it’s a turn

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back from “the real Bible,” according to Reuters. Hindu nationalists denounced it as an attempt to convert Hindus to Christianity. The attempt to explain Christianity in an Indian context is controversial even to Catholic laity, according to Reuters.

While most footnotes relate to Hindu teachings, some deal with the Koran as well. The New Community Bible notes that Mahatma Gandhi was inspired by the Sermon on the Mount, and adds that Jewish restrictions are similar to the caste system in India. “The same kind of distinction underlies the caste system in India. The ‘dalits’ are treated as ‘untouchables’ by the so-called ‘clean’ castes, because the kind of work they do brings them into touch with ‘polluting’ things and so makes them in Hindu society ritually impure. Jesus completely abolishes this kind of purity/pollution distinction. He shows that true ‘purity’ (that is, fitness for worshipping God) does not depend on external things but upon the attitudes of the heart.”

Advertising Now Saves Us Following decades of membership declines, the United Methodist Church launched “Rethink Church,” the next phase of its “Open Hearts” advertising campaign.

The church plans to spend $20 million in new advertising on television, radio, print, and new media over the next four years. The advertising will target 18 to 34 year olds by highlighting volunteer opportunities at UMC churches.

More than 40 United Methodist bishops from around the world marked the beginning of the campaign on May 5 when they visited day laborers at three sites in and around Washington, D.C., during the Council of Bishops meeting. On May 6, more than 100 Methodists performed “random acts of kindness,” such as hailing cabs and opening doors in New York City. These vol-

unteers will also give away free song downloads that promote www.10 thousanddoors.org, a new site to support the campaign.

Hasta La Vista, Pat Robertson

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Pat Robertson is retiring as president of Regent University, effective the summer of 2010. Robertson founded the Virginia Beach school in 1978. Founded as a Christian graduate school, the university has grown from 77 to over 4,500 students enrolled in over 30 graduate and undergraduate programs.

A Regent spokesman told the Associated Press that the day-to-day duties had become “quite time consuming,” for Robertson. However, Robertson will still be actively involved with the university, working on a strategic plan to build new classrooms and student housing. A statement released by Robertson said serving as Regent’s president had been an “honor and a joy.”

When Baptists Attack Tom Rich, a congregant at First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida, wasn’t too happy with the way Pastor Mac Brunson was running his church. Brunson took over the Southern Baptist megachurch in 2006 after the previous pastor resigned, and since then Rich has been critical of Brunson’s preaching. He further disapproved of Brunson’s fundraising and administrative practices. So Rich started a blog to anonymously air his grievances with the church. According to the Associated Baptist Press, Rich says he chose to air (continued on page 11)

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Christ Alone

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recovered during the Protestant Reformation: ever exhibited the singleness of purpose that Paul displayed in preaching the gospel. Paul Scripture alone, faith alone, grace alone, and Christ was not concerned about his own reputation. He cared little for his own comfort and alone, all to the glory of God alone. What these doctrines safety. He was not interested in Christianity as a social moveshare in common is that they all find their meaning in Jement or a political cause. The only thing that mattered to him sus Christ and him crucified. was the person and work of Jesus Christ. So he said to the Start with sola Scriptura, “Scripture alone.” When the ReCorinthians, “I resolved to know nothing while I was with formers said “Scripture alone,” they meant that the Bible is you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). Paul the only foundation for faith and practice. No person, no insaid this in reference to his first visit to Corinth, when he plantstitution stands in judgment over God’s Word. Our only uled the Corinthian church. The first time he went to Corinth, timate authority is the Holy Spirit speaking in Scripture. the only thing he talked about was Jesus Christ. His message Once you accept the Bible’s authority and start to study was Christ alone. it, one of the first things you notice is that it is all about JeThere was much that Paul might have said about Jesus sus Christ. That is true not only of the Gospels, which give Christ. He might have said that Jesus was God as well as man, biographical information about Jesus, and of the epistles, that he was God the Son incarnate. He might have said that which provide theological interpretation of Jesus, but also of Jesus was a perfect example, that he lived a life of sinless obethe entire Old Testament, which holds the messianic exdience. He might have said that Jesus was a moral teacher, pectation of Jesus. After his resurrection, Jesus walked to Emthat he spoke the true words of God. He might have said that maus with two of his disciples. “And beginning with Moses Jesus was a miracle worker, that he healed the sick and raised and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in the dead. Paul could have spent an entire lifetime speaking all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). Salvaabout the deity, the perfection, the wisdom, and the power tion in Jesus Christ is the message of the whole Bible, from of Jesus Christ. And, in fact, Paul did preach about all these Genesis to Revelation. When we accept Scripture alone, the things on many occasions.

Scripture itself points us to Christ alone.

But of all that he could have said about the life and minWhat about sola gratia, “grace alone”? Grace is unmeritistry of Jesus Christ, the one thing that he emphasized was his ed favor, undeserved blessing. When the Reformers said “by death on the cross: “For I resolved to know nothing while I grace alone,” they meant that salvation was God’s free gift was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. for undeserving sinners. God does not owe us anything ex2:2). Paul’s only purpose and sole ambition was to preach Christ cept wrath. Nevertheless, he has saved us by his grace. If we alone—not as a Greek philosopher or as a Jewish miracle workask, How has God shown us this grace?—the answer is that er—but as the Savior who suffered and died for sinners. he has given us his grace in Jesus Christ, especially in his death The historical records show that Jesus of Nazareth was put on the cross for sinners. Jesus Christ is God’s gracious gift to to death in or around the year A.D. 30. He was executed in sinners. The reason that salvation is by grace alone is because the Roman fashion. After he was stripped and beaten, he was it is offered in Christ alone. led outside the city of Jerusalem to the Place of the Skull. There This brings us to sola fide, “faith alone.” If there was a way they nailed him to a rough piece of wood and left him to die for us to contribute to our own salvation—if it depended on a horrible bloody death. These are the facts of history. our own merits, if there was something we could do to earn But Paul also knew what they meant. Jesus was the perit or deserve it—then we would not be justified by faith alone; fect Son of God. Therefore, he was able to offer his body as we would be justified by faith plus works. But salvation is a perfect sacrifice for sinners. He took all the sins of his peoGod’s free gift. It is all by grace! There is nothing we can posple upon himself, paying once and for all the penalty that their sibly add to what God has already done to save us in Jesus sins deserved: God’s wrath and curse unto death. That is what Christ. Therefore, the only thing we need to do or even can Paul preached. He preached Jesus Christ and him crucified. do is to hold on to Jesus and his cross, which is what the ReHe preached that Jesus had paid the price of our sin. He formers meant when they said “faith alone.” It is because preached that everyone who trusts in Christ and in his cross salvation was accomplished by Christ alone that it is accepted will be saved. by faith alone, without the addition of any works of our own.

Today, we praise God for the great biblical truths that were As Martin Luther said, “The cross of Christ is nothing else than f ever there was a man with a one-track mind it was the apostle Paul. Few men have

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forsaking everything and clinging with the heart’s faith to Christ alone.”1 Christ alone—that is another great Reformation doctrine that finds its meaning in the cross. James Boice explained it like this: “The Reformers taught that salvation is by and through the work of Jesus Christ only, which is what the slogan solus Christus refers to. It means that [through the cross and the empty tomb] Jesus has done it all so that now no merit on the part of man, no merit of the saints, no works of ours performed either here or in purgatory can add to that completed saving work.”2 All of this is for the glory of God alone: soli Deo gloria. When we give praise to Christ for his work on the cross, we are giving glory to God, for Jesus Christ is God incarnate. Since we are saved by Christ alone and not by ourselves, all the honor and glory of our salvation returns to God and to him alone.

The reason we talk about these great Reformation doctrines—and also sing about them—is not because we want to live in the past or because we have an antiquarian interest in church history. No, we celebrate these doctrines because they are biblical truths of eternal significance and perpetual importance. Indeed, these doctrines, which find their meaning in the cross of Christ, are a matter of spiritual life and death. What we need to know is exactly the same thing that Paul resolved to know and what the Reformers wanted to know, and that is Jesus Christ and him crucified.

We need to know the crucified Christ because this knowledge is essential for our own salvation. An example of what it means to trust in Christ alone for your salvation comes from the life of Donald Smarto, a national leader in prison ministry. Before he came to Christ, Smarto was in seminary, preparing to enter the Roman Catholic priesthood. He had developed a fascination with all the trappings of Catholic religion—the sacred rituals and the ornate vestments. One night he went out to the movies where he saw a scene that shocked him: A bishop dressed in sacred robes was caught by a gust of wind that parted his garments to reveal what was underneath: a rotted skeleton. At that instant, Smarto’s conscience cried out, “That’s me!” But as he soon as he said it, he tried to deny it. He drove back to the seminary, muttering the whole way, “That’s not me. It can’t be me. I’m a good person!”

Frantically, Smarto rehearsed his many pious deeds—his fasting, his penance, his prayers—searching for some assurance of his salvation. Finding none, he went out into the corn fields where he wandered for hours. Eventually, the moon clouded over and the night became so black that he could not even see his hand in front of his face. He began to panic, and in his fear he cried out for a sign from God. As he waited, panting in the black darkness, he heard a faint humming sound. Slowly he walked toward it until he bumped into a hard, rough wooden post. He put his hands out to feel it. “Of course!” he said to himself. “It’s a telephone pole!” As he stood there, the clouds parted and he was able to see again. He looked up and there, silhouetted against the moon, was the wooden crossbar that supported the phone lines. He was standing at the foot of a giant cross.

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In that moment, everything Don Smarto had ever learned from the Bible came into focus, and he realized that all he needed to do to be saved was to hold on to Christ and his cross. He described his experience like this: Now I knew, I really knew, that Christ had died for me.

It was coupled with the more important revelation that I was a sinner, that I was not the good person I had thought I was a moment before. All at once I embraced the telephone pole and began to cry. I must have hugged that piece of wood for nearly an hour. I could imagine Jesus nailed to this pole, blood dripping from his wounds. I felt as if the blood were dripping over me, cleansing me of my sin and unworthiness.3 If you are not yet a Christian, God is inviting you to know Christ and him crucified, to trust in him alone for your salvation. He is calling you to admit that you are a sinner in need of forgiveness, and that if you are to be saved, there is nothing else you can do except hold on to the cross of the crucified Christ. If you have already come to the cross, do not let go! The crucified Christ is the only hope for this fallen world.

As a Christian, your purpose is not to get people to conform to your lifestyle or to convince them to adopt your point of view. Your purpose is to point people to Jesus Christ and to his cross, which alone has the power to save.

Dr. Philip G. Ryken is senior minister at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Martin Luther, quoted in Alister E. McGrath, The Mystery of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 166.

2James Montgomery Boice, Here We Stand! A Call from Confessing Evangelicals (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), 11.

3Donald Smarto, Pursued: A True Story of Crime, Faith, and Family (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1990), 122.

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Speaking Of…

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hen I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified....My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.”

—Paul the Apostle (1 Cor. 1–2, 4–5)

COMMON GRACE G o d ’ s

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Reflections on John Updike (1932–2009)

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into science fiction: Toward the End of Time.

John Updike—was in May 2008. He was in Washington, D.C., to deliver the JefUpdike’s writing shows a powerful interest in the deferson Lecture under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities. tails of human life. He wrote once of Vermeer’s paintDr. Brian Lee was in charge of his schedule and kindly ining, “Young Woman Standing at a Virginal,” as “very possitroduced me to Updike in a corridor as they were walking bly the most beautiful painting in the world” and then refrom one place to another. We spoke for about three minflected on its details, “silk dress, pearl necklace, velvet chair utes, which in and of itself does not make me an expert on seat, red ribbons, marbled virginal sides, plaster wall, basethe writing of John Updike. I have, however, over many years board tiles, paintings within paintings, gleaming nubbled gold been an eager and appreciative reader of his work. frame, alert and enigmatic face with greenish skin.”1 He conWhen I met him, Updike was just leaving an interview cluded: “This is the ordinary world re-created by a human where he had been asked which of his novels he particularly hand and eye.” Updike in his writing often does something liked. He had answered that The Centaur was perhaps his favery similar, showing remarkable interest in human life and vorite as it was modeled on his father as a high school teacher the ordinary world by the detailed description he gives of so and in which he had tried to capture the texture of high school many things. In Couples, for example, he explores the feellife by moving classical Greek mythology into the narrative. ings of women in playing field hockey, describes the mateHe also mentioned an affection for Couples, which brought rial needed to build a hamster cage, and writes of complex him fame and money, and The Coup set in Africa. issues in photosynthesis. Some critics may accuse him of “virHis answer allowed me to mention in our brief convertuosic fuss” from which Updike had exculpated Vermeer, but sation that I was very much looking forward to the release I think rather it reflects his enthusiasm for the variety of huof The Widows of Eastwick, already announced for the fall of man endeavors and experiences.

2008, because The Witches of Eastwick was my favorite novel Updike writes arrestingly beautiful sentences. Consider of his. He smiled his kind and somewhat sly smile and said these examples, taken from Couples, ranging from minor to that literary critic Harold Bloom had liked The Witches best, profound observations: but then it was the only novel of his that Bloom had liked.

Updike was thin, well-dressed, exuding an air of kindness The salami he made lunch from was minced death. and patience. He looked healthy for his seventy-six years.

He did not bear himself as the lion of American letters, yet Neusner comported himself with the confidence of the the volume and breadth of his work is remarkable and probenergetically second-rate. ably unrivaled by any great American literary figure in the second half of the twentieth century. He wrote novels, short For much of what they took to be morality proved to stories, poems, art and literary criticism, and essays. His novbe merely the consciousness of the other couples watchels are set in many diverse locations from Brazil to Africa and ing them.

Arizona, although most of them take place either in New Eng[T]here was little in her religious background—feebly land or the mid-Atlantic states. The forms of his novels are Presbyterian; her father, though a generous pledger, had strikingly varied: in addition to rather straightforward narbeen rather too rich to go to church, like a man who rative, we find magical realism in Brazil, an epistolary form would have embarrassed his servants by appearing at in S., a multigenerational novel in In the Beauty of the Lilies, a novel set in a twenty-four-hour period in Seek My Face, eltheir party—to account for her inconvenient sense of evil. ements of stream of consciousness in Couples, and novels with Many critics have said that while Updike writes beautisequels, most famously with the Rabbit series, but also with fully, he really has nothing to say. Such criticism mystifies Bech and with the women of Eastwick. He wrote a trilogy me. I think it reflects that the critics are not interested in the inspired by Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, exploring in things that Updike has to say. Indeed, they seem to feel that modern settings the perspective of Hawthorne’s three prinhe has let them down by the things he has chosen to say. cipal characters: the minister in A Month of Sundays, the husSuch criticism has often reminded me of an article I read band in Roger’s Version, and Hester in S. He even ventured he last time I spoke with John Updike—well, all right, the only time I spoke with

J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 9 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 1 1

more than thirty years ago in The New Yorker about Pella, Iowa.

It was a charming and insightful piece about a small town seen through the eyes of a New Yorker. One element of the essay in particular has always stayed in my mind: the writer spent a Sunday in Pella and marveled that almost everyone was in church morning and evening. The writer did not attend church, but rather searched all over town to find someone to interview who was not in church. The decision not to attend church has stood as a symbol for me of the myopia of much of the intellectual establishment in America that assumes, since it is not interested in religion, it must have no real importance in the lives of people.

In many ways, John Updike has been as misunderstood by many as Pella was in this essay. Updike began his days in a Pennsylvania small town, but was then welcomed into the bosom of the eastern establishment. He attended Harvard and then lived in Manhattan, writing for The New Yorker. Surely he had arrived. But then he left Manhattan for the sake of his writing and his family and moved to a small town outside of Boston. He wrote often—although by no means exclusively—about white, middle-class Protestants from outside the important cities of America. For years, he wrote one novel annually and produced many learned and interesting essays on literature, art, golf, and other subjects. Although once divorced, he never seemed to have trouble with alcohol, drugs, or writer’s block. Strangely, many within the intellectual establishment seem to have been unable to forgive him for this effrontery.

In these reflections on Updike, I do not write as a critic but as a reader. While critics have their uses, I tend to agree with Kierkegaard: “An artist is someone who suffers and creates.

A critic is the same except he neither suffers nor creates.” Updike once referred to many of his critics as “harshly dismissive and blithely inaccurate.”2 I have not read extensively in the writings of Updike’s critics; but time and again in reading reviews of his new novels, I wondered if the reviewers had read the same book I had. This distance between my experience and the critics was perfectly captured in the comment my mother-in-law heard from some pundit on the radio who observed that he did not like Updike’s novels, although the only one he had read was The Catcher in the Rye. Another good example of the silliness written about Updike is the memorial that appeared in The National Review.

There the author admitted that he had not read a great deal of Updike, but observed that Updike seemed to regard adultery as a sacrament. In the first place, Updike as a Protestant author does not have a sacramental view of reality; and in the second place, he does not write as if adultery were good or healthy. Consider the conversation between two famous adulterers in Updike’s Couples, after the woman learns she is pregnant with her lover’s child: “It’s all so silly, isn’t it? Adultery. It’s so much trouble.”

He shrugged, reluctant to agree. “It’s a way of giving yourself adventures. Of getting out in the world and seeking knowledge.”

She asked, “What do we know now, Piet?”

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He felt her, in the use of his name, drawing near, making of this desperate meeting an occasion of their being together, a date. He hardened his voice: “We know God is not mocked.”

Updike is not presenting adultery as a sacrament, but rather as part of the frantic search for meaning in a world that has lost God. He wrote, “About sex in general, by all means let’s have it in fiction, as detailed as needs be, but real, real in its social and psychological connections. Let’s take coitus out of the closet and off the altar and put it on the continuum of human behavior.”3 Not all Christians must or should read Updike, for there are offensive and problematic things in his writing. His explicit discussion of sex understandably offends many Christians, and he is not necessary reading for any. His writing on sex, however, is not titillating; and for those who are not offended, he offers remarkable insights into the complex and sinful ways humans live their lives.

One useful critic who has explored the writings of Updike is George Hunt, S. J. As early as 1980, Hunt wrote with sympathy and insight, John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion, and Art. These three secret things were Updike’s own statement of his work, as he sought to give adequate place to elements of human experience neglected by other authors.

As Updike writes about sex, so he also writes about religion as a human experience. In many novels he contrasts the claims of science with those of faith. In Couples, for example, a scientist, who is an avowed atheist, comments on a complex chemical reaction: “If a clever theologian ever got hold of how complex it is, they’d make us all believe in God again.” But at the same time that Updike believes the complexity of nature points to the existence of a creator, he also seems to believe that the indifference of nature points in the opposite direction. He gives voice to such fears in The Widows of Eastwick when Alexandra is visiting an ancient Egyptian tomb: “No escape, everything around her proclaimed. No escape, however energetically and luxuriously religions make a show of rescuing us from death. There is no magic, the world is solid, clear through, like the depths of limestone above her.”

He summed up his ambivalence about the relation of nature and the supernatural, or of science and religion, in the last sentence of a one-page statement for National Public Radio for a series entitled “This I Believe”: We are part of nature, and natural necessity compels and in the end dissolves us; yet to renounce all and any supernature, any appeal or judgment beyond the claims of matter and private appetite, leaves in the dust too much of our humanity, as through the millennia it has manifested itself in art and altruism, idealism, and joie de vivre.4 Updike was not a preacher, but he did think of himself as a Christian. He regularly attended church, affirmed the physical resurrection of Christ and read Karl Barth avidly. He believed that the function of creative writing was not to pro-

mote religion, but was “a mode of truth-telling, self-expression, and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.”5 He exposed in our human experiences both the reality and beauty of the image of God in us and the mess and misery of sin. He helped us understand what it is to be human in a fallen world.

Updike wrote: “A fiction writer’s duty is to deliver reality as it has come to him—to describe the details, the conflicts, and puzzles of being a live human being.”6 The reader’s privilege has been to be moved by his elegant voice. I, for one, shall greatly miss the annual anticipation and satisfaction of his latest novel.

Dr. W. Robert Godfrey is president and professor of church history at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido, California.

John Updike, Due Considerations, Essays and Criticism (New York: Knopf, 2007), 663f.

2Updike, 652.

3Cited in George Hunt, John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion, and Art (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980), 210.

4Updike, 671.

5Updike, 670.

6Updike, 670.

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Between the Times (continued from page 6) his grievances anonymously to “encourage open and honest dialogue without getting into personalities.”

Obviously, Rich’s blog didn’t stay anonymous. At the request of church leaders, Robert Hinson, a police officer who is a member of First Baptist and who serves on the church’s security detail, opened a criminal investigation of the blog.

Hinson subpoenaed Google and Comcast to determine that Rich was the author of the blog. Though the investigation revealed Rich had done nothing illegal, Hinson revealed Rich’s identity to church leaders. Tom Rich and his wife Yvette were immediately issued trespass warnings and banned from church property.

Rich is now suing the local police and state prosecutor.

The lawsuit alleges that Hinson and local authorities “spent taxpayer money and government time prosecuting an errand of the church and in so doing acted as an extension and enforcer for a particular religious entity.” Brunson and the church claim that the investigation was opened as a result of the fact that someone had tried to take pictures of his wife and that his mail was being tampered with.

However, no police report had been filed by Brunson or the church documenting this suspicious behavior prior to the investigation into Rich’s blog.

Babette’s Feast: An Appetizer

By Patricia Anders “Mercy and truth, my friends, have met together,” said the General. “Righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another.”

This is a tale of grace—a breaking in of the not-yet into the here and now, a taste of glories to come and a sampling of forgiveness and love. It is a turning of the literal table by the servant who liberates those she serves by doing her “very best” to “make them perfectly happy,” thereby teaching them the greatest lesson of their lives.

“Babette’s Feast” is a short story written by Isak Dinesen (nome de plume of Karen Blixen, 1885–1962), published in Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard; and it is also a delightful Danish movie, which won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1988. Set in a nineteenth-century small coastal town in Denmark, this is the story of two sisters, Martine (named for Martin Luther) and Philippa (named for Philip Melanchthon). They live among the Brothers and Sisters of an ascetic Lutheran group founded by their father, the old Dean, choosing a pietistic life of self-denial. By the time Madame Babette Hersant arrives on the sisters’ doorstep from revolutionary France, the aging Brothers and Sisters have begun to lose the vision of the old Dean (now long in his grave), and distant memories of hurt and wrongdoing return to haunt them and to cause bitterness and strife among them.

Twelve years pass and after winning 10,000 francs in the French lottery, Babette wishes to thank the sisters for their kindness to her by cooking “a real French dinner” for the Brothers and Sisters in honor of the old Dean’s hundredth anniversary. Although fearful of the lavish food and drink Babette intends to serve, the Brothers and Sisters pledge not to discuss the food and to eat without any pleasure.

After a long period of preparation and expense by Babette, the evening finally arrives and all gather around the exquisite table, complete with fine china, stemware, tablecloth, and candles. Visiting his elderly aunt, who is one of the Sisters, General Loewenhielm is invited to dine with the others (making the number of guests now twelve); and it is only he—who has tasted the finest of Parisian cuisine—who can fully appreciate what Babette has prepared. As the evening progresses, however, all those around the table find their spirits lifted as they enjoy the wonderful feast before them— despite themselves. As they finish their last course, the General is moved to give a speech: (continued on page 24) J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 9 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 1 3

Celebrating Calvin Ten Ways Modern Culture Is Different Because of John Calvin

by David W. Hall Parity Among all Professions: The Doctrine of Vocation

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Another of the culture-shaping aspects of Calvin’s thought was his emphasis on the sacredness of ordinary vocations. Before Calvin and the Protestant Reformation, the doctrine of vocation or calling was thought to be exclusively for the clergy. However, his view of work as inherently dignified by our Creator elevated all disciplines and lawful vocations to the status of holy calling. One could, after Calvin, be as called to medicine, law, or education as a clergyman was called to serve the church.

Calvin’s call for hard work did not necessarily equate success or prosperity with divine blessing. His views, though, did have a persistent tendency of ennobling various areas of human calling and labor. Business, commerce, and industry were all elevated by Calvin’s principles, and those who adhered to these became leaders of modern enterprise. Max Weber and others are correct to identify that Calvinism dignified work and callings of many kinds.

Prior to his time, many workers felt little sense of calling unless entering the priesthood. Due primarily to the priestly emphasis of the Roman Catholic Church, prior to the Reformation “calling” or vocation was largely restricted to ecclesiastical callings. Calvin taught that any area of work—farming, teaching, governing, business—could be a valid calling from God, every bit as sacred as serving as a minister. This was a radical change in worldview, which would ultimately alter many economies, cultures, and human lives.

The formation of the Genevan Academy under Calvin called for general education (not only in religious studies), and it provided for studies in law, medicine, history, and education. Calvin and other Reformers helped retire the sa-

cred/secular distinction. He realized that a person could serve God in any area of labor and glorify him. Calvin counseled with many leaders, entrepreneurs, printers, and merchants in his time, and he did not revile any lawful calling. The character of Calvinism ennobles all good work. Despite its faith in the afterlife, Calvinism called its adherents to be leaders in all fields.

His commentary on the fourth commandment in Exodus 20 also underscores the dignity of work. Just as God commanded people to rest on the seventh day, so the Lord expected them to work six days. Work was vital for all people made in God’s image, and for Calvin, thus, all callings were important. Calvin’s doctrine of work was further underscored—not to mention widely popularized—by his explanation that the fourth commandment that mandated rest on one day out of seven equally called for work during the other six.

Whether we eat or drink, as Calvin agreed with Paul in the New Testament, we do all to the glory of God. That is why the great post-Reformation composer Johann Sebastian Bach signed each of his original scores with the initials “SDG.” Those letters stood for the Latin phrase sola Dei gloria (“to God alone be the glory”). Bach knew the character of Calvinism and applied it to his craft. Some of the finest Christians in history have also applied the Lordship of Christ to their own vocations and served as leaders in fields for the glory of God.

The very name of John Calvin stirs up controversy. For those who have been primarily on the negative side of the divide—and for those on the opposite ridge— Modern Reformation is featuring a series in 2009 to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Genevan Reformer’s birth (July 10, 1509). Rather than focus on biography or theology, this series looks briefly at ten areas of culture irrevocably transformed by the influence of Calvin and his band of brothers and sisters.

Love him or hate him, he was a change agent. We think for the better.

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Economics and Profit: The Invisible Hand

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Of interest to historians, both sympathetic and unsympathetic to Calvin, whatever Calvin was doing during this time transformed Geneva into a visible and bustling forum for economic development. With a growing intellectual ferment, evidenced by the founding of Calvin‘s Academy and the presence of modern financial institutions (e.g., a Medici bank), Geneva became an ideal center for perfecting and exporting reform.1 Wherever Calvinism spread, so did a love for free markets and capitalism. If one valid measurement of leadership is its impact on its immediate environment, one might well compare Geneva before and after Calvin. The socioeconomic difference between before and after Calvin may be noted by comparing three key occupational segments. In 1536, prior to Calvin‘s immigration, Geneva had 50 merchants, three printers, and few, if any, nobles. By the late 1550s, Geneva was home to 180 merchants, 113 printers and publishers, and at least 70 aristocratic refugees who claimed nobility.2 It is certainly erroneous to think, however, like Max Weber in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), that Calvinists equated material success with a sign of being the elect. To rebut that idea, one may simply consult Calvin’s teaching on the eighth commandment. On this commandment that forbade stealing, Calvin interpreted that the holding and protecting of personal property was by implication perfectly normal. In fact that commandment, properly understood, called for avoidance of greed for what others have, and it required every person to “exert himself honestly in preserving his own [property].” He warned believers not to squander what God providentially gave and also to care for his neighbor’s well-being. He also saw this commandment as calling for contentment with: our own lot, we study to acquire nothing but honest and lawful gain; if we long not to grow rich by injustice, nor to plunder our neighbor of his goods...if we hasten not to heap up wealth cruelly wrung from the blood of others; if we do not...with excessive eagerness scrape together whatever may glut our avarice or meet our prodigality. On the other hand, let it be our constant aim faithfully to lend our counsel and aid to all so as to assist them in retaining their property.

A prayer by Calvin makes Weber’s oft-repeated confusion fall to the ground more rapidly. The commonly mistaken caricature of Calvin as a crass capitalist should be contrasted with the prayer he suggested before beginning work, which is included in the 1562 Genevan Catechism. In that prayer, he led the people in asking God to bless their labor, noting that if God failed to bless it, “Nothing goes well or can prosper.”

He prayed for the Holy Spirit to aid workers in this calling “without any fraud or deception, and so that we shall have regard more to follow their ordinances than to satisfy our appetite to make ourselves rich.” Along with this, Calvin prayed

that workers would also care for the indigent and that the prosperous would not become conceited. He prayed that God would diminish prosperity if he knew the people needed a dose of poverty to return them to their senses. Far from callousness toward the less fortunate, Calvin prayed that workers would “not fall into mistrust,” would “wait patiently” on God to provide, and would “rest with entire assurance in thy pure goodness.”2 He also asserted that any endeavor that ceased to have charity as its aim was diseased at its very root. Elsewhere, Calvin warned that luxury could incite great problems and produce “great carelessness as to virtue.” Moreover, he warned against “eagerly contend[ing] for riches and honors, trusting in our own dexterity and assiduity, or leaning on the favor of men, or confiding in any empty imagination of fortune; but [that we] should always have respect to the Lord.”

Lest Calvin be misunderstood, he also called for a “curb to be laid on us” to restrain “a too eager desire of becoming rich, or an ambitious striving after honor.” Although Calvin advocated reliance on God and not wealth, the prosperity ethic that followed his time in Geneva is one of the wide-ranging effects of his thought and practice.

David Hall (Ph.D. Whitefield Theological Seminary) is senior pastor of Midway Presbyterian Church in Powder Springs, Georgia, and executive director of Calvin500 (www.calvin500.org). He is the author of several books, including The Legacy of John Calvin (P&R, 2008), and The Genevan Reformation and the American Founding (Lexington, 2005).

Several studies detail Calvin‘s Geneva. Among the best are: E. William Monter, Calvin’s Geneva (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967); Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1610: A Collection of Documents, eds.

Alistair Duke, Gillian Lewis, and Andrew Pettegree (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1988); J. T. McNeill, “John Calvin on Civil Government,” Calvinism and the Political Order, ed. George L. Hunt (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965), 22–45; William A. Dunning, A History of Political Theories: From Luther to Montesquieu (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 26–33; W. Fred Graham, The Constructive Revolutionary: John Calvin, His Socio-Economic Impact (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1975); and William G. Naphy, Calvin and the Consolidation of the Genevan Reformation (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1994). Two other biographies also add to our understanding: William Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Alister McGrath, A Life of John Calvin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).

2Monter’s numbers, of course, may be challenged. It is possible that records were kept better after 1536, which could explain some of the rise of the merchant class (Calvin‘s Geneva, 5.). Even if that should be established, however, the astronomic rise of printers and nobility is certain. Nobles, mainly from France, fled to Geneva since adhering to Protestantism at home could have meant their death.

3Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1610: A Collection of Documents, 34.

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A F E A S T I N A F A S T- F O O D W O R L D

Feasting in a Fast-Food World BY

MICHAEL HORTON

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According to Eric Schlosser’s book Fast-Food Nation, only a generation ago in the United States three-quarters of its food expenses was spent on home-cooked meals, while today half is spent on restaurants—and mostly fast-food chains. This transformation has been referred to as “the McDonaldization of America.” And it’s now an essential part of what Francis Fukayama calls “the global cliché culture.”

Nearly everything in our lives today can be reduced to a commodity, and every important goal can be set aside for immediate gratification. Life is a food court.

Something analogous is happening in the church. The values of convenience, autonomous individualism, self-expression, and instant gratification turn the search for the sacred into a banal exercise in narcissistic futility. We settle for a drive-through window Happy Meal when God offers us a feast with him in the communion of saints.

The Main Event: Eating and Drinking with God The theme of eating and drinking in the presence of God is prominent from Genesis to Revelation. In the ancient world, an official meal between the suzerain (great king) and the lesser ruler (vassal) was a treaty-making ritual. With this background, we encounter God’s promise of the fruit of the Tree of Life as the Sacrament of consummation held out to humanity through our covenant head. Instead of waiting for their host to give them the fruit of life, Adam and Eve wanted their Happy Meal now and ordered from their own menu. After Abram’s battle with God’s enemies, he is treated to a covenantal meal of bread and wine with the mysterious Melchizedek, king of Salem, who we are told was a type of Christ (Gen. 14:18, with Ps. 110:4, Heb. 7:1, 17). At Mount Sinai, after the golden calf episode, God graciously renewed his covenant, calling Moses, Aaron and his sons (Nadab and Abihu), and seventy elders to ascend the mountain into the cloud of his presence. There the Lord ratified the covenant as his guests “beheld God, and ate and drank” (Exod. 24:11). Moses then received the tablets of the Ten Commandments and remained on the mountain, in the cloud with God, for forty days and forty nights (v.

18). For their continued unbelief, however, most of the desert generation were barred (along with Moses) from entering the Promised Land. Instead of enduring the trial and entering the land flowing with milk and honey, that generation died just short of the Jordan River. Significantly, God commanded the Bread of the Presence to be placed in the Holy of Holies, as a perpetual confirmation of his provision for his people (Exod. 25:30).

The theme of “eating and drinking in the presence of the Lord” is carried forward in the New Testament, beginning with Jesus’ trial in the desert—for forty days and forty nights, recapitulating Israel’s trial (and echoing Moses’ mediation on the mountain with God for forty days and forty nights). This time, however, Jesus rebuffed the serpent’s enticements for “glory now.” Instead of demanding the food he craved, Jesus replied with the words of Scripture: “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’” (Matt. 4:4). Je-

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sus fasted for us—fulfilling the law—so that we could feast with him in his kingdom.

The Goal of a Long Journey: The Feast in Luke’s Gospel It is striking how often in Scripture God, the Stranger, meets us as we are on the way to somewhere else. Going about their daily work, with their own plans and expectations for the future, the disciples were confronted by Jesus and called out to join him on his journey to the feast.

Luke’s Gospel particularly emphasizes the theme of Jesus as the journeying guest who is not received, even by his own (Luke 9:52–19:44). In fact, he is rejected in Jerusalem (Luke 19:45–23:49). “Eating and drinking in the presence of the Lord” (Luke 13:25) explicitly invokes the covenantal meals of the Old Testament. Only now, it is the “insiders” who, refusing the invitation, are cast out and the “outsiders” who are seated at the kingdom feast with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

The theme of “eating and drinking in the presence of the LORD” runs throughout Exodus and Deuteronomy. It is the climax of the event in which God calls Moses, Aaron, and the elders to the top of Mount Sinai. Israel's journey to the Promised Land, “flowing with milk and honey,” is a pilgrimage to a feast, yet the people test God, “demanding the food they craved,” refusing to trust his provision. Later, God reminds Israel that bread and wine were withheld in the wilderness—except for the miraculous manna from heaven and water from the rock (Deut. 29:6; cf. 14:23). Eating the bread and taking up the cup of salvation are central to the Feast of Passover, and Pentecost is the annual call to “rejoice in the feast” (Deut. 6:13–15). Feasting with God is arguably the goal of these narratives—and, indeed, of the history of redemption.

Leading his people to the Promised Land, God spreads a table in the waterless desert. He gives them bread from heaven and water from the rock—and, as Paul reminds us, “that Rock was Christ” (1 Cor. 10:4). Yet, there was always more to come: the incarnation of the Rock in our own humanity. “Be silent before the Lord God! For the day of the Lord is near; the Lord has prepared a sacrifice and consecrated his guests” (Zeph. 1:7).

This history is recapitulated both in the life of Jesus and that of his contemporaries. John the Baptist comes announcing the nearness of the kingdom, but is beheaded (although some believed his report). His ministry is not one of jubilation in the Promised Land (“He came neither eating nor drinking”), but of serious judgment and a call to repentance; while the ministry of Jesus will be that of calling sinners, outcasts, strangers and aliens to his festive banquet (“The Son of Man came eating and drinking and they say, ‘Behold a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners”). He feeds the five thousand, but they were there for a free meal, like that wilderness generation: “But can he give us meat?”

Rejected by his own, just as he was by the unbelieving generation of Israelites when the spies returned with their firstfruits of the good land, he nevertheless sends his mesJ U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 9 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 1 5

Who is Jesus? Your substitutionary sacrifice for sin, and

Getting the plot of Scripture is crucial to the very existence of the church. Who is your robe of righteousness and immortality. What is his Jesus? We don’t get to decide. The story tells us who Jekingdom—and thus the mission statement of the sus is! He’s not just anything and everything we want him church? The forgiveness of sins. A kingdom of grace to be in our lives. But even if everything else in your life now, a kingdom of glory at the end. seems to speak against this Jesus being the Christ, “the one senger “into the highways and byways” to gather guests for who would redeem Israel,” he has conquered your greathis banquet. Jesus moves toward Jerusalem; and as he does est enemy: the wages of sin, the sting of death, and the curse so, he teaches the disciples to invite to the banquet those of the law. He is the one “about whom the scriptures spoke, who cannot repay them (Luke 4:14). After all, isn’t that that he should be crucified and rise again on the third day.” what God does with us?

Who is Jesus? Your substitutionary sacrifice for sin, and The disciples did not understand the meaning of the jouryour robe of righteousness and immortality. What is his ney from Galilee to Jerusalem, even when Jesus repeatkingdom—and thus the mission statement of the church? edly spoke of his death and resurrection as they neared the The forgiveness of sins. A kingdom of grace now, a kingdom city. Assuming that it will be a victory celebration, they vie of glory at the end. for the best seat on either side of Jesus’ throne on coro“That very day”—the day of Jesus’ resurrection—two disnation day. Even after being on the road with Jesus for three ciples were on their way to Emmaus, “about seven miles years, they fail to understand that the feast awaiting them from Jerusalem,” discussing the momentous events that will be the body and blood of their Master, as he gives his they had just experienced in Jerusalem (vv. 13–14). This life for their sins. Then, in the upper room, he spreads his time, it is not an angel but Jesus Christ himself who apbanquet in the “wilderness” on the verge of the Promised pears: “But their eyes were kept from recognizing him” (v.

Land—his own death and resurrection. Only in this case, 16). There are no trumpets, no thunder or lightening, no unlike Moses, the mediator of this new covenant will not voice from heaven; Jesus simply joins these two disciples die with the disobedient generation on this dark side of the on their journey and asks them what they are talking about Promised Land, but as the greater Joshua will, through his with such vigor. “And they stood still, looking sad. Then death and resurrection, lead his people across the Jordan. one of them, named Cleopas, answered him, ‘Are you the Jesus sends Peter and John ahead to find a place to celeonly visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that brate this meal in Jerusalem, as Passover yields to Holy have happened there in these days?” “What things?” JeCommunion (Luke 22). sus asked. Recounting the events with astonishment that the stranger had to ask, the disciples sigh, “But we had Meeting a Stranger on the Way to Somewhere Else: hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (vv. 19–24).

Luke 24 It was dawn, on “the first day of the week”—the beThe Stranger Is a Guest (v. 29) ginning of the new creation—as the women disciples By drawing out the reasons for their disillusionment, Jebrought fresh spices for their Master’s dead body to the sus was drawing out the misunderstandings of the kingtomb, according to Jewish custom (Luke 24:1–12). Howdom that they had assumed. First the cross and then gloever, when they arrived at dawn, there was no guard and ry. That is the order that they missed. The kingdom of God the stone was rolled away, the tomb empty. Two angels had become for them a purely this-worldly regime here and appeared “in dazzling apparel” and the women were “frightnow. They had gotten the “journey” wrong: a theology of ened and bowed their faces to the ground” (vv. 4, 23). Luke glory versus a theology of the cross: first cross, then glo24:6–7 (like verses 26, 46, and 47) presents a creedal statery. ment with the formula of crucifixion and resurrection on the Remarkably, however, they stick to the facts: the witthird day. The women at the tomb should seek Christ ness of the women and the disciples to the empty tomb. “among the living” rather than among the dead, say the Yet the empty tomb by itself did not establish the resurrecangels. Crucial also is the fact that they are told that Jesus tion. They were confused by it all. Did someone steal the is risen “as he told you” (v. 6) and the women “remembered his body? If so, who? The Romans, the Sanhedrin, some of words” (v. 8). Throughout this post-resurrection appearance, the disciples? The disciples were walking along as dead men the community is referred back to the words that Jesus had while the Lord of Life was walking beside them unrecogspoken. Everything now depends on recalling (reciting) nized. This Emmaus journey is like a recapitulation of the Jesus’ words, “hearing” it again for the first time! Faith not whole history of Israel. As Jesus interprets that whole hisonly moves from promise to fulfillment, but from fulfilltory, “beginning with Moses and all the prophets,” the hero ment to a further promise. of the epic is himself traveling at their side. He shows them 16 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

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that he not only is with them on the way, but is himself “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”

Gentiles might be expected not to get this; Israel surely should have, and the disciples are even more culpable.

Jesus rebukes them—not in wrath, but in gentleness— as he preaches himself from all the Scriptures. Instead of simply rebuking unbelief, Jesus preaches the gospel that creates faith. At this point, Jesus is still a stranger. Rather than referring first to his own teaching, he takes them to the Scriptures, which of course meant the Old Testament.

Even before he reminds them of his words (v. 44), he reminds them of the words of Scripture.

Jesus knows the rules of hospitality, and rather than lording it over them as he could have (revealing himself as the Risen King all at once), he lets himself be a stranger, invited to dinner simply because “it is toward evening and the day is now far spent” (v. 29). Even after the resurrection, Jesus displays his humility, serving us in descending mercy.

From their recollection in verse 32, these two disciples were no doubt pondering everything that the stranger had told them while the table was being set for dinner.

The Stranger Becomes the Host (vv. 30–35) Reversing the proper roles of hospitality, Jesus becomes the host. Just as the disciples had entered the upper room for one meal (the Passover) only to receive in addition a new meal (the Lord’s Supper), now Jesus takes over and transforms an ordinary meal into the first post-resurrection Eucharist. In doing so, their sorrow is turned to joy and their unbelief is turned to recognition. The formula here, reminiscent of the words of the upper room in Luke 22, is unmistakable: “took…broke…gave.” As Calvin points out, not only in the action but in the form of words that Jesus repeated, the disciples recognized the one who had instituted this Supper.

The last day (Saturday) surrenders to the first day (Sunday) as the entrance of God’s people into their everlasting rest. Tonight, and to the end of the age, Christ will host this meal from his Sabbath throne: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there in the midst of them” (Matt. 18:20).

“And their eyes were opened and they recognized him. And he vanished from their sight” (v. 31). Again, the resurrection is something that happened to Jesus and not simply a subjective experience of the disciples. It was not his memory or impact or influence or even his spirit that lived on, but Jesus of Nazareth the person himself! He was physically, bodily raised. Nevertheless, the recognition of this event is what happens to them. The same person, with the same physical characteristics, was present but not recognized.

They had been kept from recognizing him until that moment, just as he “vanishes from their sight,” not because he is a phantom but because their senses are being directed by him. This meal brings about recognition: “They said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us as he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures?’” (v. 32). The Sacrament ratifies the words that they had

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heard the stranger speak on the road. Through the Word and the Supper, the Spirit opens their understanding. He is no longer a stranger, but the host.

The Strangers Become the Witnesses (vv. 33–49) Now everybody is on the road again: back to Jerusalem, back to the upper room, but this time to get everybody on board to go spread the Word to the world. The tables are turned: the preacher becomes the content of what is preached; the stranger becomes the host and the hosts are the strangers. Yet they too become recognized as witnesses and friends of the host. These two disciples on earth are like the two angelic witnesses from heaven, returning to the eleven in Jerusalem with good news. There they reunite with the eleven, who are already abuzz with the report of the empty tomb.

Now the church that had been scattered in denial, sorrow, and confusion is “gathered together” in joy, “saying, ‘The Lord has risen indeed and has appeared to Simon!’

There they told what had happened on the road and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread” (vv.

33–35). Like the dinner guests in Isak Dinesen’s “Babette’s Feast” (see sidebar on page 11), it is possible to be strangers even with neighbors on a tiny island who meet regularly for prayer and Bible reading. On the other hand, it is possible for complete strangers to embrace and dance together in the streets when the news is big enough. Apart from Christ, as he delivers himself to us through the public service of preaching and Sacrament, “community” is a meaningless term. Other bonds (generational, socioeconomic, political, musical preferences, and so forth) created by other affinities have no place here. In comparison with the risen Christ in our midst, dispensing his gifts, the decisions and activity of committees, leaders, and parishioners are no more significant than the march of ants from mound to mound.

Through Christ’s action among them, his disciples are not only made one with him but with each other.

Now at last, the “breaking of the bread” in the upper room makes sense as the breaking of Christ’s body for the life of his people. The good news begins with the nucleus of this first band of Christians and then works itself out to “Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the earth.”

First things first: the church receives Christ (vv. 36–49).

They cannot become witnesses until they themselves have been made recipients of the Good News. “Jesus himself stood in the midst of them” (v. 36). Here is that covenantal language again: “Wherever two or three are gathered in my name.” No longer outside the gate on the cross, nor inside the tomb, nor even alongside the disciples on the Emmaus road, but standing as the “pitched tabernacle” in the midst of his people, Jesus announces, “Peace to you!” A covenantal announcement, a benediction (or salutation), with which the liturgy is begun.

Again, the story is made all the more credible by their all too human reaction: “But they were startled and frightened and thought they saw a spirit” (v. 37). Not until JeJ U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 9 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 1 7

sus begins speaking his Word does the frightening stranger become the most welcome visitor. He is not a spirit but resurrected flesh and bones (vv. 38–39). Jesus even condescends to their weakness by giving his hands and feet to their examination. The same body that had hung on the cross and lay dead for three days is now standing before them, resurrected but not yet glorified. “And while they still disbelieved for joy and were marveling, he said to them, ‘Have you anything to eat?’ They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it before them” (v. 41). Ghosts don’t eat fish. Since he is the firstfruits of the whole harvest, this assures that our resurrection will be bodily: restoring and glorifying rather than dispensing with our earthiness. The death of Jesus belongs to the past age of sin and death that he conquered; his resurrection opens up a future for us all.

Even though they see and examine him, it is his words that they must hear if they are truly to recognize him for who he is (v. 44). And further still, they must have their minds opened (v. 45). These are passive verbs: they did not come with an open mind, nor did they open their minds; their minds were opened by the Lord of the Feast. Only as their minds are opened to understand will they comprehend what he will say about himself and the next stage of the kingdom in verses 46–49. This witness, just as Jesus predicts, went out and “proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”

Yet, they are not ready. They are witnesses “of these things,” but they are not yet empowered “from on high” to be made witnesses to these things throughout the earth.

The Ascension and Pentecost still lay ahead. Jesus will be with them for forty days (the period between the feasts of Passover—the feast of the “passing over” of God’s wrath and Pentecost—the feast of the harvest’s firstfruits). It’s “40 Days of Preparation”—a little seminary, to turn disciples into apostles. It is a time to gather together in the upper room, awaiting the promised Spirit who will equip the witnesses for their mission. Micah had prophesied: It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and it shall be lifted above the hills; and peoples shall flow to it, and many nations shall come, and say: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.

(Mic. 4:1–2) The proclamation of Christ in Scripture in terms of promise and fulfillment becomes the substance of apostolic preaching in Acts, as Christ himself “stood in the midst” of his covenant people who gathered for the apostles’ teaching, the breaking of the bread, fellowship, and prayer.

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now, it is the sacrificial meal in which Christ is the food and drink. Yet each time we gather, we not only proclaim Christ’s death until he comes, we participate in the renewing powers of the age to come. We taste the morsels of that wedding banquet when the meal of Christ’s sacrifice will become the feast of unending delight. For on that day, Christ will be the host rather than the meal, and we will eat and drink with him in an everlasting exchange of gifts.

No longer as obsessed with the problems that we brought with us to church, we are gathered as this Eucharistic community in thanksgiving and joy. No longer filled with disillusionment and fear, our hearts are once again cheered with good news to share with a needy world that still lies on the other side of Easter, in sin and death.

As Frederick Buechner in Magnificent Defeat nicely summarizes, There is little that we can point to in our lives as deserving anything but God’s wrath. Our best moments have been mostly grotesque parodies. Our best loves have been almost always blurred with selfishness and deceit. But there is something to which we can point.

Not anything that we ever did or were, but something that was done for us by another. Not our own lives, but the life of one who died in our behalf and yet is still alive. This is our only glory and our only hope.

And the sound that it makes is the sound of excitement and gladness and laughter that floats through the night air from a great banquet.

Announced by his Word and sealed in his table-fellowship “in the midst of us,” this Good News— “Peace be with you!”—wells up within us as a message to be proclaimed to others. “Gathered together in one place,” we—on this side of Pentecost—are also scattered after the benediction out into the world as his witnesses to all that has been done.

The Lord is risen!

He is risen indeed!

We are his people and he is our dwelling place.

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Michael Horton is J. Gresham Machen Professor of Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California (Escondido).

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More than Meets the Mouth Or, the Meaning of Meals The following is a transcription of a lecture Ken Myers gave at someone’s home—over dinner no doubt!

For most of my adult life, I’ve been involved one way or another in trying to understand contemporary culture from within a Christian worldview. I’ve been interested in asking, “What in our culture makes the gospel foolishness?”

In 1 Corinthians 1:23, Paul says that the gospel is foolishness to the Greeks: there were things about Greek culture that made the gospel particularly implausible. I think that, in addition to the fact that people are sinful and don’t like to hear the message of the necessity of repentance, there are at any given time and in any given culture, particular blind spots or ways in which the culture eclipses what the truth is. And I’ve been interested in that partly for reasons of commitment to evangelism, trying to figure out why the blind spots are there, and partly for reasons of trying to figure out how we ought to understand the gospel in a pure way and not be influenced by the surrounding culture.

Recently, I’ve been more interested in what we might call the way culture denies reality, and the ways in which the church is tempted, because of its placement in our culture, to deny reality. I’m interested in cultural patterns that

deny the structures of reality that God has created, because culture isn’t just about ideas—it’s about ways of being and doing within God’s creation. Roger Lundin, in a book he wrote called The Culture of Interpretation, says that the word “culture” designates a complex interlocking network of symbols, practices, and beliefs at the heart of a society’s life.

Most Christian cultural apologetics (as I sometimes describe what I do) tend to focus on beliefs: what kind of worldview—that is, what kind of implicit theology or philosophy—is evident in our culture? So we often talk about our culture’s view of something. I’m really interested in practices and symbols, because they’re associated with beliefs; and often practices and symbols tell us subtler things about the beliefs that we might not see otherwise. But symbols, practices, and beliefs within a particular culture always reflect some view of God, and they also express some view of creation and some view of the human. What do we think it means to be human? Cultural life is a set of choices that

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to an extreme form, removing it from the reality of lived human life in space and time. might be dehumanizing because we’re generally not Paul Marshall has written that we often think of ourvery good at rejoicing in our mere humanity. selves as apprentice angels, not as redeemed human beaffirm some idea or other of what people see as the ramings who are on a pilgrimage to a richer and fuller expeifications of being human, particularly of their underrience of our humanity. standing of what human nature is. Culture at its best in The term “Gnosticism” comes from the Greek word gnosome way represents the created goodness and subsequent sis, meaning “knowledge.” It refers to a variety of religious fallenness of what it means to live in space and time as dimovements that stress salvation through secret knowledge, vine image-bearers of a three-person Creator, living in space and they all also hold that matter is intrinsically evil. Acand time with bodies intended to enjoy the material world cording to some Greek thought, there were in the universe with other people, engaging the rest of creation through two eternal and irreconcilable and opposing principles of five distinct senses. good and evil: good was resident in spirit, and evil took the Culture isn’t just about ideas; it’s about the reality of our form of matter. And so God is good because he’s Spirit; and embodied life in space and time, just as Jesus wasn’t merewe are evil, not because of disobedience, but because of the ly the idea of redemption but an embodied redeemer. We fact that we are material. Now, that clearly contradicts the can do good culture and we can do bad culture. We do good biblical teaching that God created the material universe and culture insofar as we recognize who we really are, who God then insisted pretty emphatically on its goodness: six times, really is, and what the world really is. Bad culture involves as a matter of fact, in the first chapter of Genesis. The last the denial of reality as much as the breaking of rules. Bad time, he says “Behold, it was very good” when he reflects culture is God-denying in its denial of reality. It’s also deon it (Gen. 1:31). What’s more, God later entered the world humanizing. Contemporary Christians are very good at as the Word became flesh, in order to redeem the world, sniffing out the God-denying parts. We’re not as good at which we’re told in John that God loved so much (John seeing ways in which our culture might be dehumanizing 3:16). because we’re generally not very good at rejoicing in our Orthodox Christianity has officially repudiated Gnostimere humanity. cism. Every time we recite the Apostles’ or Nicene creeds I am increasingly using the phrase “Christian humanwe affirm the resurrection of the body, not the immortalism” to describe this kind of project of cultural apologetity of the soul. I don’t know how much we think about that ics. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that a lot of what affirmation and what consequences the doctrine of the resconstitutes bad or unhealthy culture is not only contrary urrection of the body has for the way we live now. But deto God’s Word and contrary to God’s order in creation, but spite this official rejection of Gnosticism, Gnostic sentiments it’s bad for people, and it’s bad for people in a way that dehave infected the church from day one, and they’re espenies some aspect of their humanity. So, if we’re going to cially strong in American Protestantism. Whenever we think address the dehumanizing aspects of culture, then we need of the gospel merely in terms of some vague religious feelto re-humanize it, and that’s why I like the phrase “Chrising, rather than the record of the work of God in real histian humanism,” which would include defining and detory, we’re thinking in a Gnostic direction. Whenever we lighting in and caring for the joys of the merely human. display indifference to or suspicion of the physical world, Now, most Christians would gag at the phrase “Christwe’re betraying a kind of Gnosticism. Whenever we ian humanism” if they didn’t die first. If we were to go to think of our salvation as a way to escape the limitations of most churches in the area on a Sunday morning—conhuman nature (including the limitations of our embodiservative churches—and ask people to fill in the blank, ment) instead of a pilgrimage of faithfulness within the good “[blank] humanism,” and played a little Family Feud with limits of our createdness, we’re thinking like Gnostics. them, the phrase that would come to mind would not be Whenever we think that true faith is just a matter of spir“Christian.” Similarly, if we were to go to the local university itual insights and sensations, or something that addresses and ask them to fill in the blank, “Christian [blank],” it only our motives, and not a matter of evoking specific works wouldn’t be “Christian humanism.” It would be “Christof love and obedience in the real world of space and time, ian right” or “Christian coalition,” or something like that. of matter and history, we’re thinking like Gnostics.

The two words seem to be at odds with one another in our Today, Gnosticism among contemporary Americans time, and I think the idea of Christian humanism seems takes a slightly different form. Some of us may not be concounterintuitive to many people because, among other reavinced that it’s evil to have a body, but we are suspicious sons, Christians have succumbed to what might be called of our embodiment in the sense that to be embodied means a Gnostic temptation as they’ve thought about the ramito live in history, it means to live in a particular commufications of their beliefs. The church has been tempted in nity, and it means to live in creation. Roger Lundin again different ways at different times to spiritualize Christian faith has said that the form of our contemporary Gnosticism is

We’re not as good at seeing ways in which our culture

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to embrace the idea that the individual self can know truth immediately without any reference to the created order that Solomon himself relied on to know truth; without any reference to the community of faith that we’re a part of, which is the church; without any reference to the tradition that we’re a part of, which would be the theological tradition of the church. I think that’s one of the reasons why denominations and sects have flourished in America; we have something like twenty-thousand denominations in this country—some outrageous number like that—because of the fact that we’ve been instilled with this idea that each individual has the capacity to know truth apart from any tradition, apart from history, apart from what God has done in the church or in nature.

I think a lot of our environmental confusion is due to the fact that we don’t take our embodiment seriously. It’s interesting that the story of Creation and the Fall link two particular sources of fruitfulness. The curse afflicts what?

It afflicts childbirth and it afflicts agriculture. Originally we were tied to the earth: we were created from the dust of the earth, and we were given the fruit of the earth to eat.

We can’t survive without an attachment to the earth.

I want to use eating as a kind of test case to try to discover some kind of wisdom about our nature: What might it mean that we are creatures who eat? That’s not the sort of approach theologians or pastors might take, but maybe they should take such an approach more frequently. God could have created us as creatures who photosynthesize, who just stand out in the sun for a little while and get all the energy we need and then go back to work, or he could have created us with little nuclear generators that give us all our energy; but for some reason he created us as creatures who eat. What do we learn from this? What’s common about creatures that eat? We’re not the only creatures who eat—I’m assuming angels don’t eat—and there are other ways to create beings apart from that kind of necessity.

What kinds of things do we learn from the fact that we eat?

Jewish philosopher Leon Kass has suggested that creatures that eat are necessarily curious about the world around them. They know that they don’t exist necessarily. They know that they’re contingent on other things to exist, so they know that they’re needy. They also need to be curious because they need to find something to eat, and so they have to have an outward direction about themselves. He looks at quite a few other aspects in a book of his called The Hungry Soul.

We celebrate as a nation a holiday that we still call Thanksgiving, even though it’s not entirely certain who’s being thanked—other than the federal government for having given us the day off. It’s a holiday that combines religious affirmation of some vague sense, usually, with memories of national identity. It’s at root a harvest festival, and the first Thanksgiving was celebrated in Virginia in 1619—not in Massachusetts by the Pilgrims, who celebrated it a year later. They were, in a sense, repeating what non-Christian peoples have done; that is, celebrate the fact that since we must eat to live and since the earth must give

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us food to eat, we’re very grateful to God for favoring us with his blessing so that the earth does give forth food.

Now, if you know a little bit of Greek, you know that the Greek word for giving thanks is eucharisto. And the word “Eucharist” is used by many churches to describe or label what is alternatively called the Lord’s Supper or Communion. The Eucharist is a thanksgiving meal. It’s a meal that Christians share regularly and a meal that recognizes that while we do live by bread, we don’t live by bread alone.

We also recognize the fact that those who have fellowship with the “Word become flesh” live by partaking of his body and blood. I’m not going to talk much about this—I’m just mentioning it in passing—but we could take a lot of time to ask: why did Jesus institute a meal as one of our sacraments? And why does he say this barbaric, cannibalistic thing, that we can’t live unless we eat his body and blood?

There’s something about eating, and there’s more than meets the mouth to eating. And it’s remarkable how frequently eating is associated in the Scriptures with events of the highest theological and spiritual importance. In the very first chapter of Genesis, in the account of the sixth day of creation, God says to his newly formed image-bearers, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food” (Gen. 1:29). Then God beholds everything that he has made and assesses it: it was very good. The stuff and the order of creation and the nature of nature is good. It is a good thing that we’re creatures that need to eat, as it constantly directs our attention to our finitude, to our creatureliness, and to our grateful reliance on our creator.

Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann has observed that in the biblical story of creation, man is presented as a hungry being and the whole world as his food. Man must eat in order to live; he must take the world into his body and transform it into himself, into flesh and blood. He is indeed that which he eats, and the whole world is presented as one all-embracing banquet table for man. This image of the banquet remains throughout the whole Bible: the central image of life. It is the image of life at its creation, and also the image of life at its end and fulfillment.

That fulfillment is described in Revelation 19:9 where John writes, “And the angel said to me, ‘Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.’

And he said to me, ‘These are true words of God.’” Jesus, at the meal we now call the Last Supper, after he poured out the symbolic wine for the disciples, told them that he wouldn’t drink again from this fruit of the vine “until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”

That is, until the everlasting festive fellowship of the bride and the bridegroom commences. Horatius Bonar, who’s written some of our finest hymns, caught the sense of this when he wrote, in reference to the church’s commemoJ U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 9 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 2 1

ed with reverence. A meal is still a rite, the last natural sacrament of family enjoyment of meals are not really separable. Because and friendship, of life that is more than eating and we are created as physical and hungry beings, God’s drinking. To eat is still something more than just provisions for body and soul are mystically united. to maintain bodily functions. People may not unration of the Lord’s Supper, “Feast after feast, thus comes derstand what that “something more” is—but they and passes by, yet passing, points to the glad feast above, nonetheless desire to celebrate it. They are still hungiving sweet foretaste of the festal joy, the Lamb’s great gry and thirsty for sacramental life. bridal feast of bliss and love.”

From the beginning, from Creation—in chapter one of Now maybe the centuries of secularism failed to reduce eatGenesis when God gives the earth to man so that he might ing to mere fueling. But I fear that only a few decades of live—to the end of holy history, eating is a profoundly imRonald McDonald may have succeeded where Voltaire, portant activity for human beings. It’s in the very order of Rousseau, Bertrand Russell, and Carl Sagan have failed. creation. It’s in the arrogant and rebellious eating of the Fall Schmemann wrote this passage in the early 1960s, before in which Eve eats something she’s not supposed to and deMcDonald’s became nationally popular. fines her eating on her terms rather than on God’s terms The American hunger for convenience may not have de(Gen. 3:6). It’s in the bread and wine brought by the prieststroyed our hunger for meaning, but it has certainly eclipsed ly king Melchizedek as Abraham is journeying home (Gen. it. Now I could never prove this scientifically, but I have 14:18). It’s in the preparation for deliverance in the Exoa hunch that the unprecedented epidemic of eating disdus (Exod. 12). It’s in Israel’s miraculous eating in the orders in our time must be tied to the fact that our whole wilderness (Exod. 16). It’s in the feeding of a famished Eliculture is increasingly organized around disordered attitudes jah by ravens (1 Kings 17:6), and of a suicidally depressed toward eating. Once, families organized their lives, as did Elijah by an angel who makes a cake of bread (1 Kings 19:4– communities, around shared meals. Today, meals are 8). It’s in the miracles of water into wine (John 2:7) and consumed on the run to leave time for more activities. We of multiplying bread and fish (Matt. 14:19); and it’s even want our food to be convenient and we want it to be cheap. in that wonderful post-resurrection command of Jesus to American economists and agricultural bureaucrats are proud the disciples, one of the few post-resurrection commands. of the fact that food is cheaper here than anywhere in the We know, “Go ye therefore into all the world and preach world, but no one seems ashamed of the fact that it’s also the gospel,” but there was another important command less tasty, less treasured, and less savory. I was speaking with that’s recorded in John 21:12, “Come and have breakfast.” a friend who recently moved back here from France, where And it’s shortly after this that Jesus uses another eating imhis school-age daughter had an hour-and-a-half lunch age when he tells Peter three times, “Feed my sheep.” Jebreak. In her school in Kentucky, she has fifteen minutes. sus has just fed the disciples by cooking for them a breakIt’s fueling; it’s not enjoying a meal. fast on the beach after they’ve been up all night catching Another friend who commented similarly has noticed fish. It’s remarkable to me that we have so few pictures of that when Europeans can’t sit down to enjoy a meal, they what Jesus did after the resurrection and the fact that so don’t eat. He said he thinks that may be why they don’t much time is taken on the fact that he’s out there cookhave the weight problems that a lot of Americans do. I mying breakfast for the guys. As a friend of mine said, “Cleanself would never think, “If I can’t sit down for a meal, I’ll ing the fish: a pretty earthy task for the resurrected Secskip it.” No, I’ll grab something and eat while I’m driving ond Person of the Trinity to do.” because I think, well, the important thing is to get someIn the Christian view, communion with God and the enthing into my stomach, even though I’m not likely to die joyment of meals are not really separable. Because we are of starvation. But we don’t realize that we’re missing somecreated as physical and hungry beings, God’s provisions for thing in that kind of meal. I’d go so far as to say that we’re body and soul are mystically united. Again, Orthodox thealienated from our food. It’s an alien kind of substance. ologian Alexander Schmemann says that at some instincRobin Mather, a food critic for the Detroit News, tells some tive level all human beings know that eating is an occasion rather scary stories about people who write her letters about for the recognition of our provisional existence—that is, food preparation and food safety. One wrote, “I have a can someone else has to provide for us or we wouldn’t survive— of tuna in my cupboard. I have no idea how old it is. The and of a power beyond ourselves that sustains us. Schmesticker says it cost 35 cents. Is it still safe to eat?” But the mann writes, one that scared me most was a woman who wrote in saying she was puzzled by a recipe she read that asked her to Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eatskin the chicken breasts, and did this mean, she asked, that ing into something strictly utilitarian. Food is still treatshe was to peel the plastic film off the Styrofoam tray?

In the Christian view, communion with God and the

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Wendell Berry is a farmer/poet/novelist living in Kentucky. He works a small farm in Port Royal and writes poetry when he’s not feeding the hogs. He has also written quite a few essays about cultural and agricultural issues, and he has persuaded me that we have lost sight of the link between culture and agriculture, that we need to take more seriously the created pattern of the earth’s provision for our food, and not to look at it as an industrial but as a biological enterprise. Berry, who has written quite a bit about the pleasures of eating, points out that our economic order encourages us to be mere and mindless consumers of food, just as our entertainment industry encourages us not to entertain ourselves, but to be less and less involved in entertaining ourselves and to become more and more passively dependent on commercial suppliers. So too have patrons of the food industry, who have tended more and more to be mere consumers: passive, uncritical, and dependent. Indeed, this sort of consumption may be said to be one of the chief goals of industrial production. The food industrialists have by now persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared. They will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and, just like your mother, beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it pre-chewed into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so. And so the passive American consumer sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food confronts a platter covered with inert anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, bleached, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and of agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.

Berry concludes, “The result of this exile is a kind of solitude, unprecedented in human experience, in which the eater may think of eating first as purely a commercial transaction between him and his supplier, and then as a purely appetitive transaction between him and his food, but not as something in the realm of the living world.” I describe this as a kind of collective eating disorder. Our experience of eating is disordered: it’s increasingly detached from an order of things in creation. And so our intuitive recognition of the kinds of creatures we are and of the requirements of a well-lived life is itself disordered.

Why am I making such a big deal about all of this? I think because it’s an echo of one of the biggest problems in contemporary culture, and that is to assume that nature or creation and culture are in opposition; that culture is what human beings do, not to reflect nature or to be engaged in creation, but what we do to improve on creation. Nature is just a lot of disordered raw material awaiting human ingenuity and desire. There’s just a bunch of stuff out there

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and it has no order and no meaning. We impose order on it by our wills and our creativity. There’s no such thing either as human nature, except for the existence of creativity and will; and there’s no order or logic to the way we live in the world. Reality is what we think it is.

C. S. Lewis observed in an incredibly prescient book written in 1948 called The Abolition of Man, “For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, selfdiscipline and virtue.” In other words, to be wise and to live a good life means to discern the ways of the world as Solomon did, to understand that there’s an order in creation, and that I should fit my life into that order in some way; and we do that through knowledge, through an understanding of the world; we do it through self-discipline, where we constrain ourselves and contain our appetites and virtue, which is a development of entrenched habits of choosing to do the right thing. On the other hand, there is the modern view; he describes this as the view of applied science or technology and of magic. He relates our technical approach to the approach of magicians, where the problem for them is: “How do I subdue reality to the wishes of men?”

The magician or the genie in the bottle comes in and remakes reality to fit our wishes. And modern technology is increasingly doing the same. We have our wishes; we want to reconstruct reality. We have certain desires; we want to reorder nature so that our desires can be fulfilled.

There’s a passage in C. S. Lewis’s book Perelandra in which the protagonist goes to another planet and sees all sorts of beasts and trees and plants that are unlike anything that exist on earth. There’s one scene in particular in which he goes up to a tree with big globular bubble-like fruit on it. As he touches one, it bursts open and showers him with a strange but sensual experience of taste and smell. He finds it very satisfying; in fact, it’s the greatest feeling he’s ever encountered. Seeing a whole grove of these trees with these clusters of bubbles, he thinks to himself, “I just want to run through them all!” But he soon realizes that would be wrong. That would be to gorge himself on a pleasure that is best enjoyed according to the delicacy of the nature of the pleasure itself. And so he realizes that he can feast only insofar as he has a kind of ordered desire, a level of containment to the desire, and he’ll enjoy it more that way. And we similarly tend to think that if something is good, then more of the same thing as soon as possible is better. But that may not be true. It may be that something is good, and we’ll really enjoy it a lot more if we just wait for the next time.

At some deep intuitive level, I think God has created us with a desire for an experience of something rooted in the nature of things, and that’s why I think the environmental movement has sprung up, realizing that there is something in the nature of things, in the created order, that isn’t just there for our desires. Unfortunately, some have ended up worshipping nature rather than being—as God says to Adam in Genesis 2:15—placed in the garden to tend and keep it. That is our rightful relationship with creation: we are there to tend and keep, taking into consideration the J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 9 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 2 3

nature of the nature for which we are caring. G. K. Chesterton says that the pagan wants to worship nature as mother, but that we are rather to treat nature as a little sister, not as a mother—a little sister who’s in need of care, and neither independent of us nor lording it over us. We are created with a sense that we are more than matter and desire, even though our cultural institutions seem to suggest otherwise. But it does take a lot of effort to live unconventionally; so when cultural conventions suggest that eating can be reduced to mere fueling, it’s harder and harder to remember the deeper meaning of meals.

Christians ought to have a more thoughtful attitude toward such things than others do. I doubt it’s the case, but it would be nice to see that Christians did take meals more seriously and treat them with more reverence than the population at large. Unfortunately, the social science data suggests that we don’t even take marriage much more seriously than the population at large does. So, sadly, I’m not hopeful about this. But I think it is one of the areas, while it’s not an explicitly moral thing—that is, again, it’s not a sin to use paper plates; there’s no law concerning it—where there’s a question of fittingness.

I think Americans have an undervalued view of how important symbolic action is. That’s one of the reasons our lives have become more and more informal, because we don’t realize the power of symbolic action to seal commitments and ideas into our heads. I think this is why the Sacraments are instituted, because God knows the preacher can preach; but unless you do something, unless there is some symbolic action, involving material reality, you’re not going to understand. That’s not magic, that’s just taking account for the kind of creatures we are. If we were angels made of pure mind or pure spirit, we probably wouldn’t need to give attention to symbolic action. Fortunately, we still recognize the necessity of symbolic action in most funerals (although not always). Funerals and weddings are the two places where some symbolic action is still retained, for the most part. But largely, we tend to give that up, again because we do prefer to think of ourselves as pure will or pure spirit. In our salvation, we are not saved to become angels, but we are saved to become perfected embodied souls—or ensouled bodies, which is a little more accurate. We’re not really embodied souls, at least in terms of the order in creation. God first makes the body and then “souls” it by breathing into it life.

To conclude, I want to quote Wendell Berry one more time: Our kitchens and other eating places more and more resemble filling stations, as our homes more and more resemble motels. Life is not very interesting, we seem to have decided: let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory and fast. We hurry through our meals to go to work and hurry through our work in order to recreate ourselves in the evenings and on weekends and vacations, and then we hurry with the greatest possible speed and noise and violence through our recreation.

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food joint, hell-bent on increasing the quality of our life? And all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and the purposes of the life of the body in this world.

He’s suggesting that there’s a pattern to the way our bodies ought to live in this world; that there’s some things that you stretch so far that you get to a breaking point. And I like that phrase, “The life of the body in this world,” because we do live as embodied creatures; we have a particular nature and we live in a particular kind of place—and that nature and that place received a benediction on the sixth day of creation. We’re more interested in going beyond the purposes and possibilities of life in this world because those purposes and possibilities are limited. We’re enchanted by the possibilities of worlds of our own creation. We want to reorder space and time, to treat time as a mere commodity rather than the form of our existence, to eliminate the meaning and significance of matter itself if possible, to reconfigure our own biology and the structure of all around us so as to satisfy and exalt our own wills. But we’re creatures of body and spirit, and to be embodied means to be limited and to be needy. That’s the state in which we’re created, as limited and needy creatures, and that was the state upon which God pronounced that benediction. It’s a good thing that we are limited and needy. It’s a good thing to be limited and needy. That condition is not a circumstance of the Fall; it’s part of our good human nature. ■

Kenneth A. Myers (MA, Westminster Theological Seminary) is a founder of Mars Hill Audio and a writer/editor.

Babette’s Feast (continued from page 11) “Man, my friends,” said General Loewenhielm, “is frail and foolish. We have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and shortsightedness we imagine divine grace to be finite....But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty....For mercy and truth have met together, and righteousness and bliss have kissed one another!”

Through this speech and the dinner and wine, the Brothers and Sisters realized that this “grace...had been allotted to them....The vain illusions of this earth had dissolved before their eyes like smoke, and they had seen the universe as it really is. They had been given one hour of the millennium.”

Patricia Anders is managing editor of Modern Reformation.

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hat God takes a deep interest in food should come as no surprise. He created humans with the need for food. The first and last chapters of Scripture make references to food. The fall of Adam involved food. Israel’s ceremonial law was largely centered on food. The Psalms frequently praise God for providing food. And in the Gospels we encounter the Son of God performing miracles with food, enjoying conversations over food, even instituting a holy sacrament with food. Food is important to God. It is an expression of his goodness and essential to the lives of his image-bearers. It is more than a mere battery to keep our bodies going; food satisfies some of the longings of the human soul. “If we ponder to what end God created food,” said Calvin, “we shall find that he meant not only to provide for necessity but also for delight and good cheer.”1 Perhaps Robert Farrar Capon said it best in his eccentric The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection: “To be sure, food keeps us alive, but that is only its smallest and most temporary work. Its eternal purpose is to furnish our sensibilities against the day when we shall sit down at the heavenly banquet and see how gracious the Lord is. Nourishment is only for a while; what we shall need forever is taste.”2 Simply put, food is part of being human.

Perhaps it is not surprising then that God often compares eating food to hearing his Word. In Isaiah 55:1–3, God renewed his covenant of grace with Israel by inviting them to a meal: Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your

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Come and Eat leading with Israel to receive what God freely us excellent offered in his grace, the prophet Isaiah used a Hebrew particle, one that usually functions as a cry of woe, to emphasize Israel’s dire need to take God’s offer: “Ho! Come!” Through the ministry of the Word, Christ calls his people to come into his restaurant and dine with him.

He stands on the sidewalk, as it were, crying out to the passersby who are hungry, “I have something good prepared for you! Come and eat! Come to my table!” Money is not an issue. In this restaurant, people who cannot pay are welcome. In fact, our money is no good with God. You only need to be hungry to have a reservation.

“Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come buy wine and milk without money and without price” (Isa. 55:1).

There is no currency we can offer God to receive the redemptive benefits of his meals. We cannot, through our obedience, buy what he freely gives as a gift. He has already paid the cost in full through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. We now owe nothing. There is no bill.

God simply says, “Come and eat!”

The primary purpose of going to church, therefore, is not to serve God but to be served by him. The same Lord who once rose from supper, laid aside his outer garments, tied a towel around his waist, and washed the feet of his disciples, continues to condescend to his followers and serve them in Word and Sacrament. He summons us to a corporate, festive event in the call to worship. Each week, through the ministry of the Word, he spreads a table in the wilderness, setting before us excellent food and drink for the soul.

The beverages of which Isaiah spoke—water, milk, and wine—became scarce in Israel as they suffered the covenant curses for their disobedience (Deut. 28:18, 24, 30, 33, 39, 51). Water, milk, and wine correspond respectively to our human needs of refreshment, nourishment, and joy. Without water, there could be no life. Without the protein found in milk, there could be no growth.

And without wine—well, do we really want to imagine a world without wine? God has given it as an expression of his goodness to gladden the heart of man (Ps. 104:15) and to grease the sandy gears of life. Without wine, we would be deprived of color, beauty, and exhilaration in this present evil age.

While Israel sat on the brink of destruction, the prophet’s use of this imagery couldn’t have been more timely. What water, milk, and wine do for us physically, the gospel does for us spiritually. It refreshes us with the living water of Christ (John 4:14; 7:37–38), nourishes us so that we may “grow up to salvation” (1 Pet. 2:2), and causes our hearts to rejoice in the promise of glorified life (1 Pet. 1:8).

Every Sunday, in the public means of grace, Christ sets these beverages before us in abundant supply.

Each week, through the ministry of the Word, he spreads a table in the wilderness, setting before food and drink for the soul. labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; hear, that your soul may live; and I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.

Although Israel had broken the Mosaic covenant and would soon suffer the curse of exile, they were invited to enjoy God’s fellowship through his everlasting covenant—his covenant with Abraham (Gen. 15; 17:1–14) and, subsequently, with David (2 Sam. 7:1–17). Such gracious invitations to Israel are found throughout the Book of Isaiah and, indeed, the whole corpus of the prophets. What is remarkable about this one, however, is the analogy God makes of hearing to eating. He deliberately uses gastronomic imagery to describe the spiritual sustenance and delight contained in his gospel promises.

In the same way, Jesus, the mediator of the new covenant, commissioned Peter with the words, “Feed my lambs….Feed my sheep” (John 21:15b, 17b). Beyond the nourishment that food provides to the body and the enjoyment it brings to the soul, lies a deeper human need that can be received only from the Bread of Life, given freely to us in Word and Sacrament at the local church. In the new covenant, the local church is something like a local restaurant; it is a place where people go to eat a meal. The pastor, like a chef, works with fine ingredients and labors to prepare something excellent. Guests arrive, sit down, and a meal is served.

Granted, the two belong to different kingdoms. A local restaurant belongs to the kingdom of man; it is a business establishment frequented by customers. The local church, on the other hand, belongs to the kingdom of God; it is a manifestation of the body of Christ, created by his Word and Spirit. Nevertheless, we should not dismiss the analogy too hastily. Feeding the sheep is the chief part of Peter’s exhortation to pastors in local churches to “shepherd the flock of God” (1 Pet. 5:2a; cf. Acts 20:28). It is the very fulfillment of God’s promise in Jeremiah: “And I will give you shepherds after my own heart, who will feed you with knowledge and understanding” (Jer. 3:15; cf. 23:1–4; 31:10).

Just as a chef’s vocation requires him to prepare meals for the body, a pastor’s vocation requires him to prepare meals for the soul. “This feeding is by the preaching of the gospel,” said John Owen. “He is no pastor who doth not feed his flock. It belongs essentially to the office.”3 The local church, then, is the spot where this happens; it is where the sheep go to eat. It does not merely consist of people; it is also the place where Christ, through his under-shepherds, feeds his flock publicly and corporately.

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Living on McDonald’s n the animated film Ratatouille, a story about a gifted rat in Paris who dreams of becoming a chef, Remy, the main character, laments the fact that his fellow rats are content with eating garbage. “If you are what you eat,” declares Remy at the beginning of the movie, “then I only want to eat the good stuff.” His pragmatist father, however, disagrees: “Food is fuel. You get picky about what you put in the tank, your engine is gonna die.” Remy is horrified watching his family and friends wolf down trash while gourmet food is available. “What are you eating?” he asks his brother in disgust. “I don’t really know,” says his brother.

“I think it was some sort of wrapper once.”

In a similar way, God does not want his people eating garbage. There is lament in the prophet’s question, “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?”(Isa. 55:2a). Like rats comfortable with eating trash, we are prone to consume spiritual rubbish and junk food. Left to ourselves, we will spend our livelihood on a subhuman diet of drivethrough spirituality, grasping for instant gratification in our quest for self-improvement. Or, if we are more desperate, we will go to the garbage bin to rummage laboriously through a pile of half-eaten crust and empty containers, searching for anything that might resemble practical advice or helpful principles for living. Meanwhile, we are oblivious to the fact that our Master has set the table and called us to dinner.

That is why preaching is so important. As Kevin Vanhoozer has noted, “The sermon is the best frontal assault on imaginations held captive by secular stories that promise other ways to the good life.”4 Curved in on ourselves in selfish introspection and idol worship, we need an external word, a voice that comes from outside of ourselves, to interfere with our make-believe worlds and tell us the truth. We need to hear that surprising message of a holy God justifying the wicked through Christ. The living preaching of his Word, as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it in Question 98, is God’s ordained means to accomplish this.

It is an intrusive act by the Holy Spirit, driving us out of ourselves and directing our faith to the promises of God, which in Christ are yes and amen. The Westminster Larger Catechism gets at this precise point when it describes in Question 155 how the Holy Spirit makes the Word effectual to salvation:

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The Spirit of God maketh the reading, but especially the preaching of the word, an effectual means of enlightening, convincing, and humbling sinners; of driving them out of themselves, and drawing them unto Christ; of conforming them to his image, and subduing them to his will; of strengthening them against temptations and corruptions; of building them up in grace, and establishing their hearts in holiness and comfort through faith unto salvation.

But without Christ’s divine emissary sent to us, how will

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we hear? Without an ordained servant to serve us a meal, how will we eat? If “faith comes by hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ,” as Paul says in Romans 10, then self-feeding will not work. Hardwired for law by nature, the gospel is counterintuitive to us. Someone must tell us this good news. Someone must serve us this meal that informs us of what we do not know by nature; namely, that in Christ we have passed from death to life, and from judgment to mercy. Without coming to the feast God provides for us, we will inevitably gravitate toward the drivethrough lane of therapy and the garbage bin of moralism.

Preaching is God’s merciful act whereby he pulls us away from our toxic self-feast and serves us his meal of life.

Authentic Cuisine od delights in giving his people the real thing to eat.

“Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food” (Isa. 55:2b). The Hebrew word for rich is literally fat. The feast that he provides in the gospel is not a meager, low-carbohydrate, or lowfat diet. He brings the real thing: real bread, real steaks, real Parmigiano-Reggiano—the best food and the best wine. He blesses his people with a rich banquet and authentic cuisine, a cuisine that is redemptive-historical. In other words, the preaching served to the people in the local church should always use a method that preaches Christ responsibly from the whole Bible.

Of course, the term “redemptive-historical preaching” is somewhat elastic, at least in Reformed circles. It is similar to the phrase “covenant theology”; not everyone means the same thing when they use it. For example, I have sometimes heard people caricaturize redemptive-historical preaching as preaching that ignores the imperatives of Scripture and leaves little place, if any, for application. That is a most unfortunate misrepresentation of the term. Redemptive-historical preaching, in its most simple definition, is preaching that preaches Christ from all the Scriptures.

It assumes that the Scriptures are not a collection of timeless principles in abstract, but a coherent record of progressive revelation that tells the story of God redeeming a people for himself through the person and work of Christ his Son. It takes seriously Christ’s admonition to the Pharisees who missed the point of this story: “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me” (John 5:39). It is the kind of preaching that Christ himself gave to his disciples on the road to Emmaus, where, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures, the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). It applies biblical theology to the meal, which, as Graeme Goldsworthy notes, “is nothing more or less than allowing the Bible to speak as a whole: as the one word of the one God about the one way of salvation.”5 It proclaims Old Testament characters such as Noah, Joseph, David, and Daniel primarily not as moral examples to imitate, but as sinners in the unfolding drama of redemptive history who foreshadowed Christ. It is a method of preaching that takes

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seriously Edmund Clowney’s warning that “it is possible to know Bible stories, yet miss the Bible story.”

The Bible is much more than William How stated: “a golden casket where gems of truth are stored.” It is more than a bewildering collection of oracles, proverbs, poems, architectural directions, annals, and prophecies. The Bible has a story line. It traces an unfolding drama. The story follows the history of Israel, but it does not begin there, nor does it contain what you would expect in a national history. The narrative does not pay tribute to Israel. Rather, it regularly condemns Israel and justifies God’s severest judgments.

The story is God’s story. It describes His work to rescue rebels from their folly, guilt, and ruin.6 Starving, weary souls need to hear this story line and unfolding drama that culminates in the person and work of Christ. Sadly, however, there will always be local chefs who deviate from the Bible’s cuisine. Let them be urged to keep it authentic. “The preacher’s business,” said R. L. Dabney, “is to take what is given him in the Scriptures, as it is given to him, and to endeavor to imprint it on the souls of men.

All else is God’s work.”7 Fusion food might be a fun fad in our postmodern culture, but it has no place on the spiritual menu in the local church.

Hear and Live s a pastor of a local church, I often walk alone through the empty auditorium of our building during the week. In the stillness, I look at the vacant pews and think of the people who will fill them on Sunday during the dinner rush. I contemplate the text I am working through that week and the sermon I am preparing. I look at the raised pulpit and large table and anticipate the food that will be served to them. I reflect on the movement of the liturgy, which, in some ways, resembles the structure of an Italian meal. The salutation after the invocation is similar to an aperitivo (aperitif). The absolution after the confession of sins is like the antipasto (appetizer).

The sermon is the primo (first course), and the Lord’s Supper the secondo (second course). A contorno (side dish) might be served, if there is a baptism that day, but the meal will always conclude with formaggio e frutta (cheese and fruits) and/or dolce e caffe (dessert and coffee); that is, a benediction. I think of how, throughout the meal, we will raise our glasses of fine Sangiovese or Nero d’Avola wine in response to the God of grace, singing his praise, and confessing his goodness and mercy to us. This is a dining hall where God meets his people and feeds them with the surprising feast of Christ. These are the means he has ordained to give us refreshment, nourishment, and delight in this present evil age, a foretaste of that great meal to come, which was prophesied in Isaiah 25:6–9:

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On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich 28 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever; and the LORD God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken. It will be said on that day, “Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the LORD; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.” ■

Michael Brown (M.Div., Westminster Seminary California) is pastor of Christ United Reformed Church in Santee, California.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, III.10.2.

Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection (New York: The Modern Library, 2002), 40.

3John Owen, “Sermon V,” Works (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1998), 9:453.

4Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A CanonicalLinguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 456.

5Graeme Goldsworthy, Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2000), 7.

6Edmund Clowney, The Unfolding Mystery: Discovering Christ in the Old Testament (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R, 1988), 11.

7R. L. Dabney, Evangelical Eloquence (1870; repr. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1999), 37.

1 2

Speaking Of… Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, If I lack’d anything.

A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here: Love said, You shall be he.

I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear, I cannot look on thee.

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I? Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame Go where it doth deserve.

And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?

My dear, then I will serve.

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: So I did sit and eat.

—George Herbert (1593–1633)

Word among established parishioners was that the death knoll for our parish was now ringing. This was it. The lifesupport system was about to be unceremoniously unplugged. And who would have thought it? After all, they brought in a young minister to turn things around, to get the contemporary service going, to give the young folks with shorter attention spans what they wanted—shorter sermons and shorter services. But now this: Holy Communion each and every week, and sometimes even more. Breaking ninety-five years of tradition, the Divine Service at Grace Lutheran Church extended in length by 50 percent. The average service time was now the same as a feature film and without the titillation of modern technologies.

Weeks passed, and then months, and some of our veteran members couldn’t figure it out. The church was steadily growing. And it wasn’t the statistical development that was the principal topic of conversation; rather it was the growth and maturity of parishioners. Love, peace, and joy had taken up, what seemed to be, permanent residence in what was once a house with discord.

What accounted for the transformation? It was nothing other than the benefits of the gospel proclaimed and administered to those who became eager to receive them in faith. No gimmicks. No programs. It was just the promises of God being made efficacious by the Son and the Spirit.

It began with a prolonged Sunday school series (for the entire family) on the power and profundity of God’s Word in and through the Divine Service. Basic principles were laid down and reiterated over the space of several months. These

principles were posited to train our people to think and act biblically with respect to a theology of worship, not a style of worship. Our weekly mantras included the following: • Our Lord speaks and we listen, for his Word bestows what it says (Isa. 55:11).

• The Eucharistic liturgy (Acts 2:42), as a divine gift, let’s the Lord have his say.

• God is present for you in the promise of the gospel and in the Sacraments.

• God wants us to receive his promised gifts in Christ through faith.

• A promise cannot be received but by faith and faith is that worship that receives the benefits that God offers.

• Everything in worship bespeaks a theology: know what’s being said.

I worked on expanding the horizons of communicants by explaining and employing a wide spectrum of terms for and about the Lord’s Supper. Designations such as “Eucharist,” “Sacrament,” “holy,” “mystery,” and others helped to enrich their understanding and appreciation of the “Sacrament of the Altar,” but also helped to connect their “eschatological wedding feast of the Lamb” with the broader “communion of the saints.” This was no innovation, but exactly what our Reformation confession taught: “The people are instructed more regularly and with the greatest diligence concerning the Holy Sacrament, to what purpose it was instituted, and J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 9 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 2 9

how it is to be used, namely, as a comfort to terrified consciences. In this way, the people are drawn to Communion” (Augsburg Confession, Article XXIV).

Immediately, the elders of the parish and I began to see the mystery and power of Holy Communion as believers were drawn to it. God was present and active in our midst through the means by which he was imparting grace and bolstering faith, and our people wanted in on that action.

Where once the Lord’s Supper was delegated to the fringes of pastoral theology, now it suddenly became the hinge on which it turned.

We discovered a neglected dimension of Holy Communion in what the Holy Spirit accomplishes on the horizontal plane when Christ feeds his people with his body and blood. The elders and I witnessed this phenomenon firsthand on occasions when reconciliation between parishioners was necessary. As we proceeded according to the pattern of Matthew 18:15ff, it was Holy Communion that seemed to naturally follow the word of absolution to a penitent member. And when the Eucharist was celebrated on such occasions, reconciliation became tangible. Personal absolution beckoned a share in that which engenders corporate absolution, namely Holy Communion in the One who accomplished for us the great work of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18–19). Once a person was right with their formerly offended brother, partaking of the Lord’s Supper communicated to all parties involved that things were well with God, with one another, and with the entire assembly of believers. Everyone felt welcome in church.

Through the Lord’s Supper, “being at one” became a visible reality. The cup of forgiveness was actually shared among those who previously could not share a good word together. Now they were enjoying a meal, breaking bread with Christ himself in their midst. Communion, it turned out, had an uncanny effect on making reconciliation or restoration a rite of passage, an event, a kairotic moment infused with meaning through its healing and restorative nature, for all who partook of this divine gift of our Lord’s body and blood.

Holy Communion brought other unexpected benefits.

It demolished post-Enlightenment ideals concerning the “self” plaguing our church; ideas that subverted Christian discipleship and biblical understanding of being human.

Where once it was the “self” defined by radical individualism and autonomy, now a dyadic principle was at play: the meal common to believers established a familial commonality. Holy Communion, the “with-union” meal, was powerfully and graphically restating parishioner identity on both vertical and horizontal planes as brethren in Christ. Alienation for younger members and isolation sometimes endemic among seniors was contraindicated by the Sacrament (cf. 1 Cor. 10:17). The Lord’s Supper said to our teens and collegians, “The Lord is right here with you”; and to our seniors it said, “You have a family and it’s all those who share this bread and wine with you. You’re never alone.” For me, it reaffirmed the importance of actively promoting the use of the common cup, of sharing 30 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

in Christ’s blood from a treasured chalice (rather than disposable individual cups). The permanence of cherished Communion ware more readily reiterates the New Testament teaching of what it means to be “in Christ” rather than worthless plastic products heading for the landfill.

The identity-making power of the Supper links modern individuals—otherwise branded by the conventions of pop culture, death culture, and so forth—to the people of the Passover story. Together, we relive the great story of the accomplishment and application of forgiveness granted to us, while judgment passes over us and we share in the meal that is the Passover Lamb, Jesus the Christ. On tables and altars in San Diego, Sheboygan, and Saskatoon, the story is therefore made real and communicants enter into the new humanity-defining, epoch-making drama. In other words, since we live and move and have our being in a narratable world, and since the fallen world is constantly challenging or denying the Bible’s narrative, it behooves the church to utilize the most powerful and graphic means available to proclaim the real story—the real voice of God in his Word and the real presence of God in his Sacrament.

Robert Jenson put it this way: In effect, the church could say to her hearers: “You know that story you think you must be living out in the real world? We are here to tell you about its turning point and outcome.”…If we are in our time rightly to apprehend the eschatological reality of the gospel promise, we have to hear it with Christ the risen Lord visibly looming over our hearts and with His living and dead saints visibly gathered around us. Above all, the church must celebrate the Eucharist as the dramatic depiction, and as the succession of tableaux, that it intrinsically is. How can we point our lives to the Kingdom’s great Banquet, if its foretaste is spread before us with all the beauty of a McDonald’s counter?1 Holy Communion thus placards before mankind the turning point of the world’s story—the crucifixion of the Son of God—and its outcome: God’s kingdom rule of grace and mercy in our midst. Word and Sacrament ministry replicates the metanarrative of Holy Scripture for us in the here and now. During the Lord’s Supper, our people were not only hearing about this true-to-life-narrative, they were experiencing it as a real presence, which was elsewhere obscured or denied. In Communion, the metanarrative came to bear on our narratives; its overarching and defining story filled our stories (be they ever so mundane or inane), infusing them with dramatic meaning and coherence—especially through the reconciliation of the tension of living simil iustus et peccator. Jenson’s point is that something this epic, this divine, cannot easily accommodate itself to fast-food mentality, but requires that we sit down for dinner with the family. Because the story is far grander than our moment, life necessarily slows down during Communion and sanity is reintroduced, even if only for the space of thirty minutes around the Table.

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In the corporate setting, three things need to be connected pastorally to Holy Communion so as to enlarge and heighten the impact of the great drama it displays: preaching, music, and mystery. First, the sermon must bridge what takes place in the high point of the gospel reading and the gospel feasting. Once we have heard the real voice, the sermon must prepare the people for the real presence. Good, biblical preaching encourages and invites its baptized auditors to receive what the present Lord comes to bestow.

As one element of gospel proclamation, the sermon will explain how the gap between the cross of twenty centuries ago and sinners today is right now bridged by Christ’s ongoing bestowal of the fruits of his cross in Word and Sacrament and thus direct believers to the Lord’s Table.

However, there can be bad preaching. Even still, the weekly administration of the Lord’s Supper safeguards the proclamation and dissemination of the holy gospel when the preacher fumbles the ball, for whatever reason. And, so, while Christ may be forgotten or neglected in exposition and declaration, he cannot be so in consecration and distribution.

Second, musical selections will leave an enduring impression on the Communion event. Within our respective Baptist, Episcopal, Lutheran, and Presbyterian hymnals there are a laudable assortment of theologically rich and stylistically appropriate Eucharistic hymns. Songs such as “Eat This Bread” and “Hear, O My Lord, I See Thee Face to Face,” or “O Lord, We Praise Thee,” sing this gospel-drama into our hearts, minds, and lives. In order to retain the humanity of the service in terms of our sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving, such music should always be live, not taped. Naked voices, children present at the Communion rail, and pastoral distribution should be commonplace during a Lord’s Supper that bespeaks of this celebration as a family event, possessing warmth and dignity mingled with joy. Music will do much to dispel inappropriate sterility or irreverent silliness.

Third, labor to retain a sense of mystery. This is done by respecting, in one’s posture and presentation (that is, circumspection and ceremony), the holiness of the Eucharist.

Lose the mysteriousness of your Communion practice and the Sacrament becomes domesticated, trite, a show-andtell device at best.

The impact of this cannot be underestimated in terms of Communion’s formative power on a parish—indeed, on the individual Christian’s worldview and welfare. In Holy Communion, the forgiveness of sins moves from the onedimensional forum of declaration into the realm of threedimensional manifestation. Grace becomes tangible, sensational, eventful. Just as the crucifixion and resurrection of the Lord are the real facts from which all discipleship originates, so too the Lord’s Supper serves as a common source for Christian reality and experience of God’s real voice and real presence. Here, too, God intervenes and counteracts our propensity to look within for answers, strength, or the cure, where instead we find disillusionment, despair, and deceit. Set before us, set outside of us in the Eucharist, is

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the reality of Christ. Here, in this event, the Lord is the active, objective one.

What comfort the Supper brings to the hearts of believers, especially since we cannot go back to the cross. To be sure, the forgiveness of sins was achieved on the cross, but yet it is not given out on the cross. “What Jesus won on the cross, he now comes to distribute in the Sacrament, as also in the Gospel where it is preached.”2 Luther explains this important point in his tract, “Against the Heavenly Prophets”: If now I seek the forgiveness of sins, I do not run to the cross, for I will not find it there. Nor must I hold to the suffering of Christ as Dr. Karlstadt trifles, in knowledge or remembrance, for I will not find it there either. But I will find in the sacrament or the Gospel the word which distributes, presents, offers, and gives to me that forgiveness which was won on the cross.3 However conceived in Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed theologies, all acknowledge that the sacramental presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Lord’s Supper differs from the general presence—the omnipresence—of Christ in the world. It is one thing for Christ to be present somewhere. It is another thing for him to be available to us here. Luther means to emphasize the reality of God’s presence with us, amidst the messiness of life or its sometimes story-less trappings. We can be assured that we will find him where he has told us to look for him—in Word and Sacrament.

The Lord’s Supper is especially personal, because it is always “for you,” the baptized believer. Pastoral emphasis on the “for you” clause of the words of institution falls in line with the purpose of the Eucharist as a sacramental gift and not a sacrificial offering: “These words, ‘Given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sin,’ show us that in the Sacrament forgiveness of sins, life and salvation are given us through these words. For where there is forgiveness of sins, there is also life and salvation.’”4 Since we never contribute anything toward the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation, the communicant can relax about being welcomed as a sinner. The Supper is for the sinner. And that is because the Lord’s Supper, as an institution of Jesus Christ, is a source of apostolic gospel, and it is the gospel that saves, sanctifies, and glorifies (1 Cor. 1:30).

In terms of exercising pastoral care in persona Christi, I learned that looking the recipient in the eye and using his or her first name during distribution intimately underscored the “for you” dynamic of Holy Communion: “Take and eat, [Sophia, John, etc.]. This is the body of Christ given for you.”

The “for you” benefits are especially prized when one is left in a frail or terminal condition. Received orally, it is evocative of much of the medicine we receive today. The Reformers and the Puritans frequently likened the Lord’s Supper to a pure, soothing medicine that sustains and vivifies both soul and body, arguing that “where the soul is healed, the body has benefitted also.” Martin Luther J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 9 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 3 1

liked to say that the Sacrament was a precious antidote against the poisons in our systems: “For here in the Sacrament you are to receive from Christ’s lips the forgiveness of sins, which contains and brings with it God’s grace and Spirit with all his gifts, protection, defense, and power against death and the devil and every trouble.”5 The eyes of my homebound parishioners and those confined to hospitals and rehabilitation centers brighten when I enter for a visit. However, their eyes positively sparkle when the visit is accompanied by the Eucharist. Medicine that counts for eternity is being administered and, what is more, the sure hope of the resurrection comes to bear directly on their situation. United to Christ in Holy Communion, they are profoundly reassured that as he is, so they shall be (1 John 3:2). Not on a few occasions have I heard homebound communicants thank out loud both the Savior and the pastor for visiting.

Given the regular course of life, seniors are more acutely aware that Holy Communion remains something of a preview. There is a greater feast to come, not as a replacement of this meal but as through the intensification of it. This facet of the Supper serves as a great comfort and weekly monument for them that here is a God-given institution that maintains continuity from this life to the life to come. For those who are grieved by the death of a loved one, Holy Communion evokes the third article of the Apostles’ Creed and confesses a “communion of the saints” as part of the ministry of the Holy Spirit. I have one dear member who, after over sixty years of marriage, lost her husband. Marcia comes to Communion not only to enjoy the presence of Christ but also to be reconnected with her husband in the communion of saints. Likewise, the only real comfort I could offer parents who recently buried their three-year-old son was to teach them how the Lord’s Supper unites not only past and future in the present, but also all the baptized in Christ with one another. As we think of the death, a sense of remoteness in time is inevitable. All sorts of ideas are devised to overcome this sense of remoteness. But the Sacrament of the Altar makes the sacrifice of Christ ever-present because the body given unto death then, and the blood shed, is the same as that which we receive now, yet without re-presenting (repeating) the act of atonement. So, too, death is dispelled and shown to be a conquered foe when the resurrected one, Jesus Christ, brings heaven and its occupants to be in our midst even now through Holy Communion.

This is an event of extraordinary pastoral intimacy, tenderness, and divine ministry. One must therefore be careful not to “over-fence” the Table and thereby discourage those who need the forgiveness of sins from the very means of receiving it. While respecting your tradition’s parameters concerning “closed communion,” remember that Christ is inviting. He welcomes his people to receive gifts from his hand and with his good word. An unduly austere regiment of fencing can prove to be equally prohibitive to God’s welcomed people as it would be for unwelcomed unworthy persons (per 1 Cor. 11:27–29). After all, unlike those 32 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

outside the covenant community, Christians sin not only against God’s law but also against his grace in Christ. But here Jesus is nevertheless specifically inviting his simil iustus et peccator people to come to his Table and dine with him, on him, because in the Eucharist God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is doing something. Not only is there a performative speech-act that reaffirms justification by grace through faith, but there is also the placarding of Christ as the object of faith.

Conversely, withholding the Sacrament should have a profound effect on the unrepentant. Being prohibited from Eucharistic intimacy with Christ bars one from an objective source of absolution, indeed, of life and salvation. The effectiveness of the “bands” or excommunication will likely correspond with the level of the parish’s taught eagerness to receive and to reverence the means of grace.

In Holy Communion, we can have a captive audience in a unique forum in which, like the sermon, the auditor’s response is passive—a reception in faith. We would do well to take care and time to ensure that boring repetition and sloppy distribution practices do not hinder parishioners’ experience of the promise-making God active in their midst as the promise-keeping God. As with rich foods and choice wines, expect a Communion setting that bespeaks the finest meal of God, such that persists from one life to the next.

Where faith and hope give way to love and where preaching and baptisms cease, yet the Lord’s Supper persists as long as the kingdom of God. Since this is the case, pastors should not withhold from their congregations this objective and efficacious means of grace any more than they would withhold the sermon or the reading of the Scriptures. In Holy Communion, then, we find God’s church growth program for the body of believers that may or may not yield numerical fruit, but which always promises to bring the fruit of the gospel in the lives of those who receive it in faith. ■

Rev. John Bombaro (Ph.D., King’s College, University of London) is the parish minister at Grace Lutheran Church, San Diego, and a lecturer in theology and religious studies at the University of San Diego.

Robert W. Jenson, “How the World Lost Its Story,” First Things (October 1993), www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5168.

2Kenneth W. Wieting, “Sacramental Preaching: The Lord’s Supper” in Liturgical Preaching, eds. Paul J. Grime and Dean W. Nadasdy (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2001), 68.

3Martin Luther, “Against the Heavenly Prophets,” in Luther’s Works: American Edition, vol. 40 (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1958), 213–14.

4Martin Luther, Small Catechism (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2005), 31. Emphasis added.

5Martin Luther, Large Catechism, Fifth Part: The Sacrament of the Altar, §§68–70, in The Book of Concord, eds. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2000), 474.

1

Consuming Communion

By Daniel Eggold Christian writers at their best seldom fail to mention that just as the Lord’s Supper looks back to the Last Supper, so it also looks forward to the messianic meal in heaven, the wedding feast of the future, when Christ as bridegroom and the church as his bride will be united at the “marriage supper of the Lamb” (cf. Rev. 19:9 and 19:7; 3:20). The Lord’s Supper is, at the same time, a feast of remembrance and a feast of hope—hope in the deeper sense of the New Testament, hope for the coming of Christ in glory. This Supper, therefore, is the remembrance of the hour when the Lamb of God was slain, and at the same time it is the joyful looking forward to the day when our redemption will be accomplished at the Supper of the Lamb.

Yet I cannot help but think that it is hard for most participants to picture the mystery of our participation in the eternal marriage feast in heaven, when they have as a model in their minds driving up to the window at McDonald’s for a hamburger, fries, and a Coke. It is an inescapable fact that our lives are lived and the Lord’s Supper celebrated in the context of a consumer society that places a high value on the production and consumption of material goods and services and an even higher value on physical convenience and comfort. That people are coming to the Lord’s Table with a mentality and an attitude carried over from the culture in which they live twenty-four hours a day is often betrayed by the questions asked: “What can I get out of the service today?”

“Won’t celebrating the full Communion liturgy make the service too long?”

“Won’t receiving Communion too often make it seem less special?”

It is beyond the reach of this short article to investigate the full effect of consumerism and the Christian faith. What I would like to do at this point is to engage in a bit of diagnostic work. First, how does consumerism condition our thinking about the Lord’s Supper? Next, drawing upon the wisdom of Martin Luther’s conception of the vita passiva, I will articulate how the church can respond to the effect consumerism has on the Lord’s Supper.

Have It Your Way Over the past few years, there have been major changes in the way items are made and services are delivered. Companies are starting to build products designed just for you.

You can buy a computer assembled to your exact specifications, and you can buy a pair of Levi’s cut to fit your body.

But you can also buy pills with the exact blend of vitamins, minerals, and herbs that you like, glasses molded to fit your face precisely, CDs with music tracks that you choose, cos-

metics mixed to match your skin tone, textbooks whose chapters are picked out by your professor, a loan structured to meet your financial profile, or a night at a hotel where every employee knows your favorite wine. And if your child does not like any of Mattel’s 125 different Barbie dolls, she will soon be able to design her own.

But what makes a good servant makes a bad master. First, consumerism demands constant consumption and production of material goods and services. It calls forth constant activity—the use of objects or services. Consumerism belongs to an active lifestyle unrelieved by contemplation.

Stores are open seven days a week, not only because people wish to make money or because some people’s needs are best served that way, but because people need to be doing something, to be active, consuming, seven days a week.

Many people experience the need to “get away” to “slow down,” to “go on retreat.” And they should, because the pressures of the consumerist society drive human beings to seek respite. The many Americans who seek relief of some kind (enjoyment of nature, music, or religious retreat) do not belie the fact that consumerism implies incessant activity but rather bear witness to it by their efforts to escape. Consumerism begins and ends with us.

Second, and more importantly, the relationship between God and us is subject to similar objectification; that is, grace is envisioned as a “thing” to be obtained as the result of a process of self-development—the latest program, the latest book, and so forth. Even worship is more like the payment of an insurance premium than an expression of faith and love toward the Beloved who calls and responds. The consumer mentality can push the understanding of ex opere operato to its ultimate deformity.

The question here, however, is how this conditions our thinking about the Lord’s Supper. I once heard a man remark that the real weekend liturgy for the family was the trip to the shopping center. We can picture the children scurrying here and there in curiosity and delight. We can imagine Mother enjoying the clothes on the racks, even though the family cannot afford them now. Father can look over the power tools he dreams of having some day. An ice cream cone at Baskin-Robbins makes the celebration complete. How can the Lord’s Supper compete with the multiple appeals of the shopping mall?

It cannot, of course. However, as a result of living in a consumer society, do we unconsciously expect it to compete? Do we come to the celebration of the Lord’s Supper from our consumer society disposed for that purpose? Do we carry out the liturgy in a celebratory or a consumerist manner? Is there, for example, time to dwell on the Word of God, or do the words of the first reading, the response psalm, the second reading, the acclamation, the gospel, the J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 9 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 3 3

homily, the creed, and the general intercessions follow upon one another as rapidly as one commercial after another on TV or the radio? What place do we give to silence in celebration? If the attendance is large, do we feel thrilled, even though the services may be poor celebrations and the participation poor, as the producer and consuming public exult in the novel that sells millions of copies or the film that attracts millions of viewers, even though novel or film lacks substance?

Have It God’s Way If it is true that we cannot compete with consumerism, then how can the church contrast the Lord’s Supper with the world in which we are immersed and see its effects and benefits? I believe that Martin Luther’s concept of the Christian life as vita passiva is helpful on this point.1 Vita passiva means the “passive life.” However, Luther does not mean to say that the Christian life is static, but rather passive in the sense that God is the active subject and the Christian is the object of God’s action. The Christian life is passive because it suffers; it undergoes God’s work and so passively receives it. Because of this, oftentimes it is translated as the “receptive life.” Regardless of translation, the vita passiva is crucial in that it is not an experience I produce or consume but rather it is that which I suffer or undergo. Instead of envisaging the spiritual life beginning with something in us, “we let God alone work in us and that in all our powers do we do nothing of our own.”

Although Luther used vita passiva to describe the whole Christian life, he did assign a specific time where this vita passiva can be experienced and exercised in a most paradigmatic way—namely, in the Lord’s Supper. “In consecrating and administering, the priests are our servants.

Through them we are not offering a good work or communicating something in an active sense. Rather, we are receiving through them the promises and the sign; we are being communicated unto in the passive sense.”

If this act is understood, everything is changed. We can no longer objectify the God from whom the gift is given.

Neither can God sink into a consumable good to be obtained and possessed by appropriate technical manipulation of the means that lead to him, much as the desired expensive home is to be eventually owned by a series of carefully chosen purchases, sales, larger purchases, bigger sales, and so on. Rather, God in his gracious condescension gives himself to us in this meal. We are recipients; we receive his sacrifice. As Luther wrote in his Large Catechism: We go to the sacrament because we receive there a great treasure, through and in which we obtain the forgiveness of sins. Why? Because the words are there through which this is imparted! Christ bids me eat and drink in order that the sacrament may be mine and may be a source of blessing to me as a sure pledge and sign—indeed, as the very gift he has provided for me against my sins, death, and all evils.

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Nor can we root around in our own egos in a vain attempt at developing self-esteem or attempts at self-realization. Rather, God comes to us, available to us in all our senses. God comes to us, shattering our false self-images, and then sharing his own body and blood with us so that we can see ourselves, others, and all creation as God does.

This is the gift that, like all other enactment of the Word, sustains pilgrims who have their eyes on the abiding city of God. Then, when we have reached our pilgrimage, the Lord’s Supper will be replaced by the “Supper of the Lamb.”

Daniel Eggold (M.Div., Concordia Seminary of Saint Louis, Missouri) is associate pastor of Immanuel Lutheran Church of Valparaiso, Indiana.

Cf. Oswald Bayer, Theology the Lutheran Way (Guetersloh: Guetersloher Verlagshaus, 1994); and Reinhard Hütter, Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice, trans. Doug Stott (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000).

2Martin Luther, Luther’s Works: The Christian in Society I, vol.

44, eds. J. J. Pelikan, H. C. Oswald, and H. T. Lehman (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 72.

3Martin Luther, Luther’s Works: Word and Sacrament II, vol. 36, eds. J. J. Pelikan, H. C. Oswald, and H. T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 49.

4The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, ed. T. G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1959), 449.

1

Speaking Of… Deck thyself, my soul, with gladness, Leave the gloomy haunts of sadness; Come into the daylight’s splendor, There with joy thy praises render Unto Him whose grace unbounded Hath this wondrous banquet founded.

High o’er all the heav’ns He reigneth, Yet to dwell with thee He deigneth.

Jesus, Bread of Life, I pray Thee, Let me gladly here obey Thee.

By Thy love I am invited, Be Thy love with love requited; From this banquet let me measure, Lord, how vast and deep its treasure.

Through the gifts Thou here dost give me As Thy guest in heaven receive me.

—Johann Franck (1618–77)

INTERVIEW f o r

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An Interview with James Gilmore

The Church in an Experience Economy White Horse Inn host Michael Horton recently had a special opportunity to talk about Christ in a post-Christian culture with James Gilmore. He is the author of several books, including Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want (Harvard Business Press, 2007) and The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage (Harvard Business Press, 1999), both of which he co-wrote with B. Joseph Pine II. Mr. Gilmore is a partner at Strategic Horizons consulting company in Aurora, Ohio.

One of the goals of our series this year is to understand how we can be Christians in a post-Christian culture, which seems to be dominated by experiences. Even worship has become the worship “experience.” How is it that we’re living in what you have coined as an “experience economy”?

There is a book whose primary argument is an economic thesis purporting that experiences are a distinct form of economic output. One way to think about how that migrates over to this issue is whether or not we believe that business is the dominant social institution of our time. If business is pursuing experience, it seems natural that other institutions as well, such as the church, would grab onto that idea.

The not-for-profit sector also speaks about the “donor experience”—we no longer just give money; we have to stage some event in order to solicit the money. So, in multiple spheres of life and culture, we see this desire for experiences. But what we address explicitly in the book is the desire for consumers to have experiences today.

How can you sell experiences?

You attach a price to it. In general terms, you call it an admission fee, just like you pay to go to Disney-

land or to see a movie. If you pay an access fee, or if you pay a fee to spend time at some place or event, that’s the way to explicitly charge for experience. But it also exists in subtler forms: a monthly subscription to Netflix is a subtle but significant difference from paying for each Blockbuster movie rental. In some sense, the service is subsumed inside of the experience.

And once you see that subtle but significant difference, it creates opportunities to think, “Oh, let’s do that with other items as well.” If you can charge a subscription to movies, you can charge a subscription to handbags, which is happening. Rather than purchasing an expensive handbag, one has an annual fee, paying only for the time the bag is used and mailing it back to the warehouse when done.

To some extent, we’ve so saturated the world with goods that we need instead to find ways to charge only for the time using the goods.

And, again, it’s a subtle but significant difference. We argue that structurally, in industry after industry, competition will force this kind of realignment to occur, because service jobs are going away just like manufacturing jobs have gone away, and they’re not coming back.

Our book addresses a long-term

structural shift in the very fabric of advanced economies.

Do you see a parallel between what’s happening in the economy generally and the proclivity of church leaders to use terms like “worship experience”? Have terms and phrases like that fallen into our vocabulary by accident?

I haven’t studied it rigorously, but I suspect that’s the case. Perhaps the term worship “service” emerged with the service economy. In “worship wars,” what people clearly experience as consumers in the marketplace has found its way into the church. I’m not necessarily sure that this is a new postmodern phenomenon. The practice of setting hymns to old drinking tunes and so forth has been around for a long time, and is probably not an altogether bad thing. But I think there’s a mixture of good and bad in our church environments.

What do you see as the good that we could use and the bad that we should avoid?

I always struggle with not bringing my own personal tastes and preferences into this. As a son of a former Air Force chaplain, I learned to be somewhat accommodating or willing to let loose some rope if you will—or a noose in some cases. I have some main concerns in this area. First and foremost is the rise of business activity within the visible church; that is, charging for things: from charging at a book table to a couples’ retreat, or to separate fundraising for flowers.

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Although much of this has been going on for a long time, there is a significant update. Instead of the book table, we now have the “Holy Grounds Coffee Shop and Book Shop.” It’s this commercial activity that most troubles me. The church is not a business and should not sell economic offerings. As I see the digitization of media, it seems to me all the more reason to give away these items for free. If your church writes new hymns or new praise choruses, why not make it freely available to others? If you write commentaries or if you publish your sermons, why not make that freely available instead of using it as a revenue source? It seems to me that God ordained means of funding the churches through the tithe and offerings; and the extent to which a significant portion of revenue comes from places other than the tithe and offerings, the church becomes a business, which is a corrupting influence.

It becomes beholden to whatever it’s dependent on.

It can be and I don’t think necessarily even consciously. Oftentimes people don’t think about this; they just go through the motions. Many churches—even smaller churches—have certain practices they do because it’s what they’ve always done. Why should individual donations pay for Easter lilies instead of paying for them out of the general funds like we do everything else?

But we see a need to do these things for some reason. A small bit is probably not that corrupting of an influence; but if it’s in a major activity of the church, I think it corrupts in ways unthinkingly, because it doesn’t maintain the purity of the church.

And a lot of this is happening.

The experience economy may be a context in which there’s been a sort of proliferation of activities and in which we can lose focus on the primary, limited purposes of the visible church. For instance, how many churches are full of activities 36 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

but don’t practice the Lord’s Supper every week? I would rather see it start there. I’ve had pastors approach me who read The Experience Economy in seminary. They ask, “How can we make the worship experience more compelling, more engaging?” My answer is that we already have this institution ordained by God and given to us; we can’t get any more multi-century than the Lord’s Supper. I worry sometimes that our work gets taken as sort of a primer for worship.

That’s pretty remarkable, because your book has received a lot of attention as sort of summarizing a cultural movement and what’s going on today in the macro-business world; and yet when people in churches ask you how they can make this transition into the church and how the church can become part of the experience economy, you’re saying that the church is different from a business.

Yes, absolutely. Pastors, church leaders, and laypeople read the book, but they need to understand that its thesis is a structural shift in the nature of the economy in terms of what people desire to purchase as consumers. To some extent, I think the church should be the one institution that completely refrains from that activity; it should be the one place where people can escape from that activity because it is the place that offers the free gift.

So, the whole connection between the gospel and the life of the church—not necessarily the life of all Christians, because we live in two worlds—should be defined together; the gospel and life in the church are related.

We are in two worlds and in our church homes where we labor for our local congregations as I think we should. To me, this offer of the free gift should have a derivative effect of all the activities of the church. They too should be for free. And also, I think it should influence what is performed as an or-

ganized body and what is done in the private lives of members. The other thing I see going on is that many activities are brought into the formal management or staging of the organized church, as opposed to maintaining the relationship with people’s lives in the world when they come to the visible church for discipline, for oversight, or for counsel. I think this is a previous era when the farmer would meet with elders to adjust weights and balances to say how much did you really charge me? Is your scale accurate? You would be held accountable in your private endeavors outside the church.

When the church becomes the platform for these worldly activities, you would think there would be greater oversight, especially within the visible church, but we don’t bother to look at it. In fact, a lot of these activities, when they come inside of the church, are a mechanism not to be looked at, at least not to the scrutiny of “what are you doing with that business enterprise?”

I just read T. David Gordon’s wonderful book Why Johnny Can’t Preach. What struck me in this book was the lack of performance reviews or feedback mechanisms for the sermon of the pastor. We don’t talk about that, let alone talk about these other things. I think more Christians should be encouraged to pursue experience and transformation pursuits in their private lives. In fact, I think it’s right for the church to ask, for example, some member of means who is working for some business that does not have an explicitly Christian worldview, “Why are you still working there? Perhaps you should take the capital that you’ve earned, that you’re sitting on, and put it at risk and start some new venture, in this world of experiences, in this world of transformations, and have a Christian happen to run that business.”

I think we did have this in past eras and that some of the great

manufacture enterprises and service enterprises were founded by Christians. They understood the difference between the two worlds.

But I think sometimes we as Christians are not participating as fully in the invention of new experiences and transformations in our private lives because we’ve retreated to doing those activities in the church. How many aspiring rock musicians are playing in the house band of the church instead of being in the marketplace? I’d rather have them in the marketplace. Acts 17:17 says that Paul went daily into the marketplace to reason with whoever happened to be there. To me, that’s the theme verse: go into the marketplace. Experience and transformations offer opportunities to do that, as opposed to doing the experiences and transformations inside the church.

It’s interesting to see how you followed your book The Experience Economy with Authenticity and the concern in our culture with authenticity. We often encounter in the church: “Oh, now this is what we need: be a real Christian.” What do you mean by authenticity? What’s happening here and why is it being appropriated in the church?

This one definitely is not just in the church but everywhere. You can’t escape eating at a self-proclaimed “authentic” Mexican restaurant, or driving a “real” car, or using the “real” Yellow Pages ad nauseam; that is, people self-describing their offerings as authentic or real.

It was seven or eight years between books for us, although many business writers pump out a book every six or twelve months. Not us.

We like to focus our attention on longer-term, structural, more significant trends. It’s not even a trend; it’s more of a structural underpinning of what’s going on. The basic notion of Authenticity is that we argue in each wave of economic history that there has emerged a dominant consumer sensibility, or a reason to buy, a motivation. In the

agrarian economy, that sensibility was availability. You went to an actual market, a physical place, because you were in the market for turnips. You are going to buy five dollars’ worth of turnips, so you turn to Farmer Brown and ask, “Any turnips today? Because if you have them, I’m buying them.”

Availability was the main concern and not price. Price would only be a concern if the price were to spike, but this would happen only if there was scarcity.

It wasn’t until the shift to an industrial economy that cost emerged as the primary concern. What mass production did was drive down the cost of goods so that nearly everybody could afford to buy one of whatever they chose to own. And today in the United States, a little over 99 percent of the population owns one of every physical good category they want. We forget that our ancestors bought their firstever radio, their first-ever dishwasher, their first-ever dress pair of shoes, their first-ever belt, or even their first-ever hairbrush—because mass production made things affordable, and so affordability became the dominant concern.

Then with the shift to the service economy, quality emerged. That is, when you suddenly are paying somebody else to change your oil instead of changing it yourself, to mow your lawn instead of mowing it yourself, or do your nails, or cut your hair—then you care about the performance or the quality of those services or the quality of those goods. And now in the shift to the experience economy where you pay to augment parenting in an American Girl Place, you pay to have the Geek Squad come and repair your computer, you vacation in places like Atlantis, or you get a drink at the ice bar, vodka bar, and it’s five degrees—all these almost unreal, surreal kind of environments that are constructed. In this kind of experience economy, we think this creates the desire for real. People want authentic. So the lens through

which consumers evaluate something today is whether it’s real or fake. It used to be that if people didn’t like something they’d say, “Aw, that’s a piece of junk.” You don’t hear that too much today. Today, if people don’t like something, they’ll say: “Oh, that’s so fake; that’s so phony.” This is now, we argue, the dominant term of derision and it is what people most value. Similarly, when they look at a church and when they look at a preacher, they say, "Aw, that's a fake church—it's not real," I'd argue that they bring that consumer lens. It’s not about the quality of the preaching anymore; it’s about how authentic and real the preaching is. That’s the mentality they bring to it.

It seems that what a lot of younger people mean by “authentic” is that it isn’t like their parents’ church with all the bells and whistles, which was sort of creating the Disney experience of God. They want to encounter God as he is, even if it terrifies them.

That’s certainly one manifestation of it. We sometimes jokingly say that Europe is authentic to Americans because it’s older than we are. Disneyland is real to anyone who was born after 1955 because it’s older than they are. So especially with Emergents going back to ancient church. They want to go back to something that’s more authentic versus all this fakery of our parents’ generation, but they don’t recognize that some of the practices in reaction to that are equally contrived.

The key here is to know what the church does and do it well—that is, Word and Sacrament ministry— and then go out into your vocations as Christians, working side by side with non-Christians, and do the best that you can do, to the glory of God. Abraham Kuyper’s “spheres of sovereignty” is what I’m arguing here.

To folks who are well versed in Reformed circles: let’s go back and read those lectures at Princeton.

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REQUIRED READING FOR 21ST CENTURY CHRISTIANS mo de r n r e fo r matio n must-reads

Satisfying Reading for the Hungry Christian The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage

The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology

By B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore Harvard Business, 1999 How did we get to the point where an experience is a commodity? After reading our interview in this issue with Gilmore, read this book to see how experience is changing the way we do business.

By Kevin J. Vanhoozer Westminster John Knox, 2005 This groundbreaking work redirects our attention back to doctrine—not as a dry subject for academic reflection but as the stage upon which we live the Christian life and participate in the church’s witness and work.

The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection

Contagious Holiness: Jesus’ Meals with Sinners

By Robert Farrar Capon Modern Library, 2002 Part cookbook, part sermon, and all gospel: this is Capon at his best. The author is an unorthodox (in the best sense of the word) Episcopal priest who loves grace and uses food to convey his message that our enjoyment of this life is merely a foretaste of the Kingdom in its fullness.

By Craig L. Blomberg InterVarsity, 2005 Part of the fascinating “New Studies in Biblical Theology” series edited by D. A. Carson, Blomberg’s work surveys the place of food in the Gospels.

Jesus’ meals with sinners are examples of his mission and his call to those who would follow him.

SEE ALSO: Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community

by Wendell Berry (Pantheon)

Peculiar Speech: Preaching to the Baptized

by William H. Willimon (Wm. B. Eerdmans)

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A Better Way: Rediscovering the Drama in God-Centered Worship by Michael Horton (Baker) We Become What We Worship: A Biblical Theology of Idolatry by G. K. Beale (IVP Academic)

REVIEWS w h a t ’ s

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Shortchanging the World?

A

s the editor and contributor, C. J. Mahaney begins the book Worldliness

In his introduction, Mahaney defines what it is, exactly, that we by posing the provocative question of whether 1 John 2:15 is still in our are not to love: “The world we’re not to love is the organized system of Bibles, or if we have, in true Jeffersonian fashion, simply cut out the human civilization that is actively hostile to God and alienated from God” (26, beloved disciple’s exemphasis original). More specifically, worldliness is “a love hortation: “Do not love for this fallen world. It’s loving the values and pursuits of the the world” (15). The world that stand opposed to God” (27). Some specific issues reason for such a that the authors address throughout the book are the memetaphorical excision is dia, music, stuff, and clothes. that the very command Worldliness closes with a chapter whose title is meant to be gives rise to more quessomething of an ironic surprise: “How to Love the World” (writtions than it answers, ten by Jeff Purswell). Here the author insists that “to read the such as: message of this book as a call merely to avoidance is to misunderstand it….It would be equally tragic if we defined our Does it mean I can’t relationship with the world simply in terms of negation” (140). watch MTV or go to In this chapter, Purswell seeks to demonstrate how it is that an R-rated movie? a Christian should love and faithfully live in this present world.

Do I have to give up After providing a brief biography of the human story folmy favorite TV lowing the pattern of creation, fall, redemption, and conshows?...How do I summation, Purswell draws our attention to the all-imporknow if I’m spending tant (and often ignored) fact that it is not the created order too much time playper se that we are called to avoid (as if the physical world, ing games or watchas such, is evil as the Gnostics insist). On the contrary, writes Purswell, the believer is a spiritual exile and a geographical American Christians and ing YouTube clips on my computer?...Can earthling, and the lens of Scripture allows the Christian pilWorldliness: Resisting the Seduction of a Fallen a Christian try to grim an “enhanced enjoyment of the world” (148).

World make lots of money, edited by C. J. Mahaney own a second home, Crossway, 2008 drive a nice car, and Modern Reformation invites you to submit 192 pages (hardback), $12.99 enjoy the luxuries of a book review for publication in the modern life?...How do I know if I’m guilty of the sin Reviews section of an upcoming issue this of worldliness? (17) year. We would like to give you the oppor-

These are certainly important questions to ask, particularly in light of Mahaney’s observation, borrowed from James Hunter, that Christians have “lost a measure of clarity” with respect to how we relate to the world (21). “We have softened,” says Mahaney, to the point where the adjective worldly and the noun worldliness have lost much of their meaning in the contemporary church (22). Against the Christian culture of capitulation, Mahaney rightly insists that “the greater our difference from the world, the more true our testimony for Christ—and the more potent our witness against sin” (23). Worldliness, Mahaney writes, “is a passionate plea to a generation for whom the dangers of worldliness are perhaps more perilous than for any that has gone before” (24).

tunity to critique, evaluate, and consider books both good and bad from your reformational perspective. Thoughtful Christians will examine the most important books of the day, and we want to encourage interaction with books that inspire and instruct, or maybe frustrate and concern. Submit your review of 1,000 words or less in an email to reviews@modernreformation.org.

Please reference the guidelines and suggestions available at www.modernreformation.org/submissions.

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Although the fall brought frustration and corruption even to natural creation, it remains a gift from God to be acknowledged, appreciated, and enjoyed….It may sound strange to ears tuned to discern danger in all talk about “the world,” but Paul seems just as concerned about a failure to appreciate creation as he is about the tendency to worship it. (150, 151) “For the heart transformed by the gospel,” Purswell writes, “the physical world holds great promise as a worship-producing source of pleasure and provision that opens the eyes to God and engenders worship of God” (151).

I certainly appreciate the way Worldliness concludes with some instruction concerning how to love the world without loving it—affirming, as it were, that “This Is My Father’s World” and that “This World Is Not My Home”—but I still feel that the world gets a bit short-changed by Mahaney and the other contributors. Despite the very helpful biblical-theological emphases throughout, Worldliness fails to appreciate adequately just how significant the fourth category is in the creation-fall-redemption-consummation motif. If this present age is provisional and will one day be overthrown by an eternal age to come, and if the transformation for which we long is to be experienced in the resurrection, then it follows (especially if one is an amillennialist) that earth and its common blessings are simply that: earthly and common. Furthermore, the Reformed distinction between the sacred and secular realms can be understood within this framework, with the former referring to heavenly realities and the latter denoting earthly ones. But Worldliness explicitly denies this distinction, with Purswell actually calling for its “demolition.”

According to him, the dominion mandate should guard us from being “plagued by the tendency to compartmentalize some aspects of our lives as spiritual, good, and holy and others as unspiritual, unimportant, and amoral” (155). Setting aside his failure to read the dominion mandate through the lens of New Testament eschatology, Purswell, by insisting that our earthly pursuits are either “holy” or “unimportant,” forces the reader into a false dilemma that omits the option of “common.” If art, sports, or cooking are neither demonic nor divine, then there is no reason why they cannot be enjoyed for their own sakes without the added pressure to baptize, redeem, or in some sense Christianize them.

The only other area of disappointment with this book centers on the fact that, for the authors of Worldliness, the all-important task of distinguishing ourselves from the world is pursued on an almost completely individual level. While there is little doubt that the believer needs instruction on how to combat his own worldliness and sin, no Reformed Christian should underestimate the role that the visible church plays in setting ourselves apart from the citizens of this present evil age. In fact, one may go as far as to suggest that the primary way that we distinguish ourselves from nonbelievers is by our sacred activity, which primarily occurs in worship every Lord’s Day as we are ushered into glory and truly leave the world behind.

These issues aside, Worldliness is a necessary and helpful book that will undoubtedly aid believers in the task of liv4 0 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

ing in the world while not being of it.

Jason J. Stellman is pastor of Exile Presbyterian Church in Woodinville, Washington.

This is My Body: The Presence of Christ in Reformation Thought

by Thomas J. Davis Baker Academic, 2008 224 pages (paperback), $24.99 I do not believe that I am overstating things when I say that the Lord’s Supper is not taken very seriously in many churches today. Most Christians have only the vaguest understanding of what they are doing and why when they partake of the bread and wine (or, more likely, the mini-crackers and grape juice).

Even among those who think they have some grasp of the meaning of the Supper, there are many who view it as a tedious burden or boring ritual, indicating that they too have no real understanding of it. Ignorance and apathy are the two adjectives that describe the contemporary church’s view of the Lord’s Supper.

Ignorance also characterized the sixteenth-century church’s view of the Supper, but apathy? Hardly! Many Christians may have misunderstood the Sacrament, but few denied its importance.

Among those who wrote extensively on the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, or Eucharist, were the Reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin. The views of both men are sometimes oversimplified, but continuing research is helping us to gain a clearer understanding of the issues that united and divided the two. An important recent contribution is the book This is My Body by Thomas J. Davis, professor of religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. Most of the chapters of this work have been previously published in scholarly journals, and one chapter was a paper presented at a conference in 2006; that is, this book is not a single sustained argument but a collection of essays on various topics related to the main theme.

The first two chapters are devoted to exploring some aspects of the Eucharistic thought of Martin Luther. Chapter 1 looks at Luther’s developing view of the role of faith in relation to the Sacrament, while chapter 2 looks at the centrality of the Word to Luther’s Eucharistic teaching. Most of the remaining chapters focus on various aspects of Calvin’s teaching. Davis looks, for example, at the importance of the words of institution, the role of Christ’s human body in salvation,

the presence of Christ in preaching, and the ascension, among other things.

Two of the most helpful chapters in the book are chapter 3, dealing with the words of institution in Calvin’s Eucharistic theology, and chapter 7, dealing with Calvin’s exegesis of the ascension and its relation to the Eucharist. As Davis explains in chapter 3, if there is one thing that is certain about Calvin’s view of the Eucharist, it is that “without the words of institution, the rite makes no sense” (65). But for Calvin, this does not mean the mere repetition of the words of institution. Instead, it means that these words must be both proclaimed and interpreted. This is evident from an examination of Calvin’s liturgies in which the minister first reads the words from 1 Corinthians and then expounds them in some detail. In other words, if the communicant is to benefit from the Supper, he or she must hear the words of institution and understand them.

Davis’s reflections on the ascension in chapter 7 are also very helpful. Here he begins to unravel the relationship in Calvin’s mind between Christ’s absence and presence. Calvin insisted that Christ’s body was removed from earth to heaven in the ascension and that it is corporally absent from believers. Yet Calvin also taught that in the Supper Christians somehow have access to Christ’s body, which is in heaven. Davis argues that resolution to this tension may be found if we understand that when Calvin spoke of the “distance” of Christ’s body, he was speaking metaphorically of separation, since heaven itself is not a place in the sky but is instead a different dimension of reality (136–37). What this means for Davis is that Calvin was somewhat closer to Luther than is usually granted.

The one weakness in the book, in my opinion, is found in chapter 8 where Davis repeats the thesis of his earlier book The Clearest Promises of God (AMS Press, 1995). Here, as before, Davis argues that Calvin’s doctrine of the Eucharist underwent significant development between 1536 and 1559 (see 142, note 4). I would argue to the contrary that while Calvin’s doctrine underwent significant development between 1536 and 1541, it was essentially settled at that point and that remaining changes were merely refinements and clarifications.

It is not clear to me that Davis supports his thesis unambiguously. In The Clearest Promises, for example, Davis states: “The foundations, then, of Calvin’s Eucharistic theology are in place at the end of the Strasbourg period” (128). He continues, What remains is for Calvin to implement his Eucharistic theology as he serves as pastor in the city of Geneva; to fine-tune his concept of Eucharistic instrumentality in his biblical commentaries as it relates to how God has always used secondary instruments to reveal knowledge of himself to his people; and, finally, to refine his notion of how Christ communicates his body and blood to the believer as he engages Westphal in debate. (129, emphasis added) Regarding other aspects of Calvin’s doctrine, Davis writes, “Before 1541, he [Calvin] established that he believed these topics to be essential to correct Eucharistic doctrine; after 1541, he provides a rationale why this is the case” (184). A rationale,

however, is not the same as significant development. Implementing, fine-tuning, and refining are not the same as extensive theological development. The significant development occurred between 1536 and 1541. By 1541, the essentials of Calvin’s doctrine of the Supper were settled. After 1541, in the midst of various controversies, Calvin further clarified his doctrine, but he did not substantially alter it.

This is My Body is a fascinating and important book, and chapter 3 is invaluable. Davis offers insight on a number of issues rarely addressed by theologians and historians. Despite some reservations in connection with Davis’s understanding of the development of Calvin’s views, I enthusiastically recommend this book to all those who seek to understand the Reformed doctrine and to partake of the Supper with understanding.

Keith A. Mathison is director of curriculum development for Ligonier Ministries and an associate editor of Tabletalk magazine.

Return to Rome: Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic

by Francis J. Beckwith Brazos Press, 2009 144 pages (paperback), $14.99 What would cause an evangelical professor of philosophy at a well-known Protestant university and the president, as well as a member for over twenty years, of the Evangelical Theological Society to suddenly resign both his presidency and membership and return to full communion in the Roman Catholic Church? This is in fact what took place back in May 2007 when Dr. Francis Beckwith suddenly made public his rejection of key Protestant doctrines and his return to the Roman Catholic Church. Dr. Beckwith’s resignation and departure from Protestantism caused no small tempest within evangelical circles among friends, colleagues, and many, like me, who have benefited from his scholarly writings over the years.

With his most recent publication, Return to Rome, Dr. Beckwith seeks to provide both an autobiographical account of his personal struggles in this transition, along with his theological reasons for leaving the Roman Catholic Church as a young adult to embrace and cherish Protestant theology, only to return years later to full communion with the church of his childhood.

While Beckwith’s personal account is an interesting story, I have space to make only a quick point in regard to this portion of the book. Beckwith’s impetus in returning to Rome seems to be more romantic than reasoned, even if he denies J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 9 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 4 1

this criticism throughout the introduction (14). His testimony throughout makes it clear that this is an important reason for his return; an almost nostalgic “return home” motif is developed as Beckwith repeatedly uses the phrase “the church of my baptism” (28, 75, 116, and 129) to describe his impulse of longing. Beckwith’s parents baptized him a Catholic and saw that he was confirmed, which prompts him to ask in hindsight if there is a sufficient reason to “remain in schism with the Church in which my parents baptized me” (116).

But the nostalgic longing wasn’t the only motivation for Beckwith’s return to Rome. He was also encouraged by pietist sympathies and mystical impulses. He relates how as a teen he became interested in Protestantism because they appeared to be more serious about their faith and their defense of it in contrast to the “watered-down and intellectually vapid presentation of the Gospel” in the American Catholic Church after Vatican II (38).

Additionally, Beckwith shares a sentimental story about his niece Darby (73–75), his nephew Dean (19–22), and his wife’s mystical vision of Jesus moving and talking with his disciples during Mass in Waco, Texas—all of which coincided with the exact time in Homewood, Alabama, when the bread was blessed under a mural of the Lord’s Supper hanging over the altar. This gave comfort to Dr. Beckwith and his wife concerning her father’s “baptism of desire” (68–71), and further contributed to his reasoning to return to Rome.

The specific doctrines that most challenged Beckwith, and in fact kept him from ever thinking he would return to the Catholic Church, were “the doctrine of justification, the Real Presence in the Eucharist, the teaching authority of the Church (including apostolic succession and the primacy of the Pope), and Penance” (79, 82, 114). It is clear from his own testimony, however, that the nature of the church’s authority is the lynchpin of the entire disagreement so that once pulled all the other teachings would simply be embraced. In a rather telling display of clarity, Dr. Beckwith summarizes the heart or formal cause of the Reformation debate: I reasoned that if the Catholic views on Church authority, justification, the communion of the saints, and the sacraments were defensible, then these other so-called “stumbling blocks” withered away, since the Catholic Church would in fact be God’s authoritative instrument in the development of Christian doctrine. (79) In this regard, Dr. Beckwith states that the doctrine of sola scriptura played almost no role in his struggle with the question of his theological identity (79). He argues that he had long ago rejected the Protestant doctrine, seeing that most Protestants had so qualified the limits of the doctrine that “it seemed to be more a slogan than a standard” (79). In its place, however, Beckwith offers no argument for the Catholic Church’s supreme authority (see 79–81). Rather, one is left with only a few criticisms of how Protestants have not provided sufficient support for their doctrine of sola scriptura or how that doctrine has been so qualified as to fail to be of any practical use.

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Unfortunately, there is something of a false dichotomy in his argument. Simply stating that sola scriptura is irrelevant or doesn’t function very well practically in all cases isn’t the same as proving that it is wrong or a false doctrine, nor does it prove that all authority in faith and life should belong to the church or the pontiff in Rome. This is the crux of the debate about authority between Protestants and Catholics: either the Bible alone is supreme or the magisterium is. As Dr. Beckwith argues, once sola scriptura is jettisoned in favor of the pope, then whatever the church states as her doctrine is de facto orthodox and biblical.

Dr. Beckwith spends most of his argument on the material cause of the Reformation—the doctrine of justification by faith alone or sola fide. Once again, he begins with how the Protestant’s doctrine of justification is deficient, both historically and exegetically. Here we see how the material cause bears such heavy weight on the formal cause for support. One must first answer the question of authority, whether sola scriptura or the magisterium, before he or she can proceed any further in the debate. If sola scriptura is accepted, then the historical argument will carry less weight (N.B., I did not say “no” weight). But if the magisterium is supreme, then the historical argument becomes crucial in the debate.

Regarding the doctrine of justification, Beckwith returns to well-worn, and frankly superficial, arguments to the effect that the Protestant doctrine depends on philosophical nominalism and voluntarism (in the notion that God can declare a sinner righteous who is not actually inherently righteous). This is, in Beckwith’s view, a legal fiction, a mere forensic relationship—what he calls “methodological Protestantism” that always pertains to theory and never practice.

The Catholic view of justification, meanwhile, is held to be much broader and realistic, and one that involves progressive sanctification as part of justification. In this schema, the sinner freely cooperates with God’s unmerited, infused grace so as to produce real, radical transformation of life.

While Dr. Beckwith’s book makes for interesting reading, I don’t think his case will be persuasive to a Reformed Christian unless he or she is already sympathetic to Rome, radical pietism, and even mysticism. For the most part, he offers little by way of new arguments, and all the texts he references in regards to the doctrine of justification have already been adequately interpreted by Reformed theologians for over five centuries. Without any convincing arguments for why sola scriptura should be rejected, I remain unmoved. The Bible teaches that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, on account of Jesus Christ’s work alone.

Robert A. Lotzer is pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Abilene, Texas.

POINT OF CONTACT: BOOKS YOUR NEIGHBORS ARE READING The Peculiar Life of Sundays

by Stephen Miller Harvard University Press, 2008 310 pages (hardback), $27.95 Stephen Miller is described on the dust jacket of this curious book only as “the author of the bestselling book Conversation: A History of a Declining Art.” All we know about Mr. Miller, then, is that he is a student of decline. The book under review here is primarily a study of the decline of Sunday as a cultural phenomenon.

The book analyzes attitudes toward Sunday basically by distinguishing between Sunday as a holy day and as a holiday.

The focus of the book—about 75 percent—is on the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. The remaining part is about equally divided between Sunday in antiquity and Sunday in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Miller’s interest is clearly on England and America. (In the chapter “Sunday in EighteenthCentury England and Scotland” there is hardly any discussion of Scotland.) His method is largely literary, studying Sunday attitudes and practices through the lives and writings of various literary figures such as George Herbert, Samuel Johnson, John Ruskin, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. No clear rationale is offered for the figures chosen to illustrate attitudes toward Sunday. We are left with the impression that they are simply figures that Miller has read and found interesting. While extensive endnotes indicate wide scholarly reading, the book feels more random than thorough. At times, the book seems more descriptive than analytical. For example, Miller writes that Dr. Johnson was “a devout Anglican” and “regarded Sunday as the Lord’s Day, and he thought Christians should observe it as a Sabbath” (99). Yet Johnson “was not a Sabbatarian” (100).

In addition, Miller records that for “approximately three decades Johnson made a resolution to go to church on Sunday—and for the most part he did not keep it” (103). The contradictions of human life are not too surprising, and Miller explains that Johnson stayed up late Saturday nights and so could not get up early enough on Sundays for church. Still, Johnson in such circumstances seems something less than a devout Anglican.

The value of the book for most readers of Modern Reformation is twofold. First, it is an interesting collection of information, particularly cultural and literary, on Sunday. Second, it invites Christians to reflect on Sunday as both a holy day and as a holiday. Such reflection should be both historical and theological.

Historically, the twentieth century has seen both cultural and ecclesiastical decline in Sunday as both holy day and holiday. For secular Americans in the twenty-first century, Sunday may be a day of work or a day off work, but the only real distinguishing mark of the day is as a day of sports. American Christians seem increasingly little different from their secular counterparts.

Whereas in the early twentieth century almost all American Protestants were quite Sabbatarian in theology and practice, today most have become anti-Sabbatarian. Many churches have abandoned their Sunday evening service, and many now offer worship services in the place of the Sunday service on other days of the week.

Many Christians see nothing objectionable to working on Sunday, especially as a worship service is usually available at another time. And even most conservative Protestants seem to feel that one worship service a week is enough. Many are involved in other church activities, to be sure, and usually seem to believe that such activities are more important and spiritually profitable than formal (or most likely informal) worship services.

Miller encapsulates how dramatically this historical change has occurred in the most conservatively Protestant part of the United States: Stock-car racing, which holds its major races on Sunday, is popular….Many of the drivers, crews, and spectators are descended from Sabbatarian households, but they do not think they are profaning the Sabbath by racing on Sunday. NASCAR advertises itself as a Christian sport suitable for the whole family. Its leading figures often talk about their religious faith, and there are pit-stop church services on Sunday for the crews. (66) The impact of these changes on the life of the church can be historically appraised. The church as an institution will certainly be less central in the life of Christians and of communities. The time and energies of Christians will increasingly be spent elsewhere. The loss of Sunday as a Christian Sabbath, I believe, has already manifested itself in a decline of biblical knowledge, discipline, and piety. As Christians, we need time for God. Theological reflection is even more important for contemporary Christians. Our piety and practice must be informed by the Bible, not tradition. The idea of the Sabbath is God’s and is grounded in creation, not only in the Mosaic covenant. God blessed and sanctified the seventh day (Gen. 2:3). The sabbatical principle of creation has been amplified and changed in the course of the history of redemption so that today this principle is maintained by recognizing Sunday, the day of the Lord’s resurrection, as the Christian Sabbath. For a clear, positive, biblical presentation of this view (and helpful answers to its detractors), see Joseph Pipa, The Lord’s Day. Miller’s book is well written, interesting, and worth reading if you have time. But read Pipa first. The latter’s book is also well written, interesting, and worth reading—but it is also spiritually profitable.

W. Robert Godfrey is president and professor of church history at Westminster Seminary California (Escondido).

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FINAL THOUGHTS f r o m

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Global Souls Come Home

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nonymous voyeurs of identities we might wish to assume, bodies that we imag-

they were in control, and all that Moses’ derelict lieuine we could have and goods we imagine that we can afford, we long to be trans- tenant Aaron could say for himself was, “You know ported—even for a moment—from our banal but real existence to a manufactured how the people are” (v.

22). Evidently, given Moses’ pseudo-reality. The amazing thing is that reality and simulaabsence, Aaron’s acquiescence was calculated to keep them tion blur. from more wide-scale mutiny. The natives were getting restIn the world of business, James Gilmore has described our less. Idolatry always involves a cluster of vices, but impatience era as the “experience economy.” The agrarian economy inis prominent among them. volved an exchange of goods, such as produce, followed by the Moses was a servant; Jesus is God’s Son: “He is the image industrial economy and then the service economy. In the exof the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). God was saving his peoperience economy, people actually purchase experiences. They ple for the authentic incarnation—something far greater, far do not buy products such as diet pills and programs, but the exmore “meaningful,” than the worship experience they perience of “a new you.” Of course, this isn’t all bad. Like any could manufacture. But they would not wait. In the absence economy, this one has its pluses and minuses. However, like of Moses the mediator, the people barricaded themselves from the real God and his terrifying presence.

Gilmore (a Modern Reformation subscriber!), I think that it’s alWe find ourselves in a somewhat analogous situation. ways dangerous when the church adopts any economic phiWe don’t like mediators much and don’t see the need for losophy from the sphere of everyday business. The church has them. After all, we have a direct, immediate, and highly perits own economics, Gilmore insists: a free gospel, freely dissonal relationship with God. However, it’s the job of the seminated, with offerings covering the costs so that the church church in its official capacity to help people see their need does not have to become dependent on market forces for its revfor a mediator, to recognize the danger of approaching a holy enue stream. We have ample examples from churches across God like a consumer meanders through the food court of spirthe spectrum of capitulating to market pressures in past itual experiences. In this time between Christ’s two advents, economies, so it is not surprising that in the experience econwe become restless, bored, and willing to stage our own simomy there could be such a thing as the “worship experience.” ulations of a glorious King and his kingdom.

There is now a Starbucks practically on every corner, but eventually it will not provide the right experience; another We’re not masters who have already arrived or snacking generation will come along that will only remember the chain tourists who have no destination except to flit from booth as a cliché of the early twenty-first century. The same can to booth at the carnival of life experiences. Rather, we are be said of the church that ties its wagon to pop culture. Genpilgrims on the way to the feast. Rather than settling for a erally speaking, the values of convenience, efficiency, instant Happy Meal that we can order right now, we should grow gratification, and autonomous anonymity that create the whirl up and enjoy a feast that God has prepared for us on his terms. in our culture are utterly destructive of the lifelong growth Here we actually taste and see that the Lord is good—not only in Christ to which Scripture calls us and our neighbors. in his providence but in the miracle of salvation.

Do we come to church as sovereign consumers seeking a When we treat worship like a drive-through window ex“worship experience,” hoping to express our existing identiperience, we allow the values of our busy work week to crowd ty, authenticity, and choices rather than being richly fed at God’s out the weekly anticipation of the age to come. The Christable, from his menu through his servers? If we can control tian Sabbath slows us down to hear and receive the gifts brought this experience more fully by customizing it to our unique prefto us from heaven. It’s still not the Marriage Supper of the erences and aspirations, it is not surprising that even some evanLamb, but it is a foretaste, where the age to come penetrates gelical leaders herald the advent of the Internet “church.” The this passing evil age. Only in this way do we have the authentic God-experience is only a mouse-click away. experience of being reconciled to God in Christ, his sinless meReferring to the public service as a “worship experience” diator. And only through the objective means of grace (preachmakes us the object rather than God. Like cruises and tours, ing and Sacrament) does “authentic” mean the real thing and these “experiences” are manufactured, packaged, and sold. not just a simulation projected by our own felt needs.

At Mount Sinai, the people were terrified by the authentic presence of God in his Word, so they manufactured an alMichael Horton is editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation. ternate “worship experience” (Exod. 19:18–21; 32:6). Now 4 4 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G