Beyond-Nostalgia-September-October-2008

MERE CHRISTIANITY ❘ ARE WE GETTING SIDETRACKED? ❘ RECOGNIZING PERSECUTION

MODERN REFORMATION

Beyond Nostalgia: The Risk of Orthodoxy

VOLUME

17, NUMBER 5, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008, $6.00

MODERN REFORMATION 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 William Edgar, Borrowed Capital Starr Meade, Big Thoughts for Little Minds MR Editors, Required Reading Diana Frazier, Reviews Michael Horton, Final Thoughts Staff | Editors Ann Henderson Hart, Staff Writer Alyson S. Platt, Copy Editor Lori A. Cook, Layout and Design Ben Conarroe, Proofreader Contributing Scholars Peter D. Anders James Bachman S. M. Baugh Gerald Bray Jerry Bridges D. A. Carson Bryan Chapell R. Scott Clark Marva Dawn Mark Dever J. Ligon Duncan Adam S. Francisco W. Robert Godfrey T. David Gordon Donald A. Hagner John Hannah Gillis Harp D. G. Hart Paul Helm Hywel R. Jones Ken Jones Peter Jones Richard Lints Korey Maas Keith Mathison Donald G. Matzat John Muether John Nunes Craig Parton John Piper Kim Riddlebarger Rick Ritchie Rod Rosenbladt Philip G. Ryken R. C. Sproul A. Craig Troxel Carl Trueman David VanDrunen Gene E. Veith William Willimon Todd Wilken Paul F. M. Zahl Modern Reformation © 2008 All rights reserved.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS september/october

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Beyond Nostalgia: The Risk of Orthodoxy 14 Whose Orthodoxy?

Beyond any nostalgic feelings we have about church tradition, do we know how to define right doctrine? Are there basic tenets all Christians can hold to and are they still important for us today?

by Michael Horton Plus: How to Know When the Line Is Crossed

21 Distractions from Orthodoxy If established creeds and confessions have already defined orthodoxy, why do we worry about trying to answer questions we find outside these clear boundaries?

by T. David Gordon Plus: Beyond Culture Wars

30 Can Orthodoxy Be Missional?

Can orthodoxy really be missional in the twenty-first century and, if so, why should it be preferred over thriving otherthan-orthodox beliefs and schemes?

by John Bombaro Plus: Taking History Seriously in an Ahistorical Age

37 Clashing Narratives In a “Christian nation,” do evangelicals risk persecution by affirming Christian orthodoxy? The author examines the reality of serving Christ in our culture.

by Peter D. Anders Plus: Optimism, Pessimism, and Hope

12 In Season Meditations on reading, preaching, and using Scripture.

by W. H. Smith

COVER COMPOSITE BY LORI COOK

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In This Issue page 2 | Letters page 3 | Between the Times page 4 Borrowed Capital page 8 | Big Thoughts for Little Minds page 10 Interview page 42 | Required Reading page 45 | Reviews page 46 | Final Thoughts page 56

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IN THIS ISSUE

A Hollow Confession

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rthodoxy has fallen out of favor among evangelicals. Among a growing number of younger evangelicals, the fight for orthodoxy is seen as a power play that attempts to overthrow community and diversity with certainty and authoritarianism. Among those of a different generation and ethos, orthodoxy is seen as a sort of supernatural baking powder that sucks all the Spiritfilled life out of the church and is to be abandoned so that we can just love Jesus.

Underlying both concerns is a significant challenge to a Protestant point of view that considers how we act to be not only more important than what we believe, but also more fundamentally true than statements of belief. Beliefs aren’t unimportant, of course, but they are situated differently in this scenario.

On the confessing evangelical side of the fence, orthodoxy has also gotten a raw deal. Orthodoxy has been neutered by nostalgia: the good ole’ days (right or wrong) are the new vantage point from which beliefs and actions are judged.

At the same time we’re hankering for a golden age, we’re also busy expanding the boundaries of the Faith’s essence to include all those (primarily cultural) points of view we happen to hold. Is it any wonder confessional churches are becoming less confessional and more culturally situated?

What’s a confessing evangelical to do? Reformed theologian and Editor-inChief Michael Horton goes to the heart of the matter by defining orthodoxy: both the boundaries of belief and the right to establish those boundaries to identify communities and traditions within larger movements of faith. But before you start shaking your head in agreement too hard, be sure to follow up with Presbyterian pastor and history professor T. David Gordon, who warns confessional Reformed folks especially about certain distractions from orthodoxy that have become established in our circles. These are sacred cows we would do well to smash because they have tamed orthodoxy, and Lutheran pastor John Bombaro argues that orthodoxy—by its very nature—is missional and bridges historical and social divides that always seem to be in danger of dividing the church. Peter Anders (Reformed, evangelical, and loving it) finishes up the issue by reevaluating the risk factor of orthodoxy for those who have become blind or apathetic collaborators with the dominant culture, and the real risk of persecution for those who choose to be faithful to Christian orthodoxy. Also in this issue, we’re proud to feature a new interview with Methodist bishop (and former Duke University chaplain) Will Willimon, a frequent guest on the White Horse Inn and a sort of lonely voice in the wilderness warning evangelicals of the danger to which their present course might lead.

Can’t get enough Modern Reformation? Make sure you get through this one quickly because an extra issue of the magazine is coming your way in a few short weeks. Just in time for the elections, a special seventh issue examining the Lutheran and Reformed doctrine of the two kingdoms and its implications on our civil society.

This extra issue is a gift to you for your support of the mission and work of the magazine. Let us know how it challenges and stimulates your own election year thinking by dropping us a line at letters@modernreformation.org.

NEXT ISSUES October/November 2008 Special Political Issue Eric Landry November/December 2008 Executive Editor Evangelicalism’s Winter?

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LETTERS your

Correction In the May/June 2008 issue of “The New Spiritualities,” footnote 23 on page 28 of the article, “The New Spirituality: Dismantling and Recon-structing Reality” by Peter Jones, mistakenly referred to Marcia Montenegro as a “witch.” The footnote should have read, “See the statements about witchcraft by Marcia Montenegro.” Marcia Montenegro was formerly a professional astrologer who had clients who were witches, but she was not and is not a witch. Her organization, Christian Answers for the New Age, reaches those in the occult and New Age and educates Christians on these topics.

Additionally, the website given is an old one. The correct website is www.christiananswersforthenewage.or g. Our sincere apologies to Ms. Montenegro for this error.

After reading about Dawkins et al. and the New Atheism, I purchased and read Defending Your Faith by R. C. Sproul. In all I was reminded of my own experience. I was raised in a slightly better than nominal Christian home. When I was eighteen, my father was diagnosed with cancer and died shortly thereafter. I was “angry at God” for six months before and after.

The point of all this is to relate what woke me up. While I was in the U.S. Army’s version of Basic Training, a Fort Knox area Methodist church held an outreach. After hearing the gospel message and invitation to speak with a counselor, I decided to answer the call and give them an earful. I told the man that he served an unjust God who takes husbands away from homemaker wives, leaving small children with no father and families with no income. I told him I was “angry at God.” What he said I will never forget. After a long pause (no doubt he was praying) he said, “Are you sure that you are not just using being angry at God as an excuse for doing what you want to

do?” And isn’t that what it all boils down to? We as humans will do whatever it takes, whether it be rationalization, excuse making, or— as with Dawkins and his crew— outright denial, in order to avoid accountability to God. Yet, at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Eric J Farley Via e-mail

Thank you for a great issue on Gnosticism. I believe that if Reformed churches are to truly address this cult of the “personal relationship,” they must go back not only to the Reformation doctrines of justification and salvation but also to Reformational worship particularly as it came out of Geneva. What so often passes for “Reformed” these days is the very thing that Calvin, Knox, and others fought so hard to eliminate—false worship. One would do well to read War Against the Idols

by Carlos Eire to understand the importance and emphasis on worship in the Reformation. For a clear understanding of Calvin’s view of how justification and worship relate and work together, one should also read Calvin’s On the Necessity of Reforming the Church.

If worship focuses on the pleasure of the self, such as a baptized rock/ classical concert, then we will grow Gnostics. The cult of the personal relationship is grown in the greenhouse of worship as religious entertainment. The concert may vary from classical to contemporary, but it is still focused on the self. But if we truly recapture a focus on God-centered worship, we will grow Christians.

In On the Necessity of Reforming the Church, Calvin says that if one will

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not worship God as God has commanded, then on what basis do we have to expect that person truly to do anything else God commands?

In other words, one is quite capable of giving an assent to Reformed theology, while in reality he lives for the personal relationship.

Those who would escape Gnostic worship should read John Murray’s “Minority Report” to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church’s study on worship (http://www.opc.org/GA/song. html#Minority). I contend that the door to Gnostic worship turns on the hinges of the redefinition of “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” in Ephesians 5:17–21.

In Genesis 4, Cain worshipped the true God sacrificially, but he did it his way. When we worship the true God our way, we are no better.

Fred Sloan Powhatan, Virginia

Modern Reformation Letters to the Editor 1725 Bear Valley Parkway Escondido CA 92027 760.741.1045 fax Letters@modernreformation.org Letters under 200 words are more likely to be printed than longer letters. Letters may be edited for content and length.

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Marriage in California: Same Sex, Different Meaning

The California Supreme Court redefined marriage to include samesex couples in a broadly worded 4–3 decision that would invalidate almost any law that discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation. In 2000, California voters ratified the historic understanding of marriage as a union between man and woman by adopting the California Defense of Marriage Act with a 61.4 percent majority.

The court declared that Californians have a fundamental right to marry someone of the same sex and that same-sex couples have the right “to have their official family relationship accorded the same dignity, respect, and stature as that accorded to all other officially recognized family relationships.”

Associate Justice Marvin Baxter stated in his dissent, “Nothing in our Constitution, express or implicit, compels the majority’s startling conclusion that the age-old understanding of marriage—an understanding recently confirmed by an initiative law—is no longer valid.”

Baxter said that revisions, if desired, should be handled democratically rather than via judicial fiat.

Californians inclined to decide the matter democratically will have an opportunity to do so in November when a constitutional amendment will be voted on. The California Marriage Protection Act would amend the California constitution to provide expressly that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid

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or recognized in California.”

A report on National Public Radio showed that same-sex marriage rights can be in conflict with the freedom to exercise religious beliefs. A lesbian couple in New Jersey wanted to celebrate their civil union in a Methodist pavilion. The organization that operates the building offered them the use of the boardwalk or any other space not used for religious purposes. The lesbian couple filed a complaint with New Jersey’s Division of Civil Rights, arguing that the Methodists unlawfully discriminated against them based on sexual orientation. They won and the state revoked the organization’s tax exemption for the pavilion area.

As states have legalized same-sex partnerships, the rights of gay couples have consistently trumped the rights of religious groups, according to National Public Radio.

Marc Stern, general counsel for the

American Jewish Congress, told NPR that this does not mean that a pastor can be sued for preaching against same-sex marriage. But, he says, that may be just about the only religious activity that will be protected.

Yeshiva University was ordered to allow same-sex couples in its married dormitory. A Lutheran school was sued for expelling two allegedly lesbian students. Catholic Charities abandoned its adoption service in Massachusetts after it was told it had to place children with same-sex couples. A California doctor who refused to provide IVF services to a lesbian woman is expected to lose his case before the California Supreme Court.

And then there’s the case of a wedding photographer in Albuquerque, New Mexico. On January 28, the New Mexico Human Rights Commission heard the case of Vanessa Willock v. Elane Photogra-phy.

Notable Quotables “Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment.”

—Mark Morford, columnist, San Francisco Chronicle.

“And then this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and then I thought, is that karma? When you’re not nice that the bad things happen to you?”

—Actress Sharon Stone blaming a devastating Chinese earthquake on the government’s treatment of Tibet.

“It’s not my role to set off bombs—that’s ridiculous. I have a weapon.

It’s to write. It’s to speak out. That’s my jihad. You can do many things with words. Writing is also a bomb.”

—Female jihadist Malika El Aroud, who posts incendiary messages on the Internet.

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Willock had requested that the company shoot her wedding and owner Elaine Huguenin replied via email: “We do not photograph samesex weddings. But thanks for checking out our site! Have a great day!”

Co-owner Jonathan Huguenin said that they made the decision when they formed the business. “We wanted to make sure that everything we photographed—everything we used our artistic ability for, everything we told a story for or conveyed a message of—would be in line with our values and our beliefs,” he told NPR. The Huguenins were found guilty of discrimination and ordered to pay Willock’s $6,600 attorney bill.

Episcopal Tension Level Reaches GAFCON5 At the end of May, a blushing couple arrived for their nuptial mass at the twelfth-century St. Bartholomew the Great Anglican Church in London.

Walking down the aisle to Mendelssohn’s wedding march, the bridal party gathered at the altar.

Based on the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the traditional service opened with the words, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God to join these men in a holy covenant of love and fidelity.”

That’s right. “These men.” The service was the first Anglican wedding of a same-sex couple. What’s more, both were Anglican priests. The couple exchanged $16,000 diamondencrusted wedding bands and served a seven-tier cake before their first dance together.

As the bishop of London ordered an inquiry into the ceremony, the wedding served as a reminder of the Anglican Communion’s division.

News of the wedding emerged at the same time as a summit of conservative Anglican bishops.

At the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), conservative leaders declared that they were

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taking matters into their own hands.

They decried the acceptance and promotion by the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada of what they called a false gospel. In a statement analyzing the problems in the Communion, the bishops said, “This false gospel undermines the authority of God’s Word written and the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the author of salvation from sin, death and judgement. Many of its proponents claim that all religions offer equal access to God and that Jesus is only a way, not the way, the truth and the life. It promotes a variety of sexual preferences and immoral behaviour as a universal human right. It claims God’s blessing for same-sex unions over against the biblical teaching on holy matrimony.”

In response to the current state of affairs, the bishops announced that they no longer see the archbishop of Canterbury as the one who decides who is Anglican or not. They also announced their intentions to form a province in North America.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams criticized the bishops’ move in his typically fetid fashion. “Any claim to be free to operate across provincial boundaries is fraught with difficulty,” he said in a statement. He urged them to “think very carefully.”

In the United States, dozens of parishes have left the Episcopal Church and placed themselves under the authority of African and South American bishops. Eleven parishes in northern Virginia have left and have been embroiled in a legal battle with the diocese over who owns the property. In late June, a Virginia judge ruled that the congregations have a constitutional right to keep their properties.

PC(USA): It’s Gay Clergy Or We Sue The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) voted for a $2 million war chest to sue congregations seeking to leave; ap-

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By the Numbers 300. The number of banners flown by United Methodist, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and other faith groups against “U.S.sponsored torture” as part of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture’s “Banners Across America” campaign.

5 percent. Americans who reported tithing 10 percent of their income, according to Barna.

36 percent. Californian voters who told the Los Angeles Times that they would not support an amendment to limit marriage to one man and one woman. Days later, a Field Poll claimed that 51 percent of voters would oppose the amendment.

150. The amount of megabytes of encrypted storage space that can be used to send documents from YouveBeenLeftBehind.com to friends and family in the case you’ve been raptured.

47 percent. Americans who consider gossip a sin. Fewer than half consider pornography (along with swearing, sex before marriage, and sexual thoughts about someone to whom you are not married) to be sinful. Only 35 percent consider not taking proper care of your body to be sinful, according to Ellison Research. $12.95. How much salvation is sold for at ReserveaSpotinHeaven.com.

20. The percentage point decline in the U.S. marriage rate from 1995 to 2005, according to The National Marriage Project. Some 10 percent of all couples live together outside the bonds of matrimony.

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proved a change to one of the church’s confessions that would remove mention of homosexuality; voted to rescind thirty years’ worth of church policy on the incompatibility of homosexual behavior and Christian life; and voted to remove language from the church’s constitution requiring ordained ministers, elders, and deacons to be chaste.

The last change must be ratified by a majority of the 2.2 millionmember denomination’s presbyteries. Similar efforts to change ordination rules in 1997 and 2001 failed, but if this passes, it will permit the ordination of non-celibate gay clergy.

Current rules require ordained ministers to live in “fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman or chastity in singleness.” That language would be removed under the new rules.

The proposed language would require candidates to “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.” A presbytery or church council could decide that a gay or lesbian person does or does not meet that standard.

At the same time the assembly voted to permit the ordination of homosexuals, it also voted to retain the church body’s definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman. A resolution advocating civil rights for same-sex couples, however, was overwhelmingly approved.

Battles over ordination of gay clergy have bitterly split the Louisville, Kentucky, based denomination, which is only half as large as it was in the 1960s.

“We know that we have lost at least another 50,000 [members] over the last 18 months because of

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congregations withdrawing” to the smaller, more conservative Evangelical Presbyterian Church, the Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, the outgoing stated clerk of the denomination, said in “Is There a Future for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)?” He blamed long-running controversies and congregations that are in a “maintenance” rather than “mission” mentality. He described mega-churches and evangelical and Pen-tecostal bodies as “far shallower theologically but far savvier technologically.”

After the document was released, the church announced it suffered its worst annual membership decline in decades in 2007. The denomination lost 57,572 members in 2007, a drop of 2.5 percent compared to 2006.

“I suspect churches will leave because of this General Assembly,” the Rev. Jerry Andrews told the Los Angeles Times. He presides over a large Presbyterian congregation in suburban Chicago and is co-moderator of the Presbyterian Coalition, a gathering of evangelical individuals, churches, and organizations within the national church. “They will cite the actions of this General Assembly as the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

The 39-year-old Rev. Bruce ReyesChow was elected the denomination’s moderator and the Rev. Gradye Parsons was named the general assembly’s stated clerk, which is the church’s chief ecclesiastical leader.

Trading Truth for Pluralism For most Christians, May 11 was Pentecost Sunday, the day the church marks the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the apostles. It’s often referred to as the birthday of the Holy Christian Church.

But for the nearly 400 congregations affiliated with the Center for Progressive Christianity, the day was celebrated as Pluralism Sunday, in which all world religions are honored for the good they do

their adherents.

“We do not claim that our religion is superior to all others. Instead, we celebrate that we can grow closer to God and grow deeper in compassion, and we can understand our own traditions better, through a deeper awareness of the world’s religions,” said Rev. Jim Burklo, the event’s national coordinator.

To celebrate Pluralism Sunday, Epiphany Community Unitarian Universalist Church of Fenton, Michigan, invited a Zen Buddhist with a Christian background to be the preacher that day “so that we can experience the similarities of our faith paths.” Anne Lerche, the pastor of Mizpah United Church of Christ in Hopkins, Minnesota, did a pulpit exchange with Bet Shalom Temple.

Barbara Currie, pastor of the Congregational Church in Deering, New Hampshire, preached about how Jesus is the church’s gate to God, yet there are other equally important and creditable gates to God for other people. Holy Redeemer Reformed Catholic Church in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, had a Muslim speaker present areas of agreement between historical Christianity and Islam and incorporated various prayers of different religious traditions into its Mass.

“Pluralism is the idea that my religion is good for me and your religion may turn out to be as good for you as mine is for me. So, pluralism is the concept that there are multiple loci of truth and salvation among the religions,” Burklo said. “There is a lot of confusion about this. Pluralism often gets confused with other things, like ‘relativism.’”

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News Briefs “Human Rights” or Religious Wrongs?

The first week of June, a British Columbia “human rights” tribunal—a bureaucratic commission empowered to award civil penalties—heard a complaint against Canadian conservative Mark Steyn and Maclean’s magazine.

The 2.8-million circulation newsweekly printed an excerpt from Steyn’s book, America Alone, which argued that demographic trends mean Western civilization will be forced to confront problems associated with radical Islam. A fringe Muslim group then filed a complaint with three of Canada’s 14 human rights commissions after the magazine refused to allow them to respond with complete editorial control and the cover of the magazine. Thanks to a 1990 Canadian Supreme Court decision, these commissions have the power to censure the press and force them to defend themselves in quasi-legal tribunals with no evidentiary rules or formal procedure. The decision from the B.C. tribunal is still pending.

The very same week Steyn and Maclean’s went on trial in B.C., the Alberta Human Rights Commission handed down a draconian decision against the Rev. Stephen Boissoin.

In 2002, the Alberta pastor wrote a fire-and-brimstone letter to a local newspaper condemning homosexuality. After a drawn-out tribunal, the Alberta Human Rights Com-mission fined him $7,000 and, per the language of the decision, the pastor is forbidden from making “disparaging” remarks about homo-sexuality—including repeating biblical injunctions, for the rest of his life. (Not that this was entirely unexpected, as the Saskatchewan Human Rights

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Commission had previously fined a newspaper for printing an advertisement containing Bible verses condemning homosexuality.) It would seem that both critical discussion of religion and religious expression itself are endangered in Canada.

Church Marketing Comes Up Barren A nondenominational church near Dallas ran a contest to give free fertility treatments to one lucky couple struggling to conceive a baby.

More than 100 couples applied to eleven7church, named for Hebrews 11:7–8, before the Father’s Day announcement.

The winning couple, who were not members of the congregation, will receive a medical evaluation and assisted reproduction services, a value as high as $40,000. In vitro fertilization, which normally creates embryos that are placed in the womb, is among the covered options.

“For our church, we’ve decided we want this service for folks,” Rev. Keith Luttrell told the Dallas Morning News. “We obviously don’t have a theological problem with it.”

The treatment offer produced much media coverage, but Luttrell says the church would have made the offer even if it received none.

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believe in God and more than half pray daily. Yet nearly threequarters of them say that many religions can lead to salvation, according to a survey of 36,000 people by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Over 70 percent of those in the Presbyterian Church in America and 78 percent of those in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod said many religions could lead to eternal life.

But there is some concern that the questions were poorly phrased.

It’s unknown whether respondents were saying that members of other Christian denominations would be saved or whether they were saying that members of other religions would be saved.

“I am being a bit picky here, but I suspect that if you asked a lot of people that Pew Forum question today, they would think of the great world religions,” Terry Mattingly, a syndicated columnist for Scripps Howard News Service, wrote on the GetReligion.org blog.

“But many Christians would think more narrowly than that. Not all.

Not many, perhaps. But some.

What is your religion? I’m a Baptist, a Nazarene, an Episcopalian, a Catholic. Can people outside of your religion be saved?

Of course. This is not the same thing, for many, as saying that they believe that salvation is found outside faith in Jesus Christ.”

The fact that one-fifth of atheists, who by definition do not believe in God, claim a belief in God also indicates problems with the survey.

Survey Says What?

More than 90 percent of Americans—including one in five people who say they are atheists—

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Life: The Movie?

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ew people would argue with the idea that life, at least life in the affluent sections

other objects to be the terminal point of our of the West, has become increasingly shaped by the entertainment industry— affection, is never really going to satisfy. To ascribe and not simply by the fact that we watch a lot of television. Entertainment has such importance to created things rather than to the also come to shape values in a profound and sometimes creator is sinful; more than that, it is also self-defeating. To disturbing way. The cosmetic surgery industry speaks adapt a line from the 1980s movie, Top Gun: sin writes checks eloquently of how the perfect, eternal youthfulness of the stars its body cannot cash. It promises satisfaction through has become the aspiration of many of the general populace, enjoyment; but all it gives is a temporary high that, when it and the way in which sexual mores have been refashioned by wears off, must be satisfied by a further hit, another synthetic the drip-drip-drip from the TV screen of patterns of behavior is buzz produced by a creaturely object rather than the Creator. quite striking. Will and Grace, for example, did not just reflect Seen in this light, the obsession of the affluent West with the fact that homosexuality is now socially acceptable; for a entertainment in all its forms takes on a significance far generation of young people it was no doubt formative in the beyond the instilling of trivial values and obsession with very way they think about such things. superficial aesthetics. It starts to look more like a rather So, life is increasingly like a movie. Well, yes—and no. desperate attempt to find happiness, enjoyment, and From a Christian perspective, there’s more to it than that. satisfaction in more and more dramatic ways, all of which The popularity of entertainment as evidenced by the vast are ultimately doomed to failure. Of course, not that the amounts of money it now involves indicates a deeper failure is constant or immediately apparent. Like the junkie malaise than mere trivial superficiality. Yes, it is rather silly who shoots up in the morning, the high is real. There is no when radio stations have to have counseling help-lines to question about that. But the problem is that the high is assist people who are thrust into deep depression by the only temporary and serves in the long run as something elimination of a favorite sports team from the cup. It is that exacerbates the craving rather than satisfying it. certainly a sign that entertainment has come to hold a In addition to this, there is a second problem. To put central place in human self-understanding; but it also something created in the place of God, to ascribe to any indicates the vacuous hole that exists at the center of creature that power that can only be legitimately ascribed to human life in a fallen world.

God, is to commit idolatry; and the problem of idolatry is not It was Augustine who saw the perfection of human simply that it involves false worship; it is also transformative beings in the love of God. God, as an infinite being, could of the idolater. Psalm 115 is very clear on this: idols have fully satisfy the restless longings of the human soul; and, eyes, ears, mouths, and so on, but they do not see, hear, or as human beings came to love God, they would gradually speak. In other words, they look like the real thing, but they come to enjoy him in a perfect manner. This note is picked are actually impotent fakes who can do nothing. Worse still up by Protestantism in Question One of the Westminster is the impact they have on idolaters: those who make them, Shorter Catechism: What is the chief end of man? Man’s we are told, will be like them. In other words, idolatry chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. In short, dehumanizes the idolater, making him or her as impotent the craving that drives much of our appetite for and absurd as the thing they worship. entertainment can only be satisfied by God. To take this second problem first: the idolatry of Yet in the Fall, while the basic drive to find fulfillment entertainment inevitably blunts our moral senses. and completion in love remained the same, it ceased to be Priorities become totally skewed. The trivial becomes outwardly directed toward God and came to be inwardly crucial while the important is ignored. Why is it that most directed toward self, and to all those creaturely things that of us care more about the fortunes of the local team—be it fallen humanity in its moral blindness considered to be football, rugby, hockey, or whatever—than we do about adequate to the task. the starving in Africa, the homeless on the streets, or the If Augustine is right, then seeking such ultimate problems caused by pollution? It is not that we enjoyment in any other object, or allowing our enjoyment of consciously and wickedly ignore problems of which we are

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A society obsessed with entertainment is like that.

Short-term highs that con us increasingly into thinking everything is going okay; values rearranged by idolatry that trick us into believing that beauty or wealth or even the success of the local team will allow us to die happy; but a long-term price to pay in terms of the real problem—our failure to find rest and enjoyment in the one place where these things can really be found (in fact we are designed to find them): God himself. Only as we come to make God the object of our love, only as we seek to find our true humanity in loving him, will we find our moral senses become increasingly sensitive to what is right and wrong—in our own lives and in the world around us—and only then will our lives be built on solid capital rather than on a wing and prayer. Only then we will find that, when our debt is finally called in, we have a place to shelter from the coming storm of judgment.

Only as we come to make God the object of our love… will we find our moral senses become sensitive to what is right and wrong. acutely aware; we are not acutely aware of them for the very reason that our moral senses have ceased to function because we are idolaters who worship dumb and blind idols. Why is it that we are more offended by someone making a disparaging remark about our favorite celebrity or sports hero than we are by the fact that our neighborhoods are full of couples having sex outside of marriage? It’s not because we wickedly rejoice in fornication; it’s because our moral senses have come to be blind and deaf and dumb as a result of idolatry. We worship the products of the entertainment industry and we slowly come to share its values, not by emulation but by the collapse in moral sensitivity that worship of anything but the true and living God brings in its wake. Idolatry destroys our critical faculties and then we come to reflect the values of that which we worship. Entertainment is not in itself bad: it’s good after a hard week at work to kick back in front of a decent movie, to watch a game—or even better—get out and play in one. But the West has in general gone way beyond that and this idolatry of entertainment shatters our moral compass.

But that is not the only problem with the idolatry of fun in which the West routinely indulges. Returning to the insight of Augustine, sin writes checks it cannot cash; it latches on to finite objects of love that can never satisfy in any lasting sense. Of course, the mind-numbing nature of idolatry means we are doomed to understand the difficulty less and less: the less satisfying the momentary highs from sin become, the more we want to transgress to see if we can find that lasting buzz from some creaturely god. Yet there is ultimately going to be a price to pay.

Reflect for a moment on the immediate past. It seems increasingly clear that the economic good times of the last decade or so are coming to an end. The reason? Well, in the mid-twentieth century, Keynesian thinkers argued that economic problems could be solved by printing money. Of course, that merely served to fuel inflation and the shortterm gains were always in long-term difficulties. Modern economic textbooks will tell you that post-Thatcher/Reagan moved us beyond Keynes, but there is nonetheless a kind of free market neo-Keynesianism at work today. We don’t print money; we simply lend it to people who have no hope of ever paying it back. Hence the sub-prime mortgage fiasco that threatens to pull entire national economies into the dirt. The money had no reality to back it and thus only ever had a very tenuous existence, incapable of sustaining the reality it apparently promised. Yes, the beneficiary of these mortgages gets a temporary boost to their finances and their living conditions; but in the long term they are consigned to a lifetime of debt, repossession of their house, and general ruination of life.

Carl R. Trueman (Ph.D., University of Aberdeen) is professor of historical theology and church history at Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia). He is the author of Wages of Spin: Critical Writings on Historic and Contemporary Evangelicalism (Christian Focus, 2007) and numerous other books and articles.

Speaking Of…

T

elevision: Here, in an endless diet of thrills, spills, and drama, we can live out our lives through the rapid-fire

series of images we see played out before our eyes. Your life may be boring and dull, but you can watch television and get some specious, voyeuristic thrill or satisfaction out of watching the lives of others. What else could explain the success of the various Big Brother franchises, where the boring lives of a bunch of freaky inadequates becomes compulsive viewing for millions? Is it simply the pharisaic buzz of "Lord, I thank you that I am not like other men" that we get when watching these weirdos strut their stuff; or does the act of watching them have a strangely comforting and soporific effect on our own senses? Probably a bit of both. And TV's ability to juxtapose the serious with the stupid, and to reduce even the most complex discussions to a few simplistic sound bites shows just how difficult it is to convey anything either subtle or truly challenging. When TV becomes more than an occasional distraction, it becomes a soporific medium designed to dull the senses of its willing victims.

—Carl Trueman S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 9

BIG THOUGHTS FOR LITTLE MINDS r e sou rces

fo r

homes

Back to the Source!

F

rom reporters announcing big news stories to historians recording true events,

Sunday school that day.

In most cases, they would people want to know they can trust their sources. Nowhere is it more important see no reason for bringing Bibles, since they will not to have a reliable source than in the area of Bible doctrine. This is true for children use them in class. Many Bible teachers for children just as it is for adults. Children can learn sound doctrine seem to think they have done their job if they accurately with a measure of understanding—understanding that explain what it says. In this case, though, the method will increase as they grow in their cognitive abilities and, matters as well as the message. If children usually just we pray, as they mature in the Christian faith. A child listen to a teacher tell about the Bible, and do not actually approaching adolescence, who has already received a firm see what it says, they learn to depend on people in doctrinal foundation, has the biblical grid he needs for authority to tell them what the Bible teaches. This sets evaluating the new ideas he is about to encounter and for them up to be misled by someone who seems to know, but making choices. As stated in earlier columns, we lay these who falsely represents, the Bible’s teaching. We need to foundations of doctrine by clearly defining biblical terms, train children to read and study the Bible, not simply take by illustrating abstract concepts with everyday things, by someone else’s word about what it contains. explaining the unfamiliar by means of the familiar, by Just as with riding a bicycle or solving math problems, keeping God and his plan of redemption central to Bible using the Bible is a skill that must be practiced. Teachers stories, and by tirelessly repeating what we have taught and parents must make opportunities for children not just before. In addition, because we want children to know to hear what the Bible says but to practice using it. One of where our doctrine comes from, we should regularly take the most basic places to begin is by teaching children the them back to the source. We must teach them how to use names of the Bible’s books in order and then reviewing their Bibles. them periodically so they will not forget them. Then we From almost its earliest beginnings, the New Testament must teach them how to find things in their Bibles and church faced teachers of false doctrine and preachers of provide them with opportunities for practice. It often “another gospel.” Whenever the New Testament writers comes as a surprise to parents to realize that their schooladdress this topic, they always call believers to hold to the aged children do not know how to look up a Bible verse. teaching they had received from Christ and from his Looking up something in the Bible is more complicated apostles. There is a standard. Any teaching claiming to be than simply turning to page 34 in some other book. from God must always be compared to the standard. The Children need to know that the first number in a Bible Reformers too, after centuries of Scripture being set aside reference refers to a chapter and the second number refers in favor of men’s traditions, called the church to return to to a verse. Then they need to know how to find chapter the source, to return to sola Scriptura, the Bible alone. numbers and verse numbers on the pages of their own Faithful teachers of Christian truth want to teach the Bibles (they do have their own Bibles, don’t they?). Then doctrine found in the Bible. We want our children to they need to have some idea of where in the Bible to find believe what the Bible says to be true. As they grow, the particular book they’re looking for. Believe it or not, though, our children will come into contact with unfaithful children still enjoy doing old-fashioned “sword drills” (so teachers, who either deliberately seek to undermine called because Ephesians 6 calls the Word of God “the biblical doctrine or who do not know it well enough to sword of the Spirit”). Children stand in a line across the present it accurately. How will children know when they room, their Bibles at their sides. They come to attention hear unsound doctrine? We do a great service for our when the teacher says, “Atten-shun!” They hold their children if we teach them how to use their Bibles and if we Bibles with one hand underneath, one hand on top of the develop in them habits of listening to new ideas with their cover when the teacher calls, “Draw swords.” The teacher Bibles open. announces the passage to find twice and then says, If you ask them, most American children heading off to “Charge!” Everyone begins looking. Once a child has church on Sunday morning will tell you that the Bible is found the verse and put her finger upon it, she takes a giant God’s Word and is very important—but very few of those step forward so the teacher sees. Once everyone has children will be carrying a Bible with them to use in found the verse, that child reads it out loud. (But the same

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classes) and that anyone who brings a Bible from home will get one at the end in word but also of class, I have had very few children show up without them. If a family does not have a Bible for a child to bring, give him an inexpensive one. Have extras on hand for the days when children forget or for that one incorrigible student who never brings one—and do not allow Bible use in your class to be optional. (Imagine a math teacher who permitted students to neither bring nor use their math books if they so chose!)

Children do not always want to do what they should do, but we require it of them anyway. Sometimes we encourage participation with little immediate rewards, such as stars for books read in the schoolroom or gummy worms for bringing Bibles to Sunday school. While children are young, we want to develop habits in them—habits, we hope, that they will carry with them on into the years when they do these things because they want to do them.

Take your children back to the source of the doctrine you teach them. Have them read it from the Bible for themselves. Train them to use God’s Word. Show them how to find things and give them many opportunities to practice Bible skills. In this way, you will communicate to them that God’s people treasure God’s book—not only in word but also in deed and in truth.

In this way, you will communicate to them that God’s people treasure God’s book—not only in deed and in truth. one or two children will always find it, you may say. In that event, after they have read one or two verses, they may continue participating, but the first child after them to find a verse will read it.)

Many well-intentioned Sunday school curricula include the day’s Bible passage in the student papers, the advantage being that the visiting child, who has no Bible to bring, or who does not know how to find things, can still read along. The message the regular attendees receive from this, though, is that there is no need to bring a Bible to class. In addition, no one receives practice in using Bibles. I urge teachers not to rely on the shortcuts provided by student papers, but to work student practice in Bible use into every class. As you prepare a lesson, think of other passages you know that relate to this lesson.

Your students will benefit both from the practice in looking things up in their Bibles and from seeing how well established in God’s Word is the particular point you are making in the day’s lesson.

Have the children use their Bibles as much as they possibly can at their age level. With children who read, tell the Bible story if you like, but also look it up and take turns reading it. Ask the children as many questions as you can based on what they read. This trains them to look in the text for answers. Ask questions about teaching or doctrinal passages, as well as about narrative passages; just keep your questions as concrete as possible. Do not allow the children to simply call out something that would correctly answer the question but is not in the text; insist that they find the specific answer to your question in the text they just read. Teach them to analyze a passage—or even just the day’s memory verse—with who, what, when, where, why, and how questions. Train them to watch for particular themes—for instance, what God is like or God’s covenant with his people—and highlight them in their Bibles when they find them.

Even beginning readers can find someone’s name in the opening verses to see what human character will be in this story or with help can sound out a short key verse from the lesson. Have them do this from the Bible itself, to develop in them the idea that Christians use their Bibles, because that is where we find what God wants us to know about him. You can even prepare preschool children for Bible study by making a point of always showing them the day’s story in your Bible before you begin to tell it.

I anticipate one objection from teachers: I’ve tried to get children to bring their Bibles and they just won’t bring them. I offer this very unspiritual advice: Bribery will work wonders. In every children’s class I’ve ever taught, once the children realize that I always bring a bag of gummy worms (or something comparable; stickers work in some

Starr Meade is author of Training Hearts, Teaching Minds: Family Devotions Based on the Shorter Catechism (P&R, 2000).

Speaking Of…

“P

reachers must not be boring. To a large extent the pastor and boredom are

synonymous concepts. Listeners often think that they have heard already what is being said in the pulpit.

They have long since known it themselves. The fault certainly does not lie with them alone. Against boredom the only defense is again being biblical. If a sermon is biblical, it will not be boring. Holy scripture is in fact so interesting and has so much that is new and exciting to tell us that listeners cannot even think about dropping off to sleep.”

—Karl Barth

S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 11

The Story and Glory of True Love

by W. H. Smith There is a book of the Bible from which ministers seldom preach. Though I have lived nearly sixty years, been a minister for thirty-five and married for almost forty, I am one of those who have avoided speaking on this book—the Song of Solomon. Then one day I chose to use it for a wedding ceremony.

The love of a man and woman in a fallen world is both pain and pleasure. We know that from experience. But we know it also because God tells us so in this ancient book. I want briefly to summarize what it has to say about this love.

First, this love involves the intense desire to possess and be possessed. Listen as the betrothed woman speaks to the man she loves: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine…. Draw me after you; let us run” (1:2–4). She tells him she longs for the time when she can show her affection in public without shame: “Oh that you were like a brother to me….If I found you outside I would kiss you, and none would despise me” (8:1, 2). She speaks to her friends about him: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine” (6:3). “I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me” (7:10). In the book the

woman has a dream and, as often happens in our dreams, one of her anxieties is expressed—the fear of losing the man she loves. In her dream he comes and knocks at her door, but she protests that it is late and that she is already in bed. Soon, however, she gets up and goes to the door but finds he is no longer there. Her heart is broken, and she tells her friends to find him and “tell him I am sick with love” (5:8). Listen to the man as he speaks to the woman who will be his bride: “You have captivated my heart, my sister, my bride; you have captivated my heart with one glance of your eyes….How beautiful is your love, my sister, my bride! How much better is your love than wine” (4:9, 10). “Turn your eyes away from me, for they overwhelm me” (6:5). It would not be too strong to say that these two are obsessed with each other. Nor can we avoid saying that this love is sexual, for the book reveals that it is intensely so; and none of it wrong—indeed is as good as good can be. In the innocence of the Garden of Eden, when God made Eve, Adam responded, “This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” (Gen. 2:23). He meant something like this: “Finally! Now this is what I was looking for and couldn’t find.” And God’s own words after giving the woman to the man confirm that Adam is right: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and hold fast In Season: Meditations on to his wife, and they shall become Reading, Preaching, and one flesh” (Gen. 2:24).

Second, this love includes a joyful Using Scripture delight in each other’s physical What role does the Bible play in your life? Is it a resource for attributes. The young man says of daily wisdom, a self-help manual extraordinaire, a doctrinal the one he loves: “Behold, you repository? Perhaps it doesn’t have a regular role in your life are beautiful my beloved, behold because these other uses (and abuses) of Scripture have you are beautiful” (1:15). Again, overtaken its true purpose. Throughout this year, we are “Behold, you are beautiful, my love, behold, you are beautiful” featuring “In Season: Meditations on reading, preaching, and (4:1). “You are altogether using Scripture.” Articles will be written by various people beautiful, my love; there is no (the laity, professional theologians, and ministers); and each flaw in you” (4:7). Now, don’t will be unique (a sermon, a hermeneutic, thoughts on get squeamish, but as he praises application, and even concerns about the misuse of Scripture). her beauty he mentions teeth, We want to continue the conversation on our website, so feel mouth, nose, cheeks, neck, eyes, free to e-mail us at letters@modernreformation.org with your lips, head, hair, feet, breasts, thoughts after reading each issue’s “In Season.” thighs, belly, and navel. Needless to say, he likes all of her! But she

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no less delights in his attractiveness. She says, “Behold, you are beautiful, my beloved, truly delightful!” (1:14).

Though he is but a country boy, she thinks of him as a king as handsome as Solomon himself. Her friends ask, “Why is your beloved more than another beloved?” She answers, “My beloved is radiant and ruddy, distinguished among ten thousand” (5:9, 10). She goes on to describe his head, hair, eyes, cheeks, lips, arms, legs, mouth, and his body in general. She concludes, “He is altogether desirable” (5:16).

What are we to make of these statements each makes about the other being superior in appearance to all others?

Is this the truth? No and yes. No, in the absolute sense that the woman is the most beautiful woman ever and he the most handsome man ever. But, yes, it is the truth in that what they see is exactly what they see and should see through the eyes of love. Perhaps you are thinking that this kind of thing “runs its course” and then goes away.

But this is not just a wave you ride till it crashes on the shore of reality. It is something you choose to do the rest of your life. The proverb tells the man who is no longer newly married: “Rejoice in the wife of your youth…be intoxicated always with her love” (Prov. 5:18, 19).

Appreciation and praise of the beloved’s physical attractiveness is not all there is to married love, but it is surely a part. No doubt it may be more exuberant and intense when love is young, but this part of love need never go away. Don’t let it.

Last, this love waits. The couple desires each other and praises each other’s attractiveness. They both even imagine what it will be like when at last they marry and fulfill their longings for one another. But they do not act on the desire and attraction until the marriage itself takes place. Three times the woman says something important to her friends, “I adjure you that you not stir up or waken love until it pleases” (2:7, 3:5, 8:4). The relationship is given time to develop and move forward. There is an aspect of their love not emphasized in this book, but which would not develop if they did not wait for the appropriate time to act on their desire. It is friendship. The woman calls her man not only her beloved, but “my friend” (8:4). Unlike desire, friendship takes time, and it is important to allow it the time it needs. All the desire in the world cannot take the place of friendship in marriage.

Marriage is more than satisfying one another’s desires, holy as it is to do so. Marriage means that two people genuinely care for and are committed to each other. They are friends who will walk through all of life together, who will experience the joys and sorrows of life, the good times and the bad, as inseparable companions. There will be a time when it will be appropriate for the Song of Solomon to express their love for one another unrestrained and with exuberance; but that time is not now, no matter how great their desire or how certain they are of their love.

That time will be when they are wed and officially acknowledged as husband and wife. Then they will be free to enjoy their love with the approval of God, family, and community. There was a time when the beauty and

innocence of this kind of love could be acknowledged even in a secular song. In 1966, The Beach Boys released an album that included the song, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?”

Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older, Then we wouldn’t have to wait so long; And wouldn’t it be nice to live together In the kind of world where we belong?

You know it’s gonna make it that much better, When we can say goodnight and stay together.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could wake up In the morning when the day is new, And, after having spent the day together, Hold each other close the whole night through?

Happy times together we’ve been spending, I wish that every kiss was never-ending.

Wouldn’t it be nice?

Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true.

Baby, then there wouldn’t be a single thing we couldn’t do.

We could be married, And then we’d be happy.

Wouldn’t it be nice?

I know it’s not great poetry, but wouldn’t it be nice indeed if the love that waits for marriage was more common?

How different this is from the cheap, demanding desire portrayed in so much movie and television comedy and drama where people squander and abuse the gift that should be experienced in the context of married love. How different is the love that allows the bride to say to her groom on the day of their wedding, “Set me as a seal upon your heart” (6:6) and know that he already has, because they have waited. This is the love that lasts. It is as strong as death. Many waters cannot quench it.

William H. Smith (M.Div., Reformed Theological Seminary, Jackson) is pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Louisville, Mississippi.

S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 13

B E Y O N D N O S TA L G I A : T H E R I S K O F O R T H O D O X Y

Whose Orthodoxy?

How to Define It and Why It’s So Important

by Michael Horton

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W H O S E

E

verywhere we turn today, “faith” has become an attitude in search of an object: you’ve got to believe in something. We hear a lot about “faith communities” as a genus of which particular religions are regarded as species; “faith perspectives,” even “faith-based” political initiatives. Prince Charles has intimated that upon his succession to Britain’s throne he plans to delete the definite article in his historic title, changing it from “Defender of the Faith” to “Defender of Faith.” French deconstruction philosopher, Jacques Derrida, argued that a general “messianic consciousness” was important for keeping alive hope in the future, but that the announcement of the arrival of any particular messiah provokes violence and dangerous finality. In surveys of American adults, we routinely encounter a positive view of “spirituality” and a somewhat negative view of “religion.”

Actually, there is nothing especially postmodern about this situation. Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant sharply contrasted a universal religion of morality and particular “ecclesiastical faiths,” and even argued that the latter is the cause of disunity and violence. To the extent that the Christian faith has been quarantined to the personal, subjective, and private life of individuals, it is simply another form of therapy and moral selfimprovement rather than a public announcement of the epochal acts of God in Jesus Christ in history.

In this setting, where “faith” is merely a matter of personal opinion and experience, “orthodoxy” loses its object. Or rather, the object shifts from God to the self. We’re no longer talking about truth and falsehood, the triune God and idols, but about the degree to which and the rigor with which we hold certain opinions. You have your “orthodoxy” and I have mine. Max Weber, a founder of sociology, predicted that the privatization of faith would lead to the relativization of religious claims until religion just finally died out.

Although this “secularization thesis” has proved true in Europe, it has not been so in the United States.

One reason why evangelicalism actually flourishes in this process of secularization is that it celebrates the inward, subjective, personal and private dimensions of religious experience over against the outward, formal, objective, public and corporate dimensions. When secularization leads the population in herd-like fashion to confess that religion is “a very personal matter,” they reflect the influence of popular pietism and revivalism in our culture as much as the legacy of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. After all, doesn’t the call for “deeds” over “creeds” reflect Kant’s contrast between a religion of pure morality and ecclesiastical faiths? When Emergent church leader Brian McLaren says his hope is not necessarily that adherents of other religions may become adherents of the Christian faith, but that they will become better Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist followers of Jesus, he is simply repeating a familiar modern refrain. Many of us were reared on evangelistic appeals that distinguished sharply between a personal relationship with Jesus and joining a church. We live in the land of “no creed but Christ,” as if

O R T H O D O X Y ?

specifying what we mean by “Christ” were itself a violation of the intimacy of the personal relationship.

In Scripture, however, there is no such contrast. The New Testament uses faith (pistis) to refer both to the faith that is believed (fides quae creditur) and the personal act of faith (fides qua creditur). The former, often indicated by the definite article (the faith), is evident in many passages (1 Cor. 16:13; 2 Cor. 13:5; Eph. 4:5, 13; Col. 1:23; 1 Tim. 4:1; 6:12; 2 Tim. 3:8, 4:7; and Jude 1:3). Most often, however, the faith spoken of is the personal act of believing the gospel. The content of the faith is the gospel and the object of our faith is Jesus Christ as he comes to us in the gospel (Mark 1:15; John 3:15–17, 8:24, 11:27, 12:36, 14:1, 17:21, 20:31; Acts 15:7, 9, 16:31, 26:28; Rom. 3:22, 25, 28, 3:30, 4:5, 11, 16, 24, 5:1, 6:8, 9:30, 10:6, 9, 14; 1 Cor. 1:21, 2:5; Gal. 2:16, 20, 3:22, 24; Eph. 1:19, 2:8, 3:17, 6:16; 1 Thess.

3:7, 4:14, 5:8; 1 Tim. 2:15; 2 Tim 3:15; Heb. 11:1, 3, 6, 8, 12:2; James 1:3, 2:14; 1 Pet. 1:5, 7, 9, 21; 1 John 3:23, 5:4, 10; and Jude 1:5). From this saving faith in Christ as he is given in the promise of the gospel radiates our faith in God and his promises more generally.

In this understanding, orthodoxy is not only a subjective conviction (though it involves this element); it is an extro-spective (i.e., outward-looking) claim about a state of affairs that happens to be true whether we believe it or not. Orthodoxy is not defined by the intensity with which one holds certain convictions or by the rigor with which one conserves traditional views.

Christian orthodoxy has been articulated and defended as often by people of a liberal temperament as heterodoxy and heresy have been promulgated by narrow-minded sectarians.

From the time of the apostles, Christians—especially pastors—have been called to “guard the deposit that was entrusted to [them]” (1 Tim. 6:20) and to “follow the pattern of sound words” (2 Tim. 1:13). In fact, New Testament scholars recognize various fragments in Paul’s epistles of creedal formulas that were already in use, said, and sung in the apostolic church. Against the Gnostics, the second-century church father Irenaeus spoke of the “rule of faith,” an incipient creed, and in the fourth century the Nicene Creed became the touchstone of Christian orthodoxy.

It is not so much the concept of orthodoxy itself as the relentless assault on the particulars of Christian orthodoxy—the Nicene faith—that first shaped our contemporary culture’s antipathy. A new “orthodoxy” of naturalism, moralism, and relativism became more rigidly enforced in modernity than in any era of “Christendom.”

Mere Christianity hy can’t we just be “mere Christians”? One of the truly remarkable things about evangelicalism is its enormous success in drawing together Christians from a variety of traditions for common witness to Christ and fellowship. I did not become a Christian when I became Reformed; in fact, I credit my nurture in an Arminian Baptist background with

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networks often replace the distinctive faith and practice of churches. Especially given such thing as a Reformed faith, but only a Christian the pietistic and revivalist heritage of the movement, it faith to which our Reformed confessions bear witness. seems increasingly difficult to participate in the evangelical introducing me to the Bible and many of the central truths coalition unless one is willing to keep his or her Reformed I still hold today. My pastors, parents, and family friends or Lutheran slip from showing. To the extent that a would not have recognized any formal adherence to a Presbyterian church thinks of itself as evangelical more creed, but they held the articles of the Apostles’ Creed with than Reformed, it sounds, looks, and acts more like a nongreater commitment than many professing Christians who Reformed church. All cats become grey, as a generic set of do, including ministers in denominations who swear lowest-common-denominators rather than rich confesbefore God to defend and teach its truths. It was through sional commitments define the shape of our doctrine and evangelicalism’s untidy yet intuitive coalescence around church life.

Christ’s person and work that I first became aware of At the other end, partly in reaction to this Reformed theology and bumped into other evangelicals phenomenon, many confessional Protestants are ready to who held it. Also in evangelicalism I became familiar with opt out of “mere Christianity.” True Christianity is really God’s work in other parts of the world, not only through found only in the Lutheran confession, some assume. In returning missionaries but through the parachurch my own circles, we commonly refer to the Reformed faith. ministries that attracted people from diverse cultures and But we were baptized into Christ, not into Calvin. There backgrounds. In this environment, I not only became is no such thing as a Reformed faith, but only a Christian frustrated with the movement’s captivities to American faith to which our Reformed confessions bear witness. I culture but encountered fellow Christians who agreed. for one believe that these confessions bear the clearest and Ironically, then, evangelicalism is perhaps the most soundest witness to our common faith, but it is the latter ecumenical form of Christianity in the world today, as it has that takes precedence. been ever since the modern missionary movement. For this It was this conviction that motivated C. S. Lewis’s Mere reason, Reformed leaders from Bishop J. C. Ryle to J. I. Christianity. Lewis imagined that the Christian family is Packer (Anglican), Charles Hodge to R. C. Sproul like a great house with many rooms, where inhabitants (Presbyterian), and John Owen to D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones sometimes mingle in the hallway. The hallway is “mere (Congregationalist) could speak of an “evangelical Christianity.” Lewis introduces his remarkable book by Christianity” that is simply true Christianity—mere clarifying this point: Christianity. They could go on to defend the particulars of Reformed theology that distinguish it from other traditions, I hope no reader will suppose that ‘mere’ Christianity but they knew they had more in common with a Baptist is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds such as Charles Spurgeon and even a Wesleyan such as, well, [confessions] of the existing communions—as if a John Wesley, than with those in their own communion who man could adopt it in preference to Congregadeparted from essentials of the Christian faith. tionalism or Greek Orthodoxy or anything else. It is At the same time, these Reformed leaders actually lived more like a hall out of which doors open into several in their “own rooms” (as C. S. Lewis describes it): not only rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall the larger common area of Reformed faith and practice but have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, in the particular spaces of Anglican, Presbyterian, and not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and Congregationalist churches. As difficult as it is to find the meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from proper balance here, it is crucial in my view that we which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. recover their example at a time when there is increasing For that purpose the worst of the rooms (whichever polarization and evangelicalism itself seems to be losing its that may be) is, I think, preferable.1 focus on Christ and therefore the intensity of its consensus.

So while the danger on more confessional sides is to ignore Evangelicalism, especially today, has become in many C. S. Lewis’s invitation to “mere Christianity,” the opposite ways a tradition in its own right that nevertheless refuses danger is toward a shallowness that loiters in the hallway to acknowledge itself as such. Prior to the 1950s, and never lives in any room. evangelicalism was mostly a loose coalition of people who There are many reasons why we should not give up the banded together in defense of the gospel, but who actually hallway. First, it gives us a place to stand—together. There is “lived” in their particular churches. They lived and moved a time to articulate our distinctive formulations of and had their being in a particular confession that (ideally, Christian teaching and practice, and there is a time to join at least) shaped their faith and practice over many years. brothers and sisters in the hallway to meet and greet Since the neo-evangelical movement, however, a constelstrangers to God’s promises as most of us once were lation of parachurch institutions has arisen whose

We were baptized into Christ, not Calvin. There is no

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ourselves. Even on these points such strangers will be likely to hear different accents, but the focus is on the most evident, explicit, and central emphases of the New Testament. Even if the stranger does not adopt our room, we are glad enough that they have taken up residence in the house.

Second, it gives us a place to listen to one another. If the tendency of evangelicalism is to ignore the treasures in the various rooms by supposing that the hallway is the house, my own tendency is to ignore the hallway where my brothers and sisters mingle and enrich my own understanding of the faith we share in common. At seminal points my own growth in appreciation for Christianity generally, as well as Reformed convictions, has been spurred on by lively interaction with believers from other traditions. In many cases, I have not only become more aware of where our differences lie but of where my own caricatures or half-truths about other views lie. In the process, I am often amazed by areas of agreement I never knew existed because we use different vocabularies. Each tradition has a tendency to ride hobby-horses that obscure other important truths, and by engaging with other Christians we often find ourselves recovering emphases that were latent in our tradition but that we have ignored because we were content to talk to ourselves. The “one holy, catholic and apostolic church” is a body, with ears as well as mouths. Mutual edification and correction can occur not only formally, within our own churches, but informally through interaction. Listening in the hallway not only includes other Christians but the strangers who do not yet embrace our common faith. If we stay holed up in our rooms all the time, we are faithful neither to our evangelistic calling in the world nor to our own spiritual health. Ignorant of the pressing questions our neighbors are asking and objections they articulate, we become selfsatisfied and our churches spend their energies on introspection, which easily turns to family quarrels of secondary or tertiary matters. Spending some time in the hallway has a way of waking the sleep from our eyes.

Third, it gives us a place to speak. Not only benefiting from the insights of others, I want to spend some time in the hallway because I believe that Reformed theology offers the best interpretation of Christian faith and practice. We can’t just put up a sign on the door with our denominational label and expect other Christians, much less non-Christians, to come knocking. We were called to “go into all the world,” not to hide our light under a shade in our cozy quarters.

In my view, the danger of confessional Lutherans and Reformed Christians is to ignore “mere Christianity,” partly in reaction against the opposite danger. The Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds still provide us with the best definition of orthodoxy. These creeds do not say everything we want to say, of course, but therein lies their strength. In spite of the important differences between Christian churches, there is a place to stand together—like Athanasius—against the world for the world.

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There is a lot of wisdom in Lewis’s vision. In this view of orthodoxy, we have to be on guard against two misinterpretations: to eliminate the hallway, assuming that our room is the only one in the house; and to eliminate the rooms, mistaking our room for the hallway.

Eventually, both extremes lead to the same outcome.

Orthodoxy Is Not Conservatism ontrary to its popular caricature by friend and foe alike, orthodoxy is not the same as conservatism, traditionalism, or nostalgia. Rather, it has always required believers to swim against the tide of their own time and place, to get out of their comfort zone, and to challenge their own cherished presuppositions and narrow experience. It is hardly radical to follow the spirit of the age; the adventure lies in challenging the status quo with the always-surprising and disorienting power of the gospel. This means that genuine orthodoxy is in touch with its own time and place as well as “the faith once and for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).

Seeking to know what it believes and why it believes it, orthodoxy is sensitive to the particular questions and issues that demand special attention and understanding.

Taking the faith seriously, witnesses to orthodoxy do not have to take themselves seriously. They are not just throwing their weight around, substituting intensity of personal will or conviction for the power of the truth itself, but are “ready to give to everyone a reason for the hope that [we] have” (1 Pet. 3:15).

The power of Christian orthodoxy lies not in its “orthodoxy” but in the distinctive dogma it tenaciously defends against all odds. In 1949, Dorothy Sayers (1893–1957)—the celebrated English playwright, mystery novelist, essayist, and poet—described “the greatest story ever told”: Christ’s incarnation, life, death, and resurrection as the plotline of Scripture. She then wondered why the churches had transformed this into bland moralism. It’s not orthodoxy’s dogmas that are dull, she argued, but the trite and sentimental aphorisms that pass for sermons.2 But how precisely is Christian dogma “the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man”?

Sayers explains,

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It is the dogma that is the drama—not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and moral uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death—but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that one might be glad to believe.3 At the beginning of the twentieth century, another famous English writer, poet, satirist, novelist, and literary S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 17

The new humility paralyzes people from actually moving in any direction, used here it means the Apostles’ Creed, as understood despite all the talk of progress, innovation, and by everybody calling himself a Christian until a very forward-looking excitement. “We are on the road short time ago.” to producing a race of men too mentally modest to critic, G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), routinely sparred believe in the multiplication table….Scoffers of old time with friends like Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. were too proud to be convinced; but these are too With Nietzsche, they had assumed that Christian humble to be convinced.”8 Chesterton adds, “An orthodoxy was a blight on humanity, a curse upon life and imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of happiness. It is obviously a generalization, but Chesterton saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age is basically correct when he says that Christianity’s “outer but cannot be held in another….You might as well say ring” is despair, awareness of the tragic sense of life that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, because of original sin; while its “inner ring” is “life but cannot be believed on Tuesdays.”9 dancing like children, and drinking wine like men; for Therefore, when orthodoxy is defined by its particular Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom....But in convictions, it is seen to be more open and free, not less. the modern philosophy the case is the opposite; it is its In fact, “It is commonly the loose and latitudinarian outer ring that is obviously artistic and emancipated; its Christians who pay quite indefensible compliments to despair is within.”4 Because its chief article is that life has Christianity,” Chesterton observes. no transcendent meaning or purpose, Chesterton added, They talk as if there had never been any piety until Christianity came, a point on which any medieval It cannot hope to find any romance; its romances will would have been eager to correct them. They have no plots....One can find no meanings in a jungle represent that the remarkable thing about Christianity of skepticism; but the man will find more and more was that it was the first to preach simplicity or selfmeanings who walks through a forest of doctrine restraint, or inwardness and sincerity. They will think and design. Here everything has a story tied to its tail, me very narrow (whatever that means) if I say that like the tools or pictures in my father’s house; for it is the remarkable thing about Christianity was that it my father’s house. I end where I began—at the right was the first to preach Christianity. Its peculiarity was end. I have entered at least the gate of all good that it was peculiar, and simplicity and sincerity are philosophy. I have come into my second childhood.5 not peculiar, but obvious ideals for all mankind.

Christianity was the answer to a riddle, not the last Chesterton clarifies: “When the word ‘orthodoxy’ is used truism uttered after a long talk.10 here it means the Apostles’ Creed, as understood by everybody calling himself a Christian until a very short time ago.”6 It is not Christian orthodoxy but moralistic liberalism that It is not a particularly “postmodern” reaction that finds reduces the surprising news of the gospel to the bland talk of orthodoxy arrogant and narrow-minded. repetition of what people already know.

Chesterton speaks of the “dislocation of humility” in Chesterton refers to an article he had recently read modern thought: arguing that “Christianity when stripped of its armour of dogma (as who should speak of a man stripped of his By asking for pleasure, he lost the chief pleasure; for armour of bones), turned out to be nothing but the the chief pleasure is surprise. Hence it became Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light....Now, if I were to say evident that if a man would make his world large, he that Christianity came into the world specially to destroy must be always making himself small….But what we the doctrine of the Inner Light, that would be an suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. exaggeration. But it would be very much nearer the truth.”11 The Romans of the first century (especially the Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition.

Modesty has settled on the organ of conviction; where Stoics) were advocates of the Inner Light, it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the [Yet] of all horrible religions the most horrible is the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the worship of the god within....Christianity came into part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the the world firstly in order to assert with violence that part he ought not to assert—himself. Today what we a man had not only to look inwards but to look doubt is not ourselves but God’s Word.7 outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain.

Chesterton clarifies: “When the word ‘orthodoxy’ is

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The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners.12 The identification of orthodoxy with mere conservatism cannot explain how Christianity (unlike liberal “progressivism”) has brought perpetual shock and disruption to the status quo. “Some fall back simply on the clock: they talk as if mere passage through time brought some superiority; so that even a man of the first mental caliber carelessly uses the phrase that human morality is never up to date. How can anything be up to date?—a date has no character.”13 A heresy in the second, fourth, or twelfth century is still a heresy in the twenty-first. There is nothing “postmodern” about the suggestion that the faith has to be constantly conformed to the spirit of the age; this is the unassailable modern dogma of progress. With the whole world being divided between progressives and conservatives, Chesterton quipped, “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”14 Today, orthodoxy is often confused with a cultural and even political conservatism. This has not always been so (and still is not in other parts of the world). Frequently, America’s culture wars are identified by sociologists in terms of “orthodox” versus “progressive,” which is to define orthodoxy again in terms other than Christian doctrine.

Setting its sights on the plotline of God’s mighty acts in history “for us and for our salvation,” orthodoxy defines faithfulness by how well we not only conserve this faith but by how well we correct our faith and practice to conform to its rule. That’s why orthodoxy has given rise as often to reformations as to conservations. It is a living faith—in fact, the only part of what calls itself Christianity that is actually alive. From this Archimedean point, William Wilberforce was able to stand almost alone in bringing down the British slave trade.

Christian orthodoxy has no personal stake in progressivism or conservatism; its instincts are evangelical in the deepest sense: oriented to the gospel that creates and sustains the church in all times and places.

Heterodoxy is easy; orthodoxy is the challenge.

Orthodoxy forces us to set sail for ever new and distant harbors, beyond the comfort of our cherished assumptions and practices. It is orthodoxy that is adventuresome, refusing to allow us to stew in our own juices. We are not allowed to reduce our horizon to the dimensions of our own experience in our own time and place but must become “catholic” creatures: opened up to the church in all times and places.

Where the gospel itself is at stake there can be no compromise, as Paul indicated in his famous Epistle to the Galatians; for it is the gospel that not only defines the house but creates it and keeps everyone in it alive.

However we may justly quarrel with other important matters, wherever that gospel is confessed and proclaimed,

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we owe the judgment of charity—for our own good, as well as that of others. So I conclude with an admonition from Lewis: When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.15 ■ Michael Horton is J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California (Escondido).

WORKS CITED 1 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 12.

2 Dorothy Sayers, Creed or Chaos? (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949), 24.

3 Sayers, 24.

4 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy: The Romance of Faith (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 158.

5 Chesterton, 157–58.

6 Chesterton, 30.

7 Chesterton, 31.

8 Chesterton, 32.

9 Chesterton, 74.

10 Chesterton, 75.

11 Chesterton, 75.

12 Chesterton, 75–76.

13 Chesterton, 103.

14 Illustrated London News (1924-04-19).

15 Lewis, 12.

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Whose Orthodoxy?

How to Know When the Line Is Crossed

by Michael Horton Who defines the content of “orthodoxy”? Every society has a constitution and the canon of the covenant of grace by which our Ascended King reigns is his Word, Holy Scripture. While the church needs its courts to interpret this constitution, it is always the fallible interpreter and never the infallible source. Only when the church is faithful to this canon is it truly the community of Christ; but precisely because it is defined by this canon, it is always open to correction and change.

Not all truths are of the same importance nor all errors of equal weight. Reformed theologian Francis Turretin (1623–87) provides a helpful analysis of some distinctions we should bear in mind when considering the boundaries of orthodoxy. We may err either by addition or subtraction, warns Turretin. Representing the latter, Socinians and Arminians reduce necessary doctrines to that which is morally useful; in the latter case, to “faith in the divine promises and obedience to the divine precepts and a due reverence for the Scriptures.”1 Erring by addition is Rome, which requires all of its dogmas as necessary for salvation. The truth, however, lies between these extremes—careful to insist upon the fundamental articles of religion, yet careful also to “neither restrict them too closely, nor extend them too far….In this sense, fundamental articles of religion belong to the Decalogue, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the sacraments, and the power of the keys because they contain the doctrine of salvation as necessary and fundamental without which we cannot receive the rest.”2 Everything that God reveals is necessary to be believed, yet these truths “are not all equally necessary.” We must not confuse the implications and amplification of doctrines with the doctrines themselves.3 He distinguishes between “substance” (for example, “Christ died”) and “circumstances” (“between two thieves”). The former is “absolute and indispensable,” the latter “hypothetical and changeable.” Some doctrines are necessary for the very existence (esse) of faith, while others are necessary for the well-being (bene-esse) of faith. We believe the whole Word of God, but specifically “the doctrine concerning Christ with the dependant articles and the promises of God.” These “primary” articles include the Trinity, Christ the Mediator, justification, and so on. “Others are secondary and mediate (or consequent) hypotheses and conclusions springing from and deduced from the primary.”4 Therefore, not every error can be ranked as heresy. “As all truths are not of the same necessity, so all the wounds which are inflicted upon the truth are not therefore deadly, nor is every error capital.” There are “errors against the foundation”—direct rejection of fundamental articles of the Creed; “errors about [around] the foundation”—assertions 2 0 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

that implicitly contradict a chief article, and “errors beside the foundation,” which does not injure the faith.5 Drawing on Hilary and Jerome, Turretin further distinguishes between verbal errors that concern the language used in formulating a doctrine and “a real error (about the doctrines themselves).” The former cannot be considered “fundamental.” “The sense, not the words, gives character to a fault.”6 The following things must belong to fundamental articles: (1) that they be catholic, for the things necessary for the salvation of everyone are required for a universal faith (according to the Athanasian Creed ‘whoever wishes to be saved must above all things hold the catholic faith; for unless it is held entire and inviolate he will perish forever’; (2) that the belief of the catholic truths necessarily draws salvation after it; and the ignorance of them, the entire doubt of danger, the impious and heretical denial, is damnable; (3) that believers cherish a true consent to them, nor do some think differently from others because if anyone thinks or speaks otherwise he is subjected to the curse (Gal. 1:8). Hence where a difference in fundamentals exists, there cannot be union; (4) that all theological doctrines be reduced to them as to a rule which the apostle calls the analogy of faith (analogian pisteos); (5) that they be primary and principal truths upon which all others are built as upon a foundation—and being removed, faith itself is overthrown; not secondary and less principal, by the removal of which faith is only shaken.7 —

Turretin points out that the “fundamental articles” are so clear from Scripture that they could be reduced to a common creed that has bound Christians of differing traditions through the centuries. Turretin therefore helps us delineate the line (so we clearly know when it has been crossed) through this definition of orthodox Christianity: [T]he doctrines concerning the sacred Scriptures as inspired (theopneusto), being the only and perfect rule of faith; concerning the unity of God and the Trinity; concerning Christ, the Redeemer, and his most perfect satisfaction; concerning sin and its penalty— death; concerning the law and its inability to save; concerning justification by faith; concerning the necessity of grace and good works, sanctification and the worship of God, the church, the resurrection of the dead, the final judgment, and eternal life and —

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B E Y O N D N O S TA L G I A : T H E R I S K O F O R T H O D O X Y

Distractions from Orthodoxy

“O

rthodoxy” now has a fairly clear definition.

The church’s historic creeds and confessions have continued to affirm the basic realities of the Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed, and the respective communions have refined their own distinctives. The boundaries of orthodoxy, whether generically considered or considered within the church’s respective branches, are fairly well established. We must seriously ask whether the circle of orthodoxy now needs to be further restricted.

That is, we may have reached the point where other questions that we raise, fair enough and important enough in their own right, should not be placed in the position of tests of orthodoxy or fellowship.

Orthodoxy was and is already risky. It is the means by which the church (or some branch thereof) defines itself, by which it distinguishes itself from other societies and/or individuals. Whenever it does so, it runs the risk of excluding those who ought to be included, the way Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses are excluded by not affirming the deity of Christ. Thus, orthodoxy is a serious, risky business because we do not wish to declare an “insider” to be an “outsider.”

Some individuals appear to be less concerned about this risk than others. I knew an individual once whose recurring theme was that the church (generally or specifically) was moving in heterodox directions. When I asked for evidence of this movement, he almost always cited some matter that appeared in none of the historic creeds of the church. So, what sounded at first as though some of the theological cows had left the barn, ended up being that he had brought in some carpenters and made a smaller barn.

Pendulums swing curiously, racing through the middle and tarrying at the extremes. The church, likewise, might swing from the extreme of not caring to talk seriously about doctrine on the one hand, to the other extreme of making every doctrinal discussion a test of orthodoxy on the other. Modern Reformation’s editors are surely interested in a vigorous defense of orthodoxy, and they surely encourage hearty and open debate about matters related to the church’s faith and life, but not every such discussion need be regarded as a test of orthodoxy or a term of communion.

My students are alternately amused and disturbed by my occasional reference to what I inelegantly call the “toilet effect.” Having completed the task that brought you to the toilet in the first place, you reach around and push the handle, but accidentally bump the Reader’s Digest (or your “to-do” list, your spouse’s toothbrush, or the family Chihuahua) off the sink into the toilet also. The swirl having already begun, the Digest is doomed to a most unliterary fate. It suffers the “toilet effect,” wasted in the effort to remove genuine waste. The church not infrequently suffers also from the toilet effect. In the effort to rid itself of some perceived effluvium or another, other resources, energies, graces, or gifts sometimes get caught in the swirl and disappear also.

Satan is a distracter/diverter of the church’s resources, and we should not be unaware of his devices. He loves waste, especially the church’s waste, because it blunts her warfare against him. He loves the toilet effect, when the

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church’s greater resources disappear in overzealous attempts to achieve smaller gains. Indeed, I often wonder if the Evil One is not the inventor of the toilet effect. The temptation of Christ in Matthew 4 was not a moral temptation in any ordinary sense of the term. Eating bread is not sinful. Rather, Satan tempted Christ to divert his distinctive messianic power from its primary purpose of rescuing the lost from Satan’s dominion. Similarly, Satan frequently, perhaps ordinarily, tempts the church to divert its energies from its primary purpose of rescuing the lost from Satan’s dominion.

Things that are legitimate to address in their own right need not occupy an undue amount of the church’s resources, and some such issues need never be resolved.

Examples of such studied and deliberate ambiguities in the Westminster standards, for instance, include: infant salvation (“elect infants dying in infancy”), the nature of obedience owed to the civil magistrate (“obedience to his lawful commands”), post- and amillennialism, and mediate or immediate imputation of sin. Other truths are so woven into the fabric of theology that they must be regarded as a matter either of general Christian orthodoxy (the articles of the Apostles’ Creed for instance) or a matter of the particular orthodoxy of one of its branches (Lutheran versus Reformed understanding of the nature of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper). But other matters, worthy of Christian conversation, needn’t be finally resolved.

Several matters have recently consumed inordinate amounts of the church’s attention and distracted her from her life as a worshiping and discipling community. Matters perfectly worthy of our attention and conversation were regarded as matters that needed ecclesiastical resolution, while other matters that might be more important were given less or no attention. Here are several of my candidates for winners of the coveted toilet effect.

The Length of Creation Days am an exegete by training, and exegetes always take an interest in understanding particular texts properly.

Genesis 1 is no exception; it is a masterfully terse record of the Maker’s plans for his created order and, in my opinion, remains one of the most comprehensively informative texts in Holy Scripture. But some of what it narrates resists exegetical resolution. I don’t think, for instance, that we have even the remotest idea what the recurring expression there means: “And there was evening, and there was morning, one (or another numeral) day.” According to this narrative, the sun was not created until the fourth day, so what does the expression mean, “There was evening, and there was morning,” when there is no sun? The question is fascinating as it drives us into a consideration of the mysteries of protology, which are every bit as mysterious as the mysteries of eschatology.

At the same time, however, utterly nothing impinges upon the resolution of the question. There is no question of faith or practice that would change one whit regardless of

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how the question is resolved. What doctrine that we currently believe would be altered, regardless of what “evening and morning” means without the sun? What sentence in any of the Christian creeds would need to be altered if we were able to resolve this question? And what matter of Christian practice would change? If we were to go through Luther’s Small Catechism, or the Westminster Larger Catechism, line by line in the exposition of the Decalogue, what line would need to be removed, added, or altered in any way on the basis of our resolution of the matter?

Some have proposed, with straight faces (I don’t know how they accomplish this, but I’ve witnessed it more than once), that it impinges upon Sabbath observance, but they convince no one. The “days” of protology are unique; there is no sunshine. Our days do have sunshine (in Grove City, Pennsylvania, only fifty times annually), and our days are defined by the recurring pattern of dusk and dawn, evening and morning as determined by the earth’s rotation creating the illusion of sunset and sunrise. We know what a “day” is for us, which is all we need to know for Sabbath observance. More problematic for the straight-faced-this-is-necessary-for-Sabbath-observance view is the fact that the seventh day, according to the Genesis narrative, has neither evening nor morning. That is, the one “day” in that narrative that should be most determinative for Sabbath observance is notorious for distinguishing itself by the absence of the otherwiserecurring pattern of “evening and morning.” Thus, by the narrative of Genesis 1, the one day that is not governed by the pattern of “evening and morning” is the Sabbath.

The only thing at stake in the matter is a populist hermeneutic, and such a hermeneutic, precious though it may be to some in the United States, has never been affirmed by any of the church’s creeds nor by any of its major representative theologians. In the discussion of solar days, I often heard the plaintive cry of the populists: “But don’t you think the average layman reading his Bible concludes that these are solar days of twenty-four hours’ duration?” I’m perfectly willing to concede that perhaps the average layman does conclude so, but I feel no obligation to conform my opinions to his. If I did, I would not have taken a Ph.D. in biblical studies; I would have simply read the occasional Gallup Poll to determine the meaning of holy writ. The average layman, I suppose, thinks “ecclesia/church” in Matthew 18 is the Christian church; but Calvin didn’t think so nor did such commissioners to the Westminster Assembly such as Samuel Rutherford or George Gillespie, nor contemporary scholars such as Herman Ridderbos, all of whom understood it to be a reference to the Jewish Sanhedrin, as do I. The average layman probably understands Psalm 23 to be agricultural rather than royal, the Beatitudes to be ethical rather than eschatological, the Bible to contain “ten commandments” somewhere, Ephesians 4 to teach something about “equipping” saints to do the church’s ministry, etcetera, all of which I deny, based on my careful study of the relevant original texts in each case. Following

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Calvin’s “natural sense” hermeneutic, I believe texts should be understood in their natural sense, grammatically and historically considered.

Calvin was Renaissance-trained, and he employed the vigorous linguistic and historical tools of that training to determine what the natural sense of a text was; he did not consult the populace at Geneva. Yet when several communions studied this matter (at considerable expense of time and money), following a substantial hue and cry to do so, the primary motivation appears to have been nothing more than the preservation of the myth of the populist hermeneutic; a myth nowhere enshrined in any of the church’s creeds, and a myth not worth lifting a finger to save. Note how far this myth is from confessional language. Even in the place where the Westminster Confession addresses what we commonly call “the perspicuity of Scripture,” note how non-perspicuous they say it actually is: All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all: yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them. (WCF 1:7) This highly nuanced text affirms only that the basic gospel message (what is to be “believed and observed for salvation”) can be “sufficiently” (savingly?) understood by both the learned and the unlearned. And even here, this may require studying the entire Bible (“some place of Scripture or other”), and a due use of ordinary means.

But other “things” in Scripture are less plain in themselves and less plain to all, so Westminster manifests no concern that everything in Scripture be so. Now, if some partisan on one of the sides of the solar-day controversy can explain to me how the resolution of this interesting question is necessary to be “believed and observed for salvation,” then I am more than willing to see the church use its limited resources in the effort to resolve it. To suggest this, however, would require Herculean efforts at straight-face syndrome.

Van Tilian Apologetics lthough Dr. Van Til had retired by the time I arrived at Westminster to study there in the late 1970s, he was still in good health, was often seen at the seminary, and gave the occasional guest lecture. I was as impressed with him personally as all who met him apparently were, and having read some of his books in college, I was already an appreciative disciple of his apologetic. Professor John Frame, in classes there, helped us through some of the more difficult aspects of his thought, while gratefully promoting its distinctives. In the literary arena, both Richard Pratt and Greg Bahnsen also contributed

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profoundly to my appreciation for Dr. Van Til’s thought.

I was then, and remain now, an appreciative Van Tilian and am happy for any occasion to express what I consider to be the distinctive benefits of his approach to Christian apologetics. However, it is not at all necessary that the Christian church resolve the question of apologetic method. As Van Til himself would testify, if still living, such a resolution would remove most of Old Princeton (and those like them) from the Reformed communions, a loss most of us would hardly approve.

An ahistorical definition of orthodoxy is a serious matter; it suggests that “orthodoxy” indeed has no fixed meaning and therefore any issue that arises may plausibly be perceived as a threat to “orthodoxy.” In theory, then, anything about which we converse could take on heretical dimension; every difference could be perceived as a matter necessitating ecclesiastical resolution. Such a climate would have the effect of stifling theological discourse because the stakes would be too high.

Biblical Theology versus Systematic Theology s Geerhardus Vos taught, so-called biblical theology and systematic theology are complementary aspects of the overall theological enterprise. Biblical theology arranges/systematizes the teaching of the canon historically; and systematic theology arranges the teaching of Scripture topically. Neither could or should be avoided; neither can be avoided. John Owen (1616–83) wrote about biblical theology, Herman Witsius (1636– 1708) wrote about it; Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) wrote about it; Samuel Bolton (a commissioner to the Westminster Assembly) wrote about it; so Vos did not invent the discipline during his career at Princeton from the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth.1 When John Owen, Samuel Miller, and Robert Lewis Dabney all described the so-called Lord’s Prayer as “defective,” this was/is a biblical theological judgment, not a systematic theological judgment; each believed it was a Jewish prayer, defective in not mentioning the mediation of Christ, a defect unavoidable in its original historical setting, but later corrected/supplemented by Jesus’ instructions about praying in his name.2 In some circles, however, individuals appear to be suggesting that one must choose between these two aspects of the overall theological enterprise. But would we require a choice between exegetical theology and systematic theology? Would we require a choice between apologetic theology and polemical theology? We all make biblical-theological choices, and we all make systematictheological choices, and we may rightly discuss the choices we make in each; but we cannot choose to delete one of them, and it makes no good intellectual sense even to discuss their relative “priority.” Some texts make little or no sense until biblical theological questions are raised, such as Jesus saying, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, so practice and observe whatever they tell you” (Matt. 23:2). Does this mean that we should do and

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On this topic, I am also at times surprised at how truncated the historical question and propagates special revelation—what God has is framed, covering merely a couple centuries of the revealed in Scripture.

American experiment. The idea of “Christendom” or a practice whatever the first-century scribes and Pharisees self-consciously Christian nationalism is at least as old as taught? Of course not, but at this moment in Jesus’ public A.D. 774, when Emperor Charlemagne was designated by ministry, the new covenant had not yet been inaugurated, the pope as the “champion” of Christianity, and in 1302 and the Sinai covenant still obliged God’s visible people on Boniface VIII confirmed the matter in a papal bull (Unum earth. Therefore, it was their duty (but not ours) to do Sanctum). Roman Catholicism then for well over a what the Pharisees taught, as teachers of Moses. millennium has promoted the notion of using the power of Particular interpretive questions of either a biblical the state to promote Christianity. When William of theological or systematic theological character should, of Ockham (1288–c. 1347) disputed the teaching of Unum course, continue to engage all thoughtful readers of the Sanctum, he was excommunicated; and according to the Scriptures. But there is nothing to be gained (other than Catholic Encyclopedia, he was often referred to as “the first deception) by any pretense that we can live without either Protestant.” I am somewhat surprised that the Religious of these disciplines, and even discussions of their alleged Right so blithely promotes the Catholic view on the matter. priority one to the other do not take us anywhere. What But the real point is this: The church is not the the Bible teaches about prayer is a systematic theological American Historical Society and her officers do not have question we must all engage. Whether and to what degree earned doctorates in American historical studies. It is not the Lord’s Prayer is a Jewish or Christian prayer is a biblical the church’s place to settle disputes over history (her creed theological question that engaged John Owen, Samuel mentions only one historical figure, Pontius Pilate—and Miller, and Robert Lewis Dabney, and should engage us that backhandedly—placing the crucifixion in a genuine also. But I fail to see how we can construct a biblical space-and-time context). Such questions might interest a understanding of prayer without asking both questions. number of us as individuals, but they are not the kinds of Debating whether or in what order we should do so is questions the church is called or instituted to resolve. simply a waste of time.

“Christian” Education Christian America/Culture Wars very thoughtful Christian couple will raise itizenship per se is a valid component of ethics, and questions about how best to rear their children there is every good reason for interested people to within the resources and opportunities that God’s raise the question of citizenship in general or, if it providence affords. There is every reason for this to be an exists, Christian citizenship in particular. Citizenship and important and thoughtful consideration. But the church public square issues, however, are not necessarily more has utterly no authority to resolve the matter. Nothing, important than other aspects of the cultural mandate (such not a word, in the entirety of Holy Scripture says anything as writing poetry or symphonies, or refining agricultural at all about compulsory education, an idea vigorously technology), and our tradition has raised serious questions resisted by such orthodox theologians as Robert Lewis about partisan politics and the spirituality of the church.

Dabney when it was first proposed. And nothing in the Especially surprising, in this regard, is the amount of Scriptures addresses formal education at all, which would have been out of the financial reach of nearly all Christians effort expended at attempting to prove that our early Republic was intentionally “a Christian nation” or that the prior to the twentieth century. Nearly as important, for individual Founders were Christian believers.3 This surprises our purposes, none of the historic creeds of the church me not only because the existent documents appear to be at address the matter either. best inconclusive, but also because it would mean nothing Admittedly, some texts have been “drafted” into service in anyway. The accidents of history can never oblige us; and this cause, but the texts themselves would be conscientious even if the Founders had intended to establish a Christian objectors to this draft. Poor hapless Deuteronomy 6 has nation (whatever that might mean), we would be under no been drafted into a number of causes, including the youobligation whatsoever to continue the experiment in our must-home-school or Christian-school-your-children cause, generation, unless we (the populace as a whole) believed but the text itself resists the draft. The text says nothing there was value to it. To illustrate: The Founders also about formal education at all but rather addresses ordinary day-to-day life (“talk of them when you sit in your house, plainly intended to permit the African slave trade to and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, continue for the foreseeable future without federal and when you rise”). And the substance of Deuteronomy 6 interference. Does this mean we should resurrect the has nothing to do with mathematics or geography. “These practice today? Of course not; it was a horrible idea then, words that I command you today” in Deuteronomy 6:6 are and would remain a horrible idea today.

As a distinct institution, the church proclaims, preserves,

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certainly the same as the material referred to in verse 1: “This is the commandment, the statutes and the rules that the LORD your God commanded me to teach you, that you may do them in the land to which you are going over, to possess it.” And this in turn is surely the Decalogue, which had just been given in Deuteronomy 5. The only thing Deuteronomy 6 required of Israelite parents was to teach their children the Ten Commandments as they went through their everyday life.

We home-schooled our daughters for a number of years and then enrolled them in a Christian school where my wife served as the school’s administrator. I am, therefore, opposed neither to home-schooling nor private Christian schools; I just don’t think the issue is addressed in the Scriptures or in the creeds of the church, and that it ought to be discussed without any suspicion that it has anything at all to do with orthodoxy.

Women in Military rima facie, it was not unlawful for Deborah to play some role in the military. Similarly, it is the duty of all humans to promote and defend human life. If someone breaks into a home while the father is away on business, a mother is perfectly justified in introducing the intruder to the household Glock handgun. Prima facie, then, we know before we go any further that the Scriptures do not prohibit, as a moral absolute, females from defending innocent human life. Thus, the very most the Christian community could do with the matter is offer counsel based on general revelation, which unbelievers can do as well. Some of us, by analogy, did not agree with the military’s decision to jettison the .45 ACP as its standard handgun cartridge in favor of the nine mm cartridge (and correspondingly different weapons to chamber it), but is this the kind of matter that the church should address? Is it within her realm of competence?

As a distinct institution, the church proclaims, preserves, and propagates special revelation—what God has revealed in Scripture. She has no special or particular competence in general revelation, and so she brings nothing to the table when we debate the relative merits or demerits of women serving in the military. Yet at least two communions actually studied this matter, expending considerable finances and energies to study a matter that, from the outset, she ought to have known she could not say anything about. Did even the most ardent opponents of women in the military, for instance, seriously believe that the church should excommunicate patriotic women who serve in the military?

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Conclusion ow many missionaries, home or foreign, might have been sent out with the monies expended to study such issues as women in the military or the length of the creation days? Vigorous, informed theological discussion is healthy for the church, and I have myself participated in it from time to time. But not every discussion

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is a matter of orthodoxy.

Some discussions may appropriately remain unsettled. Such discussions, therefore, need not absorb an inordinate amount of the church’s resources, and surely need not be settled at the substantial expense of study committees or ecclesiastical trials. ■

T. David Gordon (Ph.D., Union Theological Seminary, Virginia) is professor of religion and Greek at Grove City College, Pennsylvania. He has contributed to a number of books and study Bibles, and has published scholarly reviews and articles in journals.

WORKS CITED 1 Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948); John Owen, Biblical Theology, or The Nature, Origin, Development, and Study of Theological Truth, in Six Books (1661) trans. Stephen P. Westcott (Pittsburgh: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 1994); Herman Witsius, The Economy of the Covenants Between God and Man, trans. William Crookshank (1677, reprint Escondido, CA: The den Dulk Christian Foundation, 1990); Jonathan Edwards, “A History of the Work of Redemption,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 1, 532–619 (1834, reprint Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 1987), Samuel Bolton, The True Bounds of Christian Freedom (1645, reprint Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 1978).

2 John Owen, “The Lord’s Prayer Considered,” in The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Gold (reprint, Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 1983), vol. xv, 14; Samuel Miller, Thoughts on Public Prayer (1849, reprint Harrisburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 1985), 51–53; Robert Lewis Dabney, Lectures in Systematic Theology (Richmond: Presbyterian Committee of Education, 1927), 721.

3 There are many sources for this. In popular media, one naturally thinks of the late D. James Kennedy at Coral Ridge; and at a more academic level, the 1,200-page treatise by Dr. Peter Lillback of Westminster Seminary, George Washington’s Sacred Fire. My own opinion is much more of that associated with Michael Novak (Washington’s God), Paul F. Boller, Jr. (George Washington and Religion), or my colleague Gary Scott Smith (Faith and the Presidency: From George Washington to George W. Bush), each of which describes Washington as neither a conventional orthodox Christian nor a conventional Deist, but some kind of a hybrid between them who believed in a Supreme Being who acts in history (unlike a strict Deist), who almost never mentioned Christ, and certainly never mentioned any redemption achieved by him (unlike a genuinely orthodox Christian). I am content to think of him, as Dr. Smith does, as a “theistic rationalist.”

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Beyond Culture Wars

by Michael S. Horton In yet another presidential election year, we find ourselves as Christians vying for the right position on a host of political and social issues and some even doubt that any non-Republicans can be Christians. Fifteen years after this article was printed, we seem to be only more enmeshed in what Michael Horton calls “culture wars.” The need for the gospel remains as strong as ever, and it is our hope that you will be challenged by these still-relevant charges laid to us by the editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation.

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C. Sproul tells of the story of his letter to the best-selling author of Lords of Discipline commending him on his style. The trendsetting novelist replied from his flat in Rome, informing Sproul that he had been the first Christian to compliment him on the novel. Raised in a fundamentalist home, this author told Sproul that the familiar circle from which he was raised now denounces him and proudly brands his literature satanic. The only time it seems that evangelicals get involved in mainstream society is to register some complaint, some degree of hostility. And when our bright, energetic, talented thinkers, artists, and workers go out into the world to fulfill their calling as a calling, they are often gunned down by the brethren for selling out to the world.

Fundamentalists have always been hostile to the outside world, but now they are highly politicized. Their anti-worldly stance, which was once kept within the four walls of the church building, is now seen in mass rallies in public places. U.S. Senate Chaplain Richard Halverson, an evangelical himself, recently said, “All evangelicals care about is their own agenda. They will keep all the phone lines in Washington busy and many of the callers are downright nasty, yet when it comes to hundreds of other issues Congress faces, they never hear from evangelicals.” The only time we get involved in education is to protest public education. The only time, it seems, we get involved in the arts is to protest the public funding of obscene art. While pro-life leaders often confuse the issue of abortion with getting Little Red Riding Hood taken out of the public libraries.

Before, we were hostile to the world but we were separated from it. Now we are still hostile, but very much involved. That’s why our involvement is so harsh, so strident, and often so very negative. Until we see our role in this world in a positive light we will continue to come off as those who can only judge instead of contribute. We engage in discussions of politics as a disgruntled minority demanding its rights, its piece of the pie, while very often we know little and care less about the deeper philosophical and cultural issues of our time.

Culture wars—that is what this situation is being called as American society polarizes into two camps, each employing the language of the battlefield poised to gain control of the nation’s public institutions. You might ask what all this has

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to do with evangelism and apologetics? Everything! Ask the average person on the street what an evangelical is and you are likely to get stereotypical images, or portraits of TV evangelists, or particular political or ideological positions, but how likely are you to hear the “evangel,” the gospel as the singular proclamation of the evangelicals?

Christianity Is Not a Culture he first problem with the church being identified with the culture wars is a pretty basic one: Christianity is not a culture. It is a faith wrapped around a person who had a real life, a life of significance because he was God incarnate and rose from the dead as he promised. It is a system of truth-claims. The gospel has succeeded in a variety of cultures and has thrived among groups, maintaining vastly different values and mores, and has been just as good at reconciling socialists to God as capitalists. This past January, in the wake of the inaugural festivities, President Clinton gathered a group of Southern Baptists ministers to pray with him in Little Rock. They assured the evangelical community and the secular media as well that President Clinton was a sound, solid, Biblebelieving evangelical. Why? How did they know that?

They said because he even cried during the singing of some of the hymns. While all this was going on I did an interview with a Christian station in the Bible Belt, and Clinton’s Christian convictions seemed to be the chief interest of the callers. One caller said, “Isn’t that amazing!

Can you believe all that? Did you hear that just the other day Jerry Falwell responded—and good for him—he responded, ‘You can’t tell whether a person is a Christian or not just because he cries at the hymns. I want to know what is his position on abortion!’” I replied to the caller, “No, you are both wrong. The question is, What is his view of Christ? Who does he say he is?” Neither group seemed to get the point. One group is influenced by pietistic sentiment, the other by political ideology. Now one might argue that one’s position on abortion must be consistent with his profession of faith, and I do believe that every Christian ought to seek the end of this worldwide holocaust, but abortion is not in the Apostles’ Creed! It is not an article of Christian faith!

What we’ve done is we have substituted the gospel for moral, political, and sentimental tests. That’s why Pat Robertson can’t be called into question, in spite of his

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serious doctrinal errors, while Tony Campolo, who is a little left of center politically, can be put on a heresy trial for his political views by a group of parachurch ministries whose supposed purpose of existence is evangelism. Today the basis of unity is ideology, not doctrine. What defines us politically is one thing, what defines us as Christians is a totally different set of questions. It is not to say that public policy issues shouldn’t be important to a Christian. Quite the contrary, every Christian ought to be interested in public policy issues, but as citizens, not as the church making stands on what the gospel is. Yet too often in the past twenty years we have equated the gospel with a particular cultural agenda. Surely no one would say that the late Francis Schaffer shied away from public issues, but he warned, “Equating any other loyalty, whether it is political, national, or ethnic, with our loyalty to God is sin, and we better get our priorities straight now.” He says, There is a tremendous pressure to lose the Reformation memory as the years pass and our first task is not to align our message with the middle class establishment only to have our children rebel against our faith because of our politics, but to recover the lost truth of our Reformation heritage.

This is why we must recover the biblical doctrine of the two kingdoms as Luther and Calvin did so clearly four and a half centuries ago. There are two kings and two kingdoms, each ruling a distinct sphere. I remember that one of the leaders of the National Association of Evangelicals (N.A.E.) when Mr. Clinton was elected asked, “Now what is to become of the kingdom of God?”—as though President-elect Clinton had anything whatsoever to do with the kingdom of God, that is, as a public official.

In the kingdom of culture—what Augustine called “the city of man”—there are rulers, there are laws, there are customs that are regulated by human wisdom. In the kingdom of Christ—or “the city of God”—there is one ruler, our Lord Jesus Christ, and he advances his kingdom, not through marketing, not through legislation or police force, but by the proclamation of the gospel and the administration of his holy sacraments. If we confuse these two kingdoms—and we have—we will no doubt confuse evangelism with cultural, moral, and political programs.

A Grand Obstruction nd that brings me to my second point: it is a grand obstruction for the people out there. What happens when we confuse evangelism with a particular social or political agenda? Well, we’ve seen it in history, haven’t we, in the crusades when evangelistic texts like “Go ye into the world and preach the gospel making disciples of all the nations” was used as a justification for political expansion and the building up of an empire. When this confusion occurs, it is very difficult to convince the South African victim of apartheid, or the Jewish victim of the Holocaust, or those who suffered under the pro-czar

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Russian Orthodox Church, that Christianity is not a source of political oppression. And whether or not it is true or an unfair caricature by the secular press (I tend to think it is both), evangelical Christianity is now being widely perceived as one more dying gasp of one more ally of the status quo of middle American, white, middle class culture unwilling to let go of its power. The issue is whether we confused culture values with the gospel, not whether those values are right or wrong. Billy Graham said, It is an error to identify the gospel with any particular system or culture, that has been my own danger.

When I go to preach the gospel I go as an ambassador for the Kingdom of God, not America. To tie the gospel to any political system, secular program, or society is wrong and will only serve to divert the gospel.

We have to ask ourselves whether the gospel really is our main preoccupation these days. Just over a decade ago Jerry Falwell said, “The sad fact is that today the United States could only kill three to five percent of the Soviets.”

That’s a great pro-life movement! That will really get the world out there to stand up and take notice of what the gospel can do. Meanwhile the same leader said, “We have to stay away from helping the poor because it is a complex issue.” The poor and unemployed had no reason to listen to our gospel with Falwell calling them “that lazy trifling bunch lined up in unemployment offices who would not work in a pie shop eating the holes out of doughnuts.” This same religious leader argued during the 50’s that Christians ought not to stand up for the civil rights of the blacks. How can the gospel be advanced when it is perceived as a radical political and social agenda, when it always sides with a particular segment of society predictably, whether it is Jerry Falwell or Jesse Jackson?

I have always wondered why any homosexual would listen to us the way we talk about AIDS as the judgment of God. I have often reflected that it is a good thing God does not hand out judgments for gossip and slander and greed and self-centeredness and self-righteousness or many of our evangelical churches would be empty. But there are other reaches of alienation. Gallup tells us that white evangelicals are more likely than any other group to object to having black or Hispanic neighbors. Boy, that’s a gospel concern, isn’t it? That will sure help push the gospel along. Evangelicals just simply aren’t concerned about the gospel, the “evangel,” anymore. It’s about a culture. It’s about preserving traditional values for a certain segment of society. Francis Schaeffer was worried that evangelicalism would become so aligned with conservative middle class Americanism that any rejection of the establishment would entail a rejection of Christ, and that is exactly what happened in the sixties. God—albeit the unknown God of the pagans—fit in when Ike was president. After all, Eisenhower declared that “there can be no good government without religion, and I don’t care what religion it is.” But with the rejection of that particular S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 27

cultural expression, and the growing diversity of the across the Christian landscape, I don’t know how we have American population, there was not enough room for the gall to muster together out of our hypocritical selves God. Why? Because we helped define God as a public the fire in our belly to attack the world for being worldly! mascot of society. As Peter Berger says, “He who marries Gallup and Barna hand us survey after survey the spirit of the age soon becomes a widower.” But the demonstrating that evangelical Christians are as likely to Holy Spirit will not honor any other gospel. embrace lifestyles every bit as hedonistic, materialistic, We have become the rock of offense rather than Christ. self-centered, and sexually immoral as the world in The irony is we have taken the offense out of the gospel— general. The statistics are about neck and neck. That is why we don’t preach sin and grace anymore—and have taken pollster Lou Harris reports, “After ten years of piety and it over for ourselves. We're offensive for all the wrong ideology the American people have about had it with the reasons while we leave the gospel itself devoid of its approach of religious types.” When are we going to realize power. People with whom we may not agree will not give that God is looking in our direction with his charge, us a hearing at the end of the twentieth century. Not “Because of you my name is blasphemed among the because we have preached the gospel and called them to gentiles”? How many evangelists will we have to see repentance and they don’t like that, but because we have disgraced on national television for their own moral framed our communication with them in terms of a war bankruptcy before we can say with the apostle Paul, “I am for social, political, and cultural not ashamed of the Gospel for it control. Contrary to the is the power of God unto If you view sin in terms of actions and religious leaders of his day, salvation for everyone who Jesus was the friend of sinners. believes.” not primarily in terms of a condition, Prostitutes turned from their At the end of the day the prostitution because, as Jesus culture wars are not only you will see the answer primarily in the misguided theologically and said, “He who is forgiven much loves much.” The Holy Spirit biblically, but even strateterms of moral reform, not in terms of gically. It is simply an illusion will not convert a single soul through moral crusades. He to think that there is any throwing yourself on the mercy of God. possibility of putting the lion will not convert a prostitute through Senate bill 242, or back in the cage. Secularism is change the direction of the homosexual by prime-time here for awhile and will only be turned back with better denunciation from moralistic preachers. Yes, we are called ideas. Secularism is the result of a vacuum we created. In to preach the good news and to call men and women to an ironically titled book, Battle for the Mind, Tim LaHaye repentance, but that is not a political issue, that is not asserted that secular humanism is moral, not theological, but that’s the root of the problem—that people like Tim ultimate a moral issue, that is a gospel issue. Repentance LaHaye have thought the problem is ultimately moral and can no more be coerced by the state than faith; both are not deeper, not theological. If you believe that our society’s the gracious gifts of God. greatest problem or any individual’s greatest problem is behavioral, you have a weak view of sin and, A Grand Offense nd finally it is a grand offense to God. At this year’s consequently, a weak view of grace. If you view sin in National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) conventerms of actions and not primarily in terms of a condition, tion in Los Angeles, the star of Murder, She Wrote, you will see the answer primarily in the terms of moral Angela Lansbury, was asked to address the delegates, but reform, not in terms of throwing yourself on the mercy of the planners were going to cancel her appearance at the God. That is why Charles Finney, who said, “A revival is convention because in an upcoming movie she was to play the work of man not God; it’s simply the right use of a prostitute. That morning, the hosts of Good Morning means,” was also the father of the temperance movement.

America could not keep from making their comment, You don’t need a cross in this scenario; you need a kit to “Wow, if that is not an irony! A convention of telehelp you put your life back together or a law or a rule to vangelists barring someone from their convention for govern your behavior so you don’t get out of hand. No, I playing immoral roles.” Recently I was asked to appear on must insist secular humanism is a theological issue and a secular talk show with an ACLU lawyer to discuss the sowhen we put it in its natural theological habitat a strange called “culture wars.” The host admitted I was her second thing happens; we realize that we ourselves are the secular pick since the pastor/church leader she had previously humanists. LaHaye observes that the chief mark of secular chosen had just been arrested for embezzlement. I also humanism is to place man at the center of existence. But happen to know right now prominent Christian leaders that is exactly what I see being done in churches across who were writing books about traditional values while America. Aren’t our testimonies designed to show people one left his wife for another woman, another one was how God made me happy, how he satisfied me, how he having an affair, and another (a pro-life activist) was worked for me? Aren’t our worship services for our tastes counseling his daughter to have an abortion. As we look very often and not for God’s? Don’t we tell people that once

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they become Christians they too will experience the abundant life? What we should be telling people is that salvation isn’t a matter of God making sure we are happy with him, but his making sure he is happy with us, and that is why we have the cross at the middle of it all. But churches don’t center anymore on the old rugged cross, where God saved us from himself by putting his own son in our place to bear the wrath justly meant for us. No, that would make us unhappy, to talk about wrath and hell. More often church services center on us as if our happiness were the goal of the universe. But, Tim LaHaye, this is exactly what you call secular humanism. I am not the first to see this irony. Historians Hatch, Nolan, and Marston write, Humanism or faith in humanity has been mixed with virtually every American religious heritage including evangelicalism and fundamentalism. Most commonly, since the 19th Century many Americans, including many evangelical Christian Americans, have tended to believe in the essential goodness of humanity and the importance of believing in oneself, in self-help and the ability of a free people to solve their own problems.

Sounds like a litany of an average Christian bookstore these days. Further, the same people who protest the erosion of moral absolutes are often quite willing to accept the erosion of doctrinal absolutes. It is an amazing irony! I can be absolutely certain that God has a published position on the Panama Canal treaty, but remain basically unsure about justification and election! If we are as apathetic about moral issues as we are about doctrinal issues, then we are really in trouble, then we are put in the dog house.

Conclusion e propose a twofold strategy. First, we will have to clear up this confusion about the gospel and cultural values. I believe being pro-choice is morally wrong, but it is not heretical. God will never be anyone’s mascot and will never allow himself to be worshipped in either the carved image of the donkey or the elephant. We cannot impose our will on the American electorate anymore and we will have to stop it. We’ll have to stop shaking our fists at our neighbors. We must call the church to a cease-fire with the world over gays in the military and engage in spiritual warfare for their hearts and minds for the first time perhaps in forty years. Second, we’ll not only have to recover gospel proclamation, but we’ll have to learn how to interact positively again with our culture. When the church was facing a really hostile culture in the first century—a lot more hostile than ours— Paul instructed the early Christians to “make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to work well with your hands so that you may win the respect of outsiders and have enough to give those in need.”

In God’s charges against Israel recorded in Hosea, the moral breakdown is credited to the fact that God’s people

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had grown ignorant of the God they worshipped. Truth again lies slain in the streets, slain not by villainous secular humanists but by self-congratulatory believers. A people without understanding will always come to ruin. Not a people without enough laws, not a people without enough police, not a people without enough rules, not a people without enough moral values, for ultimately a people’s morality is an expression of deeper convictions. But a people without understanding! T. S. Eliot once observed, To justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of morality for the general culture, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion. It is not enthusiasm but dogma that differentiates a Christian from a pagan society.

For those who will tear down the cardboard and tin shacks and go for the quality materials, building on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone, there is hope for the future. For those who will lodge their anchor on this rock and know no other message than Christ and him crucified, there is the promise, “I will go on building my church and not even the gates of hell will prevail against it.” “For what does it profit a man,” our Lord asked, “if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?”

Reprinted from “Beyond Culture Wars,” Modern Reformation (May/June 1993).

Whose Orthodoxy cont. (continued from page 20) such as are connected with these. All of these are so strictly joined together that they mutually depend upon each other. One cannot be withdrawn without overthrowing all the rest.8 WORKS CITED 1 Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Vol. 1: First Through Tenth Topics, trans. G. M. Giger, ed. J. T. Dennison, Jr. (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1992), 48.

2 Turretin, 48.

3 Turretin, 49.

4 Turretin, 49–50.

5 Turretin, 50.

6 Turretin, 51.

7 Turretin, 52.

8 Turretin, 52.

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B E Y O N D N O S TA L G I A : T H E R I S K O F O R T H O D O X Y

Can Orthodoxy Be Missional?

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f you know someone heading out of seminary or a graduate school of theology eager to apply that confessional missionary zeal of their denominational fathers to a calling parish, then it’s likely they will be in for a rude awakening rather than a great one.

Increasingly throughout Reformation orthodoxy, greenhorn pastors like myself—as well as aspiring ministers—are faced with a dilemma once we depart from the assumed safe haven of seminaries where the Augsburg, Heidelberg, and Westminster Confessions hold stock. We face a decision either go the route of “church growth” movements for assurances in mission enterprises—where missions are principally done in and through seekersensitive worship services—or, alternatively, chance the application of missional orthodoxy amid a North American church culture dominated by neo-evangelical standards, and thus fall out of step with the prevailing contemporary Christian scene. We quickly come to see that the promise of the former is bound up with a manageable methodology, user-friendly techniques, and the allure of a charismatic personality, all the while boasting of inspiring data to vouchsafe its present legitimacy and hope for the future. The promise of the latter is bound up with impenetrable pneumatology, clunky liturgical repetition, and the churchly mundane, showing instead a disconcerting multigenerational trend of declension. Sales and statistics evidence that evangelical “church growth” is increasing. Reformation orthodoxy isn’t, at least not in the same way or in the same numbers. The quandary tells all that serious risk-taking is involved with orthodoxy, compelling us to ask: Can orthodoxy really be missional in the twenty-first century and, if so, why should it be preferred over thriving other-than-orthodox beliefs and schemes?

As a rookie minister, I found myself asking this question not as an academic exercise with the expectation of mouthing nostalgic aphorisms from yesteryear’s systematicians, but because of pressures from both outside and inside the parish. Most vicars, first-call pastors, and the like will feel acute pressure too. Outside encroachments come by way of the local megachurch campus looming its shadow over their modest parish, parachurch spam glutting their inbox, and the omnipresence of Calvary Chapel radio. Inside the church, it must be asked if the seminary itself might be part of the capitulation problem.

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Then there will be head counting at each service, while the church treasurer crunches numbers for a hand-wringing parish. Finally, they can count on expectations from everybody for the pastor to bring in new believers.

Again, fresh from seminary, with a vision of missional activity hermetically sealed in the ages of Johannes Bugenhagen and Jonathan Edwards, their first commitments are likely to be destabilized by trends within their own ranks. They’ll be surprised to see seasoned ministers unceremoniously dumping their subordinate standard and liturgy like Enron shares, only to adopt “organic worship” or “coffee house worship” as justifiable alternatives for missional worship. Certain parishioners and a vocal segment of their ministerium will undermine their confessional holdings: from pundits broadcasting the need to implement a contemporary service “if this church is to survive,” to those with an agenda peddling inclusivity in Table fellowship, church membership, and the office of holy ministry itself in order to get the church “growing.”

The better part of our confessional communions is already envious, if not altogether covetous, of the packed parking lot of Insert Name Here Community Church down the street. Our churches want dynamic ministers to lead them into the Promised Land of bulging statistics, where collection plates flow with milk and money—just like down the street. Armed with the latest insights and applications garnered from Gallup and Barna, young pastors will be expected to get the church to thrive, not merely survive with proof-is-in-the-pudding seekersensitive styles of evangelistic worship. They’ll hear the mantra that a new day has dawned that requires contemporizing even their heritage. So why hold on to that verbose confession and those monochrome sacraments when it comes to doing missions in the digitally enhanced twenty-first century? If the proof is in the evangelistic pudding, then why retain unfashionable orthodoxy, especially its theology-laden liturgy, when it comes to the contemporary mission? Let’s face it— orthodoxy isn’t sexy; an organic coffee ministry is. As long as we retain the Word and sacraments, then it’s all the same in the end, right?

Though church growth innovators within our ranks are correct in thinking that what takes place during the assembly of believers has great import for missions and indeed is a, if not the, principal place our churches interface the gospel with unbelievers, yet there is a misnomer to address. One cannot appeal, as so frequently is the case, to the church growth movement’s retention of “Word and sacrament” as the principal bond to a confessional identity as an “Anglican,” “Lutheran,” or “Presbyterian,” and thereby tout one’s vindication in departing from the inherited liturgy.

I’ve quickly learned that the Lutheran identity, for example, is forged, retained, and perpetuated through the rites codified within our confession of faith. In other words, one cannot be genuinely Lutheran and claim confessional allegiance if one does not retain the very

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liturgical rites by which gospel orthodoxy is expressed in the confession and manifest in church. It is the rites spoken of within the Augsburg Confession and Apology that distinguish authentic Lutheran Word and sacrament orthodoxy as such from, say, “statement of faith” minimalists or pan-confessionalists or non-confessing types, whoever they may be.

Lutheranism or Presbyterianism or Anglicanism become denominational nominalism (that is, just another shade of white in the American evangelical landscape of snow) when a reductionistic approach to orthodoxy—as expressed through the liturgical rites—is the order of the day.

It is the liturgical rites themselves, which facilitate and articulate Word and sacrament ministry, that in turn establish the line of demarcation between orthodox belief and neo-orthodox, heterodox, or heretical beliefs.

Compromise here and it is no wonder our one-time catechumens hemorrhaging from our midst feel right at home in non-confessional churches. What’s the difference between the contemporary “Lutheran” service and the “worship experiences” of other traditions that they are emulating? Not much, former parishioners say. They feel right at home elsewhere because the vehicle of confessional doctrines—the rites themselves—were eviscerated from their confessional conscience by becoming “things indifferent.” But for the Reformers, the things that were indifferent were not the rites of the liturgy but supposedly binding ceremonies. The Reformers said that the ceremonies of traditionalism could change (in many cases, should change) or be discarded, but not the rites that bore the Bible’s core liturgy of God’s Word and sacraments. They were nonnegotiable items of the tradition. For when the rites are lost, the meaning is lost, and when the meaning is lost, so is the significance. This is why it can hardly be said that such and such Lutheran church is engaged in confessional, orthodox missional enterprise through Word and sacrament ministry when the manifestation of missional orthopraxy (that is, “right practice”) is altogether unrecognizable or indiscernible from non-confessional practices and beliefs. It’s not just remembering the past but being part of the past that makes us truly confessional missionaries to the present.

But outside of these considerations of valued confessional identity, heritage, and tradition, there are two basic biblical and theological reasons for retaining past orthodoxy for present and future missional endeavors.

First, it is to be embraced and extolled because it is within orthodoxy—within that theology-laden liturgy—that God has been pleased to commit his promises to make his gospel and Word and sacraments efficacious for the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. This should be enough, but both Scripture and history give us further confidence in the second reason: God keeps his word. This means that not only can orthodoxy be missional, it is inherently so by God’s trustworthy character, as well as its God-given gospel content and design. That gospel content and design, as has been suggested, is the Divine Liturgy.

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leaves many uncomfortable.

Something ancient, something settled in terms of ancient theology-laden liturgy, one finds God’s multifaceted content and meaning, is not easily domesticated and only means for efficacious missional enterprise. This is because the diminishes when altered. Consequently, one cannot readily liturgy, as they saw it, was not a style of worship but a fit the settled Christian synthesis of revamped synatheology of missional worship through which God is present gogue worship and a reconstituted Paschal meal (i.e., the for the sinner in the promise of the gospel. liturgy of Acts 2:42) into modern categories of altar To be sure then, there is risk involved with orthodoxy, calls and skit evangelism. For those committed to the but it is the risk of faith on our part, the risk of trusting the Reformation confessions, this “ancient consensual promise-making God to be promise-keeping in Christ scriptural teaching” of the Patristic period is the creedal through the means he himself has ordained to accomplish orthodoxy behind confessional orthodoxy and, as Luther his own redeeming purposes. But it is also this risk of would vigorously contend, has a greater degree of orthodoxy embraced that the Scriptures and later the missional pudding-proof than means unbounded to such church and Reformation fathers dub “the wisdom of God” orthodoxy. Indeed, Luther, Calvin, and Cranmer all argued (cf. 1 Cor. 1:18–31). And since it is a matter of leaning on that within the ancient theology-laden liturgy, one finds God’s wisdom rather than our own cunning, all of our God’s multifaceted means for efficacious missional doubts and fears should be put to rest when it comes to enterprise. This is because the liturgy, as they saw it, was orthodox missiology. I can offer, therefore, no better advice not a style of worship but a theology of missional worship than that which my own father confessor told me after a through which God is present for the sinner in the promise frustrating first year of ministry where I had been beset by of the gospel. the aforementioned missional dilemma: “Have confidence We therefore get it wrong when we think of orthodoxy that in the liturgy God has his say,” he advised. “And when as if it was only about a canon of right belief. It is not. It God has his say, have confidence that his Word and entails and is expressed through God’s liturgical actions, all sacraments bestow precisely what he says.” These words of which, in the new covenant, are gospel gifts to us. lifted the burden of performance-based ministry off of my Philipp Melanchthon had no time for any doctrine that shoulders and wholly freed me to love and shepherd God’s did not keep the gospel good news. For him, new covenant people with confessional integrity, while the Holy Spirit doctrines were only those that met a dual criterion: they busied himself with saving and sanctifying sinners in need must extol the necessity of Christ’s blood atonement and of grace and mercy. comfort the soul therewith. Luther referred to In The Rebirth of Orthodoxy, Thomas C. Oden defines Melanchthon’s criterion as a theological dung detector that orthodoxy as the “integrated biblical teaching as interpreted goes off when an alleged new covenant doctrine consists in its most consensual period” or, more simply, the of a “If you/then God” scenario. Law dressed up as gospel “ancient consensual scriptural teaching.”1 And of what, stinks of death, and the dung of human sin and feigned exactly, did orthodoxy consist? If nothing else, from St. righteousness is sniffed out. The sweet scent of orthodoxy Luke to St. Augustine and beyond, orthodoxy consisted of says, “When God/then you” or, as in Ephesians 2:4, “But the Divine Liturgy. An umbrella with some breadth, the God/now you.” The Wittenberg tandem was making the Divine Liturgy entails everything from “the apostles’ point that new covenant orthodoxy consists of doctrines teaching and the fellowship in the breaking of the bread and a liturgy that is exclusively gospel-oriented—and if and the prayers” (Acts 2:42) to baptizing and teaching gospel-oriented, then inherently missional for the disciples (Matt. 28:19–20). The Bible’s liturgy is the means ingathering of sinners and the sanctifying of saints. For in of divine grace behind which and through which God the gospel means of grace, God holds out his promised gifts himself is the acting agent to save and sanctify through the in Christ to be received in faith by all. application of the redemptive benefits of Christ crucified The gospel then is never something inward and neither and resurrected. In other words, the liturgy is essentially is it an in-house possession reserved for scholastic debate or God’s sacramental actions of self-giving and justifying popular piety. Instead, the gospel is always outward: it goes speech-acts through Jesus the Son, in the power and out into the church and marketplace, establishing the presence of the Holy Spirit. In both Scripture and the forum of salvation in which the Father, Son, and Holy ancient church we learn that the liturgy given by God was Spirit bring a rule of grace and peace to bear on those in not merely the vehicle of sanctification for believers but need of justification by another. Simply put, the gospel is salvation for unbelievers. for proclamation or—to say the same thing—that which Oden has given us a good starting point, but one that orthodoxy proclaims. The new covenant liturgy thus

Indeed, Luther, Calvin, and Cranmer all argued that within the

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ensures gospel proclamation in Word and sacrament. In other words, the liturgy itself is inherently missional because orthodoxy, by its very nature, proclaims good news to the entire world. Whether in the public reading of the gospels, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, pronouncing holy absolution, baptizing, or partaking in Holy Communion, the Divine Liturgy is orthodoxy in the act of mission. God, it seems, has engineered orthodoxy with a content that cannot be anything else but missional because its message is always good news for the public domain.

Since the doctrines of justification by grace alone through faith alone on account of Jesus Christ alone were most clearly articulated and presented by multifaceted liturgical expressions designed by God himself, Luther and Melanchthon were eager to see people brought to church.

In their thinking, what could be more intrinsically missional and outreach-oriented than the proclaimed gospel through the divine means given to do so?

Confidence therefore ran high among the first, second, and third generations of reformers concerning the missional nature of orthodoxy, and it should do so among us as well: for every facet of the liturgy offers mission and evangelism tethered to the promises, presence, and activity of God. In the Old Testament, for example, the missional enterprise of God’s people was carried out through doxology built in to the liturgy.2 Psalm 105 is one of scores of texts where the outward and mission thrust of liturgical participation is manifest.

Oh give thanks to the LORD; call upon his name; make known his deeds among the peoples!

Sing to him, sing praises to him; tell of all his wondrous works!

Glory in his holy name; let the hearts of those who seek the LORD rejoice!

Seek the LORD and his strength; seek his presence continually!

Remember the wondrous works that he has done, his miracles, and the judgments he uttered, O offspring of Abraham, his servant, children of Jacob, his chosen ones!

In this song of praise, the imperative carries with it an indicative: “Make known his deeds among the peoples.”

The “deeds” that are to be made known to the Gentile nations (i.e., unbelieving peoples) are God’s gracious deeds, particularly his covenant of grace established with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (vv. 8–11).

How is the gospel to be made known to the nations? It is proclaimed amid liturgical song by doxological “singing” and “praising,” but also by liturgical responses like antiphonal “telling” and the confessional “remembering” of God’s gospel deeds. Calvin comments on this psalm by saying the church is uniquely distinguished from unbelievers precisely by its privilege of rejoicing in the name of God before the nations of the world.3 This aspect

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of the liturgy then is not a style of worship but a theology of worshipful evangelism. When praising God in the assembly of believers through a doxological liturgy, there is the proclamation of the character and deeds of God in the hearing of all present, and in this case unbelievers are especially in view.

So, too, in the New Testament: “unbelievers or outsiders” are not merely invited into the worship of God by his people, they are expected to be there, just as we find them in 1 Corinthians 14:22–25. There Paul assumes their presence and anticipates their response to liturgical features of the gathered church. In the efficacious hearing of God’s Word, the “unbeliever or outsider…is called to account by all, the secrets of his heart are disclosed, and so, falling on his face, he will worship God and declare that God is really among you.” That which evokes the awe, conversion, and worship of sinners saved by grace is the Lord forgiving the sins of his people and comforting them with his Word and sacrament presence (1 Cor. 1:18–31, 10:16–22, 11:20–29).

It has to be said that the most explosive means of Godinspired, theology-laden, liturgical missional activity comes by way of holy baptism. It has not been going doorto-door nor having the tent revival nor even the stadium crusade that has been greatest vehicle of Christian evangelization. In every age of the church, baptism— particularly infant baptism—has been the overwhelmingly greatest means of expanding the church. Christ has built into the covenant of grace itself an evangelistic liturgical feature that ensures the propagation of the faith in such a fashion that the Lord does all the work and receives all the glory—the baptizing of adults and children alike. If you desire to see the church grow, then break out your baptismal liturgy and start asking people in your church, neighborhood, and workplace if they or their children have been baptized, and you will find a great deal of gospel discussion taking place.

A rigorous theology and practice of baptism keeps the church mission-minded and thoroughly evangelistic, for nothing else but baptism defines Christian as such. No standard of law, no decisional reliance, no self-evaluation, nothing but God’s outward, objective sacrament speech-act makes and defines persons as sons and daughters of God. The evangelism of baptism covers all persons within its scope, just as in the Old Testament, but this time bringing the fulfillment of the promises of grace. Unbelievers, like Gentiles of old, come to believe the gospel and are baptized into the covenant (Mark 16:16), while the children of believers inherit the gospel benefits by way of God’s promise (Acts 2:39; Luke 19:15). Either way, the liturgical rite of baptism engenders query and conversation, even self-evaluation by unbelievers, especially when it is regularly taking place during church and its remembrance is constantly on the lips and at the fingertips of believers (for those who make the sign of the cross).

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resurrection (Rom. 6:1–11). All of my best evangelistic moments have started with asking either of these simple questions: Are you baptized? Has your child been baptized?

Mission strategies have to take into account the obvious confessional direction offered in biblical baptism evangelism.

Paired with baptism in Matthew 28:18–20, of course, is the necessity of catechetical teaching. Per the mandate of our Lord, the mission of the church consists of making disciples through baptism and teaching. In large part, baptizing and teaching are the mission of orthodoxy and the very means of the mission itself. In both, God has inbuilt an outward mission thrust to baptism and catechesis.

Disciples are made by passing through the waters of holy baptism and by being immersed in the sacred teaching of the apostles (Acts 2:38–42). But due to the fact that baptism without the accompanying teaching frequently leads to poor discipleship, the church busies itself with teaching to the font and from the font.

In fact, Luther nor Calvin nor Cranmer would allow their auditors to understand that the missional endeavor of orthodoxy entails evangelism only. It stretches well beyond baptism to include catechetical discipleship; indeed, that being mission-minded means engaging in the theological art of making lifelong disciples of Jesus of Nazareth. Put differently, “missional” never means merely head-counting at the crusade or baptistery, but a corresponding life of discipleship yielded as the fruit of an engendered faith through Word and sacrament.

Consequently, not only is the sacrament of holy baptism at play here but also catechesis, holy absolution (in Reformed communions: declaration of pardon) and Holy Communion. An orthodox faith that is authentically missional is possessed and formed by the real voice of God and the real presence of Christ in the Word and sacrament ministry of the church. Unless we abandon Jesus’ great commission, then the Word and sacrament ministry of the church must be embraced as the twin engines of orthodox missiology, not only in ages past but also by the promise and presence of God remaining so until the end of the age.

Likewise, Holy Communion is deeply missional, especially when it retains its rightful place in weekly Eucharistic celebrations. If the Lord’s Supper is an objective means of divine gospel grace, then we have no more liberty to withhold it from God’s people than we do preaching the gospel or pronouncing absolution. The Eucharist brings the gospel to bear in the pure, unadulterated gospel words of institution. What is more, there is the profound and mysterious aesthetic dynamic to Holy Communion—the gospel made visible to all who are present: believers engaged in an incarnational encounter with their redeeming Lord; unbelievers witnessing how God is present with his people, feeding and healing them through the life-giving blood of Christ. The Divine Liturgy is the Eucharist liturgy—Christ’s death being proclaimed in the theater of mission.

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(John 15:26–27) in accomplishing the divine will to save and to sanctify. A simple reliance upon the Holy Spirit to render efficacious the means of grace defines the mission statement of confessional orthodoxy. We look to the fulfillment of the Parakletos in Acts 2 and there we find liturgical proliferation (preaching, baptizing, praising, gathering around the apostles’ teaching, fellowship in the breaking of bread, the prayers) and the Holy Spirit adding to the church “day by day those who were being saved” (2:47).

Thus, along with the Resurrection, Pentecost is celebrated weekly though a Divine Liturgy as the Holy Spirit faithfully does his work since the days the gospel moved out from Jerusalem to spread throughout the entire world. Only the person, promise, and means of God garner the orthodox response of faith and the confidence of the faithful.

In response to the Sunday morning Pentecost happenings of the Spirit that we experience, the focus of the renewed church is to do mission through vocation Monday through Saturday, to invite others to “come and see” (John 1:46). By God’s design, orthodoxy begets a culture of biblically formed orthopraxis, and this includes a missional dynamic to our various vocations to family, friends, coworkers, and neighbors.

A confident faith in God’s Word, will, and presence frees ministers and parishioners alike from the bondage of the missional Zeitgeist, which is the endless pursuit of the contemporary and relevant silver-bullet evangelistic program. We need not busy ourselves with missional approaches employing the latest fads, gimmicks, skits, video dramas, demographic pandering, and the like, in an attempt to artificially replicate what the liturgy does so naturally and with the promises of God and power of the Holy Spirit permanently affixed. Orthodoxy simply does not allow us to see the liturgy as an order of service, but rather Scripture and the ancient consensual scriptural interpretation compel us to trust it as the God-given vehicle by which the Holy Spirit is cut loose in the midst of believers and unbelievers alike. Have confidence that in the liturgy God has his say and in having his say he bestows precisely what he says. Maybe then the risk of orthodoxy will appear no more risky than the spiritual discipline of faith in the promise-keeping God of our fathers. ■

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

WORKS CITED 1 Thomas C. Oden, The Rebirth of Orthodoxy: Signs of New Life in Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), 29.

2 I thank Brian Thomas for this insight and following reflection.

3 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Grand Rapids: Baker Book Company, 2003), 6:173.

Taking History Seriously in an Ahistorical Age

by Gillis Harp

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mong the most daunting challenges I have faced as a college professor has been the task of convincing my students that the study of history is an intrinsically worthwhile project. Perhaps accounting and engineering majors have always been a hard-sell in this regard, but the pervasive antihistorical spirit of our contemporary culture makes many students increasingly difficult to persuade. (Let me stress here that my students over the years at several different institutions have been of a high caliber—the problem is a broader cultural one, not limited to postsecondary education.)

In the classroom, this reality manifests itself in myriad ways. Despite their remarkable ability to master the most arcane computer jargon, undergraduates complain bitterly about having to read “archaic” prose. I am not referring here to Middle English but to the writings of, say, the New England Puritans or even Charles Dickens. Back in the 1960s, I recall reading Treasure Island and (being a weak reader in elementary school) struggling a little. Today, many high school students simply can’t be bothered. Inevitably, such a prejudice produces a blinkered perspective. At the very least, it makes it difficult for students to enter into what the University of Chicago’s Robert Hutchens once termed the “great conversation” of the West. And I have in mind here only works in English. Obviously, such a habit of restricting oneself only to those works composed in the colloquialisms of the past thirty years provides access to a constricted and parochial “conversation.”

Moreover, this prejudice against things historical also extends to two areas of particular interest to the young—film and music. Despite their intense fascination with Hollywood, I have found it extraordinarily difficult to interest high school or college students in films made before the 1990s. Invariably I’m asked when I am about to show something in class: “Is this an old movie?” When I nod in the affirmative, a kind of barrier descends. Black and white format is the kiss of death.

“Those old black and white films are just so depressing,” I’ve heard more than once. (I can’t imagine the Marx Brothers depressing, but there you have it.) Meanwhile, commercial radio reflects this same mindset that newer is always better and that older is inescapably outdated and irrelevant. No one finds it peculiar that so-called country music stations never play the music of the Carter Family or Hank Williams. The founders of the genre might be appropriate subjects of academic study but, evidently, they’re no longer sufficiently important to broadcast. Of course, such an approach to music ensures that young listeners never realize just how derivative most contemporary commercial music is and how much genuine lack of creativity characterizes what’s on the radio playlists. As for those who might like to hear something recorded before 1990, they’re relegated to “oldies” stations that sample incredibly short lists of commercial hits from the last thirty years.

Thus separated from younger listeners, this predigested and narrow selection feeds a sort of nostalgia that, in fact, discourages any meaningful engagement with the music of the past. As Christopher Lasch once observed, nostalgia actually reflects a dismissive attitude to the past because it declines to take it seriously; it refuses to allow the past to really engage the present. Instead, old music (or any older cultural product) is dismissed as quaint or romantic and thereby its impact is effectively defused. Nostalgia “idealizes the past,” Lasch observed, but not in order to understand the way in which [it] unavoidably influences the present and the future.

Nor does it unambiguously assert the superiority of bygone days. It contains an admixture of selfcongratulation. By exaggerating the naïve simplicity of earlier times, it implicitly celebrates the worldly wisdom of later generations. It not only misrepresents the past but diminishes the past.1 As Lasch argues elsewhere, nostalgia implies that the past was not “in any way better than life today.” Much as I enjoy watching them, it is this dimension of historical reenactments that I sometimes find problematic. Such a secure and malleable past rarely stands in judgment of our modern thinking or habits; indeed, it implies that the past can be domesticated without ever offering a serious critique of our contemporary world. Instead, the past should be allowed to engage critically our present. Robert Penn Warren put it best at the Agrarians’ reunion in 1956: “The past is always a rebuke to the present....It’s a better rebuke than any dream of the future. It’s a better rebuke because you can see what some of the costs were, what frail virtues were achieved in the past by frail men.” As Paul V. Murphy notes in his recent study of the Nashville Agrarians, “In this context, the Agrarian image of a better antebellum South came to represent for Warren a potential source of spiritual revitalization.”2 History can contribute to such a “revitalization” when we allow our ancestors to also cast their votes, as G. K. Chesterton so wonderfully put it.

Obviously, our consumerist economic order has long encouraged and rewarded this sort of disrespect for and ignorance of the past. Planned obsolescence convinces the consumer that newer is always better; the market promotes the public fascination with anything new because such an attitude has proved to be so profitable.

Indeed, in recent years, fascination with the novel has blossomed into what some have accurately labeled consumer fetishism, especially in the realm of electronics.

C. S. Lewis warned his readers about the dangers of dismissing the past with a presentist sneer. He referred to such disdain for history as “chronological snobbery.” Lewis apparently borrowed this wonderful phrase from his friend, S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 35

Owen Barfield. Barfield observed how many moderns had persuaded themselves that all the thinking of the past was decidedly inferior. “Humanity,” noted Barfield, is now viewed as having “languished for countless generations in the most childish errors on all sorts of crucial subjects, until it was redeemed by some simple scientific dictum of the last century.” Accordingly, moderns have come to believe that “anything more than a hundred years old is ancient” and “in the world of books, or opinions about books, the age at which senility sets in has now been reduced to about ten.”3 Accordingly, Lewis explained that it was always advisable to include old books with new ones in any reading regimen.

Lewis counseled this not because these older authors were infallible, but because they didn’t share the assumptions of moderns and therefore saw things differently. As such, their work could be a valuable corrective for the particular blind spots that afflict contemporary authors.

But this pervasive ahistorical spirit should not be the exclusive concern of history professors and other professional old fogies. Christians, as Lewis understood, should be especially concerned about the implications of such dismissive attitudes to the past. Just as a culture that devalues or ignores the past stumbles about, so too does the church become a sort of “weightless” society when there is no knowledge of or respect for Christian history. Even within confessional traditions, there is a staggering lack of knowledge of the founders among the faithful. It is increasingly common to encounter Lutherans who have never made a serious study of Luther, or Calvinists who have no knowledge of either the Geneva Reformer’s theology or his liturgical practice. Recently, a Presbyterian pastor I know was reprimanded by his denomination for teaching a particular theological position. He was censured despite the fact that he demonstrated clearly that what he taught had long been an accepted view within historic Reformed circles. As one of my colleagues reflected with disgust, the history simply didn’t matter to his judges.

Almost any other consideration (and especially the latest ideological concerns) now effectively trumps tradition.

In many Christian circles, historical precedent has come to possess no weight whatsoever. This love for novelty has been especially evident in the liturgical reforms of the last forty years. Although the 1662 Book of Common Prayer served Anglicans for roughly four hundred years, the Church of England is already on its third set of “contemporary” services (the Alternative Service Book having lasted a measly twenty years). Part of what dismissing this ancient form has done in this instance for Anglicans is to separate them from that “great cloud of witnesses” spoken of in Hebrews 12.

More fundamentally, the debate about recognizing homosexual “marriage” is also a manifestation of this pervasive mindset. We have arrived at the place where human institutions rooted in antiquity can be redefined with scarcely a backward glance to thousands of years of history.

Now, it is worth clarifying what I do not mean here by a deep appreciation for past thinkers and a profound respect for history in general. I do not mean mere nostalgia, nor is the 3 6 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

approach I am proposing a kind of reactionary traditionalism.

We would do well to remember that Christ sharply criticized the Pharisees for their ossified formalism. By reducing the law to a lengthy list of legalistic proscriptions, they missed the spirit of the law. Man became viewed as made for the Sabbath rather than the Sabbath for man. Jaroslav Pelikan expressed the proper Christian balance in this regard when he defined traditionalism as “the dead faith of the living” and tradition as “the living faith of the dead.”

Yet “historical study,” observed J. Gresham Machen, “is absolutely necessary for a stalwart Christianity.” Past events and historical understanding are at the very heart of the Christian religion. The Jewish community out of which Christianity arose saw its own history as nothing less than a record of God’s dealings with his people. The God of Israel disclosed himself in a definitive way in the history of the Jewish people. Those who reject the idea of a God who reveals himself in the history of an unremarkable Semitic tribe, who indeed speaks in the pages of their sacred Scriptures, will never make sense of the Old Testament. Of course, this “scandal of historical particularity” (as one commentator has called it) only gets worse when we consider Judaism’s offshoot, Christianity. Roman Catholic historian Christopher Dawson puts it succinctly: The Christian view of history is not merely a belief in the direction of divine providence, it is a belief in the intervention by God in the life of mankind by direct action at certain definite points in time and place. The doctrine of the Incarnation which is the central doctrine of the Christian faith is also the center of history, and thus it is natural and appropriate that our traditional Christian history is framed in a chronological system which takes the year of the Incarnation as its point of reference and reckons its annals backwards and forwards from this fixed centre.4 Many young people from Christian homes are eager to serve their churches and to engage the larger culture for Christ. Yet, it is hard to imagine how those who cut themselves off from so much that surrounds that “fixed center” will ever have the sort of profound and salutary impact they imagine.

Gillis Harp is professor of history at Grove City College (Grove City, Pennsylvania).

WORKS CITED 1 Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 118.

2 Paul V. Murphy, The Rebuke of History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 9.

3 Owen Barfield, History in English Words (Westockbridge, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 2002), 164; Owen Barfield, Worlds Apart (San Rafael, CA: The Barfield Press, 2006), 148.

4 Christopher Dawson, The Dynamics of World History (London: Sheed & Ward, 1957), 235.

B E Y O N D N O S TA L G I A : T H E R I S K O F O R T H O D O X Y

Clashing Narratives: Recognizing Persecution in the Risk of Christian Orthodoxy “We are praying for you.”

This was said to me by a Russian pastor to whom I had just secretly delivered Bibles in a city called Leningrad in what was the Soviet Union, locked behind an “Iron Curtain.” We had spent the morning drinking coffee in the basement of his church, discussing the oppressive political realities of seeking to faithfully serve Jesus Christ in his country at that time. When I sought to encourage him by reporting that Christians in the West are praying for him, he earnestly responded with this statement. I was compelled to ask him what he meant—how could it be that a church living under the daily hardships of persecution is so concerned about us who enjoy life in relative freedom? His answer became the occasion for much personal reflection over the years: “We clearly see the ways our common Enemy persecutes us through the atheistic communist propaganda and practices of our government; our Enemy persecutes you just as ruthlessly, except you don’t see it.”

Certainly, in our “Christian nation” we do not experience persecution in the same sense as our brothers and sisters who live in societies with systemic ties to hostile ideologies or religions. In fact, I often hear American evangelical Christians lament or criticize our own lack of such persecution, as if it would somehow purify us, or as if the natural and supernatural enemies of Christ and his church were now somehow leaving us alone. Rather than romanticize persecution in a way that keeps us from seeing things as they really are in our culture, we should reflect on the question: In our “Christian nation,” are we evangelicals actually living under a persecution that escapes our recognition?

As a means of addressing this question, let us explore the issue of Christian orthodoxy on a more basic level than the identification of its content; but this is not to marginalize the critically important responsibility for Christians to know, trust in, and act out what are taken to be the orthodox teachings of our religion. In correct response to the relentless assault on the content of our Christian faith over the centuries, the “good fight” (1 Tim. 6:12; 2 Tim. 4:7) for God’s people is defined as BY

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“guarding” what has been entrusted to our care on the one hand (1 Tim. 6:29), and “contending” for it within contemporary culture on the other (Jude 3). Beneath the important debates over its content, however, is a deeper conflict between two powerful narratives struggling to define our orientation to the very concept of Christian orthodoxy itself. I will refer to these as the narrative of evangelical objectivism and the narrative of Enlightenment subjectivism. To more clearly define this struggle in terms of these two narratives will be to uncover a true persecution that evangelical Christians experience in our culture and have been experiencing for a long time.

The Narrative of Evangelical Objectivism he word ‘orthodox’ as I am using it here comes from the terms orthos, meaning ‘correct,’ and doxos, meaning ‘opinion’ or ‘belief.’ To be orthodox in a general Christian sense means that one’s own beliefs (and practices) are in conformity to the established beliefs (and practices) of Christianity. This concept of Christian orthodoxy denotes fidelity to the historical Christian belief system as set forth in Holy Scripture, and as it has been reproduced throughout the centuries in the creeds and confessions of the Christian church. Basic to this concept of orthodoxy, and particularly defining for evangelicalism, is its objectivist orientation. Here the judge of what is correct Christian belief and practice is established ‘outside’ the subject (that is, the believer). This external judge is found in the uniquely normative revelation of God in Holy Scripture and the derivatively normative witness of Christian tradition that aids us in our efforts to properly understand and apply Scripture. As a result, in this sense of Christian orthodoxy, one’s own reason, conscience, feelings, insights, worldview, society, culture, etc., are allowed to be checked and corrected by Holy Scripture and the creeds and confessions of the Christian church.

The narrative of objectivism that informs this concept of orthodoxy has its modern roots not in the Enlightenment but in the post-Reformation period (1570–1680), known as Protestant Scholasticism, within which the classical Reformed and Lutheran theological systems were formulated. Although sometimes overlooked, this period is part of the heritage for much of American evangelicalism, developing as it did out of the Old Princeton theology of the nineteenth century that in turn drew directly from the systematic theology of the late Protestant Scholastic Francis Turretin. Here the basic question “How can God be known?” is answered not through an examination of the capabilities and possibilities inherent in humanity, but by slightly changing the perspective: how God can be known must be determined by the way in which he actually is known, by the creative event of his self-revelation. The endeavor here is to begin with God and not with humanity; with what is possible with God, not with what is possible for humanity. Thus, the primary and comprehensive interest is in what God says about himself, taking very seriously the wise advice of Ecclesiastes:

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Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. Go near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools, who do not know that they do wrong. Do not be quick with your mouth, do not be hasty in your heart to utter anything before God. God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few. (Eccles. 5:1–2) In this objectivist narrative, God’s act of self-revelation is the single indispensable prerequisite for our knowledge of God. Yet, because God infinitely transcends us (Job 11:7; Ps. 145:3; Isa. 55:8–9; Rom. 11:33) and because we are sinners (1 Tim. 6:16), divine revelation is not suitable to be communicated to us without accommodation. John Calvin first used this word to describe the process of divine selfrevelation in terms of a great rhetorician whose precise aim is to adjust or adapt his language in a way that would be suitable to the intended audience. This loving act of accommodation is fulfilled in the knowledge of God we receive through Jesus Christ (John 1:16; 1 Cor. 1:30; 2:6–16; Eph. 4:13). The incarnation makes possible for us a true revelation of God that is comprehensible, able to be discussed in our language, and—because it consists of redemptive acts—able to be received by us as the good news of the gospel.

This powerful narrative is centered on Jesus Christ and the blessings of his gospel that are now proclaimed and communicated to the world through the Word of God. This is a twofold reality, consisting of the external Word of God (the inspired, self-authenticating, sufficient, clear, and infallible Holy Scriptures), and the internal Word of God (the Holy Spirit’s creative work that reclaims our sinful condition and gifts us with new possibilities for understanding and obeying this external Word). The activity of the Word of God is also twofold—it creates the church as the location of the redemptive realities and benefits that Jesus Christ accomplished and communicates to believers; and it regenerates and sanctifies believers themselves, bestowing knowledge of God and a loving delight in God. With this understanding of the present twofold reality and activity of the Word of God, the objectivist narrative unequivocally affirms that knowledge of God is possible only because God has both established this knowledge of himself externally to us and because he has made it internally possible for us to understand and desire it. And in the same way that God does not keep his selfknowledge “shut up in his own bosom” but graciously sends it forth in revelation, so also the church does not keep this knowledge of God to herself. The church enters this narrative as that which is called into existence by the Word of God as a “great cloud of witnesses” to that Word (Heb. 12:1). Our witness is our human interpretation, explanation, or rational discourse on God, proclaimed and lived out before the world in words and deeds, beliefs and practices. What enables and frees our human response to be true or correct is not its conformity to our own reason, conscience, feelings, insights, and social and cultural norms. On the contrary, our witness to God is made free to

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become true by the act of God’s Word, the act of God revealing himself, which we hear and to which we attempt to conform in faithfulness and obedience. This narrative of evangelical objectivism is essentially a brief commentary on 1 Corinthians 2:10–13: For to us God revealed them through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God, which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words.

The Narrative of Enlightenment Subjectivism o see how this evangelical narrative contrasts to another defining narrative of our contemporary culture, one only needs to compare it to an eighteenth-century definition of the modern Enlightenment out of which it flows:

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Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his selfimposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.

This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another.

Sapere Aude! ‘Have courage to use your own understanding!’—that is the motto of enlightenment.” (Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?)

What Kant and other thinkers of this formative period of the Modern Age meant by “guidance from another” was guidance from the received pre-modern texts, traditions, and institutions—the authority and trustworthiness of which was then being brought into question. This was not limited to, but certainly included Christian orthodoxy. In fairness to some of the great intellectual leaders of this movement—such as Descartes, Locke, Newton, and Kant—the project was not (and is not) necessarily antiChristian, but rather the attempt to re-establish Christianity on what would come to be thought of as a more promising subjectivist orientation. Here the judge of what is correct Christian belief and practice is established in accordance with the natural capacities and possibilities ‘within’ the subject (the believer). The perceived need for such a radical shift came as the optimistic ad fontes of the Renaissance and the expectant sola Scriptura of the Reformation ultimately collapsed into the religious wars and conflicts of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Out of the skepticism of this turmoil rose the light of the cogito, the new science, and the new Christianity.

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The powerful ensuing narrative now announced a resurgent optimism based on the courage to allow one’s own reason, conscience, feelings, insights, and social and cultural norms to check and if necessary correct the received texts, traditions, and institutions. This Enlightenment subjectivist narrative is centered on autonomous humanity and all the new possibilities that our self-asserted freedom from externally imposed authorities will bring.

This Enlightenment narrative is still entrenched in our contemporary culture as it continues to profoundly influence Western Christianity. It has been well argued that our continuing subjectivism is one tradition of modernity left relatively intact by the penetrating criticisms of postmodernism (even though the ‘self’ as the subject has given way to the broader human categories of community and culture). This key aspect of Kant’s challenge has only been expanded by Nietzsche’s ‘open sea’ and Derrida’s différance. Regardless of the new distrust of metanarratives, the narrative of Enlightenment subjectivism continues unabated to propagate the promises of human autonomy.

Where the church informed by this Enlightenment narrative has not dismissed the concept of Christian orthodoxy altogether, there has continued an unyielding effort to restate or even reinvent the faith in accordance with contemporary subjectivist categories.

Not-so-subtle examples abound. In the eighteenthcentury “Age of Reason,” it was asserted that “God cannot demand us to adore what we cannot rationally comprehend or verify.” In the nineteenth century, the attempt was made to reconstruct Protestant Christianity in terms of Romanticism for the purpose of demonstrating to the “cultured despisers” the usefulness of Christian symbols in making sense of humanity’s deep feeling of absolute dependence. At the turn of the twentieth century, the essence of Christianity was articulated as merely God’s universal love for us and our moral responsibility to participate in his wonderful plan for world history. Later in the twentieth century, the German Christians integrated the goals and teachings of the Third Reich with the goals and teachings of Christian orthodoxy. And already in the twenty-first century, many have taken recent decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court as a sign that the Spirit is leading the church into the “full adulthood of inclusion” with the ministerial ordination of non-celibate gays and lesbians.

While these obvious examples highlight the contrast between the concept of orthodoxy as it is informed by an evangelical objectivist narrative and by an Enlightenment subjectivist narrative, the question still remains: How is it that these two clashing narratives manifest actual persecution against the evangelical church in our culture today?

Persecution in the Clash of these Two Narratives he persecution we experience as evangelicals in our contemporary culture comes to light with a conceptual analysis of the nature of our church’s existence between “the already and the not yet.” Even within the dynamic reality of our interrelationship with

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culture, we still seem to exist between two distinctive poles consisting of an objectively established Christian orthodoxy on the one side and the many facets of a culture informed by Enlightenment subjectivism on the other.

This bipolar reality is created by the sanctifying work of the Word of God itself, permitting our own stories to be deeply defined for a time by the narratives that inform each of these poles. Furthermore, within this tension we hear the clear call to humble, prayerful, and diligent obedience to God’s Word in reflecting on, articulating, proclaiming, and confessing the Word of God, in being witnesses of Jesus Christ, and in being agents of God in this culture with both our words and deeds: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8).

We recognize that our witness will not be totally without the subjective influences of our culture, history, or contemporary thought forms on its reception, articulation, and also its self-understanding. Yet, we see our primary task as faithfulness to God’s self-revelation, even as we seek to navigate between these poles by challenging contemporary culture in a meaningful way and by allowing contemporary culture to challenge our ideas as well. Thus, an evangelicalism defined by this narrative of objectivism will risk a holy discretion in relating to culture by engaging contemporary languages, thoughts, mediums, and expressions—always careful not to alter the essential content of divine revelation authoritatively established for us as Christian orthodoxy.

The constant choice before us then is to which pole we give the primary weight of authority. Of course, the answer that logically follows from the evangelical objectivist narrative would have to be the pole of Christian

orthodoxy. However, we are constantly compelled by the Enlightenment subjectivist narrative to exercise our autonomy in asserting ourselves over this pole as its judge.

Giving in to this pressure always leads us to a situation where we affirm theoretically what we deny practically.

Even in our most conservative evangelical churches, the authority and integrity of Christian orthodoxy are often practically denied in subtle ways. This of course includes but also goes well beyond the moral inconsistencies we all struggle with as sinners. We judge the merit of the particulars of Christian orthodoxy according to the subjective categories of our own feelings, personal philosophies, social norms, or according to their usefulness in the development of our own culturally defined successful life. We substitute for orthodoxy our deeply held cultural beliefs such as “God helps those who help themselves,” or we rationalize our disinterest and disengagement with orthodoxy as manifesting our own notion of a different, deeper spirituality. While we rightly agree with our post-Enlightenment culture that the last century has taught us—and current events continue to remind us—how dangerous it is to uncritically embrace traditional beliefs and practices; we tend also to fear faithfulness and obedience to an externally established Christian orthodoxy, seeing it as a blind conformity rather than the new possibility of true freedom created for us by the Word of God. We also deny the authority and integrity of Christian orthodoxy when we rush toward integration with other academic disciplines, business models, political ideologies, and entertainment mediums, judging the outcome in terms of effectiveness and relevance rather than faithfulness and obedience. Believing that conflict and division are worse than heresy, we allow subjectivist concepts of pluralism and

Optimism, Pessimism, and Hope

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am a Southerner. Lost causes don’t bother me. We are used to them. And ours is not even lost—at least, not in the long run.

In the short run, I am not very optimistic for our society or for the church. We as a society are trying to maintain our democracy while dismantling its foundation: the selfevident truth that all people are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.

This project is doomed to failure. Nevertheless, having repudiated the only foundation on which a successful democracy has ever been erected, we presume to teach the rest of the world how to “do” democracy.

Meanwhile, the conservative church’s only response to this situation is senselessly to berate society for departing from a foundation it no longer remembers ever having had, rather than doing the only sensible thing to address

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the problem: re-evangelizing American society from scratch and teaching it the biblical worldview all over again. At the same time, I see our theological birthright, the hard gains of an evangelical movement that clawed its way up out of fundamentalist anti-intellectualism, being squandered for a mess of postmodern epistemological pottage, soft nihilism masquerading as humility about truth. But look: if there is no resurrection, then Christ is not raised; and if there are no valid metanarratives, then Christianity is not true. It is really as simple as that.

Unwilling to face that stark simplicity, the evangelical movement finds itself exactly where the mainline Protestant denominations were a century ago, losing its message to the spirit of the age so slowly and subtly that it doesn’t realize what is happening. Only now, as this new apostasy “emerges,” the friends of truth, remembering how

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relativism to become normative over our objectivist concept of Christian orthodoxy. Here we forget that doctrinal differences and debates are necessary and healthful for a church that is able to “speak the truth in love” (Eph. 4:15).

With nostalgia we seek to repristinate some past era of the church, forgetting that Christian orthodoxy itself teaches that the whole church belongs to the Spirit and that “between the already and the not yet” the golden age of Christianity always awaits us in the future. We say “no creed but Christ” as if the creeds and confessions of Christian orthodoxy are not themselves gifts from Christ that aid us in properly understanding and applying Holy Scripture (Eph. 4:11–15). Here we forget that our creeds and confessions are authorities over us even as Holy Scripture remains in authority over them. In all these examples and more we take the risk of accepting and affirming the concept of an externally established Christian orthodoxy, and then deny its authority and integrity in the way we seek to engage it, articulate it, integrate it, and live it out in culture.

The immediate consequence of this subtle transgression of the First Commandment is the descent of our evangelical witness into a conflicted and impotent hypocrisy. For this reason, a hundred times a day—through all the mediums of society and culture informed by Enlightenment subjectivism—our enemy comes to us and asks: “Did God really say...?” (Gen. 3:1). Like the methodical propaganda of an atheistic communist government, we clearly see this as an attack on Christian orthodoxy. What we evangelicals do not recognize so clearly, however, is the Enemy’s equally relentless pressure on us to misuse our freedom and respond from a subjectivist orientation:

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the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. (Gen. 3:6) This is starkly contrasted by the humility of Christ’s objectivist response to the same persecution: “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’” (Matt. 4:4).

The risk of Christian orthodoxy is the risk of a knowing and humble conformity to an externally established authority in a culture that is dead set on doing the opposite.

The very real persecution that compels evangelicals to practically affirm human autonomy by employing our own reason, feelings, insights, and social and cultural norms to judge and deny the authority and integrity of Christian orthodoxy is often something that escapes our recognition.

This is not some romantic notion of a purifying persecution, but rather a necessary consequence to be embraced by a community of faith that has already been sanctified by the Word of God. Living within the tension of these clashing narratives is the oppressive reality of seeking to follow and faithfully serve Jesus Christ in our culture at this time. Yet it is by God’s grace that we withstand this persecution and affirm Christian orthodoxy both theoretically and practically in fulfillment of our calling as obedient witnesses until the return of our Lord (2 Thess. 2:13–17).

In the meantime, it is an encouragement to know that our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world—who are experiencing only different forms of persecution from our common Enemy—are praying for us. ■

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that

Peter Anders teaches theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (South Hamilton, Massachusetts).

ugly things turned during the old fundamentalist days and thinking that nothing could be worse than to be labeled a “separatist,” no longer have any stomach for the fight.

Fortunately, both history and theology save me from despair. History tells me that things have looked this bad before, or worse—right after the fall of Rome, at the height of medieval papal corruption before the Reformation, at the height of the Endarkenment of the eighteenth century before the first Great Awakening came seemingly out of nowhere. And theology tells me that God is sovereign and doesn’t need favorable cultural situations to accomplish his purpose or preserve his remnant or even initiate a new Reformation leading to a new awakening.

So, thank God, I don’t need optimism. In fact, the need to find optimism based on a Pollyanna-ish view of circumstances through rose-colored glasses—which a lot of Christians seem to think it their duty to concoct—is the most pessimistic and depressing thing I can imagine. We can offer something much better. Let’s be pessimistic enough to be pushed away from the

broken reed of optimism back to the solid staff of Christian hope, based not on any reading of the circumstances at all, but on the reality and character and promises of God. The Prince of Darkness grim, We tremble not for him.

His wrath we can endure, For lo! His doom is sure: One little Word shall fell him.

We have no hope in this world. Good! That means we have the Enemy right where we want him. Lift up your heads, for our redemption draweth nigh!

Donald T. Williams (Ph.D. University of Georgia) is professor of English and director of the School of Arts and Sciences at Toccoa Falls College, Georgia, and an ordained minister in the Evangelical Free Church of America.

S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 41

INTERVIEW f o r

d i a l og u e

i n

and

out

of

our

circles

An Interview with William H. Willimon

The State of Evangelicalism William H. Willimon, a bishop in the United Methodist Church, is a theologian and preacher, the former Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, and the author of over fifty books. White Horse Inn producer Shane Rosenthal conducted this interview with Bishop Willimon for a White Horse Inn video documentary on American Christianity to be released this fall.

What’s your take on evangelicalism?

It would take a mainline liberal Protestant type like me to say this, but I find contemporary evangelicalism disillusioning in some of its aspects and it’s as if moralistic therapeutic deism has got all of us. I remember listening on TV—it’s the only place I can hear evangelicals preach—and he’s up there saying, “You’re good and you mean well and God loves you and you need to work harder and believe more in yourself.” I’m old enough to remember when you used to count on evangelicals to say, “Hey, it’s in the Bible. Sorry that doesn’t appeal to you, but God said it, we believe it, that ends it.” I think we’re really missing that kind of theological authorization for the church and its ministry—that’s a dilemma we’re in.

But isn’t cultural relevance necessary for the church to get a hearing in society today?

Well, I’m part of a church ecclesiastical tradition in North America—mainline liberal Protestantism—where I did the cultural relevance thing up big, with the help of some great minds like Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich and others. I feel that in reaching out to the culture, we fell in face down. We woke up one day and we weren’t really saying anything different from the message that people could get at any other segment of the culture; or as one of my friends said, we woke up one day and there was no difference between church and Rotary, and Rotary at least meets at a convenient hour of the week and serves lunch. And that’s a problem.

This is talking as a preacher, but I got the impression when I was in seminary that my job was to sort of close the gap between this primitive Christian faith and the brave new self-critical modern world, and that in twenty minutes I was to bring those two worlds together. Well, later in my ministry I decided that my challenge is to open up the gap, to say in my preaching in a sense, “Gee, you really don’t know Jesus, do you?” and “We are not faithful to the historic Christian faith, are we?” Because it’s in that gap that I think the Holy Spirit works and moves, and in that recognition. You know, “Depart from me, I’m a sinful man.” That was the effect that Jesus had on some of the

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first people he talked to.

Christianity is not just another lifestyle option, not another sort of project that I can enlist in getting whatever it is I wanted before I met Jesus. I’m much more interested in cultural abrasiveness and cultural conflict than I am in cultural accommodation.

Part of the quest for cultural relevance hinges on the preacher’s task of translation. Can we stop using words like “justification,” “propitiation,” or “atonement” and still claim to be orthodox?

I think most of the theology that I learned in seminary was what I would characterize as in the translation mode. We had some wonderful thinkers who said, “Now, you take the Christian faith and you reframe it, you redescribe it, you translate it.” For Paul Tillich, you don’t say “God,” you say “ultimate reality.” You don’t say “faith,” you talk about “ultimate concern.” In other words, you take the Christian faith and you take the categories of au courant existentialist philosophy; you just sift it through that and that’s something you can preach.

Of course, nobody knows existentialism anymore or bothers with it, so where do we go with that? I think George Lindbeck in his book, The Nature of Doctrine, says that there is a peculiar sort of untranslatability to the Christian faith; that you just haven’t said “salvation” when you say “self-esteem,” and you haven’t said the good news of Jesus Christ when you’ve said, “I have found a way to help your marriage work.” In Christianity, you’ve got to sit and learn the language—just like you can’t learn French by reading Madame Bovary in an English translation. You’ve got to sit and learn the vocabulary and the grammar.

I know my buddy Stanley Hauerwas says that the best training to be a pastor today is to have previously been a teacher of high school French; that the same skills to drive French verbs into the heads of adolescents are wonderfully transferable to the parish, because in a way Christianity is like learning a new language. If you’ve ever tried to learn French, you know that you’re not just learning different labels; you’re learning a different culture. You are moving through the words into a different world. So I’m not much on the translation mode. I think, as we sometimes say, something is “lost in translation.” Well, that something

may be absolutely crucial. When you say that you interview pastors and evangelicals and they say, “I translate into the mode,” it’s fascinating to me. I think that is the old discredited liberal project of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that many of us mainliners realize takes you nowhere. It’s an incredible thinning out of the gospel. It is so disheartening to see evangelicals now jumping on that and buying it. We’re all liberals now.

What’s the relationship between what we preach and what we need? Does “self-help” preaching betray a selfcentered theology that just doesn’t need God anymore?

In my experience, people on top, people in positions of economic power, always feel good about themselves and their world: “Oh, this is God’s world and God created it just like it is; and just like it is seems wonderful because it’s my world and I’m in charge of it.” I think a lot of the kind of self-help stuff you get in American preaching today is a commentary on our sort of economic cult-ness.

Marx was right in a certain sense; that is, what you believe is more functional, what kind of car you drive, than it is what kind of God you think we’ve got.

One dilemma is that we North Americans can solve with our checkbooks so many of the dilemmas that people used to ask God to help them with. Like the Bible has a wonderfully modest view of human need: food, clothing, housing, things like that. But we can solve all of those with our checkbook; we don’t need to ask God for any of that. So we move on to ask God for meaning in life, or purpose, or whatever—matters the Bible seems to care little about. And that’s the problem. So I think the fact that we’re into selfhelp and bootstraps theology—pull yourself up; if you think you can, you can. That was the message Norman Vincent Peale preached to mainline Protestantism back in the fifties when we had “made it.” It’s kind of sad to see some so-called evangelicals buying into that now, and I think it’s more of a commentary on the economic location of the congregation than it is on any sort of discernment of the gospel.

It sounds like we’re in danger of assuming the gospel.

I think there is a kind of assumption in mainline North American Protestantism that being a Christian is roughly synonymous with being a thinking, caring, sensitive American; that being a Christian means to be a really nice person, a human being that is very caring and loving, etcetera. No, to be a Christian is to be someone who looks at this Jew from Nazareth, Jesus Christ, and says, “That’s God, that’s the reality, that’s the key to the world.” It’s not something you generally come to overnight. It takes a lifetime of being gradually formed into that conviction; to not only believe it, but live it. I think that’s a different way of thinking.

Lesslie Newbigin said, “Many of us are beginning to feel like missionaries in the very culture we thought we owned.” I think—and this is one reason I like people under thirty, people I rarely meet in my church because we’re aging out—that is a real sense among young

Christians, that Christianity is weird; it is a countercultural, different way of living. As Malcolm Muggeridge said, “Only dead fish swim with the stream.” By the way, one thing I really miss about being in campus ministry, being a college chaplain, is that no self-respecting college student would walk into a physics class where the professor says, “Now, about the second law of thermodynamics...” and they say, “Wait a minute, translate that into the words I already know.” The professor would say, “Hey kid. Write this down.

It’s going to be on the exam. I’m going to define the second law of thermodynamics for you, and you’ll need to memorize it and it will change your life, once you know this.” I miss that because now I’m around people who are not in that kind of educational mode; they don’t think they need to be converted to be Christians. Well, I’m just afraid that this is such a counter way of living in reality. You have to be born again. You’re going to have to get a whole bunch of words that will eventually make you a different human being from you were before you met Jesus.

But it seems that one of the problems of the modern church (seen especially, perhaps, in megachurch youth ministry) is that reality must be pleasant, that fun and games are more preferential than the lifetransforming power of the gospel. What hope do our kids have of being discipled if we’re busy telling their parents how to be a better you?

There is an army base near my home where they’re preparing people to go to Iraq; I’ve noticed they don’t seem to do that with fun and games. They do it by saying, “Here are some skills you’ve got to have or you could die, and you could cause the death of other people.” I think it’s kind of an analogy. I feel sorry for kids that think Christianity is about skateboarding and fun and games, and then they go off to college and realize it’s like we’re in a kind of war. I would also say that as somebody who’s been trying to follow Jesus for a long time, “Hey kid, this ain’t easy.” And it ain’t easy because Jesus won’t make it easy. He loves to take ordinary, faithless weak people and make them disciples and demand that they take over the world with him, in his way.

Years ago when I was a young pastor, William Sloan Coffin—a great icon of liberal mainline Christianity—asked a question: “How do you attract people to the gospel of Jesus Christ by appealing essentially to their selfish self-interest?

How do you lure them in?” Because that’s what we said we were doing. Well, we first reached them by appealing to their felt needs. How do you do that, and then jump somehow, switching bait, to Jesus Christ who says, “You want to find your life? Lose it. You want to live? Die. You want to grow up? Be born again.” How do you do that?

To be a Christian is to be willing to be transformed by Jesus Christ. It’s to be willing to have your life molded.

That sounds kind of painful and all, and it sure can be. I’m a Wesleyan, a Methodist who actually believes that you can be a better person after you met Jesus than before— Calvinists and Lutherans are suspicious of that project. But S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 43

we can say: “Hey, I’m sorry, I’ve got problems, but I know Jesus has pulled through the needle’s eye. I’m being pulled. I’m different.” So let the differences begin.

That sounds like a “downer.” Shouldn’t our worship services be upbeat?

One reason I believe the Bible is the Word of God is that the Bible manages to hit the full range of emotions one has when one is in the presence of a living God, as opposed to being in the presence of a fake God. Joy is a Christian emotion. I guess it’s because I’ve worked with college students, but I’m suspicious of most claims of joy because I know the way they have a lot of joy yet also lament—the gnashing of teeth, wailing, the rending of garments, the broken and contrite spirit—these are also extolled as something that God sometimes does to people.

Again, I would say that people on top, people in power, tend toward joy, they tend toward praise. A great book I still think back to by Walter Brueggemann was called Israel’s Praise, an analysis of the Psalms. Brueggemann argues that Israel’s Psalter is based on reflexive praise; that is, “God, we were slaves in Egypt, God has delivered us with a mighty hand: Praise the Lord.” Brueggemann says that degenerates from there into Psalm 150, a psalm I always particularly liked, which is praise for nothing. Get a tambourine, praise the Lord; let’s just praise the Lord, for nothing. That worries me about worship defined as purely praise.

On the other hand, however, it means that when the church prays, when the church sings, there’s a lot at stake there—particularly if you’re like a Methodist. We really don’t have any theology, or big statements of faith and all— we have the hymnal; but I’m worried that a lot of our churches are appearing to jettison the hymnal. I was at a socalled contemporary service awhile back and I said to the preacher, “You owe my grandmother an apology. I don’t know that she was that wrong about God in the music she sang.” There’s a kind of arrogance that says, “Oh, we’re so modern and we’re so different, and we’re the first generation ever to walk with Jesus; you can’t trust anybody over thirty and so, here, let’s sing this.” I must say that that phenomenon appears to be more by people my age. The under-forty crowd seems to say, “Hey, old man, you got something to tell me? Tell me. I’m open for it. I’d like to know what you found helpful in your walk with Christ. What songs did you sing that enabled you to survive as a Christian? Would you teach them to me? I’m willing to learn.” So I think we may be turning the corner on that. I do worry about churches that put all their eggs in that basket; but, hey, they can get born again too and next thing you know, they’re back singing Charles Wesley.

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REQUIRED READING FOR 21ST CENTURY CHRISTIANS modern

reformation

m u st-r e ad s

Readings on Orthodoxy Today Evangelical Truth: A Personal Plea for Unity, Integrity & Faithfulness

Institutes of Elenctic Theology P & R, 1997

by Francis Turretin Turretin’s work is the standard for Reformed orthodoxy; yet his concerns are not merely doctrinal but also bridge the gap between theory and application.

His precise formulations of doctrine—in contrast to the controversies of his day—give modern readers a clear picture of the importance and relevance of theology.

InterVarsity Press, 2003

by John Stott This short book presents a clear call for evangelicals to reaffirm their theological and practical distinctives in trinitarian terms of revelation, the cross, and the Spirit, and in contrast to fundamentalism and liberalism.

Christianity and Liberalism

The Theology of PostReformation Lutheranism

Eerdmans, 2001

by J. Gresham Machen A theological classic, Machen’s clear identification of two competing systems of belief is as true today as it was when it was first published in 1923.

Though some of the players have changed, the need for an orthodox Protestantism is as great as ever.

SEE ALSO: The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World by David Wells (Eerdmans) Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition by Jaroslav Pelikan (Yale University Press)

Concordia, 2003

by Robert Preus Lutheran orthodoxy has a fine spokesman in Robert Preus. These two volumes, covering theological prolegomena and the doctrine of God and his creation, systematize and analyze the works of those prominent theologians who developed and defended Lutheran doctrine.

LOGIA: A Journal of Lutheran Theology Early Christian Doctrines by J. N. D. Kelley (Continuum International)

The Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin (Eerdmans)

How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

by Francis A. Schaeffer (Crossway) S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 45

REVIEWS wh at ’s

b e i n g

r ea d

A Theological Life

J

ohn Muether has written a noteworthy biography of the life and ministry

nineteen. As a loyal member of the Christian Reformed Church, of Cornelius Van Til, setting the theological contributions of Van Til in the Van Til enrolled at Calvin College in 1920. It was at Calvin that historical context in which they were developed and defended. It is on this “Van Til’s greatest collegiate accomplishment was editing the account that Muether’s Calvin College Chimes, a student publication that began in Cornelius Van Til: Re1907” (42). As editor of the Chimes, Van Til developed his formed Apologist and method of defending the faith with “fit modesty and Churchman stands out unreserved conviction” (43). It would be in the same spirit as a unique contributhat he carried with him into the rigorous battles that tion to the world of would mark the majority of his ministry.

Christian biographies.

The church was always near to the heart of the man The overarching purwho had, by the time he finished college, already become pose of this work is to quite an academician. After graduating from Princeton show that Van Til was Seminary with a Th.B., an M.A., a Th.M. and a Ph.D.—and preeminently committhat, remarkably within only five years—Van Til ted to the work of proceeded to accept a call to the Christian Reformed Christ in the church. In Church in Spring Lake, Michigan. Though he was ready short, the book aims at and able to stay in the pastorate, it was not long before demonstrating that “Van Princeton Seminary called him to replace William Brenton Til’s theological commitGreene as professor of apologetics in 1928. The decision to ment cannot be underleave the pastorate for the seminary was not a rejection of stood apart from his the ministry in Van Til’s mind. “Every minister he once ecclesiology” (15). wrote, had a ‘V.D.M. degree’ (that is a ‘Verbum Dei Cornelius Van Til: Cornelius Van Til Minister,’ or a ‘Minister of the Word of God’): ‘When Reformed Apologist and was a child of the therefore I became a teacher of apologetics it was natural Churchman Afscheiding. The Afscheidfor me to think not only of my Th.M. and my Ph.D. but ing was a term used to above all of my V. D. M. The former degrees were but means

by John R. Muether denote the group that Presbyterian & Reformed Publishers, 2008 whereby I might be true to the latter degree’” (59). It was 288 pages (paperback), $24.99 seceded from the state this attitude that Van Til carried with him throughout his church of the Netherministry at Princeton and into his long career at lands in the nineteenth century. It was not until the days Westminster Theological Seminary. of Abraham Kuyper that the children of the secession One pleasantly unexpected aspect of Muether’s would be compelled to “break out of the social and cultural biography is the way in which he includes several isolation that characterized the Afscheiding” (24). Here the accounts of the human frailties of Cornelius Van Til. Far force of the Doleantie—the Kuyperian demand for a too often, biographers have painted portraits of Christian Calvinistic worldview to influence every sphere of men and women in such heroic light that the reader is left society—would be pressed upon Dutch Reformed wondering if they really were men and women with a churches. The Afscheiding and the Doleantie were finally nature like ours. Muether includes the account of the time wed in Herman Bavinck’s Gereformeerde Dogmatiek—a work when Van Til—mourning the seemingly untimely death of of no small importance in Van Til’s teaching on antithesis Westminster founder J. Gresham Machen and wondering and common grace. what would happen to the seminary on account of the loss The Christian home was a place of intellectual and of their leader—went to see his aged father in order to devotional nurture for young Cornelius. The sixth son of speak with him about the situation. Ike Van Til reminded Ike and Klazina Van Til, Kees (pronounced Case), as he his son of the passage in Hebrews: “He that cometh to God would later come to be known, expressed interest in must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of them pursuing the Christian ministry at the youthful age of that diligently seek Him.” “Van Til recalled….‘That was all

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he said. I was rebuked and chastened. Did I still finally trust in Machen’s greatness as a scholar and a man or did I trust in the Christ to whom Machen constantly pointed us?’” (85).

One cannot help but sense the fervor with which Van Til fought for the prominence of a consistent Reformed theology in the American church. From the beginning of his college days, he was forced to defend the faith in the midst of theological controversy. Whether it was in the Christian Reformed Church, Calvin Theological Seminary, Princeton Seminary, or on the field of the American Presbyterian church, Cornelius Van Til was a man who “contended earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints.” With the church and seminary always on the brink of losing its Reformed distinctions, Van Til understood his calling to refute everything that was not rooted in Scripture and in the Reformed confessions of the church.

Muether has done an outstanding job of describing the historical context of Van Til’s battle over the doctrine of common grace, his stand against Karl Barth, his place in the Gordon Clark controversy, and his interaction with J. Oliver Buswell, Herman Dooyeweerd, Carl Henry, and Francis Shaeffer. In fact, while this volume may not have been intended to be a primer to the writings of Van Til, it certainly serves that purpose on account of its threefold emphasis: historical setting; bibliographical references; and clear, theological analysis.

Muether has produced a well-researched, well-written, and interesting biography of Cornelius Van Til. He has focused on the various aspects of the life of Van Til in such a way that the reader will come to view Van Til as a remarkable Christian husband, father, teacher, and churchman. Muether impresses the reader with a desire for stronger convictions and a greater love of the Reformed faith as he traces the life of one of the greatest warriors of the Reformed church. In a day when theological relativism reigns and compromise is ever knocking on our doors, this portrait of Van Til sets before the reader one of the cloud of witnesses who ran the race set before him and looked steadfastly unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.

Nicholas T. Batzig is a Th.M student at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary and currently serves as interim pastor at Christ the King (PCA) in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania.

Monk Habits for Everyday People: Benedictine Spirituality for Protestants

By Dennis Okholm Brazos Press, 2007 144 pages (paperback), $12.99 Of making many books on living the “spiritual life” there is no end (to paraphrase Ecclesiastes 12:12), and so one more is not surprising. The twist, however, is that this is a book on Benedictine spirituality written by a Presbyterian pastor and professor of theology. What is also surprising is that this book sold out at the annual meetings of both the Evangelical Theological Society and the American Academy of Religion this past November, which shows a definite interest in a title such as, Monk Habits for Everyday People: Benedictine Spirituality for Protestants. Obviously aware of the raised eyebrows this book would cause in Reformed circles, Dennis Okholm’s first chapter answers the question on everyone’s mind: “What’s a Good (Protestant Evangelical) Boy Doin’ in a Monastery?”

Its spirituality has enriched my Christian life so much so that, as I tell my Benedictine friends, I am glad to be their evangelist to my Protestant brothers and sisters.

That’s the reason for this book....I hope to entice Protestant readers (especially those like me whose pedigree includes Baptist and conservative evangelical strains), and others who care to join the circle....In sharing the wealth, then, this book will hopefully serve as an apologia to my Protestant brothers and sisters who often understandably have misconceptions about monasticism, as well as objections to Roman Catholicism more generally. (19–20) I first realized Okholm was not your typical Presbyterian when he arranged for Wheaton graduate students in his medieval church history class (which I was invited to attend) to visit a Benedictine monastery not too far out in Illinois farmland. We experienced a day of community and hospitality that was both enlightening and refreshing. So it was not surprising that some fifteen years later, Okholm would want to publish this book in order to share with a wider audience his learned experiences as a Benedictine oblate. Of course, he is not the first Protestant to become involved in monasticism—a notable example is the poet Kathleen Norris (another Presbyterian), who wrote the foreword to Monk Habits and is the author of the S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 47

best-seller, The Cloister Walk. But why this desire for Protestants to live in and learn from monastic communities, a lifestyle we know the Reformers denounced?

Okholm is certainly aware of the theological differences between our Protestant faith and that of Roman Catholicism, and in the book’s appendix he discusses the “‘semi-Pelagian (translation ‘semi-heretical’) label affixed to John Cassian, whose theology undergirds Benedict’s Rule” (21), as well as the objections raised by Calvin and Luther against the corrupted monasticism of the fifteenth century. Okholm’s main focus, however, is on the Rule itself and Benedict’s honest attempt at a needed reformation for the church in his day (sixth-century Italy): “By taking a critical stance toward the prevailing ethos, Benedict began a movement toward redemption of the created world whose fall Augustine had so eloquently described a century before in The City of God” (26).

Despite the theological differences, Okholm believes that the basic spiritual habits of the Benedictines are truly Christ-centered and therefore relevant to all Christians— especially today in a society where he feels that Benedictine virtues are “healthier than much of the spiritual junk food that permeates our culture and satiates the appetites of folks who would do better to graze on something more nutritious” (20).

Seven of his ten chapters concentrate on particular practices Okholm believes are necessary to the Christian life. One can surmise the content by the chapter titles: “Learning to Listen,” “Poverty: Sharing the Goods,” “Obedience: Objectifying Providence,” “Humility: Letting Go of the Mask,” “Hospitality: The Guest as Christ,” “Stability: Staying Put to Get Somewhere,” and “Balance: God in Everything.” All of these worthwhile habits are important to each believer’s spiritual discipline and maturing, a part of the Christian’s sanctification process.

What was most striking to me was how obvious these practices are and yet how scarce in my life and, let’s be honest, in too much of the church I see around me. How many of us can be quiet enough to really listen to what God is telling us through the Scriptures? How many of us deliberately consider the best way to use our money or our goods, following “Martin Luther’s notion that goods are not really ‘goods’ unless they can be shared”? (46). Okholm states: “We live in a culture that consumes to the extent that avarice is no longer one of Gregory the Great’s deadly sins but one of Donald Trump’s virtues” (47). As Elizabeth Seaton (1774–1821) said, which Okholm echoes in his book, “Live simply so that others may simply live” (53).

Not surprisingly, it was the chapter on obedience I found the most convicting. Okholm says of obedience that it’s “almost a dirty word outside of military schools. But it really needs to be part of the Christian’s vocabulary. The monk’s surrender of his will to others sounds harsh to the modern Western ear, which places a premium on individual autonomy and freedom of choice” (55). We are to be obedient to the Word of God and also to those in authority over us—which can mean the church, the 4 8 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

household, the workplace, the government, and so on.

There is accountability for us in many ways and, in response, due obedience. This indeed is hard for anyone who feels free and autonomous; but this is part of what it means to die to ourselves, to live for God and for others.

Another part of this dying to ourselves is humility, which Okholm shows is vital not only to monks but to every Christian, especially as we live within the community of believers: Like obedience and poverty, humility is an exercise in giving up my own will. It’s all tied to the selfemptying that the apostle Paul talks about in Philippians 2. In different ways, obedience, limiting speech, poverty, and humility all involve the eradication of self-will and self-centeredness. (72) The chapter on hospitality is also an important reminder to welcome everyone as we would Christ himself, but it is the chapter on stability that is convicting for those of us who live in a culture of church “s/hopping.” Okholm encourages us to find a good church and truly commit to it just as seriously as the Benedictines committed to their communities—usually for life. We find it too easy to leave one place rather than face up to the challenges we may find in living within the family of God (as with your parents or siblings, you have to learn to live with them— which means you may not always like them, but you are called to love them nevertheless). Okholm adds: “The amazing irony is that only through stability—staying where God has put us—can we change” (97). Iron sharpens iron after all.

The last chapter is on balance, which includes body, mind, and soul. For the Benedictines, “There is a balance to the day that maintains proper perspective. We need this to keep us from serving possessions, egos, jobs, and all the other wonderful things that easily become idols that demand our all” (101).

Although we know that Reformation theology teaches us to have an external focus—that our salvation and all good gifts come from outside of us; that is, from God—it is still good practice to keep always in mind these spiritual habits—in essence, fruits of the Spirit—that help us die to ourselves, love and serve others, forming us into mature followers of Jesus Christ. This was true for the early church and remains true to the church universal. As Okholm concludes: “Benedict...gave us instruction in virtues like obedience, stability, and balance in life. We would all do well to listen once again and appropriate what this saint offered the undivided Christian world a millennium and a half ago” (113).

Patricia Anders is managing editor of Modern Reformation.

Ancient-Future Worship

by Robert E. Webber Baker Books, 2008 192 pages (paperback), $14.99 “Worship does God’s story,” writes Robert Webber. Those four words are the rubric for the entire book published as the final volume of the AncientFuture series. [Editorial note: Robert Webber died April 27, 2007, at age 73 from pancreatic cancer.]

Written on the popular level, Webber argues for a return to the ancient paradigm for worship as the way forward.

Ancient-Future Worship is a decent introduction to the liturgical world. The book is directed to evangelicals who are perhaps weary of over-programmed, growth-oriented church life. Its aim is to call Christians to a worship that “discloses the work of Jesus Christ”(97).

The book is divided into two parts, preceded by an introduction that serves as a summary to the book as a whole. Each chapter employs a reader-friendly layout, using headings and including summary sections at the conclusion of each chapter. The first part, “Rediscovering God’s Story in Worship,” seeks to inform the reader of the scriptural and historical basis for the four pillars of worship in Webber’s paradigm. Worship is the reenactment of God’s redemptive work in space and time, and in this sense worship does God’s story. Worship also remembers the past and anticipates the future works of God in the present. Consequently, the fullness of worship encompasses the fullness of the biblical witness in both the Old and New Testaments.

The second part of the book deals primarily with the application of the rediscovery of Part One to the tripartite transforming worship of the Christian church (i.e., Word, Eucharist, and prayer). Webber explains that the role of the Word of God in worship is to transform participants by implicating them into the Divine Narrative in history. The Eucharist transforms worshippers as they participate in the presence of God. The section on prayer seeks to return the reader’s paradigm toward public prayer. “The story of God,” Webber writes, “is the substance of the inner content that shapes the outer form of public prayer.

Worship prays God’s story” (151).

In his conclusion, Webber informs the reader of the primary and secondary sources that have impacted him in his journey toward “Ancient-Future Worship.” Church fathers such as Ignatius and Athanasius have composed the ancient component of Webber’s sources, while his contemporary influences are almost exclusively Eastern Orthodox. Last, the appendix is a call to evangelicals to

turn away from the modern and cultural trappings that “camouflage God’s story or empty it of its cosmic and redemptive meaning.”

The recapitulation of redemptive history is set forth as a core purpose of worship. As such, an emphasis on trinitarian worship comes to the fore. Redemptive history entails God’s work in the Garden of Eden to Christ Jesus’ Second Advent bringing Paradise with him. Consequently, worship is the convergence of the past and the future into the present, concentering divine transcendence and immanence.

There is iterative concern for the fullness of God’s story being brought to bear upon Christian worship. Webber reflects on why congregants may struggle with liturgical worship: “One reason is because we tend to be New Testament Christians rather than Bible Christians” (67). To put it another way, embracing the entire Christian metanarrative in Sunday worship is an exercise of implicating oneself (participating) in God’s story and shaping one’s worldview for worshipping the Lord in the mundane.

Related to the Christian metanarrative in Scripture is a welcomed emphasis on the objective nature of worship.

This objective worship is embodied not merely propositional, a corporate endeavor not a private enterprise—a weighty calling, not comfortable entertainment. “The primary focus of worship then and now is not me, the worshipper, but God, who redeems the world” (97).

This reader deeply appreciates the concern given to the worship of God in Ancient-Future Worship. Webber circumscribes the liturgical question of how form relates to content and provides constructive avenues for Christians concerned about historical worship to traverse.

While the discussion and interaction with the Divine Liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church is fruitful, Webber’s more or less exclusive commitment to the Eastern liturgy seems arbitrary and at times dismissive of the Western tradition, which ironically shares much of the same liturgical traditions. This is especially true in Western Rite Orthodox and Eastern Rite Catholics.

Evangelicals from a certain Reformed perspective more oriented to redemptive history may inadvertently feel a bit slighted. The emphasis on the Christian metanarrative has historically been central to theologians like John Calvin, Gerhardus Vos, and more recently in the field of worship, Hughes Oliphant Old. Overall, Ancient-Future Worship is worth the read. Its irenic tone will engage the reader in a much needed conversation with the self, the contemporary culture, and the church as God’s people have worshipped the incarnate-risen-and-exalted Christ throughout the centuries.

William J. Nielsen (M.Div., Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia) is a member of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Dallas and reflects regularly at http://nielsensnook.com.

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Christ & Culture Revisited

by D. A. Carson Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008 243 pages (hardcover), $24.00 In D. A. Carson’s Christ & Culture Revisited, the author seeks to bring some biblicaltheological insights to bear upon H. Richard Niebuhr’s famous work, Christ and Culture.

Carson begins with a reminder of Niebuhr’s fivefold typology for discerning the relationship of Christ to culture (chapter 1), and then moves on to provide what he calls the “non-negotiables” of biblical theology such as creation, the fall, the call of Israel, the coming of Christ, and the eventual ushering in of the new heavens and new earth (chapter 2).

Carson then turns his attention to a discussion of culture and postmodernism (chapter 3), secularism, democracy, freedom, and power (chapter 4), church and state (chapter 5), and then highlights some ongoing tensions within the Christ and culture discussion (chapter 6).

Concerning the first of Niebuhr’s options, “Christ Against Culture,” Carson sums up Niebuhr on this point thus: “For the Christian, political life must be shunned, and so also military service, philosophy, and the arts” (14).

Included within this group would be certain Mennonites, the early Quakers, Leo Tolstoy, and, Carson adds, Stanley Hauerwas.

The second of Niebuhr’s categories is dubbed, “The Christ of Culture.” This position, Niebuhr argues, is adopted by those who hail Jesus as the Messiah of their society and has been represented by the early Gnostics, Abelard, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson, and the various “culture-Protestants” who have dominated the religious scene since the eighteenth century.

The third of Niebuhr’s options is “Christ Above Culture” and is, according to him, the majority position in the history of the church. Advocates of this “synthesist” position include Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and, most importantly, Thomas Aquinas. One of the greatest problems with this approach, argues Carson, is that it ignores just how culturally conditioned such syntheses really are. Just like the Jesus of Harnack and Herrmann looked suspiciously like a nineteenth-century German liberal, so the Jesus of the contemporary advocates of “Christ Over Culture” looks, well, just like us.

Niebuhr’s fourth category, “Christ and Culture in Paradox,” is assigned to “dualists” such as the “true Lutheran [who] finds life both tragic and joyful.” The dualist motif is also found in Paul, Marcion, and Augustine.

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Transformer of Culture,” which—according to Carson’s reading of Niebuhr—is not concerned so much with individual conversions but the conversion of culture itself.

Interestingly, Niebuhr places both John Calvin and John Wesley within this trajectory. According to Carson, Wesley actually strengthens his conversionist heritage by espousing the doctrine of sinless perfection.

Carson is rather uncomfortable with Niebuhr’s five typologies, arguing that “this emphasis on choosing from among the options does not square with the canonical function of Scripture” (206). Rather than identifying competing paradigms, all of which address the Christ/culture issue from the perspectives of the various biblical authors (an approach to Scripture that was common in the liberal circles of Niebuhr’s day), Carson maintains that a more holistic model must be derived from the totality of the biblical witness. Further, this approach will include elements of all five of Niebuhr’s options, depending on the circumstances (with the possible exception of “The Christ of Culture,” for which Carson finds little biblical warrant).

In his discussion of the options vying for favor in the contemporary Christ/culture conversation, Carson interacts with those whose expectations he deems “minimalist” (such as Darryl Hart and Frederica Mathewes-Green).

Citing Hart’s insistence that Kuyperian attempts to integrate faith and scholarship are misguided, and MathewesGreen’s likening of culture to the weather (we live in it and can even predict it with some accuracy, but changing it is not really an option), Carson argues that if all these authors were doing were offering a warning against utopianism, then all would be well. But such pessimism “fail[s] to see the temporally good things we can do to improve and even transform social structures” (217–18, emphasis original). Listing examples such as abolishing slavery, curing disease, and reducing sex traffic, Carson maintains that “in these and countless other ways cultural change is possible. More importantly, doing good to the city...is part of our responsibility as God’s redeemed people in this time of tension between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet.’”

While I would concur that “it is unwise to speak of ‘redeeming culture’” (217), I find Carson’s antidote to minimalism too, well, maximalist. The assumption seems to be that the “we” who desire to accomplish such obviously welcome goals as ending slavery and curing disease must be “we Christians.” What Carson overlooks is the fact that history is filled with examples of sinners who disliked cancer, as well as with saints who defended slavery. In other words, one does not need to affirm Chalcedonian Christology in order to work toward the curing of disease, nor have all who affirmed that Christology wanted slavery to end. This idea—that believers have a monopoly on morality, that cultural clean-up is a kingdom responsibility, and that Scripture furnishes the saints with a clear idea of what godly society would look like—seems to ignore both the fact that the Bible’s authority is limited to those loci it actually addresses clearly and that all people share the imago Dei, as well a common basis for morality provided by

the works of God’s law written on our hearts. In a word, pagans are often more horizontally good and the pious horizontally bad than we usually care to admit.

Carson concludes that the careful student of Scripture must view with suspicion any attempt to canonize a particular Christ/culture paradigm. If our thinking is governed by “the great turning points of redemptive history,” then “various ways of thinking about the relationship between Christ and culture may prove heuristically helpful but will not assume canonical force.”

The result will be our ability “to be as flexible in this regard as are the New Testament documents, without undermining such absolutes as ‘Jesus is Lord!’” (226).

I wholeheartedly applaud Carson’s attempt to view the relationship of Christ to culture within the context of a biblical-theological matrix, and his discussion of culture and postmodernism is very helpful. Still, I wish that, when all was said and done, he had landed upon more terra firma rather than leaving the reader with his feet planted in midair.

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

For Us and For Our Salvation

by Stephen Nichols Crossway Books, 2007 176 pages (paperback), $14.99 As much as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has come under criticism, Stephen J. Nichols argues that it has had at least one salutary effect: “Prior to The Da Vinci Code, you would have been hard-pressed to find many conversant with the Nicene Creed, but now nearly fifty million readers, not to mention masses of moviegoers, know a thing or two about it.” As encouraging as that may be, however, Nichols regrets that for the most part “a thing or two” is all people come away knowing, and that they are left with the impression that Nicea imposed controversial and previously unheard of ideas on the church. In For Us and For Our Salvation, he attempts to correct that perception by surveying the development of the doctrine of Christ from the first to the fifth century. His aim is to reassure the reader that the early church gave a strong, united confession of Christ’s divinity and humanity, one which was reflected in the creeds but did not originate there.

In the first two chapters, Nichols goes back to the first

three centuries. He unpacks the unorthodox views of that time, explaining who the Ebionites and Docetists were, and he tries to show why their views seemed sensible in terms of the Platonism that was current with them. He goes on to discuss the orthodox views of Ignatius, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Hippolytus, and he argues that their ideas are essentially early statements of what came to be expressed in the creeds.

The next two chapters concentrate on the councils of Nicea and Constantinople. Nichols tells the story of the debate between Arius and Athanasius, of the convening of the Council of Nicea, and of the overwhelming vote at that council in favor of Athanasius. He goes on to tell how afterward there was a succession of emperors in favor of Arius, how Athanasius was forced to spend much of his life in exile, and how his view finally came to be accepted again at the Council of Constantinople. Along the way, he introduces the reader to the three Cappadocian fathers— Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus—and explains why they are such a significant part of the story.

In the final two chapters, Nichols focuses on the fifth century and the Council of Chalcedon. He goes through the nuanced differences among Apollinarianism, Nestorianism, and Eutychianism, and then discusses the orthodox views of Cyril of Alexandria, Leo the Great, and Flavian of Constantinople. He puts particular emphasis on Leo, who—even though he was absent from the council— exercised a significant influence on the final shape of the Chalcedonian Creed. He closes the book with a short epilogue, discussing ways in which the early christological heresies have resurfaced in subsequent centuries.

There are several commendable aspects of this survey.

Nichols does a nice job of establishing the context and importance of a number of early Church Fathers (and every other chapter is made up of primary sources, so one is able to read the Church Fathers in their own words).

Also, he is very open about the way politics influenced the production of the creeds while still emphasizing that they were a matter of repeated consensus—that there were only two votes in favor of Arius at Nicea and that Chalcedon was a unanimous vote of 520.

That said, there are several questions a reader might legitimately have that are not well treated. The book is less exegetical than might be hoped; it spends much more time telling the story of the controversy over Christology than it does explaining the biblical basis for Christology. It would be less suited then for someone with concerns about the fact that the church used non-biblical terms that were loaded with philosophical meaning (which Nichols himself acknowledges). Similarly, the book is less theological than it could be; it spends less of its time explaining why the two natures of Christ are so important, so that one who was puzzled about that question and wondering why these debates mattered would probably do better elsewhere. Finally, the book is not an apology for creeds and councils per se; it spends less time arguing why S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 51

doctrinal definitions are important, so that someone with the tendency to see religion as divisive and hateful might only have their perceptions reinforced (especially when Nichols points out that Athanasius spent six decades wrangling, in effect, over one letter—whether the relationship between Christ and the Father should be described as homoousion versus homoiousion.)

These should not be seen as faults since no book can do everything, and Nichols’ book seems to have the specific aim of alleviating historical worries among those who hold to orthodox Christology and who have some understanding of what is at stake. For that purpose, he has provided a great place to start. For an explanation, however, of the importance of orthodox Christology, a defense of the biblical basis of that theology, or a response to those who are suspicious of things like creeds, it would probably be best to look elsewhere.

Michael Vendsel is a Ph.D. student in philosophy at Villanova University.

In My Place Condemned He Stood: Celebrating the Glory of the Atonement

by J. I. Packer and Mark Dever Crossway/Good News Publishers, 2008 192 pages (paperback), $16.99 The cross is the heart of the Christian faith. It is the center of the gospel. It is, pardon the pun, the crux of the matter.

There really is no need to justify another look at the death (and, of course, the resurrection) of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Consideration of the atonement is essential to properly understanding the faith and indeed to experiencing salvation. How-ever, we live in a day when all that is solid is melting away and vanishing into vapor. We have seen it with the doctrine of justification; we are seeing it now with the doctrine of Scripture. Should we really be surprised that the doctrine of the atonement is now also a bone of contention? Certain Christian traditions have never appreciated the penal substitutionary understanding of the atonement. For instance, Arminians and Anabaptists are none too fond of the view. But now, within the evangelical camp, we find calls to reassess or reject penal substitutionary atonement. Over in Great Britain the publication of Steve Chalk and Alan Mann’s The Lost 5 2 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

Message of Jesus (where we are told that penal substitutionary atonement amounts to “cosmic child abuse”) and the response of Pierced For Our Transgressions (a stellar defense of the doctrine by members of the faculty of Oak Hill College in London) has provided the contours of the controversy. The debate has crossed the Atlantic under the influence of such notables as Bishop N. T. Wright and has gained momentum with the rise of the Emerging church. Of course, there have been calls to reject penal substitutionary atonement on this side of the pond for many years now (one thinks of Joel Green and Mark Baker’s Recovering the Scandal of the Cross), but the controversy as it now stands is just one more piece of evidence that the fabric of evangelicalism is unraveling before our eyes.

Into this volatile context steps In My Place Condemned He Stood. What we have here is a gem of a little book. It is good to find the truth of penal substitutionary atonement so positively and winsomely presented here. The book opens with a forward by the men who comprise Together 4 the Gospel (Ligon Duncan, R. Albert Mohler, Jr., Mark Dever, and C. J. Mahaney), where each in turn they narrate the story behind the publication of In My Place (13–16). Ligon Duncan provides the fullest account of how these four friends birthed the book. First came the recognition that all four had benefitted from J. I. Packer’s introduction to the paperback edition of John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (indeed, this is at least the third appearance of this true classic—first with the Owen work, then with Packer’s Quest for Godliness, and now as an integral part of In My Place). Later followed another Packer entry, What Did the Cross Achieve? The Logic of Penal Substitution. Finally, it was recalled that Packer had eloquently unpacked the atonement in a chapter in his Knowing God, “The Heart of the Gospel.” These undoubtedly form the heart of the book.

In addition to these three Packer classics, In My Place contains a helpful preface and introduction—and Mark Dever’s 2006 Christianity Today article, “Nothing But the Blood,” an epilogue. Ligon Duncan does yeoman’s service in providing us with both a tremendously useful graduated list of books on the cross and an annotated bibliography that provides illuminating background information on the various authors and works included. As one who has taught courses on the atonement in both the college and church setting, I can say that this volume is a veritable vade mecum of classic short essays.

Let’s consider the four central essays in more detail. We will go in the order in which they appear in the book. First, we read “The Heart of the Gospel” (29–52), which is drawn from Packer’s tremendously popular Knowing God. This book, which has attained nearly iconic status in evangelical circles, contains this powerful and persuasive chapter that discusses the centrality of the death of Christ and the propitious nature of that work. Packer begins with a reference to the tragedy of the Trojan War (29), which serves as an illustration of pagan propitiation where capricious gods and goddesses have to be placated by semi-

ignorant humans. This is not the kind of propitiation that the Bible presents as the heart of the atonement. In the Old Testament, propitiation undergirds the whole sacrificial system. And in the New Testament, as Packer notes, we find four word groups that stress, respectively, Paul’s discussion of God’s rationale for the justification of the sinner, the author of Hebrews’ discussion of the rationale for the Son’s incarnation, John’s treatment of the heavenly ministry of the Lord, and finally, John’s definition of the love of God (30–32). Packer continues to note that propitiation—the placation of the wrath of God the Father in the Son’s perfect offering of himself as a sacrifice—is more than expiation, although a proper biblical understanding of propitiation takes up into itself the reality of expiation (which is the covering over of sin, the source of God’s wrath). Packer rightly discusses the nature of God’s anger and describes propitiation in three ways: (1) propitiation is the work of God himself; (2) propitiation was made by the death of Jesus Christ; and (3) propitiation manifests God’s righteousness (35–40). In discussing the death of Christ more closely, Packer unpacks the death in terms of it being the driving force in Jesus’ life, by considering the fate of those who reject God, in thinking about the gift of peace that Christ’s death brings, a demonstration of God’s love, and as it brings glory to God (43–52). At the conclusion of this chapter one has to agree with Packer that the atonement, properly understood, is the heart of the gospel.

If we thought that “The Heart of the Gospel” was stellar, “What did the Cross Achieve? The Logic of Penal Substitution” (53–100) shines like the noonday sun. I was so impressed with this material, originally given as a lecture at Tyndale Hall in the 1970s, I required my college students to read and digest its details. When Packer originally gave this lecture, his stated goal was to explicate the quintessential evangelical belief concerning the atonement (53). Oh, how the mighty have fallen! One can readily ascertain that Packer intends to explicate what it means for Christ’s death to be both substitutionary and penal. He begins with a discussion of method where he chides the Protestant Scholastics for falling into a form of rationalism in their attempt to answer Socianism’s aberrant views of the atonement (54–64). I wonder if Packer would need to reassess his sentiments expressed here in light of the groundbreaking work of Richard Muller. Confident charges of rationalism brought against Protestant Scholasticism look less convincing to us who have been exposed to the cool and bracing astringent of the Muller school. It is true that we find plenty of mystery in the atonement. Substitution, Packer notes, is a model derived from biblical exegesis. Christ dies in the place of others. That is substitution in a nutshell.

But substitution repels some because it is usually coupled with penal considerations. Christ stood in our place and bore our penalty. Packer reminds us that there have been alternative explanations of the atonement, one involving the effect of the cross on man alone and the other as affecting only spiritual forces outside of man

(71–73). Penal substitution denies none of these concerns but points out that the atonement involves much, much more. Penal substitution recognizes that the atonement has its first effect on God. Packer points out that to add the “qualifier” penal to substitution is to anchor substitution in the world of “moral law, guilty conscience, and retributive justice.” Packer then explores penal substitution under five headings: substitution and retribution, substitution and solidarity, substitution and mystery, substitution and salvation, and substitution and divine love (82–96).

Packer then sums up the insights of penal substitution into the atonement in nine principles (97). Packer concludes this lecture by asking two questions: (1) Is this way of understanding of the atonement inconsistent with the faith and religion of the New Testament? (2) Is this model for understanding the death of Christ truly based on the Bible (98)? By answering these questions, Packer brings this comprehensive consideration of penal substitutionary atonement to a conclusion. This chapter is must reading.

Mark Dever then offers us a useful summary of what we have been getting in more detail in the Packer chapters with his “Nothing But the Blood,” an article that originally appeared in Christianity Today in May 2006 (101–10). I think it is always useful to have summary discussions of such deep and significant doctrines as penal substitutionary atonement. If you are like me, there can be a tendency to lose the forest for all the trees. I tend to get lost in the details. Dever serves us as a sure guide.

Answering the charge that some Christians can be too “atonement centered” (101), Dever points us to the fact that with the atonement we have reached the very essence of the faith. As he begins to answer the charge that we can be too cross-centered, Dever references Packer’s “What Did the Cross Achieve?” and the discussion there of three kinds of crosses. The atonement has been understood to affect man, spiritual forces, and God’s wrath respectively (102–03). Dever then goes on to address several charges: (1) some have suggested that penal substitution is an inadequate explanation of the cross; (2) others have said that penal substitution is irrelevant; (3) that it is too individualistic; and (4) that penal substitution is too violent (103–06). Dever then goes on to show how penal substitution is absolutely scriptural, points out the “problems with the problems,” and closes noting that penal substitution ought not to be set against other complementary views of the atonement. When all is said and done, however, penal substitution is not merely one view of the atonement among many, but the heart and center of a properly biblical view.

Finally, we come to Packer’s introduction to John Owen’s classic, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, in “Saved By His Precious Blood” (111–44). What can I say about this that would do it justice? How often does an introduction to a classic become a classic itself? Packer explains Owen’s lumbering Latinized English style, his historical context (defending a Reformed view of the atonement against Amyraldianism, Socianism, and S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 53

Arminian-ism), and the fact that explicating and defending the Calvinistic view of the atonement just is explicating and defending a biblical view of the same (114–24). The central thrust of Owen’s project is a defense of limited atonement (or particular redemption or definite atonement). Ultimately, we want to know: Has the triune God accomplished redemption or has he made it only possible? Packer and Owen provide as thorough a treatment of the topic as you will find anywhere.

I cannot speak too highly of this fine book. About the only criticism I can offer about the book as a whole is that it lacks any indices. Scripture, name, and subject indices would have made this a more useful volume. In the overall scheme of things, however, this is a minor point.

The fact is that this little book focuses our minds and hearts on the center of the gospel and that is where we really ought to be centered! May we never glory in anything other than the atoning work of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I dare say (apart from the Scriptures themselves) this book is just the right place to start.

Jeffrey Waddington is a Ph.D. candidate at Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia).

POINT OF CONTACT: BOOKS YOUR NEIGHBORS ARE READING In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

by Michael Pollan The Penguin Press, 2008 201 pages (hardback), $21.95 I admit it, my obsession with any potato product liberally sprinkled with salt has resulted in four years off and on the South Beach Diet. The basic principles all make sense—good carbs, good fats, good sugars— but actually maintaining a steady diet of eating well is hard work. It takes time to shop for food and prepare it. And time is what most of us don’t have. So we eat what can be consumed on the run. And often what we eat is not really food at all.

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Thus the reason for Michael Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, the follow up to his best-seller, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Starting with the credo, “Eat food.

Not too much. Mostly plants,” Pollan launches an attack on “nutritionism” and the industrialization of the food industry. He lays out his position clearly in the first few pages, making the rest of the book in some ways unnecessary: Eating a little meat isn’t going to kill you, though it might be better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re better off eating whole fresh foods rather than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to “eat food,” which is not quite as simple as it sounds. For while it used to be that food was all you could eat, today there are thousands of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages elaborately festooned with health claims, which brings me to another, somewhat counterintuitive, piece of advice: If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat. (1–2) But do read it. If nothing else, the recounting of the history of nutrition legislation, the radical reversals in nutrition advice we’ve received in our lifetime, and the billions of dollars spent each year on diet “foods” will make you think differently about what, when, and how you eat.

And thinking is what is often absent in our consumption.

In three sections, Pollan deals with nutritionism, the industrialization of the food industry, and then finally practical ways to change the way we eat. Even if you don’t buy his argument about how diet-based food manufacturing is more of a business model to increase market share than increase health, just following the statistics on heart disease, diabetes, and other dietaryrelated health problems, it is quite startling to realize that as a whole, Westerners are fatter today than when low-fat foods were introduced. And while death due to heart disease may be down, heart disease itself is up. So the change is more likely as a result of medical gains and not health improvements. Perhaps an indication on why health care costs are soaring?

To further compound our dietary dilemma, Pollan says, “You’ve probably…noticed that many of the scientific theories put forward to account for exactly what in the Western diet is responsible for Western diseases conflict with one another.” Fat is out, then it’s in. Carbs are in, then they’re out. Butter, bad; margarine, good—or is it the reverse?

In the final section of the book, Pollan maps some practical advice for getting back to eating real food.

Starting with this most basic tip, “Don’t eat anything your

great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” the point is illustrated with a popular kid’s treat: She picks up a package of Go-Gurt Portable Yogurt tubes—and has no idea what this could possibly be.

Is it a food or a toothpaste?...Sure there’s some yogurt in there, but there are also a dozen other things that aren’t remotely yogurtlike, ingredients…including high fructose corn syrup, modified corn starch, kosher gelatin, carregeenan, tricalcium phosphate, natural and artificial flavors, vitamins, and so forth….How did yogurt, which in your great grandmother’s day consisted simply of milk inoculated with a bacterial culture, ever get to be so complicated? Is a product like Go-Gurt Portable Yogurt still a whole food? A food of any kind? Or is it just a food product? (149) Other amusing tips: “Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle”; “You are what you eat eats too”; “Do all your eating at a table”; and “Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does” (148–92). And let me add my own—avoid eating anything that when you type the ingredients, the words are not already in your spell-check feature.

One theme I found odd was the perception of the role of Christianity—or more exactly, American Christian ideology—in the demise of the Western diet. For those of us in the Reformed world who take delight in God’s creation, including the enjoyment of a good meal, statements like Laura Shapiro’s assessment of Christian social reformers of the nineteenth century come as a bit of a shock: “The naked act of eating was little more than unavoidable…and was not to be considered a pleasure except with great discretion” (55). For many of us, good food is a joy and an integral part of family life as well as hospitality. Puritans also take a bit of heat:

selection and preparation. Many of us do not live near family and this gives us opportunity to talk over the news of the day, laugh over common foibles of life, and grieve in the loss of life within community. One woman has become a believer, two divorced men have found companionship in the group, and a homesick seminary student found a sense of family. We go to each other’s graduations, baptisms, birthdays, and funerals. And it all started with sharing a meal. What better reason to defend food?

Diana S. Frazier is a member of Cresheim Valley Church, a PCA church in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia, and Modern Reformation’s book review editor.

Speaking Of…

B

reakfast is an unmerciful meal. Unless you live in a house full of larks, you know perfectly

well that few people are fit company at that hour.

Accordingly, a completely routine meal, unvarying from day to day, is a blessing to everyone. [E]xcept for men who have already worked hard for hours, an ordinary weekday breakfast is no time for a feast.

Almost as clearly as breakfast, lunch is a meal in via, on the run. To sit down as if the world were our

Nutrition science has usually put more of its energies into the idea that the problems it studies are a result of too much of a bad thing instead of too little of a good thing. Is this good science or nutritionist prejudice? The epidemiologist John Powles has suggested this predilection is little more than a Puritan bias: Bad things happen to people who eat bad things. (67)

oyster at 12:30 is to face the second half of our daily obedience pretending that the agony of the world is over already. I have long been convinced that man needs sleep more than food in the middle of the day.

It is only at night, in gremio familiae...that we can

Putting that aside, what is the take-away value of the read? For me: pay attention, slow down, enjoy my food, eat real food. And remember that meals are more than the sum of the food on the plate.

My husband and I have been part of a neighborhood dinner group for the last five years. Most Wednesdays, twenty to forty of our neighbors (ages fourteen months to early eighties) gather together and share a meal, all taking an assignment from our weekly Evite. Because we are each providing one item, more effort is often put into the

properly rejoice and eat like men.

—Robert Farrar Capon, Episcopal priest and food lover

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FINAL THOUGHTS f r o m

t h e

d e s k

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editor-in-chief

The Risk of Orthodoxy

O

rthodoxy is risky business. Or so we’ve argued in this issue. The choice

orthodoxy, often drawn from theological before us, or any generation, is not whether we’ll be apostates but to which assumptions that diverge from the mission that side of the front we will defect. We will be faithful either to the spirit of the Christ authorized. The church is thriving in its age, delivered through its parodies of God’s Word and mission when it is faithful in its proclamation of Christ in sacraments, or to the Spirit of Christ, whose reign brings Word and sacrament and its care for Christ’s sheep in body true freedom. Either we will surrender to the market, the and soul. The assumption in many Christian circles today state, utopian ideologies, pragmatism, and the therapeutic is that we have the right doctrine (orthodoxy), but just worldview that feeds our narcissism, or we will be called aren’t “living it out” (orthopraxy). However, the statistics out of ourselves by the surprising announcement that God (including the latest ones from the Pew Center indicating has accomplished our liberation from the guilt and that most evangelicals believe that there are many routes tyranny of our sins in Jesus Christ. to salvation) tell a different story.

Most regular Ours is not the first generation that has had to decide to churchgoers have not been instructed in even the basics of fight on. The early Christians might well have survived Scripture. We are “living it out,” but it’s the orthodoxies of and thrived in the Roman Empire under the caesars if it our culture that shape our daily assumptions. were not for their narrow-minded conviction that Christ Even in circles where we affirm the right doctrine on alone is Lord and the only Savior of the world. It is never paper, do our lives indicate to our spouses and our children hard to go with the flow. Where did we ever get the idea that we cling to Christ alone for our salvation and hope that orthodoxy is for conservatives? rather than to the ephemeral fads and fashions of Today, religious pluralism has become the new entertainment and marketing? Do our children know by orthodoxy of the American empire. But let’s not forget the way we speak and pray at home, in formal and that the civil religion of our supposed glory days was as informal ways, that the truth changes the way we think, threatening to the health and vitality of Christian feel, and live in relevant ways? Or do they have reason to orthodoxy as it was for the era of “Christendom” after conclude that orthodoxy stops at the level of assent? Does Constantine. Postmodernism becomes an easy target for it change the way we relate to them and to others? those looking for an easy way of lionizing or demonizing Connecting doctrine and practice, in ways suggested by whatever time we happen to be living in by God’s Peter Anders, has always brought fresh witness to the appointment. Yet regardless of our time and place, we are watching world and service to our neighbors. living in that in-between tension of “the present age,” Like the Word that defines it, orthodoxy is “living and defined by sin and death, and “the age to come,” active,” God’s true and faithful speech that creates the inaugurated by Christ’s resurrection, ascension, and world of which it speaks. Before we can live it out, we sending of the Spirit. must hear it, receive it, be bathed in it, and fed by it.

Merely scratching the surface, this issue has sought to give some definition to orthodoxy—not as a temperament but as a content of belief. We have pointed to the danger Michael Horton is editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation. in taking our creed for granted, assuming that it is ideally suited for rather than being the deadly enemy of an era that reduces all of life to consumerism, politics, therapy, and entertainment. While theological liberals of countless stripes have little left to throw overboard, T. David Gordon has reminded us that we who revel in our orthodoxy are often distracted from the core of Christian faith and practice by secondary pursuits, many of which have nothing to do with the apostolic deposit in the first place.

John Bombaro has reminded us that “missional”—as that word is thrown about these days— is its own kind of

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