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AMBASSADORS OF CHRIST ❘ “MISSIONALISM” AND THE REFORMED CHURCH ❘ MISSIONS AND PLURALISM

MODERN REFORMATION

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Features 14

The Ministry of Reconciliation: Embassy of Grace Like an embassy in a foreign country, the church is a safe haven for its citizens. From its many locations, the policies of the Great King, Jesus Christ, are announced to the world. As Christ’s ambassadors, aren’t we still called to herald this good news to the world in a ministry of reconciliation?

By Michael Horton

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“And He Gave Gifts to Men” What was once regarded as a high calling is now trivialized by the every-member-a-minister movement. When Luther and the Reformers proclaimed that the pastoral office was a necessity and of divine origin, could anyone infer from the Lutheran church’s contemporary practice that we still hold to this? If not, is there a remedy?

By Brent McGuire Plus… The Importance of Church Office in the Ordinary Ministry

By Michael Horton

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Missionalism, Church Style If God has elected a small and elite few to be saved, what’s the point of sharing the gospel with anyone? Is being “missional” an answer? Can churches Reformed by definition be truly missional in their ministry?

By Jason J. Stellman Plus… “Porch Church”

By Ryan Glomsrud

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Missions and the Work of the Church In 1932, Harvard professor Ernest Hocking published Re-Thinking Missions, a stunning rejection of Protestant missions as it had been conducted for almost two centuries. What was the church’s reaction then and what does it mean for us today? The author looks at various responses, notably

by Pearl Buck and J. Gresham Machen.

By D. G. Hart

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What Do We Do About Sunday School?

Is Sunday school primarily a moral training ground for children, from which adults eventually graduate and mature to making autonomous and acceptable moral choices based on feelings? Or is it still about the gospel and seeing Christ in all the Scriptures?

By Susan E. Erikson

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The Church in a Pluralist Society After Lesslie Newbigin returned from the mission field to his “home” in the West, what did he begin to realize about a theology of mission in an increasingly diverse and pluralistic culture?

By Shane Lems M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 1

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Marketing Director Michele Tedrick Department Editors Ryan Glomsrud, In This Issue & Reviews Michael Horton, For a Modern Reformation Staff | Editors Lori A. Cook, Layout & Design Elizabeth Isaac, Copy Editor Ann Smith, Proofreader Modern Reformation © 2011 All rights reserved.

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Focus on Missions A Servant’s Enduring Faith

By Marie Notcheva From the Hallway: Perspectives on Evangelical Theology Defending Nothing, Evangelizing No One: “Oh Apologetics, Where Art Thou?”

By Craig A. Parton For a Modern Reformation Missional & Vocational

By Michael Horton

The Latest Ideas Sweeping the Land…

Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Executive Editor Ryan Glomsrud

Studies in Acts Acts 3: The Ambassadors of the Kingdom

By Dennis E. Johnson

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SimChurch: Being the Church in the Virtual World

By Douglas Estes Reviewed by Nick Lannon A Dialogue: In and Out of Our Circles Defining the Church White Horse Inn Interview with Edmund Clowney Lutheranism 101 Edited by Scot A. Kinnaman Reviewed by John J. Bombaro Welcome to a Reformed Church: A Guide for Pilgrims

By Daniel R. Hyde Reviewed by Ryan Kron Christianity at the Religious Roundtable: Evangelicalism in Conversation with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam

By Timothy C. Tennent Reviewed by John D. “Jady” Koch, Jr. Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

By John Piper Reviewed by Beryl Clemens Smith Point of Contact: Books Your Neighbors Are Reading The Finkler Question

By Howard Jacobson Reviewed by W. Robert Godfrey COVER ART: CACOON/DIGITAL VISION/GETTY IMAGES

IN THIS ISSUE

And the Lord Added to Their Number

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hen Luke records in Acts 2:47 that “the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved,” the “number” in view was not an ambiguous reference. The fulfilling of the Great Commission means adding to the church, the body of Christ, the great number of saints, the people of God whom the Lord has redeemed for himself. How were they added? By what means did the Lord save his people day by day? The preaching of the Word of Christ.

In this issue we turn to examine the importance of the church in relation to the Great Commission. We make reference to the “Embassy of Grace” from which the Lord’s ambassadors are sent forth to declare the treaty of the Great King. The connection to make is that the church is the place where one hears the Word preached and receives baptism and instruction in all the things Jesus taught. The church also sends ambassadors, namely, ordained servants to fan out to the ends of the earth planting churches far and wide as outposts of God’s mercy, forgiveness, and hope in any and all wilderness lands, from Minneapolis to Mozambique.

We cannot make too much of the embassy motif. Editor-in-Chief Michael Horton assures us that when we encounter terms such as “ambassador,” “herald,” and “minister” we are brought into a world of international diplomacy in which churches truly are embassies in a foreign land.

The church exists because of Christ’s ministry and the work of the Spirit, not because of its ministers or the pious faith of its members. There are, however, “offices” that God ordained for the work of the ministry that he gave for the sake of the Word. Lutheran minister Brent McGuire reflects upon Ephesians 4, “And He Gave Gifts to Men,” and helps us understand the blessing of the public proclamation of the gospel by God’s messenger in a pastoral office.

One of the crucial distinctions that attentive readers will note throughout this issue, either stated directly or implied, is between the special office of Word and Sacrament ministers and the general office of all believers as witnesses to Christ. Minister of Exile Presbyterian Church Jason Stellman reminds us of the difference, that while all believers are called to faithfully glorify God in their earthly callings or secular vocations it is nonetheless not incumbent upon all believers to fulfill the Great Commission beyond the general call of the Bible to be ready to give an answer for the hope they have in the gospel. The larger task of Christian mission is, once again, for those who like Paul are “separated to the gospel of God” (Rom. 1:1).

To reinforce a number of these points, we print a fascinating interview with Edmund Clowney about the corporate nature of the church that includes a remarkable redemptive-historical summary of the calling and gathering of the people of God from Genesis to Revelation. In more recent history of the people of God, of course, there are many heroes and villains in the modern missionary movement. We look at one of each with articles

by Marie Notcheva and D. G. Hart. Hart reminds us of the perennial relevance of the Presbyterian controversies of the 1930s and ‘40s, especially in relation to missions and the social gospel. Similarly, Susan Erikson introduces us to Robert Raikes, who was credited with inventing Sunday school, almost entirely for the purpose of social activism. This movement intentionally and explicitly sought to undermine and replace catechetical instruction and family worship with generic self-help morality aiming to produce productive members of polite society. Erikson takes a constructive approach in conclusion, outlining three models for family worship and catechism today. Finally, Craig Parton laments the loss of apologetics in contemporary times, and Shane Lems summarizes the very best we may learn from the writings of well-known missionary Lesslie Newbigin.

We refer to Romans 10 throughout this issue, and for good reason. Implied in this passage is the crucial link between the Great Commission and the public proclamation of the gospel by ministers who are specially appointed and sent for this task. “For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved....How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed?...And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!’”

Ryan Glomsrud Executive Editor

NEXT ISSUES July/August 2011 Word & Sacrament: Making Disciples of All Nations September/October 2011 Social Justice, Social Gospel?

M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 3

STUDIES IN ACTS

Acts 3: The Ambassadors of the Kingdom

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n our first study in Acts (Modern Reformation, January/February 2011) we

Moreover, even beyond the circle of the elders, Acts shows observed that the title “Acts of the Apostles,” which became attached to this us that every believer has a general call to be an ambassabook by the end of the second century, is only partly accurate. From the dor of Christ’s kingdom.

Luke’s account of the Spirit’s descent at Pentecost (Acts 2:1–41) introduces opening lines of this theological history, Luke sent the both the apostles’ unique role as witnesses and the signal that Jesus, the exalted Lord, would be the prime Spirit’s mission first to enable specially called ministers mover in the spread of his reign of grace through the and then to enable all believers to speak the gospel. growth of his Word. Yet in assigning this title to Luke’s Three features stand out in Peter’s sermon, the inspired second volume, the early church rightly recognized interpretation of the Pentecost event. First, Peter’s serthat the apostles, chosen and specially authorized by mon showed that the “mighty works of God” (2:11) Jesus as witnesses to his resurrection, filled a pivotal were Jesus’ crucifixion in keeping with God’s “definite role. Acts opens with Jesus giving marching orders plan and foreknowledge” (2:23), Jesus’ resurrection “through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had from the dead and enthronement on high in fulfillment chosen” (Acts 1:2). Even before the day of Pentecost, of God’s prophecy through David (2:24–36), and Jesus’ Jesus filled the vacancy in the Twelve left by Judas’ outpouring of the divine Spirit as promised through the treachery and demise (1:12–26), so that the number prophet Joel (2:16–21, 33). The message that cut into of the King’s directly appointed ambassadors would be hearts and brought repentance, faith, and forgiveness restored to full strength when he poured out his Spirit was a message about the decisive historical events of the in power from his heavenly throne. In the aftermath gospel, as Paul would sum it up: “That Christ died for of Jesus’ enthronement at God’s right hand, the words our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was and deeds of the risen Lord would indeed be mediated buried, that he was raised on the third day in accorthrough “the acts of his apostles.” dance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared” to witYet it was not only the apostles who declared the nesses (1 Cor. 15:3–5). good news about Jesus. The apostles’ testimony was Second, because historical events form the core of central; theirs was a special call. Therefore, as the the church’s lifesaving message, the apostles’ role as church grew in size, other leaders were ordained to witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection is foundational to the oversee its mercy ministries, so that the apostles could church’s entire mission in every generation. Peter “devote [themselves] to prayer and to the ministry of affirmed the uniqueness of the apostles’ mission as the word” (Acts 6:4). Nevertheless, two of those mercy witnesses when he declared, “This Jesus God raised ministers, Stephen and Philip, spoke God’s truth with up, and of that we are all witnesses” (Acts 2:32). such Holy Spirit-given power that opponents could not Both before and after that climactic claim, the aposrefute their words and others came to faith in Christ tles’ role as Jesus’ witnesses—and specifically as wit(6:8–10; 8:5, 12). Later Luke reports the leadership of nesses to his resurrection—is stated again and again elders both in the church at Jerusalem (11:30; 15:2, 6) (1:8, 22; 3:15; 5:32; 10:39, 41; 13:31). It is for this reaand in Gentile congregations far from Judea (14:23; son that both Paul (Eph. 2:20) and John (Rev. 21:14) 20:17–38). Such elders, a legacy of Israel’s tribal strucspeak of the apostles as foundational for the temple ture, had special authority to lead and to teach the and City of God (that is, the church). In their eyewitWord (1 Tim. 3:1–7; 5:17; Titus 1:5–9; 1 Pet. 5:1–4). The ness testimony to what Jesus said and did as suffering elders were to teach and apply to the current and future Servant and risen Lord, the long-awaited “mystery of generations the new covenant revelation that the aposChrist” has been revealed (Eph. 3:4–5). The focus of tles had received directly from the Lord himself.

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Christian witness is not the subjective transformation that we have experienced—although none of us will bear witness faithfully unless we have been transformed! The focus of Christian witness is Jesus’ person and work, so its foundation is the apostles’ testimony, now expressed in the pages of Scripture.

Third, through the prophet Joel, God promised to pour his Spirit “on all flesh,” anointing both sons and daughters, young and old, even servants and slaves as a new band of prophets. This motif may surprise us, in view of the concentration we just observed on the apostles’ unique mission to bear witness to Christ’s resurrection with the distinctive authority of ambassadors commissioned by the King (see Eph. 6:20). Yet the distribution of the Holy Spirit’s gifts of speech on the day of Pentecost exhibits an expansion of the enabling presence of the Spirit at that watershed of redemptive history, as Israel’s institutions gave way to the “new wineskins” of the new covenant church. The group gathered to await the Spirit’s descent included not only the apostles but also “the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers”—a company numbering about one hundred and twenty (Acts 1:13–15).

When the Spirit swept down from heaven, “they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak” (2:2–4). Throughout the Old Testament era, the Spirit’s gifts of word and wisdom had been rationed out selectively to Israel’s leaders, especially prophets, kings, and occasionally priests.1 Yet early on Moses had expressed the longing “that all the Lord’s people were prophets, that the Lord would put his Spirit on them!”

(Num. 11:29). Centuries later, God promised through the prophet Joel that Moses’ wish would eventually be granted: “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit” (Joel 2:28–29).

Finally, at Pentecost God kept his promise. A tongue of flame resting on the head of every believer symbolized the reality that the Spirit had filled them all. As that band of one hundred and twenty declared Jesus’ sufferings and glory, people speaking various dialects heard the mighty works of God “in our own tongues” (Acts 2:1–4, 11). Peter therefore announced that God had kept his “last days” promise to make all his people prophets (2:15–21). The apostles’ witness-bearing was foundational, but the church’s witness-bearing mission (established on that foundation) extends beyond the circle of the apostles.

Several factors in Acts reinforce the point that the risen Lord has (to paraphrase the Heidelberg Catechism) “shared” his prophetic anointing with all believers, so that we are all “to confess his name.”2 First, Jesus’

commission to the apostles, “You shall be my witnesses,” echoes the Lord’s commission to all Israel in the prophecy of Isaiah. In an earlier study we noted that Jesus incorporated into his promise of the Spirit’s coming (1:8) the wording of Isaiah 49:6–7, “to the end of the earth.” In that same promise he included another allusion to Isaiah as well. His promise that when the Spirit descends “you shall be my witnesses” echoed God’s summons to Israel to take the witness stand in his lawsuit against the idols (Isa. 43:10–12; 44:8). Because the Lord had performed great acts of rescue for Israel, they should testify that he alone is God, the only Savior. By invoking this Old Testament allusion, Jesus identified himself as Yahweh, the covenant God of Israel. Those who are truly Jehovah’s witnesses testify about Jesus, just as Yahweh had called ancient Israel to testify, “There is salvation in no one else” (Acts 4:13). Jesus also identified his apostles, the nucleus of his church, as the new Israel who must make his divine glory known to all peoples. Isaiah foresaw a day when the Spirit of God would be poured out on his people like rainfall on parched earth, and the result would be their words of witness and worship: “This one will say, ‘I am the Lord’s,’ another will call on the name of Jacob” (Isa. 44:5). At Pentecost, when the Spirit fell not merely on the apostles but on the whole assembly of expectant believers, a new Israel was constituted as the witnesses who boldly announced that Jesus alone is Savior.

Second, the Spirit who filled all believers at Pentecost is the divine Witness who confirms the apostles’ testimony, and he is the Father’s gift to all who obey the gospel’s call. In Acts 5:32, the apostles had been arrested and threatened by the Jewish Sanhedrin, accused of disregarding the council’s earlier ban against speaking the good news about Jesus. But the apostles calmly reaffirmed the reality of Jesus’ resurrection and the promise of forgiveness that God was extending to Israel through him, sealing their testimony with the affirmation, “And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him” (emphasis added). The Spirit whose testimony confirmed the apostles’ words was given not only to the apostles but to all who heeded God’s call to repentance and faith in Jesus the Christ. The unfolding narrative of Acts demonstrates that the Spirit testifies not just to all believers, confirming to our hearts the reliability of the apostolic word (Rom. 8:15–16), but also through all believers—the whole of the new Israel to whom Yahweh (that is, Jesus) says, “You are my witnesses.”

Third, the testifying activity of God’s Spirit through the whole church, and not only its apostolic leaders, became most evident when the church’s witness moved out of Jerusalem into “all Judea and Samaria” (Acts M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 5

1:8). Stephen was martyred (martyr in Greek means “witness”3) for his testimony about Jesus, to the hearty approval of Saul of Tarsus. Saul, inflamed by blind zeal, launched a persecution that forced believers out of Jerusalem and dispersed them into the surrounding region. Yet the inspired narrator points out that it was not the apostles but other believers who were scattered from the City of David, and thus placed in the vanguard of gospel advance: “They were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles” (8:1, emphasis added). As a result, “those who were scattered went about preaching the word” (8:4).4 This scattering and preaching of all believers except the apostles suggest that their witness is a post-Pentecost parallel to the mission of preaching and exorcism on which Jesus had sent seventy-two “others” in Luke 10:1–24. In Luke 9:1–6 he had sent the apostles on such a mission, but in Luke 10 he sent a larger band of unnamed disciples to announce the kingdom’s coming in the royal authority of his name (10:17). Luke narrates that eventually “those who were scattered because of the persecution that arose over Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch,” at first “speaking the word to no one except Jews.” Then in Antioch some of them began “preaching the Lord Jesus” to Greek-speaking Gentiles as well (11:19–20). The first messengers to carry the word of King Jesus’ victory into Judea and Samaria and then to Antioch in Syria, the third city of Rome’s farflung empire, were not apostles like Peter, John, or Paul, but unnamed followers of Jesus who faithfully bore witness to the message of Christ’s death and resurrection, as they had heard it proclaimed by the apostolic eyewitnesses.

Apostles followed the trails blazed by ordinary, Spirit-led believers to confirm God’s work of grace in ever-expanding circles. Philip, who had been called to serve tables and feed widows, brought the gospel to Samaria (8:4–11). He was followed by the apostles Peter and John, who confirmed “that Samaria had received the word of God” (8:12–25). At the Spirit’s direction Philip told a Gentile governmental official “the good news about Jesus” (8:35) and continued to spread the word in coastal towns (8:40). Peter likewise ministered along the coast until he too received orders to bring the gospel to a representative of a Gentile government, the Roman centurion Cornelius (9:32– 10:48). To the newborn Gentile congregation at Antioch, the church in Jerusalem sent one of its most respected leaders, Barnabas, who with (the now-converted) Saul taught new converts to Christ—first called “Christians” here—for over a year (11:19–26).

The prominence of sermons preached by apostles throughout Acts (chapters 2, 3, 4, 10, 13, 14, 17, 20, 22, 26) demonstrates how vital to the expansion and 6 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

growth of the church was the apostolic ministry of the Word. Yet Acts also shows that God is pleased to post ordinary ordained ministers, who share Christ’s prophetic anointing, at the cutting edge of his kingdom’s advance. Acts reflects a symbiosis of gospel witness, in which the foundational testimony of the apostles and the authoritative instruction of other ordained ministers became the fount from which the witness of all believers sprang to the lips and through the lives of the whole church, “sons and daughters, young men and old men, male servants and female servants.”

Sadly, in the succeeding centuries, polarizing stresses on either the special calling of ordained ministers or the general call to all believers have often shattered this symbiosis. Sometimes the role of the church’s ordained leaders has been so exalted that the Spirit-enabled ministry of mere members has been devalued. In other eras, a cultural suspicion of authority has spilled into the church, minimizing the significance of the special office held by ministers of Word and Sacrament, an office indispensable for the instruction and direction of all the members of the body. The template that emerges from the pages of Acts shows God’s wise design for his church, in which ordained preachers and ordinary believers fulfill their distinctive roles as witnesses to Christ’s victory and as ambassadors of his kingdom.

Dennis E. Johnson is professor of practical theology at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido and author of The Message of Acts in the History of Redemption (P&R 1997).

See Benjamin B. Warfield, “The Spirit of God in the Old Testament,” in Biblical and Theological Studies (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1952), 127–56.

2Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 12, having explained Jesus’ title “Christ” in terms of his anointing as prophet, priest, and king (Q/A 31), then affirms that by union with Christ believers share both in his anointing and in his threefold office (Q/A 32): “But why are you called a Christian? Because by faith I am a member of Christ and so I share in his anointing. I am anointed to confess his name, to present myself to him as a living sacrifice of thanks, to strive with a good conscience against sin and the devil in this life, and afterward to reign with Christ over all creation for all eternity.”

3Saul would later refer to Stephen as Jesus’ “witness,” whose execution Saul had approved (Acts 22:20).

4The Greek verb that the ESV renders “preaching” in Acts 8:4 is euangelizomai, literally, “announcing the good news” or “evangelizing.”

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FOCUS ON MISSIONS

A Servant’s Enduring Faith

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n a sweltering night in downtown Sofia, well-dressed couples pour

a prison floor and a train ride north, handcuffed to four into an overflowing stone church. First Evangelical Congregational other prisoners, his suit was ruined. Undaunted, this Church is hosting a night of classical music commemorating the “enemy of the state” used the trip to tell his traveling companions about Jesus Christ.

“Year of the Bible” in Bulgaria. As Rachmaninoff’s The Communists wanted the one thing from prelude fills the sanctuary, a silver-haired gentleman Kulichev that he was not willing to give: compromise. and his wife enter and are greeted by several attendees.

Authorities had long been attempting to replace him It is obvious that many people are fond of this man; as pastor of First Evangelical with a well-known party their demeanor is friendly, yet respectful. Neither tall collaborator. Such flagrant interference in a congrenor intimidating, Pastor Hristo Kulichev doesn’t stand gational church was against both the church’s bylaws out in a crowd. His brown eyes convey gentleness yet and Bulgaria’s constitution, as Kulichev reminded his become intense when he preaches. With a broad smile interrogator. Twice he was offered freedom in and kind word for everyone, Pastor Hristo resembles exchange for relinquishing his pulpit to the state. everyone’s favorite grandfather. Tonight, the retired Twice he refused. Kulichev insisted on remaining minister is enjoying a concert with his wife Tsvetanka faithful to God’s call on his life, which, he repeatedly in the church he has pastored for decades. No casual explained, was to preach the gospel. observer would imagine he had spent years in brutal Communist prisons and labor camps.

Rev. Kulichev does not rely on gimmicks, flashiness, or emotionally charged oration. A soft-spoken man, whether preaching or defending himself to the state police, his tone remains even. He disdains hair gel and designer suits, and has never owned a Rolex.

A man not given to self-indulgence or introspection, Kulichev prefers content over style. In the pulpit, he rarely mentions himself—he strives to glorify God alone by preaching Christ from all the Scriptures.

In January 1985, as totalitarianism was gasping its last breaths in Eastern Europe, Pastor Hristo and his brother Dimitar were arrested for preaching after having their ordination credentials revoked by the state. In prison, his logical Scripture-laced responses and calm demeanor The congregation stood loyally behind him, even enraged his interrogators. Behind his imperturbable bolting the doors of the church when a police escort exterior lay an iron will—one fully submitted to God arrived to install the state-sanctioned “pastor.” The rather than man. Already middle aged at the time of his militia returned with German shepherds that tore the arrest, the unassuming preacher could not be manipusanctuary apart. One elderly member quipped, “We lated by any state agent or prison guard into “cooperatChristians have faced lions before. They think we’re ing.” Selling out was simply beneath his dignity. afraid of a few dogs?”

Kulichev is the epitome of grace under pressure.

Due to a well-oiled propaganda machine, few in When he was summoned by the Ministry of the Interior, the West realized how persecuted Bulgarian Christians his son suggested he wear an extra layer of clothing in were in the 1980s. It was common practice for gospelanticipation of a damp prison cell. Kulichev declined, preaching pastors to be removed from their churches insisting on wearing his Sunday suit in order to look the and replaced with Communist agents. Sermons were equal of his interrogators. After three nights sleeping on M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 7

We soon understood that any such work would have reviewed and censored; peace, labor, and “brotherly many compromises attached...and accepted that our love” were approved topics. Sin, redemption, and salcurrent circumstance would be the norm.” vation through Christ were strictly off limits. Sunday This experience strengthened Kulichev’s resolve schools were illegal. The government confidently prenot to train his two children in duplicity to make life dicted that by the year 2000, the church would no more bearable. Neither joined the Young Pioneers or longer exist in Bulgaria. Attempts to undermine and Komsomol, despite pressure from teachers. The discredit from within were more effective than outprospect of their bleak future was often dangled before right persecution. Even today, many of Bulgaria’s him, but Kulichev never allowed himself to worry that older generation are completely incapable of distinhis faith would ruin their lives. As he would later do guishing Lenin’s ideology from that of Christ. in prison, Kulichev learned to discipline his mind.

In prison, Kulichev distinguished himself among “Three thoughts strengthen me in difficulties and both guards and prisoners. A vegetarian for health reatemptation,” he says. “On Golgotha, my Lord died in sons, the pastor refused meat on principle. Kulichev my place on a coarse wooden cross. I strive not to unfailingly knelt in his filthy cell to thank God for each allow anything to overshadow that picture before my meager bread ration. Assigned with two cellmates to eyes. Also, the Church is my spiritual family and work at the prison sink, he insisted that they wash through it I become a part of utensils “as if they were going Another challenge to Bulgaria’s the Body of Christ. I may be into our own mouths.” Being evangelical community came in the only the nail on the little finabsolutely consistent, even in ger, but I belong to His Body. matters with no overt spiri1990s, when Western missions Thirdly, I think about the tual significance, was his way inadvertently competed with future in His glory.” to maintain integrity. Trusting established churches by working After serving his initial in God and his parishioners’ independently. “Bulgarian Protestants sentence, Kulichev traveled faithfulness, Kulichev conthemselves don’t know their own around Bulgaria, preaching stantly rehearsed Scripture history,” Kulichev laments. and encouraging youth groups. and seized clandestine witArrested again, he was exilnessing opportunities.

He encourages foreign parachurch ed to northern Bulgaria. He Sofia Central Prison was organizations to work with the viewed his time in the deinfamous for dehumanizing nation’s existing church, thus tention camp as his personal conditions. In 1985, guards promoting unity in the Body.

“Patmos”—a sabbatical to be were still torturing and beatused for study and prayer. After two years of interning prisoners in padded cells to elicit confessions. ment, he was released in 1988, a year before democAlthough Kulichev escaped such brutality, the agents racy arrived in Bulgaria. “I prefer to be in prison tormented him psychologically by claiming his wife or with Christ than free without Him,” he maintains, congregants had become informants. “You obviously and doesn’t understand people’s condolence. “Why don’t know my wife,” he retorted, knowing that ‘sorry’? My imprisonment was the greatest gift God Tsvetanka was no stranger to persecution. In 1896, a could have given me. I was counted worthy to parmob had torched her grandfather’s home and ran take in the sufferings of Christ,” he says, echoing him out of the village for refusing paedo-baptism.

Paul’s joyful prison letters.

She stood up to the police when they ransacked the During the 1990s, I listened to Kulichev preach on family’s apartment and became an invaluable source the dangers of compromise and the need to stand firm of support during Kulichev’s imprisonment. in faith. Transitioning from an insulated, underground The couple had long since resolved that they and Christianity to a growingly materialistic society, believtheir children would serve God, although they would ers were less equipped to resist the infusion of worldconstantly be forced to count the cost. Kulichev liness than they were the godless evil of Communism. recalls: “Our first real testing as a family came when “In the past, the Church changed the world,” I was fired from my teaching position. I was expected Kulichev says. “Now, the world is changing the to stop going to church in order to remain a high Church. Throughout its history, the Church’s main school teacher, something we could not do. I became challenge has been to preserve its purity, and the a house construction worker, an exhausting profesevangelical underground church was very strong; sion. I worked six days a week and on Sunday I travvery pure. The believers were ready to lay down their eled to preach. There was no time to rest or prepare lives for the gospel, whereas now, some come to sermons. Then, my wife and I both succumbed to the church because it’s interesting, like a hobby; but they temptation to seek work in line with our education.

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come without a full surrender of their lives to Christ.”

Church attendance in Bulgaria declined somewhat after the initial boom of interest in the early 1990s. As the nation approaches its twenty-second year anniversary of democracy this fall, the gospel is no longer the “novelty” it once was. “Some will always receive the Good News with joy, but after a while fall away,” Kulichev notes. “Now that there are no restrictions on believers, that very freedom leads to some making compromises with their faith.” Until a decade ago, lukewarm Christianity was unheard of in Eastern Europe. Now, a more casual approach toward worship and Christian life is seeping in— personified by the teens now starting to show up to church in t-shirts and flip-flops.

The type of surrender Kulichev has in mind leaves little room for ambiguity. In 1993, he preached a memorable sermon on tithing that left me, as a fiercely independent 22-year-old, both convicted and incredulous. Many in the mostly elderly congregation were living on $50 monthly pensions. After Kulichev built a watertight case for biblical giving, I watched arthritic hands dig deeply into threadbare pockets and purses. These Christians had never compromised before; why should they start now?

Another challenge to Bulgaria’s evangelical community came in the 1990s, when Western missions inadvertently competed with established churches by working independently. “Bulgarian Protestants themselves don’t know their own history,” Kulichev laments.

He encourages foreign parachurch organizations to work with the nation’s existing church, thus promoting unity in the Body. “Missionaries came with the attitude that Bulgaria is a blank canvas with no churches, to which they had to bring the Gospel....Many couldn’t understand that there were people in this country who already knew their Lord and Savior—people who had suffered for their faith, and who persevered in trials and persecution.”American missionaries tended to undermine their own witness with their lavish lifestyles, and in Kulichev’s opinion would benefit from the self-sacrificing example of the Balkans’ earliest evangelists.

Kulichev has traveled widely in the United States, preaching and speaking at conferences. (Several months after interviewing him, I learned from another American that he is proficient in English—a detail he neglected to mention during our time together.) While he loves American believers, he is concerned about our tendency to become “slaves to our own comfort.” “The freedom in which Christians live is a much bigger temptation than trials,” he said.

“A person who has lived in comfort and is used to living without ordeals doesn’t want to lose that way of life. He is prepared to make concessions in his loyalty

to God. This mentality goes against what God wants from His flock—obedience and faithfulness, which are not measured in percentages. There is no 50%, 90% or 99% loyalty—a wife would not be pleased if her husband were 50% faithful.”

Undaunted by oppression from outside the church, he is more pained by personal attacks from within.

“The thorn in my flesh was inflicted by my Christian brothers,” he admits. “Some have said that I am very extreme and opinionated; that I am an uncouth cement mixer; a common laborer. Likewise, in Corinth, some didn’t accept Paul as an apostle.” Such criticism can be deadly to a novice pastor, and Kulichev cautions against the fear of man. “Do not take interest in your ministry’s results or compare yourself to others,” he said. “This can sometimes cause you to consider yourself a failure; or it may breed jealousy or gloating in you. This is the devil’s goal. God wants you to be His witness; not His accountant. Your work is to dig, to sow or to water, but God causes the growth.” He also cautions young pastors against putting their families before God. As he enters his sixth decade of contending for the faith, Kulichev credits his longevity and enduring enthusiasm simply to the knowledge that his life belongs to Christ. “I have passed through temptations and trials like everyone else,” he reflects. “Some of them were serious, while others at first glance appeared innocent but were incompatible with the Christian life. At age 20, I was infatuated with one of my fellow university students—something completely normal. But that girl was not a believer. The only way to deal with these strong feelings was to seek God’s counsel. I prayed, ‘Lord, in order to serve you I must be obedient. I am weak; I need your strength and grace. Help me to keep myself pure and freed from these feelings.’” God fortified him, and Hristo met Tsvetanka five years later, in 1954. “I have been a target of ridicule from some…but God helped me protect my purity until marriage, and my faithfulness in marriage.” The couple celebrated their fiftieth golden wedding anniversary several years ago, surrounded by their children and grandchildren.

Whether preaching in the United States or in Bulgaria, Kulichev’s message is the same. He abhors the preaching of what he calls “an easy Christianity.”

“People are coming to Christ for Him to heal their diseases and provide for them materially,” he said. “I am concerned about ‘Prosperity Christianity,’ which leads people to seek material rather than heavenly blessings.” While few may be called upon to go to prison, Kulichev fears that many believers are unprepared to accept suffering for Christ as a normal, even expected (continued on page 13) M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 9

FROM THE HALLWAY p e r s p e c t i v e s

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Defending Nothing, Evangelizing No One: “Oh Apologetics, Where Art Thou?”

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had not unpacked my suitcase in the freshman dorm at college before

most offensive extra-curricular activity,” as it chafes Christians descended upon me like mongrel hordes. One in particular was the Trinitarian foundations of modern thought exemmy Resident Advisor or “RA.” He was a senior (thus worthy of genuflection) plified in religious pluralism (there are many ways), and a leader in an evangelical organization on camcultural diversity (all ways are arbitrary), and epistepus. His bookshelf was stuffed with the best of apolomological relativism (no way is the only way). getical literature. He chose to live in my lowly world, But didn’t our Lord say something about going and I later discovered, for the sole purpose of evangelizing proclaiming the good news? Evangelism, as I recall it, forsaken freshmen. requires: 1) an evangel; 2) knowledge of what that When not having the gospel presented in comevangel is;3 and 3) proclamation of that evangel to pelling form to me by my RA, I was repeatedly chalothers so that they may believe. Instead of doing the lenged on campus by evangelical Christians who were often hard labor of defending the faith and evangelzealously contending for the faith. These were izing the lost (which involves study in order to underChristians who simply stated what Christianity was stand objections to Christianity), Christians are and why I should believe it. They brought me what encouraged to tighten their abs by investing in Body Luke the Physician calls the “many convincing proofs” Gospel4 instead of proclaiming the gospel. Unbelief related to the case for Christ (Acts 1:3). These were welcomes the new evangel of Christian living.

Christians familiar with John Warwick Montgomery, We are at a remarkable moment in church history, C. S. Lewis, and F. F. Bruce.1 And when my gas gauge not because of the power of three centuries of secuof questions veered toward empty, they called for a larism or because of the unanswerable objections verdict—namely, to receive Jesus as my Savior. posed by brilliant unbelievers. Nor is it because of the After becoming a Christian, I was almost immediately challenge of Islam or because of the influence of catechized into Montgomery, Lewis, and Bruce, and Eastern religions with their ability to insert a Yoga class then returned back almost as immediately to the marinto every Christian church’s weekly calendar of ketplace to talk with non-Christians. It was normal for me events. What is remarkable is the loss of confidence in and two of my roommates to join the staff of missionary there being any point in defending the faith anymore.

Along with this, and because of this, has come a groups after graduation, a platform that allowed me an growing disinterest in evangelism. Proclaiming the opportunity to contend for the truth of Christianity at gospel does not motivate like “being the gospel.” over one hundred universities and colleges.

So what? Today’s secular college freshmen are also The church thought it could ignore apologetics being exposed to a persuasively defended gospel and with no harm to evangelism. Now the church finds given “tough” and “tender” minded evidences2 that the gospel itself is denied by its new evangelists. Oh call for a verdict, right? Were it so. I could be off base Apologetics, where art thou? on this, but my take is that defending the faith (how negative can you be?) is now considered by many What We Ignored: Apologetics Christians to be the approach of misguided zealots The term from which we get our word “apologetwho preach mind-numbing creeds rather than heartics” comes from the Greek text of 1 Peter 3:15: “Be ready always to give a defense (apologia) for the hope stirring deeds. Evangelism gets top prize now for “the 10 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

that is within you, yet with gentleness and reverence.”

We get two broadsides from this passage.

First, apologetics, or defending the faith, is biblically commanded. It is not optional to give a reason for the hope that is within us, nor is it relegated to the pastoral office or to a special class of “intellectual” Christians. Second, sharing you (whether it is your heart or your testimony) is not biblical, let alone apostolic, apologetics. Instead, we are to give reasons for believing in Jesus’ perfect life, atoning death, and resurrection from the dead, and are to proclaim that evidence that demands a verdict.

Apologetics is not only biblically commanded, it also has a long and noble history. There was even an “Age of the Apologists” in the second, third, and fourth centuries that developed a Hall of Fame of defenders of the faith (Cyprian, Irenaeus, Ambrose, Eusebius, Tertullian, and Augustine). In fact, there is even an impressive pedigree of lawyers who have investigated the truth-claims of Christianity and found them compelling.5 One justly wonders then how we get to a contemporary situation where pastors (who should have received the most comprehensive training in this area) are often fortunate to have even one course on apologetics as their preparation for ministering to a culture steeped in three hundred years of secularism.

Apologetics is about giving reasons. It is not, therefore, simply a form of philosophy in which one engages in endless discussions of the ontological argument for the existence of God, nor is it a species of systematic theology (a view commonly held by some Calvinist presuppositionalists), nor is it simply a subset of preaching (a uniquely Lutheran view that has tended to mean that Mr. Layman may stay in the domain of potlucks and church committees and away from pagans).

There is something to learn from the fact that the most effective apologists in the last century were not trained in formal theology at all (Lewis, Chesterton, Sayers, Williams, and Tolkien). One need not have a seminary education to be effective in the defense of the faith. The church will benefit from both wellequipped laypeople and a learned clergy.

What We Lost From What We Ignored: Evangelism and the Gospel We ignored apologetics and lost what apologetics was defending. Well, what is it we are defending in apologetics? The gospel, of course! Or, to be more specific, what Lewis called “Mere Christianity.” Think of those central propositions of the Apostles’ Creed.

Another way to think of it: Apologetical energy should be spent on defending something to do with

either the formal principle of all theology (Scripture and its reliability and authority) or the material principle of Scripture (Jesus Christ and the gospel).

But this is exactly where so many well-meaning Christians missed the 3:10 train to Yuma. Because the gospel is not the center and circumference of their theology (it is just one of many equally important doctrines), they end up with what is secondary in Scripture becoming primary, while what is primary becomes secondary. Interminable arguments are centered on, for example, what went on before time, or at the beginning of time, or what happens at the end of time. Speculation has the front seat and facts have the backseat or no seat.

So, apologetics is about the defense of the faith and specifically of the gospel. What then is the gospel? Just this: Christ died for sinners and you qualify.6 The gospel is all about what was done for you and in spite of you. We are the problem, not the solution, and any “apologetic” that is about your anything (except your sin) is decidedly not defending the gospel.

In summary, when defending the faith, stop every once in a while and ask: Is what I just discussed with that unbeliever in the Apostles’ Creed or not? If not, a flare should go up that you are very likely headed off the train trestle.

The church thought it could ignore apologetics with no harm to evangelism or the gospel. Guilty of not contending for the faith, the church is in danger of forgetting that there is something worth believing in and contending for.

Culture Pays the Price for What We Have Ignored and Lost The roots of modern secularism go back three centuries to the earliest attempts at supposedly “safe” biblical criticism aimed at the first books of the Old Testament.7 Surgery on the Old Testament was soon applied to the New, and untethered man quickly concluded he did not need any word from God to give him either morals (found so obviously in nature and her laws) or an explanation for the origin of the species.

Hegel’s dialectic, Marx’s economic metaphysic, Darwin’s natural selection, and Wagner’s romanticizing of the past all provided compelling secular means of grace for modern man to conclude that he could now safely jettison orthodox Christianity and return to Eden.8 The Bible was dead. God was dead. Man was free and had in hand a self-diagnosis of perfect health.

This brief moment of peace ended with World War I and the entrails-filled trenches of Verdun, the same forsaken sumps in which C. S. Lewis buried the vestiges of his Christian faith.

Intellectuals (and, of course, general culture shortly thereafter) went from optimism in man’s ability to save M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 1 1

himself to utter pessimism and a retreat into existential despair. The French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus summarized it so cheerfully: “A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.”9 Instead of proclaiming the faith once delivered to the saints and defending it with the sharp arguments honed over the centuries by apologists from Cyprian to Chesterton, the church defaulted from defending the gospel to a misguided attempt to “be” the gospel. The casualties have been the loss of apologetics, the loss of evangelism, and the loss of the gospel.

Ignorance Is Bliss for Some Lutherans and Reformed Just when Christians had every reason to provide factual responses to the challenges of speculative worldviews, Lutheran and Reformed teachings presented theological reasons not to do effective apologetics.

Reformed apologists, emphasizing the noetic effects of sin (i.e., the effects of sin on our ability to have knowledge) and total depravity, saw the persuasion of pagans as epistemologically and morally doomed. Some Lutherans, having never actually talked to a pagan about the case for Christianity, happily folded what might be left of apologetics into the office of preaching.

Preaching was done solely by the trained clergy. In any event, “reason-based” apologetics could be done only by those who were theologically Arminian, though they may not have been theologically literate enough to know it.

Liberal Christians, of course, believed that there really was nothing worth defending that was not part of ethics. Apologetics was a dubious activity since the Bible was full of errors and contradictions, but one could still find a Jesus of love and pacifism.10 Fundamentalists associated reaching the lost with compromising their piety. Better to focus on Christian living and end-times seminars than to interact with those who have questions about the faith. And if one must talk to a non-Christian, it is too easy to speak about one’s own heart and private subjective feelings; after all, one’s testimony cannot be disproven.

Recovering What We Ignored Our situation today? A multiplicity of religious options are being presented, essentially all claiming to change one’s life, and none of them offering anything that resembles persuasive factual evidence. The Christian church has the answers. In fact, offering evidence for belief is unique to Christian truth-claims.

Apologetics that focuses on the case for Christ is not antithetical to evangelism. In fact, such a defense of the faith is evangelism.

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Classical theologians rightly presented saving faith as grounded on notitia (knowledge) or facts.11 That much was fundamental. The content of the gospel is the perfect life and atoning death of Jesus Christ for the sins of the world and rising from the dead for our justification. That is the notitia of saving faith and the special domain of apologetics. Saving faith is built on saving facts, and one must assent to those facts and agree they are true (assensus). That assent, however, does not save since even Satan assented to the truth of who Christ was (why else did he show Jesus the kingdoms of this world unless he knew the jig was up?). But finally, there must be trust or fiducia in those facts as true pro me (“for me”). Perhaps a crass analogy, but think of it this way: It is not enough to have $1 million in the bank, or to assent that the million is in the bank, if you instead decide to live like a pauper. You need to draw on what is in your account or you live and die a beggar.

The church has skipped notitia and assensus (where apologetics operates), and lives solely now in the domain of direct appeals to fiducia (being “born again” and constant talk about “faith”).

Instead of providing biblical, historical, scientific, and legal evidences on behalf of the Christian position,12 Christians have jettisoned the apostolic admonition. Instead of learning the many convincing proofs, they are way too busy learning the purposedriven life while grooving to Body Gospel.

In Summation: Don’t Ignore This!

It is not apologetics instead of evangelism. It is not apologetics versus evangelism. It is not apologetics without evangelism. Apologetics that centers on the facticity and centrality of the death and resurrection of our Lord for the forgiveness of sins is apologetics as evangelism.

Craig A. Parton is a trial lawyer and partner in a law firm in Santa Barbara, California. He is the author of three books and is the United States Director of the International Academy of Apologetics, Evangelism and Human Rights (www.apologeticsacademy.eu), which conducts its annual summer study sessions in Strasbourg, France.

See John Warwick Montgomery’s History, Law and Christianity (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada: Canadian Institute for Law, Theology and Public Policy, 2002); C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity (New York: MacMillan & Co., 1970); and F. F. Bruce’s The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 1987).

1

For further reading on the distinction between tough and tender minded evidences, see two volumes of edited articles: Christianity for the Tough Minded (Minneapolis: Bethany Books, 1973); and Myth, Allegory and Gospel (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada: Canadian Institute for Law, Theology and Public Policy, 2000). See also Bernard Ramm, Types of Apologetic Systems (Wheaton: Van Kampen Press, 1953), which presents apologetical approaches based on “subjective immediacy” (Pascal, Kierkegaard, Brunner), “natural theology” (Aquinas, Butler, and Tennant), and those “stressing revelation” (Augustine, Van Til, and Carnell).

3 Approximately 30% of born-again American “Christians” now deny the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Dan Barker, Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America’s Leading Atheists (Berkeley: Ulysses Press, 2008), 277, footnotes 4 and 5.

4 The latest “get buffed with Jesus” infomercial.

5 Philip Johnson lists over ninety lawyers who have written on the truth-claims of Christianity, ranging from Hugo Grotius (the “father of international law”) in the 1600s to the present day, with such apologists as Sir Norman Anderson, Lord Hailsham, Jacques Ellul, and John Warwick Montgomery. See Johnson’s “Juridical Apologetics 1600–2000 A.D.: A BioBibliographical Essay,” Global Journal of Classical Theology, vol. 3, no. 1 (March 2002): 1–25.

6 Rod Rosenbladt, both in public lectures and in personal conversation.

7John Warwick Montgomery, The Law Above the Law (Minneapolis: Bethany Books, 1975).

8 Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx & Wagner: A Critique of a Heritage (New York: Little, Brown, 1958).

9 C. S. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), esp. 20, and the poem “De Profundis,” which Lewis begins: “Come let us curse our Master ere we die, For all our hopes in endless ruin lie. The good is dead. Let us curse God most High.”

10 Albert Camus, The Fall (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), 6–7.

11 Willard Sperry, “Yes, But”: The Bankruptcy of Apologetics (New York: Harper & Bros., 1931).

12 This epistemology was fundamental to the apologetical focus of the Old Princeton school (Alexander, Hodge, Warfield) and their “Christian Baconism,” which was squarely based on the basic pillar of facts, facts, facts.

Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 173.

13For the best summary of the array of evidences, see John Warwick Montgomery’s Tructutus Logico Theologicus, 4th ed. (Bonn: Culture & Science, 2009), esp. Proposition 3 (“Historical, jurisprudential, and scientific standards of evidence offer the touchstone for resolving the religious predicament by establishing the truth claims of Christian proclamation”), 65–128.

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A Servant’s Enduring Faith (continued from page 9) part of the Christian life. As the contemporary Bulgarian Church navigates the “free market” of spirituality, he also sees a growing need for discernment.

“I am concerned about the great invasion of false doctrines and cults, although Christ Himself warned us that many will come in His name. I am also concerned about the warped charismatic spirit, which leads people astray from the true gospel by opening the gates of the Church to carnality.”

At age eighty-one, Kulichev shows no signs of slowing down. In March 2009, he organized a service commemorating the infamous Pastor’s Trial of 1949. The beloved patriarchal figure still preaches regularly, prints a monthly newsletter, and writes books (Heralds of the Truth: The History of the Evangelical Church in Bulgaria is available at www.lulu.com). Despite the demands of ministry, he advises pastors to avoid a performancebased mindset. “Don’t try to give God ‘the best,’” he said.

“I saw a brochure with this title, but it is misleading.

What we think of as ‘the best,’ God may consider worthless. God doesn’t want something from us. He wants us. He wants us to give Him ourselves.” Pastor Hristo likewise gives of himself to every individual who needs sustenance. During the week, he frequents First Evangelical’s soup kitchen and chats with both volunteers and recipients. While many of them are neither familiar with his eschatological views nor have they read his books, they recognize genuine compassion.

As Kulichev surveys the church’s development over the last half century, he hopes believers will learn from the past. “We are grateful to our forefathers who bore suffering, reproach and poverty to hand down the faith, once for all delivered to the Saints.

May God strengthen us all to preserve this faith as good stewards. The hardships are like shadows from which no one can flee, but when we look upon Jesus as the sun in our life, then the shadow is behind us; we don’t see it. If we turn our back on the sun, the shadow moves in front of us and seems ominous.”

Marie Notcheva (B.A., print journalism, Syracuse University) is a writer and biblical counselor in training. After her first visit to Bulgaria in 1992 with Campus Crusade for Christ and many subsequent years in Sofia, she has served the Bostonarea immigrant community as a certified interpreter. She has been a women’s Bible study leader for nearly twenty years, and her book Redeemed from the Pit: Biblical Repentance and Restoration from the Bondage of Eating Disorders will be published by Calvary Press later this year.

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EMBASSY OF GRACE

The Ministry of Reconciliation: Embassy of Grace

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MICHAEL HORTON

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herever tensions flare up in the world between nations, it is usually the embassies of both nations that feel the brunt. For example, the U.S. embassy in any part of the world is actually considered U.S. territory: an island in a foreign country. There citizens under threat find shelter and from it diplomats receive and communicate the policies set by the current U. S. administration. When you’re on embassy soil, you are actually in your nation of true citizenship.

It’s not surprising that the New Testament draws on similar metaphors for international diplomacy, especially since the whole framework of biblical faith is a covenant in which Yahweh is the Great King (Suzerain) who establishes a relationship with his vassal (servant) on the basis of having liberated the vassal from imminent destruction.

In fact, there is a lot of political language in Scripture. The Great Commission is given within the wider context of the covenant of grace that was initiated with God’s promise of a redeemer in Genesis 3:15, reaffirmed in the covenant with Abraham, and fulfilled in the new covenant. In the political treaties of the Ancient Near East, a Great King (emperor) would graciously deliver a smaller kingdom from invaders and then incorporate that kingdom into his empire. In these treaties, there was a clause that gave the lesser king the right to invoke the Great King in the case of future threats. It was referred to as “calling on the name of _____.”

This political relationship became the template for the covenant of grace. Quoting Joel 2:32, Paul declares, “For ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved’” (Rom. 10:13). We do not have to attempt to ascend to the heavens or descend into the depths to attain salvation; rather, God comes down to us, not only rescuing us but delivering the good news that reconciles us to him. Paul adds the following links in the chain of his argument: But how are they to call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!”…So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. (vv. 14–15, 17)

The word for “Lord” (kyrios) was one of Caesar’s titles, and this was not lost on the first Christians or their persecutors who demanded that this title be reserved for the emperor. Israel is called to be “a light

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to the nations” (Isa. 49:6), a title bestowed on Jesus Christ who brought his heavenly kingdom to earth. In the new covenant, God’s missionary people are called to live as “aliens and strangers,” knowing that the land to which they are called (namely, “this present evil age,” wherever it is) is temporary. The church is called a “colony of heaven,” each local assembly an embassy to which men, women, and children flee from the judgment that is coming on the whole earth at the end of the age. The Triune God is Savior and Lord; becoming flesh, the Lord was made a servant even to the point of death on a cross. “Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:8–11).

As an embassy, the church is not only a safe haven, it is also the center from which the policies of the Great King—Jesus Christ—are announced to the world. The apostles even described themselves as “ambassadors.” Paul relates, All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Working together with him, then, we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain. For he says, “In a favorable time I listened to you, and in a day of salvation I have helped you.”

Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation. (2 Cor. 5:18–6:2) From this passage (and others) we see a clear distinction between the mission of Jesus Christ and the mission of his apostles. Christ has redeemed and reconciled sinners to God. We are not extending his incarnation or his redeeming and reconciling work.

The work of reconciliation is not an ongoing movement or a process unfolding in history. In fact, he says that “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.” In Romans 5, Paul elaborates: “Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 1 5

were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life” (Rom. 5:9–10). This reconciling work is not done by us, but for us. It is not something to complete, but something to rejoice in and to announce to others: “More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation” (v. 11).

What continues—and what Christ’s ambassadors are called to participate in as coworkers with God— is the ministry of heralding this good news to the ends of the earth. Through this ministry, strangers and enemies experience and embrace the reconciliation that Christ achieved more than two millennia ago.

Ambassadors are not the head of state; they convey policy but do not create or negotiate it. The King of kings authorized his apostles to speak in his name, to the extent that whoever hears them hears him and whoever receives them receives him (Matt. 10:40; 16:18–19; 18:18–20). The “ministry of reconciliation” that Christ entrusted to his apostles—and then to ordinary ministers in their special office and indeed all believers in the general office of prophet, priest, and king—consists in the worldwide communication of this good news. Ambassadors are not doing the work of redeeming and reconciling, yet they are “working

KNOW WHAT YOU BELIEVE… There are several crucial distinctions in Reformed theology that are introduced in this article and assumed throughout the remainder of this issue. The first is between the extraordinary apostolic ministry on the one hand and the later ordinary ministry of the Word by ordained pastors on the other. In the post-apostolic era, we believe from Scripture that the Spirit works through the ordinary ministry of Word and Sacrament. The extraordinary works of the apostles have ceased.

In the ordinary ministry of the Word, a second distinction is made between the special office of duly called and appointed ministers who preach the gospel and administer the sacraments, and then the general office of all believers in which all Christians are faithful witnesses to Christ.

Many of the debates and much of the confusion between supposedly “high” and “low” ecclesiologies would be advanced by attention to these important distinctions.

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together with him” by proclaiming Christ, “God making his appeal through us.”

Like their Lord, the directly appointed ambassadors of Christ were beaten, flogged, imprisoned, and even martyred. Instead of calling on the name of the Lord through his delegated representatives, the kingdoms of this age responded to God’s embassy with hostility.

And yet, the Great Commission bore and continues to bear fruit among Jews and Gentiles to this day. “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Rom. 1:16). When we encounter titles such as “ministers” and “heralds,” we are drawn into the world of international politics.

After his resurrection, our Lord commissioned his apostles to go throughout the earth, making disciples by preaching the gospel, baptizing, and teaching everything he has delivered for faith and practice.

There is a lot of rich substance packed into that mandate. Motivated by a sense of urgency, Christians for two millennia have made enormous sacrifices— including their own lives—in order to bring the saving message of Christ to every person on earth.

With respect to the message and the methods—the policies and their implementation—ambassadors are always servants. It is not their ministry, but Christ’s. No matter how important or charismatic a pastor might be, the very idea of a church being “so-and-so’s church” or “my ministry” was treasonous in the thoughts of the apostles. Their gospel was Christ’s gospel, and they were not authorized to alter his Word or strategies.

Christ gave his Great Commission, and throughout the book of Acts we see it carried out. (This is why we spent several weeks recently on the White Horse Inn going through the highlights of Acts.) In every chapter of Acts we encounter repeated references to the apostles proclaiming Christ, preaching the Word, teaching and persuading Jews and Greeks concerning Christ and his resurrection, announcing the forgiveness of sins. Baptized, new citizens are now annexed by the Great King to his empire of grace, enrolled in the visible church. They are richly cared for with teaching, the Lord’s Supper, the prayers, and the fellowship of the saints in both spiritual and temporal welfare. Then living in the world, believers witness to Christ and love and serve their neighbors through their callings. They are made “salt” through the ministry of Christ’s ambassadors, and then they too are shaken out into the world.

After the death of the apostles, ordinary ministers carried on this embassy through preaching and sacrament. Embassies of earthly kingdoms are authorized to deliver the judgment or pledges of their rulers, but only this embassy is authorized by the King of kings

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to forgive sins in his name. The kingdoms of this age have not yet been made the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ (Rev. 11:15). For now, the heavenly embassy is holy ground in the midst of common lands. Although our ultimate citizenship is in heaven, where we are already seated with Christ, we are called to live as strangers and sojourners in the empires of this age (Heb. 11:13–16). Each local church is an embassy of grace in its own right. Yet this embassy proclaims and witnesses to the day when the whole earth will be full of the glory of God, and even now calls everyone everywhere to embrace Jesus Christ as the only Savior and Lord of the world.

The Ground Campaign his view of the church as the embassy of grace cannot be taken for granted today. As in other periods, the church easily substitutes itself for its ascended Lord. After all, Jesus Christ is not now present bodily on the earth. When Christ ascended, leading captivity captive, he assumed the seat of cosmic power and authority. Sending his Spirit to lead the ground campaign, he is opening hearts and freeing Satan’s prisoners from the fear of death. Through the ministry of the Word, the Spirit is uniting sinners to Christ, making them citizens of heaven and coheirs with Christ. This is the mission of the church between Christ’s two comings: namely, to call strangers and aliens to the worldwide feast, and to prepare a table in the wilderness where sinners are forgiven. It is the era of repentance and faith, through the proclamation of the gospel. Christ is creating citizens—coheirs of the everlasting inheritance. Only when he returns again bodily will his reign on earth be consummated, wars cease, oppression and violence be vanquished, and the dead raised.

In one sense, of course, we cry out, “Lord, come quickly,” because we want to see an end to evil in the world and in our own hearts. Yet in another sense, every day that passes is yet another opportunity for the Spirit to call sinners to Christ through his Word. The door of the ark is still wide open—for now. The delay of Christ’s return in judgment reveals his loving patience, enduring the mutiny of the human race—and the ongoing sinfulness of his own church (2 Pet. 3:8–10).

One of the longest errors in church history, “Christendom” was an attempt to seize the thrones of the earth for Jesus Christ before his own return to consummate the kingdom. Instead of receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken (Heb. 12:28), we imagine we can usher in the consummated kingdom through our own agendas. So instead of fulfilling the embassy that Christ has in fact given to the church in this time between his two comings, we often act as if we are writing the final act of the play.

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Today, we hear about “living the gospel” versus “proclaiming the gospel,” “deeds” over “creeds,” transforming cultures through our works rather than preaching, teaching, baptism, Communion, and caring for the flock through elders and deacons. There is a lot of loose talk about our redeeming activity, completing Christ’s work of reconciling the world to God. This, however, confuses the unique (and completed) work of the King with the ongoing mission of the church in the power of the Spirit.

Repeatedly in church history—and certainly today—we would rather create kingdom policy rather than merely communicate it. Churches now create their own vision statements, mission statements, and strategic plans. Even when these statements allude to the Great Commission, our Lord’s priorities of preaching the gospel, baptizing, and teaching disciples to obey everything Christ has commanded (the three “marks of the church”: Word, Sacrament, and discipline) are often marginalized by our own. We have programs, campuses, myriad “ministries” to run. And each Lord’s Day easily becomes another opportunity to recruit the sheep for our own enterprises rather than to feed them for their earthly pilgrimage.

Diplomats, ambassadors, official heralds were appointed by the head of state to announce something of great significance—for individuals and for the whole world. Even the term “gospel” was a secular term in Greek that referred to the good news that an ambassador was sent to announce back in the capital: namely, that there had been victory on the battlefield.

Just as ambassadors are not free to create their own policies, they aren’t merely private individuals who share their personal beliefs and experiences with others. They do not send themselves, but are officially commissioned and sent. The apostles were sent directly from Christ as “eyewitnesses of his majesty” (2 Pet. 1:16; cf. Luke 1:2), while ordinary ministers such as Timothy were trained and then called and commissioned by Christ through the “laying on of hands by the presbytery” (1 Tim. 4:14). Christ still sends his ambassadors out on his mission, proclaiming the good news, baptizing, and teaching everything that Christ commanded. And he still calls his whole body to witness to God’s saving love in Jesus Christ through word and deed. It is a time of exile in Babylon, building houses and planting vineyards, working and praying for the welfare of the city, while we also raise covenant children and reach out to those who are outside of the covenant community with our witness and service (Jer. 29:4–9 with 1 Pet. 1:13–21). So these two cities or kingdoms intersect in the believer, whose heavenly citizenship shapes but is never to be confused with temporal citizenship in the common cities of this age.1 M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 1 7

The Embassy Isn’t the Capital and the Ambassador Isn’t the President n a variety of ways—and for a variety of reasons—the early medieval church became increasingly distracted from its mandate from heaven.

Where our Lord assured the disciples that he would send the Holy Spirit to teach them everything concerning his person and work, through his Word, the church became increasingly restless with the simple commission to preach, teach, baptized, commune, and care for the flock. We dare not try to fill up the space/time between the ascended Christ and his suffering and witnessing church. Only the bodily return of Christ will consummate the kingdom. Yet, though absent from the earth in the flesh, Christ himself continues to lead history to the end for which he redeemed it. He does this by his Word and Spirit.

In the early Middle Ages, the church increasingly came to see itself as the visible replacement for its ascended Lord. Filling up the space/time between its glorified Lord and the world, it created a hierarchy of mediators from Mary and the saints to the popes and bishops all the way down to the laity. The church had the power to summon the ascended Christ back to earth in the flesh by the ringing of a bell in the Mass.

Symbolizing the church, Mary is represented in medieval art as larger than life, with the baby Jesus securely kept in her lap.

Eventually, the bishop of Rome proclaimed himself the “vicar of Christ on earth” (vicar meaning “substitute” or “stand-in”). In one sense, of course, ministers are vicars—representatives who speak God’s Word in his name. For Rome, however, this meant that the absence of Jesus in the flesh could be compensated for by the visible church. Where the Protestant Reformers insisted that the true church is present wherever the Word is properly proclaimed and the sacraments are administered according to Christ’s institution, Rome maintains to this day that the true church is visible under “the one vicar of Christ on earth, the Roman pontiff.”2 There is nothing questionable, ambiguous, or precarious about the church’s location or identity in this age. It is simply the kingdom of God—the historical replacement for the natural body of Christ. The historical body of Jesus Christ is of no consequence, since the church has replaced his bodily presence.

In fact, Rome speaks often about the church as the ongoing incarnation of Christ on earth, continuing his redeeming work. According to Karl Adam, only now are we at the place where we can envision a return of alienated children to Rome, so that “the great and urgent task of the West is to close at long last the unwholesome breach that has divided us for centuries, to create a new spiritual unity, a religious centre, and so

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to prepare the only possible foundation for a rebuilding and rebirth of Western civilization” (emphasis added).3 The Roman Catholic Church is “the realisation on earth of the Kingdom of God.”4 “Christ the Lord is the real self of the Church,” and the church and Christ are “one and the same person, one Christ, the whole Christ.”5 Consistent with its view of the Lord’s Supper as the transubstantiation of consecrated bread and wine into the natural body and blood of Christ, the visible church with its papal head simply is Jesus Christ. Why long for the bodily return of Christ when we have the church?

As one church father wrote, “He who looks at the church looks directly at Christ.” The Roman Catholic Church simply is the kingdom of God. Signs (bread and wine, the visible church and its ministry) simply are the reality signified (Christ’s body and blood, the consummated kingdom of God on earth).

At the other end of the spectrum is the “Zwinglian” tendency of radical Protestants. In this case, signs are separated from the reality. At most, they witness to or symbolize Christ and his kingdom. The signs, however, do not convey the reality. Just as bread and wine are merely symbols pointing to Christ’s body and blood, and the faith of individual believers makes it effectual, the visible church is not really important.

What matters is the personal faith and experience of individuals who create the church by their collective willing and activity. In his defense of Free Church ecclesiology, Miroslav Volf is not uncritical: Whether they want to or not, Free Churches often function as “homogeneous units” specializing in the specific needs of specific social classes and cultural circles, and then in mutual competition try to sell their commodity at dumping prices to the religious consumer in the supermarket of life projects; the customer is king and the one best suited to evaluate his or her own religious needs and from whom nothing more is required than a bit of loyalty and as much money as possible. If the Free Churches want to contribute to the salvation of Christendom, they themselves must first be healed.6 Volf also points out that the privatization of faith that warps ecclesiology also makes Free Church ecclesiologies more effective in contemporary cultures.7 Stanley Grenz observes, “The post-Reformation discussion of the vera ecclesia (“true church”) formed the historical context for the emergence of the covenant idea as the focal understanding of the nature of the church.” With its insistence on the marks of the church, “the Reformers shifted the focus to Word and Sacrament,” but the Anabaptists and Baptists

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“took yet a further step,” advocating a congregational ecclesiology. “This view asserts that the true church is essentially people standing in voluntary covenant with God.” “No longer did the corporate whole take precedence over the individual as in the medieval model,” notes Grenz. Individuals formed the church rather than vice versa. “As a result, in the order of salvation the believer—and not the church—stands first in priority.”8 “Because the coming together of believers in mutual covenant constitutes the church, it is the covenant community of individuals,” although it has a history as well.9 In his widely influential Revisioning Evangelical Theology, Grenz draws on the radical Protestant (Anabaptist-Pietist) heritage to contrast the spontaneous, inward, personal, and experiential dimension of faith with the formal, external, corporate, and sacramental aspects.

So it becomes clear that one’s beliefs about the relation between sign and reality affect one’s view not only of the sacraments but of the church as well. If Rome maintains that the visible signs (water, bread and wine, church) are simply transformed into the invisible reality (regeneration, body and blood, kingdom of God), radical Protestants believe that the visible signs are relatively unimportant; at most, they merely testify to our personal experience. The reality is not present in or with the signs, but only in the inner realm of the soul. In contrast to both, Scripture places us in the realm of a covenant. In proclaiming his gracious promise, God creates justifying faith in the heart of Abram and his spiritual heirs. In ratifying his promise with circumcision and eventually the Passover (and in the new covenant, with baptism and the Supper), the Triune God creates and secures a redeemed community. The creaturely signs (preaching, baptism, Eucharist) remain creaturely signs, yet they are also means of grace. Through them, God’s promise creates the world of which they speak. The visible church, too, remains a “mixed body” of sheep and goats. Even the sheep remain simultaneously justified and sinful. Its reality as the kingdom of God is often ambiguous in this age, yet the visible church participates in that reality because of the Word and Spirit.

Contrasting Ecclesiologies f the Roman Catholic view of the church is hierarchical, the radical Protestant view is closer to a contractual view. Instead of everything depending on God’s promise, as in a covenantal view, everything depends on the faith and piety of individuals who choose to make Jesus Lord and Savior. So the church comes into being not by the Word, but by its own decision and pious activity. Taken to its extreme, contractual thinking easily leads to the view expressed by

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George Barna, an evangelical pioneer of church marketing: “Think of your church not as a religious meeting place, but as a service agency—an entity that exists to satisfy people’s needs.”10 Not surprisingly, Barna has recently suggested that the institutional church is no longer relevant and should be replaced by informal gatherings for fellowship and Internet communities. In fact, he has introduced a new demographic: the “Revolutionaries,” the “millions of believers” who “have moved beyond the established church and chosen to be the church instead.”11 Barna explains his use of “church” (small “c”) to refer to “the congregation-based faith experience, which involves a formal structure, a hierarchy of leadership, and a specific group of believers”—and “Church” (capital “C”) to denote “all believers in Jesus Christ, comprising the population of heaven-bound individuals who are connected by faith in Christ, regardless of their local church connections or involvement.”12 The Revolutionaries have found that in order to pursue an authentic faith they had to abandon the church.13 Barna, however, is hardly a dispassionate pollster; he takes his stand with the Revolutionaries, who will have an “unprecedented” effect on the institutional Church.14 Intimate worship, says Barna, does “not require a ‘worship service,’” just a personal commitment to the Bible, prayer, and discipleship.15 Offering a gloss on Acts 2:42–47, Barna suggests that preaching is simply “faith-based conversation,” the means of grace merely “intentional spiritual growth,” “love,” “resource investment,” “spiritual friendships,” and “family faith.”16 Notice how all of the emphasis falls on what individuals do. There is no suggestion in this book that the church might be defined by God’s work for us. “What matters is not whom you associate with (i.e., a local church), but who you are,” says Barna.17 Given the statistics, churched Christians do not live any differently from the rest of the population, so the usefulness of ecclesiastical involvement is put in question.18 “Scripture teaches us that devoting your life to loving God with all your heart, mind, strength, and soul is what honors Him. Being part of a local church may facilitate that. Or it might not.”19 While, according to Barna, the Bible does not establish the idea of the local church, much less its “corporate practices, rituals, or structures, it does, however, offer direction regarding the importance and integration of fundamental spiritual disciplines into one’s life.”20 He recognizes that the shift from the institutional church to “alternative faith communities” is largely due to market forces: Whether you examine the changes in broadcasting, clothing, music, investing, or automoM AY / J U N E 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 1 9

However thin, there is a theology

Barna’s exhortation: “So if you are a Revolutionary, it is because you have sensed and responded to God’s calling to behind Barna’s interpretation of be such an imitator of Christ. It is not a church’s responsibility to make you into Jesus as the paradigmatic “Revoluthis mold….The choice to become a Revolutionary—and it is a choice—is a tionary,” and it is basically that of covenant you make with God alone.”24 Although a leader of the emerging the nineteenth-century revivalist church movement (often critical of the megachurch model), Dan Kimball advoCharles Finney. cates the same ecclesiological assumpbiles, producers of such consumables realize that tions. He challenges the Reformation’s identification Americans want control over their lives. The of the church as the place where certain things are done, result has been the “niching” of America—creatsuch as preaching and sacrament. Instead, he says, the ing highly refined categories that serve smaller church is a people who do certain things.25 Of course, this numbers of people, but can command greater shifts the focus of activity from God to us. Just as loyalty (and profits). During the past three surely as in the Roman Catholic system, the church’s decades, even the local church has undergone works take priority over God’s grace. Preaching the such a niching process, with the advent of gospel takes a backseat to “living the gospel” (as if the churches designed for different generations, those gospel were something for us to do instead of good offering divergent styles of worship music, connews for us to believe and proclaim). gregations that emphasize ministries of interest to In the Roman Catholic view, the church is more of specialized populations, and so forth. The church a giver of grace than the embassy of grace. The true landscape now offers these boutique churches church is identified with its ministers (popes, bishops, alongside the something-for-everybody megaand priests) rather than its ministry (Word, churches. In the religious marketplace, the Sacrament, and discipline). The ambassadors mistake churches that have suffered most are those who themselves for the King. Radical Protestantism, howstuck with the one-size-fits-all approach, typically ever, overreacts against this smothering hierarchy by proving that one-size-fits-nobody.21 locating the true identity of the church in the people and their personal piety. Any official function of “the ministry of reconciliation” is a threat to the egalitarFurthermore, American consumers are demanding ian spirit of the community. In different ways, both of “practical faith experiences” over doctrine, “novelty these approaches threaten to replace Jesus Christ in and creativity, rather than predictability in religious his saving office, through his ordained ministry, with experiences; and the need for time-shifting, rather than the willing and doing of human beings. Over a ceninflexible scheduling of religious events.”22 Instead, the tury ago, the Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Revolutionaries are turning to house churches, family Bavinck observed a similar irony: churches (i.e., devotions with the immediate family), and what he calls “cyberchurch”: “the range of spiritual The difference is only that, whereas Rome finds experiences delivered through the Internet.”23 the ground and possibility for the continued exisHowever thin, there is a theology behind Barna’s tence of the Christian religion in the institutional interpretation of Jesus as the paradigmatic church, i.e., the infallible pope, Schleiermacher “Revolutionary,” and it is basically that of the nineteenth-century revivalist Charles Finney. According to and his kind find it in the church as organism, i.e., Finney, conversion is not dependent on a miracle of in the religious community, while mysticism and divine grace, but is the result of individual decision, as rationalism find it in religious individuals. All of any other choice. Nor is it mediated by the regular them explain the continued existence in terms of ministry of Word and Sacrament, but is produced the leading of the Holy Spirit, the indwelling of through “excitements sufficient to induce repenChrist, but this has its organ, the pope in the case tance,” whatever the methods. Just as rational methof Rome, the organism of the church in the case ods produce results in industry (for Finney), market of Schleiermacher, and for Anabaptism, in every principles apply equally to the growth of believers, believer individually.26 churches, and fast-food chains. The Pelagian tendency of his contractual approach is clearly evident in Across the spectrum of evangelicalism, the pre20 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

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supposition is widely shared that the individual believer’s personal relationship with Jesus is immediate, inward, and direct, based on one’s decision to accept Christ, and that membership in the church is also an individual decision that may (or, in some cases, may not) serve that basic contract.

Welcome to a Reformation Church n contrast to both hierarchical and egalitarian models of the church, Reformation teaching affirms with the New Testament that the church is “the creation of the Word.” The Spirit gives us faith through the preaching of the Word—specifically, through hearing the gospel. That is why the growth of the church in the book of Acts is reported with the phrase, “And the word of God spread.” We live out our callings in the world not as if we were the gospel, but because of the gospel and in a way that brings those around us into the atmosphere of its blessings.

It is certainly true that our hypocritical practice can repel people from hearing the gospel. If people do not hear the gospel proclaimed, however, they will not be saved. This is why the central mandate of the Great Commission is to “proclaim the gospel to everyone”: “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Rom. 10:17). Faith is expressed through love and good works, but it does not come from them. Peter says that we are “born again…through the living and abiding word of God….And this word is the good news that was preached to you” (1 Pet. 1:23, 25).

We neither confuse the sign with the reality nor separate them. Just as, according to 1 Corinthians 10:16, the bread and wine remain signs even though they are united to the reality in heaven (Christ’s body and blood), the visible church “participates” in the consummated kingdom of God, even though it remains an earthly sign.

Christ is not now present on earth in his natural body, and his ecclesial body cannot serve as his substitute. Neither in a hierarchical nor egalitarian form is the church an extension of Jesus Christ’s unique person and work. Yet the church is not orphaned by its ascended Lord, since the Spirit unites us to Christ and therefore to each other in a communion of faith, hope, and love. Thus even now there is a society spread throughout the kingdoms of this age that, however ambiguous to our empirical observation, is not only a community but a communion, not only a fellowship of believers but a church, not only a group of friends who have contracted with Jesus for salvation—and therefore with a local church as a “serviceprovider”—but as a genuine sign participating in the reality of the everlasting Sabbath feast that awaits us.

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Neither because of its exalted ministers nor because of its pious faith and activity in the world, but because of Christ’s ministry that he is pleased to exercise through sinful creatures by his Spirit, is the church truly an embassy of grace in this passing evil age, waiting for the return of its glorified Head. Pointing like John the Baptist away from ourselves to the Lamb of God, the church proclaims to the world, “Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again!” ■

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

For more on this, see David VanDrunen’s excellent book, Living in God’s Two Kingdoms: A Biblical Vision for Christianity and Culture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010).

2Robert Bellarmine, De controversies, tom. 2, liber 3, De ecclesia militante, cap. 2, “De definitione Ecclesiae” (Naples: Giuliano, 1857), 2:75.

3Karl Adam, The Spirit of Catholicism (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 6.

4Adam, 14.

5Adam, 15.

6Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 18.

7Volf, 16, 17.

8Stanley Grenz, Theology for the Community of God (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1997), 609–11.

9Grenz, 614.

10George Barna, Marketing the Church (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1988), 37.

11George Barna, Revolution: Finding Vibrant Faith Beyond the Walls of the Sanctuary (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2005), back cover copy.

12Barna, Revolution, x.

13Barna, Revolution, 17.

14Barna, Revolution, 17.

15Barna, Revolution, 22.

16Barna, Revolution, 24–25.

17Barna, Revolution, 29.

18Barna, Revolution, 30–31.

19Barna, Revolution, 37.

20Barna, Revolution, 37.

21Barna, Revolution, 62–63.

22Barna, Revolution, 63.

23Barna, Revolution, 65.

24Barna, Revolution, 70.

25Dan Kimball, The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations (Zondervan, 2003), esp. 91ff.

26Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, trans. John Vriend, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 1:424.

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EMBASSY OF GRACE

“And He Gave Gifts to Men”

By Brent McGuire

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here prevails within visible Christendom today a remarkable indifference toward the public ministry. Some congregations intentionally go years without a called pastor, simply because they find it cheaper to line up weekly pulpit supply. Fewer and fewer Christian parents encourage their sons to consider entering the ministry, a fact reflected in the declining rates of enrollment at our seminaries. And what was once regarded by both Christians and non-Christians as a high calling is today trivialized by the every-member-a-minister movement. We have ministers of education, ministers of music, and ministers of youth—none of whom is a minister at all, at least not in the biblical sense of a man trained and specially called to preach the gospel and to administer the means of grace on behalf of and for the good of a Christian congregation. We have puppet ministries, book ministries, and even clown ministries. Could anyone infer from the church’s contemporary practice that it officially regarded the pastoral office as a necessity and of divine origin?

But what is the debate about pastors and officers in the church really about? Pastors complaining about the diminished regard for the pastoral ministry often come across sounding like churchy versions of Rodney Dangerfield: “We pastors get no respect! No respect at all!” But at stake in changing attitudes toward the public ministry are not pastors’ feelings. Nor is the fundamental concern a kind of balance of power. The ultimate issue is the power of God’s Word.

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divine mandate for the public ministry disappears. It is not either/or. It is both.

For everyone who calls on the name of the A major accent of the Lutheran Reformation, of Lord will be saved. But how are they to call on course, was the doctrine of the priesthood of all him in whom they have not believed? And how believers. Passages such as 1 Peter 2:9, in which St. are they to believe in him of whom they have Peter calls all Christians a “chosen race, a royal priestnever heard? And how are they to hear without hood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession,” someone preaching? And how are they to were cited by Luther and others to defend the prinpreach unless they are sent? As it is written, ciple that the priesthood belonged generally to all bap“How beautiful are the feet of those who preach tized believers and not exclusively to bearers of an the good news!” But they have not all obeyed ecclesiastical office. They were reacting against the the gospel. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has Roman Catholic position that held that God had believed what he has heard from us?” So faith appointed under the new covenant, as he had in the comes from hearing, and hearing through the old, a visible and external priesthood to mediate word of Christ. between the church and Christ, and by the sacrifice of the Mass to placate the wrath of the Father.

The verses above make clear that it is the Word of The Reformers pointed to the biblical testimony Christ that creates saving faith. “Faith comes from that the sacrifices of the Old Testament were fulfilled hearing and hearing through the word of Christ.” and completed by the one sacrifice of Christ, the true The apostle Paul knows nothing of what the Jesuit High Priest (see especially Heb. 7–9). “He is a priest forKarl Rahner called “anonymous Christians,” but only ever after the order of Melchizedek” (Ps. 110:4). Christ Christians who have been called through the Word. performs the work of a priest by bearing our burden The text says more than this; in fact it says that the and interceding for us. As Christ’s brothers by baptism, entire source and origin of salvation depends on God’s however, Christians receive a share in Christ’s priestly sending out a true minister of the Word. The Word office. What were the prerogatives of the priestly class that saves, then, is an exterof the Old Testament are, nal Word—a Word that now that Christ has come, “But you are a chosen people, comes to men from the outcommonly held and exerside and is brought and cised by every member of a royal priesthood, a holy nation, mediated to them by men. the community of believers. a people belonging to God, As Luther wrote in his All who believe in the gospel Smalcald Articles (1537), “It are priests with Christ— that you may declare the praises must be firmly maintained members of a “royal priestof him who called you out of darkthat God gives no one his hood, a holy nation.” As John says in his Revelation, Spirit or grace apart from ness into his wonderful light.”

Christ has “made us a kingthe external Word which (1 Pet. 2:9) dom, priests to his God and goes before.”1 Luther’s discussion of the ministry or Father” (1:6). office of preaching is fundamentally the insistence on Luther, in his Second Exposition of Psalm 110 (1539), the divine power of the Word that is written and uses exalted language to describe the priestly status of read, spoken and heard. the baptized: “Every baptized Christian is a priest In modern Protestant discussions concerning the already, not by appointment or ordination from the pastoral ministry, there sometimes seem to be two pope or any other man, but because Christ Himself has utterly separate and even contradictory Luthers: one begotten him a priest and has given birth to him in of whom says that the rights previously treated as the Baptism.”2 “Every baptized Christian is, and ought to be, called a priest, just as much as St. Peter or St. Paul.”3 exclusive possession of the ordained actually belong But in what ways do Christians participate in to all Christians; and the other of whom insists that the office of the public ministry is divinely instituted Christ’s priestly office? “In the prophet Malachi (2:7),” and not to be usurped by ordinary Christians. But if Luther says, “priests are called the angels of one recognizes the central importance to the Lutheran God....Hence it is the primary function of a priest, who Reformers of the power of the external Word to creis called, ordained, and anointed by God Himself, to ate and sustain faith in Christ, the seeming contrateach people God’s Word and doctrine, not his diction between a Luther who is all about the own....From this you can see that the preaching of the universal priesthood and a Luther insistent on the Gospel is really the true priestly office.”4 What is the M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 2 3

principal activity of a Christian priest? It is to preach the gospel: Every Christian has the right and the duty to teach, instruct, admonish, comfort, and rebuke his neighbor with the Word of God at every opportunity and whenever necessary. For example, father and mother should do this for their children and household; a brother, neighbor, citizen, or peasant for the other. Certainly one Christian may instruct and admonish another ignorant or weak Christian concerning the Ten Commandments, the Creed, or the Lord’s Prayer. And he who receives such instruction is also under obligation to accept it as God’s Word and publicly to confess it.5 And just as it is precisely in the preaching of God’s Word—the speaking to another the Word of forgiveness through Christ Jesus—that a Christian exercises his rights as a royal priest, the ecclesiastical priest who fails to preach God’s Word renounces his claim to the title. “The priestly office consists of three parts: to teach or preach God’s Word, to sacrifice, and to pray....If anyone does not exercise these functions of the office, but still wants to be called a priest or pope, he does not deserve this beautiful and glorious name.”6 True, evangelical “priests” “attend to the ministry of the Word. They teach the gospel about the blessings of Christ, and they show that the forgiveness

of sins takes place on account of Christ. This teaching offers solid consolation to consciences. In addition, they teach about the good works that God commands, and they speak about the value and use of the sacraments” (Apology, XXIV.48).7 For their part, rather than deny the charge, the Roman Catholics protected the position that priests need not proclaim the gospel by cursing its critics: “If anyone says that those who do not preach are not priests at all, let him be anathema” (Trent, 23rd Session, “Decree Concerning Holy Orders,” Canon 1).

The Ordained Ministry nd yet the emphasis placed by the Lutheran Reformers on the universal priesthood was animated not by a resentment against ecclesiastical hegemony per se, but by a concern for the proclamation of the Word. The gospel of Christ is the means by which men are saved. The medieval clergy, who had been entrusted with preaching that gospel and administering the means of grace, had instead obscured the proclamation of the gospel with an emphasis on works, had transformed the gift of the Lord’s Supper into the sacrifice of the Mass, had burdened consciences with manmade laws and traditions, and had in many other ways withheld rather than delivered the Word that brought people to saving faith in Christ.

One of the ironies about the modern invocation of the priesthood of all believers is that it is often pre-

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The Importance of Church Office in the Ordinary Ministry

by Michael Horton

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n Scripture all of God’s people are presented as priests, living stones being built into a holy sanctuary.

Yet not all of the covenant people are ministers. All are sheep, but not all are shepherds under the Great Shepherd (as Paul especially argues in 1 Cor. 11 and 12). There are different gifts and different callings within the one body. Christ is the sole mediator between God and humanity (1Titus 2:5), but he has given “the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers” to his body, “building [it] up” (Eph. 4:5–16). These differing gifts generate special offices of ministry and oversight. Such graces, however, are not qualities (or, as in Roman Catholic terminology, an indelible “character”) sacramentally infused into ministers so that they might be elevated ontologically above the laity. They are simply gifts for particular offices, given in order to serve the rest of the body. As Christ has promised, he has not left us orphans but is present by the Spirit through the ministry of the Word. Admittedly, this is a difficult interpretation to affirm, especially since most of our modern translations (in contrast to older ones) render Ephesians 4:11– 12 as follows: “The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry” (NRSV, but also essentially the same construction in other modern translations, including the ESV). However, there are good reasons for preferring the older translations (for example, the King James Version), which render the verses, “And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.”

Reflecting the actual construction of the Greek, the older translation draws three lines of purpose

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sented simply as a mandate for the kind of activities that Christians should already be engaged in. Pietists, for instance, talk about the obligation of Bible reading, though they have abandoned the belief that the words of Scripture are means by which the Holy Spirit kills and brings to life alive. In this light, Bible reading becomes almost a monastic discipline, a rote obligation to prove one is a Christian priest. Likewise, they speak of the obligation of spreading the gospel, while denying that any Christian could effectively proclaim the forgiveness of sins to another with a divine word of absolution. At the heart of the sixteenth-century debate over the priesthood of all believers, however, was the conviction that there is in fact power to the Word.

The evangelical insight that the Holy Spirit creates and sustains faith through the Word—a Word that comes to people from the outside—also finds practical reflection in what the Lutheran Reformers taught concerning the pastoral office. That all Christians are, by virtue of their baptism, royal priests does not preclude the necessity of investing special persons with the office of the public ministry. Christ himself commanded that there be a public ministry—that is, a particular office whose bearer executes the rights and privileges of the spiritual priesthood on behalf of the congregation: “When he ascended on high he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men....And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work

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of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:8, 11–12).

The heavenly Christ has given gifts to his church, among them, pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints. Luther brings in Ephesians 4 in his commentary on Psalm 110: Out of the multitude of Christians some must be selected who shall lead the others by virtue of the special gifts and aptitude which God gives them for the office. Thus St. Paul writes: “And His gifts were that some should be apostles, etc.” For although we are all priests, this does not mean that all of us can preach, teach, and rule. Certain ones of the multitude must be selected and separated for such an office. And he who has such an office is not a priest because of his office but a servant of all the others, who are priests.8 More than a position established by the congregation for the sake of good order, the pastoral office was seen by Luther and the Reformers as established by God for the sake of the Word. As Melanchthon pointed out in The Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope, “Among those gifts belonging to the church he lists pastors and teachers and adds that such are given for serving and building up the body of Christ.”9 How are the saints equipped? How is the body of Christ built up, whether recent converts or the estab-

clauses from the offices given that newer translations obscure. The same officers who are given for the completion (not equipping) of the saints are also given for the work of ministry and edification of the body.1 On this reading, Christ has given apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastors and teachers for the ministry of the Word that brings the whole body to unity, maturity, and completion in the truth. This is not to say that the body is complete in and through these offices alone, for there are other gifts mentioned elsewhere (esp. Rom. 12 and 1Cor. 12). The focus here, however, is restricted to that work of bringing unity and maturity to the body through sound doctrine. Favoring this interpretation of Ephesians 4, commentator Andrew Lincoln notes, “An active role for all believers is safeguarded by vv. 7, 16, but the primary context here in v. 12 is the function and role of Christ’s specific gifts, the ministers, not that of all the saints. Rendering katartismon ‘completion’ has a straightforward meaning which does not require supplementing by a further phrase, and diakonia, ‘service,’ is more likely to refer to the ministry of the ministers just named.” Thus it is “hard to avoid the suspicion that opting for the other view is too often motivated by a zeal to avoid clericalism and to support a ‘democratic’ model of the Church.”2 It is significant that the gifts mentioned in Romans 12:3–8 and 1 Corinthians 12:4–28 include hospitality, giving, administration, and other acts of service, but Ephesians 4 only mentions Christ’s gift of officers to his church for the maturity of the whole body in sound doctrine. So the point is that in his ascension Christ has given the ministry of the Word to his people as a gift. This does not mean that those who are not ministers are not gifted and called to love and serve each other, but that comes later in verses 17 through the whole of chapter 5. Before they serve, they are served. This underscores again the remarkable generosity of the church’s victorious head, that he would make his people receivers first and active givers as a result. While every member and every gift is needed in order for the body to be fully operative, (continued on page 26) M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 2 5

lished church? Through the preached Word of Christ: “To this end Christ sent the Holy Spirit; to this end Christ himself called and gave the Holy Spirit to the apostles and their successors, ministers, preachers and teachers, as Paul tells us; who are to exercise the Word, that the Word may resound always and everywhere in the world, reaching to children’s children, and on down to future generations” (Luther, Church Postils, Sermon for the Sunday after Easter).10 Over the years, much ink has been spent arguing over Ephesians 4:11–12. Does the phrase “work of the ministry” go back to the main clause and therefore refer to a function of the apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastor-teachers in verse 11? Or is “for the work of ministry” to be linked with the previous phrase “to equip the saints” so that the activity described is a function of the saints—that is, all Christians? Is ergon diakonias to be translated “the work of the ministry” or “works of service”? Luther, for his part, translated the passage, “He gave some to be apostles, etc., in order to prepare the saints for works of the office through which the body of Christ is to be built up.”

Whether “ministry” or “service” refer back to “the apostles, etc.” or to “the saints,” the point remains that the gifts of the ascended Lord here are the men doing

the proclamation of the gospel in order to equip the saints. The question of how the remaining clause gets translated is somewhat secondary. Insofar as the insistence that “ministry” be linked with “saints” is intended to diminish the importance of pastors and teachers, it is really an attempt to say the saints can be equipped in some other way of our own preference.

And that is to reject the Lord’s gifts.

Paul says that the prophets, apostles, evangelists, pastors and teachers are gifts of the ascended Lord. We might have expected him to say that Christ, after he ascended, gave the Holy Spirit. Instead, he says that he gave these men. This, however, is not a contradiction of the Lord’s giving of the Holy Spirit. He gives the Holy Spirit through the preaching of the gospel, which takes place through the men God sends.

It was pointed out above that in contemporary discussions of the ministry, Luther is often pitted against himself. Which is it? Is the church a priesthood of all believers? Or does it depend on the office of a called minister? That the answer is both is tied directly to the Lutheran appreciation for the efficacy of the Word. In the Smalcald Articles, Luther writes, “We now want to return to the gospel, which gives guidance and help against sin in more than one way, because God is extravagantly rich in his grace.” He

(continued from page 25) the very life of the body depends on the faithful maintenance of the ministry of Word and Sacrament. Not all members of the body can devote themselves exclusively to the Word and prayer as Peter observed (Acts 6:2–7), but if some do not (especially out of a misguided assumption that every member is a minister), the sheep will not be fed and the body will not be built up into Christ. In fact, when the apostles were freed for this work by the appointment of deacons, we read, “So the word of God continued to increase” (Acts 6:7). If Peter needed to be freed up for this work, then certainly ordinary ministers must be preserved as much as possible from secular affairs and even the necessary and important details of church administration.

Through this ministry, we are all recipients of the unity of the faith, the knowledge of the Son of God, and maturity in Christ. Therefore, that which we all possess jointly already in Christ (one God and Father, one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism) is preserved by Christ from generation to generation. On the basis of this gift of ambassadors, the other members of the body receive what they need so that they may “no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds” (Eph. 4:17), but live out their calling in the world (vv. 18–24). They even participate in the service, not only as recipients but also as actors, “addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with [their] heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ” (5:15–21). For all of this, a formal ministry of the Word is essential.

Not only as a community but as a church the body is connected to its head in audible and visible bonds.

For example, the Westminster Confession declares, The Lord Jesus, as king and head of his Church, hath therein appointed a government in the hand of Church officers, distinct from the civil magistrate.

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goes on to list “the spoken word, in which the forgiveness of sins is preached to the whole world (which is the proper function of the gospel)”; “baptism”; “the holy Sacrament of the Altar”; “the power of the keys”; and “the mutual conversation and consolation of brothers and sisters.”11 There is but one gospel, and yet God, who is extravagantly rich in his grace, delivers it to us in many ways.

It is not for the Christian to pick his favorite means of grace and then despise the others or reject them as unnecessary. Christians should not set the pastoral office against the priesthood of all believers. Both the pastoral office and the mutual consolation of the brethren deliver God’s grace to the hearer. They are two different things, to be sure. Not every Christian, though a priest, is or can be a pastor, as Luther acknowledges in his commentary on Psalm 110. The pastor (shepherd) bears a unique office, in which he proclaims the Word, by which all Christians are made, on behalf of the congregation (flock). His ministry is public not simply because he speaks out in the open, but because he speaks and administers on the basis of an acknowledged call on behalf of the community.

And yet the Word of the gospel the pastor preaches is no more sure a Word than that which the individual Christian proclaims in the context of his or her voca-

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tion, “at every opportunity and whenever necessary.”

Both are the gospel, the power of God unto salvation.

It might be asked if it is possible for the church to survive in the absence of one of the means of grace or in the absence of called ministers. Churches in the time of the Soviet Union, for instance, because of the ban on Christianity and the criminalization of the priesthood, went years without an ordained minister serving them. The church did survive; Christians remained faithful during that time of persecution, sustained by the reading of Holy Scriptures, baptism, and the mutual consolation of the brethren. But one dare not justify on the basis of emergency situations the rejection of God’s gifts under circumstances that do not require it. Apart from some necessity or cross imposed by Christ himself, to reject one or the other means of grace is to reject the gift of God. This most certainly applies to the pastoral office. It is as though, after hearing that the risen Lord has given one a certain gift, one says in response, “No thank you. I’ve got a better way.”

What a tremendous effect Paul’s word to the Ephesians should have on the church today!

Ephesians 4 teaches that the gifts of the ascended Lord are the men doing the proclamation in order to equip the saints. Pastors and teachers are in the same

the word and censures; and to open it unto penitent sinners, by the ministry of the gospel, and by absolution from censures, as occasion shall require.

In addition to the local church, there are broader assemblies of the church, whose conclusions “are to be received with reverence and submission, not only for their agreement with the Word, but also for the power whereby they are made, as being an ordinance of God, appointed thereunto in his Word.”

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

Our interpretation depends largely on whether we render katartismon in verse 12a “equip” and eis “for” or render them “complete” and “in.” It is possible lexically to render katartismon either “equip” or “complete” (also train). However, “completion” fits better with the logic of the argument, where the analogy is that of a body growing up into maturity. This occurs through Christ’s gift of evangelists, pastors, and teachers. Furthermore, this gift is given for the express purpose of “building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood...so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine,” but instead be engaged in “speaking the truth in love” (vv. 12–15).

2Andrew T. Lincoln, Ephesians (WBC; Dallas: Word, 1990), 253; cf. T. David Gordon, “‘Equipping’ Ministry in Ephesians 4,” JETS 37, no. 1 (March 1994): 69–78. It is also interesting to read Calvin’s commentary on this passage (Commentaries on the Epistles of Paul to the Galatians and Ephesians, trans. William Pringle [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996], 277–86), especially since the more recent translation does not even occur to him. For this very reason, he seems to capture the flow of the passage’s argument more smoothly than many commentators who follow the newer translation.

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list as apostles and prophets. We surely accept that the apostles and prophets were gifts from God. The pastor is not an apostle, and yet Holy Scripture declares that he is no less a gift from God than the apostle Paul.

Pastors, do you hear that? Your ministry is given you

by God Almighty! Lay Christians, do you hear that?

Your pastor is God’s gift to you, to equip you for eternal life!

The recognition that the key concern for Luther and the Reformation was the external Word, which alone has the power to effect salvation, helps us better understand why the Reformers were not caught up as so many are today in a kind of power struggle. For the Reformers, it was not a matter of carving out boundaries of power, as though pastors preaching the Word in public and individual Christians bearing witness to the Word in their vocations were mutually exclusive alternatives. The doctrine of the universal priesthood did not in any way diminish the necessity for or undermine the divine founding of the pastoral office.

And it should not do so for us today. Would that both pastors and congregations embraced as the Lutheran Reformation did the apostle’s word in Ephesians 4 that the pastoral office is divinely given.

The pastor holds a particular office, in which he deliv-

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ers to those entrusted to his care that which alone can bring us to Christ and through him eternal life—the gospel. “What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed” (1 Cor. 3:5). ■

Brent McGuire (S.T.M., Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri) is senior pastor of Our Redeemer Lutheran Church in Dallas, Texas.

The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, eds. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2000), 322.

2Luther’s Works: Selected Psalms, vol. 13 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1956), 329.

3Selected Psalms, 330.

4Selected Psalms, 315–16.

5Selected Psalms, 333.

6Selected Psalms, 315.

7Book of Concord, 267.

8Selected Psalms, 322.

9Book of Concord, 341.

10 Sermons of Martin Luther: Church Postils, vol. 7, ed.

John Lenker (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1995), 241.

11Book of Concord, 319.

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ven the least traveled among us understands that there are such things as cultural “no-nos” that one would be wise to avoid. Wearing a Los Angeles Lakers jersey in South Boston would be one example (albeit a commendable and heroic one to be sure). In the world of American evangelicalism, one of the most offensive expletives that one can utter in mixed company is the word “Calvinism,” for in the minds of many the term is synonymous with a failure—and even a refusal—to evangelize. After all, we hear that if God has elected a small and elite few to be saved, and if his choice was made before the world was created, then what’s the point of sharing the gospel with anyone?

In order to answer this charge, some Reformed and Calvinistic leaders have adopted a term designed to highlight the flavor and character of our churches.

That term is “missional.” Rather than being heady, we are told, we should be missional; instead of focusing on doctrine, we should be missional; rather than being insular and self-satisfied, we should be missional. When put like that, it’s hard to disagree. If our choice is between being missional or being a theological egghead, or between being missional and preaching a twelve-week series of sermons on the magisterial Reformers’ understanding of the communicatio idiomatum (the communication of attributes of Christ’s two natures), we would choose the former

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In a word, while all believers are

lowships. Less attention and money are usually paid to things such as interior called to faithfully glorify God by décor, sound systems, and professional musicianship in a Reformed church than fulfilling their earthly callings, it is in a more broadly evangelical one.

Moreover, it is less necessary for a not incumbent upon them to also Reformed pastor to be a dynamic and edgy personality or a witty and humorfulfill the Great Commission. That ous speaker than it is for those in other congregations. In fact, successful Reholy task is given to men set apart formed church planting can take place without any electric instruments, tattoos, from worldly endeavors—men who, PowerPoint, or hair product. like Paul, are “separated to the How do we do it? The answer comes back to the issue of vision, which necesgospel of God” (Rom. 1:1, NKJV). sarily causes us to redefine “success” and seek to reclaim it from the lexicon of every time. My purpose in this article is not to contemporary culture. If a church’s vision is to transdenounce missionalism or to call for the “frozen choform the society, bring about justice in one’s comsen” to circle their TULIP-affirming wagons and take munity, and redeem the arts, sciences, and the a defensive posture against all things non-Reformed, economy, then success will be a pretty tall order but to open the door for discussion about how the (although that church’s failure will be easily measurseeds of missional ecclesiology can be sown in able, being displayed every time one of its members churchly soil, which pays due attention to things such opens a newspaper). Further, such a lofty and ambias the marks of the church and the ordinary means of tious vision will have to be undertaken with a grace. In a word, I want to argue that Reformed severely deficient tool chest, for no rational person churches, by being self-consciously Reformed in their would claim that the Bible furnishes us with the identity and philosophy of ministry, can by definition means to achieving such secular ends. No, “the thereby be truly missional. weapons of our warfare are not carnal,” and therefore the tools for spiritual warfare cannot be branThe Mission and the Marks dished for the purpose of winning the culture war or brief glance at many churches’ websites will achieving earthly goals, even when these goals are be sufficient to demonstrate that the issues of good ones (2 Cor. 10:4; Eph. 6:12). If a church’s identity and philosophy of ministry are convision, however, is to minister Word and Sacrament sidered to be extremely important; they have pages to its members and to disciple them into mature outlining not only their vision but also their goals, Christian fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, chilcore values, and mission. Redundancy aside, it is dren, then not only is the mandate clearly laid out, worth asking: What should our church be about? but the tools to accomplish it are also present.

What is it we are trying to accomplish, and how?

At Exile Presbyterian Church where I pastor, our The task of crafting a pithy yet profound vision vision statement on the inside cover of our weekly statement, as well as an action plan to achieve it, can order of worship reads: “Welcome to Exile Presbyterian appear overwhelming, especially to those in nondeChurch! Our greatest desire as a church is to preach nominational contexts without much in the way of Jesus Christ from the law and the gospel, to nourish history or tradition to fall back on for guidance and baptized believers with the body and blood of our Lord counsel. The Reformed are at an advantage here, for at His table, and to encourage our members to walk in not only has our vision been set for us by our forefafaith and holiness, bringing our heavenly citizenship to thers in the faith, but the keys to our success are bear upon our earthly callings in this present age.” As already made known. Now, those in other corners of you may have noticed, this is a slightly fleshed-out way the broader church can also claim to have a tried-andof saying that as a church our mission is to simply distrue formula in place that guarantees success, but play the marks that characterize what all churches are there are some important differences between that supposed to be. To put it even simpler, our church’s claim and the one I am making. For example, the steps vision statement could just as easily read, “Welcome to to realizing the vision of a Reformed church are quite Exile Presbyterian Church, where our goal is to be the simple, as opposed (oftentimes) to those of other felchurch.” In their book Resident Aliens, Stanley Hauerwas

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and William Willimon write that the church is meant to be “a new people, an alternative polis, a countercultural social structure….The church does not exist to ask what needs doing to keep the world running smoothly and then to motivate our people to go do it....The church has its own reason for being, hid within its own mandate and not found in the world. We are not chartered by the Emperor.” Thus the church’s mission is incredibly simple, and yet utterly staggering at the same time: “[We] seek to influence the world by being the church, that is, by being something the world is not and never can be.”1 The Means to the Mission f the mission of the church is to “be the church” by displaying the distinctive marks by which a true church can be identified, the question then arises: What will this look like in actual practice? It is here that our discussion must move from the mission of the church to the means of grace. The Westminster Larger Catechism asks:

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Question: What are the outward means whereby Christ communicates to us the benefits of his mediation?

Answer: The outward and ordinary means whereby Christ communicates to his church the benefits of his mediation, are all his ordinances; especially the Word, sacraments, and prayer; all which are made effectual to the elect for their salvation. (Q/A 154)2 The next question is: Question: How is the Word made effectual to salvation?

Answer: The Spirit of God maketh the reading, but especially the preaching of the Word, an effectual means of enlightening, convincing, and humbling sinners; of driving them out of themselves, and drawing them unto Christ; of conforming them to his image, and subduing them to his will; of strengthening them against temptations and corruptions; of building them up in grace, and establishing their hearts in holiness and comfort through faith unto salvation. (Q/A 155)3 The Heidelberg Catechism shares this outlook; the only difference being that instead of speaking of the preaching of the Word of God, it states more specifically and refers to “the preaching of the holy gospel” (Q/A 19, 83, 84).

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Why is this significant for setting a truly missional agenda for the church? The answer is obvious: If the mission of the church is to “be the church” by following Jesus’ Great Commission, and if part of that commission is to preach the gospel to every creature, then what better way to be missional than to make the preaching of the holy gospel the cornerstone of the church’s ministry?

There are many benefits that arise from this view of ecclesial missionalism. For example, it focuses the church’s missional impulse in a concrete way— namely, toward the ordained ministry of Word and Sacrament. In many evangelical contexts the missional goal is rightly promoted, but the onus of achieving it often falls upon each and every member of the congregation. Thus the expectation of preaching the gospel is placed upon the accountants, mechanics, and soccer moms of the congregation, instead of upon the church’s ministers of the Word who have actually been ordained to fulfill this very task. Remember, the Great Commission was originally given to the apostles, not to every single believer. This means that, while it is admirable and encouraged for all Christians to be witnesses to Christ in their lives (and in their speech when the opportunity arises), there is a specific context in which gospel preaching enjoys a promised blessing by God’s Spirit, and that context is the pulpit each Lord’s Day. Paul writes to the Romans: “For ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’...How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!’…So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (10:13–15, 17).

In the apostle’s mind it seems inconceivable that the preaching that produces faith would be done outside the context of a duly ordained minister whom the church has sent out upon this holy errand.4 It was of the church that Jesus was speaking when he issued the promise that “the gates of hell would not prevail against it,” and it was of this church that Paul wrote to Timothy, calling it “the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth” (Matt. 16:18; 1 Tim. 3:15). In a word, while all believers are called to faithfully glorify God by fulfilling their earthly callings, it is not incumbent upon them to also fulfill the Great Commission. That holy task is given to men set apart from worldly endeavors—men who, like Paul, are “separated to the gospel of God” (Rom. 1:1, NKJV).

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To be sure, an ecclesial and churchly approach to missionalism also has its challenges, perhaps the greatest of which is the fact that a faithfully preached gospel will simply refuse to prop up or reinforce the agenda of this passing age, thereby limiting its popularity potential. The fact that this even needs to be said is itself troubling, but the reality is that a large number of churches in our day seem to desire little more than to improve this age rather than ministering the mysteries of the age to come. They feel that the way to “connect” with their audience is by appealing to their sense of responsibility to make a difference in their community. The only way to awaken sinners and saints from their idolatrous obsession with the American dream (whether in its secular or baptized

version) is by the kind of evangelism that is bold, biblical, churchly, and disruptive. “Postmodern preaching,” writes Willimon, “[considers itself] a word from heaven meant, not just to speak to the world, but rather to expose, unmask, and then to change the world through the generation of a countercultural community who now know something they could not possibly have thought up on their own.” He continues: All faithful preaching begins as an act of a determinately self-revealing God, Yahweh, who loves to talk, who delights in argument, declaration, epistemological conflict, assertion, and promise, who loves to create something out of nothing through nothing more powerful than words....It

“Porch Church” by Ryan Glomsrud Have you ever heard someone say that they don’t need to go to church on Sunday because they are going to have “porch church”? That’s when you manage to wake up on Sunday morning but only shuffle in your slippers to the couch or rocking chair on the porch to stream a sermon on the web. Sipping on your cup of Joe, you may not be listening to the preaching of the Word, but I suppose it is one better (although just barely) than snoozing through a service at “Bedside Baptist” or “Pillow-side Presbyterian.” I don’t know what is the Lutheran equivalent, maybe “Lay-me-Down-to-Sleep Lutheran”?

In any case, the Scripture reference that is most frequently trotted out to justify such neglect of the communion of the saints at Lord’s Day worship is Matthew 18:20: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I among them.” See, it is claimed, you can have “church” at home by yourself, as long as there are two or three gathered—your spouse and maybe the family dog just to be fully compliant to the letter of the law. Unfortunately, this is probably one of the most misunderstood (one is tempted to say abused) passages among low-church evangelicals. To put matters simply, it is a verse taken horribly out of context and means almost the exact opposite of what the verse-quoter would like it to mean.

Matthew 18 as a whole is probably best known as a chapter for instructing Christians in how to deal with conflict. What should you do when you are having a disagreement with another Christian? If you know your Bible well, you’ll turn to Matthew 18:15–20 for advice. “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.”

That’s the protocol; keep the matter private, if possible. Don’t be passive aggressive, just go talk it out and try to come to terms over your differences. If successful, you have won your brother, kept the peace, lived a quiet and humble life, and demonstrated Christian patience and charity to one another. But what if the private meeting doesn’t go very well? What if matters take a turn for the worse and your brother hardens himself against you, worsening the conflict and deepening the trouble? Well, the passage continues on. Here we find the context for our verse allegedly in support of “porch church.” Jesus explains, “But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector” (vv.16–17, emphasis added). Now this is interesting: If a conflict between brothers cannot be handled privately, Jesus instructs us to involve the church, presumably the elders. Here the elders serve in their appointed office, and the church may call a brother to account.

This is called “church discipline,” and for Reformed churches is an identifying mark of a true church.

Implied at the end of verse 17 is that the church has the power of excommunication (“Let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector”—in other words, as a stranger and alien to the covenant promises).

Recognizing that this may be difficult to swallow, although just how much so is difficult to tell, Jesus himself goes on to assert the authority of his appointed officers, the elders of a church. “Truly,” he says—no

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will be speaking that worries more about obedience to the text than about the allegedly contemporary context of our speaking. It will trouble itself more over proclaiming the Word than over any lack of contemporary response.

Realizing modernity’s grave limits, it will be preaching that is willing not to be heard, understood, or grasped by affluent, early twenty-first century people. It will be preaching that delights in the convoluted thickness of the biblical texts.5 He concludes with the exhortation that preachers ought never to forget that what Acts 2 wants us to call the gift of the Holy Spirit is what the world attributed to too much booze too early in the day.

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In the Meantime... s a young believer I remember wishing I could travel back in time and be an eyewitness to the earthly ministry of Christ, especially the Sermon on the Mount (it hadn’t yet occurred to me that my Aramaic is a bit rusty). We often have a kind of romantic view of what it must have been like to see Jesus in the flesh and to hear him preach with our own ears. What we so easily forget, however, is that by the time Jesus’ earthly ministry was drawing to a close you could count on two hands the people who actually understood what he was talking about, as well as the fact that the apostles, after Jesus’ ascension, give no hint whatsoever that they wished they could return to the good old days

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joking in other words—“whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (vs. 18). Whoa! Did Jesus, the only mediator between God and man, the one to whom belongs all authority in heaven and on earth, just say to his disciples that they had the power to bind and loose in heaven and on earth? Yes, and in fact, it wasn’t the first time he instructed his disciples that this kind of authority had been delegated to the church. Two chapters earlier Jesus said much the same to Peter after his confession, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (16:16). Then came Jesus’ famous statement: “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (vv.17–18). Then in the next sentence Jesus grants to Peter and the church the power to shut and loose, find and free. Namely, he grants the “keys of the kingdom.” “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (16:19). So the exact phrase delegating an appropriate authority of excommunication (i.e., binding and shutting) has been granted to the church in at least two places by Jesus himself.

Returning to the hypothetical brotherly conflict of chapter 18, Jesus explains that if elders of two or three in number are unable to bring a brother to repentance, that they do in fact have the power to excommunicate, a serious move of temporal churchly justice to declare that without repentance this brother is under the wrath and condemnation of God and Christ is of no use to them. “Again I say to you,” Jesus concludes, “if two or three of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them” (vv.19–20). In other words, if two or more elders are gathered to make this kind of drastic pronouncement, then it is as if Jesus himself is among them, casting the brother out, and the Father in heaven will heed their administration of justice.

This is not a teaching to take lightly, and it certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with listening to sermons on the Internet and neglecting the corporate gathering of the body of Christ. If anything, it means the church is that much more important than our Sunday-snoozers would like, in fact having the power to open and shut the kingdom of heaven. What precisely this means is asked in Question 83 of the Heidelberg Catechism: “What are the keys of the kingdom? Answer: The preaching of the holy gospel, and Christian discipline, or excommunication out of the Christian church; by these two, the kingdom of heaven is opened to believers, and shut against unbelievers.” Next time you are tempted to sleep in on Sunday morning and catch the latest evangelical super-pastor on the Internet, get yourself to church, or you may find the elders knocking at your door. The meeting of two or three gathered there will be to encourage you to get back to church for Word and Sacrament ministry!

Ryan Glomsrud is executive editor of Modern Reformation.

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when Jesus walked with them down the dusty streets of Galilee. In fact, all the evidence points to the apostles actually having a deeper understanding of and intimacy with Jesus after his ascension than before it.

Paul writes: “For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised. From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.

The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Cor. 5:14–17).

The fact of the matter is that Jesus is simply no longer present with his people in the physical and local way that he once was; but rather, in this period of overlap between Christ’s ascension and second coming, the way his presence is mediated to his people is by the Holy Spirit through the church, an outpost of grace. Another way of putting this is that we live in the “meantime,” in the gap between promise and fulfillment, with a foot in heaven and a foot in the here and now; and this necessarily puts certain limits upon our expectations about how Jesus works among us. This is important for us to wrestle with and accept, for it will not only protect us from becoming overly infatuated with stealing glimpses of Jesus’ glory that are eschatologically illicit (for the time being anyway), but it will also enable us to gain a true appreciation for the churchly way that things such as the Great Commission are accomplished during this period of tension between the already of the kingdom’s inauguration and the not-yet of its consummation. The Gnosticism and Docetism that threatened the early church are still alive and well today, and

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minimizing the importance of Jesus’ body can take many different forms, not the least of which is an ecclesiology that allows the invisible church to swallow the visible one. In order to avoid such extremes, we must reconcile ourselves with the fact that Calvinism is not inimical to zealous evangelism, and that the visible church is the one place where the preaching of the gospel is sure to be granted blessing and success.

In sum, if we love Jesus then we will love evangelism, and if we love evangelism then we will love his church, for it is there that the gospel is proclaimed each Lord’s Day, and where a community who were once “not a people” are called out and constituted as citizens of Christ’s heavenly kingdom. ■

Jason J. Stellman is pastor of Exile Presbyterian Church in Woodinville, Washington, and author of Dual Citizens: Worship and Life between the Already and the Not Yet (Reformation Trust, 2009).

Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), 38–39 (emphasis added).

2See http://reformed.org/documents/wlc_w_proofs/ WLC_fn_151-196.html - fn991.

3See http://reformed.org/documents/wlc_w_proofs/ WLC_fn_151-196.html - fn992.

4It is true that Paul also claimed to rejoice even when the gospel is preached by unworthy and self-serving men (Phil. 1:15–18), but that is far different from saying that the ordained ministry of the Word is in some way unnecessary or dispensable.

5William Willimon, “Peculiar Truth: Postmodern Preaching,” Modern Reformation (July/August 2003).

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Missions and the Work of the Church

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hat is the theological equivalent for the conundrum about the tree that falls in the woods without a hearer? What happens when a theological bomb is detonated but no one seems to notice? Is it still a bomb? Is it still destructive?

Re-Thinking Missions, a book published in 1932 just when it seemed the fundamentalist controversy was calming down, was just that—a bombshell dropped right in the middle of the U.S. Protestant world, and yet only those with the best hearing devices heard it go off. Ernest Hocking, a professor of philosophy at Harvard University, wrote the book on behalf of the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry, an interdenominational study underwritten by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., commissioned to investigate the promise and perils of Protestant foreign missions in India, Burma, China, and Japan. Like so many reports of its kind, the Layman’s Inquiry wound up revealing more about the laymen conducting the study than it did about Protestant developments in Asia. What it revealed

was the triumph of the Social Gospel within the largest Protestant denominations in the United States at the expense of the church’s confessional witness of Word and Sacrament. By the 1930s, a socially active and transformational faith had compromised the traditional means of teaching and ministry performed by pastors, evangelists, and missionaries.

The opening section of Re-Thinking Missions tipped the committee’s prescriptive hand, even while the tone conveyed an objective description of the contemporary missions enterprise. For instance, Hocking, writing for the entire committee, conceded that all religions had a missionary motive—a debatable proposition since Christianity was responsible for transmitting its faith more than any other world religion aside from Islam. But because each religion— especially the Asian ones of Hinduism, Shinto, and Buddhism—shared with Christianity and Judaism “an ardent desire to communicate a spiritual value regarded as unique and of supreme importance,”

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Hocking could attribute to every great world religion a passion for “saving” unbelievers, thus ironically portraying Eastern religions in remarkably Western (even Christian) terms. Another indication that the committee’s minds were already made up was a remark about the limitations of the existing Protestant missionary personnel. Missionaries to Asia were “unduly weak,” first, because they lacked coordination and were bogged down in redundancy and inefficiency. Second—and here Hocking revealed his prejudice—the contemporary missionaries were ineffective in “interpreting Christianity to the Orient.” But this defect was premised on the committee’s own defective understanding of the gospel.

That theological premise was patent in Hocking’s description of theological changes that had undermined and essentially removed the old motivation for conducting foreign missions. Sweeping changes in intellectual life, both in the sciences and in philosophy,

Of all the changes in the world, a theological change will bear most directly upon the missionary motive. If the conception of hell changes, if attention is drawn away from the fear of God’s punitive justice in the everlasting torment of the unsaved, to happier conceptions of destiny, if there is a shift of concern from other-worldly issues to the problems of sin and suffering in the present life, these changes will immediately alter that view of the perils of the soul which gave to the original motive of Protestant missions much of its poignant urgency.

But Hocking was happy himself to report that Christianity had indeed changed. No longer a religion of fear, it had become one of “beneficence.” This meant that the churches had passed through their “bitter” conflicts with science to a stage where free inquiry and full faith were necessary components of a “complete world-view.” For some reason, Hocking did not notice that new From this shift followed an approach to understandings of human origins did not evangelism that paid less attention to word and necessarily alter the problem of human sinfulness and the possibility of a rightmore to deed, less to the message for eous God. No matter, for him and the individuals and more to the order of societies.… committee, modern Western Christianity lacked a “disposition to believe that sinThe best and brightest of Western missions cere and aspiring seekers after God in other religions are to be damned.” personnel affirmed that “man is a unity” and Instead, the churches had “become less so the physical, mental, and social aspects of concerned...to save men from eternal punishment than from the danger of loshis needs could not be isolated. For this reason, ing the supreme good.” “missionary work must be sufficiently compreFrom this shift followed an approach to evangelism that paid less attention to hensive to serve the whole man.” Ministry to word and more to deed, less to the mesthe entire person, as well as society, elevated sage for individuals and more to the order of societies. Here Re-Thinking Missions medicine and education to as high (if not echoed a declaration of missions leaders that had met only four years earlier in higher) a rank as preaching.

Jerusalem. The best and brightest of had yielded new insights in “our religious experiWestern missions personnel affirmed that “man is a ence.” As such, theology was not the study of God but unity” and so the physical, mental, and social aspects an attempt to explain human experience. This meant of his needs could not be isolated. For this reason, that the “function of religion [is] to bring man into the “missionary work must be sufficiently comprehenpresence of the everlasting and real.” According to this sive to serve the whole man.” Ministry to the entire scheme, the idea of heaven, hell, an afterlife, and person, as well as society, elevated medicine and edudivine judgment for sin was foreign no matter cation to as high (if not higher) a rank as preaching. If whether people believed the earth was six thousand medicine and education were subordinate to evanor millions of years old. Science, in other words, had gelism, then the assistance missionaries offered to little to do with an existential encounter of reality. Be Asians ceased to be disinterested and would be inferior, that as it may, Hocking went on to explain the effects because such teaching and healing were not as valuof intellectual developments on foreign missions: able as salvation. The way around this dilemma was to see that ministering to the “secular needs of men in the 36 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

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spirit of Christ is evangelism.” An added benefit of word and deed missions was that deeds were not as controversial as preaching. After all, doctrine could offend an unbelieving Asian, and separate Presbyterian from Methodist missionaries. But missionary enterprises that gave the right emphasis to social ministries ultimately showed the superiority of Christianity to religions of “illusion” or “pessimism.” Christianity “regards the condition of the human being in human society as an express object of God’s concern,” Hocking wrote.

Regarding social service as something more than a humanitarian act of relief but as “an act of union with God’s will,” then, was “in a special sense an expression of the kernel of the Christian faith.”

This reconfiguration of the nature and purpose of missions, and even of the gospel itself, afforded Hocking and the committee space to reconfigure the church in relation to the kingdom of God. The interconnectedness of persons, society, and the whole cosmos pointed to an understanding of the kingdom of God that transcended the church and even religion.

For Hocking, this kingdom stood for “the full development of individuals,” the “maturing of social groups,” and the “spiritual unity of all men and races.”

Such unity could not come through religion alone, but only from a global consensus on “the deeper principles of right and wrong.” Also important was a “special concern in the values of existence,” because whatever “heightens imagination, or intensifies affection and joy, enters directly into [the kingdom of God’s] province.”

With such an expansive view of the kingdom, the task of planting churches increasingly took a backseat to constructing a spiritual organism that could “further the true ends of life.” For this reason, planting churches and evangelism “in many cases defeated the central business of missionary enterprise.”

This was a stunning rejection of Christian missions as they had been conducted for the better part of two centuries among Protestants, but the report caused barely a ripple in the world of mainline Protestantism—except among the northern Presbyterians, who had just spent a decade disputing the essential articles of the faith and the limits of disagreement.

One reason for the silence may be that few people cared about reports issued by denominational bureaucrats and even less about the findings of a Harvard University philosopher. But just as likely was the reality that most members of the largest Protestant denominations saw little problem with the church engaging in social forms of Christianity (also known as the Social Gospel). Since the era when mainline Protestantism had come into its own, that of the Second Great Awakening and the Benevolent Empire of social and moral reform agencies, Anglo-American

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Protestants had taken for granted the mutually reinforcing ministries of evangelism and social activism.

The only question was the right proportions of social reform and evangelism for the evangelical Protestant recipe of realizing God’s kingdom. By the 1920s, only the most liberal of Protestants were adjusting the ingredients, while the majority of the Protestants committed to evangelism had found parachurch agencies or nondenominational congregations to conduct the work of soul winning. In the middle were denominational agencies that tried to keep word and deed harmoniously together.

Among the northern Presbyterians, where a conservative remnant continued to look to the Reformed confessions for self-identity, debates about the relationship between social and declaratory Christianity could still generate speakers and audiences. Those audiences were especially large when the likes of a celebrated novelist and Presbyterian missionary was giving the speech. Pearl Buck, recently home on furlough from China and having written on the basis of her experience the highly acclaimed novel The Good Earth (1931), was beginning to sever her ties to the Presbyterian Church’s Board of Foreign Missions, but she did give one talk in late 1932 to a crowd of Presbyterian women and board officials at the Astor Hotel in New York City in which she decided to heap praise on Hocking’s report. She echoed the point about the mediocrity of personnel. Instead of attending to the needs of the Asian people, missionaries were overly burdened with gaining converts. What the churches needed to do was emphasize deed more than word. “I am weary unto death with this incessant preaching,” she declared. “Let us cease our talk for a time and cut off our talkers and try to express our religion in terms of living service.” Buck did not want missionaries to abandon the Word entirely, though what the Bible revealed to her was a far cry from the Confession of Faith. But if a missionary would simply throw himself in the “native work” of the people he was serving, “[p]reaching would be his last task.”

Buck concluded by endorsing Hocking’s report: “If Christians take this book seriously at all, I foresee possibly the greatest missionary impetus we have known in centuries.”

With a publication Presbyterians had formally cosponsored and with one of their missionaries publicly rejecting the task of evangelism, the head of the church’s mission board, Robert E. Speer, had at least a public relations problem if not an actual snag in operations. So, on the one hand, Speer tried in his little book “Re-Thinking Missions” Examined (1933) to show support for a report his own office had helped prepare. He complimented Hocking for calling for M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 3 7

higher standards among personnel, establishing indigenous churches, and applying Christianity to social problems. But, on the other hand, Speer was loath to recognize in Asian religions any value for the ultimate question of eternal life. Christ is still “the way,” he wrote, “not a way, and there is no goal beyond Him or apart from Him, nor any search for truth that is to be found outside him.”

The problem for confessional Presbyterians, as J. Gresham Machen’s assessment revealed, was that Speer talked one way but acted in another. The general secretary’s affirmation of Christ’s uniqueness was reassuring to many evangelical church members. But did the missions board actually implement programs that adhered to that affirmation? The example of Pearl Buck, who resigned from the missions board—and whose resignation was accepted “with reluctance”— made this apparent hypocrisy all the more pressing.

How many missionaries like Buck had the Presbyterian missions board sent to Asia and other parts of the world? How many on the staff of the missions board examined missionary candidates for their understanding of the gospel, their commitment to planting churches, and their view of the church’s purpose?

Machen believed that the report by Hocking itself constituted a “public attack against the very heart of the Christian religion,” but the question was the degree to which Presbyterian officials were responsible for or sympathetic to it. Speer himself might affirm the finality of Jesus Christ, but would he sever ties between the denomination’s board and the laymen’s committee, or would he have his deputies weed out personnel or programs that harbored Hocking’s view of Christianity? These denominational realities prompted Machen to bypass Re-Thinking Missions and scrutinize the board itself. For instance, he pointed out that the Presbyterian board had endorsed and given support to two liberal evangelicals, Sherwood Eddy, a leader in the Student Volunteer Movement and the YMCA, and Toyohiko Kagawa, a Japanese Christian reformer and labor activist. This guilt-by-association tactic was unconvincing to many, even if it did demonstrate that the Presbyterian board was hardly disciplined in its execution of responsibilities. As the Harvard historian William R. Hutchison noted, Machen’s list of questionable missionaries or related workers was also “an honor roll of contemporary Christian leadership.” In other words, Machen shot himself in the foot if his aim was to persuade Presbyterians in the middle.

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chasm in his communion between liberals and conservatives. In his celebrated book Christianity and Liberalism, Machen had feared already that American missionaries were going to foreign lands not with a “message of salvation” but with a very different appeal, such as, “We are missionaries to Japan; Japan will be dominated by militarism unless the principles of Jesus have sway; send us out therefore to prevent the calamity of war.” Such a basis for missions was contrary to the message to which the Presbyterian Church was legally bound through its constitution. As Machen reminded his readers, most of the Protestant churches in the United States were creedal churches, which in the case of the Presbyterian Church meant that officers subscribed the Westminster Standards. Liberals were, in his estimation, intellectually dishonest in taking those vows if they did not believe and teach the theology of the confession. But liberals were not the only ones who threatened the confessional character of the Presbyterian Church. Broadly evangelical leaders like Speer or liberal evangelicals like Eddy, who might mix different proportions of evangelism and social Christian, were also guilty of betraying the cause of Presbyterian missions if they did not hold to the Reformed creeds or make those affirmations the basis for planting churches around the world.

Of course, Machen lost the conflict with Presbyterian leaders and was eventually found guilty for insubordination when he founded a new missions agency dedicated to sending out missionaries committed to the Reformed faith. But the points at issue in the Presbyterian controversy—the relationship between word and deed in the tasks of evangelism, missions, and church planting—has not gone away, even for evangelical Protestants who would sympathize with Machen’s opposition to liberalism. The recent “Cape Town Commitment” published and affirmed at the 2010 Lausanne Congress shows the lingering confusion over the spiritual nature of Christian ministry and the general or common tasks of such activities as education and medicine. For instance, the “Commitment” calls for Christians to be people of truth, and the statement places, in numerical order, at least living the truth ahead of proclaiming it. It explains that “[s]poken proclamation of the truth of the gospel remains paramount in our mission.” But such proclamation “cannot be separated from living out the truth” because word and deed “must go together.” An indication of just how far the combination of works and words must go comes in a section of the declaration where delegates affirmed “Christ’s Peace for His Suffering Creation”: (continued on page 45)

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What Do We Do About Sunday School?

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hile vacationing in Hawaii for our twentyfifth wedding anniversary, my husband and I worshipped with a local church. The pastor biblically unpacked Acts 7, the story of Stephen. When the pastor described the stoning of Stephen, there was a collective gasp in the room. It was an electrifying moment when we realized that many in this congregation had never heard the story before! Seeing the Bible come alive this way was not only exciting but sobering. This sampling of modern America unfortunately echoes across time: “Another generation grew up who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done” (Judg. 2:10b, NIV). Where was the church? Hadn’t any of these adults ever been to Sunday school?

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The sad truth is that probably some of these worshippers had attended Sunday school as children and came away with a view of church and Christianity best expressed in Christian Smith’s newest book Souls in Transition, the second book in a continuing sociological study of American young people coming of age and their religious affiliations. The study presents a picture of “emerging adults,”1 ages eighteen to twenty-three, a group generally neutral about religion with a tendency to “pick and choose” what they want to believe. They think the church and its Sunday school programs are primarily a moral training ground for children, from which adults eventually graduate and mature to making autonomous and acceptable moral choices. While emerging adults don’t believe it

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them.”4 Like the original instructions in the introduction to The Heidelberg Catechism, fathers were reminded of God’s command to teach their children the Word of God (Deut. 4, 6, 11), and ministers were offered practical suggestions toward incorporating the study of catechism and Scripture, with public examination as part of weekly sermons and classes.

Robert Raikes (1735–1811) of Gloucester, England, is credited with the origins of the Sunday (or Sabbath) school. Editor of the Gloucester Journal, Raikes began his Sabbath school program in 1781 to provide simple education to the children of England’s working poor. Raikes paid teachers to forcefully gather ragged and unruly children into rented halls for five Sunday hours of reading, writing, and moral and religious training. With the support of the queen and the earls of Ducie and Salisbury, by 1811 the program had educated over 400,000 pupils.

American Sunday school’s beginnings reflect Pietism and lay revivalism. Pietism centers Christianity around a personal conversion experience, the supremacy of the Bible over emphasis on denominational or doctrinal differences, and a call to active social involvement. The British revivalist By the late eighteenth century, almost all traces of George Whitefield—who was influenced by the teaching of his contemporary Whitefield’s work were gone, and Christians earnestly John Wesley on piety and the “New prayed, not for faithful churches, but for more revivals.

Birth”—made seven trips to America Such a spiritual awakening occurred in 1800, when rebetween 1738 and 1770, preaching his way across urban New England to enorvivalism caught the spirit of a nation, and new conmous crowds in mass evangelistic ralverts enthusiastically formed nondenominational lies. But by the late eighteenth century, societies and organizations. American Sunday school almost all traces of Whitefield’s work were gone, and Christians earnestly was born, along with a variety of evangelistic and prayed, not for faithful churches, but for charitable works, including tract and Bible distribution, more revivals. Such a spiritual awakenand aid for the inner city poor, orphans, and widows. ing occurred in 1800, when revivalism caught the spirit of a nation, and new G. I. Williamson refers to as “spiritual road maps,”2 converts enthusiastically formed nondenominational representing the work and study of the Bible by gensocieties and organizations. American Sunday school erations of believers to help us correctly navigate was born, along with a variety of evangelistic and through Scripture.3 charitable works, including tract and Bible distribuPrior to the late eighteenth century, most tion, and aid for the inner city poor, orphans, and widProtestant children were expected to learn catechism, ows. By 1812 a number of Sunday school unions some metric psalms, prayers, and Bible verses, both at were operating throughout the major Eastern cities of home and at church. From the early to mid-ninethe United States and as far west as Ohio and Indiana.5 teenth century, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) assemVarious Sunday school unions in Philadelphia bly members passed yearly resolutions to pastors and formed an international body that became the sessions “to assemble as often as they may deem necAmerican Sunday School Union (ASSU), officially essary during the year with their baptized children ratified at its first anniversary meeting, May 25, 1824, with their parents, to recommend said children to God to offer standardized Sunday school lesson plans that in prayer, explain to them the nature of their baptism, could be used by a number of denominations. While the relation which they sustain to the church; the Methodists and Baptists represented the dominant obligations which their baptism has imposed on denominations of nineteenth-century revival and is possible to really know truth, autonomous personal moral feelings, outside of any religious tradition or history, are useful for solving problems and helpful in being “good.”

Where was the preaching of the Word and the sacraments? How had the gospel message been lost?

The Story (all that Scripture has to tell us about God’s interaction with his people in history and about Christ and his gospel) had somehow become a moralistic training program delivered by church and Sunday school. Each child now felt he had been taught “to do what is right in his own eyes” (Judg. 17:6, ESV). To understand how we got here, we need to go back into our own church history.

Long before Sunday school, the church developed confessions and creeds that detailed the saving doctrines of Scripture and catechisms (simple summaries of Christian doctrine in a question-and-answer format) to consistently and biblically teach their members and their children. Protestant churches since the Reformation, being particularly concerned with keeping The Story alive and true to Scripture, composed a number of creeds, confessions, and catechisms—what

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Sunday school activity, Presbyterians were in key positions from the very beginning. The new Sunday school organization published tracts and books, as exciting reports of great successes poured in, claiming “no sooner were schools commenced in destitute places than a change was visible in the morals of the children and the inhabitants of the neighborhood.

Profane swearing, intemperance, and Sabbath breaking, which formerly prevailed to an alarming extent, in a great measure ceased.”6 The PC(USA), expressing the opinion of many American Protestants, laid the rise of a more moral America at the feet of Sunday school: “A powerful corrective to the most inaccessible portions of the community. They begin moral education at the right time—in the best manner— and under the most promising circumstances.”7 Sunday school now promised a more moral America.

Doctrine was considered divisive to American social and moral unity, and the intentional blending of both the civic and spiritual spheres under the authority of the ASSU required a paving over of any denominational distinctives. The strategy of the ASSU “was unabashedly stated to ignore, whenever possible, doctrinal and political difference; to be antiseptically undenominational in purpose and practice.”8 The pastor was encouraged to oversee the initial organization of the various Sunday school programs, but not teach catechism “because the partialities of some families may prefer one system of doctrine while other families…would choose a different one.”9 In this way the pietistic spirit that elevated Sunday school and activated a social benevolence that clearly benefited society unfortunately undermined the spiritual authority of both parents and the preaching ministry of the Word. Over and above the pastor, the Sunday school teacher was presented as the liaison between Americans and their true religion. He was seen as a pulpit replacement, regularly meeting with families, speaking against neighborhood irregularities that might lead the student to vice, and serving as the family’s “spiritual counselor, friend and helper.”10 Marianna C. Brown, writing in 1901, added, “The Sunday school missionary goes where sometimes he is the only pastor in the section, visiting the people in sickness, burying their dead, and counseling them in hours of perplexity.”11 By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the duty of parents was no longer to teach their children Scripture and doctrine; rather, it was to raise the estimation of the Sunday school teaher in their children’s eyes, assist their children with lessons the Sunday school teacher had assigned, enforce attendance, and train children “to habits of exact punctuality.”12 Sabbath schools were now recognized as “one of the most efficient agencies for

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conducting the aggressive work to which the Church is called.”13 The actual church pastor was relegated to the role of assistant to the Sunday school and its teachers, as “the Sunday-school must still stand acknowledged an unrivalled agency for training a generation in the knowledge of saving truth.”14 Scripture disagrees. “To each of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ’s gifts,” notes Paul, “for the edifying of the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:7, 12). But a few are set apart for the ministry of the Word. “How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher?” (Rom. 10:14). And what about the role of the father and God’s command for parents to teach their children? How can we raise children who know the Word and live for Christ, while promoting the church’s primary function of Word and Sacrament through worship? Is Sunday school still an option?

Smith’s sociological study, directed toward a variety of religious categories, interestingly (and perhaps unintentionally) identifies biblical principles that focus on those elements that spiritually favor the raising of another generation in the context of the church. The study identifies three key factors that are most likely to bring what the church would call “covenant children” into committed Christian adulthood: 1) parents with a strong and active religious faith that includes regular church attendance and the living out of their own faith in front of their children (Deut. 6: 6–9; Eph. 6:4); 2) other adults in the congregation to whom young people can turn for further help and support (Ps. 78:1–7; Rom. 12:9–13; Eph. 4:11–16, 5:19–20; Phil. 2:1–4); and 3) youth who have a personal religious faith of their own that includes personal religious experiences (what we would consider an active relationship with God), and who are also actively involved in regular religious practices—prayer, reading the Bible, and church attendance (Deut. 5:32; Eph. 6:10–18; Rom. 8; 2 Tim. 3:16–17; Heb. 10:19–25).

What do we do about Sunday school? I believe Sunday school can support these elements. First, it can be a teaching tool, an opportunity to support the ministry of the Word, by opening up Scripture and explaining confessional roadmaps in ways that are age-appropriate and understandable. Many families are coming into the church without any biblical culture in their backgrounds. It should not surprise us that Acts 7 presented new information. We should use Sunday school to not only teach basic biblical stories but explain how they all point to Christ. Second, it can function as a training tool. Parents need consistent M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 4 1

biblical support and training so they can effectively bring the gospel to bear in their own homes. Third, it can be an equipping tool for all members of the body, instructing each of us how to apply the gospel to all aspects of our lives.

This article identifies three models some biblical churches are using to address these areas. In all these churches there is a renewed focus on family worship, with a high regard for Scripture, the pastoral office, and the sacraments. There is a respect for church history and for the confessions, and church-related activities are directed toward building Christian community. In each church, Sunday school has been redefined (and renamed) as a teaching and equipping ministry, and classes are intentionally gospel oriented, not moralistic.

Classical Family Worship he first example I call the Classical Model.

Classical churches, with some minor program differentiation, have been in existence since the Reformation. They encourage family worship and are strong on training both parents and children. At the representative church, catechism classes begin at the preschool level with the memorization of the Apostles’

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HELPFUL RESOURCES Catechism Training Hearts, Teaching Minds: Family Devotions Based on the Shorter Catechism by Starr Meade (P&R Publishing, 2000). Family devotions based on the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

Catechism for Young Children (Christian Education and Publications; www.cepbookstore.com).

Excellent start for very young children.

Firm in the Faith: A Fifty-Two-Week Study Based on the Westminster Shorter Catechism by Dennis D. Hustedt (Grace Distribution, 2010).

Family Devotions The Family Worship Book: A Resource Book for Family Devotions by Terry L. Johnson (Christian Focus, 2003).

Long Story Short: Ten Minute Devotions to Draw Your Family to God by Marty Machowski (New Growth Press, 2010).

Leading Little Ones to God by Marian M. Schoolland (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1995).

Bible Story Books and Teaching the Bible/Doctrine to Children The Child’s Story Bible by Catherine Vos, 5th ed.

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Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer.

Older children, up through twelfth grade, learn the Heidelberg Catechism. High school students also study The Canons of Dordt, The Belgic Confession, covenant theology, and Christian apologetics. Catechism class is often referred to as “school” and less often as “Sunday school.” Much of the teaching also includes direct application: Why are we learning this? How does this apply to our lives? Parents are expected to teach Scripture and catechize their children at home. In order to join the church, potential members are required to attend a twelve-week course on the Three Forms of Unity. A Wednesday evening theology class is also offered to help adults understand the faith and better prepare them to train their own children.

Families are encouraged to develop regular habits of family Bible reading, which includes an ongoing review of catechism questions and prayer. Elders make annual visits to each member home to encourage families in their study of the Word and doctrine.

Intergenerational Approach he second approach I call the Intergenerational Model. At an intergenerational church, families are encouraged to worship together. Children’s

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(Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 1983). This is a classic.

The Jesus Storybook Bible by Sally Lloyd-Jones and illustrated by Jago (ZonderKidz, 2007).

The Big Picture Story Bible by David Helm (Crossway Books, 2004).

A Family Bible Story Book: Mighty Acts of God by Starr Meade and illustrated by Tim O’Connor (Crossway Books, 2010).

God’s Mighty Acts in Salvation by Starr Meade (Crossway Books, 2010). A study of Galatians.

God’s Mighty Acts in Creation by Starr Meade (Crossway Books, 2010). A study of creation and the attributes of God in the light of all Scripture.

Grandpa’s Box: Retelling the Biblical Story of Redemption

by Starr Meade (P&R Publishing, 2005).

Discovering Jesus in Genesis by Susan Hunt and Richie Hunt (Crossway Books, 2002).

Discovering Jesus in Exodus: Covenant Promises for Covenant Kids by Susan Hunt and Richie Hunt (Crossway Books, 2004).

Big Truths for Little Kids by Susan Hunt and Richie Hunt (Crossway Books, 1999).

Big Truths for Young Hearts: Teaching and Learning the Greatness of God by Bruce Ware (Crossway Books, 2009).

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church is offered during the sermon as an option (requiring parental approval) for children ages three through kindergarten. The goals of the program are to give very young children a desire for worship and an understanding of its elements, to help children see the Bible as a whole book, and to expose them to the gospel, to covenantal doctrine, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments in an environment that takes into account shorter attention spans and the emotions and spontaneity often expressed by this age group. The liturgy follows many of the elements associated with regular worship and includes a short Bible lesson with visual aids. The lessons are part of a threeyear rotation of Old and New Testament lessons, holiday lessons, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, elements of worship, and basic doctrine.

On the first Sunday of each month, the elements of the Lord’s Supper are also explained. A program director commented that many children tend to “graduate” themselves out of the program and join their families in regular worship when they reach kindergarten age. Sunday school, called “Transforming Lives in Christ” (TLC), is offered for all ages with age-appropriate instruction in studies of the Old and New Testament, with catechism taught in the earlier

grades. Adult classes, in a four-year rotation, include studies of church history, Bible book studies, and church doctrine. Weekly sermon response classes also provide an opportunity to further engage with the pastor and to think through the sermon’s message on a deeper level. Every four years, a class on family devotions is taught, and parents are encouraged to implement classroom suggestions in their homes.

Families of youth are invited to attend and participate in youth classes and activities. Leadership teams made up of parents, members of the congregation, and designated youth support personnel, under the direction of a youth and family pastor, work with teens in the larger program context, as well as mentor smaller groups, where youth can be engaged more directly. Mentor groups are designed to create accountability, provide encouragement, and build strong bonds that support honesty, humility, and discipline. The overriding goal is to equip teens to apply their knowledge of Scripture, catechism, and doctrine toward spiritual growth and maturity. Students can be called upon at any time to “stand and deliver,” to be ready to recite from catechism, Scripture, or doctrine and then publically engage with a leader on how their recitation applies to their lives (e.g., how

Scripture Memory Memory Work Notebook by Paul G. Settle, 5th ed. (Great Commission Publications, 2000). For ages three to high school, it combines Scripture with Westminster Catechisms.

My ABC Bible Verses by Susan Hunt (Crossway Books, 1998). A verse for each letter of the alphabet: “A – As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the Lord is round about his people.”

Seeds Family Worship CDs (Bema Media). In a contemporary music style, children learn Scripture by singing. CDs include “Seeds of Faith,” “Seeds of Courage,” “Seeds of Purpose,” “Seeds of Praise,” and “Seeds of Family Worship.”

Preparing Children for Worship Parenting in the Pew by Robbie Castleman (IVP Books, 1993). New preface and appendices added 2003. A very practical guide.

Church History for Kids John Calvin by Simonetta Carr (Reformation Heritage Books, 2008). For ages eight to thirteen.

Augustine of Hippo by Simonetta Carr (Reformation Heritage Books, 2009). For ages eight to thirteen.

John Owens by Simonetta Carr (Reformation Heritage Books, 2010). For ages eight to thirteen.

The Church in History by B. K. Kuiper (Christian Schools International, reprinted 1998).

For Parents Parenting with Scripture: A Topical Guide for Teachable Moments by Kara Durbin (Moody Publishers, 2001).

Shepherding a Child’s Heart by Tedd Tripp (Shepherd Press, 1995).

Instructing a Child’s Heart by Tedd Tripp (Shepherd Press, 2008).

Bringing the Gospel to Covenant Children by Joel R. Beeke (Reformation Heritage Books, 2001).

Age of Opportunity by Paul David Tripp, 2nd ed. (P&R Publishing, 2001). Helping parents raise teens in the faith.

Rediscovering Catechism: The Art of Equipping Covenant Children by Donald Van Dyken (P&R Publishing, 2000). This book includes an extensive list of resources.

Heirs of the Covenant by Susan Hunt (Crossway Books, 1998).

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No program can “make” Christians. None of these models are spiritual formulas that promise perfect outcomes—that has always been the will of God the Father through the saving redemptive blood of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit. But we should make every effort to obey God’s commands: preaching the Word in and out of season (2 Tim. 4:2), teaching and raising our children in the Lord, and faithfully knowing the Lord and what he has done. does this help them overcome sin?). Elder teams are assigned to families to offer biblical counsel and prayer support.

The Integrated Model he third model is called the Integrated Model.

In this type of church the entire family worships and attends Sunday school together. Printed outlines, with words missing, are provided for both worship and Sunday school, and parents and children fill them out as a family. Sunday school is called “Family Sunday School Hour,” and all members attend, sharing the care of wiggly children. Topics have included how to study the Bible, church history, sermon response, theology, and doctrine. Young people, ages twelve to twenty-five, are encouraged to serve on ministry teams and are expected to work with adults in all lay areas of worship ministry. To encourage family devotions, the pastor and elders meet one Saturday each month with all the men of the church, and sons are invited to attend at the discretion of their fathers. Topics include a study of The Westminster Confession dealing with family issues, Christian growth, and family worship. Prayer meetings are held every Friday evening. Whole families attend and children are encouraged to pray out loud.

Elders are assigned to families and are expected to maintain regular contact.

No program can “make” Christians. None of these models are spiritual formulas that promise perfect outcomes—that has always been the will of God the Father through the saving redemptive blood of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit. But we should make every effort to obey God’s commands: preaching the Word in and out of season (2 Tim. 4:2), teaching and raising our children in the Lord, and faithfully knowing the Lord and what he has done. We need to know the Word and work together to correctly navigate its meaning, so that we may be God’s “living stones, being built together into a spiritual house” (1 Pet. 2:5), growing and building the church as each part does its

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work (Eph. 4:15–16). We who are members of Christ’s body, his church, must live out The Story, expressing an active and ongoing engagement in our lives and our words, with his Word, working together in community to demolish those strongholds that would steal another generation away. How else can we and our children truly take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ? (2 Cor. 10:5). ■

Susan E. Erikson (M.A., Historical Theology, Westminster Seminary California), married for thirty-six years, has raised three children and is the proud grandmother of eight (with a ninth on the way). She ran a private school program for homeschoolers that offered a lending library, quarterly workshops, a monthly newsletter, and individualized program oversight. She is also the author of a women’s leadership training program and presently serves as chair of Christian Growth with women’s ministries at New Life Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Escondido, California.

Christian Smith with Patricia Snell, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4. The authors refer to youth ages 18–23 as “emerging adults,” a scholarly term used to describe the present culturally derived period in modern youth between childhood and true adulthood. Their study focuses on the early period of emerging adulthood.

2G. I. Williamson, The Heidelberg Catechism: A Study Guide (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 1993), 3.

3A sampling of creeds/confessions include: The Book of Concord for Lutheran believers, which includes among other documents Luther’s Small and Large Catechisms (1529) and the Augsburg Confession (1530); The Three Forms of Unity made up of The Belgic Confession (originally written in 1561 as a statement of faith for persecuted Christians in the Lowlands), The Heidelberg Catechism (written in 1563 for Dutch Reformed congregations), and The Canons of Dordt (written in 1618 as a response to doctrinal concerns). The Westminster Confession of Faith (first published in 1646) became the doctrinal standard of English and Scottish Presbyterians and Congregationalists in England and America, with the Westminster Larger Catechism (approved in 1648) and the Shorter Catechism (also approved in 1648) as a simpler version for children. The Second London Confession of 1689 was written for Reformed Baptist congregations.

4Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Minutes of the General 1

Assembly, 1818 (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1817–20), 56.

5William J. Petersen, A Brief History of the American Sunday-School Union (Villanova: American Sunday School Union, n.d.), 2.

6Petersen, 4.

7Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Minutes of the General Assembly, 1824 (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1821–38), 128–29.

8Robert W. Lynn and Elliott Wright, The Big Little School (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 19–20.

9Owen, Plans and Motives for the Extension of Sabbath Schools, Addressed to Clergymen (Princeton: Princeton Sunday School Union, 1829), 17. Note: Identity of Owen is not given.

10“By the unstated author of ‘The Teacher Taught,’” The Teacher Teaching: A Practical View of the Relations and Duties of the Sunday School Teacher (Philadelphia: American Sunday School Union, 1861), 74.

11Marianna C. Brown, Sunday-School Movements in America (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1901), 47.

12“The Teacher Taught,” 54.

13Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Minutes of the General Assembly, 1864 (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1851–1920), 332.

14“The Teacher Taught,” 85.

FROM MODERN REFORMATION

AVAILABLE AT: www.whitehorseinn.org/justified

Missions and the Work of the Church (continued from page 38) We encourage Christians worldwide to: A) Adopt lifestyles that renounce habits of consumption that are destructive or polluting; B) Exert legitimate means to persuade governments to put moral imperatives above political expediency on issues of environmental destruction and potential climate change; C) Recognize and encourage the missional calling both of (i) Christians who engage in the proper use of the earth’s resources for human need and welfare through agriculture, industry and medicine, and (ii) Christians who engage in the protection and restoration of the earth’s habitats and species through conservation and advocacy. Both share the same goal for both serve the same Creator, Provider and Redeemer.

A concern for creation is indeed a worthy reminder for all Christians, but is it the work of evangelism and missions? This was the same dilemma that confronted Protestants a century ago who were rethinking the task of foreign missions in light of the globalization of Western culture—through technology, medicine, education, and economics. By expanding the work of missions to include cultural and social activities, mainline Protestants lost the capacity to distinguish the spiritual and eternal responsibilities of the church from the mundane, temporal and, yes, worthwhile, duties of other governments, schools, banks, and farms. To be sure, the motivation was usually laudable, either to help less fortunate people or to bring glory to God across the wide range of human endeavors. But lost in these wholesome aims were two truths that Presbyterians confessed and that conservatives like Machen always kept in mind when contemplating the work of the church, whether in the United States or China: first, that the visible church is the kingdom of Christ (WCF 25.2); and second, that unto this visible church God gave “the ministry, oracles, and ordinances of God, for the gathering and perfecting of the saints, in this life, to the end of the world” (WCF 25.3).

Keeping those truths straight will not resolve a host of dilemmas that surround the work of evangelism and missions, but it will help in preserving the uniqueness and necessity of the church’s ministry. ■

D. G. Hart is visiting professor of history at Hillsdale College and author of From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: American Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism (Eerdmans, forthcoming).

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EMBASSY OF GRACE

The Church in a Pluralist Society

“It is obvious that the story of the empty tomb cannot be fitted into our contemporary worldview, or indeed into any worldview except one of which it is the starting point.”1

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his is one truth that British theologian and missionary Lesslie Newbigin (1909–98) emphasized in many ways. The statement might well be called the main point of his life and teaching.

His story goes like this. One Christmas, while Newbigin was serving his long tenure as a missionary in India, he noticed the people worshiping a host of deities, including Jesus. He realized this was not a step in the right direction; instead, it was proof that the Indian culture had domesticated Jesus into its religious customs. The Hindus in India didn’t reject Jesus—they simply accepted him as one of their many gods (GPS 3).

This led Newbigin to question if and how he himself had domesticated Jesus. How did he, as a Westerner, reduce the gospel like those in the Indian culture

around him? Newbigin recognized that he had indeed tamed it by assuming it could be taught and defended primarily in terms of the reasonableness that the Enlightenment emphasized. Here was his conviction: he had subjected the gospel to his intellect rather than have his intellect be subjected to the gospel. “I too,” wrote Newbigin, “had been guilty of domesticating the gospel” (GPS 3)—which brings us back to the opening statement. When Newbigin returned to Europe and England, he became convinced that Western culture was also guilty of this domestication.

This is a good starting place for a discussion of Newbigin’s contribution to theology and missions today. What follows then is an introduction to what I believe are Newbigin’s most helpful commentaries on the gospel in Western pluralist society. I don’t agree with everything Newbigin wrote, but I do believe reformational churches can learn much from his impressive contribution to missionary theology.

Though it may be a cultural faux pas to summarize

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a British theologian with three (Dutch) points, I think the following are good ones: 1) the church and Western culture; 2) the church and public truth; and 3) the church and Christian knowledge. All of these have to do with the gospel, the church, the culture in which we live, epistemology (the theory of knowing), and missions—things that Newbigin spent his life learning about and teaching. Really, all three of these have much to do with the opening quotation.

The Church and Western Culture Our Culture: Not Christian, But Pagan Over twenty years ago, Newbigin wrote that our Western culture is no longer Christian, but pagan.

Furthermore, it is a hostile sort of paganism borne out of the rejection of Christianity that has been happening for decades (FG 20). There may have been a time when Western culture was predominately made up of Christians, but that time is over. Today we live in a post-Christian society where pluralism reigns. Not only is pluralism the order of the day, it is even celebrated and applauded (GPS 1).

The places where we live are not places teeming with Bible-believing Christians; they are places where one finds Muslims, Buddhists, Mormons, and a host of other such religions (not to mention agnostics and quasi-Christian groups). The situation is much like that of Mars Hill in Acts 17: people are “very religious” in our culture, but it is not really a good thing. Because of this religious pluralism, Newbigin believed that the society in which we live “is far more resistant to the gospel than the pre-Christian paganism with which cross-cultural missions have been familiar” (FG 20).

Some of us perhaps grew up in Christian circles, but these are breaking down and even disappearing where they may have been in existence just thirty years ago. In my own experience, even rural areas that have been predominately Christian in the past are no longer such today. In urban areas, the only things many people know about Christianity are what they learn through popular media (which leads to a much distorted view to say the least!). We should take to heart Newbigin’s observation that the pagan society in which we live “is the most challenging missionary frontier of our time” (FG 20).2 It might not be a stretch to say that in the next few decades the United States will probably be one of the biggest and most difficult mission fields in the world.

Our Mission Field: Not There, But Here Another thing Newbigin asserted clearly was that the church needs to be a missionary church to our own cities and towns. In our pluralistic Western culture, we are in a “missionary situation” (TOS 2). The

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people in cities and towns where we live are the places where we need to make disciples. Since mission is “faith in action,” in love we reach out to those next door (TOS 39). “Missions are…an expression of love” (GPS 127). In even more profound terms, Newbigin said, “The missionary action of the Church is the exegesis of the gospel” (TTT 35).

Newbigin also said that we really cannot speak of revival in our Western countries; we cannot call people back to their spiritual roots when we proclaim the gospel (TOS 2). The spiritual roots are no longer Christian roots; they are pluralistic. Perhaps there is some semblance of Christianity in the spiritual roots of many people, but it is Christianity plus a bunch of other non-Christian beliefs. The religious ideas of Eastern philosophies are becoming embedded in our culture, and many people now look down upon “Christian” Western imperialism (FG 101–03). Instead of the term “revival,” we have to use the terms “evangelism” and “missions” when we speak about being a church in the neighborhood where we live and worship.

One more thing worth noting in brief is that Newbigin said that though Christianity used to spread with Western imperialism and colonization, this is no longer the case. In fact, it is a danger for the Western church to think in terms of cultural imperialism, as if the gospel is part of Western culture. Since our own cities are the “mission field” and since we live in a pluralistic culture, “Missions will no longer work along the stream of expanding Western power. They have to learn to go against the stream. And in this situation we shall find that the New Testament speaks to us much more directly than does the nineteenth century as we learn afresh what it means to bear witness to the gospel from a position not of strength, but of weakness” (TOS 5). In “going against the stream,” the church’s message also clashes with cultural values.

The Church and Public Truth The Central Truth: The Resurrection “A serious commitment to evangelism, to the telling of the story which the Church is sent to tell, means a radical questioning of the reigning assumptions of public life” (TTT 2). This important statement must also be aimed at the Christian. The gospel questions the reigning assumptions of the basic person. As stated earlier, Newbigin said we have to realize that we have some cultural assumptions that lead us to domesticate the gospel. “The gospel…calls into question all cultures, including the one in which it was originally embodied” (FTG 4).

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as a Western ideology or philosophy. We also need to be more open to learning from non-Western churches, which might be able to pull the log out of our Western eyes and make us see Christian truth even more clearly (FG 137). The church is a church in via (on the way), a learning church, one that is a pilgrim on the heavenward way (GPS 124, 197; PC 70, TOS 179–80). Therefore we humbly take lessons from other Christian churches that are also on the way. No church can claim to know it all or take the position of cultural superiority.

The resurrection is the truth that calls cultures into question and keeps churches humble. “The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the beginning of a new creation, the work of that same power by which creation itself exists” (TTT 11). The story of Jesus standing up in life after being dead in a tomb is a true fact and in fact true (TTT 10–11; PC 4–6). In J. Gresham Machen’s words, “The good news about facts is that they stay put.” Though cultures change, the gospel does not; the message of Jesus dying and coming back to life is not something that happened in my heart. It is the turning point of history that happened, as a matter of fact, on Palestinian dirt two thousand years ago.3 The External Truth: The Resurrection Because the resurrection is a fact of history, it is a not a private value but a public truth (PC 2, 26, 37; TTT 24; TOS 87). The clash here is that most people in Western society think that religion is a matter of private value, while scientific findings are those of public truth (PC 46; FG 17). Modernity says freedom (of speech, of religion, and so forth) is the way to truth. Jesus says the opposite: he is the truth that sets people free (PC 68).

Therefore, because of this clash, the church in any culture will need to attack all the cultural behaviors and beliefs that are incompatible with the gospel, just as “foreign” missionaries have done (FG 95). Because our Western churches are mission churches to our own pluralistic culture, we will have to loudly and clearly unmask the pagan practices and idolatry of the day (Newbigin talked about consumerism and politics, among other Western idols). And we have to start the unmasking in our own churches.

Recalling Newbigin’s argument that he had adopted the Enlightenment’s intellect, he explains: When the church tells the story about Christ being raised from the dead, we announce it as a public, factual truth while the culture around us subjects it to the realm of private value and belief. The church must never cave in to the reigning assumption of the day, that belief is something that stays quietly and romantically in one’s closet. “There can be no true 48 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

evangelism except that which announces what is not only good news but true news” (TTT 52). This is a head-on collision between the church and Western culture. The preaching of the cross and resurrection means that the darkness of the world will attack and make the church suffer (GPS 114). As with Christ, so with the church: the cross comes before the crown.

The Preached Truth: Not a Secret The resurrection story that the church is compelled to tell as a missionary church is not a story of her own creation. Instead, she was created by this factual story (PC 53). Christians have been laid hold of by the author and subject of this story, and now the church’s task is to bear witness to this true story (PC 94; TOS 17). The church is not the lord of the story, the church isn’t the possessor of the story, nor is the church a ghetto where the story is kept secret (PC 94; TOS 189). The church is a humble witness to the historical good news of Jesus’ resurrection. If the church does not proclaim this good news as public truth, it becomes simply one more religious club or moralistic cultural ghetto. “Christians can never seek refuge in a ghetto where their faith is not proclaimed as public truth for all” (FG 115).

Newbigin also said the church’s missionary witness to the resurrection is neither a self-serving exercise nor a self-promoting endeavor. The church doesn’t sit on top of the truth as its author; she embodies it, submits to it, and is constantly changed by it (PC 72–76; TTT 34; TOS 61): “When the church affirms the gospel as public truth it is challenging the whole of society to wake out of the nightmare of subjectivism and relativism, to escape from the captivity of the self turned in upon itself, and to accept the calling which is addressed to every human being to seek, acknowledge, and proclaim the truth” (TTT 13). The resurrection is not only a public truth the church announces to the surrounding pluralistic and relativistic culture, but it is also the starting point of her thinking, which leads us to our final point.

The Church and Christian Knowledge The Starting Point: The Gospel “Because the authority of Jesus is ultimate, the recognition of it involves a commitment that replaces all other commitments” (TOS 14). Drawing on St. Athanasius (d. 373), Newbigin used the Greek term arche (beginning) when it came to the resurrection as being foundational for our thinking (epistemology) (TTT 17). The beginning point of Christian thought— and of course the beginning point of the church and her mission—is belief in the truth of the resurrection of Jesus, the good news. Belief in Jesus’ resurrection

T H E

is the basis of our thinking and reasoning (TTT 24).

Here again the opening quotation comes into play.

The starting point of knowledge, or epistemology, for most of Western culture has much to do with the Enlightenment’s insistence to subject everything to man’s critical scrutiny and observation. The gospel clashes with this because we must not start with Enlightenment presuppositions but rather with gospel presuppositions. One says, “What is dead stays dead,” while the other says, “Jesus died and rose again.”

Jesus’ death and resurrection means Christians think differently from non-Christians.

We cannot fit the gospel into any worldview or epistemology that doesn’t start with the resurrection.

This cuts deeper still: because we are products of “enlightened” Western culture, the gospel keeps on changing us and challenging our thinking; it cuts right down our center. When God changes us, our old beliefs “are called into question” (PC 87; TTT 49).

This is a lifelong process Reformed theology calls sanctification—the dying away of the old man and the coming to life of the new man. Newbigin recognized this and called it a “life-long enterprise” (FG 148).

The Solid Reference Point: God and His Word What are the reliable grounds for knowing the truth? “There are no more reliable grounds than what are given to us in God’s revelation” (TTT 33). We cannot first demonstrate Christianity’s reasonableness and truth by reference to something else, as if there is some Cartesian point outside of Christianity that can prove its truthfulness (TTT 35). The Christian faith that submits to Jesus’ authority and the truth of his Word is not a scientific experiment to dissect under the microscope; it is a truth that has to be personally affirmed and lived (PC 40–44; TTT 34–39). This knowledge is both subjective and objective; it is what Augustine said so long ago: we believe in order to know (PC 9, 50). We not only believe that Jesus rose from the dead, we personally assent to the truth and live according to it.

Even though the Word of God is true, and even though the empty tomb is a fact of history, the church is always a church in via (PC 7). The pilgrim church is part of a story, so there is always room for surprises (PC 72). This means the church needs to be epistemologically humble. As noted earlier, she is not lord and master of the truth, but believes it and proclaims it as her missionary endeavor (PC 86–92). The story is exciting, and since it made the church and is growing her, missionary theology is an exhilarating topic for discussion and prayer. Newbigin leaves no room for boredom in the church. There should be no such thing as dead orthodoxy if we are gripped by the truth

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of the empty tomb. It all goes back to the resurrection—the truly good news that continues to change us.

Conclusion It is obvious that the story of the empty tomb cannot be fitted into our contemporary worldview, or indeed any worldview except one of which it is the starting point.

The good news of the resurrection is at the center of the church, the church’s epistemology, the church’s preaching, and the church’s mission. These emphases of Newbigin are clear and consistent throughout his writing. For Newbigin, it was as if the resurrection was something like a nuclear bomb, only the fallout was life giving and mission enabling (GPS 116). Just as you cannot safely place a nuclear bomb in your backyard, neither can a person safely fit the gospel into his worldview. It shatters our old way of thinking and sets us on a new path—a path that is joyful and exciting, but that often runs counter to that of culture (FG 149).

So it is also a painful path of the cross on the way to the glory of heaven (TOS 107–09).

In the end, Newbigin’s great contribution is his stress on the absolute necessity of the resurrection for missions. “Missions are an expression of our hope...[they] are the test of our faith that the gospel is true.…At the heart of mission is thanksgiving and praise” (GPS 127). “Mission is…faith in action” (TOS 39). “Mission is an acted out doxology. That is its deepest secret. Its purpose is that God may be glorified” (GPS 127).

Shane Lems (M. Div., Westminster Seminary California) is a church planter and United Reformed Church pastor.

Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 11 (hereafter cited as GPS). Other references are abbreviated as follows: TTT = Truth to Tell (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991); PC = Proper Confidence (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995); TOS = The Open Secret (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995); FG = Foolishness to the Greeks (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986).

2See also his chapter “The Myth of the Secular Society” in GPS. 3Newbigin wrote well about this in a chapter called “Christ, the Clue to History” in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society.

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THE LATEST IDEAS SWEEPING THE LAND… r e v i e w s

“Real-World” Church

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n his book SimChurch: Being the Church in the Virtual World,

This distinction is important to Estes, as it should be. It is the first place virDouglas Estes gets defensive about an accusation that no one tual churches apparently come against resistance. Everyone knows realseems to be leveling. I, for one, was only peripherally aware of world churches should have websites, and isn’t that enough of an Internet the “virtual world” presence? Estes argues that it isn’t, and to illustrate he before picking up makes a comparison with which real-world evangelEstes’ book. As a ists are sure to take issue. member of the clergy, Estes likens the virtual world to a new landmass I didn’t really know discovered off the coast of Africa. “Wouldn’t we plant that there were virchurches there?” he asks. By ignoring (at best) or tual churches in virshunning (at worst) the virtual world, Estes claims we tual worlds, much are making no attempt to reach this new continent less was I aware of full of souls in need of the good news of Jesus Christ. some movement to A large fallacy exists in this argument, of course: The classify such churches citizens of this newly discovered land (the virtual as “not real,” the moveworld) are also citizens of a known territory (the real ment against which world). The implication that we (the apparently antiEstes writes. Rather virtual church crowd) are dropping the ball on the than writing an introGreat Commission is a little underhanded and ultiduction or an ode to mately specious. It would serve Estes’ argument betvirtual churches, his ter to simply suggest that it’s possible some people SimChurch: Being defense of the same might be better reached in a virtual church than in a the Church in the comes off as, well, defenreal-world church. He does make this argument later Virtual World sive. He rarely quotes in the book, but he doesn’t do himself any favors with

by Douglas Estes specific arguments what he must hope is his audience: real world Zondervan, 2009 against the validity of Christians wondering about virtual world ministry.

256 pages (paperback), $16.99 virtual churches (pullOne of the first protestations that critics of virtual ing most of the crichurches are alleged to bring up is the necessary use tique from only two sources outside of general of avatars. For the uninitiated (a group that has anecdotal “evidence”) and puts his reader in mind of shrunk considerably in the wake of James Cameron’s Queen Gertrude’s observation: “The lady doth protest blockbuster film), an avatar is an online “you” that too much, methinks.” SimChurch, though, provides an you control in the virtual world. Estes admits up front introduction to the virtual church despite itself. that most people create avatars that are little like The first point that Estes is at pains to make is an themselves. The first-blush reaction to widespread important one and well made: Virtual churches are avatar use is that it is too easy for congregants of a virnot the same as church websites. My brick and mortual church to hide their “real” selves behind their tar church has a website, on which we publish seravatars. Indeed, how is a pastor to minister to a conmons, prayer lists, sign-up sheets, schedules, and so gregant who presents as half-man, half-bull? As Estes forth. This does not make us a virtual church. To boris quick (and correct) to point out, though, we all use row Estes’ vernacular, it simply makes us a real-world avatars in our real lives—the “us” we create for the church with a website. A virtual church proper is a world to see. This practice could be said to be espechurch that exists in the virtual world. That is, a cially prevalent in churches. Virtual churches simply church that exists in a world that exists exclusively admit that a ubiquitous real-world practice occurs (continued on page 63) online, such as Second Life or even World of Warcraft.

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A DIALOGUE: IN AND OUT OF OUR CIRCLES An Interview with Edmund Clowney

Defining the Church Dr. Clowney (1917–2005), the former president of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and founding president of Westminster Seminary in California, was a major figure in the growth of Reformed theology in the second half of the twentieth century. He was the author of numerous books, including The Church (IVP).

This White Horse Inn interview was originally broadcast on July 7, 1996.

Very often in our day when we talk about the church and our definition of the church, at least in our imagination, it is different from what people in other generations would have understood by “the church.”

How do you think that the average person in the evangelical world today would understand the church in a way that would be different from predecessors?

The misunderstanding that comes in, beyond thinking that the church is a building, is forgetting the corporate nature of the church, that the church is the body of Christ and that it’s made up of believers. Although that’s getting emphasis today too, which is encouraging. I think that the knowledge of the church as made up of members who work together, Paul’s analogy of the organic figure of the body, is getting more attention—which is a good thing.

In The Church, you talk about the approach of the World Council of Churches—especially about the model of becoming vs. being, not a company of the redeemed. But today, the church is often seen as a ministry of redemption itself. What is the difference between those two views?

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I think the point has often been made that the church is a pilgrim church; it’s a church on the way, seeking for a great objective before it with emphasis on the future. The church is becoming; it’s looking for what’s going to come—I think that’s a way of evading the biblical doctrine of the church, evading what we’re told the church really is. The church is first of all made up of those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, who are joined to Christ, and who have been ingrafted into Christ. So the church does have a position; the church is made up of those who are the people of God. They are made to be children of God, people who belong to God because they belong to Jesus.

It’s curious that in the older liberalism of the World Council of Churches, their symbol of an ark with a cross in it has been derided to say that the church ought not to be thought of as a little group of the saved floating in a sea of damnation—that the church is to be understood as including everybody and that it is to be defined not by what it is but by what it does. The church is a servant church, and it’s been said that the only difference between the church and the world is the fact that the church knows that the world is

saved, which presents a view that is completely unbiblical— that everybody is saved, and the only problem is that some people don’t know it.

We even hear that the church is the incarnation of God as much as Jesus Christ was. What you’re describing as the World Council of Churches in the 1940s and ‘50s is now making its way into evangelicalism. Do you see that as a potential problem if we don’t take seriously the church as the redeemed community? We are redeemed by the incarnation; we aren’t the redemptive incarnate Word.

Yes, the church is Christ’s, but the church is not made up of christs. We belong because we belong to Jesus. I think sometimes that figure of the church as the body of Christ, as Paul uses it, has been misunderstood. It’s been thought that Christ is the head in the sense of the physical top of the body.

If I put my hands around my neck, what’s above it is my head, and what’s below it is my body. And with that in view, it’s been thought that the body certainly needs the head; a headless corpse isn’t going very far, and the head needs a body.

From this, it’s deduced that Christ needs the church as much as the church needs Christ. The only presence of Christ in the world is in the church, and therefore the church is thought of as the lit-

eral incarnation of Christ, so that he was incarnate first in the womb of the virgin, and then incarnate now in the people of God, the church.

is not a means of grace. It reveals that God is present, but it does not reveal what grace brings to us—the saving power of Christ’s atonement.

In your book, you also touch on the subject under the heading of the sacraments: “The hierarchy of the church is, in Roman Catholic theology, a sacramental sign, and the church today is a sacrament.

Indeed, the very fleshly G. K. Chesterton was affirming the sacramental sense of God’s presence in creation when he said, ‘Catholicism is a thick steak, a glass of stout and a good cigar.’ Spreading the sacramental over the whole creation dilutes its force. If everything is sacramental, then bread and wine are already sacraments before their consecration, and the mystery of the Eucharist differs only in degree from the sacramentality of an incarnate creation.”

The Roman Catholic Church has insisted on a sacramental emphasis in salvation, the salvation coming through the sacraments, and the church itself being seen as a sacrament. And in that rather amusing quote from Chesterton, the Roman Catholic Church has also insisted on not only the reality of the universe, but also the symbolic existence of the universe—that it’s somehow a mediation of God. It’s important for us to recognize that God is the Creator, that he’s revealed in his creation, and that there’s constantly the reality of God’s creation all around us that points to God himself as the maker. But I think the danger comes when we think of everything in the universe as such as being a means of grace, like a sacrament. Creation, however,

What’s interesting is that today, Richard Foster for instance, who writes on the spiritual disciplines, is a Quaker who doesn’t believe in the sacraments, and has very eloquent books arguing for the sacramental nature of just about everything. In an article he wrote in Christianity Today, he included bread, wine, and water with about fifteen other things. So there really is this tendency, even in circles where the sacraments of the Lord’s Supper and baptism have not historically been accepted.

There is a danger of trying to go outside of the bounds of God’s revealed record of salvation in Word and Sacrament.

Yes, there surely is.

You write, “Tension between ardor and order was already part of the struggle of the early church with Montanism.

It continued in the sectarian movements of the Middle Ages. Luther and Calvin opposed Anabaptist fervor with heated condemnation.

Orthodox believers opposed the enthusiasts, concerned about the threat that they posed to the order and doctrine of the church. Today we face the same questions. Are critics of the charismatic movement guilty of seeking to quench the spirit?”

I think it’s a question we should ask. It’s important to understand that the church of God is a triune church. We’re warned in the book of Ephesians that we are not to ignore the work of the Spirit,

giving diligence to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There’s much about the Spirit, and the church is the church of the Father, so it’s the people of God. The Old Testament emphasizes the peoplehood of those who God claims and redeems. The church is made up of the disciples of Jesus Christ; it’s his church, his gathering.

But the church is also the fellowship of the Spirit. I think it’s important to recognize that it’s never one to the detriment of the other. There’s the unfolding wonder of God’s great redemption, and we need one to understand the other.

Without the Old Testament you don’t understand the meaning of the preaching of the kingdom of God. When John the Baptist comes proclaiming the kingdom, when Jesus teaches the kingdom, what does that mean? It’s the Old Testament that shows us the background of that. So you have to see the church as the people of God, and from that move on to see that Jesus Christ comes to fulfill all that’s promised in the Old Testament, that he’s the climax of it all.

It might be a good idea, especially on that line and the other issues we’ve already raised, if you could give us a run through from Genesis to Revelation—a sort of synopsis of the church in redemptive history.

When Jesus said to Simon Peter, “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church,” Jesus was not using an unfamiliar word. He was using a word that was very well known in the Old Testament: it’s the Hebrew word qahal, which is translated as ecclesia in the Greek Old Testament. Jesus

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was using the term that describes the church as the congregation; that is, those who meet together. But what does it mean that the church is the congregation? It’s really an active word; it means the people who are actually gathered.

The background of that use by Jesus is in the Old Testament.

The gathering in view is particularly the gathering at Mt. Sinai, which is where God brought Israel when he brought them out of Egypt, out of slavery, and brought them to himself and made them his people. From Mt. Sinai he spoke to them the words of his covenant law, that they might be brought together to be his people. In Deuteronomy, this is called the “Great Day of the Assembly.” So the church is the ecclesia, the assembly, the gathering, because of the roots back in the Old Testament when God assembled them. God said to Moses, “Assemble to me the people.” It’s often said that “assembly” means to bring them out of the world into the church; but it means to bring them out of their tents into the presence of God, to stand before the Lord at the foot of the mountain, and there to enter into covenant with him.

And so, the assembly in the Old Testament always looks back to the Great Day of the Assembly.

And then Jesus says, “I will build my church, my assembly”—not something new, but something renewed. Because the great story of the Old Testament, of course, is the way in which the people of God sinned against his law. No other nation records its own shame, but the people of God, Israel, did because it’s not a story about the people, it’s a 5 4 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

story about God and how he dealt with the people. So here he establishes his people and his covenant, and they show themselves to be covenant breakers, and then God has to show that his purposes will not fail. And they won’t fail for two reasons.

The first is that there is always a remnant left. The great cedar tree of Lebanon will be cut down in God’s judgment, but out of it there will come a little shoot. So you have something left, the stump, and then you have a sign of renewal, the shoot, which becomes in Isaiah’s prophecy a foreshadowing of Jesus Christ, who is the shoot from the root of David, the branch, and the ensign to which the nations will be gathered. You have this beautiful picture of both remnant and renewal. Jesus says, I come to build my church; I’m going to gather the remnant, the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Their shepherds weren’t gathering them, so God said, I’ll come myself to gather them, and I will make David my servant to gather them. So Jesus comes as the Lord and the servant, to gather his people together.

That leads us forward to a wonderful definitive view of the church that is not only in Ephesians but also in Hebrews 12: we do not come to Mt. Sinai as Moses did, and to the fear and terror of the fire that came down on Mt. Sinai, but what do we come to? Sometimes I think people suppose, “Well, I’m glad we don’t have to deal with that. The people of Israel said they couldn’t bear to hear the voice of God speaking.

We’re glad we don’t come to that, but now we’ve got things calmed down, and God’s under

control.” What does it say, though, in Hebrews 12? “Our God is a consuming fire.” It does not say that God has been domesticated, but that we’re brought more immediately into the presence of the God who is a consuming fire. Therefore it says we must worship with awe because he is the Lord God. The beautiful picture in Hebrews 12 is the feast day assembly of the saints and the angels: they’ll all be gathered together, and there they will be, and there they are. The point is that they are now in God’s presence, which gives us a beautiful picture of the church. Where do we come when we worship in the book of Hebrews? We come where God is, to the spirits of just men made perfect, to Jesus, and to the blood of the covenant that speaks better than that of Abel—who was murdered by his brother and whose blood cries out from the ground for vengeance. We come to Jesus Christ, who bore our sins in his own body on the tree, and whose atoning blood cries out for deliverance.

That’s why when we come to this mountain, the writer of Hebrews says, we come not to a mountain that is burning, around which people tremble, but to a place of comfort and forgiveness.

Yes, because Israel traveled from Sinai to Zion, and the author of Hebrews says that we’ve traveled from Sinai to Zion, and we come to the place where God is—not the earthly Zion, but the heavenly Zion.

Do you think that a lot of dispensational teaching today misses the main thread of what you’ve just laid out so

beautifully—the continuity as Moses leads us to Christ?

I’m glad for the progress that has been made in dispensational theology.

I was raised on the Scofield Reference Bible. It said in that Bible that you’re saved by works in the Old Testament, by grace in the New Testament; you can’t pray the Lord’s Prayer because that’s praying on legal ground, because it says forgive us our debts on the ground that we’ve forgiven our debtors: “Lord forgive me, because I’m so forgiving.” I can’t understand how C. I. Scofield could write that, but it’s in that Bible, and even as a kid that puzzled me. But dispensationalists are no longer teaching that; they’re teaching grace in both dispensations and that’s fine. I think from a Reformed perspective, there’s more insight into the structure of the Old Testament, the periods of the history of redemption. So I’m optimistic of people drawing closer together on these matters. But the great division still is between the church and Israel, and that’s where I think dispensationalism still misses the point.

How important do you think this is to our understanding of the church? In five minutes you gave us one of the most magnificent expositions of huge blocks of Scripture. That’s the beauty in covenant theol-

ogy—the ability to make sense of these large passages of Scripture by looking at them in their original context and see how God unfolds this wonderful drama throughout Scripture. It’s not a bunch of different stories; it’s one story centering around the cross, unified from the first promise until the consummation. Do you think if we don’t follow this kind of approach of redemptive unfolding that we tend to see all kinds of different messages in the Bible?

Yes I do, and sometimes not even unified messages. We miss the fact that the Bible is a story. We think it’s like a casket of gems, where you can pull out memory verses or verses suitable for framing; you just look in the Bible for little nuggets and don’t see it as God’s story.

You mentioned how some believe now that we are, as the body of Christ, almost a literal revelation of him. How does that play into evangelism? The Spirit and the Word convict; how much are we, as the body of Christ, a part of the conversion process as we share the gospel?

It’s the importance of our making Christ known by word, declaring the gospel to people, but of course also manifesting by our lives that Christ’s salvation does make a difference; there must be not only the spo-

ken word but there must be fruit in our lives that manifests Christ. That’s where I think it’s important to realize that although we are not the incarnation of Christ in the world, we are the people of God, and we are the body of Christ in the world. Paul uses the body of Christ figure, not to describe our relations to the world, but to describe our relations to one another: how the hand relates to the foot, or the eye to the nose, or whatever. Nevertheless, the fact that we live in the world as the body of Christ makes us to be lamps of witness in the world, and we are given the Word that we might speak it forth.

So the church really is God’s new society and should be something that is set against the paradigm of the culture and its values.

That’s right, and that’s why I wanted to emphasize in my book that we are the people of God. I used the phrase, “We are the Christian ethnics.” We can’t avoid ethnicity in the modern world. But the ethnicity of the church is entirely different from the ethnicity of the world, because the ethnicity of the church binds us together in Christ. But we are the people of God in the world and that unites the people who cannot be united in any other way.

Modern Reformation is a bimonthly magazine discussing theology, apologetics, and cultural issues. Since 1992 we have been helping Christians “know what they believe and why they believe it.” We intentionally include voices from across the reformational spectrum: Anglican, Baptist, Congregational, Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Reformed. Modern Reformation is more than just our name—it’s our mission.

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Lutheranism 101 Edited by Scot A. Kinnaman Concordia Publishing House, 2010 312 pages (paperback), $15.99 Firmly ensconced within the genre indicative of the “Complete Idiot’s Guide” series, Lutheranism 101 is the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod’s version of a quick, usable, comprehensive, and concise primer. With contributions from nearly forty different LCMS theologians, pastors, and authors, the range of this succinct guide spans the full scope of Lutheran theological convictions, liturgical commitments, history, and practice.

This type of publication fills an important need for confessional Lutherans—namely, accessibility for persons on the periphery of Lutheranism or, alternatively, neophytes to the conservative Reformation tradition of Augsburg. The mere fact that it bears the Concordia Publishing House imprint is an implicit recognition that the future of the Missouri Synod in particular and North American Lutheranism as a whole lies not in hereditary transmission of “the faith of our fathers,” as it had from the 1800s through the 1960s. Rather, the future of the LCMS is to be found in evangelized converts and transdenominational movement, especially among exhausted evangelicals and disaffected Roman Catholics, mostly because the last two generations of Lutherans have not proliferated as they allowed their liturgical and theological distinctives to be muted or jettisoned to the point where parishioners feel comfortable leaving for sacramentarian churches and non-Western rite contemporary services. Lutheranism 101 is sure to help all such sojourners better understand the enclave of Wittenbergers and, for some, acclimate to their new surroundings.

The primer opens with an obliging “Quick Start Guide” containing the primary catechetical sources for the fundamental teachings of Lutheranism: a summary of the Christian faith from the six chief parts of Luther’s Small Catechism, the ecumenical creeds, the solas of the Reformation, and common prayers. Following the guide are six main divisions. Part one rehearses the redemptive historical storyline of Scripture beginning with God, moving to the Fall and the nature of sin, the person and work of Jesus, and concludes with an amillennial understanding of the eschaton. Part two pertains to how God’s power and grace are administered in the 56 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

world through two kingdoms—civil government and the church. Laudable is the attempt to not shy away from addressing issues such as the Office of Holy Ministry, denominational fragmentation, and female ordination. Subsequent divisions include “Part Three: The Means of Grace,” “Part Four: Lutherans at a Glance,” “Part Five: Worship: The Blessings of God,” and “Part Six: Living as Lutherans.” All six parts incorporate related quotes from the Bible, the Book of Concord, and Luther’s works.

The product itself possesses a studious yet welcoming presentation, bearing all the marks of attentive structural consideration without any of this genre’s typical obnoxiousness. Let’s face it, publications of this type are frequently devoid of seriousness, contrived, and usually lack coherence in their arrangement of content and chapters. But not this one. Replete with appropriate iconography, call-outs, and excursuses, its tempered format lends itself easily to navigation, logical progression, and readability.

In short, it is a good primer precisely because it does not try to do too much. There is, however, this drawback: though glutted with forty-five pages of appendices, it possesses no index—an egregious blunder for a ready resource of this type. Moreover, there are several typesetting errors and a small number of compositional infelicities that somewhat detract from what otherwise is a very obliging publication.

There are other more serious disconcerting features of this production; for instance, the conspicuous downgrading of confessional nomenclature. One wonders if a specter of political correctness sometimes haunts the presses of CPH or if confessional Lutheranism on the whole has capitulated to prevailing evangelical phraseology with its antipathy to all things “Catholic.”

Confessional terms such as “Mass,” “priest,” “Eucharist,” and the like are fastidiously avoided.

Worse is the perennial pessimism or amnesia that prevails among CPH authors and editors concerning Luther’s frequent articulation of what he calls, “the third sacrament” of penance or absolution (sometimes also denominated “repentance” or “confession”).

Thanks to Concordia Publishing House’s insistence that Lutherans parrot but two bona fide sacraments in publications like this one, as well as the “Explanatory Notes” to Luther’s Small Catechism, Luther is pitted against Luther and the Confessions, resulting in generations of Lutherans turning a blind eye to Apology Articles XII and XIII, with the upshot being a ministerium that has relinquished absolution’s sacramental status and therefore potency in pastoral application. In the nonconfessional “Explanatory Notes” to the Small Catechism, repeated in Lutheranism 101 on pages 147 and 208, the editors permit a tripartite definition of a sacrament dif-

ferent from Apology XII.4 on “The Number and Use of the Sacraments,” which says: “If we define the sacraments as rites, which have the command of God and to which the promise of grace has been added, it is easy to determine what the sacraments are, properly speaking.”

A sacrament consists of three things: 1) a rite that 2) was instituted by the Lord Jesus and 3) offers and delivers the promise of God’s grace to be received by faith alone. Note that it does not say that there must be some physical element, some material (differing from the definition espoused by CPH and, strangely enough, the LCMS website), but ritus—an act, rite, or ceremony. This is the confessional Lutheran definition of a sacrament. In this light, Article XII.4 continues by saying, “Therefore, the sacraments are actually baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and absolution (the sacrament of penance). For these rites have the command of God and the promise of grace, which is the essence of the New Testament.”

Thus the pertinent sections of Lutheranism 101 on “Confession and Absolution,” as well as on the “Church and the Keys,” do not service the confessions well on this matter. In one place, the authors admit that the practice of confession and absolution (especially private) has fallen on hard times. What the authors fail to mention is that this is completely contrary to Luther’s wishes and in tension with the Book of Concord. Sadly and no doubt unintentionally, publications like this one are themselves responsible for fostering conflict, confusion, and contradictions within LCMS congregations over the use and number of the sacraments. Instead of marching lockstep to nonconfessional rhetoric, the authors and editors of this project could have helped to reset the trajectory of Lutheran thought and practice. Simply put, a stronger statement is needed regarding all the sacraments.

Notwithstanding these infractions, Lutheranism 101 is worthy of wide distribution. Confessional Lutherans can be confident that this polished product is well suited for persons ready and willing to learn more about the evangelical-Catholic tradition of Christianity or, alternatively, any Lutheran layperson looking for a low-impact catechetical guide or refresher course.

With a good pastor to fill in the blanks and make only a couple of necessary corrections, Lutheranism 101 immediately displaces Augsburg Press’s dreadfully minimalistic and cartoonish The Lutheran Course as the standard resource for new member classes.

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

Welcome to a Reformed Church: A Guide for Pilgrims

By Daniel R. Hyde Reformation Trust Publishing, 2010 178 pages (paperback), $12.00 As I am new church planter in Minneapolis, Daniel Hyde’s Welcome to a Reformed Church is the first book I reach for on my shelf. Many of our visitors are new to Reformed theology, and Welcome to a Reformed Church is a tool we will use for discipleship in Bible studies and new members classes.

Like many of our visitors, I did not grow up in a Reformed church; and while reading Hyde’s book, I felt as if he were describing my own pilgrimage. Many of my friends and family are very skeptical of this strange thing called “a Reformed Church,” and my hope is that they will read this book and perhaps for the first time begin to understand the history of Reformed Protestantism.

Hyde does not write as an ivory tower theologian.

This book is for the dairy farmer who spends his day in the mud and for the busy homemaker who can only get twenty minutes to read quietly at the end of a hectic day. However, Welcome to a Reformed Church is not a fluffy read. On the contrary, it is packed with a well thought out historical defense and explanation of Reformed theology. The book challenges our presuppositions and draws us outside of our narcissistic ways to consider Christ’s church through the centuries.

Hyde’s thesis is summarized in three basic points.

First, Reformed churches are Christian churches.

Second, Reformed churches are Protestant churches.

Third, Reformed churches are just that—Reformed churches (xxv–xxvi). In order to clear up any misunderstandings people have about Reformed theology, Hyde helpfully explains terms such as “catholic,” “Protestant,” “evangelical,” and “Reformed.” Sometimes these terms are thrown around as catch-phrases, but Hyde wisely explains what they truly mean in an effort to show that Reformed churches do not teach novel doctrines.

The book also discusses church history, confessions, Scripture, covenant, justification, sanctification, the church, worship, preaching, and sacraments— thoughtfully explaining each of these important topM AY / J U N E 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 5 7

ics from a Reformed perspective. Overall, it is readable and edifying as Hyde shows that Reformed theology engages the head and the heart.

Welcome to a Reformed Church helps us to avoid what C. S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery.” There are historic and theological roots to what we believe.

We are Christian churches who confess the Apostles’, Nicene, and Chalcedonian creeds. We are Protestant churches who “protest” the false teachings of Rome and uphold the five solas of the Reformation. We are “evangelical” in the historic use of the term as we believe and preach the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

We are “reformed according to the word of God,” and we confess to believe the Three Forms of Unity and the Westminster Standards.

As you read Welcome to a Reformed Church, I hope you see that to be creedal and confessional is not to be stuffy and snobbish. Rather, it is to be united in heart, soul, mind, and strength with what the Word of God teaches us about the doctrines of God, man, Christ, salvation, the church, the sacraments, and the last things (14–15). To be Reformed is to be confessional— and to know what we believe, a person must read the creeds and confessions of our churches, which is our summary of the teaching of the Bible.

When it comes to Scripture, Hyde defends sola scriptura (“Scripture alone”): the Scriptures are the final and highest authority in the Christian church in all areas of its faith and life. In fact, the canon created the church and not vice versa as Roman Catholics claim. The canon of Scripture is a great drama of redemption. As Dorothy Sayers once said, “The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man—and the dogma is the drama.” From Genesis to Revelation, Christ is the center of this drama. We are often so vain that we think the Bible is all about us, but in reality the Bible is about the person and work of the God-man.

Hyde goes on to explain that it is the concept of covenant that unifies the acts in the greatest drama ever staged (52). The four acts of this drama are creation, rebellion, redemption, and consummation (53).

The unity of the covenant of grace is seen in that while there are sixty-six books in the canon, written by forty authors over sixteen centuries, there is one main message (45)—namely, God’s plan to redeem a sinful people for himself through Christ.

The central message of the Bible is about how God has condescended to his creatures in Christ to save us from guilt, wrath, and hell. The most profound question we will ever ask is: “How are sinners righteous before a holy God?” (Heidelberg 60). Hyde says this question gets at the heart of what Reformed churches are all about.

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Sadly, this doctrine of justification is under attack in many circles today. Anything other than the doctrine of justification by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone is a “different gospel” (Gal. 1:6), which brings with it an eternal anathema (Gal. 1:8–9) (108). In his chapter on justification, Hyde defends the gospel, which is the good news that Christ’s active and passive obedience imputed to the sinner is the ground of our justification. Christ’s active obedience is his obedience to the law of God in thought, word, and deed from the moment of his conception through the end of his earthly life (82).

Christ’s passive obedience speaks of his sufferings in his life and death. As J. Gresham Machen said on his deathbed, “Thank God for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.”

Hyde grounds his defense of Reformed theology in a proper understanding of guilt, grace, and gratitude.

This is the structure of the book of Romans as well as the Heidelberg Catechism. Hyde says, “The law is to be preached in all its terror, while the gospel is to be preached in all its comfort as that which the law cannot do” (Rom. 8:3–4). The Word of God kills and makes alive through the law and the gospel. While our good works have no standing before God for our justification (91), the moral aspect of the law of God is now a guide for us in living a life of gratitude. Reformed churches are certainly not hotbeds of antinomianism!

Hyde encourages his readers to seek to join an assembly of God’s people that practices the outward marks of a true church. According to Article 29 of The Belgic Confession, these marks are the pure preaching of the gospel, the pure administration of the sacraments, and the exercise of church discipline (105). It is also important that as we gather on the Lord’s Day, “we come to worship on God’s terms, not ours; that we do in worship what God wants, not what we want” (115). We are to worship according to what God has commanded in his Word, which is called the Regulative Principle of Worship (Heidelberg 96; Belgic 7). As God’s people gather together, we “participate in the glorious reality that we have already entered God’s rest (Matt. 11:28; Heb. 4:10) and that we await the experience of the fullness of this rest in eternity in the new heavens and new earth” (Rev. 21–22) (124).

We worship as a colony of heaven on earth. The age to come breaks into this present evil age, and our hearts are lifted to heaven by the Holy Spirit as we worship on the Lord’s Day. Another important Reformed distinctive is that the primary way God saves and nourishes his people is through Word and Sacrament. These ordinary means of grace are anything but ordinary as they are God’s ordained “media” to sustain and sanctify weary

pilgrims (141). Through the preaching of the Word of God, the Spirit converts, convicts, comforts, and challenges his people. Through the use of the Sacraments, we can see, smell, taste, and touch the visible gospel.

Welcome to a Reformed Church helps us see that doctrine leads to discipleship, which then leads to doxology. The more we study the truths of the “faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), the more we will seek to live a life of gratitude to God for the redemption accomplished by Christ and applied to us by the Holy Spirit. The deeper we delve into understanding the history of the church through the creeds and confessions handed down to us, the more we resound in praise to our Triune God. Hyde concludes his book with two very practical appendices. The first is aimed at answering questions about the practices of Reformed churches, and the second is a basic bibliography to help the reader explore more about Reformed theology. From beginning to end, Welcome to a Reformed Church is a refreshingly clear, concise, and cogent introduction to the beliefs and practices of Reformed churches. I joyfully recommend it as a resource to pass on to visitors, new members, and weary pilgrims who are wandering in the wilderness of this fallen world.

Ryan Kron is a church planting pastor at Redeemer Reformed Church (RCUS) in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Christianity at the Religious Roundtable: Evangelicalism in Conversation with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam

By Timothy C. Tennent Baker Academic, 2002 270 pages (paperback), $26.00 In the twenty-first century, as globalization continues to draw people of different religions into closer and closer proximity, it is good to be reminded that for much of our history, Christians were engaged in intense and fruitful dialogue—whether by choice or necessity—with adherents of other religions. Indeed, the apostle Peter enjoined the nascent first-century church to be “prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you;

yet do it with gentleness and respect” (1 Pet. 3:15, ESV).

Christianity at the Religious Roundtable by Timothy C. Tennent, current president of Asbury Theological Seminary, is a book that strikes just this sort of elusive balance between reason, gentleness, and respect.

This book, explains Tennent, is “based on the premise that genuine dialogue can occur in a way that is faithful to historic Christianity and yet is willing to listen and respond to the honest objections of those who remain unconvinced” (240).

This book is situated squarely between a comparative religion textbook and an apologetic for the Christian faith. Tennent locates himself along the well-known inclusivist/exclusivist missional spectrum as an engaged exclusivist, a position he argues that recognizes that “while we must be careful not to allow general revelation to swallow up special revelation (inclusivism), we must not relinquish the basic truth that there is a continuity between the two” (26). In other words, this book is written from the perspective of a convicted Christian who allows the mutually exclusive and competing truth-claims of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam to speak for themselves. The subject matter alone makes it a must-read for anyone interested in gaining a deeper knowledge of how these four world faiths interact, but its particular strengths and uniqueness lie in its layout, content, and conviction.

Tennent separates the book into two distinct sections: a roundtable dialogue followed by three case studies. In explaining the layout of the book, Tennent writes, “What makes this book distinctive is that it is more than a one-way defense of historic Christianity.

The upcoming dialogues allow for a vigorous, twoway exchange of ideas” (27). This exchange, he notes, is not without precedent, as his is written with the idea of Martin Luther’s famous religious roundtable discussions—later known as “Table Talk”—firmly in sight. “The present work,” he writes, “seeks to emulate the give-and-take of Luther’s talks in an informal, noncombative way for the mutual edification of all who participate” (28).

In the first section, the interreligious dialogues are based upon “numerous formal and informal conversations that the author has had with non-Christians around the world, [and] presents fictional conversations between an evangelical-Christian and members of the three largest non-Christian religions—HinM AY / J U N E 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 5 9

duism, Buddhism, and Islam”(29–30). The second section of the book—the case studies of Justin Martyr, Brahmabandhav Upadhyay, and A. G. Hogg—is a thought-provoking and valuable addendum to the foregoing dialogues. Keeping with the theme and tenor of the book, these studies are presented with little criticism or comment, although they are followed by thoughtful discussion questions, which could be used by a teacher or leader to help work through the implications of each case study presented.

In addition to its helpful layout, the book is to be commended for its depth of content—evidenced by the need for an appended thirteen-page glossary— that reflects its stated intention to take each religion seriously, and the Christian religious terminology is no exception! Not only will the reader learn the differences between how Madhyamika and Yogacara Buddhists articulate the Dharma-kaya, or the intricacies of Hindu cosmology as it developed during the Vedic period, but the reader will be (re)introduced to similarly sophisticated Christian theological concepts concerning the nature of the Trinity, ontology, and epistemology.

In an intriguing move, Tennent does not directly address each faith’s soteriology—the question of salvation. Instead, he begins each dialogue with a discussion of the respective doctrine of God (or lack thereof) upon which each theological system is grounded. Tennent then follows up with a particular doctrine distinct to each. This silence on soteriological particulars, explains Tennent, “is an important and strategic omission that is intentional....I strongly believe it is virtually impossible to really explore this question without understanding it within the larger worldview and context of the religion” (32). In this way, each is allowed to articulate its own beliefs concerning the nature of reality and existence of God and, as such, the soteriological framework is revealed.

Finally, the most refreshing and commendable aspect of this book is its conviction. “True interreligious dialogue,” he argues, “acknowledges that all religions in one way or another seek to defend certain truth claims. It is not fair to any religion to allow it to be ensnared in the swamp of religious pluralism, which concludes that we are all saying the same thing” (240). An acknowledgment of just such real differences between religions is the first step toward developing genuine relationships—not superficially concocted ones—between convicted people of differing faiths. “True witness to someone of another faith,” writes Tennent, “means that we must understand his or her actual position, not a caricature of it” (241).

Needless to say, those who deny the validity of any sort of objective truth-claims both within Christianity 60 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

and without will find fault with this book, and its technical specificity may make it seem inaccessible to the casual reader; however, its conviction and sophistication are exactly what is to be commended, because it is just this combination that has characterized the best of the historic Christian witness and is itself a testament to the gospel.

The Rev. John D. “Jady” Koch, Jr., a doctoral candidate in systematic theology at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, is the curate at Christ Church Anglican in Vienna, Austria. He is also a founding board member of Mockingbird Ministries (www.mockingbirdnyc.blogspot.com).

Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

By John Piper Crossway, 2010 224 pages (hardcover), $19.99 Living in a world of sound-bites, spin, and hype, where most folks spend their free time watching TV, a computer screen, texting, or enjoying some form of evangelical entertainment, who has time to read a book, let alone really think about theology? It was refreshing to read John Piper’s new book Think. His premise is succinct: It “is about using the means God has given us to know him, love him, and serve people.” In Finally Alive, Piper emphasized the new birth as our basis of loving others with the love of God. In Think, his plea is “to embrace serious thinking as a means of knowing and loving God and people.” I can think of no true believer who would not greatly benefit from his challenge.

Piper challenges the philosophy of relativism. It is immoral, duplicitous, perverse, and corrupts “the high calling of language.” It enslaves people, and like a poisonous gas—invisible—it pollutes all of society. It is “a prostitution of the gift of thinking.”

Piper skillfully attacks anti-intellectualism, calling it a “destructive use of the mind—like pragmatism and subjectivism.” “The remedy for barren intellectualism is not anti-intellectualism, but humble, faithful, prayerful, Spirit-dependent, rigorous thinking.”

Reading the Scriptures “is the God-appointed way of knowing the mysteries of God.” He emphasizes the need to make thinking an intentional endeavor— hard work—with the benefits of deferred gratification.

The joy of learning the meaning of Scripture is enduring the pain of hard study. And aiding that study is developing the habit of asking questions with a humble spirit. “God gives the treasures of His wisdom through the tenacious task of our thinking.”

It was thrilling to read of Piper’s passion for biblical thinking, but also somewhat disheartening to take note of things I missed. First, I missed a greater emphasis on the person and work of the Holy Spirit.

Although there are hundreds of references to “thinking,” I noted only about thirty references to the Holy Spirit. Because of unscriptural excesses of some of our Pentecostal brethren, we have a tendency to push the teaching of the Scripture on the person and work of the Holy Spirit to the periphery of our discourse, thus failing to acknowledge, as Warfield did, that the Holy Spirit was “sent forth to act as His [Christ’s] representative in His absence.” In other words, shouldn’t we be as familiar with the Holy Spirit who indwells us as our guide as the disciples were with Jesus? Even though it’s the Spirit’s work to reveal Christ—not himself—does not the Holy Spirit feel grieved by our continual avoidance of his person as God’s executor and dispenser of divine activities on earth? We might join in Piper’s plea that we “embrace serious thinking as a means of knowing and loving God and others” with Christ’s admonition: “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?” (Luke 11:13).

Second, I missed a more thorough connection of the Spirit’s work of regeneration and our thinking about spiritual matters. Whereas some would say there can be nothing in the heart that is not first in the mind, others would hold that the regeneration of man’s spirit (heart) by the Holy Spirit is that giving of spiritual life that enables our minds to properly and spiritually know God. “It is the Spirit who gives life, the flesh profits nothing” (John 6:63). “For the Spirit searches all things, yea, the deep things of God” (1 Cor. 2:11). “As the spirit of man is the seat of human life, the very life of man itself, so the Spirit of God is His very life-element” (B. B. Warfield, Biblical And Theological Studies, 53). Is this what Jesus meant when he said, “That having been born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6)? Whereas Piper states that human thinking and divine revealing work together in awakening saving faith, does the Spirit awaken faith that is a part of us, or is faith something that is “not out of us” (Eph. 2:8), but rather a gift of the Spirit, and the function-

ing of our quickened spirit that has been “renewed” by regeneration (Titus 3:6)?

I did not find many references to Paul’s teaching on the “mystery, which has been hidden from ages and generations…which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Because of distortions in the teachings of those who believe in a “deeper life,” I believe we must ask ourselves: How are we united with Christ? Do we share Paul’s heartthrob to “know Him” and “be discovered” as living in vital, spiritual union with him?

Have we plumbed the depths of Christ’s words, “I in them, and Thou in Me”? Piper certainly believes this and communicates it in other places, and yet I did not find a detailed treatment of Paul’s words, “We have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16).

Warfield explained it this way: “There is a sense, then, in which, when Christ goes away, the Spirit comes in His stead; there is also a sense in which, when the Spirit comes, Christ comes in Him; and with Christ’s coming the Father comes too” (Warfield 40). Can we really express the love of God to others without the Spirit’s living the very life of Christ through our mortal flesh (2 Cor. 4:10)?

In a surprising latter portion of the book, Piper promotes the values of education available at the recently established Bethlehem College and Seminary.

Growing out of his “The Bethlehem Institute” at Bethlehem Baptist Church, the college and seminary hope to join the plethora of Christian colleges offering accredited Bachelor of Arts and Master of Divinity degrees. With a curriculum that is church based and stresses the thinking values of “observing, understanding, evaluating, feeling, applying, and expressing,” Piper hopes that future graduates will be capable thinkers, lovers of God, well-equipped ambassadors of Christ, and servants of others.

Christians, above all people on earth, should be supreme thinkers. In Christ, both the written and indwelling Word, the believer finds completeness. As J. I. Packer said in Hot Tub Religion, “The secret joy for believers lies in the fine art of Christian thinking. It is by this means that the Holy Spirit, over and above His special occasional visitations in moments of joy, regularly sustains in us the joy that marks us out as Christ’s” (159). If you’re up to some serious thinking that will help you know God, love him, and truly love others, then John Piper’s challenge to think will get your “little gray cells” humming.

Beryl Clemens Smith, a former faculty member of Bob Jones University, is an ordained PCA ruling and teaching elder, associate editor of The Blaisdell Papers, and author of Embers–Poetry for Everyday Living.

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POINT OF CONTACT: BOOKS YOUR NEIGHBORS ARE READING

The Finkler Question

By Howard Jacobson Bloomsbury USA, 2010 320 pages (paperback), $15.00 At first glance, the novel The Finkler Question has almost nothing to do with the Reformation, original or modern.

The only slight connection is the rather incidental remark that the Jews were thrown out of England in 1290 and welcomed back in 1655 (179).

The discerning reader of Modern Reformation will know that in 1655 England was governed by the Puritan Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector, but the novel does not mention or reflect in any way on Cromwell’s policy of religious toleration. Nonetheless the novel deserves attention. In 2010, it was the winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize for the best novel of the year by a writer in Great Britain or Ireland, and despite that, the book is readable and interesting.

The main character of the novel, Julian Treslove, lives in contemporary London. He is about fifty and is a Gentile whose two closest friends are both Jews: the one—Sam Finkler—is a friend from his school days, and the other—Libor Sevcik—is a Czech immigrant who is about eighty. The two Jews are recent widowers. Julian has never been married, although he has two sons from two of his many loves.

The novel revolves around Treslove’s growing interest in trying to understand and then to identify with his Jewish friends and with Jewish life. Sam Finkler in many ways epitomizes for Julian what it means to be Jewish. Early in the novel Julian concludes that he will better understand things Jewish if he substitutes for the word “Jewish,” whenever he thinks of it, with the word “Finkler” (17). So the Finkler question is the Jewish question in the novel.

The style of the novel is one of its most appealing and engaging features. The writing is beautiful, at times epigrammatic, and often comic. Libor’s relationship with his wife expresses something of Jacobson’s attitude in the novel: “He had made her laugh at the beginning. Laughter had been his most 62 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

precious gift to her” (268). The humor in this book comes in many forms: the ridiculous, the absurd, the teasing, and the flippant. Ponder for example this statement: Julian and one of his loves spent “three fretful days in Paris during which they hadn’t been able to find a single place to eat. In Paris!” (51). Or less subtly and at greater length: Julian “had once fallen in love with a woman he had watched lighting a candle and crossing herself. In grief, he’d presumed….After a fortnight of intense consolation, she asked him, ‘Why do you keep telling me it’ll be all right? There isn’t anything wrong.’ He shook his head. ‘I saw you lighting a candle’….‘There’s something you should know about me,’ she said. ‘I’m a bit of an arsonist….’ In the morning he woke to twin realizations. The first was that she had left him. The second was that his sheets were on fire” (30).

As Treslove’s involvement with Jewish life and issues becomes more intense, the novel becomes more serious, although it never loses a comic dimension.

Various questions are raised in a variety of discussions among the characters: What is it like to be a Jew, to live in a predominately Gentile world, to live with antiSemitism, to live in the shadow of the Holocaust, and to feel some responsibility for Israel, particularly for violence there against Arabs? Does having a state of their own make the Jews now like everybody else (274)?

All of these questions express in one way or another two underlying issues: Are Jews special and how are they to live with a sense of exceptionalism, both in themselves and in others? The problem of exceptionalism is powerfully presented in the relationship of Sam Finkler and his wife. When Finkler proposed to Tyler, she was a Gentile. He did not care, but she had insisted on converting to Judaism. She pressed the question: Are the Jews “a light to the nations” (Isa. 42:6)? This question in many forms is raised personally, provocatively, and challengingly throughout the book.

While the characters in the novel constantly discuss Judaism, God is seldom considered. Most of the Jews in the novel do not really believe in God, although God’s providential care is considered briefly as a possibility by Finkler (185). Much time is spent discussing circumcision, not however in its theological significance, but much more in terms of its physical and sexual consequences. The Finkler question is more ethnic or cultural than religious, but it is still seriously (or comically) thought provoking.

For those readers wanting other thoughtful and informative books on Jewish-Gentile relations in the twentieth century, I would recommend two books.

The first is a striking novel, The Song before It Is Sung by Justin Cartwright (2007), which examines the friendship of a Jew in England with an anti-Nazi German in

the 1930s and 1940s. The second is a chilling historical study, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

by Timothy Snyder (2010), presenting the suffering particularly of Ukrainian and Polish Jews at the hands of Communist and Nazi ideologues.

As important as the Jewish questions are to the novel, the attraction of The Finkler Question rests more fundamentally on the universal human issues it discusses. The universal themes are the ones raised by most good novels: truth, love, death, relationships, and meaning. For example, the novel vacillates on meaning in human life: “None of it made the slightest sense” (56) and “There were no accidents. Everything had a meaning” (164).

The central universal theme of the novel is that of identity, which is played out particularly in relation to Julian. Who is he? He is a Gentile who wants to be a Jew, a father who does not like his children, a romantic and tragic figure, a profound lover of women, one after another: “The sense of history swirling around him, all made him an unreliable witness to his own life” (82). The end of the book says of Finkler, “He never really knew Treslove either” (307). The struggles for identity in all the major characters lead the reader to reflect on his or her own identity.

Near the end of the novel, after the death of a friend, Julian dreams of Finkler speaking to him, “If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile” (288). This quotation from Hamlet evokes a game they had once played: “He and Finkler had quoted Hamlet endlessly to each other at school.

It was the only work of literature they had both liked at the same time. Finkler was not a literary man.

Literature was insufficiently susceptible to rationality for his taste. And lacked practical application. But Hamlet worked for him” (48). The Hamlet quotation in Julian’s dream works by drawing on the words of the dying Hamlet in the last scene of the play, begging Horatio not to commit suicide. Hamlet’s words continue, “And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story.” Finkler in effect calls on Treslove to tell the story of the Finkler question.

Hamlet is the universal story of identity, meaning, and relationships. Horatio, after Hamlet’s death, says to Fortinbras in the midst of all the dead: “What is it you would see? If aught of woe or wonder, cease your search.” Jacobson also helps us see life, largely through the eyes of Julian, for whom life is not so much woe or wonder, or even tragedy, as farce (300). Christians will not agree that life is ultimately tragedy or farce, but will be stimulated to think about life by this remarkable book.

SimChurch Review (continued from page 50) while real-world churches pretend it doesn’t.

When Estes’ discussion turns to the administration of the sacraments and church discipline, though, he paints himself into a bit of a corner. By making the administration of each a constitutive part of what makes a church legitimate, he forces himself to find ways in which virtual churches can administer the sacraments, for one, in a “real” way (mostly involving pilgrimages to real-world churches). It would seem to be a better route, however, to attempt to argue for a redefinition of church: that where the preaching of the gospel is, there the church is. By holding to a historical definition of “church” in a decidedly nonhistorical context, Estes makes the sacraments into a ponderous chore rather than the glorious grace they are meant to be. With regard to discipline, Estes finds himself in a similar place. My own tradition, Anglicanism, does not consider discipline a necessary mark of the church, but many other traditions do. Once again, by insisting on a measure of church discipline, Estes (whose church is loosely connected to the Baptist tradition) makes his argument harder to win.

Confronted with such issues, Estes seems to cheat.

He offers alternatives of varying worth, but doesn’t argue for one over another. He asks lots of rhetorical questions, often ending sections with several in a row, without ever answering any of them. Beyond being a tiresome technique, it’s only a surface profundity without any substance underneath.

I never would have thought that virtual churches were “real” or “legitimate” churches, although any opportunity for people to hear the gospel is some small victory. The preaching of the gospel is rare enough in real-world churches that its presentation anywhere should be celebrated. By writing his book in defensive response to a perceived critique, Estes has weakened what could have been a powerful story of gospel witness in a new environment, and he could have interacted with old definitions of church for a new world, rather than allowing the virtual church to simply “be” church in a new way.

The Rev. Nick Lannon is curate of Grace Church Van Vorst in Jersey City, New Jersey.

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

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FOR A MODERN REFORMATION i t ’ s

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Missional & Vocational

“A

properly missional mindset will identify the church as distinct

claiming his Word, baptizing, teaching, administerfrom but engaged with the world, encouraging individual ing Communion, prayer, and caring for the spiritual Christians to pursue their God-honoring vocations.” and temporal welfare of the saints.

The church is a visible society, a new humanity At the same time, the whole body of Christ—served “called out of darkness into [God’s] marvelous light” by this ministry—is “salt” and “light” in the world, dis(1 Pet. 2:9). Living in exile, much like Israel in persed throughout the week to love and serve its Babylon, believers are called to gather neighbors in the world. Believers are 1. Recover the “Solas” regularly in the public assembly and called to godliness in the fellowship of to conduct themselves with love and 2. Law & Gospel the saints and to witness to God’s service to each other, their families, 3. Missional & Vocational grace by word and deed. They are and their non-Christian neighbors. exhorted to spread the fragrance of 4. Word & Sacrament Having been baptized into a new citChrist also in their families, neighborizenship in the age to come, we live 5. Catechesis hoods, and vocations. They are called as “strangers and exiles” in the 6. Confessional to pray for their secular rulers and empires of this fading age, longing obey the laws of the land and “to for “a better country—that is, a heavenly one” (Heb. aspire to live quietly, and to mind [their] own affairs, 11:13, 16). and to work with [their] hands…so that [they] may The visible church has always been tempted by the live properly before outsiders and be dependent on no lure of secular power and glory, confusing the kingone” (1 Thess. 4:11–12). dom of Christ with the kingdoms of this age. No part There are many things that believers are called to of the world, nor any sphere, is independent of God’s do in the world that go beyond the mandate Christ lordship: “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it” has given to his visible church. Where Scripture is (Ps. 24:1). Nevertheless, the Triune God exercises his silent, believers are free to exercise their Christian libsovereignty in different ways in each kingdom: by erty in judgments concerning temporal affairs. providence and common grace in the civil realm, and Therefore, in every neighborhood and nation, by miracle and saving grace through the ministry of Christians should exercise their earthly citizenship Word and Sacrament. with concern for the common welfare of their neighUnlike the church in the Old Testament, the new bors—especially of those who are vulnerable to injuscovenant church is not identified with a particular tice, poverty, and sickness. race or nation. It is “a kingdom of priests” that has been “purchased for God” by Christ’s blood “from every race, nation, and tongue” (Rev. 5:9). In this Michael Horton is editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation. time between Christ’s two advents, the church does not therefore exercise a temporal dominion, driving the ungodly out of God’s holy land (Matt. 5:38–48).

All lands are common; only the temple consisting of Christ and his people is holy. This new international people, made one by Christ’s Word and Spirit, is never to be confused with any nation, culture, race, or civil order. The ministry that Christ exercises through his church’s officers is restricted to pro64 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G