for-you-your-children-march-april-2011

THE MISSIONAL CHURCH ❘ REACHING THE “BURNED-OVER” GENERATION ❘ A REPORT FROM LAUSANNE III

MODERN REFORMATION For You, Your Children…

…and All Who Are Far Off VOLUME 20, NUMBER 2, MARCH/APRIL 2011, $6.50

MODERN REFORMATION m a r c h / a p r i l

2 0 1 1

|

v o l u m e

2 0

n u m b e r

2

Features 14

Missional Church or New Monasticism?

If younger Christians are tired of spiritual consumerism and evangelism pitches, do our churches offer them a better alternative? Or is their newfound interest in redeemed creation misguided by the ongoing revival of contemplative monastic spirituality with its emphasis on personal piety, rather than the world-affirming piety of the Reformation? What does it mean for the church to be “missional” in a world created and redeemed by God?

By Michael Horton

22

Compassion, Creativity, and Connecting with a Burned-Over Generation How do we connect with today’s “burned-over” generation—those young people robbed of hearing the good news? The gospel message must and will transcend any circumstantial concerns. But aside from the “how,” are there some basic principles that might aid us in smuggling it through the elaborate defenses of the modern man?

By David Zahl

28

Bible, Translation, and Evangelism: “And How Shall They Hear Without a Preacher?”

This year marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible, an act of translation that has influenced countless millions for good. But we still need effective evangelists in our day and age, those who “translate” Christ and his Word into the languages of a lost world.

By Donald P. Richmond

31

Contending for the Faith: An Open Letter to North American Churches Born and raised in Malawi and now serving as a Reformed pastor in British Columbia, Rev. Matandika shares his concerns regarding the state of the church in North America and in the Western world in light of some prevailing unhealthy trends—providing a warning, an exhortation, and a promise from God’s Word.

By Rev. Fletcher Matandika

36

Let Your Words Be Gracious: A Glimpse into Personal Evangelism In much evangelism training, the importance of the church is almost entirely left out. How can we learn the basics of sharing our faith—overcoming our fears, using gospel tracts, answering primary objections—while ignoring the church’s Word and Sacrament ministry, where true disciples of Christ are made and grow?

By Leon Brown

M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 1

Ad Extra: Articles Aside

4 7 10 56

Studies in Acts Acts 2: “The Dimensions of the Kingdom”

By Dennis E. Johnson Missions Past and Present “The Puritans as Missionaries”

By Lee Gatiss From the Hallway “Renée of France: A Bruised Reed under Calvin’s Pastoral Care”

By Simonetta Carr For a Modern Reformation “Law & Gospel”

By Michael Horton

The Latest Ideas Sweeping the Land…

MODERN REFORMATION Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton

40 42

Executive Editor Ryan Glomsrud

48

Managing Editor Patricia Anders Marketing Director Michele Tedrick

50

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

53

Modern Reformation © 2011 All rights reserved.

ISSN-1076-7169 1725 Bear Valley Parkway Escondido, CA 92027 (800) 890-7556 info@modernreformation.org www.modernreformation.org Subscription Information US 1 YR $32 Digital Only 1 YR $25 US Student 1 YR $25 Canada 1 YR $39 Europe 1 YR $58 Other 1 YR $65

52

2 YR $58 – – – – 2 YR $70 2 YR $104 2 YR $118

2 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

54

Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream

By David Platt Reviewed by John Fonville A Report from the Lausanne III Congress White Horse Inn Interview with Christopher Wright Pearl Buck in China: Journey to the Good Earth

By Hilary Spurling Reviewed by Ann Henderson Hart Missional Renaissance: Changing the Scorecard for the Church

By Reggie McNeal Reviewed by Brian W. Thomas Apologetics for the 21st Century

By Louis Markos Reviewed by Craig Parton From Nicaea to Chalcedon: A Guide to the Literature and Its Background

By Frances M. Young with Andrew Teal Reviewed by Carl R. Trueman Point of Contact: Books Your Neighbors Are Reading Freedom

By Jonathan Franzen Reviewed by Brooke Mintun

COVER ART: ALLAN TOOLEY/ISTOCK PHOTO

IN THIS ISSUE

Fulfilled and Fulfilling

I

n this issue of Modern Reformation we turn to missions and evangelism. Let us never falter in recalling how important it is both to get the gospel right and to get the gospel out. Jesus himself indicated that the Word would go forth immediately upon arrival of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. He commissioned the disciples, declaring that they would be witnesses “in Jerusalem and in Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” Indeed, by the time of Peter’s first sermon in Acts, momentum was gathering. Jesus’ declarations were fulfilled, and with great confidence in the work of the Spirit we continue today to see God build his church. All authority belongs to Christ!

This is his world and his mission, which is what we need to grasp to be part of the coming and going to near and far-off places—wherever there are ears to hear. After all, as Peter preached, “The promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself” (Acts 2:38–39).

But God’s emissaries are called to preach the gospel, not to be the gospel. The latter is quite simply impossible, though you wouldn’t know it from popular evangelical rhetoric. That is why with characteristic wisdom and pastoral sensitivity, Editor-in-Chief Michael Horton challenges the “monasticism” of current writers on missional spirituality. Under the magnifying glass is the oft-heard phrase coined by Francis Assisi, “Preach the gospel, and if necessary use words.” To the contrary, Horton argues that we need to work for a “new reformation” according to God’s Word. An appropriate response to the Great Commission begins with a proper understanding of discipleship—disciples being those followers of Christ who are glad to hear and embrace the gospel rather than offer up their acts of service as fulfillment of the Great Commission.

We are not alone in crying out for a modern reformation of our churches, for such was the theme of Christopher Wright’s recent address to the third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in Cape Town, South Africa. We include a full interview with Wright for your careful consideration of the current state of contemporary missions. Life is complicated, however, so we also need to reflect upon the challenges that face the advancement of Christ’s kingdom in every generation, from the sixteenth century down to the current “burned-over” generation. Author Simonetta Carr introduces us to Renée of France, a woman of the Reformation era who struggled to play her part in the spread of the evangelical cause in Europe and received pastoral care from John Calvin in the process. David Zahl, author and founder of the Mockingbird blog, offers an up-to-date evaluation of the emerging generation’s cynicism and spiritual malaise. It is packed with hardhitting, honest, and accurate insights, giving us much food for thought. Communicating law and gospel with creativity—now that is a way forward!

Unfortunately, we frequently make the gospel commission more difficult by transporting an “American” gospel (which is no gospel) around the world. Reverend Fletcher Matandika, a minister in the Central African Presbyterian Church, offers a sobering and pleading word in his “Open Letter to North American Churches.”

This sets on the table the “translation” issues that must always be faced in moving from one culture to another, and Reverend Donald Richmond of the Reformed Episcopal Church offers a timely reflection in this regard on the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. Similarly, Leon Brown of the Evangelism Team encourages us to let our words be seasoned with salt, and includes a number of very practical suggestions in aid of personal evangelism.

There are many things to take away from this issue, but first and foremost be encouraged, in the words of Dennis E. Johnson, by “the global dimensions and the glorious advance of Christ’s kingdom through the proclamation of the cross in the might of the Spirit, and the wide embrace of God’s grace that knits persons from every race, ethnicity, and language into one new people of God.”

Ryan Glomsrud Executive Editor

NEXT ISSUES May/June 2011 Embassy of Grace July/August 2011 Word & Sacrament: Making Disciples of All Nations M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 3

STUDIES IN ACTS

Acts 2: The Dimensions of the Kingdom

T

he Great Commission recorded in Matthew 28 and in Luke’s accounts

his followers’ hopes that “he was the one who was of Jesus’ post-resurrection teaching in his Gospel and the Acts of the to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21). In their minds, the Apostles foretells the global expansion of the reign of God under the term “redeem” carried overtones of military and political liberation from oppression by pagan powers, scepter of the exalted Messiah. In Matthew’s narrative as the aged priest Zechariah had anticipated over Jesus declares, “All authority in heaven and on earth has thirty years before: “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, been given to me” (Matt. 28:18). He is identifying himfor he has visited and redeemed his people and has self as “one like a son of Man” whom Daniel foresaw raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his approaching the Ancient of Days to receive “dominion servant David…that we, being delivered from the and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and hand of our enemies, might serve [God] without fear languages should serve him” (Dan. 7:13–14). Jesus’ in holiness and righteousness before him all our days” universal authority warrants his commission to his apos(Luke 1:68, 74–75). tles to “make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19).

For centuries Israel had been dominated, devasLikewise, in Luke’s Gospel the risen Lord shows his tated, and dislocated by a succession of Ancient Near followers that Moses’ Law, the prophets, and the Psalms Eastern and Mediterranean superpowers: Assyria, foretold not only his suffering and resurrection but also Babylon, Persia, Greece, Syria, and presently Rome. the preaching of repentance leading to forgiveness “in It is no wonder that the pilgrim crowds streaming into his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem” Jerusalem to observe the Passover had extolled Jesus (Luke 24:47). The redemptive kingdom of God, at last as a new David, “the King who comes in the name of inaugurated in history through Christ’s death and resthe Lord” (Luke 19:38, echoing Psalm 118:26, which urrection, will spread both geographically and demoin turn echoes 1 Sam. 17:45). As ancient David had graphically until his glorious return from heaven. defeated the Philistine champion Goliath, so now— At the opening of the book of Acts the geographic they thought—this Son of David, so mighty in deed and demographic expansion of the Messiah’s realm is and word, would lead his people in a new exodus, expressed in his well-known words: “But you will expelling the infidel troops that occupied the Lord’s receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon land. A new regime of righteousness and peace would you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and dawn! But before the week’s end, their leaders had in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” turned the fickle masses against their King, and their (Acts 1:8). The significance of this prediction becomes “Hosanna!” (“Save us!”) turned to “Crucify!” (Luke clear as we view it against three backgrounds: 1) the 23:21). Jesus’ crucifixion meant the death of dreams disciples’ question whether Jesus, having risen from for political and military liberation, and Jesus’ faiththe grave, would now “restore the kingdom to Israel” ful followers were devastated.

(Acts 1:6); 2) the Servant Song of Isaiah 49 to which Yet his resurrection from the dead stirred dead Jesus alluded in his reply to their question; and 3) the dreams back to life in the hearts of those who saw the unfolding history of the apostles’ and the church’s witrisen Messiah. Naturally, they asked him: “Lord, will ness-bearing mission that fills the next twenty-seven you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” Their and a half chapters of Acts. hopes were soaring again, even higher than on Palm Sunday; they dreamed again of a new era of peace and “Will You at This Time Restore freedom for God’s oppressed nation. But their hopes the Kingdom to Israel?” were not high enough, their dreams not daring Forty days earlier, Jesus’ execution had shattered 4 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

enough, their vision of the kingdom’s dimensions not even close to expansive enough! Jesus’ reply showed that their sights were by far set too low.

“Salvation to the End of the Earth” Jesus first rebuked their relentless curiosity about secrets that belong to God alone: “Not yours is it to know times or epochs which the Father set in his own authority” (Acts 1:7; compare Matt. 24:36; in the Greek text “not yours” is thrust forward in the sentence for emphasis). Then he stretched their mental picture of the parameters of his kingdom by alluding to a rich reservoir of Old Testament prophetic promise he had cited often before: Isaiah’s portrait of the faithful, suffering, and glorified Servant of the Lord.

Through Isaiah, God had introduced a Servant whom he found well pleasing (Isa. 42:1). That Servant would be despised and mistreated by the very people he had come to rescue, bearing blows of divine justice in their place to bring them healing (49:7; 52:13– 53:12). It would seem that the Servant had “labored in vain” and “spent [his] strength for nothing” (49:4).

Yet at that moment of dashed hopes, the Lord would expand his Servant’s influence to global proportions: “And now the Lord says…‘It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel; I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (49:5–6).

The Father had spoken twice from heaven, pronouncing Jesus “well pleasing” (Matt. 3:17; 17:5).

Jesus had announced that, as the Servant of Isaiah 53:12, he would “be numbered with transgressors” (22:37) and pour out his lifeblood “for many” (Mark 14:24). Now he was the glorified Servant of the Lord (Acts 3:13, alluding to Isa. 52:13), raised from the dead. His exaltation meant that the dimensions of God’s redemptive kingdom were about to expand to envelop the entire world. So Jesus lifted his friends’ sights beyond Israel’s borders to “the end of the earth,” to which the Lord’s Servant would bring salvation.

Restoring wayward Israel—rescuing the righteous remnant who yearned for Israel’s consolation and “the redemption of Jerusalem” (Luke 2:25, 38)— would be one aspect of the Servant’s mission. But God’s agenda for his Servant is far wider, far weightier than retrieving Israel’s strays: “I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” (In the Greek Septuagint, the Hebrew word goyim, typically rendered “nations” in - Both English versions, is translated by the term ethne. the Hebrew goyim and the Greek ethne refer to people groups that have distinct cultural identities [“nationalities” or “ethnic groups”] rather than the geopoliti-

cal states with territorial boundaries [like modern “nations”]. Although ethne- occasionally refers to all “nations,” including Israel [Exod. 19:6], more often in the Bible the ethne- are non-Israelite people groups outside the Lord’s covenant—that is, the Gentiles.)

In Acts 1:8, Jesus echoed Isaiah’s wording, setting his disciples’ constricted conception of the kingdom in sharp contrast to the horizon-expanding promise of Isaiah 49:6: the Lord’s light would shine not merely on benighted Israel but also on the diverse people groups at the earth’s extremities. As the good news of salvation in Christ moved out from Jerusalem into Judea and Samaria and beyond, Paul and Barnabas would quote this prophecy from Isaiah in a synagogue far from Israel’s borders. Though their testimony about Jesus hit a wall of resistance among their fellow Jews, and though they seemed to have “labored in vain” (Isa. 49:4), they would bring this good news to Gentiles, fulfilling the Lord’s commission: “For so the Lord has commanded us, saying, ‘I have made you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring salvation to the end of the earth’” (Acts 13:47).

“My Witnesses in Jerusalem, in All Judea and Samaria, and to Earth’s End” The book of Acts tells the story of the expanding boundaries of God’s kingdom of grace, both geographically and demographically. On the day of Pentecost, when Christ poured out God’s Spirit in power on his church, the result was a miraculous preview of the succeeding centuries of the church’s mission. People of diverse nationalities and languages— from Mesopotamia in the east, to Cappadocia in the north, to Egypt and Libya in the south, to Rome in the west—exclaimed in astonishment that Jesus’ followers were “telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God” (Acts 2:8–11). The listening crowd comprised “Jews” (natural descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) and “proselytes” (Gentile converts to Judaism who, like ancient Ruth, had abandoned their pagan roots in order to serve Israel’s God). Proselytes entered Judaism through circumcision and other rituals, vowing obedience to the moral, civil, and ceremonial commandments that God gave Israel at Sinai.

The proselytes at Pentecost were previews of the kingdom’s international, multicultural expansion profiled later in Acts. As the gospel crossed regional boundaries and ethnic divisions, people from all the world’s peoples would be embraced in Jesus’ reign of grace—and without Judaism’s ceremonial rites.

Intercultural tension in the early church would launch the geographic expansion of kingdom boundaries toward “the end of the earth” (Acts 6:1–7). Still centered in Jerusalem, the church now numbered in M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 5

the thousands. The believers’ practice of sharing meals and worship in homes (Acts 2:46–47) had spawned numerous small congregations, some apparently worshiping in Aramaic while others used Greek (6:1). The sheer numbers, as well as the language difference, meant that some widows were overlooked in the daily sharing of food. To address the crisis, the apostles instructed the believers to select seven men “full of the Spirit and wisdom” to manage their tangible expression of Jesus’ mercy. Among those seven was a living preview of the breadth of the kingdom: Nicolas, a proselyte from Antioch (6:5). One born among the pagan Gentiles had become a trusted leader of the church.

Another of the seven, Stephen, soon met martyrdom. His testimony about Jesus “the Righteous One” (the Suffering Servant, Isa. 53:11; Acts 7:52) provoked a violent persecution that scattered Jesus’ followers “throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria” (Acts 8:1). Thus the first wave of geographic expansion that Jesus predicted in Acts 1:8 began. With it, the demographic walls of racial identity, cultural custom, and religious regulation that once insulated Israel from its pagan neighbors began to crumble.

Philip, another of the seven, made his way into Samaria. Samaritan religion was an amalgamation of Israelite piety and pagan practice, reflecting its origins in the corruptions of Israel’s northern tribes and Gentiles relocated into the region by Assyria (see 2 Kings 16:7–41). Samaritans occupied a covenantal “no man’s land” between Judaism and paganism.

Although they revered the books of Moses, they rejected later Old Testament Scriptures that documented the Northern Kingdom’s decline into idolatry.

Consequently, Jews typically did not share utensils with Samaritans (John 4:9) and regarded them as “foreigners” (Luke 17:18). On Jewish lips, “Samaritan” was a term of insult (John 8:48). Yet as Philip spoke “good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ,” Samaritan crowds believed and were baptized (Acts 8:5–12). The descent of God’s Spirit on Samaritan believers confirmed to the apostles Peter and John that indeed “Samaria had received the word of God” (8:14–25). God’s salvation was moving out, crossing territorial, traditional, and cultural boundaries.

The next wave of expansion was minor in miles but monumental in the religious distance it spanned.

Philip was directed to a deserted road southwest of Jerusalem, into ancient Philistine territory, where God orchestrated his rendezvous with a eunuch, the treasurer of the queen of Ethiopia (Acts 8:26–39). Since God’s law excluded eunuchs from the worshiping assembly of Israel (Deut. 23:1), this official—though he 6 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

had traveled many miles in his quest to know the true God—would have been excluded from the inner courts of the temple in Jerusalem. Yet as Philip explained Isaiah 53 and “the good news about Jesus,” the eunuch entered the family of God by faith—a living, breathing fulfillment of God’s promise to welcome foreigners and eunuchs into his “house of prayer for all peoples” (Isa. 56:3–8). As the Ethiopian headed home—among the first Christian missionaries to Africa—Philip preached in coastal towns until he reached Caesarea, the capital of the Roman province of Judea.

Peter followed Philip’s footsteps along the coast (Acts 9:32–43) until summoned to Caesarea by a Roman centurion. Cornelius, like the eunuch, longed to know the God of Israel (10:1–8). He gathered an audience to hear Peter’s saving message. As Peter proclaimed Jesus to these foreigners with pagan pasts, the Holy Spirit signaled that he had cleansed their hearts by faith (10:44–48; 11:15–17; 15:7–11). Jesus had dismantled the wall separating Jew from Gentile at his cross (Eph. 2:13–16), and Jesus’ Spirit now led the church to recognize the divine demolition of that divider: “Then to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance that leads to life” (Acts 11:18). Jesus the glorified Servant was shining “like a light to the Gentiles,” to the end of the earth.

Through the remaining chapters of Acts, the story unfolds further. Those scattered by persecution reached Antioch in Syria, the third largest city of the Roman Empire (11:19–26). At first, they evangelized only Jews, but soon some were “preaching the Lord Jesus” also to Greek-speaking Gentiles. A congregation of gospeltransformed ex-pagans was established in that cosmopolitan center at the crossroads between East and West.

Saul of Tarsus, whose violent zeal scattered Christians into Judea and Samaria, was en route to Damascus to seize more believers when he himself was seized by Christ in a blazing display of blinding glory (9:1–19). Called “to carry [Jesus’] name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel” (9:15), Saul proclaimed Jesus as the Christ first in Damascus, then in Jerusalem, and then in Antioch.

From Antioch the Holy Spirit sent Paul out (13:1–3) to distant lands—Cyprus, Asia Minor, Macedonia, and Achaia—until he reached Rome, the imperial capital, to stand before Caesar himself (27:24; 28:11–31).

Living as we do at “the end of the earth,” we may find the ethnocentric “tunnel vision” of Jesus’ first followers, so focused on Israel’s political fortunes, quaint or even offensive. But we too can fall into a nearsighted preoccupation with problems close at hand— in our personal lives, families, congregations, (continued on page 9)

MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT

The Puritans as Missionaries

“M

issionary” is not the first word that comes to mind

mate the seriousness of such seemingly trivial matwhen one thinks of the Puritans. Keen disciples, pas- ters. To the Puritan mind, they were only the tip of sionate pastors, devotional writers, powerful preachers, the iceberg. The larger question below the surface was much more solemn: What was the nature of true precise theologians—yes. Radical revolutionaries and Christianity? reformers, even. But not missionaries. The recent In taking the stand they did on such matters they Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge were not being petty Pharisees, “purists” merely for University Press, 2008), which features twenty inthe sake of it. They wholeheartedly believed they depth studies by a stellar cast of the great and the good were acting for the gospel itself. They saw the dangers in Puritan studies today on a whole host of subjects of allowing alternative gospels (especially “free will” related to Puritanism, has no chapter on their misArminianism or superstitious Roman Catholicism) to sionary endeavors nor even an index entry for “evancreep back into the church dressed in official garb gelism.” Yet as far as the Puritans themselves were under cover of apparent reverence. They feared for concerned, all their efforts in theology, ministry, and their nation should these things be permitted to drag even politics were focused on bringing glory to God the church back into the dark ages from which the through the salvation of sinners, their biblical edifiReformation had rescued it. cation, and their establishment in the fellowship of the For the Puritans, these were issues of conscience. church until the Lord’s return. In that sense, then, And issues of conscience in religion were not simply even if they did not use the words “mission” or “evanabout personal preferences and “style.” If they were gelism” as we might today, the Puritan story is the relentlessly pushed (as they were by Archbishop story of a persistent, determined, and spiritually Laud), they eventually constituted a direct attack on minded attempt to reach the lost for Christ. the Lordship of Christ. As the cream of Puritan divines In this article I hope to restore to our mental porput it in chapter 20 of the Westminster Confession of Faith, trait of the Puritans this focus they themselves had on “God alone is Lord of the conscience.” Puritan politiGod’s mission and ours. In order to do that, we will cal machinations were often simply the overspill of look briefly at two ways in which the Puritan agenda their pastoral and missionary zeal to see people won has been misunderstood (that is, politically and thefor Christ alone and freed by Christ from superstition, ologically), and then at three more direct and explicit impiety, and atheism. If we may frown upon certain manifestations of the Puritan zeal for mission (in groups for going too far in some respects and giving America, Britain, and their local churches). There is the Puritans a reputation for suppressing all fun in the much for us to glean from these entrepreneurial and process, we should at the very least attempt to underresourceful saints of yesteryear as we ponder our stand their often very godly and mission-sensitive own obedience in the twenty-first century to the motives.

Great Commission (Matt. 28:18–20).

Puritan Politics and the Liberating Gospel Much has been written about Puritan politics. By politics I mean of course both civil and ecclesiastical politics, for these were so often indistinct in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Troubles between the Puritans and the establishment began because of issues, for example, to do with church ceremonies, the use of particular garments, and liturgical forms. It would be a grave mistake, however, to underesti-

Puritan Theology and the Gracious Gospel Another way in which the Puritans have been misunderstood is in their theology. Puritan theologians of this period have been accused of being dry, dusty scholastics who reduced the faith of their dynamic Reformation predecessors to mere formulas and complicated it with Aristotelian philosophy.

It is true that seventeenth-century theology is not a mere repetition of the earlier work of Luther and M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 7

Calvin. Yet is that not exactly what we ought to expect?

For the enemies of the gospel became more and more sophisticated in their attacks upon it. The main aim of Puritan theologians was to institutionalize and to defend the Reformation’s doctrine of grace against not only Roman Catholics but also radical Anabaptists, anti-Trinitarians, rationalists, and compromisers of various stripes, so it could be passed on safely to the next generation. This was no mere academic exercise, though it often took academic or “scholastic” form, of course, as is fitting in an academic environment.

If accused of being “too precise,” Puritans would reply, “But we worship and serve a splendidly precise God.” Their considerable theological gifts were devoted to preserving the biblical theology of salvation by grace alone from all the corruptions and deviations that assailed it during those turbulent times. This was not merely for the sake of conserving a supposedly pure system of doctrine; what Puritan divines sought to protect was grace itself, the very grace these pastorally minded theologians hoped would reach and save the unconverted.

For all their supposed “scholasticism,” it is clear when one actually reads the works of men such as William Perkins and John Owen that their ultimate desire was to flood bookstalls, pulpits, and homes with the good news of God’s mercy and free gift of life in Christ Jesus, and steer seekers away from pale imitations of this powerful message.

Let us look now at some of the Puritans’ more explicitly evangelistic achievements and goals. I propose to examine their gospel outreach to the Indians in the New World, the unevangelized areas of the Old World, and the unsanctified in their churches. Puritan missionary strategy enthusiastically embraced all three of these spheres.

The Indians in New England In the 1630s, persecution of some Puritans became so hot that many of them considered emigration to the New World. As Joseph Caryl later wrote on the early progress of the gospel among the American Indians in a 1650 report, The Light Appearing More and More: “The Lord, who is wonderful in Counsel, and excellent in working, hath so wrought, that the scorching of some of his people with the Sun of persecution, hath been the enlightening of those who were not his people, with the Sun of righteousness.”

While many colonists were concerned simply to grab resource-rich land from the natives, Caryl spoke of “how much doth it become Christians to let Heathens see that they seek them more than theirs; That the gaining of them to Christ is more in their eye, than any worldly gain.”

8 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

Puritan evangelism among Native Americans was supported by high profile Puritans such as John Owen, William Bridge, Thomas Goodwin, and Philip Nye. The cause was pushed along by Henry Whitfield, not a direct physical ancestor of the eighteenth-century evangelist George Whitefield but certainly a spiritual ancestor. Whitfield published letters from men like John Eliot, the so-called “Apostle to the Indians” whose extraordinary productivity in preparing sermons and publishing sacred texts in an Indian language was unprecedented and never duplicated.

French and Spanish Roman Catholic missionaries focused on rituals and sacraments, claiming huge numbers of converts, but Eliot and Puritans like him taught and translated God’s Word, believing that even on an entirely foreign mission field, the Word of God would prove living and active, the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.

Puritan missionaries in America have been criticized for a certain amount of underlying racism and accused of using missionary efforts to consolidate military conquests. In certain places there was some segregating of Indian converts into “praying towns” likened by a few to concentration camps. To be fair, they ought to be seen against the prevailing norms of their own lifetimes and not judged entirely by the standards of later centuries, and it should be remembered that Eliot founded an academy that was notable for educating English, Indian, and African students together. But whatever mistakes we may see in hindsight, it is clear the Puritan missionaries were motivated above all by the vision of Revelation 5, where people “from every tribe and tongue and nation” stand together in praise and adoration before the Lamb of God. The Indians in Old England and Wales In his short tract, The Hirelings Ministry (1652), Roger Williams, the controversial founder of Providence (Rhode Island), highlighted another important sphere for mission. There are not just Indians back in America, he said, but “we have Indians at home, Indians in Cornwall, Indians in Wales, Indians in Ireland....Who can deny but that the body of this and of all other Protestant Nations (as well as Popish) are unconverted?” The Puritans saw the challenge of reaching the unevangelized dark corners of the land and took it on with relish.

Some outreach to areas outside London happened almost naturally as Puritan merchants traded with other parts of the country, taking the gospel along with their wares. Mission to areas outside the immediate gravitational pull of the capital was much slower.

Preachers were sometimes sent by the government to

border counties as tools of military or economic policy, to remind the populace of their spiritual duties of loyalty to the crown and diligent labor, but not necessarily to call them to fruitful obedience to the higher power of the Messiah who died for sinners.

One innovative approach to more biblical evangelism was attempted by the wonderfully named “Feoffees for the Purchase of Impropriations” (one of whom was John White, the great-grandfather of John and Charles Wesley). For several years, this lay-led initiative sought to buy up advowsons, the legal right to appoint ministers in parish churches often held by local landowners, and then to appoint reliable Puritan preachers and evangelists. Their holdings and interests were scattered but showed a marked concentration in unreached areas of Wales and its borders. The Feoffees also augmented the stipends of ministers in poorer areas to help improve the quality of the preaching ministry there, and others funded “lectures” in market towns with the aim of reaching business people with the gospel. Such were the strategic ambitions of these bold trustees that increasingly anti-Puritan forces within the government forced their suppression in 1633, but not before the conversion of many English and Welsh “Indians.”

The Indians in Our Churches The Puritan minister William Whately of Banbury once exclaimed, “What does one do when the ‘unsanctified world’ exists right within one’s own parish?” The most comprehensive Puritan answer to that question was given by Richard Baxter in his book The Reformed Pastor, which was clear that “we must labour, in a special manner, for the conversion of the unconverted.” Yet preaching alone was not sufficient for this task. With Paul in Acts 20 as his model, Baxter taught people not just from the pulpit but excelled in teaching them also “from house to house.”

In fact, Baxter invited the whole town to his home and took them, one by one, family by family, through a catechism, asking questions to probe their understanding, teaching and exhorting them where necessary. From experience he learned that this could lead to more spiritual understanding in half an hour than could ten years of preaching. Through his faithful diligence, many nominal Christians and entirely unchurched families were brought to a living faith in Christ.

Baxter’s model of ministry was highly focused on clergy activity. Laymen had their place, particularly fathers in pastoring their families, but Baxter’s model is perhaps open to the criticism that the pastor was in danger of becoming too dominant, like a medieval

priest. We may probably wish to involve laity more in evangelism and elders in pastoral visitation, reckoning lay-led small groups as the basic unit of pastoral care. But in an age of multicampus ministries and video-link sermons, where whole congregations may not know or be known by their preacher, Baxter’s personal approach to the Indians in his church may stand as a sharp rebuke to more distant pastoring techniques, which may reach thousands but only on a more superficial level.

In these ways then, the Puritans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sought to fulfill the Great Commission. They made their share of mistakes. But their politics and their theologizing sought to protect the gospel and its liberty, so that in their mission to pagan foreigners, superstitious countrymen, and nominal churchgoers they could employ every creative means at their disposal to win the nations for Christ.

There is much for us to ponder in their example.

Lee Gatiss is editor of Theologian: The Internet Journal for Integrated Theology (www.theologian.org.uk) and editor/author of several books, including Pilgrims, Warriors, and Servants: Puritan Wisdom for Today’s Church (Latimer Trust, 2010). He lives in Cambridge, England, where he is researching seventeenth-century biblical interpretation.

Studies in Acts (continued from page 6) communities, denominations, or nations. We may fail to glimpse the global dimensions and the glorious advance of Christ’s kingdom through the proclamation of the cross in the might of the Spirit and the wide embrace of God’s grace that knits persons from every race, ethnicity, and language into one new people of God. How diverse is our mental portrait of Christ’s kingdom people? How global is our passion for his kingdom mission?

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

M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 9

FROM THE HALLWAY

Renée of France: A Bruised Reed under Calvin’s Pastoral Care A bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench. (Isa. 42:3)

S

ome biographies leave us with mixed emotions. The surge of inspiration we get when reading about the unswerving faith of Christian martyrs or the utter dedication of some preachers or missionaries is

sometimes dampened by the feeling that we can’t measure up. That’s when stories of people like Renée of France comfort our hearts, reminding us that our faith, small or great, is always a gift of God, which he has promised to preserve until the end.

When John Calvin first met Renée in 1536, she was duchess of Ferrara, Italy, by virtue of her marriage to Duke Ercole d’Este. In her heart, however, as daughter of King Louis XII and Anne of Brittany, she was still primarily a French princess. In fact, had it not been for the French Salic law forbidding daughters to inherit the kingdom, she should have been on the throne of France, and she knew it well. Married to a man with very contrasting interests, intolerant of her habits and unimpressed with her plain looks, she had built a distinctively French Protestant court around herself where everyone spoke French, dressed according to the French fashion, and had access to Protestant books and preachers.

John Calvin was at that time one of the many Protestant refugees who had left France to escape persecution. Although he had just published the Institutes of the Christian Religion, he was still fairly unknown. To be safe, however, he used a pseudonym: Charles d’Eperville.

We don’t know why Calvin visited Ferrara. He had undoubtedly heard about Renée’s faith. Maybe he was hoping to find a fervent Protestant like Marguerite of Navarre, sister of King Louis, who could be instrumental in aiding French refugees and perhaps in influencing the king. What he found was a 10 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

strong-willed and lonely woman, trying to live out her faith in a difficult situation, bound as she was by her husband’s attempts to appease the pope for polit-

ical reasons.

Calvin’s short stay in Ferrara made a great impact on Renée’s court, and soon after his departure some openly rebelled against the Mass, with serious consequences. As for Renée, she developed a deep respect for the Reformer, trusting him (as her letters attest) to be her spiritual mentor—a role Calvin embraced wholeheartedly. He corresponded with her until his death, through every crisis of her life.

Dangerous Doctrines Calvin’s motives for his correspondence with Renée are listed at the onset of his first recorded letter to her—his concern for her welfare, his duty as minister of the Word to make every effort to assist those in a position of power, and most of all the display of God’s grace he had seen in her during his visit, so much that he said, “I would feel accursed did I not take advantage of every opportunity to serve you.”

This pastoral letter addressed a problem someone in her court had brought to his attention: one of Renée’s preachers had persuaded her that attending the Mass was not wrong, but that it was in fact advisable, so as not to offend the weaker brethren. After reminding the duchess that the Mass was in fact an abominable act of idolatry and blasphemy, Calvin warned her, “If we attend it to please the ignorant, those who see us present conclude that we approve it and follow our example....If we wish to avoid offending others, we will have to ban Jesus Christ, because he is the rock of offense on which most people stumble.”

We don’t know how much Renée followed Calvin’s counsel. We know that she didn’t dismiss the preacher immediately and that she attended Mass at least on some occasions, such as during the visit of Pope Paul in 1544. The duke’s gift in 1540 to her of the villa in Consandolo, a small town about fifty miles south of Ferrara, allowed her greater freedom of worship. After 1550, when the death of some Italian Protestants in her region made it clear that it was impossible to sit on the fence, we have more examples of her open refusal to attend Mass, together with her daughters.

The Inquisition and the Fall In 1553, the Church of Rome put increasing pressure on the duke. Renée’s religious tendencies were common knowledge, and the pope could no longer ignore them. In 1554, a Jesuit priest named Jean Pelletier was sent to Ferrara to investigate. After assessing the situation, he persuaded the duke to adopt rigid measures to bring his wife back into the Roman Catholic fold.

Knowing his wife’s partiality to France, and realizing her antipathy and disdain for Pelletier and his methods, Ercole asked King Henry II (who had succeeded Francis I) to send a French Catholic theologian. King Henry sent Matthieu Ory, Dominican prior in Paris.

At this point, Calvin was informed of the plan.

Revealing his deep and alarmed distress over Renée’s predicament and expressing the urgency of the matter, he regretted his inability to visit her in person, entangled as he was with the administration of the church in Geneva. Despite the scarcity of ministers, he sent another preacher, François de Morel, to comfort and strengthen her during that difficult time.

In spite of de Morel’s efforts, Renée’s situation worsened quickly. In fact, de Morel was discovered, and the duke, now more irritated than ever, confined his wife to a room in his castle, sending their daughters to a convent in nearby Modena and dismissing all of Renée’s staff. Now alone, Renée was subjected to daily rigorous lectures and persuasions by the two clergymen in a fierce struggle for her soul.

She resisted for many days. Finally, she recanted, first with Ory—in her concern, maybe, to keep good ties with the king of France—and finally, pressured by threats of never seeing her daughters again, with Pelletier. We don’t know the sincerity of her recantation. On the one hand, she wrote words of perfect submission to France and to her husband. On the other hand, Ercole never really believed her and kept her under careful surveillance until his death.

As news of her abjuration reached Calvin, he commented regretfully to his friend William Farel, “What

can I say but that an example of constancy is a rare thing among princes?” Writing to Renée, however, he admonished her in love, talking about her denial of the faith as a rumor not yet verified. “Our good God is always ready to receive us in His grace,” he wrote, “and, when we fall, he holds out his hand that our falls may not be fatal....If, through your weakness, the enemy has gotten the better hand over you, may he not have the final victory, but may he know that those whom God has lifted are doubly strengthened against any struggle.”

Slow Recovery After her recantation, Renée apparently managed to live relatively undisturbed in her villa in Consandolo. We can deduce this from some hints in Calvin’s letters: “It is an evil sign when those who have waged with you so relentless a war to turn you aside from God’s service now leave you in peace.” In another letter, he described her as asleep in a condition of spiritual enslavement.

Yet her letters reveal a strong yearning and pining for God’s service, which Calvin recognized as a good sign. He sent at least one minister to help her, even if for a short time, and continued to exhort her to seek instruction: “We don’t need to urge you—you know well how much you need it.”

In 1559 on his deathbed, Ercole asked Renée to promise again that she would live as a Catholic and stop corresponding with Calvin. He had included her in his will on condition that she lived “the Catholic way, as true Christian.” Moved by the pleas of her dying husband, Renée caved in again and promised.

Later, Calvin reassured her that, being a mistake with which she had offended God, her promise was not binding.

Moving to France Now free from her marriage obligations, Renée asked Calvin’s advice on her plans to return to France.

Calvin didn’t hide his hesitations. France had changed much since 1528, and political and religious wars were raging. Besides, he was not sure if Renée had become stronger in faith. If not, he felt compelled to warn her that the move could very well take her from the frying pan into the fire. He concluded on a positive note, exhorting her to remember that her “inheritance and eternal rest are not down here,” as both God’s Word and her experience had taught her.

In spite of his warnings, Renée arrived in Orleans, France, on November 7, 1560. She soon realized Calvin was right. The political situation in France was complex, and she found herself in a difficult situation, especially since her firstborn daughter, Anne, was M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 11

the wife of Francis, duke of Guise, one of the main protagonists in the religious war.

She moved to her castle in Montargis, hoping to distance herself from political struggles, but the war followed her there with a barrage of new challenges.

The senseless violence of both parties shocked her to the point that she decided to make her castle a refuge for all wounded, regardless of their religion. She was also appalled by the Huguenots’ requests that she allow the plundering of the shops owned by Roman Catholics in Montargis, and she was deeply offended by remarks condemning her Catholic son-in-law to hell. Besides, there was some friction between her and her minister and church-planter, de Morel, mostly pertaining to his role in the administration of her staff and his denial of her request to attend the synod meetings held in her castle. She sent her complaints to Calvin, who had been in correspondence with her all this time.

Once again, Calvin wrote a long and detailed answer, warning her against the power of personal affections and highlighting the difference between eagerness to take revenge against those who have offended us directly and a zeal to preserve God’s church against its enemies. At the same time, he praised her refusal to acquiesce to the unjust requests of the Huguenots and agreed that no one should declare another person damned. Regarding the synod, he didn’t forbid her to attend but admonished her not to interfere with its decisions. Mostly, he helped her understand the importance of submitting to the government of the church: “Madame, to have a duly Reformed church, it is more than necessary to appoint someone to watch over the life of each person. And, so that no one may feel aggrieved at having to give account of his actions to the elders, let them be chosen by the congregation.”

Calvin’s careful preoccupation with the affairs of the Reformed church in France, and his thorough investigation of each matter as it was referred to him, is amazing if we remember his concurrent involvement with the restructuring of the church in Geneva

12 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

and the development of pressing theological doctrines. Renée still felt, however, that there were many serious problems of which he was not aware: “I beg you, Monsieur Calvin, to ask God to show you the truth of all these things, since I pray that, through you, God will expose the hidden works of malice prevailing in this world and in this age.”

She didn’t know Calvin was critically ill at that time. His reply was short. After an uncharacteristic explanation of his terrible ailments, he addressed her problems briefly. He exhorted her not to be too vexed by things around her, praised her for a life spent in the faith, and encouraged her to press on.

Less than eight weeks later, on May 27, 1564, Calvin died, and Theodore Beza, his successor in Geneva, continued the correspondence with Renée.

The duchess lived for ten more years, still supporting the diffusion of the Protestant faith without intervening in the political arena. Slowly, the community of Protestant refugees in Montargis became large enough to grant the building of a Protestant college.

Before her death on June 15, 1575, Renée prefaced her will with a statement written in the third person, confessing her grievous disobedience “in spite of having been instructed in God’s pure word and truth, a blessing which has no equal in this world,” giving God all the glory for the preservation of her faith. She ended the preamble with a resolution to confess God’s truth “with heart and lips until her last breath, so that, in life and in death, she may live and die for the Lord God.”

Simonetta Carr was born in Italy and has lived and worked in different cultures. A former elementary school teacher, she has home-schooled her eight children for many years. She is the author of the series Christian Biographies for Young Readers (Reformation Heritage Books) and is presently working on a short biography of Renée of France for Evangelical Press. She lives in Santee, California, with her family and is a member and Sunday school teacher at Christ United Reformed Church.

M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 13

F O R Y O U , Y O U R C H I L D R E N , A N D A L L W H O A R E FA R O F F

Missional Church or New Monasticism?

BY 14 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

MICHAEL HORTON

M I S S I O N A L

S

ome of us remember the Tears for Fears song, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” Yet the mantra today is more about changing the world than ruling it. Lots of younger Christians are tired of spiritual consumerism and evangelism pitches about inviting Jesus into your heart so you can go to heaven when you die. There has to be more to Christianity than “soul-saving.” Isn’t there something in there about “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting”? About a new creation? Don’t we sing “Joy to the World,” anticipating the blessings of Christ’s kingdom extending “far as the curse is found”?

Nevertheless, a legitimate question can be raised as to whether this newfound interest in creation redeemed is still guided by a paradigm that owes more to monasticism than to the world-affirming piety of the Reformation.

The New Monasticism edieval monasticism was divided between those who prized the contemplative life (spiritual ascent to heaven through private disciplines of the mind) and those who gave priority to the active life (spiritual ascent through good works, especially for the poor). Francis of Assisi—and the Franciscan Order named after him—emphasized the latter.

First, today we see a revival of contemplative spirituality. It is a traditional evangelical emphasis on personal piety: discipleship as inner transformation through spiritual disciplines. Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline (1979) introduced many evangelicals to the medieval mystics and contemplative writers. From The Divine Conspiracy (1998) to The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’ Essential Teachings on Discipleship (2006), Dallas Willard has repeated this call to discipleship: inner transformation through the spiritual disciplines.

Willard presses pastors to ask themselves, “Is my first aim to make disciples? Or do I just run an operation?”1 Discipleship has lost its coinage, Willard judges with insight:

M

Discipleship on the theological right has come to mean preparation for soul winning, under the direction of parachurch efforts that had discipleship farmed out to them because the local church really wasn’t doing it. On the left, discipleship has come to mean some form of social activity or social service, from serving soup lines to political protests to…whatever. The term “discipleship” has currently been ruined so far as any solid psychological and biblical content is concerned.2

C H U R C H

O R

N E W

M O N A S T I C I S M ?

Whether in the form of “soul-winning” or social work, evangelicals are too activistic; they need to seek inner transformation through spiritual disciplines, especially “solitude, silence, and fasting.”

These, Willard says, are the “keys of the kingdom.”3 He writes, “I almost never meet someone in spiritual coldness, perplexity, distress, and failure who is regular in the use of those spiritual exercises that will be obvious to anyone familiar with the contents of the New Testament.”4 When asked to identify “the discipline that you think we need to be exploring more at this point,” Foster answered, “Solitude.”

It is the most foundational of the disciplines of abstinence, the via negativa. The evangelical passion for engagement with the world is good. But as Thomas à Kempis says, the only person who’s safe to travel is the person who’s free to stay at home. And Pascal said that we would solve the world’s problems if we just learned to sit in our room alone. Solitude is essential for right engagement.5 Second, we can observe in evangelicalism today a more “Franciscan” (active life) emphasis on true discipleship as social transformation, especially in caring for the needs of the disadvantaged among us. The spiritual disciplines and inner transformation are not completely left behind; in fact, many advocates of this model—especially in the Emergent/emerging church movement—recognize the impact of writers such as Foster and Willard. However, the prayer labyrinths, chanting, Celtic crosses, candles, and journaling are all geared ultimately to create community more than solitude and to propel the community into witness through service. Leaders in this circle like to quote that line attributed to Francis of Assisi: “Preach the gospel at all times and if necessary use words.”

For all of their differences, the similarities between these two forms of monastic piety are as evident today as ever.

“Living the Gospel” vs. “Preaching the Gospel” oth contemplative (“spiritual disciplines”) and active (Emergent) writers tend to blur and merge commands and promises, indicatives and imperatives.

That is, there is a strong tendency to identify the gospel with what we do rather than with what God has done for us—and the world—in Jesus Christ. We are active agents more than beneficiaries and witnesses of God’s reconciling work, building his kingdom through our efforts more than receiving a

B

M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 15

GRAMMAR 101: INDICATIVES AND IMPERATIVES These are terms borrowed from common grammar that we use frequently in the pages of Modern Reformation. For our theological purposes, we use them to describe the basic distinction between law and gospel.

Indicatives relate to gospel announcements whereas imperatives relate to instruction from the law. A standard dictionary defines the terms this way.

MR

in-dic-a-tive [in-dik-uh-tiv] “...noting or pertaining to the mood of the verb used for ordinary objective statements, questions, etc., as in the verb plays in John plays football.” im-per-a-tive [im-per-uh-tiv] “...noting or pertaining to the mood of the verb used in commands, requests, etc., as in Listen! Go!” Distinguishing law and gospel is sometimes as simple as determining the mood of the verb in the passage you are studying. Is the verb in the imperative or indicative mood? Is it commanding or making a request, such as “Do this and live”?

Or is the passage stating a fact, as in “Christ has set you free”?

(Definitions from Dictionary.com) kingdom that expands through preaching and Sacrament.

Willard offers his own translation (more like a very loose paraphrase) of the Great Commission: “I have been given say over all things in heaven and in the earth. As you go, therefore, make disciples of all kinds of people, submerge them in the Trinitarian Presence, and show them how to do everything I have commanded. And now look: I am with you every minute until the job is done” (emphasis added).6 Willard thinks the real problem is that there is too much emphasis on grace and justification: “If there is anything we should know by now, it is that a gospel of justification alone does not regenerate disciples.”7 Willard believes that the heart of the gospel is inner renewal and that we are transformed in our character by “carefully planned and grace-sustained 16 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

disciplines.”8 It is not so much through the gospel that the Spirit transforms us as it is through our own determination and effort: “What transforms us is the will to obey Jesus Christ from a life that is one with his resurrected reality day by day, learning obedience through inward transformation.”9 “Jesus is actually looking for people he can trust with his power.”10 Similarly, Foster complains that an emphasis on God’s grace has paralyzed the pursuit of inner transformation. Where Scripture teaches that the most important, most real, and most lasting work is Christ’s objective work in history for our salvation, Foster writes, The most important, most real, most lasting work is accomplished in the depths of our heart. This work is solitary and interior….It is the work of heart purity, of soul conversion, of inward transformation, of life formation….Much intense formation work is necessary before we can stand the fires of heaven. Much training is necessary before we are the kind of persons who can safely and easily reign with God.11 Although the Emergent movement reflects a more communal emphasis on social transformation, it shares the medieval, Anabaptist, and Pietist emphasis on deeds over creeds. Brian McLaren explains, “Anabaptists see the Christian faith primarily as a way of life,” focusing on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount rather than on Paul and doctrines concerning personal salvation.12 More than proclaiming Christ’s finished work of reconciling sinners to the Father, the focus is on completing Christ’s redeeming work of social transformation. Tony Jones, another leader in this movement, relates: “In an emergent church, you’re likely to hear a phrase like ‘Our calling as a church is to partner with God in the work that God is already doing in the world—to cooperate in the building of God’s Kingdom.’” Trying to anticipate Reformed objections he notes, “Many theological assumptions lie behind this statement,” although “the idea that human beings can ‘cooperate’ with God is particularly galling to conservative Calvinists, who generally deny the human ability to participate with God’s work.”13 According to McLaren, being “missional” means that we encourage Buddhists, Muslims, and Jews to become better Buddhists, Muslims, and Jews as followers of Jesus’ example. It is not what we proclaim but how we live that transforms the world. McLaren writes, “To say that Jesus is Savior is to say that in Jesus, God is intervening as Savior in all of these ways, judging (naming evil as evil), forgiving (breaking the vicious cycle of cause and effect, making rec-

M I S S I O N A L

C H U R C H

O R

N E W

M O N A S T I C I S M ?

onciliation possible), and teaching (showing how to set chain reactions of good in motion).”14 There is no mention of Christ bearing God’s wrath in our place— in fact, no mention of the cross having any impact on the vertical (God-human) relationship. “Then, because we are so often ignorantly wrong and stupid, Jesus comes with saving teaching, profound yet amazingly compact: Love God with your whole heart, soul, mind, and strength, Jesus says, and love your neighbor as yourself, and that is enough.” This is what it means to say that “Jesus is saving the world.”15 Although Jesus called this the summary of the law (Matt. 22:37–40, citing Deut. 6:5) for McLaren it becomes the summary of the gospel.

“I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.” With that, “the high priest tore his garments and said, ‘What further witnesses do we need? You have heard his blasphemy. What is your decision?’

And they all condemned him as deserving death” (Mark 14:53–64).

Jesus was never charged on the grounds of trying to bring world peace: quite the contrary (Matt. 10:34–37).

Jesus’ opponents never included a revolutionary blueprint for improving world conditions among the indictments against him. In fact, his mission was an utter failure for those who saw him as a leader of political revolution. He will return in glory to judge, to deliver, and to make all things new in a Then the Pharisees went and laid plans to trap [Jesus] in his words. global political kingdom of rightThey sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians....One of eousness and blessing. However, between his advents is the space in them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, history for repentance and faith. which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: Nor were Jesus’ followers “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul indicted before Jewish and Roman and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. tribunals on the charge of building meaningful community and “living And a second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law the gospel.” They were persecuted and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” for proclaiming the gospel. In a letter written to Emperor Trajan about (Matt. 22:15–16, 35–40) A.D. 112, Pliny, governor of Bithynia First, “living the gospel” is a category mistake. By def(central-northern Turkey), explains the elements of inition, the gospel is news (euangelion, “good news”). their subversive worship: You don’t “do” news; you do law and you hear gospel.

Second, the specific content of this good news is the for(1) Hymns about Jesus sung as part of early giveness of sins through faith in Christ’s saving life, Christian worship; (2) prayer to God “through” death, and resurrection. We are beneficiaries of this Jesus and “in Jesus’ name,” and even direct action, not active participants. Scripture certainly prayer to Jesus himself, including particularly teaches that we live in view of God’s mercies, in a the invocation of Jesus in the corporate worship manner worthy of the gospel we profess, and so forth. setting; (3) “calling upon the name of Jesus,” However, it represents our lives and good works as the particularly in Christian baptism and in healing fruit of the faith created by the gospel, not as part of and exorcism; (4) the Christian common meal the gospel itself. enacted as a sacred meal where the risen Jesus Third, the Scriptures teach consistently that faith presides as “Lord” of the gathered community; comes through the proclamation of the gospel, not (5) the practice of ritually “confessing” Jesus in through good works. Christ himself was not arrested the context of Christian worship; and (6) Christian prophecy as oracles of the risen Jesus, and arraigned because he was trying to restore famand the Holy Spirit of prophecy understood as ily values or feed the poor. Even his miraculous signs also the Spirit of Jesus.16 were not by themselves offensive, except as they were signs testifying to his claims about himself. The Pliny was concerned about the rapidly spreading faith mounting ire of the religious leaders toward Jesus coain Christ, as we see in his complaint to Caesar that the lesced around him making himself equal with God pagan temples were “almost deserted,” and as a result, (John 5:18) and forgiving sins in his own person, the enormous economic trade in the various cults and directly, over against the temple and its sacrificial syssacrifices was suffering. What stood out to Pliny, howtem (Mark 2:7). In fact, at his trial he was charged by ever, was the intractability of these “criminals”: all the Jewish Council with announcing the destruction they had to do in order to be sent home freely was to of the temple. When the high priest asked, “Are you curse Jesus and offer incense to the emperor. Yet this the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?” Jesus answered: M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 17

they would not do, even up to the moment of their execution.17 Throughout the New Testament, believers are said to suffer specifically “because of me [Jesus] and because of my [Jesus’] name” (Matt. 10:18, 22; for the same phrase, see Acts 4:17–18; 5:40; 6:8–8:1; 9:14, 21; 26:9, 11; 2 Cor. 11:22–29). This charge of blasphemy indicates not only the central charge of their opposition but also the central conviction of the earliest Christians: Jesus Christ as God and the only Savior.

The Romans accused the early Christians of atheism and of undermining the civil religion by refusing to participate in the cult of the emperor. Roman senator and historian Tacitus relates that “an immense multitude,” upon acknowledging they were Christians, was arrested on the charge of “hatred of the human race.”18 Yet these martyrs even used their trial as an occasion to articulate, explain, and defend the gospel (besides the many examples in Acts, see 1 Pet. 3:15–16).

So the law tells us what God requires of us; the gospel tells us what God has done for us. Precisely because the gospel is not about us but for us, there is community deeper than any natural bonds or affinities and a wider impact than occasional “ministry projects.” The gospel is the announcement that a life has already been lived perfectly for us, surrendered for us, and taken back up as the firstfruits of the new creation. Believing this good news, we then offer ourselves not as sacrifices of atonement but as “living sacrifices” of thanksgiving, spreading the aroma of Christ (2 Cor. 2:15). We live obediently “in view of God’s mercies” (Rom. 12:1–2).

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). Our lives may attract people to or repel them from the word of the gospel. However, Dan Kimball is simply wrong when he (like Jones above) invokes St. Francis’s advice about a wordless preaching of the gospel, saying, “Our lives will preach better than anything we can say.”19 Ironically, when we are seeking Christ rather than a generic social and moral impact on the society that we could have apart from him, something strange happens. A communion emerges around the Lamb, drawing people together “from every tribe, kindred, tongue, people and nation” into “a kingdom of priests to our God” (Rev. 5:9). From a justifying and sanctifying communion with Christ that they share 18 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

together, there emerges a foretaste of genuine peace, love, and justice that can orient our ordinary lives and animate our activity in our worldly callings. The Great Commission is a specific mandate with manifold effects.

To see the church’s focus as delivering God’s forgiveness of sins to the world is not due to any Platonic soul-body divide. Many of us were raised in churches that were interested in “soul-winning” rather than “saving the world.” Emergent folks are right to point us toward the wider horizon of God’s redemptive purposes. Reformation theology, however, has always generated a piety different from “Left Behind” endtime scenarios. Christ has already redeemed the world—securing blessing “as far as the curse is found.”

Yet only when he returns will this kingdom be consummated; for now, it is inaugurated and expands by proclaiming the Judge’s forgiving, justifying, and renewing grace to the ends of the earth.

Ironically, Emergent theologies share uncomfortable similarities at this point with the prosperity gospel. Both are right in their expectation of Christ’s universal reign in blessing, peace, justice, and love— beyond the reach of sin, death, and sorrow. God cares as much for the body as for the soul. But both movements jump the gun, thinking they can usher in the consummation of this kingdom by their own action.

We can make things better in this passing evil age, but it’s still “this passing evil age” rather than the consummation of the age to come. Doctors cannot conquer death, but they can be instruments of God’s common grace in delaying it. Deacons were appointed in the churches to care for the temporal needs of the saints, even though the ministry of Word, Sacrament, and discipline bestows every spiritual blessing in Christ. We can fix the roof of our fellow image-bearers, even if they are atheists, but we cannot give them a secure home beyond the ravages of poverty. That’s what it means to be “salt”: it preserves things from decaying as quickly as they might. The salvation Christ has won for us is not just “going to heaven when we die.” It isn’t a matter merely of saving souls.

We will be raised bodily at the end of the age, and the whole creation along with us in Christ’s train (Rom. 8:19–21). Yet, this second act awaits Christ’s return.

“But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (v. 25).

“Going to Church” vs. “Being the Church” f we build the kingdom by “living the gospel,” then it would make sense if we stopped going to church and instead practiced our discipleship in community or in neighborhood service projects.

Willard comments, “It is a tragic error to think that

I

M I S S I O N A L

Jesus was telling us, as he left, to start churches, as that is understood today….He wants us to establish ‘beachheads’ or bases of operation for the Kingdom of God wherever we are….The outward effect of this life in Christ is perpetual moral revolution, until the purpose of humanity on earth is completed.” So this is the real question for true disciples: “Will they break out of the churches to be his Church?”20 Similarly, Kimball writes, “We can’t go to church because we are the church.”21 From this Kimball draws the familiar contrast between evangelism (mission) and the marks of the church (means of grace).

Kimball thinks that things went wrong at the Reformation.

The Reformers, in their effort to raise the authority of the Bible and ensure sound doctrine, defined the marks of a true church: a place where the gospel is rightly preached, the sacraments are rightly administered, and church discipline is exercised. However, over time these marks narrowed the definition of the church itself as a “place where” instead of a “people who are” reality. The word church became defined as “a place where certain things happen,” such as preaching and communion.22 Ironically, identifying the church as “‘a place where certain things happen,’ such as preaching and communion” is contrasted by such writers with a missional perspective, even though Jesus himself instituted these means of grace as the Great Commission.

The shift from proclamation of the gospel to conversation about the gospel as the community’s world transforming is evident in the worship gathering.

Jones describes Jacob’s Well, a pioneering Emergent community in Kansas City: “To the classic Presbyterian sanctuary with dark-stained pews and a choir loft, JW has added the requisite video screens and replaced the pulpit with a band. All of the speaking takes place at the floor level—only the musicians are on stage” (emphasis added).23 (One might wonder how exactly this differs from the model pioneered by the megachurches.) As the predominantly white audience gathers, he says, there is a table off to one side with a quote from the contemporary Anabaptist theologian John Howard Yoder suggesting that “the visible church is not to be the bearer of Christ’s message, but to be the message.”24 Similarly, Jones’s own church, Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis (led by Doug Pagitt), transforms the traditional service into a conversation. “The point is to jettison the magisterial sermon that has ruled over much of Protestantism for five hundred years,” Jones

C H U R C H

O R

N E W

M O N A S T I C I S M ?

explains. “Here the sermon is deconstructed, turned on its head. The Bible is referred to as a ‘member of the community’ with whom we are in conversation, and the communal interpretation of a text bubbles up from the life of the community.”25 Bread and grape juice and wine are offered in “a loud, party atmosphere, and an optional quiet meditation room.”

[But] this aspect of the worship is not guided by a clergyperson….As such, communion is introduced by a variety of persons—one week it will be with a poem, another week with a testimony about “what the Lord’s Supper means to me,” and another week with the traditional “Words of Institution” from the Book of Common Prayer. [After this] we sit down again for announcements, and the kids then begin to fight over the leftover communion bread, since it’s usually cinnamon raisin or chocolate chip or cheddar jalapeño sourdough. [It’s messy] but true worship of God is a messy endeavor. I make no bones about that. It’s not meant to be done “decently and in order,” but messily and with only a semblance of order, and with a great deal of joy.26 None of this is really new. Pietism made the marks of the church identified in our Lord’s Great Commission (namely, preaching, Sacrament and discipline) secondary to a host of spiritual disciplines that he did not command. Revivalism extended this trajectory. Charles Finney, the notorious preacher of the Second Great Awakening, wrote that the Great Commission just said, “Go.…It did not prescribe any forms. It did not admit any….And [the disciples’] object was to make known the gospel in the most effectual way…so as to obtain attention and secure obedience of the greatest number possible. No person can find any form of doing this laid down in the Bible.”27 This may seem like an odd interpretation, since the “form of doing this” is given explicitly in the Great Commission—after the “Go” part! Nevertheless, this was the practical outworking of Finney’s humancentered theology. Consequently, the church is not God’s embassy, entrusted with the ministry of Word and Sacrament, but “a society of moral reformers.”

Like Finney himself, revival leaders do not need special training for their calling, since it is deeds rather than creeds that propel the church’s mission in the world. A pretty messy endeavor indeed. Catholic historian Garry Wills observes, The camp meeting set the pattern for credentialing Evangelical ministers. They were valiM A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 19

into the heavens, while the righteousness that is by faith receives Christ as he brace the indicative to which I have already referred. descends to us through the Word Like Mary Magdalene, they cherish every word from preached: sending ambassadors with his Word (Rom. 10:5–16). Faith does not their Savior’s lips and will drop everything they are come from works; works come from doing whenever they can learn from him—and then, faith, and “faith comes from hearing, and as forgiven and renewed creatures, they bring their hearing through the word of Christ” (v.

17). loving witness and good deeds to others....When you Disciples are first of all those who gladly are already justified, there is nowhere for your good hear and embrace the indicative to which works to go except out to your neighbors. God doesn’t I have already referred. Like Mary Magdalene, they cherish every word from need them, Luther famously observed, but your their Savior’s lips and will drop everything neighbor does. that they are doing whenever they can learn from him—and then, as forgiven dated by the crowd’s response. Organizational and renewed creatures, they bring their loving witness credentialing, doctrinal purity, personal educaand good deeds to others. tion were useless here—in fact, some educated Challenging the whole monastic paradigm, the ministers had to make a pretense of ignorance.

Reformation is a good historical example of this The minister was ordained from below, by the approach. Whether climbing the ladder of spiritual converts he made….The do-it-yourself religion disciplines or good works, the medieval monk was called for a make-it-yourself ministry.28 seen as a super-saint who performed these offices on behalf of the rest of the believers who were engaged Wills captures here the connection between the mesin the lower realm of secular work and family life. sage and the methods: turning the gospel concerning The Reformation dismantled this scheme, first by Christ into our good works leads logically to the emphasizing that salvation is from start to finish God’s downplaying of God’s means of grace in favor of our work for us, not our work for God. Nothing that we methods of inner or social transformation. do can contribute to Christ’s perfect righteousness, so Putting the pieces together then, just as the new God is not pleased by works that we perform for spemonasticism collapses the gospel into law and going to cial notice or credit. Second, as the Reformers church into being the church, it also collapses the observed, these works performed for our own salvachurch-as-gathered into the church-as-scattered. Or, to tion do nothing for our neighbor—especially when borrow Abraham Kuyper’s helpful categories, the the monk is ensconced in a cell busily engaged in servchurch as organization is dissolved into the church as ices that have no real benefit to others. When you are organism. There are many things that Christians are already justified, there is nowhere for your good called to do in the world as parents, employees, works to go except out to your neighbors. God doesemployers, citizens, friends, and neighbors. Like all n’t need them, Luther famously observed, but your human beings created in God’s image, believers are neighbor does. Third, all Christians are saints and called to obey the Great Commandment: love of God therefore equally justified and renewed, with the and of neighbor. Yet the church as God’s official embassy same obligations to grow in their relationship with of grace gathers guests from the highways and alleys God and to love and serve their neighbors. for the feast. Or, to change the metaphor, the churchThat’s why the Reformers translated the Bible into as-gathered is the re-salinization plant, so that forgiven the common languages of the people from the origiand renewed sinners can be scattered into the world nal tongues, wrote family worship guides, prayers, as salt each week. Without the Word and Sacraments, liturgies, catechisms, psalters and hymns for singing the salt loses its savor and is good for nothing but to be around the dinner table as well as in church. It is why thrown out and trampled underfoot. newly evangelized Christians, instructed in the faith, were encouraged and empowered to be “salt” and The New Reformation “light” in their secular callings. The impact of that enewing our response to the Great “work ethic” in quality craftsmanship, medicine, legal Commission begins with the right underand political theory, science, family life, and the arts standing of discipleship. Paul reminds us that is well attested by historians. To suggest that Reformed works-righteousness is our vain attempt to ascend theology encourages passivity out of fear of “cooperDisciples are first of all those who gladly hear and em-

R

20 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

M I S S I O N A L

ating” with God’s purposes (as Jones does above) is neither historically nor theologically well informed.

We do cooperate with God in his delivery of his gifts of common and saving grace, but not in his redeeming work. Redemption is accomplished and is therefore a victory to be announced rather than to be achieved by us.

Disciples are first of all learners, like Mary who had “chosen the better part,” as Jesus said, by sitting at Jesus’ feet to be instructed while Martha was vexed “with much work.” Those who are forgiven much love much. In view of God’s mercies, loving God and neighbor now becomes our “reasonable service” (Rom. 12:1–2). And since “the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it” (Ps. 24:1), by right of creation and redemption, we can let go of our controlling and feverish agendas—liberated finally simply to love and to serve those particular neighbors whom God loves and places along our daily path. The good news is not the mark we leave on the world but the mark God leaves on us in baptism. Because “salvation is of the Lord” (Jon. 2:9), we are liberated to become active participants in the world and lovers of our neighbors, who are sinners like us in need of our good works and God’s good news. ■

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

Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’ Essential Teachings on Discipleship (New York: HarperOne, 2006), 11.

2Willard, 53.

3Willard, 34–35.

4Willard, 30.

5Interview by Mark Galli with Richard Foster, “A Life Formed in the Spirit” (17 September 2008).

1

C H U R C H

O R

N E W

M O N A S T I C I S M ?

Willard, xiii.

Willard, 62.

8Willard, 65.

9Willard, 65–66.

10Willard, 16.

11Richard Foster, “Spiritual Formation Agenda: Three Priorities for the Next 30 Years,” Christianity Today (4 February 2009).

12Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan: 2004), 206.

13Tony Jones, The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier (New York: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 72.

14McLaren, 96.

15McLaren, 97.

16Larry W. Hurtado, How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 13, from Pliny (the Younger), Epistles in J. Stevenson, ed., A New Eusebius: Documents Illustrative of the History of the Church to A.D. 337 (London: SPCK, 1974), 13–15.

17Hurtado, 81.

18Hurtado, 79.

19Dan Kimball, The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003), 79–81.

20Willard, xiii–xiv, xv.

21Kimball, 91.

22Kimball, 93.

23Jones, 177.

24Jones, 177–78.

25Jones, 216.

26Jones, 217–18.

27Quoted in Michael Pasquarello III, Christian Preaching: A Trinitarian Theology of Proclamation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 24.

28Garry Wills, Head and Heart: American Christianities (New York: The Penguin Press, 2007), 294. Emphasis added.

6 7

M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 21

F O R Y O U , Y O U R C H I L D R E N , A N D A L L W H O A R E FA R O F F

Compassion, Creativity, and Connecting with a Burned-Over Generation

W

hen confronting the Great Commission, the most vital question is the “what.” What is the message that needs to be proclaimed to all nations? What do disciples look like? And what is the point?1 This article, however, is not going to address those questions. This article concerns itself instead with the “how” of the Great Commission. Of course, the business of disciple-making is God’s work and not ours, and to dwell on questions of strategy or approach almost automatically invites Pelagius to the table. On the other hand, to ignore the specific circumstances of one’s mission field seems a tad naive, or worse, a little despairing. How many times have you watched a well-meaning minister of the gospel shoot himself in the foot by presuming knowledge or goodwill that isn’t there, or by adopting a shrill method that precludes any chance of success (and says less about the message and more about how out-of-touch the messenger is)? To be clear, the gospel message must and will transcend any circumstantial concerns. But as much as talking about the “how” is 22 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

possible, there are some basic principles that might aid us in smuggling the good news through the elaborate defenses of the modern man.

In particular, how do we connect with what might be characterized as today’s “burned-over” generation? I use the moniker in reference to the “burnedover district” in upstate New York, which after surviving two Great Awakenings has been left spiritually bereft and is subsequently the birthplace of more cults than any other geographic region in America. The label may be a bit dramatic or curmudgeonly—Lord knows this generation is no better or worse than any other—but not to acknowledge the depth of the current disillusionment is an exercise in denial. We are dealing with a generation that has suffered the full brunt of megachurch semiPelagianism, kids who by and large have been robbed of any chance to hear the gospel as good news. This applies just as much to those who have experienced

BY

D AV I D Z A H L

C O M P A S S I O N ,

C R E A T I V I T Y,

A N D

C O N N E C T I N G

it firsthand as secondhand—that is, to the religious as well as the nonreligious.

When Christianity is linked as tightly to behavior as it has been in twentieth-century American evangelicalism, it should come as no surprise when it is widely perceived as bad news: a noose that breeds hypocrisy and neurosis in its followers. At best, it is seen as a relatively harmless illusion that helps people sleep at night—at worst, as destructively moralistic claptrap with little or no understanding of human suffering. As if that wasn’t enough, traditional Christian language has been publicly yoked to a political agenda that young people find alienating. So the situation is not good. At the risk of indulging in alarmism, the Lutheran in me might say that this profound muddling of law and gospel in today’s churches has succeeded in raising psychological defenses to record heights, not to mention creating an army of refugees whose theological baggage is enormous.2 Fortunately for us, Reformation theology—if it can escape its rhetorical and temperamental straightjacket—lends itself perfectly to the situation.

Compassion nger is a rational response to the “burnedover” state of things at those who have hijacked the words of life and at those who have let it happen. Yet as righteous and inspiring as it can be, anger must eventually give way to something else if anything constructive is to occur. After all, if you resent those you are trying to reach, you will not reach them. One thinks of the tables of radical atheist books (and the responses to them) at Barnes & Noble these days—are they converting anyone? To me, it would seem that the antagonistic attitude prevents anyone who doesn’t already agree from picking them up.

We know instinctively that blame is counterproductive. Regardless of how justified it may be, it paralyzes and alienates where it’s meant to correct (as such, it seems to be one of the devil’s chief instruments). For genuine connection to begin, for bridges to be built, blame must be allowed to transform into compassion. This almost always entails some admission of culpability, achieved by holding the situation under the microscope of original sin. We all like sheep have gone astray. Our wills are bound just as much as anyone’s, even those of us who by the grace of God have been exposed to the beauty of justification by faith. The burned-over generation never had a chance—if all I’d experienced of Christianity was feelgood sentimentality (a.k.a. denial), or worse, an engine of self-righteousness and judgment, I would have walked away too. So we begin with compassion.

A

W I T H

A

B U R N E D - O V E R

G E N E R A T I O N

New Words ompassion acknowledges the religious wreckage by first giving the “old words” a rest. We must admit and accept that much of the historical language of Christianity has long been coopted by a moralistic subculture and divested of its descriptive power. It’s a sad-but-true fact that anyone who grew up during the rise of the religious right has likely been anesthetized or at least overwhelmed by religious talk. In their new book American Grace, Robert Putnam and David Campbell argue that “we’re living through the second aftershock [of the twentieth century in America’s Christian churches]…a revolt against the association between Christian faith and conservative politics, in which millions of Americans (younger Americans, especially) may be abandoning organized Christianity altogether.”3 So when the great American novelist Thornton Wilder prophetically wrote that “the revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem—new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones,” he wasn’t kidding. If we are serious about meeting the burned-over generation where they are, we start by translating our precious jargon.

Of course, the line between translation and alteration/manipulation is a thin one. If there is hesitation here, it is well founded: the message too frequently gets lost in translation. Giving the old truths fresh expression is one thing; dressing the Christian message up as something that it’s not in order to dupe people into coming to church is another—particularly when the new dress makes it less appealing, which it almost always does. To be clear, we are not talking about relevance.4 The gospel is no more or less relevant than it ever has been, and even if we wanted to, we couldn’t change that. A recent episode of the terrific NBC sitcom Community lampooned a church’s attempt to be relevant by turning Jesus into a viralvideo rapper. Those are simply the old words recontextualized in a particularly pathetic way. We’re talking about locating the places where the law and the gospel are currently and most obviously finding their cultural (horizontal) expression, bringing them to light in as plainspoken a way as possible.

C

Proclaiming vs. Instructing o what do these fresh terms look like? Most overtly, new words are just that: new words that contain some uncorrupted kernel of the original meaning. I think of the arresting albeit inadvertent synonyms for law and gospel that country singer Chris Knight uses in the title of his song “Love and a .45” (“One’ll kill you/One’ll keep you alive”). But more than that, communicating in fresh terms entails

S

M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 23

proclaiming rather than sermonizing. Moral didacticism needs to be kept in check when dealing with a burned-over generation—not because it is wrong, but because it is tired. Instead, we demonstrate and observe—we look to connect rather than convince.

This may seem contradictory to a theology of the Word, but it isn’t. Indeed, the gospel in all its historic profundity and Mel Gibson severity must continue to be proclaimed as loudly and eloquently as possible. Of course! But with the burned-over generation, which has been exhausted by pie-in-the-sky sermonizing, this proclamation will regain its power only by avoiding the lazy, pat biblicisms or naked assertions to which the “telling” approach often punts when its imagination atrophies.

As a side note, this means that the Internet is a key frontier. We all know that the Web makes a lousy forum for debate. Despite some bright spots, the Christian blogosphere is nearly as mean-spirited and narrow as the politically partisan, in which entrenched parties throw stones and build cases from behind their screens. But the Internet does make a great evidence room, an ideal showcase for the endless stream of corroboration that the media (i.e., human beings) produce so naturally and constantly: truly, even the most mundane news stories will testify that love in the face of deserved judgment bears fruit and that criticism provokes rebellion. Like a hurt child, the burned-over generation is much more likely to engage from a place

Proclaiming rather than instructing does not always come easy to folks who have grown up in reformational situations. We tend to get nervous that if we do not spell things out, they will be misunderstood, that people might get the wrong idea.5 Our emphasis on doctrinal clarity, which has served us so well in other regards, can be a bit handcuffing if misapplied when attempting to connect with a generation that couldn’t care less. A little obliqueness actually serves the cause; curiosity is our friend, illustrations even more so. Yet there persist strong objections about metaphors getting mixed and leading to confusion.

That there is no perfect illustration for the gospel goes without saying. If we are to find new persuasive words, some of them may be ambiguous at the outset. No one ever learns to speak another language without first reconciling himself to ample mistakes.

Us vs. Us t the same time, those of us with reformational convictions have a great advantage here precisely because of our doctrinal clarity. Three theological strands in particular give us an upper hand: the doctrine of total depravity, the doctrine of imputed righteousness, and the distinction between the law and the gospel.

First, total depravity. The burned-over generation is a cynical, disillusioned bunch. They have been fundamentally disappointed, not just by religion but by life and society and so forth. In the Reformation traditions, they will find a The burned-over generation is a more accurate (read: pessimistic) description of reality than elsewhere, one that cynical, disillusioned bunch….Truly, truly accounts for the full spectrum of life as a tragic impasse, rife with human behavior. A realistic anthropology—a.k.a. the level-playing field of selfsuffering and self-inflicted trauma, centeredness for which “total depravity” functions as shorthand—allows us to is precisely the condition the cross affirm cynical and nihilistic understandings of human enterprise, without being addresses. defined or threatened by them. Truly, life as a tragic impasse, rife with suffering and selfof safety—which the Internet, with all its dubious inflicted trauma, is precisely the condition the cross anonymity, does provide for better or worse. addresses. We have a firm grasp on the depth of the So argument is not our primary means of conissue. necting. You might call this a phenomenological Reformational Christians are also free to abandon apologetic. It rejects the obsession with results that has the “Us vs. Them” rhetoric that has made the culture crippled so much modern outreach by subconsciously wars such a losing battle. We can do this because we imposing a patronizing attitude in the one reaching believe in imputed righteousness, as opposed to out. Who wants to be a project? I certainly don’t. No, infused righteousness. That is, the basis of our relaresults are fundamentally not our business. A corretionship with God is outside of us, found exclusively spondingly high pneumatology leaves no room for in Christ. By regeneration we are new creations in hidden agendas or secretly hoped-for results (or outChrist, but when it comes to our vocations in the right condescension) normally embedded within reliworld we are very uncomfortable with any assertion gious rhetoric. This is refreshing.

24 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

A

C O M P A S S I O N ,

C R E A T I V I T Y,

A N D

C O N N E C T I N G

of qualitative differences between the Christian and the non-Christian. We align ourselves instead with a more universal understanding of human nature, of original sin as evenly distributed: male or female, black or white, and most importantly, both believer and nonbeliever.

A considerably more pithy way to express this attitude comes to us in Tony Hendra’s memoir Father Joe: “There are two types of people in the world. Those who divide the world into two types of people…and those who don’t.”6 A theology of connection will sympathize every time with the outsider; it will err on the side of the nonreligious. If this comes off as overly critical of other believers (which it often does in practice), it is out of compassion for the lost. We see the church as a hospital for suffering, broken people, not a clubhouse or school for zealous perfectionists, and consequently we look to embrace the Alcoholics Anonymous ethos: Imagine walking into a church where all who entered were asked to sign a waiver at the door that said: “I’m a sinner and by stepping into the room today I acknowledge that fact.” Ministry and church life (and evangelism!) would be tremendously more effective. Unfortunately, you can come into church these days and sign up for any number of identities: Easter/ Christmas type, fanatic/Pharisee, sinner, middleof-the-road, or whatever. In AA there is only the option of sinner.7 Imputed righteousness also removes the enormous judgment obstacle that keeps us from connecting on a personal level with those outside the faith. Our claims of self-improvement are no longer viewed as a basis of our witness, causing our off-putting facades of holiness to crumble, leaving transparent human beings where there were once unapproachable Christians. Indeed, the freedom of imputed righteousness gives sinful men and women permission to confront and confess their pain, to look their selfdefeating and regressive tendencies in the eye for once, knowing that they don’t go into those dark crevices alone. We no longer have to pretend to be anything other than what the gospel tells us we are: hopeless sinners in need of mercy. We can observe and confess our own turmoil without identifying with it. We are simultaneously justified and sinful. We might even find that we have compassion for others who function similarly. To the burned-over generation, this looks like Christians who aren’t afraid of darkness or honesty. It also looks like Christians who reject any sense of superiority out of hand and are

W I T H

A

B U R N E D - O V E R

G E N E R A T I O N

therefore not holier-than-thou—at least not more than anyone else.

The Seinfeld motto of “No learning, no hugging” stands. Hypocrisy as a defining trait of the fallen man need not be explained away or denied. Human foibles suddenly lose their frustrating aspect and become a refreshing place of humor! A Pharisee will take himself too seriously. A person who believes in imputed righteousness will not. Fortunately, humor lowers defenses.

You will know them by their self-deprecation.

Next, far from believing that the burned-over generation is areligious, we believe that they, like us, are intensely religious. The late author David Foster Wallace describes it this way: In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship— be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life— then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already—it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power—you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.8 Wallace conflates worship with identity for good reason. What is our current obsession with identity if not a measure of idolatry? Isn’t it the American religion?

Or, at the very least, an indication of our limitless need for justification and therefore our universal conflict with the law.

The third place, then, where reformational Christians have an advantage in connecting with the burned-over generation is their understanding of the distinction between the law and the gospel. At heart M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 25

we are trying to connect what we see as the central message of Christian theology to “the cares and concerns of everyday life.” This message, as we’ve received it, operates theologically—and thus experientially—within the dynamic of law and gospel. We believe these words speak to an enduring human reality—not exclusively a “Christian reality” but a human reality, period. The law asserts itself over all creation and provides an immediate point of connection with the entire human race. Who doesn’t deal with some degree of pressure or criticism? Who isn’t struggling with some form of (not) measuring up?

Preached in all its psychically excavating fullness, the law demolishes “Us vs. Them” mentality once and for all. No one is righteous. All have fallen short, us included. We can speak to the burned-over generation from an equal and therefore genuinely sympathetic footing. It’s not a put-on. The gospel is for both the non-Christian and the Christian.

Phrased differently, a biblical anthropology eschews any talk of Christians “engaging with” or “transforming culture.” We are the culture! In this way, the culture wars are supplanted by a war on culture wars.

We are fundamentally not against the burned-over generation because we are a part of it.

Making Use of Uselessness inally, speaking of culture, there is no greater ally in the struggle to connect with the burnedover generation than the arts. Art has the power to conjure up the ineffable, to make us aware of things we already knew (but didn’t know that we knew), to penetrate our defenses and to sneak through our ideological filters. If it’s any good, it operates outside those boundaries. Creativity is both our mode and model for connecting.

Oscar Wilde famously wrote in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, “All art is useless,” and we would tend to agree. In fact, some might say that any work of art that can be reduced to a platitude is not really art at all. Art is not meant to instruct. When well-meaning Christians turn film or music or poetry into an ideological instrument, they do it a great disservice, paradoxically excluding the very folks they’re trying to reach with their interpretation. We must let (good) art speak for itself, and if it has any quality— that is, if it has any grounding in reality—it will inevitably shed light on life and therefore truth.

Yet art is more than expressive; it is experiential. At its best, it can get us in touch with emotions and perceptions we haven’t been able to articulate, moving us on a subrational level—a heart level—which is precisely where the good news is also aimed. It can open us up. The psychological word here is abreaction.

F

26 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

James Smith puts it this way: Unhooking the arts from a “theological” instrumentalism grants space for the arts to reveal the brokenness of creation without being supervised by a banal moralism. A painting or a poem reveals the world with a harrowing attention that will sometimes bring us face-to-face with what we’ve managed to willfully ignore up to that point.9 This is the most difficult of things to do for the “Christian” artist, or for anyone with a strongly held conviction—to have the art form itself be an experience of, rather than didactically affirm either directly or through a clumsy symbolism, Christian life, which is after all just life. Ironically, this most difficult thing can be done only without conscious effort to create a “Christian” work. If it’s being supervised by “banal moralism,” it will by definition not connect. A prescribed message or outcome will destroy the project from the get-go. It must come directly from the gut.

Believers who set out to make a “human” piece of art, independent of any pietistic “law” or ”should” related to its outcome—if they’re in touch with themselves— will connect with both believers and nonbelievers.

The vast majority of the so-called Christian artists who are connecting with the wider world adopt this approach. Take Stuart Murdoch of the Scottish pop band Belle and Sebastian, for instance. Murdoch is clearly a Christian (he teaches Sunday school at his home Protestant church in Scotland), yet his songs aren’t vehicles for his ideology; there’s absolutely no attempt to convince anyone of anything. Christianity is not a source of insecurity for him; it’s simply a fact of life—a line about church-going dropped here, a reference to the New Testament there—and as such, it becomes a much more attractive one. Devoid of defensiveness, the authenticity is contagious, and it connects with the burned-over generation (his audience is primarily non-Christian), which is starving for authenticity and emotional depth. The same is true in the films of Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, Barcelona, and Last Days of Disco), which employ a similarly “peripheral approach” and almost seem to take Christianity for granted—perhaps the more convincing endorsement of all.

Most of all, art that connects with others will be the art that connects with us, at least if we’re honest with ourselves (which, again, the doctrine of imputed righteousness facilitates). It will be art that experientially gets us in touch with the deepest aspects of our experience: bondage, love, judgment, loss, conflict, guilt, forgiveness, and so on. We explore it, unafraid

C O M P A S S I O N ,

C R E A T I V I T Y,

A N D

C O N N E C T I N G

of where it takes us, confident that the truth is the truth is the truth. In other words, if we don’t genuinely like the art we’re sharing, we might as well not bother doing so.

The Ministry of Freedom and Illumination ot surprisingly, the closest corollary to ministry in this context is the creative process.

Many would say that when we are in the realm of creativity, we are in the realm of the divine.

We are dealing with desire, not duty—inspiration, not obligation. Creativity must be the basis of any effort to reach a generation that values authenticity.

The burned-over generation can smell a phony a mile away, but creativity cannot be contrived. Ministry that flows from inspiration or desire, as the case may be, will connect. Like the Holy Spirit, it will be joyful and spontaneous and heartfelt.

The law—in this case, the content- or performance-related “ought”—stifles ministry in the same way that it stifles creativity. Criticism blocks inspiration, and perfectionism paralyzes—just ask Axl Rose, Michael Jackson, or Stanley Kubrick. But grace, both the common and not-so-common variety, is the word that grants the artist permission to confront the real horror and beauty of the inner life. It is a productive force—one that allows the artist as well as the preacher to connect with others. So we can embrace ministry as a creative endeavor with inspiration at its core, checking duty at the door.

This sort of creativity responds to the Great Commission quite radically. It asks not how we should fulfill it but how we want to fulfill it, because the “want” and the “should” are ultimately the same.

Nothing else matters because nothing else will be genuine. So how are you inspired to make disciples?

That is how they will be made, thank God—through inspiration rather than obligation.

In the meantime, as we wait on the Holy Spirit for illumination, we work to expunge the superficial distinctions between Christian and non-Christian wherever possible, dwelling instead on the common ground of human suffering and mining the plumb line of spiritual longing that exerts itself in all our endeavors. We chase after new persuasive words, confident that the message will always have more traction than our delivery of it. We resist our hardwiring for imperative-based ministry. Finally, we live our lives openly and with some degree of self-understanding, trusting that the good news will come to the burned-over generation as it comes to us—from the outside and in spite of our resistance. ■

N

W I T H

A

B U R N E D - O V E R

G E N E R A T I O N

David Zahl is the director and founder of Mockingbird Ministries, a nonprofit dedicated to connecting the historic truths of the gospel with the realities of everyday life. He edited Mockingbird’s recent publication Grace in Addiction: What the Church Can Learn from Alcoholics Anonymous, and co-edited their book The Gospel According to Pixar. He also serves on the staff of Christ Episcopal Church in Charlottesville, Virginia. The 2011 Mockingbird Conference (“Grace for Today: Freedom in a Culture of Control”) will take place from March 31 to April 2 in New York City.

See Michael Horton’s “The Great Announcement” in the January/February 2011 issue of Modern Reformation.

2The 2009 American Religious Identification Survey found that “the percentage of Americans claiming ‘no religion’ almost doubled in about two decades, climbing from 8.1 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2008. The trend wasn’t confined to one region. Those marking ‘no religion,’ called the ‘Nones,’ made up the only group to have grown in every state, from the secular Northeast to the conservative Bible Belt. The Nones were most numerous among the young: a whopping 22 percent of 18- to 29year-olds claimed no religion, up from 11 percent in 1990. The study also found that 73 percent of Nones came from religious homes; 66 percent were described by the study as ‘de-converts.’” Christianity Today: http://www. ctlibrary.com/ct/2010/november/27.40.html.

3As paraphrased by Ross Douthat, The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/opinion/20doutha t.html?_r=1&ref=opinion.

4This topic has had more than a fair airing recently with the high-profile release of Brett McCracken’s book Hipster Christianity. To catch up, read the pieces McCracken wrote for The Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527487041117045753 55311122648100.html?mod=googlenews_wsj, and Christianity Today: http://www.ctlibrary.com/ct/2010/september/9.24.html. See also James Smith’s smart review for The Other Journal at Mars Hill: http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=1034&header=perspective. Both men make valid points.

5Again, Michael Horton’s recent article “The Great Announcement” has some wise words along these lines.

6Tony Hendra, Father Joe (New York, Random House, 2005), 190.

7John Z. and Tom B., Grace in Addiction: What the Church Can Learn from Alcoholics Anonymous (New York: Mockingbird, 2010), 5.

8David Foster Wallace, This Is Water (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), 99–110.

9See http://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/2083/.

1

M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 27

F O R Y O U , Y O U R C H I L D R E N , A N D A L L W H O A R E FA R O F F

Bible, Translation, and Evangelism: “And How Shall They Hear Without a Preacher?”

T

his year marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible, otherwise known as the “Authorized Version.” Whether it was truly “authorized” or not, there is little doubt about its impact upon the English language, literature, and theology. Recently published books such as Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language and Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible attest to its ongoing influence, and texts such as In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture, God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, Bible: The Story of the King James Version 1611–2011, and A Visual History of the King James Bible provide very readable histories of this influential translation.

Beyond its literary and theological impact, however, the King James Bible has also had a tremendous influence upon evangelism. Historically, Anglican evangelization was promoted partially through both the Book of Common Prayer and the Authorized Version of the Bible. Millions heard the proclamation of the good news of Jesus Christ through the propagation of these texts. Millions of other people, Anglican or otherwise, memorized the King James Bible for instruction, edification, and for evangelistic purposes.

BY 28 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

D O N A L D P. R I C H M O N D

B I B L E ,

Having said this, the King James Version does not stand entirely on its own merit. It was translated and stood squarely upon the shoulders of William Tyndale, who himself was influenced by other texts and translators. A vast majority of the King James Bible is, quite simply, the work of Tyndale (as T. S. Eliot is purported to have said, “Good writers borrow, great writers steal”).

Within the church and even before,1 the issue of translation has always been central to evangelism. We read of this as early as Acts 2 when thousands heard the Word of God in their own tongue, and took this message of Christ back to their own countries and communities. This legacy continues even today, and will likely continue until our Lord returns.

As such, it is important for us to consider how we “translate” the written Word of God into the “tongue” of family, friends, fellowship, community, and country. We are all translators of God’s Word. We are even, as St. Paul tells us, “living epistles.” Our lips speak the truth, and our lives should as best we can bear out something about the message we proclaim. What are we saying? What should be the guiding principles governing how we communicate God’s words in our contemporary culture?

When the Authorized Version was translated, the translators were commanded to abide by certain priorities, principles, and practices. Fifteen were listed by the bishop of London, Richard Bancroft.2 Let us examine a few of these, making application to ourselves and circumstances.

Rule 3 urged the translators to use “The Old Ecclesiastical Words,” which were “to be kept.” Within the Anglican churches, contrary to more radical reformers, a historic continuity was maintained between medieval Roman Catholicism and the sixteenth-century Reformation. At times, the differences between Anglicans and Presbyterians centered upon words. Bancroft, acting as an agent of King James I, insisted that words such as “ecclesia” and “presbyter” be interpreted and translated from an established ecclesiastical perspective (“church” and “priest”) and not from a more Reformed and ministerial perspective (“congregation” and “senior/elder”). While Protestants continue to be divided on this issue, we are all agreed on one point: The work of translating God’s Word through our lives and into the world must be attentive to history. Christians are called to listen carefully to our past, most especially the biblical narrative. The narrative of how God moves in the world does not begin with us. Christian history does not begin in the sixteenth century. Christian history is centered in Jesus Christ (who is the same yesterday, today, and forever) and includes God’s words through

T R A N S L A T I O N ,

A N D

E V A N G E L I S M

the Old Testament law, prophets, and writings. Our lives must be informed by this history in order to be radically transformed. Our lives must be informed by history in order to effectively engage the world, presenting it with timeless truth.

Rule 6 reads, “No Marginal Notes at all to be affixed, but only for the explanation of the Hebrew or Greek Words.” Although this may appear reasonable, King James had an entirely different agenda than simply keeping the written Word of God an unadulterated text of revelation. In short, he did not like the Puritans, and he thought that the notes contained in the Geneva Bible were theologically suspect and politically subversive. Consequently, he wanted to eliminate the notes in the Geneva Bible in order to minimize Puritan influence. Again, there continue to be differences of opinion between the casual and radical reformers on this issue. However, when applied to how Christians are called to communicate the gospel, we are all agreed. Christians must be very careful about adding to or subtracting from the written Word of God. We must strive in all that we do to be pure conduits of who God is and what God communicates. While God does use each of our personalities in order to communicate his Word, we must also make sure that our personalities are submitted to Scripture and to the Spirit. Our lips and our lives must speak with one voice, unadulterated by the “marginal notes” that undisciplined lives lend to the process of conversation. If people reject Christ, we must ensure that it is not because they are distracted by our own sins and shortcomings.

Although Bancroft was resistant to marginal notes, he was very open to a cross-referencing system within the Authorized Text of the King James Bible. This is outlined in Rule 7. One of the glories of the Reformation was the recovery of the Bible and of long-forgotten doctrines derived from the Sacred Text.

Reformers sought to recover the whole Bible and not simply parts of it. Indeed, both Wycliffe and Tyndale sought to move the English people away from superstitious stories of saints back to the supernatural revelation that God provides in Holy Scripture. Moreover, the composition and compiling of the Book of Common Prayer encouraged an in-depth reading of the Scriptures: Old Testament, New Testament, and the Apocrypha (more later). On a personal level, Rule 7 urged the people of God to be fully informed Christians. We must know the Word of God in order to grow in the grace of God. Heretics emphasize one text above another, giving no credence to God’s complete revelation. Heresy is spawned in the slime of underdeveloped or misapplied theology. The translation of any given text must be informed by the entire M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 29

is an island.” How true. We do not stand alone. To be effective, to convincingly we seek to translate God’s eternal Word share Christ’s gospel, to win the world to Christ, we must work together.4 As our into our lost world. Although there is Lord has said, the faithful scribe draws value to be found in denominational from the riches of both the old and the new. History, good history, is heritage. distinctions, most especially when History, good history, is hope.

The King James Bible, an act of transpertaining to essential doctrines, we are lation that has influenced countless milcharged by Christ to be “one” and to lions for good, reminds us that we must be and always are “translators” of Jesus express our faith through love.

Christ. The world needs effective evancorpus of revelation. Every Christian must be an gelists, but how will they hear without holy preachinformed Christian in order to be a transformed ers, without those who “translate” Christ and his Christian. Only transformed Christians will be able to Word into the languages of a lost world? ■ “translate” Sacred Text into social context.

Community was emphasized in Rules 8–10. That is, the King James Bible was not the work of one man.

The Very Rev. Dr. Donald P. Richmond, a widely pubRather, the translation of the King James Bible was lished author, is a presbyter and examining chaplain with undertaken by companies of men who worked coopthe Reformed Episcopal Church. eratively. It is to be noted in this regard that it was a Puritan who was placed in charge of the translation of 1It is to be noted that the LXX was, as a single examthe Apocrypha, those books between the Old and ple among others, translated and used for evangelistic New Testaments to which Puritans were militantly purposes both among the Jews and within the early opposed.3 Christians must learn to work together as Church. we seek to translate God’s eternal Word into our lost 2Alister McGrath, In The Beginning: The Story of the King world. Although there is value to be found in denomJames Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a inational distinctions, most especially when pertainCulture (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 173–75. ing to essential doctrines, we are charged by Christ to 3Gordon Campbell, Bible: The Story of the King James Verbe “one” and to express our faith through love. How sion 1611–2011 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), we express this loving oneness may be different from 52–53. The issue of the Apocrypha has still not entirely person to person and from place to place. Some will been resolved. Roman Catholics and Orthodox accept emphasize a “visible unity,” while others are content them. Presbyterians and radical Protestants reject them. with a “viable unity.” Some will focus upon the Anglicans, in keeping with the Thirty-Nine Articles of Recatholicity of the church, while others focus upon the ligion, accept them for edification but reject them for espurity of the church. Some will stress denominatablishing doctrine. An enlightening “must-read” text on tional lines and others will minimize them. Genuine this issue is Craig T. Allert, A High View of Scripture? The issues of difference do exist, and we must not miniAuthority of the Bible and the Formation of the New Testament mize this or compromise truth. Nevertheless, we must Canon (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007). strive to work as a community toward Christian unity 4Prayer is the great “work” we must do—which is, in and the fulfillment of the Great Commission. fact, true theology. The psalmist and St. Paul tell us how Translation of Word into world is mediated, at least blessed are the “feet” of those who share the good news. partially, through the communion of the faithful— The Richmond Revised Translation of this text suggests the church of our Lord Jesus Christ, walking, work“knees.” ing, weeping, worshipping, and witnessing together.

Finally, reference is made to other translations that were also to be consulted, including the once outlawed Tyndale Bible and the politically suspect Geneva Bible. Other texts are also referenced in Rule 14. Scholar Alister McGrath properly suggests that the King James Bible stood on “the shoulders of giants.”

It does. We all do! John Donne, the great Anglican poet and dean of St. Paul’s, rightly stated that “no man

Christians must learn to work together as

30 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

FOR YOU, YOUR CHILDREN, AND ALL WHO ARE FAR OFF

erica: m A in h it a F e h t Contending for o An Open Letter t rches u h C n a ic r e m A h t Nor tandika a M r e h c t le F v.

From Re

write to you to r ge ea ry ve I was y to Beloved, although ound it necessar f I n, o ti va al s was mon r the faith that about our com o f d en nt o c to le to you or certain peop write appealing F . s nt ai s e th or vered to ere designated f w once for all deli o ag ng lo o h oticed w ervert the grace p o h have crept in unn w , le p eo p on, ungodly y Master and nl o r u o this condemnati ny de d sensuality an of our God into rist. (Jude 3–4) Lord, Jesus Ch d ican Brothers an er m A h rt o N d ove To my dearly bel t, greetings.

Sisters in Chris write this letter to ge le vi ri p t r this grea e I thank God fo the Lord will b at th is r ye ra p e and hen to you. My hop you and strengt s s le b to er tt this le or all pleased to use aith once and f f e th r o f d en all the praise e b you as you cont ne o al d o G saints. To rever and ever! o f t delivered to the s ri h C s u through Jes glory and honor Amen.

M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 3 1

I

am writing to share a few things that I have been thinking about over time regarding the state of the church in North America and in the Western world, in light of the prevailing trends we are seeing as a result of the church’s departure from the Scriptures, from historic Christianity and its pillars. This matter is and has been of great concern to me for a very long time.

While I was in Malawi and before I went to Westminster Seminary in California where I studied for my Master of Divinity degree, I had a lot of questions about the content and depth of American Christianity as I encountered and interacted with Christians and missionaries (short term and long term) from America. The biggest questions for me centered on the Christ-centeredness and the Wordcenteredness of American Christianity. Much of what I saw and experienced seemed shallow, subjective, and sentimental. It seemed more worldly than godly.

This troubled me very much—it left a sour if not a bitter taste in my mouth and was often nauseating.

However, I did not know what to do about it as I did not understand the root of the problem and, at times, I was unsure if my sentiments were right or wrong— but something just felt off balance.

While in seminary, I continued to interact with many American evangelical Christians. Things began to get clearer as many of my doubts and suspicions were confirmed regarding the shallowness, softness, and “safeness” of American Christianity. Christianity

American Christianity. First, I am concerned for the future of global Christianity. The impact that this shallow, subjective, and sentimental (Americanized) Christianity is having on the rest of the world is of great concern to me and many of my fellow African brothers and sisters in Christ. The kind of Christianity that is being exported to the rest of the world (particularly the developing world) from America is incredibly harmful. As a Malawian Christian, I am concerned about negative influences of the American Church in my home country at different levels, not the least of all theologically.

In God’s good providence, the American church has been used of the Lord to bless the church of the Lord Jesus Christ around the world in many ways.

You have sent more missionaries to the world than any other country around the globe. That is commendable and something for which I give praise to the Lord. However, it goes without saying that what the rest of the world needs is not an Americanized version of Christianity. Rather, the world (and America included) needs the pure and Christ-centered Christianity clearly taught in the Holy Scriptures. The kind of Christianity that embraces pain and suffering and addresses the fundamental human problem— namely, sin—through the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. The kind of Christianity taught and practiced in North America is in many respects contrary to the Word of God. It is soft and easy. It teaches no selfdenial and refuses to take risks. It is more about seeking personal comfort and security. If this The kind of Christianity that is being exported to kind of Christianity spreads and gets rooted among the nations, then I wonthe rest of the world (particularly the developing der what the future of the global world) from America is incredibly harmful. As a Christian church will look like.

Second, I am concerned about the Malawian Christian, I am concerned about eternal impact of this kind of Christianity negative influences of the American Church in on individual souls. The kind of Christianity being frequently practiced my home country at different levels, not the least across North America is, as Michael of all theologically.

Horton has rightly described it, “Christless.”1 If this is indeed the case (as I believe it is based on my personal experience), then in America is relatively “safe” with very few risks there is reason enough to be concerned about the involved (if any at all). The scandal of the gospel of the eternal impact of this kind of Christianity not only on Lord Jesus Christ, the cross, and the cost of following individual souls in the pews but especially on those Christ are not things many American believers like to who preach and propagate this kind of Christianity. talk about and celebrate. All this just seems so strange.

My third and greatest concern is the glory of God While I expected to be able to speak the same lanand of the Lord Jesus Christ. The church of Jesus guage with my fellow Christian brothers and sisters in Christ must of necessity aim at and care about the America (especially those in the Reformed Church), glory of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ in everyI felt as if we were speaking different languages and thing she does. Christ must always be at the center of often speaking past each other. the church’s worship, evangelism, and missions. The As an African Christian, I have three main conchurch must strive by the grace of God to open the cerns when it comes to the American church and 32 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

C O N T E N D I N G

eyes of the blind by faithfully proclaiming and living by the gospel of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 4:1–6). I feel that many churches across North America are preaching a different kind of gospel, which the Lord through the apostle Paul condemns in Galatians 1:8–9. I plead with all who have been called to preach the gospel to follow the example of the apostle Paul and preach the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:26–27) and contend for the historic Christian faith (Jude 3).

My main goal in writing this letter is to highlight what I consider to be the central problem that I have observed and experienced in the North American Church, which is the lack of the faithful preaching of the Word of God. Article 29 of The Belgic Confession of Faith identifies this as the first mark of a true church.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism (Q & A 89) clearly states, “The Spirit of God maketh the reading, but especially the preaching of the word, an effectual means of convincing and converting sinners, and of building them up in holiness and comfort, through faith, unto salvation” (emphasis mine). The pure and unadulterated gospel of God’s grace is a nonnegotiable priority for the church of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Sadly, something other than the pure gospel of God’s salvation for sinners has taken center stage in the pulpits of North America to the extent that some churches have become what the Westminster Confession of Faith rightly describes as “the synagogues of Satan” (WCF 25.5). In many church circles, people do not want to hear about their fallen state because of sin and their need for faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, leading to repentance unto salvation. These important truths are not always discussed, explained, or applied in the pulpits of America.

I have been to a number of churches where from the moment you walk in, you have no idea what’s going on. You go there expecting to worship and meet with the Living God, but you come out dejected and wondering if it was all worth it—sometimes feeling as if you had just participated in some evil practice (like pagan worship). The moment the preacher opens his mouth, I have often caught myself reaching for a “seatbelt,” not knowing where he was going to take me—many times not preaching from a text of Scripture but building the “sermon” around a movie clip, a newspaper article, or a story of his own making. It’s like riding on the dirty and bumpy roads in Malawi in a jeep that has neither shocks nor brakes.

It’s very frightening and uncomfortable to say the least—and it’s pretty sickening. What’s worse though is hearing people’s remarks after hearing such a “sermon,” such as “Wasn’t that a great sermon?” and how “so and so” is a great preacher. The people sitting

F O R

T H E

F A I T H

I N

A M E R I C A

in the pews are just gobbling up garbage and junk (which is pollution for the soul) as their level of biblical knowledge and doctrine is so low—almost nonexistent for many of them. They can teach their kids to sing songs such as “Jesus Loves Me This I Know,” but they have no clue what that really means. I have been brought to tears, mourning for the lost opportunity for so many who need to hear “Thus saith the Lord”—a prophetic word from the mouth of God through the preacher to sinners who are at odds with him because of their sin.

A few years ago, an older minister from a mainline denomination who had reached retirement age lamented as we talked. “Fletcher, I cannot preach about sin in my congregation. People get mad at me, and they would walk out of the church if I did that.”

With great frustration and disillusionment, he continued, “I am serious! This is the reality in many congregations and in our denomination.” I felt distressed to hear this minister lament in that manner at the end of his many years of ministry. What a sad reality! I did not know how exactly to respond to him. I did with him the only thing that I could do. I asked him if we could pray together for his (now former) congregation, his denomination, and for America. As I reflect on this, I wonder how many more gospel ministers in North America will reach the end of their ministries in this manner. I pray there will be few.

Let me just take a moment and address all of my brothers who have been called to preach the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Dear brothers, remember that you have been given the highest calling that any mortal man can receive from the Lord Jesus Christ. In his divine providence, the Lord has graciously chosen and called you to declare the whole counsel of God for the salvation of sinners and sanctification of his flock entrusted to you. Heed the divine instruction handed down to Timothy and to us through the pen of the apostle Paul in 2 Timothy 4:2: “Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching.”

Remember, dear brothers, that souls of sinful men and women are at stake! If you do not preach the Word faithfully, you may fill your churches with thousands of seemingly “happy” and yet unsaved adherents who will soon stand before the seat of judgment— perhaps without knowing Christ as their mediator— and you yourself will have to give an account for their souls before the Lord on the Last Day (Ezek. 33:8–9).

Remember, dear brothers, that the gospel needs no improvement! In fact, the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ cannot be improved upon. The Lord God has put his saving power in his gospel (Rom. 1:16–17). Any attempt to improve upon this gospel will only ruin it M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 33

the house of worship and in all aspects of your life to the extent that others will be of sin will lead any serious-minded Christian to compelled and challenged to passionately embrace and behold Christ as “the Lamb savour the sweet gospel of God’s salvation. The of God who came to take away the sin of pulpits as well as the pews must seek to make the the world!” (John 1:29). Anyone whose gospel crystal clear and treasure it above all things. life has been gripped and impacted by the sobering and sweet truth of Christ’s atone“Good” moral advice and self-help tips will do ment for sin on the cross will do everynothing to save dying souls and must be shunned thing in his power (under God) to make at all costs. sure that others get it and that they too are gripped and impacted by this good and further incite the wrath of God. The simple and news of God’s salvation for sinners. yet life-changing gospel as handed down to us by the Fourth, let me encourage you to learn to appreciate the apostles in the words of Scripture (1 Cor. 15:3–4) is gospel and its necessity for the salvation of sinners. The powerful to save even the worst of sinners. gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ is the world’s only good I would be remiss to proceed in this letter without news. It gives hope to the hopeless “sinners in the addressing you, my fellow brothers and sisters in the hands of an angry God,” as Jonathan Edwards said in pews, especially because this letter is primarily his most famous sermon. A sober understanding of directed to you and not necessarily the clergy, the gravity and misery of sin will lead any seriousalthough I do pray and hope that they too will derive minded Christian to savour the sweet gospel of God’s some benefit from reading it. But for you, I have salvation. The pulpits as well as the pews must seek these five things to say. to make the gospel crystal clear and treasure it above First, sincerely long for the Word of God. “Like newborn all things. “Good” moral advice and self-help tips will infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you do nothing to save dying souls and must be shunned may grow up to salvation” (1 Pet. 2:2). Seek to learn at all costs. and be mastered by the Word of God. May God’s Fifth, keep your ministers accountable, especially by prayWord be enough for you and sufficient to fill you up ing for them. I think this point is self-explanatory, but and guide you in all matters of faith and practice.

I will say one thing here. Every gospel minister must Hunger and thirst for more of God’s Word especially be kept accountable in terms of how faithfully he when you go to the house of worship. Make it cenexercises his duties and responsibilities, especially tral to everything that you do and desire as you go when it comes to the preaching of God’s Holy Word. from day to day.

There are many ways to keep ministers accountable, Second, fight against the spirit of the age. “For the time but I will not delve into all that except to say pray for is coming when people will not endure sound teachyour ministers that by God’s grace and the working of ing, but having itching ears they will accumulate for God’s Holy Spirit they may be kept faithful and true themselves teachers to suit their passions, and will turn to their calling. In my view, that is the best way to away from listening to the truth and wander off into keep your ministers accountable before God and their myths” (2 Tim. 4:3–4). Paul’s exhortation to Timothy congregations. written centuries ago still rings true today. It is sad that I would like to end this letter with a warning, an the entertainment culture has so penetrated the exhortation, and a promise from the Word of God. church in North America, so much so that the people First, here is the warning: Beware of the devil and his in the pews expect to be entertained when they go to schemes. There are many false prophets running the house of worship, instead of confronted and comaround today trying to destroy the church of Jesus forted by the Holy Word of God in its totality.

Christ through deception. Beware of them (Matt.

Third, seek to understand Christ’s atoning work on the 7:15–20). The devil is, of course, at the center of all cross.2 Christ’s atonement for sin on the cross is, in my this deception. He does not come clothed in wolf’s view, the bedrock of our salvation and of the Christian clothing. He is too smart to do that. He comes clothed faith. Any serious Christian should be amazed by and in sheep’s clothing and so do his messengers, as the seek to better understand the grace of God given to us Bible tells us. He disguises himself as the “angel of through the Lord Jesus Christ and his substitutionary light” as do his servants (2 Cor. 11:14–15). But he is death on the cross, where he stood condemned in our prowling around like a roaring lion seeking whom he place and made us right with God (2 Cor. 5:21). I plead may devour. The Bible calls us to resist him so that he with you to make much of this truth when you go to may flee from us (1 Pet. 5:8ff). Paul Harvey’s If I Were A sober understanding of the gravity and misery

34 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

C O N T E N D I N G

the Devil illustrates this biblical truth.3 To my fellow gospel ministers, let us heed Paul’s instruction: “Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood” (Acts 20:28). Guard God’s flock from ravenous wolves that may be among you.

Second, a pleading exhortation: Stop playing as the church and start being the church that the Lord Jesus Christ bought with his precious blood. Church is serious business and so is the worship of God. We do not have the luxury of worshipping the Lord God in the way of our own choosing. If we are going to worship God rightly and truly reflect his character, then we must worship him in accordance with his Word. “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24). In addition to that, we must strive to “be holy even as he is holy” (1 Pet. 1:16). It’s time to get real. The world is perishing. There is no time for playing church games. Souls of sinful men in the hands of an angry God are at stake. God’s glory is at stake. Let’s honor Christ, the Head of the church who shed his precious blood and died to purchase a people for his own, even the church to be his bride.

Third and finally, a promise for your encouragement: Do not despair. Remember the faithful words of our Lord Jesus Christ, “I will build my church.” The situation might be pretty bad in your own denominations and/or congregations, but don’t lose heart. There is hope in Jesus Christ. The battle is not lost! If you are a true believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, hold on to the faith. Keep fighting the good fight of faith. If you are a gospel minister, pray for the outpouring of God’s Holy Spirit upon America and keep preaching the gospel faithfully. It’s not a lost cause. Preach Christ, the Son of the Living God, and him crucified. Remember his own words, “On this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt.

16:18). Hold onto that promise and watch what he will do, and when the Chief Shepherd appears, you will be found blameless.

Thank you very much for letting me share these concerns with you. May the Lord be pleased to pour out his Holy Spirit afresh upon America! May we experience a new reformation and a return to the true worship of the Triune and Living God through Jesus Christ!

F O R

T H E

F A I T H

I N

A M E R I C A

(Jude 24–25) Your brother in Christ, Rev. Fletcher Matandika Pastor, New Westminster Chapel New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada

■

Rev. Fletcher Matandika (B.A., Biblical Studies, African Bible College; M.Div., Westminster Seminary California) is founder and president of Joy to the World Ministries International (www.jtwministries.org) and founder of Ministry of Hope (www.ministryofhope.org), a Christian ministry that cares for over 3,000 orphaned children. He was born and raised in Malawi, and his father, Rev. R. A. Matandika, is a minister in the Nkhoma Synod of the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian (CCAP).

See Michael Horton, Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008).

2For more on the atonement, I highly recommend James Denney’s Death of Christ, which can be accessed at: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/denney/christ_death.ii.i. html.

3See http://www.jesus-is-lord.com/ifiwere.htm.

1

Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.

M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 35

F O R Y O U , Y O U R C H I L D R E N , A N D A L L W H O A R E FA R O F F

Let Your Words Be Gracious: A Glimpse into Personal Evangelism

By Leon Brown

W

hen it comes to sharing your faith, where do you start? Some people suggest beginning with the “how-to” of one-on-one evangelism and finding a basic model to follow in any situation. As it’s reported that public speaking anxiety ranks high in North America and can be a barrier to personal evangelism, others say you first need to overcome personal fear in this area. But sharing the gospel is no mere public speaking presentation—the Bible requires laying truth on the line, such as the holiness of God, his wrath against sin, the importance of faith, repentance from sin, and the exclusivity of Christ.

36 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

Other advice, perhaps not so helpful, is that you need not share your faith at all. While the first two suggestions are reasonable, they are insufficient as a starting point. It’s not that you don’t need to know the basics of how to share your faith or that you shouldn’t be concerned about overcoming your fears, it’s that there is a better place from which to begin, a bigger picture into which personal evangelism fits. It is in understanding the importance of the church—that the church is not just an aid in personal evangelism but a talking point, a place to which you can invite family, friends, and neighbors alike with great confidence.

L E T

In many evangelism training seminars or other programs, the importance of the church is almost entirely ignored. Christians are regularly taught the basics of sharing their faith: a few simple ideas on overcoming fear, how to use gospel tracts, the best ways to answer primary objections, and even how to set up appointments for future interactions and additional conversation about the gospel. But what about the importance of the church? Isn’t that where disciples are made by preaching the gospel? Isn’t that where the administration of baptism and the Lord’s Supper occurs (Matt. 28:19–20)? Clearly, these things take place in the church, but unfortunately in many evangelism seminars and instructional programs, the gathering of the saints on Sundays is almost entirely left out. So just what does personal evangelism look like from the perspective of the church?

The Importance of the Church he church is paramount in the making of disciples who continue to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. As you gather to worship on the Lord’s Day, “you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven…and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant” (Heb. 12:22–24). Christ, by his grace, has called men, women, and children from a place of darkness into marvelous light (1 Pet. 2:9). The church is where we find strength and comfort as we hear the preaching of the gospel and partake of the Sacraments.

The gospel of Jesus Christ assures us of our right standing before God and the forgiveness of all of our sins (Rom. 8:1). The Sacraments visibly demonstrate God’s faithfulness to us and his abiding love for us as we touch, taste, and see the elements as the Holy Spirit works amid the congregation. With such an amazing privilege before us each week, how could Christ’s church not find a place of priority in personal evangelism?

The result of the work of Christ—his victory over sin, Satan, and the world—is that the church is established (Matt. 16:18; Old Testament saints were a part of Christ’s church as well [cf. Heb. 11]). Without Christ’s work, there is no church. Without his atonement and all its benefits, there would be no gospel, baptism, or the Lord’s Supper, which strengthen our faith and in which we find hope—and without which, we have no motivation for personal evangelism. This is why the gospel does not start with “go, therefore,” but with Jesus’ statement that “all authority in heaven and on earth” has been given to him. To start anywhere else as we seek to consider our efforts in sharing the gospel with this lost and dying world would be foolish.

T

Y O U R

W O R D S

B E

G R A C I O U S

Am I Gifted? ithin God’s church, he has distributed a variety of gifts (1 Cor. 12:12–26; Eph. 4:11–12); therefore, some Christians have gifts that others do not. This raises questions regarding personal evangelism, two of which we will consider here: “Am I gifted?” and “Does everyone have the same obligation to share the faith?” Regarding the latter question, the answer is quite clearly no. For a variety of reasons, we can’t expect from laypeople what we expect from a pastor. A pastor is called to “preach the word...in season and out...[to] do the work of an evangelist,” thereby fulfilling his ministry (2 Tim. 4:2, 5). Because of social situations, neighborhoods, even careers, Christian laypeople have varying opportunities to share Christ. In everything, we must be confident that God is accomplishing his purposes in and through us as he sees fit, even if not every believer has the same number of open conversations about the gospel.

But what about the gift of evangelism? Many Christians simply don’t think they possess the gift of gab, so to speak, and therefore on account of their personality need not be concerned with sharing the good news. Whether this is true or not of you, the Lord has doubtlessly blessed some people with a greater ability to communicate than others. Nonetheless, if you can be friendly with your friends, family, or neighbors— at least on some level—then you are more than capable of inviting them to church and sharing the basics of the gospel. Every believer has embraced Christ as he is presented in the gospel and so knows the one in whom we place our hope. While not all Christians can express themselves with the most clarity and ease, and may not even possess the same amount of Bible knowledge, the gospel is nevertheless the basic staple of the Christian life. Everyone has some opportunity to express that faith and can invite someone to hear an ordained messenger of the Word, who will then make a fuller proclamation week in and week out.

W

How Do I Do It? e can be really simple here, and it should be noted that we started with the importance of the church for a reason. As previously mentioned, the church is the place where we approach Mount Zion and where the gates of heaven are opened (cf. Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 84). In the church, we are further sanctified and encouraged to live as pilgrims on this earth. The gospel is preached, and we are assured of the forgiveness of our sins that can be found only in Christ. The Sacraments are administered, which further demonstrates God’s faithfulness; then, as the worship service comes to a close,

W

M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 37

does not reflect our confession, our speech is not gracious.

Paul’s words in Colossians 4:6, howblessed with the benediction. Literally, we are comever, should not be taken merely in the negative. Some people believe their missioned with a blessing from God until we meet speech is gracious simply by what they do not say. The workplace, for example, can again. And it is during those days, between worbe filled with discussions of sexual immorality, drunkenness, or other pership services, that we have the opportunity to inversions. When we do not get involved in those conversations our speech can be, vite people to church and to share our faith. in some sense, categorized as gracious. we are blessed with the benediction. Literally, we are But as Paul seems to be pointing to the act of speakcommissioned with a blessing from God until we ing and not the lack of it, it is not only what we do not meet again. And it is during those days, between say that makes our speech gracious but what we do worship services, that we have the opportunity to say. If we keep this in mind in everyday conversation invite people to church and to share our faith. But with unbelievers, the opportunities to invite people to how do we do it? church and to share the life-giving message of the Colossians 4:5–6 gives us a paradigm for interactgospel will be easier. Granted, the fear may never go ing with unbelievers: “Walk in wisdom toward outaway, but the opportunities will increase. siders, making the best use of the time. Let your Notice Paul’s concluding remarks: “So that you speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that may know how you ought to answer each person.” you may know how you ought to answer each perThe result of walking in wisdom toward outsiders son.” What does Paul mean when he says, “Walk in and having gracious speech seasoned with salt is the wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the opportunity to answer any question unbelievers have time”? F. F. Bruce explains that “distorted accounts of regarding the faith. Your words and consistent life proChristian conduct and belief were in circulation; it was vide you with a chance to discuss spiritual matters important that Christians should give no color to with them. This is why Paul’s exhortations in the these calumnies, but should rather give the lie to previous chapter focus on actions and on words (Col. them by their regular manner of life. It remains true 3:1–17). You are accountable for both. that the reputation of the gospel is bound up with the behavior of those who claim to have experienced its What Does This Look Like? saving power” (The Epistles to the Colossians, to Philemon, ince personal evangelism can seem like a terriand to the Ephesians [Grand Rapids: William B. fying task, you should make it as natural as posEerdmans, 1984], 174; emphasis added). sible. Walking up to someone and saying, “Have The situation is no different today. False accounts you heard about Jesus, and would you mind coming of Christian behavior circulate over radio and televito church with me to hear more?” is not perhaps the sion airways as well as the Internet; people who have best way to go about sharing your faith and inviting never stepped inside a church believe they understand people to church. But if you take Paul’s exhortation to what Christianity is all about. Thus Paul’s exhortation let your speech be gracious, an invitation to church or is just as valid in our day and age. We must behave in sharing the gospel no longer seems as daunting. a manner that is “regular”—that is, consistent and in What about an everyday conversation with a neighkeeping with Christ, his gospel, and his church. bor or local vendor?—although sometimes our minds “Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned are so focused on what we need to do or where we need to go that we don’t take time for such conversawith salt, so that you may know how you ought to tions. But what about that person we didn’t speak to? answer each person” (Col. 4:6). There are several key Were we given the opportunity to let our speech be elements within this portion of Scripture that help us gracious, seasoned with salt, but didn’t do so? A mere understand a paradigm for sharing our faith. First, greeting could lead to a conversation that allows you Paul says that our speech should always be gracious. to invite that person to church or to share your faith.

In other words, our speech should not give an unbeThis is what the busyness of life does. We are a liever a reason to deny Christ (their sin and depravtask-oriented people, often with no time for others; ity give them enough reasons). As Bruce pointed out, and this prohibits many of the opportunities we have many people base Christianity on what they see and to talk about Christianity. If we would just slow down, hear professing Christians do and say. If our speech As the worship service comes to a close, we are

S

38 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

L E T

we’d find that the opportunities for personal evangelism abound. Regrettably, people are no longer accustomed to having others ask them about their day—as if no one cares anymore. So when you stop to make such a simple inquiry, they are grateful you would take the time. It’s in those everyday conversations that you have a possibility, in a natural way, to share the gospel or to invite people to church.

But how does an everyday conversation turn into a discussion regarding spiritual matters? This is where the importance of the church plays a role. Every day that passes between worship services, we anticipate attending church and hearing the gospel yet again.

This should build a sort of anticipation for the coming Lord’s Day. With this anticipation comes excitement— and we can always talk about what excites us. Just as your favorite sports team brings excitement (sometimes beyond measure), so too should the corporate worship of God. When we are excited about the gathering of saints on the Lord’s Day, hearing the gospel and partaking of the Sacraments, it naturally becomes a part of our everyday conversations.

When you ask someone how they are doing, they respond and typically reciprocate. When they do, you have the opportunity to let your words be gracious, seasoned with salt. You should tell them how you are doing, but you can also tell them what you are excited about—namely, the corporate worship of God. Your response creates an opportunity for dialogue concerning Christ, his gospel, and his church—all in perfect keeping with Paul’s exhortation in Colossians.

Once your response has been given, the individual has the opportunity to ask more questions, particularly about your church, or he may just end the conversation. Either way, you now have the opportunity to ask him whether or not he attends church, which further opens up the discussion regarding spiritual matters. And all of this happened because you asked a person how he was doing, and you took the opportunity to express yourself regarding your excitement for the corporate worship of God. But what about establishing a relationship first?

Establishing a relationship with neighbors or your local vendor is a good idea, but you don’t need a longterm relationship with someone to talk about faith.

People are interested in spiritual matters, but too often they end up talking to non-Christians rather than Christians who can give an account for the hope that is within them.

This is just one way to let your words be gracious, seasoned with salt. As you implement everyday evangelism into more of your conversations, however, you must be prepared to follow the latter half of Paul’s exhortation: “So that you may know how you

Y O U R

W O R D S

B E

G R A C I O U S

ought to answer each person” (Col. 4:6).

Unfortunately, as you share your faith and invite people to church, they are not often in a rush to submit to Christ and attend church and catechesis. People are hesitant and will pose objections. Although you may be concerned that you don’t have have an appropriate response for unbelievers, this should not cause you to worry for two reasons: 1) we are all learning and may not be able to answer every objection an unbeliever raises; and 2) this is why the corporate worship of God is so important.

God has ordained pastors and elders to lead his church. A simple invitation to church will provide a person with every opportunity to not only hear the gospel but also ask the elders about the faith once for all delivered to the saints. While you should strive to have an answer for all who have questions regarding Christianity, you shouldn’t feel burdened to know everything. Growing in a greater understanding of God’s Word is a process.

Be Prepared s you begin to engage people in everyday conversation, and the Lord blesses you with the opportunity to share his truth or invite someone to church, you should have some tools at your disposal—something as easy as having church business cards to give out with the church’s address, phone number, and worship service times. And if someone is immediately interested in knowing more about Christ and his church, you can always put your e-mail address or phone number on the back of the card and likewise get their contact information.

This is just a brief glimpse into personal evangelism.

It’s truly a privilege to share Christ crucified, risen, and exalted, and to see God add to his church. And as God provides occasion, you have this same privilege. As you go about your daily tasks, keep in mind that opportunities are always before you, and remember the words of the apostle Paul: “Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.” ■

A

Leon Brown (B.A. in Communication Studies, University of San Diego) is an ordained Baptist minister and currently attends Westminster Seminary California. He is a requested conference speaker, experienced evangelist, and the founder of the Evangelism Team ministry (2006–10). He has published previously in Modern Reformation, as well as Christian Renewal, and Bible Expositor and Illuminator. He is currently working on a book regarding personal evangelism.

M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 39

THE LATEST IDEAS SWEEPING THE LAND…

Confusing Law and Gospel

D

avid Platt’s book Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the

(40–41, 186–90).

To call the church back to its idenAmerican Dream has taken the American evangelical tity and mission, Platt seeks to “explore the biblical gospel alongside our culscene by storm. According to Mission Frontiers, 370,000 tural assumptions with an aim toward embracing Jesus for who he really is, copies have sold since not for who we have created him to be.” He therefore May 2010, and it is in proceeds to “look at the core truth of a God-centered its eighteenth printing. gospel and see how we have manipulated it into a His aim is to call the human-centered (and ultimately dissatisfying) meschurch back from its sage.” By embracing this “biblical gospel,” Platt writes, idolatrous pursuit of “we will determine not to waste our lives on anything the “American dream” but uncompromising, unconditional abandonment to and exhort Christians a gracious, loving Savior who invites us to take radito abandon their lives cal risk and promises us radical reward” (21). to a “radical gospel” While much of Platt’s diagnosis is well founded, his for the sake of “radical remedy is crucially flawed. The fundamental problem obedience” in fulfilling with Radical is its radical confusion of law and gospel. the Great Commission.

The law and gospel are so connected throughout that Platt calls attention the law ultimately absorbs the gospel. Though Platt to several valid areas uses many of the right phrases and clichés, and rightly of concern. The numcriticizes Joel Osteen (31), he ends up confusing law ber of remaining unand gospel just as much as the famous television Radical: Taking Back reached people is a “pastor.” While a gentle moralism (e.g., “Your best life Your Faith from the staggering 4.5 billion now”) abounds in much evangelical preaching today, American Dream (76). Mobilizing the what issues from Radical is only a taxing legalism. church to reach them First, Platt repeatedly issues a call to “live the

by David Platt Multnomah Books , 2010 should be a priority. gospel” (20, 94, 109, 136, 198, 200, 212). Whether 240 pages (paperback), $14.99 Furthermore, the this arises from a lack of precision or from the standChristian faith cerpoint of theological conviction, the misrepresentatainly involves the sharing of possessions, as well as tion of the gospel for readers is much the same. concern and care for the weak, the poor, and the marNowhere does Scripture issue a command for believginalized of this world (2 Cor. 8:1–4; Gal. 2:10; James ers to live the gospel. This is the unique work of 1:27).

Christ alone. The Scriptures call us to believe the Platt explains, however, that we need to become gospel and to obey the law (Titus 2:10; Phil. 1:27; Eph. aware of how a secularized worldview has influenced 4:1). This is no theological hair-splitting, but a fundaour understanding of the gospel and its implications mental and critical distinction. Law and gospel are to for how we live and order our churches (48–50). The be as carefully distinguished as Christ’s work on the destructive health-wealth “gospel” certainly contracross is from loving your neighbor. When it comes to dicts the genuine biblical gospel (3). It unquestionably this distinction, one cannot be too precise. Calvin’s reflects a crass materialism more than the good news successor Theodore Beza wrote, “We must pay great announced in Scripture (32). The widespread biblical attention to these things. For, with good reason, we illiteracy of churches, the lack of hunger for the Word can say that ignorance of this distinction between of God, the lack of intentional prayer for the spread of Law and Gospel is one of the principal sources of the the gospel, and the scarcity of sound Bible expositors abuses which corrupted and still corrupt Christianity” in pulpits are all real issues and lamentable problems (The Christian Faith, 41).

4 0 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

Second, confusion of words and concepts abounds in Platt’s examination in chapter 2 of “the foundations of the gospel” (28). Misunderstanding the uses of the law, Platt mistakenly attributes the spiritual effect of the law to the gospel. For example, Platt writes, “The gospel reveals eternal realities about God that we would sometimes rather not face” (emphasis added). These realities include God as a wrathful Judge who might damn us (29). Put another way, “the gospel confronts us with the hopelessness of our sinful condition” (31).

Therefore, whereas for Reformation theology it is the law that brings us up short, this is a task erroneously attributed to the gospel on too many occasions to count. Platt writes, “The biblical gospel says, ‘You are an enemy of God, dead in your sins, and in your present state of rebellion you are not even able to see that you need life, much less to cause yourself to come to life.’” These propositions, Platt concludes, bring us to recognize “the beauty of the gospel” (32).

Unfortunately for readers, none of these propositions reveal the beauty of the gospel. Instead, they reveal the terror of God’s law, the truth and reality of where we stand apart from Christ. God’s law discloses our sin and misery (Rom. 3:20). The gospel as extraordinary good news does not impose any commands. It doesn’t make known any realities about God that a sinner would not rather face. The gospel does not portray God as a wrathful Judge who damns sinners, but as a merciful Father who has given us his Son. The gospel does not do a law-work, exposing a sinner’s hopelessness, but rather holds out great hope. It does not convict us as enemies of God but acquits us as children and friends. Unlike the law, the gospel announces that God reconciles enemies by the death of his Son. Third, Platt’s confusion of law and gospel is evident in his exposition of the story of the rich young man (Mark 10). Platt maintains this story is an example “that Jesus does sometimes call people to sell everything they have and give it to the poor.” Because Jesus is “Lord,” this text calls us to consider if we are at least “willing to ask God if he wants us to sell everything we have” (120). He explains, “The kind of abandonment Jesus asked of the rich young man is at the core of Jesus’ invitation throughout the Gospels” (11).

A better interpretation of this passage, however, does not see it as an invitation of the gospel but as a setting forth of the law to expose the man’s pretensions of law-keeping, thereby demonstrating his lack of genuine obedience and righteousness. Jesus was not asking the young man if he is perhaps “willing.”

The demand of God’s law is not, “Do this and be radical.” Rather it is, “Do this and live, or else be damned” (Matt. 19:17; Luke. 10:28).

After setting forth the “foundations of the gospel”

(28), Platt asks his readers to consider a proper response (36). One would expect him to turn to sola fide. Regrettably, Platt maintains that the only proper reaction is “immediate and total surrender” (39). He writes, “Surely this gospel evokes unconditional surrender of all that we are and all that we have to all that he is” (37). Platt appeals to Jesus’ words at the end of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7:21– 23 as an example of the kind of total surrender the gospel demands (37–38). If such radical surrender is missing, Platt chillingly exhorts, “You and I desperately need to consider whether we have ever truly, authentically trusted in Christ for our salvation” (37).

Again, this advice is pastorally unhelpful for its blurring of law and gospel. Nowhere in Scripture is the demand of the law an invitation of the gospel. The only proper and initial response to the gospel, a truly “radical” proposal given our tendency to want to save ourselves, is to receive and rest in the finished work of Christ. This is a hopeful invitation from God, and setting this free offer apart from the many commands we find in Scripture does not mean that justification can exist without sanctification. It simply means that the call to discipleship is an expression of gratefulness, an encouragement to Christian living that is worthy of such a salvation. Repentance must be preached along with a call to faith, but the two must be distinguished in order to preserve sola fide and sola gratia.

Whenever the law is confused with the gospel, the remedy is always wrong (e.g., “unconditional surrender” and “willing to sell all”). The problem is so serious that the book must be assessed as pastorally crippling to readers who most likely already have weak souls and afflicted consciences. How does one know if he has surrendered enough? What about Paul’s confession in Romans 7:15–19? Even if one “sells all,” he has not even come close to fulfilling the radical demands of the law (Luke 17:10). The problem with approaching God on these terms is that a person never has the sense that he or she has done enough.

There remains a nagging reality of God’s disfavor, which is the enduring point of the law. After the law has humbled a person, he must then be comforted with the gospel without any mention of the law.

In the end, the central message of Christianity is not about “abandoning ourselves” (7). As important as obedience is, it is not the essence of Christianity. What makes Christianity distinctive from every other religion is the gospel. All imperatives must be given and clearly seen as implications of the gospel. “The alternative,” Graeme Goldsworthy wisely instructs, “is to preach law and to leave the impression that the essence of Christianity is what we do rather than what (continued on page 48) M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 41

An Interview with Christopher Wright

A Report from the Lausanne III Congress Christopher J. H. Wright (Ph.D., Cambridge University) was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He taught Old Testament at Union Biblical Seminary in India and later served as principal of All Nations Christian College, a missionary training school in England. He is now the international director of the Langham Partnership International, known in the United States as John Stott Ministries. He was also the primary theological coordinator for the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, which recently held the Lausanne III Congress in Cape Town, South Africa.

First of all, could you give us a firsthand report of what happened at the Lausanne Congress in Cape Town?

Cape Town was a marvelous event. There were between 4,000 and 5,000 people there from about 200 countries all around the world. That in itself is a marvelous thing—the sheer physical presence of people of almost every nation, language, and tribe gathered in one place praising the Lord Jesus Christ.

There’s a certain sense of biblical fulfillment about that, which was wonderful. I think it was also enormously encouraging to a lot of the people who came from countries where Christians are very few, where evangelical Christians are often in a tiny minority and persecuted. I think it was good for these people to meet with others, to be encouraged, to worship together, and to have freedom to talk and share. I also think that the whole balance of the congress was positive. They were looking at not just issues of evangelism and evangelistic strategy, which of course are important, but at 4 2 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

other problems in the world: illness, brokenness, violence, war, other religions—all kinds of issues the church has to face in its mission. So I think it was a great deal of information for people who wanted it. We came home exhausted but very encouraged.

Your widely reported plenary address called for a second reformation, and according to reports, you received quite a warm response to that from the delegates. What was the basic point of your address?

The basic point was that in the midst of all the things that we had to look at Lausanne in terms of what the church needs to do in order to bring the gospel to the world, the church also always needs to look at itself. As you read the Bible, you see that God has a greater problem with his own people than he does with the nations of the world. At least when you read the prophets, there is far more that the prophets say against Israel, the people of God, than they ever do against the nations. What

the prophets say is that the people of God need to return to God, to repent of their idolatry, and to be shaped again to be able to be a light and a blessing to the nations. The point I was trying to make was that the world evangelical community shouldn’t simply indulge in a kind of triumphalism or a jamboree spirit in which we go out and say that we’ve got the answer to everyone else’s problems. We need to recognize that there is a great deal about ourselves that is ugly, divided, filled with greed and consumerism and a great deal of pride; and where these things are true, we need to repent and come back to God before we go out to the world.

The language of reformation came to me because I had a Latin American friend who had done his Ph.D. with John Stott Ministries in the States and then returned to his home country in Latin America. He said that over a period of about six months, he and his wife attended ten different churches that were claiming to be evangelical. But, he said, in not one of them did he hear the Bible being preached. In all of them there was a single male minister who was extraordinarily wealthy and powerful, but the ordinary people were not being taught the Bible. They weren’t really looking for salvation.

They were looking for miracles,

and they were being sold a version of the prosperity gospel that offered them all kinds of benefits in this life if they would give their money.

I thought to myself that sounds exactly like the preReformation church in Europe, where there were very powerful, wealthy prince bishops, lording it over the population; where people were not hearing or understanding the Bible, because it wasn’t in their language; and where people were being offered indulgences for blessings in the next life for payment of money in this life.

And I thought it’s the evangelicals today who need a reformation. We actually need to realize that these are deformities in the church, and we need to be rid of them and to reform ourselves.

That leads in well to your book The Mission of God. There’s a lot of talk about “us” today, which is something you brought up in your address.

We hear phrases often today that we might not have heard fifty or even twenty years ago, such as “living the gospel,” “doing the gospel,” “being the gospel,” or “our work of extending the incarnation and the redeeming work of Christ.” Why is it important for us to think of the church’s mission as first and foremost the mission of God? I think primarily because that’s the way the Bible puts it. It seems to me that when we read the Bible as a whole from beginning to end, it shows us God, it reveals to us the God who is the creator and redeemer of the world, and it shows us God omniscient. God is about the business of bringing the world from the mess that we

made of it in Genesis 3, through to the new creation in Revelation 21 and 22. And everything in between really is God’s mission, God’s plan, God’s agenda, for which purpose he has created a people and used that people as a light to the nations. Then through that people he brought the Lord Jesus Christ to complete his mission, to embody it, to achieve it, and to accomplish it on the cross and in the resurrection. Then to lead his people, through the Holy Spirit, in the task of participating in God’s mission to bring the gospel to people of every tribe and tongue and nation, until the day when Christ returns.

And then, of course, we have the great vision of the end— the resurrection, final judgment, and the new creation in which God once again dwells with us in a new earth. In that sense, I believe we need to think biblically about God’s mission and our part in it, rather than thinking about our mission and how we can somehow help God do a bit of his stuff, which he seems to have a lot of difficulty over. It’s far better to start where the Bible starts, make it the mission of God, and then ask: What role do we have in that?

So now the Abrahamic promise, having been fulfilled, actually gets to be dispensed to people from every tribe, kindred, tongue, people, and nation.

Absolutely. In fact, in my book I describe God’s words to Abraham in Genesis 12 as the Great Commission. It is, in a sense, the first Great Commission because at the beginning of it God actually says, “Get up and go, be a blessing, and all

nations on the earth will be blessed through you.” That’s God’s promise and covenant and command all in one to Abraham in Genesis 12, and it’s what the apostle Paul actually calls the gospel in Galatians 3.

Paul says, “The Scriptures preached the gospel in advance to Abraham, saying, ‘Through you all the nations will be blessed.’” So that blessing of the nations is gospel truth, and it’s missional truth because it is God’s purpose to bring it about.

And, of course, in the era that we now live in—that is, after the resurrection and ascension—we have that explicit command of the Lord Jesus Christ to go to the nations. But the reason why we go to the nations is to gather them into that Abrahamic promise of blessing.

So it’s one covenant, it’s one commission, it’s the mission of God to bring the blessing of Abraham to all nations, which is what Revelation 21–22 points to, to be completed.

The United Kingdom used to be the center of world mission, followed by the era of North American missions. How has the center of global Christian mission changed in the past fifty years or so?

It’s certainly changed in the last fifty years, but I would go back a little bit before your question and say that for a period the United Kingdom had a very important role to play because of the sovereignty of God in which he raises up empires and then puts them down, and I suppose for a while, Britain had an empire that also facilitated mission. But long before that, there were Christian missionaries in and from Africa, and in and from the Middle

M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 4 3

East. There were Syrian missionaries in China from about A.D. 600 to 800, and Celtic missionaries from Ireland going through Egypt and elsewhere from about A.D. 300 to 400. So mission goes back a long, long way. And then, as you say, we moved through the era of Western mission. Now, global Christianity has spread such that the majority of all world Christians live outside the West, in the continents of the South and East. So you have huge numbers of Christians in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. As you say, it has happened within the past fifty years or so, and it will continue.

But this does not mean somehow that the responsibility for mission has passed from one part of the church to another, because mission is not a relay race where you pass the baton on to somebody else, and then you drop out and they get on with the job. That’s sometimes the way people talk.

They say, “The West has had its great missionary era, and now it’s the turn of Asia, now it’s the turn of Africa.” That’s really a false way of looking at it, because mission is much more like a boat race where everybody pulls their weight until the race is over. It’s the whole church taking the whole gospel to the whole world. The fact that there are now more Christians in Africa and Asia does not excuse the West from its responsibility in Christian mission.

There’s often a lot of excitement about the shifting of so much activity to the global South in terms of missionary expansion, maybe for the reasons that you suggest there, to 4 4 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

make us feel a little better about living in the secularized West. You’re someone who sees global missions in terms of the big picture. Do you think that sometimes, in all of the excitement, we downplay the division and, as you say, some of the things that especially American pseudo-Christianity has exported—such as the prosperity gospel—so that there are lots of different forms of so-called Christianity exploding along with orthodox Christianity in the twothirds world?

Yes, that’s very true. Jesus in his parables said, “There are wheat and weeds.” As the kingdom of God grows, so does the work of the Enemy in producing counterfeit and false forms of Christian profession and belief. It has always been thus. There is nothing new about that. I suppose when you get an explosion of Christian growth around the world, you will get all kinds of false elements to it.

I would not want to pretend or suggest to Western Christians that the growth of Christianity outside the West, in Africa and Asia, is all healthy. There is a lot that causes great concern, not just to us, but to them.

There are many, many African brothers and sisters that I know who are deeply concerned about the shallowness of so much Christian profession—as you said, of the permeation of so many churches with prosperity gospel teaching, which is partly an export from the West.

Some of it was birthed in America, but there are indigenous forms of the prosperity gospel all over the place, in Asia and Africa, tapping into what is basically human greed, human covetousness, and

human desire to escape from the problems of life by whatever means possible.

There are forms of Christianity that are quite different from authentic New Testament faith and discipleship with humble walking in obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ. But that would be true wherever you look. You used the phrase a moment ago, “North American pseudo-Christianity.” I would say there is a great deal of what you might call “folk Christianity” around in the West in general, not just in America but also in Britain— that is, a kind of veneer of Christian culture alongside a fundamentally idolatrous consumerist culture, in which we really live by different gods and by different standards, but we just happen to have a somewhat Christianized version of it. It is essentially a kind of syncretism. It’s not very different from what we find in the Old Testament when Israel was constantly tempted to mix the worship of the living God with the worship of the Baals (Baal, of course, being the god of business, the god of money, the god of sex, the god of fertility and land and everything else that mattered in everyday life).

And so you basically try to have the best of both worlds until Jesus comes along and says, “Actually, you can’t.

You can’t serve God and Mammon.” You need to work out who the true God is.

For Christian believers anywhere in the world, whether in the West or in the South, the challenge is to avoid a kind of syncretism of discipleship of Jesus with an unconverted worldview. It certainly faces us in the West. I suppose it also means to say that really there’s

no such thing as “the mission field out there” and “the home church back here.” Everywhere now is mission field. We enter the mission field every time we go out the doors of our church.

Many of our sisters and brothers in Africa and elsewhere recognize that. In fact, one of my British friends in Lausanne at Cape Town said that he had a very fascinating conversation with an African. The African said to him, “Where do you come from?” He said, “Well, I’m from Britain.” And the African said, “Oh, that’s a really tough country, isn’t it?” This was revealing because it was recognizing that we live now in the secularized West in what is a primary mission field. The mission field is the line between belief and unbelief.

Wherever that happens, that is the frontline of the gospel. We need to think in those terms rather than in purely geographical terms, that somehow we live here in a Christian place and everybody else out there lives in “the mission field.” That’s really a false paradigm.

Lesslie Newbigin emphasized that point, and it really changed my thinking about what the mission field was. But do you ever wonder if it’s being taken too far by some when you get this sense that Africa and Asia are doing fine now? We don’t need to send missionaries; we need to be missional. And then you add to that, we don’t need to preach the gospel, we need to do works of service and show our faith by our works; basically, we become the gospel. Do you see the pendulum swinging a little too far in the other direction?

Yes, I do. I think this is one of the real problems. I think it must drive the Lord crazy sometimes, if I can put it like that. John Stott used to say that he longed for a balanced biblical Christianity. He said that we have this constant tendency as Christians to swing from one extreme to another extreme. And so if people at some stage were only concerned with sending missionaries to Africa and so on, and not doing mission on their own doorsteps, and thinking that the only way in which you are Christian is by preaching the gospel in what you say and not by what you do, then of course we need a swing of the pendulum that reminds us that mission is why we’re on this planet. Local churches should be missional in their neighborhoods, and we should not just be preaching at people, but we should be embodying the gospel and living the gospel and doing works of service.

Why on earth do we have to keep saying one rather than the other when the Bible tells us that we ought to be doing both? A church has really lost the plot that wants to say, “We don’t send missionaries overseas; we don’t preach and evangelize; we are a missional church.” They’ve actually lost the biblical point. We are to be and do and say, and we’re to be and do and say here, where we are, and to the uttermost ends of the earth.

I very much regret if the word “missional” begins to get used as a way of opting out of international cross-cultural church-planting evangelistic mission work in places where the gospel has never been heard. And let’s remember that there are still hundreds of peo-

ples who have not yet heard of the name of Jesus, let alone been discipled. There still is an urgent need for evangelistic cross-cultural church-planting mission. I would not want anything that I’ve said or written to take away from that reality and that need.

But at the same time, we’ve got to ask, What are we here for as a church, if we’re a local church, if we’re a group of believers? And the answer is that we’re here to be the presence of Jesus in this place, in the midst of these people in our neighborhood; and by acts of love and service, goodness and justice, and by bearing witness to the Lord Jesus Christ, to be the light of the gospel in this place. It’s never to be an either/or. It ought to be a wholeness, an indivisible missional lifestyle, a missional commitment of a church and of a Christian believer.

Obviously, the history of missions is a mix of triumph and tragedy. But what do you say to people who identify modern missions with colonialism and imperialism, especially when you hear that in the media these days?

First of all, I would say to that kind of accusation that there’s an element of truth in it that we shouldn’t try to deny. We should say there is failure, there is brokenness, there are things we need to repent of in the history of the Christian faith throughout the centuries.

We ought to be the first to repent of it and to say that’s not the way we want to do missions.

The second thing to say, though, is that this can also be used as something of a myth with which to bash Christians.

M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 4 5

When you actually examine the history, often the imperialists and the colonialists were those who were most hostile to Christian mission. In India, which is where I worked, it was precisely the colonial powers and the commercial interests of the East India Trading Company that for years refused to allow missionaries to go inland at all, to go away from the coastal cities, precisely because they didn’t want the gospel to reach the “natives,” as they would have been called in those days. Because they knew that when Christianity touched these people, it tended to create a greater desire for freedom and for human rights and an end to exploitation and that people would get educated and be able to read. And then who would be able to control them? So in fact, colonial powers were often very obstructive to Christian mission—not at all just the Bible and the gun going hand in hand. There’s a great deal of mythology about that, especially when opponents of Christian mission want to simply say, “Well, all Christian mission is imperialist or colonialist”—very far from it.

The next thing I would say is that today in our world, by far the majority of Christian mission is actually happening from the countries of the South and the East. There are far more missionaries now from Africa, India, and Latin American countries than from Britain or America. These people who are engaged in mission from those cultures are anything but colonialists and imperialists. In fact, they’re quite the opposite— they are the formerly colonized. Mission is no longer, if it ever really was, from the pow4 6 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

erful colonial nations to the darkest benighted corners of the earth. Mission is from everywhere to everywhere.

You’re far more likely to meet a Brazilian missionary in North America than a British missionary in Brazil. The whole shift of Christian mission has moved away from those eras of colonial or imperial domination of the world.

One of the things I appreciated so much from The Mission of God’s People is the way you bring some balance.

On one hand, there’s a tendency—or at least a perceived tendency—to assume that our cultural context doesn’t really affect our interpretations of Scripture or our mission. On the other hand, there’s a reaction against that assumption— many missiologists today emphasize that the gospel itself is always changing, depending on its cultural context. How do we navigate between these extremes?

The first thing to say is that the gospel itself is unchangeable for the reason that it’s not a concept but facts. In other words, we’re bringing good news. The gospel is a narrative of what God has done in Christ, as Paul put it: that Jesus died for our sins and was raised again on the third day. Those are facts that are to be borne witness to.

Having said that, the fact is that every cultural context is different. That news of what God has done through Christ has to be communicated in both language and forms that make sense within the culture.

Then it has to redeem that culture from within and give expression to itself in cultural forms that will not only show the full richness of the gospel

but also enable the Abrahamic promise to be fulfilled. There is a sense in which the fullness of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, at one level, has already been accomplished. It has happened within history, and all that is needed for our salvation has been done by Jesus Christ and his cross and resurrection.

This is point A. But point B is that because the promise is historical and God said that every nation would come into that blessing, there is a sense in which we won’t see the fullness of all the gospel will have accomplished, and all the richness of who Jesus is and what Jesus has done, until we gather with people of every tribe and nation and language and culture—when we see the fullness and the richness of the redeemed creation and all the redeemed ethnic diversity of humanity, which is a creation reality.

So it’s both/and. It’s not that we have a gospel that has no cultural relevance—just a sort of transhistorical abstract gospel that we happen to know and just export everywhere else. It’s not that. Nor, on the other hand, is it just that every culture makes up the gospel for itself, so that the gospel is purely contextual and subjective. But these objective historical facts of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth have to take shape and be rooted in every culture and then transform those cultures redemptively from within. That’s the exciting dimension of world mission—that it affirms cultures while redeeming them, and it brings them to their completion in Christ.

One of the things you pointed out in your book that I thought was helpful is that

there is so much talk today about being advocates for particular groups, especially given the fact that we haven’t necessarily been very good listeners—“we” meaning white, privileged people in the West—and we’ve just assumed that our culture is neutral and that everyone else has cultural biases. But you make the great point, after acknowledging all of that, that we are advocates for God first and foremost. We are not developing an African theology or an Indian theology or a Western theology. We need to work together as Christians from all around the world to be advocates first of all for God and his mission.

That’s right. That’s part of why it’s the mission of God and not just a mission of the church.

We have a mission, but the mission that we have is to bear witness to the Lord Jesus Christ and all his teaching and all that he reveals of the living God. Advocacy in that sense is to say that every human culture is relative to the biblical revelation of God. That’s why it’s all we sometimes talk about— Indian Christian theology or African Christian theology— but in the West we have grown so used to the hegemony of saying, “We’ve got the theology,” because we hammered it out in our Western universities.

“We’ve just got the theology; we haven’t got a culturally contextualized theology.” Of course we have. Every human context and every human culture is the product of a history, some of which is pre-Christian even if the pre-Christian era goes a long way back. So even if we’re talking about European Christianity, there was a time when Europe was utterly pagan and had to be converted

and was never perhaps fully converted. There are still worldviews within the European Christian reality that derive from its pre-Christian era.

You used the word “advocate.” Of course we are advocates for God and bear witness to God, but I think what the Bible also shows is that because of God’s heart for the needy, the lost, the broken, the oppressed, the exploited, and so on, there is that within the gospel that is intrinsically, as it were, on the side of those whom God particularly loves in relation to those who are being exploited or oppressed, those who are the victims of wrongdoing and evil. Therefore, there is an intrinsically liberating dimension to the gospel. We are for those whom the world is against, as it were. You see something of that in the ministry of Jesus as well—the directions he took and the priorities of his ministry. Any kind of gospel proclamation has to be good news that is a threat to those who are or do evil, and is liberating to those who are victims. In that sense, there is an advocacy element to Christian mission.

But precisely because we are advocates for God, we are advocates for those with whom he sides. Your work has been inextricably linked to a concern for theological training in the two-thirds world with Langham Partnership.

One of the things that I’ve noticed in your writing is your concern that although it seems that theological training was very much a part of the initial thrust of modern missions, it has been waning in a lot of two-thirds world contexts. Do you think that the superficial-

ity and loss of interest in theology in the West, generally speaking, is mirrored in what’s happening in the two-thirds world?

I think there are several factors in what you describe. First of all, you’re absolutely right to say that the concern for theological education as a dimension of mission is at the heart of the ministry of the Langham Partnership and John Stott Ministries, because we’re very concerned for church depth and nurturing, not just for church growth and evangelism.

I think that one of the factors in the decline, or rather the sidelining, of theological education in the mission community, particularly in the West, is the idea of a sort of closure mentality based on a certain view of the Great Commission—which is to say that Jesus basically told us to evangelize every people in the world and get the job done, and that once the job’s done, Jesus can come back. So we end up with a kind of urgency and a haste and an interpretation of the Great Commission in relation purely to evangelism, ignoring the fact that the Great Commission—if we’re going to use that text—speaks of discipling the nations and specifically not just baptizing people, that is, bringing them to conversion and faith and repentance through evangelism. Explicitly, Jesus says, “Teach them to obey all that I have commanded you.” The teaching ministry of the church is an essential part of mission.

Then when you look at the New Testament and see what Paul counted as mission, it wasn’t only his work of church planting; it was also all the teaching he did in his churches,

M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 4 7

grounding them in the faith, teaching the whole counsel of God; and it was also the work of people such as Timothy and Apollos who came along after a church planter like Paul, who spent years in nurturing, teaching, and discipling the church.

And in Corinthians, Paul says quite explicitly that neither he nor Apollos are more important in God’s mission. In fact, he says that the one who plants and the one who waters have one purpose, one mission.

So the task of theological education—teaching and training of pastors and those who would equip the church— seems to me intrinsically missional. It’s not just something that happens afterwards as a sort of superstructure on mission. But the task of teaching and training is itself intrinsi-

cally a legitimate part of Christian mission and should never have been sidelined. In fact, when some mission organizations opted out of it and said, “Well, now we will only support frontline evangelism and church planting,” I think they were very shortsighted. I think they actually are leaving out an essential part of the missional task of the church as defined by the New Testament. I think theological education is intrinsically missional and should therefore also be intentionally missional, that it should see itself as a servant of the church there to enable the church to train pastors who will also then equip the saints for works of service, so the church itself is being equipped for their whole life’s discipleship and mission in the

Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream (continued from page 41) God has done. Legalism easily creeps in even when we think we have avoided it. The preacher may well understand the relationship of law and grace, but the structure of the sermon program may undermine it in the thinking of many in the congregation” (Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture, 59).

Platt may understand the relationship of law and grace, but Radical undermines a proper biblical perspective for thousands of readers. Ultimately, Radical’s demands cannot be sustained and its end cannot be achieved, because only the gospel can give what the law commands. Weak, sinful consciences find no comfort or enduring motivation in a confused gospel.

Evangelical obedience is nurtured in the soil of assurance. Therefore, the life and ministry of believers must be self-consciously gospel-centered in order to maintain long-term effectiveness for the kingdom of God.

John Fonville is pastor of Paramount Church in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.

4 8 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

workplaces of the world—not just in the sending of missionaries and pastors but actually enabling ordinary believers to be witnesses to the Lord Jesus Christ wherever they work, whether that’s in the family, field, farm, office, workplace, or factory. In all of those places, they’re being equipped to live according to the standards of Christ, to live out a Christian worldview, being taught by the Scriptures by pastors who’ve been properly trained with theological education that sees this as its purpose: missionary.

Pearl Buck in China: Journey to the Good Earth

By Hilary Spurling Simon & Schuster, 2010 320 pages (hardcover), $27.00 One of history’s most famous missionary kids, writer Pearl Buck, journeyed from China’s remotest provinces to literary fame in New York, and then to an extraordinary home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. There she adopted several mixedrace children and championed the needs of the underclass around the world.

The blond-haired child (called the “blue-eyed demon” by Chinese school children) became the white-haired grand dame welcomed to the Kennedy White House and feted by John and Jackie alongside Robert Frost. She mined her missionary past often in her seventy-plus books,

most famously in The Good Earth, garnering the Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize in the process. Through her work, Buck gave Americans a window into that inexplicable distant land of China—especially during the 1930s and 40s.

Buck was the product of America’s great missionary impulse that began during the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century. On the classic New England campus of Williams College in Massachusetts stands the Haystack Monument representing the beginning of the American Missionary Movement. The college website still includes the story in its history: In the early years the religious reputation of the College depended on the essential orthodoxy of its presidents and faculty. It gathered strength from the famous episode of the “haystack meeting” in the summer of 1806.

Five Williams undergraduates, seeking to continue their prayers and conversations in spite of a sudden thunderstorm, retired from a grove of trees to the shelter of a nearby haystack, where they were inspired to launch the great adventure of American foreign missions.

Inspired with missionary zeal, Absalom Sydenstricker, Pearl’s father, felt called to labor in China—and labor it was. Absalom, along with his wife Carrie, suffered great loss—including the deaths of four children— and many other hardships on the field as Presbyterian missionaries.

Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker, born on June 26, 1892, was the offspring of that “great adventure of American foreign missions.” Pearl’s middle name “Comfort” signified a hope by her parents that she would prove just that after so much tragedy. Young Pearl showed childlike faith, as well as precocious industry, publishing for the first time in the Christian Observer in 1898.

I am a little girl, six years old. I live in China. I have a big brother in college who is coming to China to help our father tell the Chinese about Jesus. I have two little brothers in heaven.

Maudie went first, then Artie, then Edith, and on the tenth of last month my little brother, Clyde, left us to go to our real home in heaven.

Clyde said he was a Christian soldier, and that heaven was his bestest home. Clyde was four years old, and we both love the little letters in the Observer. I wrote this all by myself, and my hand is tired, so goodbye.

This poignant passage is included in the extraordinary book Pearl S. Buck, A Cultural Biography by Peter Conn (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Conn, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, chronicles how Buck rejected the faith of her youth: In the end, Pearl was inevitably shaped by both her parents. She rejected her father’s religious beliefs and his narrow-mindedness, but she inherited his evangelical zeal, his sense of rectitude, his passion for learning. Though she stopped believing in Christian ideas of salvation, she became, in effect, a secular missionary, bringing the gospels of civil rights and cross-cultural understanding to people on two continents.

Conn writes in a careful and evenhanded fashion about traditional flashpoints—religion, politics, and sex—with which most biographers wrestle.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for a new biography, Pearl Buck in China by Hilary Spurling.

Though The New York Times included Spurling’s biography in its “100 Notable Books of 2010,” this reader considers the book quite inferior to Conn’s. Spurling disappoints because her color palette seems limited to black and white. For instance, Pearl Buck’s father is painted as an almost completely reprehensible figure.

Pearl, on the other hand, is viewed in an overwhelmingly positive light. “Her father,” Spurling writes, “remained physically and emotionally distant, shut up in his study if not actually away prospecting for souls, never seeming particularly at home even when he was living in the same house.” Isn’t “prospecting for souls” a little biased? Further, according to Spurling, Absalom was a cold and miserly man, who “by his own reckoning” made only ten converts in his first ten years on the field.

Spurling does excel, however, at capturing the influences that turned the young Pearl into an amazingly accomplished woman. The shy and sensitive girl is filled with wonder and creativity. In her childhood, she was exposed to the horrors of war (the family had to move often for fear for their lives). Facing the results of pagan practices, young Pearl buries strangled female babies so they won’t be prey for wild dogs. And yet she thinks in the Chinese language and is more at home in the East than the West. When she wasn’t repressing some of these gruesome events, she was mining them for her later fiction. It is the early years of Buck’s life that drive the biographer, who is determined to excavate the seeds of Buck’s creativity as well as her sense of mission. These early years are covered in chapters titled “Family of Ghosts,” “Mental Bifocals,” “The Spirit and the Flesh,” “Inside M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 49

the Doll’s House,” and “Thinking in Chinese.”

Spurling certainly lacks nuance and subtlety when describing the missions controversy in which Peal Buck became embroiled. Although Buck married another Presbyterian missionary, John Buck, his passion was the economic rather than spiritual health of the country. He, too, excelled and became a leading agricultural economist in China.

In 1930, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. financed a report designed to revisit how missions were executed by seven denominations—including Presbyterians. Two years later, initial findings were published, along with a report by Harvard professor William Ernest Hocking. These two inquiries led to the publication in 1932 of a one-volume summary of the findings called Re-Thinking Missions: A Laymen’s Inquiry after One Hundred Years.

Re-Thinking Missions argued that the old view of the missionary as an evangelist seeking to save the world for Christ should be replaced by a new, more accommodating approach. The truth of Christianity lay not in any particular doctrines but in the unique simplicity of its central teachings. Buck praised the findings in a Christian Century book review: “I think this is the only book I have ever read that seems to me literally true in its every observation and right in its every conclusion.”

In a November 1932 speech before a large audience at New York’s Astor Hotel, Buck dismissed the view that missionary work’s success should be gauged by counting new church members. Instead she advocated humanitarian efforts to improve the educational, agricultural, medical, and sanitary conditions of the mission field. In a Harpers magazine article, Buck questioned whether believing in the virgin birth or the divinity of Christ were essential to being a Christian. Even Christ’s historical reality or whether Christianity is the one and only divine truth is irrelevant.

Spurling covers these events—and the Presbyterian churches’ reactions to them—in her usually nuanced manner. She titled the chapter “The Stink of Condescension.” The “public witch hunt,” she writes, was “spearheaded by a hard-core fundamentalist, Dr. J. Gresham Machen of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, who charged the Mission Board with scandalous laxity, identifying Mrs. J. L. Buck as the prime culprit and demanding her immediate dismissal as an unbeliever.”

Conn, on the other hand, leaves open the possibility that Buck may have had mixed motives for some of her statements. He’s mindful that the controversy helped her book sales.

The image of Pearl Buck remains that of a creative, 50 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

driven, conflicted, calculating, and generous woman.

Writing in an obituary of Machen in the New Republic, Buck wrote: We have lost a man whom our times can ill spare....There was a power in him which was positive in its very negations. He was worth a hundred of his fellows who, as princes of the church, occupy easy places and play their church politics and trim their sails to every wind, who...offend all honest and searching spirits.

No forthright mind can live among them, neither the honest skeptic nor the honest dogmatist. I wish Dr. Machen had lived to go on fighting them.

I am confident that writer Hilary Spurling would not be as nuanced in her assessment. Thus, for those captivated—or haunted—by Pearl Buck’s long and winding life, turn to Peter Conn’s older but far richer biography.

Ann Henderson Hart lives in Philadelphia and is a regular contributor to Modern Reformation.

Missional Renaissance: Changing the Scorecard for the Church

By Reggie McNeal Jossey-Bass, 2009 224 pages (hardback), $24.95 The past decade has seen exponential interest in the interconnection of ecclesiology and missiology, especially with the increase of church planting in the Western hemisphere where Christianity has otherwise seen its influence wane.

Standing as the adjectival nom du jour to describe this phenomenon is the word “missional.” Articles, books, and conferences abound in an effort to define and debate this elusive term. Entering the fray to provide direction for churches that desire to become missional is Reggie McNeal’s monograph, Missional Renaissance: Changing the Scorecard for the Church. As

a “Missional Specialist” working for the Leadership Network in Dallas, McNeal’s style is akin to other notable leadership authorities such as Stephen Covey and Ken Blanchard, and therefore the book reads more like a missional “how-to” for those who are ready to trade in their outdated Purpose-Driven Church for the next big thing to sweep the evangelical landscape.

In this short easy-to-read monograph, McNeal comes out swinging by making the grandiose claim that the rise of the missional church is the “single biggest development in Christianity since the Reformation” (xiii)! If this self-understanding does not raise suspicion, then his next statement certainly will.

“Whereas the Reformation gifted us with a plethora of denominations distinguished by doctrine and polity, the missional movement actually simplifies the taxonomy of Christianity into two groups: those who get it and those who don’t” (xiii).

From the introduction to the conclusion, the author continues to draw the proverbial line in the sand between the traditional church and the missional church approaches to mission and ministry.

The trouble is that McNeal leaves the reader guessing what “traditional” church he has in mind. At times he seems to have the consumeristic church growth movement of the 1990s in his sights (à la Saddleback or Willow Creek); at other times, however, it is the heritage of Luther and Calvin that he clearly confronts.

McNeal contends there are three significant shifts that church leaders must make in order to become authentically missional. First, there is the shift from an internal to an external ministry focus. Second, there is the shift from program development to people development. Third, there is the shift from a churchbased to a kingdom-based leadership agenda. These three together form for McNeal the “signature characteristics of what missional means” (xvi). As he traverses each of these shifts in the following chapters, he repeatedly paints a negative picture of the traditional church (both neo-evangelical and reformational), which identifies the church as a “place where things happen and where congregants receive religious goods and services” (49). If by “religious goods and services” McNeal has in mind the traditional marks of the church, the proclamation of the gospel and the proper administration of the Sacraments, then he most certainly finds himself at odds with the Reformation tradition.

In chapter 3 he sets up a stark either/or scenario between the so-called “attractional” and “incarnational” church approaches. From his perspective, the attractional church is likened to the traditional church

as a place the “people frequent and support by their participation and gifts of time, money, and energy” (50). The incarnational church, by contrast, understands itself as the body of Christ in the world, focusing on “being there”—at home, in the street, in the marketplace, at school, in the neighborhood—in the places people live their lives (50). Here and in many other places throughout, the author would greatly benefit from a refresher course on historical theology; for most of the examples he uses to describe the missional-incarnational method for fulfilling the church’s mission would fall under the doctrine of vocation and the priesthood of all believers, for Lutherans and Reformed alike—something that has had a prominent place in traditional churches for half a millennium.

McNeal’s directions for turning missional are often simply a repackaging of what the church has always done: prayer, social benefaction, partnering with the community to show our concern for the neighborhood, the importance of the laity, and so forth. The author is to be commended for his emphasis and concern for people via programs.

The real weakness of McNeal’s approach is biblical.

Jesus is crystal clear in the Great Commission of Matthew 28:19–20. The method of a true missional church according to its Lord is, and will always be, Word and Sacrament. And when we get a glimpse of the church at Pentecost, we find them gathered together around the apostles’ doctrine, the prayers, and the breaking of the bread, which were preceded by a sermon and massive baptismal service (Acts 2).

It is here in Christ’s Word and Sacraments where we can be certain of Christ’s presence and therefore find ourselves in a true church. As the Father sent the Son, and together Father and Son have sent the Spirit, so now our Triune God sends the church into the world, but he has not left us without means. And it is the author’s undervaluing of God’s ability to work through the ordinary means of Word and Sacrament that will leave many readers skeptical of McNeal’s missional renaissance, and content to support instead the missio Dei of their traditional church.

Brian W. Thomas is vicar of Grace Lutheran Church in San Diego, and is a graduate student of the Cross-cultural Ministry Center at Christ College, Concordia University, in Irvine, California.

M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 51

Apologetics for the 21st Century

By Louis Markos Crossway, 2010 272 pages (paperback), $17.99 Louis Markos’s Apologetics for the 21st Century might more aptly be entitled The Answer to Almost Every Modern Objection to Christianity Ever Asked, as Given by Almost Every Modern Apologist Who Ever Lived. The book attempts to cover all major modern apologists and just about all ancient and modern arguments marshaled on behalf of the faith, while also providing a roadmap for operating in postmodern times.

That said, the book rather remarkably succeeds in committing some fatal sins of omission.

Markos is a recognized authority on C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton, and the red meat of this volume is not surprisingly found in the first section devoted to their apologetical legacy. Markos correctly concludes that section by noting that evidentialism is the mainstream modern approach that issues from Lewis. He goes on to lament that “dry and academic” Calvinistic presuppositionalism has been “far less effective and useful” in real world discussions with unbelief, a contention buttressed by the relative paucity of useful public debates between presuppositionalists and nonChristians. The approach of working inductively from the bottom up by means of facts and evidence, notes the author, is where common man lives and moves and has his daily being. Evidentialism finds that it is structurally organic to start and end with the fundamental priority of defending a Christ born outside a greasy motel in Bethlehem and later crucified under a greasy Roman Procurator outside of Jerusalem.

Helpful discussions of several of Chesterton’s works follow the more comprehensive treatment of Lewis, with particular emphasis on Chesterton’s “Cosmic Christian” view of history found in The Everlasting Man. Markos then moves on to the apologetical contribution of Dorothy Sayers. There he focuses on her utterly original defense of the Trinity based on an analysis of the human creative process (see The Mind of the Maker). The author goes on to show how the “evidentialist legacy” of Lewis was advanced by the uniquely American contributions of Francis Schaeffer, Josh McDowell, and Lee Strobel.

52 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

Markos quickly jumps from original thinkers like Lewis and Sayers to popularizers like McDowell and Strobel. This is not fatal, though showing some familiarity with the contributions of Edward John Carnell, Harold Lindsell, and Wilbur Smith (founding members of the “Old” Fuller School of Theology a half century ago) would have provided a useful dosage of intervening gravitas.

Markos does a yeoman’s job of cataloguing many of the giants of modern apologetics. But herein lies the Achilles heel of this book. For reasons utterly mystifying, Markos’s Apologists Hall of Fame omits the one name without whom there would be a very different apologetical landscape both here and across The Pond—namely, John Warwick Montgomery. Ironically, the front and back covers of Markos’s own book sing out with praises to Markos from no less than three apologists who themselves have noted their direct debt to the work of Montgomery over his five decades of writing, debating, and teaching (Francis Beckwith, Craig Hazen, and Gary Habermas). Nary a mention is made of Montgomery or of his contribution to historical and evidential apologetics (History, Law and Christianity, Faith Founded on Fact, and Christianity for the Tough Minded), to legal apologetics (Christ Our Advocate, The Law Above the Law, and Jurisprudence Reader), to philosophical apologetics (Tractatus Logico-Theologicus), to ethics (Human Rights and Human Dignity and Situation Ethics), to literary apologetics (Myth, Allegory & Gospel and The Transcendent Holmes), and to biblical authority (God’s Inerrant Word and Crisis in Lutheran Theology). Instead, one is left with the disfigured impression that modern American apologetics begins and ends with Fran, Josh, and Lee. To be charitable, this omission surely cannot be intentional but does suggest the author is not rowing with all his oars in the water.

Another fur ball that coughs up from this footnoteless book is Markos’s maddening inability to engage contemporary Christian leaders who are anxious to jump into the philosophical bed with postmodernism.

Remarkably, his section on “Nonapologetic Apologists” cites, without any serious blood being spilled, the likes of Brian McLaren and James Choung. To include these two (and to then shovel onto the pile references to “apologists” Joel Osteen and Rick Warren) in a survey of modern apologetics, while ignoring someone such as Montgomery, is a little like including an extensive section on Liberace in a volume on the history of music while forgetting to mention J. S. Bach. In another example of Markos’s frequently uncritical style, the author compliments (or at least attributes without challenge) James Choung’s “vision” of Christian salvation as providing a “fuller

gospel.” One must be excused for asking: fuller than what? The existing gospel? If so, how much more shed blood does one get with the fuller gospel?

Returning now to the book’s strengths, Apologetics for the 21st Century does properly chronicle (and laud) the development of the Intelligent Design movement and the critical efforts of Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, and William Dembski to create the so-called “wedge” within the scientific community’s monolithic, indeed Pavlovian, response to Intelligent Design. Not to leave unaddressed any major apologetical issue, Markos also has useful sections on the traditional arguments for the existence of God, Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, as well as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and the New Atheists.

Louis Markos has made an effort to document the work of modern evidential apologists, though he has neglected entirely the significant and fruitful field of legal apologetics (Greenleaf, Sherlock, Linton, J. N. D. Anderson, Luckhoo, Clifford, Ellul, Archer, Lord Hailsham, and so forth). I suppose he can, with effort, also be excused for omitting the important contributions of the likes of Montgomery, Carnell, Lindsell, and Smith in exchange for fixating on their popularizing descendants like McDowell and Strobel.

What is the best benefit of this basic handbook on modern apologists? It might save you some shelf space, which should then be immediately stuffed to the proverbial gills with the works of more serious scholars, in order that one might more fully and competently engage in apologetics for the twenty-first century.

Craig Parton is a trial lawyer in Santa Barbara, California, and the author of three books on the defense of the faith.

He is also the United States Director of the International Academy of Apologetics, Evangelism and Human Rights (www.apologeticsacademy.edu), which meets each July in Strasbourg, France.

From Nicaea to Chalcedon: A Guide to the Literature and Its Background

By Frances M. Young with Andrew Teal Baker Academic, 2nd edition, 2010 416 pages (paperback), $39.99 The years between the Councils of Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451) were an incredibly fertile time for the development of doctrinal thinking relative to both the Trinity and the incarnation. While it would

obviously be wrong to say that such reflection either began or ended at the two poles of this time period, the primary terms of future debate were established at this time and have remained the creedal touchstones for future theological and ecumenical discussion in these key areas.

Nevertheless, to the neophyte student approaching the subject, it can be difficult to obtain a clear picture of the key personalities, ideas, and events in a way that makes coherent sense of the whole. An earlier generation of scholars, under the influence of the monumental work of John Henry Newman, tended to focus on the central roles of Arius and, more importantly, Athanasius. More recent scholarship has dethroned the “Athanasius against the world” narrative and replaced it with a picture that is at once more nuanced and therefore more complicated. Today’s student needs a guidebook through the twists and turns that lead from Nicaea to Chalcedon, where today’s good guy is tomorrow’s problem (e.g., Apollinaris).

It is therefore a delight to see Frances Young’s guide to the literature and personalities of the period back in print, revised for a second edition with the help of Andrew Teal. Taking into account developments in the field since the 1983 first edition, this updated book is a vital handbook for the newcomer to the field and to the teacher or academic who wants a one-volume handbook within arm’s reach.

The book is divided into six chapters, each focusing on a particular character or theme. The usual suspects are all here: Eusebius of Caesarea, Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Cyril of Alexandria, among others. In each case, the authors give a brief overview of life, career, and significance; then, with the more important figures, they offer an account of key works and theological contributions; and they conclude each section and chapter with suggested further reading. The authors also range broadly within the theology of the men they study, thus demonstrating how discussion of Trinity and the incarnation cannot be divorced from the practical realities of church life. This is surely a vital point to make, given the constant tendency throughout church history (as strong today as ever) to assume that such discussions are merely abstract metaphysics of little relevance to worship and life.

The authors have struck a nice balance in what they present: the reader is given enough to whet the M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 53

appetite but is not bogged down with too much technical detail. In addition, a remarkable amount of ground is covered in just 400 pages, making this book without parallel in terms of investment relative to the information it contains.

To say a book is a must-read or a must-buy is something of a hackneyed cliché today; but anyone— student, professor, minister, elder, or layperson—who wants to understand better how and why the church came to think the way she does about God, the Trinity, and the incarnation could do no better than to purchase this eminently readable and learned book.

Carl R. Trueman is professor of historical theology and church history at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

POINT OF CONTACT: BOOKS YOUR NEIGHBORS ARE READING

Freedom

By Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010 576 pages (hardcover), $28.00 “Freedom” is a word that gets bandied about a lot, mostly by politicians and ideologues. They shroud it in historical nostalgia and glittering, indeterminate progressive garb, tapping into the subjective warmth and tempered patriotism it elicits in their hearers. What exactly we need to be freed from and what we’ll do with that freedom once we have it, they never bother to elucidate clearly. Why should they?

Freedom is good. We want to be free. The problem with their side-stepping is that it doesn’t address the question that’s becoming ever more prevalent in a society addicted to instant gratification: What does one do with one’s freedom? There’s no lack of it in a place such as the United States where we have the ability and license to do pretty much anything—buy whatever we want, see whatever and whomever we will, 54 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

go wherever and whenever we choose. But what should we do with our freedom? Once we know what we can do with it (and more ominously) what we ought to do with it, is freedom still something we want?

This is the question that Jonathan Franzen explores in his novel Freedom. The story has been touted as a commentary on contemporary American marriage and family life, but it’s also an insightful examination of how our political and economic environments influence those relationships—how the systems that facilitate our freedom (in the political sense of the word) help determine our freedom in our interactions with our spouses and children. Politics are the driving force behind Patty Emerson’s aristocratic New York family. Her father is described as the quintessential WASP attorney; her mother is a state assemblywoman. So much does the political machine dominate the Emersons’ relationship with their daughter and with each other that when Patty is raped at seventeen by a classmate, both her mother and her father counsel her against prosecuting the offender and his wealthy, influential family. This confirms what Patty has suspected all along: that in her family of sophisticated, philanthropic parents and cultured, artistic siblings, she is nothing more than the aberrant gene, manifesting itself as a dumb jock. As a result, she throws herself into sports, her intensely competitive nature acting as both a refuge and coping mechanism.

It was economic considerations that prompted Walter Berglund’s ancestors to leave their native “socialist” Sweden for the free-market opportunities of the United States. The problem was that once they had their freedom—the freedom to make more money, live where they choose, and socialize with whom they would—they didn’t know how to use it.

As a result, they essentially gave themselves over to the impulse of the moment, and before very long were again shackled by the poverty they sought to escape. Not only does it enfetter the Berglund forebears to a life of indigence and ignominy, it extends down the family line to Walter. His father’s attempts to mortify Walter’s artistic tastes by forcing him to clean the blood and urine out of the carpets of the family’s decaying motel, and his mother’s inability to effectively defend him to her husband, confirm Walter’s sense of inadequacy, and he retreats (literally) into nature, finding the peace and comfort he seeks in the Minnesota woods.

The story centers on Walter and Patty trying to free themselves from the cycle of self-destruction that has characterized their family histories. Instead of allowing economic circumstances to dictate his decisions, Walter attempts to establish a new economic foundation in society—a static one focused on the

preservation of nature rather than its consumerist exploitation. Instead of yielding to the feminist agenda and familial pressure that compel her to pursue a vocation outside of her home and family, Patty becomes a stay-at-home wife and mother, determined to be the nurturing and encouraging parent she lacked.

The tragedy is that despite their recognition of their sins and their earnest, genuine desire to mortify them, they simply can’t. Like dogs returning to their vomit, they are condemned to repeat the same mistakes, even while they acknowledge their damning effects on themselves and their relationship with each other and their children. In her autobiography, Patty repeatedly acknowledges Walter’s manifest superiority to Richard Katz, his aloof, hipper-than-thou best friend—his selflessness, his courage, his kindness, his unconditional and absolute love of herself. But so great is her need for a competitive environment that she cannot refrain from pursuing Richard—his shrewd manner and aloofness present a challenge too tempting to ignore.

While Walter recognizes that there’s a significant problem in his marriage, he cannot help but view confrontation as synonymous with abuse, aggression, and domination—the very traits he abhorred in his father.

Since he cannot address the difficulty on his terms, and won’t attempt to on his wife’s, he retreats into his conservation work (again, into nature) and concentrates his energies on preserving his refuge rather than on repairing his relationship.

If the sociological statistics are correct, then this is a faithful portrayal of most contemporary American marriages—husbands and wives find themselves not just visited by their own sins but hounded by those of their fathers, condemned to repeating their mistakes and suffering from wounds of others’ infliction. Their frustration and disappointment are aggravated by the promises of saccharine self-help books and motivational speakers who readily offer Band-Aids for their cuts, but who cannot provide a cure for the compulsive desire to cut. The spouses who are fortunate enough to be able to recognize and own their problems are still powerless to find a solution—they cannot fix their problems because their being and way of being has been formed and developed by them.

Even though the story ends happily, with Walter and Patty reuniting after a six-year separation, it’s an uneasy happiness. Although they’ve both reconciled with their remaining family members, we don’t see any scene of reconciliation between Walter and Patty. Patty simply shows up at their summer home, and Walter lets her back in—there are no apologies, no explanations, not even an attempt at an explicit resolve to do something differently. One is tempted to close the book with the cynical expectation that it won’t be long

before the whole cycle repeats itself.

While it’s not a particularly uplifting read, Freedom is a faithful, well-written illustration of the sort of lives we as Christians have been called out of—the tragedy and agony of a life characterized by an endless repetition of sin and suffering for sin. Although Walter and Patty pursue freedom, they’re hindered in their pursuit by their limited understanding of what true freedom is and what it’s for. They appear to view it as the absence of restraint, a casting off of the shackles that have bound them (i.e., the abuse and rejection of their parents and their pathological need for affirmation).

What they fail to realize (what they cannot realize) is that true freedom brings with it the power to act—to act wisely and well, and to use one’s gifts, talents, and resources for what is good and true. Such is our sinful estate that we cannot attain this freedom in our own power—it can be found only in Christ. Because he freely gave all of himself—his life, his being, his will—we may take comfort in the fact that unlike Walter and Patty we are not condemned to these actions. We may find ourselves looking for ultimate affirmation in our spouses, a sense of worth in our vocations, and liberation from the pain and trauma of our past, but we may rest in the knowledge that Christ has risen victorious for us, thereby freeing us from the devastating cycle of our sin. It is in him, through the work of the Holy Spirit, that we are granted the freedom that not only breaks our bonds but gives us the will and desire to use that freedom to bind ourselves both to him and to one another in love.

Brooke Mintun is an administrative assistant at White Horse Inn.

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.

M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 55

FOR A MODERN REFORMATION i t ’ s

m o r e

t h a n

j u s t

o u r

n a m e — i t ’ s

o u r

m i s s i o n

Law & Gospel

I

n God’s Word we hear both law (commands to be obeyed) and gospel (good

transformation. In many cases, consciences are news to be believed). The perennial temptation of the church in every age bound not to God’s law but to personal agendas. In this is to confuse these two words. Sometimes the law is dissolved into the way, the gospel’s indicatives (announcing what gospel; more frequently, the gospel becomes absorbed the Triune God has accomplished for our salvation) is into the law. We often hear calls to “live the gospel” or taken for granted, left behind, as if the gospel itself were not the source of all numerical and spiritual even to “be the gospel.” This means in effect that our growth. The gospel is not merely a message that peoown conformity to the righteousness that God ple need to hear to become condemands rather than Christ’s life, verted; it is “the power of God unto death, and resurrection becomes the 1. Recover the “Solas” salvation” in every moment of the message. When God speaks his law, 2. Law & Gospel Christian life. The commands of we finally have a true measure of our 3. Missional & Vocational Scripture continue to direct, but only lives. There is no room for excuses. the gospel gives. As we mature in the Not only in what we have done but in 4. Word & Sacrament Christian life, the goal is not to move what we have failed to do, we have 5. Catechesis beyond the gospel but to grow deeper all fallen short of the glory of God. 6. Confessional in it, understanding more and more Yet when God speaks his gospel, it what it means to be part of God’s new is a strange and surprising announcecreation: justified, sanctified, and one day glorified. ment. Although God could justly condemn all of us, As Christians from different denominations and he has planned and executed our redemption at the confessions, we plead with all churches to maintain a greatest personal cost: the suffering of his own Son. In clearer distinction between the law and the gospel: 1) the fullness of time, the Son became flesh. He fulfilled in preaching, so that God’s holy claim and will may be all righteousness during his whole life in our place and known, and that his grace in Christ rather than our then bore our curse in our place, raised on the third inner experience or holiness will be our confidence; day as the glorified head of his body, the church. All 2) in baptism and the Lord’s Supper, so that we will of our righteousness, holiness, and redemption are no longer reduce God’s means of grace to our means found in Christ alone; and because he lives, we too of commitment or expressions of our own piety and will be raised in glory beyond the reach of sin and inner sanctity; 3) in worship, so that God’s speech death. The law promises life on the condition of pertakes priority over our speech, and God’s service to us fect obedience; the gospel promises life in Christ alone, has priority over our pious intentions, expressions, through faith alone. Only in Christ can any sinner dare to stand unashamed before the face of God. and activity; 4) in evangelistic outreach, so that we no The sixteenth-century Reformers recognized that longer substitute our own ascending “steps to victory” this distinction lies at the heart of all true preaching, in our own lives in place of the announcement of teaching, ministry, and discipleship. Martin Luther God’s descent to us in mercy and the life, death, and said that making this distinction clearly is the highest resurrection of Christ; and 5) in preparing believers for and most difficult mark of a sound preacher, and works of love and service to their neighbors in their Theodore Beza warned that “confusion of the law callings, not as a selfish concern to satisfy God but as and the gospel lies at the heart of all the errors that the free embrace of others simply for their own benhave corrupted the church.” efit as forgiven and renewed people.

Much of the emphasis in Christian circles today is on imperatives: commands and exhortations, spiritual Michael Horton is editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation. workout plans and agendas for personal and social 56 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G