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MODERN REFORMATION No Church, No Problem?

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

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No Church, No Problem?

16 No Church, No Problem?

Can the Internet replace the institutional church? How can its self-serve buffet replace God’s feast of Word and sacrament?

by Michael Horton Plus: The Heretical Imperative Revisited

23 In Search of the Spirit Using the Heidelberg Catechism, the author shows how the Spirit is inseparably linked to the church by means of grace.

by Daniel R. Hyde

27 Individualism’s Not the Problem—Community’s Not the Solution Because it’s more than loneliness that plagues our postmodern society, the author argues that a greater change needs to happen than simply joining a church.

by Jonathan Leeman

32 Church is Family Has the church lost its relevance to today’s Christians? Is it merely a reflection of the “new normal” dysfunctional family or does it remain Christ’s true family?

by John N. Day

36 Managing Sinner/Saints in Today’s Congregations A professor/pastor reviews changes in the Lutheran church over the past fifty years and prescribes some viable ways forward.

by James Bachman

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

by Timothy Johnson COVER PHOTO BY PHOTOALTO AGENCY/JUPITER IMAGES

S UBSCRIPTION I NFORMATION US US Student Canada Europe Other

TABLE OF CONTENTS july/august

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In This Issue page 2 | Letters page 3 | Between the Times page 4 Borrowed Capital page 8 | Big Thoughts for Little Minds page 10 Interview page 40 | Required Reading page 43 | Reviews page 44 | Final Thoughts page 52

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IN THIS ISSUE

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n indication of the depth of our spiritual blindness is our inability to see efforts to rid the world of the institutional church as one of Satan’s most significant and oldest acts. If the church is both organization and organism, and if the church has existed since the Garden Temple of Genesis 2, then the current nail-biting laments over the state and future of the church are just the latest in a long series of conflicts between the seed of the Serpent and the seed of the woman. And so long as we have Christ’s own promise that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the church (Matt. 16:18), then to paraphrase Mark Twain we can confidently say that reports concerning the church’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

The expected riposte to all of this is that the church doesn’t go away, but that the current form of being the church should make way to provide room for more contemporary cultural expressions of the church. This argument has lurched forward under the pseudo-academic guise of Frank Viola and George Barna’s book, Pagan Christianity: Exploring Roots of Our Church Practices. (For a good summary and critique, read Peter Jones’ review at www.Reformation 21.com.) And it’s to this issue that Reformed pastors Michael Horton and Daniel Hyde turn their attention in their respective articles: is there continuity of practice that helps define the church from age to age? Is that continuity a historical accident, or are there clear, biblical expectations that help define our experience of the church?

A buzzword that helps unify those who wish to overturn the institutional church for something else is “community” and the search for authentic community they suppose should characterize whatever form the church takes in our age. Is the problem really individualism? Is the solution merely community?

Not so, says Jonathan Leeman, director of communications for 9Marks. The real issues at play are the subversion of proper authority and the exaltation of the self.

This issue concludes with two different perspectives on being the church.

The first, from Presbyterian pastor John Day, explores the dynamics and implications of the church’s identification as the “mother, brothers, and sisters” of Christ (Matt. 12:49–50). The second, from Lutheran pastor James Bachman, takes off those rose-colored glasses and forces us to look at the necessity of the law as way of providing order to an increasingly disordered ecclesial life.

The great tragedy of our age is the absence of Christ from many of the communities that name themselves after him. And while we can lament all the divergent and heterodox movements away from the visible body of Christ on earth, the church, we must be willing to ask the hard questions of our own communions and our commitments to the church. We appreciate your willingness to thoughtfully tackle these questions with us as we continue our yearlong project of exposing and reforming “Christless Christianity.”

Eric Landry

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NEXT ISSUES September/October 2008 Beyond Nostalgia: The Risk of Orthodoxy November/December 2008 Evangelicalism’s Winter?

LETTERS your

Adam Francisco’s treatment of the New Atheism (March/April 2008) is helpful in several respects—especially in pointing out that the newest thing about it is how wealthy its spokesmen are. He misses the opportunity, however, to point out just how Christian these atheists are. Though they themselves may aver, for all respective purposes it is the Christian God they don’t believe exists; it is the miracles of Christ that are doubted; Christian philosophical arguments are disputed.

Even their positive concerns are peculiarly Christian. Disregard for earthly authority, especially religious, has long Christian pedigree. The scientific method itself has roots in Christian materialism and natural theology. All this makes me wonder whether the attention given Hitchens et al, as well as his respondents, is not a smokescreen that covers a much deeper and more frightening anxiety: how to keep Western civilization and its material benefits from coming to an end. Atheists claim to carry the torch.

Christians say it’s theirs. The atheists are right to worry whether theism— especially its Christian variant—can carry civilization forward. St. Paul urges Christians to be good citizens, but this is decidedly a concession. The overwhelming witness of the New Testament is that this world is coming to an end, and that our hope is in the coming Kingdom of God. We may pray along with the atheists that there be peace on earth. But the Christian also prays, “Thy Kingdom Come.”

Maybe we should be afraid. Those of us who don’t believe anyway.

Andrew Wilson Princeton Theological Seminary

I am concerned about Starr Meade’s use of the words “should take” as she described the roads to travel to teach doctrine to our children (“Explain It—Over and Over and Over,” March/April 2008). I am

afraid that in scrupulously following these roads many of us will find ourselves thinking like the Pharisee and thanking God that we are not like other parents who have no methodology. That attitude is then easily modeled to our children who will find themselves thankful they are not like other kids who don’t know their Shorter Catechism. I know—I was one of those haughty children who became a haughty parent.

The command of God for parents to diligently teach their children is plain, but perhaps the road is allowed by God to be a little rambling. We are to talk of God’s commands, be ready to answer when our children ask, discipline and train, but Scripture doesn’t give a list of required vocabulary to define, require a set number of minutes of drill and repetition, or elevate knowledge of Latin roots.

Parents may find the ideas presented very beneficial, but I also think it would be helpful if they were presented more as, “Here are some methods you could use,” and less as, “This is what good Christian parents do.”

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that parents can become proud of their methods and children can become proud of their catechism answers. But just because sinful hearts find an occasion to sin in good things is no reason to stop advocating those good things.

Starr Meade

The issue on the New Atheism (March/April 2008) was extremely helpful and a must-read. David Robertson’s article “Arguing with Atheists, A Personal Reflection” is a powerful reminder of the goal and purpose of our witness of the Lord to a lost world. I want to thank him for making at least three points of great importance for the gospel of Christ.

First, he stated, “Do you ever notice how much we talk about the gospel, but seem to struggle to actually pro(continued on page 11)

Susan Ray Allen, Texas

Author’s Reply The “should” in my article had to do with accurately teaching doctrine to children. It’s a main premise of Modern Reformation magazine, and of the New Testament, that the church should teach doctrine. I believe that teachers of doctrine should define terms (my first point in the article), and I believe that teachers of doctrine should repeat and repeat (my second point in the article). Under each of those two points, I gave suggestions, worded to indicate that they were suggestions. (“It often helps to…,” “We can also explain by…,” a certain thing “can help clarify,” etc.)

All people being sinners, it is true

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A Methodism to the Madness Every four years the United Methodist Church meets in General Conference to hash out theological issues and elect new church officers.

The General Conference is usually the source of much tension within the church body, which is divided by opposing factions. This year’s General Conference, held April 23–May 2, was no exception. Once again, Bibleoriented traditionalists found themselves opposing a leadership dragging the church in a direction defined by liberal political activism.

Every General Conference since 1972 has featured debate over the issue of homosexuality. This year, yet again, Methodist delegations voted to retain language that states the church’s position on homosexuality as “incompatible with Christian teaching.” A measure to strike the word “incompatible” and replace it with language urging members to “refrain from judgment regarding homosexual persons and practices as the Spirit leads us to new insight” was defeated 517 to 416. A solid majority also voted not to change the church’s constitution, the Book of Discipline, to recognize same-sex civil unions.

But that was just the beginning of the rancor at the conference. The 11.5-million-member church body now has close to 30 percent of its membership in Africa. Since 1999, the African church has almost tripled in size to over three million members, at a time when the eight-millionmember church body in America is hemorrhaging a thousand members a week—there are three million fewer American Methodists than in 1990.

That the Africans are also more conservative and have repeatedly denounced the denomination’s liberal leadership is creating major headaches for the current leadership who wish to drag the church in a more progressive direction. About 30 percent of the members in the American church are more traditional or evan-

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gelicals. That 30 percent combined with the African 30 percent has created a new majority, emerging since the 2004 General Conference, which threatens to overtake the liberal church bureaucracy and start pushing the Methodists in a more conservative direction.

When conservative Methodist reform groups threw a reception for the arriving African delegation and provided them with cell phones for their visit to help coordinate voting and achieve shared church goals, the church leadership accused the conservative reform groups of racism. A member of the church’s “joint monitoring team” from the Commission on the Status and Role of Women and the Commission on Religion and Race declared to the United Methodist News Service that providing cell phones “is inappropriate behavior and it destroys community.

We have gathered for Christian conferencing, which requires trust, honesty, openness and respect. Whenever there is an imbalance of power relationships with the expectation of

reciprocity, this behavior gives the appearance of paternalism, manipulation, exploitation and of course, racism.”

The United Methodist News Service story didn’t mention that in the past liberal church leaders had tried to woo the Africans with free meals, gift baskets, and other tokens.

However, the charge of racism was especially curious considering the church’s own actions at the conference. In electing the church’s judicial council—the church’s main enforcement mechanism for keeping out practicing gay clergy—church bishops and their affiliated liberal caucus groups ran a slate capturing a majority of seats on the council that included no Africans. “It was revealing that they would not nominate anyone from where over 30 percent of the church now lives,” Mark Tooley, the United Methodist Action director at the Institute for Religion and Democracy and author of Taking Back the United Methodist Church, told National Review Online.

Though the Judicial Council represents a significant defeat, the Africans

Notable Quotables “Whereas Pope Benedict XVI has spoken out for the weak and vulnerable, witnessing to the value of each and every human life.”

— A clause in a resolution honoring Pope Benedict that had to be modified in order to pass muster with Sen. Barbara Boxer and other Democrats. They felt it was a reference to abortion.

“Most harmful pied piper of heresies.”

— James A. Smith Sr. describing Oprah Winfrey in an editorial for the Florida Baptist Witness. The anti-Oprah editorial was then excerpted in the National Enquirer in an article titled “Baptist leader condemns Oprah,” a development that “delighted” Smith.

“Then came the publishing of these drawings, which came in the framework of a new Crusade, in which the Pope of the Vatican has played a large, lengthy role.”

—Osama bin Laden

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and allied Americans shouldn’t worry too much. By the next General Conference, the growing African delegation should represent about 40 percent of the church. And cell phones or no cell phones, the American reformers and Africans will have four years to communicate with each other about what they want to accomplish at the next General Conference. ■ Lutherans with Issues On Tuesday of Holy Week, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod canceled its popular radio program “Issues, Etc.” Host Todd Wilken and producer Jeff Schwarz were fired without explanation. Within hours, the show’s Web site, archived episodes and past issues of its journal were removed.

The show was broadcast from KFUO-AM, the synod’s radio station in St. Louis. But its listener base was worldwide thanks to syndication and podcasting. “Issues, Etc.” held fast to its confessional Lutheran identity but covered a wide range of religious, cultural, and political issues of interest to the larger Christian community.

Billed as talk radio for the thinking Christian, the show’s frequent guests included Alister McGrath, Albert Mohler, and Michael Horton who discussed how the church should respond to the culture. Wilken also ran regular series on the catechisms and the creeds of the church. He would broadcast the sermons of popular American preachers and then analyze them with a three-part diagnostic tool: How many times is Jesus mentioned? Is Jesus the subject of the verbs? And are those verbs the verbs of Scripture or the verbs of modern psychology?

The outcry in response to the show’s cancellation—and removal of any evidence it existed—prompted various explanations from synodical leaders. At first they claimed the show was canceled for “business and programmatic reasons” but declined to say what those reasons were.

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Then the synod cited lackluster three- and four-year-old Arbitron ratings for the St. Louis listening market and claimed the show lost $250,000 a year. But the synod neglected to mention national Arbitron ratings or the hundreds of thousands of podcast downloads each month.

The Rev. Michael Kumm, who served on three management committees for the station, told the Wall Street Journal that the explanation didn’t add up. “‘Issues, Etc.’ is the most listened to, most popular and generates more income than any other program at the station and perhaps even the others combined. This decision is purely political,” he said.

Many of the show’s fans agreed.

The church body is divided between confessional Lutherans and those who embrace generic pop-culture Christianity. Many of the synod’s most powerful current leaders are aligned with the latter group.

While “Issues, Etc.” never discussed church politics or criticized synodical officials, it was critical of the modern church marketing techniques they promoted. The LCMS recently embarked on a $100 million campaign to reach 100 million “uncommitted people” with the gospel by 2017. The metric for determining whether the centrally planned production goal is met is not baptisms but rather “critical events” such as discussions with strangers and friends.

Since he was elected in 2001 following the death of A. L. Barry, LCMS President Gerald Kieschnick has used heavy-handed tactics to centralize power and reduce the influence of confessional Lutherans at church headquarters, including issuing executive orders to prevent them from being hired into positions at church headquarters in St. Louis.

But perhaps the purge of “Issues, Etc.” was a bridge too far.

Thousands of “Issues, Etc.” fans from around the world complained

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By the Numbers 2:1 ratio. Unchurched Americans who prefer traditional church architecture over contemporary worship spaces, according to LifeWay Research.

26 percent. Ever-married evangelicals who have been divorced. By comparison, 33 percent of Americans who have been married have been divorced at least once, according to The Barna Group.

67 percent. Cohabitating couples who marry that eventually divorce, compared to 45 percent of all first marriages according to Mike and Harriet McManus in their book Living Together: Myths, Risks & Answers.

58 percent. Americans who view the pope favorably, according to a poll by the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion commissioned by the Knights of Columbus. Eighteen percent view him unfavorably.

3.2 million. Number of teenage girls in America who have at least one sexually transmitted disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

38 seconds. Intervals at which children who watch MTV and BET are exposed to adult content, including that of a sexual, violent, profane, or obscene nature, according to a study by the Parents Television Council.

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about the cancellation. A petition in support of the program sprang up, letters flooded church headquarters, and loyal listeners demonstrated in front of the corporate offices in St. Louis.

In response to the outcry, President Kieschnick said, “Listeners of ‘Issues, Etc.’ have had nine years and countless invitations and opportunities to support the program financially, and some have, but not nearly enough to offset the show’s deep, ongoing losses.”

LCMS laypeople immediately questioned the numbers behind Kieschnick’s claim, as well as the notion that programs that spread the gospel must make a profit or risk being canceled. ■ Planned Prevarication Lila Rose, a UCLA student and founder of the unfortunately named campus pro-life publication The Advocate, took it upon herself to do a bit of muckraking. Rose visited a Planned Parenthood facility in Los Angeles, posing as a pregnant 15 year old and accompanied by a man claiming to be her 23-year-old boyfriend. As such, the situation amounts to statutory rape—a serious crime that should be reported. Rose secretly recorded her visit to the abortion clinic, where she was advised to lie so the situation would appear legal. “If you’re 15, we have to report it. If you’re not, if you’re older than that, then we don’t need to,” explained the employee in the recording. “You could say 16…well, just figure out a birth date that works.

And I don’t know anything,” said the Planned Parenthood worker on tape.

This is not the first time Planned Parenthood has been caught playing fast and loose with the law. In 2002, a Texas pro-life group, Life Dynamics, hired an actress to call over 800 Planned Parenthood locations around the country posing as a 13-year-old girl who had been a victim of sexual assault. Of the locations that acknowledged she was the victim of a crime,

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91 percent agreed to conceal it.

Not surprisingly, when Rose published the results of her investigative journalism, she received a letter from the CEO of Planned Parenthood Los Angeles demanding she “immediately relinquish to PPLA the original and any copies of all communications with PPLA employees you have recorded without their consent.” Apparently Planned Parenthood believes the “right to privacy” extends to anyone who would publicize their criminal behavior. It’s a novel legal strategy to be sure, but one the Supreme Court is unlikely to uphold. ■ Free Continental Nirvana

The Preston Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee, is doing away with one of the most sacred traditions in American lodging—the Bible in the nightstand.

Instead, hotel rooms will contain “spiritual menus” where guests can order up a variety of religious texts. In addition to the King James Bible and New American Bible, guests will also be able to request the Koran, the Torah, the Tao Te Ching, The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, the Book of Mormon, books on Scientology and the Bhagavad Gita.

“We’ve only had positive feedback because we’ve included the Bible and we’ve actually added on to it to have two versions. I think we’ve made everybody happy,” Dina Nishioka, public relations director for Hotel Preston, told The Tennessean.

When asked for comment, Brian Ruf, president of the Travel and

Tourism Research Association, said the hotel was so “leading edge” that his organization had no idea whether or not the hotel was on the cusp of a trend. The boutique hotel, which targets a “hipster clientele” according to The Tennessean, has also recently tried a number of other gimmicks including complimentary pet fish, rubber duckies, and lava lamps for their rooms and a pillow menu.

As a “living art display,” Hotel Preston was at one point hiring young women to take turns wearing pink lingerie and living in a glassplated mock hotel room in a corner of the hotel’s cocktail lounge.

As it happens, Gideon International is also based in Nashville. Since 1908, the organization has been sending out complimentary Bibles to hotels around the world. They declined to comment on the Hotel Preston’s decision. ■ It’s Fun to Stay in the ELCA The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America shied away from taking a position on homosexuality in its new draft social statement on human sexuality.

The March report, designed to lay out a framework for discussions of human sexuality, said the church had yet to reach consensus on the matter.

The statement has four major sections: theological and ethical foundations for understanding sexuality; sexuality as part of God’s creative activity; trust at the heart of faith active in love; and social trust and the common good.

Early attention has focused on those portions of the report dealing with same-sex relationships. Bishop Peter Strommen of the Northeastern Minnesota Synod, who chaired the panel that prepared the report, said he hopes Lutherans will also look at other aspects of the report.

“If you think about how the things in the report affect people’s lives, there are many other topics in here than just same-gender relationships,” he told the Star-Tribune. “In fact,

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that’s a very small part of the report.”

Society relies on intimate relationships to sustain itself through strong families, Strommen said, but societal pressures can also erode the foundation on which long-lasting relationships depend.

Emily Eastwood, executive director of Lutherans Concerned/North America, a gay and lesbian advocacy group, called the draft “inconsistent and insufficient.”

“It calls for an end to discrimination,” she said in a press release. “Yet the church continues to discriminate against same-gender couples and families by relegating them to second-class status.”

Paull Spring, of the conservative group Lutheran CORE, said the report contained some “glaring theological errors.” By redefining marriage as a “relationship of love and trust between two people,” the statement opens the door to supporting same-gender committed relationships, he said in a statement.

The draft says the church does not wish to alter the “the historic origin of the term ‘marriage’ as a life-long and committed relationship between a woman and man,” but does says that “dissolution of a committed samegender relationship be treated with the same gravity as the dissolution of a marriage.” ■

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News Briefs XVI Versus LCD In his first visit to the United States, Pope Benedict XVI warned American Catholics against a relativism that reduces all religions to their lowest common denominator.

In an April address to the nation’s bishops, Benedict said the church should not be complacent just because American secularism is not as hostile to religious belief as its European counterpart.

“It is not enough to count on this traditional religiosity and go about business as usual, even as its foundations are being slowly undermined,” he said.

Benedict also argued for a complete subscription to Catholic teaching, condemning the individualist streak in American culture that leads some Catholics to pick and choose which doctrines they’ll follow.

“Faith becomes a passive acceptance that certain things ‘out there’ are true, but without practical relevance for everyday life,” he said.

“The result is a growing separation of faith from life, living ‘as if God did not exist.’”

He specifically cited the scandal given by “Catholics who promote an alleged right to abortion.”

Martyred In Iraq Archbishop Paul Rahho, leader of the Chaldean Catholic Church in northern Iraq, was found dead in March. The courageous leader had been ambushed by gunmen who killed his driver and two companions after he led the Stations of the Cross at the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit in Mosul.

He spent most of his life in Mosul, a city with one of the largest and oldest Christian populations in Iraq. While he enjoyed good relations with many Muslims, he had expressed concern over moves to

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incorporate Sharia into the new Iraqi Constitution.

Rahho claimed that one in three Christians had been forced out of Mosul and said those who didn’t faced stark choices—convert to Islam, pay the jizya (a tax imposed on nonMuslims) or risk being killed.

Another Complicated Yoga Position The Sunday Times of South Africa reports on 96-year-old “Catholic spiritual teacher” Winnie Young who “encourages her pupils to find God through yoga.” Young has retained her Catholic faith despite spending the majority of her life studying under Yogacharya BKS Iyengar, one of the most respected yogis in the world. In fact, she says that yoga has helped draw her nearer to Christ. Her book, Yoga for Christians, argues that the idea that yoga is a religion is a misconception. She does, however, acknowledge that certain Hindu beliefs are incorporated into yoga in ways unacceptable to Christians. Still, Young says that years of practicing the Eastern discipline have taught her where to draw the line, such that she can teach yoga to other Christians without compromising their religious beliefs.

Hindus are not amused by Young’s contentions. The head of the South African Hindu Maha Sabha, Ashwin Trikamjee, rejects Young’s attempts to meld yoga and Christianity outright.

“It’s hypocrisy of the highest order. I don’t understand how anyone can teach yoga from a Christian background. It is an indisputable fact that yoga has its origins in the East and in Hinduism,” he said.

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films such as Signs, 21 Grams, or In America. Art taken a tumble. Less than half of all American adults read even one book for fun or can sharpen our appreciation of Scripture. The pleasure in a given year. How might Bible reading have declined even among the skills required for sound biblical interpretation can most faithful? We applaud poet Dana Gioia, chair of the also be applied to movie watching.

National Endowment of the Arts, for his tireless efforts to How does this duel listening work? What might it look get people reading again. With their “Big Read” program, like? For my latest book, I studied the new cinematic the N.E.A. tries to unite entire communities around a sincanon. I turned to the Internet Movie Database as the gle book. What can we learn from their nascent efforts? If most democratic community of film lovers. The IMDb a city can start reading and discussing To Kill a Mockingbird, aggregates the shared knowledge of filmgoers across ages then surely a church community can be challenged to and borders, allowing anyone to be a film critic. While meditate upon Genesis, Jeremiah, or Galatians? plenty of anomalies can emerge (like fanboys with a blind Where has all the discretionary time for reading gone? allegiance to all things Quentin Tarantino), over several To the electronic kingdom! We can blame our biblical illitmonths and thousands of ratings, a collective insight eracy on the movies, television shows, and video games emerges. I started with their evolving list of the top films that increasingly occupy our time (and public conversaof the twenty-first century. In studying the movies that tion!). So how do we fight the allure of pretty pictures and matter to the most dedicated film fans, what thematic tenattractive actors? In 1934, Karl Barth and Emil Brunner dencies emerged? Could those “texts” provide a fresh had a heated debate about how much credit to extend window into Scripture? What timeless biblical truths toward sources of revelation beyond Scripture. Their snapwould emerge as relevant responses to the most vexing py rejoinders are gathered in the thin volume, Natural movies?

Theology. Brunner suggested that a “point of contact” can I am stunned by what I discovered. The forty-five films be made between God and humanity. This point of conI surveyed broke into roughly three thematic groups. The tact may be a glimpse of a flower, a fresh breeze, or a most brutal films dealt with evil in an uncompromising friend’s encouragement. Could this point of contact way. Oscar winners like The Departed and No Country for extend to cultural artifacts? Might God speak to us Old Men document the wages of sin in uncompromising through a song, a show, a film? While Barth appreciated ways. They are cautionary tales about lying, cheating, and Mozart’s music, he rejected Brunner’s proposal in an essay stealing. These powerful films remind us how utterly called unambiguously, “Nein!” For Barth, the initiative depraved humanity remains. The next generation of filmrests solely upon the Divine. It is veiled, only revealed by goers isn’t afraid of sin—they welcome frank portraits of God himself. As fallen vessels, we never appropriate our fallenness.

God—YAHWEH appropriates us.

Memento (2000) reinvents the tropes of film noir. It turns the jaded private eye into an unreliable narrator.

While Barth’s rejection of cultural capital held sway for Leonard’s short-term memory loss keeps us off balance, much of the subsequent Reformed tradition, Brunner’s trying to piece together clues. By the conclusion of the point of contact appears to have arrived. The marginalizafilm, we discover our endless capacity for self-deception. tion of church, Scripture, and tradition seems to have left So what are the scriptural connections? These dark, vious grasping for “point of contact” on our cell phones and lent films take us back to the garden, to God’s first quesplasma screens. tion to humanity, “Why are you hiding?” I was reminded Pastors and scholars are increasingly locating theoloof the excuses we make. How we blame everyone but gy within pop culture. We scan movies in search of serourselves for our failings. Memento is a brilliant meditation mon illustrations; we wade into the darkness of a on original sin. screening room in order to find illumination. Carefully A second theme emerging from our most important observing today’s films may open us up to neglected movies is community. Harrowing films like Crash and Hotel truths of Scripture. The wisdom of Ecclesiastes or the Rwanda force us to consider the other. Whether we are cries of Lamentations may take on added resonance after facing urban sprawl in Los Angeles or genocide in a trip to the Cineplex. The fist-shaking Psalms of David Rwanda, we are invited to step into another person’s may correspond to the questions of theodicy integral to t is tough to be a people rooted in sola scriptura during an era in which reading has

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(and her baby brother) into the labyrinth with Vidal in the curse of sin. hot pursuit. During her final test, Ofelia chooses to sacrifice her own life rather than her baby brother’s. She is ushered into a golden kingdom where her parents commend her, echoing God’s affirmation, “Well done my good and faithful servant.”

Given all the ugliness we’ve witnessed, we are desperate to get back to the garden to reverse the curse of sin.

The hobbits in The Lord of the Rings long to get back to the verdant Shire, to enjoy a pint of ale, to savor the strawberries. But that peaceable kingdom will not arrive without a struggle. We need a fellowship to navigate the journey to Mount Doom. We need a diverse community of hobbits, elves, dwarves, and tree people to resist evil. The Christian story doesn’t end in a shire but in a city, with streets paved with gold, where living waters feed trees that have healing in their leaves. We’re invited to a banquet; to all who are thirsty, the Spirit and the Bride say, “Come.” We long for fantasy because we recognize our dire straits. Film noir shows us how deceptive we can be. Movies about community suggest that we are indeed our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. The finest fantasy films remind us of how imaginative and hopeful Revelation 21 and 22 remain. As we wander into the dark of cinema, the longing for the light of God’s promises emerges. That’s a point of contact I am eager to embrace.

Given all the ugliness we’ve witnessed, we are desperate to get back to the garden to reverse shoes. Will we push past our stereotypes and rise up to defend those who are oppressed or threatened? In Little Miss Sunshine, that empathetic invitation is comic. Family remains the first place we learn to live as a community. In Mystic River, the results of indifference are tragic. When two boyhood friends fail to rally to another pal’s defense, the entire fabric of a working class neighborhood in Boston unravels. In The Lives of Others, a Stasi agent spies upon a playwright and an actress in East Germany. The beauty of their true selves brings tears to the eyes of the committed Communist, and he risks his own safety and career to protect their freedoms. As I wrestle with The Lives of Others, I find myself confronted by God’s second question to humanity when God asks Cain, “Where is your brother?” The blood of Abel cries out from the ground, and yet Cain dodges responsibility with another question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The answer in the finest contemporary films is “yes.”

So where does hope reside? The third (and largest) block of films forming the new cinematic canon are fantasies. It may be tempting to dismiss Pixar’s colorful cartoons as superficial, but Finding Nemo and The Incredibles offer plenty of substantive commentary amidst the animation. They enlighten and entertain. Even the seemingly silly Pirates of the Caribbean series began with a theological premise. What was the pirates’ problem? They needed to reverse a deadly curse. Only the blood of one man could free them from their perpetual problem.

What can we make of complex fantasies like Pan’s Labyrinth and The Lord of the Rings trilogy? For fairytales to work, evil must be taken seriously. Fantasy must mirror our world’s ambiguity, mystery, and danger. There are poison apples and berries and mushrooms in the forest.

Children must learn to see through nature, to discover the genuine dangers hiding beneath facades.

In Pan’s Labyrinth, 11-year-old Ofelia confronts monsters in two realms. When her widowed mother marries a captain in Fascist Spain, Ofelia is transported to world of violence, torture, and abuse. She escapes to a fantasy world of fairies and fauns that appears equally menacing.

While her brutal stepfather, Vidal, focuses solely upon the baby boy residing in her ailing mother’s womb, Ofelia explores the labyrinth in the nearby dark woods. She sneaks into the frightening chambers of the Pale Man, a devourer of children—although her stepfather proves to be equally monstrous. Pan’s Labyrinth becomes a bloody nightmare, collapsing the distance between the Spanish Civil War and Ofelia’s imagination.

Yet director Guillermo Del Toro ends Pan’s Labyrinth with remarkably Christian imagery and choices. The faun proves to be a trustworthy companion, drawing Ofelia

Craig Detweiler (Ph.D., Fuller Theological Seminary) directs the Reel Spirituality Institute at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is the author of Into the Dark: Seeing the Sacred in the Top Films of the 21st Century (Baker Academic, 2008) and co-author of A Matrix of Meanings: Finding God in Pop Culture (Baker Academic, 2003). His feature documentary, Purple State of Mind, is currently showing around the country.

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BIG THOUGHTS FOR LITTLE MINDS r e sou rces

fo r

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Focus On the Central Point

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e want to do more than merely provide substantive, doctrinal teaching

Aesop’s fable. In this case, the “moral of the story” for children. We also want to present it in such a way that the children becomes the central point.

Or they focus on the can grasp it. We can do this if we will work at using methodologies that human character’s need, showing how God met it. engage children. Here is a quick review of methodologies This makes the human central and God resembles the previously discussed in this column. Give simple, accurate magic pot or the magic beans or the magic words in a fairy definitions of theological terms. Make use of repetition. (Imagine tale, giving the human character what he wants. a pastor who uses just these two methodologies, in a limTake, for example, the story in Acts 12 of Peter’s release ited fashion, but regularly. Imagine that he chooses just from prison by an angel. Herod had arrested and executone theological term from his sermon each Sunday and ed the apostle James. Seeing that this pleased the Jews, he clearly, simply explains it for children. As the weeks go by, had arrested Peter as well and planned to execute him the he periodically refers back to it for them. By the end of a next day. Christians met in a home and prayed earnestly. year, the children of his congregation would understand During the night, an angel came to Peter’s cell and awak52 important theological concepts and be able to explain ened him. Peter’s chains fell off and he followed the angel them to someone else.) Use illustrations, an invaluable past the guards and through locked gates that opened on teaching technique often practiced by Jesus himself. Move their own accord. He went to those who were praying for from the familiar to the unfamiliar. The younger the child, him who at first refused to believe it was him! The moralthe more concretely she thinks and the more she needs istic approach to this story would be to focus on the what she already understands to provide a bridge to someearnestly praying Christians as an example of how we thing new. should pray (which, of course, they certainly are). The Here is one more means of teaching doctrine to chilneed-focused approach would concentrate on how God dren: Tell Bible stories. This column will examine our focus took care of Peter and saved him from harm, assuring the when we tell Bible stories to children. This is such an obvichildren that God will protect and care for them too ously good idea that it really does not need to be stated. (which he certainly will—depending on what we mean by Children love stories and the Bible is full of them. Less “protect”; the need-focused teacher will probably want to obvious perhaps is this: when we tell children a Bible hurry past the part about James having been executed). story, we must be careful to focus on the story’s main In truth, however, the story is about God continuing the point. A quick search on Amazon will bring up a myriad work he had begun of sending the good news of Jesus of different Bible storybooks for children. Too many Bible Christ out into all the world through his church. Herod storytellers, however, fail to use Bible stories for the purand the Jews had opposed him. They intended to silence pose for which God intended them when he included the apostles and to prevent the gospel from spreading. them in Scripture. They have failed to focus on what is God overruled them. In fact, to stop with Peter’s arrival at central in the stories, and have used them to try to accomthe prayer meeting leaves the story unfinished. The very plish other things instead. next part of Acts 12 describes Herod’s appearance to some God gave us his Word, first of all, as his self-revelation to of his subjects who praised him as a god. He gladly us. He intends to show us who he is and, especially, who received their praise and “immediately, an angel of the he is as Savior and Redeemer of his people. The Bible story Lord struck him down.” The story goes on to recount his is the story of God redeeming his people, and every smalldecidedly un-godlike end and finishes by saying, “But the er story it contains contributes, in some way, to showing us word of God increased and multiplied.” God accomplishwhat God is like and what he has done to accomplish es his purposes, regardless of who stands in the way. He redemption. When we tell a Bible story to children, we had sent his long-promised Messiah, who had accommust carefully focus on these things as central. plished redemption for his people; now he was sending the This is not what usually happens. More commonly, message about it to the ends of the earth and it could not when people tell Bible stories to children, they focus on be stopped. one of two things. They may focus on the human characAs another example, take the story in 1 Kings 17 of the ter’s example, giving the story a moralistic twist, like an widow whose handful of flour and small amount of oil

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never ran out, in spite of widespread famine, as long as she kept Elijah as a guest in her home. The moralistic teacher would point out that, like the widow, we should always give to God first before considering our own wants and needs. The need-focused teacher would want the children to see that God provides them with their food and will always do so. While these may both be good points, they are not the main point. The main point is that God’s word has the power to accomplish what it speaks. The chapter began with a confrontation between Elijah, the prophet of God, and the idolatrous Ahab, whose wife had involved God’s people in worship of the Canaanite god Baal. Elijah, as the mouthpiece of God, declared that there would be neither dew nor rain for years until by his word. That was how the famine began. At first God told Elijah he had “commanded” the ravens to provide Elijah’s food. Then God sent him to a widow whom he had “commanded” to feed him. When Elijah had asked the widow for something to eat, she had said that all she had was a handful of flour and a little oil. Elijah’s answer: “Thus says the Lord the God of Israel, ‘The jar of flour shall not be spent, and the jug of oil shall not be empty, until the day that the Lord sends rain upon the earth.’” The prophets, including Elijah, spoke God’s word to his people, who often failed to heed it. The people needed to see that what God speaks occurs always just as he says it will.

Let me suggest a few resources you could use for examples of Bible stories for children that keep a biblical focus.

Sally Lloyd-Jones has written an overview Bible storybook, The Jesus Storybook: Every Story Whispers His Name. As the title promises, this book takes children through an overview of Scripture’s Old and New Testaments, pointing out how each story looks ahead or looks back to the Savior God gave us.

In my book for older elementary children, Grandpa’s Box, Bible stories from Old and New Testament are told around the theme of the warfare God spoke of in the Garden of Eden, between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. Each story is told to show God as the victor, overcoming the obstacles to having a people for himself. Promise and Deliverance by S. G. de Graaf is a wonderful older work in four volumes, which was written for the teachers of children rather than for children themselves. It shows teachers how every Bible story moves God’s redemptive purpose for his people a little further along.

While resources can be helpful, it is most rewarding to learn to see and to tell Bible stories for yourself in a way that keeps God and his purposes central. Here are some helps to doing that. First, remember that God is the main character of every Bible story. As you read each story, ask yourself, “What is God doing in this story? What do I see to be true about God here?”

Secondly, keep in mind “the big picture.” The Bible’s story is the narrative of how God accomplishes his purpose of having a covenant people for himself, in spite of Satan’s opposition and his people’s own sinfulness. As you read a story, ask yourself how this particular, smaller story fits into that big, overall story. Of course, the better you know

the whole story (i.e., all of the biblical stories in their context), the more adept you will become at this.

Thirdly, consider the particular story’s context. In the Bible story examples given above, to isolate either story from its context is almost to necessitate a moralistic or human-centered perspective. You need to consider the whole book where the story is found. What is the book’s purpose? What was its human author’s original intention in writing it? How does this particular story fit into its specific book, and how would telling this particular story help to accomplish its author’s purpose?

I once heard an illustration in which the Bible was likened to a museum whose subject is God. Each passage of Scripture was compared to exhibits in the museum, each offering a different angle or showing another facet of the richness of God’s character. Every story is one of these exhibits, calling us to marvel at yet one more wonderful thing about our God. This is how we need to tell the Bible stories to our children, refusing to allow ourselves to be sidetracked by anything less.

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

Letters cont. (continued from page 4)

claim the gospel itself to those who most need to hear it?” I need this reminder to proclaim the gospel to those who most need to hear it as well as talk about it with the family of God. Second, he made the point that “shoring up the faith of the faithful” seemed to be the goal of our tracts, articles, and books and not the conversion of the unbeliever. If our aim is to proclaim the gospel of God’s grace and not a shoring up of my faith only, the outcome would be the achievement of both. Lastly, his declaration, “If our theology cannot be lived and proclaimed to unbelievers, then in what sense can it be termed biblical theology?” Yes indeed, if our theology is the Sword of the Lord, it will cut to the very soul those God has and is calling unto himself.

We need to proclaim this gospel and not just talk about it.

Our mission is to proclaim this gospel to the unbeliever, not just discuss it inside the fellowship. Then our theology will accomplish God’s purpose and not return void. I want to thank David Robertson for reminding me of these truths.

Dr. Ron Daves, Pastor Temple Baptist Church Columbia, South Carolina

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Jacob’s “Ladder” and the Condescension of God in Genesis 28:10–22

by Timothy Johnson Two years ago I preached a message entitled “Christmas at Bethel.” I recall the furrowed brows this title elicited in the weeks leading up to the sermon when people inquired about my approaching sermon topic. Imagine how they would have responded to the title “Christmas at Luz”! My purpose here is to share some of the exegetical points that informed this sermon with the goal of emphasizing an important and foundational Christian teaching that does not always receive the attention it deserves: the condescension of God. The condescension of God addresses the almost unfathomable reality that the triune God has seen fit to humble himself to his own creatures. From beginning to end, the Bible portrays the omnipotent, all-knowing God of the universe as the God who regularly stoops down from glory to care for his beloved ones. The ultimate expression of God’s condescension manifests itself in the God-man Jesus

whom Jonathan Edwards describes in his sermon “The Excellency of Christ” as the “one of infinite condescension.”1 And yet casting God in these humble terms continues to confound a Western culture whose every impulse exhorts the sacred individual to defend his rights, to climb the ladder of professional success and, most damagingly, to attempt to ascend to God. Under such conditions, humility is an obstacle, not a prescription for improvement. The church is not immune from this cultural influence whose pervasive power is easily detected in the preaching and teaching that commonly conforms to these cultural expectations. Thus condescension of God is an important reminder for the church that upward mobility is not the pattern of life modeled or prescribed by the triune God of the Christian Bible.

We, like Edwards, are amazed at how infinite glory and infinite humility converge in Jesus, and while his incarnation is surely the most complete manifestation of God’s condescension, it is valuable to note that the Old Testament provides In Season: Meditations on many glimpses into God’s intenReading, Preaching, and tional pattern of revealing this condescension.

For example, God Using Scripture walked in the garden (Gen. 3); What role does the Bible play in your life? Is it a resource for descended to earth in order to daily wisdom, a self-help manual extraordinaire, a doctrinal mercifully confuse our languages repository? Perhaps it doesn’t have a regular role in your life (Gen. 11); investigated the sins of because these other uses (and abuses) of Scripture have overSodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 18); taken its true purpose. Throughout this year, we are featuring met frequently with Moses (Exod. 4); and patiently engaged “In Season: Meditations on reading, preaching, and using Job (Job 38), just to name a few.

Scripture.” Articles will be written by various people (the The Sunday school story of laity, professional theologians, and ministers); and each will be Jacob’s ladder represents another unique (a sermon, a hermeneutic, thoughts on application, example of how the Bible reveals and even concerns about the misuse of Scripture). We want to God’s condescension and, as continue the conversation on our website, so feel free to e-mail such, serves as an excellent place us at letters@modernreformation.org with your thoughts after within the Old Testament to learn reading each issue’s “In Season.” how God prepared for the descent of his Son.

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Context In Genesis 28, Isaac sent Jacob away from the Promised Land (Canaan) to Paddan-aram so that Jacob would marry a woman from Rebekah’s family instead of from the despised local Canaanites. Jacob was also fleeing from his brother Esau who intended to kill him on account of Jacob’s deceptive appropriation of his birthright (Gen. 27:41). On his journey toward Paddan-aram, Jacob spent the night “at a certain place” that is identified as Luz, which Jacob would later rename Bethel meaning “house of God.” At this location Jacob received a dream that featured what has come to be popularly known as a ladder connecting heaven and earth (Gen. 28:12).

This so-called ladder was likely not a ladder at all. The underlying Hebrew word is found only in this verse within the Old Testament, and the etymology of the word suggests a meaning closer to a stairway. The NIV translates “stairway,” footnoting ladder as a possible translation; and while the ESV translates “ladder” in the text, it footnotes as a possible reading, “flight of steps,” which is my preferred translation. Scholars recognize this interpretive problem and some surmise that the image of an ancient ziggurat was influencing the author of the verse. A ziggurat was an ancient pyramidal structure with outside staircases that pagans would ascend to a shrine in order to worship their deity. Some even suggest that the imagery found here in verse 12 mirrors the kind of edifice described in the Tower of Babel story (Gen.11:4).

Grammar and Theology In my view, the primary exegetical and homiletical problem raised by the translation of “ladder” is that readers generally picture climbing ladders. Unfortunately, some church fathers such as Augustine allegorized the soul’s spiritual ascent up this ladder, which has no doubt contributed to the preservation of the popular translation of “ladder” (NASB, NKJV).2 For that matter, ziggurats also conjure images of ascent. I believe, however, that a common feature of Hebrew grammar found in Genesis 28:12 actually suggests that the word being used here (regardless of whether it is translated “ladder,” “stairway,” or “flight of steps”) is being directed “toward the earth.” The Hebrew word for earth in verse 12 (eretz) is suffixed with the Hebrew letter he (h) thereby reading “eretzah.” This grammatical feature is called a “locative he” and generally denotes direction toward something.3 It is also used in no less than six other instances in this particular story. Thus, one could easily translate verse 12 this way: “And he dreamed, and behold, there was a (ladder, stairway, flight of steps) positioned toward the earth.” By contrast, virtually every translation yields something like “there was a ladder set up on the earth” (ESV).

Naturally, if one were to interpret the grammar in the way I suggest, the striking imagery of God’s descending activity toward earth emerges rather clearly. One could not confuse the fact that it is God who is initiating the process toward Jacob, not the reverse. In his book Putting

Amazing Back into Grace, Michael Horton also considers Jacob’s “ladder” a metaphor for Christ’s descent, seeing Jesus as the fulfillment of the ladder in John 1:51.4 Horton points to Luther’s condemnation of medieval religion as a “superstitious ‘ladder of glory’” that found greater delight in the pursuit of God through pious endeavors than in the condescension of God.5 Thus, the most natural interpretation of the grammar conforms to a theology that uncompromisingly seeks to turn our attention away from our own efforts to reach God. Luther knew that the pursuit of God frequently manifests itself as futile attempts to do “good works,” which only serve an insatiable desire to climb ladders. Most every deviant theological trajectory can, eventually, be traced back to some faulty, though commonly wellintended, attempt to incorporate a greater role for the human being that will ultimately intercept a greater percentage of glory from God and hand it off to man. This theology of glory is the antithesis to the biblical reality of God’s condescension and it can surface in rather subtle formulations.

Justification and Good Works For example, consider the current impact that the New Paul Perspective is possibly having on some views of justification. John Piper’s recent book, The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright, critiques Wright’s disappointing view that our works serve as part of the basis for our justification.6 Piper skillfully reveals that Wright’s assertion that Paul was not as opposed to Jewish legalism (which is the traditional interpretation of Paul) as he was with Jewish ethnocentrism (which is a position more in line with the New Paul School), falters in that both ethnocentrism and legalism stem from the same taproot of selfrighteousness.7 According to Piper, while Paul opposed both ethnocentrism and legalism, he ultimately opposed that self-righteousness that could eventually result in one who could “boast in God’s grace.”8 Thus, it would seem that those who seek to elevate the value of works in the context of justification by claiming that Paul was preoccupied with ethnocentrism are simply avoiding the core issue of self-righteousness, which is the true source of worksrighteousness. Piper then draws attention to Wright’s perception that there is a “conspiracy” among those who do not concentrate enough attention on the relationship between justification and sanctification.9 Unfortunately, such a sentiment is becoming increasingly prevalent in evangelical circles.

It is right at this point of any discussion on the relationship between good works and salvation that the condescension of God is so important. Good works are not ours to create nor even to emphasize in the first place. Properly understood, good works are the outward result of a justified life, both of which come from the hand of God. One classic biblical articulation on the relationship of faith and good works is found in Ephesians 2:8–10 (ESV) where verse 10 is far too often forgotten: J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 1 3

scription for overcoming fear.

For example, in Isaiah 7:14 Ahaz receives the prophecy of should be one of euphoric gratitude and the kind of Immanuel in the midst of his fear of an advancing Assyrian “good works” that mark a justified person, which is army; and in Matthew 1:20 while Joseph was afraid to take exactly what Jacob displays.

Mary as his wife, he was told not to fear because his son would be For by grace you have been saved through faith. And that Immanuel. After Moses’ first fearful rejection of this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a God’s call from the burning bush, God responds that he result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are will be with him (Exod. 3:12). Jeremiah’s fear of his call his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good due to his youth was also tempered by God’s comforting works, which God prepared beforehand, that we words that he would be with him (Jer. 1:8). Jesus’ Great should walk in them.

Commission was given to anxious disciples with the promise that he would be with them (Matt. 28:20).

God is the author of our good works, not us! Verse 10 Finally, in Acts 18:9, as Paul fears preaching the gospel should serve as a descriptive, humbling comfort that to the Gentiles in Corinth, Jesus charges him not to fear, God has done everything for us, including preparing the saying, “I am with you.” good works in which his justified ones are to walk. Too often we try to prescribe good works as a way of pleasing Application God, and this often takes the form of quoting James In our greatest fears, God reaches down to remind us 2:26, “Faith without works is dead.” But I read the that he’s with us. Pursuing good works as the hoped for whole of James 2:14–26, in accordance with Ephesians basis or even partial basis of our right standing before God 2:8–10, as a description of the fact that faith that does not is simply a desperate attempt to overcome our insecurity result in good works cannot save (James 2:14). In other and fear that we do not measure up before a holy and words, James is not prescribing good works as a way of righteous God. The truth is that we do not measure up, proving that we have faith, he is describing the fact that and we cannot for all have sinned and fall short of the one who is justified will necessarily produce good works. glory of God (Rom. 3:28). However, the good news is that Therefore, Paul and James together describe what only God’s consistent pattern of condescension demonstrates God can do. Just as God declared that he would write a his eternal and compassionate love for us. new covenant on his people’s hearts that was different Our response to this undeserved, unearned grace from the ones given earlier, thereby implying that only should be one of euphoric gratitude and the kind of he would provide the means of salvation (Jer. “good works” that mark a justified person, which is 31:31–34), so too God provides the good works in which exactly what Jacob displays. After receiving the message justified believers cheerfully walk. God has done it all! from God in his dream, Jacob responds by first sanctifyReformed theology rightfully emphasizes justification ing the “certain place” both by renaming Luz to Bethel because it is the necessary source of the good works that and by anointing a common stone to serve as a sacred result by God’s providential intention. Emphasizing pillar. Such a sanctification of Jacob’s surroundings will good works (a.k.a. sanctification) apart from its source, also be seen in a twenty-first century regenerate life justification, simply places the cart before the horse and bearing sanctifying fruit that sets us apart from the ultimately yields insecure man-pleasing fruit that is not world as a necessary result of God’s initiating grace. the kind of secure, fearless, life-changing fruit that Common elements of our life—such as our homes, cars, results from justification. work place, choice of television programming, and more—will be seen with different eyes. No longer do we Immanuel longingly peer up the ladder to see if we can attain either We can see how God’s intervention at Luz ultimately worldly or spiritual glory, but we will be more aware of led to Jacob’s changed life by first overcoming his insecuthe common world around us and in a better posture to rity. As he saw the flight of steps descending to him, God’s walk in the good works that “God prepared beforewords provided the comfort and security that the scared, hand.” Such a life that is less consumed with self will be lonely, wretched swindler needed to hear. In one of the marked by the one characteristic that Calvin considered Bible’s first “Immanuel” verses, God declares to Jacob in foremost in the Christian: humility. Calvin wrote in his Genesis 28:15, “Behold, I am with you and will keep you Institutes, “A saying of Chrysostom’s has always pleased wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land.” me very much, that the foundation of our philosophy is The phrase “God with us” constitutes perhaps the greatest humility”; and Calvin was even more fond of articulation of God’s condescension in the Bible, and as in Augustine’s contention that the primary precept of a so many other instances, this phrase is offered as a preChristian is “first, second, third and always” humility.10

Our response to this undeserved, unearned grace

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Jacob’s second response was his vow to follow God. Once God has called his elect, we cannot help but follow him. Jesus said, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:62).

The pursuit of success or piety loses its aroma. Like Peter we recite, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). Slowly but surely we will be less oriented on consumption and more content with all that God provides. Such a trajectory is clearly seen in Jacob’s third response, which was to tithe all that God had given him. No “good work” demonstrates trust and thanksgiving in God more than cheerfully giving away our possessions. In the end, Jacob’s combined response to God’s condescension overflows with the kind of Godwrought good works that both define a justified saint and ultimately glorify God who is the author of justification and good works.

Conclusion In Genesis 28:12, God the Father demonstrates his eternal pattern of condescension with Jacob, and in the New Testament God the Son fulfills that pattern. But it doesn’t end there. The classic ordus salutis of Romans 8:28–30 is appropriately preceded by indicators of the triune commitment to acting on our behalf in verses 26 and 27. Since “we do not even know what to pray for as we ought,” God the Spirit “helps us in our weakness” by interceding for us “according to the will of God.” Even after foreknowing, predestining, calling, and justifying, God the Spirit continues to intervene on our behalf in order to guarantee our glorification. Truly God is with us, and as Piper states, “Our only hope for living the radical demands of the Christian life is that God is totally for us now and forever.”11 Like the inspiring image of a father bending down to hear his child’s request, the picture of our heavenly father humbling himself to meet our needs is powerful and true.

The clear biblical presentation of the condescension of God combined with the portrayal of the misguided attempts to “make a name for ourselves” in the Tower of Babel story should forever remove the teaching that ascent to God is part of his design for our lives. Thus, Jacob could not have been seeing a ziggurat enticing him to ascend to God. Instead, we must submit to that precisely phrased portion of Anglicanism’s post-communion prayer that prescribes our best approach to employing good works:

both our salvation and good works who, as the incarnate Immanuel, provides the best gift by humbly carrying his helpless children up the flight of steps to the Father.

Timothy Johnson (Ph.D., Marquette University) is assistant professor of Old Testament and Hebrew and interim associate dean of administration at Nashotah House Theological Seminary in Nashotah, Wisconsin. He is ordained with the Evangelical Free Church of America.

WORKS CITED 1 Jonathan Edwards, “The Excellency of Christ,” as cited from The Works of President Edwards: Forty Sermons on Various Subjects. See an updated version of this sermon at http://www.reformationtheology.com/2005/12/ jonathan_edwards_the_excellenc.php.

2 Quoted from Genesis 12–50 (Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture II), ed. Mark Sheridan (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 188.

3 B. Waltke and M. O’Connor, Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1990), 185.

4 Michael Horton, Putting Amazing Back into Grace (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994), 110.

5 Horton, 179.

6 See John Piper’s extensive, fair, and convincing critique of Wright’s position in The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright (Wheaton: Crossway, 2007). Piper cites from N. T. Wright, “New Perspectives on Paul,” in Justification in Perspective: Historical Developments and Contemporary Challenges, ed. Bruce L. McCormack (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), 260.

7 Piper, 156–57.

8 Piper, 157.

9 Piper quotes from Wright, “New Perspectives on Paul,” 253.

10 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2.2.11.

John Stott’s Evangelical Truth (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999) includes a postscript entitled “The Preeminence of Humility” where he states, “I make so bold as to claim, in this brief postscript, that the supreme quality which the evangelical faith engenders (or should do) is humility,” 122.

11 Piper, The Future of Justification, 184.

And we humbly beseech, O heavenly Father, so to assist us with thy grace, that we may continue in that holy fellowship, and do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honor and glory, world without end. Amen.

Whether it’s pride, ethnocentrism, or a legalism that boasts in good works, the arrogant, self-righteousness that fosters them all is overcome by God’s great and eternal condescension as completed in Jesus Christ, the author of J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 1 5

NO CHURCH, NO PROBLEM?

No Church, No Problem?

by Michael Horton

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ow many times have you heard that the church is not a place but a people? Across the board, from more traditional to more experimental approaches to ministry, the dominant perspective seems to be that we gather on the Lord’s Day primarily in order to do something for God and each other rather than first of all to receive something from God. Drawing on Darrell Guder, Emerging church leader Dan Kimball has recently argued that in its emphasis on the “marks of the church” (preaching and sacrament) the Reformation inadvertently turned the focus away from the church-as-people who do certain things to the church-as-place where certain things are done.

But there’s nothing inadvertent about it. With Scripture itself, the Reformers were very explicit about the fact that we come to church first of all because the Creator of the universe has summoned us to appear before him in his court.

Entering as his covenant people, we invoke the name of Christ for our salvation, God addresses us again in judgment and forgiveness, and we respond with our “Amen!” of faith and thanksgiving for who God is and what he has done for us. The gifts of the Father in the Son by the Spirit come first; our action is a response to God’s action.

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on choice in this culture collides with the biblical emphasis on God’s electing, redeeming, and calling grace as well as the covenantal, communal, and corporate nature of our growth in Christ. Even when we come to church, it is often as individual consumers of spiritual experiences, with opportunities for self-expression in worship and “finding our ministry” in the church rather than being beneficiaries of God’s gifts to us through servants whom he has called to be our shepherds under Christ (see Eph. 4:1–16).

Not surprisingly, ministers today are regarded more as “life coaches” who facilitate our self-transformation than as ambassadors of Christ, devoted to the Word of God and prayer, so that they can spread a feast on behalf of the King for his people in this world. If the focus of our message falls on our “willing and running” rather than on God’s mercy (Rom. 9:16), it will follow that our methods will concentrate almost exclusively on finding the best techniques for transforming ourselves and others. It is a simultaneously activistic and individualistic approach. Yet this subverts God’s whole intention on the Lord’s Day. He comes not to help you “become a better you,” but to kill you and raise you together with Christ as part of his redeemed body.

Why We Need the Church Because the church is first of all a place where God does certain things, it becomes a people who do certain things.

We cannot take God’s action for granted or assume that it has been done in the past. Christ, both Lord and Savior of his church, appointed an official ministry (including officers) so that he could continue to serve his covenant people and extend his kingdom of grace to the ends of the earth by his Spirit. Even in the present—every time we gather—it is God who summons us in judgment and grace.

It is not our devotion, praise, piety, or service that comes first, but God’s service to us. This is why we must assemble at a place where the gospel is truly preached, the sacraments are administered according to Christ’s institution, and there is a visible form of Christ’s heavenly reign through officers whom he has called and sent.

Pastors, teachers, and elders are not “life coaches” who help us in our personalized goals for spiritual fitness, but gifts given by the Ascended Lord so that the whole church might become mature and less susceptible to being spiritually duped (Eph. 4:1–16).

God’s Service Creates a Redeemed People on Pilgrimage in This Present Age Churches of the Reformation have always agreed that the true church is found wherever the gospel is truly preached and the sacraments are administered according to Christ’s institution. But this means that the public ministry provided on the Lord’s Day is primarily God’s ministry to us. We are not individuals who come together simply for fresh marching orders for transforming ourselves and our culture, but sinners who come to die and to be made alive in Christ—no longer defined by our individual choices and preferences (the niche demo-graphics of our passing age), but by our incorporation into Christ and his body.

Even the purpose of our singing is not self-expression (witnessing to our own piety), but is to “teach and admonish one another in all wisdom” so that “the word of Christ [may] dwell in you richly” (Col. 3:16), “giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of Jesus Christ” (Eph. 4:20). We come to invoke the name of our Covenant Lord, to hear his law and receive his forgiveness. Only then are we able to receive his gifts with the “Amen!” of faith and repentance, with a heart full of thanksgiving toward God and love toward our neighbors.

But if “church” is primarily about what individuals do (even if they happen to do it in the same building), then it stands to reason that our services will focus on motivating us for action rather than ministering to us God’s action here and now in the Spirit, through Word and sacrament, that which he has already accomplished for us objectively in Jesus Christ. The liturgy will be replaced with various announcements of church programs; the songs will simply be opportunities for self-expression; the preaching will largely consist of tips for transformation; baptism and the Supper will afford opportunities merely for us to commit

From “Every-Member-Ministry” to “Self-Feeders” The reigning paradigm of churches today, however, seems to be quite different. Two characteristics especially stand out when we think of American Christianity: activism and individualism. Known for our self-confidence, Americans do not like to be on the receiving end.

Even when we are receiving something, we prefer to think of it as something we deserve rather than an outright gift.

We’re also individualists. We do not like to be told who we are and what we need by someone else—even God— but would much rather decide who we are or will be and determine our own felt needs accordingly. Our emphasis

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and recommit ourselves rather than serve as means of grace.

Before long, it will be easy for churches to imagine that what happens on the Lord’s Day is less important than what happens in small groups or in the private lives of individual Christians. In fact, this is explicitly advocated today.

In a fairly recent study, Willow Creek—a pioneer megachurch—discovered that its most active and mature members are the most likely to be dissatisfied with their own personal growth and the level of teaching and worship that they are receiving. From this, the leadership concluded that as people mature in their faith, they need the church less. After all, the main purpose of the church is to provide a platform for ministry and service opportunities to individuals rather than a means of grace. As people grow, therefore, they need the church less. We need to help believers to become “self-feeders,” the study concluded.1 The Ultimate in “Self-Feeding” How far can this trajectory take us? Evangelical marketer George Barna gives us a good indication. Like the recent Willow Creek study, Barna concludes that what individual believers do on their own is more important than what the church does for them. Barna, however, takes Finney’s legacy to the next logical step. A leading marketing consultant to megachurches as well as the Disney Corporation, he has recently gone so far as to suggest that the days of the institutional church are over.

Barna celebrates a rising demographic of what he calls “Revolutionaries”—“millions of believers” who “have moved beyond the established church and chosen to be the church instead.”2 Since “being the church” is a matter of individual choice and effort, all people need are resources for their own work of personal and social transformation. “Based on our research,” Barna relates, “I have projected that by the year 2010, 10 to 20 percent of Americans will derive all their spiritual input (and output) through the Internet.”3 Who needs the church when you have an iPod? Like any service provider, the church needs to figure out what business it’s in, says Barna: Ours is not the business of organized religion, corporate worship, or Bible teaching. If we dedicate ourselves to such a business we will be left by the wayside as the culture moves forward. Those are fragments of a larger purpose to which we have been called by God’s Word. We are in the business of life transformation.4 Of course, Barna does not believe that Christians should abandon all religious practices, but the only ones he still thinks are essential are those that can be done by individuals in private, or at most in families or informal public gatherings. But by eliminating the public means of grace, Barna (like Willow Creek) directs us away from God’s lavish feast to a self-serve buffet.

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sions of the Willow Creek study cited above, Barna writes, “Whether you choose to remain involved in the congregational mold or to venture into the spiritual unknown, to experience the competing dynamics of independence and responsibility, move ahead boldly. God’s perspective is that the structures and routines you engage with matter much less than the character and commitments that define you.”

Believers need not find a good church, but they should “get a good coach.” If the gospel is good advice rather than good news, obviously the church is simply “a resource” for our personal development, as Barna suggests.5 If the local church is to survive, says Barna, authority must shift from being centralized to decentralized; leadership from “pastor-driven” to “lay-driven,” which means that the sheep are primarily servers rather than served by the ministry. Further, ministry must shift from “resistance” to change to “acceptance,” from “tradition and order” to “mission and vision,” from an “all-purpose” to a “specialized” approach to ministry, “tradition bound” to “relevance bound,” from a view of the people’s role as receivers to actors, from “knowledge” to “transformation.”6 “In just a few years,” Barna predicts, “we will see that millions of people will never travel physically to a church, but will instead roam the Internet in search of meaningful spiritual experiences.”7 After all, he adds, the heart of Jesus’ ministry was “the development of people’s character.”8 “If we rise to the challenge,” says Barna, America will witness a “moral resurgence,” new leadership, and the Christian message “will regain respect” in our culture.9 Intimate worship, says Barna, does “not require a ‘worship service,’” just a personal commitment to the Bible, prayer, and discipleship.10 His book concludes with the warning of the last judgment: “What report of your commitment to practical, holy, life-transforming service will you be able to give Him?”11 The Revolutionaries have found that in order to pursue an authentic faith they had to abandon the church.12 This is finally where American spirituality leaves us: alone, surfing the Internet, casting about for coaches and teammates, trying to save ourselves from captivity to this present age by finding those “excitements” that will induce a transformed life. Increasingly, the examples I have referred to are what people mean by the adjective “missional.”

Like the nineteenth-century revivalist Charles Finney, George Barna asserts that the Bible offers “almost no restrictions on structures and methods” for the church.13 In fact, as we have seen, he does not even think that the visible church itself is divinely established. Nature abhors a vacuum and where Barna imagines that the Bible prescribes no particular structures or methods, the invisible hand of the market fills the void. He even recognizes that the shift from the institutional church to “alternative faith communities” is largely due to market forces: “Whether you examine the changes in broadcasting, clothing, music, investing, or automobiles, producers of such consumables realize that Americans want control over their lives. The result has been the ‘niching’ of America—creating highly

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refined categories that serve smaller numbers of people, but can command greater loyalty (and profits).” The same thing is happening to the church, Barna notes, as if it were a fate to be embraced rather than an apostasy to be resisted.14 However thin, there is a theology behind Barna’s interpretation of Jesus as the paradigmatic “Revolu-tionary,” and it is basically that of Finney. “So if you are a Revolutionary,” says Barna, “it is because you have sensed and responded to God’s calling to be such an imitator of Christ. It is not a church’s responsibility to make you into this mold….The choice to become a Revolutionary—and it is a choice—is a covenant you make with God alone.”15 In this way, however, the work of the people displaces the work of God. “Feed My Sheep” The gospel is good news. The message determines the medium. There is a clear logic to Paul’s argument in Romans 10, where he contrasts “the righteousness that is by works” and “the righteousness that is through faith.”

We were redeemed by Christ’s actions, not ours; the Spirit applies this redemption to us here and now so that we are justified through faith apart from works; even this faith is given to us through the proclamation of Christ. Since this gospel is a report to be believed rather than a task for us to fulfill, it needs heralds, ambassadors, and witnesses.

The method of delivery is suited to its content. If the central message of Christianity were how to have your best life now or become a better you, then we wouldn’t need heralds, but rather life coaches, spiritual directors, and motivational speakers. Good advice requires a person with a plan; good news requires a person with a message.

This is not to say that we do not also need good advice or plans, but that the source of the church’s existence and mission in this world is this announcement of God’s victory in Jesus Christ.

Coaches can send themselves with their own suggestions, but an ambassador has to be sent with an authorized announcement. If the goal is to get people to go and find Christ, then the methods will be whatever we find pragmatically successful; if it’s all about Christ finding sinners, then the methods are already determined. Simply quoting verses 13–15 reveals the logical chain of Paul’s argument: “‘For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ But how are they to call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent?” The evangel defines evangelism; the content determines the methods of delivery; the marks of the church (preaching and sacrament) define its mission (evangelizing, baptizing, teaching, and communing).

The marks of the true church are the proper preaching of the Word, administration of the sacraments, and discipline.

The mission of the church is simply to execute these tasks faithfully. Throughout the Book of Acts, the growth of the

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church is attributed to the proclamation of the gospel: “The word of God spread.” Waking the dead, this gospel proclamation is not only the content but the method. Those who believed were baptized along with their whole household.

They were not simply added to the conversion statistics, but to the church—the visible church, which is no more visible in this world than when it is gathered around the Lord’s Table in fellowship with their ascended head. Furthermore, the apostles and elders—and, by Acts 6, the deacons— served the church as officers representing Christ’s threefold office of Prophet, King, and Priest.

We find no dichotomy between the official ministry of the church as a historical institution and the Spirit-filled mission of reaching the lost. The mission expanded the church; it did not subvert it. Through this ministry, “The Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved” (Acts 2:47). So when evangelists today qualify their invitation to receive Christ by saying, “I’m not talking about joining a church,” they are stepping outside of the mission established by Jesus Christ and evidenced in the remarkable spread of the gospel under the ministry of the apostles.

Christ has not only appointed the message, but the methods and, as we have seen, there is an inseparable connection between them. All around us we see evidence that churches may affirm the gospel of salvation by grace alone in Christ alone through faith alone, but then adopt a methodology that suggests otherwise. Christ has appointed preaching, because “faith comes by hearing the word of Christ” (Rom. 10:17); baptism, because it is the sign and seal of inclusion in Christ; the Supper, because through it we receive Christ and all of his benefits. In other words, these methods are appointed precisely because they are means of grace rather than means of works; means of God’s descent to us rather than means of our ascent to God. In this way, Christ makes himself not only the gift, but the giver; not only the object of faith, but the active agent, together with the Spirit, in giving us faith. And he not only gives us this faith in the beginning, but deepens, matures, and increases our faith throughout our lives. The gospel is not something that we need to “get saved” so that we can move on to something else; it is “the power of God unto salvation” throughout our pilgrimage. So we need this gospel to be delivered to us regularly, both for our justification and our sanctification.

We also need the law to guide our faith and practice.

Christ not only saves, he rules. In fact, he rules in order to save. His sovereignty liberates us from oppression—not only the guilt and condemnation of our sins, but from the tyranny of sin. The gospel is not only enough for our justification; it is the source of our sanctification as we recognize that we are “dead to sin and alive to Christ.” The gospel tells us that Christ has toppled the reign of sin; it no longer has any legal authority or determining power over us. It can no longer define us. The old “I”—who was married to sin—has died, and we are now wedded to Christ J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 1 9

Christ does not deliver us from one tyrant only to leave us weak and isolated prey to mature beyond the nurture of the church, but to submit weather, wolves, and our own wanderings. “Obey ourselves to the preaching, teaching, and oversight of your leaders and submit to those shepherds whom God has placed over us in Christ. them,” Scripture exhorts, “for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who have to give an account. and righteousness. The gospel is big news indeed. We Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that need it not merely to subdue our doubts and insecurity, would be of no advantage to you” (Heb. 13:17–18). but our indwelling sin.

Yet even this admonition is grounded in the gospel: Submitting ourselves not only to the life-creating gospel submitting to the discipline of shepherds is an advantage to but to the life-guiding commands of Scripture, we recogus because through it God promises all of his blessings in nize our need for the spiritual oversight of our pastors and Christ. elders and the service of deacons. Like any family, the Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without church needs proper discipline and order so that our perwavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us considsonal and corporate life together will imperfectly but truly er how to stir one another to love and good works, not reflect the fact that the church is an embassy of Christ and neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but the age to come even in this present evil age. God’s law, encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the not our spontaneous sincerity, defines what we should do.

Day drawing near (Heb. 10:23–25). ■ The individualistic emphasis of evangelicalism stands in sharp contrast to the covenantal paradigm that we find in Scripture. We are commanded not to become self-feeders Michael S. Horton is J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic who mature beyond the nurture of the church, but to subTheology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California mit ourselves to the preaching, teaching, and oversight of (Escondido). those shepherds whom God has placed over us in Christ.

We read at the end of John’s Gospel the account of how Jesus made breakfast for seven of his astonished disciples WORKS CITED 1 in his third appearance after his resurrection: Greg L. Hawkins and Cally Parkinson, Reveal: Where Are You? (South Barrington, IL: Willow, 2007).

2 When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to George Barna, Revolution: Finding Vibrant Faith Beyond Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me the Walls of the Sanctuary (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you 2005), back cover copy.

3 know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my Barna, 180.

4 lambs.” A second time he said to him, “Simon son of George Barna, The Second Coming of the Church John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; (Nashville: Word, 1998), 96.

5 you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Tend Barna, The Second Coming of the Church, 68, 138–40.

6 my sheep.” He said to him the third time, “Simon Barna, The Second Coming of the Church, 177.

7 son of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt Barna, The Second Coming of the Church, 65.

8 because he said to him the third time, “Do you love Barna, Revolution, 203.

9 Barna, Revolution, 208. me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know every10 Barna, Revolution, 22. thing; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, 11 Barna, Revolution, 210.

“Feed my sheep.” (John 21:15–17) 12 Barna, Revolution, 17.

13 Barna, Revolution, 175.

As the passage goes on to relate, Jesus was preparing Peter 14 Barna, Revolution, 62–63. for a difficult ministry that would culminate in his own 15 Barna, Revolution, 70. crucifixion (vv. 18–19). Unlike the false shepherds who scattered his flock (denounced in Jeremiah 23), the Good Shepherd has laid down his life for them and united them together under his gracious rule (John 10). And now through his under-shepherds Jesus will continue to feed his sheep and lead them to everlasting pastures. The church’s min-istry is exercised faithfully when the people are fed, not when the sheep are expected to become their own shepherds.

We are commanded not to become self-feeders who

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The Heretical Imperative Revisited

by Richard Lints Many lament the vast diversity of Protestant denominaDenominations have historically functioned not as a tions on the American landscape: Why cannot we means of greater independence and self-definition, but as Christians agree more often? Denominations allegedly concrete ways to be bound with others who are defined by undermine the unity of the church. Let me suggest it is the gospel across the ages. not denominations that undermine the unity of the Wherever the gospel has gone, there is a protection of church, but rather the way in which most Americans the sacredness of time, the sacredness of space, and the relate to church in the first place. The recent massive sursacredness of community. The gospel grants a reorientavey of religion in American life by the Pew Forum on tion to time in the covenantal remembering of the narraReligion reminded us that church commitment sits lightly tive of redemption. The gospel resists being captured by on those who attend church. The study told us that any cultural moment and any unique micronarrative.

Americans shop for church as they might shop for groInstead, the gospel transports us into that strange time of ceries. There is nothing strikingly new in this phenomethe already and the not yet. The gospel also protects the non. America has been a nation of choosers for a very long sacredness of space in the conviction that Christ was incartime. Peter Berger, however, wrote nearly thirty years ago nate in the flesh and continues to be really present in the that when religion is strictly a matter of consumer choice, Lord’s Supper by the power of the Holy Spirit. This the very nature of that religious conviction undergoes a embodiment of the gospel has often been accompanied by pro-found change. He referred an earthy piety among historic to it as the “Heretical Protestant traditions celebratWherever the gospel has gone, Imperative.” When religious ing the con-creteness of conviction is chosen as one redemption.

With-out the there is a protection of might choose any other comsacred space of the Lord’s modity, it ceases to have much Supper, all of life becomes a the sacredness of time, traction in people’s lives. It fast food meal that will never ceases to be an integrating cengenuinely satisfy us.

The the sacredness of space, and ter for them. It also puts them gospel also protects the sacredinto a distinctly different relaness of community in the conthe sacredness of community. tionship to their local church. viction that being bound to When people shop for church they will increasingly see Christ entails that we are bound to each other. The “conchurch itself as insignificant. nectional” nature of the gospel is a central dimension of it.

Though church attendance remained relatively stable Dying to oneself is the other side of the coin of living for over the last two decades according to the Pew Survey, Christ. Dying to oneself is also antithetical to the selfish they noticed how frequently people change church and consumerism that leads us to shop for churches. Many change church traditions. There was no enduring place in young postmoderns desire a genuine community today, people’s lives for a church tradition since people moved so but too frequently are afraid of concrete, enduring comfluidly across traditions. We need an anchor in our church munities that may impinge upon their actual choices. life not of mere religious formalism, but as a restraint on Denominations are simply collections of church not only the very commodification of religious life that is the real across a geographic space but also across many generations. reason for such superficiality of religious belief.

In this sense, they are embodiments of living traditions.

Committing oneself to a church tradition may serve as a Their demise has been in part a function of the modern bulwark against the increasing irrelevance of religious revolt against the sacredness of time, space, and communibelief in people’s lives. When church and conviction are ty intrinsic to traditions. The church can seem strangely out separated, eventually both will wither and fade away. of place in a culture where technology has radically re-conIt is not an uncommon lament among postmodern strued our sense of time and space and community. evangelicals that we need to get “beyond denomina-tionBecause of the power of our tools, we lose a sense of belongalism.” As counterintuitive as it may seem in this environing to any particular place, since our lives are lived in the ment, the opposite may actually prove more fruitful. ubiquity of everyplace. The Internet is but the latest tool Denominations as concrete expressions of theological trathat enables us to transcend older notions of belonging to a ditions may serve to situate people in the very living complace. So it is with time. The power of our tools deceives us munities that resist being defined by consumer choices. into thinking that time is now “controllable.” We can do so J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 2 1

much more in such a short space of time. Microwave a baked potato, fly across a vast continent in a day, scour the entire Bible in seconds with an electronic concordance. On the list goes. Since we no longer belong to space and time, the impulse is to abandon belonging to an enduring community as well. The counterintuitive reality is that the more powerful our tools are, the more we are controlled by them.

Think of the stress you feel in an ordinary day by how much you “should” accomplish. Would it not be nice to belong to a specific time and place, removed from the burdens of being omnipotent and omniscient?

We should be reminded that collections of churches connected together (i.e., denominations) have served as a dissenting voice against religious hegemony and against cultural idolatries. Historically, denominations were the means to protect dissent while also remaining loyal to the larger social project of liberal democracies. The dissenting churches of England in the early eighteenth century (Presbyterian, Baptist, and Congregationalist) sought civil protection from the established Church of England while remaining loyal to the British crown. They saw themselves as prophetic corrections to the state church too closely allied with political self-interest.

Denominations with rare exceptions in the West have never viewed themselves as the “one true church.” They saw themselves as branches of the one true church removed from essential control by governing authorities.

This permitted and at times encouraged a wider confessional conversation among the various branches of the Protestant churches. Unlike Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, Protestants had a built-in structural context for dissent. Under the increasing pluralization of modernity, denominations became all too fiercely independent of each other; and under the conditions of a consumer culture, they became fiercely protective of their “market share.” The result was the inability of people in the pews to see any remnant of the visible unity of the gospel beyond local congregational life. It may be understandable that the people lament the divisions of modern denominational life, but the greater tragedy has been the autonomy and anonymity of religious life unhinged from enduring religious traditions.

The dynamics of denominational identity underwent a significant shift through the middle decades of the twentieth century when the major denominations on American soil divided along critical sociopolitical lines. These sorts of divisions split denominations into two parties, conservatives and liberals. Religious identity became more and more identified with one’s sociopolitical convictions.

Religious conservatives and religious liberals were the two great parties of American religious life in the second half of the twentieth century. These great culture war definitions had the unintended consequence of flattening out the differences among the denominations.

Evangelical Presbyterians and evangelical Methodists were likely to see themselves as allies and their liberal counterparts as foes.

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was reflected in the political template (liberal/conservative) being the primary framework defining church life. Even the formations of new denominations in the period tended to emerge either as conservative or liberal in the cultural space they inhabited. The rise of parachurch and nondenominational ministries in this period did not escape the liberal/conservative divisions either. They simply reinforced the notion that religious people were more centrally identified by the political tradition they belonged to rather than any religious tradition grounded in a peculiar creed or confession. The difficulty of Roman Catholics to assimilate into the democratic culture through much of the twentieth century was in part a function of their sense of belonging to a different sacred political order. So it continues with confessional Protestants in our day who seem oddly out of place on the liberal/conservative spectrum.

The captivity of current ecclesiastical identities along the political spectrum betrays the more fundamental identity of the church as the bearer of a sacred wisdom of an entirely different order than the political sphere.

Denominationalism is neither the cause nor the consequence of the political captivity of the church. That captivity is owing rather to the loss of wisdom about the sacred matters by which the church is constituted, and conversely the embrace of a conventional wisdom by which Christians pragmatically live out their concrete existence in highly commercial contexts.

Peculiar to the witness of the gospel in the New Testament is the embrace of diverse tribes, races, and cultures. The apostle Paul notably grounds this claim in the reality that Christ is our peace who has “broken down the dividing wall of hostility.” A distinctive dimension of the gospel ought to be made manifest in the reconciliation of those who belong to the same Lord. This serves as a pungent testimony against those fractured churches or fractious denominations all too prevalent today. Justifiably, many of the young postmodern evangelicals echo this criticism against the “traditional” church. The overcoming of diversity, however, happens not by greater isolation nor by great anonymity, but by the honest reconciliation of disagreements. Reconciliation is accomplished in the breaking of bread together in the Lord’s Supper. It is accomplished in the sharing of one baptism. It is accomplished when living traditions bump up against each other seriously. Reconciliation is not possible if there are no enduring relationships. And it is precisely those enduring relationships that are so countercultural to our present postmodern and consumer moment.

Richard Lints is professor of theology and apologetics at GordonConwell Theological Seminary (South Hamilton, Massachusetts) and author of The Fabric of Theology (Eerdmans, 1993). He is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America.

NO CHURCH, NO PROBLEM?

In Search of the Spirit

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MBRACE Your Inner Pentecostal.” In a recent article in Christianity Today, Chris Armstrong of Bethel Seminary (Minneapolis) and senior editor of Christian History & Biography seeks to show that “Holy Spirit religion is quietly infiltrating the church, revitalizing us all.” Through the influence of Pentecostalism, he suggests, Christians across all denominational boundaries are in search of the Spirit.

How are they finding the Spirit? Many congregations have become “Pentecostalized” through contemporary worship styles, spontaneous worship services with no printed order of service, and the “priesthood of all believers,” which is defined as every member being free to exercise their perceived spiritual gifts in worship as well as every member having a ministry. Yet Armstrong notes that beneath these lay the reason: the “baptism in the Holy

Spirit.” This experience brings a new, joyous, and personal sense of communion with a loving God. An Age of Pentecostalism Must we embrace our own “inner Pentecostal” to find the person and power of the Holy Spirit? Before responding so quickly—as I presume most Modern Reformation readers will with a resounding no—think about how you may have been affected unconsciously by the age of Pentecostalism. If I were to ask you what a Spirit-filled church looked like, how would you describe it to me? The twentieth-century Pentecostal movement has caused us to think of spirituality, a Spirit-filled church, and the Holy Spirit himself as things we can manipulate. We have been trained to think that the Holy Spirit is where the excitement is, where the ethos of joy, openness, and upliftedness are.

As I mentioned, this even affects us as Modern Reformation readers. For all our talk about the means of grace of preaching and sacraments, John Calvin’s words still ring true of us all: “The human mind is, so to speak, a perpetual forge of idols” (Institutes 1.11.8). For example, if our minister preaches the gospel week in and week out we say, “I’ve heard that, I’m bored.” We say to ourselves, “I wish he would just mix in a few stories and have some verve in the pulpit.” We think public worship is a good thing but say, “I’m burned out right now.” We may even be discontented by our organ, piano, or merely our voices and desire a praise team to lift us up.

So must we embrace our “inner Pentecostal” to end our search for the Spirit? The purpose of this article is to instill confidence in you that the Holy Spirit is not found through secret mantras or merely in feel-good ways, but that he is inseparably linked to the visible ministry of preaching and the sacraments in the visible church.

I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For Before demonstrating from Scripture and illustrating this truth from the Reformed confessions, let me interject a personal note. As a convert in a Foursquare church, then college student at a Pentecostal liberal arts college while working as a youth pastor in a Pentecostal church, I too was in search of the Spirit. I too went to church constantly, attended Bible studies on the spiritual gifts, participated in revivals, and especially sought the Spirit’s power in quiet times. Yet there was something missing. There was something not quite right about my obsession with the Spirit and seeking him in my own efforts. I was at the point of despair and giving up on the church altogether.

Whereas in older days our Protestant forefathers saw this search for the Spirit revealed in the Anabaptist separation of the Spirit from the Word, the problem today is bigger than that. In our time, people are taught to search for the Spirit apart from the church. The reasoning goes a little something like this: If individual Christians are “temples

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DANIEL R. HYDE

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People want to attend to the spiritual side of their lives, they are interested in God, doctrine, then it but their experience of church has not been relevant.” As we conclude, I would like to illustrate Paul’s principle in Ephesians 2 with a survey of the role of the Holy Spirit in the means of grace as expressed by the Heidelberg Catechism (1563).

If a local church preaches the foundational truths of Christ as cornerstone and the apostolic is a Spirit-filled church. of the Holy Spirit,” then they are self-sufficient seekers, free to look for experiences with the Spirit and spiritually energizing moments on their own.

Finding the Spirit in the Tangible Although I had given up on the church, she had not given up on me. While I could not find what I thought was the Holy Spirit in my own way, she brought me into contact with the Spirit through the most ordinary and tangible of ways: the visible church’s media of preaching and sacraments. I was astonished to find that this is exactly what Paul told the Ephesian Christians. The Ephesians were no strangers to the world of religious experiences, but Paul said their corporate identity (not individualistic identity) was “the dwelling place of God in the Spirit” (Eph. 2:22). This means that when I assemble with the people of God, the Spirit dwells in our midst and works through this visible church—a church founded upon the prophets’ and apostles’ public preaching of Christ (Eph. 2:20). The church our Lord purchased with his own blood (Acts 20:28) is a Spiritfilled church. Therefore, if a local church preaches the foundational truths of Christ as cornerstone and the apostolic doctrine, then it is a Spirit-filled church.

The fact that the Spirit is found in the tangible is exemplified in Paul’s use of the metaphor of a house to describe the church. This house has a foundation—the apostles and prophets; it has a cornerstone—Christ; and it has a structure—which is amazingly described as the people. The two groups of Jews and Gentiles have been made one, have been granted access to one Father, and have been made one house. Then in Ephesians 2:22, Paul says, “In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.” 1 Peter 2:5 expresses this same truth when we read: “You yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house.” So this house-temple has a foundation, a cornerstone, and a structure. It also has a resident: God by means of his Spirit. The church then is the fulfillment of the tabernacle and temple. Instead of being filled with fire and cloud, the church is filled with the Spirit (Exod. 40; 1 Kings 8).

What Does This Mean?

What does this mean for how we relate to and come into contact with the Holy Spirit? It means we look at the church and expect something from it that more and more professing Christians do not. In a recent study published in the pages of Leadership, nearly half of Christians do not find involvement in a local church a significant part of their daily lives. As one pastor said in response to the survey: “Faith is relevant for many people, but church is not….

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Preaching The catechism makes a vital link between the work of the Spirit and preaching. Question and answer 65 speaks of the origin of true faith as the work of the Holy Spirit “by the preaching of the holy Gospel” (Cf. Q&A 21). This means that while the Holy Spirit is the sole creator of faith, he uses the means of the Word as the way he creates this faith. In saying this, we can see that the Word and Spirit are so united that the Word can be said to be the external form of the Spirit, while the Spirit can be said to be the internal power of the Word.

Moving into question and answer 67, the catechism asks, “Are both these, then, the Word and the Sacraments, designed to direct our faith to the sacrifice of Christ on the cross as the only ground of our salvation?” In speaking of the preached Word, the Heidelberg answers, “Yes, truly; for the Holy Ghost teaches in the Gospel…that our whole salvation stands in the one sacrifice of Christ made for us on the cross” (emphasis added). We find in these words a commentary on what the catechism later describes as the “lively preaching” of the Word (Q&A 98). Preaching is the living Word of the Holy Spirit to his church. As the apostle Paul says, the preaching of Christ and him crucified (1 Cor. 1:23, 2:2) is preaching that is not in “plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (1 Cor. 2:4). The Holy Spirit speaks in preaching, a point that was made in Reformed confessional literature two years earlier: “Wherefore when this Word of God is now preached in the church by preachers lawfully called, we believe that the very Word of God is preached, and received of the faithful” (Second Helvetic Confession, ch. 1.4).

Sacraments The sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper are used by the same Holy Spirit primarily to confirm the faith that he has already created in the hearts of believers. Q&A 67 teaches us that the Holy Spirit condescends to work through the ordinary. According to the Heidelberg Catechism, the mission-minded, evangelistic church is found in the church that preaches the gospel in a lively way (Q&A 98) and that faithfully administers the sacraments (Q&A 65). The Spirit is found in the church that is filled with the preached Word, the waters of baptism, and the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper. Through these means, Christ’s mission of bringing the evangel to the world becomes the church’s mission.

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Baptism Turning to each sacrament in particular, we see an indisputable fact about the Holy Spirit in the Heidelberg Catechism. The Spirit is mentioned in all six questions and answers devoted to the doctrine of baptism. What this means is that baptism is no mere symbol, nor is it a work whereby sins are forgiven just by placing water on someone ex opere operato, but is a means of the work of the Spirit in our lives.

Question 69 asks, “How is it signified and sealed unto thee in holy Baptism that thou hast part in the one sacrifice of Christ on the cross?”

Thus: that Christ instituted this outward washing with water, and has joined therewith this promise, that I am washed with his blood and Spirit from the pollution of my soul, that is, from all my sins, as certainly as I am washed outwardly with water whereby commonly the filthiness of the body is taken away.

The outward sign of water, which in human terms washes the body, signifies the parallel inner reality of the cleansing of the soul by Christ’s blood and Spirit. Question and answer 70 goes on to explain this doctrine, asking, “What is it to be washed with the blood and Spirit of Christ?”

It is to have the forgiveness of sins from God, through grace, for the sake of Christ’s blood, which he shed for us in his sacrifice on the cross; and also to be renewed by the Holy Ghost, and sanctified to be members of Christ, that so we may more and more die unto sin, and lead holy and unblamable lives.

Again, we notice here the theme of the double benefit of Jesus Christ in justification and sanctification. Baptism is an outward sign and seal that Christ’s blood justifies, while the Holy Spirit sanctifies us by putting to death our sin and bringing us to new life.

Where, though, do the Scriptures promise this?

Question 71 clearly wants catechumens to be able to locate this doctrine in Scripture, by answering with a quotation of several texts of Scripture (Matt. 28:19; Titus 3:5; Acts 22:16). Especially in reference to Titus 3:5, the catechism understands this washing as the work of the Holy Spirit.

This renewal spoken of in the catechism was incorporated into the “Form of Baptism” of the Palatinate Liturgy, which explains what it means to be baptized “in the name of the Holy Ghost”: We are assured that the Holy Ghost will be the Teacher and Comforter of us and our children to all eternity, and make us true members of the body of Christ. (And further that we have fellowship with all His benefits in common with all the members of His Church, so that our sins shall be remembered no more forever, and that the corruptions and infirmities, that still cling to us may be continually mortified

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and a new life be commenced, which finally in the resurrection, [when our body shall be made like unto the glorious body of Christ], shall be completely revealed in us.)

At this point, the catechism in question and answer 72 takes a polemic turn, distancing itself from Rome: “Is, then, the outward washing of water itself the washing away of sins?” This question is succinctly answered, “No; for only the blood of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit cleanse us from all sin.”

Question and answer 73 presses this point, no doubt to impress upon catechumens and those listening to catechetical sermons, “Why, then, doth the Holy Ghost call Baptism the washing of regeneration and the washing away of sins?” The answer: God speaks thus not without great cause: namely, not only to teach us thereby that like as the filthiness of the body is taken away by water, so our sins also are taken away by the blood and Spirit of Christ; but much more, that by this divine pledge and token he may assure us that we are as really washed from our sins spiritually as our bodies are washed with water.

Although we know that it is the Holy Spirit who washes us from our sins, he interchanges the sign and the thing signified when he speaks. The Spirit does this because it is “through the use of the signs” that our faith is confirmed.

The waters of baptism are therefore the pledge that our sins are forgiven.

The final question and answer on the topic of baptism is meant to show the catholicity of the Reformed faith by distancing itself from Anabaptism on the subject of whether infants should also be baptized. Even here the catechism mentions the Holy Spirit, saying that the “sign of the covenant” is to be given to children of believers: Since they, as well as their parents, belong to the covenant and people of God, and both redemption from sin and the Holy Ghost, who works faith, are through the blood of Christ promised to them no less than to their parents. (Q&A 74) As Zacharius Ursinus said about this question and answer, the Holy Spirit speaks to the children of believers through baptism “in a manner adapted to their capacity” to teach them that they belong to the covenant of God. Lord’s Supper With its presentation of the Holy Supper, the Heidelberg Catechism avoids the technical jargon of the “mode” of Christ’s “real” presence. Instead, the role of the Holy Spirit is put in place of this and any other term in three key questions and answers. In question 76 we are asked, “What is it to eat the crucified body and drink the shed blood of Christ?”

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no need to continue trying to find the Spirit in direct experience upon the soul of the in direct experience upon the soul of the believer, believer, as Pente-costalism, mysticism, and pietism teach. as Pentecostalism, mysticism, and pietism teach.

Instead, you can experience his presence in public worIt is not only to embrace with a believing heart all the ship—as that is his place of residence—by hearing his voice sufferings and death of Christ, and thereby to obtain in the preaching of the gospel and coming into contact the forgiveness of sins and life eternal, but moreover, with his grace and power in the sacraments. ■ also, to be so united more and more to his sacred body by the Holy Ghost, who dwells both in Christ and in us, that although he is in heaven, and we on Daniel R. Hyde is the pastor of Oceanside United Reformed the earth, we are nevertheless flesh of his flesh and Church in Oceanside/Carlsbad, California, and is a Th.M. candibone of his bones, and live and are governed forever date at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary. He is the author by one Spirit, as members of the same body are govof Jesus Loves the Little Children (2006), The Good erned by one soul.

Confession (2006), What to Expect in Reformed Worship (2007), God with Us (2008), and With Heart and Mouth To eat and drink Christ is not only to believe, as St. (2008).

Augustine said, but also to be united to Christ’s body by the Holy Spirit. This role of the Holy Spirit in the Lord’s Supper distinguished John Calvin’s doctrine of the Supper WORKS CITED from the Roman and Lutheran doctrine and that is folChristianity Today’s article, “Embrace Your Inner lowed by the Heidelberg. The catechism teaches a communPentecostal,” can be found at http://www.christianity ion with the body of Christ and makes the Holy Spirit the today.com/ct/2006/september/40.86.html. bond of union.

Leadership’s survey, “5 Kinds of Christians,” can be This emphasis of the work of the Holy Spirit in the found at http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2007/ Lord’s Supper is also expressed in question and answer 79, 004/1.19.html. which asks, “Why, then, doth Christ call the bread his The Reformation “Form for Baptism” from the Heidelberg body, and the cup his blood, or the New Testament in his Catechism can be found in a slightly modified version in blood; and St. Paul, the communion of the body and the “Baptism of Infants: Form Number 1,” Psalter Hymnal blood of Christ?”

(Grand Rapids: Christian Reformed Church, 1976).

The Commentary of Dr. Zacharias Ursinus on the Heidelberg Christ speaks thus not without great cause: namely, Catechism, trans. G. W. Williard (1852; Phillipsburg: not only to teach us thereby that like as bread and Presbyterian and Reformed, reprinted 1985). wine sustain this temporal life, so also his crucified body and shed blood are the true meat and drink of our souls unto life eternal; but much more, by this visible sign and pledge to assure us that we are as really partakers of his true body and blood, through the working of the Holy Ghost, as we receive by the mouth of the body these holy tokens in remembrance of him; and that all his sufferings and obedience are as certainly our own as if we had ourselves suffered and done all in our own persons.

There is no need to continue trying to find the Spirit

Again it is emphasized that Christ is received through the Holy Spirit’s powerful and mysterious work. Finally, this is expressed in the controversial question and answer 80, which asks, “What difference is there between the Lord’s Supper and the Popish Mass?” The answer, in part, is that we are “ingrafted into Christ” by the Holy Spirit, not by eating and drinking transformed bread and wine.

Conclusion Are you in search of the Holy Spirit but can’t seem to find what you are looking for? Search no longer. There is 2 6 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

NO CHURCH, NO PROBLEM?

Individualism’s Not the Problem— Community’s Not the Solution

by Jonathan Leeman Individualism is the problem. Community is the solution.

That’s what they are saying. First the philosophers, sociologists, political theorists, psychologists, and theologians were saying it. Now I hear pastors, church leaders, and impressionable young seminarians saying it. Individualism is what bedevils culture and church both; community is what will save them.

Last Thanksgiving I was wholly absorbed in the sweet potato casserole on my plate when the twenty-something sitting beside me, whom I had just met and who is working on his master of divinity at a conservative Reformed seminary, threw out that increasingly common line about traditional accounts of the gospel and conversion being “individualistic.” I had to put my fork down and say something—and I love sweet potato casserole; you know, with the baked pecans, brown sugar, and butter?

I know what these kinds of statements are getting at, and to a point I’m sympathetic. But we need to take caution: the communitarian impulse can refashion how churches conceive of their mission, their life together, the gospel, even

God himself. Much of the communitarian literature is helpful. But it can also misconstrue and mislead.

The Communitarian Story The communitarian story goes something like this: The Enlightenment brought us radical free agency and contractualism, both of which emerge out of a grandiose vision of the individual as autonomous and supreme, like Lady Liberty perched alone on Liberty Island, exalted. Yet this proud vision has merely yielded the “disengaged self.”1 In our day, this disengaged self probably lives in the suburbs, surrounds his house with a tall fence, has Gap and Banana Republic charge cards in his wallet, sends an annual check to Green Peace in exchange for a newsletter, and possesses several friends who look just like him ethically and economically. If this stock character of ours is a Christian, we’ll assume those checks find their way instead to the nearby (within thirty miles) megachurch. We’ll note that he’s basically indifferent toward the denizens of downtown slums. And we’ll shake our heads and wring our hands J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 2 7

with dismay when every song on his praise-song soundtrack focuses on his own relationship with Jesus and the afterlife.

As this story continues, the demise of the Enlightenment has exposed the thin, self-centered, and self-deceived nature of such a man. Our suburban acquaintance is not as independent as he thinks he is. That’s why he wears pre-washed jeans and Gap khakis, just like everyone else.2 In these postmodern times, we’ve discovered that every self is socially constituted “all the way down.”3 Everything that is me wasn’t originally mine, but belongs to the various communities I occupy. Then it becomes mine; then it becomes me.4 Through language, “I” am an amalgamation of everyone around me, in one way or another.5 Relationships therefore are all important. What’s more, the now globalized globe is teaching us that no individual or individual truth is universal. All is perspective. And diversifying our perspectives in the eclecticism of community is the surest path to enrichment, beauty, justice, and peace.

The Relational Turn In the social sciences, this communitarian story results from what’s sometimes called the “relational turn,” according to which the formerly accidental, peripheral matter of relationship comes into the substantive center of human existence (ontology).6 We are our relationships and cannot divorce ourselves from them without an identity crisis.7 In theology, too, the significance of relationships (the dialectic of I and Thou) reorients every category of systematic.8 It’s observed that God’s very being is defined by three persons in community; that human persons bear a “relational analogy” to God’s trinitarian community; that sin is the breaking of community; that Christ brings reconciliation through his work and the embrace of the church community; and that the eschaton will sum up all things in our participation in the divine community.

Some of the titles in this theological genre tell all: The Trinity and the Kingdom (1981 in English); Being As Communion (1985); After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (1998); The Social God and the Relational Self (2001); Like Father, Like Son: The Trinity Imaged in Our Humanity (2005); Trinity in Human Community: Exploring Congregational Life in the Image of the Social Trinity (2006); and so on.

Impact on Churches Several lessons for churches follow from the communitarian story, say its proponents. For starters, we must recover an understanding of the church as a community of people, not an impersonal institution.9 The institutionalization of the church can be seen in everything from the centralization of authority in the bishop, to the commingling of church and state following Constantine, to the tangled mess of committees down at First Baptist, to the membership classes and packets of the megachurch. But if relationships are what constitute the church’s essence, any structures that do exist should be organic, liquid, or natural (again, consider the titles: Organic Church, 2 8 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

Organic Community, Liquid Church, or Natural Church Development).

Also, preaching should not be a monologue but a dialogue. Congregations should be encouraged to speak and learn from a multiplicity of viewpoints.10 Conversion should not so much be treated as a onetime event, because life within this community will lead to continual change and reformation. Better to speak of a conversation or at least a “continuing conversion,” which like a conversation implies a continual openness to new perspectives.11 Semper reformandi, right?

Central values or purposes should be emphasized, not exclusivistic boundaries (following “centered-set thinking” rather than “bounded-set thinking”).12 Outsiders should feel embraced and encouraged to serve.13 The old practices of membership and discipline hinder this kind of relational embrace and stop the conversation.

In general, the church’s posture toward the world must be one of invitation, embrace, and the declaring of God’s shalom in Christ, for “through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross” (Col. 1:20, NRSV). Any gospel that’s fixated on my own salvation rather than God’s kingdom work of restoring peace and justice to all of creation is “too small.”14 Jesus is not just about me; he’s about the whole cosmos. I need to get over myself.

Ultimately, mission serves the purpose of communion.

“Ultimately,” says theologian Simon Chan, “all things are to be brought back into communion with the triune God. Communion is the ultimate end, not mission.”15 Ultimately, the mutual glorification project of Father and Son that we read about in the Gospel of John, by which they alternatively give and receive love and glory, extends to the church and then to all creation. “May they be one as we are one” (see John 17:20–26). The old hierarchies between male and female, insider and outsider, clergy and laity, must be abolished. And so, the picture of God as Lord gives way to the picture of God as Father, which then gives way to the picture of God as Friend.16 Confusing Symptoms and Causes No one writer that I’m aware of says precisely all this; but this constellation of ideas is increasingly common among academics and practitioners, evangelicals and postevangelicals, Emergents and Calvinists. And the communitarian’s story gets much right.

But I fear that its emphases—good emphases—sometimes become primary emphases and thereby confuse the symptoms for the root maladies, like pointing to a man in prison and deciding, “He’s lonely because he’s in prison,” which is true, but which misses the point. He’s lonely because he has committed a crime.

Ultimately, individualism is not the problem and community is not the solution, not directly. What then is the distinctive problem of Enlightenment and postEnlightenment culture and churches? And what’s the solution? Let’s consider the story again.

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The Real Problem: We Hate Authority Communitarians and postmoderns usually begin their story with the move from pre-modernity to modernity just like I would. They acknowledge that it’s a story about authority, whereby the external authority of church or tradition was replaced by the authority of one’s own mind; hence the language of autonomous individualism (autonomos meaning “self-law”). Descartes’ philosophical method, after all, begins with complete skepticism toward every external epistemological authority.

When communitarians and postmoderns come to critique this shift to modernity, however, they don’t quite seek to undo it because, well, we just can’t go back to premodernity!17 And they claim that Kant or others won’t let them. Still, they don’t like modernity’s effects—atomism, radical skepticism, consumerism, and so on. They thus address the effects themselves while, ironically, refusing to address the more prickly issue of authority.

As the story continues, therefore, it’s not authority they want to talk about, even though that’s what got Descartes and everyone who followed into trouble. They just want to talk about relationships.

For instance, one theologian writes, “My contention is that the distinctive failures of our era derive from its failures of due relatedness to God.”18 Our problems are a matter of “due relatedness”? Well, that’s sort of right. But is this how the apostle Paul or the prophet Jeremiah would have put it?: “Thus says the Lord, ‘I have observed a failure of due relatedness, O Israel.’”

The problem with the modern self is not merely that it’s “unrelated.” It’s rebellious. Not just disengaged, but defiant.

Not just independent, but insubordinate. Where YAHWEH, the maker of heaven and earth, described himself to Moses as the self-defining, predicate-less “I AM” (ego sum in the Vulgate), the ground of all reality, Descartes’ method effectively shoved YAHWEH aside, making his existence (and God’s!) a predicate of his own thinking mind (cogito ergo sum). He established a philosophical method for asserting that we are like God, knowing good from evil. Descartes’ move, like Adam’s, did not merely break a relationship; it broke God’s law or Word. The implications are not merely personal, but judicial. It’s not just a friend who is cast off; it’s a Lord and Judge. The philosophical methods we associate with modernity and postmodernity, in a sense, whisper the same line whispered by the snake in the Garden (Gen. 3:5). What the shift from pre-modernity to modernity signified, really, was that this satanic whisper gained a moral and philosophical credibility in the so-called Christian West (even if it had always been believed and practiced). In other words, the Enlightenment did not bring us radical free agency and contractualism. Genesis 3 did.

The Enlightenment legitimized it.

If the distinctive failure of our era is in fact a failure of “due relatedness,” then we will have to assign the magnificent weight of God’s eternal Lordship and exquisite holiness to that flimsy little adjective “due.” We have indeed failed to relate to God. Yet it’s how we have failed to relate

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to him that counts. We have failed to obey him and those who would mediate his authority to us. We have failed to listen to his authoritative Word. We have failed to image his character and glory.

God is interested in a relationship with human beings, but it’s not a relationship between two self-sovereigns— even a greater sovereign and a lesser sovereign. It’s not a relationship of give and take, of mutuality, of reciprocity.

It’s not a perichoretic (mutually indwelling) dance, as some would put it. Rather, it’s the relationship between an image-maker and an image, between a thing and the reflection of that thing, as it were, in a mirror. That’s true today; that will remain true in the eschaton.19 A right relationship between us and God occurs when we—like true mirrors, not carnival mirrors—reflect him and his glory rightly; when the lines and curves of our character reflect the lines and curves of his character (2 Cor. 3:18; 1 John 3:1–2). A biblical conception of relationship with God is therefore structured by his Lordship and authority—that we might image him and his glory rightly!

Reorienting the Doctrine of Sin Flattening these hierarchies subtly changes everything.

Consider the doctrine of sin, for starters. Here’s how one recent writer characterizes sin: “The wages of sin is death, because, if our life has its basis in our relationship to God and to other people and if these relationships are corrupted, our very life is threatened to its core.”20 That’s true, but it doesn’t go far enough.

The wages of sin is death not just because our sin breaks our relationship with God, who is the source of life; the wages of sin is death because we have broken his law. We have lied about his character by imaging him perversely, as does that wavy carnival mirror. In so doing, we have offended against his glorious, beautiful, holy, resplendent majesty. The wages of sin is death because God’s glory is weighty and infinite, and we have fallen short of it. The wages of sin is death because God is worthy of all honor, worship, and praise, and we have blown him off. We are guilty and a payment is required.

Reorienting the Doctrine of Christ’s Work Sin is more than a broken relationship, and salvation is more than a restored relationship. Sin is an offending against majesty, and salvation is a restoration to the adoration of majesty21—“having no other gods,” in Moses’ words; “loving God with heart, mind, soul, and strength,” in Jesus’ words. This is why one Puritan prayer reads, “Let me never forget that the heinousness of sin lies not so much in the nature of the sin committed, as in the greatness of the Person sinned against.”22 Part of being restored to the adoration of majesty is recognizing that our sins against him are grave indeed and worthy of his eternal wrath.

Yet when sin and guilt are downplayed, as in the communitarian conception, what becomes of Christ’s atonement? Naturally, propitiation and a payment for guilt will seem superfluous. Instead, the atonement will be about J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 2 9

the removal of shame and the restoration of relationship.23 Individual culpability won’t so much be the point.

Structural breakdown is what Christ’s kingdom will be said to address.

Reorienting the Doctrine of the Church What I appreciate most about the communitarian thesis is its ability to crisply identify, well, the rampant individualism among Christians today. Christians today assume they are their own shepherds, and so we treat the church like consumers. Individuals join churches lightly and exit lightly, since doing so does not violate our sense of love and its obligations. We don’t stop to weigh the consequences of our departure on others. We don’t discuss the reasons for leaving with the pastors. We just go. We take our purchase back to the checkout counter. It’s nothing personal. All in all, we ask little of others and give little in return.

What’s tragic is, Christians who come and go from churches are merely mimicking so many pastors. A man comes for several years, hears of another opportunity, leaves, and thinks nothing of it. His understanding of love is devoid of any sense of long-term obligation to a flock.

Responding to all this, however, requires us to do more than stand up and give three cheers for community. More to the point, the New Testament does not ground the unity of Christ’s body in theological anthropology. And it only briefly alludes to the doctrine of the Trinity as the ground of our unity (as in John 17). Rather, it grounds the unity of Christ’s body in Christ’s person and work!24 In reconciling us to himself (Eph. 2:1–10), he also reconciled us to one another (Eph. 2:11–20).

Though I am a Baptist and a congregationalist by conviction, this is where my own tradition has leaned too far toward voluntaristic assumptions about life in the local church. The Christian life must be lived through the local church because that’s what Christ has made us—members of his body. To claim that I belong to the church without belonging to a church is equivalent to claiming that I have been granted Christ’s righteousness without seeking to put on that righteousness in ethical living. The imperative necessarily follows the indicative. We’re called to submit to the authority and discipline of a local church because we have submitted to the authority and discipline of Christ (e.g., Matt. 18:15–20; 1 Cor. 5; Heb. 13:17). Indeed, to say that Christians should belong to a local church merely because it’s advantageous to living the Christian life misses the point that the church body is now part and parcel of a Christian’s very identity.25 An adopted son attends the family dinner table with his new brothers and sisters not just because it’s good for him, but because that’s what he is—a member of the family.

To a point then I can sympathize with the friend with whom I shared the Thanksgiving meal. We evangelicals can indeed construe the gospel and conversion too individualistically. Yet that doesn’t mean the gospel and conversion are any less individual and personal. Rather, we 3 0 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

fail to recognize the full implications of Christ’s work.

Union with Christ means union with his body and that union with the body must be put on, enacted, lived out with real, step-on-your-toes people. It’s through the local church that Christians are able to display the glorious character of God in a way we cannot on our own (e.g., John 13:34–35).

Reorienting the Doctrine of God Implicit in the communitarian story, I believe, is a tendency toward a diminished God. Does mission serve the purpose of communion, as Simon Chan put it, or the purpose of worship, as John Piper has put it? The answer depends, again, on what kind of relationship we have in mind and what the ultimate object of God’s love is—us or his own glory. One other theologian of a communitarian bent, amazingly, seems to place a man-centeredness right into the heart of his description of God’s own glory when he defines God’s glory as “God’s love” for “the good of the creation.”26 The Bible’s call to obedience and submission before God’s authority is rooted in his glory. The despising of authority, therefore, is finally a despising of his glory and majesty. In other words, identifying the real problem as our hatred of authority and not just individualism doesn’t even push us far enough. The real problem, finally, is a hatred of God’s majesty and worth.

The Real Solution: Repentance Western culture today is “individualistic,” no doubt about it. But I believe there’s a difference between a clinical-sounding sociologist’s word like “individualistic” and a pulpitpounding fundamentalist preacher’s word like “disobedient” or “hates authority.” But that’s what individualism is. It’s plain old disobedience to God. We won’t get very far if we don’t pull off these secular masks and call them by their oldfashioned, Sunday school-sounding names. Loneliness is not the problem. A refusal to live life on anyone else’s terms is.

Another way to put all this: we’re not dealing with a relationship problem, but a worship problem.

The solution then is not community; it’s repentance.

The solution is a changing of heart and direction—in the individual! This repentance includes joining a community and making relationships. But it’s joining a particular kind of community where self is no longer sovereign and where one is called to obedience to the church as an expression of obedience to God. It’s the joining of a community where God’s Word and the worship of God are supreme in everything.

Entering into biblical church membership means submitting oneself to a body of relationships with authoritative structures, a body in which different members assume different roles even though together they constitute one body.

What’s more, all of those relationships together conspire to give worship and praise to God. Most Christians don’t think of themselves as repenting or, analogously, submitting when they join a church. Maybe they feel lonely and join the church for fellowship. Maybe

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they have considered the biblical arguments for church membership and become persuaded that it’s the right thing to do. Maybe they’ve never thought about it at all and have just done what all the Christians they know do. But whatever their conscious experience, joining a church is fundamentally a matter of repentance and submission. It’s not simply a matter of “joining” or “committing” or “due relatedness.” It’s certainly not a matter of joining some club with various membership privileges, as when one joins a country club. Insofar as the word “member” carries that connotation in Western minds, it’s an unfortunate word to use. Still, it’s a good word to use, because submitting to a local church and becoming a member is an external enactment of what it means to submit to Christ and become a member of his body. It’s keeping the imperative of what Christ has accomplished in the indicative. Submitting to a local church on earth, in the language of Christian ethics, is a becoming of what we are in heaven. ■

Jonathan Leeman (M.Div., Southern Seminary; MsC, London School of Economics; Ph.D. candidate, University of Wales, Lampeter) is director of communications at 9Marks and an elder at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. He is currently working on a book on church membership and discipline (forthcoming from Crossway).

WORKS CITED 1 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Press, 1989), 143–58.

2 Colin Gunton calls this the “homogenizing abolition of particularity,” in The One, The Three, and the Many (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 46.

3 Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 11.

4 Sandel, 55–59.

5 Taylor, 36.

6 F. LeRon Shults, Reforming Theological Anthropology: After the Philosophical Turn to Relationality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 11–36.

7 Sandel, p. 179; cf. Taylor, 27.

8 See esp. F. LeRon Shults, Reforming Theological Anthropology and Reforming the Doctrine of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).

9 Much has been written on this topic. A good chapterlength introduction is in Avery Cardinal Dulles, Models of the Church, expanded edition (New York: Image Books, 2002), 39–54; for a book-length introduction, see Dennis Doyle, Communion Ecclesiology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000); a Protestant version of the argument occurs in Colin Gunton, “The Church on Earth: The Roots of Community,” in Colin E. Gunton and Daniel W. Hardy, On Being the Church: Essays on the Christian Community (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989), 48–80.

10 See O. Wesley Allen Jr., The Homiletic of All Believers: A Conversational Approach (WJK, 2005); Doug Pagitt,

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Preaching Re-imagined: The Role of the Sermon in Communities of Faith (Zondervan, 2005).

11 See George R. Hunsberger, “Evangelical Conversion toward a Missional Ecclesiology,” in Evangelical Ecclesiology, ed.

John Stackhouse (Baker, 2003), 123–26; Darrell L. Guder, The Continuing Conversion of the Church (Eerdmans, 2000).

12 See Paul G. Hiebert, Anthropological Reflections on Missiological Issues (Baker, 1994), 110–36.

13 See Dan Kimball’s story in this regard in They Like Jesus But Not the Church: Insights from Emerging Generations (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007), 160–61.

14 Hence, the theme for Christianity Today’s 2008 Christian Vision Project is “Is Our Gospel Too Small?,” to which the answer is apparently “yes.” Go to http://www. christianvisionproject.com.

15 See http://www.christianvisionproject.com/2007/06/ the_mission_of_the_trinity.html.

16 Jürgen Moltmann, Church in the Power of the Spirit (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 114–21, esp. 118.

17 For example, the famous missiologist whom many Emergents and missional writers build upon, David Bosch, writes, “It is futile to attempt nostalgically to return to a pre-Enlightenment worldview. It is not possible to ‘unknow‘ what we have learned….The ‘light’ in the Enlightenment was real light and should not simply be discarded. What is needed, rather, is to realize that the Enlightenment paradigm has served is purpose; we should now move beyond it.” In Transforming Mission (Marynoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 273–74.

18 Gunton, 38.

19 Contra Moltmann, God’s Lordship does not dissolve in the eschaton, because we will still be images, not imagemakers.

20 Tom Smail, Like Father, Like Son: The Trinity Imagined in Our Humanity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 238.

21 Cf. John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol.

1, ed. John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 39.

22 From the prayer entitled “Humiliation” in The Valley of Vision, ed. Arthur Bennet (Banner of Truth, 2002 edition), 143.

23 A number of the authors we’ve been mentioning could be referred to, such as Colin Gunton or Tom Smail.

For a quick introduction to the argument and a response, see Steve Jeffrey, Michael Ovey, and Andrew Sachs, Pierced For Our Transgressions (Wheaton: Crossway, 2007), 249–63.

24 Graham A. Cole, He Who Gives Life: The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit (Wheaton: Crossway, 2007), 89–91.

25 Cf. Sandel, 148–50.

26 Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 62; also 39. I say “seems” because his statements are brief and could use further elaboration.

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NO CHURCH, NO PROBLEM?

CHURCH IS FAMILY

by John N. Day

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or good or for ill, we live in a postmodern age. Among the many facets of this paradigm shift are a suspicion of order and objectivity, truth and reason, tradition and institutions; and the church has often devolved into this very institutionalism: with its rigid and distant authority structures, its attachment to traditions, its passion for reason at the expense of relationships, and its contentment with systemic hypocrisy (to name but a few).

Postmoderns, therefore, have tended to be repulsed by the church rather than attracted to it. Has the church finally lost its relevance?

But what postmodernism needs (among other things) is a true sense of family—and not the “new normal” of dysfunctional family, but one that models genuine love and loyalty, honor and affection, consistently and persistently.

And this is what the church can uniquely offer—indeed, this is who we are uniquely to be. Nothing shows the nature of the church and the church’s Savior quite like this. As Jesus said in John 13:35: “By this all people will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another” (all quotations of Scripture are taken from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version, 2001).

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The Importance of Family here’s an old saying: “Blood is thicker than water.”

This means that our family ties—we’re related by blood—are the strongest ties we have, stronger than any friendships or relationships. Your family (if it’s a good one) will stick with you through thick and thin when all other friends and helps may fail. As the proverb tells us: “A brother is born for adversity” (Prov. 17:17). Family defends, family honors, family sacrifices for one another.

This is part of what is good and noble about family.

But there’s an account in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus seems to dismiss all this. At the close of chapter 12, Jesus is coming to the end of a pointed dialogue with the religious hierarchy, “the scribes and Pharisees”—known for their righteousness, their rules, and their hypocrisy: all things that postmodernism instinctively reacts against. Jesus is flagged that his mother and brothers are outside wanting to talk with him, but he replies—somewhat rudely: “‘Who is My mother, and who are My brothers?’ And stretching out His hand toward His disciples, He said, ‘Here are My mother and My brothers! For whoever does the will of My Father in heaven is My brother and sister and mother’” (Matt. 12:48–50).

All that is praiseworthy about family loyalty, Jesus seems to disregard in one fell swoop, in one broad swath of his hand. But is Jesus simply brushing them off—his own mother and brothers—and discounting their importance in his life? On the surface, it might look like it; but it cannot be so.

As we know from the Scriptures, the nuclear family was important to Jesus, from his youth to his death. He submitted to his parents in his youth (Luke 2:51); he provided for his mother in his death (John 19:26–27).

And family honor needs to be something we continue to esteem and strive to uphold. The Fifth Commandment tells us: “Honor your father and your mother” (Exod.

20:12). And (as the apostle Paul says), this is still “the first commandment with a promise: that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land” (Eph. 6:2–3). This is something, sadly, that we as a society (by and large) have lost. What was once at the very core of our culture seems almost foreign to our current generations. So, how might we begin to recapture this fundamental sense of honor in family and especially toward our parents?

In childhood, we are called to “obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right” (Eph. 6:1); but when we turn from adolescence into adulthood, the relationship changes. Our children sometimes seem almost thrilled to tell us that they don’t have to obey us anymore (as if there’s some magic to the number eighteen). What they might not notice, however, is that they are still called to honor us (as we are always to honor ours). That command never grows up; that command never moves on when we move out of the house. One example the apostle Paul uses is direct and apropos in our day: “If anyone

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does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim. 5:8)!

Yet this is also seen in mundane ways: as in how we talk about each other. No one’s perfect, but do we seek to honor them in what we say—and do not say? Do we give of ourselves freely to them? Do we go out of our way for them? Do we stand by their side, even when shame might come back at us? I’m reminded of a time on the school bus when I was little, when the older boys in the back started picking on me. My oldest brother, who was sitting there with them, noticed the distress they were causing me; and although it probably cost him some popularity points, he stood up for me and made them stop. That’s what family is for; that’s what a brother is supposed to do. That’s honor and loyalty and love; and to God, those are supreme virtues.

And yet, there is something more. In Jesus’ mind, there is something more important than family; there is a higher priority, a closer tie. “Blood is thicker than water,” yes. But “faith is thicker than blood” (if I can play with the phrase a bit). And so, Jesus doesn’t dismiss, but he does deflect. He doesn’t answer directly; he redirects.

Family is vitally important, yes. But real family is something different.

Faith is what makes true family. As Paul tells us in Romans 4: It is not the race of Abraham, but the faith of Abraham that makes us heirs of the promise of grace, that brings us into the family of God, that makes Abraham “the father of us all” (4:16). And as Jesus has just mentioned, doing the will of God is the indicator of that faith (Matt. 12:50). This is how our faith is shown.

So, are we the “brother and sister and mother” of Jesus? Are we really his family? The answer to that question hinges on our obedience to his Word (where the will of God is found). Will I submit to his authority over all of my life—especially in those uncomfortable areas that Jesus so often prods, like how we act and react to those people we just don’t get along with? This obedience centers on the issue of love. As the apostle John writes: “By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother. For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another” (1 John 3:10–11). If you’re good family, you’re supposed to love; and if you’re God’s family, you’re really supposed to love.

Implications for Church Life oming out of Jesus’ words in Matthew 12, there are two clear implications for church life that seem inescapable: one in the abstract and the other in concrete.

First (as a basic statement): Church is family. This is how the New Testament talks—clearly and repeatedly.

Notable examples are these: How do the apostles always

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treated). If we have a problem, we have to learn to work it out: to be kind to one another, to forwe must try to understand each other, accept each give and be forgiven. For with family, you’re stuck. Or fellow other, treat each other with respect (as we would Christians in other denominmaybe just across town: ations, want to be treated). they are my brothers and sisters— even when we have completely address the members of Christ’s church? As subjects, different convictions about so many different issues. If we sheep, or citizens (all true)? No, they call us “brothers.” are united by faith in Jesus and obedience to his will (in This is a family term. God is typically spoken of, not as its simplicity: the cross and love), then we are family. We our sovereign, shepherd, or king (again, all true), but as need to take that to heart: let it sink in and let it seep out. our “Father.” This is a family term. When the church as Second (getting specific): Each church is family. Not a whole is described, we find such wonderful depictions only should we understand that the church in general is as a temple, bride, body, and flock (all true); but we are family, but also that each particular church is family: also called “the household of faith.” “So then, as we both in what it is (by definition) and what it must be (by have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especalling). We are to view each other as family and we are cially to those who are of the household of faith” (Gal. to treat each other as family. In other words, we should 6:10). That, again, is a family term. care for each other as if we were, in fact, “blood.”

These aren’t just empty words; they mean something.

Notice what the apostle Paul says to young pastor Part of this meaning is certainly that it recognizes our Timothy (for it is a distinctly different approach): “Do differences and stays together anyway—not just by tolnot rebuke an older man but encourage him as you erating one another, but by actually seeking to love one would a father, younger men as brothers, older women another. If church is family, we cannot live and grow by as mothers, younger women as sisters, in all purity” (1 promoting division: that’s not family, that’s dysfunction.

Tim. 5:1–2). Thus, I am to treat those who are older than As the apostle Paul says: “In Christ Jesus you are all sons me in my church as if he or she were my very own of God, through faith” (Gal. 3:26). “Sons of God”: father or mother. What honor and deference does this there’s that family again. And one of the chief conserequire? Can I just blow them off? I am also to treat my quences is this: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is peers or those younger than me as if they were my very neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for own sisters and brothers. Then how can I treat them you are all one in Christ” (3:28). It breaks down all those either as a “meat market” (the young singles) or as a barriers. nuisance (the rambunctious kids)?

But look how we continue so commonly to build Those who engage in various ministries in our churchchurches based on divisions—even if it’s called good es (whether paid staff or volunteer) aren’t just people— business practice and marketing sense—instead of they’re family. The pastors and support staff are not just around our identity as family. We have churches dividemployees who can be chastised and sacked with hardly ed by race and subculture (when usually it’s not a neca second thought; deacons, nursery workers, Sunday essary thing); we have churches divided by generations school teachers, and choir members are not just volunor various preferences of worship and style; we have teers who can be used up and thrown away—they’re my churches that divide over almost anything and everyfather or mother, my sister, or brother. We are to strive thing. Is that what (good) family does? for excellence, yes; but encouragement must be our Yet in how many of your “blood” families do you motto, and the code we live by. One person I would like have only one generation of people—one age group? to highlight in my own church is our 92-year-old organThat’s impossible. In how many families do you have ist, who has devoted his life and talents to the Lord. And only one perspective on how to dress? How many of what a blessing he is. Now, he’d be the first to tell you us—in our own small families—have different interests? he’s no spring chicken (and is beginning to feel increasFor example, I prefer outside work, my wife prefers ingly the frailties of his age). But as I’ve said to him on inside; I don’t particularly like slugs and spiders, but one more than one occasion: “As long as you feel able and of my daughters loves slugs and my son loves spiders. want to continue to play, we’d love to keep you as our How many of you like different foods or think that organist.” That’s a completely different attitude than things should be done in different ways (the proverbial you’ll find in the world…and it’s supposed to be! toilet seat up or down comes to mind)? How much This past year, one of our newer members asked me more, then, in our churches? (if I may paraphrase): “What would you say is distinctive If we have our differences (which we invariably will), about this church, that sets it apart, that you would conwe must try to understand each other, accept each other, sider a ‘draw’ (in addition to the non-negotiable of protreat each other with respect (as we would want to be claiming the gospel)? In other words, why should peo-

If we have our differences (which we invariably will),

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ple come here?” I answered: “A true sense of family.”

That is what we strive to be and to do; and it shows. It was something my wife and I first noticed when we came to serve at this congregation, and which we have intentionally sought to foster even further.

We seek to bring this sense of family, of true community (for which the postmodern heart so deeply longs) into the various aspects of our life and worship together.

One longstanding ministry we have is intentionally trans-generational, where we connect a younger child to an older adult to form a special relationship of prayer for one another (which usually also includes the exchange of gifts and a bond of affection). We have also integrated this thinking into our worship as well. One of the (as I see it) detrimental quirks of modern American evangelicalism is the prevalence of “children’s church”— where the kids are dismissed before the sermon, both to be supposedly more relevant for them and less bothersome for the adults. This is reminiscent of the attitude of the disciples when children were brought before the Lord for his blessing. “And the disciples rebuked them.

But when Jesus saw it, He was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the children come to Me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God’” (Mark 10:13–14). In our congregation here, we have made it a point to welcome children of all ages into our community worship—both because this was evidently the attitude of Christ, and also because we seek to bring up our children in the faith, as fully in the faith, from their earliest years. They are not foreigners to the family of Christ, but full members of it.

This ethos was confirmed for me in a special way when a family who had a disabled child visited our congregation. This child periodically (and loudly) made noises during the service. From the pulpit that morning, I extended a public declaration to that child and his family that they were fully welcome in our worship. Instead of any glares or stares, he was warmly received; and when he continues to make his noises, no one seems to mind. Because he’s part of the family.

As the early church father Tertullian stated in his defense of the faith before the pagan world (Apology 39.7–8), this family ethos was readily seen: But it is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to put a brand upon us. See, they say, how they love one another, for themselves are animated by mutual hatred; how they are ready even to die for one another, for they themselves will sooner put to death. And they are wroth with us, too, because we call each other brethren; for no other reason, as I think, than because among themselves names of consanguinity are assumed in mere pretence of affection.

How many churches are truly characterized by this mindset and actually seek to live this out? In how many

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do you sense the genuine warmth and spirit of those who not only call themselves “brothers and sisters,” but who actually live like it? Too often instead you find things cold and uncaring, plastic-faced or two-faced; and too quickly to quarrel and divide. Oh, that our churches again would recapture this affection—not in pretence, but in truth! Because family cares—and shows it.

And so, the church has profound relevance in a postmodern world, if it will truly live like the brothers and sisters of Christ—deeply caring for one another. This is part of our core identity, and has the potential for significant impact in our postmodern culture, if we will simply take it to heart. ■

John N. Day is senior pastor at Bellewood Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Bellevue, Washington, and the author of Crying for Justice: What the Psalms Teach Us about Mercy and Vengeance in an Age of Terrorism (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2005).

Speaking Of…

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et us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage

one another and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

— Hebrews 10:25

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he body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many,

they form one body. So it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free and we were all given the one Spirit to drink….Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.

— 1 Corinthians 12:12, 13, 27

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NO CHURCH, NO PROBLEM?

MANAGING SINNER/SAINTS IN TODAY’S CONGREGATIONS

A CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVE ON LUTHERAN CONGREGATIONAL LIFE

BY JAMES

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y current pastor demonstrates energy and skill as he works to build a viable congregation in Southern California—and as a Lutheran pastor and professor, I assist him in his ministry; but neither of us foresaw in 1972 (the year of my ordination) the challenges we both face today. The Lutheran theological categories of law and gospel, sinner and saint, and God’s two ways of ruling provide tools that help me discern the meaning of the last fifty years of rapid change in Lutheran congregational life in North America; and fellow believers in other Reformation communities have encountered similar changes and are likely to use similar categories.

Here is the first of two hard truths that I have fought against for most of my years: By itself, sound theology fails to provide a platform upon which a human congregation can be built.

In the past fifty years, sound, confessional Lutheran theology has lost most of its distinctive cultural and social practices. As Alban Institute President James Wind “crunches the numbers” in the “massive U.S. Religious Landscape Survey 2008” put out by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (see http://www.alban.org/ con-

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versation.aspx?id=5818), he discerns the painful reality we are all experiencing: Once upon a time religious leaders represented very distinct religious communities that were clearly differentiated from the ones down the street or across town.

Now our leaders work in a sea of religious vagueness and search for ways to help people surrounded by a growing tide of “nothing in particular” find something in particular to build a life upon.

Unfortunately, Wind does not comment on why and how the clear differentiation of communities has disappeared. My thesis, however, is that clear differentiation has disappeared not first because sound theology has become muddled. No, clear differentiation first disappears because North America erases distinctive cultural and social practices.

A second hard truth follows on the first: Distinctive cultural and social practices accomplish necessary tasks that sound theology cannot accomplish by itself. This truth is hard and dif-

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ficult to see because, whereas sound theology proclaims the gospel of justification by grace through faith that makes us saints, cultural and social practices operate in the realm of law and what Lutherans call God’s left-hand rule—God’s law dominated remedy for managing sinners.

A comparison of yesterday and today in Lutheran congregations will illustrate these hard truths.

Yesterday’s Stable Social Context for Congregational Life Fifty years ago, northern European music, education, and other social and cultural practices still strongly shaped North American Lutheran congregations. Lutherans confess that Christ reaches us through the Holy Spirit’s gifts of God’s Word and sacraments, not necessarily through Bach, bowling, beer, Walther League, Dart Ball, lime Jello, or the seventeenth-century authorized English translation of Holy Scripture. But, humanly speaking, well-defined social and cultural practices organize sinners and help construct a visible platform for gospel proclamation. Loss of distinctive practices threatens congregations with James Wind’s “sea of religious vagueness” and with the loss of a visible platform for gospel proclamation.

Over half a century ago, Lutherans tended to use common liturgies, sing common songs (in harmony), teach and shape children in common ways, share common meals and menus, use common worship times, and so forth. Because people were not especially mobile, grandmothers and grandfathers led multigenerational communities; their hands directly shaped the next generations and passed on the social and cultural inheritance, which held sway far beyond the doors of the sanctuary.

Everybody knew the right age for First Communion and Confirmation. Catechetical practice was well defined and uniform. Everybody knew on which hymnal page the Sunday liturgy would begin. Lutherans could be reasonably confident that, should they come upon a Lutheran congregation in a distant state, they would see the same hymnals, vestments, art, and architecture, and would encounter roughly the same practices they had experienced back home.

Practices and rules for courting, marriage and parenting, roles for men and women, expectations of schools and colleges, ethical standards for fair business practice—all these and more were well and uniformly defined in the Lutheran communities. Congregational leaders could expect extensive continuity between the congregation that had shaped them and any congregation they would be called to serve.

While we may celebrate the elimination of old practices that seem now excessively restrictive, if we don’t create a new set of distinctive practices, Lutherans will disappear from the North American scene.

Today’s Chaotic and Unstable Social Milieu North American culture has succeeded in erasing most of Lutheranism’s distinctive immigrant social and cultural practices. Mobile and new congregants may know little or

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nothing about J. S. Bach and sixteenth-century chorales.

We no longer have a common educational and catechetical practice for children. A common commitment to the Lutheran Women’s Missionary League or the Lutheran Laymen’s League no longer glues us together. Pastors and other ministers no longer have common background experiences that establish common bonds and provide common reference points.

Beyond the doors of the sanctuary, practices and rules for courting, marriage and parenting, roles for men and women, expectations of schools and colleges, ethical standards for fair business practice—all these and more are no longer passed on with confidence.

Lutheran congregations have lost what I call the hidden hand of ethnic social solidarity that helped us shape and manage congregational community in the past. The old hidden hands of grandparents and others no longer pass on the cultural heritage.

Although James Wind calls this a “sea of religious vagueness,” the phrase itself is too ambiguous. Yes, some religious traditions have gone vague in their fundamental theology, but even those traditions that have maintained well-defined theological formulations have been mostly unable to hold the line against the erasing of distinctive social and cultural practices from the past. Thus we have a clue to what we need for the future: we need to maintain our commitment to sound theology, but we also need to respond to the disappearance of the supporting social and cultural practices of the past.

Doomed Responses A doomed response would be to try to recreate the old immigrant social and cultural dynamics. Our former ethnic social solidarity is gone for good, and the loss is both liberating and troubling. We also cannot pride ourselves that orthodox preaching of the gospel inevitably builds a viable human community. We, like the original apostles, have discovered that orthodox preaching does not necessarily build a community. They often began their preaching in communities that already had a structure; namely, the Jewish synagogue and the Roman household. Sometimes a human community would grow up that could pay the preacher’s expenses, and sometimes St. Paul had to ply his tent-making trade (Acts 18:3, 20:34, 1 Thess. 2:9).

The human success of some heterodox and nonChristian religious communities forces recognition that, humanly speaking, the local congregation does not get its human strength from orthodox gospel proclamation.

The Ways Forward Congregational members are still sinners as well as saints, so congregational life will be marked by the law dynamics that characterize the old sinful order. Lutherans say the old is governed by God’s law under his left-hand rule, but we haven’t always noticed that the local congregation has many left-hand rule dynamics. The essential is to preach Christ. The necessary is to manage sinner/saints J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 3 7

mistakenly defend the techniques as part of the gospel.

Sound Lutheran theology cal, catechetical, literary, musical, artistic, recognizes that sinner/saints continue to need the law and ethical practices that are worthy platforms for even while their true lives are hidden with Christ in the gospel proclamation.

God. The appearance of laworiented leadership in the so that stable contexts emerge, in the midst of which we congregation can be affirmed in its necessity even while can preach the gospel and administer the sacraments. But the pastor leads us to see the “End of the Law” in Christ. what tools can and should we use? Today, Lutherans in We need to recognize that church growth has much more North America have a chaos of old and new social and culto do with the necessary law-oriented tasks of congregatural practices vying to provide platforms for the Lutheran tional management than with the essential ministry of gospel proclamation. Congregations throughout the contiWord and sacrament. nent are fragmented on the question of which social and Effective congregational management will not just magcultural practices to use to build congregational life. ically happen. We must have intentional preparation of Music and liturgy are obvious examples of our fragpastors and ministers for their new tasks, and we must mentation. Note that the question to ask is not simply demand that seminaries find ways of addressing this need. whether this piece of music and text is orthodox and in The hidden hands of grandmothers and grandfathers must harmony with the Scriptures. Humanly speaking, music somehow be replaced. Congregations now look to their and ritual are strong expressions of culture and are tools pastors and leaders to lend these hands. for managing sinner/saints. So, we must also ask both Second, we must recognize that distinctive social and locally and globally whether our choices regarding music cultural practices can be chosen, modeled, and taught by and liturgy are building strong communities; and we congregational leaders. We are too shallow in our talk should further ask whether our choices have any hope of about appropriating practices from the surrounding, uniting communities across town, across the state, and increasingly pagan culture. Yes, if something good is wideacross the continent. ly acknowledged and practiced in the general culture, we The challenge of choosing among a variety of good and may be able to appropriate it. But in our current environcreative options creates plenty of contention and division ment, the general culture has little of value to give us and among Lutheran congregations today. If we want any is in desperate need of receiving from us the riches that semblance of visible unity among our congregations, we two millennia of Christian communal life have will need to solve this problem. Otherwise we’ll be identibequeathed to us. fied with a confusing potpourri of options that will leave When congregational leaders love their people and North American Lutheranism with little that is distinctive, their people trust them, much can be done through modand we’ll drown in Wind’s “sea of religious vagueness.” eling and teaching. I am speaking here not about the absolutely essential proclamation of God’s Word; rather, I What’s a Pastor or a Church Leader to Do? am speaking about choosing, modeling, and teaching disLutheran pastors are usually drawn to their vocations tinctive practices that provide a solid platform for the for the sake of the essential tasks of Word and sacrament proclamation of the gospel. ministry, and not because they want to undertake the lawLeaders must study, learn, choose, and teach rich lituroriented tasks that are necessary for managing singical, catechetical, literary, musical, artistic, and ethical ner/saints. But our current social and cultural setting is so practices that are worthy platforms for the gospel proclachaotic and unstable that the human side of congregationmation. Use the law to tell indifferent and lazy sinners al life won’t flourish without careful attention to these that, in the presence of God’s gracious service of us, we necessary tasks. The result is that congregations are owe the rich response that we see in the Psalms, in the increasingly leaning on pastors to provide the left-hand church’s history of public prayer, in the astonishing variety rule leadership needs to keep the community going. and abundance of first-rate music composed to the glory of God, and in the endeavor to lead holy lives. How pitiful to Concrete Recommendations take a vapid product of debased culture, couple it with bad First, we must put a correct theological interpretation religious poetry and call it relevant worship that speaks to upon the proliferation of organizations that teach church the people. How cowardly never to take on hard questions leadership and “church growth” techniques. Many concerning practices and rules for courting, marriage, and Lutherans mistakenly reject the teaching of leadership parenting, roles for men and women, expectations of techniques because they sense that leadership skills are schools and colleges, ethical standards for fair business law-oriented and do not plainly proclaim the gospel. practice, and more.

Others accept the necessity of learning the techniques, but Third, we must accept the fact that the personal charis-

Leaders must study, learn, choose, and teach rich liturgi-

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ma of the pastor and other ministers has become central to the human success of a congregation. Reformation communities see the perils in this contemporary reality. We know, with John the Baptizer, that Christ must increase and we must decrease (John 3:30). But now that the old hidden social and cultural hands have little independent power to shape and manage congregational life, the leaders must have and develop the personal power to draw people in, inspire them, and enlist them to build the human community. Seminaries and other leadership mentors must both help congregational leaders develop their gifts and instruct them in ways of deploying gifts while keeping the focus on Christ.

Finally, we must learn to manage the rich range of cultural choices available to help us build a contemporary congregation. For example, modern Lutheran hymnals are chock-full of diverse, high-quality choices for liturgy, hymnody, prayer, and catechesis. A selection must inevitably be made.

We will not want to return to the completely uniform practices in worship that were the order of the day fifty years ago, but we do need to create some unity within our diversity. For Lutherans, our modern hymnals may do just this. We can witness to our unity by committing to have a common hymnal in the pews of congregations throughout North America; and we can witness to our diversity by the fact that each congregation can and will use the common hymnal in flexibly diverse ways.

We must also not lose sight of the power of symbolic gestures. We may think it easier and more efficient to use PowerPoint or disposable service folders and never to put a hymnal in the pews, but this is shortsighted. A PowerPoint slide will never project the reality of distinctive Lutheran practice as effectively as a tangible book in the pews or on the chairs; and when leadership changes, even if the new leader uses the resources in ways markedly different from the previous leader, the people still have a visible marker of continuity when both the old leader and the new draw from the same hymnal.

The presence of a widely accepted hymnal also helps work against the cult of personality that can come with our reliance upon the charisma of the leaders. People (and their leaders!) can learn that the pastor and other leaders do not magically create the chief services out of their own personal power and that color, art, and pastoral demeanor in the sanctuary are not prideful local creations. For the sake of a common witness to Christ, leaders must discipline themselves within the boundaries of a rich and widely accepted set of resources.

My current pastor has not had much experience with the distinctively Lutheran social and cultural practices that supported my early life and ministry; but he loves Jesus and he loves his people, and I admire his ability to juggle sinner/saints in his ministry. I pray and dare to hope that his work and our congregation’s practices will help create a distinctive social and cultural platform for gospel proclamation throughout North American Lutheranism. ■

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James Bachman (Ph.D., Florida State University) is professor of philosophy and ethics at Concordia University (Irvine, California), dean of graduate studies at Christ College School for Theology, and assistant pastor at Light of Christ Lutheran Church in Irvine, California. He also currently serves on the Stem Cell Research Oversight Committee for the University of California, Irvine, and regularly speaks at conferences and workshops around the country on health ethics.

Speaking Of…

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he spouse of Christ cannot be adulterous; she is uncorrupted and pure. She knows one home; she guards with chaste modesty the sanctity of one couch. She keeps us for God. She appoints the sons whom she has born for the kingdom. Whoever is separated from the Church and is joined to an adulteress, is separated from the promises of the Church; nor can he who forsakes the Church of Christ attain to the rewards of Christ. He is a stranger; he is profane; he is an enemy. He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother. If any one could escape who was outside the ark of Noah, then he also may escape who shall be outside of the Church. The Lord warns, saying, “He who is not with me is against me, and he who gathereth not with me scattereth” (St. Matthew 12:30). He who breaks the peace and the concord of Christ, does so in opposition to Christ; he who gathereth elsewhere than in the Church, scatters the Church of Christ. The Lord says, “I and the Father are one” (St. John 10:30); and again it is written of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, “And these three are one” (I St. John 5:7). And does any one believe that this unity which thus comes from the divine strength and coheres in celestial sacraments, can be divided in the Church, and can be separated by the parting asunder of opposing wills? He who does not hold this unity does not hold God’s law, does not hold the faith of the Father and the Son, does not hold life and salvation.

— Cyprian J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 3 9

INTERVIEW f o r

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An Interview with J. I. Packer

The State of Evangelicalism What do you think is the overall health, or lack thereof, of the contemporary evangelical church?

I better begin with saying that by “the evangelical church” I mean the whole fellowship of congregations that believe that the Bible is the Word of God and that Jesus Christ is the savior who everybody needs. I am myself an Anglican, and I fraternize with folk of a number of denominations who are all linked with me and I with them by evangelical faith. Within that frame, on balance, I am hopeful. I think I see evangelicals strengthening their grip on the gospel and also on the fact that they have to be different from the world around them, realizing slowly but surely that they must know their stuff for witness in the world, and so they’re giving themselves to learning their faith with a diligence that is relatively new. I didn’t find it when I came to North America nearly thirty years ago.

Sociologist Christian Smith conducted a five-year study of religious teens throughout America and some in Canada. Whatever their church affiliation, he found they all have the same religious outlook on life: God wants me to be good; he wants us to be happy; he’s there when we need him. But when you ask them who Jesus is, they can’t say. They can’t tell you the significance of the cross nor anything about the Trinity. He called it “moralistic, therapeutic deism.”

Although a lot of these kids were going to church regularly, he said that there’s a failure to pass on the distinctive denominational traits. What are your thoughts about that and about how many Christians are passing on faith to the next generation?

First of all, I don’t doubt what he affirms is true, and I put it down to the fact that churches by and large have lost the habit of catechism, and so they don’t teach young people doctrine. Even the syllabi in degree courses are defective here for those who are going to be youth leaders and who are currently being educated at seminaries; most youth leaders are much better at telling stories and organizing games than they are at teaching the faith. I think that catechism—that is, formal instruction—needn’t be by question and answer in the old-fashioned way, though it needs to be in a form of education that involves the young people as thoroughly as possible. This has to be recovered; and at the moment the Roman Catholics are doing far better than we evangelicals are in educating

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their young people. I am hoping that from that we’ll stand both a fuller recovery of adult catechesis across the board in Christian education, and a reaching out to recover catechesis for young people whereby you teach them the basic Christian truths. From my standpoint, generalizing about evangelicals, I am able to say with confidence that it’s the same biblical truths, the same gospel truths that every evangelical congregation wants to impart to its young people; but it does mean a change of mindset about the way to deal with young people and their groups and so on. We haven’t got very far along that road as yet, so you can’t be surprised at results like these which highlight the fact that the gospel is not known to the young people in our evangelical churches.

Do you think part of the problem is that we’ve turned our worship into outreach? Is there a difference between outreach evangelism and Christian worship?

Yes, I think so. I think of the churches that have given themselves to “seeker services”—twice a Sunday if they have two services and once a Sunday if they don’t. The seeker services are exclusively or narrowly focused on the people who aren’t yet believers but whom the church is hoping to interest and intrigue. I must confess that in my limited experience of seeker-sensitive services, what is done both in the way of music and of drama is all superficial. The bottom line is that at the end of one of these seeker-sensitive occasions, the saints who came to be fed have not been fed. They came to worship God and they’ve been allowed to do precious little of that; and the folk from outside, if any have come in, have been fed so superficially that they haven’t got the authentic Christian message either. Putting it in secular terms, it’s been a flop.

Churches that have specialized in seeker-sensitive ministry are beginning to see it’s a flop, starting at the top—I mean, Willow Creek has acknowledged that there was an unrecognized superficiality in the whole way in which they sought to involve, intrigue, and disciple folk; and they’re telling the world that they’re going to try and do better. Well, I think they’ll have to change the formula.

I recently visited a megachurch youth center where kids were skateboarding, playing video games, racing motorcycles—on break from what was more like a rock concert than worship. In many cases, we

don’t want kids to get bored in church so we’re making them ultra-excited. Then—and here is where some of these megachurches admit they’ve failed— the kids go off to college, but they don’t interact with adult churches. They’re used to the kid fun and they can’t find it when they’re in college. What are your thoughts about all that?

You are absolutely right. That’s the way it is and it’s very sad.

It’s a wrong pattern and it’s harming rather than helping the kids. It’s asking them to leave behind what they thought of as Christianity. There’s enough temptation and pressure at the modern university to do that anyway. We don’t want to set them up for falling victim to that pressure by the way that we nurture them in church. So, I’m absolutely at one with your uneasiness about this kind of youth work which maximizes entertainment and fun and getting them excited.

Real Christianity will get them excited too, but in a different way, at a different level; and of course what I say about youth applies also to adults. All Christians ought to be excited about their faith. There’s been something lacking in the discipling if they aren’t; but excited in a different way from this hysterical entertainment-oriented excitement.

In a traditional Anglican service, for example, when kids come in, they may be bored, especially when you compare it to many other entertainments. Is it wrong for us to bore a kid?

On balance, yes, I think it is wrong to bore a kid because kids know no response to boredom except simply to switch off. The world of secular grade school education is using enough imagination and ingenuity to keep the kids’ interest from beginning to end. In other words, it can be done. And I would say, let our churches learn from the good teachers in the grade schools. I don’t believe it’s impossible for us thoroughly to reform our way of nurturing kids and teenagers to keep them from boredom, but to feed them regularly the substance of the faith, and a fascination with the Bible as a landscape of life in which the faith is being illustrated, expressed, and sometimes hidden. There are all sorts of challenges to the mind that an ingenious teacher can do.

I’m a great believer in the importance of trinitarian thinking in discipling. A lot of what has weakened discipling is the result of thinking of only one person of the godhead at any one time—think about the Holy Spirit and what he does; think about Jesus and his death on the cross for us; think of the Father and of his love and goodwill. But you’re not thinking, you see, of the three together: the divine team which works in the unity of a single program and plan, each person in the team fulfilling his part in our salvation, so that the gospel is much less “what a friend we have in Jesus,” but “what a team of friends we have through Jesus”—it’s the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Our discipling instruction will be infinitely strengthened if we present it that way. Sometimes people say, “I’ve never heard it put like that before.” People will be deistic unless they are taught the Trinity.

Can the gospel be understood if it’s chiefly explained in terms of lifestyle change rather than the objective nature as, for example, in 1 Corinthians 15 where Paul explains how God raised Christ from the dead and the trinitarian elements that are involved there?

When most people think of the gospel, especially in many popular churches, they focus on their own lifechange, becoming a better person, their testimony, and so on. What are your thoughts?

My thoughts are that those two things never should have been separated and that each loses its power when separated from the other. Proclaiming the doctrine of the atonement that Christ wrought for us all on the cross without proclaiming life-change through the power of the risen Christ and his Holy Spirit weakens the testimony of the cross. If you talk about lifestyle change without focusing on the cross of Christ followed by his resurrection—which is the objective foundation for the transformation—you weaken, indeed you falsify, what is being said about the God who changes your life.

But what is the nature of the gospel itself?

It is the good news that for us lost and ruined souls, God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—has done something which saves us, which transforms us, which gives us hope and community that is the life of love, friendship, and trust; God has done something which imparts value to life in a way that we never conceived, but it’s all founded on what God did at the cross and in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and it all focuses on the person of the Lord Jesus and his gift of the Spirit as he draws us into sonship with him to the Father and to the service of Father, Son, and Spirit together. That’s the wholeness of the gospel and it’s got to be presented in that way.

I’ve asked pastors, “If I was to ask people in your congregation about crucial doctrines like justification, propitiation, imputation, how do you think they’d answer?” Most of them said, “Oh, probably all over the map.” Can we be evangelical but not be well grounded in these crucial doctrines? Or is it okay for us to have different opinions about justification?

No, I don’t think it’s okay for us to have different opinions about these key doctrines. I think your question calls attention to something we talked about before, namely the fact that catechesis—that is, teaching the truths that people live by and teaching them how to live by those truths—has pretty much perished from our evangelical churches for more than a century now. In fact, historically among evangelicals there has been consensus concerning them or virtual consensus; and amongst literate evangelicals today, there continues to be consensus; and textbooks of theology and so forth are steadily being produced which explain and celebrate that consensus. But, yes, it is the case that for lack of anything that does the catechetical job in our church life, we have lots of people in the pews who don’t understand these doctrines, don’t J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 4 1

even know why they need to understand these doctrines, and certainly don’t know where to look in order to get an understanding. Expository sermons often fail to give a doctrinal understanding. In my vision of church life, catechesis and expository sermons go together. But either without the other is going to be deficient in practice as a way of generating lively mature adult disciples.

Would you agree that Pelagianism is a natural outgrowth of being in Adam and that unless we’re taught these crucial doctrines of grace and justification, we will by nature want to think in terms of saving ourselves?

Yes, I do. It has often been said that Pelagianism is the heresy of the natural man. We need to teach sin at the deep level the Bible teaches it—the heart of man is desperately wicked and who can know it? Only God knows it and only God can show you the sickness of your own heart. But, yes, my hope is that the evangelical church will come to see that the teaching that contradicts Pelagianism—the teaching that pins us to the wall as helpless spiritually, unable to save ourselves, helpless in the presence of God, lost and ruined—must be given thoroughly, as well as that teaching which exhibits the cross of Christ—his substitutionary atonement, where he took our place, bearing the retributive judgment due to our sins, and the resurrection of Jesus whereby as the living Lord he became available as a personal minister and friend in the life of those into whose lives he breaks. Again, superficiality and sentimentality which disfigure so much of our evangelical testimony these days must be transcended.

What do you think about some of the ideas coming out of someone such as N. T. Wright—especially his interpretation of the gospel and of St. Paul?

I think his material is somewhat like the curate’s egg in the old British cartoon, where the dithery young clergyman tells the bishop who asks him whether he’s enjoying his boiled egg, “Oh yes, sir, it is very good in parts.” Actually, it’s a rotten egg. I think Tom Wright’s material is very good in parts. A price always has to be paid for originality in any field of study; original contributors are going to get some things wrong, just as they’re going to get other things magnificently right; and I think that is how it is really with Tom Wright. He pushes some of the things that he’s seen too hard, but at the same time I am grateful for some of the things that he’s seen clearly and said with crashing weight and strength—most notably in his recent book, which I think is absolutely masterly, on the resurrection of the Lord Jesus and his being set loose now as a personal influence throughout the human race. That’s superb; that’s a magnificent achievement. There is reality in his thought that the gospel came into a world where Jewish theology was living with the notion that we haven’t yet seen the full release from the captivity of half a millennium before. There was that strand in Jewish theology, but I think he pushes it too far. And I think that he’s wrong actually in his understanding of Paul on justification. I don’t need to do more here 4 2 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

than refer to a book which has come out recently and shows this, I think, very compellingly. It’s the book on the future of justification by John Piper, where courteously but firmly he shows that what Tom Wright has said about justification is pointing in the right direction but off the wavelength—as with radio, if you’re almost on wavelength, but not quite, you don’t get the sound that you need to hear.

This is the case when Tom Wright talks about justification.

Would you say that it approximates the Roman Catholic view?

It’s not quite Roman Catholic, no. The Roman Catholic view is that justification is a process that begins when sacramental grace first finds you, and it continues until after purgatory when you’re finally perfected in glory. By putting it that way, Catholics obscure the momentousness of justification as a reality in a person’s life. A momentousness consists precisely—so I would say and I have all the Reformed heritage on my side—of the fact that this is the last judgment that will ever be passed on where you are to spend eternity; the judgment is being passed here and now in time, and when it’s been passed, your destiny is assured for time and eternity so you may have an assurance of a kind which a Roman Catholic cannot have.

What do you think about a niche marketing approach that has by virtue of the different worship styles—teen pop, alternative, and adult boomer— created generational segregation?

We have separated the ages, very much to the loss of each age. In the New Testament, the Christian church is an all-age community, and in real life the experience of the family to look no further should convince us that the interaction of the ages is enriching. The principle is that generations should be mixed up in the church for the glory of God. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t disciple groups of people of the same age or the same sex separately from time to time. That’s a good thing to do. But for the most part, the right thing is the mixed community in which everybody is making the effort to understand and empathize with all the other people in the other age groups. Make the effort is the key phrase here. Older people tend not to make the effort to understand younger people, and younger people are actually encouraged not to make the effort to understand older people. That’s a loss of a crucial Christian value in my judgment. If worship styles are so fixed that what’s being offered fits the expectations, the hopes, even the prejudices, of any one of these groups as opposed to the others, I don’t believe the worship style glorifies God, and some change, some reformation, some adjustment, and some enlargement of spiritual vision is really called for.

White Horse Inn producer Shane Rosenthal conducted this interview with J. I. Packer for a White Horse Inn video documentary on American Christianity to be released this fall.

REQUIRED READING FOR 21ST CENTURY CHRISTIANS modern

reformation

m u st-r e ad s

Readings on the Church Today Heaven on Earth: The Gifts of Christ in the Divine Service

The Church: Contours of Christian Theology InterVarsity Press, 1995

by Edmund Clowney The author, a Presbyterian pastor and theologian, provides a scholarly and accessible work covering all the important aspects of a wellthought-out theology of the church.

Concordia Publishing, 2008

by Arthur A. Just Jr. A professor of exegetical theology, Just introduces the reader to Lutheran liturgy, showing that worship is not so much about our work for God but about his unique and indispensable service to us.

A Better Way: Rediscovering the Drama of God-Centered Worship

The Deliberate Church Crossway Books, 2005

by Mark Dever and Paul Alexander From the minds that bring you 9Marks Ministries comes a helpful handbook on beginning and growing healthy churches. Melding together practical and pastoral advice, the authors anticipate your questions and answer a few you should have.

Baker, 2003

by Michael Horton The editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation showcases the importance of the visible church by exploring the church’s worship as a gathered community.

SEE ALSO: Who Runs the Church? Four Views on Church Government edited by Paul E. Engle (Zondervan)

Nine Marks of a Healthy Church by Mark Dever (Crossway Books)

The Enduring Community by Brian Habig and Les Newsom (Reformed University Press)

The Fire and the Staff: Lutheran Theology in Practice by Klemet I. Preus (Concordia Publishing)

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REVIEWS wh at ’s

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A Man for Our Season

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n this book, Kolb and Arand offer the reader some thoughts on how the rich-

answer is that we should stress what we have that Catholics lack: es of the Lutheran tradition might be used in contemporary church life. Both a robust doctrine of assurance.

That was the hinge on which the men are well qualified for the task: Kolb is well known for a number of out- Lutheran Reformation turned, and this book demonstrates how standing monographs that element is integral to the whole of Lutheran theology. on Martin Luther; and The authors also demonstrate in brilliant fashion how Arand has worked on righteousness and Word connect with each other. Much is the background to the often made about the “legal fiction” that is the Protestant Book of Concord, the notion of justification. Kolb and Arand demonstrate that Lutheran confessional Luther’s understanding of the Word is highly creative: God standards, and has writspeaks, and a certain state of affairs is true, no matter what ten an excellent pasthe outward, empirical or “rational” evidence might sugtoral book on the hisgest. As there was nothing, then God spoke and there was tory and theology of the creation, so on the cross all evidence suggest a disaster, Luther’s catechisms. but God’s Word tells us that it is grace triumphant; so in jusHere, these two outtification, when God declares me to be righteous, I am so in standing Lutherans the eyes of the only one who ultimately determines what have pooled their conreality is—God himself. Particularly helpful in parts of this siderable resources and discussion is the authors’ (intentional?) appropriation of offer to the church a the language of conversation to express that which they fine example of how a intend. “Conversation” has become one of the perennial historic tradition can clichés of the postmodern church world, where it generalyet be of relevance ly refers to a democratic exchange of ideas that may—or The Genius of Luther’s today. may not—lead to some kind of conclusion. Here, Kolb and Theology For most evangeliArand make it clear that there is a divine-human conversaby Robert Kolb and cals, Luther looms tion, but it is always the case that God holds the initiative larger as a symbol than and that human beings simply respond. We can speak to Charles L. Arand as a positive resource.

Baker Academic, 2008 and of God because he has first spoken to and of us.

240 pages (paperback), $21.99 Indeed, he is known The section on sacraments is perhaps the area where more as the man who evangelicals will find most with which to disagree, given stood against Rome on the point of justification than as the strong realism of the Lutheran tradition. Nevertheless, one who helped to build a church. His exegesis has dated in an evangelical world that neglects sacraments, there are considerably; and his view of the sacraments sits uncomsome healthy correctives here. I found particularly helpfortably both with the default Zwinglians of the evangeliful the notion of sacraments nourishing the believer, a cal tradition and the Calvinists among the Reformed. Yet point scarcely unique to Lutheranism, which reminds us his work still possesses riches that are there for the taking of the church’s central priorities and which functionally by anyone who cares to look. connects the sacraments to the Word.

The book is divided into two sections, the first deals with One final point: Chapter nine is particularly useful. humanity and the two kinds of righteousness, and the secHere, the authors talk about the conveying of God’s Word ond with the doctrine of the Word of God. Thus, this is no from one to another. The point is simple: Only as we comprehensive statement of Lutheran thought; rather it is speak the gospel to each other as believers do we die to sin intended as an example of how the writings of Luther, and rise with Christ. So much of evangelical life focuses Melanchthon, and others can inform discussion of these on telling the gospel to unbelievers, yet one of the great vital topics today. Of particular note in both sections is the insights of Lutheranism was the transformative power of centrality of assurance. I am often asked in class about how the Word for human beings in general. It does not lose its we as Protestants should interact with Catholics. My power for believers; it is not simply a transfer of informa-

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tion; rather, the Word is the lifeblood of the Christian life.

This is an excellent book, well written, and fascinating. I have not enjoyed reading something so much for a long time.

Carl R. Trueman is vice president for academic affairs and professor of church history at Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia).

A High View of Scripture?: The Authority of the Bible and the Formation of the New Testament Canon

by Craig Allert Baker Academic, 2007 208 pages (paperback), $18.99 Craig Allert chairs the Religious Studies Department at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia. His area of expertise is patristics and most of his published work focuses on issues related to biblical authority and evangelical doctrines of Scripture. In Allert’s latest work, he seeks to investigate “the implications of the formation of the New Testament canon on evangelical doctrines of Scripture” (10).

During this lengthy process of formation, the early church depended upon the Scriptures, along with other authoritative sources, and the church’s authoritative interpretation. This dynamic interplay, guided by the Holy Spirit, appears to be Allert’s ideal of a high view of Scripture.

To clarify his perspective, Allert draws a number of distinctions to which evangelicals will be sensitive. He distinguishes between what the Bible is and what the Bible says (11). Allert believes we should be “just as concerned with how the New Testament came to exist in the form we have it as with what it says” (173). Inerrancy is one way to champion biblical authority; infallibility, he contends is quite another (20).

Evangelicalism is a movement without a theological system (17, 33). Biblicism is a problem that must be distinguished from a high view of Scripture based on an understanding of how the canon was formed (26). In the early church, Scripture was not synonymous with canon (39) and inspiration was not limited to today’s Bible (59). Furthermore, Allert distinguishes between responding to the Bible and interacting with the community of faith: “The Christian faith did not grow in

response to a book but as a response to God’s interaction with the community of faith” (145).

The theme running through these distinctions is Allert’s conviction that the early church fathers had a better doctrine of Scripture than evangelicalism. “In the early church a high view of Scripture was not one that necessitated a text that functioned authoritatively outside of the church.

This would have been unthinkable to the fathers. In evangelical circles today, however, we are still being encouraged to think that this was how the church fathers viewed Scripture, and how we in turn should view it” (175–76).

Allert is especially concerned with evangelicals imposing their understanding of Scripture on the early church fathers. “We must be aware of not forcing our twenty-firstcentury closed New Testament canon perspective back onto the first and second centuries” (40). “An appeal to the ‘Bible’ as the early church’s sole rule for faith and life is anachronistic” (145).

He defines evangelicalism (chapter one) as a movement with “incredibly divergent strands” that tends to be defensive and reactionary. Evangelicals have fallen for the modern perversions of rationalism and individualism, instead of conserving historic Christian orthodox. Allert paints a bleak picture: “There is no real historical theological tradition underlying evangelical soteriology, no interpretive guidelines underlying bibliology” (30). In chapter two, Allert argues that evangelicals have a naive understanding of how the canon was formed. Throughout the first four centuries of the church, the authoritative body of Scriptures was more fluid and less certain, more broad and less defined, than most evangelicals realize. For Allert, the main question is not “What is in and what is out?” as much as it is “How did these documents function?” (51).

He contends that it is important to distinguish between “Scripture” and “canon” because this body of literature was not closed until the fifth century. Moreover, Allert demonstrates that Ignatius, Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and others used theopneustos (Godbreathed) to refer to commentaries and expositions outside what came to be included in the canon. Allert, however, does not demonstrate that the early church’s expansive view of inspiration works against the unique character of the biblical books that eventually became the canon.

Nor does he describe any ways in which the early church fathers might have challenged evangelicalism’s doctrine of inerrancy or distinguished between infallibility and inerrancy. Undoubtedly Allert would criticize this suggestion as anachronistic—a case of reading back into the early church evangelicalism’s high view of Scripture; but it is a fair question for several reasons. First, how does the early church’s understanding of Scripture compare to evangelicalism’s doctrine of Scripture? Would Irenaeus of Lyons’ understanding of Scripture be closer to John Stott’s or Luke Timothy Johnson’s? We might expect some evidence from patristics that would indicate either continuity or discontinuity with the evangelical doctrine of Scripture, but Allert presents none.

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Second, Allert may be guilty of his own anachronism, reading his opposition to inerrancy back into his study of patristics. It is not altogether clear how his contention of a lengthy and convoluted process of canon formation makes evangelicalism’s doctrine of Scripture modern and naive. At some point, the formation of the canon was completed and it seems reasonable that evangelicals based their doctrine of Scripture on that closed canon, rather than renew the debate previously experienced by the early church. Can it not be argued that evangelicals stand in the tradition of the early church by faithfully accepting the closed canon rather than engaging in a debate as to what texts are authoritative today?

Many evangelicals would agree with Allert that the formation of the New Testament canon stands in “the wider canonical heritage” (86) and that the “reliable apostolic tradition” was not fixed “in the canonical Gospels” until the fourth century or later. But evangelicals may fail to see how this undermines their doctrine of Scripture, minimizes the apostolic tradition, and devalues the early church. One might reason that the serious debate over which books to include in the canon was in fact a testimony to the importance the early church attributed to the “God-breathed” Scriptures. But does the process of canonization in the early church suggest that the only way today’s church can “hope to understand the inspiration of Scripture” is through ecclesiastical authorities properly interpreting the Bible (145)?

In his comparison between the early church and the contemporary church, Allert bypasses the Reformation, making it difficult to understand his criticism and his concern over tradition. All he says about the Reformation is that evangelicals have failed to uphold the “Protestant” tradition of bearing witness and declaring openly, because they have become defensive and reactionary. Allert contends, “In our desire to avoid the corrupting influence of tradition, we have often missed the fact that the very Bible we claim to accept as our only guide is itself a product of the very tradition we avoid” (145).

Allert is sensitive to how others will read his work. “I affirm the authority of the Bible as God’s revelation to humanity, and as such I affirm that it is the final source for the believers’ faith and life. Nothing I write in this book should be read as a denial of this” (14). Authors don’t usually advise their reviewers, but Allert concludes his introduction with a preemptive concern. He warns against imposing a “traditionalistic bibliology” on his work and criticizes those who might be tempted to use their review of his book as “a platform for a defense of the verbal plenary theory of inspiration and its logical conclusion of inerrancy” (15). He contends that traditionalism has left evangelicals rigid, defensive, and unaware of how their cherished doctrinal essentials became essential in the first place. “Nowhere do we see this narrow theological foundation more clearly than in the evangelical doctrine of Scripture” (35). His basic thesis is that evangelicals ought to be honest enough to admit that the Bible did not drop out of the sky and that the formation of the canon was a slow process carried on over three centuries within the tradition of the church. Allert argues that if evan4 6 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

gelicals understood the fluidity of this long process and the controlling significance of church tradition, then they would not limit “inspiration” to the sixty-six books of the Bible nor conclude that the text is inerrant. Instead of being monopolized by the concept of inerrancy, evangelicals would realize that “Scripture” and “canon” were not synonymous for hundreds of years and they would learn to appreciate “the wider canonical heritage” (86).

Allert argues that the biblical meaning of inspiration taught in 2 Timothy 3:15–17 does not refer to the “divine origin” of Scripture but how the “sacred writings” function in conjunction with other sources of teaching and influence.

He reasons that the Scriptures function alongside other sources that comprise a tradition of faithful witness. Allert embraces Luke Timothy Johnson’s conclusion that those who use this passage “to argue for the origin of Scripture are captivated by ‘theological concerns about the inspiration of Scripture that are driven by an anachronistic literalism’” (149). How can Allert be so confident in this conclusion? I would be inclined to think just the opposite—that the bifurcation of “origin” and “function” is more in the mind of the modern scholar than it is in the mind of the apostle.

Are we to accept tradition as a paradigm of fluidity and debate or are we to embrace the solid conclusions of tradition? The early church blessed evangelicalism with a high view of Scripture, a deep understanding of the Trinity, a true comprehension of Christ, and solid doctrine of salvation. Evangelicals depend upon that dynamic heritage. If Tertullian, Augustine, and Irenaeus were to return to the contemporary church, where would they feel most at home? With those who affirm the plenary inspiration of Scripture or with those who believe that Matthew’s magi were invented to get a point across?

Douglas D. Webster is professor of preaching at Beeson Divinity School (Birmingham, Alabama).

Walking in Your Own Shoes: Discover God’s Direction for Your Life

by Robert A. Schuller FaithWords, 2007 256 pages (hardback), $21.99 As the son of Robert H. Schuller of Crystal Cathedral and Hour of Power fame, Schuller knew that he had a tough act to follow when he succeeded his father as senior pastor of their megachurch in California. He draws on his own story as a way to introduce

his thesis that we are unique, created by God to do something in this world that nobody else can do. Using the metaphor of a journey, Schuller divides the book into fifteen chapters designed to argue and reinforce the point that regardless of our circumstances each step of our journey serves both to equip us for and maintain us in our life’s purpose. Our past has prepared us, the present continues to shape us, and all the twists, turns, roadblocks, and setbacks that we encounter play an essential role in this grand plan. We therefore need to persevere, be courageous, and remain focused on the bigger picture.

The chapters are a montage of stories about people whose lives took unexpected turns, some threatening to derail their progress in their ultimate goal, and how they handled these difficulties. Most are quite inspiring, a sort of Chicken Soup for the Soul interspersed with Schuller’s commentary and observations. Many of these tales he links to passages of Scripture, using them to illustrate a point for which he finds support in the Bible. The subtitle indicates that the author has at least two foundational premises wrapped up in promises: first, that there is a God and he does have a purpose for our lives; and second, that we can discover that purpose and receive God’s help in living it out.

The principle that God has a plan for individuals is sometimes explained to the reader in rather human-centered terms: Schuller places us as the pinnacle of a pyramid of realities, with God’s existence, ability, love, creation and household leading the way to the apex—people as God’s image. In the course of this discussion, he tries to establish God as the foundation supporting and enabling us to fulfill our dreams: John 3:16, the most famous verse in the Bible, says God loved us so much He came to earth to meet with us and provide what we need to live life. Jesus Himself said, “I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of” (John 10:10 The Message). Think about that. Whatever life you have dreamed about having, Jesus came to provide it and more. I’m sure these words of Jesus are what inspired the apostle Paul (who discovered a life better than he had ever imagined) to write, “Now glory be to God! By his mighty power at work within us, he is able to accomplish infinitely more than we would ever dare to ask or hope” (Eph. 3:20 NLT). (10) In this section, and indeed on and off throughout the book, Schuller explains the idea of one’s purpose in life in terms that clearly set humans in the center around which everything, including in some ways God, revolves: God can help us and even came to earth to provide what we need. This was not surprising to read given the emphasis on “positive Christianity” in the Crystal Cathedral and the Hour of Power. The presentation of the book as uniquely Christian, however, and Schuller’s ready identification with the Reformed Church of America, seem to demand more than what

the reader can get from talk shows and the array of other, not specifically Christian, self-help books.

Nevertheless, Schuller is happily inconsistent in this human-centered perspective: there are times in the book when he transcends it long enough to discuss our drama in divine terms.

When I talk to people searching for their purpose in life, they usually talk about ‘needing to know’ and ‘needing insight’—they want to find what is ‘best’ for them in life. Knowledge, insight, finding what’s best—the apostle Paul said we find those things not by pursuing them but by pursuing love. Did you know everything we need for ourselves in life comes as a byproduct of loving God and loving others? (145, emphasis his) The parts of his book that force us to look at our lives from the long—even eternal—perspective of the God who made us and has deigned to use us in this world are refreshing, if too brief.

Schuller’s confusion of perspective is most apparent in his treatment of Scripture. It more often, though not exclusively, serves to support his point than to be what informs his argument, and at times fails even to do that.

His use of Psalm 23, for example, has little that connects it to his section-by-section advice (190–99). Reformed believers will find his treatment of the parable of the sower in Matthew 13 similarly eisegetical when he encourages his readers to become the good type of soil: “I pray you’ll prepare for the rest of your life by allowing yourself to receive the gift of eternal life” (179).

As far as the book’s promise that it will help the reader discover God’s direction for his or her life, it is hard to see what Schuller offers except the reminders that our personal narrative is not over until it’s over. Using many examples (indeed, every chapter begins with a story), we are prompted to stay the course in pursuit of our dreams and goals. Beyond this encouragement to persevere in following them, though, there is no direction on how one might “discover” them.

Ultimately the usefulness of the book will be determined by the perspective of the reader: those who are looking for general encouragement with some Christian support will find this a hopeful, if rather thin, read. On the other hand, those who are looking to understand the ways of God in the lives of humans will likely be disappointed: even those times Schuller does turn to the Bible, he seems unable to allow Scripture to set the agenda for his discussion. That is to be expected in a secular book that seeks to inspire. It is a disappointment when the book is marketed as a way to discover God’s direction for our lives.

Karen DeCrescenzo Lavery (Ph.D., Harvard University) is a freelance writer and editor living on Boston’s North Shore.

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The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America

by Thomas S. Kidd Yale University Press, 2007 416 pages (hardback), $35.00 This book has two primary purposes: (1) to provide a thorough narrative describing the various revivals of religion in the American colonies between 1730 and 1800, and (2) to show that these revivals constitute the beginnings of evangelicalism in America. There is no question that the book accomplishes its first purpose superbly.

Whether the book accomplishes its second purpose is more questionable. I will start with the second purpose.

Kidd begins the introduction to his book in this way, “Everywhere in early twenty-first century America, signs point to the influence of evangelical Christianity.” He then asks, “How did evangelicalism begin?” (xiii). In his epilogue, Kidd summarizes the answer to this question: “This book has shown that there was, indeed, a First Great Awakening, but it was a long Great Awakening and produced a new variation of Protestant Christianity: evangelicalism....The Great Awakening can be acknowledged as ‘great’ because it produced the evangelical movement” (322–23). (This kind of structure, by the way, is one of the strengths of the book; it is extremely well organized and well written.) Kidd obviously believes he has accomplished this second purpose—and he may have. It all depends on one’s definition of evangelical and evangelicalism.

Kidd recognizes very early in the book that the accomplishment of his second purpose will depend on his definition of evangelicalism. He reviews the fourfold definition provided by David Bebbington—conversionsim, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism—and he argues that “Bebbington’s ‘quadrilateral’ does not adequately distinguish early evangelicalism from movements that preceded it” (xiv). He then suggests the following as a crucial fifth element: Missing from Bebbington’s definition is early evangelicalism’s new attention to the person of the Holy Spirit, particularly in revival. Early American evangelicalism was distinguished from earlier forms of Protestantism by dramatically increased emphases on seasons of revival, or outpourings of the Holy Spirit, and on converted sinners experiencing God’s love personally. (xiv, emphasis his) 4 8 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

If Kidd is right in his revised definition of evangelicalism, then there can be little doubt that he has, in this book, accomplished his second purpose. But particularly remembering that Kidd has begun his discussion by mentioning early twenty-first century American evangelicalism, there is a question as to whether this definition is fully accurate.

Is early twenty-first century American evangelicalism really and universally characterized by “seasons of revival” or “outpourings of the Holy Spirit”? My own judgment is that it is not. And if it is not, what does this mean for the validity of Kidd’s argument throughout the book? I think it makes that argument at least questionable.

But whether Kidd has accomplished his second purpose, he certainly has accomplished his first; and, frankly, I would find the book extremely valuable whether or not Kidd has managed to demonstrate a direct lineal connection between the Great Awakening and twenty-first century American evangelicalism. What Mark Noll says of the book is absolutely correct: “There is no book of comparable breadth, either chronologically or geographically.”

More than forty years ago, in his monumental Religion and the American Mind, Alan Heimert argued that the Great Awakening was the first truly national event in American history, and Kidd shows in great detail exactly how and why Heimert was correct. That in itself makes the book invaluable for anyone interested in either the history of revival or the history of America.

But beyond its sheer breadth, Kidd’s book offers some penetrating analyses of the facts he narrates, analyses that potentially enrich both secular and ecclesiastical historiography. Of the many examples, I will mention only a few.

Kidd makes a powerful and persuasive argument that the proponents of the revivals that constituted the “long Great Awakening” led the way in the church in recognizing the full humanity of African slaves in the colonies (136–37, 213–14): Early American white evangelicals’ commitment to evangelization set in motion perhaps the most remarkable change in American religious history: the nearly wholesale conversion of African Americans to some form of evangelical Christianity. That great transformation began in force in the mid 1780’s and by the early nineteenth century African Americans were converting at almost unparalleled rates.

Evangelical thought among whites and blacks would help fuel the antislavery movement before the American Civil War. (214) This fact does not, of course, mean that eighteenth-century evangelicals were immediately and completely transported out of their (sinful) cultures. Many such individuals, even while evangelizing African Americans and welcoming them into previously white churches, continued to accept, either passively or actively, the institution of slavery.

But Kidd convincingly makes the point that the impetus for change in American racial attitudes came, not from those

(often regarded as theological “liberals”) who opposed the revivals, but from those (often regarded as more theologically “conservative”) who supported the revivals.

An even more fascinating point, particularly given current debates within early twenty-first century American evangelicalism, it was the supporters of the revivals who began to recognize that women might have some role to play in the leadership of the evangelical church (280).

Jonathan Edwards’ most famous opponent, Charles Chauncy, was also considered the leader of the “liberal” cause in mid-eighteenth century American Christianity.

“According to antirevivalist Charles Chauncy...one of the most disconcerting features of the revivals was that ‘Women and Girls, yea, Negroes have taken upon them to do the Business of Preachers’” (213). Kidd’s analysis of the entire situation is fraught with consequences for the modern church: the revivalists “embraced a certain kind of spiritual egalitarianism....They believed strongly that the gospel of the new birth should be preached to all” (213). Talk about radical ideas!

One of Kidd’s strongest analyses concerns the relationship between revivalist theology and the political theories out of which emerged the American Revolution. Alan Heimert (Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the American Revolution), Bernard Bailyn (The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution), and Mark Noll (Christians in the American Revolution) are just three of many who have written extensively on this subject and to whose works Kidd refers. His entire eighteenth chapter (appropriately entitled “The God of Glory is On Our Side”) deals masterfully with this complex relationship. He points out that among those whom he considers evangelicals there were four main groups: patriots (fully supportive of the revolutionary cause); reformists (who desired “revolution” within American social structures as much as in the colonies’ relationship with Britain); loyalists (opposed to the revolution); and sojourners (who sought to remain aloof from the revolution because they “believed that the affairs of the Kingdom of God demanded detachment from the wars of nations”; 291). No one of these four was more evangelical or Christian than the others—a fascinating possible lesson for today’s evangelical churches.

A final analysis that this reviewer found particularly enriching, given his personal theological interests, was on why the preaching of Jonathan Edwards made that preaching so powerful. Using the example of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Kidd points out: “Sinners” used at least twenty metaphors to picture God’s wrath building up against rebellious sinners, including a furnace burning, black storm clouds approaching, flood waters surging against a dam, and most famously, the spider dangling over fire....All of Edwards’s listeners that day would have affirmed that this judgment awaited unforgiven sinners, but perhaps the doctrine had grown stale with familiarity. Edwards’s vivid images may have awakened

some previously passive residents, while other visitors may have come expecting to have another emotional encounter with God and got their wish. (105) This series of metaphors designed to make the propositional truth about hell “affecting” was what, in human terms and according to Kidd, gave Edwards’ preaching such power.

And that kind of goal also characterized Edwards’ “positive” preaching as well. In a wonderfully appropriate turn of phrase, Kidd suggests that, more than anything else, Edwards sought raise his congregation’s “esteem of Jesus” (119). Esteem is an attitude of heart founded upon propositional truth and it recalls Edwards’ famous statement in his Treatise on Religious Affections: “No light in the understanding is good which does not produce holy affection in the heart.”

“Light in the understanding” is the necessary starting point, but it is just a starting point. Increasing one’s hearers’ “esteem for Jesus” is the ultimate goal of preaching!

Samuel T. Logan is executive secretary of World Reformed Fellowship and special counsel to the president and professor of church history at Biblical Theological Seminary.

Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World

by Joanna Weaver WaterBrook Press, 2007 288 pages (hardback), $13.99 Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World is not a new book.

It was initially released in 2000 in hardback, and was rereleased in trade paperback in 2002 as a revised edition with a new Bible study appendix. In 2007, the book was again republished in a gift edition.

The 2002 edition, which I read, continues to hold a respectable place on the Amazon best-seller list in its category, “Christian living—women’s issues.”

Joanna Weaver’s focus finds expression in her subtitle, Finding Intimacy with God in the Busyness of Life. Using the account of Martha and Mary in Luke 10:38–42 as her springboard, she develops an involved eisegetical tale wherein Martha “Stewart,” the energetic hostess, welcomes thirteen or more men for an impromptu dinner party, complete with folded napkins and centerpieces.

Meanwhile, Mary, “more prone to walk in the dew of the morning than to get caught up in the ‘dos’ of the day,” is J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 4 9

nowhere to be found. We know, of course, that Mary is sitting at the Lord’s feet, listening to him. In Weaver’s telling, Martha is pushed to the limit when she finds “little Mary being quite contrary” in with the men, and “with a cutting edge to her voice” asks Jesus to intervene (3–5).

But, instead of doing what Martha wants and expects, Jesus issues his famous rebuke and defends Mary’s choice as that which is better.

Weaver characterizes this narrative as a tug of war between “living room intimacy” with Christ and “kitchen service.” In the next three chapters, she analyzes the passage. Martha’s question, “Lord, don’t you care?” reveals that she is trapped in the “three deadly D’s”: distraction, discouragement, and doubt. Jesus diagnoses hers as a worry problem and his prescribed cure is that Martha discover how to worship and grow in her relationship with him. In the following three chapters, Weaver addresses these findings more deeply.

In chapter eight, “Lessons from Lazarus,” the book takes a more expansive turn. Moving to John’s Gospel, Weaver examines how the sisters coped with hardship and tragedy after the death of their brother, and what they each sought from Jesus. She focuses on Martha’s teachable heart in chapter nine, based on the differences she notes between the narratives in Luke and John, and on Mary’s extravagant love in chapter ten, highlighting the differences between her and Judas in John 12:1–11, the anointing with nard. Chapter eleven discusses the need to balance work and worship, and provides some suggestions on how to achieve it. Chapter twelve describes Weaver’s aha moment (“It’s both!”), and she reveals that it’s possible to pursue Martha tasks with a Mary heart within the joy of total surrender to Christ.

It is easy to see why Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World is so popular with women’s Bible study groups and with others seeking scriptural guidance on how to navigate the demands of modern life while keeping their eyes fixed on Jesus. Weaver has a warm, conversational style, and is confessional with her own struggles to find balance as a pastor’s wife, a mother, and an author. She lavishly quotes other well-known practical theology and devotional writers and makes good use of modern day parables to illustrate her points. Weaver intersperses her writing with boxes containing tips, how-tos, and other practical observations; and in the appendix, she includes study questions for each chapter and other helpful information. She wants women to learn from her personal journey, and it’s easy to do. Who among us hasn’t at times found herself spinning out of control with too much to do and too little time to do any of it well?

But even as I periodically found myself nodding in agreement, I was more frequently disappointed by Weaver’s reductionistic, pedestrian approach to the biblical material. She is not an exegete, and her reliance instead on middle American midrash, homespun stories, and proof-texting is the book’s most serious weakness. In an effort to be folksy, she moves into dubious theological ter5 0 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

ritory when she explains the Bible as “God’s grammar book,” and provides instructions like “never put a period where God puts a comma” (126). She does little to explore Martha’s positive role as the householder who welcomes Jesus, exactly as did Zaccheus, or Luke’s placement of the account just after the parable of the Good Samaritan, inviting us to explore his juxtaposition of the roles of service and piety in both. Weaver is so intent on her ministry to frazzled wives and mothers that she misses the power of the Martha and Mary texts to challenge and transform hearts and minds in the context of the bigger gospel picture.

Ironically, her commitment to Martha and Mary as the vehicles for making her point actually undermines the structure of the book by its midpoint. The raising of Lazarus and the anointing of Jesus feature the sisters of Bethany, but not in direct continuity with Luke. Weaver’s efforts to fold all three accounts neatly into her thesis are forced, and the book wanders disjointedly in the later chapters. Although she occasionally offers some interesting individual insights along the way—I particularly liked her value comparison between Judas’s thirty pieces of silver and Mary’s alabaster jar of nard—they are frustratingly brief and don’t move her central argument forward. It should be said, however, that a Bible study group working a chapter or two at a time is not likely to find the structural problem bothersome.

Weaver does not write from a Reformed perspective, so some readers will be turned off by lines like “just as Adam and Eve’s disobedience blocked God’s purpose, our obedience releases his plan” (130). But this book’s demonstrated staying power suggests that most broadly evangelical women will overlook these flaws. Instead, they will identify with Joanna Weaver’s kindhearted, transformed Martha guidance in helping them rebuild Mary-like worship relationships with Jesus. They will find that Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World will read easily, strike the right chords, and inspire them to seek Weaver’s personal victory for themselves.

Susan P. Michaelson (M.Div., Westminster Theological Seminary) is a theological writer, teaches adult Sunday school, and is a study group leader for the annual Women in the Word workshop.

POINT OF CONTACT: BOOKS YOUR NEIGHBORS ARE READING Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices, and Priorities of a Winning Life

by Tony Dungy Tyndale, 2007 301 pages (hardback), $26.99 There are many sports- or football-as-metaphor-for-life stories in print, such as this one (note the subtitle). Additionally, there are celebrities who go to print either at a high point in their career (after winning an Oscar or the Super Bowl). Each of these circumstances is a fertile situation for selling a lot of books and to some degree is true of this book, which topped both Christian and non-Christian lists for a time.

But Quiet Strength is much more than celebrity bravado on display. It is something, as the title describes, paradoxically intriguing. It demonstrates a deep gospel truth presented over and over in Scripture, especially by Jesus and Paul. Tony Dungy, in recounting his life around football, gives us a peek into the counterintuitive upside-down nature of life in the kingdom. In a world where we expect loud strength and quiet weakness, particularly in the world of professional football, we are confronted with a calm, faith-based, family-focused unpretentious NFL coach. There are no screaming histrionics here. It is twenty unremarkable chapters on a remarkably faithful man. It is his uncommon commonness seen in the aphoristic life lessons he dispenses along the way, his extraordinary ordinariness in the midst of a high pressure job that accounts for much of the curiosity about the man and his life.

This is for Dungy a matter of deep personal conviction and something to which he tenaciously adheres through thick-and-thin times as a professional football coach. It is probably best expressed in the words of the legendary NFL coach Chuck Noll for whom Tony Dungy played and from whom he got his first coaching job: “Champions are champions not because they do anything extraordinary but because they do the ordinary better than anyone else.” In keeping with his be “faithful in small things” upbringing, Dungy steadfastly refused the seduction of novelty and gimmicks, and continued to instruct his teams to “do what

we do” (105), a recurring refrain in football and life.

Dungy, the son of a college professor and high school teacher, was nurtured in a loving Christian home. “As far back as I could remember, I understood who Jesus was, that He died because of the things I had done wrong” (20).

All throughout his life, he hears nurturing, proverbial echoes of his parents’ wisdom guiding him, especially in the lessons about “venting” when angry.

It is his vibrant Christian testimony that is on display.

We see Dungy navigate life as a talented high school athlete, a college quarterback, a short-lived professional career as a defensive back and up through the NFL coaching ranks. His growth is chronicled from his youth as a shy kid to husband, father of five, and key spokesman for a family organization. In living, he shows us that worldly success at the highest level is not necessarily inimical to seeking first the kingdom as a devout follower of Jesus.

Though his life is in many ways storied and idyllic, it was not completely so. In this regard, particularly poignant is Dungy’s account of the death of his oldest son. The response of the Dungy family epitomizes what it means to grieve in hope, what it means to see death, not as the end, but as the door into eternity with Christ: “We were determined to make Jamie’s funeral a celebration” (249). By his own admission, Dungy’s quiet strength is fueled by something far more than emotional fortitude or temperamental conditioning. He relies on the miracle of God’s grace. “His power works best in my weakness” (263) is how he paraphrased Paul in 2 Corinthians 12:9 during their time of loss. Here we do not see any naive triumphalism in tragedy. He and his wife Lauren allow a little access to their deep inner pain and perplexity: “Here I am, a spokesman for the All Pro Dad program, helping others be better parents, and my child took his own life” (259).

It wasn’t until one year later (2006) that Dungy would finally reach the pinnacle of professional football as the coach of a Super Bowl-winning team and the first African American to do so. Of course, the significance of this historical moment is not lost on him; he is quite aware of what this means for black society. He saw covenantal lessons in it and is attuned to those who paved the way. His accomplishment wasn’t his alone. Like most black Americans, he is conscious of his place and participation in a larger narrative of a people. Quite interestingly, the year that Dungy won the Super Bowl, his friend, former assistant coach, and fellow African American, Lovie Smith, was head coach of the opposing Chicago Bears. A historic moment and outcome was guaranteed.

Dungy’s life shows us that in the economy of Jesus’ kingdom community, yes, ultimately the first finish last and the last finish first; but sometimes even in this life, we may get a peak of that final dynamic breaking in.

Mark Robinson is an assistant pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City.

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FINAL THOUGHTS f r o m

t h e

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editor-in-chief

A Tale of Two Churches Imagine two scenarios of church life.

secondary to “finding their ministry” in the church. n the first, God gathers his people together in a covenantal event to judge and to jus- And if they brought a friend to church, they tify, to kill, and to make alive. The emphasis is on the work of the triune God, cen- could not be sure they would hear the gospel. tering on Christ’s redeeming work. Entering with our thin characters and shallow The second scenario has captivated churches across plots in this passing age, open perhaps to finding a supportthe spectrum. The denominational label or conservativeing role for God in our life movie, God finds a place for us in liberal divide matter little on this score. Everybody seems to his unfolding drama instead. Our character dies in this think we come to church first of all to receive rather than to episode (again!) and we find ourselves in a strange new give. Despite differences over style, defenders of traditional world among strange new people, with a strange God doing and contemporary approaches to worship seem largely to strange things to us and for us that we could never imagine, agree that we go to church primarily to do something. And much less accomplish, for ourselves. Through the preachin spite of the Emerging church’s criticism of their parents’ ing, God sweeps us into this drama and creates faith in our megachurch as consumeristic and inauthentic, both generhearts through the gospel. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper ations seem to assume that the church is a platform for our are means of grace: God’s work, not ours. As this gospel creactivity. It’s not enough to make a stand for God-centered ates, deepens, and inflames faith, a profound sense of praise rather than human-centered worship if “God-centered” and thanksgiving fills hearts, leading to an exchange of gifts means that he is the passive receiver of our worship more in the communion of saints and service to our neighbor in than the active agent who serves us. the world through our various callings. Having been served In any covenantal relationship, there are two parties.

by God, believers serve. Fed with truth and filled with Of course, there will be activity on our side, but it is always thanksgiving, they are ready to give gifts to others in wellresponsive to God’s initiating grace—the “Amen!” of faith informed witness, instruction, hospitality, and generosity. in the saving work of the triune God in Jesus Christ. And And because they have been relieved of numerous burdens it is only this faith that creates genuine experience and that to spend all of their energy on church-related “ministries” bears the fruit of genuinely good works in which God throughout the week, they have more time to serve their delights and our neighbors are served. It’s so easy to forfamilies, neighbors, and co-workers in the world. get that the gospel is “the power of God unto salvation” in In the second scenario, the people assume they come to every moment of the Christian life (Rom. 1:16). In my church primarily to do something. The emphasis is on their zeal mixed with arrogance, I easily succumb to “a form of work for God. The preaching focuses on us and our activity, godliness while denying its power” (2 Tim. 3:5). with a constant stream of exhortations and principles for lifeWe don’t need more “community,” but more of the gospel transformation. No longer considered means of grace, that creates a specific kind of community of the Spirit in this Baptism and the Supper are means of commitment. The passing evil age. We don’t need more activities, but more singing, which Paul said was a way of more deeply feeding Word-and-sacrament ministry. The sheep don’t need more on the Word of Christ in thanksgiving (Col. 3:16), often opportunities to serve the church as much as to be served by becomes transformed into another opportunity to express a church that treasures them as Christ’s flock. We don’t need our piety, devotion, experience, fervency, and commitment. more spiritual disciplines, but more profound instruction in Often malnourished because of a ministry defined by personGod’s Word from cradle to grave that will fill our minds with al charisma and motivational skills than by knowledge and wonder, our hearts with thanksgiving, and our own meditapiety, these same sheep are expected to be shepherds themtion and prayer with richness. Any voluntary service organselves. Always serving, they are rarely served. Ill-informed ization can create a fellowship of the like-minded. Only about the grand narrative of God’s work in redemptive hisGod’s work—in and through the gospel—can create a comtory, they do not really know what to say to a non-Christian munion of saints and spread a feast in the desert. except to talk about their own experiences and perhaps repeat some slogans or formulas they might be hard-pressed Michael Horton is editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation. to explain. Their calling by God to secular vocations is made

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