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THE GREAT COMMISSION ❘ INTERVIEW WITH GRAEME GOLDSWORTHY ❘ WHERE ARE WE IN 2011?

MODERN REFORMATION The Great Announcement

VOLUME 20, NUMBER 1, JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011, $6.50

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The Great Announcement: “All Authority in Heaven and on Earth Has Been Given to Me” What did Jesus mean when he acknowledged that the Father had “given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him”? The answer goes to the heart of his opening words in the Great Commission and unfolds in the Gospel of John. But what does this “great announcement” mean to us today?

By Michael Horton Plus… A Theology of Missions

By Ryan Glomsrud Plus… Ad Fontes: Calvin on Matthew 28:18

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“You Are Here”: The Map of Redemptive History Since we live some two thousand years removed from the time of the apostles, how do we relate to the apostolic age of so long ago? Should we understand the dramatic events found in the book of Acts as normative for what should go on in the church today? Or should we see ourselves as living in a different age entirely—one that has little or no connection to the time of the apostles? Just where are we on the map of redemptive history?

By Kim Riddlebarger

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The Return of the King: Exploring the Kingdom of God in Jesus’ Inaugural Sermon Jesus’ first public sermon makes it clear that through him something decidedly new was happening in the world: God’s reign had broken into history. Therefore the task of the Great Commission could be undertaken with urgency. The power of Jesus’ message was in his focus on the coming kingdom.

Should the message of the modern church be any different?

By Michael J. Kruger Plus… The Difference a Comma Makes

By Ryan Glomsrud

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The Mission Statement: “Go Into All the World” Any conversation about the “Great Commission” must begin with agreeing that the missional activity of the church is the work of God. The very doing of the things of the Great Commission, not just the commissioning itself, is the doing of God. But how is God acting in mission? What does it mean to “go into all the world”?

By John J. Bombaro

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Ad Extra: Articles Aside

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Studies in Acts “The Power of the Kingdom”

By Dennis E. Johnson Missions Past and Present “Lutheran Missions: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow”

By Lawrence R. Rast, Jr. From the Hallway: Perspectives on Evangelical Theology “The Religious Right and Old Princeton”

By P. C. Kemeny and Gillis Harp For a Modern Reformation “Recovering the ‘Solas’”

By Michael Horton

The Latest Ideas Sweeping the Land…

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

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Managing Editor Patricia Anders

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

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Modern Reformation © 2011 All rights reserved.

ISSN-1076-7169

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Turning Back the Darkness: The Biblical Pattern of Reformation

By Richard D. Phillips Reviewed by John Bombaro The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America

By Thomas S. Kidd Reviewed by D. G. Hart “Finding the Gospel in the Whole Bible” White Horse Inn Interview with Graeme Goldsworthy The Kingdom of Christ: The New Evangelical Perspective

By Russell D. Moore Reviewed by Michael Allen Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

By N. T. Wright Reviewed by Kim Riddlebarger The Judaizing Calvin: Sixteenth-Century Debates over the Messianic Psalms

By G. Sujin Pak Reviewed by Dan Borvan The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade

By Susan Wise Bauer Reviewed by Meredith Riedel Point of Contact: Books Your Neighbors Are Reading The Betrayal: A Novel on John Calvin

By Douglas Bond Reviewed by Patricia Anders COVER ART: IMAGE SOURCE/GETTY IMAGES

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IN THIS ISSUE

The Word about the Kingdom

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e are thrilled to bring you the first issue of our 2011 series on the Great Commission. All this year we will move through NEXT ISSUES Jesus’ sending of the disciples as we find recorded in March/April 2011 Matthew 28. Our decision to take up this topic was an organic one, “For You, Your Children, growing out of a natural progression from “Guilt” to “Grace” and finally and All Who Are Far Off” “Gratitude,” to borrow categories from the Heidelberg Catechism. In the May/June 2011 recent past we have discussed “Christless Christianity” (“Guilt”) and the Embassy of Grace “Gospel-Driven Life” (“Grace”),” but now we take up in all its detail the “Great Commission” (“Gratitude”).

Our editor-in-chief Michael Horton sounds the first trumpet blast with his usual eloquence and persuasiveness, bringing us right to the heart of the message we want to communicate for a modern reformation of our churches.

The Great Commission must begin with Jesus’ Great Announcement. Next, Kim Riddlebarger, White Horse Inn cohost, and Michael Kruger, New Testament professor at Reformed Theological Seminary, each tackle the fascinating connections between eschatology (the study of last things, sometimes called more colloquially the “end times”) and the Great Commission. In a very real sense, missions is a matter of spreading the word about the kingdom. These authors help us learn that the kingdom theme provides the infrastructure of Jesus’ mission and ministry, as well as our present place in the growing of the kingdom—where we are situated on the map of redemptive history.

Later, Graeme Goldsworthy explains in our exclusive interview that the kingdom of God is one of the Bible’s unifying themes that can help believers understand the big picture story from Genesis to Revelation. This is evident especially in Jesus’ post-resurrection ministry and in the life of the early church, a conclusion that is ably presented in the first installment of our yearlong series by Dennis Johnson, “Studies in Acts.”

Regular contributor John Bombaro of Grace Lutheran Church develops these insights in “The Mission Statement: ‘Go Into All the World.’” He strikes a Lutheran note that will encourage evangelicals to consider that even though evangelism is a task that belongs to all of us, Jesus didn’t necessarily exhort every believer as much as commission his disciples, namely, duly appointed church leaders. Lawrence Rast, Jr. then supplies another of our yearlong series: a retrospective and prospective look at missions in various denominations. Finally, Michael Horton offers the first of a series of platforms that we want to lay out in each issue as part of our effort to build an evangelical consensus. The first action item is the recovery of the “solas” of the Reformation. Only this can help us avoid what is sometimes called “mission creep.” By the end of the year, these six positions will help us generate momentum for a modern reformation.

By now you will have noticed a few changes to the look and feel of MR. We are fast approaching our twentieth anniversary, and to that end we will tackle even more issues and challenges that stand at the crossroads of the Reformation and contemporary evangelicalism, in more depth and detail—and always with pastoral sensitivity. In addition to our thematic “Feature” articles and “Articles Aside,” both mainstays of the magazine, we now want to build out a third part of the magazine called “The Latest Ideas Sweeping the Land”—a phrase taken from the White Horse Inn radio prologue. This expanded section will include the dialogues, debates, and discussions for which we are well known, along with a new and improved book reviews section. Very few things in evangelicalism have a shelf life of twenty months much less twenty years, and we are pleased to have the support of a wide and enthusiastic readership. We aim to be a much-discussed, trend-spotting, faith-defending publication and hope you will benefit from our Reformation advocacy for another twenty years. Please share us with all of your friends and family in the New Year!

Ryan Glomsrud Executive Editor

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STUDIES IN ACTS

The Power of the Kingdom

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ust weeks before, their hopes had been dashed. Now everything had

the watershed, worldshaking events of Jesus’ changed. Back then, two of them had sadly explained to a fellow trav- crucifixion and resurrection, they still needed his eler that their teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, a mighty prophet, had been instruction in order to grasp what sort of king and kingdom God had promised to his people. repudiated by the leaders of Judaism and crucified by Luke’s record of the risen Lord’s instruction during Roman authorities. “But we had hoped that he was the forty days between his resurrection and his ascenthe one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21).1 But now, sion (Luke 24 and Acts 1:1–11) amplifies our underJesus’ followers knew that he had been raised from standing of the Great Commission expressed in the dead. The fellow traveler identified himself as Matthew 28:18–20. The rest of the book of Acts Jesus; and over the following weeks, to groups large demonstrates how the character, power, and dimenand small, he “presented himself alive after his sufsions of Christ’s kingdom came to expression in the fering by many proofs, appearing to them during decades after Jesus assumed his heavenly throne, in forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God” fulfillment of God’s promise to King David (Acts 2:29– (Acts 1:3). Everything had changed.

33). As the 2011 issues of Modern Reformation will Well, not quite everything. Jesus’ disciples now explore various facets of the Great Commission knew that their hope in Jesus as Israel’s Redeemer recorded by Matthew, these reflections on the book of had not been misplaced after all. But their mental Acts will enrich our understanding from the compleimage of what Israel’s redemption would look like mentary perspective of the Evangelist Luke. The founseems to have remained essentially the same. The dation-laying apostolic era that flowed from the question in the forefront of their minds was still, Spirit’s descent at Pentecost defines the contours for “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to the church in its new covenant form. So Luke’s Israel?” (Acts 1:5). Israel had been subjugated to a sucinspired account of the early church’s life and mission cession of Gentile empires—Babylon, Persia, Greece, sets the priorities and parameters for our response to Syria, and now Rome. Since the Messiah had conJesus’ Great Commission today, as we seek to make quered death itself, surely now he would lead God’s disciples of all the people groups on earth. captive people to liberty as a new David, casting off The kingdom of God is the overarching context in the shackles of the pagan overlords!

But Jesus sidestepped their question, reminding which the book of Acts places the church’s commuthem (as he had days before his death, Mark 13:32) nal life, mission, and growth. In the closing chapter of that it was not their place to probe the Creator’s secret Luke’s Gospel, we read Jesus’ detailed teaching about timetable for history (Acts 1:7). Then he went on to how the Old Testament Scriptures had been and correct the assumptions implicit in their question. He would be fulfilled in his death and resurrection, and spoke of “the end of the earth” to expand their horiin the resultant declaration of forgiveness to all zons from a nearsighted focus on Israel. He promised nations through his witnesses (Luke 24:25–27, 44– a power more potent than military arms, conveyed by 49). As Luke opens his second volume (Acts), he God’s Holy Spirit, who would come upon them sums up that detailed instruction in a single phrase: shortly. He signaled that the Spirit’s power would “Speaking about the kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3). The advance the kingdom not through coercive force but book of Acts closes on the same note, with the aposthrough a message that would capture hearts: “You tle Paul in chains in Rome but still “proclaiming the will be my witnesses” (1:8). They had not yet grasped kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus the kind of kingdom that the risen Messiah Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance” would rule, the power by which he would exert his (28:31). Between these “bookends,” Luke reports reign, and the global extent of his domain. Even after that Paul devoted three months in Ephesus trying to 4 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

persuade those in the synagogue “about the kingdom (16:14–15).2 In these and other ways, Jesus was makof God” (19:8). Moreover, in each of the twenty ing good on his promise not to leave his friends orphans, but rather return to them in the personal instances in Acts in which we read the title “Christ”— presence and power of the Holy Spirit (John 14:18, the Greek equivalent of Messiah, Anointed One—we should immediately think “king” (Acts 4:26, citing 23, 26–28). This King walked humbly among us as Psalm 2:2). Not surprisingly, the apostles were accused “Immanuel,” God with us, during his years of serviof preaching Jesus as a rival king to Caesar (Acts tude and suffering. Upon ascending his throne, he 17:7). As the narrative of Acts traces the expansion of would not be an absentee monarch, ruling from a disthe church from Jerusalem (the city of King David) to tance. Though exalted to supreme authority at his Father’s right hand in heaven, Jesus the Anointed Rome (the capital of the mighty Caesars), we are would also keep his word to his followers: “I am with shown how the risen Messiah Jesus wields his royal you always, to the end of the age”(Matt. 28:20). authority in redemptive power, expanding his sphere These two truths—that the church is defined by its from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria and “to the end allegiance to Jesus the King, and that our King is of the earth.” The church is the realm in which the present with us by his Spirit—have huge implicalong-promised kingdom of God under the scepter of tions for our response to his Great Commission. They Jesus the Anointed finds expression. mean, among other things, that the Word of the The motif that Jesus the King is the active Agent King—the Bible—controls the ways in which Christ’s who drives the growth of his kingdom is introduced followers are to “make in the brief prologue of Acts, when Luke refers disciples of all nations.”

These two truths—that the church is to his ”first book,” our Our King has not merely Third Gospel, as convey- defined by its allegiance to Jesus the King, charged us with a task to ing “all that Jesus began accomplish and then left and that our King is present with us by us to our own devices to to do and teach, until the day when he was taken his Spirit—have huge implications for our figure out how to tackle the assignment, like a up” into heaven (Acts demanding tycoon put1:1–2). Implied in the response to his Great Commission. word “began” is the ting aspiring apprentices promise that Luke’s second volume, the book of Acts, through their paces. The church’s growth is so intewould continue the story by recording what Jesus grally bound to the Word of our King that Luke natucontinued to do and teach after his ascension to God’s rally refers to numerical church growth—and he does right hand. Strictly speaking, the title assigned to this give attention to numbers!—as “word growth.” In document by the early church, “the Acts of the Jerusalem “the word of God continued to increase [or Apostles,” is not quite accurate. If Luke himself had ‘grow’3] and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith” (Acts 6:7). As believers were scatassigned a title for his volume two, he might well have tered by persecution into Judea and Samaria, still “the chosen, “the Acts of the Living and Ascended Lord word of God increased [grew] and multiplied” (12:24), Jesus through his Apostles.” as it did in Ephesus, home to the famous temple of The King continued to appoint and empower leadArtemis (19:20). Just as teaching Jesus’ Word (“to ers to administer his reign over his people. Jesus had observe all that I have commanded you”) is integral to chosen his apostles during his earthly ministry (Acts the Great Commission (Matt. 28:19), so Luke’s theol1:2); so when a replacement for the traitor Judas was ogy of the growing Word underscores the King’s choneeded to restore to twelve the number of the apossen method for expanding his kingdom. Those who are tles who would now function as the “tribal heads” of joyful subjects of this King will align their methods with the new Israel, the church prayed to Jesus to show his, embracing the centrality of his Word, written and whether Joseph or Matthias should assume Judas’ preached, to the growth of his kingdom in the world. office (Acts 1:17–26). It was King Jesus who poured The King wields his authority not only through his out the Spirit in power on the day of Pentecost, so that Word but also through the servants whom he gives to pilgrims from many nations heard God’s mighty his church. No fewer than three times in Acts (chapworks of salvation each in his own dialect and tongue ters 9, 22, 26), Jesus’ conquest and transformation of (2:33). The name of Jesus enabled the lame to leap Saul of Tarsus from persecutor to propagator of the (3:6; 4:10–12). As Paul proclaimed the gospel to Lydia faith is recounted. That same Saul, writing under his and other women near Philippi, “the Lord opened her Roman name Paul, taught that Christ, having heart to what was said by Paul” and she received bapascended to his heavenly throne, celebrated his victism as one who was now “faithful to the Lord” J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 5

tory by taking captives through grace and giving them as servant-leaders to his church: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers (Eph. 4:7–13). In fact, as we shall see in a future meditation, Acts reveals that Christ’s Spirit enables not only the church’s leaders but all its members to participate in the expansion of his kingdom (Acts 2:1–4, 17–19; 8:1–4). As Paul went on to instruct the believers of Ephesus, Christ, the head of his body (the church), makes the whole body grow as each member fulfills his or her role in serving one another (Eph. 4:15–16).

The placement of each member in the body—the assignment of each citizen in the kingdom—is determined by the King’s wise and sovereign will: “God has arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose” (1 Cor. 12:18). Christ the King empowers and employs both leaders and members, each in his or her own calling and Spirit-given abilities, to build his kingdom community.

The King who proclaims the Word and is proclaimed in the Word brings his good news home to human hearts by the power of his Holy Spirit. For this reason, J. A. Bengel suggested that Acts might well be entitled “The Acts of the Holy Spirit.”4 His suggestion was moving in the right direction by refocusing attention from the church’s human leaders, the apostles, to the divine Actor who was exerting kingdom power through them. Yet when Jesus promised the descent of God’s Spirit in the fullness of “last days” power, he stressed that the Spirit’s mission would be to apply the once-for-all redemption achievement of the Son and to implement the Son’s reign on earth: “But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me” (John 15:26).5 The Holy Spirit is “the Spirit of Jesus” (Acts 16:7).

(Perhaps we should blend Bengel’s observation with the title suggested earlier in this meditation: “The Acts of the Living and Ascended Lord Jesus through his Apostles in the Power of the Holy Spirit.”)

The power of God’s kingdom is the power of Christ’s Holy Spirit. This is Luke’s point in referring repeatedly to the Spirit’s descent on the day of Pentecost (Acts 1:5; 2:1–41; 10:44–48; 11:15–17; 15:8). Jesus’ kingship is a threat to Caesar’s (and any human government’s) demand for ultimate and absolute trust and loyalty, but not because Jesus’ followers seek to establish his reign by armed insurrection. The civil disturbances that dogged their steps as they moved from city to city were fomented not by the gospel’s heralds but by its enemies (16:19–24; 18:12–17; 19:23–41). Jesus’ kingship threatens earthly powers because his Spirit’s convicting power pierces people so much more deeply than sword or spear, insult or intimidation. The state’s 6 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

coercive force or the disapproval of public opinion can often (but not always!) keep people from translating their inner desires into outward actions (and for that we can, in most cases, be grateful; Rom. 13:1–7). But the weapons wielded by state and society, as daunting as they appear to be, can only mask but never change the heart’s desires. Only the life-giving power of God’s Spirit turns stone-hard hearts tender (see Ezek. 36:25– 37) and draws them in faith to the foot of the King: “Now when they heard [the gospel] they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?’” (Acts 2:37). When rulers (ancient or modern, Gentile or Jewish) recognize their own limited role and seek from subjects only a compliance that fosters justice and peace, the higher claims of King Jesus direct his subjects to render honor and willing obedience. But when rulers demand devotion that rightly belongs only to the King of kings, the Spirit’s liberating power and peace enable Christ’s free subjects to respond, calmly but firmly, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). Meanwhile, the Word of the cross (so weak and foolish in the world’s ears), carried forward in the power of the Spirit, breaks down strongholds and takes thoughts and hearts captive to serve Christ the King (2 Cor. 10:4–5).

Dennis E. Johnson is professor of practical theology at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido.

Scripture quotations are from the ESV. In Luke and Acts the title “Lord” characteristically refers to Christ, although in a few instances, especially in citations from the Old Testament, it designates God the Father or the triune God. 3The Greek verb that the ESV renders “increase” in these texts is auxan, a biological metaphor (see Luke 1:80; 2:40). Paul uses the agricultural metaphor of “bearing fruit and growing” to describe the vitality of the Word in Colosse and throughout “the whole world” (Col. 1:6).

4J. A. Bengel, Gnomon of the New Testament, trans. C. T. Lewis (1742; ET Philadelphia: Perkinpine & Higgins, 1862), 1:742.

5See also John 16:13–14: “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak….He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare to you.” The apostles, having presented the gospel to the Jewish Sanhedrin, testified, “And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him” (Acts 5:32).

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MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT

Lutheran Missions: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

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n 1855, Philip Schaff published his wonderful romp through the United

Lund, Sweden, and has 145 member churches in States titled America: A Sketch of Its Political, Social, and Religious Character. In 79 countries.3 The more confessionally oriented Interit he captured the diversity of American life, including how Lutherans fit national Lutheran Council (ILC), which includes my own church, The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod into it—or didn’t. “It is no easy matter to describe the (LCMS), is much smaller, having 33 member churches character and internal condition of the Lutheran confession,” noted Schaff.1 He was right—and when one in 31 countries. It defines its confessional commitment as follows: “The ILC is a worldwide association of tosses Lutheran missions into the mix, the picture gets established confessional Lutheran church bodies even more complex. which proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ on the From inception, Lutheranism has struggled with basis of an unconditional commitment to the Holy basic questions of identity, catholicity, ecclesiology, Scriptures as the inspired and infallible Word of God and mission. Is Lutheranism a church in its own right, and to the Lutheran Confessions contained in the or is it merely a confessional movement in the larger Book of Concord as the true and faithful exposition of church catholic? Is it the “true visible church on the Word of God.”4 earth,” or merely a denomination?2 How do these issues affect its understanding of mission? The quesThe multitude of Lutheran synods often confounds tions are many—the answers abound!

Lutherans and non-Lutherans alike. There are currently about 8 million Lutherans in North America.

Making Sense of Lutheranism They belong to some 21 different church bodies, a Lutheranism is typically equated with Germany— sampling of which is located in the box on this page. justifiably so to a point. Of the over 70 million nomChurch bodies affiliated with the LWF, ILC, as well inal Lutherans in the world today, the vast majority as other Lutheran entities, have their roots in a lively are in Western Europe, and of those some 40 million sense of mission that has always been a part of the live in Germany. The Lutheran World Federation Lutheran tradition. Indeed, the Lutheran churches (LWF), “a global communion of Christian churches in of North America are in many ways the direct results the Lutheran tradition,” was founded in 1947 in of a Lutheran theology of mission.

Year Founded The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) The Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) Association of Free Lutheran Congregations The Evangelical Lutheran Synod Association of American Lutheran Churches The Church of the Lutheran Brethren Church of the Lutheran Confession The Apostolic Lutheran Church

1988 1847 1850 1962 1918 1987 1900 1960 1960

Baptized Membership 4,709,956 2,500,000 390,213 44,000 20,000 14,137 8,900 8,600 6,000

Number of Congregations 10,000+ 6,500 1200 270 140 79 123 75 57

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Lutheran Missions Lutherans, of course, trace their history back to Martin Luther (1483–1546). And while Luther himself did not write specifically to what we today think of technically as missiology, recent studies have shown that engagement with the emerging questions of mission was central to his thoughts.5 Contrary to some caricatures, Luther had a rather expansive vision of the present scope and future extent of mission, as his comments on Matthew 24:14 show.

Before the last day comes, the church’s regiment and Christian faith must spread out over the entire world as Christ in one of the previous chapters has already said; not one town will remain where the Gospel has not been preached. And the Gospel will run through the entire world so that all have a testimony to their consciences whether they believe or not. The Gospel has been in Egypt.

There it is gone. Likewise, it has been in Greece, in Italy, in Spain, in France and in other countries.

Now it is in Germany. Who knows for how long?

The Gospel is now with us, but our ingratitude and disdain for Gospel Word, our greed and pomp, mean that it will not stay for long. And because of this the enthusiasts will enter the picture and thereafter great wars….Then the last day will come. St. Paul says this to the Romans in the eleventh chapter [Romans 11:25], the Gospel must be preached until the Gentiles in full number have come to heaven.6 Lutherans, however, have not always been linked with being vigorously active in mission. Part of the problem was the context in which Lutheranism emerged. With church and state inseparably interrelated in Reformation-era Germany, the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555) established the principle of cuius regio eius religio (“Whose realm, his religion”) as a means of allowing Lutheranism and Roman Catholicism to coexist peacefully. Whatever the religion of the ruler was, that was the religion of his region. While this temporarily halted the wars of religion, it also truncated the church’s mission as both traditions agreed they would not “try to persuade the subjects of other Estates to abandon their religion.”7 The arrangement had a debilitating effect on missions, however, because rulers were obligated to evangelize only their own subjects. Indeed, they were prohibited from reaching out to those beyond their borders.8 This may in part explain the puzzling opinion offered by the theological faculty of the University of Wittenberg in 1651, which seemed to limit the 8 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

scope of the Great Commission. Noting that Matthew 28 specifically applied only to the apostles, the Wittenberg faculty argued that it is the direct responsibility of the rightly appointed rulers to propagate the gospel in the territories God has entrusted to them.

Obviously the rulers had fulfilled this duty. World mission was beyond their range.9 As the eighteenth century opened, a new era of mission work emerged as well, with Pietistic Lutherans at the forefront.10 The efforts of Philip Spener (1635–1705) and especially August Hermann Franke (1663–1727) at Halle would bring mission to the forefront of Lutheran thought and practice. By 1706 Heinrich Plütschau (1678–1747) and Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1683–1719) arrived at the Dutch colony of Tranquebar in India, under direct instructions from King Frederick IV of Denmark (reigned 1671–1730) to “instruct the ignorant in the first principles of Christian doctrine” on the basis of the Scriptures and the Lutheran Confessions and to “teach nothing besides it.”11 Lutheran missions had arrived. The growth and development of Lutheranism as a world movement over the course of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries led to the Lutheran tradition extending itself to the ends of the earth.12 Today Lutheranism is growing rapidly in the emerging “global south,” especially in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Indonesia, among other places.13 Present Challenges A number of missiological challenges face Lutheranism in the present. Historic questions on the authority of Scripture and confessional subscription continue to pose themselves to Lutherans.

Additionally, questions about women in ministry and sexuality, among others, have more recently captured Lutheran attention. However, one of the most pressing issues facing Lutheranism today is a demographic one. In a recently published study of religion in America, the racial and ethnic composition of evangelical Protestantism is 81 percent white, while mainline Protestantism is 91 percent white.14 As striking as these numbers are, they are higher for Lutherans. The LCMS is approximately 95 percent white. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), which committed itself from its inception in 1988 to an aggressive outreach to all people groups and mandates that its leadership provide representation for minorities, is approximately 97 percent white.

These realities will necessarily impact American Lutheranism in the next generation. Today American birthrates are at about 2.1 children per childbearing woman. That merely replaces the existing population.

However, among the primary demographic category for Lutherans, the birthrate is below the repopulating threshold. In contrast, birthrates among African Americans and Latinos are much higher. If these current demographic trends continue, by 2050 whites will be a minority in America. The results for largely white Lutheran churches are obvious. Growth trends will be flat at best (something the LCMS has experienced consistently since 1970). Decline—a reality for many of the mainline churches since at least 1970— may accelerate (something currently being experienced in the ELCA).

This is already the LCMS’s experience. In the 1980s, when the LCMS prepared for its national youth gathering, it had a pool of approximately 250,000 teenagers it could seek to attract. At present, there are merely 95,000 teenagers in the Missouri Synod. It is also true for the ELCA and WELS. The implications for the future are clear: Lutheran churches in the United States are aging rapidly.15 Conclusion A number of years ago, historian Mark Noll wondered about the “newsworthy potential” of Lutheranism. Noting it lacks glamour, Noll argued that the Lutheran tradition still has something more important to give to the American religious scene.

Lutherans do have much to offer to the wider American community, but only if they can fulfill two conditions. First, to contribute as Lutherans in America, Lutherans must remain authentically Lutheran. Second, to contribute as Lutherans in America, Lutherans must also find out how to speak Lutheranism with an American accent….Lutherans are heirs to a better way. They possess confessions that have stood the test of time, that arise from the major themes of Scripture, that present a cohesive picture of the Christian’s relationship to God, to fellow humans, and to the world.16 Lutherans continue to struggle with issues of identity, confession, ecclesiology, and mission. They do so in the context of a rapidly changing world. They do so, as well, with a renewed sense of focusing on the centrality of God’s mission, which has been such an important part of Lutheran thought and life from its inception, even as we hear from Luther in a 1524 sermon on Matthew 22:9–10: Afterward, the Gospel gets its start through the apostles. Now he says, “Go out!” Here no one is excluded. Christ concludes that all are children

of the devil, so he sends out his own; otherwise it would have served no purpose. “Whoever you meet, bring here!” “Go out!” The apostles did this until the table was full. And this continues still every day, and the servants will continue to do so until the end of the world.17

Lawrence R. Rast, Jr., is academic dean and professor of historical theology at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He also serves as chairman of the Commission on Theology and Church Relations of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod.

Philip Schaff, America: A Sketch of Its Political, Social, and Religious Character (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961), 150–58.

2C. F. W. Walther, The True Visible Church: An Essay for the Convention of the General Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States, for its Sessions at St. Louis, Mo., October 31, 1866, trans. John Thedore Mueller (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1961).

3See http://www.lutheranworld.org/lwf/index.php/ who-we-are (accessed 25 October 2010).

4See http://www.ilc-online.org/pages/default.asp?

NavID=3 (accessed 25 October 2010).

5Most importantly, see Ingemar Öberg, Luther and World Mission: A Historical and Systematic Study, trans. Dean Apel (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2007). See also Eugene Bunkowske, “Was Luther a Missionary?” Concordia Theological Quarterly 49 (April–July 1985): 161–79, http:// www.ctsfw.net/media/pdfs/bunkowskeluther missionary. pdf (accessed 25 October 2010). For Luther’s interaction with Islam, see Adam Francisco, Martin Luther and Islam: A Study in Sixteenth-Century Polemics and Apologetics (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

6WA 47:565.11ff., in Öberg, 136–37.

7“The Religious Peace of Augsburg,” in Eric Lund, ed., Documents from the History of Lutheranism 1517–1750 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), 170.

8James A. Scherer, Mission and Unity in Lutheranism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), 6.

9Scherer, 14; Martin I. Klauber and Scott M. Manetsch, The Great Commission: Evangelicals and the History of World Missions (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 20), 51.

10Preston A. Laury, A History of Lutheran Missions (Reading, PA: Pilger Publishing House, 1899).

11“Instructions of King Frederick IV of Denmark to the First Pietist Missionaries (November 17, 1705),” in Lund, 299.

12Klaus Detlev Schulz, Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana, clearly explicates the Lutheran theology of mission, as well as providing an immensely helpful chronology and map of Lutheran mis1

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

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t h e o l o g y

The Religious Right and Old Princeton

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ore than sixty years ago, Carl F. H. Henry’s The Uneasy Conscience

Socialism more acutely.”3 Perhaps the heirs of of Modern Fundamentalism (1947) chastised fundamentalists Henry would do well to consider the insights of for their anti-intellectualism and cultural pessimism. While Machen’s colleagues at Old Princeton regarding the relationship between the Bible and politics. Although commending fundamentalists for preserving doctrinal one should avoid the almost hagiographic admiration fidelity to the supernatural gospel, Henry lambasted of Old School Princeton that still characterizes some their “pessimism” and “indifference” to social ills. He Presbyterians, it would not be inaccurate to say that also lamented the fact that “social reform movements these conservative Christians took a decidedly more dedicated to the elimination of such evils do not have thoughtful, measured, and judicious approach to the active, let alone vigorous, cooperation of large segquestions of theology and politics than many outspoments of evangelical Christianity.” For Henry, a ken combatants in today’s “culture war.” This is not to Christianity “without a passion to turn the world say that Old School Presbyterians did not engage in upside down is not reflective of apostolic Christianity.” polemics. They certainly did. Their contributions on He even cited J. Gresham Machen as illustrative of the this subject were not knee-jerk, however. Their seriolder conviction that “Christianity has a message relous scholarly reflections were always taken seriously evant to the world crisis, however staggering the by their theological opponents. In other words, their issues.”1 careful contemplations would not fit very well into Today, many heirs of Carl Henry, including some our culture of shallow bumper-sticker slogans, op-ed within the Presbyterian and Reformed community, pieces, or tweets. have abandoned individualistic pietism and embraced The work of William Brenton Greene (1854–1928) a more holistic vision of the gospel. In fact, it would presents an interesting case study of Old Princeton’s not be unfair to suggest that some have even identiunderstanding of the relationship between Christianity fied a particular political agenda as the only one sancand politics. Greene was a Presbyterian blueblood. A tioned by the Bible and suggest that any dissent is graduate of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton tantamount to doctrinal heresy. For instance, in a University) and Princeton Seminary, Greene sucbook published just before the 2008 election, How ceeded Francis Landy Patton as Stuart Professor of the Would Jesus Vote? A Christian Perspective on the Issues, D. Relations of Philosophy and Science to the Christian James Kennedy argued that one can furnish a simple answer to that question. Jesus “left us all sorts of Religion at the seminary in 1892. In 1903, he became commands and principles to follow.” To be sure, the professor of apologetics and Christian ethics.

Kennedy acknowledged that there was sometimes Greene was a conservative Calvinist who was a sharp ambiguity over some of the principles that “wellcritic of the theologically liberal Social Gospel movemeaning” Christians fight over. But at the end of the ment, but he cautioned the orthodox not to become day, Kennedy’s work points unambiguously to the ideologues. Writing at the height of the Progressive conclusion that Jesus would vote Republican.2 Of movement in 1912, Greene identified three points course, similar examples of identifying a specific politoften forgotten or overlooked by today’s Christian ical party with Christianity abound on the religious conservatives. He stressed first that Christians should left as well. For instance, a prominent United Church avoid allying their faith too closely with a particular of Christ minister recently proclaimed that the political movement. Greene criticized liberal “agenda found throughout the Gospels coincides with Christians on this point fairly harshly. In Greene’s the Democratic platform, it mirrors the principles of estimation, Social Gospellers view the church’s pri10 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

mary mission as solving social problems.

Consequently, the movement wrongly preaches “sociology rather than theology.” Yet Greene did not dismiss social reform and counsel as an otherworldly quietism. In fact, he called such social reform “indispensible.” While there is a healthy interaction between church and society, he warned that “to unite them we must tend to weaken the former and to embarrass the latter.” While Greene had in mind the Social Gospellers’ close identification with the Progressive movement, his insight applies to reformers on both the left and the right today.4 Second, Greene admonished clergy who preached certain political positions not taught explicitly in Scripture. As he explained: “In the case of extra-biblical questions, such as whether the railroads should be run by the state or, as with us, by private corporations, the minister may express his opinion as an individual; but he should never use his pulpit for this purpose.”

From the pulpit, he speaks “with the authority of God, and neither in his Word nor in his works has God pronounced on these questions.”5 Evidently, Greene did not hold that the Bible proscribed public ownership of one sector of the economy in 1912!

Though a minister might believe that certain biblical principles were undermined by particular policies, he should preach the principles and not “use his pulpit for an anti-socialistic crusade,” Greene advised.

Moreover, denouncing other believers who drew different conclusions from their principles was ruled out

by Greene. In fact, Greene said it was “absurd” for a minister to “desert” his authority as a minister by getting distracted by “extra-biblical questions.” When it comes to particular “social issues” that are “not referred to in Scripture,” Greene said, the minister should only “proclaim and illustrate” the general “principles” articulated in Scripture. “He ought not refer them to particular persons or movements.” In other words, ministers should preach only biblical principles, not advocate particular political policies from the pulpit, because Christians of good faith can disagree over the application of those principles. Moreover, Christians who prefer different policies “have a right to insist that they be not publicly assailed in the house of the God and Father of us all.”6 Preachers need to ensure that it is the cross of Christ that gives offense and not the minister’s particular political hobbyhorse.

Finally, Greene warned that even when focusing on the “evils explicitly condemned in Scripture,” citing “the social evil, drunkenness, [and] extortion” as examples, the minister “must constantly be on his guard against becoming only or chiefly a reformer and agitator. Regeneration rather than transformation should be his aim. The Gospel rather than the Law

should be the burden of his preaching.” Of course, to insist that the minister has a “commission” that is “higher,” as Greene put it, “than the mission of the mere social reformer” does not suggest that the gospel message has no social consequences. Although Greene’s focus in his 1912 article was primarily on the role of the clergy in these matters, today’s spokespeople for evangelicalism may want to ponder his wise advice. More conservative evangelicals could stand to take greater care in reading specific public policies into Scripture, and avoid excoriating their fellow Christians who do not find the same political economy there.

Greene’s advice might disappoint some Christian conservatives today. It is ironic that many in the religious right reflect a partisanship far more sectarian than Old School Presbyterian orthodoxy. It is hard work to strive to reach the common good in the public square when particular partisan policies have been baptized as the only biblical position. Much of what Christians disagree about in the political realm is really a matter of prudential reasoning. To Greene, Christians can disagree over the application of biblical principles to specific policies that are designed to promote the common good. “To identify the church,” Greene warned, “with political parties or benevolent associations is to dim her distinctness and so to lessen her efficiency as a spiritual force.”7

P. C. Kemeny is associate professor of religion and humanities at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania.

Gillis Harp is professor of history at Grove City College.

Carl F. H. Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1947), 117, 28, 19.

2D. James Kennedy and Jerry Newcombe, How Would Jesus Vote? A Christian Perspective on the Issues (Colorado Springs, CO: WaterBrook Press, 2008), chapter 1.

3See http://www.faithandsocialism.org/?p=38.

4William Henry Greene, “The Church and the Social Question,” Princeton Theological Review 10 (1912): 380, 395.

5Greene, 395.

6Greene, 395, 396.

7Greene, 396.

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T H E G R E AT A N N O U N C E M E N T

The Great Announcement “All Authority in Heaven and on Earth Has Been Given to Me”

By Michael Horton

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A THEOLOGY OF MISSIONS

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RYAN GLOMSRUD

There is something about the topic “The Great Commission” that tests our resolve that Word and Sacrament ministry is the lifeblood of a growing and expanding church. This is probably because missions is an immensely practical task, and so frequently the connection between theology and mission is obscured in contemporary evangelicalism.

In this issue we begin with grace, hoping to make explicit that the commissioning and sending of the disciples by Jesus—the Great Commission—is preceded by a definitive work of grace, namely, salvation won and the inauguration of the kingdom of God through the person, message, and triumph of Christ on the cross and in the resurrection! We do not begin with the directive “Go,” but with Jesus’ prefatory announcement—indeed, as we are calling it, the Great Announcement: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” It is on this basis that Jesus commands us to “therefore go” with grateful hearts to be heralds of his good news.

As we move along this year, readers will note that this announcement is one of two bookends that buttress the famous commission. Most of us memorized the passage, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,” only without much context. But keeping theology and mission together encourages us to take note of the bookends: first, Jesus’ great announcement of his finished work; and then, what we are calling the Great Assurance—the theme of our last issue in 2011. After commissioning the disciples, Jesus concludes with a promise of huge importance: “And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Our evangelistic coming and going is always on the basis of those two promises.

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am a pretty impulsive person. There is a check I need to take to the bank. I rush out the door, jump in the car, and am halfway to my destination when I realize that I’ve forgotten the check. The most humiliating part of it is that I will have to return home and face my wife’s grinning visage greeting me at the door, holding the check, and saying, “Did you forget something?”

Just go. Just do it. “Get ‘er done,” as they say.

Reflection slows you down.

The same thing can happen with the Great Commission. It doesn’t really matter if we don’t get all the details right as long as we are zealous. It is easy to subordinate the message to the mission, the evangel to evangelism, as if being busy with outreach could trump the content of what we have been given to communicate.

quipped to a critic of his methods, “I like my way of doing it better than your way of not doing it.” If “zeal without knowledge” is deadly (Rom. 10:2–3), then knowledge without zeal is dead. The Great Commission doesn’t give any quarter to either of these extremes.

“Go therefore into all the world and make disciples.” This is the version of the Great Commission that many of us memorized. However, it leaves out a great deal. To begin with, it leaves out the whole rationale for the commission in the first place. Although it sounds a little corny, a good rule of thumb in reading the Scriptures is that whenever you find a “therefore” you need to stop and ask “what it’s there for.”

When we see an imperative such as “Go therefore,” we need to go back and look at what has already been said leading up to it. There is no reason for us to go into all the world as Christ’s ambassadors apart from And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and the work that he has already accomon earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples plished. of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of The Great Commission actually begins with the declaration, “All the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that authority in heaven and on earth I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to has been given to me” (Matt. the end of the age.” (Matt. 28:18–20 ESV) 28:18). This is the rationale for everything the church is called to Of course, it can work the other way, too. We can do and to be. The church’s commission is indeed be preoccupied with getting the message right without directed by a purpose (“making disciples of all nations”), actually getting it out. The evangelist D. L. Moody once but it is driven by a promise.

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ON THE EMMAUS ROAD That very day two of them were going to a village named Emmaus,

As Christopher Wright points out in The Mission of God, the about seven miles from Jerusalem, and they were talking with each missionary mandate is not limother about all these things that had happened. While they were ited to a handful of proof-texts; the whole Bible is a missionary talking and discussing together, Jesus himself drew near and went document.

And God is the origwith them….And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interinal missionary. He was a mispreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself…. sionary in creation: speaking the world into being by his Word, in “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, the power of his Spirit. Adam that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the was commissioned to bring the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their whole earth under submission to God’s righteous rule, but he minds to understand the Scriptures. (Luke 24:13–14, 27, 44–45) forfeited this calling. Israel too was called out by God as “a light to the Gentiles.” Yet, Grounding Purposes in Promises “like Adam, Israel transgressed the covenant” (Hos. ike our own lives, the church is gospel driven.

6:7). In the fullness of time, however, the Father sent Every new covenant command is grounded in the Son into the world to save sinners. In his post-resthe gospel. We love God because he first loved urrection appearances to the disciples, Jesus not only us (1 John 4:10, 19). We choose Christ because he preached himself as the center of Scripture (Luke chose us (John 15:6; Eph. 1:4–5, 11; 2 Thess. 2:13).

24:27, 44), he made their proclamation of him part of We are called to holiness because we are already that mission as well: “‘This is what is written: The declared to be holy in Christ, clothed in his rightChrist will suffer and rise from the dead on the third eousness (Col 1:22; 3:12; 1 Cor. 1:30). Because we day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be have been crucified, buried, and raised with Christ, we preached in his name to all nations, beginning at are no longer under the tyranny of sin and are thereJerusalem’” (vv. 45–47). And after his ascension, the fore to offer up ourselves in body and soul to rightSon together with the Father sent the Spirit at eousness (Rom. 6:1–14). “In view of the mercies of Pentecost. God’s mission, of course, is qualitatively disGod,” we are called to “present [our] bodies as a livtinct from ours. The triune God is the Redeemer; we ing sacrifice” (Rom. 12:1). are the redeemed. But the redeemed are given the The church’s mission is grounded in God’s mission, privilege of participating in God’s mission to the world which he fulfilled objectively in his Son and whose by proclaiming the gospel, administering the sacrasubjective effects he is bringing about in the world ments, and caring for the expanding flock of Christ. through his Spirit. Because the Father sent the Son and then the Spirit, we are sent into all the world with The Gospel-Driven Church his gospel. e must never take Christ’s work for So the church is what it is not because of its own granted. The gospel is not merely somedecision, planning, and zealous activity, but because thing we take to unbelievers; it is the Word of God’s. Far from eliminating the place for our own that created and continues to sustain the whole response, God’s grace is its only possible source. Far church in its earthly pilgrimage. In addition, we must from turning us into blocks of stone, with no will or never confuse Christ’s work with our own. There is a activity, the good news we take to the world—by lot of loose talk these days about our “living the which we also are saved—liberates our willing and gospel” or even “being the gospel,” as if our lives running, so that we can trust in Christ and bear the were the good news. We even hear it said that the fruit of the Spirit in love toward God and neighbor. church is an extension of Christ’s incarnation and The triumphant indicative—announcing the achieveredeeming work, as if Jesus came to provide the moral example or template, and we are called to ments of the triune God—always comes first. God’s complete his work. gracious performance creates a church in the midst of There is one Savior and one head of the church. To this present evil age that imperfectly responds by sayhim alone all authority is given in heaven and on ing “Amen!” in word and deed to all God has worded earth. There is only one incarnation of God in history, it to be. Only because it is in Christ is there an assemand he finished the work of fulfilling all righteousness, bly of sinners drawn from every people and lanbearing the curse, and triumphing over sin and death. guage—transferred from the kingdom of death to the We use the verb “redeem” too casually today, as if kingdom of everlasting life.

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we (individually or collectively) could be the subject of this sort of action. God has already redeemed the world in his Son, purchasing for himself “people from every tribe and tongue and nation” (Rev. 5:9). On this basis, the Spirit is at work applying this redemption, drawing sinners to Christ, justifying and renewing them, in the hope that their bodies will be raised together with an entirely renovated creation (Rom. 8:16–23). The church comes into being not as an extension or further completion of Christ’s redeeming work, but as a result of his completed work.

On the verge of Good Friday, Jesus prayed, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:1–3).

What did Jesus mean here when he acknowledged that the Father had “given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him”? The answer goes to the heart of his opening words in the Great Commission, and it unfolds gradually in the Gospel of John.

John’s Gospel announces Jesus as the Word made flesh, nevertheless rejected even by his own. “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:1–13).

We do not have the ability or authority to make ourselves children of God, but Jesus exercises his authority to give life in the power of the Spirit. In John 3, Jesus tells Nicodemus that apart from this new birth “from above,” no one can enter his kingdom (v. 5).

In John 5, Jesus says, “For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whom he will” (v. 21). The Father has given all judgment into the hands of the Son (vv. 22–23).

Jesus then proclaims (John 6:37–39, 44): All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day….No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.

In John 10, Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the

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Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep….My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand” (vv. 14–15, 27–28). Again, in John 15, he reminds his disciples, “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide” (v. 16).

So there is a thread running throughout John’s Gospel that testifies to the eternal covenant of redemption in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Father chose a people in Christ from the mass of fallen humanity, giving them to Christ as their Mediator, with the Spirit as the one who will give them faith and keep them in that faith to the end. Not one of those whom the Father gave to the Son will be lost.

Given the unity of the Bible’s witness to Christ, this thread of passages in John’s Gospel helps us understand what Jesus meant in the Great Commission. Although the latter is not included in so many words in Luke or in John, the basic substance is there in their concluding chapters as well (Luke 24:44–53; John 21:15–19): “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” What an announcement! It presupposes everything from our Lord’s conception in the womb of the Virgin Mary to his ascension to the Father’s right hand.

And it anticipates his return in glory to judge the living and the dead. He alone has all authority to save and to condemn.

In his opening vision of the Apocalypse, John hears these words from the glorified Son: “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades” (Rev. 1:17–18). Just as this triumphant indicative grounds Jesus’ imperative, “Write therefore the things you have seen” in this remarkable book (v. 19), his announcement that all authority is in his hands is the rationale for the Great Commission’s “Therefore, go…!”

In Whose Hands Do We Lie? e are born into the world as children of Adam, “dead in sins and trespasses” (Eph. 2:1), incapable of responding positively to God apart from his gracious gift of faith (Eph. 2:5, 8– 9). Given the seriousness of human sin and rebellion, the command to go into the whole world and preach the gospel would be vain if the ultimate power and authority lay in the hands of sinners.

This authority does not even lie in the hands of preachers or church growth strategists. Jesus Christ

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did not make it possible for us to be saved. He did not begin a work of redemption. He did not do “his part” so that we could do ours. Rather, Jesus Christ has accomplished everything. He has become flesh of our flesh. He has fulfilled all righteousness in our place and has borne the judgment for every one of our sins as our substitute. And he has been raised as the firstfruits of a whole harvest, the beginning of the resurrection from the dead. There is no more redeeming work to be done!

I’ll never forget when this marvelous truth of Christ’s objective, completed work really gripped me.

My well-meaning pastor once asked me, “When were you saved?” Without intending to be clever, I heard myself answer, “Two thousand years ago.” At first, I was as surprised at the remark as my pastor. A lot of our talk about “getting saved” in evangelical circles focuses on the day that we did something: we said yes to Jesus or we invited Jesus into our heart, said a prayer, went forward, or otherwise evidenced a decisive conversion experience. This, however, shifts the concentration from the gospel itself (Christ’s saving work) to our experience of the gospel.

The new birth itself becomes an imperative in this approach of “how to be born again,” as if it were something we could bring about by following the proper instructions. In the gospel, the new birth is not an imperative (command) but an indicative (statement of fact). That is, it simply declares the state of affairs: we cannot enter Christ’s kingdom unless we are “born from above.” We are not born again by our decision, as the apostle had already indicated in John 1:13. Rather, says Peter, “you have been born again…through the living and abiding word of

God….And this word is the good news that was preached to you” (1 Pet. 1:23, 25). The gospel is for us, not about us. It isn’t about anything that we do, feel, or choose. It is the good news about Jesus Christ and what he has accomplished for us.

Of course, we show evidence of the new birth. In conversion, we repent and believe the gospel. God does not believe for us. Nevertheless, we can believe only because he has raised us from spiritual death and granted us the gift of faith. It takes a miracle to believe in Christ—and he is still a wonder-working Savior, whose miracle of the new birth by his Spirit is greater than all of the signs he performed in his earthly ministry.

All authority in heaven and on earth is in Christ’s hands. If it were in the hands of a despot, we would never be free. If it were in our hands, we would never be saved. Because Christ has the power of life and death, however, there is not only the possibility but the assurance that there will be a church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

“The Gospel Commission” ecause all authority in heaven and on earth is given to Jesus Christ, we are sent into the world with confidence that God’s mission will be accomplished. Paul preached the gospel to Lydia and “the Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul” (Acts 16:14). After explaining that God “saved us…not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began” (2 Tim. 1:9), Paul—on the verge of his execution in Rome— assured Timothy, “Therefore I endure everything for

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Ad Fontes: Calvin on Matthew 28:18 And Jesus approached and spoke to them. His approach unquestionably removed all hesitation. Before relating that the office of teaching was committed to the disciples, Matthew says that Christ began by speaking of his power; and not without reason. For no ordinary authority would here have been enough, but sovereign and truly divine government ought to be possessed by him who commands them to promise eternal life in his name to reduce the whole world under his sway, and to publish a doctrine which subdues all pride, and lays prostrate the whole of the human race. And by this preface Christ not only encouraged the Apostles to full confidence in the discharge of their office, but confirmed the faith of his gospel in all ages. Never, certainly, would the Apostles have had sufficient confidence to undertake so arduous an office, if they had not known that their Protector sitteth in heaven, and that the highest authority is given to him; for without such a support it would have been impossible for them to make any progress. But when they learn that he to whom they owe their services is the Governor of heaven and earth, this alone was abundantly sufficient for preparing them to rise superior to all opposition. As regards the hearers, if the contemptible appearance of those who preach the gospel weakens or retards their faith, let them learn to raise their eyes to the Master himself, by whose power the majesty of the Gospel ought to be estimated, and then they will not venture to despise him when speaking by his ministers.

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the sake of the elect, that they also may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory” (2 Tim. 2:10).

The greatest missionary in the history of the church was driven by the gospel indicatives. Because God chose sinners from a mass of spiritual death, Christ saved them, and the Spirit gave them faith through the preaching of the gospel, Paul could go on, enduring persecution and knowing that God’s purposes would be realized. Not Caesar, nor the Jewish leaders, nor the sinners to whom he preached, nor Paul himself held the personal power to save or to condemn. “But I am not ashamed,” he tells Timothy, “for I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that Day what has been entrusted to me” (2 Tim. 1:12).

A missionary friend once told me that when his plane approached the Mumbai airport and he saw the masses of people below, he was overwhelmed with the impossibility of his task. Then he remembered that he was not commissioned to save these people, or even to open their hearts to believe the gospel, but simply to proclaim it and that God would gather his people. That made all the difference, he said, and he was liberated to fulfill his calling.

People join all sorts of movements and causes by their own free will or because they are coerced by others or seduced by advertisements. But because all authority in heaven and on earth is in Christ’s hands, our wills—bound by sin—are liberated to receive the beauty of an utterly gracious salvation. There can be no recovery of delight in the Great Commission without a renewal of the church’s conviction that it not only came into being but is sustained in every

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moment by the will and work of the Father, in the Son, by the Spirit.

The Mission Will Succeed ecause Christ accomplished his mission, ours is guaranteed success—defined by God’s purposes, not ours. It is this confidence that motivates a missionary in Saudi Arabia to labor for years before witnessing a single conversion. So why do so many of us, as American Christians, measure success in our own churches by other standards, based on what we can accomplish and see on an impressive scale?

Christ’s ascension to the right hand of the Father creates the confidence that our going will not be in vain. The same Word that creates and sustains the church’s own existence and growth is proclaimed to the world, so that Christ’s kingdom expands to the ends of the earth. The Father’s decision is irrevocable.

Christ’s mission is accomplished already, and the Spirit will be just as successful in his labors. Therefore, the Great Commission cannot fail.

Jesus had already prepared the disciples for his departure and the sending of the Spirit (John 14–16).

He had told them, “I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matt. 16:18–19). Christ himself has redeemed his church and is now building his church in the power of his Word and Spirit. It is not a kingdom that we are building, but a kingdom that we are receiving (Heb. 12:28).

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He expressly calls himself the Lord and King of heaven and earth, because, by constraining men to obey him in the preaching of the gospel, he establishes his throne on the earth; and, by regenerating his people to a new life, and inviting them to the hope of salvation, he opens heaven to admit to a blessed immortality with angels those who formerly had not only crawled on the world, but had been plunged in the abyss of death. Yet let us remember that what Christ possessed in his own right was given to him by the Father in our flesh, or—to express it more clearly—in the person of the Mediator; for he does not lay claim to the eternal power with which he was endued before the creation of the world, but to that which he has now received, by being appointed to be Judge of the world. Nay, more, it ought to be remarked, that this authority was not fully known until he rose from the dead; for then only did he come forth adorned with the emblems of supreme King. To this also relate those words of Paul: he emptied himself...therefore God hath exalted him, and given to him a name which is above every other name, (Phil. ii. 7, 9.) And though, in other passages, the sitting at the right hand of God is placed after the ascension to heaven, as later in the order of time; yet as the resurrection and the ascension to heaven are closely connected with each other, with good reason does Christ now speak of his power in such magnificent terms.

John Calvin, “Commentary on a Harmony of Matthew, Mark, and Luke,” Calvin’s Commentaries XVII

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useful, therapeutically valuable, or spiritually and intellectually enlightening was fine. In fact, when it came to gods, the more the merrier! The Roman Empire was a melting pot of cultures and religions. However, whatever varied religions and spiritualities it tolerated, Rome insisted that they contribute to the civil religion that included the cult of the emperor. God could have his heaven, or the inner soul, but Caesar was “lord of the earth.”

The early Christians were not fed to wild beasts or dipped in wax and set ablaze as lamps in Nero’s garden because they thought Jesus was a helpful life coach or role model, but because they witnessed to him as the only Lord and Savior of the world. Jesus Christ doesn’t just live in the private hearts of individuals as the source of an inner peace. He is the Creator, Ruler, Redeemer, and Judge of all the earth. And now he commands everyone everywhere to repent. All idols are shams. All power and authority not only in heaven but on earth is Christ’s. He has cast Satan out of the heavenly sanctuary, where he prosecuted the saints day and night (Rev. 12). And now, having bound the strong man, he is looting his house on earth, taking back what rightfully belongs to him (Matt. 12:29).

We can only imagine the offence that such testimony as the following might have aroused in Caesar or his emissaries:

In his opening vision of the Apocalypse, John hears these words from the glorified Son: "Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades." Just as this triumphant indicative grounds Jesus' imperative, "Write therefore the things you have seen" in this remarkable book, his announcement that all authority is in his hands is the rationale for the Great Commission's "Therefore, go...!"

In Heaven and On Earth he titles “Lord” and “Savior of the World” are familiar in our Christian vocabulary, but apart from the unfolding drama of redemption they are mere slogans. In fact, these phrases have taken on a less radical meaning in our ordinary usage today. We often speak of “making Jesus our personal Lord and Savior,” but this obscures two important points.

First, we do not make Jesus anything, especially Lord and Savior. It is because he already is Lord and Savior that we are freed from the fear of death and hell. All authority belongs to him already.

Second, the gospel announces Jesus Christ not only as your personal Lord and Savior or mine, but as the Lord and Savior of the world. All authority in heaven and on earth belongs to him. As the risen Lord, he is given by the Father the power to judge and to justify. Salvation is not just “fire insurance” or “sin management.” The gospel promises far more than going to heaven when you die. It is an all-encompassing pledge from God for the total renewal of creation. It involves the resurrection of our bodies, and the liberation of the whole creation from its bondage to sin and death. When he returns, Jesus will judge every person and nation and consummate his kingdom in everlasting righteousness and peace. We cannot limit salvation to our private world of the soul; the whole cosmos was created by the Father, in the Son, through the Spirit, and it is upheld and finally redeemed in the same way.

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Privatized Religion? he privatized view of Jesus merely as “personal Lord and Savior” does not really provoke controversy today. After all, our non-Christian neighbors shrug and say, “Whatever works for you.”

Yet these ascriptions of praise to Jesus Christ were subversive on the lips of early Christians in the Roman Empire. After all, they were titles Caesar had ascribed to himself. People could believe whatever they wanted to in private. Whatever they found morally

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For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities— all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of the cross. (Col. 1:16–20) Later in Colossians Paul writes, “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him” (Col. 2:13–15).

The “rulers and authorities”—whether sin, death,

and Satan or their earthly lackeys who spread destruction to the ends of the earth—are already divested of their ultimate power. Even in his weakness, God has made a mockery of the powerful of this age (1 Cor. 1:25–29).

Caesars may still rule and demand the proper temporal allegiance of their subjects (Rom. 13:1–7), but they rule at the pleasure of the Sovereign of the universe. Disease may stalk and death may claim our bodies, but it no longer has the last word: “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?”

(1 Cor. 15:55). Our fate does not lie in the impersonal forces of nature. We are not at the mercy of insurance companies and health-care providers. Jesus Christ— not the invisible hand of the market—is Lord of all powers and principalities.

Of course, devout Jews agreed that there was only one universal sovereign, Yahweh, and stoutly refused any collusion with Gentile idolatry. However, they just as sharply rejected the apostles’ transfer of the name of Yahweh in the prophets (Joel 2:32) to Jesus (Acts 2:21 and Rom. 10:13). They regarded as blasphemy such statements as we find in Acts 4:12: “And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”

The boundaries of Israel are now redrawn around Jesus Christ. There is a new kingdom from heaven spreading its dominion in this world. It is not a kingdom of power and glory, with an earthly capital. It is a kingdom of grace and forgiveness, overcoming the death and condemnation under which the world lies helpless.

Are you rattled by the magnitude of opposition to the gospel, increasingly even in the nations once nominally committed to a vaguely Christian culture?

Does the Great Commission seem threatened by the gathering forces of secularism, militant Islam, consumerism, violence, and moral relativism? These are among the “principalities and powers” that Christ has vanquished objectively, although their effects have not yet been finally and forever eliminated.

Oscar Cullman compared Christ’s resurrection and return in glory to “D-Day” and “V-Day” during World War II. There was first of all the landing assault that broke the back of the Nazi forces, but insurgent battles raged until victory in Europe was fully realized. Even now, Christ has crushed the head of the serpent and is setting prisoners free. All authority in heaven and on earth is given to him.

Are you distressed by your lack of understanding, zeal, or faithfulness in your own discipleship, much less in your appreciation for the Great Commission?

Christ is Lord! He has forgiven you all of your sins

and has given you a new heart. In spite of every setback, you are assured that your Shepherd-King has already won the war!

Before You Go efore there can be a mission, there has to be a message. Before we go, we must stop and hear—really hear—what has happened that we are to take to the world. Before there is a witness, there must be a person whose accomplishment is worthy of proclaiming even at great personal risk.

Before there is an evangelistic outreach, there must be an evangel. The gospel comes first. We must hear it— not just at first for our own conversion, but every moment of our lives—if the Great Commission is to be a joyful delight rather than an intolerable burden with an impossible goal. Hear our Lord’s assurance again, with all of the supporting evidence of his incarnation, life, death, and resurrection: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” ■

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

KNOW WHAT YOU BELIEVE… What did Jesus mean here when he acknowledged that the Father had “given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him”? The answer goes to the heart of his opening words in the Great Commission, and it unfolds gradually in the Gospel of John.

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This question is central for understanding the immediate context of the Great Commission.

Jesus made two bookend statements, one on each side of Matthew 28:19. The first of these statements is this “Great Announcement,” that all authority has been given to him in heaven and on earth.

For further reflection: What does it really mean, and why is it important for the Great Commission? How does the answer to this question unfold gradually in the Gospel of John?

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“You Are Here” The Map of Redemptive History

By Kim Riddlebarger

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lthough I am blessed with a good internal compass, my first stop at a shopping mall is usually the mall directory. One of the most important features of that directory is the brightly colored arrow that indicates “You Are Here.”

Knowing where you are is the first step toward figuring out where you need to go.

When it comes to shopping, the mall directory is a nice convenience. When it comes to understanding the Bible, finding the “You Are Here” arrow is absolutely essential. Figuring out where we are in terms of our relationship to the course of redemptive history not only answers many of the questions we may have about the Bible, but such knowledge often determines what questions we are even going to ask.

The practical ramifications of finding the “You Are Here” arrow are immediately apparent. Since we live in the post-apostolic age—some two thousand years removed from the time of the apostles—how do we relate to the apostolic age so long ago? Should we do as many Pentecostals do and understand the dramatic events found in the book of Acts as normative for what should go on in the church today?

Or should we see ourselves as living in a different age entirely—one that has little or no connection to the time of the apostles?

We can push this matter even further. How do we as Christians living in the post-apostolic age relate to the old covenant era that preceded the time of the apostles? Can we look to the history of ancient Israel to help us understand how we are to relate to nonChristians around us? Should we look to the monarchy in Israel for guidance as to how the nations of the earth should govern themselves in the modern world?

These questions find their answers in knowing where we are in terms of the progress of history after the close of the canon of Scripture with the composi-

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tion of the book of Revelation, written in the early- to mid-nineties of the first century. For those of us who live nearly two thousand years after “Bible times,” where do we place the “You Are Here” arrow? In order to place that arrow properly, we need to have a good understanding of what has gone before, especially since those living during the apostolic era (that is, Jesus and the apostles) told us what to expect after the close of the apostolic age.

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Commission Fulfilled he last two thousand years of church history serve as a testimony to the fulfillment of this commission, as Jesus’ authority over all things has been made manifest in the continual existence of a church (a community of believers centered around the preached Word and the administration of the Sacraments), and through the spread of the gospel to the ends of the earth. The very existence of the church in the midst of an unbelieving world reminds us that God chooses the foolish things of the world to confound the wise (1 Cor. 1:27). Despite remaining foolishness to the Greek as well as a stumbling block to the Jew (1 Cor. 1:23), the preaching of the gospel— the message of Christ crucified (Gal. 3:1)—continues to be the means by which God advances his kingdom.

In this article, I will concentrate upon the nature of the course of the post-apostolic history of the church as defined in the New Testament itself, and consider several of the signposts—given to us by those same New Testament writers—that serve as indicators of what to expect as post-apostolic history continues to unfold until the end of the age.

In his famous Church History, Eusebius, when describing the first three centuries of the church’s existence, explains how Christians in certain parts of the Roman world thrived while others living in different locales faced horrific persecution. The same thing holds true across the ages. Circumstances may be dire in one time and in one place, while great progress and revival can be found in others. Regions dominated by paganism are evangelized, while places known for a strong gospel witness become secularized again. This is the nature of life in the post-apostolic age.

The alternating cycle of progress/persecution we see throughout the history of Christ’s church mirrors the cyclical patterns associated with the seal, bowl, and trumpet judgments found in Revelation. These divine judgments unfold throughout the course of history, but the apostle John indicates that immediately before the end (the return of Christ), the cyclical nature of these judgments will greatly intensify, and world conditions will get much worse immediately before the time of the end. The good news of the Apocalypse is that the downward spiral of rebellion against God, which is tied to the persecution of his people, will be dramatically interrupted by the return of Jesus Christ just when all seems lost. If Revelation tells us anything, it is that Jesus Christ conquers in the end. What the “You Are Here” arrow cannot tell us is how much time remains before the return of Jesus Christ.

This alternating cycle of progress/persecution seen throughout the history of the church fits with several important statements in the New Testament that indi-

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cate that a Christian possesses a dual citizenship— one earthly (Rom. 13:1–7) and one heavenly (Phil.

3:20). We also read that during the post-apostolic period, God’s people must live with a marked eschatological tension between “the already” and the “not yet.” Life in this age is to be lived in the light of the certainty that we will reach our destination because God has promised this will be the case. We know this to be true because Jesus died for our sins and was raised for our justification.

In the so-called prison letters (Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians), Paul speaks of a believer’s heavenly citizenship (Phil. 3:20) based on the believer’s assurance that Jesus’ bodily resurrection guarantees our own resurrection at the end of the age (Phil. 3:21). Paul also tells us to seek the things above where Christ is (Col. 3:1–3) because this gives us a heavenly perspective on earthly things. Paul reminds us that all those who trust in Christ are seen as though they were already raised with Christ and seated with him in the heavenly realms (Eph. 2:4–7). For Paul, Christ’s death and resurrection (the critical historical events of the apostolic era) ensure our own salvation and grant us a heavenly perspective on earthly things.

Even though the “You Are Here” arrow is placed in our own day and age some two thousand years after the apostolic age, the placement of the arrow itself must be seen as the guarantee that the same Savior— who was crucified, died, and was buried—will also ensure we reach our final goal: the redemption of our bodies and life eternal.

This future hope based upon certain historical events reflects another major theme running throughout the New Testament: What God has done in Jesus Christ (“the already”) ensures that everything God has promised his people will come to pass (“the not yet”). Paul speaks this way in Romans 8:23–25 when he talks of understanding our present sufferings in the light of that glory yet to be revealed when Christ returns at the end of the age. Because we trust in the finished work of Jesus Christ, we are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, who not only grants us hope (based on what God has already done for us through the doing and dying of Jesus), but the Spirit’s indwelling is itself the guarantee of the redemption of our bodies (Eph. 1:13–14).

This “already/not yet” perspective on things reminds us that we are pilgrims making our journey to the heavenly city. Although God has ordained all things in this life—giving everything we do meaning and purpose—the journey is not complete until we reach our final destination. Like the ancient Israelites who wandered through the wilderness of the Sinai desert awaiting entrance into the Promised Land of J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 21

Canaan, we too look forward to our entrance into that heavenly city of which the earthly Canaan was but a dim shadow. Material blessings are not an end in themselves, but point to heavenly blessings far greater than our minds can conceive. This is what the author of Hebrews was getting at when he commended Abraham for looking beyond the land of the promise to what lies ahead at the end of the age (Heb. 11:9–10).

When we see God’s record of faithfulness in the past, we are able to look to the future, knowing that God keeps his promises. Knowing how things will turn out in the end gives us the “big picture” perspective we need to make sense of a life lived between the time of Christ’s first advent and his second. The “You Are Here” arrow makes sense only when placed on a map of the whole shopping mall. An arrow on a blank sheet of plastic does us no good. The same holds true for seeing our current place in redemptive history in the light of all God has done before we came along, knowing that Christ’s finished work is the guarantee of reaching our final destiny. The arrow makes sense only against the big-picture backdrop of redemptive history.

salem, as the so-called “times of the Gentiles” begins (Luke 19:41–44; 21:24). Our Lord also speaks of the destruction of the city and the temple in A.D. 70 (Matt.

24:1–2; 14–22; Mark 13:1–2; 14–20; Luke 24:56; 20– 24). Finally, Jesus speaks of the desolation and the Diaspora of Israel (Matt. 23:37–38), which came to pass with the complex of events associated with the Jewish Wars. These signs have been fulfilled with an amazing accuracy.

Then there are a series of signs that characterize the entire interadvental-period birth pains of the age to come. Jesus warns of false Christs (Matt. 24:3–8; Mark 13:3–8; Luke 21:7–11), wars and rumors of wars (Matt. 24:3–8; Mark 13:3–8; Luke 21:7–11), earthquakes and famine (Matt. 24:3–8; Mark 13:3–8; Luke 21:7–11), false teachers and false doctrine (2 Tim. 3:1–5), as well as the persecution of believers (2 Tim. 3:12–17). These things are not only present during the lifetimes of the apostles, but may be said to characterize the entire post-apostolic era. Given the presence of such things until our Lord returns, Jesus compared the interadvental age to the days of Noah (Matt. 24:37–38). God has announced that judgment is at hand, yet unbelievers go on with their immorality as though nothing important was about to happen.

Finally, the New Testament speaks of certain signs that particularly serve to herald the end of the age and the return of our Lord. The first such sign is that the gospel must be preached to the ends of the earth (Matt. 24:14).

Although we cannot definitively declare that this sign has already been fulfilled, we can say that the last two thousand years of church history are testimony to the fact that the gospel has been preached widely. But whether it has been fulfilled or not, it is clearly the mission of the church to strive to obey the Great Commission and take the gospel to the ends of the earth.

The second sign that foretells of the end is the salvation of “all Israel” as recounted by Paul in Romans 11:25–26. In this section of Romans, Paul speaks directly to the future course of redemptive history, specifically the role to be played by Jew and Gentile in the post-apostolic age. Remarkably, Paul connects the future salvation of “all Israel” to the resurrection

The Signs of the Times ot only do we have a sure and certain hope because what has been accomplished in the apostolic era by Jesus Christ is the guarantee of the resurrection at the end of the age, but the New Testament itself speaks of certain “signs of the end” that give us additional insight into what to expect as the course of post-apostolic history unfolds. Not only are we given a theology of the future (that is, Christ’s death and resurrection guarantees predicted future events will come to pass), but we are also given several signs of the end that serve to give us a biblical “heads up” to when the end is drawing near.

There are three categories of “signs” of the end in the New Testament. The first category of signs includes those that are specific to the apostolic era. The second group deals with those signs that characterize the entire interadvental age (the time between Christ’s first and second coming). The third group of signs includes those that specifically serve to herald the end of the age.

As for those signs that are specific to the apostolic age—those signs to be witnessed by the disciples in their lifetimes (“this As he sat on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him in generation,” Matt. 24:23)—there are four specific events foretold by Jesus. private, saying, “Tell us, when will these things be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the close of the age?” And There will be false prophets, along with the arrest and persecution of Jesus answered them, “… And this gospel of the kingdom will be the disciples (Matt. 24:9–14; Mark proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all 13:9–13; Luke 21:12–19). Jesus also nations, and then the end will come.” (Matt. 24:3–4, 14) predicts the Roman siege of Jeru-

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at the end of the age (Rom. 11:15). This serves to connect the conversion of Israel to the time of the end.

Although Christians disagree about the identity of “all Israel” (some believe this to be the full number of the elect, some believe this group is the sum total of the believing remnant of Jews, while others see Paul’s reference being to Jews living at the time of the end), it is clear that “all Israel” is saved after the fullness of the Gentiles has run its course.

I take Paul to be speaking of the dramatic conversion of large numbers of ethnic Jews immediately before the time of the end as gospel progress rebounds from a largely Gentile mission to a Jewish one. I understand “all Israel” to be a reference to those ethnic Jews who embrace Jesus as their Messiah because God once again has mercy upon his ancient people.

These folk become members of Christ’s church as a testimony to the grace of God. This mass conversion of “all Israel” tells us the end is at hand.

I also see Paul’s discussion of the future as an indication that the nation of Israel has fulfilled its purpose in preparing us for the coming of Christ (Gal. 3:23–29; 4:4–6; Rom.10:4). Therefore, because we know that the “You Are Here” arrow points to a time after Jesus has fulfilled all righteousness, it should be clear we cannot look to ancient Israel for help in determining how modern nations should be governed (Christ fulfilled the law in its civil and ceremonial senses). Nor can we look to the holy wars of Israel as a pattern for our own day, since those wars pointed ahead to God’s judgment on the earth at the time of Christ’s second advent. Israel’s role on the center stage of redemptive history has given way to the role played by the true Israel, Jesus Christ, in whom all the promises of God are “yes” and “amen” (2 Cor.1:20).

The land promise God made to Abraham (Gen. 15:18–21) has already been fulfilled—at least that is what Joshua reports (Josh. 23:14). It is Paul who universalizes the original land of promise far beyond the narrow confines from the rivers of Egypt and the Euphrates to include the whole world (Rom. 4:13).

Although Israel’s national role in redemptive history has run its course with the coming of Jesus, when we see large number of Jews becoming Christians we know that the end is rapidly drawing near. The presence of a modern nation-state of Israel in the ancient land of promise is certainly tied to God’s mysterious purposes for the Jews, because all of the promises God made to the true children of Abraham (those Jews and Gentiles alike), who believe the promise and receive the Holy Spirit, have come to pass because Christ has come and the gospel has been preached to the Gentile nations.

The third sign of the impending dawn of the end of the age is a great apostasy, which is closely con-

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nected to the appearance of the man of sin (“the antichrist”), who is the final eschatological enemy of the church (2 Thess. 2:1–12; Rev. 20:7–10). Although Christians have often been tempted to see any moral decline in their own age as a sign of the end, the final apostasy will surpass anything witnessed to date.

Even though there have been many “wannabe” antichrists since the apostolic era, and many of the signs associated with the antichrist have been present to some degree throughout the post-apostolic period, at some point in the future God will cease his restraint of the mystery of lawlessness (2 Thess. 2:7), when Satan is released from the abyss (Rev. 20:7–10). Only then will the final antichrist appear, soon to be crushed by Jesus at his return.

When this final apostasy occurs and the final antichrist is revealed, God’s people will face horrific persecution from a reinvigorated beast (the state) and its leader (the antichrist) who insist that the people of God declare “Caesar is Lord.” This is the one thing Christians will refuse to do, while at the same time refusal to do so is that which provokes the beast to its great fury against the people of God. Thankfully, the reign of this archenemy of Christ and his people will be short, as he is revealed only to go to his destruction (2 Thess. 2:8; Rev. 20:7–10).

Reading the Signs iven the nature of these signs that herald the end of the age, and the great delay in seeing them realized, what is the relationship between these signs of the end and the ability of believers to discern the times? What do we do with those scriptural statements regarding the imminence of Christ’s return, in light of those passages that speak of a delay regarding Christ’s second coming (i.e., Matt. 25:1–13)? We are told that specific signs clearly precede the end (Matt.

24:32), yet we are also told that the Lord can return at any moment (Matt. 24:37). No doubt, the tension between signs preceding the end and the suddenness of the Lord’s eventual return is intentional. For one thing, this tension prevents date-setting, since no man knows the date or the hour of the Lord’s return (Matt.

24:36). For another, this tension also prevents idleness on the part of God’s people. Since we do not know when the Lord will return, we must watch and wait just as Jesus instructed us to do (Matt. 24:42–44).

Although Jesus’ words about no one knowing the date of his return are crystal clear, this has not stopped various prophecy prognosticators from setting dates and unduly speculating about the time of the end despite being forbidden to do so. Yet, we would be foolish to allow such speculative musings to turn us off to the point that we avoid altogether identifying the

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out the entire interadvental period. But the Bible does not predict specific wars, countless misguided attempts to identity the anearthquakes, and so forth. The Bible may explain current events in this sense, but tichrist and predict the timing of our Lord’s return, current events cannot be used to interpret Scripture. let us simply reaffirm that this ought not be done The spread of the gospel into the ends and expect that because God’s people have the eyes of the earth (as a condition of the end) and the salvation of all of God’s elect are of faith, we will know that the end is at hand when ongoing, although the exact fulfillment of this condition is unknown. Furthermore, we see these things come to pass. the conversion of Israel as the fullness of signs of the end and eagerly awaiting the Lord’s return. the Gentiles comes in—a harbinger of the end—is Not only did the apostolic church declare this hope in also ongoing but not yet fulfilled. A great apostasy the benediction Maranatha (“Come quickly, Lord within the church and the appearance of the man of Jesus”), but we should look forward with great expecsin (the antichrist)—which is tied to the release of tation to the blessed hope, the glorious appearance of Satan from the abyss where he had been bound so as our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ (Titus 2:13). to prevent him from deceiving the nations (Rev. 20:1– Although there are signs that remain to be fulfilled 10)—is apparently not yet fulfilled. (that is, the conversion of the Jews and the appearThe placement of the “You Are Here” arrow at ance of a final antichrist), these things can begin to our present point in history tells us three things. The come to pass at any moment. No doubt, this is what first is that we have before us a two-thousand-year Jesus was speaking of when he described the time of record of the presence of Christ’s church in the midst the end as like the pain of birth. Anyone who has of a fallen world and the spread of the gospel to the been in the delivery room knows that while things ends of the earth. Although the apostolic era has long start slowly and regularly, soon the conflation of consince passed—and as the apostles left the scene, so did tractions and moments of rest take on a life of their the miracles which confirmed their divine office— own. One never knows when the final contraction Jesus Christ is still present with us through his Word will come, only that the presence of them means a and Sacraments in the power of the Holy Spirit. The baby is about to be born. knowledge of this should give us hope that everything In this regard, Geerhardus Vos is certainly corGod has promised will come to pass. rect—the best interpreter of some of these events is The second thing is that the apostles spoke to us their fulfillment! Given the prior course of church hisabout what to expect, and that the future course of history and the countless misguided attempts to identity tory would unfold for some time as part of God’s purthe antichrist and predict the timing of our Lord’s pose for his people. The very presence of the “You Are return, let us simply reaffirm that this ought not be Here” arrow means that God has not forgotten us, and done and expect that because God’s people have the by looking back to observe his faithfulness to his peoeyes of faith, we will know that the end is at hand ple, we can look ahead with hope. Christ’s empty tomb when we see these things come to pass. points to the great day of resurrection yet to come.

What then exactly does the Bible predict for the Finally, the presence of the “You Are Here” arrow future course of this age? The prophesies associated means that all is not yet fulfilled. There are signs yet with the founding of the church and the persecution to be fulfilled, but when they come to pass—despite of the apostles and earliest Christians have clearly the darkness of the days and the urgency of our situbeen fulfilled. Those concerning the destruction of ation—we can look up, knowing that our redemption Jerusalem and the temple and the Diaspora in A.D. 70 is drawing near (Luke 21:28)! were fulfilled, and the spread of Christianity to the But until the Lord comes again, let us claim that ends of the earth (cf. Acts 1:8; Matt.13:31–32) was glorious promise: “Maranatha! Come quickly, Lord already underway at the close of the apostolic era.

Jesus.” ■ Those signs that will characterize the course of the interadvental period are also ongoing, just as Jesus predicted. There are wars and rumors of wars, earthKim Riddlebarger is pastor of Christ Reformed Church in quakes and other natural disasters, false teachers, Anaheim, California, and a cohost of the White Horse Inn heresy, and persecution. This means that the Bible lays radio program. out a general pattern of birth pains that occur throughGiven the prior course of church history and the

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The Return of the King Exploring the Kingdom of God in Jesus’ Inaugural Sermon

By Michael J. Kruger

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esus had waited a long time for his first public sermon. During the first thirty years of his life he was relatively silent, growing in “wisdom and stature” (Luke 2:52) and laboring in obscurity as a carpenter (Mark 6:3). The fact that the Gospel accounts give us precious little information about this phase of his life only heightens our expectations (and curiosity) about what Jesus would say when he was finally ready to step onto the public stage. After all, when you look at the first portion of the Gospel stories it seems everyone is talking except Jesus. In Mark’s Gospel, for example, we begin by hearing the prophets Isaiah and Malachi speak. Then we hear John the Baptist speak. After that, at Jesus’ baptism, the Father in heaven speaks. By this time, the tension is beginning to build in the mind of the reader about what Jesus is going to say when he speaks. What will be his first words to a waiting world? What will be the subject of his very first sermon? What will be his big opening line?

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In Mark 1:15 we have our answer: “The time is fulfilled.” Now, for most modern readers of the Bible this seems like a remarkably strange topic for Jesus’ public debut. What in the world is he talking about? And why would Jesus launch his ministry with a sermon on such an obscure subject? Shouldn’t Jesus’ first sermon have been a bit more practical—maybe about how to “get saved” or something like that? But the implications of Jesus’ words would not have been missed by his first-century audience. The phrase “The time is fulfilled” would have been quickly recognized as a proclamation that God’s great and wonderful promises—the very promises Israel had longed to see realized for generations—were about to come true.

It was an eschatological declaration that God’s rule was about to break into human history in a powerful and mighty way and that God’s dominion would spread throughout the world. It meant that the kingdom of God had arrived.1 Thus Jesus’ inaugural sermon in Mark 1:15 tells us something very critical; it tells us that somehow the ministry of Jesus is intimately and unavoidably connected with the coming of the kingdom of God. This connection is confirmed by the fact that the kingdom of God is the heart of Jesus’ message in all four Gospels (Mark 1:15; Matt 4:23; Luke 4:21; John 3:3–5). His preaching concerns not only “how to get to heaven” but

KNOW WHAT YOU BELIEVE… A Systematic Theology Primer Systematic theology as a broad range of disciplines is divided into the study of various objects. For example, the most basic study of God, theology, is sometimes called theology proper. Other disciplines include:

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Protology Anthropology Harmatology

Study of beginnings or creation Study of the doctrine of man Study of sin and man after the Fall Christology Study of the person and work of Christ Pneumatology Study of the person and work of the Holy Spirit Soteriology Study of salvation Ecclesiology Study of the doctrine of the church Eschatology Study of the end times

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also how heaven has, in some sense, come to earth. He is not interested only in soteriology, but also in eschatology—not just in redemption, but also redemptive history. But the connection between Jesus and the kingdom goes even deeper than this. It is not just that Jesus liked to talk about the kingdom of God, but rather he is the very one who ushers in the kingdom of God. It is through the person of Jesus and no other that God’s eschatological kingdom breaks into the world in a new and powerful way. Why? Because Jesus is more than just a herald of the kingdom. He is not merely an announcer. He is the King. The kingdom of God has arrived because the King himself has arrived.

All of these connections make it clear that if we are to understand Jesus and his mission, it is imperative we further explore this topic of the kingdom of God. One cannot be rightly understood without the other.

To do so, we shall probe more deeply into Mark 1:15 and the surrounding texts. When we dig deeper into Jesus’ inaugural sermon, we will begin to realize that the kingdom of God is not just one theme in Jesus’ ministry but the foundational theological architecture for his ministry—it forms the structural girders that frame it and hold it up.

The Power of the Kingdom: The Defeat of Satan he first thing to note about Jesus’ announcement of the kingdom of God is that it was, in effect, an announcement of the defeat of Satan. Just two verses before Jesus’ inaugural sermon, Christ was in the wilderness being tempted by Satan for forty days (Mark 1:13). Remarkably, Mark gives us very little detail about this temptation (as opposed to the other Gospels) and does not even tell us the outcome of the temptations.

Of course, this creates enormous tension for the reader.

What exactly happened in the wilderness for the last forty days? (See “What a Difference a Comma Makes” on page 30.) How did Jesus fare in this cosmic showdown with Satan himself? Who won? Then, in the very next verse, Jesus emerges from the wilderness and makes the simple statement, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.” It is here that the reader recognizes the outcome of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. He has proved faithful and victorious over the temptations of the devil. The power of Satan has been decisively broken.2 The significance of Christ’s victory over Satan in the desert is often missed by the casual reader. We too easily forget that up to this point in history not a single human being, not one person anywhere, has ever fully withstood the temptations of the devil. Not Adam. Not Abraham. Not Jacob. Not Moses. Not Joshua. Not David. Not Elijah. Not Daniel. Not anyone.

Every person on the planet, from the beginning of cre-

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ation, has ultimately succumbed to the wiles of the evil one—until now. Where the first Adam failed, the second Adam succeeded. While the first Adam gave in to temptation in a perfect and wonderful garden (with an abundance of food), the second Adam resisted temptation in a barren wilderness (while having nothing to eat). As a result, Jesus earned perfect righteousness for those he represents. He kept the law perfectly on our behalf. The accusations of the devil against God’s people cannot stand, for his people are wrapped in the perfect imputed righteousness of Christ.

The fact that the kingdom of God is marked by the overthrow of Satan is picked up in a number of other New Testament texts. In Matthew 12:28 Jesus declares, “But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.” Jesus makes it clear that his dominion over demonic forces is evidence of the arrival of the kingdom. Likewise, he declares that demons cannot be cast out unless someone “first binds the strong man” (Matt. 12:29). Thus it is the binding of Satan (and his demons along with him) that marks the coming of God’s new reign. This same language also occurs in Revelation 20:2, “And [the angel] seized the dragon, the ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.”3 Of course, to say that Satan is bound or defeated when Christ ushered in the kingdom of God will inevitably create some confusion. How can we say that Satan is bound when he seems to be quite busy and troublesome? Is he not described as a “roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Pet. 5:8)? But Christ’s defeat of Satan does not require that Satan is now inactive. He is bound, not destroyed. This simply means that Satan’s power has been curbed and the decisive blow has been dealt, even though the battle rages on. In particular, Satan is bound in regard to his ability to “deceive the nations” (Rev. 20:3). Put differently, God has a global plan for the world—to save people from every nation, tribe, people and tongue— and Satan cannot stand in the way. Prior to the coming of Christ and the kingdom he brings, the world was largely in darkness, but now “the people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light” (Isa. 9:2; cf. Matt. 4:16).

The manner in which Satan is defeated in part, but not yet in whole, reveals the essential nature of the kingdom of God. We might expect (as did many Jews in the first century) that God would bring his kingdom into the world all at once, decisively and finally overthrowing his enemies and establishing his everlasting reign. But the kingdom of God does not enter the world in one big apocalyptic event; it enters the world gradually and in advance of its final eschatological

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manifestation.4 It is like the mustard seed that starts off small but then grows “larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches” (Matt. 13:32).

This is why the eschatological nature of the kingdom of God is captured by the phrase “already, but not yet.” Although the kingdom has already come in principle through the work of Christ overthrowing Satan, it has not yet come fully and completely.

Thus Jesus’ inaugural sermon leads us to rejoice in the coming of the kingdom of God where the power of Satan is curbed and the righteousness we so desperately need has been earned for us by Christ. But it also calls us to look forward to the time when the kingdom is fully realized, Satan is utterly defeated, and all temptations toward sin finally cease. In the meantime, we live in tension, with a foot in each of these worlds.

The Purpose of the Kingdom: The Great Commission hus far we have seen that the King has returned, defeated Satan, and has announced the coming of his kingdom. It is here that the text takes a surprising and wonderful turn. One might expect that any king who returns to find rebellious subjects would issue proclamations of judgment and condemnation upon them. Surely, we should expect swift and decisive retribution on the king’s enemies.

But that is not what happens. Instead, this offended King offers the opportunity for a gracious pardon.

After announcing the kingdom, Jesus then declares, “Repent and believe the good news” (Mark 1:15).

People can join Jesus in his new kingdom if they repent of their rebellion and insubordination and embrace by faith the rightful rule of God. Of course, if they do not repent, then they will be destroyed by the judgment to come. Nevertheless, the offer of a gracious pardon tells us much about the purpose of Christ’s new kingdom. Its purpose is not (yet) to destroy but to save. Christ is building a new kingdom because he intends to fill it with a new people.

If so, then we might wonder where Christ would begin this process. Where will he turn to find the right people to help build this new kingdom? Perhaps to the Sanhedrin, the ruling aristocratic class? Perhaps to Jerusalem or Judea, the very heart of Israel? Surely, in these places Christ could find the kind of people fit for his new kingdom. But once again he does the unexpected. Our passage tells us exactly where Christ goes first to fill his new kingdom: “Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God” (Mark 1:14).

Unfortunately, being two thousand years removed from the first century, we have little appreciation of the reputation of Galilee. But in its day, it tended to

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observes, “The call of Israel has as its fundamental objective the rescue and Testament and intertestamental heritage that restoration of the entire creation.”6 Indeed, Zechariah 14:9 describes the regularly indicates that God’s eschatological coming kingdom as the time when “the Lord will be king over all the earth.”7 Thus judgment is near.…To fish for men then is to Jesus’ announcement in Mark 1:15 that the kingdom had come would have indi“catch” them so they can be judged by God— cated to first-century Jews that the time had arrived when God’s reign would some unto death and others unto life. It is not finally spread throughout the world. Put differently, if Jesus is declaring that God just “doing evangelism” in the abstract, but it is is about to act to fulfill his promises to a decidedly eschatological event that marks the Israel, one of those promises is that she would be a light to the Gentiles (Isa. coming kingdom of God. 49:6; cf. Acts 13:47).

This connection between the kingdom of God and the Great Commission is further be despised, especially by those from Judea. Such emphasized in the next set of verses. In Mark 1:16– derision is noticeable when Nathanael was told that 17 Jesus recruits his first disciples of the kingdom, Jesus was from Nazareth of Galilee and he responds, Simon and Andrew, and calls them to be “fishers of “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1: men.” Unfortunately, this phrase “fishers of men” is 46). Elsewhere, the Jewish leaders reject Jesus’ mesoften regarded by modern readers as merely a play on sianic claims because he comes from Galilee (John words—a witty pun used to link the current vocation 7:41). This derision may be due to a variety of factors, of the disciples with their new vocation. While this is but certainly included the fact that Galilee was surcertainly part of what is going on here, the implicarounded by and partially comprised of Gentiles. This is tions of the fishing motif go much deeper. The concept particularly true in Upper Galilee, which was known of fishing for men has a rich Old Testament and as “Galilee of the Gentiles” (Matt. 4:15; cf. Isa. 9:1). intertestamental heritage that regularly indicates that Again, the circumstances of Jesus’ first sermon God’s eschatological judgment is near.8 For example, remind us that the coming of the kingdom of God marks a grand transition in redemptive history. through the prophet Jeremiah God speaks of wicked Throughout the old covenant era, redemption largely men as follows, “Behold, I am sending for many fishcame to and through the Jewish people. To be sure, ers, declares the Lord, and they shall catch them….For Gentiles were allowed to join the covenant community my eyes are on all their ways. They are not hidden during this time period (upon conversion and circumfrom me, nor is their inequity concealed from my cision), but there was not a proactive, external focus on eyes” (Jer. 16:16–17). Jesus draws on these same winning Gentiles to the God of Israel. But now things motifs: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a net that was have changed. Jesus has defeated Satan. The power of thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind. sin has been broken. A new era of redemption has When it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down come. The location of Christ’s first sermon indicates that and sorted the good into containers but threw away the kingdom of God will now expand to the undesirthe bad” (Matt. 13:47–48). To fish for men then is to able places of the world: to the dark corners of the earth “catch” them so they can be judged by God—some where God is not known or worshipped. Those invited unto death and others unto life. It is not just “doing to the great wedding feast of the Lamb are not who we evangelism” in the abstract, but it is a decidedly eschamight expect: “Go out quickly to the streets and lanes tological event that marks the coming kingdom of of the city, and bring in the poor and crippled and blind God. As William Lane observes, “Fishing is the evidence of the fulfillment which Jesus proclaimed, the and lame” (Luke 14:21). Thus the coming of the kingcorollary of the in-breaking kingdom.”9 dom of God is the foundation for the Great It is only when this Old Testament context is Commission (Matt. 28:18–20). understood that the immediate response of the disciThe idea that God’s coming kingdom would bless ples in Mark 1:18 makes any sense. Why would all nations and not just Israel is certainly not a new Simon and Andrew immediately leave their nets and one. Jesus was not creating a new vision for Israel, but follow Jesus? What would cause such a quick and merely calling Israel to be what God has always decisive reaction? It is not simply because Jesus is intended it to be: the light of the world.5 N. T. Wright

The concept of fishing for men has a rich Old

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making a play on words and informing them of their new vocations. Instead, it is because they would have recognized the metaphor of fishing as an indication that God’s righteous judgment was imminent. The eschatological in-breaking of God’s kingdom was about to happen. The storm clouds were on the horizon. Jesus had sounded the alarm, so to speak, and they understood the urgency of the mission. They were to be hunters of men with a very clear message for them: repent of your sins or be swept away by the flood of the kingdom of God. Thus the Great Commission—the urgent call to preach the gospel to all the world—is not something that would have fit at just any point in redemptive history. It is decisively linked with the coming of the kingdom of God in Jesus Christ. It is for precisely this reason that so many of Christ’s kingdom parables are about the spreading of the gospel or the seeking of the lost (e.g., Matt. 13:3–9, 31–33, 47–50; Luke 15:1–31).10 This is not to suggest that evangelism did not occur in the Old Testament era, but this type of urgent, eschatological fishing is unique to the new covenant era. It can exist only where the kingdom exists and Satan has been bound. As Herman Ridderbos observes, the coming of the kingdom means that “the gospel itself now operates with an entirely new force, and an intensified content; it is the preaching of the fulfillment; it is the message of the grace of God revealed in Christ which now starts its course in this world.”11 Conclusion his all too brief glimpse at Jesus’ first public sermon makes it clear that the concept of the kingdom of God provides the infrastructure for his entire mission and ministry. As a result, the core of Jesus’ message was that through him something decidedly new was happening in the world. God’s reign had broken into history. Satan’s power had been decidedly overthrown. Jesus’ perfect righteousness as the second Adam had been fully earned. And therefore the task of the Great Commission could be undertaken with urgency. The power of Jesus’ message was in his focus on the coming kingdom. The message of the modern church must be no different. Rather than viewing Satan as a general, timeless enemy of God, we must view him in light of the new kingdom that has arrived—as defeated and overthrown by Christ. Rather than viewing the Great Commission as generic “evangelism,” we must put it into a kingdom context—we are urgently hunting/fishing for men on the eve of the eschaton. In all of this, we are reminded that the redemptive-historical timeframe matters for our understanding of the gospel and our mission. The good news is not just about the “who” or the “what” but is also about the “when.”

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This is why we should begin our message in the same place that Jesus began his: “The time is fulfilled.” ■

Michael J. Kruger is associate professor of New Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida.

General works on the kingdom of God include: G. E. Ladd, Jesus and the Kingdom: the Eschatology of Biblical Realism (New York: Harper & Row, 1964); Herman Ridderbos, The Coming of the Kingdom (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1962); George Beasley-Murray, Jesus and the Kingdom of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986); B. Chilton, God in Strength: Jesus’ Announcement of the Kingdom (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1987); and N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996).

2This is not to suggest that Satan was defeated only by Christ successfully enduring temptation. Obviously, the overthrow of Satan involves numerous events, including most centrally the death and resurrection of Christ. G. E. Ladd, The Presence of the Future: The Eschatology of Biblical Realism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), declares, “It is the entire mission of Jesus which brings about Satan’s defeat” (157).

3For a thorough argument that Revelation 20:2 refers to the first coming of Christ, see Kim Riddlebarger, A Case for Amillennialism: Understanding the End Times (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003).

4G. E. Ladd, A Theology of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 54–67.

5Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 308.

6N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 268.

7Numerous Old Testament passages make it clear that God had always had a plan for the nations; e.g., Gen. 17:4–5; Ps. 2:8, 22:27, 96:10, 97:1; Isa. 49:6, 66:1; Jer. 3:17, 10:7.

8Wilhelm Wuellner, The Meaning of “Fishers of Men” (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967).

9W. L. Lane, The Gospel According to St. Mark (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 68.

10Ridderbos, 148–55.

11Ridderbos, 149.

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The Difference a Comma Makes

By Ryan Glomsrud

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here’s an old joke about a panda that walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air. “Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. “I’m a panda,” he says at the door. “Look it up.” The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation. “Panda. Large black and white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

Admittedly it’s not a very funny joke, but then what grammar joke ever is. The point is that punctuation does matter, for wildlife manuals and for Bible reading. In the first chapter of Mark’s Gospel, we have an interesting interpretive question that arises over the placement of a colon. Mark 1:2–4 is translated and punctuated as follows in the English Standard Version:

“Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,’”

Notice the difference? In Isaiah, the voice is crying, just as in Mark, although we don’t know precisely where the voice is crying. Because of the colon placement, we learn from Isaiah that it is the preparation of the way of the Lord that will happen in the wilderness; it is in the wilderness that the paths and desert highway will be made straight.

So which is it? Is it John the Baptist who is crying in the wilderness, or is John the Baptist crying: “Make straight the paths of the Lord in the wilderness”? We know because of Mark 1:4 that John was in fact in the wilderness, but because of Isaiah 40:3 there is good reason to think that John’s message was that Jesus would prepare the way and make straight paths in the wilderness. We later learn that this prophecy from Isaiah and bold announcement from John comes true in Mark 1:12–13 when “the Spirit immediately drove him [Jesus] out into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan.

And he was with the wild animals, and the angels were ministering to him.”

What does it mean to make paths straight? Where Israel had disobeyed, struggled, doubted, and wandered in the desert for forty years, now Jesus the Messiah makes straight their crooked paths through victory over Satan and in his wilderness temptation.

John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

Ryan Glomsrud is executive editor and reviews editor of Modern Reformation.

As it is written in Isaiah the prophet,

Nestled in verse 3 the English translation gives the impression that the voice crying—namely, John the Baptist—is crying in the wilderness, proclaiming his message and announcing the way of the Lord. This is an entirely plausible rendering of the original Greek, for in verse 4 we learn that John did in fact appear, “baptizing in the wilderness.” However, John the Baptist is actually quoting Isaiah 40:3, which places the colon differently in the English translation and has some relevance for how we understand Mark 1:13. Taking careful note of the placement of the colon, Isaiah 40:3 reads, A voice cries: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”

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The panda anecdote was taken from the British best-seller by Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (Gotham Books, 2003).

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The Mission Statement: “Go Into All the World”

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ny conversation about the Matthew 28:18–20 “Great Commission” must begin with the essential acknowledgement that the missional activity of the church (that is, the sending, the going, the making of disciples by baptizing, the forming of Christians through teaching, the enduring presence, and so forth) is the work of God. No, not in the sense that the Lord merely sanctions such things or that this work is done “in the name of God” by others. It’s more basic than that. The very doing of the things of the Great Commission, not just the commissioning itself, is the doing of God. Perhaps no one put it more bluntly than Lesslie Newbigin: “It seems to me of great importance to insist that mission is not first of all an action of ours. It is an action of God.”1

Who would deny that? No one. But then it has to be asked: How is God acting in mission? And it is at this point where all missiological disagreement will be found. For many, to say that God is at work in mission is to say that he is working “in and through me” as I feed the poor, foster social justice, teach English as a second language, sponsor a Big Brother or Big Sister program, and do so in the name of Jesus as I embody the gospel in my daily life. All of these things, noble as they are, nonetheless pertain to the doctrine of vocation, not to the Great Commission. Simply put, God has not promised to be in those things (much less the “espresso cart ministry” or “Pilates ministry”), translating captive sinners from a kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. Such things are our

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doings. In them perhaps we find common grace to serve our neighbors, but not saving grace to redeem them. Consequently, it cannot be said that you are or I am the gospel mission, regardless of vocation. Truly, we do not “do” gospel mission in this sense because it immediately pertains to the law, is devoid of divine authority, and it possesses no divine power. Similarly, even our “testifying” or “witnessing,” properly understood, is to the salvation accomplished by God in Christ and applied by God in Christ through his missional doings. Which brings us back to the question: How is God in Christ acting in mission?

the Last Adam (the Son) comes as the anointed King, he does so imaging forth the Great King’s (that is, the Father’s) image—not only possessing the Word of God upon his heart, but literally as the Word of God and, at the same time, in the Adamic capacity as “the son of God” on earth, the heir of the kingdom. The identification of the Great King and the anointed—the crown prince—is a one-to-one correspondence. The crown prince (Jesus as Israel—“the prince that prevails with God”) has authority to speak and act on the Great King’s behalf just as if he were the Father, so much so that Jesus could say: “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). This identification of the Son with the Father occurs in two senses. First, there is the trinitarian sense: the Father is identified in the Son, and the Son is identified in the Father. In terms of the divine ontology or the being of God, who God is in himself, the Son corresponds to the Father.

Second, there is the anthropological sense: man possesses the image of God, and so the Son of God who comes as the Son of Man corresponds to mankind created in the image of God. In the drama of redemption the two are brought together in the incarnation—the Father sending (apostello) the Son in dual representation. Thus, the sending of the Son by the Father entails the category of apostolic commissioning within a kingdom metaphor paradigm through which an apostolic identification between the Father (the sender) and the Son (the sent) obtains to the end that Jesus possesses divine kingly authority and Holy Spirit power over things heavenly and earthly.

And so, as the God-man, the Son achieves a victory that allows the repossession of the Father’s onceusurped kingdom, and thereby initiates the fulfillment of the first man and his posterity’s original vocation to have dominion. It is only fitting then that the God-man would have men re-created in his own image to represent himself in reclaiming mankind and do so by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Context Is Kingdom he who, what, where, when, why, and how of the Great Commission emerges from its context within the Holy Scriptures, but also within the total historical drama of redemption articulated through the lens of the Bible’s principal metaphor, “the kingdom.” This governing metaphor of the kingdom makes transparent just how God acts in mission, namely, through Christ’s ministerium. That’s right— ministerium, not laity. It is not uncommon to hear an exegesis of either Matthew 28:18–20 or John 20:19– 22 that divorces the church’s ministerium from the particularity of the commission’s activities. But this cannot be an honest interpretation of these texts, since the mission statement of the church is given directly to and principally for men called to stand and serve in persona Christi (“as the person of Christ”).

The kingdom motif clarifies a straightforward exegesis of who goes, what is done, and how it’s done.

Obedient to reading the Scripture within the metaphorical paradigm of kingdom, we find in Matthew 28:18–20 that Jesus the King is speaking with full imperial authority, issuing forth his regal decree, and commissioning his royal ambassadors in a way that parallels the proto-commissioning of Genesis 1:28 and 2:15. In Eden, Adam is created in the image of God (the Great King) and is therefore “the son of God” From the Gospel of John (Luke 3:38) or, synonymously and in 5:36 “For the works that the Father has given me to accomkeeping with the principal metaphor plish, the very works that I am doing, bear witness about of the metanarrative, the crown me, that the Father has sent me.” prince. The first man is royally com“For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own missioned to have “dominion” and be 6:38 will but the will of him who sent me.” lord over the earth, to be as the heav“My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me.” enly King would be in his earthly 7:16 kingdom. Simply put, Adam rules as 12:44 “He that believes on me, believes not on me, but on him God’s viceroy. Created in the image of who sent me.” the King, man possesses derivative 12:45 “And he that sees me sees him who sent me.” lordship over the kingdom and with the King’s Word “written upon his 14:24 “The word that you hear is not mine, but the Father’s who sent me.” heart.” In the New Testament, when

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More than the other Evangelists, the apostle John nity (even the idea of the apostle is transformed by the labors to underscore this point about inner-trinitarian dawning of the new creation). Second, the power of apostolic representation through the incarnation in the commissioner (viz. the Holy Spirit sent by the the following texts—which of course set the stage for Father and the Son) would actually be present with another apostolic commissioning in John 20:19–22, the commissioned to achieve the commissioning and where Jesus makes apostles of certain disciples who only the commissioning. thereby extend his incarnational presence and power, or God’s missional doings.

“Go Therefore” nderstood within the paradigm of kingdom, Fundamental to John’s Gospel is an understanding the effect of the opening words of the Great of Jesus as the viceroy apostle—the sent one—of the Commission is a command from the Majesty Father. In this capacity, the Messiah born of a woman on High who happens to be on earth: “All authority may rightly speak for and act on behalf of the Father in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go with the full authority of the Majesty on High, if for therefore….” no other reason than the metaphor of kingdom necesNotice how Jesus, “who is called Christ” (Matt. sitates identification and representation between the 1:16), the anointed King of Israel by others, now in Great King and his Son (cf. Col. 1:15–20; Rev 1:6) or, full right declares himself to be the Lord of heaven and alternatively, the Lord and his messenger. earth. Something has changed.

Critical for understanding the His availing apostolic representa“Great Commission,” then, is the “Jesus did not invent the word tion of the Father has yielded a intertestamental Jewish concept new world order. Now he is the of shelichim—as in the rabbinic apostle, he assumed it. There was King of kings, possessing full proverb, “The messenger of a man already in God's plan a well-known divine sovereign authority. is as the man himself.” Persons commissioned as a shaliach (sin- system within which Jewish apostles Whereas once it was the Father affirming his authoritative and gular) were endowed with were operating, a system Jesus Holy Spirit-empowered viceauthority to legally and morally accepted and used.” regency (Matt. 3:16–17)—and to represent their commissioner. be sure, Jesus was the King who Significantly, the Septuagint transhung on the cross with a titulus declaring as much, lates the Hebrew word shaliach (to send) with the and by his own teaching God’s kingdom rule began Greek apostello, sustaining the emphasis of sending with the King enthroned on Golgotha—now the ressomeone with a commission to represent another urrection brings an element of triumphalistic selfwith corresponding authority. This is why the rabbis proclamation. The King has been vindicated in his of Jesus’ day considered Moses, Elijah, Elisha, and claim that all things have been given to him by the Ezekiel shelichim, authorized messengers of God who Father (Matt. 28:18). represented Yahweh in persona Dei. As Robert The upshot of who Jesus is yields the “therefore.”

Scrudieri notes, “When the shelichim went on a misCommission and mission happen because the allsion, they were actually considered to be the person authoritative, all-powerful one wills it. He commisor group who sent them.”2 But there was a caveat: the active representation of another availed only for a spesions his apostles (“sent ones”), and the only response cific mission. There was no extension of conferred to “thus saith the risen Lord” is “it was so.” His will will authority beyond the parameters of the commissionbe done. The sending, however, is for this expressed ing specifications. Once the mission was completed, purpose disclosed by the King: reconciling traitor citshaliach representation expired. “The shaliach is a proizens to the rightful King and his kingdom that has genitor of the New Testament apostle. Jesus did not come. Paul says as much in 2 Corinthians 5:18–20: invent the word apostle, he assumed it. There was already in God’s plan a well-known system within All this is from God, who through Christ recwhich Jewish apostles were operating, a system Jesus onciled us to himself and gave us the ministry accepted and used.”3 This concept of authoritative of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was recpersonal representation is brought directly into the onciling the world to himself, not counting New Testament understanding of the Great their trespasses against them, and entrusting to Commission but with two important innovations by us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we Jesus. First, he commissioned apostles for missional are ambassadors for Christ, God making his endeavors even to the Gentiles, whereas the shaliach appeal through us. never eclipsed the boundaries of the Jewish commu-

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In other words, the sending is first and foremost about forgiveness. That is God’s mission, for only God has the power to forgive sins (cf. Luke 5:21), and he does so because he loves the world with the love a father has for his children (John 3:16). This is the why of the Great Commission. God must be present in Christ through his apostles if forgiveness is to be applied and reconciliation result in our being joint heirs with Christ by adoption as sons (Rom. 8:17). And so the reclamation of God’s earthly kingdom begins, and it must do so in conjunction with the apostolic commissioning of John 20:19–20, which ultimately gives way to the making of disciples 28:18–20.

Matthew 10:40

“Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me.”

Mark 9:37

“Whoever receives me, receives not me but him who sent me.”

Luke 10:16

“The one who hears you hears me, and the one who rejects you rejects me, and the one who rejects me rejects him who sent me.”

John 13:20

“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever receives the one I send receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.”

John 17:18

“As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world.”

in Matthew

This bipartite commissioning is not open to all, however, but only to the ministerium. Both John and Matthew articulate a context in which the comOn the evening of that day, the first day of the missioning takes place for and among the eleven, not week…Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with all disciples indiscriminately. A divine intention presyou. As the Father has sent me, even so I am ents itself through the narrative placement of these sending you.” And when he had said this, he commissions, as well as a theological significance havbreathed on them and said to them, “Receive ing to do with the doctrine of representation: the the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, Father sends his Son to represent him, and now the they are forgiven them; if you withhold forSon sends his brothers to represent him representing giveness from any, it is withheld.” the Father. Only this kind of gender-specific personal apostolic commissioning could maintain the integrity This passage more than any other clears a misconof another important metaphor within Scripture: ception about the “Great Commission” of Matthew matrimonial union between the bridegroom and 28:18–20 standing alone. It has at least John 20:19–22 bride, or Christ and his church, which again restricts as its complement, if not antecedent. Thus, as we the apostolic commissioning to a ministerium. approach the Matthean Great Commission, it is underThe John 20 episode commissions the disciples to stood that as the Father sent the Son with authority to be something before they do something. You are stand in persona Patri in the accomplishment of apostles now (John 20:21)—so say I, the King (Matt. redemption, so too the Son sends certain disciples as 28:18), and this is what you shall say and do in my his apostles with authority to stand in persona Christi in stead (28:19–20). This personal apostolic representathe application of his redemption by the power of the tion of Jesus by his apostles is not only the teaching Holy Spirit. In this way God is the ultimate doer of the of John but also of the Synoptics.

Great Commission. Therefore, God gets all the glory.

When Jesus breathes on the disciples in the apostolic commissioning, it brings into focus the trinitarian nature of the sending.4 As the Father sends the Son and the Son sends the Spirit, so too In other words, the sending is first and foremost the ministerium of the church is caught up in this divine activity of sending to about forgiveness. That is God’s mission, for only become the manifestation of trinitarian activity in the going, making, teaching, God has the power to forgive sins (cf. Luke 5:21), and abiding presence among the disciples. Jesus’ self-witness and redemptive and he does so because he loves the world with activity is extended by apostolic proxy the love a father has for his children (John 3:16). and Holy Spirit performance, but with this one important difference from the This is the why of the Great Commission. first commissioning of Adam: The word 34 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

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in the mouth of God’s Edenic apostle was law; the word in the mouth of the re-created apostle is gospel.

What God Is Doing: “Making Disciples” nclusive of Luke’s 24:46–49 post-resurrection account, the Great Commission fundamentally establishes the forum for the work of God (what Puritan divines like William Perkins referred to as the theatrum salutis, the theater of salvation).5 The point of the commissioning, then, is for Christ’s ministerium to facilitate the sphere through which the Holy Spirit saves and sanctifies by the Word since they—in and of themselves— have no power, only a derivative authority. They are to preach the gospel and administer the sacraments. In this way the pastor serves as stage manager for God’s action.6 This is to take place everywhere God possesses the right of lordship: beginning in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, even to the ends of the earth. The earth is his footstool; therefore he shall reclaim it in all its parts—age, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status notwithstanding.

The sending and going of the Lord’s ministerium ironically results in the coming and gathering of sinners. There is a purposeful gathering, a summoning by the formality of the ambassadorial proclamation. God goes out to all, and all come to him for baptizing, communing, and catechesis. There is a sense then that the sending is really an entreating to a destination, and Christ is that destination. The result of the apostles going out on the day of Pentecost to Jerusalem was the making of disciples by baptizing, only to see them come together for the “apostles’ teaching, the fellowship in the breaking of the bread, and the prayers” (Acts 2:42). When the King goes out and calls all things to himself, then all things come to where he is present in person, promise, and power. The human actions of the ministerium that fill the Divine Service are totally dependent on the triune God filling them with his action.7 God makes disciples through the death-resurrection-adoption rite of holy baptism. In baptism the King speaks something about the baptized (they are justified/adopted) and about doing something to them (namely, uniting them to Christ’s death and resurrection, but also to the church). The recipient is passive. God is active in changing the status, identity, and being of the baptized. This is why Martin Luther, for example, considered all baptisms to be a sort of infant baptism. He put no stock in the self-profession of

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converts who responded to gospel preaching. To Luther, they might be hypocrites, halfhearted, or heretics. What they said about their faith in God was unavoidably uncertain, subjective, alterable. In fact, he admonished discerning converts never to trust in their declaration about God but rather God’s public and therefore objective declaration about them. If nothing else, watch and believe what God does through baptism. Luther’s point was to trust what God says about you and does to you through his ministerium when they are serving in the apostolic/shaliach capacity of the Great Commission to forgive sins and adopt sons. On one occasion, Luther pointed out that the Ethiopian eunuch asked to receive the means of disciple making—baptism—because no one legitimately baptizes himself. He saw the need to receive what someone else possessed and had the authority and power to dispense. The implication here is that the making of disciples in baptizing is an ordinance for the ministerium not the recipient, for the cleric not the catechumen, since God is the doer in baptism by way of his “sent ones.” His is the power to forgive, adopt, and regenerate. It is his declaration that “this is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased,” which cannot be questioned because it is the word of the King. According to Luther the biblical maxim “Let God be true and every man a liar” (Rom. 3:4) becomes the tangible reality of baptism.

Consequently, receiving baptism can never be a “first act of obedience” because it is always the action of God. His kingly profession about the recipient is certain, objective, and unalterable precisely because it is grounded in a divine event. The purpose and permanence of this sacrament is grounded in the will of the Lord to perpetuate the church and yield disciples who will be catechized in the faith given by God’s own doing. Thus, it endures as a work of God, not a vestige of Roman Catholicism.

“Teach Disciples” od then sets out to teach his disciples to observe all things that Christ has commanded his ministerium. The ministerium, of course, has been commanded to administer God’s Word and Sacraments. Catechesis, then, is a lifelong returning to the gospel Word in baptism, in absolution, and in Holy Communion. Observe the things that he has left his “sent ones” to tell us and give us. Having been made a “learner” (disciple), being taught of God in Christ is a lifelong resourcing of John 20 and Matthew

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28, for the gospel is not a one-off, one-time deal intended for those outside the new covenant in Christ’s blood. Rather, just as the first Great Commission pertains to the remission of sins, so too the content of catechesis consists primarily in eliciting faith in God’s gospel promise-keeping.

Doubt Nothing he final word from Jesus, “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20b, ESV), emphatically redoubles the comforting intent of verse 18, namely, that the King of heaven and earth has spoken and therefore all can and will be accomplished by his authoritative Word, which accomplishes what he says. His is the kingdom and the power and glory. So doubt nothing. This apostolic commissioning and missional enterprise is of the King.

The power and efficacy of the Word preached and the baptism administered with his authority is, in fact, the King’s doing. So then all you who bear this apostolic commissioning, doubt nothing. Pastors ought to be of the greatest confidence while serving in the office of their ordination. The King has promised always to be with them in great commissioning as the power-bearing doer. What he has spoken, he has spoken. Strike forth with the poise of a martyr and doubt nothing.

Knowing then that God is going into all the world gathering all ethnic groups (again, notwithstanding age, status, or gender), with the application of Christ’s accomplished salvation, has to be of enormous comfort for sinners because it gets our focus off of our doing, our striving, and our earnestness and onto him who has all power and authority. God as the ultimate doer of the missional church also brings the greatest of assurances. Our confidence rests always on what he has objectively done and said through the external gospel Word and Sacraments; but it also rests on his redemptive-history-tested character as the promise-making, promise-keeping God who never lies and whose Word cannot be overturned.

God works through that which has been principally committed to the curacy of Christ’s ministerium, and so the church is recognized by what she has and does.

The fundamental identity of the church as the missional doer, applying the church’s treasured possession—God’s Word and Sacraments—to captive sinners in need of a Savior King proves itself to be the presence and activity of God in the world he is reclaiming. And it is in the application of this possession that the church not only manifests itself, but is perpetuated and enlarged as the kingdom of God through God’s own doings. It is in and through the missional church that the eternal touches time, the unseen touches the seen, grace touches nature. The application of redemption

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then begins not with the wave of a spiritual wand, nor with mere edicts pronounced from the sky, but rather with recognizable physical contact points that begin with the Lord’s great commissioning. The end result, of course, is God working through particular people in a particular office employing particular means to accomplish particular ends—the making of disciples and the discipling of Christians. So far from being a disembodied religion, a spirituality of the interior, the risen King Jesus establishes the proclamation and application of his accomplished redemption through men ordained to stand in his stead to set the church in motion. The church is easily recognized by Word and Sacrament ministry purposed to this three-pronged end: the ingathering of the elect (through preaching and baptism); the sanctification of the baptized (through catechesis, absolution, and Holy Communion); and the glorification of God since he, ultimately, is the doer of these things. ■

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

Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralistic Age (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 128–29.

2Robert J. Scrudieri, The Apostolic Church: One, Holy, Catholic and Missionary (Chino, CA: Lutheran Society for Missiology, 1995), 9.

3Scrudieri, 11.

4David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in the Theology of Mission (Mary Knoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 390ff.

5See my “William Perkins: Theatrum Salutis and Preparationism,” 1997 MTh Dissertation, University of Edinburgh.

6See Kevin Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 445ff.

7Peter Brunner, Worship in the Name of Jesus, trans. M. H. Bertram (St Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1968), 124.

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

THE LATEST IDEAS SWEEPING THE LAND…

Formed and Reformed

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n Turning Back the Darkness, prolific author Richard Phillips sets

blessedness by way of divine grace, deformation divides and leads to conforth a biblical theological proposal that emerges from a “for- demnation by way of sin. But then comes the divine mandate to reform. mation-deformation-reformation” pattern characteristic of the Reformation is God’s prophetic word to his people that elicits repentance Bible’s total narrative. and engenders faithfulness. Once formed, God’s peoThough the conple need his powerful Word and Holy Spirit to content is articulated tinually reform. Obviously, the call to reformation has with an unapologetiimplications for all the inhabitants of the earth, but cally Reformed slant God’s principal intention is for this pattern to be an in(leaning as it does on house discussion. And so does Phillips. The Lord is the paradigms of covaddressing his people, the people of the covenant enant theology, as whom he formed and calls to reform, not just in bibwell as a select group lical times but all times. Unfortunately, however, the of Calvinist thinkers), Sacraments never once make it into the discussion. nonetheless the agenda This gives the impression that, apparently for Phillips, here is a faithful witthe Sacraments have little to do with the formation ness to an established (holy baptism) or the reformation (holy absolution and undeniable bibliand Holy Communion) of God’s people. This is either cal structure recapitua theological omission on the part of the author (and lated at key junctions his editors), or a conspicuous and unwelcome conin redemptive history. cession to broader evangelicalism that detracts from Turning Back the As such, a broader the value of the book as a whole. Word and Sacrament Darkness: The Biblical spectrum of evangelministry is crucial for biblical reformation.

Pattern of Reformation ical and confessional As his second point, Phillips wants his readers to see

by Richard D. Phillips readers will profit that the pattern of “formation-deformation-reforCrossway Books, 2002 from this method for mation” is not merely the fingerprint of God’s activity 192 pages (paperback), $15.99 biblical theology. Bebut also an expression of his character. To form and sides affirming exegereform, create and recreate, make new and renew, sis (reading out of Scripture) instead of isogesis and to generate and regenerate is revelatory of God (reading into Scripture), it lends itself toward a carehimself. In this pattern God makes himself known. And ful distinction between law and gospel, as well as if he is revealed through his Word and work in this justification and sanctification. way, then his people are to replicate his Word and Phillips lobbies for three important points throughwork, since they themselves have been re-formed in out the book, and he does so effectively. First, he the image of God through the work of Jesus Christ. In commends the aforementioned biblical pattern as a short, what is in God concerning these principles of formethod for understanding the Bible’s many themes. mation and reformation is now in his people: hence, Formation always initiates the model precisely the author’s third point—the timeless divine mandate because God is the creator, the sovereign active agent to reform not just among the Old Covenant people of who forms a people for himself. God speaks and it is God but also the New Covenant people of God. done—something new and wonderful is formed. But The range of biblical evidence for the formationformation is followed by the human response—defordeformation-reformation pattern exemplifies that it is mation: “An abandonment of those commands and not an isogetical imposition on a scant selection of principles established by God in the forming of His texts, but sound exegesis spanning both testaments, people” (19). Whereas formation unites and leads to with paradigmatic presence from the Exodus event to J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 1 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 3 7

Christ’s seven letters to the churches within John’s Apocalypse.

Even though Turning Back the Darkness was originally released nearly a decade ago, it is to be recommended for its refreshing focus on Bible study. Phillips rarely strays from the task at hand by keeping the conversation within Scripture and exercising restraint from the temptation to over-apply the pattern to epochs in church history. Phillips has given us a reminder that God’s call to the church for reformation remains unabated until Christ himself actuates an irreversible state of affairs upon his Parousia. Until then, the pattern of formation-deformation-reformation holds true.

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

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

by Thomas S. Kidd Yale University Press, 2009 416 pages (paperback), $22.00 In 1982, the Yale University historian of colonial America, Jon Butler, wrote a provocative article on the First Great Awakening and called the colonial revivals “an interpretive fiction.” His subject was less the eighteenth century than the particular efforts of nineteenth-century American pastors to construct a narrative of awakenings led by Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield as a “great” event in the advent of the United States. Butler noted that participants and advocates of the revivals did not describe them as “great.” But he was less concerned with how ministers and evangelists understood the events than with the way “Great Awakening” functioned among academic historians. He complained that scholars, despite the want of a comprehensive study, continued to use the “Great Awakening” to explain colonial America.

This usage, Butler argued, “distorts the extent, nature, 38 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

and cohesion of the revivals that did exist…encourages unwarranted claims for their effects on colonial society, and exaggerates their influence on the coming and character of the American Revolution.”

Although this point had particular bearing on the study of colonial society, it was also pertinent for church historians who had also taken on slim evidence the reality of a “First Great Awakening” and employed it in the standard narrative of American Christianity.

Almost twenty-five years later, Thomas Kidd has taken up Butler’s challenge. His book is a comprehensive history of the colonial revivals that later evangelicals and historians would coin the “Great Awakening.” It begins in the eighteenth century with the first instances of quickening among New England Puritans, who lamented the coldness and torpor of their churches. It extends through the revivals of the 1720s and 1730s that began to shape hopes for greater vigor and faithfulness in the church. Kidd’s narrative continues with the arrival of George Whitefield and the phenomenon of his celebrity and work in promoting awakenings in the English-speaking world on both sides of the Atlantic. The story even traces ongoing occasions of new births and earnestness in the 1760s, 1770s, and 1780s among Southern colonists as well as those who would form the provinces of Canada. Kidd leaves the impression that the greatness of this awakening was its regional scope (from South Carolina to Nova Scotia) and duration (throughout the entire century). He also argues that the nineteenth-century Second “Great” Awakening was really an extension of the First. Perhaps to complete his response to Butler, Kidd even includes a chapter on the American Revolution in which, though lining up on both sides of the war for independence, he argues that evangelicals shared important affinities with the language and rhetoric of liberty.

One last attribute of the colonial Awakenings’ greatness was the part they played in forming the evangelical movement. According to Kidd, “The Great Awakening can be acknowledged as ‘great’ because it produced the evangelical movement.”

To quibble with such a detailed and comprehensive account would seem foolish, but Kidd’s narrative may leave readers wondering about the Awakenings’ greatness. One reason is that the Great Awakening, despite Kidd’s efforts, lacks a unified narrative. The book reads like a collection of vignettes: a revival in Northampton, Massachusetts; another a few years later in Philadelphia; and then still more a little later in Virginia. In other words, Kidd does not explain why he connects these various “awakenings” so that they add up to a single “great” one. In some ways, this is

the perennial debate among historians; “lumpers” link events together into one big episode, while “splitters” stress the particularity of events. Kidd clearly falls on the side of the lumpers. What would have helped Kidd’s purposes would be the discovery of an agency or institution, say, the Great Awakening Fellowship of North America, with paid employees, membership statistics, and official publications. But no such entity existed during the First Great Awakening. It was a kaleidoscopic affair, with one evangelist burning brightly here, church controversies smoldering there, and periods of brisk sales for revivalists’ journals and books all over the place. Add all these up and the total may be a Great Awakening. But since Kidd is writing for an academic audience and cannot invoke the Holy Spirit to explain the awakenings, his unspecified criteria for construing these revivals as “great” are either his own historical judgment (arbitrary though they may be), or the conventions of an earlier group of church historians who wrote and lectured about the revivals of colonial North America as “great” (and which prompted Butler’s dissent in the first place).

Directly related to criteria of greatness is Kidd’s description of evangelicalism as a “movement.” To place all instances of awakening in the category of movement is to do exactly what Butler faulted historians for doing—namely, constructing rather than describing a reality. This may seem like a point of pedantry, but the idea of movement does suggest membership and rules for inclusion, institutions, designated leadership, and formal lines of communication. Granted, colonial society was not blessed with the structures for associational life that would come with political and economic development. But the colonies did have churches, and the revivals took place independent of ecclesiastical oversight. In fact, they generated great opposition from church leaders, whether clergy in the ecclesiastical establishment in Massachusetts or pastors in voluntary communions such as the infant American Presbyterian church. If the colonial revivals did have an institution, it was George Whitefield—a celebrity whose movements and writings, at least for a time, bound the cause of revival together. But buying Whitefield’s journals or going to hear him preach was not the same as taking vows and joining a church. The difficulty here is akin to the phenomenon of Red Sox Nation; a fan of the Boston baseball franchise may be a member of such a regime, but it is hardly an association of persons with real lines of accountability or membership privileges.

The oddity of calling evangelicalism a movement pervades Kidd’s account, unintentionally to be sure.

For instance, the author grants that evangelicals exhibited great variety, and he explores these differences. He

distinguishes among the moderate revivalists (e.g., Jonathan Edwards) and the radicals (e.g., John Davenport), and even the radicals who became moderate (e.g., Gilbert Tennent). This difference concerned whether the work of the Spirit granted evangelists and converts freedom from norms of decorum and civility; in some cases, evangelists flouted ecclesiastical rules, and converts experienced trances or fainting spells that bordered on fanaticism. Kidd’s rendering of these conflicts generally casts the moderates as having the better arguments and the basis for the evangelical “movement.” In fact, his later chapters on the revivals of the 1760s suggest that the radicals won, since the later awakenings lacked the moderation for which those like Edwards argued. This leads to the question of whether evangelicalism, if it is a movement, is fundamentally radical and so inherently unstable.

Another instance of evangelical diversity was the question of whether to support the War for Independence. Kidd sensibly presents the diversity of evangelical responses, both patriot and loyalist. He also concedes that the political diversity among the converted and revivalists “highlights the problems with interpreting early American evangelicalism as a unified cohort.” But to call evangelicalism a movement does suggest a measure of unity that Kidd’s narrative cannot support, other than the author’s own attempt to tie together these disparate and fissiparous instances of awakening.

One interpretive strategy available to Kidd for yielding a measure of unity among the colonial revivals would have been to link this experiential Protestantism to Puritanism. In particular, the revivals and conversions associated with them bear many of the fingerprints of New England Puritan demands for experiential narratives of personal awakening before qualifying for church membership. On top of this, a strain of Puritanism, practical divinity, arose in the late sixteenth century, characterized by personal holiness and earnest commitment. Having written a first book on New England Puritanism, Kidd is well equipped to trace these lines of development. But instead of looking back to English Puritanism and German Pietism, his gaze in this book turns to the twentieth century.

This may have been the advice of editors who hoped for a contemporary readership that would want to read about its historical origins. But if Kidd had considered the way that Puritan practical divinity lost unity as a movement by neglecting the institutional church in pursuit of the authentic and intense experience, he might have avoided the problems that attend the language of “movement.” (continued on page 49) J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 39

An Interview with Graeme Goldsworthy

Finding the Gospel in the Whole Bible Graeme Goldsworthy, a now-retired lecturer in Old Testament, biblical theology, and hermeneutics at Moore Theological College in Sydney, Australia, is the author of many books, including the popular According to Plan: The Unfolding Revelation of God in the Bible (IVP Academic, 2002) —one of the best and most accessible overviews of the Bible’s basic plot. His latest is Gospel-Centered Hermeneutics: Foundations and Principles of Evangelical Biblical Interpretation (IVP Academic, 2010).

We hear wonderful things about the Sydney diocese and the witness of Reformation Christianity in Australia through many of the graduates of Moore College. Do you think it takes effort to get a good understanding of the Bible, or is it a book you can just pick up and basically understand without any effort?

That’s a complicated question.

The Bible is not uniformly simple; I think that’s easy to demonstrate—just show people one part and show people another part. Obviously, stories are easy to understand. The narrative areas are much easier to understand in the sense of getting the thread of the story. But it’s putting it all together that takes some guidance and help. Now, I have said that my own personal experience is that if you can show people a fairly simple schema of how the whole Bible fits together, it really brings them alive to it. But it does take some effort.

Do you think part of our problem is that just as worship in many of our churches today is 4 0 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

merely entertaining and doesn’t demand very much, we also don’t encourage Christians as much today to become serious readers? That we only offer shallow studies about God’s will for our finances or our marriage and so forth, and that we don’t really go to the Bible for how it’s meant to be read?

Once again, it’s very hard to generalize there. My wife and I are at the moment attending a little church, in the state bordering Queensland, which we stopped at when we moved up onto the Gold Coast, because the preacher was an expository preacher. He’s very demanding in how people should read the Bible, and I share his approach.

But many preachers aren’t, and in many churches Bible reading just doesn’t happen the way it should. You just hope and pray that if you train your people and your clergy well, they will go out and stick by what they’re being taught: that is, to get people reading the Bible properly.

Reading the Bible properly, as you point out in all of your

books, begins with understanding the plot. It’s all connected from Genesis to Revelation, despite the diversity and twists and turns and different genres. There’s one unfolding plot, a history of redemption. One great example that you explore is the kingdom of God. Today, the “kingdom of God” idea is exploited for all sorts of enterprises. What would you say, as an example, of how only within the plot it makes sense?

This goes back to my first publication, Gospel and Kingdom, where I was trying to help people understand what to do with the Old Testament as Christians, and I looked for a concept that sort of bound it all together.

And although the term “kingdom of God”—and I’ve been criticized for this—doesn’t appear in the Old Testament (it explains God’s kingship and kingdoms and so on, but not the phrase “the kingdom of God” like you get in the New Testament), the concept is there. So I attempted to derive a concept that would encompass the whole progression of biblical revelation, and I, for better or for worse, put it under the sense of God’s people in God’s place under God’s rule. I maintain this sort of reductionist approach, which is a bit like an X-ray photo: you’ve got to put the meat

onto the bones, but the bones, nevertheless, are important for understanding the structure.

I’ve tried to help people understand how the concept of God ruling over his people in the place that he makes for them is the ongoing theme of the Bible, from beginning to end.

A lot of people, when they pick up the Bible, start reading where they open it. But in doing this, they may tend to think it’s merely a collection of timeless wisdom or truths.

How important is it for us to understand the history of redemption and the progress of revelation in order to interpret the particular passages we’re reading in light of the history of revelation?

I think it’s absolutely vital. At a meeting once, I said that nobody starts reading the Bible by opening up at Genesis 1 and reading through until suddenly light dawns when they get to the Gospels. A young fellow in the front row put his hand up and said, “I got converted like that.” I responded, “Well, there’s one in every crowd.”

But what I try to do when I’m asked to talk about the unity of the Bible and so on is to say: we begin by becoming Christians; it’s our conversion and our faith in Jesus Christ that is at the center of it all, so let’s go there. I like to start them off with passages such as the postresurrection appearance of Jesus in Luke 24, where he points out that the whole of the Old Testament is about him.

You can look at passages like John 5 where Jesus says to the Jewish leaders, if you believed Moses, you’d believe me, because he wrote about me.

It’s very clear from the way the New Testament sets it all

out. You can go to Stephen’s apology in Acts 7 where he gives a progressive account from Abraham through to the present day. Peter does it in his Pentecost sermon, Paul does it in Acts 13, and so on. This redemptive history thing is obviously the structure the apostles learned from Jesus.

And if that’s the way they do it, then essentially that’s the way we need to do it. So my approach is to say: Look, as Christians we read the Old Testament and we need the Old Testament to understand it in relationship to the gospel, because that’s what Jesus and the apostles teach us to do.

So we should interpret the Old Testament the way the apostles did.

Broadly speaking, yes. I know that some would say that’s impossible to do, but it seems to me if we don’t get our approach to the Old Testament from Jesus and the apostles, where do we get it from? Jesus is God’s final word and final authority to us, so he should be the one who dictates to us how the Old Testament is to be read.

In American evangelicalism, a lot of us grew up with a sort of Aesop’s Fables approach to the Old Testament. We didn’t quite know what to do with it or how to read it with Christ at the center. So, many of us go to the Old Testament for character studies: how to be a Joshua, how to dare to be a Daniel, how to fight the Goliaths in our lives, and so forth. What do you say to that approach to reading the Old Testament?

It’s not true to the way the New Testament deals with the Old Testament. Let’s read the Old Testament as Christians.

I’ve tried to point this out in According to Plan in the introductory chapters. As Christians we come to the Old Testament and read it through Christian eyes. Christian eyes are formed by what Jesus says and does in the Gospels and by what his apostles say and do in their writings and their preaching, and that the Old Testament is a book that testifies to Christ.

How does a Christian grow as a Christian, become more mature as a Christian? By becoming more like Christ— not by becoming more like David, Abraham, or Moses. So if these characters in the Old Testament are part of the way God forms us as Christians, then it must be by the way they help us to understand who and what Christ is and what he did.

Even by their failures, by pointing beyond themselves to Christ.

Absolutely. I think the failures in the Old Testament are addressed by the gospel. The failures of Israel’s history lead it to the invasion under judgment with the exile and so on, and we see at the cross the severity of being in rebellion against God and not obeying his will. There the wrath of God is visited on the one who knew no sin and was made to become sin for us. Once again, it’s the gospel that shapes our understanding of what’s going on in the Old Testament.

It’s tough enough when the gospel is obscured by an individualistic moralism, but what happens when we go to the Old Testament—especially to the book of Joshua, for example—and look at the holy war that God called Israel to wage

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against the enemies of God? You have on the right those who invoke those passages today for our enemies, whoever they may be; and those on the left who say this represents an immoral God we can’t believe in—which is different from Jesus meek and mild.

Either we have to deny those “texts of terror,” or they are timeless principles we can invoke today for the United States or Australia or the West and so forth. Is there a danger in draining the Old Testament of its historical ebb and flow, and is the difference between the relationship between Israel and God and the relationship between nations today and God an important factor in the way we interpret the Old Testament passages?

Absolutely, and here again I think you have to come back to the redemptive history structure of the Bible. I remember a passage in a book by John Bright, my supervisor at Union Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. In it he points out that many people are offended, that their Christian consciences are offended, by such stories as these in the Old Testament.

But, he says, I wonder why Jesus’ conscience wasn’t likewise offended by them? Why is it that Jesus and the apostles don’t have that kind of hangup about those stories that people have today? The answer I think lies in the progressive nature of revelation and where these stories fit into the scheme of things. The book of Joshua isn’t just the story of a people who are winning a war against enemies. It’s the story of God bringing people into the fulfillment of his promise that he made to Abraham. If you don’t put it in that covenantal con4 2 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

text, and the restoration of the sanctuary of God in the Promised Land and so on, then you are left with that dilemma.

What do you mean when you say that every Christian is a theologian?

I suppose I’m betraying my Calvinism here. As Calvin said, every human being, by virtue of being created in the image of God, has a sensus divinitatis, a sense of deity. We are all religious people. Being a human being means we are religious people. And even an atheist who wants to deny that is making a God statement. Of course, the closer application of this is that you get the Christian who says, “I’m no theologian, but…” and then launches off into a theological exposition. By saying “I’m no theologian,” what they’re trying to do is just say, “You can’t criticize me. You’re a theologian, but I’m not.” But we’re all theologians; it’s just that some are better theologians than others.

What is biblical theology and how does it relate to systematic theology?

I’ve described biblical theology in various ways. A biblical scholar looks at the way a particular book or corpus in the Bible, or even a section of a book, unfolds its theological message. Then the question is: If the Bible is the one Word of the one God about the one way of salvation through the one Savior Jesus Christ, how do all these different parts hold together? In doing biblical theology, you do a close study of your text, but you’ve not answered the question, “What is all this about?” until you’ve put it into its wider context.

And that wider context is the paragraph of the verse, the chapter of the paragraph, the book the chapter is in, and then the entire canon of the whole of Scripture—because there is one message that leads us to Jesus Christ. My way of describing biblical theology is: It’s a study of the Bible that enables us to show how every text in the Bible relates to every other text. And since Jesus is at the heart of it, you can rephrase that as: Biblical theology is the study of the Bible, which shows us how every text of the Bible relates to Jesus Christ.

Why do you think our way of interpreting all of Scripture should be gospel-centered and Christ-centered?

I’ve sometimes referred to what Paul says in 1 Timothy 2:5: There is one God and there is one mediator between God and mankind, Christ Jesus the man, or the man Christ Jesus.

Now I know he uses that in a slightly different context. But the principle, it seems to me, is the principle you find throughout the New Testament—which is that Jesus Christ is the mediator. When you look at the great cosmic passages such as Colossians—that all things were created in him and through him and for him— then it’s inescapable: It’s not just every part of the Bible but every part in this universe that God has made that finds its ultimate meaning in reference to Jesus Christ. He is the mediator of all meaning. If that is so, then it is impossible to find the real heart of the meaning of any passage of the Bible if you have done it without reference to who Jesus is and what he came to do.

Do you think we get that right if we interpret the Bible in a Christ-centered way, if we think of him primarily in terms of an example or a prototype for a humanity or an individual who is pious—that is, the “What Would Jesus Do?” approach?

The “What Would Jesus Do?” approach, I think, is misplaced because what it tries to do is to leave Jesus here sort of as the example walking around the world. He doesn’t do that anymore. If you follow the redemptive history structure, you will see that the heart of it all is the death and resurrection of Jesus—and the resurrection of Jesus, of course, includes his ascension to the right hand of God from where he rules. That comes out loud and clear in the apostolic preaching. The punch line in Peter’s Pentecost sermon was to let all of Israel know that God has made Jesus both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom they crucified. That provides a very different framework from the sort of tame “What would Jesus Do?”—let’s try to think about the ethics of Jesus. Those Jewish people who were listening to Peter were cut to the quick. This is the only evangelistic sermon where the appeal came from the congregation, “What must we do?”

You write a good deal about how the gospel has been eclipsed in various traditions throughout history. You address this especially in your latest book, Gospel-Centered Hermeneutics. How do you think the gospel-centered hermeneutic has been eclipsed in contemporary evangelicalism?

Contemporary evangelicalism is a many-colored beast in some ways. It’s a very diverse thing, and once again, I can only speak from my own experience of it. But I think a lot of the problem with modern evangelicalism is that it doesn’t learn from history. One of the reasons I put that second section in my book on hermeneutics about the eclipse of the gospel and these various things was to just show that we are so ready to allow alien ways of thinking. I suppose this is part of the human problem—even when people get converted, their mindsets also need converting. Paul says this in Romans 12: Don’t be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

John Stott wrote a little book called Your Mind Matters. I’ve recently received a manuscript of a book by a gentleman, who teaches at Union University in Tennessee, about the Christian mind and how the gospel affects the way Christians think. So often, particularly evangelical Christians grow up with a level of feeling and being carried along by the enthusiasm of the subcultural group, rather than really coming to grips with what the gospel implies for the way we think. What I’ve tried to do in my book is show that the common denominator is the allowing of alien philosophical views or mindsets or worldviews to invade the gospel framework that was adopted when we became Christians and therefore distorts it.

Could you give us some examples of that in modern evangelicalism?

I was talking to our home

group last night, and I was reading a chapter from a little book by Jim Packer on concise theology. We were talking about the effectual call of the Spirit of God. I suppose the deep divide in evangelicalism is between the more Arminian position and the more Calvinistic position. As a convinced Calvinist, I say that Arminianism has been affected by nonbiblical ways of thinking, concepts of freedom and free will and so on, which I just don’t find in the Bible. You can probably find philosophical names from these, and I suppose it goes back to Pelagianism that the great Augustine had to deal with in the early fifth century.

You also talk about quietism and Docetism. These are very big words from the history of theology. Could you unpack those terms a little bit?

I use the word “quietism” probably not in the full technical sense, but there has been in evangelical circles for some time this view that you sort of “let go and let God.” Somebody once said to me, “Isn’t it marvelous that I don’t have to make any decisions?” I asked, “What are you talking about?”

This person responded, “The Holy Spirit makes my decisions for me.” I then said, “Well, that’s very interesting. I don’t think the Holy Spirit makes my decisions for me. He might guide me, but I don’t expect him to make decisions and wear them.” I think that’s what the wisdom literature’s all about.

Quietism was in one of the holiness movements, and there was one particular writer who said that we are just a suit of clothes that Jesus wears. I

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The authority of the Bible must operate in the way the Bible is, not in the way we would like it to be or in the way our subculture has taught us that it is. remember a colleague of mine saying, “Who commits the next sin?” It’s that sort of thing that takes away from us the responsibility we have. That kind of quietism is “docetic,” which is the term in its christological sense where Jesus was seen as just divine spirit and not human. A docetic Christian is one who allows human responsibility to be cancelled out in favor of this Spirit-led idea that we don’t do anything and it’s all of the Spirit of God. You can get docetic Christians with their docetic Bible: a person who opens their Bible at a whim, sticks a pin in the page, and that’s God’s guidance.

Whatever the verse means to you, you’re expected to know what it means in its context. So what you’ve done is you’ve taken away the humanity of the Bible. There is an analogy between the humanity of Christ and the humanity of the Bible.

You clearly address the whole problem of reducing Jesus to a moral example in the hermeneutics of Protestant liberalism. Do you see any evidence of that in broader evangelical circles today?

Christian Smith, a sociologist at Notre Dame, has pointed out that even in evangelical circles the theology of Oprah seems to be seeping in wherever good sound teaching hasn’t been as present, and now we have a whole generation of evangelicals who are used to going to the Bible to find out 4 4 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

how they can be happier, healthier, wealthier, better parents, nicer friends, and how to live their best life now.

I think in the end it undermines what you mean by “evangelical.” The definition of the term is wide open once you get to that point. While I suppose most of us would see the common denominator in the way people define “evangelicalism” in terms of the authority of the Bible if that authority is not allowed to operate. The authority of the Bible must operate in the way the Bible is, not in the way we would like it to be or in the way our subculture has taught us that it is.

When my wife and I started going to this little church, somebody mentioned that there were some Bible reading notes at the back, so my wife grabbed one and brought it home. I was appalled to find that on Monday, you read a passage out of the Psalms, and on Tuesday, you read one out of 1 Kings, and on Wednesday, you read a passage out of Luke’s Gospel, and there was no rhyme or reason. It was just every day’s happy thought.

That sort of thing might go under the guise of evangelicalism, but the term “evangelical” doesn’t have any meaning at all if it’s come to that. We have to allow the Bible to be what it is.

When we say that the whole Bible is about Christ, a lot of people ask about Proverbs.

What about wisdom literature? How do you find Christ

there? What do you tell people about a book like Proverbs?

I’ve written two books on this, and I’ve done the Bible study notes on Proverbs in the Reformation Study Bible; but my book Gospel and Wisdom, which was actually the third book I had published, grew out of my study when I spent three years at Union Seminary in Virginia looking at the wisdom literature. I did my doctoral dissertation on it, and I did a master’s dissertation on it. And, of course, my interest is exactly that question. I don’t think it’s really a problem—not the sort of problem that many biblical theologians have said it is. The problem with the wisdom literature, according to many biblical theologians, is that it doesn’t talk about the covenant; it doesn’t show any sort of redemptive history framework within the book of Proverbs or within the book of Ecclesiastes.

What they forget is that you’ve got a whole pericope in 1 Kings 3–10, where the wisdom literature in Proverbs and the Song of Songs and parables, and all those sorts of things, are tied in very neatly to the covenant fulfillment as expressed in Solomon’s first part of his reign—in the building of the temple, and in the way the Gentiles, such as the Queen of Sheba, come to visit him. Then, of course, when you get to the New Testament—particularly to a passage like 1 Corinthians 1 where Christ is the wisdom of God, or 1 Corinthians 1:30 where God has made him to be our wisdom—then you ask yourself: What does it mean for Christ to be our wisdom? You go back to Proverbs, and you find that the rubric, the ruling principle for

the whole collection, has been put together under Proverbs 1:7: it is the fear of Yahweh; that is, the reverent submission to the God who has revealed himself as Yahweh. This is the covenant God. The idea that the wisdom literature has no link to the covenant and to redemptive history, I think, is nonsense. It’s in the narrative and it’s in the Gospels; it’s in the New Testament. My answer to the general question of what to do with Proverbs is that you learn to understand what Proverbs is teaching you, which is to use the brains that God has given you, to make responsible decisions, all the time knowing that when you do make a real mistake, God has made Christ to be our wisdom, and our full wisdom at times, because sometimes we become utterly foolish. We make some terrible decisions, even with the best of intentions. Our wisdom has been justified by Christ who is our wisdom. Set the whole thing into a gospel framework.

In other words, we shouldn’t at all be afraid of the genuine moral wisdom we find in Proverbs, and we should unpack that wisdom for living but also not fail to interpret it within, as you say, a gospel framework. Otherwise, it becomes one of those thoughts that eventually weigh us down until we finally feel as if this isn’t a life we can live at all.

Yes, and I think some people treat it as sort of the small print of the Sinai Law, which it isn’t.

In my view, it’s very different from the law. The law is that God said to Israel what it meant to be the people of God. It is related, obviously. But one of those aspects of living as the

people of God is not obeying individual laws, but learning what is in life and how to respond to it. Hence in Proverbs you get two apparently quite contradictory sentences next to one another, such as, “Answer not a fool according to his wisdom, lest you become like him,” and then, “Answer a fool according to his folly lest he become wise in his own eyes.”

Now, which one do you do? It seems to me what this is teaching us is that you will find yourself in a situation where somebody is mouthing off like an idiot, and you ask yourself, given the context that I’m in, is this one of those situations where I ought to rebuke the man, or is it one where I just walk away from it? Part of being wise is learning how to do that.

It’s not so much about timeless principles that can be applied in exactly every way and every instance, but rather your point earlier: think for yourself; apply the wisdom God gave all human beings, not just Jews, to concrete specific circumstances.

Yes, most Old Testament scholars recognize that part of the book of Proverbs was taken from the Egyptian Amenemope. Now, how has it been baptized? There are a couple of references to Yahweh in that section, but it comes under the general rubric that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge and that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. What do we do as Christians? We see that the fear of the Lord translates, when you get to the New Testament, to faith in Jesus Christ. So you have the clearer light of the gospel to help you to decide

what the wise thing to do is.

Proverbs tells us that the world we live in is a world in which, despite human sin, God in his grace has maintained a certain orderliness that we can learn to understand and to live according to.

Lutheran Missions (continued from page 9) sion work in his book, Mission from the Cross: The Lutheran Theology of Mission (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2009).

13Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

14See http://religions.pewforum. org/pdf/table-ethnicity-bytradition.pdf (accessed 25 October 2010).

15John B. Cobb, “Do Oldline Churches Have a Future?” http:// www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp? title=292 (accessed 25 October 2010): “California reflects in extreme form what the nation as a whole is becoming. In California the population grows, and some forms of Christianity flourish, but the oldline denominations shrink and age.

Apparently they were deeply meaningful to my generation, less so to our children, and almost off the map of real options for our grandchildren. Looking with California eyes at the South and the Midwest, where these denominations continue to flourish, one sees there also the seeds of decay.”

16Mark Noll, “The Lutheran Difference,” First Things 20 (February 1992): 31–40, http://www.leaderu. com/ftissues/ ft9202/articles/noll. html (accessed 25 October 2010).

17WA 15:714.35ff., in Öberg, 133–34.

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The Kingdom of Christ: The New Evangelical Perspective

By Russell D. Moore Crossway, 2004 320 pages (paperback), $19.99 Jesus declared that “all authority on heaven and earth” had been given to him. He also promised to his disciples—the church—“Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt.

28:18–20). Exactly how his authority over all things— heaven and earth—relates to the life of the church has proven to be a difficult and debated question. Indeed, in a time and place where neo-Gnosticism beckons as a temptation peddled by those on the left and the right, thinking about the kingdom of God should become an even more important calling for churches. It calls us to think about a number of seeming polarities: the now and the not yet, the spiritual and the earthly, the churchly and the cultural. In the midst of such vociferous debates, Russell Moore’s The Kingdom of Christ: The New Evangelical Perspective celebrates a growing consensus about the kingdom of God. The book began as a doctoral dissertation at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and it has been reissued by Crossway Books. It is clearly written and includes almost one hundred pages of endnotes (many of which are fascinating). It is thoroughly documented and well organized.

Evangelicals have taken different approaches over the years, relating the kingdom of God to the church in a variety of ways: classic dispensationalism, progressive dispensationalism, covenant theology, “modified” covenant theology, and so forth. In four main chapters, Moore charts a historical narrative, beginning with Carl F. H. Henry’s influence and moving to consider the development of an eschatological consensus among evangelicals in the latter part of the twentieth century. He notes the persistence of some critics, it must be said, so it might be more accurate to speak of an eschatological center affirmed by many otherwise diverse evangelicals and denied by some on more extreme ends of these various constituencies.

Moore’s historical analysis is fascinating, and his 4 6 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

basic survey of various positions is consistently accurate and illuminating. Most interestingly—I suspect surprising to most readers—Moore rehabilitates the theology of Carl Henry as thoroughly eschatological in character. “Henry’s Uneasy Conscience waded into the Kingdom debate as an incipient call for a new consensus, one that was a break from the Kingdom concept of classical dispensationalism and also from the spiritual understanding of many covenant theologians” (22). Henry believed that the kingdom of God was a fundamental concept, about which disagreement led to an inchoate approach by evangelicals to engaging culture and politics (chapter 1).

The historical analysis manifests a clear centrism shaping theological positions across the evangelical spectrum. Three issues have been rethought based on the work of Henry and others: eschatology, soteriology, and ecclesiology. Each doctrine relates to the biblical theme of the kingdom of God. Thanks in large part to the work of George Eldon Ladd, most evangelicals now appreciate the inaugurated understanding of the arrival of the kingdom: already established, not yet fully consummated. Jesus has decisively routed the enemy, but he has not yet completely defeated his foes. So the timing of the kingdom’s arrival is now and not yet (chapter 2). Ladd also shaped the evangelical affirmation of the holistic nature of the kingdom of God (and of salvation itself), largely because he understood the kingdom as shaped

by Jesus (56). If the sovereign is a spiritual, bodily, relational being, the kingdom also permeates these aspects of existence. So the shape of the kingdom and the nature of Christian salvation must be holistic (chapter 3). The third area to which Ladd brought clarity was in the relationship of the kingdom to the church. In his view, the kingdom is larger than the church and cannot be identified with it, but the church is the outpost of the kingdom and serves as a microcosm of what is to come. Indeed, it is helpful to think of the church’s celebration of the Lord’s Supper as a foretaste and microcosm of the great wedding feast of the lamb to be shared someday in the New Jerusalem. Ladd and the evangelical consensus believe the church is critical to the kingdom, but they do not equate the church and the kingdom (chapter 4). So a new center has emerged on these issues: the now and the not yet, the spiritual and the earthly, the churchly and the cultural.

In three ways, then, an evangelical consensus or center has emerged. Of course, there are still divisions within evangelicalism over the kingdom itself and about engaging politics. Moore takes sides on some of

these issues, and he largely avoids discussion of some others. He identifies with the premillennial position (64) and seems to favor progressive dispensationalists (or at least he seems to speak most glowingly of them: see 65). He raises the importance of ecclesiological issues for thinking about the kingdom, and here he takes a strong baptistic tact. He argues that the earlier evangelical consensus wrongly regarded ecclesiological and sacramental (a word he does not use) issues as minor. He says they do matter. The biggest weakness in the book relates to this discussion. He is surely right that the doctrine of the church matters—differences here relate to divergences elsewhere. One key difference worth exploring would be the differing notions of the church’s corporate responsibility in engaging cultural spheres of activity. It is surprising how little space is given to consideration of “two kingdom” versus neo-Calvinist approaches here.

Should churches speak to particular policies in politics (e.g., a health-care bill or a particular war strategy) or in family life (e.g., where to educate children)? Should churches speak only about principles? Do the sovereignty of God over all creation and the eventual redemption of the heavens and the earth mean that the church qua church should speak to every nook and cranny of the cosmos? Will there be a single Christian answer to any of these questions? These issues matter greatly and deserve attention, and any evangelical analysis should make greater use of the reflection of Augustine and Luther, as well as note the wider spectrum of sociopolitical implications of evangelical centrism on eschatology, soteriology, and ecclesiology (e.g., contra the claim of page 175, American evangelicalism does not vote as one).

The book will be useful for thinking about eschatology and appreciating the developments within the last few decades. Indeed, it is encouraging to see progressive dispensationalists and modified covenant theologians reading the Bible cooperatively. Furthermore, Moore makes some crucial arguments regarding the primacy of regeneration for cultural engagement (111, 126–28). While many have erred in the direction of reducing the kingdom to a spiritual reality and others have erred in conflating this spiritual reality with social and political engagement, it would surely be a mistake to simply coordinate spiritual nurture with social engagement as if they are disconnected hobbies of Christians or discrete callings of the church.

Moore also makes wonderful use of some biblical scholarship that highlights the links between the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of salvation (96–102, 108): the Calvinistic wing of American evangelicalism has maintained (with Thomas Aquinas and others) that grace does not destroy but perfects nature.

Finally, Moore shows us how far progressive dispensationalism and modified covenant theology have come in reading the promises of the Old Testament in a nuanced fashion.

Moore tells us how we have come from very divisive battles between classic dispensationalists and some staunch covenant theologians to a centrist approach regarding inaugurated and holistic eschatology. As a young theologian, it helped me appreciate the great contributions of scholars in the past two generations (Henry and Ladd, Clowney and Gaffin).

As a Christian, it encourages me to expect more and more light to shine out of the King’s constitution.

Michael Allen (Ph.D., Wheaton College) is assistant professor of systematic theology at Knox Theological Seminary in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

By N. T. Wright HarperOne, 2008 352 pages (hardcover), $24.99 N. T. Wright’s book Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church is a running complaint about the dominance of fundamentalist and liberal approaches to death, the resurrection, the intermediate state, and the mission of the church.

Surprised by Hope is more polemical than insightful, too condescending to be comforting, and too dismissive of opposing views to be convincing. Surprised by Hope is not a book of comfort one can give to a grieving Christian. Nor does it offer the depth of insight into difficult biblical passages that we have come to expect from Bishop Wright. I am not usually of the mind that the tone of a book (its “feel”) is a suitable basis for a negative review. But in a book such as this—and I want to say this carefully—a book that purports to be about “hope,” the tone of the J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 47

book does matter. Prospective buyers need to know what they are getting. This book is a polemic, not a work of pastoral comfort.

My first encounter with Wright’s work was some years ago when I read Climax of the Covenant (1991). It was immediately apparent that he was a force with which to be reckoned. Would that all scholars write with such a persuasive wit and clarity! I devoured his “Christian Origins and the Question of God” trilogy: The New Testament and the People of God (1992), Jesus and the Victory of God (1996), and The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003). Wright’s powerful defense of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ made him a hero to many conservative evangelical scholars.

But the conservative embrace of Wright quickly went south as he had been simultaneously publishing his work on Paul. What Saint Paul Really Said (1997), his subsequent volume, Paul: A Fresh Perspective (2005), along with various essays, as well as his commentary on Romans (2002), revealed that Wright was also the leading spokesman for that movement widely identified as the New Perspective on Paul (NPP). Although Wright convinced many of his own version of the “New Perspective,” others openly challenged him, mounting a rigorous defense of the Reformation’s understanding of Paul. Critics of Wright argued that Paul was indeed addressing the question of how sinners were declared righteous before a holy God. The NPP failed, it was argued, because the “old perspective” on Paul makes much better sense of Paul’s letters.

While a review of Surprised by Hope is not the place to interact with Wright’s view of justification in any detail, this book repeats the most problematic formulations of his understanding of justification and the gospel. According to Wright, the doctrine of justification is not about how people “get saved” but about identifying those already numbered among the people of God (140). Wright complains that “although people often suppose that because Paul taught justification by faith, not works, there can be no room for a future judgment ‘according to works,’ this only shows how much some have radically misunderstood [Paul]” (139). This reviewer, apparently, is among them. The common NPP refrain resurfaces: I get in by faith, but I will be judged by my works. Wright sees no conflict in this formulation because the judge is not a “hard-hearted, arrogant, or vengeful tyrant, but the Man of Sorrows” (141). So, if I understand correctly, the “hope” of which Wright speaks is that the judge will not be as strict as I was previously led to believe.

Where does that leave me on the Day of Judgment if Christ’s merit is not enough to secure my final vindication? Without much hope.

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Wright defines the gospel as “the good news that God (the world’s creator) is at last becoming king, and that Jesus, whom this God raised from the dead, is the world’s true Lord” (226–27). Not a hint here that Jesus’ death removed God’s anger from sinners, or that the cross reconciled God to me, and me to God. For Wright, preaching the gospel is “the powerful announcement that God is God, that Jesus is Lord, that the powers of evil have been defeated, that God’s world has begun” (227). This is a truncated gospel indeed.

Surprised by Hope reveals a “new” N. T. Wright as well. By “new” I do not mean that Wright has changed his views on NPP or eschatology, but that Wright’s tone is different. Because Wright has been challenged so resolutely and so often, perhaps this explains the dismissive and defensive tone of Surprised

by Hope. This is problematic in a book that purposes to answer two critical questions: “What is the ultimate Christian hope?” and “What hope is there for change, rescue, transformation, new possibilities within the world in the present?” (5).

There is much of value in Surprised by Hope, especially in the first part of the book. Wright laments the influences of Plato and Dante on our thinking about death and resurrection (Part I). He directs us to see in Jesus’ bodily resurrection from the dead the dawn of the new creation. This fact not only establishes and frames a biblical view of hope (75), this is also the point at which the Christian faith challenges and threatens paganism (67). Wright offers a spirited defense of our Lord’s bodily resurrection, as well as a surgical decimation of those specious arguments raised against it (58–74).

In Part II, Wright defines the nature of Christian hope, rejecting the stress upon individualism (80), the utopian myth of progress (81), as well as the Gnostic preoccupation with the “spiritual” at the expense of creation (88). Wright identifies the goodness of creation (94), the reality of evil (94), and directs us to the redemption of the earth. Says Wright, “What I am proposing is that the New Testament image of future hope of the whole cosmos, grounded in the resurrection of Jesus, gives as coherent a picture as we need or could have of the future which is promised to us” (107).

Wright offers a number of admittedly speculative proposals about death, eternal punishment, and the second advent of Jesus Christ. His discussion of our Lord’s second advent is also vague and confusing— very un-Wright-like. After dismissing the preoccupation of North American Christians with the second coming (“the rapture,” 117–22), Wright discusses our Lord’s appearing. Wright contends that Jesus coming

on the clouds is an “upward” event (Jesus is being vindicated), not a “downward” event (his return in judgment, 125). After informing us what Paul doesn’t say in a number of verses that seem to say otherwise, Wright takes us to a dead end. “We must remind ourselves yet once more that all Christian language about the future is a set of signposts pointing into a mist” (132). But mist is not a basis for hope.

Wright concludes that when Jesus appears, “he will in fact be ‘appearing’ right where he presently is—not a long way away within our space-time world but in his own world, God’s world, the world we call heaven. This world is different from ours (earth) but intersects with it in countless ways, not least in the inner lives of Christians themselves” (135). No question, it is difficult to understand exactly how Christ will return. But Scripture says, “This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11). Wright cites this passage when discussing the ascension but ignores the critical point about Christ’s return. The signposts say much more than Wright acknowledges. One thing the signposts do clearly tell us is that Jesus will return in the same way he ascended, in the same body, complete with nail wounds and a scar from a Roman spear.

Wright’s discussion of Jesus as judge (145) contains many of the problematic comments regarding justification and the gospel cited above. Wright is insightful when discussing the resurrection of Jesus and the nature of the resurrection body. He rejects the notion of purgatory; and although he rejects conditional immortality (181), he nevertheless offers a highly speculative proposal regarding eternal punishment.

According to Wright, people suffer eternally, but they cease to be fully human (182–83).

Part III of Surprised by Hope is the most problematic section of the book—I learned more about Wright’s personal politics and cultural tastes than I did about the biblical basis for the mission of the church.

Throughout, the formerly politically active bishop presents his own political opinions as though these opinions self-evidently constitute the proper mission of the church.

The wittiness and insight that characterized Wright’s earlier books, and the material found in Parts I and II (to a lesser degree) give way to a quick dismissal of opposing views, followed by a boorish moralizing in Part III in which Wright sets us straight about things Christians ought to be doing, especially those readers who are Americans. Wright addresses justice (213–22), beauty (222–25), and evangelism (225–30), before closing the book with a discussion of how Christ’s resurrection should inform the mission

of the church, in terms of the Sacraments (271–76), prayer (276–80), Scripture (280–83), holiness (283– 85), and love (285–89). Space does not permit detailed discussion of these matters, but readers of Modern Reformation likely will not find Wright’s approach to these matters satisfactory or helpful.

One egregious example of Wright’s propensity to moralize must suffice. He expresses his heartfelt concern for developing world indebtedness, which he says is caused by the social Darwinism of Western capitalism (213–22). Wright draws an outlandish moral equivalency between capitalism and slavery and Nazism (217), followed by this caustic remark: “Reading the collected works of F. A. Hayek [author of the Road to Serfdom, a capitalist critique of socialism] in a comfortable chair in North America simply doesn’t address the moral questions of the twenty-first century” (218–19). I suppose that it doesn’t. I hope Wright would feel the same way about someone reading Keynes or Marcuse. Is Wright lamenting the fact that the hypothetical reader of Hayek wasn’t doing anything about the problems in the developing world? Or is the lament that the hypothetical reader was wasting his time reading a defender of capitalism?

Wright’s smug moralizing rings very hollow in a book that purports to “surprise” the reader with hope.

When it comes to the church’s mission, Wright’s politics, like my own, are pretty much irrelevant.

I was surprised, but not by hope. I was surprised by how easily and deftly Wright’s own political agenda was set forth as the proper basis for the church’s mission.

Kim Riddlebarger is pastor of Christ Reformed Church in Anaheim, California, and a cohost of the White Horse Inn radio program.

The Great Awakening (continued from page 39) Despite these deficiencies, Kidd’s book does make the valid point that contemporary evangelicalism’s roots are in the revivals of the colonial era. Whether they were great, radical, or revolutionary, this book provides valuable material for understanding the nature, genius, and weaknesses of born-again Protestantism.

D. G. Hart is visiting professor of history at Hillsdale College in Michigan.

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The Judaizing Calvin: Sixteenth-Century Debates over the Messianic Psalms

By G. Sujin Pak Oxford University Press, 2010 216 pages (hardcover), $65.00 Most readers of Modern Reformation are probably familiar with John Calvin’s commentaries on the Bible.

Many no doubt own the entire set and consult them regularly. A select few perhaps even read Calvin’s commentaries for daily devotionals.

From Calvin we learn to appreciate careful handling of the Scriptures and application for the Christian life. But many who are familiar with Calvin may not know just how groundbreaking his interpretations were in his day. They were so provocative that other Protestants accused him of aiding and abetting Jewish and Arian heresies with his commentary on the Psalms. It is from these allegations that G. Sujin Pak titles her book, The Judaizing Calvin: Sixteenth-Century Debates over the Messianic Psalms.

In this volume, Dr. Pak, assistant professor of the history of Christianity at Duke Divinity School, explores the history of interpretation of eight “messianic Psalms” (Psalms 2, 8, 16, 22, 45, 72, 110, and 118) and compares Calvin with select medieval interpreters, Martin Luther, and Martin Bucer. This work began as Pak’s doctoral dissertation at Duke under the guidance of David C. Steinmetz, a true pioneer in the history of biblical exegesis. His landmark essay “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis” is still a must-read for anyone who studies Scripture. Pak ably follows her mentor in thoroughness of research and careful textual analysis.

Pak opens the book with a chapter on the medieval exegesis of these eight psalms where she examines the commentaries of the Glossa Ordinaria, Nicholas of Lyra (1270–1349), Denis the Carthusian (1402–71), and Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (1455–1536). Although the interpretations differed at certain points, the commentators generally agreed that the literal sense of these psalms was their meaning as literal prophecies of Christ. The first horizon of the life of David and the 50 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

historical context of the composition was bypassed on the way to the christological significance. For example, the kings and princes who “take counsel together against the Lord and his anointed” (Ps. 2:2) were identified as Herod, Pilate, and the Jewish leaders who conspired together against Jesus. David’s only purpose was to prophesy about Christ, not provide the original setting of the psalm. Pak concludes, “None of these interpreters read the primary, literal sense of these Psalms in reference to their historical context in the life of David or Solomon” (28).

The second chapter details Martin Luther’s method.

His interpretation of these eight psalms did not differ significantly from the medieval exegetes. Primarily, these psalms function as literal prophecies of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. Luther failed to root his understanding of the Psalms in the historical context of the life of David. In Psalm 2, he viewed the kings and princes as the Jews, the enemies of Christ. The Messiah will “speak to them in his wrath” (Ps. 2:5) and “break them with a rod of iron” (Ps. 2:11). Pak explains that Luther’s original contributions to the history of the exegesis of these eight psalms manifested in his focus on the teaching of justification by faith alone and his distinction between law and gospel.

Martin Bucer, the Reformed theologian of Strasbourg, aligned himself with much of the previous tradition of interpretation with regard to these eight psalms. They function as literal prophecies of Christ and teach specific aspects of his life and nature.

Bucer did, however, insist on the importance of the historical context as the foundation for christological readings. David then becomes a type of Christ rather than just a prophet of Christ. For example, the anointed one in Psalm 2:2 first speaks of David, but also foreshadows Christ as the anointed Son of God. Just as David was the true king set in Zion (Ps. 2:6), so Christ is the ultimate king. Pak marks Bucer as the beginning of a distinctively Reformed reading of the Psalms, specifically with his typological interpretation and emphasis on the doctrine of election. On this reading, Bucer initiated the method that Calvin would then perfect.

Calvin broke with the traditional christological interpretation of these eight psalms. He did not primarily read them as literal prophecies of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. Although many of the psalms were fully completed in Christ, the majority of his exegesis involves the importance of David. Pak outlines three general principles that Calvin adopted when applying a psalm to Christ.

First, a psalm may reference Christ when it is fully realized in Christ or more appropriate to Christ. In these cases, David acts as a type of Christ. Most of

Calvin’s christological readings of these eight psalms were typological—i.e., they were grounded in the historical context of the psalm. The Psalms do offer literal prophecies of Christ when they concern Christ’s kingship and kingdom. Calvin emphasized the royal aspect of Christ more than his predecessors, who were concerned with the passion and resurrection.

The kingdom of God becomes one of the primary lenses through which Calvin reads Scripture.

Second, Calvin applied a psalm to Christ when Christ himself does. For example, Jesus quotes Psalm 22:1 while on the cross (Matt. 27:46): “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Even though he ultimately views these psalms as relating to Christ, Calvin first rooted these passages in the life of David.

The first reading of Psalm 22 pertains to the life of David. Only after Calvin had understood the original context did he apply the psalm to Christ.

Third, a psalm applied to Christ when the christological reading retains the “simple and natural” sense of the passage and is in keeping with the author’s (divine and human) intended meaning. Concerning Psalm 2, Calvin wrote: “Those things that David declares concerning himself are not violently, or even allegorically applied to Christ, but truly predicted concerning him” (81). The christological application must keep with the author’s intention. Calvin’s restraint in applying a psalm to Christ was partially motivated by his concern for the ability to defend interpretations against Jewish commentators. Calvin distanced himself from Christians who exposed themselves to ridicule from rabbinical exegetes by “sophistically” applying aspects of psalms to Christ. He viewed a christological reading of the simple and natural sense of a psalm as most appropriate. Calvin’s interpretation of the Psalms as primarily speaking of David and only secondarily speaking of Christ, however, led some fellow Protestants to accuse him of Judaizing.

The Judaizing Calvin exposes areas of Calvin’s exegetical skill heretofore unappreciated. Reformed Christians now have a new opportunity to admire the work of Calvin, but also to adopt his methods as a means for fruitful interpretation of the Bible.

Dan Borvan is a historical theology student at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido.

The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade

By Susan Wise Bauer W. W. Norton & Company, 2010 746 pages (hardcover), $35.00 It is no mean feat to describe the events of 800 years of medieval world history in one book. In order to accomplish this, Susan Wise Bauer limits the narrative to rulers and religion, and more specifically, how medieval kings and emperors employed religion to justify their right to rule. This book follows her earlier History of the Ancient World, which focused on the rise of kingship based on power, and picks up the thread of the story as the justification for kingship changes from individual strength to divine blessing.

The History of the Medieval World begins, appropriately, with the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine to Christianity. With this event, “all at once, Christianity was more than an identity. It was a legal and political constituency—exactly what it had not been when Constantine decided to march under the banner of the cross” (11).

This history is divided into five parts titled “Unity,” “Fractions,” “New Powers,” “States and Kingdoms,” and “Crusades.” The transformation and development of imperial legitimacy by means of religion links together eighty-five chapters at a galloping pace.

Ranging across the globe, the author produces short, vivid chapters that give a global perspective on world history from the fourth to the twelfth centuries. She covers China, Korea, Japan, India and Sri Lanka, Byzantium and the Arabs, Palestine, the Caliphate, the Russian steppes, Europe, the Vikings, and the British Isles. Fascinatingly, she also presents six pages on Mesoamerica in chapter 27 and ten pages on Greenland and the Americas in chapter 75—additions that mark this synthesis as unusual, if not unique, among world history books. Another unusual feature is the mention of the well-documented Medieval Warm Period (431 and 575), and the explanation that this global temperature shift enabled the Vikings “to sail to lands where they had never been J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 51

before.” Few world histories take account of geothermal variations, even where they have a discernible influence on the historical record of human events.

This book will appeal to the average reader who is curious about medieval history and is seeking to know more about the bright and noisy drama of human events in all their unexpected glories and disasters. It is an excellent resource for home schooling and offers a comprehensive bibliography for readers who want more depth. The stories are written in clear, straightforward prose that is vivid and easy to follow. This is not a scholarly book aimed at the erudite, but an invigorating collection of stories that demonstrate that history is exciting—and it shows its significance with verve and humor. The chapters have short descriptive titles (chapter 59: “The Second Caliphate”) and a concise synopsis (chapter 59: “Between 861 and 909, Turkish soldiers take control of the Abbasid caliphate, new dynasties break away in the east, and a new caliph proclaims himself in Egypt”). Each chapter contains occasional brief footnotes explaining things such as the hierarchy of deities in Platonic thought (10), the various Goths named Theodoric (145), or the meaning of the Anglo-Saxon word for “heir to the throne” (516). A timeline is provided at the end of each chapter, listing rulers and the years of their reigns. Because political history is difficult to appreciate or understand without a knowledge of geography, the book also boasts ninety-nine maps and fifteen illustrations to set the stories in their physical context.

In a sense, the structure and emphases of the book follow the contours of the Old Testament historical books. The role of faith in the lives and decisions of leaders and soldiers is given full play. The narrative centers on the rise of states and rulers in various ways, dwells on the means and justification of authority, and identifies the political and religious priorities of kings and emperors. It describes revolutions, pivotal moments, and enduring outcomes with a lively simplicity or an amusing irony. For example, when describing the political maneuvers of the Gothic king against Constantinople, the author writes, “Unlike Odovacer [who was chopped in half], Theodoric had a spine” (146). In the story of Japanese imperial power, one reads that “the heavenly sovereign was no emperor, not in the sense of a Chinese or Byzantine or Persian emperor. He did not rule, as they did, controlling armies and laws. He shone, and in his light, power was dispersed to others….The sovereign himself needed merely to exist: a necessary, but passive, node of connection with the divine order” (410–11).

Despite its vast geographical scope, this well-written, thoroughly researched, and briskly paced book does not present a comprehensive history of the 52 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

Middle Ages. For example, it does not discuss literature, art, music, technology, philosophy, architecture, or games, but these are beyond the scope of its intention. Rather, it is a book about political strategy and the use of religion to buttress imperial power. It covers famous events such as the conversion of Constantine, the Norman invasion of England in 1066, and the repentance of the German king at Canossa. It also deals with less famous but no less important events such as the defeat of the Byzantines by the Turks at Manzikert, the An Lu Shan rebellion in China, and the rise of Islam. It presents classic, linear history unsmeared by trendy theories so dear to the politically correct. Although a discussion of changing technology in warfare—such as weapons, siege machinery, or armor—would not have detracted from the subject matter, extended descriptions might have interfered with the brisk pace of the stories. In fairness, there is some discussion of the education enjoyed by key figures and direct reference to historical chronicles by name. This book, however, is not primarily concerned with intellectual history. It is a history of boots on the ground and leadership at the top, pulsing with ambition, glory and disaster, and therefore to be thoroughly enjoyed by all.

Meredith Riedel (D.Phil., University of Oxford) teaches history at Royal Holloway University of London.

POINT OF CONTACT: BOOKS YOUR NEIGHBORS ARE READING

The Betrayal: A Novel on John Calvin

By Douglas Bond P&R Publishing, 2009 383 pages (paperback), $14.99 Once again I find myself writing the “Point of Contact” book review column, which we subtitle “Books Your Neighbors Are Reading.” The last time I wrote this column (Olive Kitteridge, January/February 2010), I lamented how too few people rush out to purchase and read the latest Pulitzer Prize literature winner.

I find myself in a similar situation this time. I happen to live in close proximity to many seminary students

(some of whom are quite Reformed), and I can assure you that none of my neighbors even know about the book I am reviewing for this issue, which means they’re certainly not reading it.

“Someone has written a novel on Calvin?” they invariably respond with wide-eyed wonder. A novel about Luther, sure. A movie about Luther, even better. But Calvin? Colorful Luther was the interesting Reformer.

Calvin, well, he did a lot of writing and preaching, and was sick a lot, but how is his life translatable to a novel?

All I can say is that yes, it can be done, and Douglas Bond has proved it. Bond, who is head of the English department at Covenant High School in Tacoma, Washington, has written other historical fiction books, but I applaud him for taking on this particular Calvin challenge for the 500th anniversary of Calvin’s birth in 2009. He also wrote a marvelous piece for Modern Reformation’s special Calvin issue (“On the Road,” July 2009), transporting the reader to sixteenth-century Paris, Strasbourg, and Geneva—walking in Calvin’s footsteps and briefly tracing the history of the Reformer’s life in the meantime. What he accomplished in just a few short magazine pages, however, he successfully expanded into 363 pages of a novel.

Here is what the publisher (Presbyterian & Reformed, of course) has to say about The Betrayal: Set amidst the backdrop of the scholarship and humanism of renaissance France, and its love of luxury, power, and decadence, this fast-paced biographical novel on John Calvin is told from the perspective of a rival whose envy escalates to violent intrigue and shameless betrayal. The Betrayal is the tale of the private war of one man who was determined to sell all for a convoluted allegiance to the King of France and the jealous Doctors of the Sorbonne, even if it cost him his own soul. Get set for royal intrigue, desperate escapes, violent martyrdom, hazardall romance and loss, high-risk debate, and sword-point confession in this tale, one that is at last a story of how God uses the humility and unflinching faithfulness of one man to break down the barrenness and bitterness of another—all accomplished by grace alone.

Sounds pretty exciting to me. A suspense/adventure tale that has to do with sola gratia—grace alone—is an amaz-

ing feat in itself. But how does one write historical fiction about such an important church figure? How can an author show Calvin as a character in a novel without upsetting the faithful? The answer is really quite simple: tell the story from someone else’s perspective.

By having a different narrator, the author can tell Calvin’s story but from the safe distance of another person. We don’t know what Calvin may be exactly thinking or feeling, but we can observe and speculate.

The book begins in April 1918 “in the war-torn village of Noyon-le-Sainte in Northern France” (13).

After the Germans bombard an old man’s house, he finds among the rubble a metal chest—previously hidden in the wall and only now revealed—containing yellowed paper and what looks like a faded blue cap from long ago. The manuscript and the hat belong, of course, to our narrator: one Jean-Louis Mourin. The old man and his grandson then read through the words of “a man long dead,” curious to discover why Mourin had hid them.

Jean-Louis Mourin begins his tale when he and Calvin were schoolmates together in that small village—vividly describing all the while how much he detested him. This hatred, which is mostly jealousy, continues throughout the majority of the novel, hence the title of the book, The Betrayal. Mourin decides to make money, while at the same time deluding himself that he is doing right by king and country (and maybe God too), during the turbulent foundational years of the Protestant Reformation. Along with Mourin, we are witnesses of the arrest of these Christians and their subsequent executions by burning at the stake.

Bond does not spare us any details, and what these early Protestants suffer serves to remind us of the faith we now hold to and what many others have died for. With Mourin, we are with Calvin and his colleagues and family as they are forced into hiding from the king of France, fleeing from one place to another, from one country to another. And again we are reminded of the courage and unwavering faith of such people to whom we today still owe much.

Jean-Louis Mourin is also moved and begins to regret his life of treachery. Calvin thinks all the while that Mourin is a faithful friend and servant, or so at least Mourin seems to think. One cannot help thinking that Calvin discovers his duplicity fairly early on, but that as long as Mourin sticks with him, he’ll keep him around, always hoping and praying for Mourin’s conversion to true faith. I won’t give away the ending, but suffice it to say that Bond presents Calvin at first from the viewpoint of an enemy and works throughout the entire novel to win over that enemy.

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Word of God against the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church of the time. Bond does seem to overdo this on occasion, however, making him almost into a saint with his “pure doctrine.” Still, overall he paints a reasonable positive picture of this controversial figure, and provides enough evidence to persuade us to sympathize with Calvin (if any of us reading this book need such persuasion).

In case the reader wonders about the authenticity of the historical events and the quotes from Calvin in the book, Bond provides a “Note to the Reader” as a preface, assuring us: “Though it is fiction, the reader may accept Calvin’s words in dialogues, sermons, discussions, and debates with confidence. In nearly all places where Calvin speaks I have drawn and shaped his words from his letters, commentaries, Institutes, and other writings….Though shaped for fiction, Calvin’s voice in this novel is a faithful attempt to reflect accurately his own verbiage, piety, and theology” (11). To substantiate this claim, Bond provides a “Guide to Further Reading” at the back of the book, providing references to each chapter as appropriate. To further assist the reader, he lists a “Timeline of the Reformation and John Calvin’s Life,” from the death of Wycliffe in 1384 to the publication of “Calvin maligner” Jérôme-Hermés Bolsec’s “fraudulent biography” of Calvin in 1577.

Doug Bond shows he has done his homework and therefore helps us to relax historically and theologically as he relates this narrative.

Not only does The Betrayal work as a novel about Calvin, it would also make an excellent film (I’d be happy to work with Bond on the screenplay). In fact, I already have an actor in mind for it. If Joseph Fiennes could play Luther, who else to play Calvin but his older brother Ralph? There are some non-Calvin fans who would agree with this choice—such as Noel Beda whom Bond quotes at the beginning of the book: “Let us banish from France this hateful doctrine of grace.”

That is, they would probably find it appropriate that the man who portrays Lord Voldemort (the definitive bad guy in the Harry Potter films) would portray John Calvin. I just happen to think Mr. Fiennes is an excellent actor and rather looks like Calvin (who, according to the majority of the surviving portraits, was decidedly better looking than Martin Luther).

But whether we love him or hate him, we cannot deny that Calvin played a significant role in the church. It is time someone finally saw that his life was actually as interesting as Luther’s.

Patricia Anders is managing editor of Modern Reformation.

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

A UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY to learn to defend historic biblical faith in an increasingly secular age devoid of a solid basis for human rights—with Dr. John Warwick Montgomery, Dr. Angus Menuge, Dr. Adam Francisco, and Craig Parton, J.D. of "Issues, Etc."

I N T E R N AT ION A L A C A DE MY OF A P OL O G E T IC S , E VA NG E L I SM & H UM A N R IG H T S 15th Annual Study Session in the French Rhineland July 5–16, 2011

A two week Certificate course carrying 3 semester hours of U.S. academic credit from Patrick Henry College, Purcellville, Virginia.

Only $2,995 exclusive of transportation to/from Strasbourg (includes registration, full tuition, lodging and meals at the University of Strasbourg, plus historical and theological excursions, etc.).

Just 20 participants will be accepted for the July 2011 session—on a rolling admission basis. So register now (deadline: February 1, 2011)!

For full details, go to www.apologeticsacademy.eu or contact the American Director, Professor Craig Parton: e-mail: parton1@juno.com phone: (805) 682-3020

J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 55

FOR A MODERN REFORMATION i t ' s

m o r e

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j u s t

o u r

n a m e — i t ' s

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m i s s i o n

Recovering the “Solas”

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or the past several years, Modern Reformation and White Horse Inn have focused on an overarching theme—among these have been “A Time

3.Word & Sacrament 4.Missional & Vocational 5.Catechesis 6.Confessional

for Truth,” “The Romans Revolution,” and “Recovering Scripture.”

In 2011, our conversations will orbit around the general theme of the Great Commission.

It’s not enough to get the gospel right; we have to get it out. But what is this famous mandate of our Lord? It has become common these days for churches to draw up mission statements and strategic plans.

What often gets lost in the shuffle, however, are the elements that Jesus gave us in the Great Commission itself: proclaiming the gospel, baptizing, and teaching everything he commanded. Like the gospel itself, this mission (and strategy) is often taken for granted. The Great Commission functions more like a slogan than an actual game plan. How do you make disciples?

How do you grow churches? More often than not, the answers Christian leaders give today bear little resemblance to the Word and Sacrament ministry that Jesus actually ordained for the creation, sustenance, and expansion of his kingdom.

Over a decade ago, the U.S. military went into the African nation of Somalia. Originally defined as a peace-keeping mission, threats to troops and other factors gradually transformed it into a vague enterprise. A Washington Post writer working on that story coined the phrase “mission creep.” It’s a good analogy for what is happening in the church today. Just as we’ve taken our eye off the ball when it comes to getting the gospel right, we have expanded the church’s mission to include anything and everything we think might have a transforming impact on the world. Our goal in 2011 is to call churches back to our Lord’s mission and strategies.

We’re also launching a new project: a manifesto.

Although we have a basic skeletal structure, we want this to be a grassroots effort—so we need your help to put flesh on it! During 2011, each issue of Modern Reformation will introduce a new reformation platform using the six points listed below: 1. Recover the “Solas” 2. Law & Gospel 56 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

The first point is a recovery of the “solas” in the church’s message, ministry, and mission.

The five “solas” of the Reformation are more than slogans to be recovered; they are the messages that will renew the church’s mission in our age. The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century was an important effort to recover the biblical gospel of Jesus Christ. It was marked by a focused attempt to understand the doctrines that comprise the gospel message. Salvation is revealed in Scripture alone (sola scriptura), accomplished by Christ alone (solus Christus) by grace alone (sola gratia) through faith alone (sola fide), to God’s glory alone (soli Deo gloria). Just as the medieval church obscured God’s Word and work by inventing new doctrines and practices that lacked biblical warrant, today’s Protestants are just as likely to turn to other sources—marketing principles, psychology, pop culture, sociology, and other disciplines—not merely to inform but to determine the content and methods of preaching, worship, outreach, and discipleship. The truth of Scripture can’t be reduced to a few slogans, of course, but these “solas” are still helpful for our narcissistic age because they redirect our attention away from us and our work to God and his work of redemption in Christ.

White Horse Inn doesn’t exist just to publish a magazine, produce an international theological talk show, or a website. These are only delivery mechanisms. What we’re really about is a new reformation. We are asking our readers and listeners to become more involved: to spread the conversation in their own circles at home, at church, in schools, with friends, relatives, and coworkers. A good way to begin is with resources. So I hope you will subscribe to Modern Reformation, share this current issue with a friend, become a partner of White Horse Inn radio, and order our “Time for Truth” MP3 today. Get a jump on the next phase of knowing—and sharing—what you believe and why you believe it!

Michael Horton is editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation.