the-great-assurance-november-december-2011

THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT TODAY ❘ WHAT TO DO UNTIL HE COMES AGAIN? ❘ A REVELATION ROUNDTABLE

MODERN REFORMATION

The Great Assurance

VOLUME 20, NUMBER 6, NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2011, $6.50

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Features 10

The Great Assurance “And behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” As Jesus closed the Great Commission with the Great Assurance, what is the church’s task until he comes again? Do we lay upon ourselves an impossible burden of wondering about what to do, or are we liberated to participate in the missionary movement in which the Triune God has been engaged from the beginning of the world?

By Michael S. Horton Plus ... Witherspoon on the Confession

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The Spirit of Christ and the Apostolic Age Is Christ more present with his church by his Spirit than he ever was while he walked the earth?

Jesus had to leave his disciples in order to truly be with them, but with the close of the apostolic age, do we somehow diminish the active work of the Spirit in the church today?

By Brian Lee

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Plagiarizing the Lord’s Prayer As fallen people, how do we really know what to pray? Do we sometimes feel our speech is muddled and imprecise? Is our approach to the Holy One maybe even contrived and ill-mannered?

The author looks at the words Jesus taught his disciples and how we too should feel free to “plagiarize” the Lord.

By John J. Bombaro

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Vocation: Work Quietly with Your Hands The author argues that the best way for Christians to present a winsome witness to their culture is to pursue their vocations competently and quietly. If they labor productively, they will reflect the image of God, become dignified humans, and provide an example that should cause others to admire them.

By T. David Gordon

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Ad Extra: Articles Aside

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Studies in Acts Acts 6: The Consummation of the Kingdom

By Dennis E. Johnson Focus on Missions Forgotten, Not Forsaken

By David Zadok For a Modern Reformation Confessional

By Michael S. 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 Marketing Director Michele Tedrick

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

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Theological Detoxification Good News for Anxious Christians: 10 Practical Things You Don’t Have to Do

By Phillip Cary Reviewed by John J. Bombaro Pillars of Grace: AD 100–1564 (A Long Line of Godly Men, vol. II)

By Steven J. Lawson Reviewed by Matthew Everhard A Dialogue: In and Out of Our Circles A Revelation Roundtable Michael Horton, Steve Baugh, Dennis Johnson, and Kim Riddlebarger Whose Community? Which Interpretation?

Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church

By Merold Westphal Reviewed by John D. “Jady” Koch, Jr. Political Grace: The Revolutionary Theology of John Calvin

By Roland Boer Reviewed by D. G. Hart Rid of My Disgrace: Hope and Healing for Victims of Sexual Assault

By Justin S. Holcomb and Lindsay A. Holcomb Reviewed by Debbe and Rod Mays Point of Contact: Books Your Neighbors Are Reading Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

By Laura Hillenbrand Reviewed by Patricia Anders COVER ART: ISTOCK PHOTO

IN THIS ISSUE

The Impossible Is Possible

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his year we have considered Jesus’ issuance of the Great Commission in Matthew 28. Not just part of it, mind you, but all of it, from the initial triumphant “Great Announcement” that all authority has been given to the Son from the Father, to the “Great Commandment” to “go” into all the world to use the right tools most suited to the message—namely, preaching, baptizing, and teaching disciples everything that Christ commanded. Now, in this capstone issue, we do in fact come to a climax. Jesus concludes the Great Announcement and the Great Commission with the Great Assurance: “And lo, I will be with you even unto the end of the age.”

Editor-in-Chief Michael Horton begins the issue with a compelling reminder that Jesus has done everything, and that he will finish the task of calling his people to himself. We have the great joy of telling everyone about it. That’s the church’s mission. Be encouraged, Christian, that you are not left wondering if you will be able to pull it off, because it’s not your work to do. It’s the news that we spread, namely, the word that redemption has been accomplished, completed on the cross, and perfected in the resurrection.

One of the things we don’t often think about or realize is that “Christ is more truly present with his church by his Spirit than he ever was while he walked the earth.” This is the sound and encouraging note struck by Reformed minister Brian Lee. The Holy Spirit is not some poor substitute for Christ, but the counselor who is the Lord and Giver of Life, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified. But Christ is not only with us by his Spirit; the Spirit also conveys the fruits of Christ’s earthly and heavenly labors through the elements of “water and blood,” or baptism and the Lord’s Supper, as Lee explains from John’s Gospel.

Sometimes it is astonishing to think how much good news there really is in the gospel, and part of this good news is that Christ will one day return in glory. Michael Horton discusses this in a “Revelation roundtable” with reliable exegetes Steve Baugh, Dennis Johnson, and Kim Riddlebarger, and missionary David Zadok discusses present-day missions and God’s plan for ethnic Israel.

What do we do then while Christ builds his church using his appointed means? Actually, it’s quite simple, as Professor T. David Gordon relates: we “work quietly with our hands.” In other words, we pursue our vocations, each of us according to our gifts. Surprisingly simple, yes? More like astoundingly simple.

What else do we do? We also pray. But have you ever prayed and wondered if it pleased the Lord? Luther asked this in his Large Catechism before recommending the Lord’s Prayer for Christians on a daily basis. Don’t be afraid of frequent repetition, Lutheran pastor John Bombaro insists, because God loves to hear the prayer that he taught his disciples.

It is important to remind ourselves time and time again that Christ will return on the day the Father has set, and in the meantime he will build his church. This relieves us of the impossible burden of doing it ourselves and actually liberates us to proclaim the work that the Triune God has been carrying out since before the foundation of the world!

Ryan Glomsrud Executive Editor

Coming in 2012 Our 20th Anniversary!

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STUDIES IN ACTS

Acts 6: The Consummation of the Kingdom

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e have observed that the risen Lord Jesus corrected the

looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up assumptions behind his apostles’ question, “Lord, will you at from you into heaven, will come in the same way as this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6).1 He gently you saw him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11). squelched their curiosity about the timing of God’s Some weeks earlier, as Jesus was approaching kingdom agenda, as such “inside information” was Jerusalem, his traveling companions were abuzz with not theirs to know (1:7; see Matt. 24:36; 25:13; Mark speculation that he would consummate God’s reign 13:32; 1 Thess. 5:1–2). He also expanded their menwhen he reached the City of David, presumably by tal horizons, showing them that the kingdom would expelling Rome’s occupation forces: “They supposed loom larger than Israel and Israel’s political status. that the kingdom of God was to appear immediately” Through the apostles’ Spirit-empowered witness, the (Luke 19:11). But Jesus poured cold water on their light of God’s comprehensive salvation would radiate feverish eschatological impatience. He told a parable out to the Gentiles at the end of the earth (Acts 1:8, about a nobleman who entrusted “minas” to ten serechoing Isa. 49:6–7; see Acts 13:46–47). vants before taking an extended journey to “a far Although the apostles were mistaken about the country” in order to be appointed king (Luke 19:11– timing and scope of the kingdom, they were right to 27).3 That parable gave a wide-angle preview of the recognize that Jesus’ resurrection marked the turning era that would span from the kingdom’s launch point in the history of the world. The forces of evil had (through his death and exaltation) to its consummabeen decisively defeated by the Messiah’s sacrificial tion (at his bodily return). Jesus himself was the death and resurrection, and a chain of events had “nobleman.” Before his departure, he entrusted treasbegun that would lead to the utter “undoing” of sin, ures to his servants to invest in his absence. Upon his sorrow, suffering, and death itself. Jesus’ ascension to return, the king would deal with his servants accordheaven, borne by a cloud into the presence of God,2 iniing to their faithfulness, and he would inflict righteous tiated an era in which he would be absent physically wrath on enemies who resented and resisted his rule from his church yet powerfully present through the (19:14, 27). In retrospect, at least, should not the Holy Spirit whom he would soon send. On the day of apostles have grasped the parable’s hint that the era of Christ’s physical absence from earth would be proPentecost, the descent of the Spirit enabled believers to longed—long enough for faithful servants to make a give voice to God’s mighty deeds in the tongues of the profit for their Master and for defiant subjects to pernations, and Peter declared that these extraordinary sist in resisting his reign? events signaled that Jesus the Messiah had assumed his In addition to preparing his church for his proroyal throne at God’s right hand (Acts 2:32–33). longed absence, Jesus’ parable also affirmed the The inauguration of the kingdom in Christ’s death, absolute certainty of his glorious return from heaven to resurrection, ascension, and the outpouring of the Spirit directed believers’ hopes toward a coming conconsummate the kingdom at the end of the age. He summation of the kingdom, when the King now made the same point repeatedly (Luke 12:35–48; enthroned in heaven would return to earth as the res17:20–30; 20:9–16; 21:25–28, 34–36). So the heavcuer of his people and the judge of all. This is the enly messengers were simply reminding the stunned disciples that their risen and ascended King had promise that two “men” in white robes—angelic mesannounced his glorious return in no uncertain terms. sengers from God’s heavenly court—announced to The promise of the King’s coming is as certain as its the dazed disciples as they stared upward after their timing is unpredictable. departed Master: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand 4 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

The inauguration of the kingdom, especially in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, secures the kingdom’s future consummation at the end of history. This theme emerges in Peter’s sermon in Solomon’s portico (Acts 3:11–26). Through faith in the name of Jesus, a man born lame had been healed, so that he could not only walk but also leap for joy in the sanctuary of God. This act of power and mercy became the occasion for bold declaration of the gospel, in which Peter announced that Jesus, the Author of Life, had been raised from the dead by God himself (3:15). Peter then called the crowd to repentance, promising “that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus, whom heaven must receive until the time for restoring all things about which God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets” (3:19–21; emphasis added). Several features of this striking sermon command our attention.

First, the future hope of refreshment and restoration, which should move Peter’s hearers to repentance, is bound up with the return of Jesus the King. Peter’s description of Jesus as “the Christ appointed for you” resumes the point he had made on the day of Pentecost: Jesus’ resurrection constitutes God’s declaration that he is “both Lord and Christ,” the rightful heir to David’s royal throne (2:25–36). By raising Jesus from the dead, God confirmed his identity as the anointed King anticipated in Psalm 2:7: “You are my Son; today I have begotten you” (see Acts 13:32–35). As Paul said in his Epistle to the Roman believers, Jesus “was declared to be the Son in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Rom. 1:4).

Second, God’s ancient prophets had foretold the “times [or seasons] of refreshing” and “the time for restoring all things” for which God’s people were longing. Visions granted to Isaiah and other Israelite seers previewed a complete reversal of the curse that had entered the world and human experience through Adam’s sin. “He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from the earth” (Isa. 25:8). “‘For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth.…The wolf and the lamb shall graze together; the lion shall eat straw like the ox, and dust shall be the serpent’s food. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain,’ says the Lord” (Isa. 65:17, 25). This global healing would be bound up with the return of Jesus the Messiah “whom heaven must receive” until the time appointed by God the Father, at which time the King will appear to consummate his royal reign.

Third, the scope of “restoration” that the King will bring is greater than Peter and his fellow apostles had

envisioned when they asked about restoring the kingdom to Israel. Peter now knew that the kingdom “restoration” that God’s prophets promised would be wider than Israel and deeper than politics. It would, in the end, embrace “all things”—a whole new heaven and a whole new earth, as Isaiah foretold (Isa. 65:17– 25; 66:2–23; the ESV’s “restore” at Acts 1:6 and “restoring” in 3:21 reflect the echo in the Greek original).4 Peter would later encourage Christians to anticipate “a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Pet. 3:13). The restoration of the beggar’s ankles, so that he leapt for joy in God’s courts, was a preview of a coming healing of the whole cosmos.

Fourth, the consummation of his kingdom at the return of the King entails not only the comforting prospect of “refreshment” and “restoration,” but also the sobering prospect of judgment. Peter proclaimed Jesus not only as the messianic King, but also as the prophet like Moses whom God would raise up—and whose voice must be heeded. “And it shall be that every soul who does not listen to that prophet shall be destroyed from the people” (Acts 3:23, alluding to Deut. 18:15–19).

Later sermons in Acts identify Jesus himself as the final Judge of the living and the dead. Not only will the word of this ultimate Moses-caliber prophet be the norm by which all people will be judged, but Christ himself is also the royal Judge, authorized by God to render the momentous, eternity-determining verdict on every human life.

When Peter preached the gospel to Cornelius and his assembled family and friends, the apostle narrated Jesus’ powerful earthly ministry, his shameful death, his resurrection, and his appearances to chosen witnesses. “And he commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead” (Acts 10:42). Christ’s role as coming judge heightens both the mercy and the urgency of the promise that Peter mentioned in the next breath: “To him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name” (10:43). Instantly the Spirit fell on Peter’s Gentile audience, they believed, and “God cleansed their hearts by faith” (see 15:9).

Later, Paul observed to Stoic and Epicurean philosophers, the intellectual dilettantes of Athens, that a public inscription implied their awareness of a God whom, by their own admission, they did not know.

This God created the universe, sustains life, and directs human affairs. Greek poets even glimpsed the truth that humanity bears his image. Though he is near to all his creatures, for ages this great Creator did not speak his redemptive word among the nations, not N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 5

even to the sophisticated Greeks. But now, with the resurrection of Jesus, things had changed: “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead” (17:30–31). To these pagan intellectuals, whose worldviews were antagonistic both to the concept of bodily resurrection and to the prospect of a last judgment,5 Paul declared the unbreakable bond uniting these two events of Jesus’ royal career: his resurrection from the dead at world history’s turning point signaled his designation by God as the judge before whom all people will stand at history’s consummation.

Vociferous derision from Paul’s audience interrupted his presentation at that point (17:32). Nonetheless, some expressed openness to further dialogue, while others even came to faith, presumably through subsequent interaction with the apostle (17:33).

A fifth and final implication of the promise that “the Christ appointed for you, Jesus” will return from heaven to restore all things concerns God’s purpose for the lengthy interim between the King’s ascension and his second coming. As the once-lame man leapt in the temple court, Peter’s sermon concluded: “God, having raised up his servant, sent him to you first, to bless you by turning every one of you from your wickedness” (Acts 3:26). Christ’s resurrection from the dead did not immediately precipitate cosmic renewal—which would have entailed last judgment on every human rebel—precisely because, as John’s Gospel says, “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17). The risen Servant Jesus now comes through the power of his Word and the presence of his Spirit to rescue rebels and turn them from the path of eternal destruction. Writing later to Christians dismayed by their Lord’s delay (as they perceived it), Peter reminded them, “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance….Count the patience of our Lord as salvation” (2 Pet. 3:9, 15).

Although it may feel like needless tardiness to suffering saints, in fact the timing of the coming consummation, sovereignly decided by the Father and known only to him, is determined by his gracious resolve to redeem all his elect among all the peoples of the earth. That is the implication of the little word “first” in Acts 3:26: “God sent his servant to you first.”

Peter had just cited God’s great promise to Abraham, “And in your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed” (Acts 3:25). The fulfillment of that 6 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

promise would require sufficient time to convey the good news of Jesus, Abraham’s offspring, throughout the world. Salvation comes by faith in Christ, and faith by hearing, and hearing by the proclamation of the Word (Rom. 10:17). God’s patience in determining the moment of his Messiah’s return and the consummation of his kingdom is motivated by his resolve to keep his promise to Abraham, bringing blessing to all of his elect among every nationality “to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). When everyone whose name is inscribed in the Lamb’s book of life has been drawn by the Spirit to trust in the Son, then at last—and at just the right time—God will send Messiah Jesus to consummate the kingdom, bringing the times of refreshing and the era of total restoration the prophets foretold, and for which we still long. Until then Christ’s church heralds the good news of our risen, reigning, and returning King to every ethnic group, calling all to repentance and faith as we eagerly anticipate “the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13) and the consummation of his rule in the new heavens and earth. ■

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

See Dennis E. Johnson, “The Power of the Kingdom,” in Modern Reformation (January/February 2011), 4.

2Daniel 7:13–14: “Behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given a dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations and languages should serve him.”

3Although this parable and that of the talents in Matthew 25:14–30 share a similar main plot, there are significant variations between them. A “mina” (Greek mna, represented by “pounds” in older English versions) was a modest amount equivalent to 100 drachmas, roughly three or four months’ wages for a day laborer. A talent was worth 60 mnas. In Matthew three servants are entrusted with different amounts, whereas in Luke each of ten servants receives the same amount. Also, Luke includes the subplot of the rebellious subjects. Probably Jesus told and then retold this story in two forms as he approached Jerusalem (Luke) and after his triumphal entry (Matthew).

4In Acts 1:6, the Greek verb apokathistano, “restore,” is used, and in 3:21 its cognate noun apokatastasis, “restora1

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FOCUS ON MISSIONS

Forgotten, Not Forsaken

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he apostle Paul often used the word “mystery” in different contexts in

As we read on in the history of God’s people, we his Epistles. The meaning behind the usage of this word remained hid- see a pattern emerging, one that becomes readily den in the Old Testament, but now has been revealed fully in the New apparent in the book of Judges. Israel rebels, the Covenant. One of the places that the word “mysLord brings upon them an enemy, the people cry out to God, and he delivers them through a judge. This tery” appears is in Romans 11:25 in connection to pattern is repeated again and again, but with time the God’s redemptive plan for the whole world, both judges become increasingly wicked. The unfaithfulJews and Gentiles. Paul warned and informed his ness of the people and their rebellion against God is readers of the mystery, that is, that “a partial hardennot limited to the era of the judges, but appears ing has come upon Israel, until the fullness of the throughout the history of the Old Testament.

Gentiles has come in” (ESV). The mystery that has The people sinned boldly against their Creator and been revealed in many ways has become a mystery Savior. They worshipped idols made by human hands. again in recent years. Is there a future hope for the Can you imagine what an insult that was to God? Yet Jewish people, the Israelites? Too many trees have God remained faithful in forgiving, saving, leading, been cut down to provide for the books and articles and guiding his people. Again and again he sent them that have been written on the topic! Almost everyone prophets to show them their desperate need for and every denomination has a view on the issue of repentance and to call them back to himself. We hear Israel, particularly since 1948 when Israel became a the cries of the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, and state, and even more so in recent years with all that others pleading with God’s people to repent, to change has occurred in the Middle East. I will come back to their ways, and to follow the God of their covenant. this point, but meanwhile it is important to see what Despite their heinous sins, the Lord God continued to is happening today in the land of the Holy One. speak through the prophets, as in Isaiah 40:1–5: The Call Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Most of us are familiar with the call of Israel in the Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her Old Testament and the covenants that God made that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is with his people. In them we see God’s faithfulness as pardoned, that she has received from the LORD’s the covenant keeper and unchangeable creator. These hand double for all her sins. A voice cries: “In characteristics of God especially stand out as we see the faithlessness of the people, the people of Israel, the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD; who are also my people by ethnicity. While Moses make straight in the desert a highway for our was on Mount Sinai receiving the law from God, the God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every people of Israel made a golden calf and said, “These mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of places a plain. And the glory of the LORD shall the land of Egypt” (Exod. 32:4). Their rebellion continued even though the Lord provided them with be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire to guide them. for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”

Because of their murmuring and rebellion, the older generation never entered the Promised Land. Even Kings also despised the ways of the Lord and adopted when Moses grew tired of the people, however, God the gods of the nations and committed evil in the sight patiently and lovingly—though at times with wrath— of the Lord. Yet in spite of their treacherous acts and led them into his presence through the tabernacle and their rejection of God and his ways, God remained into the Promised Land. faithful to them. Yes, he sent them into exile, and yes, N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 7

he held back the rain and brought upon them terrible enemies. But these acts of God were done because of his love for them. The people of Israel were his possession, and he loved them as a father. This is God’s way, and this is the true meaning of his love and his grace to the people of Israel and to us.

While it is easy for us to see the infidelity of the people of Israel under the old covenant, the performance of the church under the new covenant is not much better. We can look at the church in the Middle Ages and the condition of the church today and see the same pattern. The church in the Old Testament and the church in the New Testament in essence have not been faithful to the call of God. But again, it is not about us as people, but about him and his faithfulness.

For this reason we can see why Paul so vividly in Romans 9–11 shows us that God has not forsaken his people of old nor his promises. And while in this age and era the majority of the people of Israel have rejected their Messiah, yet “there will be a wide-scale regrafting of ethnic Jews into Christ’s body” (Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011], 731).

Living and ministering in Israel, I have the privilege of seeing that truth slowly but surely unfolding before my eyes. There is an unprecedented openness to the gospel among the Jewish people. People between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five are embracing Jesus as their Lord and Savior. The number of churches and believers continues to grow. In fact, many claim that today there are more Jewish people who believe in Jesus as their Messiah than at any other time in the last two thousand years. It saddens my heart, however, when I see that there is little interest in bringing the gospel to the Jewish people.

There is much attention given to Israel from the broad evangelical community, but often for the wrong reasons and too often without the goal of presenting the gospel. Unfortunately, the political situation and the desire to be “politically correct” have contributed to the rise of anti-Semitism, and have crippled the church in its call to bring the gospel to the Jew first. As a Reformed Jewish Christian, I regret seeing large, Reformed denominations stand silent when it comes to bringing the gospel to Israel or being directly involved in the work. How many missionaries to Israel does your church or denomination know, pray for, or support?

The Phenomena Reformed theology, or better put, biblical theology emphasizes the total sovereignty of God over all things, and in particular over history. History is his story of 8 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

redemption and how he works all things to accomplish his great plan of salvation. God in his great wisdom brings about all things in such a way as to fulfill his good and perfect will. For example, take the timing of Christ’s incarnation. The timing fulfilled all the Old Testament prophecies but was also perfect in terms of spreading the gospel. The Roman Empire, the controlling and leading force of the time, made two major contributions to civilization that we continue to benefit from even today. The first was Roman law. Many countries have laws based upon Roman law, and these laws helped to enable the Gentiles understand the laws of God. Second, the extensive European road system as well as sea routes still used today enabled missionaries to travel from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the world with the gospel.

Both of these contributions significantly enhanced the spread of the gospel. We see this movement in Acts where the gospel begins to spread from its birthplace in Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria; and in the last chapter of the book, we see Paul in Rome. In the city that was the end of the world, since the Americas were not yet discovered, Paul sits with the Jewish people and preaches and presents Jesus the Messiah. The Roman Empire paved the way for the gospel to be accepted not only by the Gentiles, even in the heart of the empire, but to spread over the then known world.

I believe the Lord is doing something similar today in regard to bringing the gospel to Israel in order to fulfill his promises. The language and the land are two modern phenomena that I believe are being used in similar ways by the Lord to pave the way in calling the Jewish people back to himself.

The Language The Hebrew language is one of the oldest languages, a language in which God spoke his Word to his people. An old and “holy” language, yet for almost two thousand years it was a dead language in the sense that it was not used for daily and common conversation but only for the reading of Scripture, other holy writings, and for prayer in the synagogue. The Jewish people felt that if Elohim had spoken to them in this language, how could they use it for ordinary, everyday conversation? In addition, the Israelites who were scattered in various parts of the world had to adopt the language of that land in order to survive.

For these reasons, the Hebrew language became a language of books, but not a language of the tongue.

In the late nineteenth century, more and more Jews began to return to the Promised Land to start a new life with renewed hope. As additional Jews left the Diaspora and returned to the ancient land of their fathers, the need to disassociate from Gentile cus-

toms and culture became more evident. During this time, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922), a Lithuanian Jew who was living in Jerusalem, made a conscious decision that he and his family would speak Hebrew at home. His idea did not spread very far in Jerusalem, as the majority of the Jews living there were religious.

His vision, however, caught on in the more secular city of Tel-Aviv, and people started to use this “new” Hebrew. Ben-Yehuda began to create a conversational Hebrew and used the Jewish Scripture as the basis for the language. This gave birth to the Modern Hebrew language of today.

The Land Scripture demonstrates the great desire of the people of Israel to return home. We see it in the psalms of ascents, particularly Psalm 123, and we see it in the writings of the prophets. It is also seen in Jewish and Christian literature. Jewish weddings, which initiate the beginning of a new family and matrimonial covenant, even to this day remember the City of Jerusalem and the newlywed promise not to forsake it. Many Christian writers, including the Puritans, wrote about the need and also the fulfillment of the promises of God to bring back the Jews to the land.

Charles Spurgeon saw the day when the Jews returned to the land. Many saw the establishment of the state of Israel as a fulfillment of specific prophecy, and in God’s sovereignty he made it happen. The fact is that just recently there are now more Jewish people who live in Israel than in any other country, including the United States and Russia.

These historical events demonstrate, I believe, that God has paved the way for the gospel to go forth in a significant way to my people, the people of Israel. A common language and the concentration of the Jewish people have empowered the gospel to go forth. We see this in a vivid way. My wife Eti remembers the days in Israel when she knew all the Jewish Christians in the land. And now the number is beyond anyone’s counting.

The Need While it is interesting to recognize the language and land phenomena, the church in Israel is also atypical. The New Testament church began with the Jewish people. All the writers of the New Testament (except possibly Luke the physician) were Jewish. In fact, the first church council debated on what to do with all these Gentiles who not only believed in the God of Israel, but now also the Jewish Messiah!

According to God’s redemptive plan, the church grew mostly among the Gentiles, and a chasm appeared between the church and its Jewish roots.

Today, after some two millennia, the New Testament church that began among Jewish people neglects Jewish people. Jewish people became victims of horrible acts in the name of “Christ” and “Christianity.” We recall the Crusades, the Inquisition in Spain, the persecutions in Russia, and the Holocaust in Germany and Europe when millions of Jewish people were murdered. Unfortunately, most Jewish people view all of these atrocities as acts of the church that blames the Jews for the murder of Jesus.

In addition to these tragedies, the church has neglected its call to proactively share the gospel with the Jewish people. Jewish mission work is often forgotten.

Churches that spend much of their resources on Israel do not seek to call the Jewish people to repentance, but have contributed rather for their own eschatological and/or political reasons. It grieves me as I observe the broader evangelical church spending many resources in Israel, but very little for the cause of the gospel. Often, Reformed churches and in particular Reformed denominations shy away from any type of ministry in Israel.

The Work Due to the fact that the language and the land were restored only recently, there are very few Christian books available in Modern Hebrew. There are hardly any commentaries in the Hebrew language. There are no systematic theology books or any introductory books on the Old or New Testaments, despite the fact that in Israel every week there are some sixty to seventy books published, the highest or second highest number per capita.

In the midst of all these challenges, the Lord has opened the door for HaGefen Publishing, the Israeli arm of Christian Witness to Israel (CWI), to play an important role not only to bring the full counsel of God to Israelis, but also to publish many Reformed books and articles. In the past few years, HaGefen Publishing has published many books and hundreds of articles to fill in the gap. For the first time, we have published the Heidelberg Catechism and the Children’s Catechism in Modern Hebrew, and the shorter catechism in Russian.

We plan to publish the Westminster Confession in 2012 and to eventually have all of the Reformed creeds in Hebrew. Furthermore, we have published books such as the Sovereignty of God, Calvin’s abridged Biblical Christianity, and Knowing God by J. I. Packer. In the past three years, we have published ten different commentaries with the goal of publishing at least one commentary on each of the sixty-six biblical books by the end of 2018. One of our most important works has been to publish the Old Testament in Modern Hebrew. (continued on page 43) N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 9

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The Great Assurance

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MICHAEL S. HORTON

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“And behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matt. 28:20)

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his past year we have unpacked the Great Commission. We began with the “Great Announcement” that generates the church’s mandate. Jesus grounds his imperative “Go!” in the indicative announcement that he has already accomplished our redemption. “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” Jesus announces, “go therefore…” He didn’t make salvation possible if we actualize or appropriate it. Rather, he accomplished our salvation and he applies it by his Word and Spirit.

“Where does true faith come from?” asks the Heidelberg Catechism. “The Holy Spirit creates it in our hearts by the preaching of the holy gospel and confirms it by the use of the holy sacraments.”

Wherever Christ—his person, his work, his promises, and his accomplishments—is proclaimed, impossible things happen. The dead are raised. A lush garden blooms in the desert. Basically, Jesus is saying, “I’ve done everything; I’ll finish what I have started— now go and tell everybody!” Jesus even gave us the system of delivery that fits with this gospel: preaching the gospel, baptizing, and teaching disciples everything that Christ commanded. This is the mission of the church, not only in planting churches but also in sustaining them from generation to generation. The mission of the church is to bear the marks of the church to the ends of the earth. As Lesslie Newbigin reminds us, the church doesn’t just engage in missions; it is God’s mission in the world. The church exists by witnessing as a fire exists by burning.

And now Jesus closes the Great Commission with the Great Assurance: “And behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Our missionary imperative is sandwiched between the indicative declaration of Christ’s mission accomplished and sustained.

Jesus is not waiting for us to fulfill the Great Commission before he returns in glory; rather, he is fulfilling the Great Commission by his Word and Spirit and will return on the day the Father has set. This relieves us of an impossible burden, liberating us to participate in the missionary movement in which the Triune God has been engaged from the beginning of the world.

The Paradoxical Promise esus pledged to be present with his church, even to the end of the age, right at the moment that he ascended to heaven. At the very moment that the disciples finally understood the point of Jesus’ journey to the cross and, through the cross, to the resurrection, he left! As the firstfruits of the harvest, Jesus ascended bodily to the right hand of the Father. What

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a time to leave, though, just when things were really getting started. What is a kingdom without a king?

Yet he had already prepared them for his departure (John 14–16). He would not leave his people as orphans but would send the promised Spirit to lead them into all truth, illuminating their hearts and minds to understand and to embrace everything he had taught, and empowering them to bring this witness to the ends of the earth. Jesus said, “I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment” (John 16:7–8). Because Christ did ascend and did send the Spirit, we today know Jesus Christ better than even the disciples before this event. The Spirit unites us to Christ, seating us with him in heavenly places, and through the ministry of Word and Sacrament raises up from the valley of dry bones a mighty army of kingdom heirs.

Our Lord’s commission began with a triumphant indicative and now concludes with a solid promise.

Lodged in the precarious crevice of his Word, where the powers of this present age are being assaulted by the powers of the age to come, the church appears weak and foolish in the eyes of the world. It does not look like the one holy, catholic, and apostolic church that its Lord nevertheless says it is. Although Jesus is absent from us in the flesh, the Spirit unites us to the whole Christ in heaven by his mysterious grace.

Nothing can compensate for Jesus’ absence in the flesh. Not even the Holy Spirit is a substitute for our Living Head; in fact, the Spirit’s indwelling presence provokes within our hearts the cry for Jesus’ return when our exile will be ended and we join him in the everlasting Sabbath. If not the Spirit, then no mere human being will suffice to make up for the bodily absence of our Lord. There is no “vicar of Christ” who replaces Jesus in the flesh. Not even the apostles replaced Jesus; they were his ambassadors in this world, and there are no living successors to St. Peter or any of the other apostles today. Not even the people of God as a community on earth can fill in for Jesus.

Rather, the church endures and even conquers from age to age and nation to nation in dependence on the Spirit who unites us to our ascended Lord and gives us every blessing in heavenly places. It is the Spirit who even now has seated us with Christ, enthroned over death and hell. It is the Spirit who inspired the words of the prophets and apostles as the Word of God, a Word through which Christ continues to address his little flock. It is the Spirit who binds us to Christ in baptism and the Lord’s Supper, so that we can be bathed by our Lord and fed with his own body and blood.

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How can Jesus announce his departure in the flesh, even telling his disciples that he will return bodily only at the end of the age, and yet at the same time promise, “And behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age”? The only possible answer is the one he gave his disciples in the upper room and repeated at his ascension: the outpouring and indwelling of the Holy Spirit, working through the Word and sacraments.

Christ’s Program, Not Ours e do not ascend to God; God descended to us and continues to descend by sending us his Word of Christ through preachers.

Christ is as near to us today as the Word that we hear proclaimed. This is Paul’s point in Romans 10, as we have seen. We have to keep our focus on the historical pattern of Christ’s descent in the flesh, death and resurrection in the flesh, ascension in the flesh, and return at the end of the age in the flesh. Descending into our history, he has forever transformed it, opening up a fissure in that history of death by his resurrection. By his Spirit, Christ keeps that fissure opened for the proclamation of the gospel, so that our lives even now become united to the new history of everlasting joy he has already entered as our pioneer.

Everything in the Great Commission keeps our eyes on Christ during this intermission—this pilgrimage that we are making and inviting others to make to the city whose architect and builder is God. It is not by turning inward in mystical contemplation or by trying to make the kingdoms of this age into the kingdom of Christ, but by knowing our job description as witnesses to Christ, that we fulfill this commission.

We are the witnesses to redemption, not the agents of it. Throughout the book of Revelation, the saints are described not as ascetic monks or as transformers of the Roman Empire into Christ’s kingdom, but as witnesses; they give their lives for the testimony to the Lamb.

In an interview with Billy Graham’s Decision magazine, C. S. Lewis was once asked, “Do you feel, then, that modern culture is being de-Christianized?” Lewis responded,

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I cannot speak to the political aspects of the question, but I have some definite views about the deChristianizing of the church. I believe that there are many accommodating preachers, and too many practitioners in the church who are not believers. Jesus Christ did not say, “Go into all the world and tell the world that it is quite right.” The Gospel is something completely different. In fact, it is directly opposed to the world.1 Like Athanasius, our motto should be, “Against the 12 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

world, for the world.” It is in the world’s best interest that we stand up to it, refusing to conform our message, mission, or methods to the pattern of this passing age. We believe, live, and act on the basis of the covenant that was made between the persons of the Trinity before all time for our redemption, the saving work of Christ that is already completed. And we believe, live, and act on the basis of Christ’s promise to be with us by his Word and Spirit until the very end, when he returns bodily in glory. This promise with which Jesus assures the shaky apostles at the end of his Great Commission is similar to the one that he issued in Matthew 16, when he gave them the keys of the kingdom: “I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it” (v. 18).

Again and again we meet this emphasis of our Lord on the kingdom that he is building and we are receiving. Jesus told his disciples not to be anxious about the future. “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32). We may build all sorts of things. We may build movements, personalities, programs, and publicity-generating organizations. But only Jesus can build his church. It is his church, not ours; his ministry, not ours. He builds it through means, to be sure, but it is the means that he has instituted and promised to bless with his saving presence.

This church may not look pretty. Regardless of its outward appearance, though, Christ’s promise trumps all earthly powers. Wherever this church is preaching Christ, baptizing, administering the Supper, confessing its sins, receiving Christ’s absolution, confessing its faith in the gospel, caring for the sheep, and unleashing its salty saints in ever-widening circles of mission, witness, and service in their ordinary vocations, Satan’s kingdom is falling piece by piece. We are storming the Bastille, that wretched prison that holds Christ’s blood-bought treasure of captives. We are bringing the good news that the long night is over and that the Light has come into the world.

Homecoming he conquest did come—and is still coming.

However, the new covenant conquest was no less puzzling to the disciples than the new covenant exodus! It wasn’t a replay of the Old Testament holy wars, with a sliver of real estate in the Middle East, that Jesus promised. Rather, in fulfillment of the Abrahamic promise, salvation will come to the ends of the earth. The whole earth will be made Christ’s theater of grace. His meek pilgrims “shall inherit the earth” (Matt. 5:5).

Preparing his disciples for his departure and the sending of the Spirit, Jesus included in that upper

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room speech the promise that he would prepare a place for them, reigning in everlasting peace over his people (John 14:1–29). Jesus did not escape the world into which he was now calling his disciples to suffer and witness. Nor is he merely waiting in heaven to return some day. Every day that passes on earth is a productive delay of the last judgment. In the meantime, Jesus is gathering a people for himself on earth, forgiving and renewing them by his Word and Spirit, interceding for his coheirs, and preparing his heavenly sanctuary for our arrival.

In this in-between time of our exile today, there is no holy land or holy nation, apart from Christ and his worldwide family. When Christ returns, however, cleansing the land in a final judgment, everything will be holy. Zechariah prophesies the day when the true temple will be cleansed of all traders and everything that defiles. The most common household pots and pans— even the bells on the horses—will bear the inscription, “Holy to the Lord!” (Zech. 14:20–21). The wasteland will again become a lush garden, from which the violent and the oppressor will be banished (Isa. 35). One last time the world will be shaken and the nations will come to the Desire of All Nations, the end-time temple filled with the glory of the Spirit (Hag. 2:6–7). “‘The glory of this latter temple shall be greater than the former,’ says the Lord of hosts. ‘And in this place I will give peace,’ says the Lord of hosts” (v. 9).

It is the final “shaking of everything that can be shaken” so that only Christ’s kingdom remains that is spoken of in Hebrews 12:18–29. In this passage, the writer observes that the theocratic kingdom of Israel could indeed be shaken—and was shaken—because it depended on conditional promises and threatened exile for disobedience. God addresses us not from Mount Sinai, however, but from Mount Zion, with absolute promises of unilateral deliverance. Founded on Christ’s perfect obedience, the kingdom we are now receiving cannot be shaken.

After the destruction of the first temple, Ezekiel received a vision of the new one (Ezek. 40–42), and then reported the return of the Spirit (in the form of the theophanic Glory-cloud) to the temple in chapter 43. A man “whose appearance shone like bronze” stood with a measuring rod, making sure that the new complex was perfect in its dimensions, including the wall separating the holy from the common (40:5– 42:20). Recalling that cherubim were posted at the eastern gate of Eden, barring re-entry to the sanctuary after the Fall, as was the case when the Glory evacuated Israel’s first temple, Ezekiel was now taken in his vision to the gate that faces east: “And it was shut.” “The Lord said to me: ‘This gate shall remain shut; it shall not be opened, and no one shall enter by

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it; for the Lord, the God of Israel, has entered by it; therefore it shall remain shut. Only the prince, because he is a prince, may sit in it to eat food before the Lord; he shall enter by way of the vestibule of the gate, and shall go out by the same way’” (44:1–3).

Nothing “unclean” will be allowed to enter its sacred precincts (vv. 4–9).

All of these prophecies are fulfilled in the heavenly sanctuary John saw in his vision in Revelation 21 and 22. First, it will be the holy habitation of God with his people, where sin, death, pain, and suffering are banished forever. “And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new’” (21:5). This is precisely what Jesus told the disciples he would do in this in-between time. The inhabitants will drink freely of the water of life, just as they will be finally allowed to eat from the Tree of Life and escape the judgment of the unrepentant world (vv.

7–8). John was then shown “the bride, the wife of the Lamb,” which is none other than “the holy city, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (vv. 9–10). Here, as in Ezekiel, the city is measured with a rod, symbolically displaying its cosmic dimensions (v. 16). In fact, it becomes increasingly clear that the temple is not something within the city, but the city itself. “I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb” (v. 22).

Unlike the temples of Eden and Jerusalem, “nothing unclean will enter it” and therefore this sanctuary’s gates “will never be shut” so that all “whose names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life may enter” (vv.

25–27). There will be no threats to life and communion with the Triune God. The physical distinctions of the temple—with its outer court of the Gentiles, inner court of the Jews, and the Most Holy Place—remind us of Jesus’ answer to the disciples’ query at his ascension, “‘Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’

He replied, ‘It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth’” (Acts 1:7–8). In the Old Testament, Israel is often described as the mountain of the Lord to which the people come, but the emphasis in the New Testament falls on the mountain of the Lord as a community of redeemed Jews and Gentiles who take the good news to the nations. “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to all creation” (Mark 16:15).

The end-time sanctuary, made without hands, has finally appeared in Christ. Far greater than the rending of the temple curtain at Jesus’ crucifixion is the rending of Jesus’ own body on the cross, which N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 13

opened up direct access to all believers. There our High Priest has entered the heavenly sanctuary of which the earthly temple was merely a type, and he entered bearing his own blood as the complete and final sacrifice for sin. There will be no renewal of the Sinai covenant, no going back to the shadows now that the reality has come.

Now believers, Jew and Gentile, are being built up into Christ as living stones. The people have become the place of God’s dwelling, robed in the glorious robes of Christ’s righteousness. The city and the temple in the book of Revelation encompass the whole cosmos.

It is not only the wall between the Jews and Gentiles that is torn down, but also the division between heavenly and earthly temples. At long last, God has not only small-scale replicas of his sanctuary, but he also dissolves any distinction between heaven and earth.2 Not only the prophets and apostles, but the whole people of God are now “caught up in the Spirit” to stand in the heavenly council, covered in priestly vestments, sent from the throne room as witnesses.3 Amid flashes of lightning and peals of thunder, John’s vision of the heavenly worship describes the twenty-four elders seated around God’s throne, with flaming torches burning before each throne. And behind the thrones hangs the rainbow of peace (Rev. 4:2–5). The flaming torches in Revelation are reminiscent of the flames of fire above each Spiritendowed witness at Pentecost. The new temple is not built “by human hands” (Acts 7:48), and they are circumcised by a circumcision without human hands, by the circumcision-death of Christ (Col. 2:11).4 The new creation is therefore entirely the work of God, and the end-time sanctuary is the temple that God has built for himself. It is not built by us but by God, whose indwelling presence is not conditioned on the nation’s faithfulness but on his own covenant faithfulness, erected not from inanimate blocks that may be pulled down but from living stones taken from every tribe under heaven with Christ as the cornerstone (1 Pet. 2:4–8).

The Old Testament prophecies anticipate a renewal of the whole earth. Nothing good that God has made—laughter, friendship, feasting, labor, and culture-making—will be lost; everything will be restored.

In the New Testament as well, the final heavenly abode is a created place (Luke 24:51; John 14:2–4; Acts 1:11; 7:55–56; 1 Pet. 3:22). To be sure, the renewal is so radical that it can be described only in apocalyptic terms (2 Pet. 3:12–13) as passing away (Rev. 21:2–3). Nevertheless, we should think not in terms of the end of God’s creation itself but of the end of creation in its current condition. Our heavenly hope is not only of saved souls but of creation (Rom. 8:19– 14 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

21). Just as Jesus ate and drank after his resurrection, so there will be eating and drinking in the new creation—although this time at the consummated marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev. 19:9), Jesus will drink wine with us (Luke 22:18). The theme of eating and drinking in the presence of the Lord that we find throughout the Old Testament narratives, and again so prominently in Luke’s Gospel, will be fully realized in that day. In Revelation 22 we hear of a great river that flows through the city, with the tree of life “yielding its fruit each month” (v. 2).

This whole creation will be wholly saved and yet wholly new. If our goal is to be liberated from creation rather than from the liberation of creation, we will understandably display little concern for the world that God has made. If, however, we are looking forward to “the restoration of all things” (Acts 3:21) and the participation of the whole creation in our redemption (Rom. 8:28–21), then our actions here and now pertain to the same world that will one day be finally and fully renewed.

Raising our eyes in faith toward God, we reach out in love to our fellow saints and to our neighbors with our hearts and our hands. As God serves us with his heavenly gifts through the ministry of the church in his own Great Commission, he also serves our neighbors with common blessings through our worldly callings. Let us live out our discipleship as those who know that all authority in heaven and on earth belongs to our Redeemer, that he is with us until the end of the age, and that he will at last return bodily to judge the living and the dead and to make everything new. And even when we—and you—fail, remember that Jesus has not and that he promises to be with us—and you—until the end of the age. He has already given you the kingdom. ■

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

The interview with Sherwood Wirt in Decision magazine is included in C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 265.

2M. G. Kline, Images of the Spirit (S. Hamilton, MA: selfpublished, 1986), 35.

3Kline, 94.

4G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2004), 233–34.

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Witherspoon on the Confession After declining several invitations, John Witherspoon (1723–94) finally accepted a call as the first pastor of Nassau Presbyterian Church and president of Princeton College. At Princeton he also taught theology, history, and philosophy to many of the new nation’s leaders, including James Madison, Aaron Burr, and a host of Supreme Court justices and members of Congress. Besides being the only clergyman (and college president) to sign the Declaration of Independence, Witherspoon also drafted the Articles of Confederation and gave input on the U.S. Constitution. However, his lesser known ministry in the Church of Scotland was just as active and controversial. Before emigrating, Witherspoon wrote Ecclesiastical Maxims, a collection of maxims that employed satire as a way of illustrating the feeble sentiments of the Kirk’s “Moderate” wing. This one is too relevant to our own day to overlook. The views he targets here are often repeated in our day, and this satire reminds us that in spite of the “postmodern” advertisements, anti-confessional arguments have varied little from their “modern” script.

—Michael S. Horton

Ecclesiastical Characteristics, Maxim III

By John Witherspoon

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t is a necessary part of the character of a moderate man, never to speak of the Confession of Faith but with a sneer; to give sly hints, that he does not thoroughly believe it; and to make the word orthodoxy a term of contempt and reproach.

The Confession of Faith, which we are now all laid under a disagreeable necessity to subscribe, was framed in times of hot religious zeal; and therefore it can hardly be supposed to contain any thing agreeable to our sentiments in these cool and refreshing days of moderation.

So true is this, that I do not remember to have heard any moderate man speak well of it, or recommend it, in a sermon, or private discourse, in my time, And, indeed, nothing can be more ridiculous, than to make a fixed standard for opinions, which change just as the fashions of clothes and dress. No complete system can be settled for all ages, except the maxims I am now compiling and illustrating, and their great perfection lies in their being ambulatory, so that they may be applied differently, with the change of times. …There is one very strong particular reason why

moderate men cannot love the Confession of Faith; moderation evidently implies a large share of charity, and consequently a good and favorable opinion of those that differ from our church; but a rigid adherence to the Confession of Faith, and high esteem of it, nearly borders upon, or gives great suspicion of harsh opinions of those that differ from us: and does not experience rise up and ratify this observation?

Who are the narrow-minded, bigotted, uncharitable persons among us?

Who are the severe censurers of those that differ in judgment? Who are the damners of the adorable Heathens, Socrates, Plato, Marcus Antonius, &c.? In fine, who are the persecutors of the inimitable heretics among ourselves? Who but the admirers of this antiquated composition, who pin their faith to other men’s sleeves, and will not endure one jot less or different belief from what their fathers had before them! It is therefore plain, that the moderate man, who desires to inclose [sic] all intelligent beings in one benevolent embrace, must have an utter abhorrence at that vile hedge of distinction, the Confession of Faith.

Why We Need to Recover Catechism “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” – Vladimir I. Lenin

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The Spirit of Christ and the Apostolic Age

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hrist’s promise to be with his church until the end of the age—delivered on the eve of his departure— is one of those gospel promises that comes wrapped in a riddle. Once the riddle is understood, it no longer obscures the truth but rather reveals it all the more profoundly. The profound truth revealed by this riddle is that Christ is more truly present with his church by his Spirit than he ever was while he walked the earth.

Jesus had to leave his disciples in order to truly be with them.

The Spirit is not less than Jesus, nor a poor substitute, but more. This “more” is extensive, so Jesus can be present with all believers equally and is no longer constrained by physical proximity. But it is also more qualitatively, as the Spirit conveys to us the fruits of Christ’s heavenly labors. He is the Spirit of the Risen Christ, the Spirit that Christ received as a promised inheritance from the Father when he ascended on high, and the Spirit he distributes as an abundant gift to each and every one who calls on his name by faith. The Spirit represents the fruits of Christ’s labors, granting the church not local but universal fellowship with the Lamb who was slain.

It is unfortunate, though understandable, that we associate the Spirit most immediately with his extraordinary outpouring on Pentecost—unfortunate because the Spirit is seen especially as a marker of the opening of the apostolic age, the passing of which is assumed to diminish his activity. One useful corrective is to turn from the opening of the apostolic age to its close. Though not as clearly marked out in the New Testament—this age passed not with a bang but with a whimper—we nevertheless catch an intimate, first-person glimpse of it in the Epistles of John. For John by all accounts was the last living apostle, the last direct link to the Savior. No

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one had imagined a church without apostles. How would she fare without them?

The Apostolic Witness: Seen with Our Eyes, Touched with Our Hands ohn writes his Gospel with a clear purpose. After recording Jesus’ words to Thomas, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not yet seen and yet have believed,” John tells us that he has written his Gospel “so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ…and that by believing, you may have life” (John 20:29, 31).

His first Epistle—more of a sermon really—has a different but related purpose: “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13).

John desires to comfort and assure the church in a time of trial, and a cursory reading of 1 John shows why. Antichrists have arisen, deceivers who are leading people astray, denying their sin, and denying that Jesus is the Son of God come in the flesh. The church has been torn apart. As a result, there is a crisis of confidence, with false prophets peddling false gospels.

John responds to this crisis of authority with a full-blown articulation of his own apostolic pedigree: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life…we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life…that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you….This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you” (1 John 1:1–5).

One can scarcely imagine the power of these words when they were read for the first time. The demoralized gathering of saints, living some sixty years after the events of Pentecost, were hearing the life-giving message of the Lord from one who heard it from his own lips, one who leaned on his breast the night before he was crucified. This is like a veteran of D-Day walking into our midst and telling stories of that frightful day.

But the power of John’s apostolic authority, rightly revered in the church, would have had a corresponding effect. How many more missives would the church receive from an eyewitness? Who would unmask the next antichrist and rebuke the next false prophet?

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The Gift of the Spirit: Eternal Life oubtless the same thoughts were coursing through John’s mind as he was writing the letter, seeking to comfort his little children that they were indeed heirs of eternal life. As he does so, his thoughts turn increasingly from the message of the eyewitness to the Spirit who safeguards this mes-

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sage in the life of the church. John assures his readers that the Word of God, what they have heard from the beginning, abides in them. In the face of the deceivers, he assures them that their anointing abides in them, even as the Word does, teaching them all things. This is the principal activity of the Spirit, as Jesus taught in the farewell discourse; he is the Spirit of truth who brings to remembrance all that Jesus said. John goes further and tells us the Spirit is truth.

Not surprisingly, John closely associates the anointing of the Spirit with the new birth. The evangelist who recorded Christ’s nighttime conversation with Nicodemus has a very concrete sense of what it means to be born from above: “God’s Spirit abides in him, and he cannot keep on sinning because he has been born of God” (3:9). We shouldn’t flinch from this apparent perfectionism in 1 John any more than we should flinch from the truth that those anointed by the Spirit “have no need for a teacher” (2:27). The reality of sin and the need for godly instruction are patently clear throughout the letter.

The Spirit is God’s seed planted in the believer, God himself living within, and the principles of truth and love necessarily take root from his presence within.

Likewise, faith is a sure sign that the seed has been planted: “Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God” (4:15). We know that we abide in him, and he in us, because he has given us his Spirit.

One cannot overestimate the importance of the Spirit’s association with the new birth in John’s thinking. This is why he addresses the church in his care as his “little children.” The Spirit who brings new birth is the giver of eternal life, for he brings the heavenly life of the Lord Jesus to those with whom he dwells.

And so John’s confidence regarding the purity of his children is born of the life that he knows lives within them. The seed of God has been planted; it will grow up into a fruitful tree. This is a coming reality that is guaranteed not merely by the word of promise, but by the fact of the one who lives within them, the heavenly Lord who nevertheless dwells in their midst.

Of course, the false prophets claim their own spirits as well. This is why John urges his children to test the spirits. The nature of this test—the confession that Jesus Christ has come from God in the flesh— demonstrates that the Spirit of truth is the Spirit of Jesus Christ. If you don’t confess this fleshly Christ, crucified and risen, then you don’t possess His Spirit.

The Spirit and the Water and the Blood s John draws his letter to a close, the Spirit comes into ever greater focus. It seems that the apostle recognizes that the time of his

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authority, his personal witness to the Word of Life, is also drawing to a close. Yet the end of the apostolic age is not the end of the Spirit’s activity, for he continues to bear witness in the church: “This is he who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ; not by the water only but by the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. For there are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood; and these three agree” (1 John 5:6–8).* This is a scary moment for the church. It is a moment of truth—the moment when the apostolic training wheels will be taken off, one way or another.

And just as John opened the Epistle with his own testimony, the testimony of a man soon to pass away, so he concludes his letter by leaving his “little children” with a lasting testimony, in fact, two lasting testimonies: the Spirit and the water and the blood, who all three agree; and the testimony of God himself concerning his Son. It is crucial to note that this discussion of the Spirit’s testifying work stems from the true confession of Jesus Christ as “he who came by water and blood.”

What does it mean that Jesus came by water and blood? Throughout his Epistles, John opposes those who deny the incarnation, specifically those who deny that Jesus “came in the flesh.” One version of this Gnostic error held that the man Jesus was endowed by the Spirit of God at his baptism (“by water only”), and departed from him before his death (“blood”), thereby sparing the divine Son of God the indignity of the all-too-human acts of birth and death.

Jesus anchors the confession of a fully human Christ in these flesh-and-blood events, birth and death.

The defense of the incarnation is not metaphysical speculation. It is not about the ontological transformation or assumption of human “stuff” into the divine. Rather, it serves the true preaching of the cross, and it is this truth of Christ crucified to which the Spirit bears witness. Yet one of the difficulties of this passage is in recognizing that John shifts his scene of focus from the birth, baptism, and death of Christ to the present working of the Spirit of the church. Though the terms “water and the blood” are not unrelated in these two settings, they have a distinct reference in the life of Jesus and in the life of the church; the first inspired John’s elaboration of the second. We see the shift in the change of tense, from past to present: Jesus came by water and blood (his birth and death), but the Spirit testifies by water and blood now.

What is this present threefold testimony of the Spirit with water and blood? One clue is found at the foot of the cross, the preaching of which inspires this discussion. Recall that when the other sheep fled their shepherd, the beloved disciple alone stood true at the 18 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

side of Mary and the women. Recall that John was adopted intimately into the earthly family of Jesus, even as he was adopted into his heavenly family: “Woman, behold your son…behold your mother.”

And recall what testimony John bears: “But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water. He who saw it has borne witness—his testimony is true, and he knows that he is telling the truth—that you also may believe.”

Water and blood both have profound symbolic significance in John’s Gospel, from the living water at the well to the true flesh and blood of the Lord. This is far more than scientific testimony to the death of Christ.

It is, for John, the symbolic link between the effusion of the life-giving Spirit and the cross.

And today, in the life of the church, the Spirit testifies to us of this life-giving reality of the cross through the sacramental elements, the water of baptism, and the blood of the Lord’s Supper. In our baptism, the Spirit is testifying alongside the water, bearing witness to the truth of the water, that we have been buried with Christ in his death on the cross. In the Lord’s Supper, the flesh and blood of Christ are made present to us through the power of the Spirit to all who believe, though he remains in heaven.

Baptism and the Lord’s Supper mark the Spirit’s outpouring at Pentecost and the beginning of the apostolic age: “And those who received the word were baptized…and they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” So they are found again here, testifying to the continued working of the Spirit long after the apostolic age has drawn to a close.

While the Spirit is clearly an inward, personal possession of all believers, John points us here to the Spirit’s outward activity alongside the sacramental elements of the water and bread and wine. This is an important corrective, and Reformed churches in particular need to hear this teaching, where Calvin’s discussion of the “internal testimony of the Spirit” has too often crowded out corresponding biblical models of the Spirit’s work through means.

There is clear evidence that the Gnostics whom John opposed in the church were inclined to denigrate the sacraments, even as they denigrated the flesh of our Lord. Contemporary Gnostic tendencies incline evangelical Christians to a similarly “spiritualizing” worship. John’s emphasis on testimony and witness ultimately urges us to look outside ourselves for the evidences and reasonableness of our faith.

We see this in part in the works of Christian love that mark out the true community of the faithful, but we see them even more objectively in the working of the sacraments in our midst.

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Through the power of the Spirit, these sacraments bring Christ into our midst, and not just any Christ, but the crucified Christ who sheds forth truth and life on the church. Instead of looking within, John urges us to look outside ourselves.

The Closing of the Apostolic Age and the Greater Testimony of God hile the Spirit is the presence of God among his people, John’s reflection upon the threefold testimony of Spirit and Word and blood in the present life of the church leads him immediately to transition back to another testimony of God, again in the past tense:

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If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater, for this is the testimony of God that he has borne concerning his Son. Whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself. Whoever does not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that God has borne concerning his Son. And this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. (1 John 5:9–12) John cannot long dwell on the life-giving work of the Spirit in the church without being led back to the historic work of the Son. John’s own preaching and teaching—the testimony of men—pales in comparison to the witness that God himself has borne concerning his Son. The power of the Word preached continues to reside in the One who is preached. He who is proclaimed is greater than the proclamation; he is the source of its life.

Witness and testimony are central themes of John’s Gospel, and here we see why. Jesus submitted himself to the legal standards of veracity: “If I alone bear witness about myself, my testimony is not deemed true.” But he continues by saying that he receives a testimony that is not from man, “For the works that the Father has given me to accomplish, the very works that I am doing, bear witness about me that the Father has sent me. And the Father who sent me has himself borne witness about me” (John 5:36–37).

This is the great testimony of God, “that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.” In other words, that which John has borne witness to in his apostolic ministry, that which the Spirit bears witness to in the life of the church, is that there is life in the Son. The purpose of this contemporary witness—of men and God— is to make Christ present to us in all his saving work.

And so, as John concludes his letter, he traces a remarkable arc through the troubled times in which

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he lived. He opens by anchoring his authority in what he has seen, heard, and touched. But in drawing his “little children” back to those simple truths taught by their Lord, back to what they have heard from the very beginning, he comes to grasp the utter dependence of his own apostolic labors upon what God has given in Christ himself. He does not conclude that the foundation he has laid is insignificant—far from it.

Instead, in directing our eyes—his own eyes—back to what he proclaims, the life that is in Christ, he has grasped that Christ himself is present with his church.

He is present through the Spirit and present through what he has written, so that we might believe and have life, and so that they who believe might know that they have life. Now. In the Son. So the Lamb who was slain is with us always, through the Spirit, in the church. Even to the very end of the age, when we shall all share in that glorious vision. ■

Rev. Dr. Brian Lee is pastor of Christ United Reformed Church in Washington, D.C.

This passage is not without its difficulties, and its force has been further muted by confusion surrounding the medieval insertion of the so-called “comma Johanneum,” an explicit Trinitarian reference regarding the “three that testify” in 5:7–8: “For there are three that bear record [in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth], the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.” It is most likely that the Johannine comma originated when a scribe or teacher made a marginal, explanatory note in his manuscript, as many of us do today, which was later understood by a later copyist as a part of the original text. In the sixteenth century, Erasmus omitted the Johannine comma from his new Latin translation, because he didn’t find any record of it in the Greek manuscripts (it is first recorded in Latin manuscripts of the sixth to ninth centuries). A tremendous uproar ensued, as it was thought that Erasmus was undermining the biblical basis of the doctrine of the Trinity; Erasmus responded that he’d include the comma in future editions of his text if a Greek manuscript could be produced. Remarkably, one was—likely dashed off quickly by a copyist—and the comma was reinserted and ended up finding its way thereby into the King James Bible. All modern translations omit it. *

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Plagiarizing the Lord’s Prayer

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en Franklin’s oft-repeated motto, “Remember that time is money,” stands in need of a serious twentieth-century upgrade. Today, text is money. Intellectual property rights are the new cash cow, not the time clock. It’s a shame Jesus didn’t have a financial advisor to counsel him on such matters. If only he would have trademarked John 3:16!

Think of what kind of financial legacy he could have bequeathed the church from the royalties gathered by the protected use of the Golden Rule. But, alas, so far from retaining the intellectual property rights to his inspired (!) sermonic material, Jesus forfeits all, instructing every disciple to plagiarize the Lord’s Prayer.1 The Messiah had a very good reason for us to take this prayer upon our lips and entrench it within our hearts through overlearning: “For we do not know what to pray for as we ought” (Rom. 8:26). And so, there is a divine expectation that we converse and commune with God, but we do not and cannot pray as we ought since we are—as Luther put it—always a sinner and constantly sinning in thought, word, and deed, even while justified in this life by Jesus’ imputed righteousness. Therefore Christ must redeem us and fulfill even the “law of prayer” on our behalf.

He not only fulfills the law of prayer and wins for us the Holy Spirit who makes intercession for us, he also bequeaths to us the perfect prayer as an availing entreaty to our heavenly Father.

Fabricating a prayer as one “ought” is an impossible task. Christians feel, in a visceral as well as cognitive way, the insufficiency of their prayers—that is our “always a sinner” nature. Our words are failing and ill20 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

suited because we so often live by sight and not by faith. Our approach to the Holy One is undeniably contrived and ill-mannered, our speech muddled and imprecise. But thanks be to God that Christ has liberated us from even the work of prayer and, with his own words, has transformed our ignorant stammering into a soul-satisfying communing with God through the plagiarized words of that Word made flesh.

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Plagiarism he gift of the Lord’s Prayer frees Christians from the unrealistic expectation of posturing a strong faith and spiritual answers when people seek words of comfort and hope. The reality is that more times than not the words aren’t there. We are usually at a loss regarding what to say to God on behalf of another person or, alternatively, to God himself regarding the fulfillment of his purposes in the world. The Lord’s Prayer frees us from the tyranny of spiritual creativity and allows us to rest in the confidence of something certain and true. Instead of fabricating something snappy to garner God’s attention, Jesus would have us lose all such originality and simply plagiarize.

The call of Christ, then, is to think differently from the way we usually think about prayer: originality isn’t necessarily a virtue, and plagiarizing isn’t necessarily a vice. Move from the propensity toward sinful subjectivity and enter into the realm of divine objectivity by taking license to steal, at the behest of the Lord himself.

Jesus steers us into the sphere of communing with our heavenly Father through prayer that is not based

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on anything we could or would fabricate, precisely because our creative prayers are the product of sinful hearts. He may have been thinking in the category of Jeremiah 17:9: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” Our prayers naturally arise out of our own desires, and our own truncated and anthropocentric vision of reality; and Jesus more than anyone understood the hearts of men (cf. John 2:25). Consequently, when our hearts and minds are the fountainhead of prayer, the conversation with God starts off on bad footing.

But there is another source—untainted, vital, and true. That source is God. More specifically, it’s God as revealed in the Bible. We could get even more specific in that it is God revealed in his Son, Jesus the Christ, the Word made flesh. When we say that God is the source for our prayers, we need to understand that our prayers need to be plagiarized prayers. We need to be praying for what God wants us to pray—that is, what we ought to pray. That means taking the words of the Way, the Truth, and the Life and putting them into our mouths.

The Actual Content of Your Prayers he good prayer is not that far removed from the good sermon. A good preacher plagiarizes.

There is no need to come up with something avant garde, because what the minister of the Word does is reiterate news—good news. In fact, this news was something that God himself first said and then generated an apostolic corps to rehearse time and again. And it will continually be reiterated—hopefully many times verbatim—because the Lord permits no copyright on the content of the holy gospel. It’s free for the taking, free for the telling, and left to the public domain of preaching and professing. The same could be said for catechesis (which means “to sound again”). Good catechumens copycat the catechism. In reiterating the Word of God, catechumens say that which is certain and true.

Now apply the same to prayer. Jesus has given us the words of prayer “to sound again.” It is no accident that Luther included the Lord’s Prayer as the third chief part of the catechism—the Lord has made it a constitutive element in basic discipleship: “When you pray, say…” (Luke 11:1–2). Indeed, receiving, owning, and implementing Christ’s catechesis on prayer sets disciples in their proper place: it is enough that disciples be as their master.

That Christ would put the words of prayer into our mouths is in good keeping with Old Testament precedence. The Psalms are self-presenting as the Prayer Book of the Bible. And yet there is a sense in which it can be said that all of Scripture serves as a rich source from which to embezzle words for prayer.

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Using the words of Scripture as your prayer—the prayer of the Lord as your prayer to the Lord—may not make you a master pray-er. It is likely that you will be no more eloquent than you are now, but you will be able to pray in a godly fashion something that is true, something according to God’s will, something purposed toward the manifestation of God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. You will be praying what God desires to hear. Again, this is the disciple’s confidence: praying the Word of God back to God allows you to say that which is most certain and true—nothing doubting.

The Premier Prayer hy did Jesus in the prayer he gave us to pray include the petitions he did? Why did he have us pray, for example, “Hallowed be Thy name”? Don’t we already know that God’s name is holy? Jesus has given us this petition because we need to say it. We need to say it because we need to say to him what he has said to us. His words turn the focus from us to the God who is there. The Lord’s Prayer says, “Concern yourself with my words, my will, rather than your own and say back to me what I have already said to you. In other words, be ye catechized and you shall be worshiping me in Spirit and in truth.”

The great thing about this is that he knows what we truly need, and so his Word in the Lord’s Prayer is really his best care for us. When we take God’s words and make them our own, we actually are praying for what’s best for ourselves.

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The Liturgy ou might have heard the Latin saying that as you pray so you believe—lex orandi, lex credenda (loosely translated, “the rule of prayer is the rule of belief” or “as you pray, so you believe”).

This maxim helps when it comes to understanding what we should pray, how we should pray, what words we should use, and from where those words ought to be derived. The prayers of the church—what the church prays—forms confession, profession, and proclamation. Doctrine flows from doxology.

This brings us back to plagiarism. If we pray what God has given us to pray, then we will be praying in line with his will, his wisdom, and (at least in this respect) be worshiping in Spirit and in truth. This has been both the beauty and the necessity of the Divine Liturgy: it protects parishioners from the whims of the minister and the minister from the whims of the parishioners. The liturgy says back to God that which is most certain and true, and this is because in the liturgy we have the Word of God suffusing every dimension of the biblical Mass, including prayer. As

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we gather for worship, the liturgy forms our prayer life, focusing on God, receiving what he has to give us, and responding to him in prayer, praise, and thanksgiving by saying back to him what he has said to us.

In this respect even the Divine Service is catechetical and therefore a constitutive element in disciple-making. No prayer could be more appropriate for the assembly of disciples than the Lord’s Prayer that entreats “Our Father” for “our daily bread” and a half dozen more petitions in every case in the plural. The Lord’s Prayer is the prayer of the church.

The Lord’s Prayer is not just a prayer among many within the liturgy. It is the prayer, truly best prayed in the context of God giving to us what he most desires to give—the Son to his bride the church in Word and Sacrament. In the Lord’s Prayer, then, both the will and the reason of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are known to us, for us.

How Our Lord Teaches Us to Pray hough we know it by rote through overlearning, we can never exhaust the theology of the Lord’s Prayer. It therefore retains deep endless value and profound meaningfulness throughout our lives. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we’re not just repeating what he has given us to say; we are actually praying. More precisely, we are praying what he wants us to pray—his will, not ours; for his reasons, not ours.

The Lord’s Prayer is to be plagiarized, not adapted.

Jesus didn’t say experiment with this model. He said, “Pray this…” Don’t just say it, pray it. Believe it. Take it to heart. Meditate upon it and take refuge in it.

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You know the Father’s name is holy and that it is holy among you because of Christ and his cross. So pray it.

You know his kingdom comes and that it has come to you in the incarnate Son of God and by the Holy Spirit. So pray it.

You know that the Father’s will is perfect and holy and that it is done among you because of great redemption accomplished by Jesus the Son. So pray it.

You know that God gives you your daily bread and that he gives it to you out of his great love, which was supremely manifested when he gave you the Bread of Life on the cross and now in the Eucharist. So pray it.

You know the Father forgives you of your sins and helps you forgive others theirs and that he forgives you because he has separated you from your sins as far as the east is from the west in forsaking his only begotten Son. So pray it.

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You know God does not lead you into temptation and that he guards you in the time of temptation because your Lord himself has endured temptation beyond what you have experienced and has overcome temptation, sin, the devil, and death. So pray it.

You know that God delivers you from evil and that it is so because he already delivered you from the punishment you deserve, delivering his own Son over to make atonement and be the propitiation. So pray it.

You know that his is the kingdom, power, and glory forever and ever and that it is so because Jesus rose from the grave, ascended into heaven, and reigns on high forever. So pray it.

You know it’s all true, and so you say “Amen.”

Plagiarism of this kind comes with no fine or record.

In fact, to take this from Jesus only liberates us from the tyranny and restlessness of perpetual innovativeness that emerge from our harmful wants and desires as we pray for what we know not. The Lord’s Prayer in the mouth of the church, then, is truth that sets us free to be honest with the Lord, serviceable to his kingdom, and in our proper place within the cosmic order—namely, as catechumens, disciples of Jesus the Christ.

God Plagiarizing Himself he Word of God teaches us that it plagiarizes itself. Everywhere in the Gospels, whether in the wilderness temptations or on the cross of Golgotha, God incarnate submitted himself to his own Word inscripturated, and thus we can be in no better position than to do the same. This is an enormous consolation when you cannot think of what to say. Don’t worry about the need for spontaneity and creativity. Let the prayer the Lord has taught us take you to that which is most certain and true, because this prayer is what Jesus himself would and did pray.

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The First and Foremost Prayer artin Luther said that “nothing is so necessary as to call upon God incessantly and drum into his ears our prayer that he may give, preserve, and increase in us faith and obedience.”2 What better to drum into his ears than his own words? Luther believed so strongly in this that it made its way into his Large Catechism:

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We should be moved and drawn to prayer. For in addition to this commandment and promise, God expects us and He Himself arranges the

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words and form of prayer for us. He places them on our lips for how and what we should pray, so that we may see how heartily He pities us in our distress, and we may never doubt that such prayer is pleasing to Him and shall certainly be answered. This [the Lord’s Prayer] is a great advantage indeed over all other prayers that we might compose ourselves. For in our own prayers the conscience would ever be in doubt and say, “I have prayed, but who knows if it pleases Him or whether I have hit upon the right proportions and form?” Therefore, there is no nobler prayer to be found upon earth than the Lord’s Prayer. We pray it daily, because it has this excellent testimony, that God loves to hear it. We ought not to surrender this for all the riches of the world.3 Psalm 51:15 gives us a good practical theology of prayer: “O Lord, open my lips.” He opens our lips with his very words, words that cannot be exhausted, just as our need to pray them cannot be exhausted. Luther put it like this: “[In the Lord’s Prayer] is included in seven successive articles, or petitions, every need that never ceases to apply to us. Each is so great that it ought to drive us to keep praying the Lord’s Prayer all our lives.”4 The Lord’s Prayer cannot be outgrown, rendered redundant, or denominated as outmoded. One simply cannot come to the point where this prayer has been mastered or where it is merely a didactic device, if for no other reason than it entreats the Lord for forgiveness, for necessities of life, for the prospering of the kingdom of God in the here and now in hope of the not yet. While the Lord’s Prayer is simple, it encompasses all of prayer—adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, and supplication. Even if it were just a simple thing, there would be nothing greater in praying to God than what he has given us in this prayer if for no other reason than the sufficiency of Scripture begets the sufficiency of this prayer, so that it can be said that the Word made flesh gave this Word for those in the flesh that our flesh may be conformed to this Word.

All Theology Is Plagiarism n Ephesians 3:12, St. Paul encourages the baptized to come with “boldness” before the throne of God. Before Paul, Jesus himself instructed his disciples to take great boldness as a plagiarizer of prayer.

Approach the throne of the great King telling him what he said, what he loves to hear, what he knows to be his good and perfect will. If you have ever wondered whether God answers your prayers, then wonder no more. By praying to him what he has given you to pray, you are assured he not only hears but

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answers your prayers according to his good and perfect will.

From what Jesus teaches and practices, it appears that all our orthodoxy and orthopraxy should be the product of pure, unmitigated plagiarism. This is what keeps our communing with God in profession, praxis, and prayer most certain and true. So choose this day from whom you will steal. As for me and my household, we will plagiarize the Lord. ■

Rev. John J. Bombaro (Ph.D., King’s College, University of London) is the senior minister at Grace Lutheran Church, San Diego, and teaches theology and religious studies at the University of San Diego. His latest work is Jonathan Edwards’s Vision of Reality: The Relationship of God to the World, Redemption History, and the Reprobate (Pickwick, 2011).

The substance of this article is adapted from Rev. Paul Willweber’s “All Theology is Plagiarism” paper presented at the Catechism Convocation on the Lord’s Prayer at Trinity Lutheran Church, Whittier, California (April 2010). Willweber is the parish minister at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in San Diego.

2T. G. Tappert, The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959; reprint 2000), 420.

3Paul Timothy McCain, ed., Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions (St. Louis: Concordia, 2005), 410.

4McCain, 412.

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Studies in Acts (continued from page 6) tion,” appears. In Luke’s two books, members of this word family appear only in these two passages and in Luke 6:10, describing Jesus’ healing of a man whose withered hand “was restored.”

5Concepts such as bodily resurrection and last judgment were unpalatable both to Stoicism (with its cyclical view of history) and to Epicureanism (which imagined the gods as blissfully indifferent to human behavior). For further information see Dennis E. Johnson, The Message of Acts in the History of Redemption (Philipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1997), 194–201.

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Vocation: Work Quietly with Your Hands

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n the 1980s, many evangelicals spoke about winning the world to Christ by the year 2000, and there were a number of conversations about the matter, all of which, in hindsight, appear to have been a tad ambitious. It was not uncommon in those days for a Gordon-Conwell Seminary student to raise a hand in class and say, “Dr. Gordon, what do we need to do to win the world to Christ by the year 2000?”

My standard reply was, “Well, if we’re going to have a fighting chance, we evangelical Christians will have to shut up until 1999.” This may sound like poor advice, and perhaps it was, but note this: Evangelicals did not shut up, and the world was not won to Christ by the year 2000 (I rest my case).

I was convinced in those years that there was entirely too much of what I sometimes uncharitably referred to as “babbling for Jesus.” My advice regarding world evangelization was probably partly wrong.

Indeed, nearly everyone else thought it was entirely wrong, but I disagree; I think it was at least partly right, albeit inelegantly expressed. Evangelicals then (and probably now) had become annoyingly officious, entirely too prone to offer unsolicited religious counsel to people who had expressed no confidence in such counsel or in the counselors who proffered it.

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Many in our culture regarded evangelicals just as they did the Jehovah’s Witnesses; they did not answer the door when we rang the doorbell, but hid behind the curtains, whispering, “Honey, have they gone yet?”

I occasionally buttressed my counsel with the Westminster Larger Catechism, whose 145th answer lists among the violations of the ninth commandment, “speaking the truth unseasonably.” My critics suggested that I had misinterpreted the catechism, so I asked them what the clause meant and they said they did not know, to which I asked, “Can you think of any occasion that might qualify as ‘unseasonable’?”

Petulant silence ordinarily followed, until they would murmur something about “manmade creeds,” which drove me to cite biblical texts such as the following: First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.

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For we hear that some among you walk in idleness, not busy at work, but busybodies. Now such persons we command and encourage in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living. (2 Thess. 3:11–12) Now concerning brotherly love you have no need for anyone to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another, for that indeed is what you are doing to all the brothers throughout Macedonia. But we urge you, brothers, to do this more and more, and to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, so that you may live properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one. (1 Thess. 4:9–12) The last of these I regarded as especially pertinent, because Paul described “living quietly” as necessary to living “properly before outsiders.” My critics assured me that “quiet” and “quietly” did not mean “quiet” or “quietly” in these passages; but I was unpersuaded, because that is what these words mean in other uses in the New Testament, such as: “And Jesus responded to the lawyers and Pharisees, saying, ‘Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, or not?’ But they remained silent” (Luke 14:3–4, cf. also 1 Tim. 2:11–12). What could this have meant here other than that the lawyers and Pharisees did not respond verbally to Jesus’ question? My counsel, however, was not based merely on the Larger Catechism or on several Pauline texts; rather, I believe these religious texts were themselves based on two larger creational realities.

First Important Reality: Talk Is Cheap he first reality upon which these texts are based is this: people are ordinarily far more impressed by how others live than by what they say. That is, noble behavior is more winning or winsome than speech. This, I suggest, is the reality behind Peter’s counsel: “Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives” (1 Pet. 3:1). I don’t know how successful his counsel was, but Peter’s insight was almost surely correct; religious faith commends itself when its adherents quietly go about their business as cooperative people. At a minimum, Peter’s counsel teaches that in some circumstances conduct is more likely to win people than speech. Talk is cheap, our culture rightly reminds us.

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Second Important Reality: The Dignity of Human Labor he second reality upon which these texts are based is even larger: the importance of productive labor, even manual/physical labor, in God’s ordering of our lives. Some ancient worldviews differed from biblical religion by teaching that the material order is either evil or undignified; the material order was regarded by many with contempt. The biblical account of the material order is quite different; at the end of each day of material creation, God observed that what he had made was “good.” And when he crowned this material order on the sixth day with a material creature made in his image, he observed that all that he had made was “very good.”

Therefore, when the image of the God who made the material world labors himself in that world, he is doing exactly what an imitator of God ought to do—what we commonly call the “cultural mandate,” or from Genesis 1:26–31 the divine mandate to the human race to exercise responsible dominion over all aspects of the created order. Working productively in this arena is essential to our very nature and dignity as human beings. After the Fall, our labor became more laborious, but labor is still essentially human, as Pope John Paul II rightly observed:

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And yet, in spite of all this toil—perhaps, in a sense, because of it—work is a good thing for man. Even though it bears the mark of a bonum arduum, in the terminology of Saint Thomas—, this does not take away the fact that, as such, it is a good thing for man. It is not only good in the sense that it is useful or something to enjoy; it is also good as being something worthy, that is to say, something that corresponds to man’s dignity, that expresses this dignity and increases it. If one wishes to define more clearly the ethical meaning of work, it is this truth that one must particularly keep in mind. Work is a good thing for man—a good thing for his humanity— because through work man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also achieves fulfilment as a human being and indeed, in a sense, becomes “more a human being.”

(Laborem exercens, Section 9) Even the Sabbath institution reflects the great significance of human labor. While we commonly regard the Sabbath command as requiring us to rest from labor, in actual fact the Sabbath command requires us to work for 6/7 of the time and to rest 1/7: “Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 27

day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work” (Exod. 20:9–10). The six days of labor are prescribed by the same Hebrew grammar as the prescription of rest. Indeed, perhaps we should occasionally refer to this as “the labor command” rather than “the Sabbath command” to make the point. We also observe that this labor/rest command is not a mere necessity of the fallen order; Moses grounded the command in God’s own labor and our imitation of him: “In six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy” (Exod. 20:12). Even our day of nonlabor dignifies and commends the six other days of labor. We imitate God both in our labor and in our rest therefrom.

Since appropriate and productive labor is so central to what it means to be the Imago Dei, it is not surprising that such labor is viewed so highly by the author of Ecclesiastes: What gain has the worker from his toil?…I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man.…So I saw that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work, for that is his lot. Who can bring him to see what will be after him? (Eccl. 3:9, 12, 13, 22) This exuberant celebration of human labor partly explains the role of physical labor in Paul’s apostolic defense. Although Paul taught that he and the other apostles had a right to make their living from preaching the gospel (2 Thess. 3:9; 1 Cor. 9:6), Paul also frequently reminded the churches that he did not avail himself of that right but rather worked with his own hands: We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are poorly dressed and buffeted and homeless, and we labor, working with our own hands. (1 Cor. 4:10–11) What then is my reward? That in my preaching I may present the gospel free of charge, so as not to make full use of my right in the gospel.

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imitate us, because we were not idle when we were with you, nor did we eat anyone’s bread without paying for it, but with toil and labor we worked night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you. It was not because we do not have that right, but to give you in ourselves an example to imitate. (2 Thess. 3:7–9) Returning to two of the texts earlier cited as teaching us to live quietly, note the relationship in each between living quietly on the one hand and laboring productively on the other: For we hear that some among you walk in idleness, not busy at work, but busybodies.

Now such persons we command and encourage in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living. (2 Thess. 3:11–12) But we urge you, brothers, to do this more and more, and to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you. (1 Thess. 4:10–11) Paul’s reasoning appears to be something like this: The best way for Christians to present a winsome witness to their culture is to pursue their vocations competently and quietly. If they labor productively, they will reflect the image of God, become dignified humans, and provide an example that will (ordinarily) cause others to admire them.

Practical Thoughts hose who live in industrial and postindustrial cultures may have difficulty understanding the exuberant celebration of human labor we observed earlier in Ecclesiastes 3, and this is understandable.

Marxists, Romanticists, and Agrarians have all called attention to the (ordinarily) dehumanizing nature of the factory. Instead of humans making all the varied decisions necessary to imagine, design, and create something from scratch, humans stand in line doing the same monotonous activities all day long. Indeed, proof of the justness of this critique of industrialization’s dehumanizing labor is that humans have been largely replaced by robotic assembly in the last two decades, proving that the labor done in many factories was never very humane.

Regardless of our environment—whether preindustrial, industrial, or postindustrial—it is important to affirm and celebrate the dignity of human labor in the material arena as a means of affirming and celebrating the Imago Dei. Perhaps several suggestions may aid in recovering a healthy, biblical affirmation of human labor.

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Doing a Job or Pursuing a Vocation ometimes the word “vocation” has been employed too narrowly, covering only certain professions, such as medicine, clergy, law, and so forth. But any particular vocation is part of the divine vocation that we labor in and exercise dominion over God’s created order. Thus all lawful work is part of the divine calling (vocatio) on the human as Imago Dei. All such lawful work is more than merely “doing my job”; it is a fulfilling of God’s creational purpose for humans.

Perceiving our labor as a vocation can have a substantial impact on how we go about our labor. I worked as a greenskeeper in the summer when I was in school. I knew I had no intention to mow greens and fairways for my “career.” But for the nine summers that I was a greenskeeper, I regarded it as my calling for the time. I was ordinarily one of the first to arrive and the last to leave; I routinely volunteered for the most unpleasant or demanding work; and I could run any piece of equipment in the shop, which made me a “utility infielder” for my superintendents. In my judgment, there is far too much Christian conversation about “finding” our calling, and too little about “pursuing” the one we have. Consider Paul’s counsel: “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ” (Col. 3:23–24). Note Paul’s wide-open, generic “whatever you do.” The joy that Ecclesiastes referred to regarding labor has everything to do with how heartily we pursue it, and almost nothing to do with “finding the right job.” Human life is never “on hold”; it does not begin when we find “the right job” or the ideal job. It begins when we imitate God; and if we labor productively in his created order (and this would include intellectual and artistic labor, as well as industrial and agricultural labor, as Pope John Paul II rightly observed), we are doing what we were created to do.

But if we regard the same labor as something apart from “who I really am,” as something disconnected from ourselves, we will not find the joy that Ecclesiastes calls us to (and we will not be the witness to our culture Paul called us to be).

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Labor and Leisure oth before the Fall and after, God designed the human experience to consist of both labor and leisure. God paused at each moment in creation to observe what he had made (“and God saw that it was good”). He also ceased from all his creative labor on the unending seventh day—which is the only day in the creation narrative that does not say afterward, “And there was evening and there was morning, a first day.” It is presented as a day that

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begins and never ends. For the human also, as a bearer of the divine image, we properly labor in the created order and also pause from that labor to enjoy the creation. A wise use of leisure can complement our labor and permit us to experience a richer humanity. If our labor draws us away from others— for instance, cataloging books in a library—we may wish to employ our leisure in more socially oriented activity. If our labor calls us to very practical tasks, we may employ our leisure for more artistic enjoyment.

Part of the dissatisfaction that some individuals find in their labor would disappear if they did not expect their labor to fulfill every aspect of their humanity and if, instead, they pursued leisure more intentionally as a supplement to their labor (a matter discussed extremely helpfully by Leland Ryken in Redeeming the Time: A Christian Approach to Work and Leisure).

Retirement ue to the present economic environment, my employer had to make some changes to the institution’s retirement program recently. The change has been the topic of considerable conversation around the college. Though I am sometimes regarded by some as a little outspoken, on this particular matter I have expressed no opinion at all, and I haven’t worried about the matter for even five seconds. As I put it to a colleague yesterday: “While this isn’t written in stone, and I’m willing to keep an open mind, I have no intention of retiring. Retirement may appear ‘normal’ in our culture, but I do not find it to be ‘normal’ in the Scriptures. It is normal for us to labor in God’s created order productively.”

I don’t expect anyone to agree with this sentiment, nor do I express it with any zeal. But I do believe we should at least reconsider whether our cultural norm of retiring at sixty-five (or sooner) is really all that “normal.” Is it normal for the Imago Dei to do nothing productive for the last fifteen or twenty years of earthly life? There may be a host of public-policy considerations that necessitate people leaving the workforce to make room for others; I have no opinion on that. But I do have an opinion about labor. Labor is not just a necessity of a fallen world nor a pragmatic need; it is an expression of the image of God, and therefore an opportunity to be human in the fullest sense. When we “retire” from labor, we “retire” from being human; and I’m in no hurry to retire from that. ■

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T. David Gordon is a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and associate professor of religion at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania.

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

Theological Detoxification

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eaders of Michael Horton’s Christless Christianity and The

niques they’re supposed to use to be more spiritual” (xvii). The new evanGospel-Driven Life will find Good News for Anxious Christians gelical theology adjudicates a person’s standing and status as a an outstanding companion in the effort to foster a proper Christian, not by the objectivity of the gospel but by their works, feelunderstanding of Christings, and experiences, which are manufactured by a ian thinking and livvariety of enslaving—and sometimes ridiculously ing that flows from gimmicky but always unbiblical—techniques that God’s good news. require constant upgrading or replacement. At the Emerging from decoutset of each chapter, Cary identifies these techades of firsthand exponiques of the religious marketplace by their clichéd sure to evangelical evangelical moniker: giving God control, finding God’s anxieties about sanctiwill, hearing God speak, letting God work, and so on. fication, this is a welThis gives way to juxtaposing theses stated in each come addition to a bourchapter heading that receive elucidation within each geoning genre that division. For example, chapter 7 is titled “Why You announces the gospel Don’t Have to Keep Getting Transformed All the is for Christians too.

Time, Or, How Virtues Make a Lasting Change in Phillip Cary, an Us,” and chapter 8 is “Why ‘Applying It to Your Life’ award winning teachIs Boring, Or, How the Gospel Is Beautiful.” Like a er and experienced classic confession of faith, each thesis expertly philosophy professor refuted is matched by an instructive expression of Good News for at Eastern University, orthodoxy.

Anxious Christians: has produced an entirely The new evangelical theology is shaped and steered 10 Practical Things You accessible, nontechnical by our North American consumerist culture and its Don’t Have to Do work intended for beleamarriage to technological advancements, personal guered believers seeking experiences, and instantaneous results. “Pastors and

by Phillip Cary Brazos Press, 2010 detoxification from popother Christian leaders have been taught to use these 197 pages (paperback), $14.99 evangelicalism. For such techniques,” explains Cary, “and get you to use them persons, this book is a too. They do this with good intentions, thinking that veritable Betty Ford Clinic. Yet it has something for everythis kind of ‘practical’ and ‘relevant’ teaching will one, because no one is immune to the disease of law-oritransform you and change your life—precisely the ented, anthropocentric Christianity that is endemic to our kind of thing that consumerist religion always prompresent milieu. ises to do” (xix). But the result is treadmill Written in a warm, conversational style speckled Christianity, bogged down by brand loyalty and guilt with personal anecdotes and plenty of biblical expofor failing to succeed in managing sin and sustaining sition, Cary’s candid but never pugnacious prose an escalating happiness. It is a hopeless path that invites his readers into a theological world that rightly leaves many evangelicals anxious, introspective, and distinguishes law from gospel—a lesson he learned exhausted, while propping up the facade of their “vicfrom Martin Luther (ix)—and therefore into the freetorious Christian life.” dom that the Good Shepherd has for his sheep.

Consumer culture offers life-changing experiences, In ten chapters, Cary debunks what he denomiexplains Cary. That may sound exciting, but these nates the “new evangelical theology,” which by his experiences are fleeting and so the believer must description is a “working theology” that tells people experience new ones. Pop culture is a marketing how to live: “It gives them practical ideas and techmedium and, in order to keep you consuming expe3 0 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

riences that promise “a new you,” it must keep you coming back. The techniques necessarily fail in the end and thinking must remain shallow so that the consumer returns for the latest fad hitting the shelves.

All of this, Cary says, is antithetical to God’s expressed will for his people and antithetical to the gospel that defines and sustains his people. The bad news of the new evangelical theology that breeds anxiety must be contrasted with the good news of Jesus Christ that yields maturity, ordinariness, stability, and virtue if faith, hope, and love are to thrive. But the gospel requires regular attention and habitual devotion, because faith lives on the gospel promises and the presence of God. Virtues and the cultivation of wisdom require work over the long haul, and that means becoming people attuned to the Holy Spirit speaking through the Word of God. So what Cary is proposing for the abatement of Christian anxiety and lethargy is nothing short of a reorientation of the evangelical mind and therefore practice.

Cary admirably accomplishes this by taking his readers through theological, philosophical, and psychological discussions without technical jargon.

Readers once intimidated by ontological or epistemological discussions will be surprised how unobtrusive Cary makes these fields of study and how effective his analysis is toward understanding human nature, the problem of suffering, and the nature and purpose of divine revelation. The book is compelling because Cary has the uncanny ability to commingle the truth of Scripture with manifest care for his students and readers in the most reachable style.

Disappointments with the book are few: first, the publisher did not include an index (forgivable); and second, the book’s cover is just plain ugly (also forgivable). These venial sins are eclipsed only by Cary’s failure to segue relevant discussions into references about the sacraments (surely a ponderous move by an Anglican Christian). Page 133 is typical: “We keep needing Christ the way hungry people need bread, and we keep receiving him whenever we hear the gospel preached and believe it. So what transforms us over the long haul is not one to two great life-changing sermons…but the repeated teaching and preaching of Christ, Sunday after Sunday, so that we never cease receiving him into our hearts.” Is not the gospel made manifest through Holy Baptism and Holy Absolution too? Does not Christ offer the supreme gift of himself—the Bread of Life—through Holy Communion, Sunday after Sunday? The Word with the sacraments is what transforms us over the long haul. Evangelicals need to hear that as well. Nothing gets our focus off of ourselves and our doing like receiving baptism or receiving absolution or receiving

Holy Communion. So how a two-hundred page book titled Good News for Anxious Christians can forego a single reference to Holy Baptism and Holy Communion makes me anxious!

As good as Cary’s book is (and it is good), however, be sure to set The Gospel-Driven Life or Harold Senkbeil’s The Power of Forgiveness as the next book on your reading list for a more complete distillation of the good news that includes Christ’s sacraments.

Notwithstanding, if you have evangelical family or friends or, indeed, if you yourself are progressing through a theological detoxification course, then Dr. Cary’s prescription of Good News for Anxious Christians should be part of your medicinal regimen.

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

Pillars of Grace: AD 100–1564 (A Long Line of Godly Men, vol. II)

By Steven J. Lawson Reformation Trust, 2011 562 pages (hardcover), $28.00 I recently had the sad experience of watching two dear members leave our congregation; and after two hour-long phone calls, I was able to get to the root of the issue: my recent sermons on the doctrine of election from Acts 9. Though I tried my best to dissuade them against leaving the fellowship, they were resolute: “We cannot, in good conscience, stay in a church that preaches predestination.” Although they had seen it in our written confessions, heard of it in our new member’s class, and been made aware of our doctrine in Sunday school, this was the last straw.

It is because of this event that reading Steven Lawson’s second volume of his “Long Line” series was such a healing salve to my bruised Calvinistic soul.

Lawson takes great pains to trace the history of the preaching of the doctrines of grace, all the way from the (continued on page 37) N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 31

A DIALOGUE: IN AND OUT OF OUR CIRCLES

A Revelation Roundtable MSH: Many people on one side view the book of Revelation as talking about future things. That’s what Kim and I grew up with; Revelation is a sort of handbook of clues to the mystery of what’s going to happen down the road of the future. On the other hand, you have what’s called “preterism,” a new position that says it is concerned with what are now to us past fulfilled prophecies. Are both of those approaches reductionistic?

Michael S. Horton joined fellow White Horse Inn co-host Kim Riddlebarger, Steve M. Baugh, and Dennis E. Johnson in a roundtable discussion on the book of Revelation. Dr. Kim Riddlebarger is pastor of Christ Reformed Church in Anaheim and the author of A Case for Amillennialism: Understanding the End Times (Baker, 2003) and Man of Sin: Uncovering the Truth about the Antichrist (Baker, 2006). Steve Baugh is professor of New Testament at Westminster Seminary California, and Dennis Johnson, professor of practical theology also at Westminster, is the author of Triumph of the Lamb (P&R, 2001).

MSH: What is the book of Revelation about? Is it really about the end times, or is it about something else?

SMB: This is the one book in the Bible that says explicitly, “Blessed is the one who reads and those who hear the words of this prophecy.” It offers a blessing for the reading and understanding of the book. God offers a blessing right upfront for reading, understanding, and heeding the message of it. So this is our book. What’s grievous is that anything could take it away from us. Regarding what it’s about, it says right at the beginning: a disclosure of Jesus Christ. So the short answer is that it’s about the Lord.

MSH: Which is why it’s called the “revelation,” the “apocalypse of Jesus Christ.”

DEJ: It’s an unveiling. In fact, that verse that Steve quoted (1:3) that says, “Blessed is the one who reads and those who hear,” presupposes the firstcentury church’s experience of the book, which would be that there would be one copy, and everyone else would experience it by hearing it read aloud. It sort of baffles the imagination now because we’re used to cross references and Bible software. Jesus promises a blessing to people who hear it read and take to heart its message; it delivers its message that clearly. And it’s a message that in one sense is about the end times, because the New Testament consistently says the last days began with the first coming of Christ, with his incarnation, his death and resurrection, and the outpouring of the Spirit. It’s about that conflict of the ages, especially as it’s brought to the phase inaugurated with Jesus’ ascension, his rule, and his combat over Satan the dragon, leading right through our time to however long it is until he returns.

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KR: I think that’s exactly the case. When you grow up in dispensationalism, as I did, you’re told that in Revelation 4:1 the rapture occurs with the “come up here” language. So everything from Revelation 4:1 on is off in the future. If you have the right pastor, you will learn that the seven letters to the churches are really a map to the church age, so you’ll find out that you really want to make sure you’re in the church in Philadelphia, not the church of Laodicea, the lukewarm church. Everything is pushed off into the future or moralized.

The problem with preterism is that it removes eschatology from the book of Revelation, and for that matter from the New Testament, by saying that this is written to the first-century church and says really nothing about the future. Once Nero rises and the beast arises to persecute the church, then most everything in the book of Revelation is fulfilled. And you’re right, I think those are both very reductionistic and rob the church of the power of this great book.

MSH: Let’s define “dispensationalism” for those who might not be familiar with the term.

KR: Historically, John Nelson Darby, who is considered the father of the Plymouth Brethren movement, said that the Bible is basically a book of seven basic dispensations and that each one of these is a particular period of redemptive history where God relates to his people in a particular way. So the first dispensation, the age of innocence, is Adam before the Fall, and after the Fall he relates to God in a different way, and you have the

age of conscience and human government. So you end up with the Bible being seven separate epochs. The difficulty is how those relate to one another. Our dispensational friends will say, “No, there’s one plan of salvation,” but it logically it makes it very tough when you’ve got seven separate economies.

MSH: So they emphasize discontinuity between the Old and New Testaments, and also between Israel and the church. How does that affect their reading of the book of Revelation?

SMB: It really is in combination with other issues that they have alongside of dispensationalism. One of them is called the “futurist approach” to Revelation.

There are different approaches; you’ve sort of outlined some of that before. They believe that because prominent dispensationalists have taught that Revelation from chapter 4 on is really just a revelation about things that will occur at a future date from our perspective, they start at Revelation 4–22; then it’s a chronological unfolding of a brief period, with a thousand-year reign of Christ on earth, to be followed by a new heavens and a new earth. But they combine it with the idea of Revelation being a chronological presentation of a future era, yet it’s all future, because from Revelation 4:1 on, it appears to be things that are future from John’s day, so they put it off to our future as well.

MSH: How should we read these chapters, if not in a chronological order as code for what’s going to happen around the corner in the future?

DEJ: The broad structure of the book of Revelation does lead us from the present situation of the seven first-century churches in Asia Minor and the tests and trials they were under. These were real churches, not ages of the church. I’m amused when dispensationalist friends say that we need to take things literally where possible, and yet some of the most literal things in the book of Revelation are descriptive of seven churches in seven western Asia Minor cities.

You can trace the route that the carrier of the book of Revelation would take from Ephesus, north to the various churches, looping around to the south in the interior and back to Laodicea. And the descriptions of the churches often fit the conditions of the cities where they are located.

So the big picture is, yes, from the present to the consummation, it is a movement across history to the second coming of Christ and the new heavens and the new earth. Within that, though, the structure of the book of Revelation often is a series of cycles or reca-

pitulations. I like to compare it to seeing a football game on TV, and then seeing three video replays of every touchdown: one with focus on the split end, then on the quarterback, and then from the end zone or something. Similarly, Revelation is looking at the same span of the struggle the church is engaged in but from different perspectives with a little bit of different focus. It’s therefore seriously problematic to simply read things in the succession of the visions as though they reflect the chronological order of the history.

MSH: You can’t read Revelation in one hand and your newspaper in the other, and think that you’re simply getting a spiritual interpretation of the events that are unfolding on CNN. KR: The sad thing is that I think people have been taught to read the book of Revelation in that way.

Prophecy preachers on TV are wonderfully skillful at finding current events in the book of Revelation, but John is not addressing events in our day and age. Dr. Johnson, I love your camera angle analogy. I think that really helps people understand why the same thing is told over and over again.

SMB: And this is not new, either. This is how you read portions of 1 Kings where you also have recapitulation. You’ve got it in Ezekiel, clearly, with the Gog and Magog passage: chapter 39 is recapitulating 38. You have Genesis 1 and 2. And those are prose. Those are not poetry or vision. We have these places where you’re looking at different angles in other places in the Bible. So we’re not imposing this foreign grid on Revelation, but reading it as the Bible presents itself.

MSH: If you have that in historical narrative, it wouldn’t be surprising at all that you would have it in poetry or apocalyptic literature.

DEJ: The other problem, of course, with the newspaper in one hand and Revelation in the other is that those first-century churches did not have our newspaper, yet this book is intended to comfort, fortify, and warn them. They did have something else that they were supposed to read in the other hand, and that was the Old Testament Scriptures. That is accessible to us, obviously, and was accessible to them, and it is really the window on the book of Revelation. God was laying out the whole vocabulary of the imagery in the Old Testament that he would then finally use in that climactic prophetic book of Revelation.

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DEJ: And to warn the compromised people of God, because there were great temptations. Certainly, a lot of those churches faced intense persecution. There were already martyrdoms; Antipas, the faithful witness, was one of them. There were other churches that needed the warning against compromise or accommodation to the culture. Its focus therefore is really for churches under a whole host of spiritual attacks—some of them physical, some of them subtle.

SMB: It’s the message of Christ to his church in this age, with all the different temptations.

MSH: The key is to understand that we are in these last days; that yes, it is about the end times, if you recognize that the end times started with the ascension of Christ.

DEJ: Exactly.

SMB: Little children, this is the last hour. You’ve heard that an antichrist is coming; even now, many antichrists have appeared. Therefore, it is the last hour. We should be awake, we should be ready, we should be seeing Christ on the throne in heaven, ascended, as Revelation beautifully pictures in chapters 5 and 12. We live in the time when Revelation is relevant, because we believe it’s relevant for today.

MSH: Could you say that another distinctive of the classic amillennial approach to the book of Revelation, in contrast to its rivals, is that it’s Christ centered? That the book of Revelation is about Christ, where the treatment people often get is that it’s about the common market countries, or it’s about Israel, or about this event or that event? Events that don’t necessarily have to have any reference to Christ. Yet this book is so pregnant with consistently Christ-centered themes.

KR: It’s a very preachable book. As a minister of a local congregation, I’ve preached through Revelation.

It’s one of those books where Christ is on every line, application jumps out, and you’ve got a lot of great tools. Dr. Johnson’s book Triumph of the Lamb is a great aid to the preacher. Revelation is a great book to preach, and I hope that the church recovers its love of it, without reading it through that dispensational or preterist lens—as you were getting at, Dr. Baugh, where you absolutely gut it of any practical significance. The practical significance of Revelation is that it speaks to Christians in every age, and it tells us about the kingdom of Christ and its conquest.

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MSH: And that’s why it’s a difficult book for us to answer all the questions that people come up with in an interview like this. You really do have to sit down and read a book like Triumph of the Lamb in order to understand how the argument in Revelation unfolds.

KR: If you’ve been raised in dispensationalism, you first have to erase the tape. You need to look at the book as though you have not encountered it before, because most people bring so many presuppositions to it that they’re looking at it in light of current events, and so they’re looking at it in a skewed way. You almost have to say: I’m asking the wrong questions; I’m going to put all that I know about this book aside and take a look at it fresh. One thing I advise people to do is get the Bible on audio. It’s great to just hear it a couple of times, the way it would have been done. Just listen to it. But you need to come to the text fresh and listen to it new for the first time.

MSH: What do you do with things like the numbers, such as 144,000 and so on?

DEJ: I once was invited by a group of pastors to have a conversation with a dispensational brother, a New Testament scholar whom I highly respect. I quickly read through his two-volume commentary on the book of Revelation and found the statement, “There is not one single number in the book of Revelation that is symbolic.” But I also found in his commentary that in Revelation 4 and 5, when he comments on the seven spirits of God, he is not ready to trade in the Trinity for a nine-person deity. He understands quite clearly that there is symbolism, that the seven spirits of God are symbolic of the complete omnipresence and the power and the omniscience of the one Holy Spirit.

So starting from that, I didn’t get a lot of distance with him on other numbers, but at least I think every Christian I’ve ever met acknowledges that there are symbolic numbers. For instance, 12 x 12,000 is typical of the symbolism of the covenant people of God. And, of course, we come to the end of the book of Revelation and the New Jerusalem is shown in those kinds of terms: 12,000 stadia, a Roman measurement; and if you look at all the edges of this cubic New Jerusalem, a new sanctuary, you have 12 edges. Very interesting: 12 x 12,000 is there. And the 12 apostles of the Lamb and the tribes of Israel. The unity of the church across that transition points from old covenant to new.

MSH: If you took that literally, it would be, what, the size of a baseball stadium?

KR: It would be a big cube, and how would we live in a big cube? I remember thinking when I was going through this disillusionment with all of that: how on earth are you going to take that and the latter chapters of Ezekiel literally?

DEJ: If you think about it, it’s 12,000 stadia high as well as wide. That actually would put it within the orbits of some of the lower satellites that we have in orbit now. So it’s a little bit of a stretch to take that literally.

SMB: I think what Dennis mentioned has to be underlined: the seven spirits. Right away, before he sees any visions, John gives the apostolic blessing, as most of the apostles do in their letters. He says, “Grace, mercy and peace be yours from he who is and was and is coming.” And then he says, “From the seven spirits of God and from Jesus Christ.” Here’s a blessing in the name of God and seven spirits. What are you going to do with that? Where else does an apostle bless the church in the name of angels? No, these are not angels. So right away we have this use of symbolic numbers. And what happened to the poor Colossians? They’re right in the middle of those seven churches. Colossae is a town in the middle of some of these other churches and they’re left out, so we have only seven churches being addressed. If you look on a map, however, they appear as a big circle, which is where a messenger would go—in a natural circle. It’s therefore the whole church and is a symbolic number as well.

DEJ: Reinforced by the refrain at the end of every letter to each church, “Hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” Not just to a single church.

SMB: There’s actually a reference in one of the church fathers where he takes it that way. This is not a new interpretation either. They understood that and accepted that.

MSH: Now, at the other end, preterism emphasizes that these prophecies have been fulfilled. If you go all the way to the full preterist position, they believe that the resurrection and the last judgment have occurred. There isn’t any Bible prophecy left to be fulfilled. So here on one end of this spectrum you have dispensationalism saying that pretty much everything is in the future, and on the other end, preterism saying that pretty much everything is in the past. How do we respond to a preterist interpretation of the book of Revelation?

KR: I think it’s helpful to at least ask the question, why is preterism popular again? What prompted this recent resurgence of preterism? I think there are two reasons. One is that the dispensationalists have overreached in setting dates. I recall several times in my late teens going to a big local church in Orange County with a lot of other teenagers and hearing the noted pastor say, “Well, this is going to be the last New Year’s Eve we’re going to be together because the rapture is imminent.” You hear that so many times that after a while you begin to say, “This can’t be right. I don’t need a verse to know that there’s something wrong with this.” So along comes the preterist position that says, “Yes, that is wrong, and here’s why: these things have already been fulfilled.” That makes sense. So a lot of it is a reaction to dispensationalism.

MSH: Especially if you can plug in verses like in Matthew 24, about the destruction of Jerusalem and other things.

KR: Even in the book of Revelation, the time is near.

Revelation 1:7 says that he’s coming in the clouds; every eye will see him. There are some indicators in Revelation that this is going to happen soon. So there’s that reaction to dispensationalism. On the other hand, you have the rise of partial preterism.

People such as R. C. Sproul, Ken Gentry, and others have offered this view: the Lord came in judgment on Israel in 70 A.D., the cosmic signs are referring to that, but the Lord is coming yet again. I think partial preterism is so internally inconsistent that if you’re going to become a partial preterist, it’s really easy to go all the way to full preterism because of some of the problems internally. I think a lot of the resurgence of preterism recently is because partial preterism has internal inconsistencies.

MSH: So the traditional amillennial interpretation would say that you have some prophecies that are fulfilled; for instance, Jesus saying, “This generation will not pass away until these things are fulfilled” and “Flee to the hills of Judea.” When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, it’s pretty obvious. And the temple—not one stone will be left upon another, and it wasn’t in 70 A.D. But some prophecies are yet to be fulfilled. So we don’t take extreme positions, one way or the other, dispensationalist or preterist.

The analogy that springs to mind is skipping a rock across a pond. First it hits one place and then it hits another. Cyrus, king of Persia, is clearly the first person Isaiah has in view. But he doesn’t quite fit all of the descriptions of that messianic figure. It really isn’t N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 35

He is told something sufficient for faith but not exhaustive for the newspaper. That’s the key.

You can take this and learn from it and know that Jesus is working in history. completely fulfilled until Christ appears. If it’s that way in Isaiah, Hosea, Ezekiel, and Zachariah, why wouldn’t it be that way in the book of Revelation? Why wouldn’t there be multiple fulfillments until we reach the final end, the final consummation? Why wouldn’t there be many tribulations, for example, leading up to one great tribulation?

SMB: The dispensationalist and the preterist views both seem to want to make the historical references to these visions far more precise than they are intended, because these visions have the wonderful capacity to reveal and not to reveal at the same time.

To say something sufficient—and, as Dennis mentioned, that’s the key word for the purpose of the book—but not to tell you everything; for there are times and seasons that the Father is not going to tell you, as Jesus says in Acts 1, that he has reserved for himself. But he’s going to tell us something. So he tells us something here, and it’s relevant for all ages. In many times, you’re looking at a vision that really can relate to a lot of things. Similar to what Jesus says in Matthew 24: “There will be wars and rumors of wars.”

And that’s not just one age; that’s the whole age.

I think that’s a key idea for interpreting a book like Daniel, Ezekiel, or others. Daniel is told explicitly: “These things are revealed,” but then, “Seal up the book; it’s not for your day.” He is told something sufficient for faith but not exhaustive for the newspaper.

That’s the key. You can take this and learn from it and know that Jesus is working in history. It’s not just spiritual ideas. There is actual history unfolded here, but it’s talked about in a way that always leaves you wondering if this is the fulfillment. Well, yes, and he’s going to do more. This is an important principle, I believe.

KR: I think George Ladd is helpful on this in his book, The Presence of the Future. Ladd was my lastditch attempt to stay premillennial, but there are several things in Ladd that I think are very useful. He makes the point that this tension between the already and the not yet is surely intentional because it does two things. First, it precludes us from date setting; it precludes us from saying that 70 A.D. will be the end when we see Jerusalem surrounded by armies. We 36 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

know that’s going to be important, but we know that’s not going to be the end of the age. Second, it also exhorts us to be active until the Lord comes. So neither can we set dates nor can we sit around and do nothing. It puts us in a tension where we’re required to act; we’re required to go about the Lord’s work until

he comes again.

MSH: When do you think the book of Revelation was written?

DEJ: My book neatly steps around that because I don’t think that’s essential. I’m inclined to go with the tradition from the patristic period that it was seen and written during the reign of Domitian in the mid-90s.

It seems to make sense to me in terms of the distance, for example, of the church of Ephesus from what we know of the planting of that church at an earlier point. And if I were a preterist, or even a partial preterist, I would feel absolutely obligated to affirm a date before 70 A.D. so I could have a prediction of the fall of Jerusalem. But I’m more inclined to go with the evidence we have from the early church in the mid90s. There may be some retrospective on the fall of Jerusalem, but fundamentally the enemy in its manifestation confronting the first-century churches was Rome.

MSH: Which also would make sense of the martyrs who were already in heaven under the throne crying out, “How long, O Lord?”

DEJ: In the vision, we’re told that they have a sense of delay, the length of time since they’ve been martyred.

SMB: That’s a good point. There are a couple of other historical things, too. We know that Laodicea was basically leveled by an earthquake around 60 or 61; and if this is 65, it is really too early to say, “You are rich and in need of nothing,” because they’re still rebuilding, and in antiquity that takes a long time. And then the church father Polycarp writes to the Philippians, “When Paul wrote his letter to you, we had not been founded yet.” Well, Paul wrote Philippians around that same time, 60 or 61, and Smyrna had not been founded as a church then, according to Polycarp, who is pretty historically reliable.

KR: I think the preterists have to really reach far to identify Babylon as apostate Israel, when it was very

clear in everybody’s mind that the city with seven hills is not a reference to Jerusalem, but a reference to Rome. I think it’s very clear that Babylon in the book of Revelation is Rome and the Roman Empire is symbolic of all God-hating imperialistic empires.

MSH: Dennis, why did you pick The Triumph of the Lamb as the title for your book?

DEJ: I had another title in mind, but the publisher liked The Triumph of the Lamb better. Since then, I’ve gotten so many compliments on it that I’ve sometimes taken credit for having chosen it. It is a wonderful title for a study of the book of Revelation. I knew that the book of Revelation is about the triumph of the Lamb, but I guess I hadn’t noticed how much it had come through in my study of it.

There’s paradox there, because as Revelation 5 introduces Jesus, it introduces him as the lion of the tribe of Judah who has triumphed. That’s what John hears. What he sees is a lamb standing as slain, and the lamb is praised for having been slain and for redeeming people from all the peoples of the earth.

That’s the triumph of the lion—it’s the slaughter of the lamb. So there you have the sacrifice of Christ as the pivotal point of the victory of God in all of history.

KR: Triumph of the Lamb really is a great commentary.

I would encourage everybody to read it. It’s just outstanding. May it live on as long as William Henrickson’s More Than Conquerors, which is over fifty years now.

MSH: And if you read that together with A Case for Amillennialism by Kim Riddlebarger, you will have a terrific summary of the amillennial perspective more generally and the book of Revelation specifically. You can see how amillennialism comes together as an approach to eschatology from Kim’s book, then go to Dennis Johnson’s book and see how it actually makes a lot more sense out of a book that a lot of us have come to believe is too mysterious for us to really understand. When you read The Triumph of the Lamb, you come away thinking this is not a book full of puzzles; this is a wonderful book full of explanation, full of wonderful unfolding, living up to its name, “the Revelation”—the unveiling.

Thanks for talking about this important subject. I hope people will come to appreciate the book of Revelation in a new way, and see it as a comfort that the Lamb has triumphed over their own enemy, sin and death, and that they too can be a part of that great throng worshipping around the throne, falling down with the elders, and casting their crowns before him.

Pillars of Grace (continued from page 31) Early Church Fathers (Clement, Ignatius, Justin Martyr), through the venerable pens of men such as Augustine and Anselm, and ultimately to the Magisterial Reformers (Zwingli, Luther, and Calvin). Lawson adequately demonstrates that the preaching of the sovereignty of God is by no means an aberrant teaching, confined to the peripheries of extremists, but rather is in fact the heartbeat of generations of orthodox evangelicals.

All told, Lawson provides twenty-three biographical sketches outlining the circumstances that shaped some of history’s most critical figures. Among them, Lawson’s treatment of the life of William Tyndale stands out.

Like a fast-paced novel, the book chronicles the Reformer who risked life and limb to translate the Bible into his beloved English vernacular. Often the reader will be awed at the providence of God and the incredible dangers his servants endured to give witness to his saving power. Lawson then surveys the influential writings of each man, often recommending their more persuasive books, letters, and tractates to the reader.

Following these biographical sketches, Lawson proceeds to give ample evidence of the doctrines of grace in each man’s teaching and writing, and provides over one hundred citations of a particular man’s life and writing per chapter. He follows a predictable format by showing how these men consistently taught divine sovereignty, radical depravity, sovereign election, definite atonement, irresistible call, preserving grace, and divine reprobation. It is in these “sampling” sections that the reader will discover just how pervasive the doctrines of grace have been. Lawson has done a lifetime of research on our behalf, and pastors in particular will find deep resource material for doctrinal sermons.

Although Lawson’s theological sections (essentially the last third of every chapter) grow repetitive at times, often stringing together quotation after quotation, his point comes across loud and clear: preaching the sovereignty of God is hardly a fringe “minority report” held by Calvin and a few of his more zealous followers. On the contrary, election, predestination, and the total depravity of man are at the very center of historic gospel preaching.

Ultimately, Lawson’s work provided this pastor with much for reflection and preaching material.

Even more important, Lawson restored my confidence that my pulpit orations on the radical nature of God’s electing grace are not so “radical” after all.

Matthew Everhard is senior pastor at Faith Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Brooksville, Florida.

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Whose Community?

Which Interpretation?

Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church

By Merold Westphal Baker Academic, 2009 160 pages (paperback), $19.99 Merold Westphal writes in Whose Community? Which Interpretation?: “It is sometimes said, that one is not prepared to read any serious philosophical text until one has already read it at least once, and there is a lot of truth in this reminder that philosophy, like physics, takes serious, disciplined preparation. There are no cheap seats where the love of wisdom reigns” (69). This book, the latest in a series entitled “The Church and Postmodern Culture,” is written, in part, to highlight (and embody) the aforementioned necessary disciplined work involved not only in philosophy and physics but also in theology.

Although Westphal admits, “It is dangerous for Jerusalem (theology) to turn to Athens (philosophy) for guidance [because] the word of the cross does not conform to the wisdom of the world (1 Cor. 1:18– 2:13),” this book is nevertheless one sustained argument that it is a necessary danger, because only through philosophical and theological reflection can we become aware of our own presuppositional biases and be brought to a more critical place of self-understanding. As a prolific author and distinguished professor, Westphal capably leads the reader into the intimidating world of twentieth-century philosophy with a reassuring confidence in its helpfulness for the church that is both refreshing and inspiring. He explains: We need not think that hermeneutical despair (“anything goes”) and hermeneutical arrogance (we have “the” interpretation) are the only alternatives. We can acknowledge that we see and interpret “in a glass, darkly,” or “in a mirror, dimly” and that we know “only in part” (1 Cor. 13:12), while ever seeking to understand and interpret better by combining the tools of 38 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

scholarship with the virtues of humbly listening to the interpretations of others and above all to the Holy Spirit. (15) After reading this book, one cannot escape the feeling that Westphal has, indeed, shown us “a more beautiful (if not more difficult!) way.”

Written to “Christian theologians of three kinds: academic, pastoral, and lay”—in other words, all Christians—whose commonality lies in the fact that they “interpret the Bible and might do well to think about what is involved in such interpretation” (13), this book is the fruit of just this sort of rumination.

Owing no doubt to his many years as a professor, in twelve relatively short chapters he skillfully leads the reader from a general introduction to the problems and theories associated with the science of philosophical hermeneutics (chapters 1–5), through an extended study of the work and thought of German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (chapters 6–9), and to some constructive, if not wholly convincing, ideas on a way forward for contemporary biblical interpretation in light of the preceding philosophical developments (chapters 10–12). Particularly throughout the first nine chapters, Westphal succeeds in offering what was promised in the introduction, as this book is “essentially a ‘course in a box.’”

Crammed into this little book is a veritable curriculum on philosophical hermeneutics that gives us a peek into the background of figures such as Schleiermacher and Dilthey, introduces us to critiques from Hirsch and Wolterstorff, and provides a core exposition of the great hermeneutic philosopher Gadamer (10–11). These three chapters on Gadamer’s dense (and notoriously difficult) Truth and Method are worth the price of the book alone. For anyone who doubts the importance of philosophical hermeneutics on the biblical interpretative process, Westphal’s masterful touch will allay many, but not all, of their fears.

Of the myriad reasons to commend this book, this relationship between philosophical reflection and theological humility is by far the most compelling. If postmodern thought has done anything, it has shaken the confidence we have in ourselves—certainly a misguided confidence from a biblical perspective!—and forced us back to a place where assumptions and assertions must be, once again, established, articulated, and defended. Because of either our finitude (meaning our limited perspectives) or our fallenness, or both, argues Westphal, “we ‘suppress the truth’ (Romans 1:18). It is important to the church not to read this passage from Romans as if it applied only to nonbelievers” (140). Indeed, his highly engaging book is not merely a critique but a constructive construal of how post-

modern thought has brought the church back to a reliance on meditation, prayer, and contemplation— Mediatitio, Oratio, Contemplatio—in which every believer “should be in regular conversation with the text...listening for God’s voice and responding to what we hear in praise, thanksgiving, repentance, and obedient action” (143).

With this renewed humbling of the reader comes a corresponding warning: This book is not for the faint of heart, because one will be hard-pressed to put it down and not be confronted (and possibly overwhelmed) by the immense complexity of interpretation and its associated philosophical, not to mention theological, problems. These are the sorts of questions that can and do bring many Christians a measure of doubt and fear, but also can result in a renewed sense of urgency to the entire interpretative enterprise.

As people who are given assurance by faith of the truthfulness, reliability, and steadfast love of God, Christians are those who can face the questions raised by contemporary philosophy and complexity of the hermeneutic task without fear. God has gifted the world with both his Word and Spirit whose work, writes Westphal, “is to continually break through our complacent prejudices and shortages of wisdom in and through the words of the Bible...Word and Spirit. As this slogan becomes practice and not just theory, the divinely transcendent voice of Scripture will become incarnate in human language, and we will hear the very voice of God in our finite and fallen interpretations” (156). “The point is not to be uncritical of some philosophical tradition (a genuine danger) but to be willing to be self-critical as theologians” (14).

It is in this critical light that through philosophical hermeneutics we can regain (or reinforce) the belief that “Scripture itself is supposed to be an outsider that can ‘challenge and correct our character,’ both individually and collectively” (140). If this is the result of postmodern religious philosophy, then we can all affirm with gladness the assertion of the series editor in the preface when he says, “In some ways we’re all postmodernists now” (9).

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

Political Grace: The Revolutionary Theology of John Calvin

By Roland Boer Westminster John Knox, 2009 176 pages (paperback), $25.00 In the summer of 2009, when scholars, pastors, and the historically minded laity were celebrating the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth, The Washington Post ran an op-ed piece by a constitutional attorney who attempted to give reasons for not only Protestants but all Americans to commemorate the Frenchman’s birth. According to Doug Phillips, “On July 10, six days after our own Independence Day, the world will celebrate the birthday of John Calvin, the man most responsible for our American system of liberty based on Republican principles of representative government.” Calvin would likely have been surprised to see comparisons between his own churchdominated Geneva and a new nation that rejected state approval to all churches and religious bodies. But for Phillips, the fact that so many founders (such as John Adams) claimed Calvin as an influence was decisive. What also mattered was the Geneva pastor’s “anti-statism, the belief in transcendent principles of law as the foundation of an ethical legal system, free market economics, decentralized authority, an educated citizenry as a safeguard against tyranny, and republican representative government which was accountable to the people and a higher law.” These convictions, which may not exactly represent Calvin’s political ideas, were so widespread among the first settlers of the United States that the historian Leopold von Ranke, whom Phillips quoted, could assert that “Calvin was virtually the founder of America.”

Readers who want a counterweight to arguments like this one or whose own politics run more toward the editorial slant of the BBC World Service than Fox News now have a book to rescue Calvin from both lower-case and upper-case republicanism. Ronald Boer, who teaches theology at the University of Newcastle in Australia, provides a reading of Calvin designed to liberate the Reformer from the clutches of the GOP and turn Calvin into a forerunner of Marx and Lenin. The way Boer pulls off this remarkable feat N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 39

is to mine the radical trajectories of Calvin’s theology for leftist politics. The result is a reading of Calvin as skewed as the efforts of American patriots to claim Calvin as founding father in absentia.

Boer divides his study into five areas: Calvin’s views of Scripture, grace, freedom, civil order, and his reliance on Paul. In each case, Boer finds a radical message that Calvin knowingly employs for theological or ecclesiastical purposes but then rejects when applied to society or civil government. And in each case, Boer registers dissatisfaction with Calvin’s failure to follow through on the radical implications of his theology. For instance, in Calvin’s doctrine of Scripture, Boer resonates with the Reformer’s argument that the Bible is independent from and preceded church authority.

Less palatable is Calvin’s rejection of Anabaptist efforts to affirm the ability of ordinary believers to understand and apply Scripture on their own. But Boer’s penchant for political and economic realities blocks the way to a worthwhile discussion of the important theological question of how God reveals himself and the authority of that revelation. He credits Calvin with a high view of Scripture that can go in one of two directions: either the conservative path “in which the Bible is not to be questioned,” or the one “of radical critiques of oppression, visions of new forms of living, and stories of revolutionary change” (113).

The same mistake of missing the theological forest for the political trees occurs in Boer’s discussion of grace. On the one hand, Calvin is a radical when it comes to the transformation that comes when a person goes from the state of total depravity to that of being alive to God. Boer approves of such depictions of sweeping change. On the other hand, Calvin understands that the transforming power of God’s grace does not apply to all people; he believes in the doctrine of limited atonement and is not a universalist. For Boer this represents a failure of nerve in Calvin, an exchange of the “democracy of depravity” for the “aristocracy of salvation.” Boer claims that this demonstrates the all too common tendency of Calvin “for radical impulses to fall back all too easily on reaction and repression” (113).

These examples show how for Boer, with the hammer of Marxist ideology in hand, all theology looks like a political tract. Arguably, the most revealing instance of this tendency to reduce theology to politics comes in Boer’s discussion of Calvin’s use of Paul.

Boer knows the recent efforts in Pauline studies to show that the apostle was a subversive who attempted to establish an alternative authority to the empire of his day. Yet Boer also asserts that Paul was two-faced because of what he wrote in Romans 13 about the duty of Christians to submit to the emperor.

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Rather than crediting Calvin for recognizing what God through Paul was trying to communicate, Boer faults both for failing to follow through with the radicalism that he himself believes to be right, no matter what God, Paul, or Calvin says: “In the same way that Paul dithers between radicalism and reaction, so also does Calvin. In the same way that Paul equivocates over the radical possibilities of this new message and his tendency to recoil, so also does Calvin. And in the same way that Paul has the option of breaking through decisively or retreating to safer ground, so also does Calvin” (110).

Had Boer known about the doctrine of the two kingdoms—the Augustinian formulation that distinguishes the affairs of the temporal political order from God’s design to build an eternal kingdom—he would likely have had the capacity to sort out these seemingly contradictory impulses in Calvin’s theology.

Clearly, the grace of the gospel is radical and overturns all post-Fall notions about guilt, punishment, and justice. Instead of an eye for an eye, the gospel proposes simply to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved. But the gospel is not a white paper for public policy. It is believed by people who still live in a fallen world where God has instituted authorities to restrain the external effects of sin for the sake of civil peace and a modicum of social order.

Perhaps Boer is unfamiliar with this way of reconciling the radical and conservative strands in Calvin’s thought because of his own upbringing in a strict Dutch Reformed home. Throughout the book he engages in a chatty and personal style, and he acknowledges his own encounter with Reformed Protestantism through his father who ministered in an apparently conservative Dutch-Australian congregation. Since most Dutch Reformed Protestants after Abraham Kuyper opted for a comprehensive understanding of creation and redemption that forbade dualisms of the kind on which two-kingdom theology relies, the likelihood that Boer did not encounter such an account of the differences between the common and redemptive kingdoms is not farfetched.

Even so, Boer’s reading of Calvin shows how important a two-kingdom outlook is. Without it, attempts to square the ordinary workings of creation with the extraordinary accomplishments of redemption are doomed to wind up either in Anabaptism or theonomy, neither of which follows from Calvin’s own understanding of providence and salvation.

D. G. Hart is visiting professor of history at Hillsdale College in Michigan and author of the forthcoming book, Calvinism: A Global History.

Rid of My Disgrace: Hope and Healing for Victims of Sexual Assault

By Justin S. Holcomb and Lindsay A. Holcomb Crossway, 2011 272 pages, (paperback), $15.99 Throughout our lives on this side of heaven, we may be characterized as either a villain or a victim in any given circumstance. Rid of My Disgrace is written particularly to give help and hope to victims of sexual abuse by placing their painful experiences in the context of God’s redeeming grace. This book is a monumental tool in equipping pastors and counselors who find abuse victims literally on their doorstep. The Holcombs instruct pastors and counselors in how to be caring and compassionate to the suffering victims. Rid of My Disgrace will give the family and friends of abuse victims a way to understand the hurt and brokenness that their relative or friend has experienced. And if “villains” (abusers) should pick up this book and read it, perhaps they will see the truth about the sin committed against another and receive the gift of repentance.

In the introduction, the authors state the grand telos of their book: “In Rid of My Disgrace, we address the effects of sexual assault with the biblical message of grace and redemption. Jesus responds to your pain and past. Your story does not end with the assault.

Your life was intended for more than shame, guilt, despair, pain, and denial. The assault does not define you or have the last word on your identity. Yes, it’s part of your story, but not the end of your story. The message of the gospel redeems what has been destroyed and applies grace to disgrace.”

The title of the book is taken from 2 Samuel 13, the story of Tamar’s assault by Amnon. As Tamar begs her half-brother not to rape her, she cries, “Don’t do this wicked thing. What about me? Where could I get rid of my disgrace?” (v. 13). Indeed, how can she be restored? Her brother throws her out as a disposable object, and she leaves, tearing her robe, putting ashes on her head, and placing her hands on her head in a gesture of pure grief and misery. The details of Tamar’s assault include all the loss of control one experiences

in such an encounter: “The loss of control over her own body, over her life and over her dignity.” The authors draw the comparison between Tamar’s suffering and the suffering of Jesus, as described in Psalm 22 and Matthew 27. Betrayal, abandonment, humiliation, and shame were part of his experience, as they were part of Tamar’s. Divided into three sections—Disgrace, Grace Applied, and Grace Accomplished—the book works through the whole of Scripture, as God’s plan of redemption is seen through the eyes of the victim.

The amassing of great writers (Luther and Calvin) through a multitude of current works in the field of counseling and research form a body of work that is staggering in both the amount of information and quality of the content. Also staggering is the sad information given: One in four women and one in six men experience some form of sexual assault; 88 to 92 percent of abuse victims are women; 8 to 12 percent are men; the highest rate of victimization occurs among women sixteen to nineteen years old; abuse occurs in 10 to 14 percent of all marriages; and almost all victims know their offender.

The authors give a comprehensive definition of sexual abuse: “Sexual assault is any type of sexual behavior or contact where consent is not freely given or obtained and is accomplished through force, intimidation, violence, coercion, manipulation, threat, deception or abuse of authority.” Sexual abuse or assault is not merely defined, but also clearly described in somewhat graphic detail so the reader will not misunderstand the difference between consensual activity and assault. This is helpful to both the victim and the counselor in helping the victim admit what has happened to him or her, and to then deal with the thoughts and emotions that out of the encounter. The authors state that “sexual assault is not simply an event that happened to you…it can have an impact on every aspect of your life.” This book gives a list of sixty effects a victim of sexual assault may experience, which is also a helpful tool for the pastor or counselor in recognizing the possibility of sexual assault in a counselee’s past.

The grace of the gospel is shown in the assault stories of six different individuals who had to deal with overwhelming emotions of denial, distorted selfimage, shame, guilt, anger, and despair. A chapter is devoted to each of these emotional states, and the power and hope of the gospel is clearly applied. The authors are able to bring the reader to the hope and help of redemption, not by mere proof-texting but by a knowledgeable and capable application of Old and New Testament texts. In this book, the reader is rescued from the ugliness of predators and villains, and is made to behold the beauty of the Savior and his restorative grace. There is bad news in this book, but N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 41

it will be eventually eradicated by indelible grace. The Holcombs give us a gloriously hopeful quote from Luther: “God receives none but those who are forsaken, restores health to none but those who are sick, gives sight to none but the blind and life to none but the dead.…He has mercy on none but the wretched and gives grace to none but those who are in disgrace.”

Debbe Mays is counselor to women and families at Mitchell Road Presbyterian Church in Greenville, South Carolina.

Rod Mays is the national coordinator for Reformed University Fellowship, the campus ministry of the Presbyterian Church in America. He also serves as an adjunct professor of practical theology at Reformed Theological Seminary. Rod and Debbe have been married for thirty-five years.

POINT OF CONTACT: BOOKS YOUR NEIGHBORS ARE READING

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

By Laura Hillenbrand Random House, 2010 496 pages (hardback), $27.00 Not usually one for reading nonfiction books, especially in the genre of wartime literature, I was glad I took the plunge with Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (author of the popular book Seabiscuit, which has been made into a film).

And this is probably the first time I’ve written this column about a book that my neighbors are indeed reading. I know this because it hit the top of The New York Times best-seller list last year. Actually, I picked up this book only because some friends strongly recommended it, and then it was on my book club reading list. Now it’s my turn to pass along this must-read recommendation to you!

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Unbroken is the wartime and post-wartime saga of Louie Zamperini, an amazing man who will celebrate his ninety-fifth birthday in January 2012. Not only did he speak this year on Memorial Day weekend at my church in Southern California (which I was greatly disappointed to miss), but he also recently received an honorary doctorate from Chapman University.

His story is nothing less than astonishing. Although worlds apart in our life experiences, Louie (if I may be so familiar with this dear man) and I have enough in common to make me feel connected with him. In fact, by the time I finished Unbroken, I felt as if he were a longtime friend. He was born in 1917 in Olean, New York, where my grandmother was born in 1913 (I wonder if her family knew his); then in the early 1920s, the Zamperini family moved out to Torrance in the Los Angeles area (that same grandmother moved to Los Angeles about twenty years later). An impressive runner, he won an athletic scholarship in the 1930s to the University of Southern California (my alma mater) and earned a place in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin (okay, this is where our connection breaks down!), where he was personally congratulated by Adolph Hitler and later stole a Nazi flag (in his youth, he had been notorious for his thievery and quick-get-away legs). It looked as though Louie had a brilliant running career ahead of him, and he planned to run in the 1940 Olympic Games in Tokyo. But then the Second World War began, and this is where Louie’s story really gets interesting.

Of course, I don’t want to supply any plot spoilers in this review, but it’s fairly obvious that Louie lived to tell his tale. It should also be obvious from the subtitle of the book that despite the horrors he endured, not only did he survive and show resilience, but there is also redemption involved—and as a Christian, this is what moved me the most.

In 1942, Louie entered the U.S. Air Force in the Pacific theater and was soon serving as a second lieutenant and bomber on a B-24 called the Green Hornet—a plane the crew didn’t think airworthy.

Unfortunately they were proved right when it crashed in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and all but three men were killed. Then begins a remarkable tale of survival (the first part of the subtitle) on a raft constantly surrounded by sharks—including a Great White straight out of a Steven Spielberg film—and eventually strafed by Japanese Zeros, with three men drinking rainwater and catching birds and baby sharks for food (eaten raw of course). It is during this time that Louie, who had never really thought about God, rather Luther-like swears that if God will let him live, Louie would serve him for the rest of his life.

But just when you would think Louie’s story couldn’t get much worse, it does. After a record-

breaking time adrift in the open sea, Louie is “rescued” by the Japanese. After this, it’s the proverbial “out of the frying pan and into the fire.” The survival story kicks into full gear and soon becomes one truly of resilience (the second part of the subtitle). Louie’s Japanese captors are atrocious, and he is moved from one death camp to another, becoming little more than a (barely) walking skeleton, surviving somehow on one ball of rice a day.

But, again, just when you think it can’t get any worse, it does. Into the story (in a chapter Hillenbrand calls “Monster”) enters Mutsuhiro Watanabe, whom the POWs nicknamed “the Bird”—“a name chosen because it carried no negative connotation that could get the POWs beaten” (239–40). Hillenbrand describes him in detail: Both his victims and his fellow Japanese would ponder his violent, erratic behavior and disagree on its cause. To Yuichi Hatto, the camp accountant, it was simply madness. Others saw something calculating. After Watanabe attacked Clarke, POW officers who had barely noticed him began looking at him with terror. The consequence of his outburst answered a ravening desire: Raw brutality gave him sway over men that his rank did not. “He suddenly saw after he hit a few men that he was feared and respected for that,” said Wade. “And so that became his style of behavior.”...A tyrant was born. Watanabe beat POWs every day, fracturing their windpipes, rupturing their eardrums, shattering their teeth. (236–7) Hillenbrand goes on, but I think this is enough to give you a good idea why this chapter is titled “Monster.”

The Bird becomes Louie’s nightmare, waking and sleeping: “From the moment that Watanabe locked eyes with Louie Zamperini, an officer, a famous Olympian, and a man for whom defiance was second nature, no man obsessed him more” (238). After being beaten daily into unconsciousness by the Bird, Louis began to relive this torture nightly in his sleep— even years after the war had ended. Watanabe’s goal was to demoralize and dehumanize Louie; and in Louie’s mind, he was successful.

I should say at this point that Laura Hillenbrand is a marvelous writer in her use of description, emotion, and gripping storytelling. After years of research and much time interviewing Louie and his surviving family and friends, Hillenbrand deserves to have another New York Times best-seller (although Louie joked that she would have an easier time than she had with the horse Seabiscuit since Louie could talk!). But I found some of her attention to detail, while interesting for

posterity and first-hand historical accounts, became a bit tedious. In fact, I was beginning to lose interest in the story—bogged down as I was in the horrific Japanese POW camp—until my pastor used Louie’s story as part of his Easter sermon. Although he gave away the ending, my interest in the book was strongly rekindled (I won’t go so far as to say “resurrected”).

This is where the redemption part of the subtitle comes in. Again, not wanting to provide a plot spoiler here, let me say that Louie’s story ends powerfully— one that drew me to tears as I felt the love and mercy of God flowing first to this pitiable man, then to his Japanese captors, and ultimately to the Bird.

This, therefore, is not just another historical account of the horrors of World War II, but it is a touching and beautiful tale of what it truly means to be human— especially a human redeemed through Christ. Do yourself a favor this holiday season and read this wonderful story. And if you have the Internet technological knowhow, check out the CBS television special made during a past Olympics that recounts Louie’s story, complete with interviews with the man himself and even Mutsuhiro Watanabe. I’ve heard that Hollywood wants to make a movie out of Unbroken, but I also heard that Louie will not give permission for them to do so unless his inspiring story includes his conversion. Although it took some time, Louie remembered his promise to God on that raft, and he has spent his entire life since then spreading the good news of the gospel. And it’s not every day you see a book like this on The New York Times best-seller list. Now that’s something to talk about with your neighbors!

Patricia Anders is managing editor of Modern Reformation.

Forgotten, Not Forsaken (continued from page 9) For the first time, Israelis are able to read the Old Testament and understand all of it. So far, we have published four out of the five volumes, and we hope to complete this project by mid-2012.

Much work lies ahead of us, but by his grace the church in Israel will play a greater role in the coming years. We are here to answer the call of the Lord to stand in the gap and fulfill this much needed and exciting last part of history before the coming of the Lord.

David Zadok is the director of HaGefen Publishing (www.ha-gefen.org.il/len) and an elder of Grace and Truth Congregation in Israel.

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FOR A MODERN REFORMATION i t ’ s

m o r e

t h a n

j u s t

o u r

n a m e

—

i t ’ s

o u r

m i s s i o n

Confessional

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cripture not only speaks of the personal faith of every believer in Christ,

historical document that we leave in the vault most of but also of “the faith once and for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). the time, or it can be a living witness to God’s unchangPaul gives us the proper coordinates in 2 Timothy. After reciting the ing gospel from generation to generation. Furthermore, gospel of Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection, a confession can be reduced to a legal contract we use to exclude brothers and sisters, or it can be a family he exhorts his young apprentice to “hold fast the patcovenant that unites us, a hymn that the saints sing to tern of sound words which you have heard from me, lure others to the feast. In the first use, a in faith and love which are in Christ confession threatens to usurp Scripture’s Jesus. That good thing which was com- 1. Recover the “Solas” normative authority; in the second mitted to you, keep by the Holy Spirit 2. Law & Gospel who dwells in us” (2 Tim. 1:8–14).

3. Missional & Vocational approach, it is the “amen” of Christ’s body to the Word of its Living Head.

We confess the faith together, across Although it places boundaries on all times and places. From the begin- 4. Word & Sacrament what we affirm and reject, being conning, the early Christians summarized 5. Catechesis fessional liberates us from the peculiar the faith together in creedal formulas. 6. Confessional teachings, rules, and forms of worship Paul speaks of such a formula as somethat are promoted by charismatic leaders and powerthing that was passed on to him and, through him, to ful personalities. There are many things the confesthe whole church. These are the things “of first imporsions do not settle that are left to Christian liberty. We tance: that Jesus died, was buried, and rose again on are not at the whim of persons or movements; no less the third day” (1 Cor. 15:1–4). than the rest of us, our leaders are bound to the The magisterial Reformers preached, taught, and Scriptures as they are confessed according to the setdefended the catholic faith defined in the ecumenical tled judgment of many churches across diverse times symbols of Nicaea, Chalcedon, and the Apostles’ and places.

Creed. At the same time, they interpreted this comThe gospel has a particular form for its faithful repmon faith according to the evangelical insights and etition in the life of God’s people. In Paul’s advice in 2 emphases rediscovered in the Reformation. Lutheran Timothy 1, the church today hears its own imperative: and Reformed churches bore witness to this faith in “Hold fast the pattern of sound words which you have confessions and catechisms. Instead of reducing the heard from me, in faith and love which are in Christ Christian faith to a few fundamentals or private opinJesus.” There are sound ways of stating our common ions, these rich statements offer a systematic way of faith. “Hold fast” is a command to preserve, not to understanding, experiencing, and living God’s truth. innovate. “Guard the truth that has been entrusted to This evangelical interpretation of catholic Christianity you by the Holy Spirit who dwells within us,” he conis confessed by Lutherans in the documents included cludes (v. 14). The truth must be guarded so that it in the Book of Concord. Continental Reformed may be dispensed to others in ever-widening circles as churches adopted the Belgic Confession, Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of the Synod of Dort, the life-giving Word that it always is in its very essence. while the Church of England adopted the ThirtyEvery generation needs to return to the wells of God’s Nine Articles, and Presbyterians adopted the Word, not merely nodding to the confession of others Westminster Confession and Small and Larger but making it our own. Far from exhibiting sectariCatechisms. Calvinistic Baptists also drew up confesanism, the “form of sound words” serves the unity and sions and catechisms. mission of the church in the world.

As is especially evident in today’s context, it’s one thing to adopt a confession and quite another to be conMichael S. Horton is editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation. fessional—to think, witness, live, and worship consistently with our profession. A confession can be a 44 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G