Miscellanies 16: On the Unity of the Church

From the PCA Position Paper "Report of the Ad-Interim Committee to Study the Biblical Basis of Church Union":

The basic principle that must be agreed to in the arrangements of any meaningful union will be the wholehearted submission to the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the Word of God, with the understanding that the directives of that Word will be over-riding criterion guiding all of the actions of the body. There must be agreement as to the functions of the body. The primary function of the church is to worship. Worship involves the acknowledging of "the true God as God and worshipping and glorifying Him accordingly". This means worshipping only by such exercises as He has revealed in His Word.

The second criterion of the true unity of the body then, will manifest itself in confession. One of the blessed fruits of the Protestant Reformation is the profusion of confessions. Those who had come to understand the truth of the gospel wanted the world to understand what the Bible had to say. To that end they formulated concise statements of what they believed the Bible taught. Do we confess the same teaching? Do we witness to the same truth? "Can two walk together except they be agreed?" (Amos 3:3). We include those who by their history have demonstrated a genuine interest in and devotion to that understanding of the Scriptures that we call the Reformed Faith.

Here we have the teaching that visible church unity is ultimately based on our confession of the truth of the Word of God and whole-hearted submission to it, both of which God causes among his people by his Spirit. Thus the first criterion for measuring church unity is our "worshipping only by such exercises as He has revealed in His Word" (i.e. the Regulative Principle of Worship). The second is our confession of faith. Both are vitally connected.

Also, notice the perspective of this paper on why the Reformed Confessions were written. "Those who had come to understand the truth of the gospel wanted the world to understand what the Bible had to say." In other words, one reason for the existence of the confessions was that the truth of the gospel might be spread to the world. A robust confessionalism does not impede evangelism but rather serves it. Indeed to confess the faith once for all handed down is to evangelize.

Jim Cassidy: On the PCUSA and Israel

Here is Jim Cassidy's recent post on the PCUSA and Israel. An excerpt reads:

From what I gather from the article is that the conservatives in the PCUSA are pro-Israel and the liberals are anti-Israel with regards to the conflict in the Middle East.

The saddest part of this whole debate in the PCUSA is that its happening at all. This is telling for where the PCUSA is at. It is an unfortunate day when this is even an issue for the conservatives in the PCUSA.

I mean, why in the world is the church even discussing this?

That’s the first question. The second is this: why do the conservatives believe that being on the side of Israel is to be on the side of righteousness?

I mean, I suppose if this were the Southern Baptist Convention I can understand. After all, a hallmark of dispensationalist theology has been – because of its premillennialism – a pro-Isreali politics. But this is the PCUSA here . . . what gives?

I think that a partial explanation can be found in the fact that even the conservatives in the PCUSA are really so far away from historical Reformed theology that to call them conservative is to bend the meaning of the word beyond all reasonable recognition.

Further explanation may be in order here. I actually think that the left wing and right wing of the PCUSA have far more in common than they think. And that commonality is what we might call New Schoolism. New Schoolism can be characterized by at least two points. One, an all consuming desire to be relevant among the culture and society in which the church finds herself. Second, a low-to-no doctrine of the spirituality of the church.

Heidelcast: On the Quest for Illegitimate Religious Experience

Here.

Reason for Amillennialism #1

If God is progressively redeeming all of the created order right now, why do bears still want to eat me with the same ferocity?

The Muppets on God's Eternal Decree

I'll be using this tomorrow in my Sunday School class on God's eternal decree and causation:

Miscellanies 15: Problems with Nature and Grace in Herman Bavinck

I just read Jan Veenhof's essay Nature and Grace in Herman Bavinck, trans. by Albert M. Wolters. I appreciate Bavinck's critique of Roman Catholicism's Neoplatonic "grace supplements nature" thesis. As he points out, Scripture teaches that grace is God's answer to sin rather than an answer to a substantial insufficiency in the nature he originally declared "good." Bavinck instead teaches that "grace restores nature" in an ethical sense.

Grace does not serve to take man up into a supernatural order, but to liberate him from sin. Grace is not opposed to nature, but only to sin. Properly speaking, it was not necessary for Adam before the Fall, but has become necessary only because of sin; therefore, it is not necessary absolutely, but only per accidens. The physical opposition of natural and supernatural is replaced by the ethical one of sin and grace (13).

On the other end of the spectrum, Bavinck criticizes Pietism's Gnostic-like tendency to see "grace opposing nature," which leads to separatism and asceticism--again, thinking of nature in a substantial sense.

So Christianity did not come into the world to condemn and put under the ban everything that existed beforehand and elsewhere, but quite the opposite, to purify from sin everything that was; and thus to cause it to answer again to its own nature and purpose (17).

Veenhof goes on to show that Bavinck maintained the historic Reformed distinction between the ecclesiastical and civil spheres of God's sovereignty in the world. He then concludes with some practical consequences of Bavinck's thought writing:

We can observe that in this conception the independence of the different spheres is fully honored, while at the same time the salutary effect of the gospel in all these spheres is emphatically underscored. Family, society, and state arise out of creation, according to Bavinck, and exist by virtue of gratia communis. Bavinck evidently agrees fully with Kuyper's idea of sphere sovereignty. It is also his conviction that sovereignty in these "organic life-spheres" descends directly from God to created reality and that each has a God-given authority of its own (26).

So far I am tracking, as long as "the salutary effect of the gospel in all these spheres" is understood to be at best indirect. However, Veenhof continues:

This authority does not in the least imply that the spheres in question have nothing to do with the gospel. On the contrary, they have been corrupted by sin and therefore need the word of God as rule and guide (26-27).

At this point I see a couple problems, which may or may not be there (I am open to correction). First, it seems that "the gospel" has been equivocated with "the word of God." This is problematic because the word of God includes both law and gospel not just gospel. The civil sphere of human society is governed by the law alone. It's government is not directly impacted by the gospel. God's words to Noah recorded in Genesis 9:6, "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed," are neither the gospel nor based on the gospel. They announce a penalty based on the the second table of the moral law. The civil government has been instituted by God and enabled by his common grace to administer justice not redemptive grace. Second, it seems, given that the civil sphere is governed by the moral law apart from the gospel, and the moral law is revealed to man naturally (c.f. Rom. 1:32; 2:14-15), the civil sphere does not "need the word of God as a rule and guide." Only the church needs the word as a rule and guide, which includes the law in its third use (i.e. the law administered in light of the gospel).

Where in the World is the Church?

I just finished Dr. Michael Horton's book Where in the World is the Church?: A Christian View of Culture and Your Role in It. Including a summary of H. Richard Niebuhr's famous five ways of conceiving church and culture issues, an accurate yet brief historical theological/philosophical overview, two chapters on the arts, a penetrating (and convicting) analysis of contemporary culture, and a thoroughgoing appeal to recover the Reformed distinction between the common and the sacred for the sake of both, I highly recommend Horton's book to anyone wanting an introduction to the study of church and culture.

A Glaring Inconsistency

In Dr. Hart's latest post he points out a glaring inconsistency in the belief and practice of some cultural transformationalists. Here's the contradiction:

1. The calling of the church is to Christianize society.
2. Society includes civil government.
3. The church is NOT called to Christianize the civil government (per the version of the WCF adopted by American Presbyterians). 

(1) and (3) cannot be true at the same time. If one believes (1), he should also believe the church is called to Christianize civil government. If he believes (3), he should not believe the church is called to Christianize society. Personally, I believe the latter is the biblical teaching. While I would love to see every civil office-holder confess Christ as Lord, I would bristle if the President's State of the Union was a Christian sermon.

Some Funny Quotes

A couple books I'm reading right now are Michael Horton's Where in the World is the Church?: A Christian View of Culture and Your Role in It and Darryl Hart's Deconstructing Evangelicalism: Conservative Protestantism in the Age of Billy Graham. I am enjoying them both immensely. Here are funny quotes from both:

Horton writes of the early church's understanding of its role in the wider culture:

It is difficult to have a terribly optimistic view of one's impact on culture when being thrown to the lions (41).

Hart writes of the downturn in evangelical "success" after Regan's election in 1980:

Electoral politics proved to be a difficult arena in which to persuade the breadth of the American public that the narrow way of faithfulness was best (14). 

Online Primers for the Two Kingdoms and Natural Law

• http://netfilehost.com/wscal/OfficeHours/01.06.10DVDnl2k.mp3 
• http://netfilehost.com/wscal/OfficeHours/12.07.09DVD.mp3 
• http://netfilehost.com/wscal/OfficeHours/10.15.09DVDBioethics.mp3 
• http://www.wscal.edu/resources/video/index.php 
• http://heidelblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/vandrunen-natural-law-two-kingdoms-office-hours/ 
• http://heidelblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/01/christ-and-culture-reading-list/ 
• http://heidelblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/once-more-resources-on-the-two-kingdoms/ 
• http://reformedforum.org/he1/  
• http://media.9marks.org/2009/08/01/being-faithful-in-a-secular-word-with-darryl-hart

R. Scott Clark: "Is Reformed Confessionalism Impious?"

Dr. Clark continues answering Dr. Frame's Review of RRC.

Attempted Axiom: On Labels

[See this disclaimer and explanation of my Attempted Axioms here]

Christianity without labels is Christianity without history.

or

Christianity without labels is not Christianity.

VanDrunen: What do recent Reformed thinkers, the Radical Reformation, and Brian Mclaren have in common?

I recently received Dr. David VanDrunen's new book Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought. It is my first exposure to VanDrunen, and I am enjoying it very much. I've found this work to be, among other things, substantive, thorough, precise, clear, and very well written. I ran across this insight early in the book. VanDrunen writes:

Another example [of an influential recent trend in broader, ecumenical Christian thought which seems remarkably friendly to the last century of Reformed social thought] comes from the recent revival in interest in the social tenets of the radical reformation, historically associated with the Anabaptists and Mennonites. The most influential voice here is surely that of Stanley Hauerwas, though himself a Methodist. A perspective grounded in the radical reformation would not ordinarily be associated with a perspective looking to Calvin and the magisterial reformation for inspiration, but they in fact share remarkable similarities. Hauerwas was influenced not only by Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder but also by the eminent philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, whose tour de force, After Virtue, subjected modern, post-Enlightenment, liberal, secular, value-free Western society to a withering critique. MacIntyre concluded that the autonomous individuals within it share no common story or telos and therefore have no resources from which to draw in order to have genuine moral discussions about anything. Not only has Hauerwas picked up on such analysis in condemning the quest for freedom and autonomy in a morally fragmented world scarred by capitalism and materialism, but he has also rejected, as inimical to Christian faith, the idea of a universal ethic or common morality grounded in natural law. Nevertheless, he has called for Christian activism in the world, but in a way peculiar to Christianity. The church, he says, is to live out its existence as a community of faith and hence display to the world how the peaceful kingdom of Christ provides an alternative to a politics built upon violence and falsehood. Hence Hauerwas voices familiar contemporary Reformed themes in rejecting a natural law social ethic, sharply critiquing modern thought and practice, promoting social activism, and calling on Christians to have the ways of the kingdom of Christ shape all of their activity in the church and in the world. Hauerwas has many admirers that have picked up and developed such themes, including those associated with the New Perspective on Paul and scholars in American evangelical circles without historic connection to the Mennonite theology. The work of Brian McLaren, a chief spokesperson for the so-called emerging church movement, is also similar in many important respects (7-9).

Sixteen Reasons Not to Watch the Superbowl

I stole this from Darryl Hart's blog Old Life (and tweaked it just a bit).

16. Remember the Sabbath day.
15. Keep it holy.
14. You have six days for all your work.
13. The Sabbath belongs to God.
12. Don’t work on it.
11. Don’t let your son work on it.
10. Or your daughter.
9. Or football players.
8. Or cheerleaders.
7. Or advertizing executives.
6. Or broadcasters.
5. For God made the world in six days.
4. Then he rested on the Sabbath.
3. For that reason he blessed the Sabbath.
2. And made it a holy day.

And the number one reason not to watch the Super Bowl. . . .

1. The COWBOYS aren’t playing.

Nick Batzig: On Biblical Numerology and the Sabbath

Here is an excellent post from Nick on biblical numerology and the Sabbath Day, among other things.

Martin Downes: On Contending for the Faith

Here is an excellent post from Martin Downes outlining the two kinds of defenses the church has against heresies, the external and the internal. On the internal defense, he writes:

Without this internal delight in the truth the external defense is certain to crumble. It is not theological statements that preserve the truth so much as men filled with the Spirit and wisdom, taught by God to follow the pattern of sound words and able to guard the good deposit.

For some churches and denominations the vibrant confessional testimony of their forefathers in the faith became no more than a museum piece, a relic that gave witness to what was once believed before the church moved on with the times. The truth remained the truth, even if you were told to look at it behind a glass case, but long gone was the atmosphere of orthodoxy.