Fencing the offering plate

I don’t know much about the context in which these quotations are being offered as evidence, but everyone ought to read them.

I have read the collected works and, strikingly, pretty much worked through this material without taking much notice. I took it for granted. I guess that is what happens when one reads John Frame and Vern Poythress before John Murray.

Here I reproduce them in full. I’ll hunt down references if no one else will:

“The fact that systematic theology is a development which arose in the course of history within the sphere of the church reminds us that it should not be thought of as the product of a theologian or series of theologians. It is true that the greatest contributions have been made by theologians. We think of Athanasius, Augustine, and Calvin. But neither these men nor their work can be understood or assessed apart from the history in the context of which they lived and wrought, particularly the history of the church. We may not underestimate the influence exerted by these men upon subsequent history. But history conditioned their work also and it is only because they occupied a certain place in history that they were able to contribute so significantly to the superstructure which we call theology. Of more relevance, however, than this obvious fact of interaction and dependence is the doctrine of the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit.”

“…so that the church organically and corporately may increase and grow up into knowledge unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. It is this perspective that not only brings to view but also requires the progression by which systematic theology has been characterized. The history of doctrine demonstrates this progressive development and we may never think that this progression has ever reached a finale. Systematic theology is never a finished science nor is its task ever completed.”

“However epochal have been the advances made at certain periods and however great the contributions of particular men we may not suppose that theological construction ever reaches definitive finality.”

“When any generation is content to rely upon its theological heritage and refuses to explore for itself the riches of divine revelation, then declension is already under way and heterodoxy will be the lot of the succeeding generation.”

“A theology that does not build upon the past ignores our debt to history and naively overlooks the fact that the present is conditioned by history. A theology that relies upon the past evades the demands of the present.”

“The progressive correction and enrichment which theology undergoes is not the exclusive task of great theologians. It often falls to the lot of students with mediocre talent to discover the oversights and correct the errors of the masters.”

“The question cannot be dismissed: Is a document drawn up more than three centuries ago an adequate Confession for the church today? First of all, it should be borne in mind that the creeds of the church have been framed in a particular historical situation to meet the need of the church in that context, and have been oriented to a considerable extent in both their negative and positive declarations to the refutation of the errors confronting the church at that time. The creeds are, therefore, historically complexioned in language and content and do not reflect the particular and distinguishing needs of subsequent generations.”

“No Confession in the history of the church exemplifies this more patently than the Westminster Confession. It is the epitome of the most mature thought to which the church of Christ has been led up to the year 1646. But are we to suppose that this progression ceased with that date? To ask the question is to answer it. An affirmative is to impugn the continued grace of which the Westminster Confession is itself an example at the time of its writing. There is more light to break forth from the living and abiding Word of God.”

I’ve never presented this sermon to an actual audience. It was a class assignment. I modified it slightly so it would read more naturally as a blog entry. In keeping with the assignment, I ended with a “sinner’s prayer,” thought that seems sort of hokey and unreal to me. But maybe I’m wrong.

In a letter we have from the Apostle Paul to his protoge Timothy, who was governing the churches of Ephesus in the first century, we read,

I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these things to you so that, if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of truth. Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness:

He was manifested in the flesh,
vindicated by the Spirit,
seen by angels,
proclaimed among the nations,
believed on in the world,
taken up in glory.

Perhaps some of you will recognize in the title of this post a slight nod to the atheist author Ayn Rand and her book Philosophy: Who Needs It? Her answer was “everyone.” Thinking is the basic means of man’s survival and philosophy teaches man how to think and what ideas are true.

I don’t know whether “everyone” needs philosophy or not, but I do know that not everyone needs Christianity, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as Christianity.

Imagine driving up to Canada and stopping at a restaurant to get a bite to eat. And while you’re sitting at the table, someone comes over to you and says in an excited voice. “Are you an American?”

You reply, “Yes, I am.”

“Wonderful! I have so little fellowship up here with fellow Americans.”

“Have you lived in Canada a long time?” you ask.

“Oh yes, all of my life. I was born here.”

“Oh… So your parents were Americans.”

“No, sadly my parents remained Canadian all their lives.”

“Then how did you become an American?”

“Well, one day I found a tract that told me about American ideas. I was transfixed by their power and adopted them as my own. I was born again, you might say. From that day on I have believed in Americanism. I have memorized all of the Declaration of Independence and portions of the Constitution, and I subscribe to the Congressional Register.”

My problem today is similar to the one you would face in trying to explain to that Canadian the reality of his situation. You would have to tell him that there is no such thing as “Americanism.” America is not an “ism” but an institution. To be an American one must be a citizen of the nation. There may be beliefs which one must hold to be a good American, but being an American is not a matter of holding certain beliefs.

Just as there is no such thing as Americanism, there is no such thing as Christianity. Jesus never proclaimed Christianity while he was with us on the earth. Nor did His Apostles preach Christianity. We live in an age of ideologies and ideological religions where people define themselves by virtue of certain ideas they believe. It is popular these days to talk about choosing a “world view” or a “belief system” of a “philosophy.” Ayn Rand is just one idea peddlar among many others. One can consider Marxism, libertarianism, conservatism, liberalism, humanism, nihilism, hinduism, buddhism, spiritism, transcendentalism, existentialism, pragmatism, theism, atheism and so on. The list of “isms” is endless. But there is no “ism” found in God’s Word, the Bible. You will not find “Christianity” among it’s pages. Saint Paul did not spread Christianity in his journeys through the Mediterranean world. Rather, he was instrumental in spreading the Church.

It is not Christianity you need.

You need the Church.

In Saint Paul’s letter to Timothy he writes about the Church, an institution which he compares to the institution of a household–which in our modern society would be comparable both to a family and a corporation.

(The other analogy which he uses elsewhere, by the way, is that of a nation–when he describes the Church as a kingdom. For example, he writes to the Colossians that God the Father “delivered us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us into the kingdom of His Beloved Son.”)

But going back to the passage I quoted above: what is the significance of calling the Church God’s “household”? According to the Bible, when God created the first man, Adam, and His wife Eve, He was a father to them. They loved one another as members of a common family. God, being the head of the household, humbly and generously poured out every blessing upon Adam and Eve. But they responded with treason and rebelled against God. As a result they were disinherited from God’s family and banished from His Kingdom. That is how we all come into the world. We are by nature orphans and exiles. Instead of being God’s friends we are alienated from Him so that we don’t love Him as we should. Being alienated from God, we are alienated from one another and don’t love each other as we should.

God, however, has not left us in this condition without hope, but has created a New Family and Kingdom to replace the one that was originally lost. The broken relationships have been restored as the institutional Church. It is in the Church with it’s pastors, and rituals and worship, and it’s proclamation of God’s Word, the Bible, where God and man are beginning to dwell together as they once did. It is there that alienation is replaced by reconciliation.

Now, because the Church is an institution, it has a history which explains it–a history commonly called “Christianity.” There are beliefs implied in the Church, just as there are beliefs implied in America or any nation, even though one cannot reduce a nation or the Church to a belief system. What America is is largely determined by how it came to be. We learn about what it means to be Americans by learning about the nation’s history–it’s wars and regimes and laws and peoples. Likewise, Paul gives Timothy a terse summary of the “common confession” of the Church which is mainly historical. The history of the Church consists primarily on the history of Jesus, and then of the Holy Spirit. Let me briefly summarize each of these:

Your need for the Church because you need Jesus.

Two thousand years ago, the birth of Jesus of Nazareth was the birth of the Church. He is thus the center of the common confession. Jesus existed from all eternity with the Father as God. But He was born to Mary as a true human being. As God revealed in the flesh–one person Who was both divine and human–Jesus Himself was the reconciliation between God and humanity. But Jesus also had to suffer the ultimate alienation in order to reconcile us to God. He allowed Himself to be die a torturous and humiliating death by being nailed to a wooden cross. He suffered the punishment we all deserve for our wrongdoing. But because Jesus was personally guiltless, he was raised to life by God’s Spirit, vindicating Him before God and man—that’s what Paul means he says Jesus was vindicated in the Spirit.

All of this was seen by God’s appointed witnesses. Paul here calls them angels, but the word in the original language can refer to a human messenger, and that is almost certainly the meaning here. These messengers proclaimed who Christ was and what he had done throughout the world (Their writings were compiled as what we call the New Testament). But Jesus is not simply the founder of a movement. He lives right now as the head of His Church having been taken up in glory. Jesus ascended into a different order of existence where He governs His Church and brings it to himself through the course of history until He will personally return to judge the living and the dead.

When I was a boy of about seven years or so, I remember getting to go on a trip with the rest of my students in my small private school to a place with a swimming pool. This was a big deal for us, since none of our families had swimming pools. The problem was I was still rather new at swimming. And sure enough I somehow inhaled at the wrong time and found myself suddenly choking on water. I was in the middle of the pool and could not reach the side. I panicked and started splashing, trying unsuccessfully to catch my breath and yell for help. The place was so crowded that no one seemed to notice me. I was literally going down for the third time when a hand caught me under the arm and a student only a few years older than me pulled me to the side.

Jesus is the human hand of God, rescuing us, if we will be rescued, from a fate far worse than drowning.

That is why you must realize that any interpretation of Jesus which presents Him primarily as a teacher of a belief system or the giver of a moral code is fundamentally at odds with reality. You don’t give a drowning man advice; you throw him a life preserver. God would not be so cruel as to merely give the human race information about how to live; He gave us the life of His Son. If we belong to Jesus, we are reconciled to God. And we can belong to Jesus if we join ourselves to Him through the Church of which He is the head.

But if we simply speak of God’s gift to us of His Son Jesus, we have not said enough. What Jesus accomplished does not ultimately reconcile all people to God. Rather, the life of Jesus must be conveyed to those who wish to benefit from who He is and what He did. Only the Holy Spirit can do this.

Your need for the Church because you need the Spirit.

According to the Bible, the Holy Spirit is a person like Jesus and the Father. Also like Jesus and the Father, the Holy Spirit is God. He is especially involved in the giving and withdrawing of life. Paul’s confession attributes the resurrection of Jesus especially to the Holy Spirit. This has implications beyond His own new life. Paul wrote to the Church in Rome of his day, “if the Spirit of Him who raised Christ Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who indwells you” (8.11). He also wrote to the Corinthian Church that each of them had been made a part of the Church by the work of the Holy Spirit. In fact, the Church is commonly called the body of Christ because it is united to Christ and receives it’s life from Him through the Holy Spirit.

Christ did not simply establish the institutional Church, but the Holy Spirit which gave life to His body as it lay in the grave continually reconstitutes the Church by conveying to it the life of Christ. Only those united to Christ by the Spirit can benefit from His reconciliation.

Toward the end of my time in seminary I was driving my Chevy Sprint down the road, when I suddenly heard a loud pop from the engine. The car suddenly slowed to a crawl and began vibrating in a rather unsettling way. It turned out my engine had blown a spark plug, leaving me with only two working pistons. Now, if I could have afforded the work, that car could have been fixed simply by putting the plug back in place. Almost any mechanical problem can be fixed by pushing or pulling something back into place, or by replacing some small part. That’s why the Bible does not use mechanical analogies. What’s wrong with us cannot be fixed by simply re-arranging what’s already there or even replacing a broken part. Our problem can only be explained in organic language. We are like branches on a dying tree. The only way we can be rescued is to be cut out of that tree and ingrafted into another, healthy tree. That is the analogy used in Scripture. Jesus is the everliving, healthy tree. We are dying because we partake of a dying nature. We will die alienated from God unless we are somehow joined to His Son. It is the Holy Spirit who mysteriously unites people to Jesus. It is by the Spirit that people cease to be orphans but are adopted by God and made part of his household.

That is why, when someone tells you that you can be “saved”, or “born again,” or whatever the lingo happens to be, without going to Church, you need to be skeptical. The notion that God could adopt someone as His child without making them a part of His household is a rather incoherent idea which the Bible does not consider normal. Furthermore, the presence of God’s Spirit is associated with the Church which He indwells. If you want to be united to Jesus by the Spirit and thus reconciled to God, you need to pursue being admitted into His household, the Church. That is the ordinary way in which we are made part of Jesus and He is made part of us.

Now, let’s think about what all this means here and now. Being reconciled to God is more important than anything on earth. God loves us and has demonstrated it by providing the means of by which we can be reconciled to Him, even though it cost Him dearly. If we spurn His great love for us and refuse to become part of his family we will become even worse off than we were before. So I plead with each one of you to make reconciliation your highest priority.

This transition from alienation outside the Church to adoption into God’s household is normally marked by the ritual of baptism. Some of you may have already been baptized as children, in which case it is important that you return to the Church and become active worshiping members, so that God does not judge you to be defectors from His Kingdom. You don’t want to be found guilty of treason do you?

For many of you, you need to come and talk to me about getting baptized into the Church as soon as possible. Baptism is how one is admitted into the Church outside of which there is no ordinary possibility of reconciliation.

For those among you who realize you need to be reconciled to God, I would like you to do something right now, so that you won’t be in doubt that, if you were to die unexpectedly, you would be welcomed into God’s presence as a reconciled friend. I would like you to turn over your handout and recite the prayer that is written there. This prayer is quite simple and short, and some of you might be think that God would not care about a written prayer. But the fact is, none of us can come to God unless we come as children. We don’t know how to talk properly unless someone first teaches us. God will delight in this prayer if you say the words sincerely. To mark the event, I have probided space for you to sign your name and date it.

To pray the words sincerely means: you won’t simply forget about all this after you have said them. Rather you will pursue the means by which God has promised you His Spirit and reconciliation. Don’t allow anything under your control to prevent you from that pursuit. Otherwise this prayer will simply become a testimony to the fact that you have spurned the love of God. But why spurn the only one who can bring you true and lasting reconciliation?

If you believe this message of God’s love, the only sane thing you can do is to pray for the reconciliation He promises. Please pray along with me:

Dear God, I confess that I am your enemy. I have not loved you as I ought to love you. I thank you that you sent your Son into the world to suffer the punishment I deserve and to rise from the dead that I might also live with Him. Forgive me, I beg you–adopt me as your child and be a Father to me, not because of anything I have done, but simply because of your incredible love and mercy. Please give me your Holy Spirit I pray, and unite me to your Son Jesus Christ. In His Name, Amen.

Volume 1 of 28 just released!

My reading has drastically slowed down, but I did get a chance to finally finish another chapter in J. I. Packer’s dissertation on Richard Baxter. I don’t have the time to fill in all the quotations that would be of interest to [my imaginary ideal] readers, so I will just state an observation.

More than a decade ago J. I . Packer was one of the people who signed a document entitled Evangelicals and Catholics Together. For what it matters, I would not have signed it, and would have told Packer to refrain from signing if he had cared about my opinion. But sign it he did.

In some quarters there was an outcry against the document for reasons I don’t want to spend time evaluating. But there was also an outcry against Packer himself, not only due to the merits (or lack thereof) of the document, but also that it displayed something wrong with Packer’s integrity. One received the distinct impression that this represented a departure from everything Packer had ever stood for.

Having completed chapter four of Packer’s study of Baxter, I can assure you that is complete nonsense. Anyone reading Packer’s glowing portrayal of Baxter’s catholic desires and actions, his attempts to find common ground with all manner of Christians, whether Jesuits, Arminians, or Calvinists, will see that there is nothing shocking about Packer’s signature. Packer signing ECT was as surprising as water running down hill, as amazing as paint drying. On the contrary, what would have been shocking is if he had chosen not to sign the document.

It is obvious reading this, Packer’s earliest work, that it was not just a description of history, but a description of his own passionate convictions (though he, of course, disagreed with Baxter’s neo-nomian conceptions). This is the young man who would later grow to write Knowing God. It shows what course he had set for himself. And he has not deviated from it! It was not incongruous that he signed ECT; he was built for it.

Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? Much in every way. To begin with, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God. What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? By no means! Let God be true though every one were a liar, as it is written, “That you may be justified in your words, and prevail when you are judged.” But if our unrighteousness serves to show the righteousness of God, what shall we say? That God is unrighteous to inflict wrath on us? (I speak in a human way.)

Not only is the phrase, “the righteousness of God.” used to denote God’s own righteousness (rather than a transferred status) but it is, for God and man alike, used as a synonym for faithfulness. Our unfaithfulness does not nullify the faithfulness of God and our unrighteousness shows the righteousness of God.

At the same time, if God is not unrighteous to inflict wrath, then he is righteous to do so. So the righteousness/faithfulness of God can involve inflicting punishment even though it can also be demonstrated in saving sinners (Romans 1.16, 17). These two aspect of righteousness are both satisfied in the propitiatory sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.

But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

Even though I haven’t had time to do half the reading I wanted to do, Phil Ryken at the Reformation21 blog has suddenly made me thisty for another journey through CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity. Here is the taste:

There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.

This will increase applications to Columbia Business School. I know nothing about the politics, economics, or personalities in the matter. I just thought it was hysterical.