NOTE: I made promises about not saying anything regarding certain ecclesiastical political fights. I didn’t say I would never blog about theology. If exterior links touch on these things, I don’t regard it as tainting the purity of these posts.
I had somehow completely missed this from Peter Leithart.
In his stimulating book Liturgical Theology, Simon Chan argues that a crucial weakness of Protestant and evangelical theology is that it ends the gospel story with the ascension and doesn’t see that Pentecost and the church are integral to the evangel. This is not Jesus’ own version of the gospel. Jesus says in Luke 24 that the Old Testament is not only about the Christ, but about the preaching of repentance to all nations. Acts also recapitulates Israel’s history.
Without a pneumatologically shaped ecclesiology, Chan says, Protestantism permits sociology to fill the vacuum: “If the Spirit is linked to the church in any way, it is to the invisible church, such as in the Spirit’s bringing spiritual rebirth to individuals. The visible church is largely defined sociologically, while the `real’ church cannot be identified with anything visible. Such an ecclesiology could only be described as docetic.”
This converges in spades with Richard Hays’ excellent book on Paul’s use of OT Scripture. He points out that much of Paul’s typology is not directly Christocentric, but rather Ecclesiocentric. The Church is prefigured in the OT narratives. The story of Ishmael and Isaac applies to the Church’s controversy with the Judaizers. Naturally, this involves Christology (the “total Christ” as Augustine would say), but it is more.
Peter’s observations about Luke 24 are backed up by Paul’s recital of the Gospel in First Corinthians 15.1ff.
Now I would remind you, brothers, [1] of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles….
There you have it. The Gospel story is Christ, death, resurrection, Church.
Interesting observation. I’ve often heard “the gospel” encapsulated in those verses, but it always stops at the word “Scriptures.” But Paul doesn’t appear to even pause in the flow of his discourse at that point, does he? In fact, (assuming the English grammar reflects the Greek well here) the “and that” makes at least the appearance to Cephas and the twelve as much a part of the main point as everything that came before. You could perhaps make a case that starting with the “then,” which isn’t as closely linked, he’s off to something less central, but I’m not certain that there is a good reason to. But certainly the appearance to the apostles is as much “of first importance” as death, burial, and resurrection. That’s a new thought for me indeed.
See garver of gaffin too
“Gaffin summarizes the implications for justification within Luke-Acts in the following way:
Pentecost, then, is the de facto justification of the church. Along with Christ’s resurrection and ascension…it is a declaration, in effect, of the church’s righteous standing before God. Pentecost is not only the efficacious empowering of the church for kingdom service (it is that, to be sure), but is also the effective demonstration that the church is no longer subject to God’s wrath. The eschatological life of the Spirit poured out on the church at Pentecost seals its acquittal and the definitive removal of it guilt…The Spirit of Pentecost is the Spirit of justification. (112)
From this quotation, it would seem that in Gaffin’s interpretation of Luke-Acts justification is first and foremost a forensic event that marks out the true covenant community as God’s forgiven eschatological people and thus is as much ecclesiological as it is soteriological.”
It is interesting that the word “church” only appears in ONE question in the entire Westminster Shorter Catechism!