Monthly Archives: October 2008

Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei

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or, in English, “The church reformed and always being reformed according to the word of God.” This 16th-century Latin motto captures the spirit and purpose of the Reformation, and so it has continued to be used through the centuries by those of us who consider ourselves heirs of the Reformation and students of the wisdom of the great Reformers. (You know, the sort of people who look at October 31 and think “Reformation Day,” not just Halloween, and write blog posts in honor of the day.)

Unfortunately—aided by a common mistranslation, “the church reformed and always reforming“—in recent times we’ve seen this motto misused in support of ends which are completely contradictory to the spirit and intent of the Reformation and the Reformed tradition; this sort of thing is quite common in the Presbyterian Church (USA), the denomination in which I serve as a pastor. The tendency is to interpret “always reforming” as the ongoing work of the church, reinventing itself to fit the culture, and set that over against “reformed” as if these are two separate things. Thus, for instance, we get this comment from Adam Walker Cleaveland from a few years ago on his blog pomomusings (emphasis mine):

I think that one could fairly easily make an argument that many of our Presbyterian churches today have focused primarily (almost exclusively) on the “Reformed” aspect, and have not critically evaluated how the church may need to continue to be “always reforming” in light of our current context.

Always reforming. Always being sensitive to the radical openness and movement of the Spirit. Always being aware that we may need to be critically evaluate our theology and methodology. While at the same time, being aware of and sensitive to the things that are part of the tradition of the Presbyterian church, and those things that are important in the holy scriptures. The Bible is an important part of the heritage of the Presbyterian church and the Christian tradition, but we must be wary of creating logocentric churches, where we become strict-constructionists when it comes to our theologies and methodologies, only allowing whatever the scriptures and tradition says. That must be balanced and held in tension with the new waves of the Spirit that may be calling for new theologies and new methodologies in a new world.

In Cleaveland’s case, he was coming from a self-consciously “emergent” position, an influence which is only beginning to emerge (if you will) in the PC(USA); but we see this sort of argument all the time from liberals in the denomination. “The Bible is an important part of our heritage, but the world is evolving and we need to evolve with it. Yes, Christians used to believe that homosexuality was sinful, but we know better now. God is doing a new thing, and his Spirit is calling for a new theology that’s appropriate to the times. We’re supposed to be always reforming—we can’t afford to cling to the dead past, we need to move with the present.” And so on, and so forth. In a nutshell: “Always reforming, new wind of the Spirit, therefore whatever we don’t like about historic Presbyterian theology and morality, we can throw out.”

The problem is twofold. First, these are folks who are very interested in reforming the church, but not so interested in the secundum verbum Dei part; I don’t know what “according to cultural assumptions” would be in Latin, but that would be more to the point. This is not to say theyreject the Scriptures, just that they reject the idea that the Scriptures could be telling them something they really don’t want to hear; they want the church to believe what they want the church to believe, and they’re happy to offer any interpretation of Scripture they can which supports that, but if they decide they can’t sustain those interpretations, they don’t respond by changing their position. Instead, they respond by rejecting the authority of Scripture on that point, declaring essentially, “that was then, this is now, and we know better.” (Some would point out that secundum verbum Dei is a later addition, which is true; it is, however, a clarifyingaddition—it adds nothing new to the older motto, but rather makes explicit what was already implicit.)

(It should be noted at this point that most of this can also be said of many who consider themselves evangelicals; the primary difference is that evangelicals don’t justify themselves by explicitly rejecting the authority of Scripture. Rather, the evangelical tendency is to privilege the individual interpretation of Scripture and simply insist that yes it does mean what I want it to mean. It still ends up locating primary authority in the autonomous individual rather than in the voice of God speaking by his Spirit through the Scripture, but by a different route and in less straightforward fashion.)

Second, there is the belief that the church is the agent of its own reformation, and that this is about the church reinventing itself and evolving. As McCormick theology professor Anna Case-Winters pointed out in Presbyterians Today several years ago, this is directly opposed to what this motto actually means, and what the Reformation was all about. As she says, this doesn’t mean that “newer is better,” nor does it leave it to us to determine what “reforming” looks like. Rather, it’s about

restoring the church to its true nature, purified from the “innovations” that riddled the church through centuries of inattention to Scripture and theological laxity. . . .

God is the agent of reformation. The church is rather the object of God’s reforming work. God’s agency and initiative have priority here. . . . Theologian Harold Nebelsick put it well: “We are the recipients of the activity of the Holy Spirit which reforms the church in accordance with the Word of God.” The church is God’s church, a creature of God’s Word and Spirit. As we say in our Brief Statement of Faith, “we belong to God.” God’s Word and Spirit guide the church’s forming and reforming.

What we need to understand here is that this motto isn’t about justifying anything we might want to do; it is rather about acknowledging that being the church isn’t about justifying what we want to do. It isn’t about getting what we want, or believing what we’re comfortable believing; instead, it’s about the negation of that approach. It’s about recognizing that the reason we keep needing God to reform us is that we keep slipping back into building churches that are about us, giving us what we want and keeping us comfortable, and thus keep needing to be called back to the will of God as revealed in Scripture. It’s also about recognizing that yes, God still speaks by his Spirit—but that he will not contradict anything he has already said, because who he is doesn’t change, and thus that if we think we feel God leading us, we need to test that sense against what he’s already revealed in Scripture.

This is why what Dr. Case-Winters says about the 16th century remains true for us today:

In the 16th-century context the impulse it reflected was neither liberal nor conservative, but radical, in the sense of returning to the “root.” The Reformers believed the church had become corrupt, so change was needed. But it was a change in the interest of preservation and restoration of more authentic faith and life—a church reformed and always to be reformed according to the Word of God.

Being Reformed means being radical in precisely that sense, for it means not that we’re always becoming something new, nor that we’re always changing, but that we’re always being conformed and reconformed to the unchanging standard of the Word of God, which means of the character and will of the one “whose beauty is past change,” as Hopkins put it. It means not that we adapt to this world, but rather we’re pulled away from adapting to this world; the goal is not to let this world squeeze us into its mold, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. It means accepting that we don’t set the agenda, but rather that we’re called to surrender to God’s agenda, and thus recognizing that we’re people under authority—the authority of God, and thus of his revelation to us in his Word—and that we must bow to that authority even when we don’t like what we hear, rather than trying to find ways to rationalize what we want to do instead.

It means, in short, allowing ourselves to be Reformed, not by our word and our will, but by the will of God in accordance with his Word.

As though not voting

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This is what I mean, brothers: the appointed time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.

—1 Corinthians 7:29-31 (ESV)

John Piper’s election message on this text, “Let Christians Vote As Though They Were Not Voting,” has been cited all over the blogosphere this last week, and rightly so; if you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend you go and do so, because what he has to say is both true and important. It’s also worth reading his sermon from this time twenty years ago on “Believing God on Election Day,” because while the names have changed, the truth of his points in that sermon hasn’t.

To this, I would only add a point that my wife has been talking about quite a bit lately (I thought she’d blogged on it, but I haven’t found the post): we as Christians are called to do things for the value of the thing itself, not in the expectation of results. Thus, for instance, we are called to evangelism, not in order to improve the attendance and giving numbers at our church, buteven if we don’t, simply because telling people about Jesus is a good thing and one of the tasks to which he calls us as his disciples. Similarly, we are called to vote, but if the candidates for whom we vote lose—if we don’t get the desired results—that doesn’t mean that our votes are “wasted.” God has commanded us to seek the welfare of the communities in which he has placed us, and that gives us the responsibility to vote, as wisely as we can; the results of that, however, are not in our hands, but God’s. We need to do our part, not to try to do his.

On reasons for an Obama victory

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I’ve said before that I expect Barack Obama to win next week, and that I expect his presidency to be bad for America. I’m afraid we’ll see a major national-security crisis to which he’ll respond ineffectively (especially since Joe Biden essentially predicted as much), a resurgence of the abortion holocaust (and especially among blacks) under one of the most pro-abortion politicians in the country, the return of stagflation with the revival of the redistributionist economic policies that produced it, a Carteresque ineffectiveness in the face of challenges, a crackdown on free speech to stifle criticism of his administration, and the domination of our government by the hard-left wing of the Democratic Party.That said, I think Obama’s going to win, and for all that I don’t think he’ll be a good president, I think it’s important for this country that he win. For one, I do not assume that America deserves to be blessed simply because we’re America; if I’m right that there are hard times ahead, I can’t deny the possibility that we as a nation have them coming to us. As nations go, this is a great one and a good one, but we are far from perfect—and those Christians who object to my saying this because they believe America has a special place in God’s plan should remember that “judgment begins in the house of God.” For another, I believe the church in this country deserves to be judged for its political idolatry; and it seems to me that this judgment must begin with its conservative wing, who must relearn not to put our trust in princes.And perhaps most importantly, I believe that John McWhorter is right: the time is such that an Obama win may well be necessary for its effects on “race” relations in this country. For all my pessimism about an Obama presidency, part of that is that I see tough times ahead regardless, and I think it’s quite likely true that the cost of an Obama defeat would be greater than the benefit. As McWhorter argues,

For 40 years, black America has been misled by a claim that we can only be our best with the total eclipse of racist bias. Few put it in so many words, but the obsession with things like tabulating ever-finer shades of racism and calling for a “national conversation” on race in which whites would listen to blacks talk about racism are based on an assumption: that the descendants of African slaves in the United States are the only group of humans in history whose problems will vanish with a “level playing field,” something no other group has ever supposed could be a reality.The general conversation is drifting slowly away from this Utopianist canard, but nothing could help hustle it into obsolescence more than an Obama presidency, especially for the generation who grew up watching a black man and his family in the White House and had little memory of a time when it would have been considered an impossibility. At the same time, nothing could breathe new life into this gestural pessimism like an Obama loss. It would be the perfect enabler for a good ten years of aggrieved mulling over “the persistence of racism,” which, for all of its cathartic seduction, would make no one less poor, more gainfully employed, or better educated. . . .The grievous result of this fetishization of racism would be that it would put a kibosh on the upsurge in black voters’ political engagement amidst the Obamenon. Newspaper articles would quote blacks disillusioned from getting excited about any future black candidate—e.g. “I thought maybe America was finally getting past racism but it turned out not to be true.” 2009 would be a year of countless panel discussions, quickie books, and celebrated rap couplets wallowing in the notion that the white man wouldn’t let Obama into the Oval Office where he belonged, urgently reminding us that to be black is still to be a victim.

HT: Justin TaylorFor all my pessimism, I think it’s important to remember this, and not to deprecate the very real symbolic value of an Obama victory—or the very real practical benefits of that symbolic value; I also think it’s important to recognize that justice demands something of this sort in partial balance for the national sin of slavery. I could wish it were someone else, a Harold Ford or a Michael Steele, but Barack Obama is clearly the man God has chosen for this moment, for his own purposes; and it remains true that “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Reflection on the mystery of prayer

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Life is filled with mystery, and, much to our chagrin, claiming to know God does not shed any light upon certain dark recesses of our world. In fact, God often appears to cast a very long, very dark shadow, a shadow that can conceal more than we like to admit. Perhaps one of wise King Solomon’s more astute observations is found in the introduction to his own prayer recorded in 2 Chron. 6:1: “The LORD has said that he would dwell in a dark cloud.” God shows himself in darkness. He invites us to meet in a place where he cannot be seen. Divine self-revelation may obscure as much as, if not more than, it illuminates.Nothing brings a feeble human being face to face with spiritual conundrums as quickly as prayer, especially petitionary prayer. For many, balancing the prospect of a divine response to our cries for help against the disappointment of heavenly silence in the face of our suffering tips the religious scales in favor of skepticism, atheism, and renunciation. Knocking on heaven’s door, asking for an audience with the cosmic king, and then making our requests clearly known is a mysterious enough activity for those of us consigned to inhabit the physical limitations of flesh and blood. But then tracing answers through the fabric of life’s chaos, drawing even tentative lines of heavenly connection between the pleas of human uttering and the course of subsequent history—that is a prophetic role for which few of us seem to be qualified. Admittedly, there are always those eager to claim the prophetic mantle, but my experience with life suggests that the longer you live and the more you pray, the less prone you are to give quck, self-assured answers. This is not to deny the possibility of answers; it is merely to acknowledge that nothing in this life, including the realm of the spirit, is automatic, and precious little is ever self-evident. Putting a coin in slot A does not immediately guarantee a Snickers Bar from chute B, especially when the pocket accumulating my spare change belongs to God. The Creator also has his own purposes, which may include sending me something totally unexpected through chute G once I have surrendered the requisite number of quarters.Prayer comprises the interface between human frailty and divine power. Yet, connection and comprehension are two very different things. Trying to peer from our world into that other domain is a bit like opening your eyes underwater. It is possible to see, somewhat, but not easily, not far, and not without considerable distortion. Light is refracted, distances are difficult to judge, size is deceptive, sticks appear to bend at the surface, brilliant underwater colors vanish when raised to the surface. We may be able to explore both worlds, but it is painfully apparent that we are better suited for the one than the other. This should not stop us from trying to understand how the two realms relate; it ought, however, to curb our human penchant for dogmatism, replacing heavy-handed solutions with a healthy dose of humility and a very gentle touch.

—David Crump, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, 14-15

Side comment or two

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The other day, I noted that Jared Wilson has begun posting his own 95 theses on the state of the American church; having covered discipleship and community in his first two postings, today he posted 19 more theses on the church—what the American church is vs. what the church ought to be. Unsurprisingly, in his distillation of the ongoing themes of his blog, he’s making a lot of important and provocative points, points which I think the church badly needs to hear and consider. I’m not going to try to offer any profound overarching comment on them, at least at this time; but there are a couple side comments which occurred to me.First, an observation on Jared’s Thesis 46: The American Church loves the spirit of the age and idolizes relevancy. This is I think a particularly important point. I’ve written about the idolatry of relevance before, at some length, with respect to worship; I think this is a classic case of unexamined assumptions corrupting and killing the best of intentions. Certainly, the church should never be irrelevant—but making relevance the goal smuggled in some ideas which completely undermined the proclamation of the gospel, and turned our worship to idolatry.Second, and much more minor, off his Theses 40-41: Jesus said the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church. Much of what passes for church in America will be prevailed against by hell. One of the things which interests me about the way the church deals with that statement by Jesus is that it’s so often read defensively, as if Jesus is saying, “Hell’s going to attack the church, but stand strong, it won’t defeat you.” This, it seems to me, betrays a very limited and modest understanding of the role and responsibility and power of the church, and a very limited vision of who we’re called to be and what we’re called to do; that in turn, I believe, makes us think that it’s well enough to content ourselves with self-help feel-good stuff. The question people never seem to ask is, when was the last time you saw gates chasing someone down the street? Last time I checked, gates don’t move. Jesus’ image there in Matthew is offensive, it’s about taking the battle to the enemy. To be sure, that too can be overdone and misused, but it’s still an important truth: we are not here merely to endure until we get to go to heaven, and thus it isn’t anywhere near enough to give the church teaching and programs which will make our endurance more enjoyable, comfortable and fulfilling. Rather, we have been given a mission to go into the strongholds of the enemy and rescue his prisoners, in the confidence that the gates of Hell will not prevail against us—which is not a promise that every battle will always go just as we wish, but is the assurance that we will win the war, because Jesus has already won it. But of course, if we’re going to take that mission seriously, then we need preaching, teaching, and worship to match.

Liberal feminist says: “Sarah Palin’s a Brainiac”

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One of the frustrations of this campaign season has been watching so many people—even conservatives, and even smart conservatives (like Peggy Noonan, or Bird over at The Thinklings)—buy the dismissive leftist line, backed by predatory editing to distort her MSM interviews, that Sarah Palin is intellectually and otherwise unqualified to be VP. On that, listen to Elaine Lafferty, the former editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine:

It’s difficult not to froth when one reads, as I did again and again this week, doubts about Sarah Palin’s “intelligence,” coming especially from women such as PBS’s Bonnie Erbe, who, as near as I recall, has not herself heretofore been burdened with the Susan Sontag of Journalism moniker. As Fred Barnes—God help me, I’m agreeing with Fred Barnes—suggests in the Weekly Standard, these high toned and authoritative dismissals come from people who have never met or spoken with Sarah Palin. Those who know her, love her or hate her, offer no such criticism. They know what I know, and I learned it from spending just a little time traveling on the cramped campaign plane this week: Sarah Palin is very smart. . . .Now by “smart,” I don’t refer to a person who is wily or calculating or nimble in the way of certain talented athletes who we admire but suspect don’t really have serious brains in their skulls. I mean, instead, a mind that is thoughtful, curious, with a discernable pattern of associative thinking and insight. Palin asks questions, and probes linkages and logic that bring to mind a quirky law professor I once had. Palin is more than a “quick study”; I’d heard rumors around the campaign of her photographic memory and, frankly, I watched it in action. She sees. She processes. She questions, and only then, she acts. What is often called her “confidence” is actually a rarity in national politics: I saw a woman who knows exactly who she is.For all those old enough to remember Senator Sam Ervin, the brilliant strict constitutional constructionist and chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee whose patois included “I’m just a country lawyer” . . . Yup, Palin is that smart.

It’s not a long piece, and it’s well worth your time to read the whole thing.HT: Beldar

Tolkien, story, and the incarnation of virtue

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Doug Hagler is, as he says, in the process of spinning down his blog Prog(ressive)nostications, which is too bad; but he’s still posting some good stuff. In particular, I appreciate his recent post of a paper on “Tolkien and Virtue Ethics,” which is well worth reading if you’re interested in either Tolkien or ethics, or the meaning of virtue, or in the power of story to communicate truth, or any combination thereof. It’s an academic paper, and thus a bit more formal, but don’t let that deter you—Doug has some important things to say. Here’s his beginning:

Aquinas, Keenan and others offer modified versions of Aristotle’s system of virtues, but they do so outside of the context of a narrative. Their virtue systems are presented and applied to various problems and subsequently analyzed, but life is not breathed into them. In order to do that, one requires a story. (MacIntyre, After Virtue, 121)One might argue that for Christians, that story is salvation history as expressed in scripture, but this is not quite the narrative that a virtue ethic requires. A virtue ethic requires a story of ennoblement, wherein the virtues espoused are demonstrated to function. Scripture, on the other hand, is a wildly various collection of ancient genres of writing, usually seen as whole but not composed as a whole. Aristotle’s culture, in contrast, was steeped in these heroic and epic stories (Ibid, 122-125) constituting a rich storytelling tradition, the surviving fragments of which we still treasure thousands of years later.It is my contention that, despite the great interruption in the development of virtue ethics, which MacIntyre identifies as the entire experiment of modernity, this storytelling tradition continues to this day. The difference is that we do not identify it as such, and it is not widely used as a source for virtue ethics. But we are still steeped in our own stories of ennoblement, and these can be a source for our ethical reflection in the context of virtue ethics.The example I will focus on is the corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien, with specific focus on The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, with reference to this other works, books, essays and letters. Tolkien is a potentially superb example of modern stories as living virtue ethics because he is in an interesting position. On the one hand, he is steeped in the heroic storytelling of northern Europe—the languages, traditions, cultures and so on, from Beowulf to the Elder Edda to the Kalevala. He also set out, particularly in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, to create stories which reflected his own Catholicism (Carpenter, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 172), including the tradition of Catholic moral theology in the tradition of Aquinas. Finally, his stories are avidly devoured by millions of fans worldwide, and have been adapted many times into various media since their publication. (Endnote 1) It seems that there is a clear potential here for one to find living, breathing virtues expressly located in modern storytelling.

Indeed. Check it out.

Nailed to the Wittenblog door

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Jared Wilson has undertaken an interesting project/challenge on his blog The Gospel-Driven Church: he’s posting his own 95 theses for the American church, 19 at a time for five days. The first 19 went up this morning, headed “On the Discipleship of the Individual Christian,” with the rest to come over the course of this week. In doing this, Jared acknowledges a possible charge of arrogance, but I don’t think that really follows; the fact that he’s deliberately echoing Martin Luther doesn’t mean he’s comparing himself to Luther, after all, or that he expects his theses to have the same effect as Luther’s did. As far as I can tell, he’s simply doing what Luther intended to do when he took hammer and nail to the door of the Wittenburg cathedral: systematizing his challenge to the status quo so as to provoke discussion. Judging by the first 19, I’d say he has a good chance of accomplishing that. If you haven’t already spent some time considering his post, I’d suggest you do so, and keep checking back for the other 76 theses; and then I’d suggest we all spend some serious time in prayer for the church in this country, and for ourselves.