Hey guys,
Though I’ll continue to post on DO periodically, the newness of life that is marriage has invoked an onset of newness in many other arenas, blogging one of them. As a result, I have started a new blog, Genu(re)flection, to more adequately house a wider range of topics and thoughts.
Most excitingly, I have an interview posted there with Brett McCracken, author of Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide.
So I have not left DiscoverOrthodoxy, no worries.
Caleb
Filed under Blog Matters, Random
Hey Everyone,
I just wanted to let you guys know that I am getting married to this beautiful creature, my lovely fiance Julie…
…10 days from now. Consequently, there are not too many things more irrelevant than blogging about theological issues when one is about to begin life with a wife.
So. I will return to you all as a married man at some point in the kinda-near future.
God Bless.
Caleb
Filed under Blog Matters
*Written for my church’s Facebook Page*
Hello fellow Gracers,
Last week, Jordan Reick posted a question on the wall that inquired “How does Grace make the Gospel visible?” Contained in his question was a request for other brothers and sisters to put forth their ideas of how our church can better manifest the Gospel to the surrounding community. Among the responses, Pastor Jonathon contributed his insights in confessing “that we need to be balanced between proclaiming the gospel in word and deed. Most PCA churches tend to be unbalanced, with the mercy side coming up short, and we’re probably not an exception there.”
With Jordan’s initial question in mind in conjunction with Pastor Jonathon’s thoughts, I have been pondering this issue as of late and feel that there may be some missing elements from this conversation.
Pastor Jonathon was indeed correct in his statement that many PCA and other Reformed churches are notoriously unbalanced as to the respective emphases placed upon preaching/doctrine and the church’s material ministry to its community. However, something that I have long held is the importance, in fact, the necessity of liturgical community as the locus and impetus of a local church’s ministry. We Reformed can often compartmentalize the various elements of church life into isolated and independent spheres such that we have our doctrine in one area, our liturgy in another, and our social ministry in yet another. Unfortunately, so often focused are we on our doctrine that we inevitably relegate the equally important spheres of liturgy and community service into realms of secondary and tertiary importance. I am submitting to you all that without a vibrant and comprehensive liturgical community, neither our doctrine nor our outward ministry to the community will be things that organically and necessarily arise as our corporate fruit of the Spirit.
Allow me to begin with some background. Every church has a center and a foundation on which its community rests. Therefore, in our church’s situation, we need only to be concerned with what unites us all into community. Ideally, as I hope to show later, this proper foundation is the liturgical life of our church but in the absence thereof, we as people will inevitably find something on which to build our community; we’ll look for our demographic. And since liturgy is not something that is actively perceived as something of grand importance, we see this all around us. Whether it’s the urban house church where all the congregants are 20 and 30-somethings who just so happen to all enjoy foreign films and vote Democrat or the upper middle class, white, surburban church where every family is conversative and just so happens to homeschool, we are surrounded by churches who found their community on things other than the liturgical life of the church. On what is our community centered? It is a fair question to ask.
Now, Pastor Jonathan recently preached on the transcedent quality of the Gospel that ascends beyond all of our demographic preferences and prejudices and unites humanity on the very thing for which we were created: the worship of God. The Church is humanity as it was created to be, a community in which the peace of Christ forever flows and its praise continuely arises to God as incense. Therefore, when we assemble on Lord’s Day, we are actively displaying to the world the chief end of man. The Church is not fundamentally an association of like-minded individuals who collectively assent to a series of theological propositions, although we do believe things. Neither is the Church primarily an organization committed to social justice like a non-profit, though we do indeed minister to the world. No, the identity and purpose of the Church is none other than the identity and purpose of every human being, the worship of God. This includes belief and ministry, but the Church’s worship, its liturgy, is the comprehensive expression of the Church’s identity.
Within the liturgical life of the local church, what is the animating force, the enlivening impetus for both belief and practical ministry? It is none other than the Eucharist, the Lord’s Table on which we partake of the Body and Blood of Christ every Sunday. For it is in the Eucharist that we as a congregation are reconstituted and sustained as the Body of Christ. The Eucharist is the center of the Church’s identity as the Body of Christ for it is in its partaking that, as Paul said, that we participate in Christ’s Body and Blood. Think about that, every time we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, Christ is actually manifesting Himself through us as His Mystical Body to the world!
Hopefully, it is now easy to see the necessary outcome of this in regards to our church’s ministry to our community. As each of us are increasingly woven into the liturgical rhythms of our church’s life by our corporate worship and participation in the Sacraments, our corporate understanding of ourselves as the Body of Christ becomes more concentrated and realized. Consequently, our service to our community comes to be seen as merely as a church being what it really is, since Christ Himself was a servant and we are Christ’s Mystical Body. Ministry to the world is an organically produced fruit from a church that understands its sacramental character based upon its Eucharistic celebration and manifested through its liturgy. Perhaps a better of way of putting this would be the words of one of my favorite theologians, the late Eastern Orthodox priest Alexander Schmemann who, in his book For the Life of the World, defines the Church as “the sacrament of Christ’s presence and action in the world.”
Without this understanding, we’ll continue on as those infamous Reformed who, at best, see social ministry as “a good thing to do” while believing the essence of the Church to be based on adherence to sound doctrine. Of course, there is an equally unfortunate ditch that is gaining momentum in our day, and that is the tendency to react to the previous scenario and understand the Church as essentially a mechanism for social justice. Therefore, we should not view the sectors of doctrine, liturgy, and social ministry as isolated and separate aspects of Church, but as one tapestry that is woven together by the liturgy and the Sacraments that define and animate the Church as the Body of Christ.
So, in conclusion, my encouragement to you all is to cherish our liturgy, learn it, love it, and conform your personal and family life into the corporate life of liturgy at Grace. Each time you approach the Lord’s Table, be mindful of the fact that in your partaking, you are being sustained as a member of Christ’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, His Body. As I’ve heard it said before, we have been adopted as members of a family and this family has a business: the proclamation of the Gospel to the world and the clothing of the naked and feeding of the hungry. However, when it comes to social ministry, the Church is not just one more non-profit organization doing social service like everyone else does. Rather, our service to the world is invoked because our Lord in whom we as the Church are mystically united through the Sacraments, “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (Phil. 2:6-7). It is because our Lord Jesus Christ became faithfully present in his Incarnation to us, the dark and sinful Other, that we, having been united to Christ, continue His mission of service to the world and submission and praise to the Father to the glory of His name over all the earth.
May this encourage you, my brothers and sisters in the Lord.
The Peace of Christ be with you all,
Caleb
So, I got involved with a friend in a facebook discussion concerning the question of whether or not the Church of Rome is indeed a part of the true Church. He was arguing for the negative while I was maintaining the positive. My comments became too many for the comment box so I am writing my final response to him here. Though I believe he entered a hiatus, he has a personal blog on which he pursues matters of doctrine like I do.
It started with his status that stated,
“For the Record: Roman Catholicism is not Christianity.”
Now, being as it may, I usually react to such statuses with at least some comment which, in this case, stated,
“In my opinion, if the Church of Rome is not a part of Christendom, then I must also exclude pretty much all of Protestantism by the same token. As long as they hold to the Ecumenical Creeds and administer baptism in the name of the Trinity, they are indeed a true Church, flawed as they are. There’s my two cents, for what they’re worth.”
To which he replied,
“Caleb: That comment sorta befuddles. (1) I do exclude pretty much all of Protestantism by that “same token.” (2) What about the Gospel? The one about grace through faith apart from works. Is it necessary for a true church? Or is it kind of a back-burner issue? Also, for any Protestant commenting on this and disagreeing. One question: Was the Reformation necessary or not? If the RCC is a true church then why did most of the reformers believe that the church needed to be rebuilt, with Scripture as the guide?”
Ok, Jon, rather than try to address every possible angle contained in your questions, I will focus on only one, your claim that the Reformers sought to rebuild the Church.
Firstly, I hope I’m correct in stating that the hope of the Reformers was not a rebuilding of the Church. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be known as the “Reformation” but rather as the “Reconstruction” or something. It is an impossibility for the Church to ever be in need of rebuilding in the literal sense. It will always be in need of reformation, but reformation is completely different than reconstruction. To declare something as being in need of rebuilding is to imply that it had completely disintegrated, or in this discussion, fallen away beforehand. Now, to make this claim, that the Church prior to the Reformation indeed was utterly apostate on an institutional level (not saying that there weren’t individual believers within Rome) and had fallen away is to run into two serious obstacles.
First off, you are initially left asserting a kind of “ecclesial deism” because it appears as though Christ founded the Church with the Apostles but at some point after his Ascension, left the Church thereby allowing it to succumb to apostasizing error. Now, this obviously is contrary to the Scriptures in which Christ promises that “the gates of hell will not prevail against it [the Church].” Again, initially, this is a big problem for the idea that the Church had fallen away prior to the Reformation for Scripture declares that Christ himself is the Cornerstone of the Church who will prevent hell from prevailing against it. So you are forbidden from holding an ecclesiologically deist view of the Church in which Christ abandoned His Body (an a priori impossibility) such that the gates of hell prevailed against it and it fell away. Given these truths, how do we Protestants deal with the church, both in East and West, that encompassed all of Christendom for almost 1500 years before Luther? The classic Protestant way of maneuvering around this is to claim that the promise that the Cornerstone Christ will always guard His Church only applies to the invisible church (since it is assumed that the Church in its truest essence is invisible) and the visible church, which is merely the accidental expression of the invisible church at a given moment in history, is not given this promise and can fall away.
Now, on a logical level, this leads to some rather interesting ramifications. If it is true that the Church is essentially invisible, and any Scriptural promise concerning “the Church” only applies to it in its invisible reality, then it is a logical possibility that tomorrow every living Christian on earth could be murdered and it still be consistently affirmed that the gates of hell had not prevailed against the Church (since there would be thousands of Christians who have passed away in previous eras who would constitute the still in tact “invisible” church which is the true Church anyway). Combine this with your rather flippant anathema against the very salvation of a whole sector of Christendom in your comments (on the grounds that if they were really Christians, they’d think just like you do) and you’re left with the real possibility that there was perhaps a period of history in which there were no real Christians who understood the Gospel (as understood by you). This assertion would essentially be the same as asserting that all Christians were wiped out for a period of time. And yet, Scripture tells us that the Church cannot fail because Christ is her Cornerstone. Well, I guess if we gnosticize the Church rendering its existence independent of a perpetual presence on earth, you can have your cake and eat it too.
Unfortunately, you now have ending up asserting a sort of ecclesiological Nestorianism. As you are probably aware, the Nestorian heresy denied that the two natures of Christ, divine and human, were entirely incarnated together as to be substantially infused together in the person of Christ. Rather, his two natures remained always distinct and separate yet loosely connected. This is why he, Nestorius, rejected the title of “Theotokos” (God-Bearer) being applied to Mary preferring instead that her title be “Christotokos” (Christ-Bearer) implying that Mary was the mother of Jesus Christ the human, but not Jesus Christ the second member of the Godhead. What’s all this talk about Christology have to do with our present discussion? Well, the Church is always spoken of as the very Body of Christ that is united to him in his death and resurrection through baptism and reconstituted and sustained as His Body through its Eucharistic participation in His Body and Blood. The Church, as defined by the late Alexander Schmemann, is “the sacrament of Christ’s presence and action” on earth. If the Church’s existence is not contigent upon a perpetual presence and action visibly on earth, then what are we saying about the Incarnation? I don’t want to get too off track, but I merely say this to show that we cannot divide the natures of the Church anymore than we can divide the natures of Christ. Therefore, when Christ proclaims that he will always guard the Church, he means the visible one.
Am I saying that Rome or Constantinople is therefore infallible? No, for I am still a Protestant. I am merely arguing that they cannot be false churches because they were the only churches for 1500 years after the Apostles and I hope to have shown the utter impossibility of the apostasy of the Church because the promises concerning it must apply to its visible reality. To be quite honest, I think this whole distinction between the visible and invisible church is a Protestant innovation constructed to deal with this issue and others. It isn’t what emerges directly from Scripture and it doesn’t fit within the orthodox framework of Christology, etc. If anything, it is the invisible church that is the accidental expression of the visible church that possesses invisible faith, not the other way around.
Believe me, I am fully aware of how many issues arise from this ranging from questions of authority, interpretation, ecclesiology, etc. But there it is, my argument that Rome and/or Eastern Orthodoxy, though in grevious error (as we all are sure to be in), are still true churches by virtue of the fact that they were the only institutional churches existing for 1500 years and therefore were protected by the promise of Christ. I won’t get in to all the nuances of the Great Schism’s effect on this and what could be said about the truly unified, pre-schism Church but I understand that complexities exist.
Now, if you are one of those Landmark Baptist types that believes that there has always been a tiny remnant of the true Church that can be traced back through the so-called heretical groups that the big, bad Catholic Church oppressed, then you can refute all this on your premises. However, in that case, I wouldn’t have much else to say to you concerning this issue.
Pax Christi,
Caleb
Included in the list of Stuff White People Like is an entry entitled Appearing to Enjoy Classical Music. In it, blogger Christian Lander humorously and satirically discusses “white people’s” tendency to put forth this image of appreciating classical music while not ever actually listening to classical music nor knowing anything about it. He says,
“Though white people do not actually listen to classical music, they like to believe that they are the type of people who would enjoy it.”
In other words, in the 20-something hipster culture, there is something attractive and appealing about being so renaissance or cultured as to be knowledgeable of classical music. However, this knowledge requires a lot of time and energy for as with other elements of high culture, classical music requires perseverance and patience to understand.
Why so much of a prologue about Stuff White People Like? Because I have often seen similarities between this particular caricature of “white people” and the way in which many evangelical Protestants view the early church.
To start out, Protestants love the early church. In fact, we depend on it, or at least on our idea of it. Since Protestantism came after Roman Catholicism and obviously Protestants want to consider themselves legitimate, in their minds the early church must necessarily be that most authentic, pristine, proto-Protestant community of believers not yet tainted by all the “formality” and Roman Catholicism. Therefore, the early church becomes almost fetishized in some Protestant circles not because they particularly love the doctrines and writings of the Apostolic Fathers, but because of what the early church represents for them. I have witnessed this activity in several conversations with friends and they often follow this logic:
As anyone who observes contemporary Protestant dialogue will know, the realm is a buzz with talk of “authenticity”, “being real”, etc. However, because of evangelicalism’s enchantment with modernity, it presupposes “authenticity” to be that which is informal, spontaneous, and egalitarian. Therefore, following the logic above, they conclude that the early church possessed those qualities. As an example of this, I once had a conversation with a Baptist friend about the issue of church authority as it pertains to the rightful privilege in the administration of the sacraments, baptism specifically. After I gave him my side, that only duly ordained ministers have the right to admit people into the Church via the sacrament of baptism, he countered saying something like, “I really don’t think that the early church was concerned with issues of ordination and such and if someone wanted to be baptized, any lay person of their choice could perform it.” Now, I am not picking on this friend of mine nor am I picking on Baptists, for this problem extends beyond them, but merely using him as an example. He was simply expressing an assumption about the early church that was in accordance with his presuppositions regarding the nature of the ideal church structure. The problem is that if he had even briefly read the actual writings of someone such as St. Ignatius of Antioch, an Apostolic Father and disciple of John, he would have read that
“It is not lawful without the bishop either to baptize or to celebrate a love-feast [the Eucharist]; but whatsoever he shall approve of, that is also pleasing to God, so that everything that is done may be secure and valid.”
So, unfortunately, his assumption was completely wrong for here we have St. Ignatius, a member of 1st generation church after the Apostles, clearly advocating a structured hierarchy in church matters, especially in that of the administration of the sacraments.
Another example of this would be some of the Christian hipsters’ supposed desire to “get back” to the early church. “Dude, we just need to return to the time of the early church, when Christianity was “real”, and church was chilling on someone’s porch talking about your “journey”, smoking cigarettes, and pursuing social justice.” Nothing against journeys, social justice, or cigarettes of course.
What I am trying to show is that many evangelicals have somewhat fetishized the early church. They don’t seem to have an actual desire to study what they said and believed, but rather, they can make into this abstract entity, the ideal church, and project onto it whatever their assumptions define as ideal. For my friend, the ideal church is one where there is no hierarchy; every Christian has just as much right as another to teach, preach, and baptize. Therefore, the early church, which he assumes to necessarily the most ideal, was also structured in the same way.
I began by relating this to that entry in Stuff White People Like about classical music in which it is said that white people like to think of themselves as people who would enjoy classical music even though they never actually make an attempt to appreciate it. There is a similar thing going on here. Many evangelicals like the idea of the early church because they assume that it functioned in the same way and believed the same things as they do and therefore the best cure for the current church’s problems is simply to “get back to the early church.” This is not completely their fault for the leadership of evangelicalism has long suffered under an apathy of church history. The early church is not an abstract and distant reality; we can fortunately know a great deal about what the early church believed and how they went about “doing church.” Therefore, we don’t have the right to just project onto them whatever we assume they must have believed. Rather, we should humbly submit to their wisdom and actually seek out their beliefs and practices in order that they may inform ours.
Pax Christi.
Filed under Evangelical Protestantism, Patristics
Hey guys,
Tiny little post for you all today. Basically, as I’ve been reading around and thinking around, I’ve caught myself pondering the relationship between what we believe to be the nature of Christ and what we believe to be the nature of the Church. In my previous post, Salus est Sacramentum, I mentioned that what one believes concerning salvation and the Church are inextricably linked. This thought has progressed further in my mind to the nature of Christ himself.
So my question to myself is, “Can Christological heresies be expressed ecclesiologically?” or conversely, “Is there an ipso facto understanding of the Church that necessarily proceeds from a Biblical understanding of Christ and His Incarnation?”
This is yet another realm of inquiry in which I have been dwelling as of late; any contemplation of the Incarnation is always sure to illuminate the hearts and mind of the members of His Body and therefore it is beneficial to point oneself in that direction. As I’ve stated before, the essence of Christ is Sacrament. I’ve said this before, but I love reminding myself of this: Christ is the embodied union of heaven and earth, eternal and temporal, God and man, Word in Flesh. The most heinous of heresies that have plagued the Church in her lifetime have asserted perversions of that fact. There is much to profit from a deconstructed Christianity for false teachers, but their plans are thwarted by the Christ who is man. To hijack the Gospel, one has to reject the God/Man Christ. Hence, we have Nestorianism, which taught that Jesus Christ possessed two separate but “loosely-united” natures of God and man, that he was not actually the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, but was a man in whom the Son lived. In addition, there is Docetism, the heresy that taught that Jesus Christ only appeared to be a man, along with Arianism, Monophysitism (Eutychianism & Apollinarism), and Monothelitism. As you can see, there were plenty of attempts to dilute, distort, and marginalize the true nature of Christ, which the Chalcedonian Creed stated to be:
“…Lord, only begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ…”
Back to my original question, I have recently been concerned with the implications of orthodox Christology on orthodox ecclesiology. It has been my, and much of Protestantism’s, tendency to approach Christology and ecclesiology as distinct and separate issues. I wonder if this is a less than ideal approach.
Given that the Church is defined Scripturally as the Body of Christ, it would appear to me that Christological and ecclesiological concerns are two sides of the same coin. Therefore, is there an ecclesiology that was established simultaneously and as necessarily as the orthodox Christology was confirmed at the first four Ecumenical Councils?
Questions to consider.
fides quaerens intellectum.
Filed under Ecclesiology
This will be brief, but I was thinking today about the idea of Contextualization, i.e. that we change our methods in taking the unchanging message of Christ to the world. The idea also extends into Christian worship. contextualizers will say that church worship should look like whatever culture it finds itself in. So in Seattle there should be an indie band leading worship, in Oklahoma maybe a country group, etc. I think this philosophy is very nice and springs from this pretty thought that diverse expressions of worship show forth the diversity of God’s people and thus God’s capability to save all peoples in all times and all places. Certainly God can and does do that.
However, I think that Contextualization is simply a myth. Maybe not in America where we have the resources to pull it off. But in the broader global sense it just doesn’t exist. The only thing that is contextualized is language and rightly so. Other than that no fresh expressions of worship are formed in a grass-roots kind of way. I have spent time with Christians in other countries, whose churches were started by Westerners. Western Christians who were part of organizations that have contextualization as a core value. And yet the worship service involved a guitar and English praise songs translated into the local vernacular. Influence is unavoidable and contextualization simply doesn’t work.
A less stressful philosophy of worship would be to have a service that is distinctly Christian and spreads with the church. That would be beautiful in that it unties the diverse peoples God has saved and makes them a new people. In John’s Revelation, when the great multitudes from every tribe and tongue and nation are engaged in worship, they are all saying the same things. That is the beauty of the church.
“After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’” – Rev. 7:9-10
Filed under Evangelical Protestantism, Musings
Hey guys,
So I’ve had some really heavy posts recently and I want to lighten it up a bit here at DO. As some of you may know, the book Stuff Christians Like is, I believe, now available for purchase. It sprung from the popular blog from one Jonathan Acuff who attempts to catalogue the satirical and supposed “likes” of the Christian subculture. He now has landed a book deal and is going on various speaking engagements. And since I often can’t help but think long-term and big picture, I inevitably began postulating what a book like this means for American evangelicalism. There’s a good chance it means absolutely nothing, but that won’t stop me from blogging about it regardless.
Now, those of you who pay attention to what the “world” is up to will know that this blog-now-book is a spinoff, a sub-version, of the wildly popular Stuff White People Like which, as you guessed it, began as blog which turned into a book whose author now does speaking tours and is considered an “insider” into the urban/liberal arts school educated/indie/artsy/vegan/green/socially aware/elitist/american apparel clad culture of today’s 20-somethings.
I don’t say that to somewhat discredit and write off Stuff Christians Like, for the philosophy behind the original Stuff White People Like fits for the Christian subculture. Both operate on the premise that their respective subcultures suffer from an intense superiority complex based on adherence to an unspoken list of the “appropriate” and “inappropriate” that when actually brought into the light and examined, is seen for its absurdity.
Moreover, I, and any other person who grew up in the golden years of Christian youth group culture, can find much to experience knowing laughter over (my personal favorite would have to be “fearing the rapture would come before you lost your virginity“). However, I am often prone to cynicism towards the superficial and arbitrarily moralistic culture one supposedly had to live in as a “good” Christian teen. Consequently, I initially wrote this off as yet another Christian attempting to ride on the coattails of someone truly creative in the “secular” world by making a Christian spinoff version to market to an audience most likely oblivious to the original in the first place. Even now, I have to try to give this guy the benefit of the doubt by believing he intended making something truly ironic. I’d like to believe that Stuff Christians Like is actually an example of its own parody, that is, this book seeks to satirically portray a Christian subculture characterized, among other things, by borrowing ideas from the secular world and putting a Christian spin on them and is written by a Christian who borrowed an idea from the world and put a Christian spin on it! The best case scenario is that the author realizes this and embraces it for the ironic beauty that it is, the alternative is that he is unaware and is therefore an example of the very thing he satirizes in which case the potential benefit contained by a project like this for evangelicalism is severely diminished.
Now, I assume that this is beneficial for evangelicalism, why? Because we are often a group who takes itself way too seriously and thinks way too highly of itself by virtue of this unspoken and rather absurd code of ethics which we subconsciously abide by. Being able to look at yourself in the mirror and know there’s stuff worth rolling your eyes at is quite healthy not only for us individually, but for us culturally. But I wonder, in big picture terms, if this book is not itself a signal of the demise of the evangelical subculture as we know it. Does the firmly entrenched evangelical subculture vitally depend on an absolute and unquestioning adherence by its inhabitants? It’s not the only book committed to similar ideas, another I stumbled onto is The Christian Culture Survival Guide which sarcastically chronicles the way to safely navigate through the workings of the Christian ghetto.
When you look at the history of trends in the modern age of pop culture, there seems to be a pattern in which an new idea or subculture is first an actual cultural reality and is therefore taken seriously by those within and without. However, if the idea/subculture is not significant or substantial enough to be be sustainable, it will soon fade away as a reality only living on in nostalgic, tongue-in-cheek, “wink, wink” throwback references. As an example, look at the way we treat the hippie culture of the 1960′s today. Though American culture was indeed affected by the hippie revolution, the effects were mainly of intellectual and psychological nature, that is, the way we viewed ourselves changed in the ’60′s. I’m talking about the clothes, the vernacular, etc. The only place where the actual characteristics live on is in our hippie-themed parties where we dress up in tie-die, wear peace sign necklaces, and say “groovy” every other sentence. Why? Because we’re reveling in a sort of light-hearted mockery of what was once serious. Forgive the digress, but I wonder if these sort of books are the equivalent of a 1960′s themed party today where we look back and sarcastically acknowledge some of the absurdities of the youth group culture we once took so seriously.
Books like Stuff Christians Like are a part of a larger cultural shift within evangelicalism being spearheaded by my generation, the Gen X-ers and Gen Y-ers, away from the all the superficial gimmicks employed by Christian marketers desperately committed to keeping us in church by making Christianity “cool”. We now have the perception and the freedom to see and acknowledge for what it is and I believe the implications for this are huge. Just as youth make or break the trends put forth by marketing execs in the world, so too do they sustain or drain the dynamics of the youth group culture in which they arrive. We are the next batch of Christians to bear children to begin the life of church kids. If we, as the parents, are already inclined against the gimmicky and narcissistic religion we were pandered in our own youth groups, what will the childrens’ ministries and youth groups look like per our standards and demands? Further, what will the evangelical subculture look like if the next generation of parents believe it to be a joke and therefore impute that to their children?
We’ll wait and see and frankly, I’m getting a front row seat!
Thanks guys,
Caleb
Filed under Evangelical Protestantism, Musings, Random
Hey everyone,
So in my last post, I attempted to cram a gigantic idea that has been formulating in my mind and heart for a few months into a blog post. I fear that I mistakenly tried to address too many aspects of this perspective and thereby appeared disjointed. I’m going to try again by taking a small portion of this idea and magnifying it for proper consideration.
First, when inquiring of the nature of salvation and Christian belief, you will inevitably arrive at the question of the nature of the Church, ecclesiology, and realize that it is the same question. What you believe about salvation and what you believe about the Church are two sides of the same coin. Consequently, the question of what defines a person as a Christian and what makes someone a part of the Church are wrapped together. So here is the question, “What defines us as the Church or on what is our identity as Christians established?
The first view, the one I will consider in this post, is what I will call the evangelical view in which there essentially are no sacraments and thus nothing sacramental about the Church’s identity or the Christian life. The Church is an invisible spiritual reality consisting of all who’ve been “saved” directly between them and God apart from the Church at their conversion; this understanding sees the visible church as, according to Leithart, “a nonessential aid to individual salvation” (Leithart 32). In this view, the visible church is merely the sum total of all professing believers who believe that Jesus died for their sins, etc, whether or not they’re formally in the visible church. In fact, such language has no category in the evangelical understanding, that is, you’re a part of the visible church because you’re a Christian and Christians are visible. The Church, in its real essence, is invisible consisting of all the elect (if you’re a Reformed Baptist) or people who choose Christ (if you’re a standard evangelical). There’s nothing significant about the visible church because it is merely the portion of the invisible church that happens to believe alive, and therefore “visible”, at a given moment in history. All in all, becoming a Christian is a spiritual reality whereby after acquiring faith and believing in your heart that Jesus died for you, your sins are forgiven and you’re “born again”. Since salvation, and likewise the Church, is solely a spiritual reality, then sacraments become rather obsolete at best and are denied at worst.
Though I hold him in high esteem, I will use parts of an article from John Piper to illustrate the ramifications of this view. In his sermon “Why We Eat the Lord’s Supper, Pt. 2″, he explicitly states that he avoids referring to baptism and the Eucharist as “sacraments” (avoiding sounding to “Catholic”) preferring instead the title of “ordinances” by which he means things “especially ‘ordained’ or instituted by Christ”.
This means that we participate in baptism and the Supper only because Jesus told us to, not because he promised a special grace in its partaking or participation. And since they’re just these things we’re supposed to do, they are nonessential appendices to the salvation, important and even mandatory, but nonessential. Later in the article, Piper claims that he does not “see the grace, mediated through the Lord’s Supper, as essentially different from the grace mediated by other means.” So on what do we feed in the Eucharist? Piper says that
“But in the act [of Communion] we really feed our souls by faith on what the broken body and spilled blood achieved for us – a justified and sanctified fellowship with the risen Christ.”
Notice the subtle distinction here. We do not feed upon the Body and Blood of Christ, but instead are given a special reminder and refreshment of what we have in Christ that Scripture likes to metaphorically refer to as feeding and drinking. This goes back to his view that there really isn’t anything special about the Eucharist because there are many mediums by which we can realize what the Gospel is; we don’t necessarily need bread and wine (juice) to facilitate that. If the Lord’s Supper is just one of many ways we receive the same grace of Gospel reminders, it’s not essential but merely beneficial on the perhaps once-a-quarter basis on which it usually gets administrated.
Moving on, how does this view see baptism? Piper says in another article that since salvation is attained ”through calling on the name of the Lord, by trusting him”, baptism is the “symbolic expression” of this calling and this trust. Being “born again” is defined as follows:
“In the new birth, the Holy Spirit supernaturally gives us new spiritual life by connecting us with Jesus Christ through faith.”
Firstly, Piper illustrates the point I am trying to make and that is we as modern Protestants upon reading that salvation is attained calling upon God, we instantly assume that this calling is either a calling of intellectual assent or spiritual inclination. We don’t interpret concepts of belief and faith as including our persons, our materiality, and therefore don’t see baptism as calling upon the Lord. Additionally, I read this sermon of his on John 3 and was surprised that in this definition, Piper ignored the reference of this new birth as being “born of water and the Spirit” (John 3:5). How does he get around this? He simply says that he doesn’t believe that the water of verse 5 refers to baptism. That was easy.
See, once you commit to this view, you have the rather hefty task of spiritualizing, analogizing, and explaining away a lot of references to material and sacramental aspects of salvation and the Church in Scripture. This can lead to a bit of irony as many Baptists pride themselves on being the chiefest of Biblical literalists. So when you come to John 3:5 and read that a person “cannot enter the kingdom of God” unless he is “born of water and the Spirit”, that water can’t be the real water of baptism and it’s just a metaphor that goes along with being “washed” in the Spirit. When you approach Romans 6 and read that by baptism, “if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (vs. 5), what that really means is that baptism just symbolically expresses the fact that a person has already been spiritually united to Christ by faith even though the text clearly states that this all happens “by baptism” (vs. 4).
I hope the illustration has made my point clear. In the popular Protestant understanding, there is nothing material, nothing sacramental about salvation or the church. You are united to Christ by your spiritual faith (and so the Church is an invisible spiritual collection of the spiritually faithful); your baptism is a symbolic expression of being united to Christ and being reborn; the Eucharist is an ordinance where we deeply remember what Christ accomplished for us.
The problem under all of this is this distinction between the visible and invisible church and an insistence that the nature of salvation and the Church is solely an invisible and spiritual one. Here is a question, was Jesus Christ invisible and spiritual? That is an obvious no, but stay with me. If Christ himself is sacramental, the ultimate union of spiritual and material, of heaven and earth, of divine and human, of eternal and temporal, the Word made flesh, and we as the Church are known as the Body of Christ, then wouldn’t that imply that our very existence as the church is, as Schmemann so perfectly put it, “the sacrament of Christ’s presence and action?” Or is our title as the “Body” of Christ yet another analogy? What I’m getting at is that in Scripture, there is no more a distinction of the invisible and visible church than there is a distinction between Christ’s divine nature and his human nature. This is all a great mystery, as all sacraments are, but as I said in my previous post, our spiritual faith and belief must be understood sacramentally within our union to Christ by virtue of His Body, the Church. So, how are we united to Christ’s Body which is the Church?
“We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his [through baptism], we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” Romans 6:4-5
So baptism is not a symbolic expression of an already existent spiritual union with Christ by faith. Baptism is faith; baptism is union with Christ. In fact, I must ask how anyone can be only spiritually united to Christ if Christ is not only spiritual. How can the “Body of Christ” be invisible and spiritual if Christ’s body was visible and material? In the Great Commission, Christ commands us to…
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…”
To Christ, baptism is not a “symbolic expression” of someone becoming a disciple, baptism is becoming a disciple. So rather than the Church being defined as the collection of professing Christians, the Church is all those who have been made disciples, being baptized into union with Christ whose Body is the Church. Visible or invisible? Both/and; it’s the sacrament of Christ’s presence and action.
So now that we have seen that Christ assembles his Church by baptism into his death and resurrection, what sustains this body as His Body? That would be the Eucharist. Paul, when exhorting the Corinthians, asks…
“The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” 1 Cor. 10:16
In the partaking of the Eucharist, the Church is mystically reconstituted as Christ’s Body by participation in the sacrament. In John 6, Christ declares that “I am the Bread of Life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger.” As I said in my previous post, when Christians feed on the bread of the Eucharist, we are coming to Christ and when we drink of the cup, we are believing in Christ. So when we read passages containing words about “believing” and “coming to Christ”, we should not see these as fundamentally spiritual actions that only our spirits accomplish. We are not only spirit and Christ is not only spirit. By virtue of his Incarnation, salvation will be a union of the spiritual and the material, a sacrament.
Just as with baptism, the Eucharist is not a “feeding” on the reminder of what Christ has accomplished for us. It is feeding on Christ! Since Christ was God in man, his labeling of himself as the Bread of Life in John 6 carries with it a material as well as divine dimension and just in case we needed any more assurance, he just goes out and says of the bread in the Upper Room, “this is my body” (Mark 14:22). I find it hard to believe when Christ said “this is my body” that he intended for us the Church to spend our centuries explaining what that doesn’t mean.
Ok, to wrap things up, the title of this post is “Salus est Sacramentum” which means “Salvation is Sacrament.” Reformed readers may bristle at that for we are not unaccustomed to the questions like “Does baptism save you?” and “What grace does the Eucharist apply?” My point now is, based on what I’ve said thus far, that these are false questions. The question is not whether or not baptism saves a person or the Eucharist applies grace for this presupposes that baptism and the Eucharist as sacraments are appendices to the Word and to spiritual salvation and therefore any mention of salvation by baptism or Eucharist would be to suggest that something other than faith is contributing to our salvation, a thorough heresy for the Reformed. What I’ve hoped to show is that salvation in Scripture isn’t understood as anything less than union with Christ by baptism and sustenance in Christ through the Eucharist. So when a child begins to understand and cherish for himself the truths of the Gospel, he is only growing in the fullness of sanctification begun when he received the Holy Spirit at his baptism and was made a Christian. As Richard Hooker, the 16th Century Anglican divine, best put it, and I’ll conclude with this:
“For as we are not naturally men without birth, so neither are we Christian men in the eye of the Church of God but by new birth, nor according to the manifest ordinary course of divine dispensation new-born, but by that baptism which both declareth and maketh us Christians. In which respect we justly hold it to be the door of our actual entrance into God’s house, the first apparent beginning of life, a seal perhaps to the grace of Election, before received, but to our sanctification here a step that hath not any before it.” (Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, LX, [3])
Pax Christi,
Caleb
Filed under Ecclesiology, Evangelical Protestantism, Soteriology, The Sacraments
One of the reasons that I have not been blogging much lately is because I have found myself within (what I hope to be) an expansion of my thinking and consequently, haven’t had anything of definite nature to write about. However, I think I have reached some level of articulation and therefore, I believe the next few posts I write will be based on some presuppositions I have recently acquired. The first and primary of the presuppositions is summarized below:
The two negative definitions I stated in regards to the nature of church, in my estimation, characterize the main ways in which the church is viewed within Protestantism. Within larger evangelicalism, it is usually the understanding that the individual “finds God” on his own and in theory, with an adequate amount of self-discipline, can grow in the faith through his piety of quiet times, scripture memory, etc. The church is seen as an optional aid to the Christian life. In fact, perhaps we have arrived in our present time to an understanding beyond this as people like George Barna suggest that it is time to move into the post-church age of Christianity where Christians are “self-feeders” who at their own discretion enlist spiritual coaches for their own pious benefit.
However, the first description has seemed to me to be the norm for the contemporary Reformed world. In our often prideful minds, we’re smart enough to know that we’re not like “those” evangelicals with their happy-clappy worship music, watered-down therapeutic preaching, and individualism. We’re Reformed. We know our doctrine. Yes, we do have hour-long sermons, expository of course, and we have our children reciting the catechism questions in between pacifier breaks. Our beliefs are most commonly understood as intellectual approbations to the various theological concepts of Reformed theology (Ordo Salutis, etc). Therefore, the constitution of the Church takes on the appearance of an association of like-minded individuals which explains why there are so many tiny Reformed denominations divided over the most atomistic of doctrinal issues. The place for a Biblical and sacramental view of the Church and Christian belief in the evangelical mind is more difficult to find and since I myself am Reformed and therefore am more aware of its personality, I will be addressing the sacramental nature of salvation and ecclesiology against the overly intellectual understanding prevalent in the Reformed world.
The implications of this are extremely difficult for me to articulate, for I’ve yet to fully understand them myself. In fact, given that I just stated that the Church is sacramental, and a sacrament by definition is a mystery, I will never fully understand it. Nevertheless, I have been attempting to unpack the meaning of this new found idea (I say that with tongue in cheek).
The late Alexander Schmemann, an Eastern Orthodox priest, states in his book For the Life of the World that:
“The Western Christian is used to thinking of sacrament as opposed to the Word, and he links the mission [of the Church] with the Word and not the sacrament. He is, moreover, accustomed to consider the sacrament as perhaps an essential and clearly defined part or institution or act of the Church and within the Church but not of the Church as being itself the sacrament of Christ’s presence and action.”
Now I and many of you, as Reformed Protestants, may bristle at these words for we are people of the Word, and rightly so. We will quickly quote Romans 10 which states that before anyone can call upon the name of the Lord, he must first believe, and to believe, he must hear the Gospel, for “faith comes from hearing” (Rom. 10:17). However, what I believe Schmemann was getting at was that there is more to salvation than belief as understood by our modern conceptions of things. As moderns, we are prone to view belief in terms of either rational assent or some spiritual intuition, a gut feeling of sorts. The important thing is that both place belief in the subjective and the abstract; you can’t see belief, only its products; I think therefore I am. Since belief is understood only in intellectual or spiritual terms, believing the Gospel becomes a matter of intellectually ascertaining the message, then considering its tenets, and then believing in one’s heart and mind that it is true.
If this is all still too… abstract, perhaps this can help. Ask your average contemporary Protestant what it means to be a Christian, and he will probably tell you something about believing that Christ died for his sins thus procuring forgiveness and setting him free to live a life of fruitfulness in the Spirit. With this answer, he’d be totally right but I doubt that Baptism and Eucharist would ever enter his equation for what it means to be a Christian. Why is this significant? It is significant because the fictional Protestant above, when speaking of belief, understands it as intellectual assent. When this understanding prevails, a Christian’s belief rests right alongside his other beliefs; I believe that limited government is best, I believe that homeschooling is the ideal educational method, and I believe in One, Holy, Catholic*, and Apostolic Church. Someone else may believe that socialism is best, that mass education is ideal, and that agnosticism is the most logical approach to religion. I and this other individual differ in the content of our beliefs but the nature of our beliefs are the same, they are intellectual expressions of our individual conception of reality, our worldviews. Christian belief is more than acceptance of the Christian worldview.
Back to Schmemann’s quote, the Church is the “sacrament of Christ’s presence and action” on earth (i.e. the Gospel). Since a sacrament involves the union of the spiritual and physical, eternal and temporal, heaven and earth, the Gospel, and the subsequent belief in it, is to be seen within this framework. Though Romans 10 speaks of the necessity of hearing the preached Word (intellectually), Paul’s words need to be understood within the wider Biblical conception of salvation which is the Church as defined by Baptism and Eucharist. In John 6, we see probably the most explicit theology of the Eucharist in Holy Scripture. In the chapter, Christ states that:
“For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world… I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst… Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you… Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.”
In these passages, we see that Christian belief is not solely intellectual assent, but just like Christ, is incarnational and sacramental. When Christians feed on the bread of the Eucharist, they are coming to Christ and when they drink of the cup, they are believing in Christ. This racks our modern brains. How can just doing something constitute belief? Because Christian belief cannot be understood outside of sacramental union with the Church which is union with Christ. Our feeding on Christ results in nothing less than abiding in Christ and He in us. We are prone to think that Jesus abides in us when we accept him whether into our hearts or minds.
Regarding baptism, Paul states in Romans 6 that:
Do you not know that al of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.”
Rather than seeing salvation primarily as the Ordo Salutis, a process whereby God saves individuals in terms of granting them faithful understanding of abstract theological concepts, the Bible equates salvation with being united to Christ in baptism and abiding in him through feeding on his flesh and drinking his blood in the Eucharist. What becomes of the people of God when they participate in the sacraments? They become the Body of Christ. This is no metaphorical device. Christ has a body by virtue of his Incarnation and we are mystically united in that body through baptism and the Eucharist as the Church, the Ekklesia. Thus, being saved is being in the Church, for the Church is salvation.
There are many implications to this different perspective. To recap, I have attempted to put forth a more Biblical and sacramental understanding of the Church and the salvation thereof. I am not saying that intellectual belief is unimportant, it surely is. However, it is not the starting point of the Christian life but rather is fruit of it springing from a Christened life. It is not inconsequential that in the Great Commission, Christ equivocates the making of disciples with baptizing them in the name of the Trinity. He did not command us to go and make disciples by imparting to them the Christian worldview. Christian belief is not another worldview, it is abiding in Christ through the sacramental system of the Church that is invoked by the abiding.
I’ll conclude with the words of St. Augustine:
“The condemned world is all that is without the Church; the reconciled world is the Church.”
Thanks everyone,
Goodnight.
Filed under Ecclesiology, The Sacraments
