Silence, Thoughts On The Sabbath

…our daily life in office and home, in cars and airplanes, at parties and conferences, while reading magazines and watching television, while looking at advertisements and hearing radio, are in themselves continuous examples of a life which has lost the dimension of depth. It runs ahead, every moment is filled with something which must be done or seen or said or planned…As long as the preliminary, transitory concerns are not silenced, no matter how interesting and valuable and important they may be, the voice of the ultimate concern cannot be heard.

Paul Tillich “The Lost Dimension in Religion“

I’m reminded of a conversation that I had with a friend a few weeks ago. He was fairly irate by discussions he had overheard in the Church that morning by people sitting in the pews that had nothing redeeming about it, or for that matter, discussion at all. Now, they weren’t swearing or flirting-that I know of-they were, rather innocently I think, talking about common things, things which any other day of the week would sanction, but not the Sabbath, I think.

The question is, what place do the mundane things of our everyday lives have in the Church as we prepare for the Divine Service; what is rest and how does that comport with our conduct on the Lord’s Day as we attend Word and Sacrament? What is the fundamental distinction, if there is one, that is delineated when we step through the door of the Church and then into the Sanctuary? Is there a difference between being on the outside looking in and being inside, or in other words, the difference between what we do in six and what is done for us on one and how that determines our thoughts, words and deed?

I have the feeling, that aside from our cultures disdain for all that is formal and possessed of a code of conduct, part of the issue that my friend encountered was the residual practice of fundamentalism/evangelicalism which remains, often long after the person has jettisoned their theology. It’s the remnants of a tradition-yes I said tradition-that encourages the idea that the Church, rather than primarily being the place of Word and Sacrament, is really just a place, just a building, where a bunch of Christians get together on Sunday to hear a man tell them his opinion about what a particular passage of scripture means. And ultimately, though I don’t think they are conscious of it, they wind up collapsing the Church visible into the Church Universal, emphasizing the sanctity of each day and the priesthood of the believer to such a degree as to relegate the Sabbath and the services thereupon as simply another day of the week on which they happen to go to Church, not to the Divine Service and certainly not to receive anything other than a “recharge” as they do worship. And “real” Christianity gets moved into the home, the workplace, the culture at large, or as I would say, Law. And because their Gospel is an ethic, a do this and live, “living it out” makes a lot of sense to their system. Since they have already located faith in themselves as an active righteousness which compels God to save them-this is why I think charismatics and and the wordfaith crowd are second cousins-why should their worship be any different, why their should preaching not be the progressive statement of their lives rather than the static and objective Gospel preached by the Apostles?

How do you do worship, how do you do church, these are phrases that are bandied about too much for my taste these days, as if the Sabbath rest was about work, seemingly defying the very concept of rest. It seems that in the midst of our humanity we forget that the Sabbath was made for man rather than man for the Sabbath and so, often we awake on Sunday with Law on our hearts as we seek to “please” God by the issue of our hearts and mouths. Let us attend the Divine service with reverence and awe, as passive sheep looking to their shepherd to provide everything, so that we might give ear to that which is of ultimate concern, Christ and his Gospel.

The Church Is Not A Soup Kitchen

 

The Church is neither modern nor antiquated but ahistorical. The functionality of the Church is not based upon trends, polls, or demography but upon biblical mandates and structure that supercede what is normative in society to create a peculiar ethical community within the broad community of common history. Somewhere along the way, though, Evangelicalism left the reservation, she has become determined to strike out on her own, and seemingly decided that any notion of historic, confessional Christianity is a sentiment for those who don’t hear the Spirit call, but that since she has received revelation and continues to presently, then all that she needs is her heart and her bible. Evangelicalism has created and is continuing to perpetuate a determined and methodical theological suicide.

The Gospel has been traded for the belly, it has became more important that we better society than save souls. Consequently, the temporal has been awarded primacy over eternity and the pure, historically presented Gospel has come to be viewed as anachronistic. Hearing and receiving from God as the primary purpose of the church has been soundly rejected by many today, who spend countless hours attempting to “hear” the Spirit speak to them and give them direction for their “ministry”. I am sorry to quash their sentiment and pseudo-compassion, but point of their “ministry” is to preach the Gospel and care for the people of God by Word and Sacrament, not feed the poor and cloth the homeless outside the community of saints.  Sorry but the church is not a soup kitchen, it is the place where the kingdom of God manifests in the here and now, giving us a foretaste of the world to come.

Furthermore, the desire to be culturally relevant has become in practice the call to expedite the “mission” no matter the medium that becomes requisite to reach the culture on their terms, resulting in pragmatic sacrifices of doctrinal and confessional character and stability in the pursuit of the damned and lost.

With this has come the reversal of the first and second greatest commandments, where it had been that we must first love the Lord in order to love our neighbor rightly, has instead been transformed into loving our neighbor in order to love God rightly, placing the creature over the creator within the structure of the covenant and morphing the sense of cultural mandate into a liturgical form. Inevitably, then, the endeavor to improve the social welfare of the immediate and distant culture acts in a sacramental function, infusing the society with “salt and light”, social programs reoriented as soteriological acts and methods of preaching the Gospel. This is story or what I call headline evangelism, it isn’t truly concerned with the content of the actual Gospel, but rather the immediate emotional impact that their experience can elicit from you.

This is the course of pietism which moves into the taxonomy of the social Gospel adherents and ultimately transforms into rationalism masquerading as Christianity, resulting in the death of God in their theology. Geerhardus Vos stated it thusly,

…Rationalism is from its cradle devoid of historic sense. It despises tradition; the past it ignores and the future it barely tolerates with a supercilious conceit of self. Moreover Rationalism is bent upon and enamored of the inward. To it the essence and value of all religion lie in purely-subjective ethico-religious experiences.

The Pauline Eschatology

No better definition, I think, may be found to describe the current state of broad, ecumenical Evangelicalism.

What Regulative Principle?

When I was a budding Calvinist still attending a charismatic, evangelical church, all that ever aroused my ire was their militant arminianism. Now the thing that I notice the most is the insufficient or utter lack of ecclessiology.

Lately, I think that I have somewhat taken for granted the fact that I attend and am a member of a reformed, confessional church where the liturgy is Biblically established, Christo-centric, and theologically defensible. I was reminded of this comfort a few days ago during a chance conversation that I had with a complete stranger.

As I talked with this gentleman I started to realize how different broad evangelical worship services are from the reformed liturgical services. We as reformed structure the service theologically and covenantally, looking to receive word and sacrament whereas the evangelical often attends the service on the Sabbath seeking what to do or perform in order to please God.

In short, we as reformed seek to define the church and its practice biblically where the evangelicals view the church psychologically and thus structure their services accordingly. They truly are the seed of Finney, seeking to excite the people, leading, I believe, to what Dr. R. S. Clark calls the quests for illegitimate religious experience and for illegitimate knowledge. I also think that this is what happens when the offices in the church are devalued by an overemphasis of the priesthood of the believer, at least, it was in my experience.

Weekly Quote

…..God has promised to take minds and ideas captive not through education or advanced research but through the ordinary and humble means he has given to his church, namely, the preaching of the Word, the administration of the sacraments, and discipline. The means of grace are essential to the church, not the ways of learning….Only when education and scholarship facilitate the faithful preaching and reading of the Word along with a proper reverence for and adherence to Scripture will Christian scholars serve God and their fellow believers well.

From “Taking Every Though Captive” by D.G. Hart

What Happens When Pragmatism Intrudes?

Belgic Confession Article 30: Concerning the Government of, and Offices in the Church.

We believe, that this true Church must be governed by that spiritual policy which our Lord hath taught us in his Word; namely, that there must be ministers or pastors to preach the Word of God, and to administer the sacraments; also elders and deacons, who, together with the pastors, form the council of the Church: that by these means true religion may be preserved, and the true doctrine everywhere propagated, likewise transgressors punished and restrained by spiritual means: also that the poor and distressed may be relieved and comforted, according to their necessities. By these means everything will be carried on in the Church with good order and decency, when faithful men are chosen, according to the rule prescribed by St. Paul in his Epistle to Timothy.

The biblical structure of the church can be, I believe, approached in one of two ways. It is either one that is theologically and ethically faithful to the witness and instruction of scripture or one which philosophically and psychologically faithful to the perceived needs of the contemporary values and cultural morass.

So what happens when pragmatism intrudes into the covenant people? Do we have either the room or the right to improvise and if so, how far may we go. Because if we go too far, we risk changing everything altogether.

Social Construct or the Habitation of Pilgrimage?

The contemporary activity of the historic protestant church is that of reassertion, of regeneration in the midst of crisis. The Gospel must be recalled in its purity and exclusivity and reestablished as the foundation upon which the church stands.

Yet the church is not a social institution, thus its mission is not one of relevance, but rather one of sustenance. The community of Christ, the people of the covenant, the church is where it is fed that which is necessary for its subsistence in this present, evil age.