Worlds Apart

History flows, from creation to separation by covenant infidelity, from separation to the reconciliation of those who receive the Son and the finalized reprobation of those who reject the son, and from there to the eschaton, the entire course of events punctuated by supernatural intrusions by God which propel both the sacred and secular. And to reduce the one to the other in either direction is to deny the redemptive, ethical distinction between those who are of the City of God and those who are of the City of Man.

Yet the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. It is the rejection of the Gospel preached which condemns man in his city, not his culture, not his ethics nor his morals, which in truth, he shares in common with the just. The point of condemnation occurs with the revealing of the Kingdom as something other than what is common, other than what is ordinarily normative for the Christian and the non-Christian, a message that tells man what is necessary for peace over and against what he thinks is necessary. And in doing so, radically challenging his epistemological methodology, calling him to look outside the city for hope, a message alien to his natural inclinations; that he will not find hope within and that he is not truly human in the intended sense, but only a shadow of his previous self, bound to death and damnation by chains of rebellion.

Hence, it is the very thing which sets the Christian apart from the world which condemns the world at the level of covenant infidelity, not cultural inferiority. The theocratic intrusion of the Mosaic economy was the shadow of the heavenly reality imposed upon creation in order to establish a vocabulary so that, the Kingdom of God with it’s Heavenly Jerusalem, could be understood as the reality to the shadow that was the Kingdom of Israel. Imperfect rule by fallen man coupled with the insufficient atonement by the blood of creatures was not the goal of the creation nor the end of God’s purpose of redemption.

Furthermore, in the act of communion, we participate in the already/not yet of the Kingdom of God; communion as participation in and the reception of the benefits of the inaugurated Kingdom of God. And the Kingdom breaks in through Word and Sacrament-the gathering of the saints together on the Lord’s day is the City of God amongst the City of Man, Word and Sacrament setting it apart by private practice, not public participation. It is the secular drama which serves as the stage for the drama of redemption; it is, as the foundry of cultural development, the storehouse where from which God draws in order to communicate to his people. This is the accommodation of the Divine to the finite, the use of the ordinary and the mundane to communicate transcendence, to reveal his will in a way which employs structures intelligible to the reason of man. A content and method innately intuitive to man rather than foreign and confusing; the intention of communication being more than mere reception but interaction, comprehension and apprehension. It is simply not enough to hear a message, but it must be understood in order for it to have an effect. It must appeal to the inherent reason which man possesses, which is common to all, the means whereby creation is navigated successfully. It is impossible to apprehend or receive any communication from anyone if the groundwork of common ideas is not first established.

Moreover, it is the vocabulary of the culture which is utilized by God in order to communicate his will, his intentions and his elucidation of historic events. Culture serves the purpose of harboring the message of the Gospel yet itself is the product of those in rebellion to their creator, setting up fiefdoms in contrast to the pilgrims who are God’s people; those not looking to homestead but to subsist-as the Church militant-until they reach home. Because home is the goal of the journey, that which the pilgrim is ever strengthening himself with, the promise of Sabbath, the sure promise of home.

 

 

One step forward, two steps back: Confessional Digression

Convictions are the root on which the tree of vital Christianity grows. No conviction, no Christianity. Scanty conviction, hunger-bitten Christianity. Profound conviction, solid and substantial religion. Ignorance is not the mother of religion, but of irrreligion. The knowledge of God is eternal life, and to know God means that we know him aright.

Faith and Life by B. B. Warfield from Selected Shorter Writings, Vol 1

I think at the heart of the motivation for the confessional subscription of both the parish assembly and the governing officers, there lies conviction. Not the desire for status but submission and accountability is what compels the faithful to bear the weight of their conviction. Subscription is nothing more than a public proclamation and attestation to the biblical content of the confession regarding the faith, piety, and practice of the Christian, but it is nothing less than that either.

The abandonment of the confessional framework for preserving and instructing the Church in many areas emanates from the dissolution of conviction-unable to stand against the unwavering assault of cultural secularism and inclusivism- which leads, I think, to the slow, and methodical abandonment of the purity of the Gospel. Because the Gospel of Jesus Christ is simply too exclusive, too socially passive for the philosophical pluralism that seems to be holding sway at this point in history.

But it does not stop at the mere dissolution of conviction but in the concession to ideologies and the metaphysical narratives of secular, philosophical pluralism. With convictions left to wither, a void is left which must be filled in order to balance the ballasts. In relation to this loss of grounding, the question of ecumenism is often at the heart of the call for either the revising or abandoning of the confessional structure and method of subscription because the less that is said, the easier, it is said, we can avoid unnecessarily schismatic altercations and preserve and broaden the unity of the body of Christ; the five sola’s of the Reformation and those who hold to them, being the main cause of such schism. Often it is precisely not that which is common to the historic Christian creeds and confessions which is included in such documents but that which is the bare minimum that must be believed in order to don the moniker of Christian. In relation, Warfield said,

Least of all, are we to seek unity by surrendering all public or organized testimony to all truth except that minimum which-just because it is the minimum, less than which no man can believe and be a Christian-all Christians of all names can unite in confessing. Subjection to the tyranny of the unbeliever is no more essential to unity than subjection to the tyranny of the believer (say the Pope); and this of course can mean nothing other than-”Let him that believes least among you be your lawgiver.” There is a sense, of course, in which the visible unity of the Church is based on the common belief and confession of the body of truth held alike by all who are Christians; but this is not the same as saying that it must be based on the repression of all organized testimony to truth not yet held by all alike.

True Church Unity: What It Is, in Selected Shorter Writings Vol. 1

It seems for some reason that many Churches and Denominations are digressing to a past recollection of a time of ignorance, calling it a simple faith. From Confession to simpler Creedal statements, to end in heresy. Inevitably, the degradation of the confessional nature of a protestant congregation or denomination will result in the loss of that which is exclusive and essential to the historic Christian faith, those theological and doctrinal threads which come together to weave the tapestry of the Drama of Redemption.

The Gospel As A Manifesto?

ac·tiv·ism

–noun

1. the doctrine or practice of vigorous action or involvement as a means of achieving political or other goals, sometimes by demonstrations, protests, etc.

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.

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The Covenant People are not politically or socially oriented as liberators, nor as purveyors of a distinct cultural export. Liberation and cultural patronage are the activities, realm and purview of the common man. Entrance into and continued membership in the Covenant Kingdom of God is not based upon a persons economic, intellectual, or social “situatedness”, rather, it is confessionally oriented. No, politics and cultural pursuits do not fall within the paradigm of the pilgrimage of God’s people through this age. The People of God exist in a different covenantal orientation then the common man that he co-habitats with in the creation, the one in grace the other still ruled exclusively by law, united only in their natural occupation as image bearers. The Christian is required to passively resist those within and intrusions by hostile forces into the Church whereas the pagan has no such mandate of pacifism. What is more, the Christian also has no such mandate of pacifism when it touches the city of man rather than the city of God. Because, if the kingdom of heaven is not possessed of present earthly permanence, then it may be reasoned, if man would truly render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, a dual citizenship must then be part of the nature of the Christian in the present age. The Christian is one who lives concurrently under the authority of the divine and the magistrate, being beholden to both, to the one functioning as one created in the image of God and affirming the solidarity of the human race and to the former as one in covenant with God who has redeemed and reconciled him to himself through the work of the cross. And activism, if left solely to the pursuit of the betterment of man is perfectly acceptable, but it is when the Gospel is cannibalized in order to justify the relevance of the Church and her Gospel to the culture that it sojourns in that activism becomes syncretism.

Thus, there is nothing inherently Christian about activism, yet that does not disqualify Christians from being activists. The essential element, though, which defends against the Gospel from being used as a resource for political action and manifesto, is motivation. The minute that we seek to act in the public arena because we are Christians with the express intent of spreading the Good News of The Gospel in order to christianize or transform the culture we have confused the two kingdoms and abandoned our role as pilgrims; intent on bringing heaven down now through the “sweat of our brow and the strength of our back”. We must recall that Christendom is a failed project; it resulted either in attempted genocide and or the forceful acquisition of land and their people under the auspices of “manifest destiny” while wearing the guise of “converting the savages”, which is neither ethically, morally, or theologically defensible. So, when the Gospel is placed within the shell of activism, what is distinctly Christian begins to be transformed into something which is practiced, while taking what is secular(see culture) and making it the concern of that which is sacred, twisting the message to fit the intent of the activist. Activism in the Church flattens out any distinction between the two kingdoms to eventually politicize and moralize Christianity, leaving it as a rationalistic methodology that speaks the hollow rhetoric of religious connotation; always looking for the meaning the words affect rather than the meaning the words represent. It devours Christianity to leave it stripped of an object yet nonetheless attempting to maintain the illusion of a transcendent goal. But in the end it will become a race that cannot be won, a faith that cannot be had in a messiah who shall never return.

Furthermore, when the the Church becomes primarily a shelter for the less fortunate of society, it has jettisoned the otherworldliness of the Gospel for the historical Jesus of Liberal theology. And although I don’t think that they all actively set out to deny the message of the cross, the certainly deny its purpose by harnessing the resources of the Church for social activism rather than the care of the congregation and the evangelization of the community because they interpret the transcendent through their navel. But then again, this is why the social Gospel is so appealing, it offers the kingdom now with no cost, being already in line with the natural tendencies of man rather than declaring the Gospel over and against the natural inclinations of mankind; offering not what is attractive and desired but what is irreducibly necessary.

The meta-narrative becomes lost in a Kantian induced postmodern miasma where nothing is true yet all receive affirmation and validation, the ultimate concern being to justify Dionysian hedonism as the prevailing ethic, because man simply wants to do what he wants to do. Yet the conscience(the Law) stands in the way of that, with the Gospel offering absolution and an end to the accusations of the Law, but man would rather choose a third way, which is really no way at all, the way of narcissism. But I don’t mean a narcissism of the individual precisely, but one of the collective race of man, one that sets man not only above the rest of creation but above God himself as the source of that which is good and right in the world, in which the breaking of the covenant in Eden is seen as liberation from the oppression of “primitive myths” to finally be human. For them the Gospel, if it is good news at all, must be dealt with solely on the mortal plane, conflating any vertical activity into the horizontal as mere myth intended to justify militant social activism, moral/ethical improvement and to explain the common phenomena of the conscience.

In the end, the passivity of the Christian Pilgrimage is simply at odds with the activist inclinations and sympathies of man in the natural realm. Man naturally wants to do to cause or affect change. But that is to practice dominion, to homestead, and it is certainly not the image of a pilgrim sojourning for a time in the midst of his journey.

Theology: A Science or Perhaps Something Else?

A very interesting post over at Historical Theoblogy about whether theology should be viewed as a science and be numbered as a philosophy or not. All from the perspective of a medieval theologian who predated Aquinas. His name was Alexander of Hales.

We May Be Pilgrims But This Ain’t Plymouth

With Noah we find a brief unmasking of the doctrine of election, regarding the unmerited favor in saving Noah and his family and the gathering from every type of creature of the earth. The widespread selection indicates mercy not caprice. Whereas God could destroy all because of their wickedness, dealing with mankind in a context of “in Adam” covenant infidelity-instead he plucks Noah and his family out in mercy and graciously protects them through the flood, bringing them out to a new land, a cleansed land, a hearkening back to paradise lost and a murky image of paradise to come.

This is the nature of a peculiar people, those saved not by any merit of their own but by the grace of God. Though belonging to a people broken and wicked, subsisting in the ruins of creation brought about by covenant infidelity, finding solace in the deluded superiority-idolatry-of human nature over evil; people caught up in a recapitulation of Babel, a movement back towards cultural and religious homogeny and hegemony. It is from these people that God chooses, that the Spirit calls through the preaching of the Gospel, that Christ unites to himself by faith. It is these people, chosen in mercy and grace, placed in the ark of the Church, to be kept by the Holy Spirit, in the midst of this present evil age until they depart it or it comes to a close who are the people of God, who live in a new covenant relationship with their Creator, experiencing what it is to be truly human, heirs of the promise.

Therefore, the Church and her Gospel is not a choice of collective resolve to simply live better lives as is the minimal result in Pascal’s Wager. Rather, it is the manifest statement by God that he has kept a people for himself out of the midst of fallen humanity. And it is not wickedness on the part of God to choose one and not the other, to choose Jacob over Esau-in order to show mercy to the former and judgement to the latter-because all have sinned, all are guilty before the law. It is his prerogative to do so-in point of fact, a God who displayed no justice in the face of transgression could not be merciful nor gracious. To do so would render the active and passive obedience of Christ to an exemplary model at best regarding the atonement, leaving the resurrection as nothing but a husk from which we must draw the kernel of our own moral and political liberation; leaving us as Pelagius, no savior and ultimately no God but our own will to power.

Thus, moralism/pietism strips Christianity of all that separates it from the other religions of the world, depleting it of all that is exclusively and externally redemptive, leading man back into himself instead of causing him to look outside of himself for reconciliation. For the only one he is beholden to, the only one he has sinned against, is himself, because God is merely the projection of his ideal self and so the Gospel does indeed become “seven steps to a better you”. Whereas, Christian belief or faith has traditionally and rightly been seen as that which is caused by God, moralism creates their god by their belief, relegating the Gospel to an action that they must live out in lieu of one that has been done for them apart from their consent and not categorized by the cultural mores of the day.

And this is the point, the Church is peculiar, it doesn’t belong here and has no need to either assimilate the culture nor be absorbed by it. The people of God must militate against this, convincing the more impressionable members of it’s community of this and simultaneously making it a credible representation to the culture at large. The modern Church is at many places at a point of crisis and it must decide whether it would be a peculiar people in covenant with God subsisting here as pilgrims in the midst of an evil age which is hostile to it or one of many “faiths” in the pantheon of mankind’s pursuit of deification.

Evil, Love and Silence from Helm’s Deep

Divine permission is compatible with the absence of risk for God as long as there are types of actions which God can prevent but which he nevertheless cannot cause, even though he may be willing for them to occur. Then God controls an evil action by permitting it – by deciding not to prevent it – and the evil action occurs because it is caused by the natures and circumstances of those who perpetrate it.

Paul Helm

Read the whole paper here.