Some cut themselves to make certain that they feel.  Pain becomes an assurance of reality, of existence.  In relation, many Christians take up causes; sometimes social, sometimes political.  Yet it becomes readily apparent that their instigation of and participation in such activities is a fearful and faithless act.  The need to constantly remind themselves that they merit what they claim and the fear that they do not are the catalysts, implicit or otherwise, of this form of activism within evangelicalism today.  Modern evangelicalism has become very medieval and monastic in this regard.  Emphasis is constantly placed upon relevance, response and results.  Programs come to mean more than substance and utilitarianism becomes the regulative principle for worship. But the modern version of asceticism is not a retreat from the world but is rather the renovation of the world with a Christian veneer and theocratic elements.  Many Christian today seem to feel that even the mundane and the common must be harnessed for holy and sacred use  if they are to be of use the Christian, be enjoyed by him, or justifiably exist at all.  This facade is what I would call the second blessing of cultural transformationalism; the church triumphant is not the church which in Christ is victorious but is the church which has come to power as Constantine; remaking the city of man in their own image.

As evangelicalism has cast off the confessional structure of the church and renounced biblically regulated worship they have found themselves increasingly dissatisfied with the biblical doctrine of Justification by faith through grace alone. And, as the realization of this dissatisfaction has become more precise, the pursuit to satiate the need for assurance has become more desperate.  It has come to the point of epicurean deconstruction; biblical worship has become replaced by “Spirituality”, evocation has replaced invocation, feeling now trumps promise as the theology of the cross is displaced by many shades of the theology of glory.

And ultimately, they are left with mysticism.

More to follow….

A society which denies the existence of God implicitly disavows any universal moral commonality and framework by which mans conscience is empowered to convict based upon actions.  Lacking any morals constants, prior restraint is not a justifiably actionable sociological function.  A pragmatic consensus replaces the conscience; laws exist to structure mans pursuit of self-exaltation and possession.  This leads to a society which is governed by that selfsame consensus, replacing justice with pleasure, desire, and hunger.  Reducing mankind to aimless drifters; travelers toward a hope that cannot be found, a hunger which cannot be satisfied and a thirst that can never be quenched.  And with the loss of restitution as the natural consequence of the violation of your neighbors sanctity, a moral downgrade and the rise of deliberate lawlessness is inevitable.  Mankind becomes stranded on a ferry that never crosses the river of moral indecision and so is carried along by strong, deep currents of idolatry to later be spit out onto a sea of unintended nihilism.  Without justice there is no rudder, no ferryman to see us to the other side.

In that I work for a large warehouse style retailer, this struck a chord with me.

“Gone are the days when we knew the wheelwrights and cobblers who worked for us.  The anonymity of our world makes accountability a vague and abstract virtue.  The cord has been broken by the distance that has cropped up between the worker and the consumer, a distance imposed by the complexities of modern factory production and the many layers of people who are, in one way or another, involved in the sale and distribution of the product.  In the whole process, the worker is disengaged from any sense of responsibility for the quality of the product, any sense of accountability to the person who eventually purchases the product.”

NO PLACE FOR TRUTH, By David Wells

Social activism as a response to the pricking of ones conscience highlights the absence of a true gospel ministry and can only ever be a temporal suture, which, though effective, provides no lasting method of treatment.  It can only ameliorate the accusations of the conscience, the law written on the heart of man; a topical analgesic of the soul.  Nothing is altered in the end, that good works in the face of moral culpability is flight rather than fight.

Consequently, when it is found blossoming in the Church, the Gospel is soon found to be lacking in it’s message of salvation to the damned, because it requires no work on the part of the redeemed and casts aspersions upon there moral goodness.  And that results in the politicizing of the institutional Church in search of applicable and immediate meaning, in other words, a “what have you done for me lately” approach to word and sacrament.  This effectively self-destructs the church community into splinter groups vying for their own agenda using Christianity and its vernacular.  The language of the Church becomes the language of the collective pursuit of humanity for equality.  Thus, the laity as constituents demand the satisfaction of their felt needs and social ailments to be rectified by their leaders( pastors and elders).  And so joining a particular church body has more in common with choosing Italian over Chinese rather than salvation by grace alone, through faith alone.  It becomes a question of who can offer the most amenities rather than who faithfully delivers word and sacrament.

And so, with the obfuscation of the Gospel, the Church becomes an elaborate social club, albeit one which is possessed of more seriousness, yet a social club nonetheless.  Civic action becomes the sacrament of the Christless Church wherein Christ has become simply a progenitor rather than a savior.  And in the midst of the people the cross is thrown down and the Gospel cast aside, because man is not really all that bad, he just needs to learn some manners.

Human affection, so beautiful in its apparent simplicity, really depends upon a treasured host of observations of the actions of our friend.  So it is also in the case of our relation to God.  It is because we know certain things about him, it is because we know that He is mighty and holy and loving, that our communion with him obtains it peculiar quality.  The devout man cannot be indifferent  to doctrine, in the sense in which many modern preachers would have us be indifferent, any more than he can listen with equanimity  to misrepresentations of an earthly friend.  Our faith in God, despite all that is said, is indissolubly connected with what we think of Him.  The devout man may indeed well do without a systematization of his knowledge-though if he be really devout he will desire just as complete a systematization as he can possibly obtain-but some knowledge he must certainly have.

from “What is Faith“   by J. Gresham Machen  pg 75

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.

Those times of calm in between the storms of temptation, those seemingly peaceful interludes in the midst of the war against sin are just that, periods of peace in between periods of trial. They are times of fortification, of the building of walls, the digging of ditches, the constant watchfulness of a sentry on duty, that is the nature of the respite. It is not a permanent condition, this quietness of temptation, nor is it an opportunity to indulge in complacency; for complacency breeds defeats, it brings about death and causes the shedding of many tears. And if transgression of the law of God does not produce tears, it will bring a sentence of death with it’s embrace.

No, we must be fighting sin, even when it seems to not be fighting us, when it besets us and when it deceives us by cowering before our false confidence, encouraging our bombastic arrogance, that we have defeated the sin which so easily ensnares us. We must weep for the sin which we committed when we have rest, that we might remember that it seeks mastery and that it shall never be tamed this side of Heaven.

You have sometimes seen sugar lying in a damp place dissolve into water. All the sugared joys of the wicked dissolve at last to the water of tears. Now tears will do us good. Now it is seasonable weeping. It is like a shower in the spring. If we do not weep now it will be too late. Could we hear the language of the damned, they are now cursing themselves that they did not weep soon enough. Oh is it not better to have our hell here, then hereafter? Is it not better to shed repenting tears than despairing tears? He that weeps here is a blessed mourner. He that weeps in hell is a cursed mourner.

from “The Beatitudes” by Thomas Watson

We must flee in the face of all temptation, present or unaccounted for. Our watchfulness should prepare us to flee to Christ, who has gained the victory for us. For we must not think that it is our will that will defeat sin in times of peace, but rather it is those times of peace which exist that we might glorify God and enjoy him, knowing that the present respite and the future victory over sin in our lives is the work of Christ. Those times should produce an attitude of gratitude, marveling in the present mercies of God, looking to the future glory, knowing that we are united to Christ and set free from the bondage of sin and death and are called to be who we are, not who we were. And so we must weep for sin, flee from sin, lest we despair on account of sin.

The Kingdom of God post-theocracy is manifested within the confines of the covenant community apart from a visible, national body, both within the families of covenant members and the administration of Word and Sacrament in the visible, institutional Church. Both of which are private, apolitical activities. Also, Christianity cannot claim any manner of superiority in regards to moral, ethical, or legal codes, rather, it shares those with the secular culture; for man, not possessing the law, still has its memory in his conscience, and so, knowing right from wrong, he shows that morality and ethical behavior are not localized with the Christian tradition but in the possession of Cain as well as Seth. And in doing so man reveals himself to be in the possession of a knowledge of justice, without which and primarily by, all legal systems legal systems find their substance.

Furthermore, within this secular or non-sectarian culture, the duty of the civil magistrate, in the execution of his office, is to restrain evil in society, not to transform individuals. Religious expression and freedom exist only within the domain of a government which shows no partiality to one group over another, and this is provided by the secular magistrate and the principality of which he is a representative; for ecclesiastical, constantinian forms of government allow for no dissent but instead enforce an artificial homogeneity. As well, the civil magistrate has not been charged with the furtherance of the Kingdom of God but rather it is the people of God who live under the civil magistrate who have been charged with the furtherance of the Kingdom of God through the preaching of the Gospel. For “Common grace was introduced to act as a rein to hold in check the curse on mankind and to make possible an interim historical environment as the theater for a program of redemption.”[1] What is interesting as well, is that we see the origin of cultural activity in the civilization of Cain(Genesis 4:17-22), indicating a non-redemptive nature. As well, the republishing of the cultural mandate in the Noahic Covenant(Gen 9) lacks a Sabbath addendum, indicating the secular nature of the restraining forces and aesthetic elements of culture.[2] In this identification, culture becomes the the strand of unity between the those in covenant with Yahweh and those who are not, a blessing that falls on the just and the unjust alike.

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Notes
1. Meredith G. Kline Kingdom Prologue: Genesis Foundations for a Covenantal Worldview (2006, Wipf & Stock) Pg 155
2. Ibid; pg 155 “For to place the stamp of the Sabbath on a cultural program is to set it apart as holy to God, as a bearer of divine name and of the promise of being crowned with consummation glory.”

Read here about how and why it is happening.

God, however, has not only told us his name, but in various instances has actually appeared to chosen people or to groups.  The presence of God in these theophanies is no exhibition of his essence, it is rather a further illustration that his essence is not only unknowable but also deadly to man-and his “voice” as well-except when graciously veiled under appearances accommodated to human abilities.  The emphasis as in the general revelation, remains on the communication of knowledge, and always under the double aspect of revealing-concealing, revealed character and concealed essence.

The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology(pg 12)  by Edward A. Dowey, Jr.