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On November 9, 2022 By In Church, Family and Children

Ten Theses on the Relationship of Spheres

Many sounds are coming from the social ecosystem concerning the role of the Church, State, and Family. This won’t satisfy the high demands of a thorough spherical theology, but I think it may provide my fundamental presuppositions on the relationship of these spheres.

Ten Theses on the relationship of spheres:

a) I affirm with Abraham Kuyper that there are three legitimate spheres (Church, Family, and State). Each sphere possesses distinct responsibilities and hierarchies. Self-government may function as a fourth sphere, but for our purposes, it should be subsumed under all three primary headings.

b) The Church is the headquarters since it is fundamentally Edenic in symbols and types. She orients her existence around the throne room of heaven. The land is the family, the place of work and rest. The world is the civil sphere, the place of structure and judgment.

c) While these spheres overlap in many places and circumstances, the pastor is not the father, the father is not the pastor, and the pastor is not the politician. Roles may overlap, but they should be fundamentally distinct.

d) The Church should speak into the civil sphere because she is the mouthpiece of the kingdom. But she communicates fundamentally through psalms, sermons, and sacraments. She is not a headquarters for political rallies but the true politics of the city speaking from heavenly authority granted and established by the work of Christ. She does not speak from a central space, but her voice is spread into many localized spaces.

e) The Church cannot impose ordinary habits and rituals upon families outside her formal gathering. She can offer wisdom and insight, but the father is free to lead his family as he pleases under the ordinary gifts of grace and the rule of God.

f) The state promotes the good and establishes order so that the Church and family may succeed in every way. She cannot usurp authority over either institution, and she cannot assume the role of priesthood or patriarch.

g) When the state violates the freedom of the Church and family, she is to be rebuked and exhorted to return to her spherical role given by God. The same application is to be made to Church and family, but the demands are more significant to the one who holds the sword.

h) All spheres submit to a higher authority. No sphere is self-sufficient, and no sphere can function properly on its own. But family and state must look to the new polis from where comes the wisdom of God (Eph. 3). All spheres must lead to Zion, City of our God.

i) State and family must order their lives to the culmination of life, which is the worship of the Father, Son, and Spirit on the first day of the week.

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On November 1, 2022 By In Church

What is All Saints’ Day?

We celebrate —together with a vast majority of Christian Churches in the world–the feast of All Saints. On this day, we honor and remember the saints gone before us. Traditionally, All Saints Day is the day after All Hallowed Eve on October 31st, and the Church celebrates it on the closest Sunday to the first of November.

All Saints Day is also known as the day when we celebrate the hallowed ones, those who have been honored by God because of their faithful lives. The Bible does this frequently when it says that we must give honor to whom honor is due (Prov. 3:27) and when it lists the great heroes of the faith and praises them for their mighty actions in the face of grave danger (Heb. 11). All Saints’ Day is the benediction of God upon martyrs, the “well done” upon the faithful, and the clothing in white robes on all those who, from their labors rest.

By celebrating the life of the saints, ultimately, we are celebrating the death of death. We celebrate that in the death of the faithful ones, Satan has been mocked. In fact, All Saints testify to the humiliation of the devil and evil throughout history. The Christian Church rejoices over evil by mocking death. The third-century theologian Athanasius gives a good example of the early church’s attitude toward death:

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On October 11, 2022 By In Church, Culture

A Creational Apologetic for Mockery

Several recent essays have offered a rich description of what has happened to the winsome phenomenon. Evangelical writers and theologians once known for defending the good have sought to minimize Gospel realities by maximizing opportunities for ecumenical endeavors. These endeavors did not produce the fruit expected, and, instead, it has led inevitably to the prodigalness of the evangelical left.

The result is a Babylonian conundrum leaving these figures defending the other side instead of protecting the voices most closely aligned with the cause of the Gospel. The winsome project has led to the adulteration of the good by compromising the good. My premise is that these authors have failed to see the Church’s role as that of protecting the creational order and priorities at all costs. These priorities negate the winsome strategy and advocate for something more distinctly aggressive regarding our relationship with ungodliness in this world.

To provide a bit of a rationale for what I call “A creational apologetic for mockery,” let me begin by offering some propositions and then conclude with some observations about the state of things in the Church.

First, I argue that creational theology compels us to use mockery against evil. Creation, by its very nature, is an apologetic against principalities and powers. Sun, moon, and stars are not merely heavenly descriptors but symbolic ones which proclaim the heavenly reality as the mode of operation for all of history. This reality presents the dignity of man, the labor of man, the complementarity of woman, and the establishment of priestly categories as fundamental antagonists to the attempts of evil men and their institutions to reverse the created order. Thus, the creation account supplants other accounts with an ideal established order and decency for both private and public arenas.

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On September 28, 2022 By In Church, Culture

#NATCON and David French

The National Conservatism movement has received much attention from various media publications. I have detailed my experience and annotations in the latest Perspectivalist podcast, and don’t want to belabor the point too much. Much of the work is being done in the background, and conversations about the future are happening all around.

One of the latest pieces on #NatCon2022 comes from The Dispatch, written by Alec Dent, representing the leftist side of the Evangelical/Roman Catholic wing. David French, the founder of this national media company has articulated a vision of politics that opposes any state imposition of a moral code. He even argues favorably for the liberty for drag queen hour in public libraries:

“There are going to be Drag Queen Story Hours. They’re going to happen. And, by the way, the fact that a person can get a room in a library and hold a Drag Queen Story Hour and get people to come? That’s one of the blessings of liberty,” French said.

Suffice it to say, my body of writing opposes such absurdities. I affirm that the very essence of the Christian faith compels the body politic to legislate Christian morality. Further, that deacons of righteousness exist to pass righteous laws. In my estimation, that entails removing obscenities like drag queen hour from all public spaces and spheres. The spheres belong to Jesus, and opposition to it is opposition to Jesus as Lord.

When I was invited to be interviewed by the journalist from the Dispatch, I came prepared to answer several different questions, and should I have taken the Doug Wilson approach, I should have recorded the 15-minute interview. But I learned a valuable lesson, and thankfully the author quoted me briefly but accurately while overlooking the body of my main points.

The concern from the Dispatch is that we build a movement that minimizes liberties for unchristian groups and unchristian practices. The goal, according to them, is to provide a society where social liberties are accepted in the public square and that Christians should advocate for a virtuous and winsome approach in our engagement.

But the Statement of Principles from National Conservatism offers a stark alternative, which is that “where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision.” Even its main philosophical head, Yoram Hazony, a Jew, states that biblical Christianity should be the source of any society. He understands that America is a sea of Protestant, biblical faith, even though only 65% of the population identifies with Christianity.

When asked whether #NatCon favors the presence of atheists, the journalist quotes me:

Some national conservatives are still willing to work with the post-religious right—so long as everyone remembers who is running the show. “I wouldn’t mind them joining the cause, as long as they submitted to the general rules and principles thereof, which I think can be guided by sacred scriptures,” Rev. Uri Brito, who delivered one of NatCon 3’s benedictions, told The Dispatch. “I would not want to be a part of a movement where atheists are guiding that movement.”

The quotation is not inaccurate, though it misses my entire build-up to it. Fine and dandy. I reaffirm that there is no future in the United States where atheism is leading. I agree with R.R. Reno that atheists may find #NatCon appealing because of our defense of country and its priorities, but they will undoubtedly demur regarding faith and family.

In the interview, I delved further into other aspects of what a true nationalism should look like and proceed from, which is an ecclesial conservatism. I developed those in my ten theses over at Kuyperian and hope others may benefit from them as well. I argued with the Dispatch that fundamentally, any movement towards a Christian orientation must be ecclesially focused and that the first priority of any true Christian nationalist is that of worshipping the Triune God. I also spoke favorably about the resurgence of Christian, Classical education and how necessary it is to re-engage our Western tradition and train our children to see the West not as a curse but as a crucial piece of our history and that Christendom flourished through this history.

Overall, I am pleased to see intensified attention on #NatCon and the principles that undergird it, and hope to see these conversations even more prevalent in the days to come.

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On September 20, 2022 By In Church

Continuity in Rituals and Rites

Many people struggle with the concept and hermeneutic of biblical continuity. They impose unnecessary breaks in the Bible. They put commas when God has put a period. The same takes place in matters of sacramental importance.

The Scriptures are a place full of rituals and rites. These rituals and rites have intentionality in Israel’s liturgy. They shape the humanity of the Israel of God. Israel becomes a people because they participate in these essential initiatory experiences. We are all shaped by experiences. These experiences in the context of the Church make us who we are. They identify us with a specific community and a particular God.

In ancient Israel, the Hebrews were identified by their bloody signs. These signs connected us with a bloody religion; the religion of our forefathers. These signs were to be identity markers ritualized into the very fabric of their humanity as image-bearers.

As God’s people transitioned through periods of obedience and disobedience, wilderness wondering, these rituals remained as promises because God works most ordinarily through means and tangible signs of his faithfulness.

But when the new creation emerged in the resurrection of Messiah Jesus, the Church was organically joined with the Gentiles, and Israel’s rituals changed and took on new meaning; they were glorified. The once bloody identity markers were replaced with cleansing markers. The New Creation now becomes marked by waters surrounding the narratives of the Gospel, the geography of Paul’s epistles, and ultimately the seas no longer cause harm as in Jonah but bring forth tranquility as in John’s abundance (Jn. 21). The New Covenant is filled with cleansing rituals.

This natural shift in creation happens because Jesus’ humanity changes and cleanses the world. His blood sacrifice is a cleansing for the nations (Is. 52:15). Jesus’ humanity humanifies the world. The presence of Messiah in word and deed pushes back the dirt and corruption and darkness and incompleteness of the Old Covenant rituals. There is a temporary nature to particular rituals, but the rituals/markers continue for a thousand generations. God does not change.

The issue of continuity is a fundamental aspect of this ritual-laden world. The rituals continue, changed by times and places, but the object/recipients of these rituals never decreases; they only increase. In the New Creation, entire households are brought forth for this cleansing ritual called baptism. Every Gentile and Jew, male and female, are made explicit recipients and are called to partake of this new sign. The New Creation is inclusive, bringing the nations to Zion city of our God (Is. 2; Matt. 28:18-20).

The New Covenant is a covenant of abundant life, and abundant life means blessings to the nations. Baptism saves to the uttermost (I Pet. 3:21) because Christ saves to the uttermost. You cannot separate the abundant life Christ gives with the abundant life of the means Christ provides for His own.

The individualized language of modern sacramental and evangelical theology is a departure from the type of language the Bible has trained us to use when referring to rituals. Rituals have always been communal activities. The glory of the many in the Old Creation is not substituted by the radical commitment of the one in the New Covenant. Jesus is always and perpetually connected to a body in His ascension work. Thus, to divorce Christ from the body is an act of covenantal treason (WCF XXVIII). Continuity is key to understanding this process. It is not as some assume that the sacrament of baptism needs to depart from the Old Creation. The sacrament of baptism is so inextricably tied to the bloody rites of the Old Creation that it cannot be divorced from it in any way, shape, or form. Blood makes room for water. Bloody-martyr-servants make room for cleansed-martyred servants. Still, One Lord, one faith, one baptism.

Baptism is a welcome party for martyrs. In baptism, the noble army of God is equipped to serve and battle. They do not begin anew, but they continue the ancient battle begun in Genesis. They add their powerful voices and armor to the battle. They are consecrated in water, their swords are sharpened, and their helmets are strengthened. In the heat of the battle, while the enemies find no place to call home, Yahweh prepares a table in the presence of His enemies.

Baptism is preparation for a life-long war. Christ leads the baptized saints. He washed them with great care and equipped them to do the work. This community of faith directs their love to the One who adopted them in love. Baptism is loyalty to Messiah. Baptism cleanses, restores, and adorns those who undergo the great cleansing. To deny a continuity of rituals is to deny the war on the serpent. All God’s children need to be ritualized so that they can war. Baptism initiates that calling formally, and we are initiated into a life of ritual warfare.

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On September 10, 2022 By In Church

The Case for Weekly Communion

Evangelicals like myself rooted in the Reformation came very late to the beauty of weekly communion. I was a sophomore in college before I realized that the vast stream of the Protestant tradition celebrated communion weekly. For most of my life, I assumed the table was reserved for special occasions like Easter or Christmas. In fact, I attended a Brethren congregation that did communion once a year. But as I broadened my theological interests, I understood the Supper’s function in the liturgy and in the theology of the church and it became unbearable to contemplate the absence of it during a worship service.

Historically, our Reformed forefathers—including Luther and Calvin—desired communion to be weekly. In fact, the early centuries of the Church and the majority of Protestant Churches in the 16th century practiced weekly communion. It was only in the 19th century, and in particular, during the Prohibitionist movement, that weekly communion became mostly obsolete. Therefore, the infrequent practice of communion is rather new in the church. This does not mean it’s wrong, but it should raise questions and it should challenge our assumptions about what the Bible actually says concerning the frequency of such practices.

The Didache, one of the earliest records of the church after the Bible says the following:

“On the Lord’s own day gather together and break bread and give thanks, having first confessed your sins so that your sacrifice may be pure.”

The Church believed that in celebrating the sacraments weekly, we become a purer people. This is not because there is something magical in the bread and wine but because God uses these means to communicate his presence and strength to us.

Additionally, the Early Church believed that the Lord’s Supper made us a more thankful people. We don’t often associate communion with thankfulness, but the very term “Eucharist” is not some invention of men. It is the word Paul uses to refer to the Lord’s Supper. The word means “thanksgiving.” The Lord’s Supper is a Thanksgiving meal; a Eucharistic meal.

The Bible makes a clear case that every time the people of God gathered for worship, the Lord’s Supper was a regular part of that gathering. Acts 2:42 says:

“And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”

There is a definite article before bread, making the text read “the breaking of the bread” (τοῦ ἄρτου). This is not a generic reference to a household meal, but it is about a particular kind of bread, the eucharistic bread used at the Lord’s Table.

Acts 20:7 says: “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of the bread and the prayers.”

Again, when the Early Church met, they always had the Lord’s Supper. In a time when persecution was rampant, the people needed to be comforted and give thanks to God as they ate together with God’s people in worship.

I had mentioned earlier that the Early Church, up to the first thousand years and later the Reformation, firmly believed in weekly communion. But there came a time when the Church abandoned this practice. In fact, as Keith Mathison observes in his book “Given For You,” Infrequent communion practice became the practice of the Roman Catholic Church in the 13th century and continued until the Reformation period. In those days, members could only partake of the sacraments once a year. It was against this background that “such men as John Calvin and Martin Bucer called for a return to the Apostolic Christian practice of weekly communion.”

We might say that part of the motive of the Reformation was to undo the Church’s practice of infrequent communion and return to the Early Church practice of weekly communion. Calvin writes in response to the common practices of the day:

“The Lord’s Table should have been spread at least once a week for the assembly of Christians, and the promises declared in it should feed us spiritually.”

Note Calvin’s use of the phrase “at least,” implying that there were other special occasions when the Supper was crucial in the formation of Church life besides the ordinariness of its practice on Sundays.

As Professor Michael Horton once observed, “Your view of the nature of the Lord’s Supper will determine the importance of it in the worship service.” It should come as no surprise then that those who view the Lord’s Supper primarily as a matter of subjective mental recollection would see no need to celebrate it frequently. But when we begin to view the Lord’s Supper as a meal of joy and a means of grace to sustain and nourish us, then we quickly begin to expect each Lord’s Day to conclude with a meal just as our day ends with Supper.

The Lord’s Supper is not a religious add-on to the regular worship service; it is an integral meal prepared for those who are called to minister to the world. The meal is a preparation for our tasks during the week.

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On September 5, 2022 By In Church

Our Labor is not in Vain

Labor Day has been a federal holiday in this country since 1894, but long ago, Solomon already opined on the importance of work: “A sluggard’s appetite is never filled, but the desires of the diligent are fully satisfied (Prov. 13:4).”

The Christian looks at Labor Day through the lens of the Apostle Paul’s view of work when he concluded his great tome on the resurrection in I Corinthians 15:

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

Paul believed that the fruit of the resurrection bears fruit in our labors. We labor in resurrection style, not as those without hope. We labor because our work has continued worth long after we are done.

Lester Dekoster defines work as “which gives meaning to life because it is the form in which we make ourselves useful to others.” In our labors, we bring extended satisfaction to others and ourselves. If we did not work, we could never give back what rightly belongs to God in tithes and offerings. If we did not work, we could never support the vast missionary enterprise throughout the world. If we did not labor, we could never enjoy the fruits of our labors in hospitality and charity.

Our work is a form of eternal stewardship. We labor on earth because it shows how we will labor for all eternity. We labor on earth because we are stewards of the earth, and we will labor in heaven because all creation will be ours. We will never stop working! On this Labor Day, consider the meaning of your work. What you do is not in vain in this world or in the world to come.

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On August 30, 2022 By In Church

Food as Dependence

Food means we are dependent creatures. It symbolizes our need to be satiated by something outside ourselves. The food we eat is dead, and only God can cause it to become alive to/in us. We depend on a God who takes dead things and brings them back to life. God can take dead animals and vegetation and use our bodies to consume these things and bring us a burst of energy and health from them.

Yahweh took animals in the Old Covenant, called priests to kill them, lay them on the altar, and make them into ascension offerings so that God would smell them and be pleased. And then, later, God would kill his own Son, offer him up as an ascension offering, and call it “very good.” Jesus’ sacrifice was pleasing to the Father. The Son’s body was a delicious offering of praise to the Father and the world.

Even throughout our Lord’s ministry, he was fully dependent on his Father. During the Last Supper, he takes up the bread and gives thanks. We, too, are eucharistic creatures called to a life of dependence, feasting on good things and celebrating the giver of all good gifts.

When we eat, our appetites are directed towards our utter dependence on God’s supernatural ability to make dead things alive. Our tastes are not independent of the giver. We eat because we treasure the giver of all good things. As Paul says, “God has given us everything richly to enjoy.”

When we eat, we tell the world that we cannot function outside our need of God. The unbeliever eats as if food is a human right, like it’s owed to him. On the other hand, the believer eats with thanksgiving, knowing that all gifts come from God–the salad and the steak, salmon, and sweet potatoes. Food means we are dependent creatures looking to the One from whom all blessings and tastes flow.

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On August 27, 2022 By In Church

God’s Preferences in Worship

The Church of our Lord Jesus is not a gathering of individual habits and rituals. In fact, the best way to never be a part of the culture of a church is to be stubbornly bound by your individual habits in church.

While everyone should have their own habits and rituals outside of worship, corporate worship ought to have a sense of unified ritualism in the best Protestant sense. Once we begin to add our external peculiarities to worship, we end up endangering the very unity Christ desires.

Corporate worship must be a call for consistent liturgical acts. For this reason, every externalized ritual must meet the standard of corporateness, and it should not appeal to individual tastes in corporate worship. The Lord’s Day worship reshapes our individual tastes and brings us into the tastes of ancient biblical texts. We talk so much about preferences in worship that we forget that God has distinct preferences that overturn our preferences.

When the people of God raise their hands for the Gloria Patri (or whatever portion of worship is common in the service), everyone raises their hands—young and old. When we kneel to confess our sins, everyone kneels to confess our sins (unless they are not able physically). When we sing a hymn or a psalm, we don’t stand there imagining we were singing something else; we sing what the body sings, whether that is on your greatest hits or not.

We cannot complain about liturgical incoherence in the evangelical world–where praise bands and people are doing two separate things or where the spontaneity of service subtracts from liturgical continuity–while offering our own version of incoherence regarding our own liturgy.

We are not individualists. We don’t atomize our participation. When we eat and drink, we are participating in Christ, joining our voices to Christ and to one another.

So, let us prepare ourselves to join one another in our separate bodies leaving our preferences behind and joining the preferences of God as expressed in our local churches. The best worship is the imitative part. Worship is not the place to bring your eccentricities; it is the place to imitate one another in adoration and acts of renewal.

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On August 24, 2022 By In Church

A Review of Austin Brown’s “A Boisterously Reformed Polemic Against Limited Atonement”

Austin Brown’s A Boisterously Reformed Polemic Against Limited Atonement is a befitting title for such a bold endeavor. Brown challenges the status quo of TULIP orthodoxy right where it hurts most, in the middle. Limited atonement has long been the subject of many pugilistic enterprises in Reformational history, and Austin puts his typewriter to work forcefully in such endeavor.

Introduction

The book argues for a universal satisfaction view of the atonement (1) with the added qualifier that “Christ did not die with an equal intent for all men (5).” Brown seeks to exalt the Lombardian formula to a place of consistency (7), derailing the attempts of limitarians to absorb Lombard as their own. Calvinists of all stripes (cranky Dutch exempted) would affirm that “Christ’s death is sufficient for all, but efficient for the elect (7).” Strict particularists, according to the author, wish to qualify to death the sufficiency of the atonement. They want to treat sufficiency as a potentiality divorcing it from universal expiation (14). But if such sufficiency remains in the realm of potentiality, then there are vast implications for strict particularists, namely that the universal offer of the Gospel is not a legitimate one (16). If Christ did not die for the non-elect, “there is no gospel for them” (20). The free offer, even spoused by strict particularists, fails to be genuine since it is not ultimately sufficient to atone for the sins of the non-elect.

Brown argues, following 17th-century Anglican, John Davenant, that the free offer is only genuine if the “death of Christ is applicable to all men (24).” Davenant sought to find a middle ground between Arminianism and Supralapsarianism. But Davenant is not the only one to oppose limited atonement in its modern definition. Anglican writer and friend Steven Wedgeworth, considering the history of TULIP theology, argues that:

Amazingly, Dabney, Charles Hodge, and William Shedd all distance themselves from theologians like Francis Turretin on the relationship between the decree of God and the cross of Christ, and even go so far as to explicitly reject key exegesis that underlies the “limited atonement” argument found in John Owen’s The Death of Death.[1]

Wedgeworth goes on to make a distinction between high and moderate Calvinists. He argues that the high Calvinist,

“…place the limit in the content of the punishment born by Christ at the cross insisting on only the special will of God toward the elect, whereas the “moderate Calvinists” allow for a general will of God toward all men, as well as the special will toward the elect, and typically place the limitation on God’s effectual calling and application of the cross-work of Christ.”

It’s important to note that the Reformed tradition has built itself on various degrees of atonement language, and there have been exegetical disputes among certifiably Calvinistic figures. Therefore, to accuse Brown of any form of an Arminian spy within the Reformed camp is to miss the diversity inherent in such conversations. It is one reason that I rarely, if ever, associate Reformed theology with TULIP. Such associations minimize the depth of Reformed history by trivializing Calvin and Bucer’s rich sacramental theology and the profound political theories of the theonomic Puritans, not to mention the liturgical theology of the German theologian John Williamson Nevin, who sought to re-articulate a rich ecclesiastical vision from Calvin.[2] To limit Reformed theology to individual soteriology would be to mock the broad themes and emphases of the Reformation.

Brown makes helpful observations throughout, working carefully through key universal texts and showing that the exegetical gymnastics done by some do not comport with the nature or context of the passage. They cannot be limited when they are naturally meant to be universalized. Again, Brown is merely stating that there is a sense in which the atonement reaches the elect and another sense in which it reaches the non-elect; but in both cases, the offer is free and genuine to all.

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