In the previous installments, we’ve been examining the question: What Does Baptism Accomplish? Those who have been following will know the answer to that question is multifaceted and can be described from several angles.
At the most basic level, we saw that Baptism initiates a covenant relationship with the Triune God and with each of the three Persons in particular. In relation to the Father, baptism is adoptive: we become members of the Family of God. In relation to the Son, it is marital: we become members of the Bride of Christ. In relation to the Holy Spirit, it is ministerial: we become members of the Universal Priesthood of the Church. Therefore, baptism simultaneously functions as an adoption, marriage, and ordination ceremony.
Having established the first two propositions, we turn now to the third. The argument to follow is structured around three points: first, the baptism of Jesus was His ordination ceremony; second, our baptism was our ordination ceremony; third, in keeping with the pattern, we will consider the objective and subjective dimensions involved.
The recent attacks by Hamas on the State of Israel and the rapidly expanding war in the Middle East that has followed have prompted many Christian preachers and pew-warmers to try their hand at theo-political punditry. This, by itself, is not necessarily a bad thing. The last few years have rightly undermined confidence in the competence of credentialed experts in many fields. We should bear in mind, however, that the fact the experts are making it up as they go is not an argument for the superiority of uninformed and ill-thought out opinions.
Many dispensationalists, predictably, see the latest violence in Israel as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy and harbinger of the last days. The fact this is how they have interpreted every instance of violence involving Israel since their particular prophetic perspective appeared in the mid-1800s does not seem to dim their enthusiasm and confidence in reading the tea leaves of providence.
Christians who lean left politically (or long ago toppled over) can be heard making arguments about nuance, context, and the evils of colonization, as if any of those things had anything to do with deliberate war crimes against a civilian population, rape, kidnapping, multilation of the dead, and calls for systematic genocide against an ethnic group. If this argument is relevant, I suppose we might offer the same nuance and context for the Holocaust and Final Solution carried out by Nazi Germany. Maybe there was something to their claims about the Jews and their manipulation and control of financial markets after all.
Even among, more politically conservative, Reformed Christians there seems to be a perverse need to state the obvious. Ethnic Israel is no longer the covenant Israel of God and The political State of Israel is not God’s chosen people—believers in Jesus are. That is true, and there is a place for noting it. So many Christians in the west have been indoctrinated by dispensational theology that we must be prepared to offer such clarifications. But what does such a claim have to do with recent violence and the present war? Why would we make this clarification our emphasis at such a time? Is it helpful or appropriate?
How are we to think christianly about ethnic Israel? The Jews are not accepted by God simply on the basis of their heritage. Membership in the covenant is delineated by faith in Christ, not merely by biological lineage.
For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.
(Galatians 3:26-29)
This does not, however, mean there is no longer any distinction to be found between ethnic Jews and the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. The same apostle who wrote Galatians 3 also clearly affirmed:
What advantage then has the Jew, or what is the profit of circumcision? Much in every way! Chiefly because to them were committed the oracles of God. For what if some did not believe? Will their unbelief make the faithfulness of God without effect? Certainly not!
(Romans 3:1-4a)
He goes on in the same epistle to the Roman saints:
I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my countrymen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom pertain the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, and the promises; of whom are the fathers and from whom, according to the flesh, Christ came, who is over all, the eternally blessed God. Amen.
(Romans 9:3-5)
These historical, bibliographical, religious, and spiritual advantages do not mean that Jewish people are saved apart from faith in Christ.
Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they may be saved.
(Romans 10:1)
The Jews must embrace their Messiah, but Paul says they will.
For I do not desire, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion, that blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved, as it is written:“The Deliverer will come out of Zion, And He will turn away ungodliness from Jacob; For this is My covenant with them, When I take away their sins.”Concerning the gospel they are enemies for your sake, but concerning the election they are beloved for the sake of the fathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. For as you were once disobedient to God, yet have now obtained mercy through their disobedience, even so these also have now been disobedient, that through the mercy shown you they also may obtain mercy. For God has committed them all to disobedience, that He might have mercy on all.
(Romans 11:25-32)
All Israel will be saved. All Israel, i.e. ethnically Jewish people, as Jews, will come to faith in Christ. This means that while the wall of partition between Jews and Gentiles has been broken down in Christ, ethnic identities still exist. The fact that the Jews are no longer God’s chosen people in the way they once were does not mean they have merely been absorbed into a mass of undifferentiated humanity. That is not what Scripture claims, quite the contrary.
Even under the Mosaic economy, the Jews were in proximity to covenant blessings that could only be fully and finally possessed by faith (John 8:31-58). Those who trusted in their ethnic heritage would not be accepted by God. They were sons of the Devil, not of Abraham. Abraham’s children have always been defined by their participation in Abraham’s faith. What has changed is not the recognition of Jewish ethnicity but the expansion of Abrahamic blessings to all nations through the resurrection and reign of Israel’s long-awaited Messiah.
God does not have two people groups with separate identities and destinies, as dispensationalism claims. But the Bible does acknowledge the persistence of the Jewish people, their distinctiveness as an ethnic group, and their future conversion to faith in Christ. Their destiny is not distinct from the Church of God but is rather to ultimately be united with the Church of God.
How are we to think about the recent attacks against Israel and their war with violent Islamists who openly state their intention to exterminate the Jews? All of the theology explained above may be true, and it may be helpful to Christians who are ill-taught on these issues. But it is of little use or relevance in responding to the kind of godless slaughter we have lately seen. Christians are sometimes guilty of the kind of theology as comfort practiced by Job’s friends. Miserable comforters are you all (Job 16:2).
Would Christian pastors have chosen September 12, 2001 as an opportune time to remind us that many of those killed the day before were unbelievers and now in Hell? Would it be helpful to observe, what is undoubtedly true, that American believers have more in common with Arab Christians than unbelieving New Yorkers who worked in the World Trade Center? The death of a neighbor’s child is not the time to lecture them about the mysteries of election. The young woman may have been dressed inappropriately, but the hours after her rape are not the best moment to discuss the importance of modesty.
It is true that American believers have more in common with a Palestinian Christian than they do with a secular Jew. It is also true that a believer has more in common with an American Christian than with his unbelieving cousin. But it would be naive and inappropriate to imagine that because one person (or group) is unbelieving, there can be no special connection to them. I have family members who are not walking with Christ, and I have far more affection and compassion for them than for anonymous Christians I have never heard about or met.
The Jews are the Christian’s cousins, and one day the family will be reunited. Christianity is a Hebraic faith. There is no denying the impact of Hellenistic language, philosophy, and culture on various aspects of the Christian tradition, but insofar as the two streams of Hebraism and Hellenism stand in opposition to one another in interpretation of Scripture, typology, liturgy, and ethics, the Christian faith stands in line with the tradition of the Hebrews, not the Greeks. Christians worship a Jew as the Son of God. Our spiritual fathers, first teachers, and foundational Scriptures are all Jewish. This is not to diminish the way in which God used the Greek language and culture to advance the cause of Christ. It is not to deny that the Jewish people, by and large, rejected their Messiah, fell under God’s condemnation, and have been estranged from the covenant of promise. But we should affirm that the Christian Church has more in common with modern Jews than with the average Gentile unbeliever, and we have vastly more in common with the State of Israel than we do with militant, Islamic terrorists.
One does not have to be a Zionist, neo-con, or dispensationalist to support Israel in its war with Hamas. The State of Israel is largely secular, but the conduct and stated mission of Hamas is explicitly, indefensibly evil. There are no mitigating circumstances, no excuses, no room for context, nuance, or negotiation. The Arab-Israeli conflict may be complicated. The Israel-Hamas war is not. To think christianly means not only thinking theologically and covenantally; it requires us to think with ethical clarity.
The waterfall above shows water moving from one level of land to another, but the water is continuous – the same water. Some things are different about the Old and New Testaments, but salvation and grace are not part of those things. Salvation and Grace are a constant – a continuity. What does this have to do with baptism?
This week I will discuss the gracious, non-works based salvation of the Old Testament. Next week I will discuss the salvation of Gentiles in the Old Testament and the reason circumcision was only for Jews.
So let’s find out whether circumcision came from a works based religion. Without further ado, let’s back up to my late childhood:
One year when I was youngish, after my father pen-marked my height in the paint of a hall doorway, I remember having a child’s epiphany. I remember working over a specific deep though while I looked at the ink line on the jamb up close to my eyes. It wasn’t about ink or height; it was about Christians being the true Jews. I ran to tell my parents: Jesus was a Jew. God had “started” Christianity from the truest teacher of the Jews – Jesus. That meant that our religion, Christianity was the faithful continuation of God’s true religion. We had the true Judaism, and it was they who had rejected Jesus who had left.
I admit that I was under-informed at that age about the complexities of the situation.
The work of Klaas Schilder (1890-1952) is not very well known in North America, but I hope that will change soon. He was a brilliant theologian—a courageous voice for Calvinist orthodoxy in the Netherlands for over four decades—who, while upholding the “cultural mandate” perspective that provides the basis for Dutch neo-Calvinist thought, disagreed with Abraham Kuyper on some key points. He sets forth his overall case in a concise manner in his little book, Christ and Culture, which has been available to the English-speaking world since 1977. Now, however, the folks at the Canadian Reformed Seminary in Hamilton, Ontario, have produced a much more readable translation, with helpful explanatory notes, which deserves careful attention from those of us in the Kuyperian camp. (Full disclosure: I wrote the Foreword to this new edition.)
As a Kuyper devotee, I do have some serious disagreements with the way Schilder makes his case. But on several key points he offers helpful words of caution to those of us who follow Kuyper. He rightly observes, for example, that Kuyper makes more than one “rather large leap” in claiming a biblical basis for the idea of sphere sovereignty. Even though I am convinced that a biblically sound Kuyperian-type case for diverse creational spheres can be developed, Schilder rightly pushes me to exercise considerable care in making the proper biblical moves.
For all of his criticisms of Kuyper, though, Schilder does not lose sight of the kinds of foundational emphases that Kuyper drew upon from the Reformed tradition. Schilder has his own criticisms of Anabaptist and Barthian perspectives, insisting—in formulations that any Kuyperian will find inspiring—that Christ is indeed the Lord of culture, and his followers must submit to his Lordship in all aspects of life. And while Schilder is not fond of the notion of common grace—such a key theological concept for many of us—Schilder nonetheless insists that we must not lose sight of the reality that all human beings, elect and non-elect, share a created “being together,” a sunousia, that has not been erased by the radical effects of the Fall. (more…)
I have been on a hiatus. I have been laying off covenant issues and trying for the most part to play nice with everyone in the theological playground. But recently, I got to listen to the final chapters of my namesake, and it was within Joshua 23 & 24 that I got a profound look at the promises of God and proper Covenant Theology (CT).
There are certainly many varieties of CT. From Murray to Kline, there are great distinctions in the Reformed realm. And now with a growth of Baptist Federalists and New CT, there are large distinctions among Baptists as well. There are theological halfway points in between and on every side. But here in Joshua, I once again found one of the reasons I hold to what I do.
Principally, it is this: that between the fall of Adam and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, God’s covenant community is made up of regenerate and unregenerate members. This is reflected in the dual nature of every covenant. Every covenant has blessings and curses, conditional and unconditional promises. Theologies that attempted to diminish this duality or embellish portions above another only do disservice to the text in the name of systematic theology. I’ll address this a little more shortly. But first the text,
“Now I am about to go the way of all the earth. You know with all your heart and soul that not one of all the good promises the Lord your God gave you has failed. Every promise has been fulfilled; not one has failed. But just as all the good things the Lord your God has promised you have come to you, so he will bring on you all the evil things he has threatened, until the Lord your God has destroyed you from this good land he has given you. If you violate the covenant of the Lord your God, which he commanded you, and go and serve other gods and bow down to them, the Lord’s anger will burn against you, and you will quickly perish from the good land he has given you.” – Joshua 23:14-16 (NASB)
Now, set aside the fact that Joshua depicts himself as about to die (this changes the context of “as for me and my house…” though doesn’t it?). Take a look at the perfect duality of God’s covenant administration. Just as He fulfills every promise so He also fulfills the curses. That I apply this duality to the New Covenant founded in Christ often bothers individuals. Hebrews seems to present this blessing/curse motif through typological means. So do many crucial portions of Romans (I’ll address a few texts from Romans shortly). So why do people take issue?
Because for many, a paradigm that permits covenant members to receive blessing or curse, seems to make salvation itself works-oriented. If it’s works-oriented, it’s not of grace. And if it’s not of grace, I’ve undermined the entire doctrine of justification. Thankfully, I don’t believe I have done this or slipped down the slope of such logic. I don’t believe Peter and Paul are guilty of it when they require people to “call on the name of the Lord” either (Acts 2:21; Rom 10:13). The type of works-based salvation that must be rejected is the one the makes works meritorious in nature. In simple terms, it is the concept that a certain action, or set of actions, brings us into good standing with God. I do not support this perspective or this type of theology.
What I support is a theology that God provides salvation to those who have faith because of His grace. Faith is no meritorious work. But it must be done. Those who are to be saved must believe. And according to James, this faith must not be dead (found without works). So how does this impact my view of covenant membership? Let me lay a little ground work and then turn to Paul in Romans 9.
The trap most modern CT falls into is the thought that without faith we should not be counted as in covenant with God. Baptists demonstrate this with their practice of “believers” baptism. And many Presbyterians demonstrate this with their rejection of paedocommunion (waiting instead for a “confession”). But both of these perceive faith in a meritorious sense. An expression of faith brings us into the covenant benefits of God. Instead, I see the Scriptures (and consistent Reformed teaching) saying that God brings us into covenant with Him before faith. Circumcision testifies to this and we see the effects of it in the book of Joshua. It is after being brought into this covenant that the blessings and curses are laid upon the people of Israel. Those with faith receive the blessing of the covenant. And because they know this to be true and have seen it they should also know that those without faith receive the curse.
But do we see this kind of thinking in the New Testament? I think we do quite explicitly,
I am telling the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience testifies with me in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and unceasing grief in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh…But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel; nor are they all children because they are Abraham’s descendants, but: “through Isaac your descendants will be named.” – Romans 9:1-3, 6-7
Here Paul is responding to the theological question of why those with the covenant blessings (Rom 9:4-5) receive curses. And Paul’s point is simple: God’s word cannot fail. Just like in the passage of Joshua, God’s covenant blessings are a reminder to the covenant people that those who shrink back from God will receive the curses. But does Paul apply this type of thinking to the church? I not only believe that he does, but I believe the only way to explain Romans 11:17-24 consistently is from this covenantal perspective. This is why Paul stresses that unbelief and faith are the criteria for this relationship in the vine (Rom 11:20, 23).
Ultimately in soteriology, our faithfulness to the covenant (the fulfillment of these faith passages in Romans 11) cannot be meritorious. Our faithfulness to the covenant is purchased in Christ. In faith we receive the blessing of the covenant because Christ received the curse of the covenant. But there remains those who enter the covenant and trample upon the faithfulness of Christ by their lack of faith (Heb 10:29).
This is where the value of Joshua’s statement comes front and center in practicality. Those seeking to disassociate God’s promises from His cruses unwittingly neglect both. Those who try and pit “conditional covenants” against “unconditional covenants” have missed the entire point. There are no covenants that God has made apart from the fulfillment of His Son. All covenants in this regard are covenants of grace. But there are covenants in which God has permitted non-elect men to attempt the conditions apart from grace. These shall fail and break the covenant bringing the curses upon themselves. And in seeing the faithfulness of God in these curses, we know the faithfulness of God in the blessings of the covenant (Josh 23:15). This is a proper covenant theology. This is Joshua’s covenant theology.<>mobi onlineпродвижение по факту
There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’Abraham Kuyper
