Entries Tagged 'The Church' ↓

I’ve been doing some study on the Sacraments lately — particularly on John Calvin’s doctrine of the Lord’s Supper — and the often spoken-of concept of “union with Christ” keeps coming up. Most of the times that I’ve heard and read about union with Christ, it’s in one of two senses: either that union that comes when one comes to believe the Gospel (ie: “being saved” or “salvific union”), or that final and full union that believers will experience at Christ’s return and eternally thereafter (“eschatological union”).

Seems to me, though, that there’s a third sense — distinct from, but closely related to, the first — of “union with Christ” that’s rarely spoken of (at least in those terms): that union with Christ that comes by being united to a local church. That union can start at a number of points in one’s life. For some, it begins at infancy when their parents raise them in the church. (And for those of us in the Reformed tradition, that union is signified and sealed at a child’s baptism.) For others, it begins after they’ve been connected to a church through regular participation with them and have formed good relationships with and within that body, whether or not they yet believe. (There’s something to be said for “belonging before believing.”) For still others, it could begin after they’ve already come to faith in Christ (through a parachurch organization or having the Gospel proclaimed to them by a friend), and then they find a church to be a part of.

It’s interesting to me that, in all three of the above examples, this sense of union with Christ is wholly independent of whether or not an individual has yet (or will ever) come to believe the Gospel. If that’s the case, is it really union with Christ?

I’d say “yes.” Union with Christ’s people is indeed true union with Christ. No, it’s not salvific union, just as salvific union isn’t the same as eschatological union… but it’s true union with Christ nonetheless. Maybe it’s a difference of degree — or something like the difference between dating, engagement, and marriage. (Not a perfect analogy, I know.)

Just some scattered thoughts. Am I out to lunch? Is it too confusing to use the term in this way? What do you think?

Last night, I posted this brief, pithy quote on Twitter.

@RaeWhitlock: “The preaching of the Word of God *is* the Word of God.” (#)

After which, I went to the living room to hang out with Amy for a few hours, and then went to bed. What I woke up to this morning on Twitter were a few surprised and surprising responses . . .

@sagethefool: @RaeWhitlock Who in the world said that? In what context could that possibly be true? (#)

@TravisSeitler: @RaeWhitlock That is theologically (and just plain logically) wrong. (#)

@rschmidtberger: @RaeWhitlock do we really want to say that the preacher’s words are Gods words? ideally sermons should be full of biblical truth (#)

Understandable responses, though. A lot of guys (and gals, for that matter) have said some pretty whack stuff under the guise of “preaching”. Surely we don’t want to attribute the words of some of those jokers to God himself, right?

So where’d this audacious and almost-heretical-sounding phrase come from? Glad you asked. It’s from an early Reformed confessional document called the Second Helvetic Confession.

In context . . .

THE PREACHING OF THE WORD OF GOD IS THE WORD OF GOD. Wherefore when this Word of God is now preached in the church by preachers lawfully called, we believe that the very Word of God is proclaimed, and received by the faithful; and that neither any other Word of God is to be invented nor is to be expected from heaven: and that now the Word itself which is preached is to be regarded, not the minister that preaches; for even if he be evil and a sinner, nevertheless the Word of God remains still true and good.

Neither do we think that therefore the outward preaching is to be thought as fruitless because the instruction in true religion depends on the inward illumination of the Spirit, or because it is written “And no longer shall each man teach his neighbor…, for they shall all know me” (Jer. 31:34), And “Neither he who plants nor he that waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (I Cor. 3:7). For although “No one can come to Christ unless he be drawn by the Father” (John 6:44), And unless the Holy Spirit inwardly illumines him, yet we know that it is surely the will of God that his Word should be preached outwardly also. God could indeed, by his Holy Spirit, or by the ministry of an angel, without the ministry of St. Peter, have taught Cornelius in the Acts; but, nevertheless, he refers him to Peter, of whom the angel speaking says, “He shall tell you what you ought to do.”

Context makes it more clear. When a preacher preaches Scripture in such a way that is faithful to its true meaning, we can be assured that the Holy Spirit is at work, and that his people are receiving the very Word of God from his mouth. This does not mean that preachers are infallible or incapable of error. By no means. What it does mean, though, is that hearers of that Word can and should be assured that, so long as the Bible is preached faithfully, God himself speaks to them in the preaching event.

Perhaps a way to phrase it that’d be more readily understood by today’s readers would be “The Word of God preached is the Word of God.” I dunno. I like the original phrasing, myself.

Thoughts?

I really need to start posting here again.  Blame Twitter for my absence.

Anyway, I preached at my church again this morning, this time from Psalm 19.  I’d post the audio again, but the recording ended up being very echo-y and practically inaudible.  So, I’m posting the manuscript that I worked from.  Feel free to read, comment, critique, etc.
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“Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations . . .” – Dueteronomy 7:9

My five-year-old daughter, Zoë, will be baptized in a couple of weeks.  Amy told her Grandma this the other day, and Grandma responded with “Is it one of those ‘infant’ baptisms, or is it a REAL baptism?”

After getting angry, calming down, and then thinking about it, I think that the answer is “yes”.

(Obviously, Zoë’s not an “infant” at five, but for the sake of this discussion, her upcoming baptism falls under what most people call “infant baptism” — that is, baptism given to the children of believers, usually soon after their birth.)

Baptism — whether it comes after someone has made a profession of faith or it comes after someone’s being born into a Christian home — is baptism.  The bifurcation between “infant” baptism and “believer’s” baptism is the creation of a false dichotomy.  Both are covenant baptism.

I think I’m going to pick up where I left off in the long-forgotten series of posts on Baptism to flesh this out.

There seem to be two dominant schools of thought when it comes to who the primary purpose and (human) audience is in corporate worship. One says “the primary purpose of the corporate gathering is to convince unbeliever and the ‘seekers’ of the beauty of Christ and call them into a ‘personal relationship’ with Him, making new worshipers of God” The other says “no, the primary purpose of the corporate gathering is the worship of God by His people, edifying and training them to do the work of the Church, including evangelism.”

So, which is it?

I was prompted recently to remember a on online conversation from the old DerekWebb.com forums (around 2004, I think) that had a profound effect on how I saw corporate worship. In it, a friend said something that I never had previously seen or heard articulated — that the so-called “seeker-sensitive” model of doing church that’s so dominant in evangelical America is wrong-headed and that when the church gathers, it does so for worship and teaching, not for evangelism. That statement knocked me for a loop, as I’d been pretty entrenched in the “gotta win souls, gotta get ‘em to walk the aisle or pray the prayer” culture for most of my life. At the same time, it really resonated with me, as I was already convinced that Hybels/Warren seeker-driven “worship” was inadequate. (It didn’t help that the church that I was a member of at the time was then preparing to go through Warren’s “40 Days of Purpose” dreck.) God really used that one post to start me on the road to learning about, embracing, and valuing corporate worship as more than just a time to “win souls”.

So now, it’s three years later. I’ve learned a lot, matured a little (I hope), and I find myself at a tension between the two schools of thought. I’m starting to think that to reach either conclusion is to embrace the same false dichotomy (albeit on different ends of the spectrum). This dichotomy suggests (or outright states, in some extreme cases) that while the Gospel message of Christ’s burial, death, and resurrection (accompanied by the Spirit) is what convinces the unbeliever and brings him into relationship with Christ, it’s something else — something “more” — that empowers the believer to then live as Christ calls him or her to live. That the Gospel is our entryway into the family of God, and after we’re in, we move beyond the Gospel to more “advanced” Christianity of some sort.

Regardless of how well-intentioned this is, it’s moralism at best, and at worst, gnosticism. The fact is that the Gospel that converts the neophyte “seeker” is the same Gospel that empowers the most mature believer to live day-by-day as Jesus calls. There’s a story that’s been told numerous times of the great Reformer, Martin Luther. In the church that he was pastoring, preached the Gospel to his congregation, week after week after week after week. His people wondered why they couldn’t move on. Surely we get the Gospel by now, Pastor! Why do you keep preaching the Gospel every week? His answer: “Because every week, you forget it.” We never move beyond the Gospel because the Gospel is what grounds us.

Now, this isn’t to say that every week, a simplistic “Gospel” message from John 3:16 is to be preached. Not at all. But too often, passages that don’t explicitly say the words “Jesus” or “Christ” are preached in such a way that robs them of meaning and reduces them to moralistic platitudes (ie: “How to live a victorious life”, “How to have a good marriage”, “Why we need prayer in schools”, etc). We seem to forget what should be obvious: that the Bible — the entire Bible — is about JESUS. This means that every passage of scripture, including those from the Old Testament, can and should be preached in such a way that points to Christ as glorious and the only solution to our problem. Take, for instance, the “unauthorized (or strange) fire” incident in Numbers 3 in which the priests Nadab and Abihu were charbroiled for not worshiping God as He had told them — it would be easy, especially for Presbyterians like myself, to preach a sermon entirely focused on the Regulative Principle with absolutely no Christ! But Jesus is there! God’s wrath justly burns against us as it did against Nadab and Abihu, and like them, we should be consumed. But no . . . Christ took that upon himself on the cross, and upon Christ the flames of God’s wrath are burned out, never again to be ignited against those who belong to him.

Jesus is there.

Therefore, it would seem to me that our worship and our preaching should be neither seeker-focused nor believer-focused, but Gospel-focused. We preach the Gospel every week from whatever passage of Scripture we’re in, and then allow (and expect) that Gospel to have its intended effect on each one there, whether believer or “seeker”. We need to let go of the either/or mentality.

After a hiatus of about a year and a half (thanks to some issues with our recording equipment), the Grace Central podcast is back up and running. The timing coincides well with the debut of the new site and the start of a new sermon series in Colossians.

Links for ya . . .

RSS feed
Subscribe w/ iTunes
iTunes Store link

Check it out.

Go here.

gracecentral.org

There are still a few glitches and kinks that need to be worked out here and there, but . . . it’s up. And it’s about eleventy bazillion times better than having a site that hadn’t been updated since October 2005.

And speaking of Grace Central . . . we started a new series tonight in Colossians. I’m pretty excited about it. Lots of parallels and similarities between the context the church in Colossae was in, and our own (young church, very diverse congregation, etc). Should be good.

On October 6, 2007, five Grace Central men (myself included) were examined by a commission of the Great Lakes Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church in America as candidates for church office (either that of Ruling Elder or Deacon). As it was put in yesterday’s church bulletin, “in a furious, stunning display of biblical knowledge, Christian character, and theological acumen, [we] each emerged victorious.”

Now, the matter goes to the congregation for nominations and elections (all taking place over the next couple of months). The elders-elect (and deacons-elect, if any) will then be ordained and installed, and Grace Central will be officially be organized as a particular church of the PCA. After that, the real work begins.

BUT . . . the studying, training, and meeting up with the guys every Saturday morning at 7:30 over the past eighteen months is over. And it paid off.

(Thanks to everyone who prayed for me.)

This is the first in a series of posts dealing with the issues of baptism, church membership, and the Lord’s Supper. It was originally going to be one post, but it was getting longer . . . and longer . . . and longer. So, I’ll be splitting it up. I’d really like to get a dialogue going, so please participate by commenting!

(Disclaimer: As most of you know, I’m a convinced paedobaptist. But don’t discount my thoughts for that reason! There are plenty of better reasons to do so. Keep in mind that these are convictions that I held as a credobaptist as well.)

There’s been a lot of talk recently in the reformed blogosphere (“Reform-o-sphere”?) and elsewhere regarding the relationship between the Sacraments and church membership . . . and particularly how a church’s view of baptism should affect admission to membership and/or the Lord’s Table. Guys like John Piper, Wayne Grudem, Mark Dever, and Ligon Duncan have participated in the conversation. (Josh Harris also preached a relevant sermon recently.)

This is my paltry attempt at joining the conversation.

The Big Question at hand is this (as Wayne Grudem puts it in the 2007 edition of his Systematic Theology) — “Do churches need to be divided over baptism?” More specifically, “how should ‘Believers-Only Baptism’ (ie: baptist) churches deal with sincere Christians in their midst whose convictions on baptism differ from their own?”*

Now, admittedly, as recently as five years ago, I had no context for this Big Question. I grew up in a denomination in which baptism and church membership were not necessarily linked, and I didn’t really see the big deal. When I was baptized at the age of 19, I had been a believer since age six, had been partaking in the Lord’s Supper since about age 10, and had already been a member of my local church for two years. (And now that I think about it, my motivation for being baptized was less about obedience to Christ and more about trying to look “spiritually mature” to a girl at my church that I had my eye on. Ahh, the folly of youth!)

The Big Question became a little more relevant to me in March of 2003. Amy and I were living in Jackson, TN and were looking for a solid church to worship with. After a not-great experience at one church, we were providentially led to Northbrook (a Southern Baptist congregation). We almost immediately knew that this would be our church home. Only one thing concerned me as I looked over the church’s Statement of Faith — to be a member, one had to have been baptized already. Not only that, but if you were baptized as an infant, it somehow “didn’t count”. If someone who was baptized as an infant wanted to join, he or she would have to be baptized again (or more accurately, “baptized, for real this time”). Even as one who believed at the time that baptism should only come after a profession of faith, denial of membership to genuine Christians didn’t seem right. Scripture tells us that there is but “one baptism” – not different baptisms depending on your station in life.

(Yes, I’m well aware that something not seeming “right to me” is no indication of whether it’s actually right not.)

The Big Problem (related to the Big Question) is this: credobaptists, by and large, believe any baptism that comes before a credible profession of faith to be invalid. Null. Void. No baptism at all. Does it really have to be this way? Should it be this way?

I’m gonna say “no”. Even though baptism is an act of obedience from us to Christ, it’s also (and I’d also say, primarily) a means of grace from Christ to us. Even if we can manage to get baptism wrong (or in the wrong sequence), do we really believe that God’s work in baptism is stifled by human error? To illustrate it in a different way . . . Amy and I had Zoë before we were married. We got that in the wrong order and plainly contrary to what scripture teaches. Still, despite that, were we not a family, even before we got married? Should Zoë have done what Nicodemus incredulously asked and re-entered the womb, in order to be “born again”, this time into the “legitimate” Whitlock family?

Even without the obvious physical impossibility, it’s ridiculous to even consider. She is our daughter, and no less our daughter, regardless of when she passed through the waters of childbirth. Why, then, do we sometimes require genuine sons and daughters of God to again pass through the waters of birth into His family, when they’ve already passed through years before?

More in this series to come.

(*: Yes, there’s another side of the equation which asks “how should paedobaptistic churches deal with those in their midst who believe that only those who give a credible profession of faith should be baptized”? That question is much more easily resolved, as every paedobaptistic church I’ve ever heard of also baptizes new converts. For them, the question is not “have you been baptized as a believer”. It’s “have you been baptized”.)