Entries Tagged 'Theology' ↓

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.

Q1: What is your only comfort in life and in death?

“Comfort” - in some sense or another, comfort is probably the most fundamental human desire.  More fundamental than our desire for love and relationship, for food, for wealth, for pleasure, for anything.  In fact, meeting any of these desires is just a means to an end: our comfort.  Whether we’re having a long talk with a good friend, popping pills, going to the shrink, or drinking a latté, we’re ultimately doing it for our comfort.  We hate to be uncomfortable in any sense, and everything that we do is designed to get us back to that place of comfort.  I guess that’s why the writers of the Heidelberg Catechism decided to address comfort in the very first question.  It resonated with their first readers in 17th-century Holland, and it resonates with us today.

A1: That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from the tyrrany of the devil.  He also preserves me in such a way that without the will of my heavenly Father not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, all things must work together for my salvation.  Therefore, by his Holy Spirit He assures me of eternal life and makes me willing and ready from now on to live for Him.

Jesus, in every sense imaginable, is the definitive answer to our discomfort.  We can rest in him, knowing that we are his, our debts are forever paid, and that even in the midst of doubt and suffering, he sovereignly orders our steps (and others’) and works them together for our good and his glory.

Q2: What do you need to know in order to live and die in the joy of this comfort?

It’s one thing to be comforted.  It another to have “joy” in being comforted.  Joy requires a constant awareness of just how bad-off you were beforehand, and an equally constant awareness of how great your comfort is now.  Those two things not only naturally produce joy, but thankfulness.

A2: First, how great my sins and misery are; second, how I am delivered from all my sins and misery; third, how I am to be thankful to God for such deliverance.

I really like the Heidelberg Catechism — a lot.  In my opinion, it’s one of the most complete pastoral summaries of Reformed Christian doctrine in existence.  So, to maintain and/or improve my writing and theological chops, I’ve decided to blog through it.  All 129 questions.

These “Heidelberg Musings” will be little meditations/devotions through each question . . . just as I’m personally processing through them.  While I’m not promising anything too profound, I hope and trust that these will be helpful to some (myself included).  When the Catechism was first produced in the 1600s, it was divided into 52 sections, one for each Lord’s Day of the year.  That’s how these will be divided as well, with each “Lord’s Day” being at least one post (maybe more, depending on how many questions are specified for a particular day).

On with the first Lord’s Day (in the next post). Please, let me know what you think . . . good and bad.

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.

Some of you have surely heard about this already, but I thought I’d put it out there and spread the word . . .

Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle (and one of my favorite preachers and missional thinkers), is set to start a new sermon series in January. In this, he’ll be answering the top nine questions submitted to him, via askanything.marshillchurch.org. The top questions are determined by a Digg-type voting system. This sermon series will later take shape as a book.

The top questions right now are decent. A question about the Regulative Principle of Worship has held the number one spot for most of the first round. There are also some about church planting, eschatology, sexual sin/purity, etc. (There are also some downright goofy questions that you can come across by clicking the “Random” link.) I’m looking forward to seeing how this series will shape up.

Anyway, I went ahead and submitted a question yesterday on the Lord’s Supper, and thanks to some friends, it’s shot up to the top 40 questions in a matter of hours. I’m now enlisting your help. If you think that my question is worth answering, click on the above link and vote it up further. You get ten votes a day.

Even if it doesn’t make it into the top nine, I’d love to get some good discussion going on it, so don’t be shy. There’s a comment section there on the site as well.

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”.)

Heretics are rarely excommunicated these days. Instead, they go on book tours. - Al Mohler

Well . . . while the Bishop of Olympia (under whom she serves) is “excited” about Anne Holmes-Redding’s Christianity/Islam mashup, the Bishop of Rhode Island (who holds jurisdiction over her ordination) doesn’t quite share that enthusiasm.

She’s been suspended from the priesthood.

(HT: AlMo)

Episcopal priest declares that she is “both Muslim and Christian”. When asked, her bishop said that he is “excited about the interfaith possibilities.”

Dude.  Yikes.

One of the perks of having friends who are missional church planters is that you can occasionally ride on the coattails of their interesting blog posts. (Because, really . . . you can’t be a missional church planter without a blog. It’s in the contract.)

My buddy Luke Camara — who I first met when I was in college, coaching Bible quizzing for my then-church, and he was a high schooler who quizzed for a “rival” church — recently posted about the issue of alcohol consumption and whether or not Christians may partake in the occasional “adult beverage” (without becoming drunk, of course). It brought to mind a great post from a couple of years ago by my friend and pastor, Greg Blosser, in response to a statement by Dr. Al Mohler (president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) regarding the issue. I reproduce Greg’s post below.

As a Christian, former baptist and fellow evangelical, I am deeply concerned about the Southern Baptist Convention. Albert Mohler (president of a prominent SBC seminary) recently stated the following, effectively banning Jesus Christ from ministry in 99% of the Southern Baptist Convention:

“I can assure you of this: if you are associated with the use of beverage alcohol, I think I dare exaggerate not to say that 99% of all doors of ministry in the Southern Baptist Convention will be closed to you. And I do not believe that is an exaggeration. And let me tell you why…you may think, ‘That just shows high-bound and unthinking the Southern Baptist Convention is.’ Why should the Southern Baptist Convention or a local church take a risk? Why should it be in the position of deciding whether this is a problem or not. I mean, you have to understand, why would the church take that on? So, I am very concerned about this generation, and that’s one of the reasons why our integrity with the denomination, with our churches, requires that we not only have this policy, but that we talk about it, we teach it and we enforce it.”

In reply:

ATTENTION JESUS: While we at Grace Central Presbyterian Church understand that you’ve been known to imbibe adult beverages from time to time, we have carefully weighed the pros and cons and have decided that your services are worth “the risk”. So please know that you are welcome to minister with us, to us, and among us in any way you so choose. Please bring the wine.

What say you?