Covenant Objectivity and Apostasy

Here's a good essay on the benefits of membership in the "visible" Church and what, if anything, is lost by those within the covenant who are unfaithful or by those who finally and permanently "fall away" from the Church. The Reformed author does not privilege TULIP over explicit scriptural statements regarding Church membership and the possibility of losing one's salvation. His exegesis persuasively shows that the biblical data do not easily conform to evangelical considerations of the implications of Church membership or to popular Calvinist formulations of the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints.

beaten with brains: All in the Family

Empathy

Is God the distant Prince of the Stars?
Is God the Indifferent One who cares not for His children?
Is God the Cold Controller—the Perfecter of Power?
Does He care how we feel?

Is God beyond pain, suffering, and weakness?
Is He the Cosmic Sadist who wounds us for kicks?

Are You the God of the philosophers?
Are You the bare, cold Reason above emotion and heat?
Or if passionate, do You burn with wrath and self-interested love?
Is justice Your concern or Your shifting whims?

O God, O God, do You really love me?
Do I really matter to You or am I just a toy—
a subject to Your infininence and uncompromising will?
I know You created me, that You gave me breath.
You know my every thought; my very hairs are numbered.
My lying down and rising up are ever in Your eyes.

But the Christ, the Christ!
If You were in Him, it could be that You have some empathy
for us creatures here below.
If You came to us in Jesus, it means you truly became one of us,
that you lived in our skin and walked in our shoes.

No, you never failed like me, but maybe it makes a difference
that you could have.
No, you never did the things I have, but you don't judge me for that.
You don't throw stones at sinners like me,
only at the pretenders who beat us down,
who want to make us pay and keep paying.

Holy and blameless were you, but you didn't flaunt it.
You were humble and forgiving, gathering to you the weak and flawed,
the hos and Joes, the cheaters and thieves, the terrorists and schemers.

Your life showed you were the friend of mortals and sinners,
but your death says even more.
You never sinned, but you identified yourself with the worst of the worst.
You died the death reserved for murderers and thieves,
beaten like a slave, tortured, slaughtered like a lamb.

But what of the wrathful Father who required the sins of the guilty
from the innocent Son?
Is this the unfeeling Patriarch of the Skies again playing vicious games
with his powerless creatures.

If the theologians are right about Father, Spirit, Son,
then the exacting Father and self-emptying Son are one.

Oh most gracious Lord! What a strange Man you are,
never requiring more of us than that which You Yourself have supplied.
Deign, if You will, to save me by Your own hand.
Condemn me only if You know how it feels.
Aye, but I pray for the first.
Through the stripes of the Son, please dear Lord,
rescue me from the curse.

Thoughts on Calvin

Here is my weekly post for my Reformation and Modern Church History class. I am discussing my impressions regarding John Calvin's personality and theology.

John Calvin looms perhaps as large in my theological imagination as St. Paul. In moments when I forget that the seat of authority rests exclusively in the Scriptures, in those moments when I am over-awed by the power of the human mind to comprehend the mysteries of God and by the eloquence of speech and the written word to express them, I get carried away and ascribe too much significance to extra-biblical witnesses to God's grace and glory. I have often done this with Calvin, and, worse, I have aspired to emulate him and attain to his level of glory. When I recognize this for the sin that it is, I turn to the God who is above and beyond anything we can comprehend and put into words, realizing my own inadequacy of expression in the face of such majesty and wonder, and I worship. Calvin was a great teacher, but, if any honors belong to human teachers, they belong to those through whom God chose to give us the authoritative witness to His revelation in history that is the Scriptures. Paul is to be honored above Calvin and God infinitely above them both.

Nevertheless, we can glory in and praise God for his gifts to others and for the gifts he gives us through them. I thank God for Calvin. I also thank God that through this week's readings and lectures I have had some incorrect impressions corrected.

Much to my surprise, and initially to my chagrin, Calvin describes himself as being of "a timid, soft, and pusillanimous nature." This is much to the contrary of what I had been informed about him. Without ever reading much of his writing, excluding quotations from his writings on the sacraments I have seen in a couple of books, I have long been aware of his importance and influence in the Protestant faith tradition and have been captivated by the grand sound of the term "Calvinism" and by the larger-than-life character of his teachings on grace, God's sovereignty in bringing us to faith and in preserving us to the end, and, of course, his thoroughly orthodox and well-balanced view of the sacraments. In contrast to what I have long thought about much of his teaching, however, I have also long thought of Calvin the man as a somewhat nasty fellow—a combative, dogmatic man who was spiritually prideful and arrogant about his knowledge, had an explosive temper, was generally ill tempered, and was the theocratic dictator who condemned Servetus to death. I also thought that the man who is the champion of the idea that God created the vast majority of humankind for the express purpose of damning them, must himself be as indifferent and un-empathetic toward people as he believed God to be.

What has been revealed to me, however, since I started reading the Institutes this year in commemoration of his 500th birthday (which coincidently falls the same day as my birthday, July 10) and since I have gotten to know him a little more personally this week is that he utterly confounds me. I love him, but he drives me nuts. On the one hand, I do see a man who is a surprisingly (to me anyway) earnest, caring, humble shepherd of his flock. He is also, or at least strives to be, intellectually humble. He does not rise to the heights of speculation that it would be easy for such an intelligent man to rise to. He has a proper and sober regard for the utter mystery of God; he's almost apophatic at some points. Also, I see that he was not a politician but a devoted churchman. Instead of one who thoughtlessly put heretics to death, I see a man who was conflicted and struggled mightily with what to do with Servetus. Instead of someone who imposed his hard, pitiless, indifferent feelings about others on God, I see someone who is simply teaching what his honest reading of the Bible shows, even if it is a teaching that seems indigestible. And yes, Calvin was human. He had a wife and grieved over the loss of his only child.

On the other hand, Calvin is a man of the 16th century with all the flaws of his time. The language he uses to speak of Catholics and even other Protestants in the Institutes is shameful and uncharitable to an extreme. It reveals him to be an extremist who cannot tolerate in the least those who disagree with him. (To be fair, Luther is guilty on this count as well.) Calvin was an old grouch with a bad temper.
(I forgive him for this; I've got a really bad temper myself.) Calvin shares the responsibility for putting Servetus to death. Religious freedom was apparently anathema to him. Also, Calvin, even if he has a right view of human limits and the incomprehensibility of God, still tries to put God and his actions into a rational box. (I concede we need systematic theology, but it inherently trends toward putting God in a rational box.) And predestination to reprobation, even though I have come to accept predestination to salvation, is still an intolerable doctrine for me.

To conclude, I regard Calvin as one of my earthly fathers in the faith. I absolutely love him and praise God for him, but don't grown-up children reserve the right to argue with their parents?

The Sacraments Revisited

I have not written exclusively or specifically on the sacraments for a little while now, but I'm not done treating the subject in depth. So far, I have written three installments about reclaiming the sacraments for evangelicals. In the process, I have challenged philosophical and theological assumptions that undermine right views of the sacraments, described in brief the sacraments' relation to ecclesiology, exposited Scriptures related to baptism, surveyed various orthodox views of baptism, and given the question of the Lord's Supper a biblical and scholarly treatment from a classically Reformed point of view. I have yet to survey the various orthodox views of the Supper, or, to discuss the broad implications of recovering a sacramental theology.

Before taking up these tasks, I think a little revision is in order when it comes to what I have already written on this subject. The things I had written before are by no means mature thoughts on the sacraments and their implications for the Church and the entire Christian life. They represent my earliest wranglings with these kinds of ideas. I've read and thought more extensively since then. Also, I've learned that doing theology is a constant balancing act. Here are some needed counterweights to my earlier thoughts.

First corrective: In a way that smacks of both medieval scholasticism and the more recent Enlightenment and Age of Reason-inspired evangelical Protestant scholasticism, I described salvation or grace (justification, sanctification, etc.) as a sort of commodity that is distributed by the Church. When we conceive of salvation in this sense, I think we are missing the point. Salvation is relational; it is none other than Christ we seek.

Second corrective: Also in reference to my previous point, commodifying salvation and thinking of the Church as some sort of salvation-dispensing machine diminish the overarching significance of the person of Jesus Christ. We should think of salvation, not as something that is abstracted from Christ and then applied to us, but as nothing more or less than the abiding personal presence of Jesus Christ in and with the believer. Similarly, we should not think of the Church as something antecedent to or separable from the person of Jesus Christ. We should think of the Church in terms of the Augustinian concept of totus Christus and the Eastern Orthodox idea of perichoresis.

The reality of totus Christus is the reality of Christ as the Head in heaven at the right hand of the Father united to the Church—His very own Body—on earth (see Ephesians 5). In other words, Christ is composed of both Christ our Head and we His Body. Therefore, we can say that whenever the Body acts in obedience to its Head, its actions are none other than the actions of Jesus Himself.

When I speak of perichoresis, I am speaking of the sense in which the Persons of the Trinity mutually indwell and interpenetrate one another. Through the Holy Spirit, we as the Body of Christ are taken up into this union the Persons of the Trinity share with one another. As a result, Christ is in us and we are in Christ. Christ is in us individually because we are in Him corporately as the Church.

The point is that neither the Church nor salvation can be theologically separated from Christ. Salvation is right relationship with Christ, embodied in the Church. The Church is salvation. The sacraments are instrumental in our salvation in that baptism incorporates us into Christ's Body and the Lord's Supper continuously renews our union with Christ and His Body.

Third corrective: The sacraments are not means of grace. Again, we are dealing with the problem of thinking of salvation as some sort of commodity. Grace is not some kind of ether that is abstracted from God and distributed. Grace is Christ Himself and the abundant mercy He shows to sinners. A better way to speak of the sacraments is as means of union with Christ.

Fourth corrective: The sacraments are not primarily visible words. This raises the specter of Zwinglian or Baptist memorialism and the worst abuses of medieval sacramental practice. The sacraments do not find their primary use or efficacy in visible demonstration. We certainly cannot neglect the symbolic significance of the sacraments, but we must understand that they are first and foremost performative actions. They are rituals. Preaching Christ's death, burial, and resurrection is more instructive than demonstrating the Gospel through baptism or the Eucharist, hence the reason why those who hold to memorialist views of the sacraments are often prone to neglect their practice.

Baptism is participation in the Gospel through repentance and the objective application of Christ's death and resurrection to us. The Lord's Supper is a participation in the Body and Blood of Christ through eating. It is a meal that embodies the humility and service to one another that are central to the ethic of Christ's Body and it anticipates the full realization of the Kingdom of God at Christ's return.

Certainly, God appeals to our senses in the sacraments but not just to our sense of sight. He appeals to our sense of hearing in that we hear the Word of God in baptismal and Eucharistic liturgies, the shuffling of feet in Communion lines, the sloshing of water, the clinking of cups and plates. God appeals to our sense of smell with the aroma of bread and wine. He appeals to our sense of touch with water, the passing of plates, the handling of pieces of bread and the cup. God appeals to our sense of taste with the Bread of Life and the fruit of the vine through which we truly taste and see that the Lord is good. And he appeals to our corporate human existence and experience by baptizing us into Himself before a great cloud of witnesses, by coming to be present with His Church at His Table, and by feeding us with His flesh and blood.

Fifth corrective: I followed the time honored practice of using a "zoom lens" to think about the sacraments. Discussions of baptism are almost always about what the water does or does not do to the baptizand, while discussions of the Lord's Supper are almost always about what does or does not happen to the bread and the wine. Also, we notice that the focus in discussions of the sacraments is often exclusively on their effects on individuals. Rarely do we consider how the sacraments work to establish and maintain the society of the Church.

As an alternative, Peter Leithart proposes a "wide-angle lens" view in discussing the significance of the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist. Here is what a wide-angle lens view of the Eucharist offers as opposed to the traditional zoom lens view:

Instead of attending only to bread and wine on a table, we see people and they are doing things. They are not simply observing the elements but passing them from hand-to-hand, sharing them, eating and drinking them. Words are being spoken. In most churches, one or a few members of the congregation stand nearer the "elements," while the rest sit, stand, or kneel at a greater distance, revealing a hierarchy of some kind. Through the zoom lens, the Eucharist is presented as a miraculous puzzle of physics or metaphysics; through a wide-angle lens, the Eucharist becomes a focal point for more theologically central issues: the relationships of the church’s members to one another, creation, and God. (Leithart, Blessed Are the Hungry, 156)

This kind of discussion provides a good segue into considering the broad reaching implications of reclaiming a sacramental theology. This preceded by a survey of the various orthodox views of the Supper is the next task in my project of reclaiming the sacraments.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

*For directing me to the concept of totus Christus, I owe Peter Leithart and his wonderful scholarship a debt of gratitude. Discussions with Dustin Lyons, former classmate at Mizzou and current graduate student at St. Vladimir's Seminary in New York City, have been important in directing me toward the theological treasures of Eastern Orthodoxy. Interestingly, Reformed scholars like Leithart have also come to look toward the wisdom of the Eastern Church for guidance in ecclesiological and Christological matters. May the dialogue continue between East and West, Protestant and Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox, Catholic and Orthodox. We have much wisdom to offer one another.*