ecclesiology – Page 2

A Few Words On Worship

The pull towards the glamorous and the exciting suggests that modern Christians continue to believe that the action is where the frenzy is. Worshipers still want the titillating, filled as it is with emotion. This accounts for why the local church service in the last 40 or so years has aped the tent revival feel with emotionally arresting music, vapid self-help sermons, and “spirit led” eccentricities. The reports one will get from such a “service” is how powerfully the spirit moved or how one could feel God’s presence.

I wonder though if God more often find us in the seemingly most barren of worship settings where a small group of people are gathered to sing simple psalms, in response to God’s greeting? Is the worship service characterized by Word and Sacrament more to be desired than the “worship” service that has all the glitz and glory that can be collected by drama teams, praise bands, and liturgical dance?

Rarely, does someone talk about how awe-inspiring it was to attend a Sunday worship service where God greets His people, where God’s people are privileged to hear God’s law, where confession of sin is made and where God speaks gospel absolution through His minister to comfort His contrite people. Rarely, do we hear people talk about the glory found in the Word faithfully broken from the pulpit, or about the presence of God in an infant baptism or in the fact that God condescended to lift us into the heavenlies so as to feed us eternal life in the Eucharist.

Christ meets us in the humblest of circumstances. He meets us in water. He meets us in bread and wine. He meets us in the Word preached. These are where Christ promises to feed us unto life eternal. It’s not as if those realities can’t be present in the context of large gathering… they certainly can be. However, more often than not all the marketing, sociology, polling and crowd psychology that goes into attracting large numbers means that the theology of the cross has been emptied out before the theology of glory show begins.

Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing automatically superior about small churches. They can fail just as spectacularly as large churches. The difference however is often in the mindset found in larger churches in the need to put on a show. Larger churches that have to pack them in, in order to keep the lights on are more prone to give a theology of glory in order to keep the wheels turning.

When it comes to worship maybe the simple and comparatively weak elements of a vertical liturgy, combined with Word and Sacrament are more to be desired than creating a mood via music and the most recent sociological technique known to really pack them in. It seems like we expect so much from our worship teams and yet we receive so little.

Years ago I read a letter by J. R. R. Tolkien to his son Christopher. The gist of it was counsel from a father to his son to look for God in places of worship that would be defined by our standards as weak and beggarly. It is often in the unexpected places that the Lord Christ condescends by His Spirit to revive the hearts of the weary by the means of water and bread and wine and the Word preached. This is the theology of the Cross. This is God using the foolishing things of the world to confound the wise and the things that are not to confound the things that are.

God is not interested in our emotions except as those emotions are the residue of minds that have clenched down hard on the Word preached. The Lord Christ is not primarily interested in what we get from worship. The Lord Christ is primarily interested in His people giving Him glory, honor and praise in worship. Worship is not about us. Worship is about the triune God, the sovereign over the whole universe. Yet, though Worship is primarily about our giving of praise, God condescends and comes near to us and bless us with Word and Sacrament and feeds us unto life eternal. Only in such a manner is our faith increased with the result that we become a blessing to God and to others.

Our Christianity in the West is a thousand miles wide but a quarter inch deep and this is in large part because there is no substance to us. As C. S. Lewis put it, “We are men without chests.” We are a shallow people and we are shallow, in part, because we have pursued in our worship a theology of glory over being satisfied with a theology of the cross. We are a shallow people in part because in our current worship arrangements we do not feast on the Word, preferring instead to pursue sugar highs found in vacuous music and simpleton horizontal sermons. A people will never rise higher than the god they serve and the god we serve in the West right now is a very small god as seen in and by the worship that we are attracted to and that we offer up. Our theology communicates a small god and our doxology reflects that.

In the words of an anonymous writer on social media;

“Luther diagnosed this long ago. The reason we flock to the spectacular and ignore the ordinary is because we are drawn to a theology of glory—we seek God in what dazzles, impresses, and moves our emotions. But God does not promise to be found in the showy things of our own making. He hides Himself under weakness. This is the theology of the cross. Baptism looks like nothing—just water. Preaching sounds like just words. The Supper appears as simple bread and wine. And the church? Small, unimpressive, overlooked. But these are the appointed places where the living Christ gives Himself to sinners. These are the means by which the Holy Spirit delivers salvation. These are the true high places of worship. The tragedy is that what God calls precious, we often find boring. What heaven calls glorious, we treat as mundane. God is not hiding in stadium lights and fog machines. He is found where He has promised to be—among the humble means of grace, in the midst of His visible Church. Do not despise the weak-looking things. That’s where Christ is.”

Francis & McAtee On The Modern Institutional Church

“What is indisputably happening today is the deliberate extirpation from Christianity of the European heritage by its enemies within the churches. The institutional Christianity that flourishes today is no longer the same religion as that practiced by Charlemagne and his successors, and it can no longer support the civilization they formed. Indeed, organized Christianity today is the enemy of the West and the race that created it.”

Sam Francis

I would go further than Francis. I would say that the Institutional Christianity that flourishes today is not only not the same religion practiced by Charlemagne, it is not even the same religion as practiced by Dabney, Machen, Van Til, and O T. Allis. It is not the same Christianity embraced by Bavinck, Vos, Murray, and Gordon H. Clark. Those eight men would have had disagreements between themselves but the disagreements they would have had pale in comparison to the disagreements that exists as between modern “Reformed” “Christianity” now and that which they practiced only a wee bit over 100 years ago.

It is an embarrassment what passes now as Christianity among the Reformed. We have just become our own version of a Pentecostalism that is untethered to any historical reality, relying instead on a more rational and polished “moving of the Spirit.”

I can only say that I rejoice that I am not longer even loosely associated with the Institutional Reformed Church as it is incarnated among the putative “White-Hat” denominations.

The Right Response Ministries & Their Wrong Response To Praying For a “Good Pope”

Joel Webbon’s “Right Response” group has a podcast session where they encourage Protestant to pray that the next Pope of Rome would be a “good” Pope. It seems they especially want to see a Pope who would oppose mass migration and who would oppose sexual perversion. The group further refers to other differences between Rome and Protestants as merely being differences that are “this, that or the other.” They refer to a need for a “good Pope — a godly man who stands firm…”

What are these Baptists smoking?

Good Pope? That’s like saying; “healthy processed fast foods,” or, “conservative sodomite,” or “benevolent dictator.” Some words just can’t be put together without causing severe mental disorientation to those who have not yet been plagued with madness.

I can see praying for a “Good Pope,” if by that one means that they are praying for a Pope to come to power who will dismantle the whole Christ denying idolatrous blasphemy that Rome is. Seriously, anybody whAllo can string the words Good Pope together with “a godly man” need to return to Church history 101.

I suppose if the Right Response team had said; “If you are a Protestant you can pray for a Pope who will be comparatively less bad than other Popes,” I could understand but the idea of a “good Pope,” who is a “godly man” indicates that some people don’t understand their un-doubted catholic Christian faith. Might as well pray for a good bout of herpes.

All of this reminds me of C. S. Lewis’ “Prince Caspian” Novel where the Old Narnians are on the cusp of being defeated by the Telemarines. In that novel a villainous dwarf named “Nikabrik” resolves to overcome looming defeat at the hands of the Telemarines by summoning for the old nemesis of the Narnians, “the Great White Witch.” Nikabrik is confident that she will help to defeat the hated Telemarines. It’s the old “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” strategy. However, the White Witch, while an enemy of the Telemarines was not friend to the Old Narnians.

In the same way the Baptists on the Right Response podcast want to find aid from a “Good Pope” in order to hold off our current New World Order Telemarines. This is not sound strategy. What matters it if the West is rolled over by the New World Order or if it is rolled over by a reinvigorated Roman Catholicism? One of those in the discussion (Wesley?) even suggested what a wonderful thing it might be if a Good Pope could bring back the millions who have left Rome because of false Pope Francis. Is Wesley sane? Should he be allowed a voice of influence? Protestant don’t want millions going back to the shackles of Rome all because there might once again be a “Good Pope.”

Anybody who reads Iron Ink with any regularity knows that I am all about Christianity covering the globe. I am all about the Church going forward to conquer the enemies of Christ. However, that cannot be done by embracing an organization and a Pope who does not have the Gospel. There is no such thing as a “Good Pope.” This kind of reasoning of Right Response is to put the cart before the horse. We are not going to recover the West by looking to Institutions that have officially condemned the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

During his life time the great J. C. Ryle warned that the Anglican Church embracing Roman Catholicism would destroy England. He was right. In the same way we are correct in saying that the Christian faith looking for help from a “Good Pope” would finally completely destroy the West. For Pete’s Sake the West was only saved by being done with all Popes.

Magic In The Modern Church

In Seminary, while pursuing my degree in cross cultural dynamics I did a course work and a good deal of reading on the idea of magic. At that time I thought we were headed for the mission field and being familiar with how culture worked was a natural fit. Most of the reading and study I did on magic was as sat in the context of third world pre-modern cultures. We looked at the idea of totems, charms, spirit-animals, grimoire, shamans, and everything in between. As it turned out Jane and I didn’t end up on the mission field (not for lack of trying) but oddly enough all that work studying magic and cross-culture contexts ended up being instrumental for understanding culture in modern and post-modern contexts right here in the USA.

When one strips all the mysticism and spooky context from the idea of the magical one is left with the reality that Magic, by definition, is the attempt to manipulate one’s surrounding by means of gaining control of the cultural context. In a pre-modern context magic is about manipulating the false gods (the supernatural) so as to put them in the magicians service. Magic thus is a way of gaining power over every circumstance that one encounters. Magic works to put the gods in the service of the one who knows the keys to manipulating the supernatural forces that guide the universe. In magic the practitioner is the one who is controlling the controllers (supernatural).

Now in a third world pre-modern context that means gaining control by means of manipulating the gods. However in a modern context magic still gains traction even though the concept of supernatural is diminished and/or dismissed. Because the gods don’t go away, even if they no longer exist in a pre-modern animistic setting, magic still is a thing. However, the adjustment one needs to make in applying the idea of the use of magic manipulating the gods in a third world setting is to understand that while magic might look different in a modern/post-modern world magic is still practiced in leverage against the gods. The secret was translating the gods of animism to the gods of in the post-modern world. Now, unlike a animistic setting where the supernatural is everywhere and the gods are thick as flies the modern/post-modern world, having denied god, has merely rearranged the deck chairs of divinity so as to find the supernatural as being controlled by the new God in town — sovereign Man. Once one understands that one begins to see that magic, as a means of establishing total control over the world, other men, and the “supernatural” via manipulation of reality in one’s favor is still a thing with the difference that the shaman, witch-doctor, and sorcerer translated into modern/post-modern culture is now called the sociologist, the marketer, the psychologist, and the propagandist. If you pause to consider it, it is easy to see that these categories of people are to us today in the modern world what the magician was to the animistic world.

Secondly, wherein “primitive” cultures it is the gods who are manipulated in modern/post-modern culture it is man as god that is controlled and manipulated by our new forms of magic. And sociology, psychology, propaganda, and marketing are the means by which man the controller magician has established manipulative control over man as god. Modern man as magician uses these forms of magic to control man as god just as the Shaman in animistic cultures used magic to control men.

You see the difference is that in the world of animism the magician worked on the supernatural to control it to his ends, whereas today in the Western world the magician works on the natural that has taken the place of what the gods were to the animistic world. In the third-world the Magician resorts to reading entrails, casting bones, chanting spells, and making potions. In today’s modern/postmodern world the Magician is more likely to read statistics, cast marketing reports, chant psychological gibberish, and map simple ways, via propaganda to get people to act the way you want them to act. However, in the end it is all about controlling people via controlling the gods. It’s all magic.

Scientism is a sub-category of modern magic as well. Scientism is used as a magic to control and manipulate modern man. This was most recently clearly seen in the whole Covid fiasco – disaster. Scientism, aided by propaganda, sociology, and psychology worked the work of magic by the magicians to control mass man. There was no reality there. It was all “magic.” It was all manipulation and control of god — of modern man. Looking back, who could ever doubt the control of the magicians? It was breathtaking to see how they used their magic spells to control the world’s population. The greatest sorcerers of all time (Merlin? Allanon? Bremen?) would be envious of the magic cast by the Covid magicians of the 21st century.

A troubling thing happened at the tail end of the 20th century and that the kind of magic spoken of above came into the Christian Church via Fuller Seminary’s “Church Growth Movement.” Lead by the likes of Donald McGavern, C. Peter Wagner, Allen Tippet and then taken up by the likes of Rick Warren, Lyle Schaller, and Bill Hybels magic was brought into the Christian Church and has not waned since its introduction. The Church growth movement was all about sociology, psychology, propaganda, and marketing. It was the magic movement coming into the last place magic should have been seen. People were “converted” by means of this magic but like all magic the spell wore off for a considerable portion of these people. Hybels went down in a sex scandal. Warren became connected to the CFR. Wagner went off the Pentecostal edge with the Vineyard movement. However it ended each of these people and many others introduced magic into the Church.

In Seminary we had to study how marketing plans could build the church. We had to take humanist psychology dressed up as Christian, we had to take a whole semester class in Church Growth techniques. (Somewhere around here I still have my Donald McGavern and C. Peter Wagner books.) We had to understand how sociology could direct people’s affections. They were all magic courses.

And now one can barely function as a church apart from the operation of magic over the congregation. Indeed, Pastors have become known more for their marketing skills or psychology counseling skills than for their understanding of reality because of familiarity with God’s Word. It is not too much to say that magic has turned the Pastorate into a Shaman or Witch Doctor. Pastors are expected, as one Pastor told me years ago, “to put the meat in the seat.” That is to be accomplished via the control that comes from rightly handling the magic. Because this is so our churches are burgeoning with people who are not converted but instead have had a successful magical spell cast upon them. Some form of modern magic (sociology, psychology, marketing, scientism, propaganda) has gripped them and holds them in congregations. Much like a voodoo doll in ancient magic would find it controlling the person who it represents so much of the modern church controls its members via magic and sociological manipulation.

Understand that the sociology, marketing, propaganda, and psychology used by the modern church is manipulation by means of modernist notions of magic. Modern magic manipulates reality by convincing people of realities that are not real. Just as the magic of Covid created a reality that dictated that poisonous vaccines were a cure, that masks stopped disease, that social distancing made one whit of difference so the modern magic of the Church creates a reality where the awe of God is lost in worship, where the law is no longer proclaimed, where egalitarianism is a spell that is cast over the congregants, where the Pastor is Shaman.

It’s all magic folks, and you need to wake up from the spell that has been cast.

Zuidema & McAtee On The Ecclesiasticizing of Christianity

“The ecclesiasticizing of religion necessarily calls into being the profaning of the non-ecclesiastical area …. the ecclesiasticized church calls into being a secularized world… The more church becomes ecclesiasticized, the more it will profane life outside the church and abandon it to profanation… The more the Church profanes life, the less it becomes the humble servant of Christ and his spiritual world dominion… people lament, certainly not without justification, about the ongoing secularization of life in the lands populated and governed by Western peoples. Concurrent with this secularization comes the distressing problem…and oppressive reality of human emancipation as the self-liberation out of the bonds to God and his Word… This is a problem which, unless it leads man to retrace his steps in this emancipation, will irretrievably abandon us to nihilism and the destruction of every last human worth, human honor, human value, and human responsibility…”

S. U. Zuidema

Communication and Confrontation

1.) Ecclesiasticizing of religion = Christianity existing only for the sake of the church. This is the goal and object of Radical Two Kingdom “theology.”

2.) This is merely the admission that if Christianity is to retreat from the public square the consequence will be a vacuum that is filled by some other prevailing religion that shapes and informs the public square. The public square can never be “neutral.” The public square is always the incarnation and thus expression of some religion. The public square only exists as being animated by religion.

3.) It is true that the public square because of secularization becomes increasingly profane. However, the profanation of the secular realm for the Christian is the divinizing or sacralizing of the public square as consistent with the tenets of the false religion that is shaping and informing the public square. In other words the profanation of the public square according to the standards of the Christian religion becomes the sacralizing of the public square according to the standards of whatever religion replaces Christianity. It’s not that the public square is no longer set apart as belonging to the God of Christianity. It is that the public square is set apart as belonging to the god of some other faith system (religion).

4.) Radical Two Kingdom Theology (R2Kt) is doing the devil’s work and as such ministers who imbibe R2K theology are of their Father the devil, intentionally or unintentionally. They are doing the work of the devil because in their work to ecclesiasticize the Christian faith they are de-Christianizing the public square in favor of some other religion which will fill the vacuum that their de-sacralizing the public square has done.

5.) When the Christian religion is ecclesiasticized the consequence is that men are released from the guiding ethos of the Christian faith. Being thus “liberated,” from Christianity in their everyday living because of the clergy’s work to ecclesiasticize the Christian faith men instantly experience bondage to some other false demon god. If men will not have the freedom that comes from living in the constraints of God’s Word then they will live in bondage to false demon gods who promise absolute libertinism. How free is a goldfish who has been set free from their fish bowl? How free is a train that is free from it’s tracks? The R2K false religion, because it ecclesiasticizes the Christian religion is guaranteed to be the greatest engine of bondage ever invented by Satan’s engineers.

6.) Unless the Lord Christ grants Reformation and renewal and delivers us from this sulfur laden doctrine of R2K that ecclesiasticizes the Christian faith mankind will continue to de-man themselves in pursuit of ever greater expressions of “freedom.” This in turn will lead to the nihilism that Zuidema speaks of, as well “as the destruction of every last human worth, human honor, human value, and human responsibility…” If the public square will not be ruled by the standards of a vibrant Christianity that informs and applies to the public square then the consequence will be the loss of true meaning and then the loss of the manishness of man. Finally, the coup de grâce will be the loss of Christianity in the ecclesial (the Church). If all that surrounds the Church is a public square that is being governed by the impulse of a false religion then the inevitable consequence is that the Church itself will fall to the public square god that was given hegemony by a Christian Church that had ecclesiasticized the Christian faith.

7.) This is not some kind of children’s game. If we cannot arrest this demonic work of ecclesiasticizing the Christian religion we will have reached a pivot in the history of mankind wherein we will find a great descent of darkness falling upon mankind.