Category: ecclesiology
Thumbnail Sketch of James K. A. Smith’s “Desiring the Kingdom”
Finished James K. A. Smith’s “Desiring the Kingdom; Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation.” There are some quality ideas in the book about the way pagan culture works in us to shape us via its liturgies. I was glad for this reminder of the necessity to be epistemologically self conscious about what is seeking to form me. There are also some excellent reflections on what happens in our Church liturgies from the opening of God’s Greeting to the closing of the Benediction. So good are these insights that I can recommend this book just for that chapter.
However, having said that Smith’s idea that the social imaginary has priority over a Christian worldview is not convincing. In this argumentation Smith is tipping his postmodern hand over and over again as seen in the advocacy of narrative over discourse, and the use of a host of what might be characterized as false dichotomies; orthopraxy precedes orthodoxy, instinct trumps rationality, animal desire precedes human reflection, heart informs mind, liturgy shapes worldveiw, habit creates thinking about habit, social imaginary over worldview thinking, and pre-cognitive over cognitive.
The idea that a sanctified imagination is to be prioritized and preferred above sanctified rational thought begs any number of questions. For example, Smith insists that liturgy trumps worldview and yet our Churches are Liturgy thick with little to show in terms of Christ formation. Smith might well counter that we have to re-think our Liturgy and that might well be true but how do we re-think our liturgy without using a worldview to correct a weak liturgy?
Smith’s insistence that the heart (desire) takes precedence over the mind (rational) is thin at best and dangerous at worst. The very idea that the heart and mind are to be dichotomized like this is the work of some kind of dualistic fever. When it comes to the use of the word “heart” in Scripture a survey reveals, when taken in context, that approximately 8 out of 10 verses in Scripture that what is being spoken of is a person’s mind. 1 out of 10 verses relate the heart to volition. Another 1 of 10 verses have the heart standing for the emotions. This indicates that in its overwhelming usage in Scripture heart and mind are synonymous. Smith makes too much capital out of the difference between head and heart.
Having said that Smith does lay his finger on the pulse of a real problem in the Church in the West today and that is the fact that so many of our children in both our Churches and our Church colleges end up having a Christianity that is only marginally different then the paganism all around them. Somewhere, Christian worldview training isn’t enough. Now, for my money I would say that is due to the fact that we are allowing the culture to interpret us as opposed to or interpreting the culture. Our Christian worldview training is failing because, at the end of the day it is not getting to the essence of thinking God’s thoughts after him. Smith realizes this and is to be lauded for that realization however, I am not convinced that his solution of a consecrated imagination as shaped and formed by worship habits is the answer. In fact, I’m convinced it is not the answer. Indeed, the answer that Smith offers up sounds to much like the idea that the Worship service is to be used as a vehicle of manipulation to form people quite without their being aware of how they are being formed. I fear there is more of Edward Bernays in Smith’s theories then there are Jesus Christ.
At the end of the book Smith changes focus to the Christian University and as he explains his vision I think what Smith wants to build is a Christian commune as a University. He prescribes potentials courses which would reduce the amount of academic work in favor of “learning to read a stranger in a coffee shop,” or to be involved in matters that are directly related to “issues of poverty.” Given the disappearance of the Christian mind in the West today this idea strikes me as potentially disastrous if it was to be followed.
Smith’s book has much to recommend it and I think it is well worth a read but at the end of the day his worldview about social imaginary is not a worldview that I can regard as wholesome.
The CRC, the Banner, Rev. Bob DeMoor and Homosexuality
“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
In the July issue of the Banner,
http://www.thebanner.org/departments/2015/06/don-t-walk-away
soon to be departing Rev. Bob DeMoor, makes a case for the CRC denomination not fracturing over the potential future doctrinal embrace of practicing homosexuality. DeMoor’s comment are, politically speaking, quite genius. DeMoor will be leaving the Banner soon and so there is little fallout he will have to face over his advocacy of the Denomination accepting practicing homosexuality via the local option. Once Rev. DeMoor is gone, other bureaucrats can respond to complaints by merely offering, “that’s Bob, and Bob’s gone now.” In the way this has been done the next policy step has been pointed to in a very clean and surgical manner.
Rev. DeMoor implores his readers and the denomination to allow each local congregation to choose for themselves whether or not their local congregation will acknowledge the teaching of Scripture that homosexual practice and lifestyle is sin. What Rev. DeMoor doesn’t tell the reader is that if such a decision was arrived at what that would mean is that those who work for the bureaucracy of the denomination (including the Seminary) would at least have to subscribe to the idea that Scripture both teaches and does not teach that homosexual practice and lifestyle is sin, or at the very least that Scripture is so ambiguous on the subject that it is a matter of adiaphora. As such, with such an embrace of the “local option” as policy the consequence would be a bureaucracy and Seminary that would, by its required muddledness on the subject, be pro-homosexual practice and lifestyle. How long could local churches hold out in upholding God’s clear word against sodomy when the whole Denominational institutional infrastructure is, at best, unable, due to denominational diktat, to be anti-homosexual lifestyle and practice?
Rev. DeMoor enjoins that the denomination should take upon itself the 1980 example of making remarriage after divorce a local option issue. Rev. DeMoor doesn’t mention that there was a long history, in the Reformed World in general, that allowed divorce after remarriage. For example, John Calvin allowed for remarriage in the context of adultery, believing that the penalty for such adultery should be death. Divorce under such circumstances gives the innocent party freedom to remarry, Calvin held, for Jesus’ condemnation of remarriage as adultery applied undoubtedly only to “unlawful and frivolous divorces.” Although Calvin was very conservative in his theological view of divorce, like Luther his practice was more liberal. His “Ecclesiastical Ordinances,” adopted by the Little and Large Councils of 1561, allowed three grounds for divorce and remarriage other than adultery: impotence, extreme religious incompatibility, and abandonment. Calvin also provided for annulment where a spouse could not, because of some physical infirmity, perform the conjugal act.
Similarly the Westminster Confession of Faith Article 24 has taught since the 17th century,
“In the case of adultery after marriage, it is lawful for the innocent party to sue out a divorce: and, after the divorce, to marry another, as if the offending party were dead.”
We could just as easily appeal to Tyndale, Bucer, Knox and other Reformed luminaries for the acceptability of remarriage after divorce in some cases.
We conclude thus that the CRC 1980 decision had historical precedents to reverse previous Synods and to allow Churches to employ the local option on the matter of divorce and remarriage. Where are the centuries long historical precedents in the Reformed world for suggesting that homosexual practice and lifestyle is a valid option so that the determining of its acceptability can be decided on a church by church and case by case basis? Rev. DeMoor is comparing apples to bananas by suggesting a parallel can be drawn between the local option as exercised for the allowance of divorce and remarriage and the local option as exercised for the allowance of men sodomizing men and women doing whatever it is that women do to one another when sharing a “conjugal” bed.
Rev. DeMoor then asks the question if such an approach would erode our teaching to biblical commitment and then answers his own question by saying “no” and then citing Scripture that communicates, in Rev. DeMoor’s world, that unity trumps all matters. However, as has been communicated by many a Divine throughout history, Unity is always only a byproduct of shared truth. Where truth is not shared the closest to unity a organization can come to is the empty shell of administrative and bureaucratic unity. This is a unity only for the sake of unity. It is a unity that stands for nothing, that strives for nothing, and that achieves nothing. It is a mirage that progressives are forever seeing.
Rev. DeMoor would have us “have the humility, love, and grace to affirm that we may have to reexamine our own certainties in light of what we communally discover in God’s Word.” This sounds so high minded and pious but what if, after reexamining our own certainties in light of what we communally discover in God’s Word, we have to say, “Here I stand against the communal discoveries, I can do no other”? My Mother always had a word for communal discoveries after I would appeal to her on that basis. Mom would simply say, “If everyone decided to jump off a cliff would you jump off with them?” Mom was pretty wise that way.
Rev. DeMoor fears denominational hemorrhaging, and well he should. However, Rev. DeMoor and others should keep in mind that hemorrhaging only happens where a wound has been inflicted on the body. The sanction and embrace of homosexual practice and lifestyle by the denomination would be a case of a self inflicted wound that results in to be expected hemorrhaging.
One thing I do agree with Rev. DeMoor and that is his observation that, “We won’t agree on what’s pastoral until we agree on what’s sinful.” There is a good deal packed into that sentence. Different visions and understandings of sin, by necessity, imply different visions and understandings of the Character of God. Different visions and understandings of sin, by necessity, imply different understandings of just exactly why the Lord Christ was raised upon the Cross and so raised from the grave. Different visions and understandings of sin give us different understandings of the person and work of the Holy Spirit in regeneration and sanctification. In point of fact different visions and understandings of sin give us different Gods, Atonements, and Spirit filled living. Those differences give us different Christianities.
May God be pleased to grant to the Christian Reformed Church the wisdom to embrace the Christianity displayed in Holy Writ.
Horror and the Modern Church
“Modern critics can not understand the genre of Horror because they can’t understand the Enlightenment, and they can’t understand the Enlightenment because they are inside it so to speak, espousing its goals; the critics, virtually to a man, espouse its values so completely they can’t conceive of any alternative to it as the project which orders their lives.”
E. Michael Jones
Monsters from the Id — pg. 296
There is something in this quote that the modern Church needs to hear as a principle. The modern Church, like Jone’s critics, too often are of little use to Christians today because the modern Church has swallowed the Enlightenment core principle of Egalitarianism. The modern Church can not fight where the fight is of most import because the modern Church is inside the Enlightenment and holds as dear to God the Enlightenment’s most core principle. This does not mean that the modern Church can never give profitable counsel. It DOES mean that any counsel the modern Church gives pertaining to the most animating issue of our time (Egalitarianism) — an issue owned by the enemy — is counsel that smells of the sulfur that besots our enemy. In the words of Pogo, In the modern Church “we have met the enemy and he is us.”
In time the modern Church will overwhelmingly fall on the sodomite marriage issue, on the Confederate flag issue, and on the Transgender issue because the modern Church owns as a principle of Christianity the core principles that drive those issues. Borrowing from Jone’s, “Egalitarianism is the project that orders their lives.”
McAtee Contra Van Drunen Regarding The Family
A response to this
http://www.modernreformation.org/default.php?page=articledisplay&var1=ArtRead&var2=1618&var3=main&var4=Home
“Rather than being an additional fourth life sphere alongside these (church, state, and culture), the household or family is the foundation and the model of these other three life spheres. The family possesses a religious moral element in its piety, a juridical element in its parental authority and sibling affection, and an element of culture in family nurture. All three life spheres lie embedded within the family in a complex way, and each is connected to the family. Since the Kingdom of God consists of the totality of all goods, here on earth one finds its purest image and most faithful representation in the household family.”
Herman Bavinck
“The Kingdom of God, The Highest Good.”
In a recent “Modern Reformation” article R2K Maestro Dr. David Van Drunen (Hereinafter DVD) concedes that the the family is important, while at the same time warns Christians to not get too hung up on family changes that are occurring within our broader culture. DVD informs us that there is a real danger that we Christians would emphasize the importance of the institutional family so much that we might fall into the danger of forgetting the importance of the institutional Church. DVD writes this article in order to make sure we don’t make that mistake.
What DVD doesn’t tell the reader explicitly is that DVD does not believe in the idea of the “Christian family.” Oh, DVD hints at this conviction, but he does not come right out and say, “the idea of the Christian family is a myth.” Yet, it is precisely because DVD does not believe in the reality of Christian family that allows him to warn against those who are warning about the impact of the demise of the Christian family. For DVD, while family is important, the incremental destruction of the Christian family model, while unfortunate, is not something, that Christians should get too ginned up about, especially if that means that care for the institutional church suffers because of too much concern for the institution of the family.
At this point, already, DVD introduces a false dichotomy into his “reasoning.” He posits that the Church Institution is more important then the Family institution, thus suggesting that the two institutions are somehow in competition, when in point of fact these two Institutions are complimentary. Together they are the left leg and the right leg of Christian walking and the demise of either institution is the demise of the ability to walk without crutches.
That the two Institutions can not be separated the way that DVD is seeking to do is seen in the way that God has ordained that the health of the Church is derived from the root of its supporting Christian families. In Scripture God has given us an integrated model where the Christian family and the Christian Church, while being distinct jurisdictions, cannot be divorced from one another. This is seen in the reality of our covenant theology. God has ordained that the Church is built up by His faithfulness to the family in their generations.
“He remembers his covenant forever, the word that he commanded, for a thousand generations…” (Psalm 105:8)
“That those generations are thought of in terms of the family is seen in the commentary of Psalm 105:8 in Psalm 103:17,
“But the steadfast love of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, and his righteousness to children’s children…”
Indeed when God promises the vast blessings of salvation to Abraham, He does so in terms of “all the families of the earth.”
Gen.12:3 And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.
This indicates that God thinks that family is important.
This relation between Church as institution and family as institution is put on display every time a Christian family brings their child to be baptized by a Christian minister in the context of God’s Christian Church. God’s faithfulness to His Church as institution is guaranteed by His faithfulness to His covenant as dwelt in by the Christian family. To mark the kind of false dichotomy between the two such as DVD enters into is both un-scriptural and unnatural.
DVD insists that it is the Church as institution which is the centrality in our Christian lives. If one did not know better one would swear, that with such a statement, one was listening to a Roman Catholic Priest and not a Reformed Doctor of the Church. Rome long taught and still teaches the “centrality of the church in our Christian lives.” To disagree with this DVD conclusion is not to dismiss the importance of the Church as institution but merely is to note the Protestant emphasis that insisted the centrality of God in the totality of our Christian lives. The centrality of God in our families, the centrality of God in our Churches, and the centrality of God in our social orders. By insisting on the centrality of the Church in our Christian lives vis-a-vis the centrality of the family DVD both creates a false dichotomy (dare we say a hyphenated dualism?) — in our Christian lives and gets very close to not realizing that God alone is to be central in all our doings.
In his article DVD damns the family with feint praise. For all that DVD does in speaking up the family he undoes it all with his insistence that there is no such thing as a Christian family. DVD goes so far as to suggest that family life, unlike Church life, is not part of the Kingdom of God. With such a sentiment DVD clearly circumscribes the Kingdom of God to the Church. And yet we have all those Kings (Rev. 21:24) and Nations (Rev. 22:2) in the new Jerusalem, a reality that cannot exist without retaining extended family categories. Kings don’t make sense without Nations and Nations don’t make sense without blood families. When DVD insists that our family relations do not follow us into the eternal Kingdom one wonders if DVD is saying that in the eschaton we will no longer be sons, daughters, Fathers, or Mothers, Aunts or Uncles, Husbands or Wives? I assume though that DVD agrees that the Son of David remains sitting on the throne? If we do not retain these familial identity markers maybe we should go all the way and dismiss the idea of other identity markers such as a retention of maleness or femaleness in the eschaton? But, again, we have “Kings” in heaven, and that also requires Maleness as well as family connections. DVD’s eschaton begins to sound like a Gnostic excitable dream.
DVD makes this explicit when he writes, “This brings us to another reason why the church is ultimately more important than the family. While family relationships are temporal, relationships in the church are permanent. To put it another way, family relationships are natural and belong to this present age, while relationships in the church are eschatological and extend into the age to come.” Is DVD saying that when I bump into my earthly Christian family member in the eschaton the relation we had as family members will be forgotten while what is remembered is that we attended and were part of the same visible Church? Others may disagree, but I invoke the charge again of creeping gnosticism. All that matters in the DVD’s eschaton are spiritual realities. The corporeal realities on earth are no more.
DVD rightly notes that our allegiance to God must be higher than our allegiance to family. This is true. What DVD does not say is that our allegiance to God must also be higher than our allegiance to the institutional visible Church. All because or allegiance to God must be higher than or family allegiance in no way proves that our allegiance to the visible Church must be higher than our allegiance to our family … unless of course one is identifying the visible institutional Church with God. Isn’t it good to know that a Reformed Doctor of the Church would never make that kind of basic reasoning and category error?
DVD’s confusion on this issue is magnified by a quick look at Scripture. When God desires to give His people symbolic speech in order to understand His person He often uses the language drawn from the family. The God of the Bible compares Himself not only to a Father who taketh pity upon His children (Ps. 103:13), but He also compares Himself to a Mother who cannot forget her nursing child (Is. 49:15). In Hebrews 12:6 God chastens like a Father, while in Isaiah He comforts like a Mother (Isaiah 66:13). In Matthew 6 we are taught to address God as our Father in Heaven.
When DVD writes, “Family is clearly not the most important thing in Scripture. Our relationships to and within the church are ultimately more important than our family relationships,” he puts the cats among the pigeons. First, we might ask, “What if the Church is comprised of a series of extended and related family units?” There was a time when that was not as far fetched as it is today. Second, it is not clear that the relationships within a Christian Church are more important than the relationships to and within Christian family. It is certainly not clear when the Christian church in question has departed from the faith as much as the Church in the West has done. Thirdly, as God alone is absolute, loyalty to Him trumps both loyalty to the family or to the visible institutional Church when there is a contradiction between God and family or God and the visible church.
When DVD writes, “Family is clearly not the most important thing in Scripture. Our relationships to and within the church are ultimately more important than our family relationships,” it is like saying that “Our Right legs are clearly not the most important thing in walking. Our relationship with and to our left legs are ultimately more important than our relationship to our right legs.” It is a false dichotomy. It presupposes a false dualism. It is a false creation of a hyphenated life. One needs to note here that it is in the family where catechism is supposed to happen (Deut. 6). It is the family where children first learn about covenantal government. In the family children begin to form an idea of God via God’s parental covenant representatives. The home is the child’s first notion of heaven. None of this is to say that the Church is less important than family. It is only to say that the family and the Church are equally ultimate before God who is alone absolute. DVD’s insistence to the contrary has introduced a false dichotomy in the thinking of Christians. This is the fruit of R2K thinking where the Kingdom is only applicable to Church life.
No one doubts the passages that DVD cites as teaching that loyalty to the Lord Christ is above loyalty to family but what DVD glosses over in those passages he cites is that those passages are not teaching loyalty to the visible Church as being equal to loyalty to the Lord Christ. They are teaching loyalty to Christ above the highest competing loyalty in existence imaginable, whether that loyalty would be to family or to the visible Church. It is interesting though that Christ chose “loyalty to family” as the highest competing loyalty in existence imaginable that might conflict with loyalty to Himself as opposed to choosing membership in the “Israel of God” at that time. My objection here is that DVD is conflating loyalty to the visible institutional Church with loyalty to the God of the Bible. In these time they are seldom the same. Really, to put this kind of emphasis on loyalty to the visible institutional Church, apart from seriously needed qualifications borders on a cult like loyalty towards the visible institutional Church.
If family is only penultimate vis-a-vis the Church then what are all those genealogies doing in the Bible? God’s inspired writers certainly saw that family was important. If family is disintegrated in heaven then why does Jesus tell a parable where Lazarus cries out for relief to “Father Abraham” who is in heaven? If family is only penultimate how was it a source of comfort when the prophetess Huldah told Josiah he would be “gathered to his fathers” (2 Kgs. 22:20)? What comfort would there be if he could not recognize his “fathers”? Was he to dwell in eternity, among his own family, as a total stranger? If family is penultimate then why are the leaves of the trees, in the eschaton, for the healing of the Nations? If family is penultimate why is it important that, in the eschaton, the Lord Christ remains “The Son of David?”
Consistent with this observation is the desire of DVD to have it both ways. On one hand family relationships disappear in the eschaton, while on the other hand DVD still insists that in the eschaton we will still think in familial categories. DVD offers, “There will be only one family in heaven, made up of millions of brothers and sisters—with Jesus as our husband (Eph. 5:25-32) and brother (Heb. 2:11-12).” But if family is only temporal, per DVD, then how is it that we will still be able to think in temporal categories in the eternal realm? Words like “Brothers” and “sisters,” and “husbands” don’t retain any meaning unless their originating referent point remains operative. In a eschaton where familial categories no longer exists thinking of someone as a “Husband” or a “Brother” is the same thinking of them as a “dxils” or a “mizeek.”
When DVD says, “Every Christian will enter heaven single” I hear more of John Locke then I do St. John. How very Libertarian of him. Now, let no one mistake me to be saying that our salvation is not by Grace alone. Instead let me be heard to be saying that such a anarchistic atomization and individualization of heaven as offered here by DVD could only happen to someone who has both been stripped of their Reformed covenantal sensibilities and has bellied up to the bar for too many Boilermakers at St. Locke’s bar and grill. Scripture teaches we are gathered to Christ because the promise was to the Fathers and to their children (that embarrassing family language again) and as many as the Lord God called. Gathered by households on Earth there is no reason to think the idea of household disappears when entering the eschatological household of God.
It is not often when one can read a piece by a Reformed Doctor of the Church that is both too Romish, too Libertarian and too Gnostic all at the same time but DVD has accomplished just that. Of course all of this is primarily driven by DVD’s
1.) R2K theology that commands that families cannot and must not be considered “Christian.”
2.) R2K theology which insists that the “Kingdom of God” is limited and defined only in the context of the Institutional Church.
3.) R2K hard dualism that sees little or no continuity between this life and the life to come.
4.) Embrace of Lockean social theory as extended to defining the eschaton where atomized individuals only exist
Much much more could be said in refuting DVD’s article. I think I could easily squeeze three more essays in refuting the details of his meanderings but enough has been said in order to point out the errors in this R2K version of Christianity. In the end, if we fail to emphasize the Biblical model of the Family, given the times we are living in it will not only be the Christian family that goes into a long dark age but it will be the Christian Church also that continues in its already long established dark age residency.