Reformation21

  • A Legacy of Shame: Luther and the Jews 30 Aug 2010 | 10:15 am

    Some years ago I was standing at a pedestrian crossing in the town of Echterdingen, near Stuttgart in Germany. It was a Sunday morning. The crossing light was at red. I looked quickly left and right, there was no car in sight and so I crossed. An elderly couple, probably coming from the same Lutheran service that I had been attending, audibly tut-tutted their disapproval at my anarchic initiative and remained stolidly where they were until the green light gave them permission to cross the deserted street. Was I unfair to see in this suspension of private judgement a vestige of what may, for better or worse, be called 'Erastianism'; the belief widely held in pre-war Germany that to disobey the State was to disobey God?  I think not. In that moment I gained an insight into how a monster such as Adolph Hitler might hold sway over such a decent and civilized people as the Germans, and how something so inherently evil as the Final Solution might be possible in a state with so great a Christian heritage, given that that state had acquired such extensive powers over religious and cultural life. And for that Martin Luther carries a share of the blame. 

    As Carl Trueman has pointed out, during the early part of the Reformation Luther entertained the hope that Jews who were disgusted by the idolatry of medieval Catholicism and had endured mistreatment at the hands of the papacy would speedily join him in working for religious reform. To win them for the Reformation he wrote, in 1523, an appealing tract entitled That Christ was born a Jew, and stated his hope that: 

    if one deals in a kindly way with the Jews and instructs them carefully, many of them will become genuine Christians and turn again to the faith of their fathers, the prophets and patriarchs.
     
    Luther's naivety was, however, soon disabused. His well meaning overtures were rebuffed and he, being infamously irascible responded with the summary harshness contained in his malevolent 1543 tirade, On the Jews and Their Lies. Attempts have been made to show that an older wiser Luther returned to his gentler original attitude, but they are not altogether convincing.  

    Not all the Reformers approved of Luther's attitude. There is a letter from Bullinger of Zurich to Martin Bucer in which he likened Luther's stance on the Jews to the Inquisition. Calvin's attitude too was generally benign, although his remarks could at times be acerbically medieval and his Geneva had no room for Jewish residents. But to give Calvin his due, it was he not Luther, who restored the Law to its rightful place in Christian life and it was Calvinists, such as the Jewish Christian John Immanuel Tremellius (1510-1580), who took part in the compilation of the Heidelberg Catechism, who were among the foremost Christian Hebraists in the succeeding two centuries. In addition, the post-Reformation rapprochement between Protestants and Jews may be substantially credited to Calvin's influence in the socio-economic and  political realms, which, in turn, inspired a generally philo-Semitic attitude among the English Puritans and provided a rationale for Oliver Cromwell's granting Jews permission to resettle in England, from which they had been banished since 1290. It was Calvinism that made Scotland a country where Jews have always been treated as 'aboriginal Presbyterians,' as Chaim Bermant once put it. In the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries Calvinism contributed to pioneering missions to the Jews, and in the twentieth century influenced the production of the Balfour Declaration and the proclivity of British and American politicians to favour the formation of the State of Israel. 

    But notwithstanding more benevolent attitudes, the evil genie was out of the bottle and Luther's hate-filled book was destined to play out its ominous role in the development of anti-Semitism in continental Europe. If the immediate effect of Luther's anti-Jewish attitude was the paralysis for two hundred years of Protestant attempts to evangelise Jews in Germany, his longer term legacy was to bequeath to Germany a toxic influence which conditioned a generation either to support the Nazis or, in a miasma of apathy, to abdicate responsibility. At his Nuremberg trial, the notorious Nazi propagandist, Julius Streicher said in his defence that he was, after all, only repeating what Luther had said. Whilst for its part, the German nation, having been inclined for so long to the view that to disobey the State was to disobey God, shrugged off any sense of personal liability in the matter. Indeed, the most frequently heard defence plea in the courts that tried Nazi war criminals was the supine remark that "I was only following orders." Of course, there were those who cried behind the curtails when they came for the Jews, as there were those, like Bonhoeffer, who were courageously bent on intervention to remove Hitler and, if necessary, pay for it with their lives. But, if, as Martin Neimoller once admitted, Hitler's war required a moratorium on Christianity, then Luther's stance on church and state as well as on the Jews eased the difficulty and salved the conscience. 

    Inevitably, the Holocaust compelled a radical re-appraisal of Jewish-Christian relations and gave rise to extreme sensitivity over Jewish evangelism, especially when Jewish writers connected Christian mission with genocide. The Nazi's adoption of some of Luther's known hostility towards the Jews seriously compromised the task of Jewish missions. Blu Greenburg is not untypical when she writes:

    I see mission through the unique...event of the Holocaust. Would those who preach conversion for all Jews really want a world Judenrein, a world free of Jews? ...After the Holocaust, can any well-meaning Christian look into my eyes and make that claim, the call for a kind of "spiritual final solution". [1] 

    Whilst the first Assembly of the World Council of Churches meeting in Amsterdam in 1948 resolutely condemned anti-Semitism it affirmed Christian witness to Jewish people. But since 1948 the guilt-ridden continental European churches have sought either to play down or reject Jewish missions. The Dutch Reformed Church (GKN) abandoned mission in favour of dialogue and endorsed the Christian kibbutz Nes Ammim's renunciation of any pretension to engage in missionary proselytism. In 1980 the Synod of Protestant Churches of the Rhineland stated: 'We are convinced that the Church has the testimony to bring its mission to other people - but not to the Jewish people.' The following year, the Church of Scotland abandoned its traditional and honourable history, and, influenced by Two Covenant theory, affirmed the priority of theological dialogue over mission to the Jewish people.    
       
    Of course, the church owes a incalculable debt to Luther, a great, though sinful and seriously flawed man, and it would be arrant folly to deny it. As Berthold Schwarz, of the Freie Theologische Akademie, Giessen, Germany has commented, 'Gordon Rupp had it right when he wrote about Luther: "I confess I am ashamed as I am ashamed of some letters of St. Jerome [and] some paragraphs in Sir Thomas More ...and must say that their authors had not so learned Christ, and that, thank God, this is not the major part of what they had to say."' We need, therefore, to take an honest and thoughtful, not a naive, approach to the problems he has bequeathed to us.

    Instructively, the Jewish Christian writer, Jacob Jocz was of the view that Luther 'with all his venom was not an anti-Semite in the modern sense.' And I find it interesting that William Cunningham, renowned for his love of the Jewish people and his commitment to their evangelisation - he was a member of the first Church of Scotland Jewish missions committee and, after 1843, its Free Church counterpart - considered that it was Luther's notorious attitude to the bigamous marriage of Philip of Hesse, rather than his vituperation against the Jews, that was "probably the darkest spot in his history." [2]  Of course, had he lived in our post-Holocaust age, he may have seen things differently. We shall never know. But this suggests to me that Cunningham might have corroborated Trueman's inclination to see Luther's hostility to the Jews as a repugnant moral aberration rather than a systemic theological weakness. 

    Notwithstanding Luther's unchristian cruelty in his attitude to the Jews - and the Anabaptists and peasants too, for that matter - we cannot but thank God for this man who clarified for the church the cardinal doctrine of justification by faith alone. There is, surely, a wise example to follow in Augustine's sage advice concerning Platonism, "separate these truths from their unfortunate associations, take them away, and put them to their proper use for the proclamation of the gospel."  Finally, let us not forget that any failure of ours to proclaim the gospel of justification by faith alone to the Jewish people of our time is a form of religious anti-Semitism as inherently evil as the philosophy of the Nazis.

    John S. Ross is a minister in the Free Church of Scotland and  Lecturer at Dumisani Theological Institute. He has taught Judaism and Jewish Missions at the Evangelical Theological College of Wales, and The Highland Theological College. His PhD, from the University of Wales (Lampeter), was awarded for a study of Scottish Missions to the Jews. He joined the Dumisani staff in 2008. John is married to Elizabeth, they have three adult children.  

     
    Notes:
     [1] Blu Greenburg "Mission Witness and Proselytism" in Tanenbaum, Wilson, Rudin (eds), Evangelicals and Jews in an Age of Pluralism (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1984),  p.229-230.
     [2] William Cunningham, Discussions on Church Principles: Popish, Erastian, and Presbyterian (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1863), p.473.



  • A Classical Analysis of Puritan Preaching 23 Aug 2010 | 3:56 pm

    INTRODUCTION

    Reformed Christians are indebted to the Puritans for a variety of reasons, not the least of which for their contribution to preaching.  In many ways, Puritan preaching was the very heartbeat of the Puritan movement.  It would be no exaggeration to say that without Puritan preaching there would have been no Puritans.  To quote Irvonwy Morgan, "Puritanism in the last resort must be assessed in terms of the pulpit."[1] 

    But what exactly is Puritan preaching?  How may it be properly distinguished from other forms of preaching?  Why has its influence been so palatably felt by succeeding generations?  In answering such questions the author will invoke a somewhat atypical method of inquiry.  To the author's knowledge, no such inquiry has hitherto been attempted.

    Most readers will be familiar with the trivium or three-fold classical approach to learning.  As a means of conveying information to the student, the classical method employed three distinct, yet progressive stages: (1) grammar; (2) dialectic; and (3) rhetoric.  According to this classical schematic, the initial phase of learning any subject necessarily involved learning the basic facts about the particular subject, otherwise known as its grammar.  The next phase of learning required the student to master the principles or inter-relatedness among those basic facts, thus arriving at a "whole" picture of the individual, basic parts.  This second phase is known as the dialectic phase.  Lastly, the student was expected to be able to express, either vocally or literarily, the totality of what he had learned in the first two phases.  This final expressive phase is known as the rhetoric phase.  

    We may illustrate a contemporary use of the trivium via the following example: Consider how a mother might teach her four-year old son how to read.  Most would agree that she should begin by having the child learn the foundational facts about our language.  This will involve memorizing the alphabet and its corresponding sounds.  Over time the child will eventually learn the identification and usage of verbs, nouns, and adjectives.  In short, the child will learn the grammar of our language.  But grammar alone is not sufficient for knowing how to read and write.  The child must eventually learn the proper relationships between nouns and verbs, between sentences and paragraphs, between words and books.  In short, the child will learn the dialectics of language.  But what good is knowledge of language if one is ill-equipped to convey such knowledge to others?  Not much.  Therefore the child must learn how to express what he has learned.  He must learn how to write and speak for himself.  In short, the child must eventually learn the art of rhetoric.

    How may this author best convey the characteristics and importance of Puritan preaching?--perhaps by explaining them in the classical pattern of the trivium.  This paper will therefore chart the foundational facts of Puritan preaching (i.e., its grammar), the principles or inter-relatedness among those facts within Puritan preaching (i.e., its dialectic), as well as the art of expressing the sum total of that knowledge (i.e., its rhetoric).[2]   Ultimately, it is the author's goal that this brief synopsis of Puritan preaching will be useful to the reader (and by extension the church) by engendering better preachers and better listeners of a most lovely gospel.

    PART ONE: THE GRAMMAR OF PURITAN PREACHING

    ~God's Word as Grammar~

    "Think in every line you read that God is speaking to you."
    --Thomas Watson

    Just as essential as phonics is for teaching a child how to read, so too the Bible was the sine qua non of Puritan preaching.  The Puritans were not just Theo-centric, they were Word-centric.  The full-orbed implications of the Reformation maxim sola scriptura were writ large upon the face of Puritan preaching.  The lives of the Puritans were uniformly shaped by the revealed will of the Triune God contained in sixty-six books which they believed were divinely preserved for the good of God's people.  Accordingly, the Puritans "loved, lived, and breathed Scripture, relishing the power of the Spirit that accompanied the Word.  They viewed Scripture as God speaking to them as their Father, giving them the truth they could trust for all eternity." [3] 

    The main concern of Puritan preaching was to transmit God's infallible word to His people.  Puritan preaching was marked by an unadulterated concern to search the Scriptures, collate their findings, and apply them to all areas of life. [4]  For the Puritans, all theological language was ultimately God's language (provided it is true).  To that end, how could a preacher possibly endeavor to employ God's Word from the pulpit without making strident and vigorous effort to understand it not just generally, but particularly?  The Puritans aimed simultaneously for telescopic knowledge of the Scriptures as well as for microscopic knowledge; their sermons exhibit appreciation for the texture of both systematic and biblical theology.  Indeed, this is hardly surprising because, "Puritan preachers received the Bible as a coherent unit rather than a random collection of unconnected fragments." [5]  

    The puritan conviction about the centrality of the Bible in preaching was reinforced by the practice of largely or exclusively limiting the details of the sermon to biblical material. [6]  Puritan preaching was expository in nature, meaning that the entire sermon was to be inextricably tied to the text.  The mere establishment of a connection between the sermon and the text was not sufficient for Puritan preachers.  Quite the contrary, for, according to the Puritans, "The sermon is not just hinged to Scripture; it quite literally exists inside the Word of God; the text is not in the sermon, but the sermon in the text....Put summarily, listening to a sermon is being in the Bible." [7]                

    ~Christ as Grammar~

    "Exhibit as much as you can of a glorious Christ.  Yea, let the motto upon your whole ministry be: Christ is all.  Let others develop the pulpit fads that come and go.  Let us specialize in preaching our Lord Jesus Christ."
    --Cotton Mather

    To be Word-centered is to be necessarily Christ-centered.  The Puritans understood this architectonic principle and their preaching reflected it.  According to Beeke, Puritan preaching "focuses on God's written Word, the Bible, and His living Word, Jesus Christ." [8]  In accordance with scriptural data such as Luke 24:44-45 [9]  and John 5:39 [10] the Puritans read their Bibles through rose-colored lenses tinted by the blood of a crucified savior and risen Lord.  It was their goal in every text to solidify that the "great theme and controlling contour of experiential preaching is Jesus Christ, for he is the supreme focus, prism, and goal of God's revelation." [11]  Hence William Perkins, the great Puritan homiletician, writes that the heart of all preaching is "to preach one Christ, by Christ, to the praise of Christ." [12]   

    This twin focus upon God's Word and the agent of that Word, namely Christ, was the essence of Puritan preaching.  Every nuance and detail of their sermons was a mere reflection and out-working of those twin principles.  Christ and His Word were the most basic facts of Puritan preaching--indeed they were the grammar of Puritan preaching.     


    PART TWO: THE DIALECTIC OF PURITAN PREACHING

    We have argued that the grammar (most basic and foundational component) of Puritan preaching is the Christo-centric Word of God.  This Christ-centric Word was to Puritan preaching what phonics is to the four-year old boy learning to read--it's everything.  And yet, at the same time it's not everything.  Knowing what God said in a particular text is not alone sufficient for transformative, God-exalting preaching.  If God's word, together with proper exegetical and hermeneutical principles, forms the "parts" of preaching, what may we say about the "whole" of preaching?  How are preachers to bring their exegetical spade-work to bear upon an audience that, according to God's word, is totally depraved and spiritually rent asunder by sin?  It is in response to that question that our concept of dialectic becomes important.  We said earlier that the dialectic addresses the inter-relatedness of foundational facts, and it is precisely within this inter-relatedness that several important dialectics emerge in Puritan preaching.  These dialectics are evidential of specific ways in which the foundational facts of Puritan preaching are crystallized and brought to bear upon the parishioner's mind.     

    ~Organizational Dialectic~

    "The receiving of the word consists of two parts: attention of mind and intention of will."
    --William Ames

    The very essence of the dialectic in the trivium schematic is the organization it provides for the individual parts.  Organization gives a global perspective to what would otherwise be isolated localities.  Sentences and paragraphs are to the student of reading what sermon outlines are to the preacher.  We might put it this way: just as Greek philosophers were expected to learn the laws of logic, so too Puritan preachers were expected to learn the laws of sermon organization.  Puritan sermons were slaves (in a good sense) to methodology and organization.  Puritan sermons were intentionally logical, they were--to borrow a phrase from Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones--logic on fire.  The Puritans were deeply concerned (perhaps too much) about form and structure within their sermons.  As contemporary preachers of the gospel, we would be wise to mirror their concern.

    William Perkins' suggested preaching format that appears at the end of his The Art of Prophesying is a cogent example of the logical progression and systematic organization that marked Puritan sermons.  Perkins advocates that preachers ought to:
    1. Read the text distinctly out of the canonical scriptures.
    2. Give the sense and understanding of it being read, by the scripture itself.
    3. Collect a few and profitable points of doctrine out of the natural sense.
    4. To apply, if he have the gift, the doctrines rightly collected to the life and manners of men in a simple and plain speech. [13] 

    Because of their deep and reverential commitment to the scriptures, the Puritans often belabored certain points of doctrine with seemingly excessive detail and scriptural proofs.  They did this not because they particularly enjoyed prolixity of speech but because they "felt constrained to proceed to buttress each doctrine with the examples and testimonies of Scripture [...] to ensure that the doctrine adduced from a specific text had the whole weight of Scripture behind it." [14]

    Ryken provides two very helpful windows into the organizational framework of a puritan sermon:

    The Puritan sermon was planned and organized.  It may have been long and detailed, but it did not ramble.  It was controlled by a discernible strategy and it progressed toward a final goal.  The methodology ensured that the content would be tied to Scripture, that the sermon would involve an intellectual grasp of the truth, and that theological doctrine would be applied to everyday living. [15]

    The Puritan sermon quotes the text and "opens" it as briefly as possible, expounding circumstances and context, explaining its grammatical meanings, reducing its tropes and schemata to prose, and setting forth its logical implications; the sermon then proclaims in a flat, indicative sentence the "doctrine" contained in the text or logically deduced from it, and proceeds to the first reason or proof.  Reason follows reason, with no other transition than a period and a number; after the last proof is stated there follow the uses or applications, also in numbered sequence, and the sermon ends when there is nothing more to be said. [16]  

    The Puritans stressed organization because they believed in the primacy of the intellect.  They believed that grace enters the heart through the mind.  According to Packer, "God does not move men to action by mere physical violence, but addresses their minds by his word, and calls for the response of deliberate consent and intelligent obedience.  It follows that every man's first duty in relation to the word of God is to understand it; and every preacher's first duty is to explain it." [17]  It is the preacher's job to explain the Bible in a clear, organized manner so that the sheep may approach it and feed upon it.

    ~Applicatory Dialectic~

    "It would grieve one to the heart to hear what excellent doctrine some ministers have in hand, while yet they let it die in their hands for want of close and lively application."
    --Richard Baxter

    Church pews are full of people who "know" the central tenants of the Christian faith and yet sadly remain unchanged by them.  There are also people in the pews that sincerely love the doctrines of the Christian faith but remain perpetually unsure of their practical relation to daily life.  The Puritans were keenly aware of both of these phenomenons.  Consequently, the Puritans labored to bring the text of scripture to bear upon the individual consciences of each and every listener.  Puritan preachers worked hard to be practical, for they realized that "doctrine is lifeless unless a person can 'build bridges' from biblical truth to everyday living." [18]  Thus Thomas Hooker can write, "When we read only of doctrines these may reach the understanding, but when we read or hear of examples, human affection doth as it were represent to us the case as our own."  [19] The puritans achieved practicality in preaching predominantly through the use of application. [20]   

    The breadth of Puritan application was anything but narrow.  Ryken summarizes William Perkins' seven categories of application from the Art of Prophesying, depending on the individual conditions of the listeners:

    I. Unbelievers who are both ignorant and unteachable....II.  Some are teachable, but yet ignorant....III.  Some have knowledge, but are not as yet humbled....IV.  Some are humbled....V.  Some do believe....VI.  Some are fallen....VII.  There is a mingled people....  [21]

    Perkins' application matrix did not stop here for he devised six types of application to all seven types of listeners in any one sermon.  Taken to its full extent, every doctrinal statement of the sermon would require forty-two distinct applications in order to make application to every class of listener.  This was, of course, not possible.  But according to Packer,

    [...] anyone making an inventory of puritan sermons will soon find examples of all forty-two specific applications, often developed with very great rhetorical and moral force.  Strength of application was, from one standpoint, the most striking feature of Puritan preaching, and it is arguable that the theory of discriminating application is the most valuable legacy that Puritan preachers have left to those who would preach the Bible and its gospel effectively today. [22]   

         It is clear that Puritan preachers were not content with the bare relaying of facts and information.  Instead, their preaching was oriented toward specific goals and the best way to accomplish this, in their mind, was to strike at the center of the listener's conscience.  What better way to accomplish this than through personal application of the text?  According to Beeke, "Applicatory preaching is the process of riveting truth so powerfully in people that they cannot help but see how they must change and how they can be empowered to do so." [23]  This type of preaching, as one might expect, was inherently confrontational without being cruel.  Applicatory preaching is not "safe" preaching, for it involves meddling with the minds and wills of men.  Beeke illustrates it well,

    [...] applicatory preaching is often costly preaching.  As has often been said, when John the Baptist preached generally, Herod heard him gladly.  But when John applied his preaching particularly, he lost his head.  Both internally in a preacher's own conscience, as well as in the consciences of his people, a fearless application of God's truth will cost a price. [24]

    God, we suspect, would have it no other way.     

    ~Discriminatory Dialectic~

    "There is not a sermon which is heard, but it sets us nearer heaven or hell."
    --John Preston

    When children are learning to spell errors are legion.  One soon discovers that the discriminatory use of a dictionary is quite necessary.  The discriminatory function of the gospel is similar to the discriminatory use of a dictionary--they both divide truth from error.  Once all the data of scripture has been assembled for a particular text, the Puritan preacher was aware that the conclusion of that data would necessarily provoke distinctions among his audience.  Truth by definition is exclusive and therefore any pulpit proclamation of the truth would divide the hearers in some way.  This division in the Puritan mind was both unavoidable and absolutely necessary.       

    The purpose of Puritan preaching was never peripheral.  Rather, it was preeminently bent toward the producing and sustaining of the new birth.  Such a purpose obviously presupposed that some men were yet spiritually dead.  A common theme in Puritan preaching, therefore, was the elucidation of a dividing line between the saved and the lost.  If what the Bible says is true (and the Puritans believed it was) then preachers were under necessary compulsion to draw such a line in nearly every sermon. [25]  And not just draw the line, but know how to influence those on either side of the line.  The Puritan Joseph Hall put it this way, "The minister must discern between his sheep and wolves; in his sheep, between the sound and the unsound; in the unsound, between the weak and the tainted; in the tainted, between the nature, qualities, and degrees of the disease and infection; and to all these he must know to administer a word in season." [26]  

    Discriminatory preaching, says Beeke, "clearly defines the difference between a Christian and a non-Christian, opening the kingdom of heaven to one and closing it against the other." [27] 

    The Puritan preachers did not follow this discriminatory model of preaching because it was faddish to do so.  They followed it because they saw it in the Bible.  In the Puritan mind, Jesus was the greatest of the discriminatory preachers.  His sermon on the mount was the magnum opus of pulpit discrimination.  Puritan preachers understood well that granting a false security to spiritual hypocrites was the most destructive of spiritual medicines.           


    PART THREE: THE RHETORIC OF PURITAN PREACHING

    We have discussed at length both the foundational facts of Puritan preaching, namely its reliance of the Christo-centric Word of God, as well as various dialectical devices that the Puritans employed to bring those foundational facts of Scripture to bear upon the minds of men.  We are now prepared to discuss various factors that shaped the actual delivery of Puritan sermons.  It is not our goal to investigate the technical components of such delivery (i.e., its length, volume, syntax, etc.) as much as it is the man behind the delivery.  Puritan preachers did not ascend their pulpits as mere voice boxes.  They went instead as whole men, bearing the full integration of flesh, personality, and spirit.  They did in fact bear a common allegiance in the science of rhetoric, but their rhetoric was not a naked science.  Their proclamation of the Word of God--as heralds of Christ--gives evidence of spiritual vitality in fullest measure. 

    ~Sanctified Rhetoricians~

    "If a man teach uprightly and walk crookedly, 
    more will fall down in the night of his life than he built in the day of his doctrine."
    --John Owen

    Puritan preachers understood well the danger of pulpit hypocrisy.  Since preaching was an inherently spiritual activity, it was therefore impossible to proclaim the importance of spiritual life via a life that was itself spiritually malnourished.  Both Puritan preachers and their congregations placed a high premium upon the importance of having "godly" ministers of the gospel.  The Puritans understood that the relationship between the pastor and his congregation was symbiotic.  If the pastor was spiritually stagnant how could the congregation expect a living flow from his mouth?  William Perkins stated it well, "He [the pastor] must first be godly affected himself who would stir up godly affections in other men." [28]  The record of Perkins' life confirms this for he was greatly loved by his congregation for his purity of life.  It is said of Perkins, "He lived sermons, and as his preaching was a comment on his text, so his practice was a comment on his preaching."  [29]  

    Acute knowledge of the cause-and-effect relationship between the preacher's personal character and his fruitfulness as a pastor led the Puritans in the constant pursuit of a sanctified life.  They knew that their ministries depended upon it.  Indeed,

    A minister's work is usually blessed in proportion to the sanctification of his heart before God.  Ministers must therefore seek grace to build the house of God with sound experiential preaching and doctrine as well as with a sanctified life.  Our preaching must shape our life, and our life must adorn our preaching. [30]

    The Puritan David Dickson is famous for charging a minister at his ordination to study two books together: the Bible, and his own heart. [31]  Packer notes, "Their strenuous exercise in meditation and prayer, their sensitiveness to sin, their utter humility, their passion for holiness, and their glowing devotion to Christ equipped them to be master-physicians of the soul.  And deep called to deep when they preached, for they spoke of the black depths and high peaks of Christian experience first-hand." [32]  The Puritan John Boys summarized it timelessly, "He doth preach most who doth live best."  [33] 

    ~Spiritual Rhetoric~

    "Ministers knock at the door of men's hearts, the Spirit comes with a key and opens the door."
    --Thomas Watson

    The Puritan preachers were men of robust intellect and disciplined study.  History shows us that they prepared their sermons carefully with painstaking and meticulous detail. [34]  Their appreciation for sound logic and intellectually stimulating argument is largely lacking for parallels in the history of humanity.  The Puritans were not, however, foolish enough to depend upon their intellect and study for the gathering of souls and the perfecting of the church.  They knew fundamentally that preaching, though highly dependent upon the intellect, was reaching for a goal that the intellect could not definitively move, namely a dead soul.

    They prayed.  In fervent prayer they sought the Spirit to accompany their work in the pulpit.  Anyone who envisions Puritan preaching as devoid of spirituality and anchored in a logical quagmire has yet to understand it.  Baxter writes, "Prayer must carry on our work as well as preaching; he preacheth not heartily to his people, that prayeth not earnestly for them.  If we prevail not with God to give them faith and repentance, we shall never prevail with them to believe and repent." [35]  John Bunyan picks up the refrain, "You can do more than pray after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed....Pray often, for prayer is a shield to the soul, a sacrifice to God, and a scourge to Satan."  [36]

    In short, the Puritans believed in the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit when it came to conversion.  They understood that the ultimate success of gospel preaching was not left to the man in the pulpit.  Packer speaks for the Puritans when he says, "Man's task is simply to be faithful in teaching the word; it is God's work to convince of its truth and write it in the heart.  The Puritans would have criticized the modern evangelistic appeal, with its wheeling for 'decisions,' as an unfortunate attempt by man to intrude into the Holy Spirit's province.  It is for God, not man, to fix the time of conversion."  [37]   

    ~Simple Rhetoric~

    "It is a by-word among us: It was a very plain sermon: And I say again, the plainer, the better."
    --William Perkins

    Despite the proclivity of words that dominated the speech patterns of their day, Puritan preaching was aimed endlessly at simplicity.  "Plain speech" was their consummate goal.  It bears saying that our present culture's love for verbal paucity and childish grammatical construction may make us the least qualified to evaluate the actual impact of such an aim.  Our present culture seems ignorant of the fact that one can speak long and yet be simple. 

    It was specifically William Perkins' The Art of Prophesying that forever changed the homiletical landscape of Puritan England.  Perkins was primarily responsible for the universal adoption of the new Reformed method by the seventeenth-century Puritans, a method which was characterized by a plain style of preaching that delivered sermons in an easy to grasp progression of exegesis, doctrines, proofs, and uses. [38]  Unfortunately, to be sure, this "plain" preaching was not always quite so plain.  Nevertheless, Puritan preaching must be judged less by its supposed "plainness" and more by its results.  According to Pipa, "In our day Puritan preaching is considered prolix and scholastic, yet in its time, Puritan preaching revolutionized England and paved the way for the Long Parliament and the Westminster Assembly."  [39] 

    It is the author's conviction that current students of Puritan preaching often equate mistakenly the Puritan concept of "plainness" with lack of complexity.  Puritan preachers like Perkins were aiming for simplicity of speech and unadorned logic, not necessarily brevity and anti-complexity.  Their style may have been difficult as times, but its theological and practical fruit are undeniable even up to our present hour.  At the end of the day we can only say that the proof is in the pudding.  The plain style of preaching advocated by Perkins did not return void in Puritan England and left an indelible mark on the face of Christianity for enduring centuries.    

    According to Ryken, "Plain preaching was defined by what it lacked as well as by what it contained [...].  What the Puritans did not want was a pastiche of quotations or an embellished style that called great attention to its own ostentatiousness." [40]  The Puritans understood the tendency for men in the pulpit to make preaching into a mere exercise of ego.   Instead of rendering praise unto the Triune God, the congregations of such men would be tempted to render praise unto the medium and not the source.  William Perkins was a staunch critic of such ego-centric preaching.

    Contra Rome, Puritan preachers wanted the Word of God living in the minds of men and that meant communicating it in such a way so as to insure its lodging.  Richard Sibbes claimed that "truth feareth nothing so much as concealment, and desireth nothing so much as clearly to be laid open to the view of all: when it is most naked, it is most lovely and powerful." [41]  Puritan preachers endeavored to reach all men with the gospel, both the learned and the unlearned.  This meant writing sermons that common folk could imbibe and learned men could appreciate.  William Perkins obviously understood this for it was said of his preaching, "His sermons were not so plain but that the piously learned did admire them, nor so learned but that the plain did understand them."  [42]     

    ~Sincere Rhetoric~

    "I preached, as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men."
    --Richard Baxter

    All of the aforementioned culminated in what scholars often refer to as experiential or affective preaching.  Beeke defines it as such, 

    preaching that seeks to explain in terms of biblical, Calvinistic truth how matters ought to go, how they do go, and the end goal of the Christian life [...] it addresses the entire range of Christian living, focusing heavily on a believer's well-being and maturity.  With the Spirit's blessing, the mission of such preaching is to transform the believer in all that he is and does to become more and more like the savior. [43]  

    All in all, experiential preaching characterized the Puritan preacher's sincere desire to measure the experienced knowledge of himself and his congregation against the touchstone of Scripture.   Experiential preaching was more than anything else an appeal to both the heart and minds of men, women, and children.  It aimed to change them, not just land on them.  Richard Baxter carries the meaning well when he says,
     
    As man is not so prone to live according to the truth he knows except it do deeply affect him, so neither doth his soul enjoy its sweetness, except speculation do pass to affection.  The understanding is not the whole soul, and therefore cannot do the whole work....The understanding must take in truths, and prepare them for the will, and it must receive them and commend them to the affections;...the affections are, as it were, the bottom of the soul.  [45] 

    Puritan preaching was not lecturing; it was a desperate calling unto souls.  It was a sincere plea to be right with God at the expense of all else.  Because of its magisterial content, preaching ought to be a serious and sober engagement.  According to Richard Baxter, "Of all the preaching in the world, I hate that preaching which tends to make the hearers laugh, or to move their minds with tickling levity and affect them as stage plays used to, instead of affecting them with a holy reverence for the name of God."  [46]      


    CONCLUSION

    This paper has charted the foundational facts of Puritan preaching (i.e., its grammar), by which we refer to the Puritan's extreme reverence for and submission to the Christo-centric Word of the Living God.  We also observed three main principles of interrelation (i.e., its dialectic) which Puritan preaching used as a means of conveying the truth of that Christo-centric Word, namely organization, application, and discrimination.  Lastly, we explored the Puritan art of expressing the sum total of its homiletical knowledge (i.e., its rhetoric) as seen in the spiritual character of the preachers themselves and the simple and sincere style of their preaching.  

    Hopefully the reader has gained a renewed appreciation for the significance of Puritan Preaching for the ultimate sake of preserving that which the modern church is far too prone to forget.  If we are to avoid the eclipse of affective gospel preaching in our own day we must become students of the Puritans for they--perhaps more so than any other epoch of redemptive history since the Apostolic age--embodied the essence of biblical preaching.  History has indeed validated the truthfulness of that statement because (to the author's knowledge) preaching modeled after the Puritan method has never failed to benefit the church and thus give pleasure to Him who gave himself up for the church.   

    Husband to Elizabeth and father of four. Joe is a a student at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, MS.  Joe served as an active duty officer in the Marine Corps for eleven years and is currently serving as an instructor pilot in the Marine Corps Reserves.  An aspiring pastor, Joe travels to Europe this summer to investigate Reformed church planting amidst American military communities stationed abroad. 

    Notes
    1 Quoted in Joseph A. Pipa's, "William Perkins and the Development of Puritan Preaching," (Doctoral Thesis Submitted to Westminster Theological Seminary, 1985), 216-217.
     2 Obviously, the analogy between Puritan preaching and the trivium model of education is not presumed to be watertight.  It is only hoped that such an angle of approach might give rise to fresh insight into the timeless nature of Puritan preaching.  After all, the trivium existed long before the Puritans.    
    3 Joel R. Beeke and Randall J. Pederson, Meet the Puritans: With a Guide to Modern Reprints (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2006), xix.
    4 Beeke and Pederson, xvii.
    5 David H. Jussely, The Puritan use of the Lectio Continua in Sermon Invention (1640-1700) (Ann Arbor: UMI Dissertation Services, 2007) 130.
    6 Leland Ryken, Wordly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986) 99.
    7 Millar Maclure, The Paul's Cross Sermons, 1534-1642 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958), p. 165.
    8 Joel Beeke, Living for God's Glory: An Introduction to Calvinism (Orlando: Reformation Trust Publishing, 2008), p. 257.
    9 Jesus said, "These are the words which I spoke unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the Law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me."
    10 Jesus himself said, "Search the scriptures; for in them you think you have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me."
    11 Beeke, Living for God's Glory, p. 258.
    12 Ibid, p. 258.
    13 Cited in Ryken, 100.
    14 Ryken, 100.
    15 Ryken, 101.
    16 Quote from Percy Miller in Ryken, 100.
    17 J. I. Packer, A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1990), 281.
    18 Ryken, 101.
    19 Quoted in Ryken, 101.
    20 Reference Beeke, Living for God's Glory, 261 for an expanded discussion of the six types of application, according to the Westminster Divines: (1) Instruction--doctrinal instruction; (2) Confutation--refuting error; (3) Exhortation--pressing obedience; (4) Dehortation--rebuking sin; (5) Comfort--encouraging perseverance; and (6) Trial--proper responses to suffering.  
    21 Ryken, 102.
    22 Packer, 288.
    23 Beeke, 259.
    24 Beeke, 261-262.
    25 See Mariano Di Gangi's, Great Themes in Puritan Preaching (Ontario: Joshua Press, 2007) for a compelling sermon on the importance and implication of the new birth, pp. 55-60.
    26 Quoted in Beeke, Living for God's Glory, 265.
    27 Beeke, Living for God's Glory, 262.
    28 Quoted in Ryken, 93.
    29 Everett H. Emerson, English Puritanism from John Hooper to John Milton (Durham: Duke University Press, 1968) 159.
    30 Joel R. Beeke, Puritan Reformed Spirituality (Webster: Evangelical Press USA, 2006) 436. 
    31 Packer, 286.
    32 Packer, 286.
    33 Beeke, 436.
    34 Ryken, 98.
    35 Quoted in Beeke, Living for God's Glory, 271.
    36 Quoted in Beeke, Puritan Reformed Spirituality, 438. 
    37 Packer, 283-284.
    38 Pipa, 216-217.
    39 Ibid., 2.
    40 Ryken, 105.
    41 Quoted in Ryken, 105.
    42 Quoted in Ryken, 105.
    43 Beeke, Living for God's Glory, 256.
    44 Ibid, 256.
    45 Quoted in Ryken, 102-103.
    46 Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (Grand Rapids: Banner of Truth, 1996) 119-120.



  • The Crowd Is Untruth 14 Jul 2010 | 8:06 pm

    The great Danish theologian and philosopher, Sǿren Kierkegaard, is probably best known in Christian circles for his haunting reflections upon God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac.  While I am guessing many of us would question the theology that underlies some of Kierkegaard's exegesis of the passage, I think there are few Christian writers or preachers who have so ably captured the terror and confusion that must have filled Abraham's mind as he made the lonely journey to the place of sacrifice.

    Kierkegaard is not easy to read at the best of times; and some of his longer works are, to put it very bluntly, surely among the most tedious masterpieces ever penned.  Who, I wonder, except for the most infatuated fan, has ever ploughed through all of the stages on life's way recounted in the book of the same name?   Further, his appropriation by later existentialist philosophy has had the twofold effect of making him a rather suspect character among the ranks of the orthodox, an irrelevance to philosophers trained in Anglo-American circles, and a quaint figure of yesteryear to the vanguard of the latest continental philosophical ideas.   Indeed, I remember as a young Christian finding his journals particularly interesting; and then reading Francis Schaeffer and realizing that SK should really be placed in the `debit' column; I myself was thus one of those whom James Barr characterized as not having to think because Schaeffer had done my thinking for me.

    Yet, over the years, I have returned to SK again and again, and not just because I found a compulsive need to think for myself and to resist letting Schaeffer - or any of the other evangelical gurus -- do it for me.  Partly the pleasure of reading SK arises from the fact that his one-liners are virtually without peer.  Indeed, if you are as bone-idle as I am, you have to love any man who can come up with a statement such as `Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.'  And I even a possess a mug with the caption, `The truth shall set ye free; but first it shall make ye miserable.'  If ever there was a sentiment of which a northern European, living in the oversized Disneyworld that is the U.S.A., needed to keep reminding himself, it is surely that one.  Indeed, among the few pleasures left to me now that my children are teenagers and regard me with withering disdain, is that of being a pessimist trapped in a nation of chirpy optimists, are the bleak landscapes of SK's essay and the films of Ingmar Bergman. I need my misery.

    But there are other reasons for reading SK, perhaps most of all his unnerving ability to nail aspects of society that have actually become more significant since his death rather than less.  Here, it is some of his shorter, lesser known essays that contain some of his most brilliant and penetrating insights.  One of them in particular, `The Crowd is Untruth,' is both profound and prophetic.  In it, he captures brilliantly both the power of the anonymity of the crowd, where personal responsibility, accountability and identity is surrendered to the larger group; and pinpoints that which became all too tragically true in the subsequent century, the ease with which a talented person can manipulate a crowd into doing the most terrible things.  Crowds can make otherwise perfectly sane people do otherwise inexplicable things: run down the road with traffic cones on their heads, applaud at the end of Justin Bieber concerts, and as we now know, herd others into gas chambers and onto killing fields.

    Demagoguery is, of course, the bane of politics; but it is also much to be feared in the church. I have often mentioned my dislike of the American evangelical tendency to exalt the great conference speaker and to allow him to do the thinking; such is surely the kind of secularization that Paul fears has invaded the church in Corinth, where crowd pleasing aesthetics trump critical thinking.  The danger in the church, therefore, is not that perfectly ordinary and decent people will construct gas chambers and usher their neighbours off to them; rather, it is the surrender of their God-given intellects to those who use the clichés, the idioms, and the buzzwords of the wider culture to herd them along a path which the leader chooses.  Fear of the leader, fear of the pack, fear of not belonging, can make people do strange things.

    Even more significant for Christians today, I suspect, are the peddlers of authenticity that now swarm around the web.  They are easy enough to spot: the slightly out of focus webpage photo, with eyes averted from the camera, serious, pensive expression, soul patch, glasses in a style first sported in the seventies by existentialist Swedish hairdressers called Sven, perhaps torn jeans, autumnal lighting, maybe a few leaves scattered on the ground.  And, above all, constant, grating references to `authenticity.' Given the clichéd manner in which it is relentlessly expressed, such `authenticity' is, it seems, a somewhat synthetic product:  whatever individuality of the blogmeister might otherwise possess is often simply obliterated by the mass-produced idiomatic pseudo-cool of the cutting-edge crowd through which `authenticity' is expressed.  It's a crowd pleasing product which, surprise surprise, too often merely reflects the predilections of the crowd. Of course, not a few of these kind of authentocrats quote Kierkegaard. A supreme ironist himself, SK would no doubt have appreciated the irony of Kierkegaard chic in the crowd of untruth and the fact that claims to authenticity are always in this present age sure signs that one is dealing with a phony.  And yes, before anyone shouts `Physician, heal thyself!' he would probably also have been amused, in a horrified sort of way, by the irony of appearing on a mug, a commodity for the mass consumer market.

    Of course, the peddlers of mass produced authenticity are soft targets, as easy to spot as their navelocentric web musings and pictures are easy to mock. But the crowd mentality also poses a problem for the Protestant Christian without the soul patch, Sven glasses, and camera with blurred vision.  The Reformed world has its dark suits, its hall of fame, and its clichéd patois of pieties as well.  We may talk about truth rather than authenticity - and rightly so - but when belief in that truth becomes merely a function of being part of the crowd, then we too have failed to be truthful individuals.

    There is a real tension here. Our faith demands only one mediator, and we as individuals are to put our trust in him; but we are also part of a corporate, communal entity; this communal dimension of Christianity finds expression in a common authority, that of the Bible, and a common language - that of the creeds, of the confessions, and indded of our own distinctive traditions, by which we communicate with each other and by which we express our corporate identity.  Thus we are caught always between the need to trust directly in Christ as individuals and yet to give due weight to our identity as part of the larger body.  The question to ask is: is this a tension we live with as we should, or is it one which is too often resolved on one side or the other?  Given the current reaction in Christian circles against individualism variously defined, and a renewed emphasis on community, it is worth asking if the tension is not in danger of resolution in favour of the corporate and at the expense of the individual.

    Take, for example, our faith.  How much do we truly believe for ourselves and how much do we believe because some great figure, some leader in our chosen community, believes?  Or because we just happen to belong to a church where everybody believes the same?   In the American world of celebrity cults and megachurches, even in the Reformed world, this is an acutely pointed and relevant question. Indeed, one does not have to be in a megachurch to see the temptation to sit back and just belong through the formalities of public worship and the vicarious belief of the church as body. But if you take a man and put him on a desert island, or in a place where nobody believes the same things, what will happen to his faith?  Will it survive?  Was it more than a mere public performance or a function of belonging to a particular community?   Stripped of its context, it will stand naked, and appear as it really is.   To put it in a way of which Luther would have approved, only the one who has truly come to the point of despair in himself as an individual can then truly come to faith in the saviour; for he cannot have another to believe on his behalf; the truth he sees is not something `out there' or reported to him by another; it necessarily involves his very being and identity.  One must first believe as an individual before one can belong to the community.

    The is the problem of American Christendom.  Now, all of the palaver about the `end of Christendom' should not fool us into thinking that a form of Christendom does not still exist.   Anywhere where Christianity has become a formality, there is Christendom; anywhere where the belief of the group substitutes for the belief of the individual, there is Christendom; anywhere the rules of the outward game can be learned, executed with panache, and substituted for the attitude of the heart, there is Christendom.  And, lest we forget, the form of that formality can be orthodoxy, just as easily as it can be heterodoxy; it can be rooted in the Westminster Standards just as easily as in the tweets of the latest aspiring authentocrat; it can be found in traditional worship styles as much as in the spontaneity of the new.  And, ironically, American individualism feeds directly into this negation of the individual: the individual as consumer, as dilettante, thrives in a world of large, anonymous churches, churches which happily continue week by week with only 10% of the people engaged in giving of time and money; there are no demands made on the 90% of individuals who make up the corporate entity precisely because the body is essentially self-perpetuating.  The crowd is truly untruth at that point.

    This tension in orthodox Christianity, between being necessarily part of a whole and an individual accountable to God, is something with which all Christians must wrestle.  To resolve it one way or the other would be to lose something crucial, for the Christian faith demands we reject both solipsistic piety and also any notion of the crowd as our mediator. The one cuts us off from the body; the other makes us mere passengers who never engage God for ourselves. 

    There are no easy answers to this; that's what makes it such an interesting and irresolvable tension.  But, as it stands, the church in America seems to have the worst of both worlds: an individualism which does not lead to true individual existence as a Christian, one where I truly take responsibility for myself before God but allow others to do it for me; and which therefore plunges inexorably towards the anonymity of the megachurch and the laziness of the pew-sitting Sunday passenger.   It is not simply the crowd which is untruth at that point.  It is the church as well.

  • A God-Centered Understanding of Sin 29 Jun 2010 | 9:31 am

    The most important truth about sin is the one least recognized in our day. It is this: all sin is primarily sin against God. Where sin is understood as merely a moral concept rather than mainly a religious one,[1]  where it is seen primarily as a person-to-person problem rather than as primarily 'theocentric,'[2]  motivation for fighting sin is decreased and confusion about the character of God is increased. While recognizing the 'horizontal' (person-to-person) nature of sin, the Bible consistently presents sin as mainly a 'vertical' (person-to-God) offence. My purpose in this article is to promote a God-centered understanding of sin by outlining the biblical evidence for the vertical nature of all sin and then reflecting on the manifold pastoral implications of this view. If we are to understand the seriousness of sin and to help ourselves and others think about and fight sin the way we ought to, we must have this God-centered view of sin. 

      

    1. The vertical direction of all sin

     

    The claim that sin is mainly a vertical problem is emphatically not the view of our culture. On the contrary, a lack of reference to God when thinking about sin is evident everywhere. Two recent books illustrate this reality. In Morality Without God?, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, a professor of philosophy and legal studies at Dartmouth College, argues that morality has nothing essentially to do with God or religion.[3] We can justifiably hold that there is such a thing as objective morality, and we can determine right and wrong, with no reference to God. The entire project of Sinnott-Armstrong's book is to divorce morality from God: according to Sinnott-Armstrong, objective morality exists, but God does not. Joseph Epstein's witty and learned book Envy is also symptomatic of the problem I'm highlighting.[4] Although the book is packed with helpful insights into the sin of envy, not once does Epstein talk about envy as having any kind of vertical component, as having anything to do with God. He treats envy purely from a horizontal perspective, dealing solely with the way it affects our relationships with other people. Therefore, whatever Epstein's religious beliefs (he implies in the book that he is not 'in a state of full religious belief'), his book does in practice what Sinnott-Armstrong's book argues for programmatically. Morality and immorality are understood in both books without reference to God.[5]

     

    Sinnott-Armstrong and Epstein, together with many other people (including many Christians) are living in a kind of moral/ethical 'Flatland,'[6] with a two-dimensional view of sin. On this view, sin is something you do to another person or something another person does to you. Granted, most Christians recognize that some sins are sins against God, but the sins they think of as falling into this category are usually those aimed directly at injuring God, such as the worship of other gods, idolatry, or taking the Lord's name in vain. Of course, breaking the first three commandments is sinning against God.[7] But so is breaking any of the Ten Commandments and so are the many sins not mentioned in the Decalogue. The Bible suggests that all sin is sin against God, even when we're not consciously trying to offend God by our sin; even when, in the moment of our sin, God is the very last one on our minds. In order to present the biblical evidence for the vertical direction of all sin, I will focus on three seemingly horizontal sins: adultery, envy, and despising those less fortunate than ourselves.

     

    The vertical direction of adultery

    According to the Bible, adultery is primarily a sin against God. In the course of Abraham's travels, he twice did a despicable and cowardly thing. Because he was afraid the kings of the countries he was visiting would kill him and take his wife, he told them Sarah was his sister. Consequently, Abimelech, the king of Gerar, took Sarah in order to make her his wife. But God came to Abimelech in a dream and told him that if he slept with Sarah he would die because Sarah was another man's wife. Abimelech protested his innocence to God and God agreed that he was in fact innocent: 'Then God said to [Abimelech] in the dream, "Yes, I know that you have done this in the integrity of your heart, and it was I who kept you from sinning against me. Therefore I did not let you touch her"' (Genesis 20.6). According to God, if Abimelech committed adultery with Sarah he would be sinning against God. Other passages offer the same God-centered perspective on the sin of adultery. When the wife of the Egyptian Potiphar tried to seduce Abraham's great-grandson Joseph, he refused and said, 'How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?' (Genesis 39.9). According to Joseph, sleeping with his master's wife would be sinning against God.

     

    King David evidently shared this view. After committing adultery with Bathsheba and ensuring that Bathsheba's husband Uriah was killed in battle, he wrote Psalm 51. In this Psalm, David cries out to God: 'Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight' (Psalm 51.4). For hundreds of years, careful readers of Psalm 51 have been amazed by David's claim that he sinned only against God. What about Bathsheba? What about Uriah her husband? Surely David sinned against them? Of course he did. David's selfish pursuit of sexual pleasure and emotional intimacy with another man's wife was clearly a sin against Bathsheba's husband Uriah, and against Bathsheba's parents, and against Bathsheba herself. We know Paul would have thought so, because he said that the command to love other people 'sums up' the command not to commit adultery (Romans 13.9). When David says he has sinned 'only' against God, he means that by far the greatest offense has been against God.[8] Consequently, all other offenses pale in comparison. Charles Spurgeon saw this clearly: 'The virus of sin lies in its opposition to God: the Psalmist's sense of sin towards others rather tended to increase the force of his feeling of sin against God. All his wrong-doing centred, culminated, and came to a climax, at the foot of the divine throne.'[9]

     

    How did David arrive at this God-centered understanding of his sin? He seems to have learned it from God himself, through Nathan the prophet. In 2 Samuel 12, God sends Nathan to confront David for his sins of murder and adultery. Nathan's message is clearly that David has sinned against Uriah by killing him and taking his wife. But the main thrust of God's message through Nathan is that David has sinned against God. God says: 'Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight?' (2 Samuel 12.9). And God says: 'Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house, because you have despised me and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife.' (2 Samuel 12.10). Nathan says: 'Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the Lord, the child who is born to you shall die' (2 Samuel 12.14). David clearly gets the message. He responds: 'I have sinned against the Lord' (2 Samuel 12.13).

     

    The vertical direction of envy

    I choose to focus on envy here because (as noted above) Joseph Epstein totally ignores the vertical dimension of envy in his book on the subject. The Old Testament book of Numbers tells the story of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, who rebel against Moses as the people of Israel journey through the wilderness (Numbers 16). These three, and at least 250 others, assemble against Moses and Aaron and take exception to the fact that Moses and Aaron have exalted themselves over the rest of Israel by being the only ones (together with Aaron's priestly sons) who can minister in the tabernacle as priests. As Levites, those who are rebelling want to do more than serve in the tabernacle. They want to be priests. Their sin is envy (cf. Psalm 106.16). They want what Moses and Aaron have. And their case is clearly against Moses and Aaron; the story in fact states that, 'they assembled themselves against Moses and against Aaron' (Numbers 16.3).

     

    But that is not how Moses sees it. Moses sees their challenge as being primarily against God: 'Therefore it is against the Lord that you and all your company have gathered together. What is Aaron that you grumble against him?' (Numbers 16.11). Later, the daughters of Zelophehad remember Korah's sin as a gathering together of the people 'against the Lord' (Numbers 27.3). Moses remembers the sin of Dathan and Abiram as contending not only against Moses and Aaron, but 'against the Lord' (Numbers 26.9). This story therefore demonstrates that the sin of envy is not merely sin against another person. That is the way we tend to think of it, as purely horizontal. But the Bible suggests that envy is most basically sin against God.

     

    The vertical direction of despising the less fortunate

     

    A third example of the vertical nature of sins we normally consider 'horizontal' comes from Proverbs. Proverbs 14.31 says: 'Whoever oppresses a poor man insults his Maker, but he who is generous to the needy honors him.' Proverbs 17.5 says: 'Whoever mocks the poor insults his Maker; he who is glad at calamity will not go unpunished.' Leviticus 6.1-3 suggests, similarly, that deceiving one's neighbor in a matter of deposit or security, or robbing one's neighbor, or oppressing one's neighbor, or finding the lost property of one's neighbor and then lying about it, constitutes a 'breach of faith against the Lord.'

     

    The vertical direction of other sins

    Throughout the Bible, we learn of many other sins that from a human-centered perspective are purely horizontal but from a God-centered perspective have a mainly vertical direction. Dishonoring and deserting one's parents and living a debauched life is sinning against God (Luke 15.18, 21). Lying to other people is sinning against God (Acts 5.3-4). The many sins of Sodom, among which were both sexual sins (Genesis 19.5) and economic sins (Ezekiel 16.49-50), were sins against the Lord (Genesis 13.13). Undue fear of other people or circumstances is sin against God, as is presumptuous activity that moves forward without God's blessing (Deuteronomy 1.26-46, esp. 1.41 and 1.43). Grumbling against God's appointed leaders is in fact grumbling against God himself.[10] Child sacrifice is a sin against God (Leviticus 20.1-5). Slander and deceit are sins against God (Psalm 50.17-22). Covetousness is sin against God (Ephesians 5.5; Colossians 3.5). Sins that fracture the Christian community, such as unaddressed anger, corrupting talk, and bitterness, are sins against God (Ephesians 4.30).[11] Persecuting Christians is a sin against Jesus (Acts 9.4-5), as is a failure to love and serve Christians (Matthew 25.41-46).

     

    2. The reason all sin is sin against God

     

    This raises an important question: why is all sin in fact sin against God? There are many reasons. I'll offer four. Sin against others offends God because he is their creator and values them, because he is your creator and has instructed you how to live, and because all sin calls God's character into question.[12] Finally, sin against God's people offends God because God has redeemed them and they belong to him and are united to him.

     

    God is their creator

    First, sin against others offends God because he is their creator. This truth is clearly indicated in Proverbs 14.31, which claims that oppressing a poor man insults his 'Maker.' Hurting another person offends and insults God because God made that person and values them. They bear his image. An offense against the creature is therefore an offense against the loving creator, just as a great sculptor is deeply offended if someone defaces or destroys his favorite creation. Proverbs 17.5 repeats this claim; mocking the poor entails insulting 'his Maker.'[13] Again in this verse, God is identified as the maker of the poor, who bears his image no less than the rich.[14] As Cornelius Plantinga has said, 'Sin offends God not only because it bereaves or assaults God directly, as in impiety or blasphemy, but also because it bereaves and assaults what God has made.'[15] It is encouraging to see recent evangelical works on ethics that recognize the Godward direction of sin. Walter Kaiser rightly claims that murder is a crime not just against another person but also against God: 'Murder, then, amounted to the shooting, mugging, or slaughtering of God himself in effigy. Murder is so serious because it is a crime against the majesty of the divine image in each individual. No matter how disgraced or debauched a person may appear, they are not to be equated with disposable litter or seen simply as disheveled wretches of humanity; they are still made in the image of God and carry enormous intrinsic potential and significance.'[16]

     

    The Godward direction of sin includes not only harming the creature but also overly valuing the creature. Why does Paul, in Ephesians 5.5, equate the 'horizontal' sin of covetousness (likely to be understood as sexual greed) with the 'vertical' sin of idolatry? Because sexual lust, like other kinds of overwhelming desire (e.g. lust for money or power), '...places self-gratification or another person at the centre of one's existence, and thus is the worship of the creature rather than the Creator...'[17]

     

    God is your creator

    Sin against others also offends God because God is your creator. Sin inhibits our ability to display God's image as we were designed by God to do. Moreover, the biblical doctrine of God as creator teaches that God continues to sustain his creation and hold it in existence. In sinning, we misuse and abuse the existence God has given us and in which he sustains us moment by moment. C.S. Lewis expressed these truths clearly: '...indeed the only way in which I can make real to myself what theology teaches about the heinousness of sin is to remember that every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us - an energy which, if not thus distorted, would have blossomed into one of those holy acts whereof "God did it" and "I did it" are both true descriptions. We poison the wine as He decants it into us; murder a melody He would play with us as the instrument. We caricature the self-portrait He would paint. Hence all sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege.'[18]

     

    As our creator, God has established rules for how we are to interact with our fellow human beings. When we resist those rules, we resist his authority as creator. Therefore, sin offends God.[19] Note that the phrase 'I am the Lord' is repeatedly inserted into the legislation about sexual relations in Leviticus 18.1-30.[20] The implication of this repeated phrase is that sexual sin involves God. He is the one who gave the commands and told his people how he wanted them to live (18.4-5, 30).

     

    I cited Leviticus 6.1-3 above. This passage claims that deceiving your neighbor financially or robbing your neighbor or pretending his lost property is your property is actually a breach of faith against the Lord. Why is this the case? We're given the answer just a few verses earlier in Leviticus. Leviticus 5.17 says: 'If anyone sins, doing any of the things that by the Lord's commandments ought not to be done...' The reason our sins involve God is that sin is a violation of his commandments. He has told us how to live, and we have disobeyed him. If a father tells his little boy not to throw stones at the cat, and the little boy nonetheless throws stones at the cat, the boy's actions have caused a rift in his relationship with the cat and with his father. In fact, he has sinned against his father even if his aim is bad and he misses the cat.

     

    The same is true with Israel's sin of fear in Deuteronomy 1.26-46. Israel's fear of the inhabitants of Canaan is sin against God because it involves disobedience to the command of God (1.26, 41), the casting of aspersions on God's character (1.27), and failure to trust God (1.32). Moses explains that Israel's refusal to enter the land was rebellion against the commandment of the Lord and a lack of trust in him.[21] The Godward direction of Israel's fear is manifest in Deuteronomy 9.24: 'You have been rebellious against the Lord from the day that I knew you.'[22]

     

    Sin calls God's character into question

    Sin against others offends God because sin is always saying to God that we know better than he how to make ourselves happy. For this reason, sin inevitably calls the truthfulness of God's plan and promises, and the goodness of his character, into question. It says to God: 'You're a liar.' Therefore sin, in the words of Proverbs 17.5, 'insults' God. The case of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram in Numbers 16 illustrates this. In Numbers 16.8-10, Moses explains that Korah's challenge to Moses and Aaron was in fact a challenging of God himself because it was God, not Moses, who appointed the Levites to their task of serving in the tabernacle and Aaron and his sons to be priests. Therefore, for Korah and the others to assert themselves against Moses and Aaron is to challenge God's wisdom in placing each person where he wants them. Their challenge against Moses and Aaron is therefore sin against God. In envying Moses and Aaron, they are essentially saying to God, 'Your allotment of responsibility is deficient. You should have given us more responsibility.' Consequently, it is God, not Moses or Aaron, who destroys these men and their households by causing the earth to split beneath their feet (Numbers 16.31-35).

     

    Whenever we envy a person who has better looks or a bigger brain than we do, we are saying to God (whether we mean to or not), 'You should have made me different.' We are essentially putting ourselves in the place of God, and this is the very heart of sin.[23] All complaining, in fact, moves in this deadly direction. In The Art of Divine Contentment, the Puritan Thomas Watson claims that, 'murmuring is rising up against God, for thou settest thyself up against God, as though you were wiser than he.'[24] In his sermon on Job 1.21, John Calvin said,

     

    'As soon as God does not send what we have desired, we dispute against Him, we bring suit, not that we appear to do this, but our manner shows that this is nevertheless our intent. We consider every blow, 'And why has this happened?' But from what spirit is this pronounced? From a poisoned heart; as if we said, "The thing should have been otherwise, I see no reason for this." Meanwhile God will be condemned among us. This is how men exasperate themselves. And in this what do they do? It is as if they accused God of being a tyrant or a hairbrain who asked only to put everything in confusion. Such horrible blasphemy blows out of the mouths of men.'[25]

     

    This is dangerous ground upon which to tread. Isaiah 45.9 pronounces woe upon the one who 'strives with him who formed him, a pot among earthen pots!'[26] The connection between envy and questioning God's wisdom and character explains why David's solution to the sin of envying wrongdoers (Psalm 37.1) is to call for trust and delight in the Lord (Psalm 37.3-4). Trusting in God's wisdom and provision punctures the power of the sin of envy.

     

    God has redeemed his people

    Finally, sin against Christians is sin against God because God has redeemed his people.[27] This reality undergirds Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians 8-10. In 1 Corinthians 8.11-13, Paul addresses the issue of whether the Corinthian Christians may eat food offered to idols in the idol temples. Before absolutely prohibiting feasting in temples (which he does in 10.14-22) Paul first focuses on a crucial reason not to eat idol meat in idol temples. One should refrain for the sake of one's brother, in order not to make him sin against his conscience by doing what he believes to be the wrong thing. Paul says that if this 'weak' brother does what he believes is wrong, he is 'destroyed.' Importantly, Paul describes this brother as one 'for whom Christ died' (8.11). Paul then establishes the seriousness of causing one's brother to stumble: 'Thus, sinning against your brothers and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ' (8.12).[28] This vertical direction of the sin convinces Paul to forgo his own rights for the sake of his brother: 'Therefore, if food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I make my brother stumble' (8.13).

     

    3. Why a God-centered perspective on sin is so important

     

    The reason it is crucial to have a God-centered perspective on sin is that we're in a tough fight against a wily enemy. Satan deceives us (John 8.44), sin deceives us (Hebrews 3.13), and we deceive ourselves (Jeremiah 17.9; Ephesians 4.22). In one meeting with a couple who had recently begun attending our church, it became clear that, despite their emphasis that they loved God's Word and were hungry for robust biblical preaching and teaching, they were unmarried and living together. There was obviously a serious disconnect occurring here between belief and practice: sin was deceiving them and they were deceiving themselves. The measure of sin's deceitfulness is its power to produce these strange blind spots and juxtapositions in our lives and unfortunately, examples abound. A young John McCain bravely endures many years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, returns home as a war hero, and begins a series of extramarital affairs. The intrepid, trustworthy, larger-than-life Sir Ernest Shackelton carries on an extramarital affair over a long period of time. The Bible is full of stories of men and women with equally terrible blind spots, and if we take a long, honest look at ourselves we will find them in our own lives. We live with these juxtapositions because sin deceives us and we swallow the lie. John Owen wisely said, 'Without sincerity and diligence in a universality of obedience, there is no mortification of any one perplexing lust to be obtained.'[29]

     

    Like all lies, sin multiplies at an alarming rate, one sin quickly leading to another. Sin rarely travels alone; it prefers to travel in packs. For example, adultery almost always requires deceiving one's partner. Frank Pittman is onto something when he claims that: 'The infidelity [of an affair] is not in the sex, necessarily, but in the secrecy. It isn't whom you lie with. It's whom you lie to.'[30] Well, of course the infidelity is in both whom you lie with and whom you lie to. The point is, they go together. One leads to the other. Our enemy (sin) is devious and fast-growing. Therefore, we must know it well. We must have a God-centered view of it. If we really grasp this perspective, it will help us enormously. Here are the some of the ways a God-centered view of sin will help us.

     

    A God-centered perspective on sin reveals sin's lies

    We sin more readily against people when we believe they have no chance of repaying our wrongs. One of the (many) reasons it is tempting to be rude toward telemarketers and bad drivers in traffic is that we will likely never see them again. Hence, we're almost invariably more impatient and less forgiving toward such people, because we believe they can't pay us back. This deeply mistaken position is revealed for the lie it is by the truth that all sin is sin against God. Because all sin, including so-called 'horizontal' sins, has a Godward direction, there is no sin that God does not care about. Every sin must be paid for, either at the cross by Jesus, or in eternity by the sinner. God demands it. When I was a boy my brothers and I put burrs into the hair of the little girl who lived next door. We thought that was very funny, because she couldn't get back at us. But when she went home and told her mom, who got angry and called our parents, the situation quickly escalated from funny to serious. We will do well to remember that sin angers God and provokes the vengeance of Jesus Christ (2 Thessalonians 1.8). God has no further preparations to make for the final judgment; he is 'ready' to judge the living and the dead (1 Peter 4.5).

     

    We're also more tempted to commit certain sins when we believe they are relatively trivial and insignificant. A white lie is just white. A little cheating on the exam is just a tiny thing. When we come to see that all sin, including the so-called 'little' sins, have a Godward direction, we realize that even these sins are actually sins 'of the deepest dye.'[31] J.I. Packer says, 'there are no small sins against a great God.'[32] Truly embracing this God-centered perspective will have transformative effects upon our marriages.[33] It will motivate us to wage war against the sins with which we once were willing to make peace. The seventeenth century English pastor John Flavel imagined the voice of temptation as saying: 'It's only a small matter, a trifle. Who else would worry about such a trivial thing?' Flavel suggested what the believer should say in response: 'Is the majesty of heaven a small matter too? If I commit this sin, I will offend and wrong a great God. Is there any little hell to torment little sinners? Great wrath awaits those the world thinks are little sinners.'[34] 

     

    We are also more likely to commit a sin when we believe it will not harm anyone. Envy is a particularly good example of this. Who does envy harm, particularly if you don't even tell the person you envy that you envy them? And suppose I envy some famous person I will never meet? Where's the harm in that? Without an understanding of the Godward direction of sin, the resultant harm of such a sin appears minimal or even non-existent. But understanding sin from a God-centered perspective sheds light on this issue by opening our eyes to the reality that all sin grieves God (Ephesians 4.30). Ed Welch writes from this God-centered perspective: 'Even if our sin does not seem to be hurting another human being, it is still sin. If sin was reduced to hurting others, then we could become morally perfect by isolating ourselves from all people. Sin, however, is not primarily a human-against-human action. It is human-against-God.'[35] The implication of this perspective is that there is no 'harmless' sin.

     

    Finally, we are more likely to commit a sin if we are not even aware it is a sin. Unless we understand sin with a view toward how it affects God, we will be deluded into thinking that some sins are not really sinful. Living all of life consciously before God opens up whole new areas that we come to see as no longer value-neutral but rather as matters of holiness or sin. To take two quite distinct examples, we might reflect upon self-harm and time management. The implications of viewing morality from a purely horizontal perspective are seen in the work of Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, who (as I noted above) has written an entire book arguing for objective morality without God. This position has important implications for Sinnott-Armstrong's understanding of self-harm. He claims it is irrational, not immoral, to cause harm to oneself without an adequate reason.[36] Suicide, for example, is merely irrational. It seems to me that this claim can only be true within a worldview that fails to take the presence of God and his ownership of our persons into account. Writing from within the Christian tradition, Aquinas taught that suicide is not just a failure of one's duty to self and community, but also a failure of one's duty to God.[37] When we understand that we are the work of a creator God and that we have a responsibility to the God who has redeemed and indwelt us (1 Corinthians 6.19-20), self-harm is rightly seen as sin against God.

     

    How we choose to use our time is not (as it is perceived in the secular time management books) a value-neutral discussion that boils down to being more productive or less productive. That is only the case if we see our time and how we use it in purely horizontal terms. But when we see time as a gift given to us by God and understand ourselves as responsible to God for how we use it, we come to understand time management as a matter of sin or righteousness. In The Preciousness of Time and the Importance of Redeeming It, Jonathan Edwards manifests a profoundly God-centered view of time management, pressing upon his readers the truth that we are accountable to God for our time and will need to give an account for our poor use of it. Edwards' vertical perspective is totally missing from most modern discussions of time management. As Walter Henegar notes, procrastination is acceptable in our culture, viewed sometimes even as an endearing personality quirk.[38] C.J. Mahaney nicely summarizes the discovery Henegar came to as he analyzed his own strong propensity toward procrastination: 'What Mr. Henegar discovered was the simple truth that underlying our procrastination -- putting off the most important duties we are called to accomplish -- was not so much a busy schedule but a sinful heart.'[39] Procrastination, seen in its vertical dimension, is not just a 'bad habit' or a lack of productivity, but rather a sin against God himself.

     

    A God-centered perspective gives us the proper motivation for fighting sin

     

    Why do we fight sin? Sometimes simply because we hate its consequences, or because we're ashamed of the stigma attached to it, or because we want to experience the thrill of victory in conquering it. These are inadequate reasons. Realizing that all sin is sin against God helps us to fight sin for the right reason - because we know it hurts God, and that is the last thing we want. Jerry Bridges says it well when he explains that our problem 'is that our attitude towards sin is more self-centered than God-centered. We are more concerned about our own "victory" over sin than we are about the fact that our sins grieve the heart of God.'[40]

     

    A God-centered perspective on sin shows the gospel to be sensible and sweet

     

    The way we view sin is a gospel issue. Thomas Watson wrote, 'Till sin be bitter, Christ will not be sweet.'[41] If we think of sin as merely a horizontal problem, we may begin to believe that our sin is small and our virtue is sizable, and that therefore we're just about good enough for heaven and not quite bad enough for hell. Realizing the vertical nature of sin disabuses us of that notion because it reveals to us the catastrophic seriousness of sin. The more bitter our sin becomes to us, the more sweet will be the gospel.

     

    If sins are merely horizontal, the gospel is not only less sweet - it is not even sensible. The gospel is the good news that God freely rescues us from eternal punishment and destines us for eternal life in his presence, in a new heavens and new earth. But the biblical doctrine of an eternal hell makes no sense if sin is merely a human-to-human offense. Clark Pinnock offers the following objection to the doctrine of eternal punishment: 'It just does not make sense to say that a God of love will torture people forever for sins done in the context of a finite life.'[42] Pinnock would be correct concerning the injustice of a punishment that lasts 'forever' for sins committed in a 'finite' life, except for the fact that each of these sins offend an infinitely precious God. The seriousness of sin is a function of the worth and value of the one who is sinned against.[43] Because all sin is against God, all sin is infinitely serious. For this reason, hell is just.[44]

     

    A few years ago, my wife and I visited one of Berlin's most famous art museums. Failing to notice a line on the floor that ran around the perimeter of each room about two feet from the wall, I enjoyed getting close up to the paintings, observing how the paint had been applied and studying the brush strokes. As I stood a few inches from one of the paintings, I had one of those sudden, crazy impulses one sometimes get in art museums: what would happen if I raised my elbow and drove my elbow straight through the painting? Thankfully, I resisted the impulse! Eventually one of the museum attendants pointed to the line on the floor and told me I had to stand behind it. The paintings were so valuable that they didn't want me to get within two feet of them, let alone put my elbow through one.

    The penalty for destroying a Bruegel or a Rembrandt or a Monet at this art gallery is greater than the penalty for destroying a postcard of the same painting being sold in the museum shop. Suppose I jab a scissors through a Rembrandt. I may be physically tackled by the attendant and I will surely face months of litigation, a significant financial penalty, and perhaps time in prison. But now suppose I jab a scissors through the postcard of the same painting in the museum gift shop. I will almost certainly not be tackled (unless the gift shop attendant is overly zealous). Rather, I will owe a couple Euro to the shop and I may not be welcome there anymore. Why the drastic difference in penalties? It's the same painting. The difference is that the original is more valuable than a postcard of the original. The seriousness of an offense is related to the worth of the one (or the thing) offended. In most societies around the world, the penalty for damaging a flower is less than that for cruelty to animals. And the penalty for cruelty to animals is less than that for child abuse. Why? Because a puppy is more valuable than a flower, and a baby is more valuable than a puppy. In fact, the penalty for injuring a human being is greater than the penalty for killing a flower because human beings are considered so much more valuable than flowers.

    Humans are in serious trouble because we have offended God, and there is no being in the universe more valuable than God. In the terms of our analogy, we have pierced not the postcard but the painting. God is a being who is valuable in every way. He is the most valuable being in the universe. And God is the one whom humans have offended. That is why our sin against him is so desperately serious. This was all seen and said by Jonathan Edwards in his remarkable sermon, 'The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners.'[45] Edwards has nuanced my view of why sin against God is infinitely serious by introducing the important concept of obligation. According to Edwards, 'The crime of one being despising and casting contempt on another, is proportionably more or less heinous, as he was under greater or less obligations to obey him.' The degree of obligation toward a being is in turn proportionate to that being's 'loveliness, honorableness, and authority.' God is infinitely lovely, infinitely excellent, infinitely beautiful. Therefore, I owe him total allegiance. Therefore, sin against him is infinitely evil[46] and deserving of infinite punishment.[47] In the course of the sermon, Edwards applies the truth that, 'It is just that God eternally cast off and destroy sinners' in order to produce conviction in his hearers. But at the end of his sermon he briefly addresses the 'godly.' They should see afresh the 'freeness and wonderfulness of the grace of God towards them.'[48] This should lead to praise of God and to humility: 'You shall never open your mouth in boasting, or self-justification; but lie the lower before God for his mercy to you.'

     

    The truth of the Godward direction of sin, in other words, makes the gospel both sensible and sweet. This truth should stagger us all over again with the grace of God in our lives. When we realize the greatness of our sin, the fact that we deserve eternal punishment and separation from God in hell, we come to see the glory of the gospel, the declaration that God offers us free pardon. We enter into relationship with him through no merit of our own. Instead of hell, we get heaven. David Wells says this forcefully and beautifully in The Courage to Be Protestant:

     

    'Without the holiness of God, sin has no meaning and grace has no point. God's holiness gives to the one its definition and to the other its greatness. Without the holiness of God, sin is merely human failure, but not failure before God....Without the holiness of God, grace is no longer grace because it does not arise from the dark clouds of his judgment that covered the cross. Without God's holiness, grace would be nothing more than sentimental benevolence. It is this holiness that shows the graciousness of grace, its character as unmerited, because it also shows us the offensiveness of sin.'[49]

     

    4. Conclusion: the hope offered by a God-centered perspective on sin

     

    The realization that all our sin is chiefly sin against God is both sobering and hope-giving. It is sobering because, as we have seen, it means there are no 'small' sins. All sin is sin against God and therefore infinitely serious. But it is also hope-giving, because God is merciful. This is the positive side to our sinning against God. When offered a choice, David chose to fall into the merciful hand of God rather than the hands of men (2 Samuel 24.14). The reason God has mercy on his people is precisely because he is God and not a man (Hosea 11.8-9).

     

    I pointed above to 2 Samuel 12, where Nathan confronts David with the Godward direction of his sins of murder and adultery. There is a poignant moment at the very end of their exchange. David recognizes the vertical dimension of his sin: 'David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the Lord"' (2 Samuel 12.13). Nathan then responds to David with an assurance of the remarkable mercy of the Lord: 'And Nathan said to David, "The Lord also has put away your sin; you shall not die"' (2 Samuel 12.13). The God we offend is the very God who forgives.[50] A significant part of developing a God-centered understanding of sin is relating to God as the one who forgives our sin and helps us battle against it. William Arnot has seen this clearly: 'The difference between an unconverted and a converted man is not that one has sins and the other has none; but that the one takes part with his cherished sins against a dreaded God, and the other takes part with a reconciled God against his hated sins.'[51]

     

    Sin, as Jonathan Edwards observed, is like a sickness of the eyes that confuses us as to the true colors of things, or like a sickness that affects our ability to taste, so that we can't distinguish good, wholesome food from bad food. Sin ruins our ability to discern spiritual things.[52] Consequently, in our fight against sin, we must shine the clear light of biblical truth upon both it and ourselves. Truly understanding our enemy is an important step in winning victory over it. I hope this article will be useful as one part of the process of understanding and battling the enemy. The gospel fruit of a God-centered perspective on sin should be not dismay but rather delight in the finished work of Christ and greater determination in the battle against sin. Soren Kierkegaard once prayed: 'Father in heaven! Hold not our sins up against us but hold us up against our sins, so that the thought of thee, when it wakens, should not remind us of what we have committed but of what thou didst forgive, not of how we went astray but of how thou didst save us!'[53]

     

     

     

    Stephen Witmer (Ph.D., University of Cambridge) has lectured in New Testament at the University of Cambridge and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and is now the pastor of Pepperell Christian Fellowship in Pepperell, Massachusetts. He has written Divine Instruction in Early Christianity (2008) and has published articles in several journals, including New Testament Studies, Novum Testamentum, and Themelios.

     


    [1] The categories are those of Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 12.

    [2] Cf. Richard Gaffin, 'Atonement in the Pauline Corpus,' pages 140-62 in Charles E. Hill and Frank A. James, III, Eds., The Glory of the Atonement (Downer's Grover: Intervarsity Press, 2004), 146.

    [3] Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Morality Without God? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

    [4] Joseph Epstein, Envy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

    [5] Of course, this is hardly a new approach. Francis Hutcheson, one of the 18th century ethicists to whom Jonathan Edwards was responding in his Dissertation Concerning the Nature of True Virtue, suggested that people could be good without any reference to God. Cf. Nick Nowalk. 'On Being Narrow-Minded,' The Harvard Ichthus 5 (2010), 14-19.

    [6] See the famous work of Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Toronto: Dover Publications, 1992, orig. publication 1884).

    [7] The Bible refers often to sins that are directly against God, e.g. Jeremiah 48.29-30, 42; 50.7, 14.

    [8] Cf. the sermon 'The Gospel of Jesus Christ,' by D.A. Carson: 'In all our sinning, God is invariably the most offended party.'

    [9] Charles H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of David, vol. 1 (Peabody: Hendrickson), 403.

    [10] Compare Exodus 15.24;16.2 with Exodus 16.6-8; and cf. Exodus 17.2-3, 7. Also compare Numbers 20.2-3 with Numbers 20.13. This point has clear contemporary relevance for those under the authority of church leaders (Acts 20.28; Ephesians 4.11) and secular leaders (Romans 13.1). Cf. John 3.33-34, which makes a different but related point: to believe the one who God has sent is to affirm that God is true. If we receive the one Jesus sent we receive Jesus and therefore have received God (John 13.20; cf. Matthew 10.40; 18.5; Mark 9.37; Luke 9.48).

    [11] Cf. Peter O'Brien, The Letter to the Ephesians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 348.

    [12] These three reasons correspond to the points made by Charles Bridges, A Commentary on Proverbs (Carlisle: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1983, orig. publication 1846), 191.

    [13] Perhaps in this verse the offence is 'mocking' rather than 'oppressing' (as in Proverbs 14.31) because in this case there is no power to actually oppress the poor. Cf. Bridges, Proverbs, 257.

    [14] Cf. Charles Bridges, Proverbs, 257: 'The poor is so, not by fortune, but by Providence. The reproach therefore falls, not on the poor, but on His Maker - on Him who made him, and made him poor...'

    [15] Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way, 16.

    [16] Walter Kaiser, What Does the Lord Require? A Guide for Preaching and Teaching Biblical Ethics (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 133.

    [17] Peter O'Brien, Ephesians, 363.

    [18] C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. (New York: Harcourt, 1964), 69.

    [19] Cf. Romans 8.7: 'For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot.'

    [20] The phrase 'I am the Lord' appears in Leviticus 18.5, 6, 21, 30.

    [21] Deuteronomy 7.17-21; 9.22-24.

    [22] Cf. 1 Samuel 14.33, 34, where Saul's men who eat animals with the blood are said to be 'sinning against the Lord' because they are disobeying his command in Leviticus 3.17.

    [23] Cf. Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2008), 43.

    [24] Quoted in C.J. Mahaney's sermon, 'Sustaining the Pastor's Soul.'

    [25] John Calvin, Sermons from Job, trans. Leroy Nixon (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1952), 29-30. Quoted in Robert D. Jones, 'Anger against God,' The Journal of Biblical Counseling 14: 1996, 17.

    [26] Cf. Charles Bridges, Proverbs, 257.

    [27] Cf. Matthew 25.41-46; Acts 9.4-5.

    [28] Cf. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 159-60.

    [29] John Owen, Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers (Carlisle: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1995), 40.

    [30] Quoted in Walter Kaiser, What Does the Lord Require?,69.

    [31] Charles Bridges, Proverbs, 257, commenting on Proverbs 17.5.

    [32] James I. Packer, God's Plans for You (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2001), 44.

    [33] Cf. Dave Harvey, When Sinners Say "I Do" (Wapwallopen, PA: Shepherd Press, 2007), 41-43.

    [34] Quoted in Tim Chester, You Can Change (Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 2008), 141.

    [35] Ed Welch, 'Homosexuality: Current Thinking and Biblical Guidelines,' Journal of Biblical Counseling13 (1995): 19-29. The quotation is from page 24.

    [36] Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Morality Without God?, 62.

    [37] Cited in Walter Kaiser, What Does the Lord Require?,141.

    [38] Henegar, Walter, "Putting Off Procrastination," Journal of Biblical Counseling 20, 2001, 40-45.

    [39] C.J. Mahaney, 'Biblical Productivity,' page 6 of an aggregate of blog posts from: http://www.sovereigngraceministries.org/Blog/

    [40] Quoted in Tim Chester, You Can Change, 128.

    [41] Quoted in Dave Harvey, When Sinners Say I Do, 16.

    [42] Quoted in John Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad! (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993), 127.

    [43] John Piper, The Passion of Jesus Christ (Wheaton: Crossway, 2004), 21 rightly notes that, 'Sin is not small, because it is not against a small Sovereign. The seriousness of an insult rises with the dignity of the one insulted.'

    [44] Cf. Graham Beynon, Last Things First (Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 2010), 88-90.

    [45] See also Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1 (Carlisle: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1998), 298.

    [46] 'And therefore if there be any being that we are under infinite obligations to love, and honour, and obey, the contrary towards him must be infinitely faulty.' 'The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners.' in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1 (Carlisle: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1998), 669.

    [47] '...if there be any such thing as a fault infinitely heinous, it will follow that it is just to inflict a punishment for it that is infinitely dreadful' 'The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners,' 669.

    [48] 'The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners,' 679.

    [49] David Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 241.

    [50] Though we must nevertheless often bear the consequences of our actions (2 Samuel 12.14).

    [51] Laws from Heaven for Life on Earth: Illustrations of the Book of Proverbs (orig., London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1884), 311. Quoted in Greg Gilbert, What Is the Gospel? (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010).

    [52] Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections, 263.

    [53] Quoted in Ben Patterson, Waiting (Downers Grove: Inter-Varsity Press, 1989), 87.

  • In Memoriam, James Montgomery Boice (1938-2000) 16 Jun 2010 | 9:07 am

    June 15 marks the tenth anniversary of the death of James Montgomery Boice, who was for thirty-two years the pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, the dean of Reformed pastor-scholars in his generation, and my beloved pastor.  The enduring image of Dr. Boice in my mind is also the first, when I had walked into Tenth Church for an evening service in 1990: standing in the pulpit preaching God's Word with authority, clarity, and both intellectual and spiritual power.  The ten years since his death have seen little decrease in his standing and influence among evangelical Christians.  Through his continuing radio ministry on The Bible Study Hour and especially through his writings, Boice continues not only to teach the Scriptures and its great doctrines, but he continues to anchor the commitment of his followers and admirers to the innerancy and sufficiency of God's living Word.

    In my opinion, the reason for James Boice's influence and legacy is seldom understood.  What was it about him that drew so wide an audience of pastors and laypeople?  The answer is that as a Reformed theologian, James Boice was a Christian first.  That is, the issues for which he stood were Christian issues: the inerrancy of Scripture, the gospel of faith in Jesus, the sin-cleansing power of Christ's blood, and the Christian witness for the salvation of the lost.   It is true that Boice served this Christian and evangelical cause from a distinctively Reformed perspective, but his cause was simply that of Christ and his gospel.  It is in this way that Boice so ably advanced the credibility of Reformed theology within evangelicalism, by showing that it is only the Reformed doctrine that can consistently uphold Christian distinctives.  Boice taught, proved, and defended Calvinism by teaching, proving, and defending the Bible.  On a personal level this Christ-centered priority was also true for James Boice.  While Boice was a Calvinist through and through, his passion was for the person and work of Jesus Christ, and his labor was offered in personal service to his living and reigning Lord and Savior.  Calvinism was ever the servant of Boice's passion for Jesus and never the master.

    I think that James Boice's ministerial career can be seen in three phases.  The first phase of his career, from the mid-1960's to around 1980, involved the defense of evangelical doctrine against liberal assaults.  These were the years when Boice was wrapping up the education he received in liberal institutions like Princeton Seminary and the University of Basel.  In his John commentary, dating from these early years, one will frequently read Boice defending the Bible from the interpretations of liberals like Rudolf Bultmann.  These were also the years when Boice was ordained in the liberal United Presbyterian Church, so that the context for his ministry was that of opposition to liberal attacks on the Bible.  It is no surprise that Boice's chief concern during these years was to defend the inerrancy and authority of Scripture, as seen in his leadership of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy (ICBI).  

    The second phase of Boice's ministry took place from around 1980-- when Tenth Presbyterian Church left the liberal UPC and eventually made its way into the evangelical Presbyterian Church in America -- until 1993.  This phase of Boice's ministry focused on the teaching of Reformed theology within an evangelical context.  Boice believed that the evangelical movement could only maintain its doctrinal moorings (and therefore its spiritual vitality) by standing on the foundation laid by the Protestant Reformers (and the apostles before them).  The crowning achievements of this period of Boice's ministry were his four-volume commentary on Romans, which not only lays out the biblical basis for Reformed doctrine but also shows the necessity of these doctrines for Christian faith and life, and his lay-friendly systematic theology, Foundations of the Christian Faith.  

    The final phase of Boice's ministry can be dated from the publishing of David Well's book, No Place for Truth, in 1993, which uncovered the looming danger of worldliness in the faith and practice of evangelical churches.  These years saw Boice emphasize not merely the inerrancy of the Bible but also the sufficiency of Scripture for the church's evangelism, holiness, guidance, and cultural impact.  It was around this time, 1994, that Boice (along with Michael Horton) founded the Alliance for Confessing Evangelicals, which carries on his work to this day.  One of Boice's final and best books issued this clarion call to reformation, Whatever Happened to the Gospel of Grace? a book which retains every bit of its relevance today and will continue to be relevant for decades to come.

    Was James Boice successful in his endeavors as a Christian statesman?  I think the answer is that he was remarkably successful as God blessed his Bible teaching and statesmanship.  As for his early defense of the Bible, Boice did not persuade the liberals, but his and others' efforts did anchor a generation of evangelicals to the inerrancy of Scripture.  As for his middle years and their emphasis on Reformed doctrine as key to the gospel, Boice lived to see the beginnings of the Reformed awakening that is now in full bloom among so many evangelical Christians.  When Boice founded the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology in 1974, experts insisted that no one wanted to hear Reformed teaching much less pay to attend such a conference.  Today, not only is Boice's PCRT still going strong (with over 2000 people attending in 2010), but it has spurred a host of even larger conferences such as the annual Ligonier Conference and the more recent Together for the Gospel.  Finally, as for Boice's later endeavors as a reforming leader, in this he also was blessed by God with considerable success.  It is true that Boice, the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, and other like-minded groups have not stemmed the flood of worldliness and doctrinal infidelity in the broader evangelical world.  But Boice did inspire a generation of young Christian leaders who are passionately committed to biblical fidelity and filled with gospel zeal.  In the last couple of years of his life, Boice often spoke to me about his excitement for the future due to the emergence of so many fervent, well-grounded young pastors and lay leaders.  Jim Boice did not die with a sense of failure but with a joyful optimism regarding what God would do in the coming years through the legion of fervent, Bible-believing, cross-exalting, sovereign grace-proclaiming Christians he saw coming behind him.

    One way for me to eulogize James Montgomery Boice is to recount both the first and the last things he ever said personally to me.  My first conversation with Boice took place at a congregational dinner of Tenth Church, shortly after I had been converted and joined the church.  I remember arriving late for the meal in the church's crowed fellowship hall, filled with circular dinner tables, and seeing no available seat except for one directly next to the senior minister, Dr. Boice.  I suppose others were too intimidated to sit next to the great preacher, but I was thrilled.  During the meal I recounted to Boice how I had been growing under his preaching and especially how my reading of his books was enriching my soul and leading me into truth.  After a bit of this, Boice interrupted me and said, "Young man, you are talking too much about me.  I would suggest that you stop reading my books and start reading the Bible for yourself, focusing on the truth that Jesus will teach you by the Holy Spirit."  At the time I was downcast over this reproof, but the episode left a permanent impact on me on the importance of being devoted to Christ and his Word rather than the teaching of any man.

    My final meeting with James Boice took place about ten years later, just a few days before he died.  A group of us from the church had gone to his home to see him for a last time and to sing some of the hymns he had written and which were set to music by Paul Jones.  The last of these hymns we sang was in my view Boice's best: "Come to the Waters," a hymn gathering together all the "water of life" themes in the Bible as they flow from the gospel.  (If you want to feel the very heart-beat of James Boice's ministry, just sing this hymn!)  Sitting on the couch with Jim afterwards, he grabbed my arm and in his cancer-weakened voice he said to me, "Rick, do you see what I am saying in that hymn?  It all flows to Jesus and out from him.  Don't ever forget that!"  By God's grace, I don't believe I ever will forget it, and I will certainly never forget the inspirational, Christ-centered life and ministry of my friend and pastor, James Montgomery Boice.

    Not long after that final meeting, I had the privilege of preaching the evening sermon at Tenth on the Sunday after Dr. Boice died.  Phil Ryken and I had scripted that Sunday, with him preaching a pastoral message of comfort to the congregation in the morning and with me preaching a memorial message that evening.  I chose as my text 2 Kings 2:11-15, the ascension of Elijah in a chariot of fire.  One reason for selecting this text was that when I had learned weeks earlier that Dr. Boice would soon die of cancer, I had gotten onto my knees and prayed for God to give me double the portion of the Spirit so as to be one of those who would carry on Jim's work.  In the sermon I wanted to point out that we as a congregation could take up Boice's legacy, like the mantel that fell from Elijah's ascending chariot, and carry it on by holding forth the convictions he had taught us from God's Word.  A couple of days before preaching the sermon, however, Phil Ryken gave me a cassette tape of a message Boice had preached on that passage.  I had thought that Jim had never preached from that text, but it turned out that he had done so for his tenth anniversary as Tenth's pastor.  In that sermon, Boice revealed that when he was a seminary student at Princeton in 1960, his father had called to tell him about the sudden death of Donald Grey Barnhouse, then pastor of Tenth Church and Boice's pulpit hero.  Jim related how when he heard the news, he fell to his knees in his room and prayed for God to give him double the portion of Elijah if he was to take up the mantle of so great a man as Barnhouse.  I ended up telling this story in my memorial sermon for Boice, pointing out that he was, like us, simply a man of faith who had prayed to be used by God.  It is therefore our sovereign and gracious God who deserves the praise and glory for the life and ministry of James Montgomery Boice, as Dr. Boice himself would be the first to insist.  If we will pray for the same - for God's mighty Spirit to equip us to minister the gospel truth to our generation - we can expect God to do great things through our labors as well.  

    Dr. Boice's favorite benediction from the Bible says of God that "from him and through him and to him are all things."  Paul concludes, "To him be glory forever.  Amen" (Rom. 11:36).  It was James Montgomery Boice's own glorification to leave us and be with God, ten years ago today, having devoted his life and labors to the praise of God's glorious grace.

  • Preaching to People? 10 Jun 2010 | 3:06 pm

    Relatively early in my preaching career I had the opportunity to preach the opening sermon at a conference.  The main conference speaker was a man that I consider to be one of the finest preachers of our times.  After hearing me preach he paid me a compliment that I did not fully appreciate or understand at the time.  He said to me something like, "You are one of the few young preachers in the denomination who actually recognizes that he is preaching to people."  At first, I did not understand what he meant, but then I proceeded to listen to him preach over the subsequent days of the conference and as my heart was moved by God's Word preached through him I began to get it.  

    Unfortunately, as I matured in my ministry I soon forgot that early lesson and drifted into a practice of "wikipreaching" in which I provided people with biblical facts rather than the Word preached.  I preached at people rather than to people.  I gave them research papers that proved my knowledge of the original languages and systematic theology, but tended little to their souls.  I forgot that I was supposed to be preaching to people.  How about you?  Are you preaching to people?

    Now at first blush this question may seem utterly ridiculous.  You are probably saying, "Of course I am preaching to people!  They are sitting there in the pews before me and I am speaking directly to them."  But I am not talking about simply making audible noises in the general direction of the congregation; rather I am talking about preaching that is consciously directed at the heart of the believer.  I am talking about preaching that understands that the pews are filled with pilgrims who are voyaging through a spiritual wilderness, not with students who are trying to earn their certificate in Reformed theological studies.  I believe the Reformed church is in desperate need of preachers who are passionate about preaching to people rather than merely giving a theological lecture or an oral commentary on a biblical text.  

    Now before I am accused of joining the ranks of the emergent, let me state without equivocation that preaching must be both theologically sound and built upon the foundation of careful biblical exegesis.  I am not advocating for fluffy felt-needs sermons that tickle the ears of post-moderns searching for existential authenticity.  I am simply calling for sermons which are delivered with the recognition that preaching, while targeting the intellect, is ultimately aimed at transforming the heart and the will of the actual living and breathing people sitting in the pews.  The importance of this need has been brought to my attention recently in three ways.  

    First, there was Iain Murray's excellent article in the February 2010 issue of Banner of Truth magazine entitled, "Expository Preaching - Time for Caution."  In this article Murray admonishes preachers that they need to do more than simply instruct in their sermons:

    "Preaching needs to be much more than an agency of instruction. It needs to strike, awaken, and arouse men and women so that they themselves become bright Christians and daily students of Scripture. If the preacher conceives his work primarily in terms of giving instruction, rather than of giving stimulus, the sermon, in most hands, very easily becomes a sort of weekly 'class'--an end in itself."

    Murray goes on to describe the traditional Scottish distinction between a "lecture" and a "sermon."  The former was an on-going commentary like address on the content of a passage, the latter was a completed distinct message tailored to move the heart of people.  Murray laments that much of what goes under the title of "sermon" today in the Reformed church is really nothing more than a "lecture."  Whatever you think about Murray's criticism of the expository method as presently practiced, his warnings about Reformed preaching turning into Reformed lecturing is one that I have taken to heart.

    A second way God brought this need to my attention was through my wife's devotional reading.  She is presently using volume two of D.A. Carson's excellent daily devotional, For the Love of God (Crossway, 1999).  She brought the reading for April 21 to my attention in which Carson comments on 2 Timothy 4:2, "Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage--with great patience and careful instruction."  I found Carson comments on the phrase "correct, rebuke and encourage" particularly challenging:

    "Preaching the Word means more than the mere conveying of information. There is information, of course, but it is so shaped and applied that it functions in one or more of these transforming ways. Thus the minister of the Gospel is necessarily a spiritual diagnostician, discerning the ailment and knowing what remedies to apply.  Pity the ministry of the Word who applies encouragement when rebuke is called for, or the reverse."

    Carson reminded me of the importance of doing spiritual triage before I preach.  He reminded me to assess the real lives of the people I am preaching to you and to tailor the application accordingly. He reminded me that the preacher must be a spiritual cardiologist.

    The third way this need came to my attention was an article on the power of God's Word co-authored by Joel Beeke and Ray Lanning.  The article is entitled "The Transforming Power of Scripture" and it appeared in the book, Sola Scriptura: The Protestant Position on the Bible (Reformation Trust, 2009).  In this article the authors call on preachers to preach "experimentally" as well as doctrinally.  That is, they call on preachers to preach to the actual Christian experience of real people trying to live the Christian life.  The authors make the following observation regarding what is often lacking in modern preaching:

    "The Word of God is often preached today in a way that will never transform anyone because it never discriminates or applies.  Preaching is then reduced to a lecture, a demonstration, a catering to the wishes and comforts of men, or a form of 'experientialism' that is cut loose from the foundation of Scripture.  Such preaching fails to expound from the Scripture what the Reformers called vital religion: how a sinner is continually stripped of his own righteousness; how he is driven to Christ alone for a full-orbed salvation; how he finds joy in simple reliance upon Christ and strives after obedience to Him; how he encounters the plague of indwelling sin, battles against backsliding, and gradually gains full victory by faith in Christ." (127)

    I can remember having far too little esteem for the "experimental" or "experiential" preaching crowd in my early days in seminary.  I was too full of my more "academic" and "high-minded" redemptive-historical approach to indulge in the misguided casuistry of the neo-puritans. Then I attended one of the Banner of Truth minister's conferences and realized that I had something to learn from these men and their passion to apply God's Word to the heart of the believers and to the essence of the Christian experience.  Beeke and Lanning have reminded me that I still have much to learn from them.

    After being bombarded by these admonishments, I have vowed to improve my preaching accordingly.  Therefore, as I prepare my sermons I purposely remind myself that I am preaching to real people not some theoretical, abstract, homogenized and faceless congregation.  I remind myself of the struggling mother, the man with the chronically ill wife, the family with the wayward son and the guy who has no idea what grace really is.  I remind myself that I am proclaiming God's Word from a pulpit and not a lectern.  I remind myself that God's Word is a sharp-two edged sword and not a dull pocket knife.  I remind myself that I am preaching to people.  How about you?  Are you preaching to people?

    Anthony T. Selvaggio is a Teaching Elder in the Rochester Reformed Presbyterian Church (RPCNA, Rochester, NY) where he regularly contributes to the preaching ministry.  He has many published works the latest of which is The Seven Signs:  Seeing the Glory of Christ in the Gospel of John (Reformation Heritage Books, 2010).   

  • Against the Tide 10 Jun 2010 | 2:57 pm

    Miroslav Volf is a distinguished scholar. He is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School and he is the director of the Yale Centre for Faith and Culture. His theological trajectory includes being the son of a Pentecostal pastor in Novi Sad (former Yugoslavia) during the communist regime of Marshall Tito; he gained a BA at the Evangelical-Theological Faculty in Zagreb, Croatia; an MA at Fuller Theological Seminary; and Dr Theol., at the University of Tübingen, Germany. 

    It is well known that he is a close friend to his mentor and research supervisor, Professor Jürgen Moltmann. Arguably, Moltmann provides one of the most significant influences upon Volf's thinking and two theological impulses that run through his writings are the themes of liberation and the Trinity. These themes are particularly expressed in Volf's books Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (1996), winner of the 2002 Grawemeyer Award; and After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (1998), winner of the Christianity Today award. Additionally, Volf's Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (2005) attains the esteem of being the Archbishop of Canterbury's official, 2006 Lenten book.

    Against the Tide reads as a collection of loosely tied, short (two to three pages) devotional essays, which are systematised into nine broad categories. As a Yale scholar, Volf leads a 'less than ordinary life' and these essays are peppered with stories from around the globe. Illustration material is drawn from skiing trips, visits to Jerusalem, India, Jordan and the Balkans, a research sabbatical in Tübingen, and inter-faith dialogue meetings. Volf states that his overall aim in this book is what he calls 'project love' (x-xii), where he seeks to expound on this single divine attribute, so that Christians can 'reflect' in their 'lives, the love that God is' (xi).

    'God and the Self' (1-20) is the first heading. In the six discourses that follow, Volf attempts to magnify the attribute of love at the exclusion of other divine characteristics such as mercy, righteousness, wrath, truth and grace, none of which are adequately handled. (Volf does mention God's wrath later in the book and he expounds; 'God's wrath is nothing but God's stance of active opposition to evil' (30). This re-interpreted notion deserves further critical scrutiny.) It is immediately evident that Volf is well-read and he refers to Søren Kierkegaard (5), Antonio Salieri (6), Martin Luther (9), and Friedrich Nietzsche (12). The last essay of this sub-section is entitled 'Dancing for God'; this metaphor deserves further comment because it appears to be gaining ground in some circles. For example Timothy Keller writes of 'The Dance of God' in The Reason for God (Hodder & Stoughton, 2008, 213-26).

    The theological origin of this 'dancing for God' metaphor is not revealed in this book but it actually derives from feminist re-envisioning of God. Patricia Wilson-Kastner proposes that the 'Greek word--perichoresis--signifies a dance around; and at the root of the theological term perichoresis is the image of dancing together'.  Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel affirms this idea: She states that Wilson- Kastner 'sees in the Trinitarian conception of perichoresis (dance, intermingling) of persons in the image of dance a confirmation of feminist conceptions of relationships and mutuality in the most beautiful way'.  Volf endorses the need to highlight the femininity of the Holy Spirit (Exclusion and Embrace, 169) in his egalitarian Trinity; one that downplays monotheism and squeezes his Trinitarian paradigm into the all-controlling concept, for him, of perichoresis (After Our Likeness, 208-20). 

    An early warning needs to be sounded. In this first section it becomes evident that Volf's methodology lacks biblical exegesis and this style continues throughout this monograph. Theology without thoroughgoing biblical exegesis moves the church into hazardous waters. 

    A second set of nine articles are gathered under the umbrella 'The Reality of Evil and the Possibility of Hope' (21-49). In many ways this kind of theme is a real strength, both in this book and in a range of Volf's other writings. His personal experience of hate and ethnic cleansing in his native Balkans has prepared him so that he can adequately proclaim this important message of forgiveness in the face of impossible hostility. He persistently calls for reconciliation and forgiveness, something which inevitably involves 'loving the evildoer' (28). He also critiques the potential selfishness that can often hide behind the 'all-American dream' and he states that such dreams, 'without God', are 'nothing but self-contradictory and unrealizable' (43). He calls Americans back to God and he writes that 'Augustine and [Jonathan] Edwards believed that if the world is to be enjoyed, it must be enjoyed in God' (43).

    In the following section on 'Family Matters' (51-76), Volf make his unashamed claim for egalitarianism which he anticipates for marriage. While many may beg to differ with his conclusions on biblical and exegetical grounds (Eph. 5:21-33; Col. 3:18-22), Volf inserts the significant clause that 'egalitarianism in and of itself will not make a marriage thrive' (53). These articles continue to display a style which protests against much in Western or rather American culture, and the call 'rings out' for Christians to swim 'against the tide' of inherent selfishness. However, each essay, though rich in devotional thought, lacks argumentation that is undergirded with sound exegetical evidence. Most Christians who stress a high value on the authority of scripture will therefore, legitimately, find this book troubling.

    Two sections follow on from this line of thought, ones that deal with the 'Church' (77-102)' and 'Mission and Other Faiths' (103-28). Here we begin to see Volf's current line of theological emphasis come to the surface; namely inter-faith dialogue (113, 123). He mourns the 'loss of biblical literacy in the West' (81) while simultaneously writing a book that lacks biblical engagement. Volf promotes the notion of women's ordination (85-88) without qualification and he reminds readers of his unchanging vision that he maps out in his own book (After Our Likeness). This ideal seeks to develop a Trinitarian, non-hierarchical understanding of the church (98), within an ecumenical context (100-102).

    The remaining chapter headings are: 'Culture and Politics' (129-63); 'Giving and Forgiving (165-80)'; 'Hope and Reconciliation' (181-206); and 'Perspective' (207-11). In these essays he makes a number of valid critiques concerning the direction that Western civilisation is generally heading and many of them will resonate with readers who hold a Christian worldview. 

    Unfortunately though, Volf's pursuit of inter-faith dialogue has led him to re-think fundamental doctrines and this causes him to propose bewildering assertions. He declares 'God is the Holy Trinity, but also ... the God whom Muslims worship as Allah'; and he asserts that 'to speak in a Christian voice' is not to make 'exclusively Christian claims in distinction from all other religions' (124-5). While he may gain an audience within politically correct circles that are trying to grapple with religious pluralism, one wonders how the son of a Pentecostal minister has arrived at his current position. The Lord Jesus Christ is clearly at odds with Volf when he states: 'I am the way and the truth and the life. No-one comes to the Father except through me' (Jn 14:6).

    Volf's newly released book comprises sixty-five essays (including the introduction) and it will give the reader a window into politically correct academic theology that is currently being spawned at the highest level in the United States. The Yale Divinity School may be able to court the favour of politicians, such as the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair who teaches for them (http://www.yale.edu/divinity/notes/080401/blair.shtml), or they may attempt to find 'A Common Word' between the three monotheistic world religions, (http://www.yale.edu/faith/acw/acw.htm) but Volf will find the task of convincing Christians who earnestly and regularly read their Bibles more difficult to reach. If you set out to read this book, perhaps you would do well to read the Gospel of John first and see how Christ is presented in His uniqueness, majesty and glory, as the 'Saviour of the World' (4:42), the 'Bread of life' (6:48), and the only hope for sinners who remain under the righteous judgment of God.    

    Against the Tide: Love in a Time of Petty Dreams and Persisting Enmities
    Miroslav Volf
    William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, 2010,
    211pp, paperback, 
    ISBN: 978 0 8028 6506 9


    Kevin J. Bidwell has completed a PhD, in 2010, at the University of Wales (Lampeter) and the dissertation title is: 'The Church as the Image of the Trinity': A Critical Evaluation of Miroslav Volf's Ecclesial Model. He is commissioned as a church planter to the city of Sheffield by the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of England and Wales. He is married to his Dutch wife Maria and they have two daughters, Melody and Rivka. 

  • Augustine and Pastoral Theology 2 Jun 2010 | 2:45 pm

    Augustine is read widely in the secular academy as a philosopher foundational to understanding the development of western civilization and for his relevance in the modern disciplines of literature, psychology, politics, ethics and aesthetics.  One gets the feeling however that secular scholars miss the soul of Augustine.  Augustine is primarily a Christian minister.  Of course, I would not want to discourage the influence of Augustine on other disciplines.  But at the same time, I am compelled to assert that to "read around" the sincere pastoral concern of Augustine in search of other motives is to miss the heart and soul of the man.  H.O. Old observes that when it comes to preaching, Augustine's pastoral concern is what sets the style of his sermons apart from other early fathers.   He is a plainspoken preacher, more eager to engage than to impress.  "It was Augustine's pastoral concern that so deeply engaged him with his congregation.  It is the pastoral concern which saves him from making his preaching a personal display, and individualistic performance or a work of oratorical art or self expression." [1]   Old observed further in his treatment of Augustine's festal sermons that he is distinguished from the Greek Fathers by his plain style in expounding the biblical text.[2]   Augustine's plain spoken, expository style is also evidence of a high regard for the Word of God.  "Evidently, for Augustine, one does not have to decorate the Word of God.  Holiness has its own beauty."[3]   The whole tenor of Augustine's sermons and writings is one of genuine concern for the people of God and the love of God.  He is first and foremost a pastor.  In this paper we will examine briefly De Doctrina  Christiana (DDC), considering the pastoral occasion for the treatise and its contribution to contemporary pulpit ministry.  When discussing the pastoral occasion for DDC we will engage three points of view as to why Augustine wrote DDC.  This engagement will contemporary scholarship demonstrates how essential it is to see Augustine first and foremost as a pastor.  Our reflection on Augustine's contribution to contemporary pulpit ministry will focus on the text of DDC.     

    The Pastoral Occasion of De Doctrina Christiana 

    There has been significant scholarly attention give to the purpose of DDC.  The debate has been prosecuted in the literature primarily along lexical lines, focusing on the meaning of doctrina . Gerald Press' "The Subject and Structure of Augustine's De Doctrina  Christiana"  provides a good overview.[4]  Press notes the difficulties in deriving a purpose for the DDC based on the meaning doctrina . Those who take the primary meaning from the prior rhetorical tradition of Cicero, conclude that doctrina in DDC means education or culture (in the Greek sense of paideia).  Those who attempt to find the meaning of doctrina  based primary its use in DDC conclude that it means doctrine or teaching the Christian sense.  Press takes another view.  Doctrina is broad enough to encompass both perspectives.  Augustine intends to provide a manual for Christian teaching, and also sets a trajectory for Christian culture that had tangible roots in the previous classical tradition: "If I am correct, the variety of [doctrina 's] accepted meanings allows Augustine to speak both to Christians and non-Christians--teaching them how to read, understand and teach the doctrines of Christianity as they are discovered in the Scriptures--and to non-Christians--showing them the sort and extent of the doctrina  to which Christians can justly lay claim."[5] 
       
    Press arrives at his conclusion by departing from tendency to try to discern a purpose for DDC by understanding the meaning of doctrina .  Instead, he argues that there is another Latin phrase used by Augustine in key places in DDC which aptly describes the content of the work and has significant background in the classical tradition:  

    Augustine has actually provided a number of clear statements of and references to the work's overall structure and topic, most of which have already been mentioned.  And the term that recurs in these passages is, not doctrina , but tracto-tractatio, which, unlike doctrina , can be fairly clearly defined and which locates the DDC fairly clearly in relation to the ancient rhetorical tradition.[6]   

    Tracto-tractatio in the classical rhetorical tradition "means treating...anything either mentally, orally, or in writing; it suggests, without specifying, the use of principles or techniques of analysis, interpretation, organization, or exposition...laws, documents, and stories as found in texts may be subjects of oratorical treatment."[7] Press argues that this phrase is used by Augustine to describe his purpose in the Preface and in Books I and IV.  He also documents how Augustine adapts the classical usage of the term to fit Christian rhetoric.

    Press is correct in observing that Augustine uses this phrase at key places in the treatise.  He quotes several instances.  Consider these two quotations from the Peface and from Book IV.  From the first paragraph of the Preface: 

    There are certain precepts of treating the Scriptures which I think can be taught no improperly to students of them, in order that they might profit not only by reading others who have revealed the secrets of divine literature but also by themselves revealing [these things] to others.  These [precepts] I have resolved to teach to those who are willing and able to learn...[8]   

    And now from paragraph one of Book IV:

    This work of mine, which is called De Doctrina  Christiana, I had divided into two by a first distinction.  For after the proemium I said...'There are two things upon which every treatment of scripture depends: the method of discovering what is to be understood and the method of setting forth what has been understood.  I shall speak about discovering first, about setting forth afterwards.'  Since, therefore, I have already said much about discovering and have finished three books about this one part, with the Lord's help I shall say a few things about setting forth..."[9]   

    From these passages and two others (1.1.1 and 1.2.2.) Press concludes that Augustine intends DDC to be a manual for "treating" the Scriptures.  Moreover, he notes that this terminology is rooted in the rhetorical tradition.  Augustine employs the terminology, modifying it specifically to fit the purposes of Christian rhetoric.
        
    How does Augustine's "treatment" of the Scriptures differ from the "treatment" of subjects by his contemporaries in the Roman world.  The rhetoric of Augustine's day had become more interested in style than substance.  This was a departure from the classical emphases of Aristotle and Cicero.  The classical tradition had five parts in the instruction of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, memory, style and delivery.  Aristotle devotes two of his three books on what is properly considered invention.  Augustine, like Aristotle, also emphasizes invention.  He spends Books I-III of DDC are on what is best described as invention.  Only in Book IV does he deal with arrangement, memory, style and delivery.  Press sees that Augustine has intentionally returned to Aristotle's classical emphasis on invention, while transforming invention to fit the purpose of Christian rhetoric.  "This feature of the work permits us to see how it arises from but transforms the tradition from which it comes.  Augustine returns to Aristotle's sense that invention is the most important part of rhetoric, but in the DDC what is being invented has changed and the circumstances and aims of the inventing have changed." [10]  (Press, 119).  

    How Augustine transformed the subject of invention?  Press observes that rhetoric did not have a place in the religious world of pagans.  Rhetoric was for the political and legal realm.  Paganism did not need rhetoric because it did not rely on texts for divine revelation in the same was as Judaism and Christianity.  Therefore, invention did not require the same diligence in arriving at the interpretation.  For Augustine, invention takes on a whole new purpose with the authoritative text of inspired Scripture.  Press concludes:  "Invention in DDC is changed both in the single emphasis on documents [Scripture] and in the view that documents have a correct interpretation or meaning that is to be discovered in them; and this suggests more generally that the circumstances and aims of invention have changed."[11]
     
    Gerald Press correctly observes that DDC returns to a classical emphasis on invention while transforming that emphasis to have a distinctly Christian rhetoric.  Therefore, DDC provides instruction for Christian teachers while at the same time offering an apologetic of sorts to the non-Christian culture.  In other words, one can have it both ways: doctrina  can be taken in the narrow sense of Christian teaching or in the broad sense of education/culture.  

    Peter Brown, building on the thesis of Henri Marrou, emphasizes Augustine's intention to put forward a Christian replacement for classical culture and education.  Brown notes that in antiquity there was tension regarding the Christian's relationship to the past.  "As long as there was nothing to put in its place, Christian critics of a classical education were all the more confused and bitter for lacking constructive alternatives...Augustine was surprisingly uninvolved in this confused situation.  He regarded [the suggestion of] bypassing education, as quite ridiculous."[12]   Brown claims that Augustine reduces the force of classical culture because he explains culture as "the product of society: it was the natural extension of the fact of language."[13]   In DDC he offers

    a new programme of learning...subtly moulded by the anxiety not to recreate, in the study of the Bible and in preaching, the crippling self-consciousness of the traditional education...Above all, he will attempt to by-pass the most self-conscious element in Late Roman education, the obsession with the rules of eloquence: a good ear, a knack, and the social fact of hearing good Latin spoken is what Augustine offers by way of training as a substitute for the schools of rhetoric in which he had once made his career."[14]   

    In Brown's assessment, however, Augustine did not place enough emphasis on classical education.  The Bishop took for granted that traditional institutions of learning would continue.  These institutions suffered with the fall of Rome, and as a result the generations following Augustine suffered.[15]
      
    As helpful as Press and Brown may be in demonstrating the influence of DDC on Augustine's contemporaries (Press) and on future generations (Brown), they seem to miss the heart and soul of the work and the local circumstances that necessitated it.  This oversight is understandable.  The later impact of DDC on future generations has been so impressive that it has overshadowed the immediate pastoral occasion of the document.  Nevertheless, the preface of DDC indicates that there were immediate pastoral concerns facing Augustine when he wrote.  Augustine began DDC in 397--the same year he assumed full responsibility as Bishop in Hippo.  What better way to begin his tenure than by writing a manual to serve as a guide for preaching and teaching?  Moreover, as he begins his treatise it is clear that he is aware that not everyone in Hippo shares his same views on how to interpret and teach the Word of God.  There are some who do not think that any interpretation or teaching is required at all:  

    But now as to those who talk vauntingly of Divine Grace, and boast that they understand and can explain Scripture without the aid of such directions as those I now propose to lay down, and who think, therefore, that what I have undertaken to write is entirely superfluous.  I would such persons could calm themselves so far as to remember that however justly they may rejoice in God's great gift, yet is was from human teachers they themselves learnt to read...suppose we advise all our brethren not to teach their children any of these things, because on the outpouring of the Holy Spirit the apostles immediately began to speak the language of every race; and warn every one who has not had a like experience that he need not consider himself a Christian, or may at least doubt whether he has yet received the Holy Spirit?  No, no; rather let us put away false pride and learn whatever can be learnt from man; and let him who teaches another communicate what he has himself received without arrogance and without jealously.[16] 

    Any pastor reading these words is comforted to know that his own troubles are not new: there have always been those in the church he believed that the Holy Spirit was sufficient for their edification.  Augustine's approach is exemplary.  He does not exclude these souls from the realm of the church.  However, he does challenge their minds and their hearts.  Everyone has learned from human teachers at some point in their lives.  To reject teachers of God's Word is a prideful act.  We should be eager to learn from whomever can profit us.  We can see from the preface, and the whole tenor of DDC, that Augustine was not writing from a detached position in an effort to put forward an alternative to classical culture.  He was writing as a pastor of souls.  Augustine "was galvanized by a hermeneutical purpose, which would not so much call on a liberal and educated exegesis of scripture for the Christian humanists of all times, as Henri Marrou and many others after him repeatedly insisted, but which would more directly address the peculiar biblical mentality of Augustine's African contemporaries whom he saw trapped in unwisely charismatic categories of exegesis, as well as in the institution of Donatism.[17]  

    Augustine did not finish DDC until 427.  One of the reasons that this treatise is so valuable is that it represents the work of a mature pastor and theologian.  Writing as the end of his career, well established as the Bishop, Augustine not only retains the same preface to the work but also includes the rules of Tyconius in Book III of DDC.  Modern scholars are critical of Augustine for not faithfully representing Tyconius.[18]   However, a close reading of Augustine's presentation of the rules of Tyconius suggests that he is not trying to restate the rules so much as rehabilitate them.  Augustine recasts these rules with his own caveats and further instructions.  The wise and charitable pastor, he recognizes that God in his providence has used Tyconius: "the book may be read by the studious (for it is of very great assistance in understanding Scripture)."[19]   However, he also warns his readers not only of the weaknesses of his theological system but also of his heresies as a Donatist--Certainly it must be read with caution, not only on account of the errors into which the author falls as a man, but chiefly on account of the heresies which he advances as a Donatist."[20]   Therefore, Augustine himself will teach Tyconius to his students--"And now I shall briefly indicate what these seven rules teach or advise."[21]   One hears Augustine speaking of Tyconius in the same terms and tone that many contemporary evangelical pastors would use to speak of N.T. Wright to young men pursuing the ministry--"There is much to learn, and much of which to be cautious.  Why don't we spend some time together thinking about what there is to learn." 
       
    Why is it important that we do not fail to miss the pastoral occasion and the pastoral purposes of Augustine in writing DDC?  It is important because to do so is to ultimately fail to see the significance in ordinary ministry done in an extraordinary manner.  Augustine responded to the ordinary circumstances of his ministry.  He had a rather average group of people to whom he ministered.  He faced pastoral problems that are common today in ministry.  His response to the pastoral ministry before was so extraordinary at times that his legacy lives on today.  However, pastors today need to see Augustine's ministry that God accomplishes great things in ministry as we address what he sets in on our path by his Providence.  How many ministers are gloomy, wishing day by day that they were in some other place doing a more glorious ministry?  North Africa was not the most glorious place in the Roman world.  But, there has probably not been a more glorious ministry.  

    The Pastoral Theology of De Doctrina  Christiana: Augustine's Contribution to Contemporary Pulpit Ministry

    Underlying the pastoral occasion for De Doctrina Christiana was a debate regarding how God would graciously sustain his people: would it be by the direct revelation of the Spirit of God, or would it be through his Word ministered by his servants.  Augustine goes to great lengths to wed the grace of God and the Word of God.  Augustine believed that God's grace was no where more evident than in His Word, by which we he revealed himself.  As H. O. Old notes, this theology of grace leads Augustine to have a robust emphasis on preaching.   "In his homiletical work, Augustine gave first importance to expository preaching.  This was quite consistent with his whole theological system.  Augustine had a strong theology of grace, and a strong theology of grace leads to a strong emphasis on revelation."[22]
       
    Augustine sees himself as completely dependent on the grace of God.  He begins DDC with these words, which read at the beginning of this treatise much in the same way as Pauline prayer wish reads at the beginning of the Apostles' letters.  Speaking of Jesus' miracles of feeding the multitudes he writes:  

    The loaves in the miracle were only five and seven in number before the disciples began to divide them among the hungry people.  But when once they began to distribute them, though the wants of so many thousands were satisfied, they filled baskets with the fragments that were left.  Now, just as that were left.  Now, just as that bread increased in the very act of breaking it, so those thoughts which the Lord has already vouchsafed to me with a view to undertaking this work will, as soon as I begin to impart them to others, be multiplied by His grace, so that, in this very work of distribution in which I have engaged, so far from incurring loss and poverty, I shall be made to rejoice in a marvelous increase of wealth.[23] 

    First, Augustine did not consider himself a clever, original thinking.  The thoughts that Augustine will share are thoughts that have been vouchsafed to him.  God is the source of these thoughts, Augustine is the steward.  All is of grace.  Second, there is confidence in future grace.  These thoughts graciously given by God will be multiplied by God.  Ministry, whether spoken or written is ministry from grace unto grace.  Confidence can be wed to humility with beauty in the preacher that understands that all fruit in ministry is from God's grace, but likewise has confidence that God is graciously faithful to give fruit to his servants, especially in the ministry of his word.  Third, the Scriptures are a living source of grace.  This analogy is a biblical analogy.  It is indeed more than an analogy.  Jesus himself is the bread of life come down from heaven.  He is present in and through his Word, and will multiply grace to those who read and listen to the living Word proclaimed.  

    Augustine exhorts his student to be dependent upon grace as well.  Augustine reminds the preacher that after all preparations have been made, the most important thing to remember is to pray: he will succeed more by piety in prayer than by gifts of oratory; and so he ought to pray for himself, and for those he is about to address before he attempts to speak."[24]   This vital dependence on prayer is accompanied with an expectation that the Holy Spirit will minister through the preacher.  Referring to Matthew 10:19-20 Augustine says, "The Holy Spirit, then, speaks thus in those who for Christ's sake are delivered to the persecutors; why not also in those who deliver Christ's message to those who are willing to learn."[25]   In the next chapter Augustine, seeming to anticipate the North African detractors to whom he referred in the preface, cautions the reader not to infer that their labors are meaningless or that teachers are not needed.  "Now if any one says that we need not direct men how or what they should teach, since the Holy Spirit makes them teachers, he may as well say that we need not pray, since our Lord says, 'Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask Him.'"[26] For Augustine, dependence upon the grace of God should be evident in the prayer life of the minister and in his humility to be taught of God by others.      
    C. S. Lewis has said that the surest route to originality is to speak the truth without trying to be original.  In Augustine, the humility of the preacher will lead him to submit even his own style to God's Word.  Ironically, humility will produce originality as the preacher seeks to match his style to that of the Scriptures.  We have seen how Augustine transforms the classical idea of invention in rhetoric.  The Bishop does the same with style.  Referring to Cicero, he writes, "he, then, shall be eloquent, who can say little things in a subdued style, in order to give instruction, moderate things in a temperate style, in order to give pleasure, and great things in a majestic style, in order to sway the mind."[27]   Cicero spoke of legal matters, however.  The Christian will always be speaking of great matters since he speaks of God's truth.[28]   But, that does not mean that the style will not change.  The style will vary according to the genre of Scripture, and the Holy Spirit's intention for the audience.  In DDC 4.20.39 Augustine gives Scripture examples for the subdued style fit for teaching, the temperate style fit for praise or blame and the majestic style intended to move the listener by shear force of the emotion.  He is careful not to have the majestic style confused with rhetorical fancy.  "The majestic style of speech differs from the temperate style just spoken of, chiefly in that it is not so much decked out with verbal ornaments as exalted into vehemence by mental emotion."[29]   He points the reader toward Paul's preaching for examples of the majestic style.[30]      
    H.O. Old notes that a generation after Cicero ceased being taught in our schools preachers began having difficulty retaining the attention of their audience.[31]   Augustine reminds us that Scripture itself is full of a variety and richness to nourish the souls of our listeners.  We need not appeal to the culture to captivate listeners.  Rather, we need to make a fresh appeal to the Word of God itself.  Many modern preachers are monotonous, however.  Augustine warns against this danger.  "We are not to suppose that it is against rule to mingle these various styles; on the contrary, every variety of style should be introduced so far as is consistent with good taste."[32]   This variety is found within the Word of God, but will also be found within portions of an address as fitting to the moment or the application: "For when we keep monotonously to the style, we fail to retain the hearers attention; but when we pass from one style to another, the discourse goes off more gracefully, even though it extend to greater length."[33]   Prayer for himself; humble submission to the teaching of others; submission to the styles of the Word of God: for Augustine these are the preacher's logical responses to the grace of God.

    Today much preaching seems to lack confidence in the presence of God and the Word of God.  Augustine calls the preacher to keep in mind the spiritual reality before him on Sunday mornings.  God is present.  He nearer to our listeners that we ever imagined.  "And though He is everywhere present to the inner eye when it is sound and clear, He condescended to make Himself manifest to the outward eye of those whose inward sight is weak and dim."[34].  The incarnation occurred not because God is far from us, but because though He is close to us we remain spiritually blind to his presence.  God has chosen to use preaching to reveal himself to his people.  Augustine follows his comments on the incarnation with comments on preaching.  Preaching is the way in which God intends to accomplish our salvation.  "For after that, in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe" (1.12.11).  
             
    Here we see a difference between Augustine's understanding of the implications of incarnation and many contemporary approaches.  Many contemporary approaches latch hold of the incarnation as a basis to accommodate culture.  Sometimes this contemporary notion of "accommodation" includes downplaying the role of the spoken word as the primary means that God intends to convey the gospel.  The New Dictionary of the Theology defines contextualization as  "a dynamic process of the church's reflection, in obedience to Christ and his mission in the world, on the interaction of the text as the word of God and the context as a specific human situation.."[35]   Today, however, every church planter in a major protestant denomination is given careful instruction in some of the rudiments of contextualization.  While thoughtful consideration of one's audience (and their culture) is essential, the impression can be gained that there is a great distance between the average non-Christian person and the word of God.  An unintended consequence of this perception has been a loss of confidence in the power of the Word of God to reach across cultural barriers of all kinds, or even to reach fifty feet into the sanctuary to touch the life of an "ordinary" person.  When reading DDC one receives a different impression altogether.  God is very near to each one of us.  There is a sense of his universal presence of God and expectation that he will be revealed in preaching.  
    Augustine's doctrine of God is joined with a doctrine of man that also gives confidence to the preacher.  For Augustine, the diversity of the human race is seen especially in the diversity of language.  Words are intended to express the thoughts of the mind.[36]   Because of arrogance of man, God multiplied the languages of men.[37]   But, the human mind is made to love God.  This feature distinguishes the human being from the beast.   "For a great thing truly is man, made after the image and similitude of God, not as respects the mortal body in which he is clothed, but as respects the rational soul by which he is exalted in honor above the beasts."[38]   Augustine would have the preacher remember that every human being is created in the image of God.  Our hearts are fashioned to love God.  There is this fundamental reality to the human race that bind us together.  Augustine has a sophisticated philosophy of language and culture.  But for Augustine human beings always have more in common than not.   
    Augustine's doctrine of the imminence of God presence and the sufficiency of God's revelation have significant implications for expository preaching.  The preacher is primarily a discloser of God as he proclaims the Word of God in the power of the Holy Spirit.  "The sounds of the preacher's words strike the ears, but the teacher is within."[39]   When the preacher approaches a congregation with the expectation that he is about to disclose the divine before them, and he has attended his expectation with prayer, the result is powerful.

    No where is Augustine more helpful to the contemporary preacher than when he speaks of the purpose of preaching. While the pastor may be allowed the luxury of ivory tower speculation in choice moments throughout the week, come Sunday the congregation demands normative truth that speaks to the world as they know it and live in.  Augustine provides a biblical paradigm that enables the pastor to be faithful to the text and the expectations of his congregation to hear a relevant Word from God.    For Augustine, human beings have a supreme purpose:

    Of all, then, that has been said since we entered upon the discussion about things, this is the sum: that we should clearly understand that the fulfillment and the end of the Law, and of all Holy Scripture, is the love of an object which is to be enjoyed, and the love of an object which can enjoy that other in fellowship with ourselves.[40] 

    People are created in the image of God to love God and to love neighbor.  Augustine can do no better than find the purpose of our lives in Jesus summation of the Law.  "As Augustine sees it, it is love of God and love of our neighbors for the sake of God which is the whole point of our trying to understand Scripture and of our trying to teach what we have come to understand."[41]   This teaching of Jesus is to be respected in our understanding of God's providence in the lives of ourselves and our hearers.  God does not intend that we find satisfaction apart from him in this world.  To the contrary, 

    The whole temporal dispensation for our salvation, therefore, was framed by the providence of God that we might know this truth and be able to act upon it; and we ought to use that dispensation, not with such love and delight as if it were a good to rest in, but with a transient feeling rather, such as we have towards the road, or carriages, or other things that are merely means.  Perhaps some other comparison can be found that will more suitably express the idea that we are to love the things by which we are borne only for the sake of that towards which we are borne.[42] 

    Here we see how Augustine's confidence in the presence of God is matched by a confidence in the providence of God.  This passage contains a rich theology of suffering for the believer.  Part of the task of preaching will be to speak from God's Word with such clarity as to make plain that God is accomplishing something in the lives of our hearers.  Their circumstances are framed by providence to enable them to love God and neighbor.  Far from being fatalistic, this theology gives real hope through the darkest times.
    The preacher's interpretation and application of Scripture is also to be informed by Jesus' summation of the law.  

    Whoever, then, thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought.  If, on the other hand, a mans draws a meaning from them that may be used for the building up of love, even though he does not happen upon the precise meaning which the author whom he reads intended to express in that place, his error is not pernicious, and he is wholly clear from the charge of deception.[43]  

    Here we see how Augustine answers the question of relevance for a modern preacher.  Modern conservative Presbyterian preachers are especially prone to lapse into bland discourse and call it preaching.  Faithfulness to the text is the dominate concern.  And yet, somehow many parishioners are left with the feeling that the Word of God does not touch down into their lives.  How unlike the teaching of Jesus!  Augustine makes the goal plain, and it is irrefutable.  If the preacher does not move his listeners toward love of God and neighbor he has failed.  Praying toward this emphasis in preparation is a great help to the preacher.  It is also freeing.  The minister is led by the Spirit of God to see how a particular text should be applied to his particular flock.  The result is preaching that is fresh and vital to the congregation.[44] 

    The preacher cannot, however, fail to present the text of the Bible accurately.  Anticipating the hermeneutical danger of letting the summation of the law dictate all exegesis, Augustine warns that mistaken interpretations must be avoided because bad interpretation will harm faith.  "Faith will totter if the authority of Scripture begin to shake.  And then, if faith totter, love itself will grow cold.  For if a man has fallen from faith, he must necessarily also fall from love; for he cannot love what he does not believe to exist."[45]   As Old writes regarding the festal sermons of Augustine, the Bishop would have his congregation to understand that "it was not seeing Jesus which brings us to faith, but hearing the gospel of Christ's victory over death and believing it."[46] The direction to interpret the Scriptures properly and apply them in such a way as to build up love for God and neighbor prevent the modern preacher from falling off either side of the homiletical cart.  How many times to we hear preaching that is all light and no heat, or all heat and no light?  Augustine would have light with heat.   

    Augustine makes a vital connection between the goal of the human life and the person and work of Christ.  The preacher is to call the people of God to love God and neighbor.  However, their hearts are cold toward God and neighbor.  Augustine recognizes that not only are we blind to see God, but we are too hard hearted to love Him.  Our sinful affections keep us from love of God and neighbor:    

    Further, when we are on the way, and that not a way that lies through space, but through a change of affections, and one which the guilt of our past sins like a hedge of thorns barred against us, what could He, who was willing to lay Himself down as the way by which we should return, do that would be still gracious and more merciful, except to forgive us all our sins, and by being crucified for us to remove the stern decrees that barred the door against our return?[47] 

    One who has experienced the conviction of the Holy Spirit can fully appreciate the metaphor of Augustine when he says that our past sins are like a "hedge of thorns barred against us."  The regenerate sinner knows what it is to feel unable to approach our Holy God because of the sting of guilt that is experienced when moving toward God.  Augustine alludes to Colossians 2:13-14[48]  when he says that Christ was crucified to remove the stern decrees that barred the door against our return.  God is everywhere present, yet we must return to him by way the cross of Christ that our affections may be set right and we may love him fully.  Here we find Calvin's emphasis on not being able to love God if we fear God.  We find the puritan emphasis on religious affections, which comes to a high place of pastoral application in Jonathan Edwards Religious Affections.  We find a grace theology which draws power from Christ in his person and his work. 
     
    The preacher following Augustine's paradigm will give careful attention to the text with humility to learn from others.  He will give himself to prayer, knowing that Holy Spirit will minister in the hour of need.  He will model his words according to Scripture.  He will speak to the affections of his listeners, reminding them that Christ is the way back to God.  Christ has removed the hedge of thorns that stand in between us and our Father.  He will boldly call for love of God and neighbor, but he will do so with grace.  His sermons may elude typical classification (Theocentric, Christocentric, Anthropocentric, Narrative, Topical, Redemptive Historical); Augustine's sermons often elude such categories.  But, his sermons will be biblical, perhaps more like the varied preaching of Jesus, Peter and Paul.       

    In this paper I have contended that Augustine needs to be re-entered into the ring as a modern day contender in the battle for best pastoral practice.  De Doctrina Christiana is a good place to start.  I wish I read this carefully and prayerfully as a seminarian.  A learned professor could teach the history of theology and preaching through this text.  The work is not perfect; no work is.  But it is like the United States Constitution in some respects.  The timeless principles of the Constitution overrode in time those elements that were more bound to culture than Wisdom.  Liberty and equality did away with slavery and provided for women's suffrage.  One would wish for more development of the theology of the cross.  Augustine gives a theology of the cross, but Luther and Calvin will improve upon his work significantly.  Indeed, if you approach this work with Luther, Calvin, Owen and Edwards lurking in the background, then you come to see that they built upon Augustine as much as they perfected him.  

    As Dr. Old concludes, "Working back and forth through the history of Christian preaching one sees how often the principles of this venerable classic have been invoked."[49]   We need to revisit Augustine more frequently today.  A student of the history of preaching, Old confirms that Augustine's prayer-wish for God to multiply is labors as Christ multiplied bread to the crowds has come true.  "The preaching ministry of Augustine had a tremendous influence on the preaching of the Western Church, down through the Middle Ages, in the Reformation, and even to our own day.  His manual on preaching De Doctrina Christiana, is still regarded as a classic."[50].  However, while it is true that De Doctrina Christiana is still regarded as a classic, it is not given full consideration as a living work capable of guiding a preacher through the modern maze of pastoral practice.  In the Reformed tradition in particular, Augustine is considered a theologian.  His preaching is revered in the way that same way that a retired athlete is revered.  They were good in their own day but couldn't play with today's competition.  So, even the respect afforded Augustine is often tempered by--to use the words of C.S. Lewis--a mild chronological snobbery.  We would do well to repent and return our attention to this old, humble Bishop.  The more we read him, the more we will understand ourselves and our calling and the Reformers we admire according to Scripture.
     
    Rev. James L. Harvey III is the Senior Minister of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Newark, Delaware.
     

    Notes
    ---------------------------------------------------------

      [1] H. O. Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church, Vol. 2 The Patristic Age (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 365.

      [2] Old, 381.

      [3] Old, 381.

      [4] Gerald A. Press, "The Subject and Structure of Augustine's De Doctrina  Christiana," Augustinian Studies 11 (1980): 99-124.  

      [5] Press, 124.

      [6] Press, 107.  

      [7] Press, 112.

      [8] Press, 112.  

      [9] Press, 112.

      [10] Press, 119. 

      [11] Press, 121.  

      [12] Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkely, CA: University of California Press, 2000 [1967]), 262.

      [13] Brown, 263.

      [14] Brown, 265.

      [15] Brown, 265-266.  

      [16] St. Augustine, De Doctrina  Christiana Proem 4-5 in Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, Vol. 2, ed. Philip Schaff (Peabody, MA: Hendrikson, 2004 [1887]), 519-520.  Hereafter DDC.   

      [17] Charles Kannengiesser, "Augustine and Tyconius: A Conflict of Christian Hermeneutics in Roman Africa," in Augustine and the Bible, ed. and trans. Pamela Bright (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1999 [1986]), 152.

     [18] So Pamela Bright, "The Preponderating Influence of Augustine" in Augustine and the Bible, ed. and trans. Pamela Bright (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1999 [1986]), 110-128.  

      [19] DDC 3.30.43.  

      [20] DDC 3.30.43.

      [21] DDC 3.30.43.

     [22] Old, 345.

      [23] DDC, 1.1.1

      [24] DDC 4.15.32

      [25] DDC 4.15.32

      [26] DDC 4.16.33

      [27] DDC 4.17.34

      [28] DDC4.18.35

      [29] DDC 4.20.42

      [30] 2nd Corinthians 6:2-10; Romans 8:28-39; Galatians 4:10-20.  Old, 349.  Old observes that Augustine is more conservative in his use of Greek Rhetoric, anchoring his preaching the pattern of the synagogue sermon rather than the Greek panegyric.    

      [31] Old, 396. 

      [32] DDC 4.22.51

      [33] DDC 4.22.51

      [34] DDC 1.12.11

     [35] Ferguson, S. B., & Packer, J. (2000, c1988). New dictionary of theology (electronic ed.) (164). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

      [36] DDC 2.3.4

      [37] DDC 2.4.5

      [38] DDC 1.22.20

      [39] Old, 363.  Commenting on Augustine's preaching on 1st John 2:27--His anointing teaches you about everything."

      [40] DDC 1.35.39

      [41] Old, 387.

      [42] DDC 1.35.39

      [43] 1.36.41

      [44] Old, 352-353.  "It is of the essence of expository preaching that one interprets the needs and concerns of the congregation just as one interprets the Scriptures...The third chapter of the Gospel of John is bound to look very different when Augustine preaches it in North Africa during the Donatist controversy...Expository preaching which is truly seasonal draws a crowd."  

      [45] DDC 1.37.42

      [46] Old, 377.  

      [47] DDC 1.17.16

      [48] "And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross."  This allusion is not noticed by the editors of NPNF.  


      [49] Old, 336.

      [50] Old, 396.


  • Is The Thickness of Two Short Planks A Forgotten Divine Attribute? 19 May 2010 | 8:13 am

    None of the systematic theologies I own include `being as thick as two short planks' in their treatments of the divine attributes; but it appears that there is a trend today to rectify this neglected aspect of God's being.   Bear with me while I explain.

    I remember while at Cambridge in the mid-80s, a cartoon appeared in the university student newspaper depicting weirdy-beardy students from the Sidgwick Site (the home of the Arts faculties), with the caption `The world is text; we move from sign to sign.'  The point was twofold: first, to poke fun at the pretentious jargon of those for whom every other word was `semiotic' or one of its cognates.  Such were apparently spending their time at college in an effort to learn how to state the obvious using language that completely obscured pretty simple ideas, and to do so in tones such that even the most banal statement might sound like a profound and ground-breaking insight.   Most have, presumably, gone on either to teach in university Arts faculties, where their inability to communicate would be considered a strength and not a weakness; or to write those easy-to-follow manuals for IKEA flatpack furniture and eastern European digital cameras.

    The second point of the cartoon was to ridicule the notion that life could be reduced to language, a very trendy position at the time and one which is taking a terribly long time to die.   Without going in to the ins and outs of the theory, I have often wondered, for example, exactly how helpful it is to think of the Holocaust as `text' or a `linguistic construct.'  It may be we need words to talk and write about such a thing; but instinct seems to indicate that there has to be more to it than that.

    Words are interesting and powerful, no-one denies that.  And one of the ways in which this is made clear is the way in which there are so many struggles about words and how they are used.    Indeed, `political correctness' is, if nothing else, a movement about language: the disabled become `differently abled'; various racial epithets are outlawed, if not by the state then at least by the bounds of acceptable taste and convention; and, indeed, in striking a blow for that despised group, the middle aged male bald guy, I might suggest we replace `baldy', `chrome dome', `Mekon' (hey, that last one will test your knowledge of post-War British pop culture) and `helmet head' with `follicly challenged', `alternatively thatched', and the increasingly popular self-designation `Mature, intelligent male with youthful outlook and GSOH seeks  lady (20-25) for friendship and perhaps more.'

    There is, however, another aspect to the changing of language which is driven not so much by a desire to avoid hurting others but rather by the attempt to hide the full horror of certain situations.   We are all aware of how this can be done.  Sometimes it is done with reference to things that are not necessarily evil but which are not exactly good news: to close a loss-making factory might be `to rationalize resources;' to put a sick dog out of its misery might be `to put it to sleep.'  Other times it can be clearly utilized to blunt or even invert the moral dimensions of an action: to argue for abortion is to be `pro-choice;' to kill off the elderly and the infirm is `euthanasia' or `mercy killing' or `death with dignity' (however one dies, I suspect the departure of life from a body can never be dignified, just more or less awful).

    Well, so much for the way in which language has been used in general public discourse; what is really worrying is that some of this spin is now firmly established within the church.  Two recent examples come to mind.  First, there is the notorious case of Ergun Caner, of Liberty Theological Seminary.  Caner allegedly invented whole swathes of his past in order to enhance his public profile and career.  Most normal people would regard a cock and bull story concocted about growing up in Turkey and having a background in jihadi culture, if not actually true, then as being a pack of lies put forward for personal gain by playing on American evangelical fears about Islam.  Not so, according to Elmer Towns, Dean of Liberty's School of Religion in a statement to Christianity Today: if Caner's story is not true, then it is just a case of the kind of `theological leverage' in which the school typically allows its faculty to engage. 

    So telling lies has now become theological leverage, and is acceptable once one has reached a certain rank in the Christian firmament?   "What?" you say "Next thing you know, they'll be inventing new and trendy terms for adultery which blunt the moral force of that sin too, presumably not an ethical matter either, providing one is high enough up the evangelical hierarchy to be accountable to no-one."  Well, funny you should mention that......  recently, I happened to come across someone talking about a new sin with which I was not familiar, the sin of relational mobility.   Hmmm, I thought, sounds interesting.  I wonder if that's what it's called when I roll over at night and accidentally whack my wife on the head with a flailing arm as I fight off some imagined sea serpent that has invaded my dreams?   Or perhaps it's a cute way of referring to the typical husband's capacity for vanishing off the face of the earth when his wife wants to go the shops to choose some new wallpaper?

    Wrong on both counts.   As I investigated the conversation, the crime in question seemed to be nothing less than divorce based on adultery; to be blunt, the shattering of a marriage by illicit and explicit genital intercourse between two people outside the bonds of the marriage vows that had been taken.   That's what the sin of 'relational mobility' apparently is.   Nice way of putting it, nest'ce pas?

    There are a number of things to notice about these two incidents.  First, they typify the trendy obfuscation that has increasingly dogged our societies for twenty years or more.  It reminds me of another Cambridge cartoon, depicting a scientist telling a friend that his dog had just died, or, to quote his words exactly, `entered a permanent mode of negative functionality.'  Thus it is with pompous flannel: to call the telling of lies `theological leverage' or to describe the straightforward destruction of a marriage by the sexual betrayal of a spouse as `relational mobility' is a good, if obviously gutless and sleazy, way of hiding exactly what it is that has been done.  

    Secondly, as regards `relational mobility', it is interesting that the language itself was spouting from the lips of someone who seemed to need to cast everything from God to garbage disposal systems in `relational categories.'   Yet, while the language used the word `relational', it actually served to depersonalize, derelationalize the whole thing.  Tell me you've committed adultery, and I know you have had sex with someone you shouldn't, and thereby permanently damaged your relationship with your spouse, the one you promised to love, come hell or highwater, because, like some sexually incontinent rabbit, you couldn't keep it in your trousers.   Tell me you've committed the sin of relational mobility, and as far as I am concerned, you might simply have hit the neighbour's fence post while parallel parking.   Adultery carries long established weight which highlights exactly the sexually explicit nature of the betrayal of a loved one; 'relational mobility' is vacuous, self-serving, sleazy flannel.

    Third, and not to put too fine a point on its, it's so utterly dishonest and completely bonkers, worthy of inclusion in the Encyclopedia Dissemblica under the entry for `Pretentious Jargon Used By the Sleazy to Avoid the Consequences of their Actions.'   I cannot wait to see the new, evangelical translation of Mt. 5:27 for the emerging market: `I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with mobile intent has already committed relational mobility in his heart.'  That certainly packs a punch over against older translations.  And we'll need to add a clause to the Ninth Commandment to the effect that it only applies to those who don't hold positions of responsibility in the church or won't profit by their perjury - sorry, their `theological leverage.'
     
    What is so jawdropping in all this is the clear belief of the people who use this language that the rest of us are complete idiots.      If I built my career on telling people that I had grown up in the jungles of Borneo as the devoted worshipper of the Snake God and, after years of eating missionaries had finally been converted through the ministry of one, I would be guilty of lying, not theological leverage, and everyone would know that that was the case.  And if I have had sex with a woman who is not the lady listed on my marriage certificate, I have committed adultery.  My next door neighbours know what adultery means; the mailman knows what adultery means; and quite possibly the man who stands at the local bus-stop and talks to the fire hydrant, convinced it is his long-lost brother, might still have enough about him to know what adultery means.   They can tell the difference between self-serving, dishonest flannel, and the truth. Am I alone in finding it offensive that these people who lay claim to being leaders in the church think that the rest of us are so stupid that we cannot see this for the patronizing dishonesty that it is?

    Worse still, of course, are the theological implications: to think that I am an idiot is one thing.  Many have done that; it's not unusual and, sadly, I am sure there is plenty of evidence to suggest that I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer.  But these people seem to think they can fool God with their slick talk and soundbites.   Yes, believe it or not, they apparently regard themselves as cleverer than their maker.  Like Adam and Eve sewing fig leaves together in the Garden, they believe that, if they use the right words, He just won't notice the reality that lies behind their thin veil of semantic scamology.  In fact, they have squeezed God into a box that is so small he barely has the divine equivalent of two brain cells to rub together.  Their apriori theological system has led them to assume God is as thick as two short planks, and that a bit of obfuscatory language and the odd specious euphemism will prevent him from holding them accountable for their lies and the filth of their personal lives.  

    To consider other human beings to be so stupid as not to see through flannel about `theological leverage' and `sins of relational mobility' is patronizing and offensive; but to assume God is moron, as thick as a brick, is, frankly, dangerous. Make no mistake: unlike the evangelical and emergent dupes out there, God is not mocked.

  • Whither or Wither? 19 May 2010 | 8:09 am

    The Trials and Tribulations of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church

    The Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church (ARPC) is one of the smaller and lesser known Presbyterian bodies in North America.  With a stated membership of around thirty-five thousand, the ARPC is one of the larger denominations in the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council (NAPARC), but is dwarfed by the largest church in that body--the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA)--which is over ten times as large as the ARPC.  The size of the ARPC, however, means that it is large enough to be interesting and yet small enough to analyze in some meaningful fashion.  

    Currently the ARPC faces pressing challenges.  While the ARPC has surmounted great difficulties in the past, these current challenges are occurring at a time of great change and dislocation in the broader context of American Christianity, and thus the stakes are raised.  This article will survey the current situation of the ARPC and then explore what the future may hold.  

    THE PROBLEM OF IDENTITY

    The result of a late eighteenth-century confluence of the Scottish Covenanter and Seceder traditions in America, the ARPC has maintained a distinctive identity for much of its history.  Historically centered in the southeastern United States (a Synod of the South was formed in 1803, and that Synod separated from the northern Associate Reformed Synods in 1822), the ARPC's identity was historically defined more by practice than theology.  While valuing orthodoxy and attached to the Westminster Standards, ARPs historically have had limited patience for theological abstraction, and heresy trials have been rare.  Rather, the ARPC was traditionally distinguished by praxis considerations--strict sabbatarianism, close communion, non-instrumental worship, and exclusive psalmody--but by the mid-twentieth century adherence to these distinctives had in great measure broken down, and the church was faced with the challenge of justifying its separate existence over against the "General Assembly Presbyterians" (in contrast to the ARPC's "General Synod" meetings).  Answers to this question have not come easily or quickly, and thus an uneasy relationship with the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) and its successors the PCA and the PC(USA) has been a fact of ARP life for more than a half century.  

    The ARPC has also been characterized by a "churchly" or "ecclesial" sensibility that has often proven quite winsome to those who come to the ARPC from other groups.  While ARPs have limited patience with theological precision, they care deeply about the church and its ministries.  Along with this ecclesial concern, especially when it is combined with genteel Southern American culture, comes a propensity for a "niceness" which seeks to avoid overt conflict, especially when such conflict concerns the institutions and agencies of the church.  

    In a context where an internal reason for existence has been elusive, ARPs have in recent decades tended to define themselves over against other churches, especially the PC(USA) and the PCA.  Over against the PC(USA) with its doctrinal and moral declension, ARPs think of themselves as orthodox and "non-liberal."  Over against more conservative groups such as the PCA and OPC (both of whose identities were forged in the heat of bitter twentieth-century ecclesiastical conflict), ARPs view themselves as "nice" and non-pugnacious.  But this identity is largely negative rather than positive.  That is, the ARPC defines itself more in terms of what it is not, and the question remains as to what the ARPC stands for.

    One thing the ARPC has stood for with some tenacity is the authority of Scripture.  Beginning around the turn of the twentieth century the ARPC (then known as the Associate Reformed Synod of the South) sought to position itself in the broader context by identifying with the consensus among "Evangelical churches."  When PCUS Neo-orthodoxy became pervasive at Erskine Seminary in the 1960's, there was a period of conflict in which ARP conservatives championed the Evangelical doctrine of inerrancy and the "Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy."  This era of conflict receded beginning in 1980 when the General Synod reaffirmed that "the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament are the Word of God without error in all that it teaches."  However, in keeping with the "niceness" of the body, no concerted attempt was made to exclude those who disagreed with this statement (opposition coalesced in the 1980 "A Covenant of Integrity" signed by many prominent ARPs), and they were, in essence, "grandfathered."  

    But the question of identity remains, and the current situation reflects some clear divisions among those who have given thought to the matter.  On the one hand, there are many who have continued in the traditional ARP path of "experimental Calvinism."  They prize evangelical Christian experience along with Reformed doctrinal integrity.  But this group is somewhat divided over questions of worship style and Reformed ethos.  On the other hand, there are those who have moved in the direction of mainline-church Kulturprotestantismus (culture Protestantism).  They think the ARPC should look more like the PC(USA), albeit without that group's embarrassing fixation on sexuality issues.  Many of these espouse a synthesis of middle-class culture and ARP identity--they are more open to the ordination of women to all offices and to Barthian views of Scripture which allow them greater flexibility to follow the dictates of the broader culture.  In essence, they are tracking the broader culture but ten to twenty years behind it.   This latter group has also rallied around Erskine College and Seminary, and recent events suggest that their loyalty is to Erskine rather than to the ARPC (more on this below).  Or to put it in slightly different terms, the ARPC now consists of two rather different churches trying to coexist under a single ecclesiastical roof, though the boundaries between the two groups are often muddied by personal and family relationships.  
     For a similar analysis of these matters, see the 2007 "Report of the Vision Committee" (http://www.arpsynod.org/pdf/Report%20of%20the%20Vision%20Committee.pdf).  

    THE PROBLEM OF DEMOGRAPHICS AND SMALL CHURCHES

    A truism of ARP history is that the ARPC "never made it into the city."  To this day, the ARPC has a large number of rural churches, many of which have dwindled precipitously in numbers as the population has shifted to the cities and the broader culture has become more secular.  Thus the membership of many ARP churches is aging, and soon many of these rural churches will be closed because the younger generation has moved away and the older generation has entered the "church triumphant."  Northern retirees who move to the rural retirement meccas in the Sunbelt are more likely to be found on the golf course or at the lake than in church on Sunday morning.  ARP efforts to plant churches in urban areas have met with only modest success, and thus the ARPC continues to have a rural center of gravity, but with little potential for growth there.  Thus, the ARPC may aptly be characterized as an evangelical church with a mainline-church demographic problem.

    Not surprisingly, ARP congregations tend to be small--in fact, very small!  According to statistics based on 2006 data provided to me by the General Synod's Parliamentarian, only 12 percent of ARP churches had more than 200 active members (32 churches out of a total of 268 congregations), and yet these 32 churches reported 49 percent of the active membership for the denomination.  On the other hand, 149 congregations (48%) reported an active membership of under 50, and 107 churches (40%) reported an active membership of between 50 and 200.  If we take the 100-150 member level as a rough indicator of economic viability in the current environment, then the conclusion emerges that the majority of ARP congregations are struggling.  
    THE PROBLEM OF RESOURCES

    While ARPC members have a well-deserved reputation for sacrificial financial support of the denomination, the church is attempting to maintain a remarkably broad range of ministries--a denominational magazine, a college, a seminary, a conference grounds, a foreign missions arm, a domestic missions agency, health insurance and retirement plans, and so on.  In fact, no other Reformed denomination is trying to do as much with similar resources.   But without real numerical growth such efforts will be impossible to sustain.  Public statements coming from the ARP Board of Stewardship at the 2008 meeting of the General Synod suggest that difficult choices regarding resource allocation must be faced soon.  Spirited competition for scarce resources will increasingly become the rule, and the bottom line is now clear--without significant growth in numbers and giving cherished ministries of the denomination will be curtailed.  

    THE PROBLEM OF INSTITUTIONS

    Most of the agencies of the General Synod have fallen into line with the conservative theological center of gravity of the denomination that was in place by 1980.  The striking exception to this has been Erskine College and Seminary.  Beginning in 1977 with the "Statement on the Philosophy of Christian Higher Education," the General Synod has tried to bring Erskine into line, but with limited success.  In short, the General Synod's relationship with the Erskine institutions has been characterized by good intentions, relatively clear directives, and little real accountability.  Despite over thirty years of effort and angst on the part of the ARP denomination, it appears to many that evangelical faculty at Erskine College remain a minority.  At Erskine Seminary a shift to the right was evident during the period of 1998-2002, but that institution has again veered leftward in a pragmatic effort to appeal to the culturally conservative but theologically fuzzy "Confessing Church" wing of the PC(USA).   

    An obvious question presents itself: why has the General Synod been unable to bring Erskine more into line with the denomination?  The answers to this question are complex.  One is the hard reality that "money talks."  To be sure, the ARPC has influence at Erskine through its appointed trustees and significant annual financial contributions, but at the same time the ARPC is too small to provide sufficient financial resources and numbers of students by itself.  Thus Erskine has sought out a range of constituencies, some of which are none too comfortable with the theology and praxis of the ARPC, and these diverse constituencies have been given a place at the table.  

    Another part of the puzzle is the makeup of the Erskine Board of Trustees, which in recent decades has been dominated by an informal alliance of moderate to left-leaning ARPs and alumni/ae.  Although each new class of Board members must be approved by the General Synod, the Erskine Board has in reality been essentially self-perpetuating.  A major reason for this is the fact that the Erskine Board itself presents a slate of nominations each year, and these Board nominations are more often than not endorsed by the General Synod's Nominations Committee, which operates with limited knowledge of institutional dynamics and the personalities involved. 

    Within the Board itself control by the ruling coalition has been carefully maintained.  Most issues of any importance are vetted by the Executive Committee of the Board, which is named by the Board Chairman.  A variety of social-control mechanisms are used to keep conservatives in line.  Those who demonstrate a willingness to work quietly within the system are rewarded with appointments, while those who prove obstreperous in their calls for missional integrity are marginalized within the Board context.  Under such circumstances, many well-meaning individuals find it easier to, as the old Southern saying puts it, "go along and get along," and some ARP conservatives become so invested in the system that they become defenders of it.   

    Another factor in the persistence of what some have termed "Olde Erskine" has to do with administrative leadership.  The seven-year presidency of John L. Carson (1998-2005) saw some success in moving the public image of the schools to the right (with a corresponding up-tick in College enrollment), but with a few exceptions Carson was unable to achieve much real ideological change.  After the nomination of a United Methodist candidate for the presidency failed to win approval by a bitterly divided Board of Trustees, Carson was finally replaced in 2007 by Randall T. Ruble, the now seventy-seven-year-old former Dean of Erskine Seminary.  Ruble is, in many ways, representative of the moderate wing of the ARP Church.  He signed the 1980 anti-inerrancy manifesto "A Covenant of Integrity," and during his time as Dean of Erskine Seminary Ruble expanded the student body by a strategy of low tuition, open admissions, and appeal to a broad range of denominational constituencies.  In fact, under his leadership the largest single denominational student representation came from the United Methodist Church.  As President, Ruble has proven to be an able financial administrator, but his tenure has been marked by increasing tensions between Erskine and the ARP Church.  

    These tensions culminated in actions taken by the ARP General Synod in a March 2010 emergency meeting, where a sizeable majority of the Synod voted to replace the Erskine Board of Trustees with an Interim Board.  Almost immediately, however, Board members and Erskine employees unhappy with the Synod's action filed legal actions and were granted a restraining order against the Synod.  Thus the future of the Erskine schools is now tied up in litigation.  

    THE CURRENT LANDSCAPE

    After a quarter-century of relative calm in the ARPC, the church has entered a new period of conflict.  At the 2007 meeting of the General Synod there was lively and contentious discussion of Erskine College, and at the 2008 meeting action was taken to strengthen the ARPC's commitment to the inerrancy of Scripture and to require that inerrancy be affirmed by teaching and administrative agency employees.  In context, these efforts were clearly a response to developments at Erskine Seminary (see http://www.reformation21.org/articles/not-an-ordinary-meeting-of-synod.php).  In 2009 a Memorial to appoint an Ecclesiastical Commission to examine the work of the Erskine Board of Trustees was approved, and that Commission was to report its findings and recommendations at the next meeting of the General Synod.  Ironically, the issues under debate--especially the authority of Scripture and the fidelity of Erskine College and Seminary--are almost identical to the issues debated in the 1970's, and even some of the dramatis personae are the same.  The more things change in the ARPC, the more they stay the same!  

    Most recently, that Ecclesiastical Commission concluded that "the oversight exercised by the Board of trustees and the Administration of Erskine College and Seminary is not in faithful accordance with the standards of the ARP Church and the synod's previously issued directives," and that an emergency situation existed.  They further requested a called meeting of the General Synod to deal with these issues.  The General Synod then met on March 2-3, 2010 and decided by significant margins to replace the Board of Trustees with an Interim Board.  The following week, a lawsuit was filed by the Chairman of the Board on behalf of Erskine College, and though that suit was ultimately withdrawn (immediately upon which a bridging action was brought by three Erskine Seminary employees and the President of the Alumni Association in order to keep the restraining order in effect), a similar legal action against the General Synod was filed on March 15, 2010 by a group of Erskine alumni, including two Trustees who are also ARP ruling elders.  As of this point, the situation is highly conflicted and unclear.  

    But these important theological and practical debates are taking place in a different external context than the 1970's, and the stakes are considerably higher as a result.  The first external factor is the doctrinal implosion of American Evangelicalism.  While ARP conservatives in the 1970's could appeal to a relatively firm consensus among Evangelicals regarding the authority of Scripture, that consensus has eroded considerably.  Today it is difficult to name a single doctrine of the faith--the authority of Scripture, justification by grace through faith, the substitutionary atonement of Christ, the immutability and omniscience of God, and so on--that is not being questioned in so-called "Evangelical" circles.  The bleak picture of the state of Evangelical theology presented by David Wells in his No Place for Truth, or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993) has been largely confirmed by subsequent history.  This means that the external evangelical resources available to ARP conservatives are more ambiguous than they were in 1980.  In addition, the conservative Reformed world is less united than it was thirty years ago.  Here, of course, the ARPC's lack of an internal compass and sense of identity only compounds the problem.

    Another important external factor is the "grand realignment" that is currently taking place in American Presbyterianism.  Church historians have long anticipated such a restructuring in the American Reformed context and the outlines of it are now emerging with some clarity.  The PC(USA)'s experiment in "big-tent" Presbyterianism must now be judged a failure.  A church with little or no doctrinal and moral agreement cannot sustain itself.  "Diversity" by itself is no basis for church life, and we may expect the PC(USA) to continue to lose members at a rate of 40-60 thousand members per year for some time.  At this point it appears that the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC) with its non-geographical "New Wineskins" presbytery is poised to pick up former PC(USA) congregations and members who are leaving because of doctrinal declension and the ordination of practicing homosexuals in the PC(USA).  Thus the center of gravity in American Presbyterianism is shifting to the right from the old "mainline" to two more conservative groups--the PCA and the EPC.  

    Interestingly, this realignment is resulting in one group that is more "Reformed" and doctrinally precise in its orientation (the PCA) and one that is more "evangelical" and doctrinally tolerant (the EPC), thus mirroring the nineteenth-century split between "Old School" and "New School" Presbyterians.  This would seem to confirm George Marsden's thesis that much in American Presbyterianism can be understood in terms of these two contrasting Presbyterian impulses (see his The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience [New Haven: Yale, 1970]).

    A PERFECT STORM?

    What are the implications of all this for the ARPC?  If the current trends in the ARPC continue there will be increasing theological conflict accompanied by numerical decline.  This numerical decline will place increasing stress on the ministries of the church.  Soon the question of defunding historic ministries and institutions of the church will be faced.  Stark choices will have to be made, and those choices will be especially painful for the ARPC with its churchly sensibility and deep love for the ministries of the church.  The only realistic way to preserve some of those ministries will be merger with another denomination.  But then the question is: which other denomination?

    The prospects for merger are not promising among the smaller denominations.  The Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) is a bit smaller than the ARPC, but the cultural gulf is likely too great to be bridged.  The Reformed Presbyterian Church in North America (RPCNA) has initiated inter-church talks with the ARPC with a view to closer relations, and there are remarkable similarities between the two churches--with their Covenanter backgrounds the two churches seem to share in common much ecclesial DNA.  But that body has its own institutions (a college, a seminary, a magazine, etc.), and there is the question of the exclusive psalmody and non-instrumental worship that the RPCNA staunchly affirms but that the ARPC has left behind.  

    That leaves the two larger bodies--the PCA and the EPC.  For various reasons, some of them not particularly good, an ARPC merger with the PCA is unlikely.  The PCA already has a full range of institutions by virtue of its 1982 "Joining and Receiving" process with the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod (RPCES), and a compelling argument for maintaining both the Erskines and the Covenants, Bonclarken and Ridge Haven is elusive.  In addition, the PCA and the ARPC are both centered in the southeastern United States and there is a legacy of tension resulting from competition in that region of geographical overlap.  Finally, there are some persistent cultural differences between the two churches that pose ongoing impediments.  

    On balance, there is more of a practical case to be made for merger with the EPC.  The EPC is a national church with a northern center of gravity.  Some of the EPC churches were formerly part of the old United Presbyterian Church in North America (UPCNA), which included the nineteenth-century northern wing of the Associate Reformed Church.  The EPC is a younger denomination without a fully developed institutional infrastructure, and so there is less institutional overlap.  In addition, the EPC will likely soon be larger than it is at the present time.  Of course, there would be some complications.  ARPs would have to reconcile themselves to the ordination of women to ruling offices and to the significant charismatic presence in the EPC.  Some ARPs would probably find the EPC too conservative for their liking, and prominent ARP moderates would also have to reconcile themselves to being smaller fish in a much larger pond.  

    To cut to the chase, a plausible scenario looks like this: within ten to fifteen years (perhaps sooner) a significant group within the ARPC will promote merger with the EPC, and seek to take the ARPC agencies and institutions with them.  But many more conservative ARPs will not countenance such a union, and they will then seek to go into the PCA.  The fate of the ARPC institutions will hang on which of these groups is in the majority.  Thus an experiment dating back to 1782 of merging two of the lesser Scottish Presbyterian traditions (the Covenanters and Seceders) will come to an end.  It will end in much the same way (through merger) that these traditions largely faded earlier in the northern United States.  

    POSTSCRIPT

    As a personal addendum, I must add that I fervently hope and pray the story does not play out as I have outlined here.  And just to be clear, I say this not to criticize the PCA or the EPC.  Both are seeking faithfully to implement responsible visions of Reformed identity.  Rather, I say this out of a conviction that the ARPC still has something distinctive to offer to American Christianity.  I have come to love and value the ARPC, even as I grieve deeply over her current "trials and tribulations," and, for the sake of the richness of the American Presbyterian experience, there needs to be a viable alternative to the Old School and New School Presbyterian options.  But, alas, history has a way of imposing its logic, and only time will tell if this author has read the tea leaves correctly.  And of course, in the providence of God, the windings of history are also endlessly surprising.  Thus I am convinced that this scenario need not be so.  Much will hinge on the emergence of new leadership to chart a healthy course for the denomination and its institutions.  The long-term success of that new leadership will, in turn, depend on its ability to lead the church in addressing the fundamental problem of identity discussed above.  The problems at the schools are in large measure but reflections of this deeper problem of identity.  

    A compelling vision of ARPC identity must not seek merely to imitate other churches such as the PCA or a more conservative version of the PC(USA).  In addition, the ARPC would be wise not to hitch its wagon to the now-tired horse of American Evangelicalism--that would result in even greater fragmentation and incoherence.  Rather, the ARPC must recover the riches of its own heritage--a winsome ecclesial sensibility, a commitment to the lordship of Jesus Christ over his church (the Covenanter legacy), and to the free offer of a gracious gospel (the Seceder legacy).  Now that would be a potent antidote to the disunity, malaise, and flaccid Kulturprotestantismus that currently saps the energy and witness of the ARPC!  




    Dr. William B. Evans is the Younts Prof. of Bible and Religion at Erskine College.  He served as Moderator of the General Synod of the ARP Church in 2005, and he currently is a member of the Strategic Planning Committee for the General Synod.  From 1996 to 1999 he chaired the Inter-Church Relations Committee of the ARPC.

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