High Place Worship and the Doctrine of Vocation

It's interesting that in some Protestant circles, particularly the Reformed who are rightly concerned to argue for the Scriptural regulation of worship then at the same time identify their secular work as worship. Their secular work is an offering (as it were), it magnifies God and advances the Kingdom.

The Reformed have historically argued that innovation in the realm of worship, viz., adding on to the Scriptural commands...is a form of idolatry.

Yet if that's true shouldn't work (as worship) also be regulated?  How do you know that what you're doing (if its worship) isn't actually engaging in yet another form of idolatry?

In fact if the principle (work as worship/Holy Vocation) is wrong... by 'sanctifying' the work you are automatically making it into an idol.

At this point I ask where can I find the Christian blueprints for government and economics, the arts and sciences? Where does the Bible show me how to form a godly political system? Where does the Bible elaborate on macro-economics? Does the Bible only allow for realism in the realm of art? Is the scientific method in accord with Scriptural metaphysics? Where can I find the answers to these questions?

They're patently not there. And there's a reason for that I would argue. Many would point to the Old Testament at this point and try and derive political, economic and social principles from the Old Covenant arrangement. But this too is an error.

The Covenant people have only one analogy in the New Covenant era...that is the Church. Only the Church can be identified with Israel the Holy Nation. No political or tribal entity on earth can claim the Covenant status even if they erroneously presume to take it upon themselves. All such claims are spurious.

The laws of the Old Testament weren't models for a social order. They were typological pictures of the coming judgment and the gospel, the way of redemption.

All the promises were about Christ. 2 Corinthians 1.20 tells us all the promises are affirmed (yes) and confirmed (amen) in Christ. When anyone tries to extract those promises and apply them to America, the modern Jewish state or people, any other entity or idea, they're rejecting Paul's clear teaching. The Old Testament promises are about Christ (who is Israel) and he makes clear elsewhere that those in Christ participate in these promises and are in and part of Israel which in the New Testament has taken on its true spiritual meaning. To be 'in' Christ is a work of the Holy Spirit and to speak of nations or civilizations in this way is to embrace philosophical speculation and deny Scripture's authority for determining doctrine.

To extract certain portions of the Old Testament or to try and apply portions of it, mixing and matching with other political philosophies, is not only reading and understanding the Bible incorrectly, it destroys the typological picture and many of the lessons the New Testament teaches. In the end, this approach is just another example of syncretism. It's the same thing that was happening under the Old Testament and being condemned. It's taking alien ideas and human-born concepts and wedding them to the theology of the Bible. Throughout the history of the Church men have attempted to do this with nations, races, and social systems. In every case they claim that this is God's way and that God is on their side. You always end up with something that looks like Christianity on the surface but in fact is pagan to its core.

Today we don't have a holy nation, a holy kingship or a holy priesthood outside of the Church. We don't have a sanctified race or social system and this reality is not a problem because the Pilgrim Church is not in the business of transforming society or attempting to gain power.

Christ is Israel, the True King, and the High Priest. Our job is to proclaim it and deny ourselves.

To try and apply these Old Testament types to modern contexts is to de-covenantalize them. It's taking the holy and treating it as common. It's sacrilege in the extreme. Israel didn't take the things that were holy and give them to the surrounding nations.

There were plenty of Jews who wanted to blend Biblical Judaism with the values and judgments of surrounding nations. They wanted to emulate them. They wanted a king like the nations. They wanted to copy their altars and forms of sensual and tactile worship.

Today so many people read the Old Testament and equate the United States with Israel. They think about how the Israelites were supposed to suppress the Canaanites or how the Israelite kings were praised for removing idolatry persecuting the sodomites etc... and they long for such a government in this land. They looked at George Bush as a Hezekiah and now look at Obama as a Manasseh.

Again, the king was a type of Jesus 'the' King, the Christ. Israel was meant to be Holy, a picture of God's grace and redemption. It had prophets and a priesthood, holy laws and even its wars were holy. All of these things, the prophets, the priests, the land, even the wars...all pointed to Jesus Christ.

To try and draw parallels with modern nations or even with the extra-Biblical concept of Christendom is to profoundly misunderstand both the Old and New Testaments. It is a misreading of the Bible on a massive scale.

You want to purge Canaanites today? That's not applicable in terms of America. We do that by purifying the Church and purging out all syncretistic impulses and idolatry, the false believers in our midst.

Right-wing American Christians think of the secular Left as the Canaanites. Actually in terms of the theological analogy....they (the Idolaters in the Church) are the spiritual heirs of the Canaanites. They're the Baal worshippers within the land (the Church). The secularists are lost too, but they're not 'in' the Church, i.e. in the land. They're only a threat to us if we borrow their worldly wisdom and seek to emulate their ways.

The New Testament tells us of the nature of our warfare. It's spiritual not carnal. Our weapons are not swords or guns. Let us not fall into the common blasphemy of viewing the lives of dead American soldiers as somehow redemptive. They have not died for us in either the social or spiritual sense. They've lived by the sword, killed for the empire and died the death they all too often deserved. We're not free as citizens because of their works. And as Christians we owe them nothing and in fact if we understand anything of the Empire and its evils...we must harshly condemn their deeds. We can urge them to repent, we can pity them, but we must not praise the agents of violence, lies and murder.

While the Sacralist cannot find economic and political blueprints from the New Testament they (through rather dubious philosophical assumptions) have allowed themselves to construct rather elaborate theological systems that in the end are speculative and often completely contradict New Testament teaching. They may use the 'Biblical' adjective when speaking of them but upon closer examination their ideas have found their genesis in a wide range of ideas and concepts that have flowed from the Western tradition which all too often is misnamed as Christendom. Regardless they are a far cry from Scripture.

It's not new. The Constantinian Shift birthed this tendency which flowered during the Middle Ages and has experienced many seasons of reinvigoration and expansion. Today, the tone is one of wistful celebration and a clarion call to militancy. The politically conservative Restorationism of our day does not concern the New Testament but a return to the supposed halcyon days of Charlemagne. Charles was many things, but in God's eyes he was not great. Luke 16.15 comes to mind:

And He said to them, “You are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts. For what is highly esteemed among men is an abomination in the sight of God.

Beginning with Augustine and others the Church reformulated its ideas about money and power (economics and politics) and abandoned the legacy of the New Testament and the early Church.

It syncretized worship, introduced hierarchy, embraced violence, and sanctified greed and wealth. The bottom line is a strict adherence to the New Testament doesn't allow for a Christian society nor does it provide the tools to build a Christian civilization. Some would argue the Old Testament does but to use it in such a way is to misunderstand and certainly misinterpret the Old Testament. Divorcing it from Christ and the history of redemption they use Old Testament ideas, syncretized with new ones and construct the Harlot Zion, the false Church.

There are those who have used this theological tendency to sanction great evil and invent new ways to do it. And no doubt there are many who are sincere in their innovations. Some seem more harmless than others. But in their zeal to reach the culture that's slipping away from them, the Church of today has embraced a great deal of pagan superstition and like the Medieval Church they've blended it with Biblical Christianity. Like the Jews of the Old Testament they have borrowed from the nations in their desire to be like them. I'm sure in those days there were many who argued a greater influence and impact could be made by speaking in the vernacular and using the media of the day.

These people have not understood the wisdom of God. They (like the world) find God's wisdom to be foolish.

We read in 2 Timothy 3:

But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: ² For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, ³ unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, ⁴ traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, ⁵ having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away! ⁶ For of this sort are those who creep into households and make captives of gullible women loaded down with sins, led away by various lusts, ⁷ always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. ⁸ Now as Jannes and Jambres resisted Moses, so do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, disapproved concerning the faith; ⁹ but they will progress no further, for their folly will be manifest to all, as theirs also was.

I'm afraid all too often people read this passage and shake their heads and say, that's just like America today. The passage is not applicable to America or any other nation. One it's characteristic of the entire age, for the Last Days are the period extending from the Ascension to the Second Coming. They don't refer to 'Last' in the sense of the time right before the 2^nd Coming. This is the last epoch of history, the last covenantal arrangement wherein this Age blends (via the Church's presence) with the Age to Come. All that is left is the Day of Judgment which in terms of eschatology has already happened with the Death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Christ. And yet it is also...not  yet.

Paul was writing in the Last Days. Acts 2.17 and Hebrews 1.2 make it clear that the Last Days have already been a reality for over 1900 years.

The Middle Ages were the Last Days too, and today we certainly live in the Last Days. Whether we live at the time Christ will actually return...who can say? I certainly hope so.

The key phrase in the passage is....having a form of godliness but denying its power.

Paul is speaking of the leaders of a false form of Christianity. These are the false apostles which dogged him everywhere he went. This is the battle found between the lines throughout all of his epistles. While at times he may seem arrogant, what he's trying to do is assert the validity of his office and calling vis-a-vis the claims of the false apostles. He counters their doctrine at every turn. And here he warns, just as he warned the Ephesians in Acts 20 that this tension will be characteristic of the entire Church age. It won't just be Gnostics (1 Timothy 6.20) teaching a wrong cosmology and a false view of the material v. the spiritual world. There will also be those who will try to revive Judaism (Acts 15), those who celebrate acculturation (1 Corinthians 5) and those who blend both Judaizing and Paganizing tendencies (Colossians 2.16-18).

Paul is speaking of those within the Church who have a form of godliness but ultimately reject the Kingdom of God. They have baptized sin and are traitors to the true Kingdom. They may be good patriots as the world defines it. They may be successful and respected. They may be good citizens and wise as the world reckons wisdom, but they like the man in Matthew 7.21-22 don't know God. They have not heeded the words of Jeremiah 9:

²³ Thus says the Lord:

“Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom,
Let not the mighty man glory in his might,
Nor let the rich man glory in his riches;
²⁴ But let him who glories glory in this,
That he understands and knows Me,
That I am the Lord, exercising lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth.
For in these I delight,” says the Lord.

²⁵ “Behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord, “that I will punish all who are circumcised with the uncircumcised— ²⁶ Egypt, Judah, Edom, the people of Ammon, Moab, and all who are in the farthest corners, who dwell in the wilderness. For all these nations are uncircumcised, and all the house of Israel are uncircumcised in the heart.”

It is God who exercises judgment and righteousness in the earth. If the Church has any part in this it is through the preaching of the Gospel and by being martyr-witnesses.

Boastful and brutal love of money and power, the root of evils is not an exercising of a judgment and righteousness. These are concepts they hide behind in order to sanctify their evil deeds.

From such turn away!

Innovation is the rejection of an objective standard. And like the Middle Ages we are flooded by fads and newly invented forms of spirituality. How do we know what's good? If it says something about 'God' and makes me feel spiritual then it must be good. The Medieval culture gave us pilgrimages and saint worship and our modern Church doesn't look much different. Today we have a cult of angels and increasingly the equivalent of saints. We have pilgrimages (some to Holy Washington DC) certainly a host of spiritual (often narcissistic) exercises. We even have miraculous visions, people going to heaven and hell. I find it hard to believe these books are so popular but their ubiquity testifies it must be so.

The Church is weighed down with superstition regarding America, the West, history, current events, and the future. Many live under the yoke of legalism, a host of prescriptions rooted in cultural taboo and narratives that have been synthesized with Scriptural truth.

We live as Christians at all times and in all places. This affects our work, our recreations, our interactions with believers, family, the culture and the state. In this sense indeed all of life is consecrated. We are born again and thus our lives are demarcated from the world around us.

We are pilgrims and that affects mission, ethics and expectations. We see this fallen world as it really is and proclaim the need for repentance and the coming judgment. Our ethic is heavenly minded. Our primary weapon is love. With it we overcome the world. Thus eschewing and rejecting all violence we cannot to aid or abet, participate in or endorse the sword-bearing state. It's there for a reason and serves an important purpose, but in the end the state and its goals do not concern us and cannot help us in what we're here to do.

In terms of ethics, we are Christians not only primarily but solely. This is our vocation. Our tasks in life are done in faith. Faith teaches us our goals and aspirations are transcendent. Our concepts of success and riches are beyond what this world can grasp. To the world we are fools. We may do good quality work but our motivations are in the world's eyes nonsensical. We refuse to play by their rules, view time and career commitment or success in the same way and thus they'll always know...we're not 'with' them.

While it is admirable and right to try and please God in terms of our work and I have no doubt there are many who are motivated by this simple concern. Nevertheless many of them and certainly their teachers are motivated by a different host of concerns ranging from something like utopia to raw power.

In this quest they have inserted a theology between the pages of Scripture and the New Testament in particular (which certainly affects how the Old is read and understood).

The insertion sometimes hiding behind a seemingly innocent and beneficent concept like Christian Vocation in the end presents a grave threat to the New Testament teaching concerning the Kingdom of God and the ethical system that flows from it is essentially obliterated. The love of money becomes the root of all success instead of the root of all evil. The loving of enemies and turning the other cheek is replaced with prideful violence often centered around the concept of an idolatrous Babel-state. The Kingdom that is not of this world is replaced with a kingdom that looks very much like the world. The battle-shield with the cross on it is a perfect symbol representing the false kingdom and the vocational ethic it generates.