Magisterial Protestantism
Comes Full Circle and the Oracular Mark of the Church
What is a Christian? Is it an easy and straightforward
question? While I don't want to pretend there aren't some nuances to consider,
nevertheless on one level it is a pretty simple question we should be able to
answer.
A Christian is a baptised person trusting in Christ, who
lives by repentance and faith. Additionally I would argue a Christian is one
who submits to the Authority of the Word as revealed by the Apostles, for it is
in this submission to the Word that the Gospel is revealed and Christ is properly
known. The Word has always been at the centre of the Gospel and at the very
heart of what identifies and delineates God's people from the lost world. There
is no living by faith, trust in Christ or even baptism apart from the Word.*
We're all sinners and no one has 'arrived' so to speak. God
is still working on hearts and changing them. This is happily acknowledged and
His longsuffering and mercy are cause to rejoice. Indeed many are better than
the theology they profess or in many cases what they've been taught.
And yet it's no wonder that Protestantism through its own
wayward thinking and tortured paths has in many ways ended up back in the
plight of Medieval Roman Catholicism. The gospel is obscured and lost, buried
in tradition and a societal and worldly redefinition of Christianity that
quenches the Spirit and loses its way. Faith is no longer faith, the Church is
no longer the Church, the Kingdom is counterfeited and reproduced in the form
of Babel with a cross crowning its highest spire.
What about the Visible Church? Isn't this a viable concept?
Doesn't that mean we can in some capacity speak of Christians who are not
actually Christians?
Of course. The doctrine of the Visible Church is easily
established. Paul in Romans 9 speaks of an Israel in which not all are of
Israel. This instructs us in how the covenant functions in the space and time
of this age versus its actual and eschatological reality in the age to come. It
was true of Old Testament Israel and it's true during the time of the New Covenant.
Christians are warned to persevere and they're warned of false teachers. Why?
Because they are in danger of being in Israel but not of Israel. In Matthew 7,
Christ speaks of false believers who will be shocked on the Day of Judgment. In
Galatians, believers are described as falling from grace. Paul stands in doubt
of some. Elsewhere, Christians are warned that they must persevere in the
faith, there are those that taste the heavenly gift, partake of the Holy Ghost
and yet still fall away. The Church is warned by appeal to Old Covenant Israel.
Don't be like them, don't grumble and lose your way falling into idolatry and
under God's wrath. Take heed lest you fall.
Christians are those who live by 'Today'... every day hearing
His Voice and refusing to harden their hearts. We are to come daily with broken
hearts of contrition, with poverty of spirit and with a fervent living faith.
The Church is to exercise discipline and yet this discipline
cannot properly function in a Sacralist or antinomian construct. The ethical
bar is necessarily lowered and only the most egregious violators of the
ecclesiastical and social order are subject to discipline. Why? Because Church
discipline necessarily becomes a criminal act and society would be overwhelmed.
A rigorous sacral rule would turn into a reign of terror. Again, this is the
lesson of Geneva, and the Puritan experiments in Commonwealth England and the Massachusetts
Bay Colony. Sacral Christianity looks to enforcement, to laws and punishment,
for the state to enforce Christianity and essentially impose it (in some form)
upon unbelievers... and yet it never
really works.
In reality, if a society were Christian, though such a thing
is not possible or even conceivable this side of glory... we would actually
need fewer laws.
As it stands we will always be a minority in this world. This
is the teaching of the New Testament. We put the unrepentant out of the Church
and return them to the world... to the realm of Satan, the realm of the
unbaptised who will perish in the bestial chaos-waters. There is no possibility
of a Christian state and no means to charter it. The concept is utterly foreign
to New Testament categories of thought. The only Christian state (so to speak)
is Zion, the Heavenly Kingdom which is by definition outside this present evil age.
It is from beyond the eschaton, part of the New Heavens and New Earth. It is
not of this world.
The Visible Church is a valid concept and serves as a
warning. Sacralism abuses this doctrine and uses it as a cloak for nominal
Christianity. It adds a socio-cultural element and thus corrupts the Biblical
conception. This added element also muddies the waters in debates over the
subject of paedobaptism. So-called nominal Christians in the Church either need
to be disciplined or more likely, if the Church is Spirit-filled (in the
Biblical sense) and faithfully preaching and teaching the Word.... the
unbeliever will not want to be there. It will be oppressive and offensive to
them. By all means urge them to repentance but if they refuse, let them go.
The Sacralist version of the Visible Church all but creates
nominal Christians and yet what are these nominal Christians? They are (at
present) Christians but in name. They are (or have degenerated into) hypocrites
that need to be exposed, thus either provoking repentance and newness of
life... or a return to the death-course of this world. The only reason they're
still in the Church is because the Church has fallen into error and redefined
its own parameters.
There will always be false Christians in the Church that fool
everyone but they should be rare and hard to discern. Once again I contend that
if the Church is doing what it's supposed to do, the heavy hand of the Elders
won't really be needed that often. Simple faithful preaching of the Word will
usually do the work.
But such preaching will only work properly if there's
antithesis between the Church and the world. Being a Christian should never be
respectable. There is no worldly gain in following Christ. It's a call to take
up the cross and follow the Lamb to Golgotha. False teachers like Billy Graham
who think the gospel is a product being sold, something to be marketed, reveal
their own spiritual poverty and lack of understanding as to what the Gospel
even is.
No lost person will want to be a Christian... if they
understand what it actually means. One can't help but pity them as they wallow
in confusion. The False Church has sown chaos with its counterfeit and watered
down gospels, its gimmicks, its dog and pony shows and other marketing tricks
that have confused people and brought them in under false pretense.
No, we're called to follow the Lamb and to take up the Cross.
No one in their right mind would do so apart from supernatural transformation.
We follow Christ because in our poverty of spirit and conviction, we have to, because the Gospel is the Truth. We cannot stand to live by
the lie anymore. The Divine mysteries have been revealed to us by the Holy
Spirit. That's what Christ said (for example in Luke 10) and that's what Paul
taught in 1 Corinthians and elsewhere. By God's grace we look at the world
through different eyes.
Truly the disciples and leaders of nominal and sacral
Christianity make proselytes but are in reality making them twice the children
of Hell. All too often they seem to think
the gospel is about respectability, gain, worldly power and prestige. They are
blind guides and Pharisees producing Pharisees.
What a sad reality. We have Christians who have so abused the
term as to render it meaningless. They have equated the Christian Calling with
something akin to a virtuous pagan philosophy. The Kingdom is reduced to
politics and culture. Heaven is cast down and reconstituted on Earth through
the efforts of men.... men working hand-in-hand with pagans, with children of
darkness.
Let us be clear, the Scriptures define what a Christian is.
Once again think of it from Satan's perspective. What could be more effective
in undermining the Church then to redefine at the most fundamental level, what
it is? Corrupt the basic terms and concepts and turn them on their heads. It's
sinister but brilliant.
Contrary to the confusion there is a Biblical definition and
the Scriptures provide parameters for Christianity, the Gospel and the Church.
It is the Remnant and it is in this remnant that the Visible Church is found.
Think of post-Solomonic Judah as opposed to the Northern Kingdom...
The Israel of Jeroboam, the kingdom of the Dan and Bethel
shrines was apostate. Were there faithful people within it? There were the Sons of the Prophets living as
a separatist remnant. There were the seven thousand that had not bowed the knee
to Baal.
The apostate kingdom still had reference to the covenant but
was clearly reckoned outside its proper 'visible' boundaries. Elisha had no
regard for Jehoram the king of Israel in 2 Kings 3. And yet the king was
Jeho-ram, he was still part of the onomastic tradition of including the name of
YHWH/Jehovah in the naming of their sons. Outwardly (at the syncretistic Dan
and Bethel shrines) they were Jehovah worshippers and yet so far removed from
the Word that they were no longer regarded as valid.** The Oracle, the
prophetic Word had all but been removed from them. In fact it denounced them (see
1 Kings 13).
It is the Word-Mark that identifies and defines the true
Church. The faithful Church does not exist by the fiction of an organic
apostolic succession. An office born of ritual does not delineate and validate
the Church. The Gospel heritage is compromised of a common faith, one rooted in
submission to revelation... the Word/Foundation of the Prophet-Apostles, the
bearers of the Holy Oracle. (See Ephesians 2.12ff)
God was covenantally present in the Old Testament where the
Word was still found. The ideas of Word, Sanctuary, Oracle and Divine Presence
are all interwoven in the Old Testament narrative. There on the holy mount in
the holy city, the king ruled the covenant people through the covenant word and
the prophets spoke the Word of God. Through what some have called the covenant
lawsuit, they kept the people accountable. The people were reckoned as accursed
when the Word was removed and no prophet was to be found (Amos 8.11, Hosea
4.5-6, Psalm 74.9). These ideas are elaborated upon and expanded in the New
Testament as they are applied to the Body of Christ, the Living Word, the Holy
Temple.
In the Northern kingdom of Israel there were those that
retained forms of YHWH worship. And yet they lost the substance, they had lost
their relationship to the Oracular Word. In some sense they were still on the
fringes of the covenant and yet were no longer reckoned able to share in its
fellowship nor could they claim possession of the Word.
This analogy helps us to place groups like Roman Catholicism
and Theological liberals. They are still in a broad tenuous sense remotely
connected to the Christian Church... and yet they have lost the Oracular
presence and their claims to being viable and true Christian communions, part
of the Visible Church, are invalid. And it's not just the liberals and Roman
Catholics that have found themselves in this plightful condition. Many
Protestants are in danger of substituting the Oracular Word for another
authority, for another Temple-Kingdom. Indeed many have already done so.
Today, Sacralism under the influence of various theological
influences has generated apostasy and confusion. We have worshippers of the
Biblical God who like Israel of old are not to be regarded.
Confusion seems to reign as we have in addition to the true
Church, found in no outward institution or bureaucracy... a multitude of
counterfeits. I am not speaking here merely in denominational terms. That is
another trap and distraction, another perversion and adulteration of the
Visible Church. The Bible speaks of 'The Church' which can be understood eschatologically
or in the sense of all viably professing Christians and congregations on the
Earth at any given time. The Scriptures also speak of churches, individual
congregations scattered throughout cities, regions and the world at large. The
Scriptures nowhere establish an intermediary tier or hierarchical structure
that organises congregations in the name of representing The Church. Regional
congregations are not organised into a separate polity and there is no
hierarchy, no office beyond the local bishop/elder.
The age of the Apostles has ended. They are now represented
by the Oracular Word they gave to the Church and those that follow it lay claim
to their spiritual heritage and emulate their doctrine and yet cannot claim
their authority or expand upon it. The parameters and foundations are set and
established in the New Testament. Practical concerns and historical conflict do
not permit Christians to form new polities or turn to innovative forms of
institution. Denominationalism is a false ecclesiastical model that breeds a
host of false categories, distractions and theological rabbit trails that lead
to pitfalls and traps. Denominations were beginning to appear in Corinth and
Paul condemned them as representing the spirit of the world. Nothing has
changed. They are in the end political organisations that devolve into
bureaucracies centered on power and money.
The counterfeit definitions of the Church are out there and
many (including what I've cited here) revolve around some notion of the Church
in socio-cultural terms. We must interact with this false concept and reckon
with it. It overshadows the history of the Church from the time of Constantine
until this present hour. We can't ignore it but we should never grant it
validity.
There are well meaning Christian people that function within
this model. Indeed this very Sunday I will sit in one of these congregations
hoping to find the true gospel shining through the corruption and distracting
miasma, products of the spiritual conflict which rages within the Church.
Kingdoms rise against kingdoms and yet the real battlefield is within the
Church. I'm sorry to say that most Christians have forgotten this or have never
learned it.
Do I want to attend these corrupt congregations and grit my
teeth listening to watered-down sermons and exercises in ear tickling? Do I
want to be subject to denominational propaganda and endless trivial contentions
over tradition or questions of which man-made model is more philosophically
coherent?
No, but until Christians begin to awaken from their slumber,
until the Scriptures are revisited and these questions reconsidered the New
Testament model of a Remnant Church will remain something of a dream finding
its only reality in clusters of individuals and congregations scattered about
North America and the world at large.
I am increasingly dubious as to whether or not this kind of
reform is possible here but as soon as I think it, I plead forgiveness for with
God all things are possible.
In the meantime we must contend with false definitions of
Christianity and the gospels and kingdoms they purport to disseminate and
fashion. There are enemies among us and yet there are also the simple who are
taken in. We must pray for them and attain victory by means of love and above
all with truth.
See also:
*Some will balk at the inclusion of baptism in the definition
of a Christian. It does require a qualification and yet this will still prove
less than sufficient for some. Baptism is the normative outward means of
entering into covenant union and thus is in that capacity is the normative
outward means of becoming part of Christ's Body, the Church i.e. a Christian.
The key word here is normative. There are exceptions. The
thief on the cross is the most famous example. His situation was exceptional as
opposed to normative. Had he not been in the process of being executed he most
certainly would have been baptised straightway.
God can certainly save apart from baptism and yet it is the
means He has ordained to mark out His people from the world. The fact that the
world abuses this mark does not change this reality. In fact it should be
expected that Satan working through the false church would do all in his power
to subvert the sign and spawn confusion. Someone who professes Christ and yet
has not been baptised or is neglecting the rite is in a state of disobedience
and if not remedied upon rebuke and instruction... their profession needs to be
called into question. Bearing none of the temporal markers of Christ they are
necessarily exempted from the Lord's Supper and have no access to mysteries and
blessings of the Gospel.
In some cases there will be a delay. Sadly this is due to
erroneous ecclesiologies and putrid denominational bureaucracies. Once the
professor-applicant grasps the issue they should seek baptism as soon as
possible and I've known some who (rightly) ended up having to resort to
somewhat unconventional means due to ecclesiastical tyranny.
Under normative terms baptism is necessary for a Christian
profession to be deemed valid, indeed it may be spoken of as the outward
covenant expression of regeneration. But that must always be qualified. At the
same time were I speaking to a Roman Catholic I would emphasise that baptism
does not save in the least but rather our salvation is found in God's grace and
expressed by faith in our transformed hearts. This is not equivocation but a
further expression of the duality or dynamic Christ Himself often employed. See
John 6.26ff for multiple examples of this dynamic in application.
** Many err in thinking the Dan and Bethel shrines were
examples of rank paganism. They were counterfeit examples of Jehovah/Temple
worship, improperly constituted and combined with elements of paganism. They
are essentially 'high place' shrines taken to the extreme because they were
officially incorporated into the cultus of the rebellious northern kingdom. There
are some (especially contemporary) commentators who differ but from Josephus to
many if not most of the older commentators, this is the commonly held view.