In a recent piece I cited a quote from Dominionist teacher
and Charles Colson protégé John Stonestreet wherein he suggested that cultural
Christianity has real benefits. It's better for people to go to church even if
it's for the wrong reasons. And by implication it's better for people to go to
a bad, theologically compromised church than none at all or to have those
churches disappear from the street corner.
This ethos is in keeping with the language and thought of
figures like Wayne Grudem who believe that Christian support and celebration of
the Trump presidency with all its sinful ugliness and even brutality (though
they whitewash this) in no way destroys the testimony of the Church. Apparently
it's better to have power even if in an immoral and ugly form than to be
disenfranchised. That's really the essence of the argument. Because even bad 'Christian'
government (actually an oxymoron) under someone like Trump is better than no
Christian government at all.
There is a hostility in these circles to Christians standing
in a place of opposition, in an adversarial role to society. The Church cannot
take dominion when we're disenfranchised or second class, when we're operating
in an 'under siege' mentality. This type of transformationalist thinking has
become the orthodoxy of our day and has even spread abroad, having infected
congregations and teachers in places like China, Latin America and Africa.
But what do the Scriptures actually say about the Church's
relationship to the world?
We've laboured elsewhere to demonstrate that the New
Testament knows nothing of dominion and in fact the opposite is true. We're
called to take up the cross, and as martyr-witnesses persecution isn't an
anomaly, it's the norm. The only triumph in the New Testament is over sin in
the transformed regenerate life and in the coming of Christ.
Sacralism envisions the Church as but a component in a larger
Kingdom construct which includes society and culture. This teaching has gone
through various incarnations since the days of Constantine and Theodosius and
Stonestreet merely represents its current Evangelical manifestation. Under this
model, the culture and thus the state are a means by which God builds His
Kingdom. Legislation and culture become pedagogical, schoolmasters to bring us
to Christ. This is a perversion and attempt to hijack Paul's teaching regarding
Redemptive-History and the Mosaic Law in Galatians 3. Such thinking is also at
the heart of the now dominant concept of worldview
in which the world's knowledge and wisdom are given a Christian gloss. The
world's intellectual advances are synthesised with Christian thought in order
for the Church to place its stamp or mark on the various spheres of society and
bind all these concepts together into one grand Dominionist unified theory of
philosophy or Christian Worldview as
it often mistakenly called. On one level it's fairly brilliant and represents a
profound utilisation and appropriation of the Western Tradition in order to
build the Kingdom of God.
But of course if such a project is in error, it would be the grand heresy of the age, the great
corruption, the groundwork for apostasy and one of the most pernicious examples
of infiltration and subversion of Christian doctrine and Scriptural authority.
The Scriptures certainly teach that God uses means. This notion
of means has proven difficult for many Evangelicals who have been highly
influenced by generations of Enlightenment Empiricism and an individualistic
Baptistic theology which has little use or capacity for the concept. To be fair
many Evangelicals embrace these concepts (such as family as a means) albeit in
a limited and often confused form.
In the New Testament, the Church itself is a means by which
grace is communicated and the family unit (another means) continues to operate
within that context. There is of course a dynamic at work wherein the Church
and the Christian experience function both on a corporate and individual level.
There have often been tendencies to overly or even exclusively focus on one or
the other.
And yet clearly God works through the family which established
in marriage, is itself patterned on the salvific union relationship of the
bride-Church with Christ the Lord-groom (Eph 5). Marriage is actually a common
institution that does not survive the eschaton (Matt 22.30) however it is
granted a special status for the Church as we are exhorted to marry in the Lord (1 Cor 7.39) and the
children produced from such unions are reckoned as sanctified or holy (1 Cor
7.14), a reality that is not true when applied to the world. This reality
points to the fact that the world's marriages are not the same as our marriages
and thus those who would confuse the world's institutions with the Church are
not only guilty of theological error, they sow confusion... placing too much
expectation on the world's concept of marriage and effectively downgrading the
Christian concept of marriage by (at least in part) subjugating it to the
culture and its definitions.
The children that result from the sanctified relationship of
Christian marriage, yea the oikos-household
is reckoned part of this larger Church-Kingdom-Covenant-Temple concept and such
offspring are included into the initiatory baptismal formulae, reckoned holy
believers and included in the promises and imperatives given to the body. They
like the covenanted adults are kept by the Holy Spirit once again working
through means such as the Word and Sacraments, prayer and though many would
downplay it in our day, individual piety as expressed in passages like the
Sermon on the Mount. The children (like the adults) that fail to persevere
either end up abandoning the Church or are put out. When discipline fails or
when the Word is not faithfully preached, the effectiveness of this God
ordained model is compromised, the Church's distinct holy identity is diluted
and eventually eradicated.*
The Word is of course a primary means, the inscripturation of
God-breathed revelation, taught as doctrine and communicated through the
foolishness of preaching. The word is also conveyed through the testimonies and
speech (a form of in-the-world preaching not to be confused with some kind of 'pass
the microphone' testimony time) of believers speaking to the lost.
Additionally the sacraments, or holy rites, mysteries or
ordinances (all valid terms) are also used to convey grace and aid in
sanctification. The holy waters of baptism and the sacred communion elements
are tied to salvation (conveying union and perseverance) and the latter bread
and wine are referred to as spiritual meat and drink, veritable Bread from
Heaven. These are real means used by God to build His Church and proclaim His
Kingdom. And there are even more that we could speak of but these are all God
ordained means that He has appointed and ordained to be used by the Church in
order to build the Church and to help it grow, persevere and maintain its
distinct identity.
It's also essential to point out that as God ordained means
they all contain a Spirit-element as it were. The Holy Spirit works through
these holy means to unite individuals to Christ and His Body, to forgive sin
and to grow in Christ-likeness, to further the process of sanctification or
regeneration (as an older generation of theologians once referred to it).
Regeneration (John 3) is to be understood not merely as a onetime Damascus
Road-type event, which not all Christians actually experience but is to be
understood as a Spirit wrought work that is at once instantaneous, progressive
and yet future.
These are God-ordained means, and a category of doctrine that
has been lost in much of the Calvinistic world and all but eradicated in the
Evangelical sphere.
But does the New Testament teach that the world, the culture
and the state are means to bring us to Christ? Is it asking too much to insist
on some Scripture to back it up, or even a basic sketched argument rooted in a
complex of verses?
I contend there is not a single passage in the New Testament,
yea in the whole of Scripture that suggests this. It's a doctrine born of philosophical
deduction, speculation and necessity born of sacralist assumption. It is read
into the Scriptures even in defiance of overwhelming testimony and data to the
contrary.
Some might turn to the Old Testament and use Israel as an
example, but this would be an error as there is no covenanted political entity
in the New Covenant. No nation can serve in the capacity of Old Testament
Israel and thus any such analogy quickly collapses. The only analogy to Old
Testament Israel is in its fulfillment which the New Testament identifies as the
True Israel or the Body of Christ, the Temple-Church of the Last Days... the
age between the First and Second Coming.
Aside from obvious passages such as Luke 16.15 which declares
what is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God, there are
passages such as 1 Corinthians 5 which refers to the world as those 'without'
and suggests that we have nothing to do with them. Indeed Paul (like Christ) has
no interest in their unjust courts and encourages the Church to see to its own
affairs.
How strange and foreign these passages must seem to the likes
of Stonestreet and those who share his Sacralist proclivities.
Aside from other obvious passages such as 1 John 2.15 wherein
we are exhorted to love not the world or the things in the world, there are
many other passages which run contrary to the basic underlying assumption of
Stonestreet and the many thinkers like him. Indeed I would argue the New
Testament militates against the dominant and nearly unchallenged Evangelical
ethos of our day. The Scriptures actually teach antithesis, that we the Church
are not of this world are in an adversarial and oppositional relationship to
it, indeed the language is indicative of a war, a spiritual war waged with
non-carnal weapons in which we are told to fight faithfully by refusing to
entangle ourselves in the affairs of this life (2 Tim 2.3-4).
And yet we're supposed to believe that the world is a means
God uses to sanctify us and grow the Church?
While I'm sure Stonestreet and others like him would
acknowledge the enmity of the world, their theology (or more properly their philosophy)
is confused and falls into contradiction as they try to have it both ways. The
ethics that flow from this thinking virtually turn the New Testament on its
head.
Indeed their theology necessarily posits an undeclared and even
unexplored 'tipping point' in which the transformed world is no longer the world but a manifestation of the
Kingdom. Were this hypothetical tipping point reached, the values and judgments
of the culture and indeed the power and money which dominate this present evil age (Gal 1.4) are no longer
'the world' but instead are the thoughts and impulses of the holy realm. And thus by implication
large swathes of the New Testament would no longer apply. Tantamount to a new
epoch nowhere suggested in the New Testament, I think more people would be
upset by this theology if they merely understood this simple point.
On the contrary we must reject the sacralist tradition and
assert the New Testament remains normative for all of this present evil age and
in keeping with its teaching, Satan will not cease to be god of this world (2 Cor 4.4) before Christ comes. The effect of
Stonestreet and other false teachers like him (and indeed they are many) is to
weaken the Church. Borrowing from the New Testament they speak of equipping the
saints and some even use the unfortunate term of empowerment. But the end
result of their teaching is quite the opposite. Rather than defend the gates,
they open them. Rather than take up the sword of the spirit, they lower it and
compromise in order to gain victory.
Is there any basis for the idea of the world and culture
being a means to bring us to Christ? What about Christendom? That's usually the
context the positive statement regarding culture is meant to apply to.
Christendom is a means (it's argued) as opposed to say the Islamic world.
Once again a proper understanding of antithesis reveals there
are better opportunities for the gospel to function within a hostile
environment as unpleasant as it might be. Christendom, a false construct with
absolutely no basis in the New Testament is also a spiritually hostile
environment but one in which the antithesis is clouded by the fog of confusion
and even seduction. The world is recast in moral faux-Christian terms and thus
many innocent and otherwise sincere people are deceived. By planting a golden
cross atop Babel, they think they're building Zion and honouring God, even as
they engage in sinful (but effectively baptised) worldly conduct.
This situation, Stonestreet's ideal actually represents a dangerous
compromise and it is in that very situation (of rival faux-Christianity) that
antithesis is desperately needed in order for the Church to maintain its
distinct identity. And historically it is the very venue in which the
anti-sacralist resistance is most fiercely persecuted.
*While the adherents of baptistic theology may rail against
those who embrace a paedo-inclusive sacramentology for introducing
'unbelievers' into the Church (a false charge), the truth is their now dominant
dominionism is guilty of creating an utterly false category of Christian... the
so-called Cultural Christian celebrated by Stonestreet. One is reminded of
Mather's old adage, 'better hypocrites than profane', a call to state
Christianity and coercion which is always the end result of such thinking. It
must be stated that many of baptistic stripe have failed to grasp that
paedo-inclusive sacramentology antedates Constantine and the error of that
unfortunate man and the Shift he represents is not represented in something
like infant baptism but in the concept of sacralist dominion, the Kingdom being
expanded to include culture, state and civilisation. Under this model infant
baptism was abused and twisted and tied in with the concept of citizenship,
distorting its older usage which harks back to the New Testament itself and is abundantly
testified to in the pre-Constantinian era.