Recently I decided to revisit Paul Washer's Ten Indictments
Against the Modern Church. You can get it in pamphlet form but in this case I
wanted to listen to it and so I went to SermonAudio. I'm not usually one for
highly impassioned preaching with shouting and all the rest, but if I am going
to listen to someone do it, it's going to be along the lines of Paul Washer.
It's been a good eight years since I listened to it last. I
remember what I was doing at the time and can place the date in 2010. I
remember being pleasantly surprised by his candor and largely accurate
assessment of Evangelicalism in the 21st century. Of course, I don't
agree with him on every point but overall it's excellent.
I recall also being surprised to hear some of the criticism.
Some members of what I call the Hyper-Solafideist factions came out against
Washer accusing him of pietism and of preaching law rather than gospel. Are
these charges warranted? No, they're not but to understand the issues we must
briefly look at Hypersolafideism, law and gospel and Pietism.
By Hyper-Solafideist I mean those that have taken
Justification by Faith Alone (Sola Fide) and have made it into a Centraldogma, an organising principle of
their system. It shapes and defines how they understand salvation, the Church,
Christian piety and even hermeneutics. By referring to it as Hyper-, I don't
mean to suggest the doctrine itself is in error. By no means, but instead what
I am suggesting is that it can be abused and overemphasised to the point that
other Biblical doctrines are distorted and subject to reductionism.
When I refer to them as 'factions' I'm referring to several
groups within the larger Protestant sphere. There are certainly some in
Reformed circles that have succumbed to this 'hyper' version of the doctrine
and this understanding is also quite common among Evangelicals. In fact they
would constitute the largest group mentioned here. Additionally it is among
Evangelical circles that one finds the most egregious forms of this hyper-
doctrine.
And not a few Confessional Lutherans advocate this position
though of course they would take grave exception to my nomenclature. The
Lutherans have retained a more robust understanding of the sacraments than what
it typically found among Evangelicals but I believe this to be more in keeping
with historical and traditional patterns of thought than a strict adherence to
and application of Scripture Alone (Sola Scriptura).
That said, in all these circles (but especially in the
Evangelical and Lutheran) there is a strong tendency toward antinomianism. In
this case I mean a kind of worldliness and lack of piety and even in some cases
a basic gravitas when it comes to Kingdom matters, the things of God so to
speak. The Lutherans are not flippant about salvation as are so many
Evangelicals but by focusing almost exclusively on the normal means of grace, Word and Sacrament in the context of Church
attendance, they are sometimes left impoverished. For in their case the Word is
often weak and I'm afraid their paradigm at times is guilty of emasculating the
imperatives of the New Testament.
Their categories of Law and Gospel are largely contrived and
imposed on the text, a fruit of Hypersolafideist doctrine. There is certainly a
distinction between Law and Gospel embodied in the Redemptive-Historical
relationship between the Old and New Testaments. But to call New Testament
imperatives 'law' is an error. Such 'laws' flow from doctrinal proclamation. Saving
faith includes trust and necessarily implies and includes transformation,
sanctification and holiness. We are known by our fruit. The fruit may be
imperfect as indeed it certainly will be, but its presence, and the trust and
conscience that undergird it are all works of God. They are necessary to
testify to the redeeming power of the Holy Spirit. To claim that 'law' is not
meant to be 'kept' because we can't keep it properly and that in response to it
we just exercise an intellectual assent in the fact that Christ keeps the
commands for us is to negate the import of the command. What that amounts to is
a more sophisticated version of 'Let go and let God', which though the notion contains
a grain of truth it does not accord with overwhelming New Testament evidences
of warning, exhortation, calls to mortification and sanctification as well as
calls to abound and persevere.
Hypersolafideism tends to downplay this fiducia or 'trust' element that is essential to saving faith. It's
subjectivity and lack of specificity causes many theologians to squirm. This
too is instructive as all too often Confessional theology is reliant on tight logically
coherent formulae regardless of whether that's how the doctrines are actually
presented in the New Testament. Maybe there's a reason Biblical doctrine wasn't
given to us in a systematic format? That's something to ponder. A subjective
element in saving faith shatters the ability to present salvation as a tightly
constructed formula or system that can be easily comprehended.
Undoubtedly there are those that have abused this by speaking
of salvation as a 'journey' or a 'love story' or something along those lines
and yet the New Testament presentation is both heavily doctrinal and yet
multifaceted. This doesn't defy doctrinal expression but at the same it supersedes
man's attempts to formulate narrow exacting propositional statements so
necessary for deductive enterprise.
Much more could be said regarding this but for now I will
only make one additional point. When Christ described the Kingdom and questions
of faith all too often he spoke in parables. Why? He spoke to those with eyes
to see and ears to hear. The unregenerate would not understand Him. To understand
the things of the Kingdom, faith and spiritual discernment was required and
thus the prima facie or common sense
understandings of the stories would miss their doctrinal import and thus be
wrong. Of course all too often this is what we encounter, as even today
Christ's teaching regarding the parables is commonly misunderstood.
An honest reading of the New Testament will produce neither the
law-gospel paradigm of Lutheran theology nor the Hypersolafideist paradigm.
Pietism is an umbrella term sometimes referencing an addition
of emotional and subjective elements to the faith. This of course is problematic
as are their total absence. Pietism was also something of a loose movement and
thus it invokes historical memory and Confessionalists retain a degree of
bitterness as the movement was perceived to have weakened their position and
ultimately their power. The record here is long and complicated and there
certainly are some problems with 17th and 18th century
Pietism and yet I have almost consistently found Confessionalists misrepresent
the history and try to blame Pietism for everything from the contemporary
disaster that is Evangelicalism to theological liberalism. It's a self-serving narrative
and a gross oversimplification of the history.
Pietists (it is claimed) were discontent with the normal
Christian life revolving around the Church, Word and Sacrament. The Pietists
wanted more because the simple Sola Fide message of Confessionalism wasn't
enough.
Actually I think a case could be made that for many Pietists
the 'normative' arrangement would have been enough but when Confessional
'normality' becomes something less, then a response is warranted if not
demanded and so Pietists met (outside the institutional church) to study the
Scriptures and pray. Why? Because the Churches were not just emotionally dead, (an
assessment that may stem in some cases from a flawed view of worship) but they
also saw that the vitality of the members was gravely lacking. There were no
fruits indicating the power and work of the Holy Spirit.
Confessionalists want everyone to come to Church, listen to the
preacher, do what you're told and all is well. And yet all wasn't well and any
honest and diligent Confessionalist will acknowledge that. Establishment
Christianity (whether official or unofficial) was rotten. Christianity was
equated with respectability. The Church was corrupted by money, patronage and
politics. In many cases it had become cold and lifeless, not because the
doctrines are dead in themselves but the ecclesiastical structures and the
so-called Christian society had made it so.
The Lutherans have suffered greatly from this affliction of
dead orthodoxy and Pietism first rose in their ranks. It must be admitted that in some cases Pietist
Christianity represented a real and vital Christianity entering in on
generations of dead orthodoxy... the fruit of Confessional Lutheranism. This is
especially true in the Scandinavian countries where Protestantism was
introduced largely by royal fiat and legislation and one is left wondering if
Biblical Christianity has ever even existed in some of these lands apart from
tiny pockets of Bible-based believers?
Word and sacrament is sufficient but when the sacrament
becomes meaningless due to a sacral understanding of the Church and the Word is
replaced by confessional and catechetical preaching, then it's understandable
that regenerate people wanted to scrape through the ice on the walls and
recapture the fire of the Scripture. I've sat in churches where the catechisms
are preached. Sure, a token Bible passage is utilised but you're not getting
the Scripture, you're getting a system. To be frank, it was awful and I pity
the people sitting under that for years and generations. They will learn a
system, a grid but all too likely they will not encounter the Spirit working
through the Word. It was very instructive (not for the reasons they intended)
and something I won't do again.
This unfortunate situation (which led to the rise of Pietism)
was in reality the fruit of the Magisterial Reformation and its Neo-Constantinianism.
Under the magisterial model, the Church had, within a couple of generations become
indistinguishable from the world. Even if initial motives were right-minded, the
Church incrementally departed from the Scriptures and instead taught a grand
system, a comprehensive schema in which every aspect of life was explained, scholastically
ordered and placed into its box. It ended up being but a variant of the
Medieval system.
And yet it was also corrupt. You're not allowed to say that
because in doing so you're labeled as a Catholic apologist or a liberal
revisionist. There's plenty of shoddy historical work to go around and the
Confessionalists have also produced their fair share. And yet it was corrupt
and the so-called Christian system did not accord with Scripture. This is what
motivated many of the Pietists to look for something more and they were right
to do so.
Their error (in principle) was the ecclesiola in ecclesia approach, the idea of the little church
within the larger Church. Another way to view it is as the little 'true' or
even 'remnant' church within the larger Church. In reality they should've
abandoned the large Confessional bodies which were unwarranted and had rested
their authority on un-scriptural stones. And eventually this happened but in
many cases it took until the 19th century for it to happen, and in
some cases there were legal obstacles.
But by then the Enlightenment had done its work. Pietists are
blamed for this too! Their subjectivity meant the Church dropped its guard with
regard to doctrine and as a consequence theology didn't matter anymore, or so
we're told.
It's pure Confessionalist slander. It's the Confessionalists
themselves who opened the door to the Enlightenment and theological liberalism.
It was their pro-Establishment, pro-institutional sacral order that opened the
door. Confessionalists battled over theology and couldn't agree and yet their
battles discredited the Scriptures even though in many cases the Scriptures
were not actually in scope. Philosophy stepped in and filled the gap and
Confessionalism's reliance on Scholastic categories and systematics had already
opened the rationalist door. There's plenty to criticise with regard to Pietism
but one grows weary of Confessionalist manipulation of the history and the
shifty polemics of denominational apologists.
Continue reading Part 2
Continue reading Part 2